Tumblr Stumbles

Against my advice, Tumblr is going to take to 1+ billion from Yahoo! and be influenced by a team that's just beginning a long crawl back. Ingrid Lunden’s TechCrunch post is a succinct read on the coming event. It’s Official: Yahoo Is Buying Tumblr For $1.1B, Vows To Keep It Independent is filled with web-speak gems from both teams about, “ultimate creative canvas, original Internet company,” and my personal favorite, “the product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators.” (golly) This is a great read that you cannot miss if you endeavor in the digital.

I truly hope the product of this union is as well planned as the initial purchase. This is a huge win for Yahoo! I still believe the momentum Tumblr had going will be stopped; some percent of their development time will go towards a future, single platform social model that Yahoo! is working towards.

P3joe

It’s Official: Yahoo Is Buying Tumblr For $1.1B, Vows To Keep It Independent

Image Credit

Glass Rush

Jon Russell’s THE NEXT WEB post is the pistol shot every Google Glass fanatic has been waiting for. Developer releases template code to allow almost anyone to create a Google Glass app chronicles the post I/O mayhem created by Applaunch’s Chris Maddern. Maddern has released an open-source template that uses the Mirror API from GitHub. A few database tweeks and your app is running on Glass.

Google controls the production fork of the Glass equation and you can bet that line never sleeps. This is a very clever ploy to have the app side of things progressing nicely as well.

P3joe

Developer releases template code to allow almost anyone to create a Google Glass app

Image Credit

The Soundtrack of Your Weekend

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

The Mamas & The Papas: California Dreaming

Thanks gabrosz for the share

Run Tumblr Run

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

Is Marissa Mayer About to Buy Tumblr for $1 Billion?

Image Credit

Virtual Pint for Designers

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

National Geographic Cities

Rally Interactive

Demo Disconnect Dance

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

Fall In Love With Philips

ISD Group

The Story of Sexy Sound

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

Bang & Olufsen BeoLab 14

Lunch Crush

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

Candy Crush iTunes

King Limited

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Willa Cline is an established author, one of the first female bloggers, and Propaganda3's own Manager of Operations.