Parkopedia

Before I started working in downtown Bellevue, I had to find where to park near my workplace before I was issued a parking pass for my building's parking lot. The high end of the downtown parking scale is $24/day and the Civica parking garage next door gouges you for $18/day. The low end of parking downtown is free at either the mall or Safeway's parking structure, roughly a half mile walk. There's also the Bellevue Transit Center which is two blocks north, which doesn't have a route that passes near where I live. At the moment, the only option I have is to commute via driving into work.

I stumbled upon the Parkopedia website and it is very cleverly done. The site allows you find parking lots, public and private parking garages, and parking meter-enforced spaces.

Here is a sample map and listing of downtown Bellevue:

Parkopedia Map - Downtown Bellevue WA

Address Listings, Available Duration, and Price

There's even another service listed on the site for parkatmyhouse.com, where users can find a house or private garage to park a vehicle at, for a fee of course. There's not much action on the eastside. This is more useful for homes and garages near a metro airport, train station, or transit center.

Promote a post, only $7 on Facebook

Well, that was weird. I was just doing a shout-out to all my Seattle friends on Facebook and was notified that I could 'promote' the post.

Out of curiosity I clicked 'promote' and Facebook wants $7 for opportunity. Well, here's the thing. I don't represent the business that I'm promoting, just spreading the word about their special customer offer to other consumers.

Companies should be paying me to promote their posts; not the other way around. What do you think?

Automation Quirks: Pardot

Pardot's integrations with third party vendor software make it competitive among vendors that offer marketing automation solutions; but there are quite a lot of quirks (read this as lost functionality) when you go from using the soup version of an email marketing platform to a nuts version; Pardot is definitely the latter.

I was setting up an email for a rebroadcast. It is a basic flat email with a tracked link for a webinar invite to a select group of prospects in our database. That is pretty easy to put together. Heck, all I had to do was make a copy of the previously broadcasted email. Although, a lot of vendors don't require this step. Anyhow. To set up a rebroadcast, I had to pull out a list of 'opens' from the previous broadcast (which, fortunately, I didn't have to export and re-import as a list) and append it to the new broadcast as a suppression list. Weird. Normally, I would be able to just suppress any lead record who received the previous 'email' in say, Silverpop, and broadcast as usual.

It just causes me to have 'more stuff' within the user environment in Pardot. Now I have an extra list that I don't need for future broadcasts, but I need for this one. I have a stinkin' suspicion that if I delete the list, I'll lose the attributes of the send data for the affected prospects.

I have noticed, however, that if you have a distinct question in Pardot and look in their help or idea forums, and can't find it...the solution does not exist. And, if you really wanted them to implement it, you could suggest the idea to their idea forum and users can vote it up to the top of the queue for development.

Blog Widgets

Tonight I found another widget for Blogger that is pretty darn nice. It's made by printfriendly.com and allows you to print or PDF a blog post. For recipes, this is a nice feature to have. It sets up the blog post in a printer-friendly page that strips out the excess blog navigation, ads, and other non-necessities. 

Learn Agile Development Through Tetris

I stumbled upon this on Slideshare today. It is an amusing and informative look at how software development (or web rollouts) are like a game of Tetris.

Learn Agile Development Through Tetris from Mark Daggett

Death of a Brand Name

Kraft Foods, a company and brand that has been around since 1903, is throwing in the towel with its 100+ year legacy for its flagship name for something completely bizarre. I should clarify that Kraft is still around, except it won't be branding its snack foods under the flagship name. Kraft's flagship products include brands such as Cadbury, Maxwell House, Nabisco, Oreo, Oscar Meyer, Philadelphia, Trident and Tang. Part of this name, ticker, and branding split is to protect the larger branded assets (mostly the grocery category) from the volatility of the snack foods category, which has faced a lot of regulatory and agricultural pressure lately. The new name for the snack foods entity will be Mondelez International Inc. (NASDAQ:MDLZ, as of Oct 1, 2012).

Seeking Alpha has a pretty good by-the-numbers breakdown of how this company and stock split will affect investors. Read more?

Battle of the Joes

When instant coffee becomes a gourmet standard for home-brewed coffee the times have certainly changed about the perfect cup. Keurig, a brand best known for single cup brewing systems, is owned by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (NASDAQ: GMCR) and held roughly 80 percent of the US market for single-serve coffee category, making it a desirable, acquisition target for larger consumer beverage companies such as Coca-Cola or Nestlé. But, that was more than a year ago when its shares traded above $40. With 34 patents on its K-Cup design expiring this September, competition for the single serve category will be even more fierce. 
Related articles:
"Green Mountain is a costly cup of coffee," Businessweek, 2/28-3/6/2011, pp. 44-45