Just sent out a newsletter to our investors talking about the latest happenings at Digitalvaliance. We are also going to start our monthly newsletter to all those interested in our service offerings. Stay tuned!
Good Evening
My name is Ashley Trahan and I am a new administrative commander here at Digitalvaliance. I am also a working senior who attends San Francisco State University where my major is Health Education with an emphasis in Community Organizing. I have a passion for people and life. I look forward to updating you all on everything from great web design deals to informative and helpful news alerts on current events.
Signing Off, yours Truly
Ash…
As we talked about in previous post, projectStation is coming along nicely. Most of the specs have been designed and database has been designed. We’ve decided to implement it using cakePHP and we are quite excited. We developed one of our firstf full scale web application using Ruby on Rails almost 3 years. The experience was amazing despite a few cut-n-tape fixes we had to implement. RoR has matured considerably since those days, and CakePHP has RoR to be thankful for its birth, but we decided to try something new.
Another reason we decided to go with PHP was because well.. it uses PHP, which is probably the most widely used web application programming language. CakePHP runs very easily in shared hosting environments (many of our clients use Shared Hosts). We developed a very basic events reservation (www.strivelifestyle.com) site for a client using cakePHP with relatively no issues and/or problems. Our experience with RoR proved invaluable. One thing I noticed personally (as the guys at RailsEnvy love to poke fun at), is there’s a LOT of similiarities between CakePHP and RoR. So much so, that I will go ahead and say that CakePHP simply strives to be the exact PHP equivalent of RoR (which isn’t a bad thing).
Anyhow, we are also in process of acquiring a mac so that development for our first iPhone application can begin. So exciting!
Since we started DV, we set out to be different. We wanted to be able to serve YOU, the small business and individual. We didn’t want to charge you ridiculous amounts of money to have a professional presence. Our main competitors, either charge too much for a great looking product or charge little, for a not-so-great looking product. We wanted to be the best of both worlds -> Quality for a fraction of the cost. Just as important, we wanted you to have a good experience while working with us.
As forward thinking as we’ve been with our mission, its been very hard to market and make DV as big as it can be, mainly because most of our inhouse processes are manual, hence limiting the number of projects we can handle concurrently. We have the capacity to deal with 100s of projects simulatenously, but our business process only allows for us to handle at most 20 projects at any given time.
To change this, we are working on a custom project management software, that will not only improve the experience of our customers when working with us, but in addition, will allow for DV to take on more projects seamlessly.
Our code name for this mission is ”Project Station” but are open to any name suggestions, that are consistent with Digitalvaliance’s theme (valiance / military / web design)! Please feel free to make any suggestion in the comments below. Some other examples we’ve thought of are: Fort Elaine, commandBase, projectServe.
Check out one of our latest custom Logos for The Ometa Group.
Ometa means Three Os (the initials of the company’s partners) in Yoruba, one of the most widely spoken languages in Nigeria. The company also seeks to go by O3G. The Logo incorporates the OOO initials, meaning of the company, along with the Christian trinity symbol. You will also notice the inner G formed where the rings all meet.
The Ometa group is focusing on “Technologies with a Conscience”.
We came across a good small collection of entrepreneurship related quotes. My personal favorite was :
“A business plan that doesn’t require a wonderful economic environment in order to succeed… is a good idea all the time.” – Marc Andreessen
“Forget about shortcuts. Run a business as if it’s forever.” – Norm Brodsky
“Consider spending less time talking, and more time prototyping, especially if you’re not very good at talking.” – Paul Buchheit, FriendFeed
See more at
http://venturehacks.com/articles/talking
via VentureHacks
Times are tough. The economy is collapsing. Everyone has been talking about it. It’s in the papers, on the news, online and even at the jobs we no longer have. I think I speak for everyone when I say, we are sick of hearing about it. How can anything get better when everyone is miserable and terrified of what’s going to happen next? Sometimes things are a little beyond our control and letting it victimize us isn’t going to help anything, so why not laugh about it? Optimism is the key. The glass is always half full, things will get better, blah blah blah, although mockery has always been America’s best defense, we may as well continue the tradition. Check out some possible post-recession logos of some of the worlds leading brands.
As logo designers, we found the following videos interesting.
Let’s face it. It seem’s as though everytime we turn on our TV sets, all we hear about is bad news (layoffs, foreclosures, bankruptcy etc). We all understand that the economy goes through up and down cycles, but this down cycle is one of the worst we’ve ever faced, and due to Globalization, everyone on Planet Earth is feeling the crunch.
So what does this mean for your business? Are you supposed to wait for things to turn around, or do you use this time as an opportunity to do your due-diligence to fill a void in the market? Companies that survive rough economic times are the ones that have always provided convenient products/services. For example, Walmart & Campbell’s are doing well during this downturn, because even when the economy is booming, they have always provided low cost products. Now that the everyone’s budget is squeezed, the product offering of these companies are even more enticing.
Here are 13 companies started during an economic downturn. The 14th could you yours.
Hyatt Corp - 1957 - 1958 Eisenhower Recession
The Jim Henson Company - Eisenhower Recession
Burger King Corp - Eisenhower Recession
IHOP Corp - Eisenhower Recession
LexisNexis - 1973 Oil Crisis
FedEx - 1973 Oil Crisis
Microsoft - 1975 Oil Crisis / economic Downturn
CNN - 1980 Recession
MTV - 1980/81 Recession / Slump
Trader Joe’s - 1958 Economic slowdown
GE - The 1873 Panick
Hewlett Packard - End of Great Depression
Wikipedia Foundation - Post 9/11 Recession
Via InsideCRM
