Archive for October, 2008
The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about us in today’s paper and online edition. Charles Passy the reporter who wrote the article put the top 4 passport expediters to the test and placed anonymous orders on their websites the week prior. The results, we returned his passport in 24 hours where as the rest took approximately 3-4 days. In addition, he praised us for our customer service in the article.
I received a phone call from Charles earlier this week and in interview we spoke about several things but in the end it came down to the fact that we had superior online technology which allowed for his passport to be expedited in such a short time.
As I mentioned to Charles, he hasn’t seen anything yet. Our new system which is scheduled to release in 2009 will allow consumers to order their U.S. passports and travel visas to any country in the world with very little effort. Our system will be fully integrated with Fedex and Google Maps which allow consumers to know where their documents are in real-time. In addition, our new system will work with GPS enabled mobile phones to assist customers in locating the nearest passport acceptance facility where they can get their documents sealed.
For more information RushMyPassport.com or to order an expedited passport, please visit: www.rushmypassport.com.
We’ve finally decided on the application we will be submitting to the Apps for Democracy innovation contest. After juggling around some different ideas, we were torn between the idea of building an application targeted towards businesses or consumers. We felt that the application would get more use from consumers so we decided to build a D.C. Historic Tours application.
D.C. Historic Tours will allow for consumers to select from a variety of historical options provided by the D.C. Data Catalog including historic streets, structures, landmarks and sites. After selecting the destinations that they would like to visit, the application will plot and route the most efficient walking or driving tour. In addition to integrating with the D.C. Data Catalog, the application will utilize Flickr to provide images of the historic sites as well as restaurants and reviews along their route from Yelp.
This weekend I had the pleasure of presenting at BarCamp DC 2008. It was the first BarCamp I have attended. BarCamp is a technology unconference where topics are suggested but there is no proper format. BOALT got some coverage from the Washington Post both on their website and in Monday’s business section. It was pretty exciting given that there were over 30 presentors and only a couple were mentioned.
My presentation topic was named, “Building a web business in an uncertain economy.” And for those of you that did not attend, I have outlined the presentation below.
I attended the AppsforDemocracy.com happy hour event last Thursday night. It was a great event hosted by Peter Corbett. The event kicked off an innovation contest which is looking for “talented technologists and creatives battling it out to see who can create the most useful applications from DC’s Data Catalog“.
BOALT will be submitting an entry to the contest early next month. I think it’s great for the government in D.C. to make all their public data so available. May the best man win!
Sexy creative is not enough to generate leads and orders through the web. There are many different attributes that can ultimately affect your bottom line. The concept is not too hard to understand but most of our clients don’t want to spend money on multivariate or A/B testing.
Take a look at our startup, RushMyPassport.com. We average approximately 100 orders a day and a redesign of our homepage increased our sales by almost $4k per day. Yep, that’s right, over $100k a month.
So, what’s the secret formula. It’s not rocket science, the trick is get over yourself, it’s not about what you want. It’s about what the masses want. Once you understand this, you’ll attain more than desirable results.
TechCrunch was liveblogging Google’s third quarter conference call today. I was glad to hear that Google had a good quarter considering recent events in the economy.
I know that a lot of companies are trimming the fat in a lot of departments and it was nice to know that paid search still remains a huge priority in the eyes of corporate America.
I think that paid search is the most effective form of advertising and this just reinforced my position. So any clients who are thinking about cutting their budgets, be wise and don’t cut paid search!