Category: Clients
Snackpot Launch Party!
May 15th, 2012 in Clients, Events, Launch Parties
Last Thursday was the launch party for The Snackpot. Did you make it out? Everyone enjoyed good music, tasty food, and hilarious commentary on the world of snacks. Check out a few of the photographs from that night and the recently lauched website at thesnackpot.com.
All photos were taken by Murphy Welch.
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Richelle Intern |
Doejo clients in the news: Mouthee, The Snackpot, Falafill & AGC
Mouthee, The Future of Web Recommendations: Friends or Robots?
TechCocktail last week profiled social recommendation app, Mouthee in a feature pitting recommendation apps that utilize social media verses a robot-like algorithm. So, would you rather get book, movie, restaurant, etc. recommendations from your friends or a program that predicts your tastes based on previous choices.
From TechCocktail:
[Mouthee’s] pretty useful – for example, movie recs include movie previews, duration, release data, and a link to buy on iTunes, while restaurants link to OpenTable for making reservations. Unlike some other apps, you can also write negative recommendations.
So Mouthee is taking the “friends” approach to recommendations. It’s based on the belief that our friends know us best, and it mimics word-of-mouth – “Hey, what movie should I see on Friday?”Unsurprisingly, this is also Facebook’s approach with its recommendations box; if you visit external sites like WSJ.com, you can see which content your friends “like” the most. Or, you could just post a status update asking for advice.
The Snackpot gets shout-out from The Onion’s A.V. Club and Crain's
The Snackpot, a snack-centric review site we’re launching next month, was profiled for its upcoming launch party May 10. The A.V. Club said they were looking forward to the night's DJ sets, the readings, and of course, the scores of top-notch nosh.
From the A.V. Club:
A new website plans to explore the uncharted terrains of snack criticism, gratifying pretentious snackers and hopefully putting a fork in the whole Doritos Locos taco debate. The site is called The Snackpot, and it will launch this month with reviews, commentary, and testimonials about the most important meal of the day.
Crain’s Chicago Business covers “businesses getting off the ground in and around Chicago.” This week they covered both The Snackpot and Falafill! From Crain's:
This Chicago-based website, which launched Monday, is all about snacks. Editor-in-Chief Jacob Daneman says it aims to be “the most trusted source for snack reviews and critical evaluation of the snacking zeitgeist.” The first articles include a review of Funyuns (“Their crunch reveals their synthetic nature, their zest leads to taste bud death and their snackability leads to inevitable shame post-consumption”) and an interview with the popular musical remix artist Girl Talk, aka Gregg Gillis, about his favorite snacks. Mr. Daneman is also a music publicist at Pitch Perfect PR, so you can expect an indie-rock vibe at the Snackpot. Watch soon for snack-oriented interviews with Jose Canseco, Len Kasper and members of Fleet Foxes, the Dismemberment Plan and TV on the Radio.
Crain's on Falafill's site launch and company growth
This falafel restaurant now has a second location at 72 E. Adams St. in the Loop, with plans to open a third joint soon in Oak Park. Like the original Falafill, at 3202 N. Broadway in Lakeview, the new counter-service restaurant lets customers choose the fresh ingredients that will go into their pita pocket or bowl. According to the Falafill website, “every ingredient in our foods comes to our kitchen fresh and raw.”
The Academy of Global Citizenship wins “Green Ribbon School” award
The Academy of Global Citizenship was declared a “Green Ribbon School” last month by the U.S. Department of Education along with 78 other schools across the country. In the first year of this nationally recognized distinction, AGC was lauded for its efforts in environmental, energy conservation and wellness education.
From the Sun-Times:
At the Academy for Global Citizenship, students start the day with up to 15 minutes of yoga and a scratch, organic breakfast.
“Health and nutrition are incorporated into our core philosophy,’’ said Academy executive director Sarah Elizabeth Ippel.
Some 13,000 square feet of asphalt that surrounds the school has been converted into an “urban center for sustainability’’ featuring a green house, an organic raised-bed garden, a composting bin, a wind turbine and a chicken coop that produces eggs, Ippel said.
Read more from NBC Chicago and Medill Reports.
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John Scribe |
Improving the way Local TV LLC delivers the news online
May 4th, 2012 in Web Design, Web Development, Clients, User Interface Design, User Experience
In a never-ending campaign to improve online readership, lobbying eyes in a heavily saturated 24-hour news cycle, broadcast stations across the country are reevaluating site design and functionality. And in the new web-centric world, no publication can afford not to.
Local TV LLC, which operates 21 broadcast stations from various networks in 16 U.S. cities, needed to update its legacy content management system. The broadcast management company’s team knew they wanted an easy-to-integrate and customizable WordPress VIP platform for its network of sites and a web design team that understood the modern web from a designability and user functionality perspective.
The company was also looking to study how users consumed the news and navigate through its news sites, honing in on page views, site traffic and popular content worth giving hierarchy to. Local TV LLC came to Doejo in the spring of 2011 to help them expand on what its stations were good at: a dedication to hyper-local news and weather coverage.
Doejo’s development and discovery team did a comprehensive job helping Local TV LLC define its audience, parsing through billions of page views from websites that reach more than 15 million people each month.
In what has been one of our most extensive projects to date, we applied the user discovery information we learned and produced a custom WordPress VIP design flexible enough to be used by all Local TV LLC stations. The new platform is much easier for editors, reporters and producers to upload content cleanly, efficiently and consistently. And after viewing the heat maps of where users were viewing the page and how far they would scroll, our designers made the pages more condensed with easily navigational tabs and more logical locations for content.
While reducing clutter and giving breaking news prominence at the top of the page, the page design allows for Twitter-style status updates on ongoing news items without compromising valuable ad space.
Developers also integrated social media platforms so readers can recommend stories and comment using Facebook, Twitter and other networks. Other third party integration natively ties in an online video platform, a social login and authentication provider, a hyper-local news platform and numerous advertising partners. To better manage ads, our developers also wrote a custom open-source plug-in called Ad Code Manager.
Read more about Local TV LLC in our case study here. And visit some of our newly desgined sites: KSTU Fox Salt Lake City, WNEP ABC Scranton, WITI Fox Milwaukee, or view the full list with links here.
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John Scribe |
Ain’t no party like a Snackpot Launch Party…
May 3rd, 2012 in Doejo Stuff, Clients, Events
Join us for the launch of The Snackpot, the ultimate source for snack reviews, on May 10th at Schuba’s, 3159 N. Southport Ave. (upstairs). Complementary snacks from Pop Chips, Pretzel Chips and a very special snack created by Top Chef’s Chuy Valencia will be provided at the party as well.
Attendees will enjoy free beer from 7pm-9pm and DJ sets by Pat Sission, Ed Anderson and Johnny Loftus. Snack related readings by key contributors including Shannon Cason (Chicago Moth Grandslam Champ), Keith Ecker (Essay Fiesta) and Johnny Loftus (Village Voice, PitchFork) will keep your appetite whet throughout the night.
Doejo is proud to have created The Snackpot’s flying Twinkie logo and, of course, the forthcoming site. The company, which launches on May 7th, will also provide commentary, testimonials, experimentation and observations on how snacking intersects with pop culture.
A $10 dollar suggested donation for the event covers all of your snacking needs and enters you in door prize raffle. Can’t get enough of The Snackpot? Check out their “The Snackpot Asks” segment where the interview artists and musicians about their favorite snacks here. Also, be sure to friend the Snackpot on Facebook and follow them on Twitter for updates!
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Monique Copy Intern |
A sneak peak at Uber Chefs, a new kind of cooking show
May 3rd, 2012 in Doejo Stuff, Web Design, Web Development, Clients
We’re excited to introduce one of our newest partner clients, Uber Chefs, launching next month! So for all you culinary aficionados, get your cutting boards ready.
Uber Chefs is a new online cooking show, with a subscription service opportunity, that will feature exceptional vegan, vegetarian and raw food recipes by top chefs. In an effort to demystify healthy eating, Uber Chefs will show how easy and accessible this type of cooking can be.
The site will launch before June 1st with a video featuring Chicago-based Chuy Valencia of Top Chef fame. He is the first of many mainstream chefs that Uber Chef will be targeting in the hopes that they will become a proponent of vegetarian eating and include it in their menus.
Chef-inspired recipes will be presented in an online cooking show format that will explain how chefs make appetizers, entrees and desserts in their personal kitchen.
For members, non-perishable ingredients including exotic spices and hard to find seasonings will be measured and distributed through a mail kit. Users have two options: buy food right away and in a short time it will be mailed to you or you can opt in for a subscription model which will allow you access to premium services such as a Q&A with dietician Carolyn Tampe. Tampe will also provide nutritional analysis for those inclined toward a vegan lifestyle but are unsure of the ingredients needed to obtain proper nutrients. Kind of like a how-to care package.
Dhara Mehta, a lifelong vegetarian with a passion for healthy eating dreamed up Uber Chefs after traveling to India and seeing how accessible a vegetarian lifestyle was there. Seth Kravitz, fellow vegetarian and CEO and Co-Founder of Technori, helped tweak the idea and introduced her to our CEO, Phil Tadros who has helped by sharing his connections throughout the city and helped fund the Uber Chefs startup.
Uber Chefs has not officially launched yet but you can still check out the Doejo-designed website and logo here. Check back on June 1st for the debut video featuring Chuy Valencia. For the latest on Uber Chefs, follow them on Twitter where they’ll be offering free promos at the launch!
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Monique Copy Intern |