Yesterday we uploaded our new weekly build of isocket. Among some general bug fixes and tweaks, we launched another often requested feature – you can now have multiple user accounts under the same group!

An isocket group is like a brand. If the Wall Street Journal used isocket to sell their ads, then the group would be WSJ and each of their sales people would have an account.

This is great because some sellers have different sales or ad ops people involved in different areas. For example, one of our publishers has a sales rep for accounts over $50k, and another sales rep for more self-service oriented orders under $50k. Each one can create and manage their separate sales through isocket, while still benefiting from a central dashboard.

For now, every group member is equal and can do the same things (edit info, etc). In the future we might build in different permissions and admin statuses.

Your different people will show up on your group profile, so that potential advertisers can see who they’re working with. When looking at a specific socket, only the user who manages that socket will show up.

How to invite people

It’s pretty straight forward. Go to your Account and select the new menu item for “Invite Group Members”. Here’s what it looks like:

A simple but often requested feature has been the ability to upload custom images for your socket pages.

One of our built in features is a screen capture system. So if you create an ad package that runs on your website www.techcrunchit.com, isocket will automagically go take a screenshot and use it for your ad packages.

But now you can upload images in addition to this screen shot and set one of them as your default!

This might be cool for publishers selling unique ad packages or who want to put a custom spin on their inventory to help it stand out. Here’s an example image made for one of TechCrunch’s sister websites to show where the ad grid is. They took a screenshot, dimmed the background, and added green squares:

It’s very simple to use. Just go to your socket, click the “Edit Socket Image” button.

Then upload one or more images. All you have to do is click the image and it will become the new profile picture. You also rollover to delete.

Enjoy! More to come…

Hey guys – my name is Jason Shen and I’m proud to be the newest addition to the isocket team!

Today, July 12th, is my first official day. But it feels like longer because I’ve been getting to know these guys through interviewing and training.

My job title is Customer Scout. You’ll be seeing more of me if you are interested in working with isocket or at local events. I’ll be playing counterpart to Ryan’s Customer BFF role. He and I are both part of the “Customer Team” – our job is to provide excellent service and help spread the word about isocket.

A little about my past:

Until last month, I was cutting my teeth in advertising as the business manager of The Stanford Daily. I oversaw operations, the ad sales & finance teams and the financial performance for our 118-year old independently incorporated newspaper. I also saw how powerful (and lucrative) premium display ads could be for our organization – which is part of why I’m so excited about isocket.

Before the Daily, I cofounded a microfinance oriented social venture, got a BS & MS from Stanford University, and spent 10 years as a nationally competitive gymnast. I was proud to be the Captain of the NCAA Div I National Championship Men’s Gymnastics team at Stanford.

I’m super excited to start kicking butt at isocket – we have an awesome team, a really useful product and some big plans to build toward. If you have any more questions about me or know of any publisher who wants an easier way to do direct and self-serve display ads, drop me a line at jason at isocket dot com.

We know many of you have been waiting for access to isocket and believe me, we’ve been anxious and working furiously to get it in your hands!  We consider this the beginning of a public beta (since the product is still a work in progress) – but specific wording aside, the big news is that we’re ready to start opening the doors.

The time that we had in private beta testing was time very well spent. We learned a lot about you, what you wanted and the direction of where isocket will be heading in the future thanks to our early beta testers.

So as part of this launch there is a ton of new stuff going live. Here’s some highlights:

Want To Sell Ads With isocket? Apply Now!

If you want to start selling ads through isocket, we’d love to have you!  Publishers who want to join go through a short application and approval process. The application is open as of today. You can start with the tour or skip directly to the application – it should take about 3 minutes.

Why do publishers apply?

We are requiring this application process to keep the quality of our marketplace high – you’ll make more money if advertisers know what they’re buying is legitimate. Many websites out there aren’t meant for direct sales, either because they are spammy, too small, etc. We’d be very sad to see someone pay for months of isocket service and not sell any ads, so if we really think that will happen, we’ll politely say so.

Want To Start Buying Ads?

If you want to buy ads through isocket there’s no application necessary. You just find the ads you want, and create an account during checkout. We’ll be releasing more features and ways to find inventory in the next few weeks. Check out our new advertisers page to see some of our featured inventory!

Brand Spankin’ New Public Pages

If you previously went to www.isocket.com looking for more info, you were probably dissapointed. While we were getting off the ground it acted as a placeholder and a way to measure interested in our product.  But today we’re launching the first versions of new public facing pages and it’s a big step forward for us – there’s detailed info about what we do, our main features, our pricing, a page with featured publishers, etc.

Be sure to go check it out and let us know what you think in the comments. My personal favorite is the about page, because our team rocks (and of course because there’s a handsome picture of me on there).

Full Redesign

A few weeks ago we quietly launched new designs for the advertiser-facing group, socket and checkout pages. For example, if you visit TechCrunch’s ad sales page, it’s a totally new look. The response has been great so far and advertisers report having a much easier time finding and buying the inventory they want.

Here’s a screen shot of the new socket page:

Versus a screen shot of the old version:

Dashboard and application redesign

Building off of the new design theme we started with the group pages, we’ve changed most of the look and feel of the product. These new designs also went live with this launch. One of the biggest things we wanted to improve was how you moved around the app and how things were organized.

Image of the new:

Versus image of the old:

Preview of things to come

This isn’t all that we’ve improved. We’ll be highlighting some additional features and announcements over the next few blogs posts. Some examples will be:

• A new account setup wizard.
• Custom socket images.
• Our pricing tiers.
• Order fulfillment – placing orders as a seller on behalf of buyers.

About a month or so ago I saw this post on TechCrunch (who just happens to be one of our awesome publishers) about how Reddit had revamped their self-service ad service. I say ‘revamped’ because Reddit has actually been running their own self-service advertising since back in December of 2009, but after a few months of letting it run they decided to make some improvements under the hood, which explains the TechCrunch write-up.

To be honest with you I’m not much of a Reddit reader myself, but I was definitely interested in the fact that they had decided to spend the time, effort and money to build their own, customized self-service advertising system. It was also cool to see that this time around when they made some updates to the system they used The Oatmeal (one of the craziest/funniest guys on the web) to whip up a cartoon to help explain it. Before you check it out, you should probably know that The Oatmeal didn’t exactly create what you would consider to be a standard FAQ or tutorial. You can take a look at it over here.

Although The Oatmeal doesn’t disappoint with his entertainingly educational guide on how to buy ads using Reddit’s newly renovated self-service system, there are a couple of real takeaways that I’d like to point out after looking over it.

1. Reddit decided to build their own, custom self-service advertising system, which shows that there is a high demand from publishers for these types of tools. Of course, not every publisher has the time, resources and motivation that it can take to build their own system, which is where we fit in. We can give publishers the tools to enable self-service advertising without the major investments needed to do it from scratch.
2. Keeping it simple can still pretty complicated. I’m not sure if you noticed or not, but The Oatmeal’s explanation of how to buy your own ads on Reddit is a fairly long 8-step process, which shows just how complicated these types of advertising systems can be — even when they’re meant to be simple. With most self-service advertisers we’ve found that the easier the process and the more simple the ad options, the better.
3. I now have a serious craving for a Big Gulp sized porkchop milkshake.

Thanks to The Oatmeal for the entertainment and if you’re a publisher and have ever thought about getting into the self-service advertising game be sure to give us a shout, we’d love to chat.

Over the past few months the isocket office has really been filling up and I gotta say that it’s been pretty nice having more people around. If we hopped into the Way Back Machine (and by way back I mean 3-4 months ago), you might remember me introducing Vinoth (aka the ‘Singapore Sensation’) to the team who was then followed up by our doubling down on designers with Eston and Al (and his dog Cosmo) who also joined the mix. Each of these additions have brought with them so much talent, experience, creativity and quirkiness it’s kinda crazy and as a combined force we have really put together an amazing team. Also I gotta say, since I was the first non-founder hired it’s been really cool to see the team come together. It hasn’t been easy, but we’re really starting to hit our stride.

With all of that being said, just when you think that the isocket team can’t possibly get any more awesome-er I am writing this post to officially let you know that yes, in fact we can and how we do that is by adding yet another talented engineer to our team. The engineer that I’m speaking of is a woman who has been around the world of technology for a long time and who is super excited to help us build isocket into a product that we all envision it can be. The only thing that she loves more than writing code is cooking up amazing food (she loves her husband a lot, too) and although she was a little surprised when she found out we had three office dogs, she now can’t imagine not having them around. Besides that, I’ll let the interview below fill you in on everything else you need to know about our newest addition to the team, Alicia Tang.

1. Hey Alicia, how about we start off with a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up and how long have you been living in California? Also, when you were first deciding to make the move, what actually made you make the jump?

I was born and grew up in a nice mid-sized city in northeastern China, where it snows every winter. I came to California in the hot summer of 2006 and stayed in L.A. for a year to get my masters in electrical engineering. I initially decided to come to the US because “the love of my life” went to Stanford so I guess you could say that it was love that eventually made me stay. I guess that’s as good of a reason as any, right?

2. I hear that you have an interesting story as far as how you got accepted to the college where you ended up studying. What are some of the details of that story and what college did you end up attending?

Technically, I finished high school in about one year, which basically got me a free pass to any college nation-wide. That year was the hardest and best year of my life so far. I was on the province team (team of 5) and was the first girl in the previous six years that landed a spot for physics Olympia. Little did I know that I would fall in love with my husband during the preparation for the final contest. So, I followed him to Peking University and studied Physics there.

3. Where did you work before you made your way to isocket and how did we track you down? What were your first impressions of the isocket team and what made you excited about working with us?

After 2 years of working at Symantec on their Veritas Server Cluster product I had the chance to meet some people who told me all about isocket. It sounded cool, so I decided to check it out for myself. My first impression was the big hand-draw isocket logo on the whiteboard in the entry room. When I saw that I knew that this was truly a startup.  The business model of isocket is simple and clean, and it only took me about 10 minutes to convince my husband that isocket rocks and that it’s the place for me.

4. When we first interviewed you I remember you mentioning that you built a web app for your husband in your spare time. What kind of app was it and what did you enjoy most about creating it?

The app is for manage/watch all our stock accounts. When it became the first website we both open every morning, I knew that it was definitely worth all the effort I put into it. Also, building this application moved me from system level, networking developer to application level, web developer. I learned java/php/javascript/ajax/mysql all by myself just so that I could build it. And during that whole process is when I really started to love developing web apps.

5. You’re the first female to work at isocket (besides Boomer, of course) – what’s it like working with a bunch of guys?

Ok, I have to admit that I am the second ‘official’ woman to be in the office, right behind Boomer. The female:male ratio at my high school was 1:4, at college was 1:9. So according to my past experiences, it’s pretty good here 1:5(2:7). Also, us girls like to get together. Boomer lays next to my feet once a while and that makes me feel warm and sweet. We’ve actually become good friends very quickly.

6. When you’re not sitting in front of your laptop, what do you enjoy doing? (you do get away from your laptop every now and then, right?)

If I’m not in front of the computer, I will most likely be in the kitchen. Cooking is art and it is what I would love to to do once I retire. Check out pics below for some examples of things I’ve cooked up in my spare time.

7. What do you think about the isocket dogs? Have you gotten used to them yet?

Dogs are part of isocket culture. Having them around makes all of the hard work here more relaxed and it also makes the office feel more like home. More importantly, dogs were born to be our companions and help us have fun and that’s just what the dogs here do.

Check out this ad that we just spotted on The Daily Beast:

It caught our eye, do you think that it would catch yours?

I’m not sure if we’ve talked about this publicly yet, but we’re now actively starting to go through and send out invites from our awesomely long list of publishers who are interested in becoming part of our private beta. It’s something that we’re super excited about moving along with for many reasons, with one of the most important being the ability to have multiple publishers using our system and giving us all of the feedback we can handle as they each make their way into unchartered isocket territory.

This process provides a great experience for both our publishers and the team here at isocket because they have a chance to finally use and help shape a system that’s going to help them solve a problem that they’ve had for a long time (how to efficiently and easily sell and manage their direct online ad sales) and we end up benefiting from all of the great feedback they give us along the way. This feedback is very important and highly valuable to us and even though we don’t end up baking every idea that a publisher comes up with into our product, we still keep them all in mind as we’re coming up with new features and ideas.

As you can probably imagine, as we continue to bring on more and more publishers the amount of  feedback we’ll get will continue to grow as well. Keeping track of everything could get really complicated really quickly, so having a way to manage this process in an easy and transparent way is important, which is why we’re going to be using Uservoice to help us out. If you’ve never used Uservoice before, basically it’s a way for anyone to suggest new features, give feedback and actively keep track of the things that we’re working on, as we’re working on them.

One of the main reasons we like Uservoice is because not only can we add things that we’re currently working on (or thinking about working on) from our end, but anyone out there who has an interest in isocket can also post their ideas and feedback, too. The most important ideas get voted on and eventually bubble to the top, which will attract the attention of me and the rest of the team here at isocket.

If you have an idea you’d like to tell us or just simply want to check out what I’m talking about, head on over to our uservoice account now. Last night we added a bunch of ideas and feedback that we’ve either gotten from publishers or that we’ve been thinking about ourselves, so there’s some fresh stuff over there  just waiting for you to vote up, comment on or whatever else you feel like doing. It’s your world, we’re just living in it.

Although we tend to stick around the office most of the time, there are a few things that can pull us away from our computers. You know, things such as walking our dogs around Burlingame, taking trips to the local Pez Museum and going to job fairs. Of course, one other thing that we really like going to are the tech events that seem to be going on all the time here in the Bay Area (which is why we all love living here) — especially the really good ones, which are sometimes hard to find.

Lucky for us we have some friends who just happen to be putting on a couple of awesome events that are coming up later this month, which makes it a little easier to decide whether we should take the tome to go or not. The two events that we know we’re going to be making appearances at later this month are Brian Zisk’s The Future of Money and Technology Summit on April 26th and Franck Nouyrigat’s Bay Area Startup Weekend in San Jose on the weekend of April 30th. In fact, we like the Bay Area Startup Weekend so much we’re an official sponsor (which we’ve done a few times before).

If any of you out there are planning on attending either of these events, please let us know so that we can connect up while we’re there. We’ll be easy to spot, just look for a bunch of guys wearing these shirts.

Here are some more details on these two upcoming events and if you have any questions about either of them, please feel free to ask us in the comments and we’ll help you out.

A couple of weeks ago, hot on the heels of the trolololo meme, Al realized that listening to the song while he was working actually increased his productivity exponentially. Of course, he didn’t want everyone to know about his secret to achieving his incredible increase in Internet working capacity, so we were forced to record him when he wasn’t paying attention.

Here’s the video that we ended up getting of him giving away his secret — feel free to use this method yourself, just be ready to never get this song out of your head. Never.