Citizens Bank of Canada used our Christmas Gingerbread Cookie Decorator ecard to sponsor its food drive. Here is the link:

https://www.citizensbank.ca/Personal/Products/SendAHolidayCard/

Citizens Bank of Canada will donate a dollar to the Canadian Association of Food Banks for every gingerbread card sent between December 10, 2007 to December 25, 2007 up to a maximum of $5000.00.

There is a small update for our TheoAvatarSDK users. It fixes the bug related to the interface (not to the isometric engine itself). The Room List was acting weird in some rare situations, and would sometimes switch users to an empty room. It has been fixed. All you have to do is to locate the “roomList” movieclip on the scene or in the library (It’s the one containing the ListBox with the room names) and then replace a couple of lines (or just the whole code, if it’s easier for you):

Here is the new code.

Special thanks to Drew Bennett from BYOB Simulation, who pointed this bug out to us. Drew is working on a very interesting business simulating portal using our TheoAvatarSDK. We plan to review it sometime soon.

If you want to find more about TheoAvatarSDK – visit https://www.theoworlds.com/theoavatarsdk.html

We updated our highly popular Christmas Gingerbread Cookie Decorator eCard for the incoming season. Now, after saving a new card, there is a new option available to you – copying the code snippet that can be pasted into your own website. So if you have a MySpace or FaceBook page, a personal blog or website, you can display your saved card directly on it!

Besides that, we also optimized our icing engine, so now it will not slow down after you add a lot of icing on the cookies.

Have fun with our ecard and spread the joy of Christmas! You can access it from here: www.theoworlds.com/christmas/.

5pm – a new generation project management tool – is finally released.

You can give it a try – there is a 14-day free trial. The registration is quick and easy. No credit card is required.

Visit: www.5pmweb.com for more details.

P.S. To help you get started, we also created a short Video Introduction with Adobe Captivate: http://www.5pmweb.com/videos/5pm_Quick_Introduction.htm

MindOrchard team used our product – TheoAvatarSDK – to create the amazing Lego City Builder. It lets you create your own city maps and export them to jpegs.

Thanks to Arran D’Aubigny for the link.

Ever wanted to build your own online world? Try our TheoAvatar SDK – a tool that helps you build multi-user 3D chats like TheoAvatar in Flash. It comes with Map Editor, source code and documentation. It runs on both ElectroServer and SmartFoxServer. Purchase it today and start digging into the exiting world of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMO)!

About a week ago our web development division launched the 5pm™ demo – the next generation web-based service for managing projects and tasks. Give it a try here: www.5pmweb.com.

You will notice the powerful and original interface, powered by web2.0 technologies like AJAX. As we mentioned before, the Flash interactive timeline was developed by TheoWorlds.com.

Feel free to play with the fully functioning public demo. The commercial version will be released soon and it will come with a 30-day free trial. Make sure to register your email in order to be notified about the release.

… you may not even know about it. AOL uses extremely aggressive process to filter out the spam. Often, suspicious emails are deleted, without even getting into the spam folder. So the end user doesn’t even have a chance to check if it’s really spam, and the sender doesn’t get any errors or a bounce back messages. It’s like an Emails Black Hole. Most likely it can be tuned up through the email settings, but not many bother.

Today we got one of many emails related to this issue: “i can not fu##ing reseve letters from this website from my friend”. This is actually the whole email, not a quote. I just had to hash out a couple of letters. No hellos or good buys, not even checking the spelling – straight to the point. But I can see where the frustration comes from. This is just another user who created a nice ecard on our website, emailed it to a friend (through our form) and… nothing happened.

Long time ago I looked into this problem, but gave up. Today I gave it another try. If you are sending many solicited emails to your users – this information is for you. If you spam people, please stop reading and go punish yourself somehow.

The best place to look for official information on this matter is here: http://postmaster.aol.com. Looks like if AOL treats your IP address as a source of spam, and this is not true, the way to fix it is to apply to their AOL Whitelist. The phone call to their service center confirmed it. So I filled in the form, submitted, confirmed… and got rejected in a couple of minutes. “Your web request has been denied because you do not appear to be the owner of the IP address(es) in your request”. That’s nice, considering that we are using a shared server – surely I’m not the owner of that IP. Next, I contacted our service provider and they said they will try to fix it… That’s where the story ends so far…

So, if you are sending many solicited email, you may want to re-check the situation with AOL. Time by time they are introducing some changes and trying new things. The reality is that you will need to invest some additional time into your AOL users.

And for all those who want to make sure that our ecards arrive to their friends – just copy the link that is generated at the end and paste it into your own email. This way it will not be lost or end in the spam folder.

Have fun with our Halloween Pumpkin Carving ecard!

Is it too early for Halloween? Not according to our stats.

In the past week we’ve seen a significant jump in the number of Halloween e-cards created through our website (www.theoworlds.com/halloween/).

Web surfers even found a new way to use it, by creating their own Halloween Avatars. It’s pretty simple. Just carve your pumpkin, press the ‘Print Screen” button and paste as new image into Paint, then then resize/crop.

I’m attaching the avatar we created for our website.

Projects exist in a time continuum. They start at some point, exist for an amount of time and then reach the deadline (hopefully). Keeping this in mind, we developed a timeline view to show progress and tasks – you can preview it here. This project is developed as a part of a bigger application – 5pm™. It’s a second generation project management tool, developed by our QG|Software division.

We plan to add editing capabilities to the timeline (imagine just dragging your tasks around) and other cool features.

To find more about this project and track its development, go to www.5pmweb.com. The beta release is coming out soon.