Come see me and my old pal Tina speaking about Mobile, and it’s influence in the social space.

Going My Way? The Implications of Advertising Within the Mobile, Social Web 

As smart phones get smarter and find themselves in more consumers’ pockets, social platforms are becoming more mobile, transforming what was once a PC-bound experience into one that has major implications for advertisers, who now have the opportunity to reach people – and their social network friends – with the right message at the right time in the right place as never before. But how will this, no pun intended, map out? How are advertisers successfully infiltrating this very intimate space in ways that please users and advertisers? What are some of the best and worst examples of marketing in the mobile, social Web? In this panel, executives deeply involved in this space will answer these questions and more.

Well my friends, I’m off for a 4-5 week trip in Asia; starting with Japan. I leave tomorrow. I’ve got my Flip camera and I’ll be sure to post fun updates and photos of my adventure. I’m bringing my brand new Mac Book Pro, along with some great reading material: Cocoa Programming using Object C, Pragmatic AJAX, AS 3.0 Design Patterns and Scalable Web Development. You’re typical, fun vacation reading. Sonia is off to India in a couple weeks as well. Have a great holiday! 

Wow, another great Adobe MAX. (Actually, it ended 2 weeks ago, but I’ve been too swamped to get to my blog!) This year’s MAX was very action-packed for me: I was invited to attend the Adobe partner/agency summit, where about 15-20 peeps from my industry get to hang out with Adobe leaders for a full day, learning about the new things Adobe is up to as well as offering ideas for the future; then, AKQA was up for 2 MAX Awards, so I attended the awards ceremony and party; and then I spoke, along with Charles Dunan, at our MAX session: Delivering Integrated Content Across Multiple Channels (i.e. Multi Channel). Whew, all this jammed-packed in to 3-4 days….not to mention all the great sessions, keynotes, and parties I attended.

Everything went great. AKQA won one of the two awards we were nominated for: The Coke Happiness Factory website, done by our New York office; congrats guys! The Agency Summit, which I also attended last year, was fun and informative as well. It was so cool to see some of the ideas we had discussed for new Adobe tools actually make it in to CS4! The new video stuff in After Effects is sooooo amazing.

Our session on Multi Channel marketing went really well too. I was so impressed with my co-presenter, Charles. It was his first speaking engagement (and at MAX no less!) and he did a great job. We had a solid turn out, lots of good questions and our final feedback was excellent (thanks everyone). More on this later…gotta pack for my trip to Japan next week….

I’m super excited to be speaking at Adobe MAX this Nov. For a guy like me, Adobe MAX is kind of like the Oscars or something! Really excited. I will have my bud Charles Duncan presenting with me. We will be discussing my favorite topic: Multi Channel creative development. We will discuss the creative strategies as well as the technical implementations behind some of our recent work from Visa, Xbox, McDonald’s and Nike. The goal will be to show how to create an integrated experience across multiple channels, including: mobile, web, social media, search and even print and other offline mediums. Please come join us. It’s at 9:30 in the morning, and I’m guessing many MAXers will just be waking up from a night of parties….so we need all the peeps we can get!

Delivering Integrated Advertising Across Multiple Channels
Join Peter Cole and Charles Duncan from digital media agency AKQA for an exploration of new possibilities in multi-channel advertising. Learn technical and creative strategies for delivering integrated experiences that blend multiple channels of communication for engaging customers, including web, search, mobile, social networking, offline, and outdoor. Concepts will be supported by real-world examples of projects completed for some of AKQA’s top clients, including Visa, McDonald’s, and Xbox.

I’m back from presenting at the AAAA Conference in Miami. Dang that place is hot – 90 at 11pm at night? Whew. I presented along with AKQA Group Planning Director, Kelli Robertson. Our presentation, entitled, “Emerging Technologies Can Create Powerful Brand Experiences” focused on a number of new technologies and how to use them to help create/inspire new marketing ideas. It can be difficult to present new technologies with the idea of pushing creative potential, without appearing too “gimmicky:” technology for technology sake – if you know what I mean. It is the great idea that leads over any new techie trend, however, just as a paintbrush and a canvas influences a painting, technology can inspire and enhance a creative vision. That said, we wanted to show new technologies, and then explain how they could be used within a marketing context.

As the audience was primarily non-technical marketing folks, we kept things high level and divided our talk into two main areas:
Location-based marketing: Serving up unique content to a user based on his/her phyisical location.

• GPS (new iPhone, Jotyou.com, loopt.com)
• Triangulation for Non-GPS Devices (Google’s MyLocation)
• Bluetooth broadcasting
• RFID (McDonald’s Japan, Mini)

Everyone can play

• Google’s Open Social
• Augmented reality (Total Immersion)
• Radiohead Lasers: DATA, it’s all about the data!

Actually, the Radiohead example got to the heart of what I wanted to get across: DATA. It sounds so “un-sexy”, but it is the ultimately where the creative power lives. The idea of being able to use a single data source to manipulate and create new “views” (presentations) of this data, is, in my opinion, the way to really begin to harness the power of technology for new innovative ideas. More on this in my next post!

A few cool things from the Google I|O this week:

1). Google Earth now works in the browser and follows the identical structure as Google Maps. (Up until now, users had to download the Google Earth desktop app). Now you can quickly re-skin your Google Map creation with the full 3D Google Earth and it will retain all the same info (and it appears as though it only takes 1 more line of code!) You can create full interactive experiences within Google Earth that will map to real locations; and you can drop your own 3D models right into the Earth. The 3D is impressive; it would be really interesting to consider building an entire experience within Google Maps, i.e. instead of making another microsite, move the experience into Google Earth, or, create a more immersive and interactive “route finder”, a “real” store finder, virtual treasure hunt, etc…

2). Lots of Open Social news; somewhat overwhelming. I attended a great session from, Jeremiah Robison the CTO of Slide where he reviewed how they handle connecting profile information among all the various networks. I really liked how he explained the high level architectural concepts and then dug straight down into the specific lines of code that support it. I will follow up with more on Open Social soon….

3). New Support for Flash. For the first time ever (as far as I am aware), Google has released new support for Flash integration (previously just AJAX). So for example, Google Maps can now be done in Flash. Obviously there is great potential for creating sweet Flash applications and web experiences, but this is also pretty big news for Online Advertising because we have been previously held back by the fact that ad servers can’t easily serve up AJAX-based ads. Now, we can create some pretty amazing Flash ad units that sync up with Google tools/data.

4). Google App Engine. Very interesting stuff; I’m particularly interested in understanding more about how the database works. I’m working on my “Hello World” App right now…more on this soon.

What an adventure. 3 days in Vegas at at MIX and then 4 days in Austin for SXSW.  Although my plane was late and I missed the opening keynote for MIX, where they demoed the Hard Rock Cafe site that Jason W designed (I’m so pissed I missed that), I was lucky to arrive in time to see Nathan Buggia’s session on SEO. This was fortunate in that I would be giving a similar talk at SXSW in two days! This weekend, I will post more on my SEO, SEM and overall “findability” thoughts, including the ideas (and code) that I presented at SXSW.

I also enjoyed the Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki Keynote. Steve B was so funny and down-to-earth, that I not only fell out of my seat laughing, I also really liked the guy! I thought that Guy did a great job. Not sure how informative it was; although I did get to hear how a typical day in the life of Steve goes, and I also found out more about the Microsoft product roadmap.  The Deep Zoom stuff (used in Hard Rock Cafe site) is pretty amazing. I also attended a demo on how to implement it. I wonder how it compares with the old Zoomify for Flash?

More on this to come….

It looks like I will be speaking on a panel with experts from Adobe, Google and Global Strategies at South By Southwest in March; I’m very excited. We will be discussing the ideas and strategies for making interactive content “findable.” In addition to search engine optimization (and search marketing) techniques, we will also share thoughts around other ways for an audience to “find” digital work. Video and Flash have specific considerations for implementing SEO. Meanwhile, SEO and other technical tricks are not so effective for a short-lived marketing campaign; so what can we do to make our work findable? This is a huge topic for me these days…..so I’ve got a lot to say! I will be presenting some recent work and discussing the “findable” strategies behind it. It’s gonna be cool and informative, so please come by!

Creating Findable Rich Media Content – Rich media content is rapidly becoming one of the most effective ways to engage audiences around the world. However, to engage them, audiences must first be able to find the content to see the value in these experiences. Crowded with other media fighting for their attention, making your online material stand out can be quite a challenge.

Attend this engaging panel of experts as they discuss their challenges and share successful approaches to making content stand out. Each panelist will share a project and discuss the challenges and successes behind making it discoverable. Topics will include, but not be limited to:

. The rise of rich media and the future of search
. Challenges behind depending only on SEO
. Deploying additional “find” strategies for shorter-life content
. Optimizing metadata
. How metadata affects search engine placement strategies

Who
* Richard Galvan, Adobe
* Bill Hunt, Global Strategies
* Todd Nemet, Google
* Peter Cole, AQKA

I had a great time at FITC Hollywood! Met some amazing people and had a great speaking session of my own. It went well, although most people were in the room next to me to see GMUNK! Thanks to everyone who attended my session; I’ve received some great feedback and a few folks have emailed me wanting to keep in touch.

All in all, I ate too well, attended some cool sessions and played a lot of poker thanks to FITC founder Shawn Pucknell, Josh from Big Spaceship, and Richard Galvan from Adobe, who taught me how to play Texas Hold Em. (I have always been a 5 Card Stud only guy.)

Big thanks to Shawn, Naomi and the rest of the good people at FITC for inviting me to speak and for creating such a valuable event for our community.

Finally, posting some valuable info capture from the MAX show. Thanks to Crazy J!

The Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit
The Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit preview release includes a high-performance graphics programming language that

Adobe is developing for image processing, codenamed Hydra, and an application to create, compile and preview Hydra filters and effects. The toolkit contains a specification for the Hydra language, several sample filters, and sample images provided by AIF team members. The AIF technology delivers a common image and video processing infrastructure which provides automatic runtime optimization on heterogeneous hardware. It currently ships in After Effects CS3 and will be used in other Adobe products in the future. The next release of Flash Player, codenamed Astro, will leverage Hydra to enable developers to create custom filters, effects and blend modes. http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIF_Toolkit

Flash Player 9 “Moviestar”
This is the latest beta release of the Flash Player (not sure when they plan on releasing it publicly). Some of you may already be aware of the new features Adobe introduced in this player release, but for those of you who aren’t here are a few cool features. Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs. This means support for up to 1080P HD video as well as the ability to take advantage of existing tools and services that leverage this industry standard format. They demoed this technology during the keynote with 720P full screen video and it looked amazing.

Multi-core support for vector rendering. At MAX the Flash Player team explained that there is currently support for up to 4 processors (cores) and that this may increase in the future. They also explained that this ONLY affects rendering. It will NOT increase the performance of ActionScript. The reason for this is because Flash is a single threaded platform and script execution cannot be divided among several processors. The rendering performance improvement results from dividing the final render frame into pieces and sending each piece to a separate processor for concurrent rendering.

Full screen mode with hardware scaling. The new full screen mode allows you to choose a rectangular area of the stage to magnify full screen. This mode will also take advantage of the video card for high performance scaling. This is the reason the full screen video during the keynote looked so good and performed so well.

Flash Player cache for common platform components, such as the Flex framework. This is a very interesting feature but for security reasons it currently only affects Adobe signed components. They hope to extend the feature to custom components when they can determine a safe way to do so. It’s basically a cache, similar to a browser cache, but it caches flash components in a domain independent manner. What this means is that if your site uses a particular component, such as the Flex framework, it will be cached by the Flash Player. When users revisit your site, or visit any other site that happens to use the same component, the component will be retrieved from the cache instead of downloaded again. This can drastically reduce download times for complex applications that leverage frameworks such as Flex. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/

Performance Tips for AS3
There was a very interesting session at MAX about performance in AS3. It compared the performance of various ActionScript statements that carry out the same task but are organized or structured in slightly different ways that have a significant effect on performance. The most important lesson from this session was TYPE YOUR VARIABLES! The performance difference between typed and untyped variables was about 10 fold! For those of you who haven’t gotten into this habit with AS2 now is the time start. It was also interesting to see that operations between two different types (such as int and uint) are much slower than if the types were the same. In the following example, the first for loop is more than 13 times faster than the second, and more than 23 times faster than the third:

var count:int = 10000000;
// comparing int to int (i < count)
for (var i:int = 0; i < count; i++);
// comparing uint to int (i < count), 13 times slower
for (var i:uint = 0; i < count; i++);
// comparing untyped to int and incrementing untyped, 23 times slower
for (var i = 0; i < count; i++);

There were some other performance tips that are a little more obvious and also have a benefit in AS2 as well as AS3. For example, assigning array length to a variable before using it in a for loop (some of you may already have a habit of doing this). In the following example the first for loop is almost 20 times faster than the second:

var a:Array = new Array(10000000);

// assign length to a variable

var len:int = a.length;

for (var i:int = 0; i < len; i++);

// use length directly, 20 times slower

for (var i:int = 0; i < a.length; i++);

The most surprising demonstration was the try-catch statement. In the demo, a complicated conditional statement that accomplished the same task as a try-catch statement was about 100 times faster! In my own experiments, a try-catch statement under normal conditions (i.e. no error is thrown) is a very small performance hit and is almost the same as there being no error handling code whatsoever. However, when an error is thrown, it’s about 300 times slower! The bottom line is it’s a good idea to use try-catch statements to handle unrecoverable scenarios and notify the programmer that they are doing something wrong (such as an index out of bounds exception). But it’s a bad idea to use them in place of simple conditional statements to handle valid scenarios that may occur under normal program execution.