Archive for October, 2007
Stop those catalogs with Catalog Choice! Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 by Matt
The idea.
Growing up in the US, I remember how annoying it was to receive commercial sales calls on the telephone late in the evening, when the family was sitting around trying to enjoy some quality time together. This problem was later solved (mostly) through the introduction of the “Do Not Call,” registry — a legislated service which marketers must consult before they can call you. If your name is on the “Do Not Call” list, it’s illegal for them to call you.
A similar problem exists today with paper catalogs. American consumers are simply inundated with unsolicited, undesired paper catalogs from a multitude of merchants. While receiving these catalogs can be just as annoying as receiving the marketing phone calls, there’s a deeper, more concerning problem. The production of the 19 billion paper catalogs sent each year in the US takes a huge toll on the environment.
19 BILLION. We throw around terms daily like million, billion, trillion, without really having a feel for the magnitude of those numbers. Consider this, it takes 11 days for a million seconds to pass. It takes 32 years for a billion seconds to pass! So, 19 billion catalogs — that’s a lot of wasted paper!
Earlier this year, my company MakaluMedia was offered an opportunity to participate in a project backed by some of the US’ largest environmental and non-profit organizations to help address this project. Today represents the culmination of several months of hard work on this project, and I’m proud to announce the launch of Catalog Choice:
Catalog Choice is a free service, that allows people to find and opt-out of the undesired catalogs they receive. The concept is very simple; you sign up, search for a catalog you receive, and opt-out. We take care the rest, and in about six weeks’ time, you should no longer receive the catalog.
The application.
Given that the service targets all American consumers, including a large segment who may not be computer saavy, a major objective was making Catalog Choice simple, inviting and easy-to-use. (Well, in fact, those should be objectives of any product really.)
Making something simple is anything but simple :) It involves everything from the visual aesthetic, to the interaction workflows, to the choice of the wording on the site. (For example, we opted against using the term “Sign up”, as some people find that idea intimidating, and rather went for “Get started now”.) We hope we’ve succeeded, but we’ll be monitoring the visitor’s experiences closely to tune and adjust the application as needed.
Technically, the site was built using the Ruby on Rails application framework, which is simply fantastic.
The launch.
The big launch happened yesterday, and shortly thereafter we were mentioned on a couple of very popular websites:
That certainly got the traffic flowing, allowing the powerful Engine Yard servers to finally break a sweat. :)
And the day ended with the good news that next week we’re going to get some major national media coverage!
The team.
I almost feel guilty to be paid to do work that’s so enjoyable, and the biggest part of that satisfaction comes from being part of the tremendous team we have in MakaluMedia. In this Catalog Choice project, Mike Rohde, an “icon” in the logo design world (couldn’t help saying that ;), designed the logo, Alex Bendiken applied his wizardry to design the application’s user interface and user experience (Alex, by the way, is the guy that won the Slashdot redesign contest!), the Rails application development included Christian Kumpf (one of our crack engineers in Germany, who happened to build an ultra-stable satellite telemetry processing system last year!), Alex (yes, same one; he does Rails application development too!), Brian Cooke (maker of famous Mac OS X applications) and our latest additions, Alvaro Silva and Luke Brown, systems work by Irish legend Niall O Broin (who will never have a weblog, so don’t get your hopes up) and, finally, project management by Fausto “I dream in SQL” Roveda, and myself.
All in all the project has been a ton of fun, and hopefully it’ll be a big success.
We need your help.
This project has been especially satisfying as it represents something that could have a major positive impact on the environment. But for that to happen, it needs to be used on a very large scale. And in that respect, we could really use your help.
As a free service, and given the high costs of marketing, the team is hoping in a big way that the service will spread via word of mouth. If you’d be willing to link to the site from your own website or blog, we’ve got some hopefully nice looking badges available here:
http://www.catalogchoice.org/#about
And if you use the service, please consider using the “Invite a friend” feature. Thanks so much.
Miscellaneous updates.
- To handle all the customer service incoming emails, Catalog Choice are using a service that absolutely rocks, MailTank. It is fantastic.