Zygote @ Egg Co.

5 Interesting Facts About the Internet in China

yongfook — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 06:00:54 +0000

Apologies for the absence! For the last couple of months I’ve been in and out of China. Beijing, specifically. Exactly why, I shall leave tantalizingly to your imagination at this point, but it’s been a lot of fun. What has been most fascinating is learning how modern China operates, specifically with [...]

Grow an Audience on Twitter with Peashoot

yongfook — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:42:37 +0000

This week I’ve launched a nifty new feature for Peashoot that really helps round out its value as a sales & marketing tool for Twitter! The new feature is called “Audience Builder” and it’s an automatic, hands-off way of growing a relevant following on Twitter for your company or product’s Twitter account. Here’s how it [...]

Improving User Retention with Achievements

yongfook — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:25:11 +0000

For a consumer internet product where the higher volume of users the better, retention is of vital importance. Piquing a user’s interest and getting them into the system is just a small part of the challenge - delighting them and encouraging them to come back time and time again is the bigger challenge after [...]

Seth Godin’s Twitter Prediction from 1999

yongfook — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:05:40 +0000

I was re-reading Seth Godin’s book Permission Marketing recently and stumbled across this rather ominous quote: Imagine for example if Pizza Hut were to send every loyal Pizza Hut customer with kids an email offering them a free soda with purchase, but just tomorrow, and just at their particular local store. And by the way, [...]

Japanese Website Mascots

yongfook — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:00:15 +0000

Today I gave a quick talk at Startonomics - Tokyo flavour - on the subject of Japanese mascots and their internal / external impact on your company or product. Here’s the presentation and my notes follow it underneath: Update - video available too! As you can see, it was just a quickie, so I did it “Pechakucha” [...]

Conversion Tracking from Twitter

yongfook — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:08:45 +0000

A quick announcement - Peashoot now tracks conversions and revenue earned from your campaigns! This opens up a bunch of interesting and useful possibilities. For example, I use Twitter to tweet out special offers to customers (or rather, potential customers). Because of the real-time nature of Twitter, this can often be a crapshoot if [...]

Peashoot Launched

yongfook — Tue, 19 May 2009 03:14:56 +0000

Peashoot, the latest Egg Co. product is now open to the public and you can head on over to the site at http://peashootapp.com and check it out. This is the public “Version 1″ and I’m very happy with how it has turned out - and I’m looking forward to adding on more features as [...]

Split Testing and Customer Happiness

yongfook — Thu, 07 May 2009 05:20:22 +0000

A/B testing, bucket testing, split testing - the practice goes by many names and for those of you who are interested in testing, here’s an absolute gem of a video. Malcom Gladwell, best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink talks about fanatical tester (and psychophysicist) Howard Moskowitz, who is best known for changing the way [...]

Peashoot Custom Domains

yongfook — Tue, 05 May 2009 12:13:43 +0000

This is another how-to for Peashoot customers :) Custom domains are useful for when you are posting campaign links and you want to preserve your brand identity. When you’re not constrained by text input limitations like on Twitter (where it’s best to use the short pea.to link), you can use your custom domain. At Egg Co. [...]

How to Read a Peashoot Report

yongfook — Tue, 05 May 2009 06:20:50 +0000

Pre-launch testing has begun with the pre-launch test group! If I haven’t contacted you yet regarding testing and you feel that I should have, it probably means I’m still working my way down the list - we’re not adding everyone all at once :) However feel free to remind me in the comments below that [...]

10 Dirty Little Web Development Tricks

yongfook — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:02:27 +0000

Look familiar? I redesigned my personal site recently and did some spring cleaning - this post has been moved over from there as I think this is a better home for it :) We all have them - little coding tricks and snippets of knowledge that we’ve picked up over years of experimentation and evolution [...]

Peashoot - Sneak Preview

yongfook — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:20:47 +0000

It’s time to lift the lid a little :) In my last blog post I talked a little about injecting some personality into our upcoming software. Today I’m announcing that Rippl3 has a new, friendlier name and I’m going to tell you a little more about the product. Peashoot is the new name and as you [...]

Happy Design

yongfook — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:41:07 +0000

Don Norman is a professor of cognitive and computer science and his message in this TED talk really resonates with me. He gives a presentation on how usability and function are of course necessary for successful products, but there is a more interesting and perhaps more essential - and elusive - element. There’s [...]

Designing to Sell

yongfook — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:04:41 +0000

In this post we’re going to look at a simple template you can follow if you need to create a design that “sells” - that is, creating a website landing page that intends to turn a viewer / user into a customer. This is a concept that we have applied successfully to client projects [...]

Quotations of David Ogilvy

yongfook — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:53:01 +0000

Recently as a little going-away gift from an Ogilvy event, I received a book of quotations by David Ogilvy. It’s amazing to think how some of these quotations are around 50 years old but they still resonate even with today’s modern marketing / advertising world. We like to think the landscape has drastically changed with [...]

Social Media ROI

yongfook — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:30:49 +0000

Cheeky subtitle: Measuring the Unmeasurable? Last week I (by the way, I am yongfook) was in Singapore to speak at the Blogout ‘09 event, organised by TDM. The audience was made up of advertising / PR agency professionals, mostly either curious about social media’s potential applications to their marketing strategies, or already aware of the [...]

What’s a Zygote?

yongfook — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 08:32:32 +0000

A fertilized egg or embryo, in the early stages of development. From Google Definitions.