UX, digital signage, Web 2.0 and stuff
Check out MoMA’s site about Doug Aitken’s ‘Sleepwalkers’. I wish I’ve seen it live in NY, but the site gives you a good impression of the video-installation.
By the way, one of the ultimate highlights of the excellent ‘Sip My Ocean’ videoexhibition at Louisiana (in Denmark) was definitely ‘Can’t Stop’ by Aitken. It’s a definitely ‘must see’ piece of videoart!
Enjoy!
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2007/aitken/
Axure RP Pro 4.4 is out and features a few long awaited improvements: Now you can
And is it me – or has the app become a bit faster?
Anyway: Axure stays in the lead as the best tool for rapid web prototyping.
Silberbauer Says: is sorry to announce that the iPhone concept is no more than a simple rip off.
70 years ago the very first iPhone was made (in beautiful sturdy bakelite) by Bell Labs which is now planning to re-market is as the iPhone Retro Classic.
First the mouse – now the iphone. Shame on you Steve, shame on you…
Designing rich newsletters for Notes has always been a pain. The Notes html rendering engine pretty much sucks. But as not many consumers use Notes it didn’t really matter. Also, webmail services like Hotmail and Gmail has been difficult to negotiate CSS wise. But you could always trust the good old Outlook to render your html e-mail in the right way.
Until now, that is.
February Microsoft launches Outlook 2007 featuring that old buggy Word rendering engine with extremely limited support for CSS. Yes: The one you know from MS Word that has the same html rendering power as did Netscape 2 – that is: Very limited indeed.
It’s nothing short of a disaster. Html formatted e-mail newsletters drive a lot of our clients’ online business, and we know for a fact that rich formatted newsletters work well: Nice design makes people buy stuff. Now some of our clients must either redesign their newsletters or fall back to text e-mail to be sure their customers can read their messages in Outlook (which most people use).
Why Microsoft has chosen to use the crippled Word rendering engine for displaying the html formatting of the brand new Outlook 2007 is a mystery.
My best guess, though, is that some fool in Microsoft has decided that to “integrate” e-mail more into the Office suite the stupid Word engine must be used all over the place. And it’s probably the same lame guy that years ago decided that Word should be the default e-mail editor for Outlook.
Source: Campaign Monitor
This week we’re testing large videoprojections in our new HQ in Ørestaden (Copenhagen).
The headline of the project is: “From a Place to Work to a Place to Create” and we’re trying to create an ambience of innovation, creativity and communication.
If you’re in the neighborhood drop by this week an enjoy the impressive prototype, else check out the videoclip.
What do you think?
In this video, captured on our trip to New York last year, a well known architect (no need to mention his name 
is showing off his new accomplishment of building the new World Trade Center number 7.
But the usability of the very fancy big screen display lets him down…
I guess the mouse will remain the preferred pointing device for most users anyway and that they’ll include a usability expert next time…
It’s true, Web 2.0 is a great thing! But, you’re not guaranteed a special place in the Great Hall of Buzz just because you call it 2.0. (and 3.0 isn’t any better
A couple of examples:
Publishing 2.0
Business 2.0
Global PR Blog Week 2.0??
Branding 2.0
We’ve experienced some technical problems with posts and comments that did not publish as they should, so now we have moved our blog to the beta version of the new Blogger.
Not that you should notice much of a difference. The URL hasn’t changed – neither have our linguistic and social skills been upgraded.
We had to turn on word verification for comments, though. That means if you’d like to comment on a post (please do!) you’ll have to enter some random letters (like you know it from Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail etc.). Sorry about that, but we’ve had some brain dead comment spam coming in lately.
Best regards,
Silberbauer Bros.
Last weekend I decided to move to Gmail for real and say bye bye to Thunderbird for good. Easy as pie? Well… no, not if you want to do it right. But it’s worth it.
I’ve had a Gmail account for years but I’ve always stuck with my “old” account and my trusty Thunderbird. Don’t get me wrong: Thunderbird is a very good mail client. The best, in fact – but it’s still a local app, and we can’t have that, can we?
Also, as I’m using 3 different computers on an every day basis, even Thunderbird and an IMAP account isn’t the perfect solution. The SPAM problem was getting on my nerves too. I’m running a pretty aggressive SPAM filter on my ISP’s server but still a lot of crap slips through. Applying the Thunderbird SPAM filter (not bad, but not perfect either) and on top of that the very aggressive Spamato filter collection helps. But Spamato keeps filtering mails from my mom(!) and most of you will understand that precisely that kind of false positive is disqualifying. Above all: Thunderbird is not Web 2.0, because Web 2.0 is about trusting Google with all your data, remember? So here goes.
Switching to Gmail is of course easy. I transformed my ISP’s IMAP account to a simple forward, so that all my mail is still scanned for SPAM and viruses by my ISP and then forwarded to my Gmail account. No sweat.
But I still have 7651 old e-mails (not counting the thousands of mails I have sent since 2002, but they will stay on my harddrive for now) in my local mailbox on this very Dell Latitude D410. Among this immense pile of mails there just may be something of importance, so I want it all on my Gmail account for fast searching and easy access – and because I like Gmail’s neat labelling function.
First off I tried the GML (Gmail Loader) but turned out to be very slow and unstable. GML also uses forwarding to send the mails to Gmail, so the original headers are not preserved.
I decided to use the “Redirect” extension for Thunderbird instead. Doing a redirect the headers should be preserved – even though Gmail chooses to date stamp these mails with the arrival time anyway. Thus, each conversation (Gmail lingo for “thread”) is datestamped with the time ofarrival, but the date stamp of the original mails inside the conversation seems to be preserved. Good enough for me as all my old mails will be archived anyway.
So after having set up a Gmail filter to archive all incoming mail immediately and having deleted the largest of the old mails in my Thunderbird mail storage I started redirecting over 7.000 mails to my Gmail account. It worked, but my ISP’s SMTP chose to go into raving spamanoia overdrive and throttle me down. I had to kill Thunderbird a couple of times to get the redirecter up running again and found out that clearing c:\documents and settings\local settings\temp, seemed to help.
Anyway, here I am with 7000+ e-mails in my Gmail neatly stacked into 3.000-and-something conversations and furthermore compressed from more than 600 MB on my disk to 99 MB on Googles disk.
It’s fast – opening Gmail in Firefox is in fact faster than opening Thunderbird. And Thunderbird still is a Formula One car compared to that old freight train they call Outlook.
Yup – Gmail works like a charm. It’s just a really great service and the interface is so well designed. It’s not beautiful, to say at least, but it’s brilliant layed out and the use of Ajax makes it snappy in just the right places.
Sadly, I can’t get the Gmail notifier to work. A firewall or router somewhere between my home and Google just won’t let it through.
Web 2.0 marks the dictatorship of the presentation layer, a triumph of appearance over architecture that any good computer scientist should immediately dismiss as unsustainable.
“O’Reilly as Tito?” What a pile of geeky bs. Mr. Thompson is really pissed that real people stole his wet dream and made up a trendy name for it.
Of course the presentation layer rules, Mr. Thompson. Because that is the one part of the system that we all see. So nice data presented in a nice way, yes please. A solid, scalable architecture – that’s great, but as long as the system delivers, I really don’t care.
Maybe, Mr. Thompson, the users got tired of waiting for you developers to get your shit together and to start producing interfaces and services that made sense on top of that nice code that you do. So they chose the systems that provide valuable services in a nice, usable way. Who wouldn’t.
The web right now is developing much like an organism. Not everything is perfect and not everything is build to last – nor should it be. But never before has the web delivered so much value to so users.
Nobody said the Web 2.0 paradigm is perfect, but it’s there, and that’s more than you can say about your promised metaverse of a new generation, scalable, modular 8th generation internet med for people that speak hex. Amazon, Google and even Microsoft are delivering – you’re just talking.
If O’Reilly is Tito, then you’re that young German guy who, seeing the colorful decadence of the Weimar Republic, decided to make us all walk in line towards that promised Third Reich: Ze plaze in which all zystemz will wörk in the zame way and no one will waste prezious coding time on that filthy rich user experienze.
Arh – just kidding. But so were you, right?
I’ve just launched our DRs new corporate site: http://www.dr.dk/omdr
I did: strategy, Project Management and IA.
I think it went really well: (we got minor issues with supporting Firefox… i know…)
What do you think?
/Lars Silberbauer
“Dansk IT’s” Usability Days 2006 are over. A two day seminar on usability – and not a bad one either. Last year the same event ended up in nothing but sales pitches from different CMS vendors (yawn), but this year focus was in fact on usability/user centered design. The 2005 catastrophe meant that only about 80 people showed up this year and that makes me wonder if there’s going to be Usability Days 2007.
Among the best speakers this year was Klaus Kaasgaard (VP of Yahoo! User Experience Research) who talked about web trends for the years to come (and just in case you’ve been living in a cave the last year: The keywords are social, participation, community, sharing). Quite inspiring.
Also, Eric Reiss gave a good performance on user experience in general.
Several cases on usability and user centric design were presented: TopDanmark (insurance company), VELUX (the ones with the roof windows and one of our clients), and The Ministry of Finance (hey – also one of our clients 
. All of them very well presented cases.
I and a colleague did a two hour hands-on workshop on personas. Two hours aren’t much for a workshop, but we managed to have people put together their own “tween”-personas for a fictitious e-commerce case. I think it went ok – but who am I to judge. I’m eagerly awaiting the feedback forms.
So, that concludes two weeks of me talking. Last thursday I gave a presentation on tools for user centred design at Creuna’s own usability seminar and friday I did the same presentation for most of my colleagues. This week I did a presentation on Web 2.0-trends as a part of another Creuna event for our clients. These things are fun to do but they sure take up a lot of time, so I’m looking forward to getting some work done the next couple of weeks – the kind of work that out clients pay us to do.
Yet another client wants a splash screen on his new, expensive and very beautiful web shop.
Why, you ask, put up a splash screen in front of a web shop? Why try to block your clients from your shop? Why spoil your conversion rate just to show a picture?
“Branding”, they say. “We want to show our brand before the customer is allowed into the shop”. End of discussion. Gaaah.
But please understand: A beautifully designed shop is GOOD branding. Easy access to buy your goods is GREAT branding. A flawless and nice shopping experience is EXCELLENT branding.
A 760×400 pixels jpg blocking the entrance to your shop is NOT great branding. It’s just plain stupid.
NO MORE SPLASH SCREENS! Have a nice weekend.
Just a small advertisement
I’m speaking at the Confex Intranet Conference 2006 on November 22. My presentation will fokus on how DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation) is using intranet, enterprise search and digital signage as a tool for corporate communication.
If you want to join the conference just sign up here.
/Lars Silberbauer
Thnx to all who showed up at the REFLEKS06 event!
I think it was worth all the hard work and presented the history of DR in a completely new context and showed how our archives can be used to generate new ideas and new experiences.
It basically worked out the way I’ve imagined it and the performing artist were absolutely amazing (MHM One, Bottega Areté, VJ Samesame, DJ Djuna Barnes, Ane Trolle, Copyflex, Je M’appelle Mads).
Thanks to all the guys and girls who helped us with catering, wardrope and security!! 
Click here for more pictures from the event and to give us some feedback.
All photos by Nicolo Fasano.
/Lars Silberbauer
EUROIA2006
In my eyes Day Two had more substance than had day one.
The first panel, Pros and Cons of Different Wireframing Techniques (Marion Böing, David Carruthers, Rob Goris, Jacco Nieuwland, Filip Borloo), dealt with different types of wireframes and prototyping techniques. It was quite interesting to hear pro- and contra-Visio panellist discuss how they worked. I was glad that one of the panellist proudly stated that she soon would be doing her prototyping in Axure RP Pro. We have used Axure for more than 1½ years and I it’s a great tool. I’d never use Visio again for this kind of work.
One panellist told that he is using a combination of Photoshop and InDesign to generate and maintain extremely high fidelity graphical “wireframes” and flowcharts. I was impressed by his method as it was a brilliant approach if you need to do a lot of key page designs, but the time one will have to spend maintaining this kind of prototype… man. That method seemed incredibly laborious.
Next up was Jared Volkmann to present his Customer Experience Framework. An excellent and fast paced presentation that took us through the three main stages in defining the customers’ behavior. It’s all about Who’s visiting? Why are they visiting? and What are they doing? Well – I guess we all know that these questions are important, but Volkmann’s framework makes it easy to communicate to the client why the work must be done. Volkmann stressed that a combination of thourough log analysis and surveys is important to understand how how the users are behaving and why they are behaving the way they are.
The second panel of the day was about IA Education In Europe. It was lead by the very engaged but also quite talkative Dr. Heiko Haubitz who teaches IA at the University of Dublin. Unfortunately his own presentation stole some of the very precious time from the panel. IA education is an important topic but I don’t feel the panel got the room it needed. Dr. Heiko, Dr. Madsen and especially Dr. Thull all deserved more time to present their views. Also I would’ve liked to hear much more from Boris Mueller who very briefly (due to a constantly crashing Adobe Reader (that’s one-nill to Powerpoint)) showed us some very exciting designs made by his students. More of that next year, please: Examples of concrete work.
Bogo Vatovec delivered one of the great presentation of the EUROIA 2006. He talked about Content Adaptation to Mobile Devices – how well does different systems adapt browser-targeted content to mobile devices? Not well at all, Vatovec revealed. None of the tested CA systems managed to transform the test sites into anything usable. Vatovecs research was thorough and his presentation downright funny. The big question in my mind is, though: Is automatic content adaptation the way to go? Is it possible to design for both pc browsers and small mobile units? I’m not sure about that.
Jason Mesut and Warren Hutchinson from Framfab UK demonstrated their concept of The Wicked Workshop. Nothing new under the sun here, but nevertheless an ok presentation on how to make a workshop a workshop and not just yet another boting meeting.
The closing keynote was made by the eccentrically dressed but brilliant Dr. Steven Pemperton of the CWI. Dr. Pemperton is chairman of the W3C html and Xforms working group and told us about xhtml2 and how it will take html to the next level by allowing for sematic markup – microformats done the right way, as Dr. Pemperton called it.
Thanks to EUROIA, ASIS&T and the comittee for putting this great event together.
On friday October 13, DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation) is hosting the first public event in our brand new corporate HQ: “REFLEKS06“.
In collaboration with the visual artist group Bottega Areté, we’ve (some colleagues and myself) created an event that combines architecture, design and communication.
The concept is based on the idea that our media heritage holds value that goes way beyond the use as documentation on historic events. Instead we can use the archieves as building blocks for new experiences.
Therefore, we’ve asked a cast of young VJs and DJs to use our media archieves and the new buildings to create a creative media experience that hopefully will be as spectacular as our new buildings in “Ørestaden”.
I think it’s going to be an outstanding once in a lifetime event. And we will definitely be working like crazy the next couple of days to make it happen!
/Lars Silberbauer
EUROIA2006
Almar van der Krogt kindly responded to my not so nice comments on his presentation at EUROIA 2006 in Berlin, and I’d like to answer him with this post instead of adding another more or less hidden comment. I feel that van der Krogts decent comment deserves an answer in a more agreeable tone of voice than was my first post about his presentation.
So, Mr. van der Krogt, thank you for commenting on my post. I’m sorry that I missed your points regarding Digg, del.icio.us and so on. My bad. These services truly are outstanding – I guess we agree on that.
Please allow me to explain in more detail why I wasn’t that fond of your presentation and why I felt provoked (if not offended). First of all: To challenge a whole community is a provoking thing to do and some kind of reaction should be expected. One would like to pick up the challenge, but in this case that would be wrong as the challenge is built on false premises. It’s just a matter of words – you could have put out a suggestion instead and I could have said, “nah, I think you’re wrong – let me tell you why”. But you chose to challenge us, and that kind of ups the ante, doesn’t it?
To challenge the IA community you insisted on comparing IA to real, physical architecture in almost every aspect. The problem is, though, that despite the term architecture these fields have almost nothing in common. It’s ok to use metaphores as “land marks” when describing IA but only as metaphores – you tried to do analogies. Furthermore you chose to put this out as a challenge – to provoke, I guess (and I must say that you succeeded in my case). But what excactly was that challenge about?
“Webmarks” cannot and should not try to be what landmarks are. The differences between the real world and the infinite space of the web are too great. A landmark (e.g. a sky scraber) is deliberately placed somewhere crowded to be seen by a lot of people. It may not have a function besides containing a lot of offices, it may be beautiful to some people and extremely ugly to others, but it’s there: You simply have to live with it no matter what. It is built in a physical space and cannot be avoided, and by its mere presence it’s a landmark. Take the Eiffel Tower – in the beginning most people hated it but it was there and the Parisians had to live with it. Slowly it became a landmark. It’s completely useless, but it’s there.
On the web, something that people dislike or something that isn’t useful will not be seen, as we may simply avoid going to it. On the web we are not confined to a finite space and thus we are not forced to pass the “webmark” again and again. If we choose not to go to it, we’ll never see it. Beauty on its own may attract some traffic but only for a short while, as beauty on the web is short lived. In that way, what works for buildings and statues does not work for websites – and hence, IMHO, the analogy fails.
So, what I disliked was that you insisted on doing an analogy between physical architecture and the web and in that process got too eager to find similarities which are not there. By looking at digg, del.icio.us, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, Youtube, Google, etc. I think it should be clear to us by now that “webmarks” are defined almost solely by their usefulness and by the degree of which they merge into the nature of the web.
Thus the greatest “webmarks” are the complete opposite of landmarks: Where landmarks stand out, webmarks merge in; where landmarks are forced upon us, webmarks can be avoided; where landmarks may be less than useful, webmarks must be useful to attract traffic and thus to qualify as webmarks at all. Webmarks cannot exist without interacting with the rest of the web and are – due to the nature of the web – everywhere at the same time (as is del.icio.us in the form of two buttons in my Firefox browser). Landmarks are defined by standing out and having a fixed location. In that way, I feel that your analogy is too flawed to support a challenge.
Best regards,
Klaus.
Creuna in Copenhagen has grown rapidly during the last two years. We have now become too large for our old (but very charming) HQs in the center of the oldest part of Copenhagen. So Friday we packed up all our stuff and moved out. Monday we will start a new era in larger and more up to date offices. We’re getting more than twice the room than we have now and we will be situated in an even more posh part of town, the eastern part of Copenhagen City.
Our new address is:
Creuna
Hammerensgade 4
DK-1267 Copenhagen K
DENMARK
EUROIA2006
So. Finally home from Berlin and from EUROIA 06. It took some time to get home, though, as SAS had grotesquely overbooked our flight. I, one colleague and two other Danes had to rent a car to get home in time for meetings Monday morning.
Why is it that SAS feels that it’s ok to sell more tickets than there are seats on the flight? And to overbook a small 72 seats De Havilland with (at least) 4 passengers is down right unethical gambling with my precious spare time. I’m expecting SAS Customer Service to refund my almost DKK 3.500 for a rental car, ferry and diesel very quickly and with an apology.
This is excactly why I deliberately never flies Ryan Air or any other discount airline. But I guess it doesn’t matter – obviously they’re all amateurs who can’t count.
Anyway: The EUROIA 06 was great. The logistics super, the premises at Hotel Maritim ProArte very good (although Italian design and Berlin pop art do not blend beautifully and Eric Reiss was as always a great host. Simply put: The geist of EUROIA 06 was high!
And how was the presentations? Well, one or two of the presenters could work on their English communication skills, and a single one of them simply should have stayed off stage. But that’s minor stuff – EUROIA 06 was without a doubt a great succes and we all had a good time discussing our practice with fellow IA’s from all over Europe.
We (I and 3 colleagues from Creuna) reached Berlin four o’clock friday and met with a group of conference attendees for happy hour at the Barist bar at the Hackescher Markt. Even though the beer flowed slowly at the start (the bar’s fault, definately not the hosts’!) it was a happy couple of happy hours. Thanks to FatDUX and ÙI for hosting this event.
Later on most of us had dinner at a Vietnamese place across the street – nice folks, great talks.
Day One
Day one was the less great day of the EUROIA 06. Morville and Reiss did great but most of the other presentation was not above average.
Saturday started off with Peter Morville‘s key note. He talked about his new book on ambient findability and stressed that search will become even more important in the future and that too little effort is put into site search. Ambient findability is about finding what you need when you need it, no matter where you are. We are not there yet, but as tagging becomes more populare, more focus is put on meta data and as search engines continues to improve we’re getting closer.
Eric Reiss told us about seven main trends in information architecture and that we must be careful that strategic IA and tactical IA do not loose touch. We don’t want those strategic business IA guys to define our practice without having tried to do real, hands on IA. Is this a threat to our profession? Well, maybe. But as long as we have a hard time defining our own practice we can hardly blame people for taking the IA way of thinking to the strategic level can we? We have to be aware, though, that IA doesn’t turn into yet another MBA kind of buzz word.
“The Strategic IA” was the title of Olly Wright‘s presentation. Mr. Wright is one of the IA’s that’ve gone strategic, and maybe Mr. Reiss is right after all: It’s dangerous to loose touch with the hands on IA. I felt that Mr. Wright didn’t get down to business but simply stated all the right things to do as an IA strategist: IA’s must understand how the client’s business works, know the roles of all the stakeholders, do all the right analysis, say all the right words, do the ROI calculations and so on and so forth. The IA must be an economist, a designer, a leader, a consultant and on top of that a very decent human being. It’s all true but it’s too much – too vaguely defined.
Ariel Guersenzvaig talked about persuadability on commercial sites. Too me there was nothing new in this talk but I agree with Guersenzvaig that all websites should be thinking in terms of conversion. Not a bad presentation at all but maybe a bit shallow for a professional IA audience.
The first panel – “A Place for IA Deliverables” clearly showed that the chosen panel format did not work. Too much time was lost on the panellist presenting themselves and the panel never really got going. I think that the committee should reconsider this format. Larisa Warnke from Carlson Marketing did good but the panel as such ended up talking about proces models more than deliverables.
Digital UK – Re-engineering the Content Architecture to Communicate the UK’s Move to Digital Television was just another case story. It was simply a presentation of your every day web design case with too much focus on average page layout. Maybe if Harvey Turner had talked more about the process and less about the very average page design it could have been more engaging.
In one of the more hard core presentations Luca Rosati, Emanuele Quintarelli and Andrea Resmini told us about their research project on combining facets and tags into a social tagging system. By using facets to enrich the one-dimensional tag clouds information can be retrieved more easily. To be honest, especially Luca Rosati was very hard to understand and I may have missed some important stuff. It’s an interesting piece of work but I can’t help thinking of systems like iBox from Interse that already uses facet schemes combined with automatic and manual tagging but in a more dynamic and customizable way that shown here. This has already been done and implemented but nevertheless: It’s exciting stuff that – but the presentation needed coherence and clarity.
To round of day one came the guy that I think should’ve saved his plane fair and stayed home in the Netherlands. Almar van der Krogt proposed a “challenge” to the IA community: To build a “webmark” or piece of “virreal architecture”. He feels that no websites are like the real skyscrabers and that we need sites that stands out in the same way as reality’s land marks. Maybe we do – but not in the way Krogt thinks, because he is right in one thing: Websites are not sky scrabers and they never will be. EBay, Google, del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, Yahoo, Amazon, and so one already do stand out. But their not pretty, Krogt says. Who are you to decide, Mr. Krogt?
I’m sorry but I have to be rude here: This was pure BS presented in a corny ninetiesish powerpoint design. It’s great that anyone have the guts to get on stage and tell us and Peter Morville that we are no good, but this was done without any knowledge of the field, without any irony and without Krogt having the slightest clue of what he wanted to achieve besides hearing himself speak. Krogt – or anyone – may attack my work, my profession and my person at any time, but please do a bit of research before doing so.
And so day one was at an end. We joined the poster session (the presentation of Swipr was interesting, but it sure doesn’t beat Axure) and then went for Indian food at Amrits. Ok food, questionable service.
My post about day two to follow soon.
Just a couple of books that I would recommend on branding, design and innovation.
Tom Kelley: Ten Faces of Innovation.
A very inspiring book on how to beat the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization. 
Tom Peters: Design
Tom Peters has the ability to get you pumped up with enthusiasm just by the way he writes and in this book the content is just as inspiring as well. This is a book with a message and you feel the commitment throughout the book.
The harsh news: THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL. The microchip will colonize all rote activities. And we will have to scramble to reinvent ourselves – as we did when we came off the farm and went into the factory, and then as we were ejected from the factory and delivered to the white collars towers.
The exciting news: THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL. The reinvented you and the reinvented me will have no choice but to scramble and add value in some meaningful way.
The Danish Brand Guru Numero Uno has created a follow up to his previous bestseller Brandchild.
Anyway, all three books are worth reading. Enjoy!
Over the last two weeks me and a colleague have executed four workshops with a client who is building a complex B2B portal. The client has for some time been working on the concept and business model but as the process needed to move forward into design we were called in to take the process to the next level – and to do this quickly as deadline was approaching mightily fast.
As the concept was not entirely documented but mostly existed inside the project team members’ minds, our design process had to be very flexible to allow for sudden changes in scope and strategy.
We soon realized that we needed to get very visual indeed to shift the team members from strategic thinking into design mode (from the “what and why”-mode to the “how”-mode), and that we also needed a lot of face time with the client to understand the complex organisational needs without doing a some thorough analysis first. So we simply brought a laptop with Axure RP 4.2, a projector and a Wacom digitizer and did 4 x 5 hours of intense rapid prototyping with the client.
We were 2 of us, 3 of them and, very importantly, the head of the company that eventually will implement the system: A skilled system architect with a great understanding of the need for IA and interaction design. We’ve worked with him before and it’s always a pleasure (I can’t mention names here, but he’ll know who he is
He and I lead the discussion while my colleague prototyped like mad in Axure, constantly reflecting the team’s decisions on the screen (he’ pretty fast in Axure – and one needs to be to keep up with 5 team members constantly changing their minds).
The first couple of hours of workshop one went by without much progress but suddenly the site started to emerge on the screen. Today we concluded the fourth and final workshop and I must say that this approach really has moved the project forward.
Live prototyping with a team of 6 is not the cheapest way to do it, but there no question that both the project and the quality of the IA and the design have benefitted from this approach.
Anyway: Tomorrow I leave for Berlin to attend the second European Information Architecture Summit. Two days of fun and educating stuff, I hope. And the IA happy hour friday evening. What’s a summit without hang overs?
I’ll blog about this event when I’ll get back, but please be patient – the next week is screwed up schedule-wise so we might reach the weekend before any posts appear.
I’ve always liked Discovery Channel. Even though some of the shows are targeted war maniacs or chopper lovers, the programs are always about some part of our reality. It’s entertainment of course – but it isn’t fake. It isn’t a lie. Until now.
Discovery Channel Europe now airs “A Sense of Murder” produced by Danish Egmont. It’s a show about some proclaimed “psychics” that “helps” the police “solving” crimes. Well, they don’t, really, because they can’t. As their so called “powers” don’t exist they are just walking about making stuff up – but what matters is that the program does not question their abilities at all. (Sorry about all the quotes). One of the psychics on the show is in fact the ever present Marion Dampier-Jeans.
In one episode of “A Sense of Murder” a Danish police officer tells the interviewer that the information given to him by the psychics could mean that the case would be reopened. Now think of this: A gun carrying member of a European police force really thinks that this freak “sees” something? If I should ever commit a murder, I want that dummy to lead the investigation. While he’s busy looking in the crystal ball I’ll be getting out of the country.
I don’t know – maybe Dampier-Jeans and her fellow wackos really do think they see something. In that case I think they should consider getting some professional psychiatric help. Or – and I think this is the case – they are just lying to make some easy money and sadly Discovery Channel seems eager to help.
The channel originally devoted to science and reality has sold out. Shame on you, Discovery Channel.
If you’re still on iTunes 6, stick with it for the time being. V7 skips like crazy when you are moving windows around or opening documents. And sometimes it skips just for the fun of it.
It’s incredible that Apple cannot produce a player that’ll play a standard 196Kbps MP3 without errors on a fast 2006 pc. I mean – Winamp 2 decoded MP3s with the cpu usage of a standard household toaster and never skipped – no matter what you did to your machine.
Some iTunes 7 victims have found that this helps: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/1308 – but only if your music is extremely distorted. The random skips don’t go away.
Maybe it’s time to check out Anapod instead of Apple’s cpu-hogging beast.
[UPDATE]
7.0.1 is out. Faster but still skips on my machine, though.
The functionality is ok – but let’s face it: It’s ugly.
Søren reminded me that it was about time to make a follow up on my previous posting about digital signage in the Big Apple. Klaus’ Zune posting created a lot of buzz, so we thought it would be appropriate to let it be the topposting for a while.
Right now there’s a lot going on in the field of digital signage and corporate branding. Some companies are leading the way and are using digital signage in their corporate branding and are redesigning their corporate HQ in order to make the ultimate corporate branding experience. They are closing the gap between architecture and communication and creating a more consistent and holistic branding experience than I’ve ever seen before.
One of the best examples is the new Bloomberg Building in New York (created by Cesar Pelli & Associates). When you visit the building it’s obvious that the architecture and digital signage have been merged to create a unique branding experience. The building is absolutely soaked with large digital displays and the architecture is stunning. The visitor leaves the building with the impression of an innovative, creative and open minded organization. I don’t know if this is the true nature of the Bloomberg Corporation, but the building itself gives the visitor this very positive impression.
For instance take a look at this large 3 tier displays which is one of the first large displays that the visitors encounter.
I know, it’s a short clip, but it shows how Bloomberg has made a combination of a large digital display that delivers news content from Bloomberg Media, but at the same time creates an branding experience. It’s not just a news ticker, it’s so much more.
Or have a look at this elevator area. Nice huh? 
I can’t describe the entire visitor experience, you have to experience it by yourself – and that is basically my point.
The corporate headquarter is the ultimate place for making a lasting impact on your customers, the press or your stakeholders. You control all the elements and you can create an experience that will be able to push through our personal “ad filtering system”, that most people has developed by watching the estimated 86.500 tv commercials per year (Ries 2002). Instead of having your customer placed in the couch in a familiar environment, you got your customer immersed in a controlled environment, where you can create an experience by making a complete experience for all five senses. As Martin Lindstrom (Danish Branding guru) says in his book “Brand Sense”:
Brand Communication has reached a new frontier. In order to succesfully conquer future horizons, brands will have to find ways to break the 2-D impasse and appeal to the three neglegted senses. Superb picture quality won’t do it. Rather we should look to embrace all five senses in order to create a foundation for future brand strategies.
You cannot send out a press release, make an online ad, create a television commercial or making a blog posting that will be able to make the same impact as the well designed corporate branding experience in your HQ. I know that not all your customers will come and visit you, but you will be able to make a lasting impact on those who does. Bloomberg has definitely showed the way by using digital signage and architecture to communicate corporate values and goals.
Take a look the next time you’re in New York, it’s really really cool.
A newly launched bookshop is made entirely in Flash. And it shows. www.elounge.com is a nightmare – IA-wise, usability-wise and UX-wise it downright sucks.
It performs badly, even on fast machines, and on a Mac your scrollbar simply dissappears if you resize your window.
The good thing is: You probably won’t find the site at all, as it will get really bad page ratings on Google which doesn’t crawl Flash.
Nothing – nothing – on this site couldn’t have been made in dhtml, and that probably faster and less expensive. So why did its agency recommend eLounge to sacrifice the user experience, the SEO, the usability, the legibility to go with a technology that even Gucci won’t use? Or is it that eLounge told the agency to bring out the Flash gimp no matter what? We’ll never know.
Are you about to design a luxury website and have already started up your Flash-editor? Wait a minute and go to www.gucci.com. Flash, right? Nope.
Now, this is a very important step in the right direction: Gucci has relaunched gucci.com without Flash. No Flash whatsoever. JavaScript has replaced that all evil and destructive plugin.
The Gucci designers could have chosen to go with Adobes terrible Flex 2 (see my oppinion on Flex 2 here) or a full blown Flash solution, but they chose to go with reality instead. They opted for usability, search engine optimization and not…. well whatever you opt for when you opt for Flash.
Congratulations, Gucci, for making the sane choice, for gaining a lot of free SEO, for re-enabling my back-button and for using the web for what it was meant for – without sacrificing the fades, scrolls, and zooms that we’ve learned to expect from those prêt a porter-websites
Read more on etre
Our sys adm. just decided that our workstations are to download updates automatically every day 12 o’clock. Great news for IT security – bad news for my blood pressure.
Sometimes I have a pretty stressed up day, and now Windows keep nagging me with this every 10 minutes:
No! I don’t wanna save everything, shut down Photoshop, Word, Axure and Dreamweaver and reboot my workstation. I’m busy, you see? I’ve got work to do!
If it was only the Windows Update nag screen, but it’s this one too:
And this one:
And iTunes, and the Adobe CS suite, and Windows Mediaplayer, and several other apps which designers think that they’ve made the one and only single most important piece of software on my workstation. Guess what, guys: I’m an adulterer. I have others apps too.
In fact I’ve got at least 8 different apps that craves my attention every now and then. That means at least 1 update every day – and that’s both on my desktop workstation and my laptop (and then again on my desktop at home). My life is one big update.
Sometimes when I’m doing a presentation for a client, Acrobat pops up “demanding my attention” as it so nicely puts it. If I try to show a piece of video Windows Mediaplayer may start the show by asking for a license update, “uhm sorry guys, I just have to …. click click… there”.
It’s as if the software is more important than the work I do. Remember that Microsoft commercial? “We see Susan dreaming of… blah blah blah”. Well, all I see is a bloody MS nag screen wanting me to reboot, even taking focus. Aaargh – there it goes again! Piss off!
Bill Buxton dreamt this up ages ago – now Jeff Han has built it and demonstrates it live: The multitouch touch sensitive screen. This might be the first glimpse of the greatest HCI revolution since the event-driven graphical interface.
Go see for yourself at YouTube.
(Source: etre)
Don’t forget to register for EUROIA Information Architecture Summit 2006 in Berlin.
Mr. Reiss and his FatDUX has lost the frames. It suits them
…I especially like the X-ray duck, which one is your favorite?
First of all, no one should be in any doubt that I believe that blogging and wikis can be used as an extremely powerful tool for corporate communication, but this demands a RADICAL change in the state of mind of most communication professionals. You cannot just add blogs or wikis to your existing communication platform without taking into account that this is just not another new tool, this is a completely new way of communicating. If you do not realize this difference, then your corporate blogging initiative is not gonna fly. To succeed, you need to rethink your communication/knowledge management strategy and it’s not done by:
“Lets do some corporate blogging – that will definitely put us right up there with the big shots in the Fortune 500 (and if not, we’ll add a Wiki, that’ll definitely do it).
You need to change! By now, devoted bloggers have praised and glorified this new medium for a couple of years and even the most well defended stronghold of corporate communication have sensed that something is happening outside side of the outer defenses. You can no longer attend a serious seminar about corporate communication without stumbling over talks on how corporate blogging will revolutionize business communication and of course the general worshipping of wikis as the greatest thing since Post It Notes.
More and more companies are showing interest in adding blogging and wiki-tools to their ever increasing portfolio of communication tools. And it’s just great? or is it??…
In my opinion, there is still a huge challenge to overcome and we’re not their yet. In fact we’re not even close!
A couple of years ago the “MUST HAVE” of communication professionals and one of the most popular subjects on communication/intranet conferences was portals and personalization. Did that really help us? Did the promised benefits arrive or have we just silently agreed on that we’ll leave the past alone and move on??
Now we have some new exciting “MUST HAVE” tools and that is the problem in a nutshell. Most communication professionals are just not getting it, they are thinking: “Cool, a new cheap digital publication thingy”. They should be thinking: “Amazing, the world of communication has changed, I must change before I’m obsolete”.
The new tools will not help and will not improve the way your business works if you don’t change your mindset. YOU need to understand that if YOU want blogging to create value for your business, YOU need to know how and YOU need to change accordingly.
Blogging is just not a thing you put on a server or get hosted somewhere in India. Blogging is a strategic decision about your corporate culture and it needs to be aligned with your overall corporate strategy and integrated in your company’s knowledge/information management strategy.
And most importantly – If you don’t feel it, if you don’t understand the media and if your not ready to bet your job on your corporate blogging initiative, you’re not ready for it.
Cool 
my Zune design made The Register. And thanks for all the comments, guys.
Update: Oh my, it’s spreading
Brasil here we come. Update again: …and here goes iPodHacks and macessentials.de
August 4: Articles in Computerworld and ComOn (both in Danish)
Here it is! Microsoft’s iPod-killer – seamlessly integrated with Windows Mediaplayer and as sleak and easy to use as its software counterpart.
Some months ago I did a redesign (IA and interaction design) of citibank.dk. Now the new site has launched and I’m excited to see the results.
The goal was to improve the conversion rate and the accuracy of applications for “fast loans”. We decided to split up a giant, single form into a step-by-step wizard.
See the result here
James Randi kindly and very quickly responded to my last post which I mailed him:
Looking over the Sam Nicholls article, I’m appalled at the number of errors and outright lies in it. Do you know if Nicholls is still alive? If so, I should make an attempt to have him present the proof for some half-dozen of his fantastic claims, hoping that he might at least try to do so.
My answer:
No, I don’t know if Nicholls is still around. I guess so – according to himself he’ll survive forever in some subatomic form or other
It’s scary, though, that his version of your work is the one that keeps circulating among the woo woo types, and obviously getting even more twisted when being translated.
Mr. Randi answers
The bottom line here is: they can’t fight the logic and the facts, so they resort to ad hominem and lies…
So true. Dampier-Jeans and her likes tend to believe anything they read as long as it fits their twisted perception of reality. Furthermore she adds to these lies by doing a bad translation without checking the facts. But then again: Facts and critical thinking will only spoil her business, so who can blame her.
Marion Dampier Jeans is a Danish self proclaimed “psychic”, who has done some appearances on Danish television in the no brain entertainment show “Åndernes magt” (“Powers of the Spirits“). In this show she walks around seeing dead people all over the place and telling them to go away. Really lame, believe me.
Of course Dampier Jeans isn’t especially fond of the illusionist James Randi, who has made it his mission to debunk so called “psychics”, “media” and other charlatans. Dampier Jeans is making a pretty good living on making people believe in ghosts, spirits an other kinds of woo woo so guys like Randi are indeed a liability to her business.
Instead of writing her own piece on Randi (guess that’ll put too much of a strain on her intellect), she’s decided to translate an old and pretty hostile article by Sam Nicholls from 1991 for publication on her website.
Unfortunately, Dampier Jeans is not at very skilled translator and among several other linguistic blunders she misses a very important detail in one of Nicholls sentences:
when asked recently if he would apologise in the event of a psychic being killed under his control, Randi snarled facetiously, “I’d say a little more than that (sorry)”;
In itself a stupid question. Nothing in Randi’s experiments would kill anyone – it’s like the old “Have you stopped beating up your wife?”-question. No wonder Randi snarles.
In Dampier Jeans’ miserable translation this turns into:
da han blev spurgt for nyligt om han ville undskylde den episode hvor et medie blev dræbt under hans kontrol, Randi snerrede føjeligt: “Jeg ville sige lidt mere end det (det må du undskylde)”;
In English this means: “When recently asked if he would apologise for that incident in which a medium was killed under his control, Randi snarled indulgently “I’d say a little more than that (I’m sorry)”.
“In the event of…” implies a hypothetical situation but Dampier Jeans obviously can’t read English very well. In the Danish translation this hypothetical death of a medium turns into a real incident, and a pretty horrible accusation of something close to murder. (Besides that the Danish grammar is pretty messed up, but that’s besides the point here).
Well… that’s one way to frame someone you disagree with.
Just returned to Copenhagen from a research trip to New York. We’ve been researching on trends and developments in the Digital Signage Business. Hopefully I’ll be able to share some of my recently gained insights in the next couple of postings.
First of all – The Research Team:
From the left:
Morten Tue Ankjær (Technical Project Manager)
Lars Silberbauer (Project Manager – Communication)
Nilo Kuhlmann Hansen (Project Manager – Architecture).
We’ve spend four busy days in meetings and on field research and the basic conclusion is that a lot is happening, both in content creation, system developtment and business models.
In the next couple of posting I’ll try to some up on the following:
1. Digital Signage and corporate branding
2. New trends in content developtment
3. Business Models and increasing revenue
4. Developments on the market for digital signage solutions.
I’ll be back!
Stupidity and media fascism know no limit. ABC suggests to implement a technology that would disable the fast-forward button on DVR’s (Digital Video Recorders such as TiVO, KiSS and other set top boxes) so that the consumers cannot fast forward through the commercials.
I’m sick of old media fascists trying to rule the world. Haven’t ABC learned anything from the way the record companies totally failed to cope with the mp3 revolution? “I would love it if the MSOs, during the deployment of the new DVRs they’re putting out there, would disable the fast-forward [button],” Shaw said. While MSOs risk losing some of their DVR customers if fast-forwarding were blocked, Shaw said the cable operators–who are beefing up their own local ad sales operations–”are in the same business we’re in.” “They’ve got to sell ads too,” he said. “So if everybody’s skipping everybody’s ads, that’s not a long-term business model for them either.” Shaw also threw cold water on the idea that neutering the fast-forward option would result in a consumer backlash. He suggested that consumers prefer DVRs for their ability to facilitate on-demand viewing and not ad-zapping–and consumers might warm to the idea that anytime viewing brings with it a tradeoff in the form of unavoidable commercial viewing. Source: Boing Boing Get real, Mike Shaw – you can’t fight the digital revolution. Broadcast commercials are dead anyway, narrowcasting and 1-to-1 is the way to go.
The market for tv-commercials is moving still closer to the consumer. A few years ago, Discovery Channel showed English commercials in Denmark Now local commercials are switched in during the commercial break. The next logical step is to switch in the commercials as close to the consumer as possible as a tailor made ad stream with maximum effect. So instead of fighting the future why don’t ABC offer free ad-supported DVRs that stream 5 minutes of targeted commercials from the net every 60 minutes or so? Program each free DVR with the geographic and demographic profile of the consumer and combine this with polls and automatic usage data collection and you’ll have a marketing monster machine placed in every home. And it’ll be owned by ABC – or who ever gets there first.
ABC HAS HELD DISCUSSIONS ON the use of technology that would disable the fast-forward button on DVRs, according to ABC President of Advertising Sales Mike Shaw, with the primary goal to allow TV commercials to run as intended.
Congrats NASA. Beautiful launch and a very nice transmission on NASA TV.
Hope that the landing goes smoothly too.
Adobe has released Flex 2, the app that’ll make doing rich internet applications a breeze.
It lets enterprises create personalized, multimedia-rich, Ajax-style applications that can reach virtually anyone on any platform.
…as Adobe says. Not Ajax-applications but Ajax-style applications. Because there certainly is a catch.
I was eager to see a demo on this revolution so I went to the Flex Store demo that is supposed to show how cool a web shop can be when made with Flex.
I was not impressed: In fact the shop (after loading for hours!) didn’t initialize. Just a empty window – both in IE and FF…
Oh my: I need Flash 9 to use an RIA produced in Flex 2. That kind of makes Flex a big no-no in my book. I could never recommend a client to build anything that requires his customers to install a proprietary plugin.
Seems to me that Flex 2 is Adobes way to try to take over the web by requiring everybody to install Flash 9.
Building your website in a tool that requires the user to install plugins at all is absolutely sheer madness. Just don’t do it.
In my last post I wanted to link to Eric Reiss’ Web Dogma ’06 on http://www.fatdux.com. But the site uses frames making deep linking impossible. Dudes?
Yesterday we pitched on a redesign proces on a large e-gov site (I can’t tell you exactly which site, of course) as one of three contestants. We came in second (the first of the loosers, as they say).
Win some, loose some – that’s ok, I can live with that. What annoys me in this case is that this not-to-be client told us we lost because we focused on issues with the website’s structure, navigation and usability problems in our quest to come up with a process that would make more citizens use the site.
The user’s flow through the site is so obviously screwed up by bad communication, bad usability and a non-functional navigation – all issues that desperately need fixing, and we felt we needed to address that. Some relatively easy, but subtle, fixes could be applied that would improve the UX a great deal, making the site more usable to the citizens who are paying for its maintenance through taxes.
But the politician that controls the site (new in office) needed something else: Visible features that can be shown on the front page for the press and other politicians to see. Quickly. So the bureau with the easy-to-implement, flashy ideas won. “Let’s add some more features”, they said.
I’m not blaming the project manager that had to make that choice. I’m blaming the politician that asks for that kind of solution while down-prioritizing the process that would make the site usable for the citizens.
Of course that kind of real IA-work will have to be done sooner or later, we were told. But right now it’s time for some really visible features.
But I fear that when it’s time for the important changes, the ones that make a difference for the citizens, some other politician has taken office and then SHE needs some really visible quick fixes, and so on…
It’s no wonder that so many e-gov solutions suck so bad. Politics and personal preferences mess up the process even before it begins. Let’s all recite Reiss’ Dogma No. 1 in a mantra-like way:
1. Anything that exists only to satisfy the internal politics of the site owner must be eliminated.
This is an interesting interview with Eric Reiss on his 10 dogmas on web design.
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/dogmas_are_mean
I’m cited in Berlingske Tidende – one of Denmark’s largest newspapers. I commented on the miserable user experience Danish citizens meet when trying to obtain a “Digital Signatur” – a personal certificate nessecary for access to the Danish e-gov solutions.
“[...]Men det hjælper ikke, at der er flere ting at bruge signaturen til, hvis folk som udgangspunkt ikke en gang kan finde ud af at hente og anvende signaturen, mener brugervenlighedsekspert, Klaus Silberbauer fra internetkonsulenthuset Creuna Danmark.- Der er tilsyneladende ikke tænkt på, at alle danskere skal kunne finde ud af at installere en digital signatur, før succesen er hjemme. Som det er nu skal en borger, der ønsker en digital signatur, igennem en veritabel jungle af fagudtryk og meget dårlig brugervenlighed, siger han.
Han mener, at det er det offentlige Danmark, der fejler ved ikke at støtte nok op omkring indsatsen med at sælge digital signatur til danskerne: – Langt de fleste kommunale og statslige websider henviser blot til TDC’s website og håber så på, at borgeren vender tilbage med en digital signatur. Men det sker ikke altid. Ofte vil borgeren få en dårlig oplevelse og måske helt opgive at hente en digital signatur, og det kan øge distancen mellem det offentlige og borgeren. Det er ærgerligt. TV-spots er ikke nok – indsatsen skal arbejdes helt ned i de enkelte websites design, lyder rådet fra Klaus Silberbauer. [...]“
In these World Cup Times we’ve also got some quick soccer results from the clash between the media-titans in Denmark: DR and TV2.
We played on the National Arena “Parken” and TV2 was lucky to get away with af 3-2 win.
Three of the players:
From the left: Lars Silberbauer (Left wing), Casper Bech (Defense) and Kenneth Plummer- (Right wing and General Director).
Just got home from an exquisite holiday in Italy. The food, the wine, the beaches of Liguria, the coffee… yummy.
And speaking of coffee: On our way home we visited our good friends in Switzerland. After the delicious lamb chops (brilliant!) Marianne and Søren served a very nice cup of espresso and to my surprise it was made on a Nestlé invention: The Nespresso machine. Small coffee capsules (sold on the net) go into a machine manufactured on license by Siemens, Jura, Köenig or some other espresso machine manufacturer and out comes pretty good espresso indeed. The capsules are of course of proprietary design and the concept is a bit too… conceptish – but the coffee is good and that’s what counts. So I’m considering buying such a Nespresso thingy.
As soon as I got home I started my Firefox browser and went to www.nespresso.com to check out the availability for Denmark. This is what met me:
Yes – an almost empty page. It was supposed to be a large Flash animation, but for some odd reason the Flash object didn’t work. It may be my browser, it may be the page, I don’t know – and I don’t care. Why on earth does Nestlé risk loosing the customer on the frontpage just to make the page flashy? My guess: Some jerkoff executive at Nestlé said: Make it flashy, make it noisy – and the designers went ahead, blew their brains out and did this site. It’s not great- have a look for yourself. I think I’ll do a more thorough review of it later on, but right now I need sleep – I’m still seeing fast approaching Audis for my eyes after 12 hours on the Autobahn.
Tuesday I managed to take a day out of a too busy schedule to go to the NN/g event in London with two of my colleagues from Creuna. On the Tuesday agenda was a tutorial on eye tracking, a tutorial on newsletter usability and Hoa Loranger‘s tutorial on corporate sites. I attended the latter.
Now, Loranger is an excellent presenter and what I like about the NN/g is that all statements are very well grounded in thorough research. That said, this tutorial was clearly targeted inhouse web masters in medium or larger corporations and not IA professionals or consultants. In other words, to me it was very basic indeed. That’s not Ms. Loranger’s fault – I should have picked another tutorial. Anyway, it’s always nice to get a brush up on the basics and Hoa Loranger is definitely more fun – and certainly better looking – than Nielsen himself.
My colleagues tell me that the eye tracking and newsletter tutorials were better, though.
We stayed at the Victoria Park Plaza which is nice but over priced. When paying £198 a night for a single, standard room I don’t expect to be charged £16,50 for a slow wireless connection and to pay extra for breakfast. The hotel business must learn that internet connection (wifi or otherwise) is considered no more a luxury than running water or electric light. It should be free and easy to use, expecially in expensive hotels.
Ok, and now to the important stuff:
UPDATE: Jacob has commented on the eye tracking seminar here
So guys, You’re ready to launch your new fantastic ubiquitous cross-media cutting-edge Web 3.0 software solution which, without any doubt, will bring you instant succes, fame and fortune.
All there’s left to do, is to launch a major marketing campaign in the Big Apple. If you can make it here, you can make it everywhere.. remember??
Here are the numbers:
The “Noobie” Campaign (no guarantee of instant succes, fame and fortune)
- Starbucks coffee sleeves: estimated 12 to 14 cents each.
- Street hawking with megaphones: $36 per hour.
- Ads on urinals and on the back of stall doors: $100 to $125.
The Medium Campaign (no guarantee of succes, but you will have a lot of fun)
- Airplanes: $8,500 per flight for skywriting; $1,000 per flight for flying a banner.
- Spotlight or projection on a building: $4,500 and up per night.
- Mobile billboard trucks: $5,000 per 50-hour week.
The “Big Spender” Campaign (guarantee of some buzz) 
- Digital subway-entrance ads: $274,000 for six ten-second spots every minute on each of New York’s 80 digital displays.
- New York Marathon naming rights: About $2-3 million per year.
- Naming rights to the new Jets-Giants stadium: at least a $12 million onetime cost.
What are you waiting for? Go for it! (and remember to invite me to the big opening at the New Stadium).
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