Eko: A Traffic Light Augmented by Progress Bars – information aesthetics.
Pretty cool way to show when a light is going green. This could make you start up a little bit earlier and keep traffic flowing more smoothly.
Archive for the ‘Ideas’ Category
Eko: A Traffic Light Augmented by Progress Bars – information aesthetics
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010Mozilla Jetpack opens opportunity for brands in the browser
Thursday, May 21st, 2009Mozilla Labs have just announced the Jetpack development extension for the Firefox browser. In essence, it allows for much easier development of Firefox plugins. Previously, you’d need a developer who was somewhat clued up with the intricacies of the browser, it’s never had a massive barrier to entry, but you wouldn’t just build a plugin for any campaign. But if I’d have a buck for everytime I’ve heard a pitch related to “let’s build a Firefox extension” I’d probably be a rich man. Inevitably it always get scuppered somehow (costs, lead time, limited knowledge, etc).
Now, with the release of Jetpack, it will allow developers who develop a microsite or other campaign related material to develop new plugins for the browser using technology that they are most familiar with – CSS, HTML, Javascript, etc. This means more stuff that you can do for a campaign. Here is a brief video explaining the basics – it does get quite technical later on so if you are an account or brand manager, don’t bother watching past 3:00 mins as it gets a bit techie, you’d be able to understand the gist of things though.
Mozilla Labs Jetpack – Intro & Tutorial from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
So what does this mean?
Well, it means that your development team will be able to develop an extension a lot quicker than previously as they won’t need to learn a new technology, plus your users would be a lot more willing to download and install the extension as they won’t need to restart their browser (this has always been a barrier to adoption for Firefox extensions).
By making it easier to develop and install these extensions, we might see the advent of “throw away extensions” – plugins that exist only for the duration of the campaign and are removed afterwards. I mentioned the Orange Internet Balloon Race campaign yesterday – something like that would work brilliantly as a quick extension for your campaign.
As with the emergence of constellations, brands need to realise that they exist on many different levels – not only on their own brand site or microsite and that the browser is a great place to tie all these elements together. A Firefox extension is a fantastic way for brands to develop engaging conversations with their fans – the danger of course being that you don’t want to overwhelm them with too much!
On another note, Mozilla has now also decreased the barrier to entry for potential extension developers. As stated above, one required different knowledge to build a Firefox extension previously, Jetpack now allows any person with knowledge of the standard web technologies to create an extension. And it’s been the extension market place that has led Firefox to become such a popular browser in the first place (that, and the fact that it’s NOT Internet Explorer!). This is a great step by Mozilla to expand on their Marketplace strategy (just as Apple, Nokia, Facebook, etc have done).
Here are links to Techcrunch, as well as ZDnet for some other light analysis.
Are there any great extensions that you can think of to develop for your brands’ campaign?
Good Ideas in 2009 in Mobile
Thursday, November 20th, 2008Video: Good Ideas in 2009 in Mobile | PSFK – Trends, Ideas & Inspiration.
This is quite an inspiring video to watch. Take the 35mins out.
Vice Magazine impact on photography
Friday, August 15th, 2008
I’ve never really thought about it.
It’s no coincidence that American Apparel’s often controversial advertising campaigns imitate the Vice look, nor that Vice photographer Terry Richardson is the principal photographer for Uniqlo’s in-house magazine, Paper. His style has countless amateur copycats worldwide, whose photos have found a home on fast-growing photo-sharing websites such as Flickr and MySpace. Snapping away at a party in Portland, Oregon, or in Harajuku, Tokyo, a global scenester can disseminate their local style worldwide before sunrise.
The Vice photography style has influenced so many styles of photography it’s crazy. Almost all of the street fashion, party pics.
Here I am thinking, dang those local street-fashion photography kids We-Are-Awesome are copying The Cobrasnake. But if I knew my sociological roots better, I’d know that Cobrasnake is a copy of Vice.
Some Cobrasnake links:
Some links for We Are Awesome
The future of software is in hardware and branded web applications
Thursday, July 31st, 2008Taking a look at this presentation at TED:
Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web.
And it’s brilliant. Kevin Kelly orginally starts taking about something that most people call, or understand as, The Singularity. The Singularity is where all computers are connected in some way, and they work together and more importantly, they/it are/is smarter than all the humans put together.
One of the quotes: “By 2040 computer processing power will surpass the processing power of all the humans combined.”
Kelly mentions thinking of devices like your sneakers as “Chips with Heels” and cars as “Chips with Wheels”. I couldn’t agree more. The future of software, and specifically web software, is in tying the offline together with the online. It’s probably always been the case, but now even more so, as we’re finally moving into understanding how the potential.
Does anyone remember the Internet Fridge? Fantastic concept, but ridiculously expensive and it never really took off, most probably because there was never the concept of a web application for the actual fridge. I’d want to be able to “zoom” into my fridge, see what I’m buying, how often I’m buying it and what I’m wasting. Should I buy less cheese (because I’m not eating everything before the expiry date)? How long has that piece of chicken been sitting in the back there? Although I like the idea of mustard, am I actually using it?
A fridge that ties in with a web application and that can pick up on your consumption habits and deduce trends is much more exciting than one that just scans the barcode and orders new stuff for you (even if that is kinda sexy).
Nike is doing something similar now with Nike Plus+. It’s the “Chip with Heels” and it’s already here. How about uploading your recent trip into the Kalahari to a site where you can share that, and download other trips? If you were looking for an add on to your Jeep social network then there’s your idea.
In the next couple of years/months we’ll start seeing more apps that add value to users, advertising will move to the sideline and branded web applications will move to the fore.
The Singularity of constantly connected apps won’t come from a single source or actor, but consumers will start to want to be able to share their data on multiple sites. That will mean more open API’s and more need for interoperability. Right at the end Kelly touches on Data Portability when he says you’ll be able to sign in/up to sites without having to put your data in… again. That’s what Facebook Connect is taking mainstream now and what OpenID has been trying to do for the past couple of years.
More on the maturing web- and the decline of banner ads
Monday, June 30th, 2008Friday drinks are great, drinks in general are great, but drinks with great minds are especially great. Last Friday we moze’d on down to Firemans Arms in Green Point for Beer ‘O Clock with Leezl, Tiaan, Herman and Clint. All people who I love working with.
I wanted to chat about how the web is maturing, how we’re seeing different apps coming from different players, and luckily Clint had already spotted what I was trying to articulate.
The web is maturing, and advertising is changing with that. Read this post by Jackson Fish Market on where they see the web going. The gist of the post is that display advertising is disruptive – placing an ad next to content is the print way of thinking about monetization, branding and advertising. Not only that, but it’s also disruptive. Users are on the site because they want to view the content, not the ad, and you are disrupting them with your popup, overlay, onionskin ad.
Enter the webapp. Web apps are places that people want to be, I want to be on tumblr, I love Slideshare and Last.Fm gets more eyeball time from me than books do. Not only those, but I was devastated when Mymilemarker.com shut down, how else will I track my ridiculous consumption patterns? (I just checked and it’s back up again).
So what that means is that people spending time on web apps want to be there, even if it is a branded environment. You have higher engagement levels, people want to be there, in fact, they even come back! What that means for an agency is that they need to rethink they way that they do branding online. Banner ads are actually really boring. Agency’s need to build web apps that are engaging, that fit with their brand, and offer productivity and utility to the user.
We’ve seen a few webapps already, but mostly not really thinking about “web apps” but still riding the “Social Networking is the be-all-and-end-all” mantra. It’s not about social networks, it’s about utility. Locally, the YoungBlood5 network was an example in a way (it had touches of being an app), but we haven’t seen anything that’s a solid application.
The future of agencies will probably see them building webapps and engaging environments, more so than creating banners, trafficking and managing e-mail campaigns.
It’s also why I get irritated by people wanting to “build social networks for everything”. It’s not about social networks, it’s about social applications. All applications need to be social in some way, but they need to be applications and offer utility.
Some examples of branded web applications (some/most border on Social Networks):
Specialised riders club (built on Rails apparently)
Nike Plus
Youngblood5
MTV Think:
StandardBank ATM locator
Why doesn’t Sasol bring out a MyMileMarker type app? Or VirginActive a health app (they already have the LifeZone stuff, but they can do more)? Rama doesn’t need a food social network, they need a web app that people can use to find recipes.
And finally, just because I know most people won’t read the article, here are Jackson Fish Market’s predictions:
- even the biggest brand advertisers will realize that creating and maintaining high quality web apps is not a simple proposition
- they will turn to their ad agencies and their interactive retinue to build these experiences
- more often than not, these folks will build sites oriented around expensive content, video, and the like
- brand advertisers will realize that they need the traditional creatives combined with deeper software expertise to make great online experiences
- some advertisers will bring this in house and in effect become software companies themselves
- some advertisers will work with companies (like ours) to deliver online experiences that have depth, quality, and utility (some of the agencies over time will build deeper expertise in this area — it’s harder than it looks)
- and whichever tactical choice a marketer makes, the bulk of online consumer software will be funded directly by brand advertisers
DiSo project: Taking a page from Facebook
Thursday, February 28th, 2008If you take a look at the structure of Facebook you can see 2 main navigation sections (disregarding the rest of the site).
- Profile data at the top (Profile, Friends, Networks, Inbox)
- You have apps and other things on the left.
The way we’ve been thinking about the way Facebook works in terms of architecture and find it incredibly interesting, from an innovation perspective and also because the products we’re building rely on similar kind of systems.
We follow the standards or thoughts in the DiSo project, as well as the concepts in the Social Network Portability (really the same thing), so we’re trying to look at how your profile can be more portable, and follow you around the web.
In Facebook, your top profile is the one that really counts, it’s the one that follows you through all the apps you’ve installed, and brings you back to your data, the one on the left is basically all the different “sites” you’re on. It’s like FriendFeed or Plaxo or whatever, but the relationship between data-owner and application is much more skewed.
This post is pretty half-arsed and pretty obvious, but sometimes you need to state the obvious!
Daily blog reads
Thursday, November 22nd, 2007In response to Charl sharing some of his daily blog reads, I’ll share some of mine as well.
I have few buckets or folders which have completely no relevance to the feeds that are in them. They were general folders that I setup ages ago and just haven’t gotten round to re-organising them. They are still relevant to some extent…
I’m not including any links… You can get that if you ask me… and I might send you the OPML file. I have 2 folders for
_Local and _Bloggers (the _ is so that they are at the top of my feeds list):