First glimpse at Treasure Chest

Treasure Chest — a web service for art dealers and art galleries we are building now is defenietely worth noting. It's not something that hit our mind recently. Me and Feodor were polishing this idea for quite a some time. Actually we started from building a web site for Feodor's father — great modern Russian painter Konstantin Troitsky back in 2003.

Soon we both understood the need in easy to use and affordable virtual internet office for artists and galleries (yes, you can call it a content management system (CMS) for artists, art dealers and galleries). This came purely from our own experience. To tell the truth — it's not that simple to manage a collection of artworks with prices and all required information. And what hit us, there were no ready solutions available on the Internet.

We decided to build a tool that will suit our own needs and (surprise, surprise) after talking to art dealers and famous painters in St. Petersburg we discovered that almost everyone wanted that kind of application to manage their assets and do business vie Internet.

Treasure Chest is in the development right now and the private beta launch is planned for mid September.

Pulsesales live Q&A session for marketers coming early September

We've got really positive reaction regarding Pulsesales from people interested in selling more using their web sites. So we consider the seminar on basic concepts of Pulsesales that was held on July 18th to be a success!

We plan to carry out next seminar on the beginning of September, 2008 to allow more people to take part.

Stay updated via this blog or subscribe to our dedicated Pulsesales newsletter, development is full speed ahead!

Don't miss the opportunity to get into product he exact feature you need.

What to do if you need some publicity

As I told in my previous note about how to make your business more visible on the web — nowadays you need to use public services to spread the word. We used a splash screen service called LaunchSplansh for our Pulsesales project and it's hard to believe but posts from RSS feed there are still missing in the Google index.

I repeat and advise again. In the word of Google use what's closer to it. Now all our product specific updates and posts will be in this blog.

Stay tuned!

Who do you design for?

This topic is something that is common to everybody in design business. Who do you design for? — I can call a guide for successful customers. Some might ask, "a guide for customers"? Why the hell do they need one? Simple answer is "because they want their project to be a success". Right?

Pulsesales — active internet marketing now evolved

For quite some time we used Stuffed Tracker to analyze visitors on our own clients' web sites. Of you are looking for your own hosted tracker — this will be your best purchase ever!

Then Google came in with it's Analytics service which was free and tightly integrated into search engine. Now all our projects use this service to track visitors.

But after a while I had an idea of the tracking system that will not only report visits but also give site owner a possibility to engage visitors, talk to them directly! It's really simple to image, it's like a car shop. First you look around, express your interest in a certain type of cars, show (in a some way) how much money you're willing to spend and finally — you're approached by the sales person who is making an offer based on your behavior observations!

Well, Pulsesales — the tool we are building at CruelPixels right now — will bring real life sales practices to your web site.

Best used by: car dealers, insurance companies, real estate market players and others, offering complex products or services with long time to sale.

If you want to stay updated about Pulsesales development subscribe to the mailing list right on the Pulsesales web site.

Another 37signals live cast!

It's going to be an excellent week!

What I like about 37signals is their way to polish things gradually. Last week they had the first live video cast ever. It went not so well because of spammer comments in the chat window and video outages. It too them one week to improve. Now they are loaded with new tools to control live questions from audience, have a look at their blog and of course don't forget to take part in the live Q&A session.

I'm personally a big fan of what they do not only because CruelPixels is about to launch a Software as a Service (SaaS) product Treasure Chest but also because 37signals tend to do things right.

Company site ideas

We are currently building CruelPixels web hideaway. Before we perfectly made it without a website, but each company reaches some point at which it wants to share ideas with the world.

While developing a strategy for our representation on the web and analyzing possibilities we noticed that it's more efficient to use public services for posting different types of information. No one will object — it's a Google world now =) So information must be reachable. And the best place to have your information exposed is Blogger for blogs, Twitter for short notes and Flickr for images.

You will be surprised how fast your data will be indexed and ready for search.

Give it a try! It's all about integration of different apps into your information environment, baby.

37signals performing live!

Yesterday guys from 37signals got Live. QA session using ustream.tv service proved to be a good way to communicate to huge customer and fan base all over the globe.

I think it's a step in the right direction and good lesson for me too. But technical implementation was awful. Sure, around 1000 concurrent chat and video stream users is a big deal. As a solution I can see refusal from the video in favor of chat and voice communication.

My own experience is that a good sound quality can easily compensate the lack of video stream, especially when there is no any valuable visual information except your pretty face.

Don't tell me it's visual age right now. I'm talking about usability and common sense. You don't need to canon shoot flies. Right?