Everyone and their mother knows that Tumblr is where all the "cool" people hang out. It’s also growing in popularity in leaps and bounds. We recently built a small integration to get you Tumblr folk a much cleaner and easier way for your readers to sign up for your email list.

The integration works by using a tool we created called Chimplr that generates some JavaScript and HTML that you paste into your Tumblr Theme’s "HTML Widget" section. The code puts a "Newsletter" button next to the other Tumblr controls. Don’t worry, it’s really easy to use!

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I’m excited to announce another graduate from the Integration Fund – KashFlow Accounting. KashFlow is an easy to understand accounting system for UK small and medium size businesses. Their online accounting software aims to make the world of invoicing, cash-flow management and VAT reports simple and streamlined, so you can spend your time running your business, not struggling with software.

As I work to manage the super-exciting influx of applications to the integration fund, one of the main things I think about is how will this integration increase the utility of our application for our users (read: does this actually help anyone)? Well, we have a gang of users in the UK and as much as I try to avoid all things accounting, rumor has it, its kind of a big deal. Small businesses spend an average of 5 hours every week dealing with accounting-related tasks like credit control, statutory financial requirements (what?) and chasing overdue invoices.

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Since typing in a long API key code can be cumbersome– especially on mobile devices– Stephen Cerutti suggested we might add the ability to grab your key from a QR code. We thought it was such a great suggestion we went ahead and launched the feature in yesterday’s application update.

QR codes are neat because they store information, like a website address or string of characters, that you can then retrieve with your smart phone’s camera and an app that’s able to read them.

There isn’t yet an option in any of our mobile apps requiring an API key to use your QR code instead, but our Mobile Labs team is working on the next piece of the puzzle as I type this. The idea is that initially you can use your favorite app to scan the code, then copy/paste your API key into the application.

If you haven’t noticed by now, we put a lot of effort into making it easy for developers to build apps on top of MailChimp’s email delivery engine via our API. As if our $1 million MailChimp Integration Fund wasn’t enough of an excuse, I thought I’d mention a few Ruby gems you can use to make integrating MailChimp with your apps even easier…

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You know the hardest part about (and therefore the secret of) good email marketing? Telling a good story. Those quarterly newsletters you write should all come together to tell the story of your brand. If your story is all about saving money, then your daily email coupons should tell that story. Starving artist? That automatic email campaign you hooked up to your flickr or dribbble should tell your story (in pictures).

But curating a story for your emails is hard. Sometimes, I want to make a point in my email newsletters, and I end up spending days just writing the back story for it on our blog. Other times, the story is scattered across Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, etc. Finding them, bookmarking them, clipping and saving them into your story can be a pain.

There’s now an app for this painful process. It’s called Storify. And Storify now integrates with MailChimp…

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