Business

Eat Your Books (And Read Your Vegetables)

Kevin HallBusiness, Design

My best friend Tom has enlisted us to help promote his new musical endeavor. MrSeley.com is now online promoting his music that kids really like. There are free ringtones via Myxer and you can hear 3 songs off the upcoming album Eat Your Books (And Read Your Vegetables). Tom is a really talented musician and writes songs for kids without veering into the moronic songs and huge bowties realm. Design wise we stuck with a more sophisticated and understated color palette that suits his style. You can sign up for the email list and he’ll let you know when the album is released and when he plays concerts you can attend.

Read more

BoomVote.com Launches

Kevin HallBusiness

We’re pleased to reveal one of the projects that took up our summer – BoomVote.com. BoomVote is a fun, entertaining take on the classic “rate people” site. In addition to posting your photo and description for free you can send messages to other members, spend hours looking through photos and videos, and win cash and prizes just for using the site. There are some great sponsors already on board who are supporting the site and sponsoring contests for people to win. The folks running the site are full of great ideas so you’ll see a lot more features and fun contests coming to the site over the next few months. In the meantime sign up and start voting. Get in […]

Read more

Why a Geek won't buy HD-DVD or Blu-ray Discs

Kevin HallBusiness, Ethics, User Experience

It’s simply not worth the trouble. Ignoring the obvious ethical and social issues, DRM leads to an arms race that should never have started. And it is one that the DRM pushers are sure to lose. It costs loads of money to produce a DRM scheme, to try to implement it, to keep it updated when it gets cracked within a few weeks of each update, and then to support all of the customers who simply want to play their movie but can’t because you are “protecting” it. There is a great discussion over at Ed Felton’s blog about the AACS cracks and updates. Basically it takes tons of time and money to stop movies from playing, inconveniencing paying customers, […]

Read more

Mandy & Pandy Site Launch

Kevin HallBusiness, Design, Marketing

We’re pleased to announce another new site launch. Mandy & Pandy’s new website is online and taking pre-orders for Mandy & Pandy Say Ni Hao Ma?, the first in a 12 book series. We worked with the books author and illustrator to launch the site as well as creating a complete identity system including business cards, postcards, letterhead, order sheets, and banners, all in time for the Toy Fair 2007 in New York City. We’re glad to be a part of this project. Mandy & Pandy books teach kids Chinese quickly and easily, rather like Dora the Explorer teaches Spanish. We’re glad to be able to offer not just our web design services but also to help with the marketing, […]

Read more

Net Neutrality

Kevin HallAsides, Business, Ethics

(via Donklephant) Net Neutrality is the principle that traffic to and from all website should be treated equally by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). They should not be allowed to slow down or speed up traffic based on what it is or whether they were paid a toll by the website operator. Basically, you paid for your connection to the internet and the people who ruin the website paid for their connection. The ISPs want to charge the web site providers an additional charge on top of that. The effect is that they can extort fees from richer companies and prevent new companies and new services from prospering. They can also use this technique to crush competitors such as when they […]

Read more

John McCain Loses My Vote

Kevin HallBusiness, Content Management, Ethics, User Experience

For while he almost had me with his maverick attitude and independent slant. His talk about compromise and ethics reforms. His sudden decision to speak at Bob Jones University without holding to his earlier pledge to tell off the racists running the place was, well, disheartening. Now he has decided to push for a ridiculous legislation that essentially bans sex offenders from using any website that requires registration, including blogs, chat rooms, social networking sites, product review sites, e-Commerce sites, etc. and potentially levies 6 figure fines against individuals who don’t police their blogs’ comments tightly enough or turn in people who post offensive material in comments.

Read more

New Site: CIPA

Kevin HallBusiness

We’re pleased to announce another new site launch. This time we’re helping CIPA, The Consortium of Independent Physician Associations, to get going in their efforts to save patients money through the prescription of effective generic drugs. CIPA is working to reduce the high cost of medical care by working with doctors to track the dispensing of generic drugs as a low cost alternative to brand name drugs. Generics are chemically identical or similar enough not to make a difference but often come at a fraction of the cost of name brand drugs. We’re working with the Medical Advantage Group in East Lansing to build the site that gets the information out to the administrators and doctors who write the prescriptions. […]

Read more

New Site: U.S. Taxpayers and Constitution Party of Michigan

Kevin HallBusiness

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve just launched a new website for the U.S. Taxpayers and Constitution Party of Michigan. Dr. Bhagwan (Bob) Dashairya led the charge in getting the new site up quickly in time for the election on Tuesday. Brad and I are glad that we could be a part of the democratic process by helping candidates for office in Michigan get their message out so voters can make an informed choice. You may recall that we launched a site for Charles Tackett’s run for Congress recently as well. The Web can be a great tool for democracy. A good website can be used by candidates to clearly communicate their views in a more sophisticated manner than 15 […]

Read more

Using and Abusing Copyright Law

Kevin HallBusiness, Ethics

(via shlep: the Self-Help Law ExPress) The North Country Gazette has a notice (highlighted above in the image) that invokes “Fair Use of Copyright” to forbid the reproduction of their publication. They’ve been called to task by David Giacalone of shlep for trying to void the Fair Use rights that all of us have. Copyright holders have exactly zero authority to void these rights and any claims to the contrary should rightly be smacked down with impunity.

Read more