After a month hiatus, the Technology Meeting has returned. This month’s meeting brought about a plethora of new ideas and technology. The quick recap below highlights some of the things presented in August’s meeting.

Bo.lt

Bo.lt is a website that allows you to edit other websites, without needing programming knowledge. To clarify, you don’t actually get to go in and revamp CNN.com, but you can edit its appearance to your liking and share your version via Bo.lt’s short-link. You can delete/edit text, remove ads, rearrange the interface, add comments, or wipe out the page entirely (although the purpose of that is beyond me). So if you wanted to share only one piece of a website, Bo.lt allows you to do that. Here’s an example of a website edited using Bo.lt.

Quick Drag – Firefox Add-On

If you’re looking to shave a few seconds off your web-browsing time each time you click, then “Quick Drag” is a great Firefox Add-on. Basically this Add-on extends the functionality of the drag-and-drop mouse gesture. Using Quick Drag allows you to quickly load URLs, search selected text on a page, and even save an image on a page without the use of keyboard shortcuts or right clicking. You simply click on what you want and drag it. Selected text will show up in the search results of a new tab and images will save straight to your Downloads folder.

Tribalfish

Tribalfish attempts to bridge the gap between social interaction and deep customer engagement using high-quality content. Essentially, Tribalfish allows you to post a short message that viewers can click on for an expanded post, without being directed to an outside website. People can browse these messages by various topics they are interested in whether it is healthcare, real estate, sports, or just about anything else. Tribalfish also has a “Groups” function where users can join, receive updates, and post messages.

TweetReach

TweetReach is a web program that allows you to get a quick snapshot of just how far your tweets reached. All you have to do is type in the desired Twitter username in the search box. TweetReach then gives you a snapshot of the past 7 days of that user’s activity along with stats such as reach, types of tweets, and exposure (impressions). TweetReach takes into account the @ mentions and retweets that your account has received and includes those as impressions. So if one of my followers retweets me, the impressions of that retweet would be included. This is based on how many followers my retweeter has.

Google Hotel Finder

Google Hotel Finder allows you to do exactly what the name says, find hotels. The difference between Google’s program and your average hotel finder, is all of the features available. Google Hotel Finder has the standard “search by location” option, but it also allows you to see popular locations; perfect if you are unfamiliar with the area. You can also keep a short list of hotels that you can come back to review at a later time. If you’re looking for the best price, Google let’s you compare the current price with the hotel’s typical price.

Additional features include limiting hotels by price per night, star rating, and user rating. However, one of the most unique features is the map view. Google gives you a preset view of all the hotels within the area. You can then adjust the shape of this area to your liking. Clicking on the hotel listing or “dot” (in map view), will give you a snapshot of the hotel’s information along with images and reviews.

YourGroups

YourGroups is a way to communicate with friends, family, and co-workers in private. Members of your group can post messages to the group wall, “buzz” each other, share photos, and schedule meet-ups. When sending a buzz or scheduling a meet-up, you can choose to include the whole group, or only certain members of the group. YourGroup is great for sharing things with a limited amount of people, in the privacy of your own group.

Every month the geeks of Demi & Cooper Advertising and DC Interactive Group convene for a Technology Meeting. During this meeting team members will share ideas, newsworthy updates, and helpful new technology with the rest of the company. Below are just some a few of the things that came up in the most recent meeting.

Twitter Photo Service

Current tweeters using yfrog and TwitPic can now use the default, Twitter.com to share pictures. Twitter has been rolling out the service slowly, to select groups of users. The service is run by Photobucket, although a Photobucket account is not needed in order to share pics via Twitter.

The interesting take on this particular photo service (compared to the 3rd party applications) is that the photo will show up with the tweet in a user’s stream/timeline. You will no longer need to click on a link to see the picture that was shared. The upload function will be placed directly to the left of the current “Add a Location” function when composing a tweet.

PDF Online

One of our artists was getting a little frustrated with file formats that wouldn’t convert from a PC to her Mac. So she found a nifty little online converter that is free of charge. PDFOnline.com allows you to convert multiple file formats into PDFs and vice-versa. It’s quick, easy, and you don’t need to sign up for an account. You just need to supply an email address where the converted file gets sent.

Facebook Page Tagging

If you’re sick of tagging your friends in pictures, you’ll be happy to know that you can tag Facebook Pages now! So go right ahead and tag Pepsi, Starbucks, and all of your favorite brands.

From a marketing standpoint, this is actually a beneficial feature. Starbucks has been at this for a while. If you head to their Facebook page you’ll notice that a plethora of their pictures are tagged from Fans. This feature allows for a lot of user-generated content and provides your page with more activity. There could be some pitfalls as you may not want certain pictures tagged with your page but as long as you consistently monitor your page you can avoid this.

ShopKick

Last but not least, we have ShopKick. This iPhone/Android app recognizes when you are watching commercials (currently only available on the CW) and instantly gives you special offers  or more information for that product. The app also recognizes when you walk into a ShopKick sponsored store and may offer you points redeemable for iTunes, gift cards, Facebook credits, or a variety of other things.

There are also special challenges that you can perform with the app such as scanning groceries in a participating store or trying on an outfit. Doing these challenges awards you with additional points.

This post is part of our monthly segment called “Technology Meeting Wrap Up.” Every month, the whole office meets to discuss fun, useful, helpful, new (or any combination of these adjectives) tools and technology. This segment discusses one bit of technology we discussed at our meeting.

Everyone’s interested in the good ol’ acronym that is one of those web buzz words, SEO. If we were playing the word association game, in a lightening round, you say “SEO” and I say “Search Engine Optimization.” Others might reply, “Better Google rankings,” “That thing I should do to my site that I know nothing about,” and still others, “Sarah Eats Oranges.” Ignore those last people.

So you may not be an SEO expert (I certainly am not), as knowing SEO requires a lot of studying and tech geek know how. Thankfully, though, we have people at Demi & Cooper who fancy themselves experts, knowledgeable on how to best work your website and blog to get the best possible rankings in search engines. Also thankfully, tools exist that can help you out with the process.

One thing that counts in search engine rankings is the URL. You want important words that people may search as part of the URL. You also want less important words removed. This way your URL is short, and each keyword included in the URL makes up a higher “percentage” of the URL, giving the words more weight in a search.

Enter the Wordpress plug in SEO Slugs. At our most recent technology meeting, Luke introduced us to this handy tool that automatically improves your blog post’s URL by removing unimportant words so only the best keywords remain.

Without SEO Slugs, in Wordpress blogs, the title of your posts is automatically translated to the URL for the post. So, for example, this blog is built with Wordpress. I titled the post “Improve Search Engine Rankings by Using a Simple Tool” The URL Wordpress automatically assigns to this post is:

http://demicooper.com/blog/2010/04/15/improve-search-engine-rankings-by-using-a-simple-tool

When I hit save or publish, the plug in retitles the post:

http://demicooper.com/blog/2010/04/15/improve-search-engine-rankings-simple-tool

SEO Slugs removed the smaller, unimportant words “by,” “using,” and “a,” which will make the other words more powerful if someone searched any combination of the other words. The URL is changed either when you save or publish the post.

If you don’t trust this autosave to give you the best URL every time, or if you have particular keywords in mind that you’d like to use, you can still edit the URL if you choose to after. This tool just saves you the step of having to edit it to remove unimportant words on every post. You can download SEO Slugs here.

Every month, the whole office gathers around the fireplace in the conference room to discuss one of our favorite topics: technology. No, we don’t do this because we are huge nerds, although I can’t claim that most of us don’t fall into that category. We meet because we realize the technology landscape changes hourly (it actually changes microsecondly, but as “changes microsecondly” isn’t a commonly accepted phrase, we’ll stick with hourly), and we want to stay ahead of the game.

At each technology meeting, we take turns presenting interesting, fun, useful, helpful, new (or any combination of these adjectives) tools and technology that we’ve discovered in the past month. We leave every meeting a little more informed about what’s current, and also impressed and excited by how much our jobs and everyone’s lives are evolving microsecondly.

We thought we’d make a segment on our blog every month to discuss one bit of technology we discussed at our meeting.

April’s focus will be something that’s been around a while, but that folks have really started to get into in the past year: QR Code. I’d venture to guess that most people don’t know what that is, so bear with me as I attempt a simple explanation. “QR” stands for “Quick Response.” A QR Codes are two-dimensional bar codes. It has other uses, but one major use you can expect to see in advertising is as a bar code that stores a URL. People with mobile camera phones that have a reader app and internet browser can take a picture of the QR Codes (or in some cases, simply scan the QR Code by aiming the camera at it), and the reader will launch the stored URL in the phone’s browser.

While this technology has had widespread usage in Japan in the past 5 years, we are just starting to see its use in marketing here very recently. Of course there’s a learning curve with the technology. Most early adopters of QR Codes include instructions for the user, as you’ll see in my examples below. But at this point in Japan, QR Codes can be found everywhere –billboards, magazines, train station posters, fast food packaging, building signage providing people with maps of the building–and people simply know to scan the code with their phones for more information.

Some examples that have caught some attention recently:

• QR Codes throughout the Detroit Red Wings program book . They show a video on the jumbotron that explains how QR Codes work. Then if fans scan the codes, they’re shown a pretty funny video about “Kronwalling,” with people checking random people all over the place, and ending with a call to action to visit their site OpenSkateDetroit.com . Two months ago the Mashable article reported the video as being watched completely through over 2,000 times…currently the view count on YouTube has it up to nearly 9,000, so we’re sure the complete watch count is now far higher than 2,000.

• A Kanye West billboard in Chicago , which allows you to scan for free ringtones and updates, or if you don’t have a QR scanner, you can just take a picture and email it to an address and content will be sent back to you.

• A building in Tokyo is completely covered with QR codes, and passersby can scan the building for info about the stores within, and with an iPhone app, people can see comments people in the building leave, check coupons, and see store information.

We created a QR Code table tent that will be on tables in the cafe at Sherman Hospital in the next few weeks. The cafe overlooks their geothermal lake–one of the largest geothermal lakes in the US. Curious diners can scan the QR Code to be taken to an informational page all about the lake. This may be our first of many future ventures into this medium.

As the blog poster points out in the Japan QR Code article, QR Codes create a direct link between print media and the web. They allows for print media to become interactive, and they are a far more elegant and reliable way to make trackable links. You don’t have to deal with the clumsy “/trackingword” redirect links anymore. Users don’t have the option to type in only your web address and miss the trackable link portion. They simply have to scan, quickly be taken to the correct page, and if you set it up correctly, you are given a reliable count of how many people scanned your link. It’s a win situation for all.

So if you have a smartphone, find a QR Code reader app and be on the lookout for code in magazines, on billboards, and even in TV spots. Perhaps within the next 5 years we’ll be scanning our fast food bags for nutritional info, train station boards to pass the time, or building maps for directional info as well.