I saw an ad in the NY Times this morning for Cingular’s BroadBand Connect service being coupled with the new Dell Latitudes. The ad mentioned a free year of Cingular service, but I haven’t been able to find any more info about it.

This relationship between Dell and Cingular is not exclusive. The new notebooks have a feature called HyperConnect that enables users to choose wireless broadband connection options, with carrier choices of Cingular Wireless or Verizon Wireless (and Vodafone in Europe).

I’ll be up here talking to the computer in pseudo code. Now wouldn’t that be totally geeky?

“VoiceCode lets a programmer dictate code in a more natural way, Désilets says, rapidly translating their utterances into awkward programming syntax.”

Too bad it only works for Python now.

Interesting and honest blog entry about why “pretty” isn’t necessarily better for websites.

“… design and usability do not go hand in hand. In fact, I’d throw out that your usability expert should (if possible) not have any design talent WHATSOEVER… Designers have too much emotional bias towards pretty things. This seems akin to the rule of having someone on staff who is a dedicated bug tester (who has NOTHING to do with the programming effort).”

Not that ours don’t need any help. Intentionally making (or leaving) design ugly doesn’t work either. Making them simple and easy to use does.

The Deli, ZingTrain, Bakehouse and most of the businesses in the ‘CoB send out regular batches of bulk mail to customers. Each business uses a different program or service, and none are very good.

ConstantContact, MailChimp, and StreamSend are some services I’ve been looking at for the businesses to use. These three are appealing because they’re user-friendly, but more so because they don’t offer lists for sale and they don’t want to steal ours. Using one of these services would relieve Pooh (and a few ‘CoBbers) of some serious stress, create uniformity and allow us to better support the people in charge of email campaigns.

StreamSend (SS) has the most appeal right now. Besides being managed by a former Deli employee, and being far cheaper than ConstantContact and MailChimp, SS offers us the kind of control/administration we want: one parent account to foot the bill and create and manage up to 25 other logins and partition the monthly allotment of 50,000 emails to each login.

So, how cheap is this service? ConstantContact charges $250 per month to send 25,001 - 50,000 emails. (It’s important to note that “emails” means recipients.) MailChimp, which does not charge per month but rather per email, is $500 for 50,000 emails. SS undercuts both these providers, charging only $50 per month to send 50,000 emails…and that’s not per login either.

You can check out each of the services for yourself. Use our vendor password with the following usernames:

• MailChimp: zingit
• ConstantContact: zing-it
• StreamSend: zingermans

The Bulk Mail Vision (DRAFT!)

DRAFT

July 30, 2006

It’s been more than a month since implementing the new mass-emailing service, StreamSend. The total monthly allotment of 50,000 emails for ZCoB is proving to be more than enough, but is an affordable amount that comfortably allows for list growth. Each Zingerman’s business has an account and at least one mailing list. (Mail Order continues to use Gammadyne.) The Deli has the largest list (plus some other lists, like Duff’s Chocolate), and Creamery has the fastest growing list. Accounts are administered and supported by ZingIT, and there are more than 10 active logins. Users are also aware of, and employing StreamSend’s external support and documentation.

Billie’s HTML work is receiving rave reviews from senders and recipients. Senders can retrieve sent emails from StreamSend, cut & paste the body of a new message, save it, and send it. After initial set up and instructions, mailing hundreds of customers is basically a few clicks of the mouse. Scheduling features of StreamSend, and its management of unsubscribe requests and bounce-backs is allowing senders to spend less time at their computer and less time managing their inboxes, and lets them quickly clean up any external customer database.

DRAFT

Comments, questions, corrections, additions…all are welcome.

Office painting

Originally uploaded by elphmorgan.

Picture of the office on Monday, nearly finished!

(Taken with my Treo, emailed to my Flickr account, logged into Flickr, pressed “Blog This” button to send to our blog.)

“You simply connect it to you PC and download the data. This data can then be plotted on Google Earth, Mapquest, maps.google.com and Virtual Earth to show exactly where it’s been, how long it took and how it got there.”
http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20060405/really-cool-portable-gps-tracker/

Should we create a domain name for Marketing and Graphics, like what we have for IT? There’s then room, syntactically, for zsn-hr as well. It would allow them to have dedicated resources, like their own wiki or blog.

Or maybe it’s fine to just do it off of Zingtranet?

We even have a vision:

The IT blog is our storehouse for news and ideas. It facilitates information flow within the IT group and with people interested in our work. It’s informative, entertaining and practical. Each member of the IT team contributes to the blog because it is easy to use. We post updates, geek finds, tea notes, and all sorts of interesting topics.

Considering four out of five of the IT staff are Introverts, this is going to be a fun experiment. Let the blogging begin!