The Code Kitchen is an incubator for innovative Web projects.

We're based in Montréal, QC, Canada.

New CakeMail website and Blog

By Francois Lane on April 1st, 2008

Following the successful launch of CakeMail Version 1.3, The Code Kitchen is happy to announce the launch of the redesigned CakeMail website: www.cakemail.com and our new CakeMail blog.

The overall objective of the redesign is to make the CakeMail website content easily accessible, more concise and more inclusive to our different user groups. The new structure maintains a good working balance between CakeMail’s key products and services, news content, developer material, and an overall view of the business of email marketing. We have modeled the new website after the stock CakeMail user interface; easy, clean and concise. We believe this updated look and structure will allow visitors to find the information they need fast, without heavy marketing jargon.

In the coming weeks, there will be more CakeMail blog posts to update you on new and exciting additions to our site, and product line. So if you haven’t already, we strongly suggest you subscribe to the CakeMail RSS feed. There are lots of exciting things in the oven!

Filed under: CakeMail –  10 Comments

Release 1.3 of the CakeMail Interface

By Francois Lane on March 27th, 2008

CakeMail is pleased to announce its latest release of the CakeMail open interface, version 1.3. All CakeMail hosted interfaces are updated automatically. If you are hosting your own interface, you can download it at: http://www.cakemail.com/download/

Template creation & management

To help speed-up the mailing creation process, CakeMail users can easily create professional templates, and then access them through their template library. CakeMail Resellers can use the CakeMail template management tool to reduce demands on creative resources, by offering their clients a set of system or user-based mailing templates.

Improved reporting

CakeMail reporting is more powerful than ever. With a simple mouse click, CakeMail users can download detailed mailing results information like who opened the mailing, who clicked on a link, and which email addresses are no loner valid. Leveraging the data from prior mailings, users can instantly generate open and click-through lists and use them to ensure timely, personalized and relevant responses.

Automated install script

There is great news for CakeMail resellers who host their interface on their own servers. CakeMail now has an install script that will automatically validate server pre-requisites, install the UI, and look for recent updates. So now you don’t have to worry about manually searching for and installing updates, all you have to do is run the CakeMail install script!

Filed under: CakeMail, Release –  0 Comments

Job offer: Marketing Manager

By Francois Lane on February 26th, 2008

CakeMail is an open-architecture, multilingual email marketing platform. CakeMail’s layered design is specifically meant for interactive marketing agencies, software companies, and web firms looking for an easy way to add email automation to their offering, synchronize data sources, reinforce their own brand, and add to their bottom line.


What you’ll do

  • Work with Sales, and Product Development groups to drive projects.
  • Define and implement a customer communications and lead generation strategy.
  • Contribute to the product improvement process.
  • Manage CakeMail’s main web property, www.cakemail.com
  • Blog.
  • Track and improve the conversion rate of website visitors and product trailers.
  • Develop marketing plan in conjunction with sales department.
  • Collaborate with PR resources.
  • Determine ROI on marketing operations.
  • Report and present competitive intelligence.
  • Define market research studies to gain knowledge about user attitudes and behavior.
  • Develop collateral that optimally positions the strengths of our products.
  • Analyze potential partner relationships.
  • Contribute to industry discussions online, such as the Email Marketer’s Club.

Essential ingredients

  • BA/BS degree, MBA a plus.
  • Four plus years experience in product marketing, direct marketing, marketing program management, or consulting.
  • Knowledge of the Email Marketing industry.
  • Outstanding written and oral communication skills.
  • Focused on results.
  • Attention to detail and organization.
  • Strong organizational and analytical skills.
  • Strong aptitude for determining the optimal way to position products in the market.
  • Understanding of the search and online advertising market.
  • Understanding of CakeMail’s strategic and competitive position.

Compensation

  • Competitive salary.
  • Generous options package.
  • Possibility of working remotely from anywhere in the world.
  • Cupcakes and cool T-shirts!
Filed under: CakeMail, Job Offer –  0 Comments

San Francisco, Macworld & the Crunchies awards

By Duncan Moore on January 15th, 2008

I’m in Silicon Valley and San Francisco this week, meeting some people, attending the Crunchies awards, and checking out the Macworld Expo (yup, we’re Apple fans - visitors to our Montreal office will notice several Macs on duty and even an iPhone, which isn’t officially available in Canada yet).

If you’d like to meet up in San Francisco, drop me a line at hi@thecodekitchen.com.

Thanks to Citizen Agency for letting me share their office space while I’m in town!

Filed under: CakeMail, The Code Kitchen –  10 Comments

Startup Camp Montreal

By Duncan Moore on December 21st, 2007

Additional tickets for Startup Camp Montreal have been released, so get them while you can (free for everyone except service providers). What’s it all about? Here’s the description from the event wiki:

Startup Camp Montreal is an event dedicated to everything Startup. It is the forum where early stage companies, investors and on-lookers alike can share information and validate pitches live. Join us as we learn from each other about the ins and outs of starting up. This event is not just for Montrealers, all are welcome. Space is limited, so you need to register soon .

A “Camp” event is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, presentations, and interaction from participants. The “Camp” event concept is inspired from Bar camp and Foo camp events originally started in California, but now held worldwide.

We presented CakeMail at Startup Camp Toronto in early December, and are looking forward to seeing the presentations in Montreal.

What were the benefits of Startup Camp for us?

  • Wisdom. When you put a bunch of really smart and experienced people in one room, there’s a lot of valuable hindsight to go around.
  • Connections. We met some fantastic like-minded people in Toronto, with whom we expect to collaborate in one way or another over the coming year.
  • Stickiness. In Made to Stick, the authors talk about “the Curse of Knowledge” that comes from being so close to something that its value seems totally obvious to you, when in fact it’s not. An event like Startup Camp gives you a chance to get a reality check and hone your pitch.
  • Feedback. The more good plans get exposed to curious people with challenging questions, the better they get.
  • Inspiration. The small scale of Startup Camp events means that everyone who is there really wants to be there. There’s no lukewarm to be found. Everybody is really enthusiastic about what they do, lots of great stories get exchanged and you come away inspired.
Filed under: CakeMail, The Code Kitchen –  0 Comments

We’re growing - and hiring!

By Duncan Moore on December 19th, 2007

We recently doubled the staff at our Montreal office with the addition of a sales and account management team, and welcomed an additional programmer to our development group in Eastern Europe. This brings us to a total of 11 people in the combined family of The Code Kitchen and CakeMail.

But we’re not stopping there! We’re seeking a Deliverability Manager to build on our in-house expertise as we expand. We’re offering a year’s worth of email delivery (150,000 sends/month) and CakeMail schwag for a successful referral, by the way!

Why join CakeMail?

  • Belong to a friendly, tight-knit team of talented, entrepreneurial people.
  • Be part of a stimulating startup.
  • Work with a truly innovative email marketing platform.
  • Blaze new trails by forging relationships beyond the major ISPs worldwide.
  • Telecommute from anywhere or come enjoy the great quality of life and culture that Montreal has to offer.

What you’ll do

  • Build on the ISP relationships established since 2002 during our founder’s previous venture.
  • Maintain feedback loop programs and white listing.
  • Resolve email filtering and blocking issues.
  • Monitor black lists and sender reputation.
  • Augment delivery-related data analytics.
  • Work with account managers to prevent, communicate and resolve deliverability issues.
  • Keep abreast of industry best practices, trends and legal changes and share this knowledge with team members and resellers.
  • Participate actively in the email marketing and anti-spam communities.
  • Contribute to industry discussions online, such as ReputationWiki.org and the Email Marketer’s Club.
  • Collaborate with in-house and third-party developers to hook various deliverability services into the CakeMail API.
  • Aid resellers in adopting best practices for content, creative, timing, data and trust-building.
  • Propose inventive ways to improve deliverability.
  • Have fun doing what you do!

Essential ingredients

  • Experience in ISP relations (2 - 5 years preferred).
  • Familiarity with delivery policies and procedures at major ISPs.
  • Technical knowledge of email delivery, filtering and authentication.
  • Familiarity with privacy and anti-spam policies and laws.
  • Strong problem-solving skills.
  • Attention to detail and organization.
  • Effective interpersonal communication skills.

Icing on the cake:

  • Excellent written English, and a strong interest in blogging.
  • Knowledge of other languages.
  • Experience with Linux and DNS administration.
  • Enthusiasm for open source and the collaborative Web.

Compensation:

  • Competitive salary.
  • Generous options package.
  • Possibility of working remotely from anywhere in the world.

Please send your CV and any other pertinent information or links to jobs@cakemail.com and let us know your salary expectations and (re)location preferences.

Filed under: CakeMail, Job Offer –  0 Comments

CakeMail, Inc.

By Duncan Moore on December 17th, 2007

The Code Kitchen recently spun off CakeMail to establish it as a separate company. We did this for a number of reasons, the main ones being:

  • The Code Kitchen is like a laboratory for cooking up new Web apps - once they’re served, they eventually take on a life of their own.
  • Having CakeMail as a separate legal entity will facilitate operations, especially from a financial perspective.
  • We wanted to offer an enticing options package to attract the best recruits to CakeMail.

What impact will this change have? For the foreseeable future, things will remain largely the same. CakeMail will continue to be based out of the same office as The Code Kitchen, and will continue to be the prime focus of both company’s efforts. François Lane is CEO of both entities.

Filed under: CakeMail –  1 Comment

CakeMail chosen to present at StartupCamp Toronto!

By Duncan Moore on November 27th, 2007

We’re very happy to have been selected to present at the inaugural StartupCamp Toronto on December 6th. StartupCamp is a special forum for a handful of startups to make brief presentations and then receive feedback and suggestions from a small audience of experienced entrepreneurs and investors.

To maximize the value of discussion and interaction, organizers have kept things cozy by capping audience size to less than that of a FaceBookCamp or a DemoCamp (the latter of which, incidentally, is a Toronto invention). Since they had to turn quite a few people away, they’ve decided to throw an after party, where there will be a dozen stations with startups giving demos throughout the evening in a format similar to Techcrunch meetups. Startups who want to take advantage of this opportunity for exposure can apply to demo at the after party using the form here. The deadline is November 30.

It’s shaping up to be a great event, with Albert Lai giving the keynote (he was recently featured on the cover of Canadian Business magazine), and organizers hinting at the unveiling of a major new development in the Canadian startup scene:

We have a huge new announcement to make at StartupCampToronto, you won’t want to miss this. Whether you just have an idea, or have been slaving away at your startup for years, something is about to happen in Canada that you want to know about. (Source)

Fellow Montreal startup Defensio will also be in Toronto to present. The Defensio and CakeMail teams have been enjoying each other’s technology lately (we’re using their anti-spam plugin on this blog and they’ve been using CakeMail via one of our resellers), but we haven’t yet had a proper face-to-face chat — although we’ve probably been at the same tech meetups — so we’re looking forward to that.

Filed under: CakeMail –  0 Comments

Fjord integrates CakeMail into their service offer

By Duncan Moore on November 16th, 2007

The Code Kitchen and CakeMail were featured today on the front page of the business section in The Montreal Gazette daily newspaper. The article is also available here on the Canada.com network.

The Gazette article very briefly mentions Fjord Interactive Marketing + Technology of the Cossette Group, which is an agency that we’ve been working with over the past few weeks. Fjord is currently integrating CakeMail into their service offer. We thought we’d take this opportunity to elaborate a bit on the details in a quick Q&A session with Bosko Milekic, Fjord’s Director of Technology:

Q. What attracted you to the CakeMail platform in the first place?

What we like about CakeMail is that it allows us to keep a lot of the intelligence of email campaigns internal while outsourcing delivery itself, which often requires significant infrastructure investments.

Q. What does CakeMail offer you that other platforms don’t?

The biggest benefit for us is CakeMail’s open approach (making available a comprehensive API and being willing to work with a community of agencies and developers on incrementally improving it). This allows us to focus on our value-add knowing that CakeMail is not competing with us, but rather complementing our service offering.

Q. How will including CakeMail in your service offer benefit your clients?

The campaign initiatives we put together for our clients are very integrated. It only makes sense that our email marketing tool be integrated too–both with our brand and with our existing results measurement and reporting tools. CakeMail makes that possible by allowing us to merge our email initiatives with other data. The result is a product that is fully integrated with our other service offerings, which ultimately makes our clients happier.

Filed under: CakeMail –  2 Comments

CakeMail launch recap

By Duncan Moore on November 9th, 2007

CakeMail taste-testing

We did a demo of the CakeMail application at BarCampMontreal3 on Saturday, November 3, 2007 at Montreal’s Society for Arts and Technology. At the same time on the Web, we kicked off our public beta and launched the CakeMail website.

The feedback so far has been really great. Here’s a sample:

We’re truly excited to see the enthusiasm and rapidity with which the CakeMail developer community is taking shape. There are already a few interesting things being coded by third parties. We expect to have some announcements on that front soon, so stay tuned!

Finally, we’d like to note that BarCampMontreal3 would not have been possible without the efforts of Evan Prodromou, Sylvain Carle, Simon Law and the fine bilingual MC skills of Aleece Germano. So a big thank-you to them, to event sponsors and to the Montreal tech community as a whole, which has been a great source of ongoing feedback for CakeMail’s development.

Filed under: CakeMail –  3 Comments
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