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!

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

If you’re interested, please send an email to me at jeff@interactivemediums.com.

UPDATE: As of 7/24/2009 this position has been filled

Mobile Monday is a global community of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influentials fostering cooperation and cross-border business development through virtual and live networking events to share ideas, best practices and trends from global markets. MoMo Chicago is the local chapter dedicated to Chicago and surrounding area (which is chalk full of mobile companies).

This month’s topic is “Niche Mobile Marketing.” As mobile marketing continues to mature, organizations are finding themselves looking for more personalized ways to engage target segments. In this month’s event you will learn key strategies from two mobile marketing veterans on how to effectively message to the growing Hispanic and Youth niche markets.

MEETING DETAILS
__________________________________________________________

Date: Monday, July 20, 2009
Time: 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Topic: Niche Mobile Marketing
Presenter: Ana Arredondo (Senior Consultant), Hugh Jedwill (Mobile Anthem)
Location: Acquity Group, 500 W Madison St, Suite 2200, Chicago, IL 60661
Location Notes: Participants can sign-in at the reception desk on the 3rd floor (picture ID required)

MEETING AGENDA
__________________________________________________________

6:00pm – Sign-In / Light-Dinner
6:10pm – 6:20pm Quick Industry News Updates
6:20pm – 6:40pm Mobile Marketing to the Hispanic Demographic
6:40pm – 7:00pm Mobile Marketing to the Youth Demographic
7:10pm – 7:30pm Marketer Roundtable
7:30pm > Beer / Networking

REGISTRATION
__________________________________________________________

To attend, please register at http://momochicago-07-2009.eventbrite.com/

Marketing Director – Chicago, IL

Responsibilities:

• Formulate unique market positioning, brand messaging, and elevate company profile and exposure
• Drive market research and competitive analysis; perform target market analysis and develop marketing strategies for aggressive target penetration
• Direct media relations and manage PR strategy
• Manage copywriting / content development (online copy, user documentation, media kits, whitepapers, collateral, press releases, case studies, presentations, blog posts, customer communications)
• Coordinate with creative resources to develop effective online and print marketing campaigns to support sales / awareness efforts.
• Manage redesign of corporate website (interactivemediums.com) and continuous iteration
• Manage TextMe (textme.net) product marketing efforts
• Manage SEO / SEM
• Lead creative client services practice and assist with ideation/program development

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience driving research, competitive analysis, launching new products, building brands, and developing growth strategies
• 3+ years of agency experience required
• Ability to complete project tasks individually or delegate /coordinate with internal or external creative resources when appropriate.
• Knowledge in creating national marketing plans, executing integrated campaigns and managing external / internal communications with press, analysts, employees, and customers
• Clear knowledge of the principles of integrated marketing and communications
• Creative thinker and problem solver
• 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
• Must be equally comfortable with identifying high ROI marketing projects and strategies as they are in personally performing the tasks necessary to complete projects.
• Marketing experience for companies providing technology enabled services and web software products.
• 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 related field required. Masters degree preferred.

Perks:

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

UPDATE: As of 7/22/2009 this position has been filled

If you’re looking for an innovative iPhone app, we’re here to help. Send an email to hello@interactivemediums.com and we’ll follow up with you.

Why did we widen the page? Two main reasons:

1) Monitors are much wider than they used to be. The number of individuals with screens optimized to 800 x 600 has plummeted, and so the new standard for web design is a width of approximately 960px. The extra space lets us bring more content above the fold without making the page feel cramped.

2) A lot of the new functionality we are building simply requires more screen real estate in order to make information easy to scan.

We’re continually refining the interface to make the application easy and intuitive to use. Please let us know if you have any feedback!

And that makes a total of two blog posts in one month :)

Here is a screen shot of the previous design:

And the revised design:

We think the revised design does a better job of highlighting:

• > Campaign type
• > Keyword (HELLO)
• > Activity (13 requests)
• > Short code

We’re making updates to the product every day, and have a lot of exciting product development in store for the next 6 months. If you’re a current customer and have feedback for us, please let us know by sending an email to feedback@textmeforbusiness.com, clicking on the feedback tab while logged in, or clicking on the ‘Need help?’ link at the top of the screen (the last two options will send us a note via email).

Happy Friday!

• In January we started working on our first iPhone application for a client, and that will be provisioned in the app store in beginning of the summer (more on this app when it’s ready). We’ve got a couple more applications in the pipe, and would love to take on more.
• Also in January, we hired John Wood as Lead Engineer
• In March (actually last week), we released a redesign of TextMe. We’ve rolled out a whole new look and feel which we’re super excited about. We’ve gotten a ton of great feedback from customers and we’ve been making tweaks every day.

Over the next few months we’ll be working on new features for TextMe, more iPhone apps, our first BlackBerry app and looking to partner with companies who offer solutions for which it doesn’t make sense for us to tackle.

Lots and lots of exciting mobile stuff happening right now. If you’re reading this and we can help you with anything, please send a note to hello@interactivemediums.com.

• Web voting widgets: No you can create true multi-channel voting by adding a web voting widget to your website. Web votes can be unlimited, or limited to the number of allowable entries that are defined on the campaign.
• Dynamic tags for vote response messages: A ‘dynamic tag’ is a small string that can be inserted into a message that will be changed in real time at the time of vote. For example, inserting ‘[TOTAL#]‘ into a vote response message will change the string to ’42′ if there are currently 42 total votes. We’ve added a slew of tags available for each voting option (keyword, description, current number of votes, current percentage) as well as total number of votes.
• Contest response tags: We currently support four types of unique contests, and we’ve added a ton of tags for each type of contest. A few examples include, current number of entries, count of entries left until a winner has won, etc.
• Routing campaign management updates: What’s a routing campaign? This is the simply the mechanism that we’ve setup to route incoming text messages to and from another system. When we receive a text message with a matching keyword, we’ll forward on to the third party system for that system to do their processing, and once they’re done with that processing the third party can then send a message back to the user through our messaging API.  We also support nifty stuff like sticky sessions (basically locking a phone number into a route for short period of time). We’ve also added keyword management to the API.
• Email and SMS notification of activity: A great example of this is with our info on demand campaign. Upon receiving the corresponding keyword, we can send a notification to any email address or mobile phone number via SMS. To test this out, just text DEMO to 839863 and you’ll get a call from a member of our team.

If you’d like to chat about any of these features in more detail, give us a ring at 866-683-9863 (866-6TEXTME), or email us at hello@interactivemediums.com.

In addition to that stuff, I just wanted to let people know that we’re working hard to build the best mobile marketing platform out there, and are adding new stuff each week. We support clients from big (Orbitz, Anheuser Busch, Ogilvy) to small, and we understand that everyone has their own unique needs. Here are some bread and butter features that we think are important, but we frankly don’t spend much time talking about:

• Support for multiple accounts: Need to manage multiple accounts? Want to assign different permissions to each user? Want to get setup with your own domain/sub-domain? No problem.
  
• Support for multiple short codes: Yep, we can do this.
  
• Aggregation partner managment: We currently work with three different aggregation partners are and are building relationships quickly. We can work directly with an aggregation partner, or you can setup an account with them directly and just provide us your account details.
• Short code management: We’ll work directly with the CSCA (Common Short Code Administration) on your behalf to secure your code and manage billing. Or you can work with them directly.

Finally, there are great things happening within mobile right now outside of mobile messaging, and we’re jumping in (hint: it starts with iphone).

http://www.mmaglobal.com/bestpractices.pdf

Highlighted in the guidelines are updates to general conduct (section 2), advertising and promotion (section 3), marketing to children (section 4) and explicit honoring of SMS STOP commands (section 8). We’re happy to see MMA continue to push forward with policies demanding that participants in the mobile ecosystem honor consumer’s choice and participation. We actively review our logs and add additional opt-out phrases that we see commonly used, such as sentences starting with “please remove”, or “take me off”, for which we honor just like any of the other required opt-out commands (STOP, STOP ALL, CANCEL, QUIT, END, UNSUBSCRIBE).

As you can imagine, the key message from this conference is: the world is changing. What was is no longer what is. People do not want to be communicated at, they want to be communicated with. The mobile phone has a strong seat at the table in this new world…and we feel right at home :)

First off, welcome to Doug Barth. Doug is joining the Interactive Mediums team as Lead Architect. Previously, Doug worked for Orbitz Worldwide, where he helped build out Orbitz’s complex event processing framework, recently highlighted at JavaOne. We are super excited to have Doug join the team.

Secondly, we’re blogging. It’s silly that it’s taken us this long to fire this up, but we’re here now and we’re excited to start posting about some of the things we’re working on, and things that we find interesting.