The Wilderness Downtown – The Arcade Fire

Flash vs. HTML5 – who will win? If the Arcade Fire promotional website (The Wilderness Downtown) is any indication, HTML5 all the way. Ad Age recently included the Creativity’s best ad “Arcade Fire: The Wilderness Downtown Trailer” in their morning newsletter, and the ad is amazing. It’s essentially a trailer for the music video. The whole concept was designed by Chris Milk from @radical.media and Google’s Aaron Koblin from the Google Creative Lab.

Basically, it’s an interactive music video for the song “We Used to Wait” that utilizes Google’s Chrome Browser and HTML5. You type in the address that you grew up in, and it takes you on a journey incorporating Google Maps. It is way cool and the functionality is amazing. You even get… [Read More]

If you logged into your Gmail acount lately you’ve seen the pop-up window that introduces you to the newest Gmail feature– making calls to land and mobile lines from within the application.

From the site:

How does this work?
You can now place calls to landline and mobile phones from within Gmail. Just dial any phone number and you’ll be connected. Learn more.

Rates
Calls to the U.S. and Canada are free in 2010. International calls are billed at our insanely low rates.

You can call Afghanistan for $.27 a minute or Zimbabwe for the premium price of $.46 a minute, and some rates are as low as $.02 a minute. Not bad.

Have you tried it yet? How does it compare to Skype?

I watched the movie “Kick Ass” the other night, and oddly, it got me thinking about social media (It’s a curse we in the business of sm live with. Be kind.) I came up with a list of how social media gives companies and individuals superpowers:

1. Invisibility: When you monitor and listen to the cloud to find out who is talking about you and your competitors and what they are saying, you are enjoying the benefits of a cloaking ability. They can’t see you, but you’re sizing up who your audience is or could be, as well as finding out exactly what they need from your type of product or service. Invisibility helps you prepare and fill gaps.
2. Empathy: The ability I hope you get from using the first ability. The reason you do all that looking and listening is to understand the audience and to empathize

… [Read More]

Facebook finally made it’s official announcement that Facebook fan page tabs are getting narrower on August 23. Here’s the official word from Facebook:

Next week, we will give Page admins the ability to preview their custom tabs in the new 520 pixel width so they can modify their layouts as needed. All profile and Page tabs will be resized automatically beginning the week of August 23.

They’ve been talking about the subject since October 2009, and I’m glad to see they’re finally rolling it out. In fact, Facebook is making quite a few changes to functionality and the user experience. They are also removing the “boxes” tab, so that will mean changes for fan pages and personal profiles alike.

The main reason they’re making the tabs narrower is to help streamline the user experience. That means if you paid a Facebook application developer to design custom… [Read More]

I wonder often how anyone could have coined the phrase

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me

when we’ve all been at the hurtful end of prejudicial words that cut deep, and sometimes leave wounds that last longer than a bruise. Especially when I have also seen words inspire and start movements. And, for me, there has been nothing more powerful than the first time I said my son’s name allowed to him moments after his birth. That kind of power is staggering…humbling.

I believe in words and the roots of words. I was the kid who looked forward to that section of the SATs where I had to match a word to its meaning by dissecting its Latin root and hoping I got it right. Maybe if I’d actually ever truly prepared for those tests, I would have even done well at… [Read More]