Author Archives: symbyoz

Happy Birthday Cards & Gift Ideas

The new chic? do your online birthday celebrations together!

We finally published a promo video for our birthday app.

Likes, Applauds, Kudos, Retweets, Shares, +1s, and all the usual “social” suspects appreciated!

Here’s something uncool: making a friend feel special for their special day is never easy. Finding the perfect gift is a big pain: between the things your friends don’t like and the things they already have, there’s little room for error. Getting physical greeting cards are nice and cute but they cost you money, they add the hassle to deal with potential delays or mishaps in the snail mail, and more often than not, they end up under your bed or drawer, unused. What a waste!

With services like Facebook that connects us with everybody we know (or should know ), It’s should be easier to send cool greetings from the comfort of our homes and discuss gift ideas with our friends to find the perfect gift to give.

The new chic? do your online birthday celebrations together

http://www.symbyoz.com/apps/birthdays

Symbyoz’s birthday app let you create personalized cards, invite friends to sign online (and in secret), find and discuss real gift ideas suggested by mutual friends or selected by the birthday recipient….

See on www.youtube.com

The Despair of Greeting Cards – Patheos

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See on www.patheos.com

Whenever we look at the pile of cards after any “card holiday,” be it Christmas, birthdays, or whatever, there’s a certain sort of discomfort that comes. We have no real need for these cards anymore, we’ve taken our real gifts out …

This entry from patheos.com is so true … not only physical cards cost money, they also are a burden when not used, and sometimes an embarrassing one: try explaining others, or even yourself, why you threw down non-trivial amount of money for a piece of paper that is now sitting at the bottom of your drawers …

And even when you do use them, I loved this priceless quote about how the recipient may feel:

That sarcastic dog exists almost purely for the sake of staring at you, mockingly, reminding you that someone spent almost as much money on him as they did on your actual gift.

These are just more reasons why birthday ecards are a smarter and better choice … in particular when you can personalize them and engage friends in common to participate and make the card even more special.

Also on Scoop.it – Birthday Cards Ideas

Did you miss a birthday this week?

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Facebook’s birthday reminders are making it very easy for everyone who’s using that service not to miss a birthday and send wishes to our friends every day. Not to mention the thousands of apps that helps people create and schedule their greetings such as ours.

However, it still occasionally happens that we miss birthdays, even when the information is on Facebook. It happened to me too many times, and I always felt terrible about it.

This week was my birthday, and I’ve been on the other end of the “missed your birthday” problem.

Many of my friends send me their wishes – of course some of them did so using our Birthday Application. Special Kudos for you guys! – and of course It felt great to have so many amazing people around me thinking of me for my special day.

But some friends didn’t. They simply missed it. And for the ones who realized, I can tell they were really embarrassed (at least they faked it well ), just as I’ve been several times when I missed the birthday of someone I really should have remembered.

The good news is that it’s not such a big issue when handled properly. With a nice “Happy Belated Birthday” card for example.

And now we got you covered: Happy Birthdays was updated so you can easily see the recent birthday celebrations, and send cute, funny belated birthday cards.

Here’s how it works:

1 – Happy Birthdays will show you birthdays that happened for the past 7 days

2 - Browse the list to check the recent birthday celebrations

3 – Click on a friend on the list if you have missed a birthday and send a belated birthday card from our templates. As usual, you can also design your own.

That’s it … diplomatic incident hopefully avoided

Enjoy your birthdays!

Wishing Birthdays Like No Other

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Back in the days, there would be that one amazing friend, that would take the time to go and pick a giant, amazing birthday card at the store.

Then he or she would give it to a dozen of mutual friends, to give back with amazing, loving notes for an amazing surprise for the birthday girl or boy.

Image credits: www.thelookingspoon.com

It still happen, but it’s less and less frequent. We’re all busy, we don’t all live in the same area, not even in the same country sometimes. It’s a major pain to do snail mail, and it’s not even really relevant anymore, because the birthday wishing tradition has moved to Facebook. Big time.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to easily create a card for someone we care, and have all our friends or family, wherever they are in the world, to sign it?

We’re happy to announce that our app Happy Birthday is now reconnecting the modern ways of wishing happy birthday with that sweet, thoughtful tradition of secretly sharing a birthday card with mutual friends in order to collect their signatures.

Here’s how it works:

1 – Create your card
It’s pretty easy: just select a friend, pick a quote, an image, a video, or one of our custom templates.

2 – Open and sign
Open your card and get started by adding your signature. Friends will do the exact same thing to sign. It’s as simple as clicking on a button.

3 – Invite friends to sign

We find your friends in common and take care of setting the right privacy options so you can secretly share with a couple clicks. Friends can invite their own mutual friends, etc.

Screen shot 2013-03-18 at 11.41.46 AM

4 – You’re done!

Once everyone has signed the card, you can simply send it. Or, if you’re too busy, you can schedule it, and we will post automatically for you.

We hope you’ll enjoy it, and don’t forget to join our community on Facebook.

He Remembers Me!

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Very few things can make a startup founder melt like a marshmallow.

Almost every single day in our life is a lonely fight for relevance, existence and traction. In a sea of sharks, of risks, of dismissals, of incomprehensions, and of doubts.

Having a thick skin, and an uncluttered mind, free from raw emotions and from the tempting lures of being complacent or appear vulnerable is not just a “nice to have”. It’s a mandatory skill to develop if we want to survive.

However, I challenge any founder not to melt after hearing a story from one of their users, whose life has been touched because of what they’ve built.

This is one of these.

It all started with “Edu”. I met him only recently, but I quickly grew a lot of respect and affection for him. It’s easy to see why: Edu is also an entrepreneur, but with a much higher profile. He’s compassionate and smart: he advises startups, and sometimes even invest in them. He loves people, and people love him.

But Edu doesn’t always have the time to show his compassion to the people in his life. He’s a very busy man.

When he was a kid, Edu was in a private catholic school run by nuns. One of the nuns, who was also one of the most respected and devoted person in the school, also really loved Edu and was always looking after him.

They ultimately stayed in touch and they connected on Facebook. But they haven’t been interacting a lot thus far.

I connected with Edu through a friend in common that introduced the two of us, as he believed we could do some business together.

That’s how I got to show him to our birthday application: Happy Birthdays.

Edu, liked it a lot. I immediately saw that we were on the same page. He understood what makes the app unique: the ability to collect and share gift ideas for people, in an easy, crowd-sourced, fun and non-intrusive fashion.

But, as it’s often the case with things we expect, or take for granted, a much simpler and much more ordinary action in the app was what touched Edu’s life.

Happy Birthdays allows users to create personalized birthday cards for select friends on Facebook. Very quickly, and very easily, while allowing the user to stay creative. Edu created and scheduled birthday cards for his friends, including for the nun, with whom he is connected on Facebook.

When we met again, a couple days ago, to catch up over a coffee, he told me about what had happened when she received his greetings: she was so moved by this simple but meaningful sign that she downloaded his message, printed it and sent it to her friends, and to Edu’s friends. Along with these touching, simple words: “He remembers me!”.

Edu eyes were sparkling as he was telling me the story. It was easy to see that he was really happy for putting so much warmth into the life of someone that matters for him.

That’s of course one the most beautiful story I’ve heard this year. And yes, it did make me melt.

Thank you Edu for sharing this story with me, and for inspiring me to stay focus and keep the faith in our vision and in what we are building.

Tales of an Empathic Civilization

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3d small people - help to the friend People are sometimes asking me why I’m working so hard on Symbyoz.

That’s because I believe in Empathy. That’s because I’m deeply pained to see it taking a conspicuous beating on a daily basis.

Empathy is understanding each other’s feelings, goals and aspirations. It’s not the caricature of a cheesy feel for anything that’s cute or weak. It’s cultivating the curiosity to know what move others, what is it that they feel, what is it that they want.

I stumbled upon this fascinating video about “outrospection”.

Don’t run away just yet or let not the nerdy word fool you … The tale, really, is simply about empathy.

Empathy is pausing to listen to others, instead of endlessly thinking and talking about ourselves and about our problems, instead of being obsessively self-reflective, instead of assuming things based on a way too common self-centered perspective.

Empathy helps to consciously decide whether we can do something with other people or whether we should ignore them.

One of my favorite author, Paulo Coelho, also perfectly captures that essence in his latest blog entry that’s really worth reading for a major boost in inspiration:

2013: the first year of the rest of my life

Some excerpts:

I will pass a beggar, who will ask me for money.
I might give it to him or I might walk past thinking that he will only spend it on drink, and as I do, I will hear his insults and know that it is simply his way of communicating with me.

I will pass someone trying to destroy a bridge.
I might try to stop him or I might realize that he is doing it because he has no one waiting for him on the other side and this is his way of trying to fend off his own loneliness.

Empathy is about looking forward, not going backwards. It’s about sharing our future, as a response to our shared present and to our shared past.

The 52 Week Money Challenge (In Action)

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It’s that time of the year again!

No, I’m not going back to the future. And yes, I do realize that the holiday season is over.

But the goal setting season just started. If you are like me, it may feel a lot like there’s always something to do … but hey, that’s what makes life so exciting! Many of us have set or will be setting their goals for 2013. Folks will aim for a better health, more money, tons of love and plenty of success.

Goal setting is very difficult. There’s countless stories about it, and I’m not going to waste your time detailing all the failures and strategies and theories many people have been through.

But I really wanted to share the following goal setting idea …

The 52 Week Money Challenge

I’m Doing the 52-Week Money Challenge!

I stumbled upon this browsing randomly in my news feed. I just loved the idea. A very simple, clearly achievable and fun way to save money for the next holiday season.

I still don’t know where the original chart came from (if you are the author, please contact me), but the idea was recently spread by Kassondra Perry-Moreland, who owns the Facebook group for the 52 Week Money Challenge, and it’s all but gone viral.

“I am a single parent, and I have worked at my job for 22 years. I just worked 53 hours alone in this payperiod and do this all of the time. I decided that this is the year that I will have something to show for working all of those hours instead of just bills left over at the end of the year.I work better if I am held accountable, even in my personal life, so I decided to see how many of my friends would be honest and say they needed help with a structured savings plan, and even if they don’t would they help me. I had no idea that it wold turn into what it has in just the last two hours.” Kassondra said.

At Symbyoz we obviously believe that goals are more achievable (and more fun !!) when they’re done and shared with friends. So I was very excited to adapt this idea and put it in action … “a la sauce Symbyoz”.

Here’s what it would looks like:

What’s cool is that you can share such an idea with a group of friends, and decide however you want to save!

For example, some clever people came up with the idea to do it backwards, so they won’t feel the pain at the end. Endings are always the most difficult part of goals!

Also, another very useful feat is that you can set up reminders so that participant will be notified each week and won’t forget to make their deposit and update their challenge entries.

You definitely should check out a demo of that idea on Symbyoz and join Kassondra’s group.

Happy New Year!

How to create and send thoughtful holiday greetings (Part 2)

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In Part 1, we’ve learned how to create a simple, thoughtful, personalized holiday greeting image for everyone, using our Happy Birthday app.

In Part 2, I’ll show how our Social Assistant app helps you to make a big impact with less effort by making it a lot easier to create individual greeting images for your important friends.

How it works

We said it in Part 1: one great way to create a thoughtful greeting message is to personalize it and, of course, make it look beautiful.

When it’s for a group of people, a greeting image can be personalized with content only related to you. But when it’s for a specific person, it’s of course best to personalize it with content related to both you and the person you’re sending your greetings to.

If you are looking to send a group card to all your friends at once, this tutorial is not for you, and you might be looking for Part 1. If you are a Photoshop pro, and it’s a piece of cake for you to create beautiful cards for several friends, or if you are using a specialized service to send customized cards to a list of contacts, this is not for you either.

But If you are looking for a simple way to send an individual greeting messages to a select list of important friends, you may be concerned about spending a lot of time and effort creating a personalized card for each and every friend on your list that you want to make a big impact on.

Rejoice! as you can do that easily this year using our Social Assistant application.

All it takes is only a few steps and a few clicks.

Step 1: Log In to Social Assistant

If you’ve already added your list of important friends there, you’re good to go.

Otherwise, you’ll need to add friends. That’s done by simply clicking on the “Add a friend” button on the tool bar menu and following the next step.

Step 2: Add your important friends

Click on “select” to select friends from your Facebook account.

If you want to add friends that are not connected to Facebook, or if you do not want link your Facebook account to Symbyoz, you can also simply type their name and an email address.

Note that you will not to be able to post the greeting on Facebook for friends that are not connected to a Facebook account.

When you are done selecting/typing the friend name and email address, simply click “Add”.

Step 3: Open the greeting card creation canvas

There is a “Catch-Up” button next to the line with your friend. Simply click on that button, then click on “Create greetings card”.

Step 4: Tweak your personalized card collage

Tweak the collage the way you like it …

Same drill as in Part 1: you can change the background, move or rotate the text and the images, add the logo of your company, the pictures of your cat, your favorite quote … OR … you can save time, do absolutely nothing and go with the default arrangement we created for you.

Step 5: Select your delivery Channel and Send

Select the delivery channel and simply send your message.

Congratulation, you’re done, only 19 more friends to do …

Step 4: Rinse and repeat

Simply do it again for all your important friends in your list.

It may take more time than sending a collective message to a group in one single shot, but the reward of having every single of your important friends receiving a beautiful, personalized and specific greeting just for them is huge, and we’re making it a lot easier than it could have been … for free! :-)

Seize that opportunity to make a big impact in your loved ones lives.

Happy Holidays!

How to create and send thoughtful holiday greetings (Part 1)

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Tweak the collage... ‘Tis the season to be thinking about sending wishes and cheers to your loved ones.

Very few things says “I care about you” better than a thoughtful, cheerful holiday greeting.

This year, Symbyoz is making it easy for you to create greetings that you can send to your friends, family and peers.

How it works

One great way to create a thoughtful greeting message is to personalize it and, of course, to make it look beautiful.

If you are a photoshop pro, and have time on your hands, you don’t need any of the following.

But if you are short on time and don’t want to use heavy, complex software to simply create a greeting, you can do that using our “Happy Birthday” application to create a collage image for a personalized but collective greeting card, or you can use our “Social Assistant” application to create a similar image, but for a specific, individual friend.

All it takes is only a few steps and a few clicks.

In this Part 1, we’ll explain how to create the personalized collective greeting card using ”Happy Birthday“. We’ll update this with a link to Part 2 where we explain how to create a personalized individual greeting card using ”Social Assistant“.

Step 1: Log In to Happy Birthdays & open the collage composer

Step 2: Customize your collage

Tweak the collage the way you like it

You can change the background, move or rotate the text and the images, add the logo of your company, the pictures of your cat, your favorite quote … OR … you can save time, do absolutely nothing and go with the default arrangement we created for you.

Step 3: Save

Once you’re satisfied, simply save & post.

We strongly recommend to download the result on your computer and/or post it on your Facebook wall to share with all your friends.

Step 4: Enjoy and be merry

There’s plenty of things you can do with your collage image, such as sending it directly by email to select friends for an even more personal touch, or post on your company wall, or pin it on Pinterest, or do whatever you want to do with it. It’s yours.

Happy Holidays!

Facebook Nation — Privacy loses to indifference

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Deutsche WelleFacebook nation — privacy loses to indifferenceWashington Post (blog)Facebook Nation is the group of people who say they will move to Canada after the election but never do. We complain and complain and complain, but we never leave.

This story is one of the most hilarious (and accurate) one I’ve read about Facebook lately. Some of the money quotes:

“Quit Facebook? But where would I go to complain to my friends about what Facebook has just done to its privacy settings? Twitter?”

“You can’t even be brought to click a simple button to vote on the issue! You’ve taken more complicated steps to access pornography! But this button? Nope. Too far.”

The truth is that Facebook culture is indeed that of hyper slacktivism and other passive/pleasurable activities. Inspiring people to take action and do something meaningful is incredibly hard. At Symbyoz we’ve got the scar tissues to prove it.

But Facebook is not a small startup anymore. They are uniquely positioned to influence the way people behave, and with these powers comes the responsibility to act like the adult/parent they should be, guiding and protecting the bratty children we can’t help but still love because we’ve been there.

In a way, that’s exactly what they started doing by removing the children the right to vote. That was exactly the right thing to do IMHO.

As Robert Scoble would say: “This is a freaking company, not a communist experiment”.

See on Scoop.it - Stay on top of your friendships