Emerge Inc. Blog

Oberlin Heritage Center has launched a new website developed with Emerge. The new site enables internal staff to update and maintain the entire website through a content management system.

Loaded with information about visiting, exploring, learning and connecting, the website also provides website visitors to quickly and easily search the site for information they are seeking. Additionally, website visitors can sign up to register for programs, tours, purchase items from the Museum Shop, purchase a brick, membership or make a donation online.

To view the website and learn more about Oberlin Heritage, visit their website at www.OberlinHeritage.org.

With Mother’s day just around the corner, Spa West in Westlake, Ohio wanted a better way to offer gift certificates over the Internet. Their previous system enabled people to buy the gift certificate online, but it had to be mailed out, something that wouldn’t work for last minute shoppers.

Additionally, they wanted to be sure the experience buying the gift certificate online matched the extraordinary experience they provide in their spa.

Emerge worked with Spa West to develop a gift certificate system that enables customers to buy gift certificates for a dollar amount or for selected services. The customer can print the gift certificate immediately from the website or they can email it to the recipient to print.

To ensure gift certificates are only used once, a unique identification code is added to each gift certificate. Spa West can look up the ID number to ensure it is active.

If your business is interested in offering instant gift certificates online, please let us know.

Emerge reached an important milestone on Monday, April 20, 2009. Avon Lake, Ohio, launched their online reservation system, becoming the first city to use the EmergeParks Reservation platform.

Emerge originally developed the Park Reservation Platform as a custom project with the Lorain County Metro Parks. Over the next few years, Emerge worked with 10 Counties to implement online reservations. These were mostly with large County Metro Parks (Columbus, Lake, Geauga, Toledo).

Based on this experience, we became interested in tapping into a potential new market, City Parks and Recreation departments. We believe in the value of building software with clients versus building it in the bubble of our office and hoping it fits clients needs.

Working with the great people at Avon Lake provide us with good insight into the differences between City and County parks. We are in the process now of planning the best next phase for the EmergeParks division of Emerge.

During the first week in April, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. As always, these conferences are exciting, eye-opening and thought provoking.

As one might expect, attendance was down a little from previous years, but still a very good showing. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘The Power of Less’ and focused on identifying the essentials and eliminating the unnecessary. In keeping with that theme, here is just a small sample of the thoughts, ideas, learning, etc. that I came away with:

• Mobile and location are coming fast. For example, point a mobile phone’s camera towards an historic building and it can pull up the wikipedia entry
• Companies that use the web as the platform are the ones that thrive, even in downturns
• If you learn from your users, then increased usage will increase performance. For example, Google’s speech recognition learns from each user.
• The amount of Data on the Internet continues to increase, discovering the hidden meanings is part of the future of the Internet
• Data isn’t only coming from people typing on a keyboard. Data sensors are adding intelligence.
• Build a simple system and let it evolve
• Create more value than you capture

As always, if anyone is interested in a deeper discussion, email, call or tweet me.