meowkitty’s Neighborhood

The eagle-eyed among you might have spotted this already, but for those who had to blink at some point yesterday - MOO's launched Business Cards! As so many of you have asked for the MOO MiniCard magic just that little bit bigger, we felt duty bound to indulge you. MOO Business Cards are a similar size to standard business cards, but with some very cool differences: Unlike lots of business cards, MOO gives you the option of a different image on every one. Using magic technology we've decided to call 'PrintFinity', you can have a different photo, logo or design on every card. So, when people ask you what you do, you can show them - everything! It's a little portfolio in your pocket, a product catalogue, a trading card, anything you like. You can buy your Business Cards in super-short runs We're an experienced bunch at MOO HQ. We've all worked in different companies before, and we still have the business cards to prove it. The traditional way is to buy business cards in batches of 250, 500, even 1000 or more, and no matter how hard you network, its impossible to get through so many before something changes - your phone number, your job title or even the company you work for. We realised if we still have stacks of old cards sitting about, you probably have too. So, we give you the option to buy in smaller batches of 50: - it's more economical (much less waste) - it gives you the chance to update your cards as you update your products or your details - it's greener - even if you're using virgin stock, at least you're not throwing it away! And talking of 'green' - there are now two paper stock options available We're slightly obsessed with paper at MOO, and take a great deal of care looking for the best paper, with the best feel, print quality and outstanding credentials. We've decided on two different stocks for our Business Cards: MOO 'Classic' - which is sustainably sourced and elemental chlorine free. Matt-laminated, it has a smooth and sturdy feel. It's the same stock you've seen and loved on MiniCards. MOO 'Green' - which is 100% recycled, 100% recyclable and biodegradeable. It's totally chlorine free, uncoated, crisp white, and prints nicer than any other recycled paper we've seen. (And we've seen a lot.) The cards come beautifully packaged Every pack of cards comes with a free Business Card holder. Designed by MOO, the box is made of recycled pulp board and fits in a briefcase or bag. We've even included two (recycled) dividers too, so as you empty the box of your own cards, you can fill it up with the ones you're given, without mixing them up. (Another problem we've had ourselves, that we thought it would be good to fix). So, there you have it. MOO Business Cards - as nice as MiniCards, but bigger, and a little bit different. We like them, and we hope you'll like them too. Oh! And if you want to see what other people have been doing, check out our ideas pages. See what other people have made, and how you could use the cards yourself.

Our first intern has flown the nest. We knew this day would come - it's kind of what interns do I suppose, but it doesn't make it any better. Rui, who we introduced all those months ago has got a brand new job back in Japan. On the one hand, we're really happy for her - the job sounds great - but we can't help feeling a wee bit sorry for ourselves.

But, we shall let her speak for herself:

"Hi Moosters,
It's very sad to announce that I have to leave MOO and cannot be one of the MOO staffs any more. I found a career opportunity at an international organisation, which deals with environmental problems in Japan. In spite of my position as a temporary staff, I stayed at MOO for a quite while, because MOO is very comfortable and I love all the MOOsters.  

The MOO community is so cool, creative, kind, nice, supportive... well, I need 100 pages to describe how great you are. Thank you very much for all your supports, and wish you the best luck! Arigato!"

Rui, we will miss you! We've got someone waiting in the wings to continue your Japanese blog, but you know what? You're a tough act to follow! Please keep in touch.

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And now, after after the rain, some sunshine. Julien, our guitar-hero-playing French intern has been getting out and about on MOO's behalf.

Before we start, this photo might help you get a better feeling of Julien, and how he's getting on at MOO. He's the one with his hands in the air... (The one with the green glasses is Jakob - and you'll be hearing more about him soon).

And here's what Julien has to say:

"I wanted to share with you some of the things I've been doing as the (official!) French MOO ambassador. Well, I went back to France last week-end, and as I wanted to present MOO to a lot of people (I haven't left my MiniCard Holder the whole week-end... just in case), I've attended a very cool bloggers' event – and MOO were 'sponsors' too.

We were around 30 people, discussing geeky stuff and gossips about the blogosphere. We spoke a lot, had (a few) drinks, and it was very very interesting. A lot of French bloggers already know us, but the ones who didn't were really (positively) surprised. Have a look at some pictures! And you can learn more about it on the French MOO blog.

It was a real pleasure,

Julien."

We announced MOO's API the other week - which allows people with just a little tech knowledge to create cool apps that integrate with MOO's process. If you don't have the tech knowledge but still fancy making something cool, you could try using Photoshop instead.

Two talented MOOsters, Dawn Mikulich and Aral Balkan have posted their creative Photoshop templates online. Each produce very different, but very cool results.

First up, Dawn. A talented photographer based in Chicago, Dawn recently made this set of MiniCards:

With beautiful bright images, the cards are split into sections, perfectly showcasing several photos at once. Dawn has kindly put the template online - and it sounds like it's going down a treat! If you use it, do let us know in the comments, we'd love to see how your cards turnout.

Next up, Aral. You might remember him from last year. He made MiniCards featuring the code needed to get the 100 most recent photos from Flickr into Flash, using SWX. They're very cool - take a look

This time, he's been making mosaics. (MOOsaics? Gah!)  
Here's a photo, taken by Relly so you can see what I mean:

Aral's online template is pre-set to the correct dimensions, and is 'sliced for your convenience'. All you need to do is import your photo, make sure it fits in the document correctly and 'Save for Web'.

jenschr has already tried it out - and got a great result:

Again, if you make cards like this, let us know!

And finally, many congratulations to MOO customer, Yves Snoeren. The Snoren's have recently had a new addition to the family, in the shape of a beautiful baby girl. There's been no time to waste since the birth however, as Yves has been racing about creating the birth announcements! With custom M&M's and a cute little teddy, all that was missing was something small and funky, with the details. Luckily, MiniCards did the trick:

and they didn't do it just the once - but many times!

Congratulations, from everyone at MOO :)

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Ps - our Flickr pool recently got it's 6000th member! Congrats to Katie Strang... Now, who'll be the 10,000th?

It's funny when you look round, realise your CEO isn't here, and only figure out where he's gone by reading the national press. Luckily for us, the mention is in a broadsheet, and no, Richard isn't embroiled in some tabloid fiasco. He's been at the Webby's!

The mention was in the British paper, The Guardian, where UK blogger Zoe Margolis was live blogging the event. Richard was there to pick up the People's Voice Award (that's you) for Best Service (that's us). It was super cool for us to even be nominated, let alone win, so we can only thank you again.

The Webby's are famous for various things, not least the fact they insist on 5 word acceptance speech. We were pleased to hear Richard used his 5 words wisely. Zoe reports:

"Next up, the British Moo.com: "They said print was dead." Classy: us Brits rule, clearly."

Classy? Us? Well... You know.

One last thing, before we stop showing off, the award itself:

And while we're on the subject of print, and it's lack of being dead, look!

Yes, believe. It's chocolate, but printed with little versions of the MOO logo. No, we're not branching out in business, just in waistline. Dan, king of the MOO Warehouse has friends in high places. His lovely friend Angela, who works for T Shirt Patisserie, made us these as a special treat. This shot is actually nothing short of a miracle, because seconds later, all the white chocolate truffles you see there were... gone.

One of those rare posts from the technology department. I'm very pleased to announce the MOO API. The API allows those with some programming skills to write programs that can specify all the data required to make an MOO product (including fully variable images AND text), and then redirect a user to the checkout process for that product.

At present, the API is in beta - we think it's mostly done, but we might make a few changes before we 'go 1.0'. We expect any changes to be backward-compatible at this point. What's more, when we go 1.0, we'll be sharing revenue back with the API key holders (and we'll backdate for any packs made during the beta period). The exact revenue structure is still being worked on, and we'll announce it nearer the time.

At moo.com/api, you can sign up to play, find the documentation, and join the developer's mailing list.

So, what can I do with it?

Simply, if you have some images that you want people to be able to print, you can build an integration to connect up to MOO.

I'm more excited by things that people will make that we haven't thought of, but here's some things that have been done:

I hooked up the TheyWorkForYou.com API to our API to produce a stats-based political trading card game, a project I've been meaning to do for about 5 years now.

Dan Coulter (of phpFlickr fame) has written a PHP wrapper library that makes building MOO API applications really very simple indeed, and a couple of sample apps

Basic - add some images, make a pack. Basic, indeed.
Mosaic - takes a big picture and makes pack of minicard tiles from it.
Rainbow - makes a pack out of your most interesting flickr photos, sorted by colour.

Alberto from Tagmore has a 3D barcode sticker generator.

I'm looking forward to many more!

Enjoy.

Did you notice we've changed a bit? We've got a bit wider, got a snazzy new homepage (featuring some great photos from our fantastic customers) and best of all, we've made it easier to browse about and go shopping!

Yes, we've given Ready Made a bit of a facelift, which means it's now much easier to view designer packs of cards or stickers and treat yourself (or your friends) to something really special.

(Like these colourful NoteCards, from Kevin Meredith

or these retro pattern MiniCards, by Rachel Cave)

If you've never seen MOO Ready Made at all before, we will forgive you - it was a bit hidden. Basically, it's packs of cards or stickers designed by our wonderful designers. But rather than mixing and matching, you can buy complete packs, and personalise them as you would a pack made with your own images.

This is great for 2 main reasons I think...
1) Designer images are perfect for those times when you realise your own photos are rubbish - or if not rubbish, perhaps just not quite right.

You might take some lovely holiday snaps, but they're not always what you want to hand over to a potential new client. "Yes, call me, we'll do lunch. Here's a shot of me in a bikini... Oh no, err hang on. Me on a donkey? Yes, I'm a professional accountant, I just umm..."

2) Making personal gifts is really nice. A beautiful pack greeting cards for your mum, or slightly evil postcards for your brother is a great gift. Especially when you can add your own personal message to the back - which is big enough to make them feel special when they see it, but not so large they wont be able to use the cards for sending out to their own friends.

So do have a browse around, and see what our talented designers have been up to. But before you go, here's a few of my own favourites.

Colin Johnson MiniCards - bright, weird and wonderful!

Marc Johns Stickers - a whimsical look at life. (Makes me snigger.)

Nut and Bee Postcards, gentle, cute, and great for the young, or young at heart.

Andrea Joseph Greeting Cards. (Just the way I'd like to draw if I ever get off this computer!)

Puppies! By Fotolia - yes, I'm a 'dog person' - but there are kittens, for you weirdo 'cat people'...

We've moved! Not that far away from our previous office, but far enough to require a full investigation into local pubs and sandwich shops. I'll keep you posted if we find anything spectacular. Our previous office was very nice - host to a lot of food...

a lot of birthdays...

Some sad times...

And some happier times...

We packed MiniCard Holders there:

We locked our CTO in the cupboard and refused to let him out,

All in all, we worked really hard.

But now, on to bigger and better things! Look at all this space:

It's quite overwhelming...

Luckily we have tanks, to help with our global domination plan:

And, umm... this:

But, you know. We're sure it'll all be fine.

In the meantime, we have a new member of the MOO crew. The wonderful Julien - a special intern from France! He's helping out with our localisation, and marketing initiatives. He's also set up a French Facebook group for us, and he's keeping a French MOO blog, too.

But enough of me talking, I'll let Julien speak for himself...

Hi everyone!

So I'm Julien, and I'm working at MOO as an intern since the beginning of April. And I'm French! I study management in a French Business School which is also based in London. I've been living here since September, and will move to Paris next September. I don't come from Paris but from Nantes, a wonderful city close to the Atlantic Ocean. And I really miss it sometimes.

My role at MOO is to help the marketing team and to breathe life into the French MOOers' community. If you speak French (even just a few words, we don't mind!), just have a look at my blog, or at our Facebook group. Feel free to participate, leave a message or post pictures, to show the French all what you do with your cards and stickers!

Bonjour tout le monde!

Bienvenue à tous ! Je m'appelle donc Julien, et je suis stagiaire chez MOO depuis le début du mois d'avril. J'étudie dans une école de commerce française qui a aussi un campus à Londres, et j'habite donc à Londres depuis septembre dernier. Mais je viens de la belle ville de Nantes, qui d'ailleurs me manque beaucoup.

Mon rôle ici chez MOO est non seulement d'aider l'équipe marketing dans ses tâches quotidiennes, mais aussi de promouvoir MOO en France et de bâtir, avec vous, une communauté francophone autour de votre utilisation des MiniCards, StickerBooks et autres articles MOO. Vous pouvez donc me retrouver sur mon blog (pour en savoir plus sur MOO et moi, et vous!), ainsi que sur le groupe Facebook qui vous est dédié. N'hésitez pas à nous y rejoindre, et à laisser des messages, images, photos... Ce groupe est fait pour vous ! Vous pourrez également y retrouver les dernières actualités, en français, sur MOO.

As some of you might've already spotted, we've 'localised'! What does that mean? Well, it means MOO is now available in more than one language. Since launch, MOO has shipped to countries all over the world, and little-by-little we've been learning, so we can speak to you in your own language too.

So far, MOO has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish and German. If your browser is already set for one of these languages, it should automatically appear in the language of your choice. If it's not, you can switch languages by clicking the links at the bottom of every page.

As I've already mentioned, we are still learning, so if you spot something a bit odd please do let us know. We might be a bit embarrassed, but we'll do what we can to fix it!

In the mean time - welcome everyone! Pull up a chair, and make yourself feel at home.

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Eh oui, certains d'entre vous l'ont probablement déjà remarqué : nous avons procédé à la 'localisation' de notre site ! Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire ? Eh bien, maintenant MOO est disponible dans plusieurs langues. Depuis son lancement, MOO a expédié ses produits dans le monde entier et petit à petit, nous avons commencé à apprendre et désormais nous parlons votre langue.

A l'heure actuelle, MOO a été traduit en Français, Italien, Espagnol et Allemand. Si votre navigateur est déjà paramétré pour l'une de ces langues, le site devrait automatiquement s'afficher dans la langue de votre choix. Sinon, vous pouvez la sélectionner en cliquant sur l'un des liens en bas de chaque page.

Comme je l'ai déjà indiqué, nous continuons notre apprentissage alors si vous remarquez des trucs bizzares, n'hésitez pas à nous les signaler. Nous serons peut-être un peu gênés mais nous nous efforcerons de corriger cela !

D'ici là – bienvenue à tous ! Asseyez-vous et faites comme chez vous.

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Wie einige vielleicht schon bemerkt haben, ist unsere Seite jetzt übersetzt! Was das heißt? Naja, das heißt, dass es MOO jetzt in mehreren Sprachen gibt. Seit unserem Launch hat MOO seine Produkte in alle Welt verschickt, und wir haben immer ein bisschen dazu gelernt. Also können wir jetzt auch in deiner Sprache kommunizieren.

Bisher wurde MOO.com ins Französische, Italienische, Spanische und Deutsche übersetzt. Wenn du deinen Browser bereits für eine dieser Sprachen eingestellt hast, solltest du die Seite automatisch in der Sprache deiner Wahl lesen können. Wenn nicht, kannst du mittels der Links am Ende jeder Seite die Sprache ändern.

Wie schon erwähnt lernen wir noch. Wenn dir also irgendetwas merkwürdig erscheinen sollte, lass es uns bitte wissen. Das wäre uns zwar ein bisschen peinlich, aber wir tun natürlich was wir können, um den Fehler zu beheben!

Derweil heißen wir alle herzlich willkommen! Schnapp' dir einen Stuhl und fühl' dich wie zu Hause.

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Come alcuni avranno già notato, il nostro sito è stato "localizzato"! Ciò significa che MOO è ora disponibile in diverse lingue. A partire dall'inaugurazione del sito, MOO ha effettuato consegne in tutto il mondo e, poco a poco, ha imparato a parlare anche la tua lingua.

Finora, MOO è stato tradotto in francese, italiano, spagnolo e tedesco. Se il tuo browser è già impostato su una di queste lingue, il sito verrà automaticamente visualizzato nella lingua selezionata. In caso contrario, puoi cambiare la lingua facendo clic sui collegamenti visualizzati in fondo a ogni pagina.

Come abbiamo già detto, stiamo ancora perfezionando l'aspetto linguistico, quindi se trovi qualcosa di strano, ti preghiamo di segnalarcelo. Faremo tutto il possibile per risolvere il problema!

Nel frattempo, ti diamo un caloroso benvenuto! Qui ti sentirai come a casa tua.

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Como algunos de vosotros ya habréis notado, ¡hemos "localizado" nuestro sitio web! ¿Qué significa esto? Pues significa que MOO ahora está disponible en varios idiomas. Desde que empezamos, MOO ha realizado envíos a países de todo el mundo y, poco a poco, hemos ido aprendiendo, por lo que ahora también podemos ofrecerte nuestro servicio en tu idioma.

Hasta ahora, MOO se ha traducido a los siguientes idiomas: francés, italiano, español y alemán. Si tu explorador ya está establecido para alguno de estos idiomas, debería mostrarte automáticamente el sitio web en el idioma de tu elección. Si no es así, puedes cambiar de idioma haciendo clic en los enlaces al final de cada página.

Como ya hemos mencionado, todavía estamos aprendiendo, por lo que si detectas algo raro, te agradeceríamos que nos lo comunicaras. Nos sacarás los colores, pero haremos lo posible por arreglarlo.

Entretanto, ¡bienvenidos a todos! Poneos cómodos en vuestras sillas y sentiros como en casa.

Thanks so much to everyone who voted for MOO in the People's Voice Webby Awards! We're very pleased to announce that with your help, we won the People's Voice vote in the 'Services' category. It means a lot to us, because - panels aside - it's actually you (the people) we're doing this for.

So, champagne all round! Or in our case, at 10 in the morning in London, a cup of tea. We might even go crazy and grab ourselves a biscuit too! Cheers!

A few weeks ago we invited you all to take part in our Sticker Design Competition.  And you did, and how!  We had over 600 designs submitted to the competition over at Pixish, including designs, illustration, photographs and mixed media images.  

From the funny to the beautiful to the downright odd, we were delighted with the entries and had a tough time whittling down the list to our top 90 images.  But we did, and we'll soon be selling a limited edition StickerBook with the winning designs.  (Check back next week for an 'on sale now' announcement on the blog.)

The Grand Prize winner is Ines Maldonado with her 'moustache' design.  Ines has won £100 of Magma vouchers.  All the winners who have had one or more image selected to be in the StickerBook will get a Flickr Pro account, and will be e-mailed with their prize soon, so well done to everyone who won and thank you to everyone who took part.

The list of the winners are below*, and if you want to see which images have made it into the pack, pop over to Pixish and scroll through all the submitted images to find the ones flagged as winners.

*What a clever, creative bunch you all are.