Overheard this morning at the County Seat Cafe, while I was working on one of our 19″ RedPost/Signs there that’s part of our local RedPost/Goshen advertising network:

Does every business have a RedPost?

First, I’m glad the brand is being well-communicated, as said person (who I didn’t recognize) knew that what I was doing was somehow called RedPost. Second, to answer her question, no, not yet.

As briefly mentioned before, tomorrow marks the start of our one month test market of the effect of digital signs on retail. We have 3 digital signs (1 37″ TV, 1 42″ HP and one 19″ RedPost/Sign) located throughout BetterWorld Books’ Goshen retail store, 2 indoor and 1 facing the street:

Each Sign is playing the same content, with the posters formatted in both 4:3 and 16:9 ratio. They developed a series of 8 posters that accomplish three goals:

1. let customers know about things the bookstore does that aren’t well known  (accept book donations, sell both new and used books, order books they don’t have in stock, and buy/sell textbooks)
2. promote specials at the store (the basement sale going on over the next two weeks, the bargain room, and the popular kids section)
3. build the bookstore’s brand (advertise for First Fridays, promote the green aspects of book donation, tout the large inventory in-store and in their warehouse)

Here are the posters. Note that at most they have 15 words, use bright colors to attract attention and simple visuals to communicate the message. Each posters displays for 10 seconds:

How we’ll measure the result: we’ll compare last year’s sales for July to this year’s. We’ll also compare book donations, bargain room sales and kid’s corner sales year over year to see if there’s an improvement.

Check out these photos (thanks Thushan) of 6 RedPost/Signs installed in Goshen College’s creative booth at the Mennonite Church USA convention. GC’s new theme is “Peace by Peace:”

Peacemaking is anything but passive.
It requires action. Compassion. Engagement.
To make peace, you need to find common ground and be ready to make some waves.
Find out how

Students can write on the booth walls with chalk, answering questions like “Who’s your peace hero? What does peace mean? What does peace look like?” They can also get their photo taken with a sign that says “I am making peace with…” in which they fill in the blank. The photos are then posted each hour on the 6 RedPost/Signs. It’s really more of an art exhibit than a trade show booth, but hey Mennonites are a creative people, I guess. Here are the photos:

The Signs are all running off a local network and local server we set up, to keep them from having to pay an internet connection fee for every single one, due to draconian convention center standards. Full disclosure: I grew up Mennonite and still consider myself one ideologically. Also, Goshen College is my alma mater.

RedPost sponsored a Sign outside the office of mPress, the official newspaper of the Mennonite Church USA conference taking place right now in Columbus, OH, with over 8,000 attendees. Here’s one of the slides we put on their Sign, as part of our sponsorship deal:

This week, we have 7 RedPost/Signs at the Mennonite Church USA’s 2009 Convention in the Columbus Convention Center in Ohio. Six are embedded in a Goshen College admissions booth in a sweet application that I’ll post photos of later this week. The 7th is outside the office of the convention paper, mPress. (On a side note, in college, I helped to produce and run a week-long video news show for the Mennonite Church USA 2001 convention, which is what led to me starting my first company, Everblue Media.)

The other Sign is at an educational conference in Texas with the guys of Haiku Learning Management Systems, another Goshen-based web startup tackling the education market with an awesome piece of web-software they’ve developed that helps teachers create online lessons, manage discussions, post grades and more.

I’ll have pics to post later this week.

My Jetta TDI (Turbocharged Direct Injection) is having issues, in that the turbo, created by a turbocharger (pictured at right), is no longer working. The turbocharger takes compressed air and a lot of gas and, like the name says, injects a turbo boost into the engine, giving my TDI a nice little boost from about 2,500 RPM to 4,000. However, without this nice little boost, while I can still drive fast, I cannot accelerate much at all. It literally takes up to 5 minutes, depending on the slope of the road, to get to 60 MPH.

This may sound all bad, but it’s not. I’ve been getting awesome gas mileage, about 45 MPG, which is much higher than the typical 35-40 MPG. Also, as someone who usually drives pretty fast, I’ve learned a lot about humility and patience.

However, this past week I put on about 1,000 miles between a trip to Chicago and 3 days in Indy. If you were one of those people who was extremely annoyed by the slowly accelerating white Jetta on the highways between Chicago, Indy and Goshen, I apologize, especially to the trucker who flipped me off and tried to run me off the road. I really was accelerating as fast as I could and was not trying to ruin your day.

My mechanic, Eckhert, a somewhat crusty old German man, will be tending to the TDI this week. If my working theory that it’s just a cracked air tube is correct, it’ll just be a $25 or so fix.

The latest links from Eric’s internet-information-addiction, compliments of Delicious:

Retail digital signage market to triple by 2013 – Retail Customer Experience
“Global shipments of retail digital signs are set to rise to 2.5 million units by 2013, generating a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 26.8 percent from 758,122 units in 2008.” That’s what I like to hear!
(tags: retail digitalsignage digitalsigns instore instoreadvertising outofhome gooddata research)

Wow. Microsoft truly does not fail to fail.

Here’s the short version: you may have heard of Microsoft Outlook, the most popular email program with 36% of the email program market. You also may have become accustomed to receiving nicely formatted emails that aren’t just plain text (called HTML email). HTML email is difficult to send, as there’s no set standard for how to display the emails across the many different email programs (Outlook, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, Apple Mail, etc.), particularly when it comes to CSS, a standard for how to format stuff online that’s ubiquitous at this point, except in Outlook, of course. Almost everyone has agreed to an HTML email standard, except for Microsoft with their Outlook program. But not to worry, Outlook 2010 is coming out next year and will fix this major problem causing the rest of the industry lots of headaches.

Except it won’t. From Microsoft’s VP in charge of Outlook:

We are focused on creating a great e-mail experience for the end user, and we support any standard that makes this better. To that end, Microsoft welcomes the development of broadly-adopted e-mail standards. We understand that e-mail is about interoperability among various e-mail programs, and we believe that Outlook provides a good mix of a rich user experience and solid interoperability with a wide variety of other e-mail programs. There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The “Email Standards Project” does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area. Should such a consensus arise, we will of course work with other e-mail vendors to provide rich support in our products. We are constantly working to improve our products and the experience that they give to our customers.

The bold part is simply false, untrue, wrong — there are standards, called web standards. All email clients work to be standards-compliant and don’t allowing scripts to execute, because of security risks. But not Microsoft, except for Outlook 2000, which was more standards-compliant than Outlook 2007 (figure that one out). This is like going to a restaurant and refusing to order food because you say that menus do not exist, but forcing them to serve you what you want even though you won’t look at the menu.

Rumor has it that the real reason Microsoft is taking this position is that “the source of the problem is that the Outlook division doesn’t have budget to license IE8’s rendering engine from the IE division” (thanks Carl), although, it seems more like bad planning/management and a refusal to recognize the hugeness of this issue for the 67% of the computer using world that isn’t using Outlook.

There’s a campaign to draw attention to Microsoft’s stupidity, check it out here, there’s already 21,457 tweets about it.

We’ve got a new friend visiting us at RedPost World HQ for the next month or so:

It’s an HP LD4200 LCD (specs) built for use as a digital sign. High brightness, 1920×1080 full HD resolution, 1000:1 contrast ratio — a really nice display.

We’re going to be doing some fairly unscientific market research with the HP monitor over the next month in the bookstore our office is located in, advertising for specific events, sales and options, and then comparing that to the store’s sales from last year to try to measure the impact of in-store digital signs. We’ll report back here on the blog.

Thanks HP!

Check out this blog template from designer Elena Gafita:

Look strangely familiar? Yep. It’s eerily like the RedPost website design we released this past fall (the current one), same color scheme, same frilly things in the background, same primary nav speech bubble thingies. It’s beyond eerie, it’s freaky. Elena came up with her design back in 2007…when the new RedPost website was merely a twinkle in an unborn baby’s eye. Odd how everything that’s been done has been done before.

But I guess if our universe is really just the product of a highly unlikely cosmic coincidence, things like this shouldn’t be a surprise.