The MailChimp was abducted from the Loudermilk Center at the 2008 Webmaster Jam Session. Aside from a humorous flickr photostream and twitter feed, there is no evidence to show who stole the MailChimp. Or, is there?
Yesterday, I happened upon the twitter feed of one Tony Chester. Tony Chester works for OnWired, a web design agency based in Cary, NC.
Today, the abductor(s) tweeted from the “ihazurchimp” twitter account links to photos of the MailChimp in front of a rest area in South Carolina. To state the obvious, this is proof the abducter was driving north, either to or through South Carolina from Atlanta, GA. My interest was piqued. I personally know most (if not all) people from South Carolina who were at the conference, and was able to rule them out through elimination. With South Carolina being ruled out in my mind, I remembered Tony Chester from North Carolina. Recalling that he works for OnWired, and they are located in Cary, NC I quickly checked google maps to estimate the driving distance. Six hours and twenty one minutes. Definitely drivable.
Who is OnWired? As described on their website:
“By day, we’re a small, vibrant web design studio located near Raleigh, North Carolina. By night: a band of highly–trained, elite special operations web mercenaries on the lam from the law.”
Curious, no? I began dissecting the clues within the abductor’s flickr stream and twitter feed. Earlier in the day, ihazurchimp tweeted that he was going to Whole Foods to get some bananas for the MailChimp. After visiting OnWired’s contact info I made a google maps search for Whole Foods Markets near their office. Interestingly enough, Whole Foods is only 2.4 miles from OnWired’s office, down Kildaire Farm Rd.
Whole Foods’ proximity was interesting, but I had to find more. I read more about OnWired’s Team. Alongside Tony Chester, Jon Norris sits as Director of Design and Marketing. On OnWired’s home page I found a blog entry Jon Norris wrote about the Webmaster Jam Session. Within, he mentions that he attended the “Design for Email 101″ presentation which was led by Ben Chestnut of MailChimp. Jon also mentioned he used to work for one of MailChimp’s competitors.
“This session is being led by Ben Chestnut of MailChimp fame. I personally wanted to sit through this one because I used to work for one of his competitors.”
What an interesting revelation. To clear things up, I wanted to find out who Jon worked for. I went to linkedin for the answer. Two years ago he worked for Bronto, an email marketing software provider.
It’s not hard evidence, but the clues sure do point toward OnWired having the MailChimp. I’ll even venture to say they will be handing it off to Bronto software, who happens to be based in Greenville, NC only 22.8 miles from OnWired’s office.
What do you say, OnWired? Do you know anything about the MailChimp’s location? As we know, the MailChimp left Atlanta Saturday afternoon (the 4th). This would mean the abductor would not have been at the Saturday night Blue Flavor after party. OnWired went to the conference as a team, as evidenced by this flickr photo taken Thursday night (the 2nd). Until they can provide photo evidence of the entire team’s appearance at the Blue Flavor party, I think they’re prime suspects. Just sayin’.
Update!
In response to some of the comments, I’ll admit this is certainly all circumstance based. As such, I’ll point out another circumstance. The abductors posted a photo of the MailChimp having a snack of peanuts in front of a brown sofa. It’s a funny circumstance that a very similar sofa can be seen in OnWired’s flickr photostream, here and here. Should this not be enough circumstance for you, take a look at the shadows cast by the circus peanuts in the MailChimp photo. Now, take a look at the light source in the OnWired’s office. What a coincidence! The photographer obviously set the MailChimp up against the sofa where he’d have the sunlight over his right shoulder. The sofas are eerily similar, there are hardwood floors in both places, and the light source is in the same direction. Those poor OnWired fellas certainly have some coincidences stacking up against them. The photos are posted below for you to compare..
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October 7th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Who stole the chimp from the Jam Session?
OnWired stole the chimp from the Jam Session.
Who me? Yes you.
Couldn’t be. Then who?
(This is all in good humor of course…but I think Ken has a pretty good case.)
October 7th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Ken, you are a smart son of a gun.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Wow — Ken has definitely put a compelling argument together, but I’m pretty sure OnWired HQ is chimp-free.
First off, the facts. Yes, the entire OnWired team attended the 2008 Webmaster Jam Session, and yes, we drove from Raleigh to Atlanta and back. We were at both days of the conference, and we left as soon as the last session was over on Saturday, skipping the Blue Flavor party and getting back home really late Saturday night (actually really early Sunday morning).
You’re right that I worked for Bronto for a while (actually in Durham, not Greenville), but I quit two years ago and haven’t stepped foot into their office since then. In fact, when our clients need an email marketing service, we typically push them to Campaign Monitor. I’ve never once recommended that one of our clients use Bronto. To add to that, we actually transitioned one of our client away from Bronto and onto Campaign Monitor earlier this year. I worked there for just over a year, but that’s pretty much where things end.
Yeah, Ken has some “evidence”, but I think it’s all purely coincidental. Here goes a quick walkthrough.
Ken states that the picture from the rest stop proves that the driver was heading north. Yeah, we passed by a South Carolina rest stop Saturday night, but it was only about two hours outside of Atlanta, so pretty much anyone could have driven there to take that picture, whether they were heading that way or not. The chimp went missing on Friday, the 3rd, but that photo wasn’t posted until 9PM on the 5th, so it could have been taken either Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night.
Next, Ken says he personally knew most of the South Carolina people from the conference, so he was able to rule them out. Did he actually check all of their vehicles? Did he check up on all the people from Georgia as well? What about other people who lived farther north? I’m pretty sure we weren’t the only ones who came from the north.
Next, Ken quotes some copy on our home page about us being elite operatives, which we wrote just to be funny. You’ll figure out in a hurry that we are a pretty wacky group if you spend a few minutes around us. If you look a little deeper on our “Who We Are” page, we have an entire spoof of the A-Team intro, but I’ll get back to this point in a minute.
On to the next thing. The “abductors” said something about Whole Foods. Yeah, there’s one near our office, but there are also a couple hundred other Whole Foods stores across the country — actually in 39 or 40 other states if my count is right.
Ken says the chimp left Atlanta on Saturday, but actually, nobody saw it after Friday afternoon. J Cornelius tweeted about it being missing around 5:45 on Friday — shortly after the last session of the day started. It could have left town then, or it could still be there for all I know.
To put it plainly, I think we’re being framed. We tweeted before the event that we were coming. Someone could have done an awful lot of homework ahead of time to find an appropriate scapegoat. Ken did all the research too, so we were apparently easy targets.
I see at least two obvious suspects here. First, as Ken has proven by his post, he’s done an incredible amount of research into our company, our location, our travel plans, our history, etc. It’s conceivable that he did this research before the event, selected us as his scapegoat, stole the chimp himself, and then posted this info to divert suspicions away from himself and his friends.
The other suspect, and the more obvious one, is someone from MailChimp — or more exactly, Ben Chestnut himself. I was in Ben’s session, as Ken noted. Ben talked an awfully long time — so long that one of the event organizers had to come in and tell him to wrap it up, and as soon as he walked out the door, Eddie Vasquez walked in and started talking. That was around 5:30 on Friday. As I previously noted, J Cornelius tweeted at 5:45 that the chimp was gone. I’m guessing there weren’t an awful lot of people skipping sessions, so about the only people in the lobby at that time would have been the organizers and speakers who were done for the day. It is entirely conceivable that Ben finished his session, walked through the lobby, picked up the chimp, and headed out the door, nodding to J Cornelius to send out the tweet to get things rolling. Think about it — it’s a perfect viral marketing campaign. The folks at MailChimp have certainly been playing along, creating a “Have You Seen Me?” page, adding pics to Facebook, etc. To top it off — getting back to something I mentioned — one of Ben’s tweets referenced the A-Team, something that clued me in to the fact that maybe he did some pre-event research on us beforehand as well. I didn’t see Ben at all on Saturday, so he certainly had plenty of time to drive to the South Carolina border, take some pictures, and head back home.
This is getting long, so to wrap it up, Ken has some circumstantial hinting that we’re the abductors, but there is just as much circumstantial evidence pointing to someone else (either he or Ben or a third party) being behind this shameless marketing ploy.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Ouch; a victim of circumstance I am! This is a great post, I think you need to change professions.
TC
October 7th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
I work at MailChimp, and I can say for a fact that I have not see that monkey anywhere in our office. And I was kind of miffed that it was taken, but only because I was the one who ordered it.
October 7th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
Damn Ken; Columbo is proud. I would say the evidence, from the couch comparisons alone, are a compelling case. Good job.
October 8th, 2008 at 6:09 am
I work at Bronto. In my 3 years as a Bronto, I spent some of that time as the aforementioned Jon Norris’s co-worker. I can confirm that Jon has never stepped foot in the Bronto offices since he’s left (at least not on my watch). I can’t confirm nor deny that Jon has never recommended Bronto to a client of his - I don’t follow Jon close enough. Unless I am reading into Jon’s comments too much, it seems like he is not a big fan of Bronto. That is too bad.
I *do* follow MailChimp and have a ton of respect for what they do, the product/support/service they provide, and - of course - for Ben’s openness, knowledge and expertise in the field of email marketing.
I want a MailChimp.
dj at bronto
twitter.com/djwaldow
October 8th, 2008 at 6:11 am
I distinctly remember that Jon Norris guy sitting in the audience, and he had a really sinister grin on his face the whole time.
Also, he smelled a lot like circus peanuts.
It’s all adding up now.
October 8th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Ok…somebody is working awfully hard to make it look like we’re the ones behind the chimp’s abduction.
Regarding the potentially incriminating couch in the aforementioned photographs, we got that a while back at Target, primarily because it was comfy and cheap. I’m sure we aren’t the only ones with a couch like that though. I’m willing to bet that you can find those in half of the college dorm rooms in the country. In fact, one of our clients has that exact couch in their lobby, so they can’t be all that rare.
Looking back through everything, I agree that there’s some compelling evidence against us. Of course, I have to say this — we’re not idiots. If we had stolen the chimp, would we really tweet that we were driving north with it? Why not west or southeast or some other direction to throw people off the trail.
Would we really tweet that we’re going to the local Whole Foods to pick up bananas, knowing that there’s one right down the street? There’s a Trader Joe’s even closer, but you all probably know that by now because the actual abductor just tweeted about it. Somebody is obviously doing their homework.
To go on, would we be dumb enough to take pictures in our office in front of our couch which already appears in other pictures on Flickr?
Even better, did we really take time out of our busy day yesterday to go on a quest for circus peanuts, just because Aarron from Mailchimp tweeted about it?
Like DJ, I respect Mailchimp. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have taken the time to sit through Ben’s session given my email marketing background. I certainly wouldn’t have stolen their mascot. I respect Bronto as well — no hard feelings there. They are just very different products, and to me, they have different target audiences. Of course, ExactTarget is another story — I had to work with it for a client earlier this year and it made me cry…
October 8th, 2008 at 7:57 am
I don’t know Jon, you did rush out of here yesterday in a tizzy, and you did come back with some orange substance smeared all over your shirt.
TC
October 8th, 2008 at 8:01 am
Wow. Accusing Ben and I is a stretch. I actually tweeted about it being missing at 3:45 on Friday so there is a hole in Jon’s theory: http://twitter.com/jcornelius/statuses/945542427
Maybe it was OnWired… the evidence above looks solid, this tweet looks suspect too: http://twitter.com/ihazurchimp/statuses/951182422
A case of raising doubt of ones guilt by engaging in self implication?
October 8th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Apparently my comments about Bronto struck a nerve, so I want to clarify. I bear no ill will toward them. Bronto is a great company with great people and great software. It simply isn’t the right solution for our smaller clients, so I refer them to a solution that is better suited for their needs. Our largest clients, who would be better suited for Bronto, already use apps like ExactTarget or DartMail or other big systems and are locked in long-term, so there’s no opportunity to get them to switch.
My comments were only meant to protect my former employer from being wrongly accused like us, since Ken mentioned that the chimp may be handed off to Bronto. My point was simply that I haven’t been to Bronto HQ and haven’t used their product in 2 years, so if we did steal the chimp — which we didn’t — it definitely wasn’t to give it to them. End of story.
October 8th, 2008 at 11:34 am
It couldn’t be my son, it was like that when he got there, you can’t prove a thing, he always told me “I cannot tell a lie, Pop Eye did it”
October 8th, 2008 at 11:48 am
@dj, thanks for the kind words. The respect is mutual here at MC. Still though. We’ll be watching you (doing that robert dinero thing with the hands like on Meet the Parents).
October 8th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
The authorities are aware of your every move, OnWired. This could be any moment now:
http://flickr.com/photos/jasongraphix/2924099433/
Don’t worry though, they’re only after the primate…and the rest of those circus peanuts.
October 8th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Man, this makes leaving Brontos at competitors offices (ahem… http://idek.net/3t) seem mild at best.
Tempers are really flaring here. I think we all need to keep what’s important in sight: ensuring the chimp is safe. Jason, were those PETA troups?
@covati on twitter
October 10th, 2008 at 11:19 am
[…] Seals, in particular, did some excellent detective work, deducing that OnWired has the MailChimp. And who is OnWired, you ask? From their […]
October 10th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Ha! Funny picture of Bronto dangling from the iContact sign.
October 13th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
[…] Ken Seals knows the answer. […]
October 15th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
The truth is out there - http://onwired.com/blog/we-haz-the-chimp/
Tony
December 11th, 2008 at 8:00 am
[…] I started suspecting my fellow Columbia residents, but I believe my coworker Ken Seals has solved the mystery. If his theory isn’t correct, the suspects have some ’splainin to […]