We are pleased to announce a new member to our management team. High-tech industry veteran Paul Smith has joined CodeBaby as the Director of Marketing.

Smith has more than 27 years of experience in Internet software marketing and sales. He is an accomplished executive bringing a rich history of helping organizations accelerate their revenue growth.

At his previous position, he was the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at BlueStreak Connect. As to his future goals at CodeBaby, Smith said, “This year I would like to solidify the marketing team, build a scalable structure, and help the sales team to attain 120 percent of its sales goal.”

Smith is a former intercollegiate basketball star earning a varsity letter for all four years, and leading as team captain for two at Fordham University in Bronx, New York.

In his spare time, Smith likes to read, hike, spend time at the beach and play golf.

With the start of a new year, we wanted to start sharing the success stories of our customers.  We have so many partnerships that continue to show dramatic results, but we thought we would start close to home with the business story of Denver-based stained glass company, Scottish Stained Glass.

Trained in Scotland, Martin Faith, Scottish Stained Glass Owner, has produced high quality custom stained glass for more than 25 years.  In economic times when some homeowners are choosing to put off home improvements, Faith wanted a new and engaging way to market his company.

“I’ve tried hundreds of different marketing ideas over the years.  I think as soon as I saw a CodeBaby on a website, I realized the potential client would be far more engaged by a CodeBaby then it could have ever be on a static website,” said Martin Faith, Scottish Stained Glass Owner.

Within a week of the interactive “Martin” CodeBaby on the company’s website, the results were dramatic.  The lead capture rate of prospective clients more than doubled.  Additionally the time spent by prospective clients on the site increased affecting Faith’s bottom line with an average of two conversions a day.

For more information, visit www.scottishstainedglass.com.  To experience the Scottish Stain Glass story, check out this video.

We’re pleased to announce a new staffing addition to our Colorado Springs office. Effective immediately, Dennis McGuire takes over as CodeBaby’s Chief Operating Officer.

McGuire brings more than 20 years of experience in the areas of business management, marketing, and sales.  Most recently, he held the position of Vice President of Star B2B, a start up business unit of Star Marketing, which is a division of $13B Omnicom group.  While at Star B2B, he developed new business strategies and improved operational efficiencies and profitabilities.  Prior to that, he was the VP and General Manager at Protocol Marketing and was a founding partner and General Manager of Saligent.

“I’m excited about the product and the unique solution that CodeBaby provides.  I look forward to growing the company globally and helping to ramp up the operations,” said Dennis McGuire.

The Colorado Springs Gazette featured McGuire’s addition and CodeBaby’s ongoing business growth in its Business Section.  To read the entire story, click here.

CodeBaby plans to make additional staffing announcements in the upcoming weeks.

One of the common questions we get at CodeBaby is “Why use digital characters for enhancing online customer experience?”  Followed closely by, “What makes for the most effective digital characters, and is more realistic better?”

Turns out, there is decades of research and findings on these questions that go all the way back to the 1970s and a foundational researcher in Japan named Masahiro Mori.  The computer gaming industry and the movie industry have been drawing on this research for years.  But it’s also relevant to what we do with CodeBaby Conversations to enhance the online customer experience.  After all, we’re counting on our digital characters to make a connection with customers.

Mori’s research correlated two factors, emotional attraction (familiarity) and realism of a robot or digital character (human likeness). Now what you might naturally reason is that as realism increases, so does the level of emotional attraction and engagement.  Based on this, if you graph the results, with Attraction on the vertical axis, and Realism on the horizontal axis, you might naturally expect a line that goes up and to the right.  But that’s not what Mori discovered.

Turns out that as humans we are more attracted and more emotionally engaged with a digital likeness up to a point.  But as the realism increases, at a certain point, the attraction actually plummets.  And in fact, it plummets into a dynamic of actual revulsion.  Only as realism increases dramatically do you regain attraction to a level approaching and ultimately surpassing the point of rapid decline.  The graph here represents these findings, and you can see that the actual “S” curve that represents the findings. Picking up on some earlier psychology concepts, Mori referred to this as the “uncanny valley”.

In the game space, this is sometimes referred to casually as the “valley of creepy”.  And even as I say that, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about.  Even though it seems logical that human attraction would increase as realism increases, you probably recognize at a very guttural, pre-cognitive level this phenomenon of revulsion.  In fact, I’ve often heard people talk about seeing something that is highly realistic, but just not quite right, “It makes your skin crawl,” or “It just creeps me out.”  Two places currently lead the way on advancing this line of research.  One is Indiana University, with leading researcher Dr. Karl F McDorman.  The other is a team of researchers at the University of Southern California Institute for Computer Technologies, led by Dr Randy Hill.  Both are doing ground breaking, fascinating work.

So what about popular examples?  Take for instance the movie “The Polar Express.”  When I ask people, I get about 50% who think the movie is just creepy.  And about 50% think it’s winsome.  Take a quick look.  What about you?

I often times say “Shrek” is approaching the pinnacle of the S curve.  Clearly, Shrek isn’t human.  And yet I consistently hear people say they “love Shrek”.

It’s interesting to watch the trends in movies today.  The two masterpieces of fully animated, computer generated movies today are “UP” and “Avatar.”  And they take very different approaches.  ”UP” is clearly staying to the left of the uncanny valley.  It uses caricature, cartoon style characters but generates a strong emotional response.

In contrast, “Avatar” uses the most highly realistic art, animation and computer generated techniques, and I believe makes a similarly powerful emotional connection … and apparently the general public agrees based on the box office results.

The movie uses a compositing technique that blends human actors and computer generated characters, the Na’vi.  I think a big part of the reason why the movie works is because the CG characters aren’t “human” but very personally engaging.  Again the Na’vi CG characters aren’t human, but are emotionally believable and engaging.

At CodeBaby, we are grappling with these very same issues.  Given the nature of technology we can deliver to a browser on the internet, we are being very careful to make sure our CodeBaby Conversations® and CodeBaby Characters® are as engaging as possible, without ending up in the Uncanny Valley.

Over the past 8 months, we’ve been busy on some cool new toys. And next week, we’ll begin revealing these shiny new trinkets to the world.

We’ve spent our time and energy on exciting new technologies to enhance our ability to make the human connection in our digital world. These projects range from internal capabilities (to improve customer service and deliver) to new applications and tools for our customers to eventually use. Here’s a taste of what’s coming soon:

Art

Our team of artists has developed a new CodeBaby character system that allows for a wide range of shapes and sizes of characters. Our character catalogue has admittedly lacked diversity on several fronts. That being said, the new art assets will expand our options and capabilities drastically.

PLEASE NOTE: We haven’t yet expanded the official CodeBaby Character Catalog that comes with CodeBaby Studio, but now have the opportunity to do so. If you have Production Studio 3.1, we’ll push these updates to you directly via the Automatic Updater. Coming very soon to a Production Studio near you!

Animation

Our artists have also been improving our tool set to leverage the latest animation tools and techniques. Our new animations will be much more accurate, effective, and [the ultimate goal being] more emotionally engaging for the end viewer. We’re leveraging motion capture and IK (“inverse kinematics”) to bring our CodeBaby characters to life in new and dynamic ways. We’ve improved the interoperability of these existing technologies with our proprietary environment.

Product: CodeBaby Suite (Beta)

Our team of Product folks have worked so hard on a cool new SaaS web application that will allow our Web customers to create and manage CodeBaby Conversations. CodeBaby Suite (in Beta) takes the process that we’ve developed internally and allows users to do it themselves. The application features three key elements: PLAN, CREATE, and DELIVER. More on CodeBaby Suite in the next post! PLEASE NOTE: CodeBaby Suite will be available to a few Web customers January 12. Contact us for more info.

We’re proud of our team and all the hard work that’s gone into our new tools and toys. If you have any questions about these new projects, let us know.

A company’s worst nightmare: An employee has tweeted about an internal corporate “incident”. The tweets hit the blogosphere, then the news. In one fell swoop, years of corporate image management are down the drain.

Faced with this scenario, some organizations go to the extreme by internally banning social media sites (like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr) without planning for external ramifications. Others, like CodeBaby, communicate a consistent social media policy addressing the dos and don’ts of online etiquette. They do this while embracing and even encouraging social media to build relationships with consumers and industry associates. But like any powerful tool, it demands responsibility. To avoid a PR tragedy, savvy organizations must proactively manage their employees’ social media behavior.

So how do they do it? In a recent example profiled by Adam Ostrow at Mashable, Telstra, Australia’s telecoms giant, developed a firm-wide, online module to set proper expectations about social media engagement. Telstra trains its 40,000 employees using CodeBaby interactive characters in a Flash comic book format. Now part of their Learn.Achieve mandatory online education program, The 3 Rs training featuring CodeBaby interactive character ‘Lily’ and friends entertain and inform learners on the meaning of Representation, Responsibility and Respect of social media. If you’re curious about how to approach this topic at your workplace or looking for some creative eLearning ideas, it’s well worth taking a look at Telstra’s approach to social media.

To see their full interactive social media training, go here.  Below is an extract.

As I wrote in a previous post, Social Media is at the center of our marketing strategy. What’s more, I am active as “Chief Evangelistic Officer” of the company. I/we are active on Twitter. We use Linkedin as a community gathering place. And we have an active blog as a place for us to share what we’re learning and thinking. Again, it takes a lot of time, energy, and persistence to do it well.

That leads me to what has become a persistent, personal question as CEO of CodeBaby. Namely, how much time should a CEO spend on Social Media? As I’m in conversation with other CEOs and as I’m reading blogs, I realize I’m not the only CEO or Senior Executive asking this question. So I thought it might be useful to do a bit of quick research on the question.  I’ve pulled together a quick and simple online survey to get your input. Just click on the button at the end of this blog to give us your opinion.

In a couple weeks, we’ll post the results. I know I’m interested in hearing what all of you think.  I suspect you share my interest in answering this common question, “How much time should a CEO spend on Social Media?” Click here to take the quick survey.

CodeBaby is one of a growing number of companies approaching marketing very differently.  Specifically, we have adopted an “Inbound Marketing” model by tuning all our messages, content, and presence on the internet to draw people to our ideas, value, and conversation.  This leads many of the people who get our tweets, blogs, and website to be ultimately interested in our product.  But we don’t start there.  Instead, we start by effectively engaging prospective customers and influencers with our ideas and content.  Yes, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plays a role, but so does Social Media.

To fully understand why we utilize Social Media, it helps to know that CodeBaby is in a rather unique situation.  If we ask a person in the online world if they want a CodeBaby on their website, more often than not what we’d get is puzzled expressions. And if we just say, “You know, do you want an avatar on your website?” then we’d further complicate matters for two reasons.

First, there have been a bunch of bad examples of Avatars that have polluted and confused the market, main among these being Microsoft Clippy. And second, what we do with digital characters online, and the conversations we create to optimize online customer experience and drive results through emotional engagement is not widely understood. Of course, once we explain a bit and tell the theory of what we do and results we’re getting, then we have great success with customers. But at this point, it requires a bit of explaining and showing. That’s what you’d expect from a company that’s creating a new category.

So we clearly know that to make CodeBaby a game changing, category making company we need to do some early market, evangelistic work. Social Media is perfect for this type of engagement, and as the CEO, I’m not just active in strategy and execution, but in advancing the conversation and ideas for emotionally engaging customers in the online customers space. In fact, my CEO acronym has multiple meanings at CodeBaby, where I am officially both Chief Executive Officer and Chief Evangelistic Officer.

So how does Social Media and Inbound Marketing fit in your company strategy? Interested in your comments.

Greeting from San Jose, CA! Booth 102 to be exact. (If you’re here, stop by and say ‘hi.’) Members of the Marketing team have joined the throngs of eLearning folks at this years Devlearn 2009, a major event for the eLearning industry held every year by The eLearning Guild. This year we’re in San Jose at the Fairmont. (Very nice!) Participants learn about the latest trends and technology in hopes of improving how they train and skill employees.

We found a sweet booth at #102, right near the entrance in hopes of finding new customers. Audrey throws the net over ‘em and I wrestle them into the booth. Here is a picture of our booth.  Our strapping CTO, Tony Delollis, was able to join us for the first day. He’s the one with coffee in his hand (anyone familiar with Tony is not surprised by such a sight).

Our software, Production Studio, has found a nice home with this crowd. eLearning designers have seen how a CodeBaby digital character can really bring their training content to life to engage their participants. We came to the show in pursuit of new customers and to also improve our visibility within the space. Also, as product marketers, it’s a great opportunity to get a feel for the eLearning market, how they buy/shop for technology, and what excites them. This type of on-site research is invaluable to us in product marketing.

“So how’s it going?” As my friends Bill and Ted would say, “Totally excellent!” We’re actually running out of materials and hand-outs due to the high level of traffic and engagement we’re experiencing with attendees. People are finding our demos interesting and relevant. (Shout out to the CodeBaby Creative and Art teams for your help in preparation!) We’re doing a raffle for a limited Production Studio license, and it garnered tons of entries in the first day alone. We also have a customer, Dave Ragan from Taco Bell, presenting today. He’s talking about how they train their tens of thousands of employees, a process which includes use of our technology: a CodeBaby character named ‘Tracy.’