John Ryan, a member since 2008 was our second winning selection. jrdesign.com.au is the home of John Ryan Design. A group of design and development professionals located in Melbourne, Australia who develop internet and cross-media applications, educational and training tools, and print based media.

In addition they are Rich Adobe Content experts who create and maintain multimedia applications and websites - from something as simple as brochure ware or as complex as fully integrated cross media and e-commerce applications.

They service vertical industries with training packages and sales tools, and aren’t committed to any particular technology, except that which fits a client’s needs.

Shawn R. is the sole proprietor of Washington Multimedia in the DC area, and an AFC member since 2008. He was pleased with his win and plans to make the best of his selection for a client at a later date.

Those are the winners and of course our collective congratulations go out to them for our first contest.

Special Pricing with 30% off for selected components, and 20% off on remaining inventory for the Pounding Pixels contestants…

Now, while the above 3 contestants may be the winners of the contest, everyone is winning because of the insight we gained from the Pounding Pixels survey. For a limited time, we are lowering our prices 30% for selected components as a special pricing offer.

Pounding Pixels Contestants Receive a 20% discount on all other inventory until October 1^st, 2010

In addition, 475 of you who participated are all eligible for a 20% discount on any of our components NOT already under special pricing until October 1^st 2010 - This is an exclusive offering to only those who participated. Please send an email to us before you purchase and we will refund the discount after your purchase is completed.

We want everyone to be a winner as AFC realigns itself to serve you.

Thank you for your continued support.

Curtis

12 midnight is when we will allow our random program to pick three winners. So far we have 473 signed up and with a little under four hours to go, that number may hold as the top amount. But we’re keeping to our word and waiting till the midnight hour, whereupon I will e-mail the winners immediately and make the announcement tomorrow morning.

We thank all the respondents and want to let everyone know that this is just the first of many contests and opportunities to win cool stuff here at AF components.

Sincerely,

Curtis

I want to thank all of you, and as of right this moment there are 458 respondents to the pounding pixels contest. So far we’ve learned quite a bit since launching this survey campaign. You see, we’re not big marketing experts, in fact, there were many times I wish we had an expert who could tell me and my partners just exactly what we should be doing when we send out an e-mail campaign. Instead we’ve had to rely upon ourselves, and we’ve had quite a few discussions over sending out e-mails to solicit your participation for the contest and to entice you to join our new benchmark e-mail system.

This stuff ain’t rocket science… it’s harder!

The topics for discussion were the frequency, the message, the length, the links and after much editing and back-and-forth we finally broke up everyone, that would be all 56,000, into the year that a member joined. As usual, much of what I wrote was edited out, and probably rightly so. I am always going to be a little more personal than most business people would agree with. Maybe that’s because I’ve owned a retail motorcycle business in the past and personal service is something that comes natural to me. Also it doesn’t help that when I write, I tend to wax poetic and imbibe with a dramatic flair. However, tonight I’m just talking straight.

Your participation is everything…

You have made this first contest mean a lot to us. There are many other sites out there where people go to buy cool components and hopefully save some time while making their applications the very best. We want to make AFC the first place you go to when you have a project that demands high quality reusable custom components. The fact that 458 of you and probably many more by the end of the weekend have signed up for three components is fantastic!

And we’re hard at work with new products coming soon!

For you designers, our ConFigIT application, soon to be released in beta, will allow you the freedom of using intelligent configuration to quickly integrate our components into your designs using an intuitive UI that easily accomplishes in a few minutes, that which would take hours using a flash timeline. The survey data has established our original guess was correct, in that the majority of our audience are programmer types, and not designers merely crossing over into programming. We’ll figure that out in a little greater detail as time allows, but for right now ConFigIT will be the answer for many a designer and developer’s needs.

Saving time with quality has always been my goal…

How many hours have I saved in the past by searching around in locating the work of others who have been there and done that before me? I can tell you, many. My issue has always been that I’m such a zealot for quality, but I could never find exactly what I wanted with the support that could customize it, or tweak it to do just what I needed to do. I’m proud to say that AFC is exactly the place I was searching for, but could never find in the past.

We are partners in your success…

We answer our e-mail within hours or less. If you ask us to help out with custom work we have low prices and we continue to work for you even after the delivery, to make your project successful. We are continuously looking for information about who we serve so we can build whatever it is you’re looking for as the next best thing. This is how AFC does business, this is how we add value to your projects and make you look good over and above ourselves.

I know this is a long one, I appreciate you reading this far

On this Labor Day weekend in the US, I want to take the time to thank you all for visiting our site, and paying us a compliment of staying a while and looking around. I look forward to the drawing and we will be announcing the winners on 7 September.

Cheers

Curtis

Designers and developers are sometimes viewed at opposite ends of the communications spectrum. Designers are noted for being highly interactive listeners, whose brilliance and depth of skills are largely unappreciated. Their lives are obsessed with seeking the client who will finally be thankful for all the nuances that make up the entire package (they don’t exist). Developers on the other hand are stereotyped as someone who listens at the back of the room to a conversation between marketing and sales, then goes back to their cubicle and whips out a design that either exceeds the mark, or misses it entirely. Designers are eccentric, Developers are introverts.

We really want to know…

We know that reality exists somewhere in between these two extremes. We have around 30,000 visitors per month. Yet we really don’t have a clue when it comes to trying to figure out who these visitors are, how they ended up on our site, and what made them come back or drove them away screaming into the darkness. We really want to know our audience at a much more personal level, possibly more personal than many of you care for. However before I go all touchy-feely on you, just know that I’ve got a reason, and that purpose is for AFComponents to serve you better.

How many of you really exist?

So we’re going to take our 56,000+ eMail list and send out a selection of choices that will ultimately determine how we should communicate with you. We all get junk mail and I probably get 50 or more informational e-mails that I have over the years opened myself up to by replying to surveys or asking for White paper’s where organizations have required my e-mail address. So I feel your pain, however there is a solution.

Let’s concentrate on those who want to know…

I want to eliminate those people who are no longer interested in communicating and communicate with those who are interested on a schedule that pleases them and allows us to know just what their interests really are. So I’m hoping that you will help us out over the next few months by sending us answers to a few simple questions for a chance to win some really cool stuff in exchange for your loyalty. Yes, we make no idealistic claims or emotional appeals to what motivates you. We will simplify it by offering bribes in exchange for loyalty. Period.

Join us, help us to help you…

We promise to make it worth your while and we will be escalating the entries for the smaller contests into some final contests for stuff that you really want. You know iPods, IPads, Android Smart Phones and cool stuff from our site.

Stay tuned for the future… and remember to Keep your mind wide open to the possibilities.

Thanks,

Curtis

We’d like to get your feedback on these revolutionary ideas and hope soon to see some blog entries and have received some e-mails discussing more of your needs.

Also, there are two weeks left in the Pounding Pixels Challenge and we’d really like to see more of you entering that contest! We know that everyone is jaded when it comes to these contests, however this is a real contest with real winners and we hope to begin holding these monthly. Please realize that there is a purpose:  To understand our audience and the people who are visiting our website to give you more of what you require. So please participate because it will help us serve you better.

Thank you,

Curtis

A heck of a lot has happened since our acquisition of AFComponents. ProContent, like many Internet entities, can make itself look about any size that we care to put into our marketing efforts. Which explains why there hasn’t been a blog post a while. We have really been busy and there are not that many of us. We are primarily entrepreneurs who concentrate on many different areas that have commonalities and synergies that can be channeled towards our ultimate goal of world domination!

Share your gratitude with our team…

Seriously though, we are focused on new products and building a new team for AFComponents. God has been very kind, and shortly after the acquisition he brought us a wonderful developer (David Ghiurau) who dropped his own efforts to build a company and threw in with us to grow this brand back to its original standing that Andre had enjoyed back in circa 2007. David has been the presence that many of you have enjoyed and praised the last couple of months. ProContent’s partners are grateful to David and we ask that you reach out through this blog and comment about his efforts to assist and make our products work better for you.

Our Jerry Maguire moment, help us to help you…

Our ultimate goal now is to try to get to know a portion of the 56,000 members that AFComponents has built over the years. We know that many of you continue to return, but also we believe many of you have thought over the last year that AFC was growing stale. And truthfully it was, however that was then and this is now.

Now we are ready to connect with you, find out what your needs are, listen to what you have to say and build the best products for the best people here on earth. So I’m asking you to please fill out our five question survey and tell us a little bit about yourself through easy selections. Even if you’ve never bought anything, or have an account, we don’t care. We’re not going to sell your e-mail address or start bombarding you with junk mail. We just want to know our audience so that we may serve you better. Oh yeah, by participating in the survey you will be automatically signed up for contest where there will be three winners on Labor Day.

Get active and stay that way

I look forward to compiling hundreds of surveys and hopefully thousands over the next couple of weeks. We are at your service and seek to give you what you want. We are listening, just tell us what you need.

Sincerely,

Curtis Fisher

My name is Curtis Fisher, and I’m a developer with a high regard for those who have chosen this craft to make their living out of their passion. I am joined by my two partners whom I will introduce shortly. Together we seek to change the world. Even if that’s one component at a time!

We are in the planning stages for the next phase of our journey. We will begin slowly over the next few weeks, and as we gain momentum our plans will include new AS3 components, switching over to CS5 and offering compatible versions to CS3. We will also begin building FLEX 3.x and FlashBuilder 4.x Versions of many popular components.

Please continue to download and purchase components, ask your support questions and communicate your needs. AFComponents is here to stay, and we want to hear from you!

I’ll be communicating more as we move forward. Introductions to the rest of the team will be forthcoming. I want to thank you for your support, and promise that we will continue to build on the AFComponents vision Andrei created back in 2005.

Sincerely,

Curtis

The new owner is a Raytown-based ProContent, who is excited and very capable of taking AFComponents to new heights. ProContent has been developing Flash / Flex solutions since 2002 but are best known for their work on Flash-based content and Amazon-branded cloud services.

Before making the decision, we reviewed a number of offers, and ProContent stood out for their technical expertise, strong product portfolio, solid understanding of the interactive space, and established presence. Most importantly, the guys have shown a strong commitment to continue to develop AFComponents and grow the community. All in all, it is a great fit!

After working on AFComponents for 5 years (more on that in the next post), it is extremely rewarding to know that the project is in good hands. We look forward seeing it grow under the new leadership.

All the best to ProContent and AFComponents!

Let’s be honest, we haven’t been able to give AFComponents the attention it deserves lately. With it’s continuing revenue and consistent traffic, it would be a shame to see our support for the project diminish as we focus more and more on UMapper. That’s where you come in.

Why are we selling AFComponents?
Over the past year most of our resources have been focused on the interactive mapping platform UMapper, which is growing quickly. Our small team can no longer fully support both projects, and we have made the decision to pursue opportunities with UMapper.

We are still devoted to the success of AFComopnents and would love to see it grow instead of simply maintaining the status quo. AFComponents is a great asset as it continues to generate revenue and enjoys consistent organic traffic.

How can I get more info?
In order to receive more information please sign this NDA. You can email the NDA to andrei at afcomponents or fax it 303-694-7305. Once we receive a signed copy we will provide you with additional details.

Please help spread the word! Forward this email to all of your friends to receive amazing blessings for the rest of the day!

That said, if you are interested or know someone who might be, sign the NDA and shoot us an email. We look forward to hearing from you.