The focus of the feature is how this long-standing American institution managed to (barely) weather the recent financial storm, through a great deal of personal sacrifice and some last-minute outside investment. It’s a compelling story. Trust us (or go read it).
We’re working on their new Volusion store right now. Look for a shiny, new site coming soon!
Our chosen charity, One Laptop Per Child, has focused a good portion of their efforts on Rwanda, both because it represents a worst-case-scenario and because its president has embraced the program to a degree unmatched by other heads of state. Because of this concentrated effort, OLPC is hoping to see an effect that stretches beyond the schoolhouse and into the economy at large.
“The President wants to make Rwanda a technology and services hub — another tall order considering that just 7% of the country’s 11 million people currently have electricity. And that, curiously enough, is where the laptops come in. He and OLPC proponents hope the computers will both teach the students the language of technology and offer them a way to chase down simple information they lack but which kids in rich nations take for granted. According to the government’s vision, the laptop will be the engine for the spread of electricity and Internet across the country…”
We’re proud to be a part of such a noble effort. If you’d like to join in, you can contribute by visiting the OLPC donation page.
Our founders spent some time at the recent Internet Retailers Conference and Exhibition in Chicago, and a good portion of that time was spent in the company of our bestest friends at Volusion. Here you’ll see Volusion’s video recap of the event and starting at about 1:22 you can see Dane and Kevin (from left to right) talking about the future of eCommerce. Their answer is pretty lengthy just because it would be rude to say, “The future of eCommerce is Brand Labs,” before throwing some gang signs and walking off camera (which was the original plan).
Last week, our founders (and senior corporate officers) Kevin Harman and Dane Downer, attended the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in Chicago. In addition to representin’ for Brand Labs, they had the opportunity to meet with our friends at Volusion, including founder and president, Kevin Sproles (seen here chatting with Kevin and Dane).
Attendance for the conference was up significantly over last year and the prevailing tone was overwhelmingly optimistic, as eCommerce continues to assert its critical position in the world of consumer retail operations as a whole. The obvious buzzword (or buzzphrase, if you will) was mobile commerce, and as the first developers of a mobile Volusion platform, we weren’t surprised one little bit. Hit the jump to see a few pics of Brand Labs with all the party people…
One of our most gracious and generous clients (here, here, and here) has (once again) attracted the attention of the national media with a cover story in the June issue of Home Accents Today.
Mixed in with Garden Gates’ truly interesting story is a special, secret Brand Labs testimonial. From the article:
What’s the best idea, event or change you’ve made recently in the way you operate or market your store?
If I told you my ideas, I would either have to kill you or charge you.
Granted, Chad could be talking about almost anything. He is, after all, an unstoppable marketing machine… but we like to believe that we’re at least some small part of his recent successes (based solely on the number of baked goods we’ve received in gratitude for a job well done).
We hope that our revelation of this bit of Chad’s big plan doesn’t mean that we’re now a target for assassination or some sort of unexpected chargeback.
Congrats on your cover story Chad! Here’s to your continued good fortune and us not being killed by your highly skilled team of ninjas!
Yesterday, Google announced the introduction of Caffeine – a new, multi-layered, super-technical upgrade to their search engine. Despite their efforts to explain the change textually and visually, it’s still too complex to be broken down into a blog post. The breakdown is that the search will now be faster, fresher and (ideally) more relevant. From our perspective, it just means that ongoing SEO has never been more important.
We have always been pretty inconsistent in describing what we do here at Brand Labs. Sometimes we design web sites. Sometimes we design websites. Sometimes we just design sites. In our defense, there has never been a recognized, definitively correct option to describe this thing you’re looking at, but the fine folks who put out the Associated Press Stylebook (note: not style book) have finally laid this issue to rest by proclaiming in their 2010 edition that the correct term is website. One word.
There. Now everything is fixed and we can all go about the task of living our lives unencumbered by the weight of this grammatical ambiguity.
Dane Downer and Kevin Harman (our vice president and president, respectively) will be attending the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition at McCormick Place West in Chicago next week. They’ll be there for all four days of the conference and would love to meet up with any of our current (or potential) customers who are interested in chatting about eCommerce.
If you’d like to set something up, you can email Dane at dane.downer@brandlabs.us or Kevin at kevin.harman@brandlabs.us, or just look for these happy, smiling faces on the show floor (Dane’s on the left, Kevin on the right). They’re prepared at all times to drop some eCommerce knowledge.
Our recently adopted charity, One Laptop Per Child, has just announced that they intend to debut an early-stage prototype of the XO-3 laptop at CES 2011. This prototype touchscreen tablet will likely have a glass screen for testing in less harsh environments, on their way to the ultimate goal of an all-plastic, nearly indestructible final product with a dual-mode display, appropriate for use in direct sunlight or indoor environments.
The new tablet looks pretty damn sweet, but we’re still in love with our little XO-1.5. On the other hand, if the OLPC folks are able to hit their target cost of $75 as opposed to the $199 for the current model, we’ll be able to change the name of our charitable effort to “One Laptop Per Child Every Three Days”. Not quite as catchy, but we don’t think the kids will mind.
Regardless, let’s just say that Volusion is up for a bunch of trophies in the upcoming Stevie Awards (the American Business Awards) on June 21. We wish them the very best of luck!
There’s a nice feature about J.W. Hulme in the August 3 edition of the Wall Street Journal.
Dane Downer and Kevin Harman (our vice president and president, respectively) will be attending the 
