One of Yoobas main capabilities include creation, the other ones are publishing and evaluation. I don’t want rank these; they’re all vital parts of our service. But if we take a closer look at the creative bit; we get into Yooba Studio.

That’s where the magic happens.

This is where you create your campaigns or marketing messages. The platform is based on multiple templates that you, within certain limits, can customize for your purpose.

The main benefit is within the process of creating a full scale campaign. If you don’t possess certain skills, you get the built-in fx, features etc., and if your specialty is to design; you do what you always do and implement your work into Yooba Studio. When you’re done in Yooba Studio; you have an engaging activity for your end-user. It’s ready to publish.

What you haven’t done is the programming...

Tags: yooba studio, internet marketing, campaign, rich media,

Some of our potential users (publicus) have expressed a will to know more about our service. That’s a very natural reaction to something new, that seems interesting and talks to you. - You want to know more. That’s also an indication that we are doing something good.  As we have chosen to go public and actually encourage conversation (relations), we need to take part of it.

How to explain Yooba then? Jonas Gabriel did a good description at the discussion board over here. It’s not saying all, and to avoid tautology; I won't have another go. And to keep things on the transparent road; it’s very hard to explain all, right now, in this context.

We are putting the final touches to the elevator pitches and all, but we really need to visualise the service to explain and illustrate its capabilities and features. And it’s not ready to go public. Yet.

But, we’ll definitely put out some mock-ups soon. I don’t know what I can get, but hopefully it can illustrate and give some new insight to our service. And yes, a second film is under production. It should be more pedagogical and informative.   

Tags: pr, facebook, yooba, transparency, caliban

Lately I've been in touch with a lot of people involved in Internet marketing in many different ways. One category is people who run small individual businesses online, who seek information and guidance about Internet marketing by joining communities or subscribing for marketing blogs etc. Maybe they have a website of some kind that they use for promotion to gain customers from. My experience is that people are often spending a lot of energy on SEO and other methods to gain traffic to their sites. But how do you get visitors to become customers?

Of course the content is the most important factor. But Internet isn't what it used to be. People surfing the Internet today get higher and higher expectations on interactivity, usability, and the visual appearance of the content. Let's face it. It's easier to sell a product with an interesting and well designed package than one with a boring and ugly package.

People who are starting up a new business can accomplish a lot on their own when it comes to Internet marketing, but they often can't afford digital agencies to produce that little extra to their promotions and marketing content. Enter Yooba!

Yooba will give you the tools to produce these components on your own. It will let you embrace creativity. You don't need to be an artist and you don't need to be a web developer to create that appealing, flashy content that attracts customers. Yooba does that for you...

Tags: visual appearance, interactivity, internet marketing

Tags: google analytics, user behaviour

I'm proud to announce that we have managed to get two awards for the Yooba.com-site so far:

NewWebPick Qualification because of the design and technology

and...

Web Sites of the Day in e-Creative Awards

We have developed and designed the site in collaboration with Soft. Special thanks to Daniel Björkefors at Soft who is the talent behind our little Caliban mascot. You will be seeing more of Caliban in the near future.

 

Tags: design, caliban, newwebpick, e-creative, soft, yooba

One of the problems we encountered when developing Yooba Studio was getting access to a small but crucial part of a Flex Component: the CheckBox check icon.  In many cases, most of the parts of a component is accessible via relatively easy means, making it easy for developers to modify its behaviour and appearance. But the CheckBox (and the RadioButton) was a different story. We wanted to change the check mark color at runtime and after doing some digging, I found the hard coded color value in CheckBoxIcon.as. Creating my own version of the file (thanks Alex!) we were able to do just what we wanted with the icon.

An example of how to go about it can be found here.

This is an example of when the open code in the Flex SDK is of great value - without it things would have been much more difficult in the every-day coding.

Tags: as, actionscript, source, code

Hi, Jonas here again. I must say that it’s nice with all inspiring thoughts and comments from everyone, keep it coming! As you probably have understood by now, we are developing a Flex application to be used on the web.

Yooba can be defined as a software as a service. This will benefit all of us, both you as a user of the service, and us as developers of the tool. Having a software as a service means the application will be available on the web, and obviously you can access it from anywhere in the world.

As a customer, you will never have to care about updates or patching your software. The online version is always up to date, and we as developers will always know that our customers are using the same version of the software. We at Yooba will of course be hosting the service, and everything that is published. When using this type of service, we will be able to have a tool that is alive; ask for a feature and we will try to implement it! Of course, it is quite hard to ask for something, when you really don’t know what is possible to do. But bear with me, there will soon be some examples of what is doable.  

Tags: yooba, software as a service

Finding the right symbol for an icon is difficult. One of the easiest icon to design is the save icon. Although it is very misleading these days (especially when developing a RIA as we do) I, as almost everybody else, choosed the 3.5" floppy-disk to symbolise "Save" in our application. It's been ages since I used a diskette and I don't really ever wanna use one again, but it's still associated with saving a project, document ect. I tried other things like an USB pocket memory or a compact disc but they are almost as irrelevant as the floppy disc when it comes to Internet applications. I thought to myself: "Many icons use metaphors of physical objects for their functions, as a magnet for "Snap", so why can't an abandoned floppy disc make the cut?", and so it did, 'cause I will not be the one to kill it (at least not this time).

Next mission: Design the icon for "Save as...".

Question: What will happen to the "Save" icon when nobody remembers the physical disc as a medium?  

Tags: save, icon, graphics, design, floppy, interface, gui, yooba

It's been a while since I introduced myself on this blog and there's been some interesting activity since then. We have got a lot of beta sign ups, our Facebook group is growing, and we are finally getting some feedback on the work so far. People are very positive and they are giving a lot of cred to the video, but they don't really understand what Yooba will do for them.

Brendan Picha made a post on his blog about Yooba and it sums up the general reaction quite well. It also includes a post I made on the discussion board of the Yooba-Facebook
group where I put a little more detail into the description of Yooba. He is still not satisfied and that I can understand. I can only wish for you to be patient. More details are coming in a near future.

I want more questions, more reactions and more discussions! This is what we have been waiting for.

So please, join our Facebook group!

Tags: yooba

Shel Holtz is talking about the ups and downs of the Social Media Release. Definitely notice taken. But the most refreshing part was about the reasons to introduce new technology:

• It solves a problem.
• It improves an existing process.
• It lets you do something you couldn’t even dream of doing before.
  

Tags: social media release, technology