Quark and other similar design programs are infamous for having a very tough learning curve, making it extremely difficult for amateurs to pick them up and make anything of quality. The company is looking to make layout and design more accessible for the general public with the introduction of Quark Promote. The goal of Quark Promote is to allow individuals and small business owners to quickly and easily create promotional materials.
Quark Promote's online template gallery features professionally designed templates for everything ranging from business cards to letterhead. Once users pick a set that they like, the Quark Promote application quickly installs and launches. Users can then enter in their own information as well as play with the color schemes and layout.
Quark Promote features hundreds of professionally designed templates that you can customize for your needs.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)The actual Quark Promote application is very easy to use and is not intimidating. It doesn't have all of the functionality of the full blown version of Quark, but there is enough there to tweak the design to your liking.
Up to this point in the process, everything is free. Users don't need to pay for templates like they do with other services. Rather Quark thinks that you will like the design enough to want to make prints. Quark Promote gives you the option to order prints by mail or to find a neighborhood printer where you can pick them up yourself. This is where Quark makes its money--on the referral fees from printers.
When I talked with the guys behind Promote, they said they have bigger plans for the service, moving forward, which include partnering up with stock photo sites such as Getty and iStockphoto to give users more customization possibilities with images. It is also possible that they will add support for searching for Creative Commons licensed content on Flickr to the application to widen the selection of available images that users can use in their promotional materials.
Corporate tools take note: You can tell Twitter exactly what you're doing, and it'll tell LinkedIn too.
Chalk one up for the cringe-worthy marketing term "personal branding": there is a new partnership between Twitter, hub for informing the world exactly what you're doing and thinking at all moments of the day, and LinkedIn, the business-networking tool on steroids. In an announcement Monday, the two companies explained that LinkedIn status messages can sync with Twitter.
"The business use case of Twitter is turning out to be very important, and more and more people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a joint video with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman that was posted to the LinkedIn blog.
So, in short, LinkedIn's "status" feature now syncs with Twitter with an optional check box--a feature that the two companies say should be rolling out over the next few days. Likewise, can set your Twitter status as your LinkedIn status by using the hash tag #li or #in, so that you can rest assured that your tweet about "watching Gossip Girl and eating cold pizza" won't immediately show up to potential clients or employers trawling your LinkedIn profile. (Full disclosure: This was my Twitter status tonight. If you believe that it renders me professionally unsound, please feel free to let me know.)
All snark aside, this is probably a very good bet for LinkedIn, which continues to grow fast and make money but which hasn't yet really jumped into the latest social-networking trend of real-time, streaming information. Inking a partnership with Twitter is much easier than launching some other kind of initiative to get members to update their statuses more often. Tweets sent to LinkedIn, presumably, could also be grouped in with LinkedIn status messages to form some kind of business-intelligence live stream. The sort of information that people want to share specifically with colleagues and professional associates could be of interest to high-end advertisers or the market research community.
Twitter, meanwhile, is going to want to stay in the limelight of the business community as it considers a long-term business model--one of the microblogging service's potential moneymakers has been launching a "dashboard" of analytics for people and companies who use it primarily for professional purposes rather than, you know, filling the world in on which beer was just discovered in the back of the fridge.
Also for Twitter, this is yet another potential source of tweets as it attempts to become the world's foremost repository of real-time information. Earlier this year, MySpace announced an official way to sync Twitter and MySpace status, and in a matter of weeks its link-shortening service had become the second most popular on Twitter (trailing Twitter's preferred Bit.ly).
Facebook, meanwhile, appears to have been more reluctant: a Twitter app on its platform has pulled tweets into status messages for some time, and an unofficial app lets members tag selective tweets with the hashtag "#fb" to cross-post them to Facebook, but the only time that Facebook has put out a big, official announcement about syncing with Twitter was when it added an easy-sync feature for "fan pages," profiles for brands and marketers.
Not surprising. Twitter is a hot name in marketing these days, and in order for Facebook to establish fan pages as an ideal spot for brands to build a presence, an easy Twitter sync is a selling point. But in the long run, it's an advantage for Facebook, which once tried to buy Twitter and was snubbed, to keep its treasure trove of what-the-world-is-thinking somewhat to itself. After all, it can get away with it: with well over 300 million active users, Facebook is significantly bigger than Twitter, and could be diluting its own product by openly sourcing status messages out to Twitter. LinkedIn, better known for its networking features than any kind of status updating, isn't running that kind of risk.
Until then: "At SFO airport at bookstore. Deciding between @gladwell and @tferriss. Need real, serious insights. Thoughts? #li."
Twitter and self-promotion go together like peanut butter and jelly, but without the right tools it takes work. I've recently begun using a handy service called Autopostr that takes most of that work out of the equation, by posting whichever of my Flickr photos I want straight to Twitter with a minimal amount of effort.
On any photo or photos you wish to share with your Twitter buddies you simply add a hash (#) in the title or "autopostr" as a photo tag. The service scans your Flickr account every five minutes, and takes any of those tagged photos and sends them out as new tweets.
Now I wouldn't recommend doing this on more than two or three photos a day since it's a bit spammy, but this system provides a very quick and simple way to promote photos without having to use URL shorteners or sign into your Twitter account. It's also makes it simple to see which photos you've shared to Twitter by sorting out which ones have hashes in the titles or autopostr tags.
Worth noting is that Autopostr won't start sending out your marked photos as tweets until it verifies your information. It also doesn't tap into your Twitter account using the popular Oauth, so you'll have to give it your Twitter username and password for it to be able to post. Creator Tistan Teunissen tells me that's coming soon though.
See also:
flickr2twitter and
You can now post pics to Twitter from Picnik
Autopostr checks to see if you added the tag or a # to your Flickr picture, and sends out a Tweet with a link to the image on your behalf.
(Credit: CNET)
Well, this is an interesting tidbit: Computer giant Dell told Internet News that its "Twitter sale alerts" have added up to about $1 million in revenue.
As we all know from Mike Myers' "Dr. Evil" character in the Austin Powers movie franchise, a million bucks isn't a whole lot of money for a major multinational corporation. But it does have something to say about how Twitter is transforming from gimmicky messaging tool to marketing powerhouse. Fire-sale start-up Woot showed that it's possible to take advantage of Twitter's rapid-fire nature to advertise fleeting deals; shoe retailer Zappos has gotten praise for using Twitter for customer service.
Low-cost airline JetBlue, as the Internet News article points out, also uses Twitter for both fare deals and customer service.
More compelling is what this can mean for Twitter's own not-yet-existent business model, which looks like it might involve premium accounts for businesses using the service. With companies touting retail success, this could widen the window of opportunity for Twitter to start encouraging them to, well, pay up.
(Credit:
CNET)
On Tuesday, the first promotional codes that will make iPhone apps free to some users began trickling out of the App Store.
Apple is finally bequeathing apps developers with a way to let some media testers review an app at no expense and reward or attract a few lucky users. (The first invite has already floated into my in-box.)
This is Apple, so there are limits. Fifty promotional codes per product, to be exact.
Also, as wonderful as it is to see the passcodes allowed and implemented, they are not free trials. Developers angling to hook new customers will still need to lure them with free, light versions of the software or the less popular approach of offering an app free for a limited time and then ratcheting up the cost when the window closes.
Still, we're happy to finally see some leeway for developers, who will also get a reprieve from issuing gift certificates that often lose them money as a workaround for letting select reviewers evaluate apps for free.
A team of researchers from the University of Georgia has come to a conclusion that will undoubtedly turn the tech world on its side (ha): if you use Facebook to promote your lovely self, it shows through. Narcissists, or those psychologically defined as "excessively egotistical," will inflate their profiles on the social network with more photos, massive friends lists, and packed activity feeds.
As we used to say on the playground in third grade, duh.
"We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others," study leader and Ph.D. student Laura Buffardi said in a Live Science article about the study. Past research back in the dinosaur days of the Web had revealed similar conclusions about narcissists and personal Web pages. Imagine how hard it was to self-promote when you had to know how to use HTML to turn the background of your personal homepage pink!
In order to conduct the study, untrained observers were shown Facebook profiles and asked to identify which ones belonged to people who are classified as narcissists. The narcissists' profiles were easy to pick out, the researchers noted.
The report is published in October's issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin academic journal.
"Narcissists might initially be seen as charming, but they end up using people for their own advantage," study co-author W. Keith Campbell said to Live Science. "They hurt the people around them and they hurt themselves in the long run."
So it looks like now the prolific Internet chatter about oversharers, bloggy self-promoters, and "wantrepreneurs" now has some academic basis.
Music giant Live Nation announced on Thursday that it has partnered with SMG, the operator of 216 stadiums, arenas, convention centers, and concert halls, in an agreement that lasts through 2011.
The announcement is in anticipation of Live Nation's ticketing service, which launches in January and will sell tickets for venues that Live Nation already represents as a promoter as well as third-party partners. Under the terms of the agreement, Live Nation will be the exclusive outlet for SMG's tickets; Live Nation expects the SMG deal to raise its potential ticketing volume by 25 percent.
Live Nation recently ended its ticketing contract with Ticketmaster, owned by InterActiveCorp before CEO Barry Diller spun it off into a separate company. When Live Nation Ticketing launches, the two companies will be direct competitors.
Live Nation has also started offering "360" representation for artists, taking the place of a music label and touring manager, as well as a promoter.
Get well soon, Sam.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)Sam Lawrence, the CMO of Jive Software, broke his foot a week ago. He wasn't looking forward to the hassle of wheeling around Web 2.0 Expo in a wheelchair, but found a way to take advantage of the situation: He turned his buggy into a mobile billboard. A metal placard mounted on the backrest advertises his own company, and he also got two other sponsors to pay for placement, offsetting the cost of the hardware.
Now that's a solid Web 2.0 business model.
Urban events site Going.com, which targets party-friendly 20-somethings with a hipster slant, announced earlier this week that it has expanded into local event ticketing. This means that promoters and event hosts on Going can now sell tickets for their concerts, benefits, parties, and other social get-togethers through the site.
The structure is much like a standard ticket site's "will-call" option; no paper tickets are mailed. "You go to the venue or the place of the event," Going CEO Evan Schumacher explained in an interview with CNET News.com, "and we tell (you) to bring your credit card or ID."
Just like the rest of Going.com, the new ticketing service is limited to New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles. And Schumacher assured me that it won't be a free-for-all due to security concerns.
"The first thing (promoters) do is they have to go through a registration process, which includes a credit card transaction validating that they are who they are, and that they represent the organization they say they represent," he said. He estimated that this approval process should take a day or two. "We actually reach out to the venue or the organization that they say they're selling tickets either for or at, and make sure that this is an accurate representation as well."
In other words, it'd be difficult for you to use Going to monetize your next house party.
And, he added, ticket resellers will not be able to use Going to scalp tickets purchased from, say, Ticketmaster at inflated prices. "We don't get involved with tickets that are at major venues," he explained. "It's not a marketplace like an eBay."
Going has cited Pollstar Magazine figures that put the U.S. ticket sales market at $3.6 billion and rising. That revenue potential is why a relatively niche-based events site is willing to take this kind of risk.
"Every ticketing site has to deal with fraud prevention," he said. "People will try all kinds of things, I'm sure, and that's why we're focusing on a high-touch validation at this phase."
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