Wall Street Journal covered some underhanded tactics employed by the organizers of the SXSW music festival against other organizations that try to take advantage of their investment in brand. For example - according to the article, free and heavily sponsored parties that aren’t sanctioned by SXSW were ratted out to fire marshals to be shut down. The article lists other unfriendly responses towards anyone that tries to leverage SXSW’s investment in branding.
There has been an inverse relationship between the friendliness of a brand and the size of the owning company’s pugilistic legal team when it comes to traditional marketing. Great examples of this are Mattel’s Barbie and anything created or acquired by Disney.
What I find particularly interesting about the SXSW revelation isn’t the tactics that they employ, or that they employ them. It is that some members of the press are either blind to modern marketing methods or just like to play along and smile.
Adobe Inc shipped Adobe Director 11 today, with a street price of $999. This not only marks the first release of Director since Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005, but also the first major update since the previous version - Director MX 2004 was released on January 5, 2004.
Four years is a very long time for Director developers to wait and some may grumble that such a mature product - given four years - would be more enriched in terms of features. Check out the attached list. While the list is short on paradigm shifting technologies - this release provides necessary improvements for creating and deploying modern applications using Adobe Director.
Paradigma Software Valentina 3.5.2 for Director 11 is the first database product with key support for Director 11 on Mac OS X on Intel, Windows Vista and Unicode. Valentina for Director is available in developer kits for building standalone applications and projectors as well as true, royalty free client-server or server-side solutions using Valentina Developer Network. With VDN, you can build shockwave-safe or standard projector interface applications and deploy these with a totally complete database server.
(more…)
WebKinz is a fascinating take on combining real world products with virtual world services. Your stuffed animal comes complete with a customizable certificate and a virtual reality version in the WebKinz online world - a sort of junior Sims environment. WebKinz has already introduced a trading card system as well.
A new release of the Mac OS and version of Apple xCode, the Apple owned tool for building applications for Mac OS X in C++ or Objective-C, always brings with it a measure of hype into the Mac OS developer community that can occasionally slop over into the Mac OS user base. But I have yet to date see a release of a developer tool, let alone an SDK, receive this much attention since the original public showing of Java - yes, the Apple iPhone SDK. And this isn’t even about the actual release, but the availability of the beta! The final release is scheduled for some time around June, 2008.
I don’t want to talk about the technical details of the release, but as John Milton put it, to justify the way of God to men on the release format and what the business implications are for the release and the iTunes Store venue. (more…)
An interesting northwest start up called Toonlet makes a fun set of online tools to rapidly create web comics. It gives you a lot of templates to start with, so that you can create mostly human (and alien) characters for your comics, add moods and the like. These types of characters aren’t the Batman/Superman type - more along the lines of what you see in the newspaper. You can also auto-generate character and then customize them.
The interface for building characters and comic strips is a very clever, easy to use set of tools that uses Flash - Flash without the pain of having to use Flash the product (vs Flash the player). It lets you resize, flip and make other transformations to your characters.
Toonlet is a lot of fun, and it has tools for sharing your creations with others - on your own website, through feeds and the like.
The Internet is being filled with comments on the recent passing of E Gary Gygax, the creator of the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game. If you are between the age of 40 to 60, you probably remember the game’s first rise in popularity in the mid-late 70’s, and the various scandals it produced, including a terrible movie with Tom Hanks. An incredible number of conventions in both offline and online games - especially MMORGs like World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online. What is particularly interesting is that Gygax himself was greatly influenced by writers such as JRR Tolkien, writer of The Lord of the Rings; he then systematized the conventions of the fantasy genre into the first pen-and-paper role playing game - that in turn greatly influenced the mechanics of these computer games.
After reading a great article in Practical Web Design on FaceBook integration, we set up both the Runtime Revolution Facebook Group and Valentina Facebook Group on…Facebook. Tom McGrath of Lazy River Software asked me earlier today why you’d want to spread yourself so thin across multiple venues. There are plenty of social implications - its extremely hard to keep up with all of these social networking venues. They all want to own our identity and content - and they all (the ones that will survive) offer integration APIs, videos, music and more to get you to participate.
But this really isn’t about the technology - its about the socializing and appropriate venue. It seems like that simple truth may be eluding many, who probably have already forgotten what drew them to pre-Web 2.0 venues that very much were about where you hung out. The more you can get your face out there in the right venue, the more likely you will meet others of that also like that venue.
