Our thoughts on the web, marketing, mobile & pretty much anything else we find interesting.
We're designing our new business cards and have decided to go with printing everything on Moo. This is partly because they allow us to have fifty (yes, 5-0) different backs to every stack we print.
These are just some of the designs that will make it to the back of our cards. This is pretty much the only thing we'll be printing in any reasonable quantity so we might as well make them interesting. What do you think?
Jeff Jarvis wrote an interesting piece on Google's response to the Federal Trade Commissions draft document on the future of journalism. As Jarvis points out this is more about "protecting the old power structure of media" than the mentioned reinvention of the news industry.
The move to protect journalism, it's integrity and value is indeed an important one but it is worrying to see the FTC focus on protecting the old model rather than trying to work out a new one. This bias towards traditional media may prove that the industry and its regulators have very little foresight to what is actually going on. He points to a great segment where Google basically explains the reality of the situation in no uncertain terms.
"The large profit margins newspapers enjoyed in the past were built on an artificial scarcity: Limited choice for advertisers as well as readers. With the Internet, that scarcity has been taken away and replaced by abundance. No policy proposal will be able to restore newspaper revenues to what they were before the emergence of online news. It is not a question of analog dollars versus digital dimes, but rather a realistic assessment of how to make money in a world of abundant competitors and consumer choice."
The idea that the FTC may consider regulating the industry and in the process penalize services such as aggregators and search engines is frightening. Fact is, the internet is changing the way people consume and find news and while it may be a painful transition the industry can find models that will work without heavy handed regulation. Or as Google puts it — "[T]he current challenges faced by the news industry are business problems, not legal problems."
The Old Spice Superbowl campaign has been a roaring success for the deodorant brand. The original TV ad "Smell Like a Man, Man" has had over 13 million views on YouTube and now its 3-day social networking targeted personalised video message effort have added another 11 million to that figure. Below is the 'thank you' message from Old Spice Man himself.
More than anything, audiences are reacting incredibly positively to the whole thing and ad agency Wieden + Kennedy has cleverly put the character to rest (for now) to avoid that to change. We Are Social has an excellent write-up of how the campaign has performed.
Involver's AMP platform just launched with a Sideshow-designed user interface and some great mentions on Venture Beat's Social Beat and TechCrunch. We've been working with Involver since 2008 on their site, UI and their fantastic suite of Facebook apps used by over 80,000 brands, agencies and artists like Alicia Keys.
From VentureBeat: "Called AMP, or the audience management platform, the dashboard helps marketers watch their Twitter followers and Facebook fans from a single place, schedule content at regular times, and track interaction."
Turns out that simply owning a great camera doesn't make you a great photographer. To prove this, the talented folks at FStoppers went on to put together a fashion shoot shot entirely on an iPhone. And no, this isn't on an iPhone 4 with it's vastly improved camera, they used the mediocre cam of the iPhone 3GS to shoot these fantastic shots.
From FStoppers: "A few weeks ago I did a full fashion photo shoot with my iPhone 3gs. I posted a few of the images and asked people to critique them (never exposing that they were shot on my cell phone). I couldn’t help but laugh when a few of our readers claimed that these were “the best images I had ever taken.” Nobody ever claimed that they were too grainy, too soft, or lacked detail." (Via MemRants)
We've got an updated show reel up. Enjoy.
While today we often try to mimic analog experiences on digital devices (we're looking at you iPad) — yesteryear's clever engineers managed to turn Pong into a completely mechanical game.
Sure, it's a little misleading and kids that were promised an arcade experience might have been ever so slightly disappointed but you've got to admire the ingenuity at work here. Skip forward a little to see how this thing actually works. Genius.
Dipity 2.0 just launched with it's brand new Sideshow-developed UI. Dipity let's users create social timelines to keep tracks of their friends online. The new version is gettting some great press and we're not even close to being done so watch this space. If you want a timely way to experience Dipity head on over to the election center for an interactive Obama/McCain timeline face-off.
Big milestone reached over at our Sideshow Labs project Cameroid: one million webcam photos. The little app that could is going from strength to strength, with hundreds of thousands of budding photographers taking and sharing webcam masterpieces on all continents. We've got a brand new version doing some pretty amazing on our internal lab servers so expect much more soon.
We're happy to announce that Sideshow co-founder Howard Mann is making his brilliant book available for free as a digital download. The no-nonsense approach outlined within the pages of Your Business Brickyard is what guides much of what we do so if you want to get to know us a little better buy or download it today. Alternatively, you can give us a ring or better still meet-up, we'll bring donuts.