MixMobi is mentioned in a short article on mobile coupons this morning in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. MixMobi is a lightweight, extremely easy to use, mobile campaign management system. The article mentions MixMobi using Twitter for mobile coupon deployment, which is one of the more popular ways our customers are deploying offers. MixMobi can also be used to deploy news, events, and other types of offers via nearly any online avenue including other social media such as Facebook, mobile messaging such as SMS, and embedding in other mobile media such as company or event websites.

MixMobi is currently in private beta. If you are interested in being a beta participant for MixMobi, please let us know.

Up until recently I’ve hosted all of my hobby/small Rails sites at Textdrive. It was inexpensive, the documentation fairly thorough, and support was responsive. About a month ago, I started putting together another small Rails site. I built it locally and was ready to deploy to my server at TextDrive. However, the server had an old version of RubyGems, and I found out that wouldn’t be upgraded. My plan was being outmoded, and needed to upgrade my plan (aka, spend more) and move my code.

I really wasn’t in the mood to do this, and so I took the opportunity to look into some of the other services getting a lot of press lately: Namely the “managed” cloud services–those apps that use EC2 or other elastic services, but put a nice front end on more easily manage deployments. The following are some first impressions on each of the services I worked with:

» Continue reading “working in the clouds”