Posts by Jeff Judge

I’m very excited to welcome Mark Rudolph as our new Vice President of Sales.

Mark is responsible for leading sales activities at Interactive Mediums, focusing IM’s products on providing impactful solutions for our customers. Mark has spent almost 20 years consulting, selling and managing technical solutions that address business problems at a variety of companies including Information Advantage, Epiphany (now Infor) and ChoiceStream. Most recently, he led the Enterprise Sales efforts at Loyalty Lab, a company that more than doubled in revenue the two years he was there.

Mark is passionate about technology, early stage companies, food and college sports. He spends most Saturdays coaching or watching his kids’ sports teams or in the fall cheering the University of Wisconsin Badgers football team with his three kids and his wonderful wife. He graduated with a degree in Industrial Engineering from UW-Madison in 1991.

This is a critical role in the evolution of our company and we’re all thrilled to start working with Mark as of today.

It’s my please to welcome Mahesh Murthy to the Interactive Mediums team as Senior Engineer.

Mahesh joins us from Orbitz Worldwide where he was involved in implementing a number of key features of the booking engine for Orbitz’s international travel platform. He was also involved in improving site performance and scalability. Outside of the office you can find Mahesh tinkering with new technology, rock climbing, playing beach volleyball or trying different kinds of beer with friends at the The Map Room.

We’re all really excited to have you join the team Mahesh!

I’m very excited to announce the hire of Drew Myler as Interactive Mediums Director of Interaction Design. We’ve been working with Drew for over 15 months and are ecstatic to have him join the team.

Drew’s professional background is centered around design, marketing and writing. He is proficient in UI design and cross-browser compliant XHTML/CSS development. He thrives on creative development and problem solving, and believes that good design communicates with simplicity, clarity and subtlety.

Drew most recently ran his own web design consultancy helping small businesses, entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations and educational institutions realize their online goals. He previously worked as an Interactive Web Designer at Duo Consulting, a web development and design company based in Chicago, where he worked with clients including CareerBuilder.com, the Chicago Park District and the Chicago Public Library.

Drew lives in Indianapolis with his wife and son, as well as a recalcitrant cat. He has left a personal blog languishing by the side of the Internet, but hopes to help it back to its feet one of these days.

Update 10/16/2009: We’ve hired! The position has been filled. Thank you to everyone who submitted there resume.

I’m very excited to announce that we’re looking for an Account Manager to join the Interactive Mediums team. The job description is below, if you are interested or know anyone that is, please apply via http://bit.ly/3Hkj0y.

Account Manager – Chicago, IL

Summary

Looking to hire an integral team member that thrives in a fast paced unstructured environment. Candidate must be capable of operating in multiple roles and enthusiastically perform a diverse range of tasks, duties, and responsibilities. Looking for candidate to grow and evolve within high growth company.

Responsibilities

• Respond to inbound sales inquiries, perform product demonstrations, follow-up
• Educate clients and prospects on mobile marketing, define objectives, and recommend solutions
• Provide first level customer support via phone and email, observe patterns, and recommend solutions
• Continuously improve the customer experience, identify issues, and implement solutions
• Assist operations with diverse range of projects and tasks
• Assist Director of Marketing with marketing actions

Requirements

• Ability to complete project tasks individually or delegate /coordinate with internal or external creative resources when appropriate
• Creative problem-solving ability and a consultancy mindset
• Demonstrated responsibility, follow-through and ability to generate results
• Strong analytic, strategic, and business reasoning abilities
• Entrepreneurial, enthusiastic, collaborative professional
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• A flexible, self-starter possessing an inherent intellectual curiosity
• Customer evangelist, passionate about providing excellent customer experience
• Experience in the following a plus (direct marketing, digital marketing, mobile marketing, brand promotions, CRM solutions, software as a service, technology / online products)

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in marketing or related field required.

Benefits

• Medical and dental insurance
• 401(k)
• Transit pre-tax enrollment
• Flexible vacation policy

I was invited to present at the Illinois Technology Association this morning to discuss the topic of incorporating a mobile strategy into your business. You can view my slides below:

Please let me know if you have any questions. This was a quick 10 minute talk, thus I’d love to deep dive into this further.

Related to yesterday’s post, we just pushed an update that includes syndication feed (XML and text) support for voting campaigns. This enables you to pull a vote snapshot into external systems like Daktronics, a popular scoreboard software provider.

We’re making changes every day to make getting data in and out of TextMe very easy. Let us know how we can help.

We just pushed out a minor update that includes links to RSS and XML syndication options for our screen chat/text to screen campaign. The perfect use case for this capability is collecting feedback via text and publishing this feedback for consumption by an external service (example: pulling in messages into your own custom built flash widget).

You can find the syndication links within the chat campaign details page.

FierceDeveloper published an excellent article today titled “Pulling back the curtain on App Store approvals“, which provides some excellent insight into Apple’s App Store approval process. I found the most interesting piece of the article to be the stats that Apple provided to the FCC in response to it’s recent request for more information on the rejection of the Google Voice app:

Let’s do the math: According to Apple, it employs about 40 full-time, trained application reviewers–the App Store receives about 8,500 new app submissions and updates each week, which translates to 212 apps per reviewer per week. Except Apple reports that all apps are subject to approval by two different reviewers, so that number doubles to 424 apps per staffer each week–assuming reviewers work the standard eight-hour day, that means each app is approved or rejected in the span of about six minutes. No wonder Apple admits to making “occasional mistakes” in the approval process, according to its statement to the FCC.

Given the shear volume of applications that Apple reviews on a daily basis, it’s no surprise that developers encounter such varying experiences with the submission and approval process. In our experience, the process has been very straightforward and time expedient. One application was submitted to the App Store and live within seven days. In our opinion, the process works pretty smoothly as long as you follow Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and code around common issues that apps are rejected for.

Other interesting tidbits:

• In the past year, Apple has reviewed more than 200,000 applications and updates
• 95 percent of all apps are approved within 14 days of submission
• Roughly 20 percent of apps are not approved as originally submitted

I’m excited to introduce Ray Krueger, the latest hire to our engineering team. Ray joins Interactive Mediums from Trustwave where helped lead the architecture and development of new payment card industry compliance products. Prior to Trustwave, Ray was a Technical Lead at Orbitz Worldwide where he built an extensible web services platform for 3rd party travel sites such as Kayak.com to shop Orbitz inventory.

We’re all very excited to have Ray join the team and dive into data. He’ll be working on an iPhone app for the next 4-6 weeks and then digging in.

I’m very excited to welcome Gib Bassett to the Interactive Mediums team as Director of Marketing. Gib joins the team from Fair Isaac Corp., where he led product marketing for the company’s analytic and business rules software tools business. In his initial role with the company he held product management responsibility for the marketing services business unit, which featured hosted customer and prospect databases, customer data integration, and data enhancement for many leading business to consumer companies. Gib’s background includes 15 years of marketing and product management experience with a variety of publicly held and start-up technology firms, including SPSS, Platinum Technology and Visual Insights.