And the competition heats up!

Last week, we began to receive submissions for the contest! We're happily surprised that people aren't waiting until the last minute to send in their entries, AND with good reason!

The earlier you send these entries in to us, the more time we have to let you know if the entries are lacking in some way. For instance, we've had a few submissions that didn't fully outline their fonts, used non-vector images, and a few other things that we can get back to you on, to ensure you have the best chance of not only winning the contest, but selling lots of your cards on our site!

So even though the deadline is officially July 17th, DON'T WAIT TILL JULY 17TH to submit your card!

So far, since most of the publicity went up, our site has been quite abuzz with activity. To date, we've gotten 700 downloads of the AI template. Even if 10% of those send in entries, we'd already be giddily happy :)

In fact, we've already received multiple entries from a few participants. Unfortunately, that also means stiff competition for that cash AND those lovely WACOM tablets. Incidentally, we just got something from the postman today.

The whole set of WACOM prizes!

The baby of the bunch, the Bamboo Fun Tablet 4x6.

The Bamboo A5 has some curious multi-lingual salutations on it. Hopefully, we will too when www.foldees.es opens up someday :)

The Intuos3 4x6. If you look carefully, you can see the box we received had a small dent on the side, although the distributor assures us that the contents are fine, and that they're all still under warranty :)

The MASSIVE Intuos3 A4! Pictured here with a carton of Farmhouse Milk for scale comparisons. Even we didn't expect it to be so big. (btw: Farmhouse Milk is the yummiest milk in the supermarket)

Better get those entries in fast, ya?

Sheer talent

As part of the PR movement for Foldees, I've been trawling the blogs of local designers to look for potential contributors to our contest. One of the reasons why we started this project was that we believed that there was talent here just waiting to be found.

I always knew that Malaysia had much more talent than most people were aware of, and yet I'm still flabbergasted at the quality, and creativity that's available in our very own country. Here are a few snippets from our local pool.

Kid Chan
When we first applied for our grant, I brought along a few samples of Malaysian talent with me to show our grant board that our project was possible, and that these people needed a voice. A full half of the samples i brought that day were from someone that I found on deviantart.com named Kid Chan (not to be confused with the celebrity photographer).

Later I found out that Kid has quite the manga following, although I'm not sure if she actually has published works just yet. Oh yea, and I only just found out that she is indeed a she :) Oops.


BunnyT

One of the talents that hails from up north, our programmer actually forwarded BunnyT's blog address to us, and said "I don't care what you do, or how you do it - you MUST entice her to join our contest!".


As you can see for yourself, her skills with character design are amazing! Equally amazing is her talent for lighting. It's easily on par with anything you've seen on a screen in GSC recently, and I really do hope that someone has already recognised her talent besides us.



Emila yusof
One of the early supporters or our site, Emila has been drawing since she could 'pick up a pencil'. Also from the northern region, she is actually a mother of one, doubling as a freelance designer. She sells a few items on Zazzle, and Imagekind (including a few greeting cards, so watch out!), as well as making a few handcrafted items which she sells on her blog.

Her art style is very much in line with my original brief to design the site - "Wistful and child-like wonder". Not only does that apply to her artwork, but also her sense of humour. I've seen some of the cards she's selling on Zazzle, and they always draw an involuntary "AwwwWwwwW..." from me. Think I'm a wuss? You try checking them out!


................................................................................

Honestly, I consider what we do at Foldees to be just a mere channel. All we're doing is creating a space for you guys to showcase your work, and telling the world about it. In other words, you could say it's sort've like designer PR - in more ways than one :)

Progress Report

Well, the publicity machine has finally kicked off, and we've been covered in quite a few places.

Kakiseni

ArtSentral


and a few other lovely blogs by lovely people :)

Also, the traffic on our site has been absolutely fantastic! Given the lack of promo (the publicity only kicked off last night), we've already gotten over 1000 hits, and more importantly, our site has registered 123 AI template downloads already! So that means (potentially) 123 entries for our contest, which is way above what we were expecting for our first 3 days. Thank you to all the lovely people who helped us spread the word - not only the sites and the bloggers, but our friends and family who have been spammi... er... "informing" their friends and family as well about the contest.

One thing we want to stress to the people who've downloaded the template - since it's the first time we've released it to the public, ANY feedback is good feedback. Is it easy, confusing, pretty, ugly, pretty ugly... anything! Leave me a comment, or drop me an email.

Muchos gracias!

UPDATE (22 June 08):
We now have coverage from two big ones!

Klue

Lowyat.net

As a result, our numbers have doubled across the board.

These are the stats from Sunday midnight 22 June, which makes it exactly one week since we started.

305 AI template downloads
2125 hits from 754 unique visitors

Thanks so much for your support and keep spreading the word!

We are live! (Facebook rocks!)

Foldees.com is finally live!

After posting it as my status on Facebook, and sending out a few messages, we immediately started receiving a bunch of traffic. Do not underestimate the power of Facebook.

To be honest, It's all very exciting right now... we just had congratulatory drinks all around here at the Foldees office, so now it's fingers-crossed to see if everything goes alright. About now, the only thing putting a damper to our spirits is the fact that your URL bar doesn't display www.foldees.com, instead showing some IP address of our actual server. This is a problem we're working to solve, but in the meantime, now that the cat's out of the bag, start thinking of some wicked greeting card ideas!

If there are any issues at all, please do not hesitate to contact us at support@foldees.com. However, apologies in advange for our response, which might take a wee bit longer for the next 24 hours.

The Foldees team will be taking in a good night's rest.

Hope we don't get sued

This is from an old 1950s series of collectible cards from Topps (which some of you comic fans might be familiar with). They're called Foldees because they can apparently fold, and make different funny stories and combinations depending on how they're folded.

Kinda cool, really. I'd love to get one of these in my office someday in like a nice, glass casing, even if it would downright incriminate us if Topps ever sued.

Right now, I'd just like to get ranked higher than these stupid cards on Google.

Finally (Almost)

It's almost midnight on Thursday night. We've just gone through a last round of checks for our contest submission process, and decided on the exact text in which we're going to spam our friends and family about the opening of Foldees.com to the public.

Finally. We're going live.

I've never had to endure a wait like this before. Programming a website as a small team is not an easy thing to do, and I, coming from my media background, am used to getting a product (my magazine) out to the market at the beginning of each month. It's been about six months so far of coding.

However, when you get down to programming a website, it's alot of testing, tweaking, re-coding and testing again - even for the smallest button or textbox. The best part is, if everything works the way it's supposed to, your best measure of success is that no one notices.

What motivates me is the thought that we're doing something really special. Allow me to say this outright from the start. Me, and everyone on my team is a Threadless slut. Personally, I have a collection of perhaps 20+ shirts from the world's favourite crowdsourcing portal.

The genius of crowdsourcing is based on the fact that everyone has at least one good idea. These ideas seldom emerge when you're sitting in a cubicle listening to your colleague play Enrique Iglesias on repeat. They come when you're in the bus, or at home. Almost everyone i know has once said something to the effect of "Dude, I got this great idea for a...". The problem is most times, you don't know what to do with it.

Well, we aim to capture that market, at least in terms of greeting cards. Of course, we're starting out small, with a small team, a small server, and a small cosy little website. But we've got big plans. We believe that there are thousands of designers out there with great ideas for greeting cards that will fill the void in design that currently exists between cutesy pet photos on the shelves at Hallmark shops and a soulless e-card.

In making this possible, I'd like to thank my team for their dedication, MDEC for putting up some funds to get us started, and YOU, in advance, for helping us create the best source for the coolest greeting cards in the world.

Soon.