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Tech circles have been exploding this week with news that both Sony and Allerta announced new smart watches- wrist accessories that are smart, connected and will replace the dummy timepiece popular with most non-millennial groups.
Both the Sony SmartWatch and Allerta’s Pebble show signs of what’s next- wireless wearable computers that can go anywhere while tethering data from iDevices and Androids- allowing for a form factor small enough to wear in our everyday lives.
Pebble, a new KickStarter crowd fund project that made its goal funding after only a few short hours, and has already raised over $3 million beyond their initial funding goal with over 30 days left to raise funds. Pebble sports an e-ink black/white display that feels more at home inside a Kindle than a smartphone. It also plays nice on Android and iOS alike. Like SmartWatch, Pebble pulls data from your smartphone, but the real promise lies in its own app store and soon-to-be-released SDK, allowing anyone to develop Pebble applications. This opens the device up to incredible potential that we may not be able to fully realize until developers have a chance to see how the device fits into their lives. The week-long battery life may usher in an era of long-lasting data devices, before only seen by e-readers with limited functionality outside reading.
This year, I predict the Pebble will do to watches what the iPhone did to mobile phones. Read More
Facebook buys Instagram, now what?
It finally happened… Facebook purchased Instagram this week. The deal went down with Facebook paying $1 billion for the photo-sharing app, and is now the most popular app that Facebook has purchased. Instagram has a strong and passionate following, with over 30 million users making their everyday photos into beautiful works of art on a daily basis. It has become one of the fastest growing apps in mobile and has sparked creativity and imagination in its users since day one.
The deal has some Instagram users worried, and Twitter was blowing up this week with legitimate concerns from passionate photo takers. And rightfully so. If you take a look at the track records of apps previously purchased by Facebook, none of them scream success. Gowalla, FriendFeed and others all saw their demise after they were scooped up by the social giant. Read More
The digital advertising sales (and in turn buying) process is a mess. A total, absolute, the-dog-got-into-the-garbage mess. There are too many vendors, too many ways to buy, too much pressure to perform and too little time.
So what the heck am I, or the poor sales people trying to convince me to buy from them, supposed to do?
Answers… Here are my top 3 tips for both Sellers and Buyers to make this process much smoother for all of us.
Notes to the Sales people:
1. Be aware that you are selling something that is almost exactly the same as at least one other product being sold to me.
Everyone says their product is the one guaranteed to solve all my advertising problems. With all the vendors I have met with or heard about, only eight of them (give or take) actually had something unique, and maybe another eight had something that truly hit all my appointed goals. Being aware of this should drive a sales attitude that is understanding. Most importantly, it should cause sales people to point out where their solution is truly different or better–not just that it exists and happens to be the best-thing-ever.
2. Tell me why I care.
The fact that you just had a site redesign or updated your targeting profiles doesn’t matter to me. Why the redesign or profiles makes your product a better environment for advertising does matter. At least half of the presentations and meetings I sit through talk about features instead of benefits to advertisers. Read More
The Muscle Behind the Trayvon Martin Movement
It’s no surprise anymore that social media has become the outlet for people to discuss hot topics going on around the world. Whether it be a political debate, or a sporting event, people turn to social media as a way to personally get involved and express their opinions.
The recent killing of Trayvon Martin, a Florida teen who stepped out to get some Skittles, is no different. There is plenty of outrage and angered emotions surrounding the situation, and people have taken to the social media streets. To catch any of you up who haven’t heard, Trayvon was a 17-year-old boy who had gone out wearing a hoodie to get some Iced Tea and Skittles and was shot and killed when he was deemed a threat by a neighbor.
Between the legal implications of this case and the emotional outpour that we have seen, social media has become the center of communications for Trayvon mourners and supporters. Petitions have been created, circulated, signed and then blasted out through social networks. Trayvon’s own parents created a petition that is now the fastest growing petition in the history of change.org due mainly in part to social sharing.
The idea that people can exercise their social responsibility in a forum that they are already using is empowering and exciting. In order to become a part of the movement to help Trayvon’s family see justice, all people need to do is log on to Facebook or Twitter or click to sign petitions on Change.org. While many people have heard about what is going on, the social aspect has added a whole new level of engagement and participation.
While hailing a cab in Austin during SxSW might be a daunting task, there certainly is no shortage of interesting new technologies to be explored. For a developer like me, it’s chock-full of panels and presentations discussing everything from techniques to tools for creating exciting new digital experiences.
There were the typical talks revolving around new ways to utilize “today’s” technologies like HTML5 and CSS3 as one would expect. However, one of the more interesting topics I was delighted and surprised to see given so much attention was WebGL. I was surprised because WebGL is so bleeding edge, we may not see mainstream implementations until 2014.
And there was no lack of talent at SxSW waiting to talk about the latest developments of WebGL. We had industry rock stars like the creator of the most popular WebGL JavaScript libary Mr. Doob, Creative Director from Google Aaron Koblin, Luz Caballero of Opera Software and Nicolas Garcia Belmonte of Sencha there to teach us all about the power and application of WebGL.
The attention given to WebGL was well-deserved — it’s going to open up some stunning new channels and opportunities developers and designers have been craving for years.
Making sense of the mayhem at SxSW is far from an easy feat. After sifting through my circuitous content trail: 90 instagrams, 136 tweets, and countless notes captured on moleskins, napkins, my iPhone and laptop, I am now left pondering the inevitable question: what was the big takeaway?
Looking back at past SxSW’s, Twitter was the quintessential poster child for start-up success, bursting onto the scene in 2007 and pioneering an entirely new mode of communication for the masses: brief, to-the-point, 140 characters of bite-sized nuggets, ranging from the mundane to the profound, and now by some estimates closing in on 500 million registered users.
However despite the microblog’s massive social media success, I’ve still heard protests—most often from creative types—that they “just don’t get it.” It’s true that the signal-to-noise ratio can often be deafening. And let’s face it, it’s pretty hard to make 140 characters look all that pretty. The medium itself, though undeniably effective in altering the way millions of people share, socialize, and even mobilize movements, still feels fleeting, temporal. Tweet today, gone tomorrow. And the bare-bones, unadorned interface flies in the face of what most creatives value most: beauty and craftsmanship. Perhaps if Twitter offered a Helvetica Neue option, the creative usage might skyrocket, but I digress…
Power to the People: Closing the Gap on Creativity
Most of us have been brought up to believe that, when it comes to creativity, “you either have it or you don’t.” Whether it’s the iconic image of dapper Don Draper pontificating about carousels and selling dreams or the tattooed hipster pushing pixels to sell products, the sacred ground of creativity is a line that supposedly can’t be crossed by “the rest of us.”
However at this year’s SxSW, a common theme resonated across a divergent range of speakers. Is technology actually bridging the creative gap between “the haves” and “have nots”? Consider these sound bites from luminaries in digital, film, music and TV:
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