

Movable Ink Launches Service To Stream Live Content In Emails - mnutt
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/movable-ink-launches-service-to-stream-live-content-in-emails/

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mwexler
Hmm... lots of us in the email marketing world did stuff like this years ago.
Almost every top-flight email marketing vendor can do this today. Perhaps I'm
missing what's the truly new, but customized emails linked to when/where they
are opened crossed by profile variables and up-to-second content like auction
prices is old hat. Looking at the demos, it looks like they either generate an
image live on the fly with whatever content you have linked in, or use GeoIP
to make a map image for local relevance.

Over the years, we found that these features don't always mesh with the
"mental model" folks had about email... so that sometimes, the effort to
create really dynamic content like this didn't really pay off; in some cases,
however, such as auctions, limited offers, and other countdown situations, it
could work really well. Some folks tried to send one mail and tell people
"hey, keep this mail, whenever you open it, it's new!" hoping that they would
go back to it during the day or even across a few days. But it would get
buried in the flood of mail. And many people assume email is static, that what
they saw this morning is what will be there that afternoon. Having it change
(deal of the hour stuff, for example) can really confuse some readers.

So, glad to see that what's old is new again, and I wish these guys luck. I'd
love, however, for someone to point out what's really new compared to the
stuff that's been done in the past. Because yes, the email game could use some
spice, and if it does something really new, perhaps this could help improve
the email experience.

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pfraze
How does it work? I'm in the same boat as jsdalton -- I thought it was't
possible.

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mnutt
The person sending the emails creates a dynamic web page. It can use all of
the latest and greatest web technologies. (AJAX, WebSockets, CSS3, SVG, etc)
Then they create a Web Crop in our dashboard, and we give them an HTML embed
code.

When a user opens the email, it points to an image on our servers. At that
point, we load the dynamic web page, take a screenshot, crop it, and render it
in your browser. But at that point instead of closing the connection, we leave
it open. Every second, we repeat the process, replacing the old image with the
new one.

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pfraze
Crafty! How do you get the image to overwrite? I would think that you could
only append to the image data that's already been transmitted.

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mnutt
Our current method uses the content-type multipart/x-mixed-replace. (Remember
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.03/ff_push.html>? Good times...) When
the request starts you specify a boundary string; then every time the browser
sees that boundary string it knows to replace the existing image.

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draz
it's (very) cool, but x-mixed-replace is not supported in all browsers. I sure
hope the browsers that support it don't end up dropping their support.

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jsdalton
I confess to not understanding how this is possible. Both Javascript and Flash
are severely limited (if not outright blocked) in most email clients. How are
they doing it? And if it's a proprietary technology, is that a good thing?

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datums
It's image swapping every few seconds. The image is based on the clients "Web
Crop". So they update screenshots over and over and over again.

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aarlo
Congrats guys. Very cool product.

We've found lots of opportunity to make email marketing more sophisticated,
and not enough smart engineers thinking about it.

BTW There's a belgian company called 8seconds ( <http://www.8seconds.net/> )
with some similar dynamic-image loading tech, combined with (I think) multi-
armed bandit split testing on the backend.

\- Aarlo from MiraPost

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gsiener
Such an amazing platform. These guys prove that email is far from dead -- it's
the lingua franca of web apps.

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sramov
What is this I don't even...

