Are you passionate about social media, influencing and engaging with customers?  Do you love social media, blogging, tweeting?  Are you a great writer, inquisitive and a news junkie?  If you’ve answered yes to these questions, then you may be our next social media and PR intern.  Your job will be to plan and execute social media campaigns to boost engagement and traffic for the Voice and our clients’ targeted audiences.  You’ll write press releases, and get stories in traditional media as well as social media.  You’ll increase fans, likes, and followers, and have an awesome time doing it.

Selected candidates will get great experience working on real campaigns for real clients.  They’ll get the opportunity to get as much responsibility as they can handle.  Nestled in Fairfield, CT, The Voice is close to NYC, the beach, and a great quality of life.  Candidates need to be bright, motivated and demonstrate ability in the skills required.

Send your resume to info@the-voice.com with a cover letter. Paid and Unpaid (school credit) internships are available.

Work with our account team to ensure clients are happy, and have all the information they need to make decisions quickly.  You’re job will be to work with our account executives to keep projects on schedule, on time and on budget.  You’ll learn the ins and outs of account management and be a key player.  You’ll be involved in client meetings, and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.

Selected candidates will get great experience working on real campaigns for real clients.  They’ll get the opportunity to get as much responsibility as they can handle.  Nestled in Fairfield, CT, The Voice is close to NYC, the beach, and a great quality of life.  Candidates need to be bright, motivated and demonstrate ability in the skills required.

Send your resume to info@the-voice.com with a cover letter noting which internship you are interested in.  Paid and unpaid (school credit) internships are available.

Work with Art Directors to deliver creative concepts including artwork, animation, and interactive content.  This is a creatively challenging role, and you will be asked to wear many hats while helping to craft concepts and full executions.  This will involve creating striking visuals, writing outstanding copy, and exceeding client expectations.  You must be demonstrably well versed in Adobe Creative Suite (especially Photoshop and Illustrator).  In addition you will need some experience with programming (HTML, CSS, js, Actionscript, etc), don’t worry if you don’t have all of these.  If you’re smart, passionate and have some programming experience, we’ll teach you everything you need to know to be successful here.  Our Art Directors are designer-developers who are passionate about creating awesome imagery and have the chops to program as well.

Selected candidates will get great experience working on real campaigns for real clients.  They’ll get the opportunity to get as much responsibility as they can handle.  Nestled in Fairfield, CT, The Voice is close to NYC, the beach, and a great quality of life.  Candidates need to be bright, motivated and demonstrate ability in the skills required.

Send your resume to info@the-voice.com with a cover letter noting which internship you are interested in.  Please provide a link to your portfolio or provide samples of your work. Paid and Unpaid (school credit) internships are available.

While yesteryear’s dinosaurs are today’s oil, we all know that the mainframe is more vital then ever in fueling organizations’ IT ecosystems. If the mainframes of the world were to go offline tonight, the global economy would instantly come to its knees.

Still, firms are fixated on revising the worldview of our industry.

To change the image, alter reality. Advertising in all its forms — social media, websites, digital marketing, print, collateral, trade shows, etc. — conveys your messaging in a compelling and memorable fashion. It communicates but will never change who you are.

You must be obsessed with evolving. How? Actively develop next-generation mainframe solutions. Go mobile. Create dashboards with great user interfaces. These are just a few examples.

Look at IBM, who spent years and a small fortune making the zEnterprise, a mainframe/server hybrid. Take a cue from CA Technologies, who developed Chorus, which busts silos by acknowledging that users now have cross-departmental Role responsibilities. I know these are huge companies, but instead of looking at how big they are, look at yourself and remember that true growth comes from within.

Do you have to leave your comfort zone? Maybe.
Is it expensive? Not necessarily.
Is it vital to the long-term health of your firm and the industry as a whole? Probably.

We are known as a leading-edge communications firm, but communications is not enough: only you can own your evolution. We can hit home runs for you in bringing your products and solutions to market, but only if you are prepared to “Be Innovative or Begone.” It is the linchpin to all our futures.

You Can Control your Evolution

Increasingly the websites are being viewed on mobile devices and tablets with varied screen sizes and resolutions. This provides a challenge to design sites that are scalable, have fluid layout capabilities and look good in all popular devises. A Varity of solutions are being explored to combat the challenges.

Browsers compatibility and other issues also impede and hinder the layouts as some browsers do not support features of css3 or html 5. One simple trick that can be used to resize images to different screen sizes and layout is using the CSS’s max-width image size percent property.

If no other image width styles override this rule, every image will load in its original size. The css sets the maximum width of the image to 100% of the screen or browser width, and when that 100% changes so does the image size. The idea is to deliver images at the maximum size they will be used at and the height and width of the image is not declared. This lets the browser resize the images as needed while using CSS to guide their relative size. It’s a great and simple technique to resize images beautifully.

Some non cons to this are

1) Max-width is not supported in IE, but a way around to that is using 1 img {width: 100%} in an IE-specific style sheet.

2) One more con to this is that when an image is resized too small in some older browsers in Windows, the rendering isn’t as clear as it ought to be.  This can be fixed using a java script code found at this link.

Fact is, Fairfield is kicking it. But how do we nurture a climate that attracts top talent to live & work? It’s an arduous assignment akin to turning around the Queen Mary. In my opinion, some of the answer lies in working with universities to establish programs. However, there are already top-flight programs in NY at SVA, NYU, Pratt, Parsons, FIT, etc. What could we offer that they don’t have? To me, the private sector should drive the curriculum. The companies of Fairfield county – GE, Nielsen, Playtex, Xerox, Diageo, etc. – should be actively engaged to articulate the creative services (and training) they need in the years to come. Relying on colleges to blow the dust off their syllabi and mint a gaggle of grads every year is not the answer, no matter how high-tech the facility and how many $ are thrown at the problem. The students just end up in debt, and many then can’t get jobs, anyway.

I believe higher education should be free, with most of the costs footed by the private sector. This philosophy is not so radical — many universities were founded on the notion of free, like Stanford and my grad school alma mater, the City University of NY. CUNY was tuition-free until the fiscal crisis of the mid-70′s. Companies would be more than happy to pay for the training if it were developing their talent. And picture the lure for an 18-year old: you can move to Fairfield County, get a free college education, with a job at the end of the rainbow. It would be a fertile row in the field of a Creative Corridor.

At The Voice, we are building a model that combines work, education and even living quarters for an all-in-one environment. We are small, and I don’t claim to have the answer, but it’s our answer. I actively support the efforts of the talented and committed people behind the CT Creative Corridor initiative. I have uploaded Marian’s excellent report here. CTcreativecorridor_Book_FINAL

According to a recent Survey by IDG, iPad use is growing among IT pros.  In fact iPad use has seen huge growth in business in general.

What this means is that many of people you are trying to reach have iPads, or will be getting them shortly. 67% of Professionals in the US use their iPad at work.  According to the survey.

IT and business professionals use their iPads more intensively, across a wider range of scenarios. Fully 51% of IT decision-makers say they “always” use their iPad at work (and a further 40% say they sometimes use it at work). Out-of-home usage is even more intense, with 79% of IT decision-makers saying that they “always” use their iPads “on the move”.

It’s becoming an app-centric world and if you want to compete, you need to be able to reach people with apps.

How does this play in regards to which platform to develop in?

I read another interesting article yesterday and it talked about the importance of the app stores (Apple, Google, or Amazon) and the lack of app stores for HTML 5/JS mobile apps.  Some companies are trying to circumvent the app stores by deploying standards based mobile application.  The problem with it is not a technological one in terms of getting adoption for their app.  The problem is a business problem.  There is no centralized app store for Standards Based apps, so they are difficult to find.  The app stores have such tight integration into the host operating system that just finding those other apps, as good as they may be, becomes much harder.

So what’s The Rub

Businesses have decisions to make.The choice of platform depends on where your audience is, what devices they have, and how they use them.  These are decisions that need serious consideration as more and more businesses decide to move into the app world.  The iPad is certainly a great platform to deploy to.  It has wide acceptance with both consumers and business professionals.  Is it the best platform for any app? Not necessarily.  Again it depends on your target market, where they go, what they are doing, and what devices they are doing it with.

Let’s not debate about whether or not it is fair like the people at these social media giants.  Google is throwing their muscle into their social media + pages and is likely not to give in because of the seemingly petulant claims by Facebook, Twitter, etc. of inequitable search results.

Businesses are now left with little other choice than to create a Google+ page to showcase their products or services or risk losing market share to their competition.

What should you consider when creating your Google+ business profile?

1.  You need to consider what keywords people will use to search for your services so that you will show up in the search results.
2. Upload images to showcase your products or services to potential customers.  Images are becoming more and more relevant in search results and are a great way to showcase your business.
3. Use your Google + page to post, post, post!  Again, try to think of and use keyword that will allow people looking for your services to find your Google + page in the search results.  When they arrive at your page they should find up-to-date information about what it is you do/provide and be able to see examples.

Lesson: businesses that refuse to participate in Google+ pages for business risk losing ground in search engine results pages!

Sprite is a combination of images into one big image. The idea of using sprites originated from the term “sprites” that comes from old school computer graphics and the video game industry. The idea was that the computer could fetch a graphic into memory, and then only display parts of that image at a time, which was faster than having to continually fetch new images.  (Reference: http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/).The concept is being applied to web design so the sprite image is fetched once and parts of that image are displayed at different locations on the website. Css is used for positioning and alignment.

It’s a life saver to our traditional web design practice of slicing and saving small individual images. Even though smaller images might be believed to load faster but because we usually have so many of them on a page each image load time can significantly decrease the speed of page load and navigation and moving through a website.

Why we need to embrace this concept is pretty evident. Most of the websites these days are being accessed on mobile devises and the load time on a mobile device really frustrates the user and can drive customer and users away from a site.

Table 1 shows popular web sites spending between 5% and 38% of the time downloading the HTML document. The other 62% to 95% of the time is spent making HTTP requests to fetch all the components in that HTML document (i.e. images, scripts, and stylesheets).  Experience shows that reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on reducing response time and is often the easiest performance improvement to make.

Table-1

(Reference: http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/)

As there are pluses and minus of everything sprites has them to. I will highlight some scenarios why sprites should not be adopted but overall sprites can be used in most cases for improvement.  Sprites are absolutely required for high traffic sites such as yahoo, msn which get huge traffic.  One the other hand Sprite images will be hard to update and change if you do not have the actual image manipulation files (psd or other image software files). It will be more work in that scenario or on a site where there will be no or few images. One basic part of all sites that sprites can be applied to easily is the navigation bar.

Some useful links to get you started with sprites.

Plugin for sprite : Spriteme:  http://spriteme.org/

Sprite and Java script in combination:  http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites2

Tutorial on Sprites: http://cssglobe.com

Like Janus, The Voice looks both forward and back

January is named for Janus, the Roman two-faced god. One looks forward, to the new year. The other, back to the year past.

The Voice also has a split personality. One side are senior folk who know what they are doing. The other side of the coin is emerging talent, often as green as a field.

Do clients care? They certainly care about the senior talent. Customers want to “fly with eagles” as one peer recently said. They want best-in-class solutions from seasoned professionals, Do they care about the jr. talent? Sometimes. Occasionally there is a perceived notion that with new heads comes fresh thinking. Often customers are altruistic, believing that our apprentices should “get a shot.”

The interns in our model certainly don’t grow our business, from an advertising agency POV. But it is what we are all about. The Voice was founded 10 years ago to address a need: give emerging talent the chance to work on real projects for actual clients. To date, over 35 interns have come through our program. We will continue to evolve and grow to provide even more opportunity to them. The rest of us will have to accept our role as the older guy of Janus.