Jacqueline Thomas, discusses the most used and abused web designs of all time. Make sure not to commit these designing-faux pas. Designers or not, we know we are guilty of at least liking one of the things on her list, which are:
Becky EbenKamp of Ad Week's creative news reports that agencies are bringing a new twist to their sites with a navigation bar which links their work to sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, and to Google for news. Agencies like CP+B, Modernista and Ignited, who are one of the first to dive into social media, are even posting blogs about their work to give people a "sneak peak" of who and what the agcency is all about. Visitors can also share stories via Facebook or subscribe to an RSS feed.
According to Chrispin Porter + Bogusky they say that their site gets approximately 1,000 visits per day, with visitors staying an average of 8 minutes. Will this be the trend for other agencies to follow?
Enter Jinni, it's like Pandora meets movies, how brilliant! Their team of movie and TV experts created the Movie Genome, an ambitious, ongoing project with the Jinni community to map more aspects of movies, shows, and semi-professional videos than ever before - so that all different viewers can match their personal tastes and moods, and find what they really want to watch next. The Movie Genome powers the search, recommendations, Taste Types and more.
The days of free Internet TV on Hulu might be coming to a close. Jonathan Miller at News Corp. has been hinting lately, and talks of a subscription model for at least some of Hulu's services. He says they would at least like to see some content on the site may be restricted to subscribers, calling in an “environment for premium content.” Also, he offered a lecture on how content purely supported by ads “doesn’t work” and that many sites were introducing micropayments as a way to ease customers away from free gradually. Digital Trends says that the service will be expanding soon to the UK, so it’s quite possible that will be the time for some major changes.
Brian Mcallister, for The University of Washington Design Show 2009, announces the sharing system of the plug in electric bicycles that can be charged when plugged into their docks. Cykels similar to this are already prominent throughout Europe, and they are to be tested in the States-in cities like Seattle and San Francisco. With this Cykel, you have the choice of pedaling to your destination or using the full on electric mode, if you're just lazy. This is a great alternative way to commute around the city and improve conditions with the environment.
This pen called the Color Picker is nothing short of awesome. It can scan a color from anywhere and then recreate it instantly for your writing / drawing needs.
Color Picker is an innovative design of a concept pen that can scan colors from anything around and instantly use the color for drawing. After placing the pen against an object, the user just presses the scan button. The color is being detected by the color sensor and the RGB cartridge of the pen mixes the required inks to create the target color. This superb device will help people to observe the changing colors of nature. With color picker, all range of artists will be able to cerate a more sensorial and visual insight of their surrounding nature’s colors.
Check out this article from Mashable regarding the possible future of social media. The article was written by Mike Laurie, a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH and is truly thought-provoking, especially #4--what a trip!
Source: Springwise
Starting early next month, global banking giant HSBC is offering passengers at Heathrow's Terminal 1 a chance to select magazine articles on topics they're interested in and have them bound into a hardback form they can take on their flight, according to Marketing Week. Through a kiosk located beyond security at Terminal 1, travellers will be greeted with an HSBC-branded hardback magazine cover. They'll then browse the diverse selection of loose-leaf articles arranged on backlit shelving, UTalkMarketing.comreported. Available articles will be sourced from coverage around the globe focusing on four general topic areas: home and abroad, commerce and politics, health and sport, and media and culture. Consumers will also be able to choose from among five writers, including celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, tennis legend Björn Borg and Harrod’s trend forecaster on the future of shopping. Once they've made their selections, travelers will simply take their articles to HSBC's binding bar to be neatly bound inside the hard cover. The two-week pilot effort, which is part of a campaign to promote the HSBC Premier Card, was developed byCunning with JC Decaux Airport, Kinetic's Aviator division and MindShare.
Website: www.hsbc.com
When many of us think of web 2.0, we think of mainstream social network communities like Facebook and Myspace, or even vertical networks like AllRecipes for food and LinkedIn for business. However, one area that we may not often think of is investing and the social networks that revolve around the stock market. Despite the fact that more than 50 social investing sites currently exist today, only a handful is achieving tangible success. Below, we take a closer look at some of those companies that are leading this relatively new frontier.
COVESTOR
Previously only a reciprocal relationship where members had to share stock information in order to see the information from others, Covestor recently announced that any user, regardless of whether he or she shared their stock information with the site, would be able to track live trades of their self-directed investors. The Covestor community is one that centers around these experienced investors, and serves as a learning environment with professional grade tools where users are able to monitor their progress and inevitably build their investment reputations. An interesting feature comes in the form of a premium fee paid to users with the best stock picks on the site by members who wish to invest alongside them. As far as looks are concerned, the site has a clean and intuitive interface that brings a fresh approach to a typically conservative realm.
Bringing people together through common investments is the main idea of Cake, another social investing site that allows users to track the performance of others and receive notifications if there is activity in their portfolios. However, with Cake, users build a network of trust with friends, family and other investors where rankings can help them decide who they wish to follow. In addition, Cake allows users to import data from multiple brokerage accounts and grants access to view historical portfolio data to help users make the best investment decisions. Cake has a simple clean interface that favors graphics for text; however, its bland appearance leaves something to be desired.
With a name that stands for “Zero Commission Costs”, Zecco prides itself on offering excellent customer service, including 10 free stock trades per month. To replace commission costs, Zecco earns revenue from interest earned on account balances of its members, charges from special services, advertising, and cross-selling products with other financial-minded institutions. Zeccoshare is the name of their investment community where, like some other sites, users can share their real portfolios and trades on individual profile pages, join discussions in forums and groups, post blogs, communicate with other users directly, and compare member performance. With a hip, irreverent attitude and a clean, intuitive interface, Zecco looks to be the voice of the ‘new school’ of investing.
SOCIAL PICKS
With SocialPicks, the stock market really is a game—a social, fantasy stock-market investment game where users pick the companies they expect to perform well on the market. Then, based on their predictions, they receive a ranking that allows others to know how they measure up in terms of their investment decisions. The site’s appearance is not dissimilar to Covestor—white and clean, but not really inviting.
UPDOWN
UpDown, another fantasy stock market game, is unique in the sense that it is the only free investment platform that allows members to earn money with zero risk of financial loss. Users do so when they ‘out-trade’ the major stock indices using the $1 million they are given in fantasy money to play. The goal for the founders is to cultivate the right mix of online members in order to obtain the data they’ll need to run a multi-billion dollar fund capable of ‘outdoing’ the markets. With the site’s social networking features, users also improve investment skills through collaboration to get them ready for when they decide to try out their investing skills in the real world.
Another site similar to Covestor (do we see a pattern here?), Vestopia allows users to track the investments of trading veterans, including some from Wall Street. Although there are few investors to track, the site claims that their sources are ‘more credible’ with profiles replete with histories of experience and success. Users can even interact with these pros via blogs, videos and live chat. Like some others, Vestopia’s appearance is bland and conservative with no sort of interactive appeal.
As the latest entry into the social investing space, Zignals takes a slightly different approach from the rest. It lets individual investors set up a bunch of rules and conditions that make it easier for them to invest in a stock or sell it at the optimal time. The decision-support tools come with access to a financially-savvy investor community where users can get advice. The rules, which are the main differentiating factors from other sites, allow investors to set up strategies such as “buy this stock if the price falls below $25 and the price of its rival rises above $35.” Zignals sends alerts to the users’ devices — PC, cell phone, pager etc. — when triggering events occur so that the investor doesn’t have to stay glued to a screen. The site is clean and relies on colorful visuals to communicate offerings—a stark difference to many other profiled sites.
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By no means an exhaustive list of all the category players, the aforementioned sites illustrate the present ‘standards’ of the social investing marketplace, such as ranking, tracking performance, etc., as well as the ‘extras’ that make each service unique. As a general observation for the evolution of this space, the real opportunities lie in the following:
• Improving design: The majority of social investment networks are, for lack of a better term, vanilla. They are plain, conservative and far from truly interactive. There is an amazing opportunity for a site to differentiate itself by making the social investment experience fun through an intuitive, yet interactive design that is as revolutionary as social investing 2.0 is.
• Enhancing the learning experience: For the social networking investor, he/she is interested in the tracking functionalities that most of the sites offer in order to measure his/her successes or failures and learn what to avoid in the future. Companies can tailor education to specific users and offer peer-generated, pro-generated and / or site-generated suggestions.
• Automation: As we have seen with sites like Cake, users appreciate alerts to notify them of activity within their portfolios, and Zignals takes this a step further with alerts based on pre-set rules. Automation like this is a great opportunity for social investing sites because today’s investors don’t want to rely on being near a computer screen to manage their investments.
• Fostering reassurance: It is no secret that people feel more comfortable doing something if other people are doing it, and when you’re dealing with stocks, following the crowd helps the majority feel at ease with their decisions. If they don’t already, social investment companies should allow users to see who is doing what in relation to the stocks they own, perhaps not on an individual basis, but maybe an overall activity graph—just a way to reassure investors about their decision.
From the company that brought you the phone that informed you if you had bad breath comes the phone service that emits scents from your phone. NTT Communications will be running a ten-day trial starting April 10 of its new Mobile Fragrance Communication service (Kaori Tshshi Mobile) where users will be able to download a "Fragrance Playlist" or files of recipes for specific smells. The Washington Post reports:
The service uses a handset's infrared port to transfer the "fragrance data" to a dedicated device similar to a plug-in air freshener that is loaded with a cartridge of base fragrances. The device then mixes them to create the chosen smell, which it then wafts out, accompanying the audio or visual content that is played on the phone.
Politico's Kingmaker game allows you to predict the outcome of any given primary date. You get points based on a combination of accuracy and beating the odds. Besides bragging rights for accurate predictions, there's also the possibility of winning prizes, including tickets to the White House Correspondent's Dinner. The creators of Kingmaker are the same people behind Fantasy Congress which is much like any fantasy sports league, except you draft and play a dream team of elected officials. Now that sounds like a good time.
Have an apparel business? You might want to consider this recent fact from Ohio-based marketing company Resource Interactive: young adults influence 88% of household apparel purchases. On February 29th, in an article entitled "Who's Holding the Handbag" on Time.com, author Deirdre Van Dyke notes that more and more young women are shopping with their mothers and influencing clothing purchases for both. To illustrate this trend, the article also references Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst for NPD Group, as he "estimates that the number of 18-to-24-year-olds shopping with Mom has grown 8% over the past three years." Looks like fertile ground for new business ideas...
Give zzzPhone 15 days, and you can have a phone made-to-order with all the features that you want. The site allows customers to select their desired features online, whether it's a higher pixel camera, GPS, stereo speakers or a flashlight, zzzPhone will make it happen, all starting at a base price of $149.
Muji is a Japanese store that sells high-quality merchandise with no brand names. The company just opened its first store in the United States in NYC and is faring considerably well. Apparently having no brand name, in some cases, can communicate even more about a person than a luxury label ever could.
He’s best known for his sentimental pop hits “Your Body is a Wonderland,” or “Daughters,” but what many had no idea of, he’s now revealing on his personal blog. John Mayer, regularly aligned with artists like Michelle Branch, Sheryl Crow and Dave Matthews …
Shown here at famous streetwear boutique Alife in New York City? Sharing a set with hip-hop super producer Just Blaze, and collaborating on a bunch of limited edition clothing? Who would have thought the vocal sample for Common’s “Go,” or the unreleased track “Bittersweet” with Kanye West was only the beginning?
From the man who wanted to run through the halls of his high school screaming, to wanting a customized Bathing Ape Fender Strat., John Mayer is quietly about to take urban and hip-hop culture by storm. He’s referencing graffiti legend Futura and receiving exclusive Japanese sneakers at his doorstep. Look out.
Even if you don’t believe, read his blog.
So I just joined this project I read about on BoingBoing called A Swarm of Angels...the idea is that they want to make the 1st creative commons licensed movie for $1 million bucks. And they're doing it $25 bucks at a time - in return you get to participate in the different stages of the process. Script development, trailer and pre-production, post production etc. etc. Pretty cool I think - so I joined as an experiment - I'll give updates as it goes to keep you informed on the "progress" - no matter what it's pretty brave.
Director/Instigator: Matt Hanson, filmmaker, writer (The End of Celluloid: Film futures in the Digital Age)
Advisers: Cory Doctorow - BoingBoing editor, Warren Ellis - comic book writer/Graphic Novelist, Tommy Pallotta - Producer, A Scanner Darkly (the cool new Richard Linklater film)
Director of Photography: Grant Gee - Music video director for Radiohead and Badly Drawn Boy
Go collaboration!
