Utility, Design and the Web

This morning I read this entry from Seth Godin and keyed on this quote:

The funny thing is that design on the web is almost the opposite. Winning sites on the web almost always have terrible design and terrible logos...In fact, it works so well it now seems to be clear that clunky, engineering-built design might just be the secret to success online.

This statement synchronizes with the emerging reality that the web is developing its own rules for effective marketing.  When attention is derived from recommendation and not interruption, the advertising focus must shift towards gaining and then leveraging recommendation. Print and TV analogues like banner ads or pre/post/mid-roll advertising do not translate into effective marketing.

What translates is utility, agile development, rich customer feedback loops and scalability. BokayMe is a representation of this strategy. The site was developed quickly ,based on the simple utility, build your own unique digital bouquet. It was developed utilizing an agile methodology on the Ruby on Rails framework. Since we launched we have engaged in continual improvements based on user feedback and we are only a week in. 

BokayMe is just one project, but it points to how Sympact is approaching brands and agencies to discuss their interactive marketing agenda.

BokayMe Featured by Mashable

BokayMe has been featured by Mashable as one of their 25 Great Resources For Valentine's Day.  We are very excited to have our first reference on the site as many of us have been long time readers.  We hope this will be the first of many as we use our ADI technology and Younety platform to rapidly build more top notch social applications.

Bokayme is awesome

This was an exciting day for the whole team here at Sympact because the beta version of BokayMe went live this morning. BokayMe is an online bouquet maker and system for sharing these digital objects with all of your best friends across social nets and mobile. We built this system for 1-800-Flowers and we all feel that it lives up to the traditions of ingenuity that has been a keystone of 1-800-Flowers success.

With a press release hitting the wires this morning, we  got our first blog mention from none other than Allen Stern the impresario behind Center Networks.

I'll quote my favorite part:

The bokay looks very beautiful online... Testing out the system, it worked as intended.

Allen also mentions that  there is a cost associated with sending your digital bokay. He did not seem to be keen on paying for these beautiful digital goods.  In the age of free goods and services delivered  via the Internet, I do think that this approach is an interesting experiment. It also places the onus on the Sympact and 1-800-Flowers teams to deliver a rock solid and compelling product to justify the cost.

We feel we met that challenge and look forward to improving on the features of BokayMe over time. We will no doubt continue to innovate to bring these great looking bokay's to anywhere on the Internet where someone wants to showcase them. Thanks to 1-800-Flowers.com for having the vision to bring BokayMe to life. To any other brands out there, if you're looking to deploy an application that picks up audience wherever that audience wants to be, give us a call. We have plenty of ideas.

Engine Yard - Merb, Rubinius, $3.5 Million, Oh My!

We have now been with Engine Yard for over two months, and the experience has been nothing short of amazing.  At Rackspace for the same money we were spending we had a single point of failure for all our apps,  a pen + mongrel_cluster config that was no where near production ready, and no direct rails support in case anything happened.

We have truly made strides with the help of the Engine Yard team.  We now have a Merb app to help handle one specific task, we now have redundancy.  We now have... HELP!!

These guys really know what they are doing, and the work going into Merb, and Rubinius along with the $3.5 Million from Benchmark capital really give us faith that Ruby hosting has nowhere to go but up.  We are happy to be up on the edge with the Engine Yard team, and have developed a great dynamic with the support staff.  If you want to get serious about your rails app and want the advice of the experts Engine Yard is the place to be.