You can say whatever you want about the demise of Flash, but it sure a large part of the last 10 years in webdesign. How fitting that Propaganda 3 would make such extensive use of it for their 10 year anniversary site which features a bells-and-whistle timeline. Not sure if this site is older, but just found it on Pixelgangster.de
(via)
So I guess we have all probably been expecting this from Google… A Catalog app that aggregates the worlds leading brands and retailers under one little screen, providing a rich, interactive shopping experience, that will also deliver Google a whole new revenue stream
The app allows you to flip through catalogue pages as you’d expect, and extends that to detailing out each product, playing videos and other rich content, while providing a “Buy Now” button to launch the brands e-comm store or “Find A Store” button which instantly maps locations with directions.
So who’s on board so far? Urban Outfitters, Williams-Sonoma, Sephora, Macys, Bloomingdales, Crate&Barrel, Lands’ End, Nordstrom, Patagonia, UGG and many many of others!
Joshua Foer: Step Outside Your Comfort Zone and Study Yourself Failing from 99% on Vimeo.
OK-ness is the enemy of greatness. At the 99% Conference, journalist Joshua Foer illustrates why we must step outside of our comfort zones to achieve truly remarkable things.
BMW posted its half year earnings at a record high this year. In fact, the company has never had a better 6 months in its entire history. For this reason, it is positive to observe the company continuing to spend some of that profit for worthy causes. But not only is CSR type activities, but rather in collective creative community platforms, such as the one just launched with the Guggenheim in NY.
The BMW Guggenheim Lab is a mobile travelling idea lab that takes on the challenges of cities and urban planning with a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. Also, it invites residents to participate.
It is not a new idea, but simple and timely. The trend of collaborative community projects has shown much hope and success especially in NY where such projects as the Highline have received much attention.
Check out this lovely TED Talk Julian Treasure on 5 ways to listen better. It’s much more than just a typical “You should listen actively”-type talk. It’s more about how we develop real understanding with each other and the world around us.
He discusses the lack of listening skills that have plagued humankind, practically from the invention of writing, and also talks about some pretty magical ways to listen better in your everyday life. I was reminded of the You Are Listening To Los Angeles site we featured here a while ago.
Julian talks about listening positions, which planners should be well acquainted with, where you shift the attitude of what you’re listening to or the filters you’re receiving the information through from active to passive, from being critical to being empathic, from in or out of your cultural norms. It’s a great technique to get conscious about the filters and ‘move to different positions’, i.e., develop your understanding of the topic or conversation in different ways.
What caught my attention, however, was the section where he talks about listening for leaders, teachers, spouses, parents or friends. He uses “Rasa”, the sanskrit word for essence or juice, as an acronym for:
Receive - pay attention
Appreciate - show that you are engaged
Summarize - make sure you understood
Ask - expand your knowledge
I would change the last one to Ask/Act - and encourage marketers to examine their actions and activities to see if they are following through to truly expand knowledge together.
Are you consciously embracing listening? Are your actions full of Rasa?
I call it Cellular Pausely: That thing where you are having a lovely conversation and then everyone takes out their phones and stops talking to each other.
How often has this happened to you? How often have you done it? Do the alerts, flashing lights and vibrations of our phones create irresistible an Pavlovian response to get connected with our virtual lives, even while we are standing or sitting next to perfectly available humans?
photo via: only can die once
Leveraging the Foursquare API, We First, a company that calls itself “Social Branding Consulting Firm” released an app for the iPhone that allows people to thank service staff found at the places where, previously, you would have just checked in. The idea is very simple and I find it very interesting. Sure, you can just actually say “Thank you!” but for service professionals it’s probably nice to have something “on record.” In fact, it could help employers incentivize their staff. A virtual “Employee of the month” program, if you will.
It begs the question: can it ultimately change how customer service improves? I think it potentially could. Making Thank Yous social may lead to new behaviors, similar to existing recommendation apps, but adding a more human element to the whole thing. After all, when we recommend a venue, do we just recommend, say the food, or also the service? I suppose many times in fact we recommend the service and friendliness and atmosphere created by employees more than the food.
After years of digital technologies just enabling people to be more and more in control of their purchase decisions (before and after), essentially arming them for the conflict and battle with a service or sales person, this kind of idea could create a platform for human interactions that is about valuing experiences, and creating incentives for those whose job it is to create those experiences for customers.
Check it out here.
On another note:Kudos to a firm that calls itself “consulting firm” to actually create a real experience for the social space, as opposed to just analyzing and talking about the social space.
Via Jake Setlak
Ever try writing a style guide for every sound aspect of a brand.
via Peda
Here’s a fascinating example of building demand for your future consumers through play - the Toyota Backseat Driver. It’s a smartphone application that allows you to drive a virtual car while riding in a real car - and the virtual ride is linked by GPS to your actual driving route, including the passing of virtual landmarks. Playing the game earns you points to customize your virtual car.
It’s some fun creative work from Party in Japan
If you’ve tried to follow all the hype about Google+, you were probably hard-pressed to try and read all the blog posts and articles. There are just too many. But what was striking about the articles was their sameness. 90% of them seem to be about the future not about the now. Little was imparted about what to do with G+, most of them where rants about what G+ isn’t or about what it should be, or about what it could be, and of course about who will win in the SN wars. The one exception I came across was an article by Thomas Hawk about how to make G+ work for you as a photographer. Other than that, I witnessed the usual hype wave, where usual suspects of social ninjas can’t help themselves and make prognostications to leave a mark, opinion-wise, so they get a share of the voice.
The problem with that isn’t the voices or prognostications, it’s that we so easily get swept away by it that we create a reality about something in our heads that we haven’t actually experienced yet ourselves. We take the time to read all this stuff, but have little time to go and innovate and experiment.
It’s been a few weeks of excitement and tizzy and dilly-dallying. Fine. Let’s move on now and speak about experience insights, experimentation and collaborative best thinking on a new platform, not the next social media weather report. There is nothing more annoying in a playground than the annoying descriptiveness of some authority figure telling us how things are, should be, could be. It stifles application and experimentation.
Alan Wolk, borrowing metaphorically from his grandmothers cookbook, makes a great point in his blog Toad Stool
What’s needed now is a lot less prognostication and a lot more observation. Let people figure out their own best way to use the platform. Before anyone starts telling them they’re doing it the wrong way.
You couldn’t be more right, and thanks for the reminder what this is supposed to be about!
