Fifty years ago today, the first Monterey Folk Festival kicked off. Artists gracing the bill included The Who, Dylan and Joan Baez. The show closed with the Mamas & the Papas. Here’s their classic, California Dreaming.
P3 hopes it is just the thing to get you shutdown and out into the weekend. Enjoy your time away and find us back in the digital when you return.
P3joe
Chris Taylor’s post on Mashable is a great read. Is Marissa Mayer About to Buy Tumblr for $1 Billion? is a sharp review of the pros, cons and potential roadblocks surrounding Yahoo’s rumored purchase of Tumblr. Focusing on the strides Tumblr has made lately, the article concludes with the open question of how readers feel about the rumble.
Yahoo should walk away. Tumblr should run. Yahoo has many problems to solve. Making the same mistake Facebook did with Instagram would be a bad way to begin the healing. Tumblr has nothing to gain from this. They’re on the brink of what Yahoo hopes to accomplish by the purchase. The future of social media already lies in the sharing of images. They should continue on their own, develop a better data capture system, and enjoy the sustainable rewards.
P3joe
National Geographic launched its CITIES app today. It’s the most beautiful Travel app you’ve ever seen. The navigation between perfectly chosen images, facts and other information, is gorgeous. The weather section blends color, digits and control into an interactive joy. Even with a limited city release and too many in-app purchases, Rally Interactive should take a bow.
The Virtual Pint is awarded each week to work that has most caught our attention during the previous seven days. For crafting an app that turns designers’ heads, CITIES, takes home this week’s gold.
P3joe
ISD’s new site for Philips takes a leap. Fall In Love With Philips approaches the mundane task of first branding then selling Phillips home products through dance - insane, post-Stomp, interpretive dance. A dancer, whose personality is shown through costume and moves, represents each of five product categories. The overall tone is irresistibly funny and I’m not sure that was the goal. If so, great job. It is pretty work.
I believe what's keeping this from greatness is the disconnect between the execution, which is terrific, and planning who it was supposed to impact. It feels like the target audience is a decade short of being serious about the products.
P3joe
Mashable’s Slideshow of Bang & Olufsen’s new line of beolab 14 speakers is a nice way to get lost. Crafted around the idea that speakers can appeal aesthetically to both men and woman, this takes advantage of the device’s curves to great affect. Large images capture the variety of options amid diverse modern home-scapes. Congrats to everyone involved in both the device design and construction as well as the digital creation.
This is a great story of sexy sound.
P3joe
iOS games go in spurts here at the P3 offices. For awhile it was Angry Birds, then there was a brief flirtation by some of us with RuneMaster. After that, it was Bejeweled Blitz, with three or four of us sitting around the lunch table trying to get the highest score before the end of the lunch hour. The game of the moment, though, seems to be Candy Crush Saga by a Swedish development team, King.com Limited. I resisted it as long as I could, but now I'm just as addicted as everyone else. Everyone seems to be playing it, from the P3 office manager to my nieces and my hairdresser. It's a deceptively silly game, with candy colors and childish (although well done) graphics. It appears at first to be a child's game, something akin to a digital version of Candy Land, but once you've played a few screens, you will be hooked.
The thing that I find challenging is that every level is different. Unlike some games where you're playing the same screen over and over, just trying to get a higher score, in this case, once you pass a level you are presented with an entirely new one. And some of them are fiendishly difficult. There are many opportunities to "buy your way" out of a tight spot, but I have so far avoided that. The alternative is to beg your Facebook friends to bail you out by giving you a new "life," and I am sorry to say that I have succumbed to that ploy. Anything so I can just play another level . . .
~Willa
Props to Anthony Ha for his TechCrunch post about the ultra-lean startup, Loop. Loop Makes It Easy To Conduct Real-Time Surveys Via iPad, introduces the Archimedes Labs backed startup, Loop. The post is a crisp overview of a mobile-first approach to surveys. The typical options are augmented with the choice of handing the customer a locked iPad with the survey ready to go. Geared for the food service and hotel industries, its developers promise built in templates and a sweet UI make it very adaptable. For dessert, managers can receive immediate feedback on a companion phone app for an intervention or thank you at the door.
Congratulations to the Loop team for so perfectly matching technology and a need, without having to manufacture either. Enjoy your success.
P3joe
The JanSport marketing team just scored big with their YouTube offering, Live Outside: Day 4 – San Diego to Phoenix. This video shows off the band, The Stone Foxes and some of their friends on a road trip, which is well orchestrated to ooze cool. JanSport products are featured throughout and the overall tone suggests that none of the fun would exist without the gear.
The work’s strength lies in the smart sprinkling of products into the vid. A gear-branding site that tastes well seasoned is rare for a reason. It’s very hard to do. Congratulations to everyone involved in this precise work.
P3joe
Joe