Denny’s has introduced a rather edgy, innovative campaign to drive new customers to their restaurants. For me, Denny’s is seen as a place I’ll only frequent past 2 am when everything else is closed, and apparently Denny’s is perfectly happy with that image.
In fact, they have launched a campaign to feed musicians who stumble in after shows for free! As times are hard, and touring costs have become exceedingly expensive, Denny’s is trying to step in and help out artists trying to hit it big.
For artists to get involved in the program, they have to sign up on Denny’s site, and get accepted into the program. Right now, there are only 6 bands in the program, so they might be going through an evaluation process now and should have a lot more bands coming on soon.
It’s great to see companies try new, edgy marketing campaigns, and hopefully this will actually help them improve their image, as well as their sales.
Grooveshark is on TV, local channel 4 news, that is! This is actually an older mention we got, but be sure you’re paying attention around the 13 second mark and have the volume up really loud, otherwise you’ll miss it :)
Getting things done or GTD is really helpful in making working at a startup manageable, while also keeping me sane. I use a number of different elements on my mac from iCal to IMAP mail, and recently I’ve been using TaskPaper to help keep me organized with different tasks and projects.
TaskPaper is a simple text editor that allows you to organize your projects and tasks via bolded sections for projects and hyphenated sections for tasks. Within tasks and projects, you can use tags to organize information further, for example I use @work and @personal to differentiate what I need to do in my life as well as at work.
Taskpaper is a great solution, but I was having issues synching up taskpaper with what actually goes on. Say I go home and buy groceries, and complete that task, I have to wait until I get back in the office to actually mark it as completed. That may sound like a small inconvenience, but when you have so many things going on, spending double-time doing these sorts of things can turn into big time-wasters.
Luckily, the guys at hogbaysoftware have a solution to help you sync taskpaper via IMAP and subsequently also your iPhone.
What you have to do is create two apple scripts (just type in script in finder to find the appropriate application) and paste the code below into the scripts. Save the files in your taskpaper scripts folder, mine is: user/Library/Application Support/Taskpaper/scripts
Call this file “Send to Mail.scpt”
tell application “Mail”
check for new mail for first account
set newtasks to content of first message of mailbox “Drafts” of first account where subject is “Todolist TaskPaper”
end tell
tell application “TaskPaper”
set text contents of front document to newtasks
end tell
Call this file “Send to Taskpaper.scpt”
tell application “TaskPaper”
set tasks to text contents of front document
end tell
tell application “Mail”
check for new mail for first account
try
set olddr to first message of mailbox “Drafts” of first account where subject is “Todolist TaskPaper”
# delete doesn’t work
move olddr to mailbox “Trash” of first account
end try
set newdr to make new outgoing message with properties {visible:false, subject:”Todolist TaskPaper”}
tell newdr to set content to tasks
save newdr
close newdr
end tell
Once you’ve saved the files, to active them, pull up Taskpaper, and click on the script in the top menu. To send your tasks to Taskpaper, click on the “Send to Mail,” and to pull in tasks, click send to Taskpaper. Now, to access your taskpaper anywhere, pull up the drafts folder on your iPhone and edit away.
Grooveshark is in the process of building out some pretty cool Twitter integrations and we’re playing around with the Tweetscan API today.
What Tweetscan has done is essentially indexed the Twitter public timeline putting everyone’s comments available for the world to see if you follow their RSS feed.
Below is an easy to use badge they have for displaying keywords used in Twitter:
This badge as well as the RSS feeds available are particularly useful for me when I’m at events like web20expo in San Fran or the like and want to find out where people are going at the event.
As a mac user with 2 computers, I’m often relying on .Mac to help keep my life organized. However, the native sync is just one part of the equation, the other major pain is synching up appointments with clients and partners.
Often it’s a back-and-forth trying to get confirmations on the calendar, and with the Mac/PC barrier, I’m often worried that all of my messages might not be getting through. Then in comes Presdo, a new Twitter-like service that’s supposed to make scheduling events a piece of cake.
You simply enter in a couple of details, and Presdo creates a quick entry for you. Tell Presdo WHEN the event is scheduled to take place, WHO is involved (you start your account by inviting yourself), WHERE the event is taking place, and WHAT the meeting is for. A great feature is that you can export the event easily into your iCal, etc. calendar application.
You can then invite guests to the event, but there is no way of importing your address book as of yet, and to get your invitee in the loop, you have to send them an email. There is a neat messaging platform that allows you to comment on the event, which probably will help with the 4 emails you send trying to confirm a time. I’ll stay a member and hopefully will see an update from them soon on some cool updates or uses for the platform.
Just got some feedback from a friend and wanted to share his questions and my responses:
Thanks for the feedback, let me address the specific questions:
Question:
What I don’t like is how the names are messed up (basically like someone who isn’t picky about it on their ipod..) but I am picky so it bothers me to get results like Sound Garden. When the band is Soundgarden.. how you could correct that with user uploads.. I don’t know where to begin.
Answer:
That’s a result of us using mp3s, etc. taken from users’ libraries where the id3 tags are not always 100% correct. This is definitely an issue we’re sorting out and are in the process of completely streamlining. We are also building in a wiki-system that lets users correct songs that are incorrect, etc.
Question:
I like the playlist and free ness of it obv.. I just don’t know why I would use it to play songs I already have ya know.. have you guys thought of making a visualization (or forgive me if I didn’t see an already existing one). I can see myself making a playlist for a party versus using youtube.. but I would want visualizations. Otherwise I did report one mp3 I found.. hehe.
Answer:
Again, something we are in the process of working out — we were thinking of adding visualizers, music videos, games, etc. to keep people active and on the page as opposed to going away a la Pandora.
While I just recently profiled Tweetscan, and how it can be used to track your customers and fans, I get introduced to another cool product, Addictomatic, which lets you check a particular search term, like “Grooveshark” across a bunch of different properties:
Topix
Ask.com
Live.com
Google Blog Search
Digg
Technorati
Bloglines
Flickr
Blinx
Truveo
Youtube
Newsvine
Wordpress
Yahoo!
:whew: quite the list, and I’m sure they’re going to be adding more soon..
Hi, my name is Andrew Wise and I am currently the VP of Business Development at Grooveshark.com. I recently graduated from the University of Florida with a BSBA in Marketing, and am living in Gainesville, FL with 5 other employees and my lovely girlfriend in a 6 "bedroom" condo. Shoot me and email and let's see if we can work together.
