Archive for April, 2008

Welcome to digital-telepathy’s newest section of our blog where we take well known brands and startups and put them through a User Experience (UX) review. We do these reviews as a way to promote untapped opportunities that these company’s have that seem to be just beyond their view of sight. We look at 4 main areas for our audit including their online brand strategy, social aspects, implementation of technology and functionality. All in all we hope the companies read our reviews, ask questions, comment and make changes to create a more enriching experience for their web community.

SignOnSanDiego.com is the digital sister of the San Diego Union Tribune. Since its launch almost 11 years ago, SignOnSanDiego.com has been through many redesigns – in fact almost every single year the design was changed completely. But is the functionality and UX farther along today than from their first version launched 11 years ago? Something tells me I’m headed for an interesting review… Continue Reading

I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com last week.  Andrew is responsible for many local web mixer events such as Lunch 2.0 and Happy Hour 2.0 in both San Diego and LA.  He’s been a great support to our community and someone that I highly respect.

Here’s the write up and phone interview.

I’m sure most of you knew yesterday was Earth Day (wait, it was?!) and here at dt we consider Earth Day an official holiday. So yesterday we took the day off and headed out to do a little dirty work at the beach (Mike Rowe would be proud). We met at Crystal Pier in Pacific Beach and headed North & South of the pier to do some cleanup.

The response from the community was awesome and we had about 35 volunteers meet up at the pier to help with some serious Earth Day lovin’! Some of the volunteers came from places like Mission Playground, StayClassy.org, West of the Five, Sycuan Learning Center, and more. One guy, Dillan Flinn drove all the way down from Newport to help out! Phh way to go buddy! Also, thanks to Surfrider Foundation for donating bags, gloves and hand sanitizer.

If you missed out on this Earth Day (we’re sorry to hear that) you can always contact your local Surfrider Foundation and see when the next beach cleanup is… or just get out there today and clean up yourself.

Thanks again to all of our volunteers who came out with smiles and a willingness to help! You guys totally ROCK!!

To see how much fun you missed out on visit our Flickr Stream.

In the past year, we have been honored with many awards, including Top 10 out of the Fastest 100 Growing Companies and Best Place to Work by the San Diego Business Journal. We are fortunate to be bestowed with another acknowledgment as a Finalist in the Fast Growth 20 by bizSanDiego Magazine.

bizSanDiego looks at revenue growth averages from the last three years, local employee growth over the past year and even takes into account market growth, including acquisitions, award recognitions, clients served and traction into other markets.

As I always say, “smoke ‘em while you got ‘em!” Although we plan to win many awards in the future, we are taking a break from the revenue-based accomplishments. We do not expect our consulting revenues to increase by 3x a year as they have in the past. 2008 is a year of heavy construction for digital-telepathy. We have diversified our focus and invested across many platforms of business and communication. We have focused our design services into a distinct process of user experience and web strategy development. We hope to create a new and fresh approach to conferences with Freedom in Action (FinA). We have 3 new startups that we are developing with our sister company RE3EL. We even built the new San Diego web news and events site, StartupSD.net.

So forgive us if we don’t measure our success by revenue and post a press release every time we score a new brand as a client. We’re working on something bigger. Our family of employees wants more than standard projects. We are putting our mission into action to make a positive impact within the world.

digital-telepathy is currently putting a new series together entitled dt conversations where we have local entrepreneurs, business owners and thought leaders come in and chat with us in a 10 minute video. It’s raw, unedited and anything but professionally recorded but it’s exciting and authentic and brings a face to the San Diego startup community.

In our search for the equipment to record the series we had everyone bring in their personal cameras to see if they’d do the trick. The camera that seemed to fit our needs the best was a Canon ZR65. What sealed the deal was a Mic Input that allowed us to use a directional mic to pick up better sound than the camcorder could do alone. The camera has a SD card slot so you can record to the memory card without using any tape. As I opened up the SD slot and examined the memory card it came with I saw a large “8″ on the sticker. Wow, 8GB (I thought) - that’s one large SD card! Then I realized it said 8M. Eight megabytes? Are you serious? WTF can you do with 8mbs in a digital camcorder? Absolutely nothing. What a waste of a flash memory card. It might as well have been one of those mock-cards they put into some digital cameras that are just place holders. I don’t get it, no card in this case is better than a worthless card.

- Regardless stay tuned for our new series and contact me if you are in the market for a free 8m SD card.