Author Archives: IdeaMonster

About IdeaMonster

Krop, Square Extension, Dust|box artist. Illusion of sense art group founder, creative director, open mind.

Internet Explorer web share is shrinking

Posted on by
Reply

browsers
According to a recent survey by “Net Applications” this is the first time in 10 years when IE had less than 60% of market share. This is of course a good trend since this browser is obsolete, buggy and doesn’t follow the standards. Plus it’s hard to make cross-browser sites look the same and it’s usually IE’s fault. The fastest growing is actually Google Chrome which might in fact overpower firefox in a few years. That is all good news, even though microsoft is working on HTML5 supporting IE9, they’ll probably be at 50% in two years.

Google vs Microsoft myth – the bigger they get the less creative they become? Not!

Posted on by
Reply

I was always wondering that for most big brands there comes a moment when they become less creative and more profit driven. Sure both microsoft and google are both big, both still generate large profits. So is it time for them to stop being creative? Apparently not quite. Google despite being “evil-is-not-evil” does a lot of useful things for people that just work. And mostly for free. Microsoft sells products in shiny packages, but there’s not much backing all of that up. Or is there?

Apparently money is just a factor, not a turning point. And we’re talking BIG money here. So google still hires good creative directors that can come up with ads and ideas that are original. Like this google chrome ad below. This is just awesome in its simplicity and the coolness-factor.

Exciting changes ahead for the web and publishing alike

Posted on by
2

tabletready

Say what?

Palm had just been bought by HP. What does that mean? Actually a lot. Right now we have to major players in the tablet area – apple and google with their android based tablets. Palm has experience with mobile devices and a great mobile OS – HP has money and marketing. This means that the era of the tablet has officially started. And this will be the next step in computing, web and print.

Changes coming

That basically means that in the precise moment of market saturation with these devices there will be a point in which some publication will receive more “hits” through slate devices than through normal print. Then we will know it has started. And if it starts it will also change the web into a more “handy” interface with bigger elements and touch / swipe enabled controls.

So maybe it’s time to get ahead of the curve and try to create new experiences that are “tablet-ready”? You think it’ll be a marker like “HD ready” was some years back?

Apple – Adobe war has ended in a retreat

Posted on by
Reply

Adobe announced a few days ago that they’ll discontinue supporting the iphone OS in flash and other products. Sure that was a battle they couldn’t win but in a way it’s pretty sad we’ll be limited to a closed platform. But maybe it’s good for the quality control, since a flash app is pretty easy to make so there would be millions of new “fart apps” and we have plenty of those already right?

So while it’s sad that adobe skips the iphone, I think it might be for the best here. Let’s just hope they won’t get mad and stop making the Creative Suite for the mac, because now that’d suck ;)

How much is a facebook fan worth? 30 cents!

Posted on by
2

facebookandmoney

Social media marketing platform company Vitrue has determined that the average value of a Facebook ?fan? is about $3.60 in equivalent media each year. This calculation is based on having one million Fan Page fans, and is not weighted for brand recognition.

Ok but what does that actually mean? First let’s try and see how did they get that number.

Let’s add it up

A company posting twice a day and having a million fans will get 60 million impressions every month. Vitrue used $5 CPM (which is a cost for a thousand impressions) and 60M impressions ended up being $300,000 per month of media value. That means that for the same amount of views the company would’ve paid that much in other media. That 300,000 is a monthly value, so per year it’d be somewhere close to 3,6 Million dollars. Dividing that by a million “Fans” we get $3,6. Is that right? Does it really work that way?

Let’s break it down

Posting twice a day for a month? 60 posts in a month? Can you imagine still being a fan of a company after you’ve been bombarded by information about them twice a day for a month? A year? Would anyone “stay as a fan” in that case? And what would they inform us about? In most cases we’d be done with all of the company’s products in a few days or weeks. So what’s next? “Buy buy buy” statuses? Sure we can say that if you put all of the oceans water in a small tube, the length of the tube would be REALLY F***ING BIG. Right?

The real number anyone?

So how many posts a month are we talking about to maintain a brand awareness and not loose the fans? I’m thinking 5 posts per month would be the right number. That would be almost 1 post per week so our “fans” won’t have their status feeds flooded, and yet they will notice us. So what do the numbers tell us in such a case? Let’s assume that we do have a million fans. So we get 5 million impressions. That is $25,000 per month. So in a year it’ll be $300,000 and thus the value of one facebook fan per year is $0,3. Which is 30 cents. And that seems a lot more natural than $3,6. Right?

Apple vs Adobe part II

Posted on by
Reply

flashvshtml5

After a serious analysis of the capabilities of HTML5 I can say the following : Flash video is FAR better than it’s HTML5 version. Really.
It’s smoother, has better quality and runs faster. And people were complaining about flash being a resource hog. Well not entirely true.
As for other things – advertisements in HTML5 are a better option, just like simple animations on the web. It’s a standard that generally will take over eventually. But what Steve Jobs was saying is that it will replace Flash entirely. And that won’t be the case – if you want proof go watch some videos on youtube and vimeo in html5 format and then watch them again in flash. The difference is actually visible even with the images themselves. HTML5 is nowhere near being good. And since youtube hasn’t implemented it yet fully means it’s not ready yet. Because they have enough money to do it if the technology allows it.

So what’s next?

We’ll see a division or if you like a “hole” between the two platforms, growing bigger and bigger over time. And since apple is the only company not accepting flash it’ll end up having them shut off from the “decent video streaming”. The rest can be done in HTML5 and it probably will be in time. Even Adobe has some tools to make HTML5 sites that will be released in CS5. It’s all for us to wait and see, but my prediction is that both the technologies will stay with us for much longer, unless the HTML5 video will be improved, because currently it just sucks.

New photoshop functions to make designers obsolete?

Posted on by
1

Designers will loose their jobs?

Or are they? So content aware fill, puppet tweaking and many more things that seem to make very hard and complicated tasks oh so easy. So now anyone can retouch a photo easily or remove a person from a photograph while preserving the background. So is it the end of designers? Will the clients do their work themselves now with all those “easy to use” automatic tools?

No, not really

Do you bake your own bread? Even though it’s not that hard now is it? Do you print your own business cards? Nah, I didn’t think so. The tools are still for us designers to use and abuse (because the abuse is actually the path to using the new tools creatively and not just as automatic gizmos). It is still up to us, maybe until apple starts to attack Adobe even more and buys Pixelmator or something to create a competition ;)
Don’t be evil, right?

New, easier tools will make our lives easier but they won’t make us disappear. So don’t worry fellow designer! You’ll keep your job. Better worry about paying Adobe their share and as usual it ain’t cheap…

HTML5 – is the end of Flash near?

Posted on by
Reply

flashvshtml5

HERE is an awesome demonstration of HTML5 capabilities. This including the online video streaming and better power / resources usage might just be the thing to tip adobe flash over the edge and into obscurity. Let’s see what they respond with, but it seems like HTML5 is the future standard. Too bad 3/4 of people still use IE6 and will be unable to see it. So is Adobe counting on people staying with IE6? Probably so ;)

The end of paper?

Posted on by
Reply

Ok, so the iPad is here. It might not be the most amazing tablet device feature wise, but it will clear the path for both itself and other companies. Just like people buying ipod clones, and iPhone wannabes with better cameras and usb slots ;) The point is we’re seeing a media revolution starting right now. And the behemoths of press are of course jumping right in.

Continue reading →

Quick update

Posted on by
Reply

We are making the next episode of the podcast and it is almost done. This time it’ll be abut facebook, since we all know and love/hate it ;)
Also we’re making another series to be announced very, very soon (not animated, but also short) you’ll see it pretty soon so stay tuned.

There will be more and longer articles and tutorials in the near future too. We’re reorganizing our ranks currently to come back bigger, faster, stronger oh and better too.

Adjusting the technology

Posted on by
Reply

This is actually more of a “thinking” subject than plain facts, but it’s pretty interesting and has been in my head for quite some time now. Let’s think about an evil example first. Do you think that macromedia making flash (well, making, buying whatever ;)) thought for a moment that it’ll cause a mass of screen blocking, full blown ads all over the internet? But on the other hand they didn’t probably think about how complicated and amazing the flash games can be, and that youtube made online video possible thanks to that technology. So basically it’s nothing new – a technology is a tool, a path that we can use and misuse (which is way more fun) to make something out of it that wasn’t originally intended.

So where else can we find an example of that? Well one thing are the LOMO cameras. Those cheap, old, film-based russian cameras became an instant hit for trendy hipsters, emo kids, and artistic souls. Taking blurry snapshots of a moving arm, a shoe, a fruit bowl. Then posting it everywhere. It all became a sort of artistic revolution, because the camera’s faults made up for the originality of the outcome. And that’s what matters.

And since we’re talking pictures – there’s the iPhone. Sure 90% of the phones in the market now have better cameras. That’s beside the point. iPhone has a bad, cheap camera but it has one advantage. Apps! People made hundreds of photography apps, both “new camera” apps and photo retouch, editing, effects, filters etc. So you can have an iPhone Lomo, an iPhone HDR (well sort of) and plenty of amazing looking pictures (and if not amazing then at least creative). Because the built in camera “thinks for you” while taking a shot. But with some clever apps and an open mind you can do exactly what you want to, when you want to. And since you have the camera with you because most of us carry our phones with us all the time, you can take a photo anytime, anywhere.

Iphoneograpy is the term for the iPhone app’s photograpy and it’s represented by sites such as :
Iphoneography.com
And also our friends from hype4.com have made a photoblog with their iphone pictures (some unaltered) at
CreativeBuzz.org
Be sure to check those out!

Facebook as the second internet

Posted on by
Reply

trends_google_facebook

The threat!

So here’s the deal. Right now A LOT (that’s an estimated number ;) of people are facebook users. And they share A LOT (also an estimate ;) of data daily. That is pretty impressive. But why? What’s so cool about farms, mafias and all those other stupid tests? Sure they work for a while but how to draw people in and keep them in ?

  • More than 200 million people?about one-fifth of all Internet users?have Facebook accounts. They spend an average of 20 minutes on the site every day.
  • By Facebook’s estimates, every month users share 4 billion pieces of information?news stories, status updates, birthday wishes, and so on. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. All of that is carefully shielded from Google.

Well they got it all figured out with external links that are viewable inside the facebook web app. Basically you can listen to a soundcloud song file, view youtube (and other) videos and read some news stories without ever leaving the page. And how do you get that stuff? Well your friends post it, and your friends are pretty much the only type of advertisement you as an experienced web user trust anymore. Aren’t they?

So basically you get all your funny videos, and all your most recent news from one place and you can comment and “like” it all in that one place, allowing other your friends to see it and spread the word. So facebook is becoming slowly a way to discover the internet and not only the social network of friends. Because before that we used aggregating websites to find certain type of content (funny videos, marketing tips, games) and right now they can all be embedded to become a part of the facebook machine.

Who should be scared?

The analysts at Hitwise claim that celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton now gets more traffic from Facebook than from Google – more than 7 million pageviews from Facebook alone. If that trend increases, then the current wisdom about web traffic is about to get turned on its ear.

Yes, it draws people away from google, and I think they’ve noticed (a little too late probably) and launched Orkut / or whatever it’s called now. Google Buzz? That’s it! It has potential of course (because it’s google) and it’s gonna be plenty useable combined with all the google cloud apps but it’s hard to break something that already works fine. And what’s more important it’s SUPER HARD to change the habits. Maybe they’ll succeed. Or maybe in a few years the internet will be facebook and content supplying “facebook apps” for it. Let’s all hope that won’t happen!

The problem with google is that it’s just a machine based on probability and algorithms to deliver you content. And social networks are based on the idea that no machine stands between you and the content. No. It’s chosen by the people you know and trust, and that’s why it’s actually better tailored to your tastes (well unless you’re spamming for thousands of friends you don’t know that is)

The web design model transformation

Posted on by
Reply

Yeah. I have noticed recently that the previous model of how things are done in the web design world has shifted slightly. What’s more important, it appears to be still moving in that direction, thus making an impact that will probably be visible in a couple of months. The current division on a bell curve would look somewhat like this:

curve1

Continue reading →