A Groupon affiliate last week did some offline promotions around Liverpool Street station by handing out USB cards that when plugged into the computer, loaded up the geo-targeted Groupon homepage via the affiliates tracked link.
Seems like a good idea! But it makes me think, what would make people go to the trouble of plugging in a USB stick instead of just typing Groupon into their web browser? Unless maybe there was a special discount that people could access via the USB stick.
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10 Alternatives To Delicious.com Bookmarking – Is Delicious really going away? According to Yahoo, no they are not shutting it down. But it hasn’t stopped people from panicking and looking around for alternatives. This article lists 10 websites that have similar features to Delicious.
7 Growing Social Bookmarking Sites Worth Exploration – The websites listed in this article are slightly different from Delicious and more like Digg. There are some interesting niche communities specifically for designers and bloggers.
7 Lies That Will Keep You From Starting Your Business – The most common reasons people give when they convince themselves that no, they can’t start a business right now. I admit that all of them have gone through my head at one point or another.
Free calling in Gmail extended through 2011 – Calls to the US and Canada are currently free through Gmail and apparently will be all through next year as well. Great news! I can continue to save on my long distance call charges. I’ve used it a few times and the sound quality is pretty good if you have a good broadband connection.
Merry Christmas everyone! 
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For those who are forever sketching out new business plans but never had the confidence or break to make it happen, here are 3 cool competitions that could give you the push that you need:
Your Own Pop-Up Store (London)
London’s The Hospital Club and property investment company Shaftesbury PLC have joined together to offer budding entrepreneurs the chance to setup a Pop-Up shop in Covent Garden’s Seven Dials. It can be anything from retail to exhibitions to social experiments as long as the purpose can be deemed ‘creative’.
Unfortunately the contest is now closed. However it will be interesting to see the winner’s work which is open to the public for a week in August.
There are two types of award for young entrepreneurs (aged 16 – 30). One is for those who have been running their own business for more than 3 months but less than 18 months. You could potentially walk away with a £10,000 cash infusion and support from a PR agency.
The second contest is for those who need funding in order to get their new business idea or project off the ground. There are 5 prizes worth £1,000 each that award the most innovative or unusual ideas submitted by new businesses in their first 12 months of trading.
This is one for social entrepreneurs. Have an idea that will change the world or help improve life on our planet? Or even if you just want to be inspired – have a look at the Rolex Awards which recognise outstanding initiatives in five key areas of human endeavour: science and health, the environment, exploration & discovery, applied technology and cultural heritage.
Pre-applications for the 2012 Rolex Awards for Enterprise are now being taken.
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It’s Wednesday again! Here are a few interesting articles and websites that I came across this week:
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I love the DODOcase story, it’s so inspiring and just goes to show that great things can happen in a short span of time if you’re in the right place at the right time and have the foresight to see big opportunities.
DODOcase is an iPad case that’s made out of bamboo and looks like a Moleskin journal, it can even double as an iPad stand. It’s made by hand using traditional book binding techniques in San Francisco, California. Engadget calls it the “Rolls Royce of iPad cases” and DODOcase fans include Evan Williams (CEO of Twitter) and Kevin Rose.
Created by two entrepreneurs Patrick Buckley and Craig Dalton, they came up with the design when they discovered that they missed the feeling of holding a good book while using the kindle. Within a few months of launching, DODOcase received over 10,000 orders (currently priced at $59.95 each) and aim to hit $3 million in revenue in its first year of business.
Patrick Buckley: “With some 17 million iPad sales projected for year one, and Apple pricing their own ‘diver suit’ [neoprene] carrying cases at around $40, we see a $680 million market for iPad cases alone. This is a huge opportunity, and we’re the quality brand in this segment of the carrying case market.”
They’ve just won the top prize in the Shopify build a business competition which is a whopping $100,000! Not to mention all the additional publicity that goes along with it, such as Tim Ferriss’ blog and the New York Times.
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Inspired by Outspoken Media‘s Weekend Coffee Links and my wanting to inject some sort of routine into this blog, I’ve decided to do a round up of links to interesting articles and websites that I’ve come across over the past week. Since I’ve decided to do this on a Wednesday, I’ve (very appropriately) decided to call this my Hump Day Links.
Hopefully you’ll find these helpful/insightful/amusing, so here goes:
Sugru Silicone Putty – hack things better. Invented by an Irish lady and some clever scientists, this looks pretty cool and very handy indeed. Don’t throw things away, fix and reuse!
Camera Cloak Bag – the world’s first shoot-through camera bag that allows you to take photos with your DSLR or SLR camera without having to remove the camera! I’m definitely getting one, when I finally get my DSLR that is.{ 0 comments }
WordPress 3 has been out for a few weeks now and designers have been busy! If you’re tired of the default 2010 theme make sure to check out this post at Design Snack.
Which lists some great WordPress 3 themes available at Theme Forest.
We’ll be keeping on eye out on both the free and premium themes to see what the community does with this great new platform. If you find any that you like make sure you post them in the comments below.
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Apple has had a lot to say about HTML5 and CSS3. They’ve even created a HTML5 Showcase to demonstrate how Safari supports the upcoming web standards.
Personally I really like the Typography example.
There is also a tutorial for each of their demos aimed at developers who want to get started creating the next version of the web.
For those of you new to HTML5 here’s a great infographic that sums up HTML5 and the current implementation:
* HTML5 logo by: justinsomnia Infographic by: pixer
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Unless you’re doing direct linking via PPC or using a different technique to send traffic direct to a merchant site you’ll need to have a website.
This can be a big hurdle for non-technical people. Luckily there is an easy solution:
WordPress
WordPress is a blogging system. But it can also be used as a Content Management System (CMS) to create websites that are easy to update.
In this post I’d like to share with you 5 WordPress plugins that I install on every site I set up.
Like the name suggests this plugin is used for on page SEO. It extends the normal WordPress features and allows you to create custom meta keywords, meta descriptions, and titles for each of your pages and posts.
If you are using PPC or monetizing your site with display ads (ex: google adwords) you’ll need to have a privacy policy. Easy Privacy Policy creates one for you with a click of a button. You can see the one created for FuzzyZen here: Privacy Policy
The next two plugins are used to tell search engines and visitors about the structure of your site.
Search engines can look at an XML file on your site to determine the structure and how often pages should be indexed. An easy way to keep this file up to date and generated automatically is to use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. You can see an example of the generated file here: XML Site Map
People also want an easy way to see the structure of your site. You can do this manually or use:
Dragon Design Sitemap Generator
to automatically create a friendly site map of your WordPress site. Look at our site map for an example.
One of the most important things for any sites is keeping track of visitors. There are many web analytics programs that you can use. One of the easiest and completely free ones is Google Analytics. Once you have it set up on your site you can see the results in the WordPress dashboard by using:
Google Analytics for WordPress
There are literally hundreds of plugins for WordPress. Each one designed to add some kind of functionality to your site. The 5 plugins mentioned in this post will help you set up your site for SEO, display advertising, and analysing your visitors.
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Yootheme, who builds beautiful templates for Joomla, has just created an awesome set of social media icons which you can download for free! From Facebook to Twitter to Flickr, there are 47 high quality icons in different colour and shape variations.
The icons come in 8 different standard sizes ranging from 16×16 to 512×512 pixels – that’s a total of 376 extremely detailed, handmade icons.
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