September 2, 2010

Idea To Reality – 1mil4mke.com

For the past two weeks I’ve been consumed with “vote getting” for a competition by Kohl’s. I won’t spent too much time talking about it (because you’ve probably heard it from me already) but Kohl’s is giving away $10,000,000 to the 20 schools that get the most votes on Facebook. Go vote if you haven’t yet! It’ll take you 5 minutes or so.

When I originally heard about this competition (Aug. 10th) the #1 school had less than 30,000 votes. Divide that figure by 5 because each person can vote 5 times per school and that’s only 6,000 people voting. That number actually shocked me. Facebook supposedly has 150 million active users in the US (see Facebook Stats). The competition had already been running for about a month (it started Jul. 7th) and THAT was all the votes #1 had? 6,000 people out of 150 million? For $500,000?! The numbers, in my humble opinion, didn’t stack up.

I expressed interest to St. Marcus about wanting to help, brainstormed a little bit throughout the week and “officially” started working on the project the following Monday (August 16th).

The Idea

The first thing I noticed was that there were two schools from Milwaukee in the top 50. I figured the best way to get people to vote would be making it about Milwaukee and not the individual schools. What came to mind was making a landing page with information about the competition, buttons to share the page, and instructions on how to vote. It was also important to stress the idea of keeping $1 million in the region (the Kohl’s company headquarters is right next to Milwaukee).

I juggled a bunch of different domain names in my mind, but nothing seemed good enough. Later that night (Wednesday, Aug. 11th) POOF! It comes to me. 1mil4mil.com! It was perfect! (At least I thought so at the time :) .) I grabbed my notebook and scribbled this:

Late Night Scribbles

Late Night Scribbles

I initially thought Keep reading →

August 27, 2010

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August 20, 2010

$5,000 – How Should We Spend It?

I meant to make a video/blog about this earlier in the week, but… Things have been pretty crazy. Let me give you the back story… Oh! And Chinese lessons will start up again the week after the competition is over (September 8th).

The Project

Last week I heard about a contest that the company Kohl’s is having. They’re giving away ten million dollars ($10,000,000) to 20 different schools. Every school in the country is competing to win five-hundred thousand dollars ($500,000). The money is going to go to the 20 schools that get the most votes during their campaign. There’s an awesome school here in Milwaukee (St. Marcus) that was already in the top 50 schools and they want to use the money to help with expansion.

I got all excited because it was an “epic” project to work on (you know how I love epic projects). So ever since last week I’ve been brainstorming ways for them to win, and all of this week I’ve been putting videos and webpages together. (One page being a contest to win an Xbox 360 Slim, go vote and sign up if you haven’t yet!)

The Money

Now… You know me (or you should!) I was prepared to go into bipolar-epic-manic-LETS-DO-THIS mode without Keep reading →

August 5, 2010

Improving The Livemocha.com Mandarin Chinese Speaking Exercises

I expressed some dissatisfaction about some aspects of Livemocha.com‘s service in a tweet and they tweeted back to me:

Livemocha: @miltownkid thanks! we are happy to fix any errors. can you identify the course/unit/lesson number?

I could try to express myself in 140 characters on Twitter, but I thought this could be useful information for them and anyone following my Chinese lessons because I plan on having you use Livemocha in the future (for pronunciation practice).

The two problems I have with the speaking exercises are Keep reading →

August 4, 2010

Pinyin Initials

[Combinations of initials and finals from Pinyin.info]

Alright. In today’s (laid back on the couch) lesson I went into more depth on pinyin initials. Most sounds in Mandarin are made up of initials and finals (but you know this already as we covered it last week when I introduced initials and finals. ;) )

I’ll quickly cover everything I covered in the video in this blog post.

Listening to and Pronouncing All of the Initials

You can Keep reading →