Digital Crema

The Kids Are Alright

The 18 to 25 year olds, GenY, at SXSW were extremely polished, goal oriented, and big thinkers for their age. The have an air of been there, done that. Veterans of the world’s circuses - the Disney trips, the overseas semesters - they know many of the methods of media influence and flashy ad displays. They want to talk about ideas, how they connect, and how they benefit.

Perhaps it is growing up with odd numbers of success obsessed parents, or perhaps absorbing so much technology makes them adapt faster, but every one I spoke with could think on their feet, stay on message like a White House Press Secretary and see opportunities from a distance. It is obviously a small sample of the population, and the youth attending SXSW include both top students from acclaimed universities and current employees of Google, Facebook, and funded startups, but I was impressed.

I don't remember myself and my college classmates being so ready to take over the world in the mid-1990s. We just wanted jobs, and we had few cheap tools with global reach. Today's grads make jobs for themselves and assume the infrastructure will be there. This vast, generation wide experience in building companies will serve them well in the coming years, and perhaps benefit all of us.

Posted via email from Fear and Loathing at SXSW Interactive

Bittersweet Branding Gyrations

While the Pepsi displays were nicely done, I still question why large brands go through great lengths to put on a big elaborate presence at a trade show. To make things worse, Pepsi didn't bring their Throwback natural sugar based soda, and could only offer flavored corn syrup or, far worse, artificial chemical sweeteners to "taste test" against each other. For all the plasma screens and nonsense, I'm still drinking Coke de Mexico or Illy coffee.

The fake sugar company wasn't the only one with a big budget to offer very little. Chevy brought their Volt, but we couldn't drive it, and parking a Corvette on the sidewalk made it look like some jerk couldn’t find a spot in the convention center garage. Microsoft had Bing-branded free cabs, and perhaps the worst copywriting in recorded history - Use Bing On Your Thing. Nice visual, Mr. Ballmer.

Yes, I understand the whole brand reenforcement bit that agencies and TV networks love, but I think they all could learn from Southwest Airlines and Apple. Make a great product and hold the fireworks. Southwest wasn't here, but their flights got plenty of us to the show and back. Apple wasn't officially here either, but the city was sea of Macs and the conference guide stated that around 70% of us are iPhone users.

Posted via email from Fear and Loathing at SXSW Interactive

Translating American Car Culture

Alcatel-Lucent hosted a 20 minute brainstorming session on the future of the automobile, and among the predictable and uninteresting suggestions (you can already unlock your car with an iPhone, folks) was a man from India that suggested that sustainability and car sharing would be important. In a country of billions, not millions, of people, the perspective is completely different than our own here in the States. While we are lucky to have personal motorized transports, its true that India and China can't copy us without consuming vastly more fuel and raw materials.

The next hero in the developing world must be a Steve McQueen that carpools or a James Dean that races through the streets of Chennai in a biodegradable solar powered sled, or those kids will inherit our automotive entitlement and no one knows where we'll find that much gas or bury that many batteries.

With so much talk of safety and sustainability, another facet of the American driving experience was completely missing from the discussion - joy. Some of us actually like to drive. I admit I enjoy driving much less than I once did, but I still have a convertible and still look for two lane winding highways any chance I get. This emotional feeling of freedom and adrenaline moves the car beyond appliance, but is the biggest challenge of transportation design in the coming years.

The carmakers that will dominate the market will be able to balance a reliable way for a billion people to commute without choking on smog or sitting in rush hour with a hobby that can be enjoyable when you don’t have to get somewhere. For all their dealer networks and marketing cachet, the real winners will find engineers up for the challenge of building the feeling of a 1962 Ferrari with the utility of a 2001 Toyota and the sustainability of a wind farm made out of aluminum cans.

Posted via email from Fear and Loathing at SXSW Interactive

Living Beyond Nations: No Place Like Home

The big players in this space are serious travelers. I admit, I'm a typical American and don't even hold a current passport (though I may be eligible for Italian citizenship, apparently). SXSW or a similar gathering is a once or twice a year thing for me at this point. I came here to absorb ideas, meet potential clients or backers and find developers to collaborate with on projects.

But these conferences are an entirely different thing for the affluent tastemakers. For them, venues like SXSWi are an ongoing set of appearances in the same way Hollywood stars show up on Leno or Larry King. The stars of the tech world fly in, have their moment on stage or sign books or make a scheduled appearance and are off to Amsterdam or Sydney or Tokyo to do it again. Just listening to the conversations of some of these people sounds like a high school geography test.

While I'm sure this is all very interesting and I would visit these places too on a Learjet salary, it means that some of the foremost thought leaders are global citizens. They fly no flags, have little time for more than headline-deep politics, and align with or promote only local interests that make sense to them or showcase their ideas. That makes these people equal parts powerful and disconnected. This is the first generation of the wealthy that spend so little time in one location. I wonder if our cities would look the same today if Andrew Carnegie kept the schedule that modern business demands.

Posted via email from Fear and Loathing at SXSW Interactive

Apple Boycott Points Adobe Towards Its Future

The stock analysts and pundits have started to look skeptically at Adobe and its strategy now that its 1970s high school sweetheart, The Fruit Company, is trying to break up with them.

As far back as 2005, I felt Adobe was picking a fight they couldn't win by buying Macromedia to own both the PDF and Flash formats. At the time, I felt it would anger the folks in Redmond the way Sun once did with Java. You could also see that far back that the Adobe-Apple relationship was not as stable as years past, and the old partners were slowly becoming rivals in some very expensive and important software - video and high end photography.

If you look at the situation today, Adobe is pinched from all sides. Flash Player on iPad and iPhone is a non-starter, and while exporting Flash projects to iPhone apps will be possible with the forthcoming CS5 versions, it gives Flash developers a subset of the functionality of these devices.

Flash on Windows is tolerated by Microsoft while they are busying trying to sell Silverlight, and even though Redmond fell asleep on the whole rich Internet application idea for about 10 years, now that they woke up they will have the attention of IT managers that already have thousands of Windows machines and wouldn't mind one less plug-in to manage.

Adobe could, of course, release a Flash-based tablet running on Linux, but that would make Apple look visionary for seeing Flash as a rival. They also have no experience selling tangible products and little brand equity beyond Acrobat Reader with casual users, so I wouldn't expect that product would create a very long line at Best Buy.

So where should Adobe go next? Nowhere. Adobe will be just fine if they do what they do best - make tools. Adobe should focus obsessively on making the best creative software tools in the world. In doing so, the lightbulb needs to come on: rich media applications - the stuff we make with Flash - shouldn't need a plug-in 2010.

InDesign doesn't require a plug-in for color printers, yet it dominates the market.

PDF is an open standard, and even though I can click on "Save as PDF," Acrobat and its related servers sell because they go well beyond that feature.

Photoshop exports to dozens of formats for all sorts of media and is the leading creative software in the world because of its flexibility.

Why then, with Flash, should we create animated content, rich forms, and video that can't "Save for Web" without relying on this leftover method from the early days of the web?

Flash as a player made a lot of sense in 1998, and even 2005. But what experience is being provided by Flash right now that can't be replicated with web standards? This is not an HTML 3 world, and the new standards need great tools. Apple is pushing web standards in defense of their position about Flash Player on iPad. In doing so, they are rather openly telling Adobe where a huge hole in the market is - decent tools for making great web standards content.

Flash - the software - should be the very best HTML5/Canvas and JavaScript creation tool in the world. Flex is designed to create applications that look better and run faster than anything the 37Signals devotees and Y Combinator applicants can do with Ruby, but without Flash content so it works in any web browser, tablet, or phone.

I taught Flash for eight years. I based the first decade of my career on Flash, and left IT by creating (Flash 3) animated cartoons and, eventually, Flash websites and eLearning projects. I've been in more discussions about Flash versus web standards than I can count, but the argument that won was, for most of that time, 'I can't create [this animation, that embedded video player, etc] with anything but Flash.'

But the technology landscape is completely different 10 years later. Adobe is still pushing the "author once, publish anywhere" dream that makes a great sales demo but every designer knows never really works for clients. What designers could really use is timeline based animation, reusable components, and embedded video that can publish to a web browser, not an old plug-in that we needed during the Netscape Era. Yes, browsers have their quirks, but if designers think will get to just click a box in Flash for Blackberry, iPhone, and Windows Whatever They Finally Called It Phone, there will be seriously budget issues in design shops happening as a result.

Unless Adobe can look at the situation objectively and prepare for life after Flash Player, they will start to lose ground to faster, more forward thinking startups. Maybe the next Macromedia will be the authors of a standards-based animation tool, or perhaps, a cross platform mobile publishing tool. Of course, like their failed attempt to beat Macromedia Flash with LiveMotion, Adobe could use a simple strategy to compete: if you can't beat them, buy them.

Posted via email from DeSetto.com

iPad: The Reviews Are In

For those of you with day jobs that are not directly tied to Apple, the iPhone, and mobile computing, here are the first 10 reviews of the new iPad. These were apparently the only 10 people given the device before release, including ol' Walt Mossberg of WSJ that had to mention that he's been using it for a week already. As if the rest of us are supposed to feel behind now.

<insert self promotion here>

If you or the people you do business with are interested in developing a game or application for the new iPad (or even the old fashioned iPhone), please contact my firm, reallyMedia. We do consulting, design, development, and even training. Our games are sold in the AppStore and will be offered as new iPad-specific and Android versions soon.

</end self promotion>

Okay, so the reviews. In summary, everyone loved it and you should buy one. Walt gets paid to say that in 1000 words. I want his gig when I'm that old.

• The Wall Street Journal (Walt Mossberg)
• The New York Times (David Pogue)
• USA Today (Jefferson Graham & Edward Baig)
• Boing Boing (Xeni Jardin)
• Omar Wasow
• TIME (Stephen Fry)
• PC Magazine (Tim Gideon)
• ABC News (Neal Karlinsky)
• Houston Chronicle (Bob LeVitus & Dwight Silverman)
• Chicago Sun Times (Andy Ihnatko)

(list from VentureBeat)

<related products I endorse>

If you are a developer looking for an easier road to iPad stardom that the native Apple tools, consider my friends at Ansca and their iPhone-iPad-Android development product, Corona. We used it build Box of Sox, and Corona now includes Facebook Connect, GPS, Camera, and text fields.

For 3D games, try out Unity after you've created your assets in 3DS, Maya, or elsewhere. We have our first Unity game almost complete, and lots of the best sellers of the AppStore were built with it.

</end endorsements>

Posted via email from DeSetto.com