First big announcement is that there’s a new emphasis on the Flash Platform – as originally called by Macromedia in 2005. Flash, Flex, AIR, and Thermo are just tools to develop experiences using the Flash Runtime, and apparently all these names are just confusing people. Adobe decided to consolidate everything into one platform and market it accordingly. Thermo was officially renamed to Flash Catalyst, and for those of you not familiar with Thermo, it’s a new tool still on early stages of development, targeted to designers or more specifically interactive designers, and allows them to convert a PSD or AI file into a RIA with all events, motions, states, animations, and data… and the best part is that it generates mxml and as3 code so a developer can extend and continue the development using Flex Builder.  Read More »

This just absolutely rocked my world. Enjoy for some Friday Fun!

* The TV ad was shot using 200 Toshiba Gigashot Cameras: the highest number of moving image cameras ever used in a film sequence
* This particular technique, viewing looping action in 360 degrees, has never been done before
*The time spent processing footage from 200 cameras was over four weeks - 24 hours a day seven days a week!
* In terms of data, this is one of the biggest jobs a post-production house has ever taken on - 20TB of data
* New offline and online editing software had to be specifically built for the job
* Soundtrack is provided by Crystal Castles
* Integrated campaign to promote Toshiba’s new range of upscaling products - TV, DVD and laptops - that convert standard definition TV and DVD images to near high-definition quality  [Cinematical]

Google Earth was released for the iPhone and IPod in the last two weeks. It had a fairly under the radar launch by Google’s standards. I finally got a chance to play with it this week while working from my hotel.

It’s free and definitely worth checking out. It’s particularly cool how it works with the GPS feature.

Obama’s digital team is hard at work again. Within 24 hours of winning the historic voite change.gov was launched. The new site transitions the focus away from winning the vote and on to streamlining the transitional period and establishing an ongoing dialog with the citizens of the United States.

The commitment to digital as a communication medium has proven effective for Obama which leads one to ponder what else will be communicated via from the Oval office in the future.

Sites like TechPresident.com which billiantly track the technical ascendancy of our two candidates and how they compare have made predictions that Obama will release his weekly address online and on video sharing sites like YouTube. They predict “town halls” will be facilitated online allowing citizens to make sure their voice is heard. They remind us of the digitally savy nature of his campaign, but most of all they predict he’ll be our first tech president even adding a chief technical officer to his chief advisors.

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I stumbled across an incredible story today on the Playstation gamer message boards. A young paralyzed teen had an idea for how to build a rig that would allow him to play video games. The teen worked with Mark Felling who did the physical assembly of the gear and after a couple months they had a kit that allowed the boy to use the vast majority of the controls on a PS3.  Read More »

Great day at Ad:Tech today, from panels to contacts, new business opportunities, new technologies, new trends, new services… Ad:Tech has it all.

The day started with a keynote from Jonathan Klein, President of CNN/US. John said that CNN embraces innovation, new technologies, new techniques, new trends, and urges all their employees to try new ideas. They have been using user generated content to get faster stories, they have a political blog aggregator that became the largest in the country, they have a program where an expert follows twitter feeds and answers questions and concerns online, in real time, they have a talk show where the host podcasts during commercials, linking the tv air experience with online / web experience. Another twitter fact is that CNN took 4 minutes to cover a recent earthquake in LA, whereas someone tweet it in 30 seconds. They also started providing more data for the next gen during the elections, especially seen during the debates; under the assumption that the younger gen can multitask and consume multiple feeds of information concurrently, they added the analysts’ opinions and scores during debates on side panels, as well as real time undecided voters conversions. Another link between air and web is John King’s touch screen; after the success of the John playing with the screen, they uploaded an interactive version to their site allowing anyone to play with it, just like on tv.  Read More »

I use Comcast for my home internet service. The connection is fast and pretty reliable, but dealing with their customer service department is like dealing with wooden puppets who can’t answer any question that doesn’t come off a cue card. I’m not the first person to have a complaint like this and candidly if you spend anytime searching the web you’ll find people with issues that range from annoying to shockingly bad.

They’ve managed to inspire a multitude of hate websites from ihatecomcast.com to comcastsucks.org. If you search Comcast on Google there is a video result showing a Comcast technician sleeping on a customer’s couch. I frequently talk about how a brand’s perception is now being defined not only by their own messaging, but by the content consumers are creating and permeating search, media sharing sites, and viral jokes. Comcast is case study example number one.

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LinkedIn announced today that it’s adding the ability to add custom applications to your profile page. It’s based on the OpenSocial application development platform.

OpenSocial didn’t take off nearly as fast as I thought it would. I had always assumed that when MySpace enabled it that adoption would pick-up rapidly. LinkedIn has now finally enabled it and I believe future tech like Google Friend Connect (which also uses OpenSocial) will really push this application platform over the top.

I installed two applications immediately. An application to quickly and easily port this blog to my profile as well an application that scans twitter with references to my company. The two apps are called Wordpress and Company Buzz respectively.

The installation was easy in terms of the number of clicks, but there were some bugs. LinkedIn didn’t acknowledge that the application was complete and the apps were only working intermittently when I viewed my profile. On the basis that I got the email they were launching this at 12.21 AM and blogged about it at 1.35 AM I’m going to cut them some slack. Hopefully it will work a bit better by the time you check it out.

If you haven’t got a LinkedIn profile yet your missing out. Social networking in the business space is equally as interesting as Facebook or MySpace. It’s just harder to pick up a date on LinkedIn…

I wanted to apologize that we didn’t post for a couple of days. The last week or so has been complete madness.

I think I did five flights last week, spent two days on site at GE, completed two massive client presentations and still managed to keep up with my normal load (excluding Take Me To Your Leader).

This weekend burn-out finally caught up with me and I slept for two and a half days. I didn’t leave my house except to go to Best Buy. (One of my latest obsessions is trying to get Windows Media Center to work with my Comcast digital cable.)

All this withstanding I actually enjoyed every second of the pressure. I do get off on this stuff. The big reward was on Friday. I bought a puppy for my girlfriend (which I think was as much a present for me as it was for her). The puppy’s name is Amelie and she’s a 1 pound 10 oz. Pomeranian.

Check out her picture after the jump…

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Everyone knows that we’re very passionate about Facebook. We’ve been actively building Facebook applications since they first launched and consider them to be one of the fundamental differentiators that helped propel Facebook to such lofty heights.

Facebook embraced what I believe builds the most successful new model businesses successes on the web. They created an open platform and let user innovation drive the direction of their business. Unfortunately, like most open platforms, it got out of control. People abused their rights in an effort to push their application to the top. The constant stream of invitations to join applications became one of the number one gripes of Facebook users as they felt they were being aggressively “spammed” (even if it was by their friends).

Facebook has been re-evaluating it’s infrastructure quite a bit these days. A new Facebook layout, for better or worse, has been released. Additionally they have been making some heavy changes to how applications were handled within the system beyond the presentation layer.

The obvious change that you would have noticed includes shifting all of your applications mini-views to a tab on your profile called “Boxes”. Really? They couldn’t name it “applications” or “apps” so it was even mildly intuitive. It’s bad enough that they’re now treating the application concept they popularized as the ugly step-child, but this is just adding insult to injury. I wish they made the tab name “don’t click here” - it would probably get more people to check it out.

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