Now even Email is Catching the GeoLocation Fever

In 2008 Steve and I sat down and looked at a piece of technology that could do incredible real time manipulation of images. It was ours and we'd deployed it for 1-800 Flowers but weren't sure what the scalable platform was, but we knew we had something. However, the problem with doing incredible things with images is that images are kind of old school. In most ad unit cases images had been replaced by data friendly formats like Flash. However, there was a place where images are of great value. Email. Here's an ad unit that we did for Thrillist and Starbucks.

So in mid-2008 we introduced our email ADIs to the world through an email offer from Fandango. That offer used IP detection to locate the recipient at time of open and construct an image on the fly. Our technology gave email images the power to modify their look and offer based on the unique attributes of the email opener. At the time of this launch the market wasn't quite ready. 

In 2010 that has changed as we now see with MailChimp offering new on-send rules for geo-location and our own partnership with Return Path which we hope will have a profoundly positive effect on their illustrious roster of clients. Geo-location is hot, but what's really hot is "real time" and for the first time email is able to go "real time" with Sympact. Come talk to us and learn how you can use Sympact to make every single email communication personal, relevant and totally connected to the opener's time and location.

Location Based Email, Starbucks, Thrillist and 2010

It's been awhile since we updated this blog. Why you ask, well the truth is we were sorting out how Sympact would take the real-time email concept forward. Having sorted this out, we are happy to say that Sympact will be showing the world the power of pushing real time content into your email marketing in 2010 and beyond.

The first example of this began with a partnership we established with Thrillist (sign up if you haven't already for this terrific email newsletter) in November. Thrillist wanted to provide their advertisers with location aware ad units within the Thrillist email newsletter. The ad unit that we created for Thrillist took a list of Starbucks locations and combined that data source with the Google Maps API. At the time of email open Sympact located the IP address of the email opener, checked our database of Starbucks locations, returned the 5 closest and plotted those on the Google Map within the 300x250 ad unit. This all happened in less than a second. The end result was a happy advertiser and a client in Thrillist who had a new high value advertising option for its clients. All it took was a Sympact URL so there were no deliverability issues.

We live in a real time world, witness the success of Twitter, Facebook, the Betaworks companies and more. Email has the largest social graph in the world, for marketers tapping into this graph, how can you not take advantage of this immense new data set. 

How can we help you leverage your data and your customer's data to deliver an email message that truly connects with your customer? Shoot us an email or connect with Steve or me on Twitter (@smartocci and @tylerfonda).

Real time email is here; with Sympact you're there.

Display Sucks...Long Live Display...Someone Help

Nice ad right, well if it were a display ad it would be a flashing mess of disgustingness that everyone would hate.

A couple of weeks back I had the pleasure of attending the DPAC II conference here in NYC. The overwhelming message that I heard was that while display advertising was essential to publishers and advertisers, the current state of display advertising did not provide a platform for the long term success of their business. This discussion came rushing back to me today, when I read Darren Herman's post on the continued relevance of display marketing.

Darren's reasons why display remains relevant and essential:

• No replacement - We've got search and display, nothing else is even close...at this point, or at any point in the near term
• Scale - Standard units and organizations that efficiently price, serve and track those units
• Comprehension - Clients understand what display ads are and what they do
• Works - Do it right you get return

I agree on each of these points and at DPAC advertisers and publishers seemed resigned to the fact that display in all its "inefficient" glory was absolutely necessary. Still the debate rages on between agencies like Weiden Kennedy who would just rather throw in the towel on branded display, while Neo@Ogilvy are clamoring for more display focusing on relevance through targeting. The fact is, display is not going anywhere, but in order for it to grow it must evolve beyond its current targeting obsessed state.

Our position at Sympact is that display will evolve and that the pairing of content and contexto-personal relevance within display is a winning combination. There is ample evidence that targeting provides a historical perspective on the individual viewer and semantic/context cues on the page itself can assist in pairing an ad contextually. However, the issue remains, having targeted to this granular level the advertiser and publisher are left with a myriad of audience slivers too small to allocate creative spend towards.So what is the solution?

The solution, is to use all of this available data as ad content. That dynamic content when paired with a brand logo and message delivers a highly relevant, personally tailored message with the kind of scale that gets the attention of big audiences, big brands and big publishers. The next evolution of display is tailoring, and those companies that make ad tailoring simple will win.

At least that's one path. The other is too make consistently brilliant display ad units like Apple does. That'll get their attention, it just the cost vs reach is out of whack. The fact is display as an advertising delivery mechanism is here to stay, how it is displayed remains in flux. Those companies, like Sympact, who are increasing returns and looking into how display converts beyond the click will be the reason for the ongoing and expanded use of display advertising.

What survives in 2009

The world seems to be coming apart at the seams as the financial frameworks which underpin our markets and the gushing liquidity that those massively scalable frameworks generated is drying up. The big problem with the liquidity gusher drying up is that a lot of businesses are being revealed to be lousy, over leveraged, low value creation enterprises.

As a startup value creation is an acute concern as you're only as good as the value that you generate. When markets are great, the perception of value can be all it takes to garner customers, funding and hopefully significant revenue. With liquidity drying up conceptual  or "long term" value creation lose their import as your clients may not last for the long term.

So as I think about who survives in 2009-2010, I think it's those businesses whose barometer for success is ROI (Gratuitous Link).Bound up in that equation are concepts like accountability, transparency and real asset value. For the next few years businesses engaged in clear value creation will be the ones that survive, whether they are a startup or a multi-billion dollar international corporation. It's time to slog.

Personalization and why it's on the minds of marketers

A few weeks back we were speaking to a couple of smart folks who mentioned a company Monetate that was doing some really cool stuff to optimize landing pages by personalizing these pages to the individual. Curious, I began to snoop around their site and think up some angles for a conversation.

Life took over and I lost the thread of following up with Monetate till today when I clicked over to their blog and saw an interesting post entitled "At Shop.org the word is personalize". Now we prefer the word "tailor" since it seems that tailoring is easier to implement at scale then personalization, but the truth is that all marketing communications delivered digitally will continue to evolve towards personalization. At the root of this movement is the idea that advertising is no longer about distraction, but about relevant engagement. Relevant engagement alters the advertising formula by increasing the importance of the information over the style. Google has always claimed that its text link ads are not ads, but rather complementary pieces of content.

This complementary content is what all ads, retail sites, news sites, et al are evolving their platforms to achieve. For years personalization was a theory, but with the speed and power of our ever evolving technical infrastructure and new agile design frameworks we can make personalization a simple utility to turn on and increase the value of marketing. Shop.org is about online retail, but the same lessons these savvy marketers are preaching will continue to filter across all media and retail experiences.

Thanks for the heads up Monetate folks.

Systems Architect

We are seeking a person – a true savant – who can join our
two person team team and lead the development, scaling,
optimization, and evolution of our ruby-on-rails / merb server imaging
technology. We’ve developed some compelling technology for which the
market opportunity is significant and growing. We currently have
several projects in production. The problems we are about to face are
likely to outstrip our expertise. This is where you come in. You will
be responsible for analyzing our current implementation and proposing
/ developing solutions appropriate for a high-traffic /
highly-available dynamic imaging service. You will also be responsible
for analyzing our current development and release processes and bring
them into conformity with today’s best practices. You will be a
cornerstone of our company.

Our Company:

Sympact Technologies is a group founded and run by tech guys. Our
mission is to make every advertisement creative, whether in email,
display or mobile, relevant and personalized to the viewer. We have a
great founding group with a diverse array of talents and interests,
who have worked together before. Given the initial response of
advertisers, agencies and email providers to our solution, we can
assure you that we are onto something big. We can also assure you that
successfully capitalizing within this market will require a ton of
work and a little bit of luck. In terms of financing, we are in the
midst of closing our seed round. The investors in this round will
include a number of angels deeply connected in the email and display
marketing space.

Responsibilities:

This position is primarily a development role however, we expect that
you will be able to take on more management responsibilities as our
team grows. Over time the ratio of development to management will
shift towards more management and less development. Therefore we need
someone who can draw on their experience to develop both a
state-of-the-art internet application and a world-class engineering
team.

1. on-going analysis of our application to identify and correct flaws
2. develop coding/documentation standards/conventions/practices
3. develop systems to ensure the reliability of a complex external
   data subsystem
4. develop a commercial grade release process
5. develop and drive head-to-toe QA process
6. monitor evolving industry best-practices and drive their adoption
   within our company

Experience / Knowledge

We need someone experienced in the following areas:

1. ruby, rails, merb, memcached, ngnix, capistrano, mongrel
2. distributed applications, S3, EC2, etc.
3. design patterns, data structures, algorithms, caching strategies
4. a deep understanding of the OSI model and the issues involved

Qualifications

• You should be a person who can see a system from a high-level and be
  able to identify sources of trouble long before they emerge.
• You will have met many technological challenges in your career and
  have been the one responsible for creating a solution.
• You’ve developed, managed, maintained real world systems with users
  numbering in the thousands.
• You have a high-level theoretical grasp of object-oriented
  programming concepts; more than simply understanding inheritance, you
  know when inheritance is appropriate and when it isn’t.

Education

Although no specific degree is required, a person qualified for this
position is likely to have an advanced degree in Computer Science.
Having said, that, there is no education better than real-world
experience.

• Location: Brooklyn, NY
• Compensation: Salary + Equity
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products
  or commercial interests.

Email Resumes to tyler@sympact.net

Engine Yard Downtime

While they might not be as big as these top services having significant outages this week, they certainly are the leaders in the Ruby on Rails world.  Our faithful and expensive, experts at Engine Yard have hit trouble not once, but twice this week.  As I am writing this adiserver has been down for over and hour and a half. This coming just a few hours after we received a credit an hour of down time from earlier this week. 

I find it funny that just yesterday we posted about moving our small applications to EC2 and the fear of single point of failure there.  We praised EY's redundant environment only to have it fail on us today. Only one of our slices seems down, yet the whole application is unresponsive, whats up with the redundancy we pay for?  Hopefully there will be an explanation in the post-mortem. 

This is all to be expected though, as the wildest super rare occurrences seem to happen whenever we move a server.  A day before our move to Engine Yard we got hit with Rackspace's really bad 36 hours.  Maybe we should warn all network admins before we move another box...

Well lets hope we come back on line soon, because as of now my head is in the clouds.

Update: We are back up, total downtime - 2 hours, 5 minutes, 39 seconds

Moving small apps from Engine Yard to EC2

When we first started at engine yard we hosted all of our applications on it, it made sense at the time, as our goal was to offload as much work from our limited resources as possible, but now that our skill levels have increased and our apps have matured, it doesn't seem as needed.

For example, our company site www.sympact.net does not get very much traffic as we don't have much of a consumer sale model.  The site is a rails 2.1 app, with a basic cms, and the only gem dependency is haml.  What justification is there for hosting it on EY?  I'm sure an engine yard representative would probably ask us why we were hosting it there in the first place and my answer would be peace of mind.  Now that we want to scale our main application out at EY, we want to best utilize out hosting budget at EY. 

As you may know, engine yard is expensive with each slice costing us $379/month (in our configuration).  Resources are very scarce, with only 3-4 mongrels recommended to be run in the memory allocation given to each slice.  Why are we giving up 1-2 of those mongrels over two slices($379) to apps that don't need it? Well that question is what lead us to EC2, and more specifically (ec2onrails + RightScale). $72 per month, per app (EY charges $50 bucks for additional apps + the slice costs).

EC2 on rails is a gem and AMI that is great for setting up rails applications that don't need very much customization.  Right Scale allows us to easily configure and design our instances... for Free. This basic setup has brought us down to a single point of failure, but we have accepted that risk for now, and still think we can scale to a redundant environment at a lower cost then EY.  Also, we now have more mongrels than before (5 in the out of the box configuration).

Just to be clear, the intention of this entry is not to bash EY, Sympact still loves and uses EY for our core application.  In fact the reason we are moving the other applications to EC2 is to get more of our EY resources for the main application.  Just be cautious about your budget with Engine Yard because your going to want more! You are going to want more slices, more memory, more cpu, and it is going to cost you.  Keep the mission critical stuff there, get the rest out.

Rails and IFrames - Issues with Internet Explorer sessions

While using our new Share-It iframe for a project we came across a strange session issue with internet explorer that was tough to track down a solution to. 

Basically we were loading an iframe with some parameters that were saved in a session, this worked fine on all browsers except for internet explorer. 

Every request had a new session id, so the issue had to be with the cookies.  As it turns out using an iframe from a different domain name is considered "third-party" and IE blocks the cookies unless....

You set this ( P3P compact policy ) response header.

P3P: CP="CAO PSA OUR"

more details about the header and what it means can be found here.

you can easily do this in a controller using this call in a before filter with this line:

response.headers['P3P'] = 'CP="CAO PSA OUR"

Since the issue was harder to find a solution to than it should have been we decided it would make a good first development post from the Sympact team. Expect More...

We're not the only ones who thinks it's cool

Over the past few weeks we have had some amazing discussions with prospective investors and business partners. The terrific insights generated have been a product of our technology bumping into some amazingly insightful and commercial business minds. One of those great minds that we bumped into was Jack Aaronson and his synopsis of Sympact's impact on email is fantastic. I have included the relevant passag below, but encourage you to read the full article and to make a habit of keeping up with Jack's thinking:

Not Just Banner Ads, E-mail Ads, Too

An exciting new technology is surfacing that lets this type of personalization of graphical ads get to a whole new level. A company called Sympact is enabling dynamically changing graphic ads based on mash-ups of any kind of external data.

One of their examples is an e-mail about a new movie. It's one thing to get an e-mail announcing a new movie like "Sex and the City." It's another thing entirely for that graphical ad to include show times at a local movie theater for today and tomorrow. Moreover, because these ads are dynamic, a user who goes back to look at that e-mail next week will see updated show times based on the current date, not the date the e-mail was sent out.

What excites me about this technology is e-mails are rendered in real time. That means if you open the same e-mail next week, the ad might be different. Imagine a whole new kind of e-mail campaign based on this.

For instance, some companies send out a "12 Days of Christmas" promotion, where each day they deliver a new e-mail with a different special. Instead, what if you send one e-mail and tell the user to look at it each day. Every day it updates to the current special.

Or what about promotion codes e-mailed to people? They probably save the e-mail, and then the promotion is expired by the time they use it. What if the promotion code is always updated to reflect current promotions?

This ability to do multi-stage campaigns with a single e-mail over time opens up a whole new level of e-mail marketing.

For anyone interested in figuring out how to use dynamic data in email, please do not hesitate to give us a shout....646-233-3508.