Archive for the 'Business' Category
Towards the Semantic Web Friday, March 7th, 2008 by Matt
Imagine a world where much of the data that’s flowing around the net takes on meaning, thereby becoming knowledge. Imagine a world where a system in Germany can infer that I’m the uncle of Wade, based on data from a system in the US indicating that my brother Page is the father of Wade. Imagine a world where an online product review from Steve is displayed for me ahead of the other 500 reviews, because of inferred trust derived from the knowledge that both Steve and I happen to share a common friend, you.
Although we’re still a long way off, recent events — in which MakaluMedia staff have played an important part — have brought us a few steps closer to such a world.
MakaluMedia hacker and researcher Arto Bendiken has long been interested in distributed systems, and “information about information”, and naturally developed an interest in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF, in short, is a technology that allows the representation of data as “knowledge”. If two independent systems store their data in RDF, and share common semantic “vocabularies”, then the two systems can effectively share their “knowledge”. What does RDF look like? A simple example has been taken from this Quick Introduction to RDF.
@prefix : <http://www.example.org/> . :john a :Person . :john :hasMother :susan . :john :hasFather :richard . :richard :hasBrother :luke .
As it happens, our Drupal team, led by Arto, has been working for a few years on a project with our colleagues at M.C. Dean and Raincity Studios in the development of a sophisticated collaboration and communication platforms for the US government, based on the Drupal platform. (Certainly it represents one of the largest and most complex Drupal instances in the world.) This platform presently supports more than 60 international clients servicing use cases ranging from policy definition collaboration, to natural crisis management, to school operations in the African continent.
This project represents a natural fit for RDF technology, given the value realized in sharing “knowledge”, not just “data”, between the various instances of the platform, as well as the growing number of other RDF-enabled systems around the world. Towards this end, the project team has been working intensively during the past months to design, develop and begin to integrate an RDF storage, management and access framework into Drupal. And since a primary objective of this project is to release the developed products as freely available open-source software, much of this RDF work can be tracked and accessed from the Drupal RDF project page.
Given that Drupal forms the core technology of the platform , the project team naturally maintains a close relationship with the its founder and leader, Dries Buytaert. In guiding the evolution of the Drupal platform, Dries has always demonstrated a willingness to take bold steps in the direction of progress, and this has been evidenced once again this week. In his keynote speech at the Drupalcon Boston 2008 conference, Dries made the big announcement that the future versions of Drupal (beginning with version seven), will be based on RDF.
Drupal presently dominates the market of open-source content management systems, and so this announcement represents a huge step forward to the building of a truly “Semantic Web”. If interested, you can read various reactions from the blogosphere at Network World and SitePoint.
We are tremendously proud to have been a part of this progress, and look forward to continuing work towards a world of networked knowledge.
Catalog Choice registers half a million users! Monday, January 28th, 2008 by Matt
Catalog Choice on the Today Show.
On January 24, Catalog Choice saw its biggest day yet, when it was covered in a fantastic piece on NBC’s “The Today Show”:
Over the course of the day, the catalogchoice.org website saw over two million page views, and registered 60,000 new user accounts, bringing the total number of registered users, three days later, to over 500,000!
In addition, “Catalog Choice” was the number one search term for the day on Google:
Coping with the traffic.
Coping with a sudden increase in traffic, orders of magnitude more than typical, was a challenge. The front-end web application servers quickly became overloaded, and later the back-end DB server became overloaded (we were servicing over 2,000 DB queries per second!) Since it’s still not possible (with our hosting providers, at least) to bring on additional servers on-demand, we quickly made several modifications to the application:
We made a number of layout modifications in the application that would allow us to cache content to a far greater extent.
These same modifications also targeted the reduction of DB queries.
With these modifications, we were able to cope well with the secondary traffic surge.
Lessons learned.
It’s quite possible that Catalog Choice is now one of the largest Ruby on Rails applications running on the internet, in terms of number of users. Over the past few months of operation, we’ve learned some lessons:
Although not related to Rails, we’ve learned that it’s a good idea, especially for a site with this broad of a user base, to be conservative on the use of client-side technology. When originally launched, we had implemented elegant page transitions, catalog finder live type-ahead, and other similar UI features — all done with JavaScript (AJAX) in a way that gave the site a desktop-application feel. We considered this acceptable practice, as we were designing for IE 6/7, Safari 2/3 and Firefox 2/3.
However, when you have 500,000 users, even 1% on older browsers represents quite a large crowd! So we’ve since modified the site to work in a far more traditional manner, relying very little on client-side JavaScript, and where necessary, degrading very gracefully.
For hosting, our infrastructure, like many these days, is based on virtual machines. We have N number of front-end web application servers, each practically maxed out in terms of CPU and memory. Based on the experience with the Today Show traffic, we’re thinking now that it might be better to have 2N front-end servers, each with half the CPU and memory, since it’s a lot easier to quickly add CPU and memory to an existing server (to meet demand), than it is to bring on additional VMs. (This is, assuming 2N front-end servers with half the memory are roughly comparable in cost to N servers with double the CPU and memory, which might not be the case.)
It has been a very exciting experience to watch the site grow, analyze the usage patterns, and adjust the application and its user interface to not only improve the usability and user experience, but to adapt to the changing user profiles (i.e. now that over 500,000 of our visitors are no longer first-timers, and that we have over 1,000 merchants in the system.)
How the site is doing.
When the site first launched, the consumer response was (and continues to be) nothing short of amazing. It is clear that this site is meeting a very big need in the United States; that is the reduction of unwanted paper catalogs. The industry’s response was, expectedly, lukewarm, especially after the Direct Marketers Association (the DMA) issued an email to all its members to “Just say no!” to Catalog Choice.
However, with half a million vocal consumers behind it, Catalog Choice has become an influential heavyweight. A website feature we launched last week alerts users to which specific merchants have refused to honor their opt-out requests, and provides the merchants customer support telephone number, just in case the consumer would like to give them a call. Within 24 hours, after being inundated with phone calls from angry customers, we had merchants changing their minds :-)
A misconception in the industry (promoted by the DMA) is that Catalog Choice seeks to do away with catalogs altogether. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Catalog Choice is about doing away with just those catalogs that are unsolicited and unwanted.
All in all, Catalog Choice has been a fantastic project for MakaluMedia. We’re fortunate to be one of very few companies having the opportunity to build and operate such a large-scale Rails site, and a site that serves such a meaningful social purpose!
Phenomenal response to Catalog Choice Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 by Matt
HARDLY A MONTH HAS PASSED since we announced the launch of Catalog Choice, a website that MakaluMedia was chosen to design and develop by an amazing team of funding and supporting organizations, and the response to the site has been extraordinary.
In less than 25 days, more than 100,000 users have registered, opting out of more than 800,000 catalogs. And for us, as user experience designers and product developers, one of the most exciting statistics is the near 50% conversion ratio, meaning that nearly one out of every two visitors to the site has registered.
Update November 21, 2007: We are about at the one month point now, and have over 180,000 users, opting out of nearly two million catalogs!.
Catalog Choice has also been featured on the national television networks CNN, NBC and ABC (see videos below), and has been well received in the press and blogosphere:
- The New York Times
- The Boston Herald
- The Chicago Tribune
- Guy Kawasaki
- Joel on Software
- Adam Engst at TidBITS
The success of the site has served to validate much of our beliefs regarding user experience design. Some of principles that stand out include:
- Simple is better. Less is more.
- A successful user experience derives from near obsessive attention to detail.
- Don’t outsource your user support. On the contrary, put your best people on it. People love getting a personal response from somebody that knows what they’re talking about. You’ll reap the benefits in trust, patience and tremendous value in terms of feedback to the process of continually improving the user experience.
We’ve also learned a wealth about effectively operating a high-volume Ruby on Rails application. (On one particular day, the ABC “Good Morning America” spot was the very top news article on Yahoo News, and we saw 20,000 new user registrations in a period of four hours.) Having a great hosting partner helps a lot!
Finally, this project is proof positive that talented and motivated people, supported by an effective agile process and paying a lot of attention to clear communications, can build a successful project, even if separated great distances geographically. Our Catalog Choice team includes MakaluMedia staff located in the United States, Germany, Spain and Ireland!
And with that, we bring this article to a close. Our next project milestones include one million catalog opt-outs, and hopefully down the road one millions users! And remember, if you’re located in the US, and ready to simplify your life while helping the environment, head on over to Catalog Choice and sign up for a free account:
Be sure to check out the following video clips.
- Catalog Choice on NBC
- Catalog Choice on CNN
- Catalog Choice on ABC Good Morning America
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.
Advanced Communications and Collaboration with Drupal Thursday, June 21st, 2007 by info
MakaluMedia has been chosen to become one of a small number of companies participating in an ambitious project aiming to develop and evolve a communication and collaboration platform serving the needs of an international community of intergovernmental agencies and organizations.
The core of the platform is based on the Drupal open-source content and collaboration framework, extended to provide advanced collaborative services such a real-time natural language translation, distributed identification, embedded instant and store/forward messaging, and voice-over-IP (VOIP).
The system allows for technology profiles to be defined in such a way that context specific instances of the platform can be provisioned, tailored and deployed on short notice. Use cases would include instances providing support to educational efforts in Africa, or emergency disaster management support to tsunami relief efforts in Asia.
MakaluMedia’s efforts in the activity include definition and tailoring of the software development process, development in the area of advanced file management, research and development in the integration of instant messaging services, and design & development of the overall platform user experience and interface.
MakaluMedia was selected to become part of this international effort, due to its experience and capabilities in the areas of formal software development related to space ground systems, combined with its activities in the development and advancement of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS).
Zero to Launch in Two Weeks (Rock-am-Ring Photo Site) Thursday, June 14th, 2007 by info
Last week, around Monday or Tuesday, we got an urgent request from our longtime German customer, Marek Lieberberg Konzertagentur:
We need a Rock-am-Ring photo upload and sharing site, ASAP!
So we hunkered down, conceived a rough concept, and Alex got to work from scratch designing and coding. About two weeks later, we just launched:
Rock-am-Ring Photo Sharing Site
This site is a good example of the productivity gains that can be realized (by great developers, of course!) with the Ruby on Rails web application framework.
Our new site features include:
User accounts, created from temporary accounts (i.e. every visitor instantly becomes a temporary user, which is migrated when they create their permanent account) with profiles. (This is an innovative technique that we’ll blog about soon.)
User uploading and management of images.
Probably the most advanced file upload interface on the web. You can select multiple files for upload (and we locally pre-filter by image size and type!), and they are sequentially uploaded and processed, with full interactive feedback to the user (You can literally upload hundreds of files at once.) We plan to publish this solution as Open Source.
Photo voting with AJAX (Digg-style, thumbs up/down). Notice we don’t display the count before voting, to avoid bias.
Photo commenting, with email notification, and 30 minute post-editing.
Community-based moderation. If three people mark an image as inappropriate, it’s no longer displayed, and we’re notified to consider suspending the user’s account.
Advanced slideshow viewer, with link emailing.
Photo tagging
AJAX implementation of carousel slider
Automatic creation of multiple sizes of uploaded files
Photo EXIF information display.
Lots of nice lightbox UI effects (signup, login, etc.)
Bilingual user interface (German/English)
Amazon S3 image storage and serving
Multi-tier server architecture
And lots and lots more…
There are still lots of features to add, but the main focus now is on database query optimization, to improve the page load times, and to support the large amount of traffic. (In the first 36 hours, we’ve got 900 images, and serviced 4 million database queries!)
All in all, this was a pretty amazing accomplishment, both in terms of what was produced and the time in which it was produced.
It was also a great (and fun!) team effort. Thanks to:
Alex, for working like a madman to get this designed, and coded in a week and a half.
Niall and Arto, for figuring out how to keep the servers handling the requests.
Christian, for being late to his movie, while providing the German translations.
Alvaro, Martin and Christian, for testing.
Nespresso, for creating the caffeine that kept us going.
Panoramio (and logo) are acquired by Google Friday, June 1st, 2007 by Mike
Congratulations to my friends Eduardo, Joaquín and José of Panoramio, in the recent Google acquisition of their startup!
From the Panoramio blog post on May 31st:
The integration of photos from Panoramio in Google Earth has been so successful since John Hanke suggested it that we see the acquisition of Panoramio as a natural consequence. We have tightened our relationship with Google Earth more and more in recent months, and at the end we decided to walk one step further. After so much work together, honestly, we couldn’t imagine a better scenario than selling Panoramio to Google.
I was honored to work with “the boyz” back in October 2005, when we created the Panoramio identity (along with two other identities after it, including Cursoo).
I’m very excited for the Panoramio team, and just as excited that the identity work for the project had a small part in helping the team get to the next level.
Congratulations guys! :-)
Business Opportunities Weblog Network Logo Design Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 by Mike
In late 2006, Dane Carlson of the Business Opportunities Weblog Network contracted me
to design an identity for his weblog network.
The Business Opportunities Weblog Network (BOWN) is described as a “moderated list of legitimate business opportunities for entrepreneurs”, which features lists of business ideas, and tips.
Dane has been blogging since 2001, and wanted a new corporate identity that was fresh and clean, to help realign his blog.
So, Dane and I started through our normal process of getting information from goals, the business, his color and style likes and dislikes, and other useful information to help me develop good design ideas.
Dane liked the general idea of a lightbulb, so I included this idea, along with several other ideas, to make sure we explored all options.
Challenges
While “Business Opportunities Weblog Network” was descriptive, it’s a really long name to deal with when creating a logo design. It would be challenging to be find a way to list the full name and not let the words dominate the identity.
Another challenge, related to the long name, was keeping the identity simple and easily recognizable. How do you show a business network in a single symbol?
Sketches
Once Dane’s information was read and digested, I brought out the sketchbook and pencil to get ideas on paper. In 2 rounds of sketches I produced several interesting ideas, incorporating the lightbulb and other ideas for representations of a network. Here are a few selected sketches:
1. This idea featured “Business Opportunities” larger, and a briefcase fashioned from triangular shapes, woth “Weblog Network” tucked under the larger type.
2. On this concept, I’ve replaced the briefcase symbol with an interconnected triangular grid symbol, to emphasize the network nature of the name.
3. Here I’m indicating a stylized lightbulb to the left, Business with most emphasis and “Opportunities” and “Weblog Network” descending in size and importance.
4. The winning idea shows a lightbulb within a circular symbol on the left, and an alternate dark version on the right. The idea was to show the lightbulb as a node on a network, incorporating both a bulb and network in the logo.
Black & White Art
Once the winning concept of a lightbulb on a network, inside of a circle containing the type was selected, I moved to produce the black and white version of the logo for Dane. The black and white phase went pretty quickly, and we both liked how the concept translated from sketch into black and white art. The next challenge was color.Color Art
In the color phase, I wanted to show Dane some color varieties, but didn’t want to do too many at one time, so I selected 3 color themes with both flat and gradated options, and presented them:
Our eyes were pretty immediately drawn to blue, orange and green. I also liked the blue/green option, though the orange center circle of the first idea (B&C) really seemed to convey a warmth to balance the cool crispness of the green and blue.
After a little deliberation, Dane chose the blue/orange/green option as the winner.
Conclusion
Just last week, Dane completed his redesign of the Business Opportunities Weblog Network weblog, and used the new logo design to shape his redesign. I really like how the colors feel warm, yet crisp and clean, and after not seeing the logo between delivery and appearance, I’m very pleased with how it turned out.
My thanks go to Dane Carlson for choosing to work with me and MakaluMedia on his new identity. We both had a great time collaborating and I think we came up with a fun, attractive logo design.
Word Count Journal, and other cool things coming in 2007 Monday, December 18th, 2006 by Matt
This past year has been really great at MakaluMedia. The company has grown in its core space business, and has moved into a couple of exciting new partnerships in the areas of web infrastructure and applications.
In addition to some new, and really cool, Drupal-based platform work in Europe that I can’t talk much about (yet), we’ve had the awesomely good fortune to have hooked up with a very successful software entrepreneur in the United States, with whom, over the course of 2007, we’re going to be building and launching a series of consumer applications that we hope will positively impact people’s lives.
The first app will launch on January 1, and is called Word Count Journal:
http://www.wordcountjournal.com
Word Count Journal is a new blog format where you write one word your first day, two words the second, three words the third, etc. By the end of a non-leap year you’ll have written a total of 66,795 words, more words that most novels.
This unique writing rhythm is great for those who want to improve their writing skills, one step at a time. The site supports private and public journals. You can create a private group to share journals between friends, classmates or family.
This site will be a free community service; one that we hope will be particularly of interest to schools, and is appetizer in the forthcoming portfolio of applications.
The second app is called Catalog Choice, and will have a major impact on the mail catalog industry, empowering the consumer to take control over the paper catalogs they receive in the mail.
The third app will be the main course, and represents an innovatively fresh twist to an old industry. Can’t talk about it much yet either, but stay tuned!
The Building of Property Guide Spain Friday, September 8th, 2006 by Matt
Earlier this year, Marbella real estate consultant, Ben Johnson, of Bright SL, approached MakaluMedia with an innovative idea: to address the lack of high-quality, objective information online, dealing with the various aspects of buying, owning and selling property in Spain. Initially, Ben had considered the idea of simply authoring and publishing a set of articles himself, but then discovered that a unique business idea was lying just beneath the surface.
It occurred to Ben, that most estate agents working in this market would highly value the ability to publish such information on their own websites, especially if the information were available in multiple languages. In addition to providing a valuable, complementary service to their customers, the provision of information in multiple languages would result in an expansion of the potential market.
Considering this, Ben felt that if he could syndicate information to interested agents, he provide a value-added service, while saving them the costs of authoring, translating and publishing. Hence the idea of Property Guide Spain (PGS) was born.
Working with Ben, the following challenges were identified:
There is no standard technology in use by the customer (agency) websites, so the solution should require little to no modification of the customer sites.
The solution should require minimal effort on the part of the customer (agency). This eliminated the option of simply publishing RSS feeds for integration into customer sites.
The solution should somehow promote Bright SL services, in function to the number of syndication customers.
In order to address challenges (1) and (2), we conceived a single publication system, which can generate any number of customer-branded interfaces (instances of the PGS). We engineered and implemented this system using the WordPress CMS, using extensively modified core templates, and custom developed plug-ins.
The resulting system allowed Ben to:
Publish a set of articles, each possibly in more than one language.
Manage (create, modify and remove) syndication customers.
For each new customer created, Ben simply uploads customer-specific branding assets (from within the standard WordPress interface), and immediately the fully customer-branded instance of the PGS becomes available at a customer-specific URL.
For example, view the following two URL (in order):
…and then…
The default instance of the site shows Bright SL property advertisements on each article, while the customer-branded version of the site shows only customer-specific information and branding.
As part of the project, we developed a number of graphical badges which can be integrated into the customer’s own website, linking to their own branded instance of the Property Guide Spain site. This allowed customer-side integration with minimal effort — simply add a graphic image, linking to the customer-specific PGS URL.
Challenge (3) required a lot of thinking, and was solved in a very innovative way. Without going into the technical details, if a visitor arrives to the PGS default URL (non-customer branded) from Google, they are shown the customer-branded site that they specifically visited. Otherwise, the visitor is shown the default PGS layout, which includes property-of-the-month advertisements from Bright SL throughout the site.
In this way, both the customer and Bright SL benefit in a fair and equitable way as the PGS customer base grows.
In the end, this has been a fascinating project, and a huge success for Ben and Bright SL. The project, for MakaluMedia, allowed us the opportunity to showcase what we feel is a unique combination of business consulting and technical solution implementation — by creating for Ben and Bright SL a unique and innovative technical solution, using open-source technology, to solve a brand new business challenge in a highly effective and economical manner.