Alaska Trip, Snowball Fights, Glaciers, Swimming

So I've never uploaded photos from any of my trips. But, being as how I believe it to be a very useful thing and I now help operate a website specifically designed for such a task I thought I might try it out.

Luckily in September of 2007 I visited Alaska.

I was cold most of the time, not just regular cold but that I'm damp and I can't get dry kind of cold.

I got seasick. I threw myself at the side of the boat so as not to puke inside so hard one time, coupled with the 5 foot swells, I almost went into the ocean where I surely would have drowned.

I almost fell off a cliff that I was climbing.

I almost slipped on a glacier and plunged 500 feet down the worlds most deadly type of sledhill, you know, the one that is entirely hard unforgiving ice and has jagged rocks at the bottom.

And for all that, it was probably the coolest trip I've taken, ever.

I met a girl there, yes, in Alaska that I went on to have first semi-long distance relationship with, then moved in with.

I hiked up that glacier, and took part in a snowball fight on it.

I did not swim in the ocean like some of the people I was with.

I got drunk off of rum and coke cooled by glacier ice I carved off myself.

We saw some of the most stunning scenery this world has to offer.

It was great spending time with a couple of Germans and two Italians that were experienced sailors and really wanted to see the world.

It's hard to describe the feeling of being out on the water for 2 weeks, touching land here and there but spending most of your time on the boat socializing and watching the scenery. Spending every night playing some cards or just talking about what to do next. Hiking on the trails in a park, or making our own trails and climbing part of a mountain. The entire experience was fantastic back to nature, amazing camaraderie and the freshest air I've ever had.

The whole trip from Juneau up into Glacier bay is here. These pictures are courtesy of Thomas Seidel and Christian Heger, both of Germany and smarter than I was to bring high quality waterproof cameras that shoot video.

I encourage everyone to go have a look and enjoy the pictures and video. Also to Lucio, Luca, Thomas, Christian and Chris, thanks for the memories.

Business Cards, Social Networking

Would you believe that we only got business cards today? We found a great printer in our neighborhood named Print Time that did an excellent job. (In fact, there was an issue with how our chosen font printed on his equipment and he was great enough to not only proof it but ask us to come down and figure it out because it wasn't up to his quality standards - that is good service.)
The card looks good eh?

So, now we have cards. What do people need business cards for? I forsook business cards a long time ago in favour of making my website as easily findable on the web as possible. I thought, surely with Google no one will ever have problems finding us if we're memorable enough.

Well, that was kinda dumb. You meet so many people in passing that if you don't give them a card, they don't find it in their pocket later at home while digging for keys or mints, and they never look you up. By the time they remember that they met a guy that had a business, your name, face and location are lost to the winds of time, tiny grains of sand that were scattered amongst a billion others never again to have any recognizable pattern.

(That metaphor was a bit excessive, but if you've studied how human memory works you'll see what I mean.)

So, business cards. I was at Toastmasters the other night which is a club for people who want to learn public speaking and practice it in a formal setting. In this meeting the tables are set up in a long U and the member sit around. As I was making my speech about my business moving around at the front I realized how easy it would be to deal the cards like playing cards along the tables. My speech was excellent and I know everyone would have taken them home.

I'll do that next time. That is just one example of how great cards are.

Social networking, striking up a conversation on a bus, hitting on the counter girl at Starbucks, whatever, business cards are the way to be.

Someone Picks up the Press Release

A bit of success. I contacted Kwantlen University College and they're going to pick up our press release about Oistr. They're picking it up on the angle that I studied marketing there.

The great thing is that those students are definitely part of our initial target market. They're people who have traveled or want to and have experiences to share on our website. We're also hoping that if they become regular users of the site, they will grow as customers and eventually start booking trips. Also, this market also spends a lot of time online social networking and we may be able to use that to get more users.

Lucky for us, they will not only publish it in their local school paper they will also issue their own press release to all of the local papers in the areas of their campuses. Their reasons for issuing the release are for purposes of marketing as well.

If they promote the fact that their alumni are out starting businesses and being generally successful, they may be able to up their enrollment.

Help me, help you. I like it, it works for me.

Another great mutually benefical partnership.

Our Facebook Pitch Video, and Facebook Apps

Facebook in its quest to make money has done a couple things to control and promote good applications.

When the app platform was developed, it went from 0 - 60 in months, everyone wanted to get in on the fastest growing social networking site to make money. Anyone could submit an app and the facebook community could evaluate it. If it was good, it spread far and wide. That's the beauty of social networking.

A lot of bad apps were developed that didn't work, didn't hold true to facebook values or whatever. So facebook started the facebook developers fund. It sounded like a great idea, they'd take applications for funding and then pick the apps that will most likely keep facebook users using facebook, and give them money to make their apps better.

Facebook has also recently started charging a fee to become a "verified developer". This is $375 per year and you go through an evaluation process. The blogs that I've been reading say it's the same thing as an extortion racket and they're offended. One one hand I see their point because it's like the net neutrality issue. If people who have great ideas for apps can't afford or aren't willing to pay, then the users of facebook miss out on something that could potentially be great. Scrabulous would be an example, did those kids in New York know it was going to be huge, and would they have done it if they had to pay? Well, probably, but that doesn't mean others wouldn't have.

I think overall it will keep the flakes from putting up bad apps that I try out for a day or two and then delete, continually wading through the massive tides of unfinished, untested and plain crappy apps.

I think we should rely on user feedback and reccomendations instead of a fee to facebook, but they are a business and I understand.

We created a pitch video to try to get facebook funding. This is before we changed our branding to Oistr. I think we did a pretty good job. We didn't get the funding though.

Writing the Oistr Press Release

This is the release I plan to send to bloggers, newspapers and anyone who might want to write about our site once it is released as version 1.0

I've written it and re-written it. Writing a press release is actually quite hard.

You want it to be dramatic to get peoples attention, but you don't want to talk crazy. It has to sum up the business and what makes it unique without boring people. It has to be done in as little as 3 paragraphs, and certainly not reaching 2 pages unless each paragraph is more engaging than the last.

I think I've done quite a nice job. It's straight forward, it accurately describes what we are doing, it tries to convey the excitement we feel about the product and has specific calls to action at the bottom.

I'd love to hear what anyone else thinks.

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, December 2008 — Oggle Interactive announced today their new travel-tourism site aimed at increasing customer travel satisfaction.

“Stats are showing a decline in satisfaction from customers that book trips through big online companies, and we aim to fix that. As travelers ourselves, we’re also sick of the corporate pandering that most travel sites inevitably pass on to their customers, and we present a better option.” - Co-founder and Marketing Director Scott Carmichael.

Oistr.com, in its infancy, is designed to be a unique integrated travel resource that uses a wiki-style aggregation of information to present all sides of the travel world to its users. Designed to be media rich and map-based for geographical reference, the future will see the addition of travel blogs, games, online booking of hotels, flights and restaurants, and the sponsoring of users that inspire other people to travel.

Currently the site is giving users a unique and powerful interface to show their travels and allowing them to recommend places to go, businesses they liked or didn’t, and to share their pictures and video in trips or right on the business listing. The “trips” can be public or private but Oistr asks that useful information for other users be marked as public with or without your contact information. Also, make friends, be a traveling leader people will watch or ask for advice. If you found a great deal out there or a bait and switch, others want to know.

Oistr is asking for your help. Go to the website, www.oistr.com, use the customer feedback feature and tell us what you think! Explore the site, inspire others to travel and guide them by showing your travel experiences, or simply your own home town.