Every month, the whole office gathers around the fireplace in the conference room to discuss one of our favorite topics: technology. No, we don’t do this because we are huge nerds, although I can’t claim that most of us don’t fall into that category. We meet because we realize the technology landscape changes hourly (it actually changes microsecondly, but as “changes microsecondly” isn’t a commonly accepted phrase, we’ll stick with hourly), and we want to stay ahead of the game.
At each technology meeting, we take turns presenting interesting, fun, useful, helpful, new (or any combination of these adjectives) tools and technology that we’ve discovered in the past month. We leave every meeting a little more informed about what’s current, and also impressed and excited by how much our jobs and everyone’s lives are evolving microsecondly.
We thought we’d make a segment on our blog every month to discuss one bit of technology we discussed at our meeting.
April’s focus will be something that’s been around a while, but that folks have really started to get into in the past year: QR Code. I’d venture to guess that most people don’t know what that is, so bear with me as I attempt a simple explanation. “QR” stands for “Quick Response.” A QR Codes are two-dimensional bar codes. It has other uses, but one major use you can expect to see in advertising is as a bar code that stores a URL. People with mobile camera phones that have a reader app and internet browser can take a picture of the QR Codes (or in some cases, simply scan the QR Code by aiming the camera at it), and the reader will launch the stored URL in the phone’s browser. Read more
The iPhone and the Droid are powerful, app-friendly devices that give users the freedom to browse the web, play games, watch videos, read up on breaking news or even (wait for it) make phone calls!
With all this power at their fingertips, what are people choosing to use most frequently? Well, Mashable recently wrote a piece dissecting January 2010 information from the mobile analytics company, Flurry.
From Mashable: (click for full article)
“For Flurry’s January report, the company decided to dissect application usage based on the following categories: games, entertainment, social networking, and news and lifestyle.
On both iPhone and Android (Android) phones, social networking apps were used most frequently — about 20 times per month — with news coming in a distant second. In fact, in terms of frequency alone, we’re using social networking apps at double the rate we’re using news applications, and four times the rate we’re firing up mobile games. Based on Flurry data, it also appears that the frequency at which we use entertainment, games and lifestyle apps in totality still doesn’t rival how frequently we use social networking apps each month.”
Back in November we covered the Firefox add-on/desktop application Yoono. As a Christmas present, the folks over at Yoono HQ gave us an updated version of the application a couple weeks ago, and is it ever sweet.
Upon downloading the newest version, I immediately noticed a change in aesthetics and in operations: Yoono now sports a slick silver look and runs much smoother than previous versions, minimizing browser slowdown when streaming multiple updates at once. But these changes were in the rearview mirror once I realized the following.
The new version of Yoono now supports multiple Twitter/Facebook accounts.
For those of us who maintain multiple accounts (On a given day I have anywhere between 3 and 5 Twitter accounts to keep an eye on), this is an unbelievable time saver. Instead of logging in to each individual account, finding something cool, relevant material and retweeting it, then doing the whole process again and again, now Yoono lets me see all of my Twitter accounts’ updates in real time, streaming in my sidebar while I’m free to do other things. It’s a level of efficiency that simply wasn’t possible before.
The screenshot above is what my Yoono sidebar looked like this morning. You’ll notice three different Twitter accounts and a lone Facebook account at the top of the image. I’m still giddy over the freedom it gives me.
Hopefully I already made this clear, but I’ll say it anyway. If you maintain multiple social media accounts on the same platform, Yoono is officially a must-have. The few minutes it takes you to install and set up will save you hours of time down the road.
See the “share” button at the bottom of this post? It’s thanks to AddThis, the “#1 Bookmarking & Sharing Service.” You might already be aware of the button and may in fact use it on your blog posts, but you may not know that it can be placed into the HTML code of your email as well.
Whether you’re sending an email to one or thousands of people, utilizing an AddThis share button makes it easy for the recipients of your email to pass your information along. It’s just up to you to have captivating content!
Here’s a screen capture of what you’ll see. Click to enlarge.
To add the button to your email, you’ll want to click on the ‘more options’ link at the bottom, then specify you’d like to use the button in an email newsletter. From that point you just choose the design of the button and the link of the article you’re sharing, and you’re good to go!
Setting up an account is free and anayltics are provided by AddThis, so you’ll easily see if taking advantage of their share buttons is worth your time. If your content is interesting, chances are it’ll be well worth the couple extra minutes.
@mashable published an article earlier in the month on the National Hockey League’s implementation of Twitter’s new list feature. Instead of creating aptly-named lists such as “NHL’s peeps” and “NHL’s fave funny homies lolz,” the league recognized that its individual teams have a greater appeal than a simple list of funny Tweeters, so it sent this message out a few weeks ago: Read more
