Halloween becomes more and more popular in our country. We are keeping up with the latest trends, too, and always appreciate a good occasion to have fun! Friday evening. Our office turned into a witch’s cavern, with a broom hanging down the ceiling, flocks of bats and hordes of spiders, candles, twilight – appropriate settings! Among the main entertainments – pumpkin carving and voting for the best Jack-O-Lantern, as well as enjoying cocktails with the chilling names like “Virgin’s Blood” and “Sorcerer’s brew”. There were lots of amusing contests and for the most courageous and daring – a visit to a Mysterious and Spooky Chamber of Dead Joe. Dressing up as dreadful creatures… Though, why talking much? You better take a look yourself!

…Halloween mood… Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: fun stuff, halloween
Posted in corporate events | 2 Comments »

After finishing animation of virtual world for one of the major names in toys industry (under NDA) and before starting full-speed on the next BIG animation project (online multi-player game – more details are not disclosed at the moment) our animation folks spent some time creating something non-commercial and fun. We wanted to contribute to the animation community and created a show reel featuring the evolution theory in our own animated way.

Traditional show reel is a compilation of best effects or parts of accomplished projects demonstrating the genius and hard years of work. We took a little different approach this time. The idea was not just to shine without being present but create a cartoon short movie which can be watched by the audiences of all ages. If you have 2 spare minutes this is worth it.

For those of you wondering about the cost to create something similar: 136 seconds * $100/150 =$13.6/20.4k (typical rate for 2D animation on outsourced animation projects)

Tags: fun stuff, general thoughts
Posted in general thoughts | 1 Comment »

Our corporate blog has been populated by SEO topics recently. The posts are getting too long – so here we go with the small and easy one. (Sorry guys, no SEO science in this one).
I’m not really sure if you already seen a pretty girl Ms Dewey integrated with Live Search – if not it’s worth checking out!

The first thing I did as a marketer after playing with the web site – I checked it’s Alexa rankings (it’s now ranked as a 13k web site in terms of visitors) and yes – the traffic was exactly the same I had pictured in mind: the popularity of the web site skyrocketed in the first week when it was introduced (looks like it was in top 1k of the web sites) and then started decreasing gradually… I think the late posts like that and the users that haven’t seen it yet are keeping the web site on 13k position.

The important lesson that can be learned: the web site is amazing and fan, however it brings no real value or importance (why should someone wait for this girl smiling and thinking while when he needs). That’s the reason for super popularity which lasted a week (the number of visitors was really huge, however few of those returned).

Tags: fun stuff, general thoughts, SEO, seo fun
Posted in SEO, general thoughts | No Comments »

Roman from SEO department passed me another cool link to the wayback internet machine. Here you can browse through 40 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. I played with it for a while and found some interesting old looks of today’s e-monsters. Did you know that Froogle existed in 1998?

Tags: cool links, froogle, fun stuff, SEO
Posted in cool links | 1 Comment »