MarkThisDate

MarkThisDate Wins Publisher’s Pitch

Today at the Dutch National Publisher’s Conference, MarkThisDate presented itself as one of five innovative publishing concepts. This short ‘pitch’ turned out to be a competition which, in all modesty, we just had to win.

Not only did the panel of professionals immediately recognize the power of Calvertising and the commercial promise of MarkThisDate.com, but in the end the entire public chose us as the most (potentially) successful concept.

Of course the “grand prize” was nothing more than recognition of our work, which is always appreciated. Cheers!

Always know when your favourite artists play with Festivalkalenders.nl

Today we launched Festivalkalenders.nl, our second spinoff aimed at a specific target group. In this case our target group are the visitors of the major summer festivals like Pinkpop and North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland and Belgium. In most cases these festivals last for days with a lot of different stages on which artists perform.



Of course you don’t take your laptop to a festival but when you sync your electronic calendar with you mobile phone as i do, the complete program of a festival is added to your phone in the blink of an eye and always with you during the festival. Quite handy if you would ask me!

Check it all out at www.festivalkalenders.nl

Add Public Calendars as a guest

As of today you can add calendars to MarkThisDate without registering first. Just send us the publicly available calendar address and the calendar will be added under the user ‘guest’. If you want to add calendars by submitting your events manually or you want to get credits for you calendar entry you still have to register first.

MarkThisDate nominated for ‘Gouden Inhaakmedaille’

Strating (Active Marketing) is again organizing the so called ‘inhaakawards ‘or ‘hook on awards’ around the major sporting events in 2008, the Olympics in Beijing and UEFA EURO 2008 in Austria and Switzerland. An expert jury judges on originality in the categories Newspapers/Print, Radio/TV, Internet and SP/Instore. We’re very proud to anounce that we are nominated for a ‘Gouden Inhaakmedaille’ in the category Internet for our spin-off Mooiesportzomer.nl. On this website visitors can very easily add all match schedules of the three major sportevents of this summer (EURO 2008, Tour de France and OS) to their calendars. MarkThisDate is nominated next to companies like Nuon, Lotto en Rexona. If you like our spin-off go to the website click on ‘Inhakers EK 2008′ and vote for Mooiesportzomer.nl.

Launch of Mooiesportzomer.nl

Last Friday we launched a nice spinoff of MarkThisDate. For EURO 2008 in June, the Tour de France in July and the Olympics 2008 in Beijing in August the event schedules can now also be found on Mooiesportzomer.nl.

We are planning on implementing more of these theme websites. For instance one with the line ups (including start en end times and stage locations) of the summer festivals in Holland. If you have suggestions for other theme websites, or want to start a theme website in collaboration with us just contact us or respond here.

Partnership with Tuxx

We’re pretty excited about our partnership with Tuxx.nl. Tuxx offers business related information and helpful documents to professionals. They also provide lots of dates which can now also be delivered to calendars. For Tuxx this means they can get their dates into the hart of the computer of their users, namely their electronic calendar. For us this means that we get access to an important user group, namely the business user.

Relaunch

As you might have noticed we changed our look and feel completely. Red and beige are now blue. In the last year we have been working on our back-end (’the engine’) and now it was time to overhaul our front-end. With thanks to the guys over at Metalab we are very happy with the result. Besides the changed color:

• we took out our homepage which was a useful but unsuccessful experiment and went back to the list view
• we added icons to calendars
• we made it easier to share calendars either via our widget or your favorite social network
• we added business functionality to facilitate professional calendar distribution
• we expanded our network through which we distribute calendars
• we added suggestions to the sidebar for easy navigation

Please let us know which features you like or dislike.

Calendar widgets

We pimped our calendar widget. Not only is it extremely easy to implement (copy/past a hyperlink), the screen that opens is completely customizable to everybody’s needs and look and feel.

Just visit the share tab on a calendar page, select your code and copy and paste it into your website. We have prefab buttons but you can put the code under a hyperlink or your own banner or button.

Below is one of my favorite implementations (click the image). Every time a visitor of your website adds this schedule to his calendar he will be happy because you made his life so much easier and you have generated 35 contact moments (one for every match) with that visitor. In these contact moments you can give the visitor extra information about the event, your website or your product. Therefore you know he will revisit your site.

You can find more info and examples at our products page.

Immovator Cross Media Cafe: the new TV Guide

Yesterday I attended the Immovator Cross Media Cafe. The topic was: The New TV Guide or EPG (electronic program guide). Key word of the day: collaborative filtering.

Interesting to see what:

• Vincent Everts, PCZapper
• Marcel Houtman, Dag, Zie.nl
• Albert Treur, TSS
• Annelies Kaptein, Stoneroos
• Berend Jan Verheijen, Hoofd Nieuwe Media, BNN
• Carl Lunenborg, Programmabladen AKN, TVgids

had to say. From a technical standpoint everything is possible: combinations with Youtube, video/tv on demand, mobile devices, etc. Please visit all those sites above and see how different the solutions to the same problem are. What I found also interesting is that TV programs in my view are not only competing amongst themselves for viewers, they are competing for precious time of the viewer. The viewer could also do some sports, read a book or visit grandma. My point is: in the examples I saw yesterday there was not one EPG that interacted with the calendar of the viewer. When am I going the watch all those collaboratively filtered programs? The solutions could be so simple as an ics feed for you favorite program, channel, actor or any collaboratively filtered (3 times is too much, I agree) content to your calendar app. Not only a good service to the visitor/viewer but also a perfect way to tell the viewer more about the show he is about to see with links back to the EPG.
Good idea ?

Friday relaunch MarkThisDate

We are very excited about our new and more intuitive look and feel coming out this Friday. We have also added lots of new features for our partners and clients. Please visit MarkThisDate.com on Friday and let us know what you think. Here is a preview: