For the past 7 years, Emerge Inc. has been working with some of Ohio’s largest County park districts to develop custom web applications. These applications have included facility reservations, program registrations, park user contact management, bar code ticketing, inventory control, volunteer management and point of sale.
Based on this experience, Emerge is spinning off a new start-up to develop a Software as a Service that helps city parks and recreation departments reach citizens, improve operations and generate non-tax revenue.
For this start-up, we have 3 new openings:
Lead software development – Ruby on Rails framework
User Interface/Experience Designer
Web Content Manager
If you are an exceptional person, skilled in one of these areas and interested in being part of an exciting start-up, please send your resume to Ed@EmergeInc.com.
On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to speak at the Northeast Ohio Regional Parks Conference held at Lakeland Community College. About 60 marketing, information technology and executives from park districts attended the presentation which was titled “A Conversation on Web, Mobile, Social and Location Technologies“.
My presenting style is to share the things I’m paying attention to, why I believe it matters and provide some examples of how it is being implemented in the industry. I also like to provide ample opportunity for the audience to share their own experiences and enable all of us to learn from each other.
Following are the presentation slides and a short summary of the presentation. If you’re interested in a further conversation on this please feel free to email or call me (440) 294-4949.
Disclaimer – I do not claim to be an expert, just someone with some experiences that others may not have. I’m focused on the 1 to 2 year level and won’t tell you what you should go tweet this afternoon. I believe in experimentation and my bias is that this stuff is very valuable, important and shouldn’t be ‘free’.
Web – In 2010, the 9 Emerge developed park websites that enable customers to purchase programs and reserve facilities generated well over $1 million in revenue. Citizens are open to doing online commerce with park districts. Services like Google Analytics enable you to track important data. Video is very quickly becoming an important tool for communicating on the Internet. A great blog for marketing people is my good Friend Tom Wanek’s.
Mobile - My presentation was at the same time that Verizon/iPhone announcement. One of the major questions that park districts will face in the next year or 2 is how they will support the large number of users accessing their information on mobile devices.
Social – The ability for people to share their thoughts and experiences with large numbers of ‘friends’ in virtual real-time has major impact on marketers. Clearly Facebook is the leader in this space and is used by more than just ‘youth’. I also touched on the ability to bring Facebook to your website through Facebook Connect.
Location – Mobile devices with built in GPS ‘know’ where we are. This opens up a number of opportunities, including location based services that enable people to share their location with others and participate in games. While location services have received a lot of publicity within the technology community, they haven’t caught on with the general public. However, there are ways to use location awareness to tailor marketing messages received by park users.
What Else – I touched briefly on a number of other areas that are worth paying attention to and will have impacts on park districts.
Discussion – The group held a phenomenal discussion which among other things, touched on topics such as twitter, facebook, social media, websites, QR codes and mapping.
The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation had another great turnout for their annual Walk to Cure Diabetes. Despite the overcast and cold temperatures, over 6,000 people walked at the Ohio State University in Columbus on Sunday, raising over $600,000.
For the fourth straight year, we have worked with the Mid-Ohio JDRF to develop the walks website to promote their event and to provide event details. For more information and photos from this year’s event, visit the Walk to Cure Diabetes website.
Discussing Skype earlier this month, I thought it would be fitting to discuss the recent moves made by Google to take on the Internet communications company.
Last Wednesday, Google made the announcement that you’d be able to make phone calls right from your Gmail account. By Thursday morning, the feature was available across the United States to Gmail users. In simple terms, it allows you to call any phone number right from your computer. As of this writing, calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for the rest of 2010, and they have a full list of rates to other countries throughout the world. Also, you can integrate your Google Voice number to your gmail account to allow it to be the outbound number people see, or to receive calls from that number in your Gmail account.
I also don’t think it is farfetched to say that Google made this announcement strategically after Skype announced their long awaited IPO. But personally, I’m not sure it will be enough to disrupt what Skype is currently doing. In late 2009, Gmail had around 176 million users. Around that same time, Skype was at about 521 million users. Skype has been focusing on improving and making this technology as good as it can be, something Google did itself with Search. Because of that, I still think it will be the leader when push comes to shove in this Internet communications tug-of-war. It’s also important to remember that Google has had some misses lately. Buzz started off with a PR firestorm and Google Wave never seemed to be the game-changer they had promised.
It will be interesting to see when Skype’s IPO occurs to see what affect this may have on their value projections. If nothing else, I hope this helps users in the long-run by each company working to make the service as good as possible and keeping the costs down.
Foursquare, the location-based service whose name you may have heard over the last few weeks, passed the 3 million user mark according to TechCrunch over the weekend. Their growth has been something to watch, hitting 1 million users in a year, 2 million users 3 months later, and now passing 3 million just one-and-a-half months after that. But can it keep this pace up?
When Facebook announced it’s own location-based feature named Places earlier this month, many saw it as the death notice to sites like Foursquare. But maybe it will be just the opposite and push services like Foursquare to the next level. According to Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley, Foursquare had its biggest day of signups after Facebook made it’s announcement. Related to that, he also says that they are growing at a rate of around 180,000 new users each day.
With location-based services continuing to grow, the real question will come down to how many people will want to send out their locations in real-time? It makes the sustainability of the service a bit more murky in the long run.
Beginning in September, Emerge is launching four new email newsletters for clients, prospective clients, friends and anyone else interested. Each newsletter will based on Emerge’s current areas of focus:
Local Business & Non-profits – designed for owners, managers and marketers of locally focused businesses and organizations.
Parks Departments – focused on the usage of the Internet for County MetroParks and City Parks Departments
Education - with an emphasis on the use of Internet technology to connect school districts with parents and the community
Government - information for city and county government offices and departments
Each newsletter will evolve over time based on the interests of subscribers and the trends in technology. Some of the things that may be included are:
Emerging Internet technology trends
Using the Internet to reach customers
Using the Internet to increase revenue
Using the Internet to reduce operating costs
Social Media
Mobile Technology
Analytics, Statistics and Data
Best Practices
Usability and Design
Emerge Company News
If you would like to join the list, please complete the form below, don’t worry, we’ll include an opt-out link in every enewsletter. If you have any ideas for the newsletters, please let us know.
Sign up to our Newsletter
Enter your e-mail address below to receive regular updates on emerging Internet technologies to reach customers, increase revenue and reduce operating costs.
I’m a huge fan of Skype, software that allows people to make free calls and instant message other users or low-cost calls to landlines and mobile devices.
It came to my attention around two and a half years ago, when during a get together with some friends over the holidays, we were able to “skype”, or call our friend also using skype, serving in the Army in the Middle East, absolutely free on a laptop. Each computer had a webcam so it gave us a chance to see him for the first time in many months, and gave him a chance to see all of us. I was sold from that moment on.
Earlier this year, Skype and Verizon struck a deal to allow Skype calls and messages on the Verizon network at no extra cost. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier blog post, I use the HTC Droid Incredible, a Verizon phone. I got the chance to test out the system, and I was more than impressed.
We tested the app using three Skype numbers, one locally, one on the west coast, and one in England. The results were nearly the same for the two stateside, with some issues to the call in England. The two here in the US had great call quality with very little lag. We did have some lag issue with the call to England, but we were also driving (I was in the passenger seat) so it’s hard to say where the lag issue was coming from. Even with the lag, it was still good quality for a free call “across the pond.”
I encourage others to check the service out and if you’re a Verizon customer with a 3G phone, definitely check out the app.
Facebook Fan Pages are an interesting and unique way for businesses to reach their customers. It provides a “website-within-a-website” feel and allows for a specific type of interactivity between the organization and the user.
One question I hear is “How can I make my fan page better?” My initial answer is always that personalization can go a very long way. Making the page your own and tying it to the identity of your company is key.
But there are apps that are built into the system that can also help to make your page better. Here are a few of my favorites below:
Static FBML – The FBML stands for FaceBook Markup Language. It is designed to add functionality to your page for added customization.
Promotions – This app will allow you to create contests and giveaways for your users, a great way to help people engage in your brand.
Social RSS – This allows you to automatically pull in any ATOM or RSS feeds, directly to your Facebook Fan page.
Poll – This one is just what it sounds like, gives you the chance to have a poll on your page. Great way to keep users coming back to your page, find out information directly from your consumers and to create an engaging place for your users to go.
Youtube for Pages – If you are creating videos for your business (and if you aren’t you should think about it), you can use this app to connect to your Youtube channel (or someone else’s) and pull the videos right to your Fan Page.
Try these options out to see if they help your Facebook Fan page and create a new experience for your customers.
Twitter is something I admittedly never saw coming. When I did see it, I never saw it reaching the heights that it has. I wasn’t sure that little 140 character messages would satisfy people, but boy was I wrong.
I find myself using Twitter a lot to search, especially current events and products I’m interested in. More often than not, I find myself with more information than I imagined I would ever find.
One of the other things I love is finding companies who are using the technology in an interesting fashion. Enter Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream from San Francisco, California. With an ever changing menu of flavors offered, they would tweet their loyal customers what flavors they’d have, among other tweets, and do it in a style of “ice cream with attitude.”
The article I found this information lists six great recommendations for those starting to use Twitter as well.
First of all, listen
Do not be boring
A live version of a FAQ
Create a focus group
Soapbox for thinkers
Starting small is fine
This all comes from a great article with even more great stories from the New York Times. Click here to read the full article.
