Happy Holidays!
|
|||||||||||||
Archive for 'About Us'
Hack4Reno Is Coming!
Calling all developers and designers! We are super excited to be a part of the fun happening in 5 short days.
If you haven’t heard yet, The City of Reno and Reno Collective are organizing the first ever Hack4Reno – a 24-hour ‘hackathon‘ which is a team competition where apps are to be built to benefit the community. Apps can be anything from serious and potentially life changing to something fun and light hearted.
Why are we participating?
We want to help get the community involved in giving back with their mad designer and developer skills to the city (and region) and to promote the openness of platforms and data.
We are not only forming a team (Go Trinity!) but we are also sponsoring the kick off luncheon for participating teams on Saturday at noon, and coffee for participants later in the evening.
Perhaps it is not for the faint of heart: let’s remember that this is October in Reno and the competition is being held outside (out in the open – like the open public data), but it will be 24 hours of having a great time with fellow developers and giving back to the community.
Come root on the Hack4Reno teams this Saturday, October 15th at noon at the Pioneer Center for the kick off and if you are really excited you can join us and stay all night! Or come back on Sunday, October 16th at 2:30pm for the announcement of the winning team!
Social Media Tracking Application for the Old Spice Campaign
We love our jobs. As part of our daily course of business, we get the opportunity to work with some wonderful clients, provide solutions to solve some of their tough problems, and generally make things better for them. Some of the work is not very glamorous, but we are here to get the essential important stuff done for our customers – not grab headlines. Last week, we got the chance to work on something that was challenging, fun, and a little crazy in its reach. We built an application (overnight) to display data about the current Old Spice online campaign, and got a huge response. It does not get much more fun and exciting than that.
If you are not familiar with the re-vamped Old Spice brand and their innovative use of social media channels, let me give a brief synopsis. Last year, Old Spice hired the “Old Spice Guy” to promote their new products. Their agency (Weiden + Kennedy) created a series of fanciful commercials with the Old Spice Guy. The campaign moved online with a series of YouTube videos, posted as responses to users asking questions (both famous and not famous) on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. For a more in-depth description, head over to Mashable or Digital Buzz.
This year Old Spice‘s online campaign involved a YouTube based battle of words between Fabio (yep, that Fabio) and the Old Spice Guy. Fabio was attempting to usurp the title of New Old Spice Guy, and Old Spice Guy rose to defend it. You can still watch the story unfold on their YouTube channel.
After watching the first day of the campaign, we decided to build an application that tabulated mentions of Fabio and Old Spice Guy (and related terms) across five social media channels (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Digg.) We displayed which character had more mentions (as well as made a worm graph of the trending in real time) ostensibly to figure out who was “winning.” You can view it here.
We blatantly stole some of the design elements off of Old Spice’s YouTube channel (they didn’t mind, apparently) to make our site identify with the campaign, then Pat went to work furiously coding the entire database application working well into the night. (He can do that, he lives in the Land of the Midnight Sun.)
The next day we crossed out fingers, and Tweeted out the application’s URL to Old Spice. Old Spice must have liked it, because they tweeted it out to their followers and posted it on Facebook.
We got 25,000+ unique visitors in one day. As a thank you the Old Spice Guy even made us a video. How awesome is that?
Despite their response making us a little giddy–
(I mean, this campaign made some big waves in our industry last year, and here they are, Tweeting and posting to YouTube about us!)
– we got a lot more out of this than a video. We demonstrated working with large amounts of data coming from different sources, creating data-crunching applications quickly and with creativity, handling irregular and enormous traffic surges, and enhancing an existing social media campaigns.
And, we had a great time. Thank you Old Spice, for a great opportunity.
Welcome Our Newest TAI Team Member!
We are delighted and proud to report that we have added another member to the small, but mighty, Trinity Applied Internet team. Web Project and Content Management Assistant Nicole Ott will now be benefiting our clients by helping with daily project management and content marketing. During the search, we saw many well-qualified candidates, but Nicole’s passion and experience with managing projects and timelines, as well as her communication and writing skills, is the perfect combination for us.
Nicole brings eight years of experience managing projects, deadlines and documentation to the Trinity Applied Internet team. She acquired a passion for the business applications of online media, including website design and social media channels while in college. Prior to joining TAI, Nicole’s attention to detail was critical in her job at the regional Starbucks Coffee Roasting Plant, in the Quality department. She holds a BS in Business Management from the University of Nevada, Reno.
Nicole has jumped right in and is happily working away on several projects, and has (thankfully) taken over most of our appointment scheduling. Feel free to contact her with questions or requests as you see fit.
Welcome to the team, Nicole!!
Download our NCET Flyer
Didn’t have time to stop by and grab a flyer?? Get your full-color copy right here.
And, here’s the link to the beginning of our “do-it-yourself” tutorial, for those of you who we referred to the site.
Meet us at the NCET Entrepreneur Expo…
…Reno Sparks Convention Center, Saturday 3/15. We’ll be exhibiting and attending as many of the breakout sessions as we can fit in. Check us out if you’re in the market for a site or have questions on how to create a “do-it-yourself” online presence.
Applying the Web
I’ve been meaning to change the name of my blog for a while – not a big change but substantial enough that I’m sure any Google goodness I had will be gone. The reason for the change? I wanted our company blog name to be similar to our company name. Basic branding 101. Same content – slightly different name. Welcome to: Applying the Web!
Under the blogdar
If Technorati is the blogdar of the blogosphere, and posting keeps your blog’s blip on the horizon, then I have either crashed or gone into stealth mode. I disappeared again. Yet again, I’ll blame workload as I’ve been finishing up five simulatenous large projects.
Hopefully May will be a more balanced month for me – some projects, some blogging.
There isn’t any better way to get back in to the swing of blogging like a streched metaphor and a heavy dose of jargon.
In the next couple weeks I’ll be posting about my latest projects, getting a couple of post ideas out of my system. I’ll also have a Google Apps for your Domain tutorial|editorial.
Resurfacing
I’m back. I’ve committed an all too typical sin of blogging – I’ve neglected to keep up on my posting – and I didn’t even bother to let people know where I was or what I was doing. If you’ve been wondering why I dropped off the face of the blogosphere – I apologize for poor communication.
A little known rule of blogging (which I did not follow) – you can take a break from regular posting but you need to let people know you are taking a break. Sort of like a cardinal rule of effective interpersonal communications. Even if you can’t get back to someone – get back to them so they know you can’t get back to them. 
I’ve been finishing up a very busy 2006. I’ve launched some websites, done some emergency web development, refined my production process, and lined up a lot of work for 2007. I’m going to have a very cool, very busy year and I’m excited for the challenge. I’ll keep you informed.
What do you want to know?
I want to hear from you.
I always have a lot of ideas for posts – it’s just a matter of getting to them. If you are one of the five people who read this blog (thank you) you probably have a good idea of the subject matter and focus. If not, please let me know.
I especially want to know if I’m leaving something out. Is there something you’d like me to research, weigh in on, or explain? Leave a comment to this post or fill out my contact form.
I look forward to hearing from you.