Category Archives: Marketing

A pirate treasure hunt

Events, Marketing, Vintage Toronto
Poster by Claudia Davila. Treasure map by Thbthttt!
Poster by Claudia Davila. Treasure map by Thbthttt!

Following up on the success of their annual Easter egg hunts, Scooter Girl Toys this year launched their very first Pirate Treasure Hunt on October 10 and in so doing, gave scores of families (and loyal customers) a chance to discover the neighbourhood—and maybe even work-off a bit of their Thanksgiving dinner—over what turned out to be a lovely long weekend.

Each crew was given some Scooter Girl buttons or maybe a Scooter Girl tattoo, but most importantly they were given a map carefully marked with the location of a number of neighbourhood treasures and other oddities. It was then their job to match one of a series of clues to each location and answer the riddle hidden there.

I developed the hunt and created the handout, using artwork and the Scooter Girl style developed by Claudia Davila. In addition, as the hunt progressed, it quickly became my job to start dropping some hints on the Scooter Girl Facebook page and spur the participants on.

Continue reading →

Waves in Motion lets you control your FileMaker scripts

Marketing,

As every FileMaker developer already knows, you can trigger a script when you open a file, you can trigger a script when you close a file, and that’s just about it. Anything else, and you have to rely on manual control or cumbersome applets that tie up you computer and slow down your applications.

Script Scheduler is a new FileMaker plug-in from Waves in Motion that does away with these limitations. You can configure Script Scheduler to trigger any script in any file at a scheduled time or at regular intervals. Or even better, you can instruct Script Scheduler to trigger a script whenever you exit a particular field.

Continue reading →

MacTicker brings the stock market to your desktop

Marketing, ,

Marc LaFoy is one of those Macintosh enthusiasts with just the right combination of loyalty and luck that had him buying Apple stock last year when it was languishing around $15.00 a share . . . just before starting its seven-month climb to a high of $43.75.

As it turned out, however, there were then no Macintosh applications for gathering stock quotes from the Internet. “I wish I could’ve watched all the excitement right on my desktop,” says Marc. “But I had to settle with looking up AAPL every day on a website and reloading the page whenever my curiosity got the better of me.”

These last few weeks, however, Marc has been heavily involved in the final testing of MacTicker, a simple Macintosh application from Galleon Software that lets you easily browse  stock market information from financial websites around the world. You can watch any number of your stocks roll by on an animated stock ticker, or call up a detailed report for each of your favorites.

Continue reading →

Galleon Software sponsors Solo Tramp benefit concert

Marketing, ,

When Roger Hodgson stepped out on stage last night to launch the next leg of his Solo Tramp world tour, he did so in support of the Northern California Center for the Arts and with the backing of a Macintosh application from Galleon Software. Perhaps best known from his days as lead singer of the British rock group Supertramp, Hodgson now takes his breakfast in America and graciously offered to perform a special home-town concert to benefit the arts center located in Grass Valley, about fifty miles northeast of Sacramento.

Continue reading →

E-mail veterans find their niche

Marketing, ,

If you had dropped by the old offices of SoftArc Inc. in 1991, you would have found Colin Biggin and Scott Appleton working hard to bring a new Macintosh bulletin-board system named FirstClass to market. In those days, everybody pitched in, building SoftArc into a multi-million-dollar company in five short, busy years. “I enjoyed those early days best of all,” says Colin, “but after five years, I felt it was time to move on.”

Colin and Scott left last March to form Galleon Software, committed to building small, useful communications tools that were just not being built by larger companies. “We want to give people exactly what they need,” says Scott. “We want to make it affordable. And we want to make it easy to use.”

Continue reading →