Oregon Bounty

Posted by Laura McCulloch on September 14th, 2009 at 07:41 PM | Comment!

OK. I know. I left Portland for Pasadena, but I think I’m still an Oregonian. I ran across the Oregon Bounty site tonight and it made me a wee bit homesick. It is a beautiful site. Very cool. Enjoy it…wherever you might be!

GoodTube.org: GoodPeople. GoodWorks. GoodNews.

Posted by Laura McCulloch on September 11th, 2009 at 03:41 PM | Comment!

We heart GoodTube! GoodTube is an internet community dedicated to Good, a video sharing site for nonprofit organizations and people involved in volunteerism worldwide. It provides charities with a way to showcase their work, reach potential donors and inspire viewers. It is a place for video enthusiasts with a Good message to connect with a global audience. GoodTube is a nonprofit, non religious enterprise, and it is 100 percent free.

If you want to share the story of your nonprofit, please check out GoodTube!

Are you ready for the Cliq?

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on September 11th, 2009 at 08:02 AM | Comment!

There’s a new phone in town.  Frankly, I’m a little skeptical.  You see, I am a pocket-carrying member of the iPhone Lovers Society.  Have been for several months.  I heart my iPhone so much, I can’t remember how I functioned without it.  True, I make my living by being hooked up to the e-mail like an IV drip, but that’s not the only reason my rubber-sleeved machine is my best friend.  This phone allows me to best live the life I’ve chosen to live—time management-wise.  Not to say that my life is the best life out there, but in charting a course towards maximizing economy of time, functionality and information, the iPhone frees me up—as long as I heed some caveats and rules:
1. No texting or email answering while driving
2. Try not to over-tweet when with the family
3. Experience comes first, communicating the experience, second

Although thoroughly convinced that the iPhone cannot be replaced, I’m intrigued by the new Android-based social networking tool: the Cliq.  The premise of Motorola’s stab at seizing the smart phone dollar is built around the “social skills” angle.  It’s email, Facebook, Twitter, phone, text and calendars all integrated, with both the touch screen AND a QWERTY keyboard. Despite the intriguing possibilities of this new kid in town, I’m still convinced that you’ll have to pry my iPhone out of my cold, dead hands!

Google Win for Digital Rights in Question

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on September 11th, 2009 at 07:49 AM | Comment!

When it comes to electronic rights for out-of-print titles, whose side are you on? Microsoft, Yahoo and the the nation’s top copyright official—or, Google, libraries, tech groups and various activists.  Should Google win the monopoly on e-production rights, or should we heed the warnings of the U.S. Copyright Chief, Marybeth Peters, who worries that Google’s win would undermine Congress’ ability to govern copyrights, and spell disaster for books published overseas. 

It’s odd, to me, however, that Microsoft would be crying foul when it comes to monopolies.  Just saying…

Facebook and Skype Save the Day

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on September 5th, 2009 at 03:58 PM | (9) Comments

I haven’t seen my daughter in six weeks.  She’s living the dream—taking a post-college trek through Europe with her backpack and an open mind.  I’m thrilled for her, and yet.

As a mother of three (and stepmother of two), I always keep one eye open and one ear available for the middle-of-the-night phone call.  The dreaded emergency.  But I delight in the daylight hours, where I’ve been able to stalk my child via various web-based interfaces.  Today, I’m particularly grateful for facebook, as it’s been the only way to get occasional fragments and sightings of my 21-year-old daughter.  A random “wall” post and photo of her with the alps peeking behind her shoulder.  There she is again with a foreign sign and a smile on her face.  Another shot—this time on the facebook page of a Swiss friend she’d visited.

This morning, thanks to a combination of interweb saviors, I was able to do what moms do best.  Save the day.  Turns out my daughter ran out of money suddenly (she’d been living off of funds on a pay-as-go bankcard, and she had guessed wrong about how much was left on it).  She’d had the flu and had been battling a fever and headache upon arriving in Amsterdam, and landed in a youth hostel in the red light district, broke, sick and starving.  She had one Euro left, and used it to get online to see if any of her facebook friends could get a message to me to reload her bank card.  Sure enough, one of her friends was online, so the instant message feature allowed the friend to deliver the message to another friend, who contacted me, and gave me the scoop. By the time the message got to me, it had been embellished a tad: She’s really sick, and her clothes are soaking wet, and she hasn’t eaten in days, and she’s making beds so they won’t put her out on the streets!  Needless to say, I was apoplectic.  Especially when I couldn’t figure out how to reach her via cell phone (all that country code business).

Within what seemed like an hour but was actually ten minutes, I figured out how to reach Amsterdam via skype.  I contacted the hostel and my daughter was promptly located by the desk clerk.  Oh, the massive relief of actually hearing my little girl’s voice!  She was on the mend, she reassured me, but was starving.  She joked that being broke and sick with the threat of homelessness in a foreign country would make her a better social worker.  She gave me the digits and I did what moms do: zoomed off to the bank to fatten the coffers.

A half hour later she posted a message to me on facebook: thanks! You rock. I am well and have eaten and am still loving the adventure.

Marc Andreessen on Charlie Rose

Posted by Laura McCulloch on September 2nd, 2009 at 08:04 AM | Comment!

Charlie Rose in conversation with Marc Andreessen, co-founder and chairman of Ning and an investor in several startups including Digg, Plazes, and Twitter.  Best known as co-author of Mosaic, and founder of Netscape.  He is on the Board of Directors of Facebook and eBay.

The Big Cover Up

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on September 2nd, 2009 at 05:51 AM | Comment!

Monday morning last, I stumbled across my lawn in the usual fashion—briefcase, purse, gym bag and sloshing coffee—and lo and behold, my car had become a canvas for a knife-wielding punk.  “Malicious mischief” my insurance claim would later call it.  At that moment, I had other words for it.  Both doors had been deeply marred with four-letter words, and one side offered the sentiment, “I love war.”  The rear of the car had been sliced through the middle in one long stroke.  Ten years in this house and never had anything like this happened.

After filing a police report, initiating an insurance claim, getting a body shop to detail the two thousand plus dollars of repair required, my rage had spilled over into sadness.  My sweet husband had affixed copy paper over the offending words, and then spent the day hunting up temporary remedies to lessen the blight.  To no avail though, the cuts were deep.

Laura suggested that maybe this was the time for car magnets, and I had been pondering the idea as well.  Why not.  After all, Honda Elements like mine are often seeing zooming about town with signage of some sort.  I e-mailed a guy I’d met at a networking event not long ago, and, voila, in less than 48 hours my lemons became, well, if not lemonade, at least seltzer with lemon squeezed in.  My car now sports band-aids for the cause!

I still would like to get my hands on the punk, though.

Welcome to Our World

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on August 29th, 2009 at 02:13 PM | Comment!

When I was a little girl imagining what I wanted to “be” when I grew up, the words “strategic communicator!” never once appeared in my daydreams.  That just goes to show that we live in a world where jobs, careers, identities and entrepreneurial ventures are evolving at humming bird-flickering speeds. 

One of the main reasons we got into the business of “strategic communications” is that we believe that the old carpenter adage, “measure twice, cut once” is also crucial to the field of marketing and communications.  My co-founder-in-crime, Laura McCulloch, likes to say, “Our culture is running as fast as it can to stay five steps behind!”  The pressure to micro-blog your existence before it changes has superseded conscious, well-thought out business strategy, and we’d like to address that.  We may twitter in bursts of 10Mbps, but our important business decisions should be made at human speed.  In other words, when it comes to identity creation, we believe in developing carefully, launching once.

In service to our claim, welcome to BridgePoint Creative—the website!  Though we’ve been in business for several years, we’ve taken our time developing our brand.  Client-by-client we’ve built bridges across the country, up and down the West Coast, and over the river and through the woods.  We’re grateful that, at long last we’re able to share our world with the larger world.  We’d love to hear what you think.