Tagga Welcomes Jim Southcott

Jim Southcott - Tagga Advisor

Tagga is excited to welcome Jim Southcott onboard as an advisor. Mr. Southcott brings 25 years of experience in marketing, advertising and strategic planning. His forte is working with senior clients to set their long-term marketing strategy by tapping into his global network to develop evermore powerful planning tools to help guide the brand strategy development process. He has extensive client side experience working with accounts including Labatts, Telus, A&W, Terasen, Vancity, Shaw, BC Lottery Corporation, Corix and Tourism Yukon. Tagga looks forward to working with Jim as the company continues to build value for businesses by enabling them to take advantage of valuable mobile marketing strategies.

Open Web Awards - Nominate tagga!

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Tristen
tagga Developer

Mobile Monday Vancouver

Since tagga is a new WINBC member, I thought I’d check out last night’s Mobile Monday Vancouver (MoMoVan for short).  When looking up the event details at momovan.com, it was cool to see tagga profiled as a feature innovater as well as our very own tagga CEO Amielle Lake as the current face of Mobile Monday.  She loves the picture of her.

This time around MoMoVan was held at Granville Island Brewing’s Tap Room, which is a delightful place for a get together.  The schedule featured interesting talks by ZinePal, Cellmap, and Wavefront as well as a panel discussion on AGPS.  I was particularly interested in Wavefront, who had visited us at tagga the previous week, seeing as they were setup to provide resources and assistance to BC wireless startups.  We are hoping that they can help us out by providing some testing and device resources (New T-Mobile G1 Android device next week!).  Check out the picture at right of my former colleague Geoff Ledingham looking sheepish as he’s being introduced by Brian Roberts as a new Wavefront Product Manager.  If you are a wireless startup in BC, I recommend talking to these guys to see what they can do for you.

It was good times at Mobile Monday last night and always nice to see what’s new and hot in Vancity.  Look out for the next one.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

The shiny new tagga SMS API

Big news from tagga, we released a free SMS messaging API this week! The tagga API lets developers send SMS text messages to their users, receive SMS text messages from their users, create taggs, and dynamically update taggs.  See below for an overview of our API features:

Send Message - Learn More
The Send Message API function lets developers send free SMS text messages to mobile users via a simple HTTP POST.  Developers can only send to users who have opted into the developers program.

Dynamic tagg Update - Learn More
The Dynamic Update API function lets developers update the message content of any tagg on the fly. This function is particularly useful when used to update Newsletter taggs, which updates all subscribers when the Newsletter content is changed.

Create tagg - Learn More
The Create tagg API function lets developers automatically create taggs and mobile websites without visiting tagga.com. This feature is particularly useful for sites with groups of users who want to create Newsletter taggs that send updates to all users in a group. This feature will also be attractive to listing sites seeking to mobilize via SMS campaigns and mobile websites.

Two Way Messaging - Learn More
The Two Way Messaging API platform will allow developers to receive messages from their users and respond accordingly, for free. Developers will receive an HTTP POST from us when their users send a message to their keyword; the developer can then dynamically decide what content to return to the user. The tagga API provides developers with tools to send and receive SMS messages to and from their users.

Check out all the details and sign up for the API!

Note that the API is only free to developers and that standard messaging rates apply to SMS recipients.

If our API doesn’t tickle your fancy you might be interested in some of our other developer tools, check them out on our Developer page.

Please contact us with any questions or suggestions and feel free to send us links to your apps.  We’d love to see the tagga API in action!

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki

I have long been a fan of Guy Kawasaki’s blog and of his books.  Today I was pleased to see that he posted about his new book “Reality Check”:

“This book is the “superset” of all my books, articles, and blogs. I wrote it to provide answers to the questions that I’ve been asked about entrepreneuring, innovating, managing, marketing, speaking, pitching, schmoozing, and hiring.” ~ Guy Kawasaki

His post also featured a hilarious foreword by the fake Steve Jobs.  If “Reality Check” is really the superset of his other books, I recommend reading this book to anyone involved in creating and selling products.  I’m definitely going to add it to my Christmas list.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Talk by Jason Fried of 37signals

I have long been a fan of 37signals and the mantras they share in their book Getting Real.  This talk by 37signals founder Jason Fried highlights some of their great ideas concerning work in the software development industry.  In my estimation, watching it is well worth an hour of your time:

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Tagga amps up its publisher tools and feature set

IT IS OFFICIALLY TIME TO GET MOBILE.
It has been just over two months since tagga launched. Time really does fly by and we have been busy promoting the product, delivering valuable ROI to advertisers, and launching new features that we hope you will like.

Updates

Sotheby’s International Realty mobilizes their listings!

Tagga signed Sotheby’s International Realty Canada as a white-label publisher. Now potential buyers surfing www.sothebysrealty.ca can, in a single click, send listing information to their phone. Our new mobile site feature enables people with smart devices to view richer content about a listing such as photos, detailed descriptions and use click to call to talk to the Realtor.  For Realtors, this helps to streamline calls and respond to inquiries more effectively.  Adding this functionality to a website takes minutes and is very easy. Already, we are seeing a 1% conversion of unique visitors. We anticipate this number to increase as awareness grows.

Advertising really does drive results!

One of our top network advertisers, Super U, has been pleased with their advertising spend to date.  Gary Tauss, Interim CEO, describes his experience as follows:

“It took less than a minute to set up an SMS advertising sponsorship. We are able to target a large group of mobile users within our target demographic. I am excited about the ability to embed our website name in texts so that users with Smartphones, like the iPhone, can click right through to us.  The text messaging demographic is the perfect demographic for us.  We look forward to a long and successful relationship with tagga.” Gary Tauss, Interim CEO, Super U Holdings

New Features

Now you can make a mobile site in 1 minute!

Mobile tagg web pages -  If you thought 80 characters wasn’t enough to get your message across, you can now make mobile web pages for your taggs.  We send the URL out in every SMS, making more content accessible to mobile users.

Send to Mobile Plugins - We’ve developed versions of our ‘Send to Mobile’ button for the major blog and content management platforms WordPress, MovableType, Joomla, Drupal, and Blogger.  Check them out on our tools page.

Demographic Targeted Ads - Worried that your ads aren’t going to the right people?  We were too. That’s why we developed a demographic based system for targeting ads to our users/your customers. Now, you can maximize the ROI on your mobile ad spend. Click here to get started.

Newsletter taggs - Make taggs that sends updates to subscribers whenever tagg content is updated. This is useful for anyone wanting to share new information with fans, party-goers, discount seekers, or sports teams.  To subscribe to a newsletter tagg all anyone has to do is text in the name of the tagg (e.g. text TAGGA to 82442). Create a newsletter tagg now!

Events Update:
Tagga has been busy promoting its new features. Last month, tagga team members attended and presented at events in Vancouver,  San Francisco and Vegas. Along the way, we made many friends and received excellent feedback from bloggers abound.  Some good reads are:

Guy Kawasaki

Mobile Messaging2.0

Techvibes

Invoke Media

TrisHussey.com

The Free Line Report

Miss604

Tagg ya’ later

The tagga team

Loving Last.fm

I never used to listen to music at work, but have started to recently.  The tagga office is open plan and all of our desks are clustered together, so I’ve found that listening to music helps me drown out the background noise and focus on what I’m doing.  One problem I have is that I’m not particularly into music.  My musical knowledge is pathetic, bordering on embarrassing.  I’ve lately had the problem that my iTunes library isn’t big enough to get me through the day with fresh music, which is why I love last.fm.

Last.fm is a web based music suggestion engine that streams you music smilar to that of your preferences.  In the morning, I go to last.fm in my browser and type in one of the few artists I know and like, which usually keeps me going all day.  I generally get a song from the artist I typed in first, then similar artists that I usually like from then on.  Conversely to last.fm’s slogan, I don’t find “the more you listen, the better it gets”.  After a while, I find that the stream will get a bit off track and start playing songs I care for less.  This is only a minor nuisance though, for selecting a new artist and restarting the stream usually gets me grooving again.

For people actually into music, I can see last.fm being used as a tool to find new, cool stuff.  For me, last.fm is music for the lazy and I’m quite enjoying it.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Blogworld Wrap Up

Two weeks later, the tagga team has finally recovered from an amazing trip to Vegas for the 2008 Blog World Expo.

tagga was there to launch new features for publisher accounts, including a publish-to-mobile plug-in for all major blog platforms featuring a 40/60 revenue share with bloggers. Already some of our bloggers are making more money with our tool than with Adsense. Why? Mobile ads have a higher value.

While we were at blogworld, tagga threw taggamob’s.  The taggamob’s were promoted through a tagga sms rss feed and through twitter with huge success.  The word of the taggamob’s spread quickly and all 6 were highly attended and successful.    We gave away chips to the Mirage Casino, cash, t-shirts and Apple Gift Certificates.

Our grand prize winner won a $500 apple gift certificate.  Check out the winner below with the tagga team.

Over all, Vegas and Blogworld were a  success for tagga.  We got the word out about our new platform, launched some great new features, and our network of subscribers exploded – we had over 700 new subscribers that weekend alone.

tagga would like to extend a very special thanks to Guy Kawasaki, Brian Solis, Dan Portnoy, and Vancouver peeps: Kris Krug, Collen Coplick, Tris Hussey, Ianiv & Arieanna Schweber and the fabulous Rebecca Bollwitt, for the fun times and support!

Photo Credits: Ianiv & Arieanna Schweber Miss604 John Gaudio

Bloggeur ? Offrez la mobilité à votre contenu!

Vous avez un blog et souhaitez envoyer votre contenu sur les téléphones mobiles via SMS? Facile. Installez votre plugiciel (plugin) Send to Mobile et un petit lien apparaîtra en dessous de chacune de vos nouvelles. Vos lecteurs pourront ainsi cliquer sur ce lien et envoyer la nouvelle sur leur cellulaire automatiquement… et gratuitement. Pour voir l’outil en action, cliquz sur le lien Send to Mobile ci-bas.

Voici comment l’installer. Rendez-vous à la section Tools et téléchargez le plugiciel correspondant à votre plate-forme. Présentement, des plugiciels sont disponibles pour Wordpress, Drupal, Movable Type et Joomla. Les autres bloggeurs ne sont pas en reste puisque nous avons également élaboré une procédure qui est indépendante de l’installation de votre serveur. Pour en savoir davantage, informez vous dans notre section dédiée aux éditeurs.

Jérôme Cantin
Développeur