If you're looking into starting a marketing campaign, this blog post by Eric Karljaluoto, creative director at smashLAB, might offer some fresh perspective. It's an insightful read, though not for someone who's easily offended. Here are the main points I took away from the article:

• "Don't spam, engage people in a dialogue."
• "It’s no longer about the number of messages you send; instead, concentrate on the actual interaction or engagement that results."

Additional reading:

• SmashLAB's Primer in Social Media
• Seth Godin's Email checklist

A client's Yahoo email account was hijacked recently. She found out after an email was sent out in her name, to her entire contact list, asking to borrow several thousand pounds. This was such an obvious scam that no-one fell for it. Fortunately, other than some embarrassment and inconvenience, there were no serious consequences. It could have been much worse.

Have you ever been presented with a premature 'change cartridge' warning by your printer? This scenario should be quite familiar: your printer is happily churning out pages with no sign of fading when suddenly the low ink indicator lights-up. The thing then becomes useless until you pop in a brand-new (and probably expensive) cartridge. You might suspect that there's still more ink and you're probably right. It's been widely-reported that printer manufacturers' cut-off system is a little too eager.

Thanks to an article from Slate, an online magazine, I came across fixyourownprinter.com. The site has a forum offering tips on how to squeeze every last drop of ink out of your cartridge. Although Slate's article focuses on laser printers, fixyourownprinter.com also covers many brands of ink-jets.

Congratulations to one of our clients, Saronti, who have released this cute YouTube video of their services.





Note: Another Cup of Coffee didn't design or build the Saronti website. I just thought it would be nice share to share the video with you. :)

Ooops!

It appears that I may have incorrectly credited some designs that appeared in our gallery. A designer we used in 2007 submitted some concepts for his portfolio section on our site. Just today, a visitor dropped us a note claiming that some of the concepts do not belong to the designer. Here's the note:

In response to my post about running your own email server, a reader mentioned the BlackBerry mobile email service. According to his computer consultant, running Exchange (Microsoft's messaging and collaboration software) as an in-house email server is necessary for the BlackBerry. Coincidentally, this subject came up with three other clients over the past year so there's obviously another common misunderstanding here—they were going to install a company server for the same reason.

The consultant was partly correct, but it really depends on your needs. BlackBerry has two types of solutions:

A common misconception amongst small-business owners is that you need your own email server. For most companies I've encountered, this is just not necessary.

Before continuing, it may help if I explain some basics. There are essentially two ways to have email:

This blog will be about helping small companies use the internet more effectively.

As a small-business owner or entrepreneur, you know that reaching a wide audience is vital. You've heard that the internet can play a big part in a successful business but perhaps don't know where to start. You have enough on your plate just keeping things running smoothly. There's no time to become an expert and there's no budget to hire an expensive consultant. Besides, who can you trust? There are charlatans out there who'd happily run away with your hard-earned savings.

Sound familiar? If so, this blog is for you. It will help you apply technology to your business, spot new ideas that might otherwise go unnoticed, and find ways to make your life easier. As a result, you'll be able to use the internet to improve your business.