Companies are exposed to many different types of complaints when employees are involved.Employees can help drive a company forward orcauses problems.Company employees are theeyes and ears on how things are really operatingat the company level.
The Morality√CheckHotline system is an objectivetool and unbiased consultative outside support systemthat delivers results to aid in the vulnerable areas thatare costly to most companies, such as:
√Sexual Harassment √ Drug Abuse √ Unsafe Working Conditions
√ Employee Theft √ Vandalism
“One Call Can Save Thousands of Dollars”
(click on the image above to learn more about Morality√Check)
We've spent the past couple of months ensuring that Woubie 1.0 runs smoothly and efficiently. Now we're excited to be working on new features and functionality. Within the next couple of months we'll be upgrading to Woubie 2.0 with the following added features:
The ability to store Contact information.
The ability to store Business information.
The ability to print individual items from any of the data sets.
And...the function we're excited about the most:
The ability to link tasks, characters, comedy, facts, attributions or locations to a Woubie.
If you thought Woubie was useful before, this new feature will knock your socks off.
Here's an example of the difference it will make:
Let's say you're a comedian. You've created a Woubie called "Comedy Club A - 6/23/2010 Show" and you've stored detailed information about where you performed it, how long the set was, how well you performed, whether you sold promotional items or not, etc.
You've also created a database of 800 jokes and you've assigned categories & subcategories, ratings, duration, key words, etc. Simply having a flexible web-based database of your comedy material saves you a lot of time.
So, what could be better?
You could have the ability to flag the 20 jokes you used for the "Comedy Club A" show and link them to the Woubie you created for that show. Then you could easily print your set or replicate the set, change a few jokes and have a whole new set within minutes.
That's what the linking function will let you do!
For writers, the ability to link facts, characters and locations to a Woubie for a book or article will turn the process of managing hundreds of individual pieces of information from painful to painless.
So, keep on Woubiefying your world and we'll keep you updated on our progress towards Woubie 2.0.
Mat Street - artist, writer, comedian, actor, director. Basically anything that requires creativity, but doesn't include having a regular 9-5 office job or a lot of manual labor.
Matstreet.com was a joint creation between Slam Industries & Mat Street and is subject to frequent changes. The cool stuff is ours; anything you don't like was done by Mat Street. :)
(Click on the image to go directly to Mat Street's web site)
If you're looking for a cool t-shirt, be sure to check out the Store. Mat Street's t-shirts are created using eco-friendly Waterbase Screenprinting (ink soaks directly into the thread). You can't even feel the printing.
Over the course of the past year, while we built and launched Woubie, we learned how to do a lot of things ourselves. If you're a small business owner or self-employed, you understand how important it is to save money by doing as much as you can yourself. We thought it might be fun to share some of what we've learned, so this is the first of our Small Business DIY series.
The most recent trick we learned is how to convert a PowerPoint presentation into a video that you can upload to sharing sites like YouTube & Vimeo and then embed in your web site. Social Media is a great tool for small businesses and it seems that people find it hard to resist at least checking out a video. They're much more likely to watch a short video, even if it's just images & music, than they are to read a whole page describing your product or service.
But making a video can be a daunting task. So we started searching for an alternative and found out that you can create a PowerPoint presentation, complete with animation, and then convert it to video. Here's the first one we made; it took about 2 days to make, mostly because we tested different conversion programs. In the end it cost us nothing except our time.
Here are the basic steps to doing it yourself:
1) Create a PowerPoint presentation around 10 slides long. You don't want the video to be too long & free video converters may limit the number of slides that can be converted per video. It's a good idea to create just two or three slides and convert it to video, so you can see how text looks. we didn't do that and we wound up having to redo the whole presentation because our original text was way too small. 2) Add animation (if you want to). The more animation you add, the bigger the file will be, so keep in mind that you don't want to overdo it. 3) Once you have it ready, time the slide show. If you don't have a stopwatch, use http://www.online-stopwatch.com/. 4) We didn't do a voice recording for our first one; we simply found some open source music that we liked. One of the places you can find out-of-copyright sound recordings is http://www.openmusicarchive.org/ . 5) If the music you found is too short and you want to either loop it or merge two different songs into one MP3, you can download a free MP3 merging program that makes it simple to select two MP3s and merge them into one. The idea is to have a sound file that is about the same length (maybe a few seconds longer) than your slide presentation. 6) After trying several different video converters, the one that worked the best for us was E.M. PowerPoint Video Converter. They have a free version that limits you to 10 slides, but it did a great job and the resulting video was cleaner and clearer than some of the others. The program is easy to use and you can simply select your PPT file, your sound file and click Convert. You have a choice of AVI file or MPG. We tried both and the AVI file was better for us. 7) Upload your file to a video sharing site, such as YouTube. If you don't have an account, it's simple and easy to create one. Once you've uploaded it, you or you webmaster can easily take the code they provide for embedding and insert it into your web site or blog.
The second example in our showcase is a simple and clean PTA web site for a local elementary school. By using the school's existing logo and school colors and gathering some pertinent information from the PTA group and the staff, we were able to complete this site within less than a week of starting the project.
The school's PTA group now has a web site that costs them nothing to host, significantly improves their ability to provide up-to-date information to parents and PTA members and is easy for them to maintain. We also set up a Twitter account and a Facebook Fan page, using the same look & feel for all of them.
Although a good portion of our focus for the past year has been on building our flagship product, Woubie, we've also been working on developing our "ChaoStructured" services.
When we started the company, we intended to hire someone to build our web sites, so that we could focus strictly on the development of Woubie. We had the skill sets to handle what it took to build a program like Woubie, but we hadn't dipped our toes into the design pool. Yet. Then we found out that it would cost us upwards of $2,500 just for one basic web site and it wouldn't even cover everything that we wanted or needed. And since we wanted a company site and a Woubie product site, we quickly realized that it just wasn't going to happen.
So we learned how to do it ourselves. And let me tell you, it was a frustrating and hair-pulling process during which we frequently said, "huh?", "WTF?" and "Maybe if we try...". In the end it was worth it. We've learned several new skill sets and we're proud of the fact that we've literally built everything for our company ourselves. From our Slam logo to Woubie, every design element, web page, support process, tweet, blog, photograph, animation, video, etc was done by one of us.
While we were doing all of this we found that many writers, comedians, small businesses & NPOs would like to have a web presence and make use of social media sites to promote themselves and their business. But like us, they just can't afford to pay what it typically costs. Or, if they do pay to have one built, because of the way web sites are typically built and hosted, they're stuck paying more every time they want to update it.
So we began working on developing a way for those folks to have a well designed, branded web presence at a fraction of the typical cost, which they can maintain and update on their own.
The result is our ChaoStructured Services.
Over the next few weeks we'll be showcasing the sites we've built using this method and showing how easy it is to get your brand out there.
The first site in our showcase is for Freeman Solutions, Inc., a home renovation company with an excellent and well-deserved reputation for impeccable work. Click on the image below to go to the site.
P.S. We're not a hosting company, a marketing company or SEO experts. But we do know some very talented people who are and would be happy to point you in their direction if that's the type of service you're looking for.
(click on the image above to learn more about Morality√Check)
