There was a time when creating promotional invites or any sort of card required the services of a design, print or promotional firm. In this era of generation ‘C’ though, all you need is a little imagination, a good piece of technology and you’re away.

I’ve always been a fan of this Moo thing and I can’t have been happier with the quality of the cards I printed early this year but I didn’t give much thought to how a service like this could be taken beyond D.I.Y business cards and thank you notes and put to genuine use in a promotional or trade show environment where perhaps the need for individually coded cards is greater. I guess being in the industry though, we’ve always had the benefit of local expertise here that could fill our requirements just as well whether for ourselves or a client. But if you’re not in the industry and have some time, you could give it a shot yourself.

This might seem a little self-cannibalistic of us but it really is a relatively easy process and one worth sharing. Addega.com have managed to create their own uniquely coded invites for their social wine discovery project. If you have a similar requirement or an event that requires serial numbered cards, read their post - How to make unique Moo invite cards.

I recieved an SMS from my auto-mechanic this morning. It’s an obvious proforma type message reminding me to bring my car in for service. A few personal details like my name and registration added, nothing special but “it’s high in value as it is low in bandwidth. The very kind of communication and promotion if you like which has been undervalued and misunderstood by brands particularly.

This is a little left field in terms of promotional marketing, but I wanted to share an intelligent piece of writing about the attraction of stripped back communication as used by platforms likeTwitter and Facebook. Michael and I had an interesting discussion about these social media applications last week. Apart from convincing him that I was not like a sixteen year old school girl SMS-ing like crazy on my mobile, I failed to express as eloquently as Rory has here why this form of digital communication works. This form of compressed inter-personal communication is enticing and as I sit here typing this post pondering the concept of technology and promotions, I wonder how many brands are allowing their customer’s to project themselves to a network of friends? A light turns on in Michael’s head!

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What’s Joost? I hear you ask. Well first of all, it’s pronounced ‘juiced’ and not ‘Yoest” as my Dutch friend with the same name and I would have thought. Joost is an interactive software for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the web using peer-to-peer TV technology. It’s near TV quality video streaming to a PC or Mac. Read more »

I’m a compulsive scribbler and note taker, I like lists and sometimes I get so consumed with an idea that other things (still important) seem to fade into oblivion. Well you could imagine my delight when I came across IMified via Solution Watch Imified is a new service that enables users to access services like Basecamp, Google Calendar, and Wordpress from their instant messaging client. With this application, I can manage to-do lists, save notes, create reminders, and even publish a post to Wordpress for Carpark. I’m quite thrilled with it but not everyone shares my excitement around the office. Read more »