The November 7th issue of New York featured  the founding of Ms. Magazine 40 years ago.  Between my career and family, I finally found the time to read it. I am fortunate to know a lot of amazing, professional women, and have always appreciated this but, it has never come full circle in my mind until now.  When a dear friend was on the cover of the Westword for her business TPCG, teaching Cops how to manage stress, do you think they knew exactly what they were up to when the cover was reminiscent of the first Ms.?

How fortunate to be born the year before Ms. Steinem had the courage to give the feminist movement a mainstream voice.  And how fortunate I was to be able to apprentice with Ms. Barbara Nessim after art school to learn how to be business women too. I always knew her influence was monumental in my life, but didn’t quite understand I was standing on the shoulders of such giants at the time. Barbara and Ms. Steinem we’re roommates back in the day.

Though I’m certain my male counterparts still earn more, we, as woman are looked upon as leaders and valued for our intellect. We rarely have to think how exceptional it is that we don’t have to think twice about our rights, we know them well.

So thank you to the women before us for what we enjoy today. And thank you to my thoroughly modern husband who does not think twice about splitting the care of household and kids. If it we’re still the same as before these great ladies, I would most likely be existing of a diet of barbiturates and bourbon. Instead, I can live on the pride of my accomplishments.

It’s the idea of personal, embrassed by a society that knows something — though often not enough — about managing their profile. What is personal about Social Media is it’s ability to incite. From political protests to riots, from flash mobs to bullying.

In the Golden Age of the 1st Amendment how do we use our freedom of speech through Social Media to incite good?

In 1996, I clipped an article out of the New York Times that stated a case was thrown out of court because of the juries inability to understand the Internet and digital media. Today, mobile shutdowns, regulations, laws, and criminal sentences are attempting to guide this age.

As part of the Corporate America keeping pace and taking a lead is important. Promoting brand awareness using Social Media is becoming the brochureware of our time.

Corporate sponsored causes raise money and interest. Ideas crowd sourced from internal social networks can help with idea management and bring ownership to the altruistic culture of a company. Social networks can be location for a collaborative employee community and a repository of employee knowledge and ideas.  Ideas that can incite doing good in and beyond the work place.

EffectiveUI is an award-winning, user-centered design and development agency that specializes in the creation and implementation of custom Web, mobile and desktop applications. Expertise in user-experience strategy, design and development, EffectiveUI creates compelling and meaningful interactions that increase customer satisfaction and loyalty and produce measurable results.

Welcome revenuePWR release 1.0! ProfitStreams™ foundation behind Closed-loop Marketing. The Customer Marketing Services provides centralization of customer profiles, dashboard reporting and the Intelligent Marketing Engine application. Customer Marketing Services is one of the three main components of revenuePWR, along with Web Services and Customer Communications.

As User Experience Designer for ProfitStreams, it’s been exciting to be able to show off what we’ve been working so hard on. From wire framing functionality to designing and creating the look and feel — the application icons, product up sells and introductions, creation and editing flows, charts and data tables — it’s all come together in one powerful platform.

You’ve seem ‘em. I started noticing them in airports, the person boarding the plane with a smart phone instead of a paper boarding pass? Now they are everywhere from business cards to any object that might benefit from accompanying information. I can hardly believe they’ve been around since 1994, but smart phones have given them a bump in recent years by better connecting the print to the online world.

Here’s the rub, QR codes leave a lot up to the viewer, who doesn’t necessarily know what a QR code is or how to use one. Remember, a small description of what the QR codes is and exactly how to use it is always handy for your viewers.

This week a beautiful gift arrived. In an Amazon box… didn’t remember ordering anything from Amazon. Inside was a lovely note from YAO and a tote adorned with the logo, marking yet another application.

Dear YAO,
Thank you for the years of collaboration, invention and sharing the vision.
XO

As User Experience Designer for Profitstreams I’ve had the chance to do some fun logo design in addition to lots of application views. We have been busy creating web-based intelligent marketing applications which are easy to use and provide measurable revenue generating results through the Closed-Loop. The applications provide immediate knowledge and insight into Customers’ behaviors.

Beginning with the foundation of revenuePWR and adding applications, merchants can create operational efficiencies while at the same time drive sales and maximize their marketing spend. The Suite includes Loyalty, eGift, Guest Management (Table Management, Wait List, Mobile Notification and Reservations), Mobile Marketing and Ordering.

ProfitStreams, has relaunched their website! Love the big bold images. It’s exciting to see such a great representation of what we’re up to. It’s rather big change in more ways than one. Still in Marketing, just not the Marketing Department. As part of the Product team, we offer “free” advice to the Creative Director and hope that as User Experience experts we’ve made our Use Case.

And as part of the Product team, we get to see everything coming together for future release. revenuePWR™ and the suite of applications were working on includes Loyalty, eGift, Guest Management (Table Management, Wait List, Mobile Notification and Reservations), Mobile Marketing and Ordering coming soon.

Whew!

We love food trucks! Doesn’t everyone right now? Inc. states, “upscale food trucks are one of the hottest businesses these days.”

Tonight, we saw this fast moving trend in action.  Steuben’s Truck was providing it’s movable feast of our favorite burger and gravy fries  in the alley behind the After Party of AIGA Colorado Design Night Out @ MATTER and notably giving a shout out to The Biscuit Bus (favorite biscuits and gravy) on facebook! Make no mistake, they get around.

For those of you who don’t already know, the word “pulp” in conjunction with anything published has become synonymous with low-grade, or inexpensive to economize on costs.  Flash forward from the printed realm to the digital. We are in an age that is becoming ripe with inexpensive marketing solutions to economize on cost.

SPAM sucks. Emails that are look better but poorly targeted suck more. In looking for the other pulp — the soft, succulent part of a fruit, ready to be picked —  can we keep low cost marketing from being low-grade marketing?

Forever the optimist, enabling a population to be savvy enough to do it them selves may create an understanding that sophisticated marketing is never inexpensive.