Homegrown 3D projection mapping
March 28, 2012 § Leave a Comment
My man and a few of his friends spent the evening creating their very own 3D projection in our living room. A few boxes, tables, and set-ups later, they ended up with this one here. The end result… a complete success. Many hours were spent watching the different visuals they were playing with – the one shown here are the iconic Space Invaders, of course. Mesmerizing.Mobile commerce: Check-out your groceries from the convenience of your shopping cart
May 18, 2011 § 1 Comment
Tired of waiting in the long retail lines every time you need a carton of milk? Some U.S. retail stores are including a check-out system on their shopping carts that allow customers to check out their items as they shop. So far, it looks like it’s a win-win solution for both customers and retailers. Customers are happy because they don’t need to wait in lines to pay, and the retail stores are happy because it turns out this new way to shop actually nets an average increase of products purchased by 10%. In other words, retailers are making shopping and check-out so easy that you although you might only need that carton of milk, why not pick up an extra bag of chips, fruit, and flour while you’re there?
Certainly an interesting concept that just highlights the continuing trend towards a more seamless intersection between bricks and mortar and mobile and online commerce.
Full article at The Wall Street Journal.
reCAPTCHA: tiny acts towards big social impact
May 1, 2011 § Leave a Comment
If you’ve ever purchased or subscribed to something online, chances are you’ve come across CAPTCHA: A series of graphically distorted letters that you need to type into a box to prove you’re not a spambot. A necessary nuisance, but a nuisance nonetheless.
Enter Luis von Ahn, one of the minds behind the original CAPTCHA. After finding out that approximately 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed in every day, with about 10 seconds used per entry, meaning humanity as a whole is generally wasting 500 thousand hours every day on filling out CAPTCHAs, Luis decided to do something about it. He created reCAPTCHA.
The significance of reCAPTCHA is that leverages the authentication process people are already completing to help digitize books one word at a time. Many online vendors and companies have switched to using reCAPTCHA in the last few years, so much so that as many as 100 million words are being digitized daily by you and I. How’s that for a tiny contribution towards big social impact? Pretty impressive.
But Luis himself speaks to all of this far better than I. Watch his TEDx talk on reCAPTCHA in the video below.
The DIGITAL story of the Nativity
December 17, 2010 § Leave a Comment
In the spirit of the holidays, Excentric sent their clients a Christmas card featuring their own rendition of the Nativity story told through a digital lens of today. I wanted to share this as I thought it was a clever way of showing how times have changed. See for yourself!
Happy Holidays!
The Guy At Home in His Underwear: Raising awareness for testicular cancer
October 16, 2010 § Leave a Comment
On October 6th, Stanfield launched “The Guy at Home in His Underwear” with the help of John St, Hard Citizen, and The Secret Location. The campaign is focused on raising awareness for testicular cancer, featuring Mark, the Guy at Home, wearing nothing but his skivvies on live camera feeds all day long. For every person who “likes” the campaign through Facebook, Stanfield’s will donate $1, up to a maximum of $25,000 to the Canadian Cancer Society.
From Day 1, the campaign took off. Within the first day, thousands gave their support by “liking” the Guy at Home in his Underwear. Since then, the campaign has gathered over 35,000 Facebook likes, managing to reach the 25,000 like and $25,000 donation goal within the first week. Stanfield’s decided to put up another $25,000 for the remainder of the campaign. Smart thinking, Stanfield’s! Since then, it seems every few hours, a few thousand more people jump in to like the campaign.
So why the huge uptake? With all the companies clamouring to “do digital” and to be the next viral sensation, what has set this campaign apart from some others that have not have met the same success? « Read the rest of this entry »
Great expectation management: Real time updates for the anxious customer
August 7, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I went to throw a quick update up on my posterous blog this morning, and came across the message below on their site.
I actually had not been aware of the scheduled maintenance that was to occur, but upon being informed, understood and had no real reaction. (Contrary to my confused reaction and subsequent post a few months ago when the JustMeans website went down. To be fair, that was not a scheduled maintenance, but all the more reason and need for effective communication.)
Posterous did a very good job in keeping the page clean and the message abundantly simple. The call to action for me, the customer, was clear: if I wanted real time updates, I should go to their Twitter stream. The main message was also very clear: a scheduled maintenance was underway, the site was temporarily down and would be back up and running as soon as they were done. I noted that the estimated time of completion for the scheduled maintenance had actually been 2AM PDT, but didn’t bother doing the time conversion for my timezone immediately. I went straight to Twitter. « Read the rest of this entry »
So you want to create an iPad app. Some guiding principles to consider.
June 2, 2010 § 1 Comment
On Wednesday, January 27, 2010, the tech world was abuzz. Apple had just announced their latest shiny new toy: the iPad.
At the time and for the weeks and months following, the announcement has been met with mixed reviews. In one camp, people have labeled it as being just an oversized iPhone that was not quite phone, not quite computer. In another, it has been heralded as something that can be expected to revolutionize the gadget industry and way we interact with technology in ways we’ve seen Apple products do in the past. Within Critical Mass, we also had many discussions about the potential impact of Apple’s new iPad. However, regardless of our discussions and each person’s opinion around the iPad, one thing was sure. There was a lot of excitement – especially at the prospect of designing some of the first iPad apps for our clients.
Rather than talk about the impact of the iPad on our industry and market (if you want a great read on the subject, see Neil Clemmon’s post on Experience Matters), this post discusses some of the things we’ve learned about iPad app design and development through our own experience with some of our savvy clients. Through the course of our work with iPad apps, six main guiding principles have surfaced.
Social responsibility meets social technology.
March 21, 2010 § Leave a Comment
What happens when you combine volunteerism, opportunity and technology? A brand new iPhone app created by VolunteerMatch and imc². Not only does the app present a convenient, easy way to find volunteer opportunities from a network of over 70,000 participating nonprofit organizations, it’s being offered free.
Having just downloaded the app, I have to admit, I had some doubts initially. I had a hard time imagining how an app of this nature could function in a way that would engage me and hold my attention, and even add useful assistance in my everyday life.
Yes, I’m committed to volunteerism, but will you, dear app, really be different than websites and volunteer forums? The answer is a resounding yes. The app is intuitive and easy to navigate. Search results are abundant and can be filtered according to location, skill-base, keyword, or area of interest. It was a great call to allow search without forcing the user to register for an account or login first. It also links up fairly seamlessly with Facebook and Twitter if someone wants to share an opportunity with a friend or acquaintance – although you need to pre-sign-in through the “Options” section, which isn’t always apparant at first glance.
I think the only thing that is yet to be seen is how useful this app will be outside of the United States. I have to admit to being a little skeptical about whether I would actually surface any results in Toronto. So, when three location-based results appeared, in a way, I was pleasantly suprised. That said, it’s still only three for the whole of the Greater Toronto Area. Of course, there is always the option to include all virtual opportunities (I received two hundred postings), which admittedly suprised me. However, the user still needs to carefully filter through them. I seemed to get a lot of “virtual” opportunities that obviously needed me to be on location.
However, the potential is tremendous and this is only the tip of the iceberg. A really interesting app – one I’ll definitely be keeping on my phone.
Find out more or download the VolunteerMatch iPhone app.
