Would you like to see some of Australia’s top business and community leaders sleeping rough on one of the coldest nights of the year?

I think you would, so sponsor our director and joint founder Chris Mawn’s brave efforts in the upcoming Vinnies CEO Sleepout on Thursday 16 June 2011.

All money raised will go towards helping Australia’s estimated 105,000 homeless men, women and children to find the warmth, safety and dignity that they desperately deserve.

It only takes a moment to make a difference. To find more information and sponsor
CLICK HERE

Chris sleeping in the rain in 2009:

I told you we’d have pics!

yellowSquares will be closed for a training day on Thursday 7 April, and re-opening on Friday 8 April.

While we will be mainly un-contactable during this time we understand that Market Research never sleeps and we will do our best to respond to emails and will continue to manage projects etc.

Stay tuned on the blog for some photos that may emerge from our team-building activities, it maybe interesting :-)

Well that was fun! We will post pictures soon – but here is a nice team pic of us after we spent the morning climbing.

These are some of the April Fool gags that are getting quite a bit of attention and in this day and age of social media propagate like wild fire and serve as fantastic marketing opportunities.

Here are the best we have seen:

Twitter Pen (Art Line):

http://www.facebook.com/artline

Number Plate Recall (BMW)

The text reads: “Custom plates are no longer permitted to make wild assertions of a vehicle’s performance, its perceived effect on members of the opposite sex, or the otherwise ‘sikness’, ‘hotness’ or ‘badness’ of a vehicle, where the vehicle in question is neither ‘sick’, ‘hot’, ‘bad’ nor possessing any kind of ‘ness’.”

http://www.abmw.com.au

Iron Cove Bridge Climb (Our Offer)

http://www.ouffer.com/sydneys-secret-bridge-climb-499-for-a-bridge-climb-experience-of-the-iconic-iron-cove-bridge-usua

And one from the archives 1957 (BBC)

The respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in. Many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC diplomatically replied, “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

A quick poll around the office and we have compiled the first YS mix tape. For January 2011 we have the following…

1. Would? – Alice in Chains (Selected by Louise)
2. Runaway – Linkin Park (Selected by Carmen)
3. Flagpole sitta – Harvey Danger (Selected by Gill)
4. Let me think about it – Ida Corr V Fedde Le Grand (Selected by Kellie)
5. Take your hands off my woman – The Darkness (Selected by Rowan)
6. Happy when it rains – Garbage (Selected by Clair)
7. Baby got back – Sir Mixalot (Selected by Amy)
8. Kinky afro – Happy Mondays (Selected by Chris)
9. Those who slay together, stay together – Chiodos (Selected by Scott)

To all our beloved clients, suppliers and friends we wish you all the best for the festive season and look forward to seeing you all in 2011.

Have a fab holiday everyone.

We open our doors again on the 10th January 2011

We are very pleased to welcome two new online programmers to yellowSquares.

Clair Reynolds

Clair worked at a full service research agency for 7 years before joining yellowSquares as online programmer.

Her experience in market research has been long and varied but has settled with her passion of online research.

Kellie Leddy

Kellie impressed us at the interview by bringing examples of her hand-coded surveys on her iPad (a way to win Mawnie over is through his apple shaped heart).

A self confessed geek with a love of technology and online research were always going to be a winning combination in my book.

We welcome with huge wide open arms our latest additions and friends Clair and Kellie :-)

We are always looking for new talent to join the team here at yellowSquares, so feel free to send your CV anytime to info@yellowsquares.com.au.

We are especially interested in project managers with experience in market research and programmers with an interest in Javascript, HTML5 or Flash.

yellowSquares has always had a love/hate relationship with Flash technology. We use and still a use a number of interactive survey ‘widgets’ that we have developed using Adobe’s Flash. And we commonly use it to deliver video (eg. TVC evaluations)

We LOVE that the widgets are good looking, easy and fun to use for respondents and deliver us powerful data that is hard to gain from traditional html question types.

We HATE that in order for respondents to be able to complete surveys that contain Flash they have to have Flash installed (and usually the latest version) Add to that Apple’s refusal to allow Flash to operate on its iPhone/iPad operating system (iOS).

We appear to be in a period of change however, HTML5 is just around the corner (ish) and already supported by the progressive forward thinking browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Apple’s Safari (of course).

HTML5 will allow us to replicate all the sexiness and cleverness of Flash based tools without the need for plugin’s. and expensive development tools. More importantly (to me at least) they will run perfectly on mobile devices such as the iPad.

yellowSquares is already in the process of porting and testing our existing widgets to a HTML5 format. Over the next few months we will begin the use of the new widgets based on auto-browser detection as a priority with a Flash fall-back.

yellowSquares will again for the 7th consecutive year be sponsoring the AMSRS 2010 Conference. This year the conference will be held at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre on the 9th/ 10th of September with the name (but not the theme necessarily) of “Eyes Wide Open”.

The line up is looking awesome with a real mix of characters and personalities. Todd Sampson (CEO of Leo Burnett and star of Gruen Transfer), Mike Walsh (Futurist, Author and CEO), Wayne Petheric (Criminologist), Bernard Salt (KPMG) and a gala night in the theme of 80’s Electric Dreams MC’d by no other than safari suit wearing Bob Downe!

Tickets are still available for more info visit www.amsrs2010.com

One of the nice things about being a non-corporate organisation is the ability to break from the shackles of tidy, symmetrical, boring, ‘grey’ web design and uniformed corporate identity.

I’ve long had the belief of what makes yellowSquares different is that we build really good relationships with our clients and we focus heavily on the kind of personalities we employ. Because of that I thought It was also very important to put yellowSquares faces to yellowSquares names on marketing literature and on our website.

Of course the downside to that that theory is that ‘staff photos’ always look really naff, no matter what you do to the pictures they always look staged, false, insincere or even worse as noted above – corporate!! Ahhh!

This then lead to the idea (and a little bit influenced by the Gorillaz) for us all to be captured comic book style. And there is a fine line, almost worse than corporate staff picture is the traditional characateur illustrations. The cartooned big head, little body holding a fishing rod or driving a racing car..urgh!

Our first rounds of drawings were completed by a guy in the US and were used in our early marketing material. Sadly for us, and not so for him, he got a job at DC Comics inking superhero’s and we lost him. Luckily, however, we found the talent of Sam McKenzie, an awesome Sydney based artist to make us look way cooler than we do in real life.

So armed with our cartooned self’s and a company name that’s lends itself to more interesting imagery that a three letter acronym we trotted off to chat with design agency Oxygen. A really talented bunch of designers that have taken my badly worded and delivered brief that basically said – “I want it to look like a note pad with doodles” and turned it in to this awesome looking website – that I am incredibly pleased with and that really captures the spirit and essence of yellowSquares. Three cheers and say hi to the new yellowSquares.com.au website! All feedback welcome :)