Using Social Collaboration to boost business

Social Networks have been a hot topic for a couple of years now, but a few new websites are now taking the online social networking phenomenon one stage further with the concept of social collaboration.

Social collaboration takes the power of social networking and adds an end product – for instance, getting groups of like-minded people to unite behind a common cause.

Many of the social collaboration sites aim to change the world for the better, with petitions, campaigns and charitable causes a common theme.

But they can also be used by businesses to boost sales and increase brand awareness, as two of our client projects proved yesterday.

Wooshare.com is a social collaboration site aiming to bring groups of people together, whether they want to save the planet or to make money.

FeelCreative.com are a leading canvas art print supplier, selling prints online and through their Manchester-based gallery.

They can normally only offer significant price reductions to customers who order a bulk purchase of prints, because bulk buying allows them to negotiate better deals with their suppliers of canvas, frames etc.

However, using Wooshare, they set up a deal where if 20 people pledged to buy a print each, those 20 individual customers would be able to achieve the same benefits as a customer buying in bulk.

Within 24 hours of setting up the 'Wooshare', FeelCreative had got the necessary 20 customers signed up.

That meant that FeelCreative had 20 new orders in one day, and the customers got their prints at a massively reduced rate!

Examples like this show how powerful social collaboration and the internet can be for businesses.

If you’d like a free consultation on how Social Collaboration could be used to boost your business, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help.

Dynamically cropping and resizing images with Flash and GD

We're currently working on a project that uses a combination of Flash and GD/PHP to allow users to upload a photo and crop it dynamically using a Flash interface.

Once the user is happy with the cropped image, they simply click 'save' and GD creates the cropped image and saves it on the server.

The main problem we've come across is that GD requires sufficient memory limits in php.ini for image resizing. If somebody uploads an image that is too big, GD can't process it because it runs out of memory.

In years gone by, the best solution probably would have been to set a size limit for uploaded photos of 500kb.

However with digital cameras and phone cameras becoming increasingly powerful, more and more of our users are uploading much larger files, and a limit of 500kb just isn't really enough.

So luckily we can use an .htaccess file to increase the memory allocation and allow GD to process larger images.

We've added the following line of code to an .htaccess file in the folder with the PHP/GD script:

php_value memory_limit 128M

That solved the problem and means that our visitors can now create thumbnails from images of up to 2Mb in size.