This month we’re writing about things that inspire us. In our digital world there are countless innovations, so I’m often inspired by new approaches to old problems.

I’ve noticed a shift in how local services are supplied to consumers and businesses. Until recently, websites vying for the holy grail of bringing local customers and service providers together used classified- or forum-type websites that allow service providers to post what they do generically. Customers were expected to sift through these listings or post what they needed and hope for the best. This paradigm is being uprooted due to rapid advances in Web and mobile technology that put the customer in charge.

The bottleneck of traditional marketing forced companies to create products and services they believed people need or want. Or in some extreme cases, companies created products they knew people didn’t need, and simply used their marketing prowess to convince people to buy their products anyway.

Small or independent service providers have largely followed suit, mimicking the marketing strategies and tactics that have restricted corporations to a limited number of products and services that can’t possibly cater to every daily need of billions of unique individuals.

Innovative local marketplaces now enable consumers to articulate exactly what they want or need at any given moment, typically via a GPS-enabled smartphone, and then leave it up to the service providers to find them and in some cases even duke it out for their business.

The wild increase in personal efficiency articulated by The New York Times is possible due to technology that enables people to tell companies what they want rather than the other way around. Now people of all walks of life make their own hours by doing exactly what people need when they need it for the amount they want to pay. This growing wave of independent providers avoid the waste and annoyance of casting wide nets with traditional marketing. This was a battle they’d never win against the corporations, so rather than keep trying they changed the rules of the game.

Here are a few that stand out:

Zaarly – Post what you want done and what you’re willing to pay. For instance, our own Tim McDonald who helped launch Zaarly tells the story of an Illinois man who needed help fishing his keys out of a storm sewer and got it done for $75.

TaskRabbit – “Do more. Live more. Be more.” People post what they need done and TaskRabbit-vetted service providers make offers to do the work, allowing the consumer to choose the best fit based on their criteria.

Agent Anything – Connects busy, hardworking people who need things done with college students looking to make money.

Will these resources help consumers focus on what they need rather than want? Not likely. It’s not hard to imagine dreaming up all kinds of random tasks you ask to have done, just to see if you can get them done for a small price. This is refreshing in a world over-crowded with group deals, coupons, and classified sites providing yet another place for service providers to sell their wares and creating confusion for consumers who don’t know where to begin.

This post was featured in epiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other epiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Mobile, Technology

Whether you are publishing content or selling products, you need to make it as easy as possible for your customers to get to your goods on their terms. Mobile usage is growing exponentially and will be an increasingly essential part of your toolkit to keep your customers coming back for more.

But if you’re just starting to think about how to go mobile, it can be hard to know where to begin. Two of the key things you’ll need to research are what mobile devices your customers are using now and what they want to use in the future. This information will help you make the right decisions when planning how to allocate your valuable resources.

Review your analytics. You should have Web analytics running on your website. Google Analytics is a top-notch free tool that will tell you a lot about how people are accessing your content. While analytics are useful, they don’t tell you the whole story. You also want to know how people ideally would view your content, which isn’t completely revealed until you’ve created an optimized mobile experience.

Send a survey. The best way to find out what your customers want is to ask. There are numerous survey tools available, which you can use to send a Web-based survey to your email list. Regardless of how you deploy the survey, it’s important to keep it short to increase the number of responses. Here is a suggested set of questions to find out your customers’ mobile preferences:

1) What type(s) of mobile phone do you have?
        a) iPhone
        b) Android
        c) Blackberry
        d) Windows
        e) Palm
        f) Other

2) What type(s) of mobile phone do you expect to have 1 year from now?
        a) iPhone
        b) Android
        c) Blackberry
        d) Windows
        e) Palm
        f) Other

3) From where do you typically view our website?
        a) Work
        b) Home
        c) On the go

4) From what type of device would you prefer to view our website?
        a) Desktop computer
        b) Laptop
        c) Tablet
        d) Mobile Phone

5) On a mobile phone, how do you prefer to read content?
        a) Apps
        b) Mobile Web browser (e.g., Safari)
        c) RSS Reader

6) If you own a tablet, what kind?
        a) iPad
        b) Android
        c) Windows
        d) Blackberry
        e) I don’t own a tablet

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Andy Swindler Categories: Gadget, How To, Marketing, Mobile, Technology

As the whole world goes mobile (2,600% increase predicted by 2015), two main options have emerged for bringing your business to the party: build apps or optimize your website.

I want to focus on the second option, optimizing your website/HTML, which is becoming a more appealing option as HTML becomes more capable of doing the things we’ve typically needed apps to do.

Once HTML 5 can do anything an app can, I see only three major advantages to building an app:

• Push notifications (a common app feature that currently doesn’t work in HTML)

• Distribution (selling/downloading an app that lives on a phone versus saving a bookmark)

• Offline access (HTML 5 is already pushing this one off the list as it has built-in offline caching features)

Apps also still have a “cool” factor, but typically introduce more time and cost in development and maintenance.

A number of terms have emerged to describe Web optimization for mobile devices. I’m here to tell you they all essentially mean the same thing: delivering a reduced amount of content to your users in a logical fashion to create a more efficient mobile experience. Ideally your website will detect the user’s device and optimize it on the fly since there are so many different mobile devices and screen sizes.

• Mobile Optimize
• Mobile Format
• Mobile Template
• Mobile Versioning
• Multi-Siting
• Adaptive Content Rendering

I think “optimize” is the most logical and accurate. Whatever you want to call it, the effort is partly technical, but largely falls in the realm of content strategy. With less screen real estate to use for your message, you’ll need to make careful decisions about what’s most important to convey to your user.

Come to think of it, brevity might just not be such a bad thing for the future of digital content delivery.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Uncategorized

If you’re like me, you can’t have enough digital desktop space. However, if you’re like me, you switched to a laptop many years ago, and had to take a step back from desktop computers that could easily run as many monitors as you could fit on your desk. Macs have always had an advantage here, running dual monitors since the late 80’s. This was one of the reasons they gained popularity for desktop publishing.

While most laptops natively support one external monitor in addition to the built-in screen, I’ve found myself at times wanting two big displays since I usually don’t have my laptop open on my desk. I find it cumbersome and recently downgraded to a 13“ MacBook Pro since I typically use the laptop as a laptop on planes and in coffee shops where it’s cramped. I may even go AirBook next.

Low and behold, about a year ago the geniuses at DisplayLink invented a microchip (let’s call it a magic box) that allows you to run a monitor off nothing more than a USB connection. How does it work? It compresses the video signal to fit into the 480 Mb/s data stream that USB can handle. Back in the day you had to have a separate video card for every monitor or pair of monitors, which used far more power and generate more heat. No more.

So now they’ve licensed the chip and there are all varieties of magic boxes out there. I highly recommend this USB display adapter from Diamond Multimedia, which works on Mac and PC and also has a built in 3-port USB hub since you’d be losing a USB port otherwise:

Installation is a snap. Install one DisplayLink driver, which you can find here for free, then plug it in and go! The box has a DVI monitor port, so you may need an adapter for VGA, etc.

The only drawback is that the refresh speed is a little sluggish. You’ll notice this when you drag windows around or play a video. It can support HD resolution on up to six additional screens (one monitor per box), which is great, but I would not recommend it for watching movies or gaming. That’s what your main monitor is for!

At Astek, we’re completely laptop-based, which is great for a flexible work environment. And now the only significant limitation has been removed. I tested it out first on one workstation, and then bought them for the whole office. It’s $60 for the box, so around $300 total investment including a monitor for a significant increase in productivity. Here’s my current setup:

What would you do with two monitors?

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Gadget, How To, Technology

We’ve reached the end of a significant phase with eMainstay, a client with whom Astek has spent the last three years building the My25 web-based meal-planning software to improve health and reduce management costs for communities housing people with developmental disabilities.

In order to broaden the market for the software, which has proven highly successful in numerous USDA-funded studies, eMainstay approached Astek to develop a robust new My25 prototype for the software and online community development. We chose video as the form to convey our vision for the future of our software and a truly innovative approach to household-oriented meal planning.

The videos below say it better than words. Bon Appetit!

My25 Business Overview

My25 Online Toolkit Intro

Extra special thanks to Vin Design, Kathleen Ermitage, and Sedgwick Productions for their multiple contributions to the ongoing success of this project.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Marketing, Technology, Web

You may have noticed a new kind of square barcode popping up all over the place, which are most likely QR codes. Actually there are a few different kinds of barcodes, but they all have the same basic purpose – using your smartphone’s camera to access information encoded on anything in the physical world.

I think of this as putting hyperlinks on any surface you see – anywhere. This is huge.

It’s the best thing I’ve seen bridging the real world of signs and paper to the virtual world of Web and mobile. With the right app you can transfer information such as contact data from a name tag or view the trailer for the movie review you’re reading. The possibilities are endless and they aren’t limited to scanning the physical world since you can scan a code on an LCD monitor and take the information with you.

Earlier this week I noticed an otherwise unmarked white cargo truck with QR codes on the back and sides. I didn’t get a chance to scan the code to see if it was a subtle marketing experiment or used for logistics tracking, but I did get the picture below.

In addition to seeing these pop up in magazines recently, I saw one Tuesday night on a Dance Flight program by DanceWorks Chicago, who recently became an Astek client. The link goes to an extended program with videos and other multimedia material you can’t get on paper.

Try scanning the QR code above. I use QuickMark on my iPhone, which works quite well scanning screens and paper. You can download QuickMark here.

Social media writer and consultant Rachel Yeomans recently posted an article spotting a QR code on Facebook for Net-a-Porter’s new mobile site:

For an example of the Microsoft Tag, which I think is a bit too colorful to be practically incorporated into most branding, I scanned an ad from the current issue of Entertainment Weekly (yes, someone else in the office has a guilty pleasure). Scan the code below to view a YouTube trailer for The Green Hornet on your mobile device. You’ll need to download a tag reader free from Microsoft.

If you’re envisioning a world in which we all wander around scanning each other for information, well, you’re probably not too far off. But this is all an interim step until the technology becomes so ubiquitous that we don’t even need our phones to do the scanning. At that point privacy and social concerns will take over the conversation from technology.

You can generate your own QR code to try out the technology. Post a comment if you’ve seen some interesting QR codes out there or think of any great uses for this technology.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Gadget, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

One of the biggest challenges we face when working with bloggers and within Astek is keeping the momentum of the blog going. If you were to look at our blog for the past month, you’d think nothing was going on at Astek, which couldn’t be farther from the truth!

As we get back in the saddle after vacations and various other last ditch efforts to soak up what’s left of the summer’s warmth, it’s a good time to offer some suggestions for keeping your (and our!) blog going.

1. Set a Realistic Schedule. Whether it’s once per week or once per month, set a schedule that you’ll be able to keep. We all get busy once the day starts going and the blog often falls to the bottom of the list. Try committing to writing your blog before you do ANYTHING else on every Tuesday, for example, and see if that helps.

2. KISS (Keep It Short & Simple). One of the things that seems to block a good article is being worried about making it perfect and long. By all means, you want to use proper spelling and grammar, but often the posts that get read the most are the shortest. Post a link and your immediate thoughts if you don’t have more time.

3. Remove Barriers to Publication. Even the act of logging into a website to update your blog can create an excuse not to publish. We recommend MacJournal or WinJournal to write posts quickly and easily from your computer. Programs like this make adding images simpler and save your login information so you can publish with one click.

4. Keep a List of Topics. Find a way to keep a list of all the interesting things you see on Facebook, the Web, or that people send you. I use MacJournal to queue up possible blog topics, but you could use Delicious.com or even a Word doc. If you keep a simple list you’ll never be stumped for a topic. As Andrew Crowe recently discovered, sometimes the list is right under your nose.

5. Be Honest. …with yourself and your audience. Don’t waste time back-filling spans of time without posts. It’s all ancient history by now anyway. Just focus on getting on top of your current schedule and don’t worry about the past.

Keeping a steady publication schedule is important for readers and search engines to know that you’re active. Let me know if these help and if you have some other tips that work for you, please leave a comment.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media

The Astek team is pleased as punch about our latest iPhone app, a flashlight that takes advantage of the new LED camera light in the iPhone 4.

But Light Beam is much more than just a flashlight! It’s the app that could save your party AND your life!

Light Beam is the iPhone 4’s brightest and easiest flashlight using the built-in LED flash! It includes a strobe light and SOS emergency beacon.

Features:

• Uses iPhone 4 built-in LED for brightest light possible.
• Intuitive, elegant design.
• Flashlight: Auto-on when app is opened for quickest access.
• Strobe Light: Bring the party with this ultra-bright strobe light. Or increase visibility for extra safety on your bike at night. Easy-touch slider allows you to control the speed.
• Emergency SOS Signal: Activate with the tap of a button. Beams a repeating SOS Morse code signal via the LED light.

Download Light Beam for iPhone 4 now!

Here’s a screenshot of Light Beam:

Check it out and if you don’t have an iPhone 4 please tell your friends!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Gadget, Technology

My first iPhone was the 2G model and I didn’t have many complaints about the voice quality or dropped calls — not any more than any other carrier anyway. When I switched to the 3G model, the voice reception became noticeably worse. At first I was content to blame the phone as it seems most people are. But I had to believe that Apple knew even the smartest of smart phones still had to be a PHONE first and foremost.

After tinkering a bit, I realized it’s very simple to switch the phone back into 2G mode. And guess what? I now enjoy the stable 2G reception from AT&T I used to. I have multi-hour-long conference calls with confidence. I can move around and not worry about dropping the call.

For data I typically just leave the wifi connected, which gives me high speed data most of the time (home, office, etc.). But if you find yourself sitting in the park or on the road needing to surf faster, just switch back to 3G. I wish the phone could use 3G for data and 2G for voice, but it’s a minor quibble.

To summarize, switch your iPhone to 2G mode and you’ll have:

Pros:

• Better voice reception and quality
• Longer battery life
• Envy from other iPhone users

Cons:

• Slower data speeds
• That nagging feeling that you’re not using the latest and greatest technology

So how do you do it? Just follow these steps:

1) Press the “Settings” icon/app from your home screen.

2) Press “General” (7th option).

3) Press “Network” (3rd option).

4) In the “Enable 3G” bar, it should say “On.” Press this and it will turn “Off” as shown below.

5) Just click your home button or back to “General” to save. It will take a few seconds to switch over, and then you’re good to go! If you need your faster 3G data, just switch it back any time.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Gadget, General, Technology

People have been serving customers in “real time” ever since there have been customers. So this is not a new concept. In fact, we’re using technology to correct a problem that technology introduced–distance between company and customer.

If someone walks into your store with a problem, you fix it immediately. If a customer calls you on the phone, you talk to them (hopefully) immediately. But what if someone posts something negative about you on Twitter or to an Internet Forum? What then?

Real time search allows you to monitor those types of interactions, complaints, and complements. It’s still your responsibility to respond, but the time needed to find such messages has been greatly reduced.

The lines between marketing and customer service are blurring. Quickly responding to someone on their own turf in a respectful manner has potential not only to set them straight, but also increase the likelihood they will tell other people about your remarkable effort to make it right. And your public response will serve as a permanent record for anyone else who sees the comment.

Twitter is currently the primary source of real time content, but expect others to get on board quickly. Twitter’s success has driven the major search engines to add real time search features to their products. But Twitter still manages the majority of real time traffic, so you can use Twitter’s built-in search engine as a place to hear what people are saying about you. Otherwise, expect popular online listening tools to start accommodating real time search in the near future.

This certainly won’t pre-empt any traditional forms of customer service, but people are out there talking about you online one way or another. You’ll be better off if you’re aware of it, since it’s not just going to go away on it’s own. At the end of the day, you should view this as an opportunity to serve people better.

 This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles 

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web