So I probably should have written this back when @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) and @cnnbrk(CNN Breaking News) were having their much publicized race to 1 million followers back in April, but I really wanted the hype to die down before blogging about it and looking like I was just jumping on the bandwagon.
Twitter’s been around for a couple of years now and those of us in the industry have been using it (on and off) since then. Now that the cat is out of the bag and the mainstream’s starting to catch on, I feel like I should mention some of the reasons why it’s becoming so popular and why I use it.

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If you’re expecting to read something about Tom Cruise, “tighty whities” or dancing with shades you’re just another victim of a marketing stunt to promote this blog. After internalizing and accepting your weakness for false advertising, it’s time for business.

Today’s demographics are way more diverse and extended than the usual; gender, age and economic status. Our market is full of different niches, which divide into sub niches, groups and cliques. Most people  see this as a problem while others see it as an opportunity, which translate into different ways of advertising products and the creation of new products.

I once heard a celebrated ad-teacher say, the creative process of an agency stops when the rules and regulations of the FCC start. Continue reading »

Trying to come up with a good and professional way to introduce myself, I noticed that there’s a lot of ground to cover in my formation as an ad professional. My name is Alan Taveras, I’m about to start  my last year of college at Sagrado Corazón, my major is advertising. This is my second week as an ad consultant, here at ML studio, and let me tell you I learned more in a week than I did last semester. People always talk about the difference in theory and practice, but man this takes the ball out of the park. In no way do I discredit all my professors and their efforts but there’s a big need for change in the formation of an ad professionals, at least in the use of the web as a medium. All their efforts and time concentrates in the traditional ways of the ad agency. Those good old days where a 15% of the media buy was the revenue. When TV, radio and newspaper where the only things you needed to sell your product, the golden days in advertising. Right now I’m in that paradox, I’ve got almost all the skills to be successful in an ad agency in the 1970’s but I will be graduating in 2010. Continue reading »

Our friend and local young entrepreneur Alfredo Richner has just launched, along with a new partner Pablo Lopez, the latest buzz project in Puerto Rico. This time it’s not an island-wide video platform for tourism; it’s something much smaller and yet perhaps equally grand, a fun iPhone app. Continue reading »

I have just recently decided to stay current with blogs from Puerto Rico, and doing so I stumbled into this post  ”Top 10 obstacles to Puerto Rico Web Startups“. The writer (owner of DondeEs.com) a local Directory/Map/web-App, writes about the hardships of starting a new business in Puerto Rico. My brother and I know a little about doing just that, so this post is all about common mistakes we’ve made while making new startups. These are focused on our corporate culture instead of the business aspect, a post dedicated to business tips will follow at some point.

1. Being too confident (not susceptible to change)

We are all about confidence; if we wouldn’t be, everything would be different. However, Continue reading »

Where to find clients I guess is the point of this post. Specially in the case of people like me, that have mad skillz on uncommon stuff and just need like 10 new clients per day.

1. The Internetz!
2. Brother’s contacts (change ‘brother’ for partners)
3. Get out there!
4. Start a Blog or Newsletter
5. Answer/Send Emails
6. Traditional

The Internetz!
My first option, as a web developer is most obviously going to be the internet. Hey! sorry for the push but really… Yes, this is the largest service market in the world! Need proof? check out Liveperson, a site Continue reading »

A great deal of our projects come from advertising agencies. And a direct effect of this is that we must stay current with the “ad-world”. Oddly enough, ad agencies themselves are a bit elusive in the “web-world”; so when we received an email from Hector Ortiz about his new project Kranios Marketing Think Tank we were psyched that he would use the internet to announce it. Continue reading »

We’ve been so busy writing about web and business while the real goal of this blog was to give you a little window into our heads. So, here’s a list of the things online which I enjoy the most.

1. This American Life
This was originally a radio show from Chicago Public Radio which finally found it’s real audience on the Internet. Each week they take a topic and tell one to four stories based on that topic. Continue reading »

That’s a pretty common question. We live in a world where a domain can be as cheap as a dollar, hosting will run you about $10 a month (free if you’re ok with 3rd party ads) and programs like MS Word and Photoshop will churn out html pages, ready for upload. So, why should anyone hire a professional web development studio?

We know stuff you don’t.

That might sound blunt but it’s true. Like any other professional, we do this for a living, every day, as part of a larger industry. We involve ourselves with other people of similar talents and maintain an ongoing conversation with the larger global industry. We read Continue reading »

For those of you not familiar with our company, it is mainly composed of 2 people, my brother Francisco and I. When we first started this company we had completely unrealistic expectations. We were under the impression that with nearly no investment we’d be able to churn out 20 websites a month and be essentially millionaires in weeks.

Everybody who has ever owned their own company is probably getting back on their chair after falling out from laughing so hard. As I mentioned before these expectations were completely unrealistic and oddly enough that fact didn’t quite dawn on us until after months of being in business with few clients. We now have a much clearer understanding of what real business is, we’ve molded Continue reading »