MARIMAIL: Google Analytics Email Converter

日本語バージョンは最後にあります。

We're happy to announce the we've just released a simple tool called MARIMAIL: Google Analytics Email Converter.

MARIMAIL is your answer when you find yourself spending 10 minutes copying and pasting that 10 links in your email to your customers with the Google Analytics parameters that'll help you track the preformance of your emails. Click on the link above and find out more. Try it out too. It's free.

MARIMAIL: Google Analyticsメール変換ツールをリリースしました！
今回のツールは自動的にメルマガや広告のメールの中にあるリンクをGoogle Analyticsでメールの効果トラッキングできるように、パラメーター追加してくれるです。
日本ではまだまだGoogle Analyticsを使いこなせてない状況でもあるので、今回のツールを使って少しでもGoogle Analyticsを役に立つと思います。
無料でご利用になれますので、ぜひ使ってみてください。

mobiledjango released!

We're happy to announce the beta version of mobiledjango, a collection of code to be used with the django platform for mobile terminals.

Originally we had built mobile django to work with JP mobiles. Currently all the code is JP mobile centric.

At the same time we're also releasing an open source version of the general purpose libraries that MARIMORE uses. We find these libraries useful in our work, and perhaps someone else might benefit from it. We'll be actively upgrading and maintaining these libraries as we use them in our projects.

Here's the project site for mobiledjango
And here's the project site for marimorepy

Mikle Inc. and MARIMORE

We are happy to announce that Mikle Inc. has just hired MARIMORE to help out on their technical and business fronts.

Mikle Inc. is a company based in Tokyo specializing in collecting information from it's wide based of users and harnessing this information in bettering the lives of many.

What made us decide to work with Mikle is their unique working style and values; They are focused on making the best products and they have fun. They also strive to be perfect in their business, which are what MARIMORE also aims to be. They are also not tied to the conventional way of thinking, which we also believe in.

We believe that the skills that we have we be able to complement the knowledge and skill set of Mikle. We also believe that this partnership will allow MARIMORE to expand by increasing our knowledge on the consumer applications front.

With this partnership, I am confident that it will be a truly win-win relationship for both our companies.

Using Django

The Django Project was released as a framework based on python and is designed to be a

"high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid
development and clean, pragmatic design."

Here at MARIMORE we use Django as our framework of choice for deploying web applications, and also for processing every other things as well, from data received through email to automatically producing reports and sending them through email.

The decision to use Django has more of a historical reasons than any other; I was trained in C on FreeBSD during my undergraduate days and have my roots in programming and data handling in that environment. Going through training in my first job at Sun Microsystems, we were exposed to many other scripting and programming languages, mainly shell scripts, perl and Java. For some reason or the other, I did not really latched to these languages. I did give Java a try though, but I think what made me lose interest was that it was not really an easy thing to integrate UNIX shell scripting with Java; I need to create some sort of a glue in the middle to make things work. I also find having to work with a lot of XML while trying to get JSP running with Tomcat was also not sexy. I blame all of this to my C background.

Going on board at Yahoo! Japan's Mail team first gave me exposure to Python. They used python for everything on backend operations there. There was 4 of us, 3 (including me) got into python while the other team member was more of a perl girl. The libraries and the web applications itself are written in C/C++ due to performance reasons. I hated that; Imagine having to muck with C/C++ code to change a small bit of output to the browser, and having to check that you've released your pointers and not stepping on someone's else memory.

The first MARIMORE service was Maritex. In it's first version, Maritex had PHP as it's frontend and we had python running in the back, sending and receving messages, talking to the db and parsing the XML. We moved to Django as it's front end engine for Ver. 2.

Currently we run Django everywhere; From the frontend to using it as the backend to automatically process remote emails. We have also created packages that will fit into django's stucture through middlewares and context processing to allow better integration with JP's mobile (read: keitai) environment.

Contact us for your Django needs.

The importance of Naming (or the over emphasis of it)

During one of our internal discussions, we were discussing on the reasons why the sales for certain services were this while other were that. During the discussion the possibility of the name for the service or product being the reason for the slower growth was pointed out.

The logic was that the name doesn't connect to it's target market and don't ring a bell.

"Sure", I thought. The name doesn't ring a bell. The root cause of that is obviously the service or product don't have a good market share yet, and no active marketing was carried out the promote the service or product.

I believe Naming is important, but only up until so. The more important aspect of the success of a product or a service is, after all, the product or the service itself.

No matter how horrible your naming is, if the product is superb and does it's job well to satisfy it's customer's need, you might have a chance.

But if you have a great name, but the product sucks, well, you won't last long, since no one want's to use a product that doesn't work. Unless it's Windows.

Apple is a bad name. It's a name of a fruit, and might have been Pear or Durian or Rambutan or even Manggis. But as we all know, Apple Inc. is the company that created iPod and to a certain extent defined the modern desktop experience. They had other products as well, like the Lisa and Macintosh, which by the way, might as well be the names of the couple living two blocks down the road.

During these kinds of discussions, I try to stay focus on the product and on the customer. Are we connecting the two? Are we satisfying the customer? Are we bringing a specific solution to a specific problem? These are the questions we should first figure out the answers to, before we wonder of at thinking of a name or brand change.

On the other hand obviously locality counts to a certain extent on naming. In Japan it's important to have a name thet has around 4 syllables, or capable of being shortened into one, i.e ミスド 、ドンキー 、ヤフー or ミクシィ。Due to the trend of the Japanese that will somehow shorten a name to around 4 syllables or less, it will allow your brand to be easily remembered and have a shot at being a verb, i.e ミクシィしてる？ Even in Japan, it's also obvious to avoid using offensive words; You wouldn't want to name your company or product "株式会社詐欺万歳" for example.

As a bonus, here is a link to a name generator in case you're thinking starting your own Web 2.0 Service: Web 2.0 Name Generator

I personally like the Chinese way of naming; There is a shopping complex in Kuala Lumpur called "Sungei Wang Plaza" which literally translates to "The Money River Plaza". If you setup shop in the Plaza, you'll be in the river which flows money. The Chinese has a particular way of naming; See how they named the rooms and halls in the Forbidden City in Beijing.

It'll be interesting to find a so-called Web 2.0 company that has a name like "The Golden Horses".

Support for docomo.blackberry.com

We are happy to announce that Maritex has started support for docomo.blackberry.com subscribers in Japan.

You can register from this page and choose docomo.blackberry.com from the dropdown menu. It's at the bottom since it's the latest domain added.

Happy Messaging!

New Year Campaign winners announced!

On 31st Dec 2008 we announced the start of a New Year Campaign to boost SMS sending from our customers. You can read the announcement here

Congratulations to the winners. Your points have already been credited to your account.

A Happy New Year!

We at MARIMORE LLC would like to wish all of you, our friends, customers, and partners, a happy and a properous 2009!