Archive for December, 2011

Startups and booze. It’s a thing.

Posted by on December 21, 2011

Leave it to the mobile developer with a gaming background to introduce the alcohol…

As we settle into our new office (updates on that later), we’ve started to piece together all the cliche and necessary components a start up needs… A Nurf armory, a skateboard, a dashboard with up-to-the-second analytics… and now, thanks in part to the holidays, we’ve got adult beverages.

I was out of the office yesterday when I got this:

Today… We’ve gone multicultural with Scotch and Samosas (Yeah, Scotch and Samosas… so good!):

So yes we work nutty hours because we really, really care about what we’re doing and how our users feel about it. We’re running a no-fat team where our amazing founders put our Ikea desks together themselves. We don’t have a super fancy office. We don’t have little corporate luxuries. We don’t even have a sink. But what PunchTab does have is a crazy awesome team of talented people that I feel super lucky to work with. And now. We’ve got booze. (Thanks Ben!)

Even amongst the piles of empty monitor boxes and a half put together couch, things are feeling complete around here.

I’m feeling compelled to go girly tomorrow… Mimosas anyone?

The French intern's induction.

 

Comments: 72

12 Days of Christmas Giveaway: Win a $50 Amazon Gift Card

Posted by on December 13, 2011

While Lords of Leaping and Ladies Dancing may have been fun in the 1800′s, we thought we’d put a modern spin on the 12 Days of Christmas. As much as we labored over a list of 12 spectacular prizes, we decided we’d keep it simple.

For 12 days we’ll be giving away $50 Gift Cards to Amazon. Simply to spread the holiday cheer and to get you guys to try out our new giveaway widget. It’s in beta testing and we want to know what you think.

So give it a whirl and enter to win while you’re at it. The giveaway starts now and ends the day after Christmas so you’ll probably have to keep the gift card for yourself. ;-)

Happy Holidays from the PunchTab Team!

Comments: 105

Big News from Twitter!

Posted by on December 10, 2011

When we read on Mashable about all the cool new things that Twitter is rolling out. We thought we should share:

Along with Twitter’s redesign announcement Thursday, the service has rolled out a new way to let website owners embed tweets that give visitors the ability to reply, retweet and favorite without leaving the page. Twitter users now can place embeddable tweets on their websites by simply using one line of code. A single-click action also lets visitors follow the creator of a tweet… (read more)

We think this whole embedded Tweet thing is pretty dang cool- Twitter’s Brian Ellin walks users through a quick how-to in his recent blog post.

But just like adding a PunchTab Giveaway or Loyalty Program to your website or blog, embedding a tweet is crazy easy and allows your users to engage within a post, follow or favorite a tweet, click on live links and lean more about conversations that are happening beyond your website. It’s as simple as clicking on the “details” link on a tweet, then select “Embed this tweet”.

You copy and paste the code and, boom:

 

We’re excited about how this is going to make a difference for our PunchTab users and interested in seeing the adoption of these new features.

What are you thoughts? Have you checked out the new features? Plan on using them?

 

Comments: 39 Tags: , , , ,

Reward users for watching YouTube videos on your site

Posted by on December 3, 2011

We’ve been asked a number of times about how to use the PunchTab SDK to reward-enable video views. Here’s a quick and dirty tutorial video (from our retro “found footage” archive) that shows one way to do it. Some useful code and a few notes are also included below. In the future you’ll see automated widgets from us that non-developers can use as well.

A live demo can be found here: http://www.hitvu.com/yt

Notes:

1. Link to the Chromeless YouTube Player example used for this tutorial:
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/chromeless_example_1.html
2. The player that we used is bare-bones. You can add different controls and customize the UI by referring to the Chromeless YouTube Player example.
3. This tutorial only rewards the viewer for their first video view of the day.

Code:

...
  <head>
    <!-- Use the Google AJAX Libraries API:
        http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/ -->
    <script src="//www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
    <script>
      google.load("swfobject", "2.1");
    </script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        function onYouTubePlayerReady(playerId) {
          ytplayer = document.getElementById("myytplayer");
        }
        function loadNewVideo(id, startSeconds) {
          if (ytplayer) {
            ytplayer.loadVideoById(id, parseInt(startSeconds));
          }
        }
	function thanks() {
	  _ptq.push(["watch",{'points':100}]);
	}
        function play() {
	  loadNewVideo("nUoP0lMW1fw",0); // replace with your video id
	  setTimeout(thanks, 5000);     // 10 seconds before giving 100 pts
          if (ytplayer) {
            ytplayer.playVideo();
          }
        }
    </script>
  </head>
...
  <body>
...
    <a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="play();">Play</a> <br>
    <!-- embed the player -->
    <div id="ytapiplayer">
      You need Flash player 8+ and JavaScript enabled to view this video.
    </div>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      // <![CDATA[

      // allowScriptAccess must be set to allow the Javascript from one 
      // domain to access the swf on the youtube domain
      var params = { allowScriptAccess: "always", bgcolor: "#cccccc" };
      // this sets the id of the object or embed tag to 'myytplayer'.
      // You then use this id to access the swf and make calls to the player's API
      var atts = { id: "myytplayer" };
      swfobject.embedSWF("http://www.youtube.com/apiplayer?enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=ytplayer", 
                         "ytapiplayer", "400", "300", "8", null, null, params, atts);
      //]]>
    </script>
...
    <!-- PunchTab code --!>
...
  </body>
Comments: 55

$50 Starbucks gift card giveaway: Right on time for the holidays season

Posted by on December 3, 2011

Baby it’s cold outside! PunchTab wants to warm you up!

Enter our December Giveaway and you could win $50 worth of Starbucks coffee.
(Running a Giveaway is easy! And it’s free. Maybe you can spread the holiday cheer by adding a give away to your blog or website? Login or sign up at www.punchtab.com and get started.)

Happy December!

Comments: 98