Archive Page 2
CakeMail launch recap
By Duncan Moore on November 9th, 2007
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:
- Web Worker Daily (GigaOM network) had a piece called “Letting Agencies Bake Their Own With CakeMail.“
- StartupNorth profiled CakeMail and some nice things to say about our strategy.
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 –
2 Comments
CakeMail, now in Russian!
By Duncan Moore on October 24th, 2007
The multilingual aspect of CakeMail is something that we’re particularly excited about. With the help of our team members in Eastern Europe, we’ve produced a localization of the CakeMail interface in Russian (beta translation). We wanted to showcase CakeMail’s ability to handle non-Latin characters, and you have to agree that it’s pretty cool to see the interface in Cyrillic:
(Click the image to see more detail on our Flickr space.)
So, other than demonstrating CakeMail’s ability to handle non-Latin characters, why Russian? For starters, it’s one of the six official languages of the United Nations and is spoken by some 250 million people worldwide. Then there’s the fact that Russia’s economic and cultural influence is growing, with an annual growth rate of nearly 7% that earns it a place among the world’s top four emerging economies. (And hey, maybe it will be an excuse to drink vodka at some point…)
So far, CakeMail is available in Quebec French, American English, and Russian, with additional versions in the works, including French (France), Canadian English, Latin American Spanish, Greek and Romanian. We’re keen to hear from people who would like to open up new niche markets by translating the interface into additional languages or dialects. If you meet that description, please get in touch!
What does all this multilingual richness in CakeMail mean? Ultimately, we believe it could help facilitate economic opportunity and cultural diversity around the world. With an email newsletter platform that can accommodate any language, organizations both large and small can more easily reap the benefits of one of the most cost-effective and timely means of communication in the digital age. Which means more conversations in a greater diversity of voices. And that’s pretty sweet.
Filed under: CakeMail –
3 Comments
Enabling the Long Tail in email marketing
By Duncan Moore on October 12th, 2007
Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and a forthcoming book called Free, spoke in Montreal on Tuesday at a one-day conference organized by Infopresse, which is a French-language media organization that covers marketing, advertising and communications from a Quebec perspective.
In the last couple of months, Anderson’s uncommon insights have helped us to clarify and articulate the CakeMail business model. Here’s how:
Defining the opportunity that CakeMail represents as an email marketing platform.
In April, before we had this blog up, The Code Kitchen had a blurb in a ChangeThis publication that briefly discussed the circumstances in which the company came to be, as well as the “white space” opportunity that CakeMail focused on. Under the heading “White Space, White Label”, we stated our intention to occupy an open space in the market: that of a dedicated, true white label service that would focus uniquely on resellers and provide them with a 100% branded solution that would be completely transparent to their end users (e.g. using their own domain and devoid of references or links to CakeMail) and totally customizable in terms of design.
But that’s only half the story. Early on, we knew that CakeMail could enjoy great success internationally due to its multilingual options, but it wasn’t until we started to think in terms of the Long Tail that the true nature of the opportunity crystallized:
There are a multitude of minority-language niche markets around the world that collectively form an opportunity far bigger than the entire English-language market.
These markets have been largely untapped because most email marketing platforms don’t offer multilingual interfaces, meaning small business users would have to understand English in order to create and manage their mailings. Of course, end-users would also have to be comfortable with English in order to understand the various system messages they might encounter as subscribers.
So why hasn’t anyone been catering to these niche markets? Until now, the barriers to entry were prohibitive. The significant investment of creating a platform for a minority language was not justified by such small niche markets, so most providers went after the mass market and offered their platforms exclusively in English.
CakeMail, on the other hand, has been designed from the ground up with internationalization in mind. All text for the interface is stored separately from the application code, which means that offering the tool in a new language can be as simple as translating the language file, for which mature editing tools already exist.
Prospective resellers in any country or region around the world can translate the CakeMail platform into their own language, thus opening up new markets by tapping into latent demand for which there was previously no corresponding offer. This is how CakeMail enables the Long Tail of distributed demand for email marketing, which in this case is scattered both geographically and linguistically.
One cannot fully appreciate the magnitude of this opportunity without considering a few facts about the international Web and localized interfaces:
- 3/4 of traffic to top US sites comes from outside the US;
- One of the top new feature requests for Flickr was the addition of multilingual interface options, which they recently added;
- Social network Hi5 generates almost as many unique visitors per month as Facebook, yet most of this traffic comes from outside the US (the Hi5 interface is offered in 9 languages and counting).
- The Wordpress interface is available in more than 50 languages, which partly explains why it is the world’s most popular self-hosted blogging platform;
- 48% of Google’s revenues are now derived from international markets. Google has long crowd-sourced translations from volunteers around the globe, thereby offering the Google interface in a staggering variety of languages and localized domains. Many of these represent tiny slivers of the global marketplace when considered individually, yet collectively add up to serious revenue for the search giant.
The lesson here is that people may consume a lot of content in American English on the Internet, but everyone prefers to use interfaces in their own language or dialect when that option is available. Or, as Chris Anderson would say, “One size does not fit all.”
So, the question remains: how many potential email marketers and subscribers have shied away from this rapidly growing medium of advertising and communication, simply because the tools were not available in their language? We’re about to find out…
Filed under: CakeMail –
2 Comments
CakeMail demo at BarcampCanada1
By Duncan Moore on October 9th, 2007
We’re going to do a demo of the CakeMail application at BarCampCanada1 on Saturday, November 3, 2007 in Montreal. At the same time on the Web, we’ll be kicking off our public beta and launching the CakeMail website.
BarCampCanada1 is the first pan-Canadian BarCamp event. Its a collective effort of the TorCamp, BarCampOttawa, and BarCampMontreal crews (represented by Bryce Johnson, Peter Childs, and Fred Ngo) and is being organized with the help of Montreal-based tech heads Sylvain Carle, Simon Law and Evan Prodromou. Thanks to them for the great initiative and we hope to see you there!
Filed under: CakeMail –
2 Comments
A new Web-based localization tool
By Duncan Moore on September 21st, 2007
As Heri at Montreal Tech Watch reported, we recently rolled our own Web-based localization tool. Specifically, it lets you easily translate into any number of languages any application that uses Gettext. (We’re using Gettext to enable internationalization of CakeMail, which is currently in beta.)
We created this translation tool because we found that using desktop Gettext editors didn’t facilitate an agile workflow. When you’re making iterative improvements while simultaneously translating the whole shebang into another language, it can get ugly pretty quickly if there are several people using different local copies of the master file instead of accessing the same file through a Web interface…
However, just after our lead programmer, George, whipped up this nifty little translator, we realized we had reinvented the wheel somewhat: turns out there are already a few Web-based Gettext editors out there (Rosetta/Launchpad, Pootle, IRMA and Kartouche). On the other hand, from what we can tell so far, the existing tools may not offer all the features people want or need. For example, a hosted tool’s translation licensing policies may not be appropriate for everyone; other tools may require that you install the server and run it yourself. And the WordPress Codex mentions the following:
Note: many translators have found Rosetta to be a good starting point, but once it comes time to proofread the entire list of translations, many have opted to switch hand-editing the PO file or using a program like poEdit or KBabel, since the Rosetta UI lacks a search feature and other things that become essential when proofreading and editing.
So now the question is: is there room for another Web-based Gettext editor? You tell us. If you’re using Gettext, we want to hear from you. What are the current tools not offering that you need or want? Leave a comment below or drop us a line at hi@thecodekitchen.com.
Our Gettext translator tool would be free for non-profit open-source projects. Initial features include:
- Simultaneous read/write by several users anywhere in the world
- Permission-based access
- Unlimited languages per project
- Search/find within entire language file
- Journaling and unlimited undo (revert to any previous version)
- Integration of screen shots and notes to provide translators and editors with the all-important context of a given message
- Live updates to the language database from within the app
- SSL encryption
Below is a very preliminary mockup of the interface (Note that the tool won’t actually be called Translator–that’s just a placeholder name):
Filed under: Translation Tool –
15 Comments
Something to read while eating Cake
By Duncan Moore on September 5th, 2007
A quick post to update you on our CakeMail beta. Things are moving forward nicely and we’re getting great feedback from users. Now that we’re at beta phase, we’ve shifted some of our efforts to focus on documentation.
We now have API documentation in HTML format for beta users. And we’ll be setting up a discussion forum for our developer community shortly. Several companies are currently integrating our API with their back-end systems and creating custom interfaces to launch their own email marketing brands, so we want to give them a place to exchange tips and ask us questions.
We’ve also got a basic user guide in the works, which will be especially useful for our resellers’ customers. We’re going to publish it in a wiki format so that the community of users can collaborate on it.
We’re keen to hear from potential resellers about what tools or documentation would facilitate their adoption of CakeMail, so feel free to leave a comment or drop us a line by email.
Filed under: CakeMail –
0 Comments
CakeMail limited beta access now available!
By Duncan Moore on August 13th, 2007
CakeMail is nearing public launch and we’re busy adding the final touches, including API documentation and other tools for our fledgling developer community.
If you’re a Web development or marketing agency that would like to have a peek at the product before we launch publicly, we’d be happy to give you a taste right away. Simply leave a comment or email us at hi@thecodekitchen.com and we’ll set you up with an account. It’s fully functional, so you can begin doing tests and even start integrating your back-end systems with our API if you’re the adventurous type that never reads documentation anyway. 
We’d like to take this opportunity to say a special thank-you to all our closed beta testers who provided invaluable feedback over the past few months. You are welcome in our kitchen any time!
Filed under: CakeMail –
2 Comments
Tables, chairs and clients
By Duncan Moore on August 10th, 2007
Being in a startup requires a healthy dose of the do-it-yourself ethic. In this case, that meant assembling one’s chair, a ritual the whole team got into this week. Add table-tops, attach adjustable legs and, presto: you’ve got an office.
Another small yet important milestone: yesterday we had our first client meeting in our new space. Topic of discussion: how their multimedia firm can use CakeMail to launch their own email marketing brand…
Filed under: The Code Kitchen –
0 Comments
Recipe: Cucumber sake ginger sangria
By Duncan Moore on July 31st, 2007
It’s pretty darn hot here in Montreal. So we thought we’d post a little something for your refreshment. Namely, a recipe for a sort of sangria made from sake, cucumber and ginger. It’s not a concoction of our own invention, but it received rave reviews every time we served it, so we figured we might as well spread the love.
When someone says sangria, you probably think red wine, right? True, the word comes from the Spanish sangre (which means blood), but the sangria method really amounts to punch. Mixing sake, cucumber and ginger yields an unusual taste that truly hits the spot on a hot day and will wow sushi lovers.
So give it a try and let us know what you think. You’re going to want to use the kind of sake that is consumed cold: it’s got a smoother, lighter taste that will blend better with the other ingredients. We also found that you can reduce the sugar and sake proportions, but that’s a matter of personal preference.
Filed under: Recipes –
2 Comments
Cake is in the oven
By Duncan Moore on July 30th, 2007
Something smells good at The Code Kitchen. Could it be Cake that’s just about ready to come out of the oven? Indeed, our new white label email marketing platform is currently in private beta and nearing launch.
What makes Cake so enticing? For starters, it’s one of the rare email marketing platforms built around a white label business model. Unlike most email marketing brands, there will be no Cake-branded email marketing tool directly available to end users.
Our solution is dedicated to resellers. Their success is our success. So when resellers call for new features, you can bet that we’ll be a lot more receptive than your average email marketing provider. In fact, Cake itself was created in response to requests by customers of our founder’s earlier email marketing venture.
Cake’s three key features set it apart:
- It’s a true white label platform: the tool’s 100% customizable front end is hosted on a reseller’s server using their own domain name. Their end-users need never know that we are running the back end.
- The Cake API enables complex series of triggers for automated events useful in e-commerce, as well as integration with CRM databases and the like.
- Cake offers full multilingual support for both the interface and mailings, including UTF-8. There are very few email marketing suppliers that deliver on all three of these aspects “out of the box”, so to speak.
So what does all of this mean? If you’re a Web design or marketing agency that doesn’t yet offer email marketing services, you can quickly and inexpensively set yourself up with a new revenue stream while extending your brand and building loyalty.
If you already offer email marketing services, you can upgrade to a system that gives you unparalleled control over the user interface, branding, language and data integration.
Sweet, indeed.
Filed under: CakeMail –
1 Comment
Join our mailing list
Fear not, spam is banned from our kitchen.