Photo courtesy of Luc Legay

Consider a typical networking event where you exchange business cards, meet new people, eat lots of cheese cubes and make contacts.  Social media is the business mixer of the 21st century and Card-ly is your digital business-card for the digital mixer.

Card-ly aggregates your online contact information in one sleek little website or “card.” The card offers an about page, a page for your social media pages, a page for business contact info and a page which streams your updates.  This thing has everything.

Imagine the possibility of placing your Card-Ly URL on your actual business card.  Now your contacts can call you, follow your tweets, facebook you, subscribe to your blog and check out your flickr shots with one, short, simple URL.

Head over to Card-ly to improve your networking opportunities today!  Be sure to check out our business card: http://www.card.ly/vqcdesigns.

P.S. we’ll keep you posted on the cheese cubes moving online as well!

It takes two to tango.  It also takes two to use technology, the user and the piece of technology.  Hence our new weekly blog covering the wonderful world of technology.  We spend all week dancing around the internet and come Tuesday we are ready to perform.  Each week VQC will highlight a piece of the tech world which caught our eye and will hopefully catch yours.

This week we’ll take a dive into augmented reality; would you like the red pill or the blue pill?  Okay, so augmented reality may not be on the level of the Matrix, but once it becomes widely available, augmented reality will redefine the way people use their mobile devices.  The technology allows a live digital image of a physical environment to be integrated with virtual information.  Take a moment to let the gears grind and imagine the possibilities this technology offers to users. Check out these examples to get a better idea of what AR offers.

Info for shoppers

FoodTracer concept+demo from gusepo on Vimeo.

This past summer an Augmented Reality Consortium of 8 AR companies was formed with a focus on developing tools, technology, applications, and content for AR.  This technology has been conceptual for nearly a decade and is now being pushed towards widespread application.  President of the consortium and CEO of Ogmento, Ori Inbar, has gone as far as to refer to this technologies development as a “digital renaissance.”

One of the leading companies of this digital renaissance is Layar based in The Netherlands.  Layar, a mobile “reality browser”, launched in June 2009 has recently become available globally on all Android Devices.   I’ll allow the video below speak for itself.  Just imagine the possibilities yourself.

“I view ceramics in two ways. First as a bold and even subtle expression of form and second as a canvas that gives the form its final statement of expression.”

-Tim Hoover

Tim Hoover is the next artist we will be featuring during the 2009 Gallery Walk. Don’t forget to check out the other artists and we hope to see you on September 13th!

Tim was born on May 12, 1965 in Boise, Idaho. He moved to Carlisle in 1973 and attended Big Spring High School, where Tim’s appreciation of art began. In the summer of 1983, he was accepted into the summer session of the Pennsylvania Governor’s School of Arts Program. He went on to further study art and ceramics at Kutztown University. In 1991, sponsored by the American Crafts Council, Tim went to Japan where he studied with several potters. He attended Kutztown University as an art major, specializing in ceramics, wood and painting.

In addition to his paintings, he continues to push ceramics with visual imagery of 2-D designs onto a 3-D format.  Tim’s work can be found in the Perry County council of the Arts Gallery, and in Carlisle at The Garden Gallery and the Carlisle Arts Learning Center. Tim’s work is also owned by a  number of private collections overseas and the state headquarters for the Comanche Tribe, in Lawton Oklahoma.
Tim resides in Carlisle where he maintains a studio and continues to work in ceramics and painting.

Special thanks to:

James Krabiel – Game On

Our next featured artist is James Krabiel.  James work will be on display on September 13th during the 21st Annual Art Association of Harrisburg Gallery Walk.  Be sure to visit VQC Designs during the walk to enter a chance to win Jame’s art.

It was at the age of eight when James gained an interest in art, first through comics, and cartoons. It was then that he began attending the Old Donation Center for the Gifted and Talented and upon completion of that program in 1997; he began attending the Governors School for the Arts in Norfolk Virginia. He finished the Governors program upon graduating from high school in 2001.  James was featured in Who’s Who of American High School Students of 2001. And held a successful show at the Kane Marie fine arts gallery in Virginia Beach.

Shortly after graduating high school James relocated to Carlisle Pennsylvania where he began working for Ron Stinson, a metal sculptor in Carlisle, at Ron’s Metal Expressions studio. In 2001, James began attending the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, graduating with honors in May of, 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in fine art. In 2009, he accepted a position in the Dickinson College Art Department as an art lab technician.

James now resides in Carlisle were he maintains a studio at the Haverstick Gallery & Studios and continues to work in diverse media such as ceramics, paints and metal.

Special thanks to the Garden Gallery for providing the artists and their art

Proceeds Benefit

“Pastel is my preferred medium. To be able to have no tool i.e. brush or palette knife between my hand and the working surface gives me great satisfaction. Touching the surface and blending the pastels with my hand feels natural and gives me a sense that I am literally ‘IN’ the painting”

-Chris Mackie

This September 13, VQC Designs will be hosting gallery space in the 21st Annual Art Association of Harrisburg’s Gallery Walk.  For this year we wanted to amp things up a bit and really show the Harrisburg locals a good time.  We decided to team up with one of our favorite galleries to visit: The Garden Gallery and host an art raffle from local artist’s work.  The proceeds from this event will be donated to the Cultural Enrichment Fund to help promote the local arts in the Harrisburg Region.  Over the following days leading up to the event we will be posting the work and bios of the artists who will be participating.

Our first featured Artist is Chris Mackie.  Chris Mackie grew up in the working class village of Gawthorpe, England. He developed an interest in art from an early age drawing on anything he could find such as old newspapers, his parents old cigarette boxes, or scrap pieces of paper. In his early school years he would produce pencil sketches of super heroes and icons from the big screen and later took an interest in Hip Hop graffiti art.

At the age of 20 Chris decided to join the Military. He joined the Elite Parachute Regiment of the British Armed Forces, serving for 5 years including a 3-year tour of duty in Northern Ireland. He then transferred to the Royal Air Force, becoming a Physical Training and Adventure Training Instructor, serving for another 10 years. In 2006 Chris was recruited into the Royal New Zealand Air Force.

During his time in the military, Chris continued drawing and painting, and in 2004 was being represented at The Coppergate Gallery in York, England and The Jay Senior Contemporary Art Studio in Wakefield, England.

In 2006, Chris switched from painting with acrylics to pastels, and his work took on an entirely new direction. He began painting inspirational images that were much more meaningful with emotional content. To Chris this was real art. Chris went back to his working class roots and looked to British Master painter L.S. Lowry, his favorite childhood artist for further inspiration. He loved the simplicity and the power of his works. Lowry’s industrial images with the working class folk in their big shoes and plain clothes evoked memories of his own childhood.

Today Chris’s subject is his journey through life.  His work expresses an array of human emotion and the importance of self-reflection. Love is a theme that you’ll often see as a recurring symbol in Chris’s work – “The Love Heart.”

He now lives in Carlisle, PA where he continues to paint. Chris’s work can be seen at The Garden Gallery and the Haverstick Gallery & Studios in Carlisle, PA.  Chris’s work can also be found across Europe, Australasia and the US.

Chris At Work

Proceeds Benefit:

Special thanks to the Garden Gallery for supplying the artists & their work.

Photo: Courtesy of www.youtwitface.com

In the year 3000, Youtube,Twitter and Facebook will merge to form one super time-wasting website called YouTwitFace.
– Conan O’Brien

Thankfully, we won’t have to wait until the year 3000 to have one ultimate social website.  Using the latest in dashboard widget desktop technology you, the average user, are able to integrate your social media accounts easily and head-ache 991 years before Conan O’Brien predicted YouTwitFace. Albeit an all in one site is non-existent, developers have created other sites and tricks to aide in the integration of your social marketing sales force.  Imagine, posting a blog that instantly links to your facebook account which then fires out tweets announcing the update to your face book which in turn returns to your twitter feed which is available on your blog.   Sound confusing, well it may be a little, but it’s pretty cool eh?

The benefits of having your social marketing force linked together return to the basic principle of why you have these accounts in the first place, to communicate with your stake-holders.  But you may ask, are all three truly necessary?  Yes if you consider the possibility that some people may use only facebook and some only twitter and some may only read your blog.  What I am getting at is having a consistent message across all three platforms provides a more efficient way to provide a consistent message to wider target area rather than if you viewed each platform as its own entity.

To begin creating a true social network marketing force it is best to tackle the process one step at a time.  Begin with a blog (check earlier posts for tips on blogging) about your business and cool related topics dealing with your business.  Consider the blog as the foundation to your social plan.  From the blog you can provide links to your facebook and twitter pages.  Facebook and twitter both provide code for a badge which updates a live stream directly to your blog.

From here head on over to your facebook page and get ready for some fun.  Using the facebook application search look for blogging applications which update your RSS fees directly in facebook.  Two applications I recommend are Blogcast and Social RSS .  Social RSS allows you to input 5 RSS feeds to have updated on your page, this allows you to have your blog and twitter updates directly imported to your facebook page.  Twitter applications are also available which allow you to post to twitter directly from facebook.  Still with  me?

So what about your Tweets?   Well, the best way to keep up with the constant flow in the twitterverse is to invest in one of the free desktop modules like Tweetdeck or Seesmic.  These programs allow you to keep tabs on multiple twitter feeds as well as facebook.  From here you can tell the world what your posting on your blog in second by second updates.  Think of these programs as an instant message service for your social media marketing force.

You may dizzied by all these connected social media marketing knowledge but don’t be intimidated, break it down step by step and remember the advantages of social media.  Being completely integrated will save you time and make your message more available to a wider audience at the best price of all: FREE.

Remember the great inventors you learned about in school: Alexander G. Bell, Thomas Edison, and Benjamin Franklin.  Ever wonder what they would do in today’s age and what they would post on facebook?  Well , let’s imagine Alexander Graham Bell was born in 1980: he would probably be spending his days developing facebook applications to call people with VoIP.  Or maybe Benjamin Franklin would have developed a Facebook App entitled “Fly the kite, but don’t get struck.”  What I am getting at is that online applications, particularly ones in facebook, are advancing the internet and its user-ability in the same fashion as inventors of years past.  For this installment of our series on facebook we’ll look at how applications are mobilizing the facebook medium for e-commerce and other fun stuff.

In the not so distant past, facebook developed the facebook platform to allow developers to do what they do best, develop.  At present, thousands of applications exist for the facebook platform ranging from fun things like graffiti and — one of my personal favorites  — rocketman to viable business practical applications.  With many developers, novice to elite, building applications daily, there exists a very large pool to choose from.  If by chance you are unable to find an application to choose from, you also have the option to develop your own.  The facebook developer’s page is an excellent source for the individual willing to get down and dirty with some code.

Another alternative to add some extra “flair” to your page is to use the static FBML application.  Static FBML (facebook mark-up language) allows you to use code to create unique tabs and boxes within your facebook page.  Within these unique boxes and tabs the possibilities are endless to create unique pages to promote and improve your business via facebook.  As you can see from these examples below, static FBML allows your facebook page to become an extension of your business:

Threadless T-Shirts – Threadless utilized the Static FBML to create a customized e-commerce portal for their killer t-shirts.

RED – RED used Static FBML to create a registration page for users to join their cause.

Facebook applications have potential to be inexpensive, efficient ways to generate ROI.  I wish you luck in your facebook application quest.  Next week we’ll be discussing more social media with integration of Twitter and Facebook.

Continuing our series on facebook, our next feature will concern the articulate art of wall posts and searching for friends. The wall originated in facebook as the main form of communication between friends. Typical wall exchanges in the early stages of facebook consisted of inside jokes and college students’ weak attempts to impress females. Now in the newer more improved facebook, the wall serves as an advanced multi-media communication tool.

The wall, also known as the “news-feed”, displays the updates to your profile in a column style fashion, very similar to posts in a forum. The news-feed has many features to enhance your facebook profile.

Text-Based Updates: The facebook equivalent to tweets, these form the basis for the wall and allow you to share your thoughts with the subscribers to your news feed. Friends have the capability to comment and express their fondness of these posts allowing them to take part in your daily business and let you know their thoughts on the matter.

Link-Posts: So you are taking a quick break from work and surfing your favorite web pages. You find an interesting article on digg.com and think “my friends HAVE to read this!” With facebook’s wall you can post the link, accompanied by a thumbnail and description to your wall. This will show up on your subscribers’ pages. Furthermore, you could get really motivated and go to specific profiles and share the link with individuals.

Multi-Media Updates: A real possibility for business is the new ability to post picture and video to their news-feed. Similar to the link, these posts can be accompanied by text. Adding creative content provides endless avenues for promotion of your business. A few quick ideas that come to mind are showing examples of your work alongside press releases, short web-commercials for promotion, or perhaps something outrageous to attract attention.

Privacy Settings: Of course you may want to be selective in who sees your posts. Utilizing the “friends lists” feature allows to organize your friends into groups based on location, relationship, or whatever you prefer. This is possible in the friends application. Using these lists allows you to filter the visibility of your posts which in turn may save you some face.

Importing From Other Sites: In these exciting days of Web2.0/Social Media Revolution/ Ubiquitous Internet, a lot of our time is spent updating sites, posting information, and of course, checking out other peoples’ similar activities. Now with the news-feed you are able to link to other Web2.0 sites and have those updates posted in your news-feed. This makes the sharing of information even easier because facebook does the work for you!

Learn to utilize the wall/news-feed to keep in touch with friends and perhaps attract some new ones in the process. Enjoy your updates and posts until next week when we delve into the world of facebook applications.

http://londoncoder.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/iceberg.jpg

Perhaps the biggest thing since Google, Facebook is a social epidemic that began on college campuses as a way for students to “connect.”  Facebook is now 150 million users strong in 170 countries represented by 35 languages and growing strong (FB grew 85% in 2008).  Within the past year facebook has targeted the private sector for its newest pool of users.  With the new service titled “pages”, which provides a presence for an organization, product, or public personality in the realm of facebook.  For a business, this presents many possibilities, possibilities that are cost effective and possibly addicting.  A series of facebook blog posts ensues covering the Facebook Revolution. Let’s get started on getting started.

Before heading over to facebook you should consider what is achievable through an account on facebook:

• Connecting With Customers – Facebook brings B2C communication to a new level of direct communication.  Reviews can be written, discussions started, and comments made about your business.  Communication in facebook is mutual, fun and comfortable for both parties.

• Informing Customers – “Fans”, the facebook equivalent to customers, to your page will receive updates whenever you post them.  Perhaps your business now offers a new product line; post it on facebook and inform your “fans” instantaneously.

• Brand Management - Your facebook page is an extension of your brand.  By adding information, photos, updates, videos, and applications your page acts as the digital version of your brand which users may interact with.  Facebook personifies your brand and allows extra value to be attached to your brand.

• Brand Awareness - Creating a business account allows other users of facebook to subscribe to your page as a “fan.”  Gaining fans is the facebook equivalent to creating brand awareness.  A bonus to generating fans is that once someone becomes a fan, a link to your page is then displayed on their page; viral campaign anyone???

These 4 things are just the tip of the benefits-facebook-provides-iceberg.  Social media is a young and undiscovered business phenomenon with its full potential yet to be realized.  You may feel overwhelmed by the size of facebook at first, but you must remember to start small and build your page’s elements one by one. Follow this link to start a page for your business.  Complete the forms and be prepared for your journey into facebook.

Stay tuned as we continue our facebook journey next with the wall and finding friends!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/267060150/sizes/o/#cc_license

We will now begin a blog entry discussing the benefits of blogging.  Yes, this is a blog on blogging, *gasp*.  Do not fret; the universe will most likely not collapse upon itself but there exists a strong possibility of meeting the bizzaro world version of yourself later today.  Let us travel back to 1998 to the conception of the “blogosphere” as we know it.  In that year only a handful of blogs existed on the internet.  These sites, coined “weblogs” by Jorn Barger, were essentially online journals for motivated individuals.  For a unique glimpse to the early days of blogging check out this list of blogs existing in the year 2000.  Fast forward 10 years and writing a blog is America’s newest favorite past-time with an estimate by Wired magazine stating nine blogs being created every minute.  Some estimates placed the number of blogs world wide to be close to 100 million with many more readers in 2008.

Of these 100 million blogs, many bloggers are not very committed to their blog and their target audience consists mainly of friends and family.  Furthermore, many blogs are concerned with the blogger’s hobbies and/or interest.  Lastly we have the part of the blogosphere, which this blog exists in, the business sector.  The blog is a useful tool for any and all types of business.  The blog creates a dialog with customers and stakeholders that can be extremely useful in generating value.  Also, the blog becomes a tool for attracting visitors to your website which may lead to future opportunities.

As you ponder starting a blog, there a few things to consider; the host of your blog, your blogs content and attracting readers.  Many avenues for hosting blogs exist online, check out this database to pick the right one for you. On a side note, these are all third party blog hosts and will not be hosted within your website. In order to have the blog be internal to your site you will need to contact your webhost to set that up.  Now onto the next step, deciding what the heck you are going to write about.  To start off, maybe write a small introduction explaining your business and welcoming visitors to your company’s blog.  Remember the blog is a conversation and can be funny and witty.  Also remember to keep the posts succinct and to the point, unlike this post.  Once you have a post or two published online you will want to attract readers for these posts.  Try an email to your contacts directing them to your brand new blog.  Also, make sure the blog has a link on your company’s homepage so potential customers can read about your business.  Another suggestion is to network your blog in the blogosphere.  Check out blog database sites like Blogarama and blog search engines such as Technorati and Google blog search to read other users blogs, generate ideas and find inspiration.

One final word of advice before you take the step toward a successful blog, have fun with the blog.  A blog is meant to be conversational and informative.  Imagine yourself at a networking event using the same language you would use while writing a memo or press release.  Chances are that you will not be the life of the party.  Now picture the guy making jokes and capturing people’s attention.  You want your blog to be funny, informative and interesting just like the fun guy at the party.  So sit back, relax, and get ready to blog!