UX should be child's play

I watched this video a couple of times over the weekend and as it's pretty amazing in that the child only seems to know or understand the interactions of an iPad above a hard copy magazine, at first I smiled and thought; WOW how times are changing that our kids will naturally interact in iPad mode rather than a hard copy mind you it's not surprising considering this kind of interaction is already on everything from touch screens in public places to smart boards in our kids schools you can even drive a car and model airplane via your iPhone! So
when I looked at it a second time I couldn't help feeling a tad sad in the fact that, here is a child that finds turning a page in a magazine so alien, why should I feel sad? Having 3 kids of my own I encourage them to explore and do things that as a child I did - climb trees, make dens to reading books. There's still something very stimulating about books - the touch the smell to the sound of the pages turning etc. No iPad version can replicate that. Neither is right or wrong but I do think it's a right of all children to interact with much information as possible regardless if it's from an iPad or from a book.

Hopefully then we'll have kids who'll grow up to be thinkers rather than robots and just conditioned to think in a certain way.

Marketing directors losing direction?

A new IBM (NYSE: IBM) study of more than 1,700 chief marketing officers from 64 countries and 19 industries reveals that the majority of the world's top marketing executives recognize a critical and permanent shift occurring in the way they engage with their customers, but question whether their marketing organizations are prepared to manage the change. The four main challeges facing Marketing Directors are:

Data explosion: Every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data - so much that 90 percent of the world's data today has been created in the last two years alone. The increasing volume, variety and velocity of data available from new digital sources like social networks, in addition to traditional sources such as sales data and market research, tops the list of CMO challenges. The difficulty is how to analyze these vast quantities of data to extract the meaningful insights, and use them effectively to improve products, services and the customer experience.

Social platforms: Social media enables anyone to become a publisher, broadcaster and critic. Facebook has more than 750 million active users, with the average user posting 90 pieces of content a month. Twitter users send about 140 million tweets a day. And YouTube's 490 million users upload more video content in a 60-day period than the three major U.S. television networks created in 60 years. Marketers are using social platforms to communicate - with 56 percent of CMOs viewing social media as a key engagement channel - but they still struggle with capturing valuable customer insight from the unstructured data that customers and potential customers produce.

Channel and device choices: The growing number of new marketing channels and devices, from smart phones to tablets, is quickly becoming a priority for CMOs. Mobile commerce is expected to reach $31 billion by 2016, representing a compound annual growth rate of 39 percent from 2011 to 2016. Meanwhile, the tablet market is expected to reach nearly 70 million units worldwide by the end of this year, growing to 294 million units by 2015.

Shifting demographics: New global markets and the influx of younger generations with different patterns of information access and consumption are changing the face of the marketplace. In India, as one example, the middle class is expected to soar from roughly 5 percent of the population to more than 40 percent in the next two decades. Marketers who have historically focused on affluent Indian consumers must adapt their strategies to market to this emerging middle class. In the United States, marketing executives must respond to the aging baby boomer generation and growing Hispanic population.
Full piece here

Snaptags better than QR codes

SnapTags are rings, with visual information aligned in a pattern of bars and breaks, that tell a reader app what content to pull up. And where the SnapTag is unique is that each tag also has an SMS short code, so people who don’t have smart phones can send and receive text messages that will connect them with a campaign, very smart.

I also love the idea that visually snaptags look so much cleaner and can be branded easily, the ease of use too in my mind could over take the growth of QR codes,as we know all the faffing around to get content from QR codes will always be a barrier for mass market comms, Snaptags could be a much better alternative.

This poster has a cold

The promotion for the new movie Contagion has truly gone viral. Ahead of the release of the film, Warner Bros Pictures hired microbiologists and immunologists to create an unconventional billboard.
Teaming up with CURB Media and ad agency Lowe Roche, they installed 2 huge petri dishes full of live bacteria in an abandoned storefront in downtown Toronto. Over a period of a few days, the bacteria multiplied and grew to spell out the name of the film, Contagion. Love this and the art direction and type reveal looks amazing, this also reminded of a campaign my old copywriter Jo Arscott did while at Saatchis where they produced a 48 sheet poster and sprayed the headline in glue - over the coming days the fumes and dirt from London streets revealed the message; 'This is what your kid breathes in everyday' it was for kids with asthma, love how both pieces play with the type and dramatised the key message.

Steve Jobs the best quotes for all creative people

Below are some of the best Steve Jobs’s quotes to inspire us to think differently and up our game through innovation and collaboration, wonderful but today a tad sad reading.

1. “The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.” Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer

2. “For something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

3. Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

4. “That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

5. “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”

6. “When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.”

7. “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”

8. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.”

9. “You’re missing it. This is not a one-man show. What’s reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there’s a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they’re not losers. What they didn’t have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now.”

10. The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient … But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.”

Thank you for inspiring me

Zombie Running App - genius

Yes you have Nike+, Runkeeper and MapMyRun and I've used them all great functional apps but I came across this last night that literally changes the game and more importantly puts the fun back into functionality.

Zombies, Run!, to be released early next year for iPhone and Android, is an app in the style of Runkeeper, with an exciting undead twist.

You start up the app, plug in your headphones and go for a run. As you begin to sprint, jog or walk to your destination of choice, you’ll hear the narrated story of a zombie-infested, dystopian future. You’re a “runner” in this world, which means that your job is to go out and collect supplies like ammo, medicine and batteries for your ragtag base of human survivors. The more you run, the more stuff you’ll acquire.

“We want to tap into a fantasy that we think a lot of people have when they’re running or deciding to get fit — that you can be the hero of your own action movie,” said the game’s designer, Adrian Hon, in an e-mail.

“After all, why does anyone want to run? Probably so we know that if things get bad, we can rely on our bodies to get us out of trouble.”


The idea first came from a class for amateur runners, which Zombies, Run! writer Naomi Alderman had joined. During an introductory session, one of the organizers asked the group why they wanted to run.

“To outrun the zombie horde,” said one of the participants. Everybody laughed — except for Alderman. Her mind was busy running races of its own.

Hon says you’ll be able to make meaningful decisions as you progress through Zombies, Run. For example, once you’ve finished a running session, you’ll be able to allocate resources to different areas of your city, choosing which people to help out. He hints that your decisions could result in life-or-death consequences for some of the game’s survivors. Bloody genius and as always an idea sprung from someones passion, in this case running.

Fans have flocked to Zombies, Run!, which has garnered over $53,000 on crowd-funding site Kickstarter in the past month. Hon and Alderman say they’re psyched about the positive reaction, noting that the game already has a “guaranteed audience.”

Combined with fun and functionality that's intune with your target audience, wonderful work is created.

Linkedin profile as an infographic

vizualize.me - Kevin's profile I came across this last night, such fun and pretty impressive, simple but functional. Interesting Linkedin over the last couple of months have really enhanced their platform. This by Vizualize.me is just another cool add on.