Author Archive

Amazing TV program “10″December 22nd, 2010

poker table behind aquariumIf you like TV series that are full of drama and suspense, you’ll love “10”, a  swiss TV series based on the poker world, that is currently running on Sunday evenings on TSR1 until the end of December and on the site itself.

We were mandated to create the website of the series and were able to use the latest technologies available : HTML5 + Flash (yes Steve we can mix them) + Facebook APIs + Streaming videos (1 week before TSR diffusion) using a LAMP OpenSource stack.

The website works on multiple devices and is optimized for iphone, ipads and most of the new smartphones on the market.

Actor in 10 playing pokerIt’s based on social interactions and if you like the site and the show, don’t hesitate to give a hand and promote the website on facebook, twitter, or send it to your friend etc…

You can even win DVDs of the complete show if you take a picture of your best POKER FACE and upload it on facebook.

http://www.10-la-serie.ch


Guillaume Arluison

Written by Guillaume Arluison

December 22nd, 2010 at 10:54 am

Posted in Interactive Marketing,Open Source

Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

with 2 comments

Newsletters & Mass Mailing CommunicationAugust 3rd, 2010

When it comes to emails and corporate electronic communication there is often a huge gap of understanding between  Marketing and IT, regardless the size of the organisation.

This is the beginning of a talk I presented a while ago about the difficulties to understand the challenges of email communication and about one of our solutions which we developped in-house.


Misunderstandings between Marketing & IT

Marketing

IT

does not refer to IT when communicating to the outside world

does not know technical details

does not need IT ?

does not understand Marketing needs

does not communicate on technical constraints and requirements

does not communicate on technical features (tracking, personalization…)

Everybody knows how to use Email, from first graders to grand parents (if not great grand parents!). Therefore, sending out an HTML newsletter shouldn’t be that hard, should it? The answer is yes and no. Given the right tools and a well-thought strategy, mass mailings are indeed quite easy to manage. However, if the “add to CC” solution is chosen, many unpleasant surprises linger around the corner, of which “badly formatted emails” might not be the worst one.

From simple email to corporate Communication

Some questions you should ask yourself or your organisation:
  • What is the scope of your mailing? Are we talking about 10 0r 10.000 ?
  • Do you want to target a specific segment of your customers / audience?
  • Do you need personalization for each email ?
  • Do you want to keep tracks of what has been sent, addresses, errors, unsubscribes?
  • Would you like to measure click-through rates or  conversion rates (in case of e-commerce)?

Mass mailing has technical impacts

There are also technical aspects to consider, which may affect your mailing strategy.

  • Bandwidth: How much bandwidth will you consume with 200K emails sent from your LAN ? Can your network handle it?
  • SPAM : Are you sure you’re doing what’s needed ? There are a lot of rules to be followed to minimize spam and avoid annoying your audience. In several countries, opt in and out rules are strictly regulated.
  • Website : How much traffic can your website handle? (don’t send 200k emails in one go with a link to a promotion if your website cannot take high traffic !)
Not taking these purely technical limitations into consideration can seriously harm your company’s image.

About the template itself

  • Plain text / HTML: Do you want to send a plain text email ? An HTML one ? Don’t forget that in this case you still have to provide a plain text version of it. The best practice is also to give at the top a link to a hosted version of the email in case the client software of your audience is not able to read it properly.
  • Images: For the images, do you want them to be embedded (emails larger but images displayed automatically) or hosted on a webserver (client generally has to accept images before seeing them, emails are smaller) ?
  • Would you like to know whether your emails have been opened, links have been clicked on?
  • Would you like  personalized links in the email to track visitors on your website ?
  • etc…
If you need further assistance with these questions don’t hesitate to contact guillaume.arluison AT b-i.com and we can give you some help. blue-infinity has been managing email campaigns for some of our largest client for years and we even have developed our own software for it.

Guillaume Arluison

Written by Guillaume Arluison

August 3rd, 2010 at 9:30 am

Posted in Interactive Marketing,Open Source

Tagged with , , , ,

without comments

the dangers of corporate blogging :-)December 10th, 2009

corporate_blogging

Guillaume Arluison

Written by Guillaume Arluison

December 10th, 2009 at 4:18 pm

Posted in b-i social

Tagged with ,

without comments

Things evolve fast, but take time to be adopted… and understood.November 4th, 2009

How many bytes are  in a Megabyte ?

1024 x 1024 = 1,048,576 bytes ?

1000 x 1000 = 1,000,000 bytes ?

This question/confusion, which seems as old as technology itself, has finally gotten  a clear answer.

…in 1998.

What is interesting is that very very few people know what a Mebibyte is. Do you?

And what’s even more disturbing is that it is only with the latest version of Mac OS X Snow leopard a little bit earlier this year (end of August 2009) that at least one OS is using the correct computations (but not the real nouns) !

It means that a file of 1,000,000 bytes under Mac OS < 10.6 and any other current Operating System (Windows XP/Vista/Seven, Linux etc…) is reported as 976 KB but if you upgrade to Snow Leopard than it suddenly weights “more” : 1.0 MB.

… but dont be afraid, that means that your Hard Drive capacity has increased, too :

A 160 GB hard-drive gives you 152.6 GB under Windows XP but “enlarges” to 160 GB on Snow Leopard.


Guillaume Arluison

Written by Guillaume Arluison

November 4th, 2009 at 10:15 am

Posted in Infrastructure Management,Open Source

Tagged with , ,

without comments

When the best is enemy of the goodSeptember 22nd, 2009

(from “Le meilleur est l’ennemi du bien” – Voltaire)

If you use the  internet as much as we do, you probably use google and you probably find https security problems quite scary.

If by any chance, like me, you look for “edu” on google :

http://www.google.ch/search?q=edu&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:fr:official&client=firefox-a

with Firefox 3.5 or greater and when the first result as below is “mailedu.ge.ch” (this may change in the future or depending on your google’s history searches) this is what happens :

google certificate error

And this come a bit as a shock. At least it did for me. What ? A certificate problem with google ?

Everytime you try, same problem.

Well, funnily enough, this problem should happen very very rarely. The reason is that Google engineers have probably realized that most of the time when a user is searching for something with google, he/she will click on the first result.

On the other hand, Mozilla has implemented a new “prefetch” mechanism in Firefox 3.5. This is derived from the old “internet accelerators” when some developers thought it was good to have a program “clicking” for you on links to prefetch the pages in order for the user to have it already in its browser cache before he made his choice on which one he wanted to click on. (Supposedly useful when … you had a low-bandwidth connection).

This time it’s better organised : it is the webmaster of the site the user is visiting who decides (or not) to put special tags in his html to enable this feature, for example :

<link rel="prefetch" href="/images/big.jpeg">

will prefetch the big family poster… when you are still looking at the article and the picture thumbnail for the moment.

So when you use  Google with Firefox (latest version), the first link on the results list is automatically prefetched.

In the case shown above,  the browser tried to pre-fetch the “mailedu” https link, which sadly had a problem with its certificate… and made it look like Google had the problem.

Guillaume Arluison

Written by Guillaume Arluison

September 22nd, 2009 at 11:49 am

Posted in Open Source

Tagged with , , , , ,

without comments