Good graphic designers are hard to find

I have some friends that are starting out their companies. They find it really challenging to get a good graphics designer. One of them tried out ScriptLance.com. He found a highly ranked professional, but the experience was still disappointing. Although technically the designer was skilled, he lacked the imagination and creativity needed for the task.
Luckily my brother is helping me out with the graphics for MPTrips.
He's got some impressive portfolio at KoomKoom.com, rarely seen in Israel.
Although the tools are getting easier and easier to use, a designer that "gets it" is hard to find. It's good to have some talented people in the family :)

MPTrips is a finalist in BizTEC06

Technion, Israel. An executive summary for MPTrips was chosen to compete on the next stage of the Technion's entrepreneurship competition BizTEC06. The executive summary for MPTrips is one of the 10 executive summaries which were chosen out of the 56 submissions to the contest. On the next stage, the finalists will submit a business plan of which the first places will win 50,000NIS, 30,000NIS and 20,000NIS. But the real prize is the feedback and mentoring from leading businessmen in the Israeli industries. I am grateful for the opportunity, and will keep on working to make this vision real, as usual.

Cheers!

Geocaching - The Official Global GPS Cache Hunt Site

Geocaching - The Official Global GPS Cache Hunt Site

Just had a good laugh now, learning about this geocaching thingy... I'm surely going to take part in this! :) Happy hunting... (Maybe we can do something in MPTrips related to this... Well, well...)

Inspiration #1

I'll try bringing here some inspiring stuff that agree with MPTrips values.
I belive that the power of podcasts is truely unprecedented. The following sound-clip quite effected me a couple of months ago, and I wanted to share this with you: Al Gore.
Betsy's Eco-Talk, where I found this, is really a gem in the podosphere.

Guerilla marketing #1 (more to come, somewhen)

Well... It's no secret this project is very low on budget. So, I thought of ways to market it. There are these usual ways of mailing lists, and news in the press, and blogs and directories, and promos, and blah, blah, blah. But, hmmm... This is effective to a certain degree. What I'm thinking about now, is encouraging people to use their digital cameras as much as they can during the mptrip. Maybe with our map in the picture or something? And hope that the pictures will help to spread the word about our product. You always show your photos to someone, right? Why not use this for some guerilla marketing :) I can personally recommend tipsfromthetopfloor.com which brought my shooting to new levels, and this way encourage the podcasting industry in general, which boosts back mptrips, and so on and so forth... The podosphere ecosystem.

www.mptrips.com

The url: http://mptrips.com now works, thanks to mydomain.com (By the way, they have some interesting services, like free email forwarding from any url you own).

Podcasting on the news

The news of Channel 2 in Israel had a short piece on podcasting last Saturday. They featured a short introduction to the phenomenon, the TCast, a short talk with Izhar Ashdot, and a podcast "addict" (hmmm... sounds familiar to me :-) ). Podcasting will become mainstream sooner or later, and I'm glad to see it catching up in Israel too. We still have a lot of issues to solve here, though. The language (ahm) is a barier both on the content side and on the ways of promotion and distribution. And iTunes - which in other countries bring a lot of mainstream listeners - is not common in Israel at all.

Reverse Billing

The idea was simple: Take an mptrip, go visit Jerusalem or Mount Carmel or Metzada. Where-ever. In the end of the tour, we offer you to leave us a 'tip' by sending an SMS with the amount you wish to donate to mptrips.com. Donate only if you enjoyed your trip. 100% of your donation goes to our group of dedicated tour guides - in order to fund production of more mptrips - for your enjoyment. Simple, clean, convenient. They even gave a nice name to it - "Reverse Billing". There are even companies that take care of everything. Really nice. The only problem is that only 35%-39% of your donation actually gets to us, after the cellular companies take most of it, and then the billing company some. Don't get me wrong, I think they deserve a decent payment, but compared to other places in the world, it does sound a bit high to me. I guess that with time we'll get to the rates that the credit card companies charge (~4%?), but until it'll get to be at least close to this - we'll have to look for other solutions.