PSPINC Official Company Blog

What’s New Newsletter Vol. 187 “New ImaMenu Features!”

Sep

28

We’re happy to announce that our easy digital menu builder, ImaMenu, now has new features! After we realized some of our customers were using it to create secret menus, we went straight to work to build out our product to better serve our customers. Now, with ImaMenu, you can:

Enable limited-time access to your menu.
Add a countdown clock.
Add a secret menu passcode and access menu.

Temporary menus are great for those running an event, chefs wanting to experiment with ingredients and/or flavors, and those looking to generate buzz for their restaurant with a secret menu. Sign up for ImaMenu for free today to get started.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#business #businesstips #businesstools #digitalmarketing #food #imamenu #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #menu #newsletter #pspinc #restaurant #restaurants #sales #smallbusiness #tech #technology #web #website #webtools

The Success of Secret Menus

Sep

26

If you’ve ever gone to Starbuck's, McDonalds, or In-N-Out, you’ve probably heard of secret menus before. A secret menu consists of hidden or popular customized menu items that a restaurant can make but doesn’t advertise. Most places that have secret menu items haven’t created them on their own; customers asked for different customizations, and they became popular over time. And since they’re usually created by customers themselves, they gain popularity over time and spread best through word of mouth.

For example, making regular menu items “animal-style” at In-N-Out isn’t part of the menu, but many people would think it is because of how popular it is. It’s been around for so long that no one knows where it came from, not even In-N-Out. Former In-N-Out Vice President, Carl Van Fleet says it first surfaced sometime in the early 1970s, but since the company didn’t create it themselves, they have no idea who did. Regardless, it’s stood the test of time, proving just how popular secret menu items could get.

Benefits of Secret Menu Items

The hard part of succeeding with secret menus is how to market them; you want people to know about them, but not so much that they won’t be “secret” anymore. It takes striking the right balance, being both accessible and exclusive. There isn’t a guaranteed way to get it right, unfortunately, but when it works, it works. Secret menus:

Create exclusivity – customers like feeling like insiders when they shop. Secret menus give them that sense of being “in the know”.
Generate buzz and interest – people love secret menus. It excites them; the prospect of ordering something that isn’t on the menu is exciting.
Give your chefs, baristas, bartenders, and others the opportunity to experiment with new ingredients and flavors without committing to adding them to the menu.
Let chefs, baristas, bartenders, and others take advantage of seasonal ingredients – creating a secret limited-time menu is the perfect solution.
Increase business and revenue.
Reward customers for their loyalty – those in the know receive exclusive and unique dining experiences.

While marketing a secret menu has proven to be difficult, creating one doesn’t have to be. With ImaMenu, you can do just that by enabling limited-time access, adding a countdown clock, and/or adding a menu passcode with a passcode enable message. Sign up for free to get started.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#animalstyle #blog #branding #business #businesstools #food #imamenu #innout #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #mcdonalds #menu #pspinc #restaurant #secretmenu #secretmenuitems #smallbusiness #starbucks #tech #technology #web

What’s New Newsletter Vol. 186 “Extortion Fraud”

Sep

21

Online scams have been around for a long time, but over the last few years, they’ve gotten more popular. Specifically, extortion frauds have become popular as many of our customers have received them in their email inboxes. Extortion frauds usually occur over email and consist of cybercriminals sending threatening messages demanding payment in exchange for not releasing sensitive information. While they may seem threatening, these emails are scams where hackers are just trying to trick people into giving them money. They don’t actually have any sensitive or embarrassing information on you, as they claim.

Our advice is to just mark those messages as spam and delete them from your inbox. As great as spam filters can be, cybercrime continues to get more sophisticated, which makes it easier for emails like these to make it into your inbox. Our Dreamersi email hosting customers have the option of adjusting their spam filters to try to weed emails like these out. If you’d like any help to clean out your inbox or adjust your spam filter, reach out to our support team! They’re always happy to help!

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#blog #business #businesstools #cybersecurity #digitalmarketing #dreamersi #email #emailhosting #marketing #marketingdigital #newsletter #pspinc #pspincwhatsnewnewsletter #security #smallbusiness #tech #technology #web #webdevelopment #website

Google’s Consent Management Platform (CMP) Changes and What It Means

Sep

19

Have you ever gone to a website only to come across a pop-up asking you to consent to the site using your data? That is what’s called a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) message. But you may have also noticed that not every website shows a GDPR message. That’s because privacy laws in the European Union and the UK are different compared to the U.S. when it comes to collecting users’ data.

Advertisers can use IAB’s Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) as a tool to hold them accountable and to comply with the GDPR as well as the ePrivacy Directive, a privacy law regulating cookie usage, data minimization, and more. When advertising with Google AdSense, Ad Manager, or Ad Mob, Google-certified Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) have IAB’s TCF integrated into them, making it easier to serve ads in the European Economic Area (EEA) and/or the U.K. Equipped with IAB's TCF, Google's CMPs, and GDPR messages, advertisers can easily serve ads in the E.U. and the UK. while complying to their privacy laws.

Google’s New CMP Requirements

Starting January 16, 2024, Google AdSense, Ad Manager, or AdMob will start requiring publishers and developers to use a CMP certified by Google. Why? Because IAB Europe’s TCF released a new version (v2.2) recently that comes with even stricter consent requirements, which include:

No longer accepting “legitimate interest” as a legal base of consent for personalization efforts.
Standardized data retention periods for third-party vendors.
Easy access for users to their CMPs for if they want to withdraw or modify their consent and preferences.

For those working with ad technology providers not registered with TCF, Google makes it easy with its Additional Consent specification. While many are already using Google-certified CMPs, those who aren’t will be affected by these new requirements.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#admanager #admob #advertising #blog #business #businesstips #businesstools #cmp #digitalmarketing #eu #europeanunion #gdpr #google #googleadsense #iab #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #smallbusiness #tcf #tech #technology #uk #web

What’s New Newsletter Vol. 185 “Scam Letters”

Sep

14

Recently, our San Diego office received some scam mail disguised as a domain renewal. Upon first glance, it looked like your average domain renewal request, but since we manage our own pspinc.com domain, we immediately realized it was a scam. Apparently, some of our customers have also received similar letters, but have thankfully asked us first if they needed to make a payment. For our web hosting customers, please be aware that our hosting services include domain management (unless you have a separate contract with a separate provider), so there shouldn’t be any additional domain-related charges. If there are, please know that it will come from us at PSPINC directly rather than the domain registrar.

If you ever receive similar scam letters or emails, making payments will potentially result in:

· Unauthorized credit card usage or
· Loss of domain

Luckily, we’re here to assist you with any hosting-related and/or IT-related concerns and issues. So if you ever have any suspicions or questions about these types of scam letters, please reach out to our support team and they’d be happy to help!

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#blog #business #businesstips #businesstools #ecommerce #hosting #marketing #newsletter #officetips #pacificsoftwarepublishing #pspinc #pspincwhatsnewnewsletter #smallbusiness #tech #technology #web #webdevelopment #webhosting

What’s New Newsletter Vol. 184 “Web Builders Vs. Custom Designed Sites”

Sep

7

Today, people have built many websites using popular web builders that make it easy for non-technical people to create a website. But as great as that is, many of those sites end up looking the same, just with different content. This isn’t to say that there aren’t great website templates out there because there are. But because of how popular these sites are, it results in a lot of similar-looking sites. The only differences are the images and word choices.

While that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it does make it harder for new websites to stand out amongst the competition. That’s why many businesses decide to get their site custom-designed. It guarantees that your site will stand out and lets you add features that may not be available from templates. Get your site custom-designed by our expert design team with one of our budget-friendly web design plans.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#blog #business #businesstips #businesstools #digitalmarketing #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #pspinc #pspincwhatsnewnewsletter #smallbusiness #tech #technology #web #webdesign #webdevelopment #website #websitebuilder #websites #wordpress

What’s New Newsletter Vol. 183 “Free Social Media Marketing Tool”

Aug

31

Social media is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways for small businesses to market themselves. But for those who aren’t trained or experienced in design, creating visually appealing posts isn’t always easy. And we’ve probably all seen our fair share of less-than-ideal graphics floating around the internet. That’s why Canva, an online graphic design tool, is so helpful to even experienced marketers.

With Canva, marketers can pick from hundreds of templates and royalty-free graphics, images, and even video. We know our marketing team here at PSPINC loves using it to their advantage. With Canva, people can drag and drop elements using their editor to make the design phase simpler so marketers can focus on marketing your business in other ways. To learn more, check out our YouTube video that breaks down all the ways Canva can help market your business. And if you’re looking to outsource your marketing work, reach out to our marketing team.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#advertising #blog #branding #business #businesstips #businesstools #digitalmarketing #facebook #instagram #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #smallbusiness #socialmedia #tech #technology #twitter #web #webdesign #website #websites #webtools

Deepfakes: Explained

Aug

29

Deepfakes are images, videos, and/or audio that are digitally altered to convincingly appear to be something else using artificial intelligence (AI). AI development has been progressing rapidly over the last few years, and deepfakes are no exception. With how popular they’ve gotten over the last few years, it’s become much harder to detect what’s fake and what isn’t online. And with it, the concern about those using the technology to spread false information. But there are, thankfully, other non-malicious uses for deepfakes that more people are exploring today.

How It Works

an artist's illustration of artificial intelligence

There are two ways to create a deepfake. The first way is specific to creating deepfake images and videos through a face swap. With this method, developers use an encoder to run thousands of face shots of two people. The encoder then reduces them to their shared common features and compresses the images. Developers then add two decoders to the process, with one recovering one face and the second recovering the other face from the compressed images. The face swap occurs when the developer feeds the encoded images into the wrong decoder. This means that the decoder trained on person B’s face gets fed person A’s compressed image and vice versa. But for it to result in a convincing video, developers need to do this for every frame.

The other way developers can create deepfakes involves using a generative adversarial network (Gan). A Gan pits two AI algorithms, a generator and a discriminator, against each other. With the generator, developers feed it random noise and it turns into a synthetic image, which developers will then feed into the discriminator, made up of a stream of images of real things like celebrities’ faces. After repeating this process multiple times, the discriminator and generator will improve over time with performance feedback. Eventually, it’ll result in very realistic images of nonexistent people.

Deepfake Use Cases

While the technology initially caused concern for malicious uses like putting harmful words in important political figures’ mouths, there are other completely innocent uses for them. Some other examples include, but are not limited to:

Restoring people’s voices when they lose them to disease with voice-cloning deepfakes.

Enlivening museums and art exhibits.

Dubbing foreign-language films.

Providing personalized responses to caller requests for receptionist services and/or simple customer phone support services.

Manipulating actors’ voices for specific scenes in post-production.

The danger that more people are concerned about is how realistic deepfakes can be. There are a few telltale signs that it’s fake, but even those constantly change because of how fast developers fix it. Fortunately, the technology’s popularity has shifted from malicious intentions to those using it to entertain others. But as deepfakes progress, they will continue to improve quickly, as they already have. What we choose to do with it, however, will largely be up to those who know how to use it.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#ai #artificialintelligence #audio #blog #business #businesstools #customerservice #cybersecurity #deepfake #deepfakes #images #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #photos #security #tech #technology #video #web #webdevelopment #webtools

Bloguru’s Twitter Integration Changes

Aug

15

Earlier this year, Twitter started charging third parties for API usage, which caused many websites to remove Twitter from their website. API stands for Application Programming Interface and lets developers integrate existing software systems into new applications. Usually, websites use APIs to share information or carry out diverse tasks. With Twitter’s new API changes, many websites have removed Twitter integration. Now, Bloguru has done the same.

It is, however, worth noting that our team is investigating a new API for our users in hopes of enhancing and upgrading the overall experience for our Bloguru users. If you’d still like to share your blog posts with your Twitter followers, copy your post’s URL and paste it into a new tweet.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#api #blog #bloguru #business #businesstools #developer #development #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #marketingtools #pspinc #smallbusiness #socialmedia #technology #twitter #twitterapi #web #webdeveloper #webdevelopment #website #webtools

Data Collection: Privacy Concerns and Regulation

Aug

15

Collecting data has become standard today as marketers use it to better promote their products. Efforts to better personalize ads have proven to be immensely successful, to the point of it becoming an expectation. But many aren’t fully aware of how much data companies collect on users, or how much gets passed around between third parties. And there isn’t much regulation on how much they can collect or what they can or can’t do with that data, which is how we got to where we are today.

With cybercrime only increasing in recent years, users want to make sure their data is safe. Generally, the more data you collect, the more personalized the ads will be. For marketers, more data collection makes up for better ads. But the increase in hacks has been too much for people to ignore. And it’s only revealed how easy it has become for criminals to hack people and how vulnerable their information can be. So, it only makes sense that many are asking for lawmakers to add more regulations when it comes to data collection and consumer privacy.

Current State of Data Collection

Advertisers everywhere have been digitally collecting data from customers for years now. But there are two major concerns over the amount of data companies collect: privacy and potential leaks. Most users don’t know how much of their data gets collected, nor do they know what they’ll do with it. That’s for a reason; companies prefer keeping their data practices discreet, especially for data they have no immediate use for. While this data they’re not immediately using may not be valuable today, companies argue it could be someday. At the federal level, there is no specific legislation that protects users’ data. But the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has the power to protect customers from unfair or deceptive data collection practices. And they do so by enforcing federal privacy and data protection regulations.

The lack of regulations at the national level hasn’t stopped individual states from enacting some privacy laws of their own. Specifically, California, Nevada, and Maine have more comprehensive laws compared to those from other states. These privacy laws include the right of consent for their personal information, the right to request companies and third parties to delete their information, and the right to opt out of companies collecting or selling their data to third parties. On the other side of things, companies have stricter guidelines because of these laws, which include disclosing the kinds of information they’re collecting, what they intend to use that data for, and publicizing the identity of third parties, among other restrictions.

What This Means Now

Data collection practices have improved over the years as people learn more about how to keep their information safe from cybercrime. And with users demanding more transparency, more companies are complying by sharing more about their data collection practice. But it hasn’t reached the point of creating federal privacy laws; they are still only at the state level. Because of that, companies can still use, share, or sell any data they collect from customers without notifying them in most states. There also aren’t any national laws about notifying users about breached data due to leaks or other data exposures, nor are there any about third parties further selling users’ data.

In the last few years, people have realized that they aren’t as protected online as they thought. And it has just strengthened the need and desire for privacy laws at the federal level. This is a growing attitude businesses should be aware of, and the hope is, is that it will inspire more companies to be more transparent about how they collect and use customer data.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.