Level 3’s Red Couch is a video series that features candid interviews from industry leaders at technology events around the globe. Phenomblue’s CEO Joe Olsen was recently “Red Couched” at Microsoft’s PhizzPop Design Challenge in Chicago. Check it out here.
In the Nov. 17 issue of Advertising Age magazine, Gatorade’s G2 was recognized in a special Marketing 50 section honoring the top 50 brands of the year and the brains behind them.
Gatorade G2’s success is attributed to the massive Super Bowl launch in early 2008 that featured heavy media spots featuring popular athletes like Derek Jeter and Dwayne Wade and a massive viral online effort including the G2 Lounge created by Phenomblue. All together, the G2 introduction was the biggest launch in Gatorade’s 40 year history
Carla Hassan, director or marketing at Gatorade, told Ad Age that not only did the low-calorie G2 reshape the Gatorade platform, but it broke marketing ground for the brand.
The G2 Lounge was an interactive environment created to allow visitors to experience an online version of the offline event in Arizona. In the real-world lounge, VIPs and media were invited to mingle and experience the new drink at a very cool, week long launch party. The G2 Lounge featured a DJ, complimentary product, a live broadcast of “Mike and Mike In the Morning” (ESPN Radio), and a miniature bowling alley.
Online G2 Lounge visitors can explore the lounge, listen to the online version of the radio show, bowl against scores posted from the real world lounge, and watch video uploaded from the live event. During the event, the video was upload at regular intervals to immerse the online visitor in the real time experience.
These ground breaking initiatives have led to a strong initial showing for G2. According to Pepsi Co. numbers are looking very strong and are leading to growth for the entire Gatorade brand. G2 also grabbed an 8.3% share in the sports drink category according to Beverage Digest.
Ms. Hassan was quoted (Ad Age) as saying, “We call G2 our Rookie of the Year and our MVP all rolled into one”.
We like the sound of that!
*Facts, quotes, and figures referenced from the November 17th issue of Ad Age magazine “Marketing 50” article entitled “G2”.
What started out as a series of random modifications to our IM photos ended up turning into a 2 month contest of itchy endurance and personal humility. One day people started photoshop’n beards and mustaches on their IM pictures. That led to a conversation of people’s ability to grow a mustache and beard, which in turn lead to the first Phenomblue “Facial Follicle Formation” Contest. The contest rules are simple: grow as much facial hair as you can in two months and then craft the coolest mustache.
Using Microsoft’s Silverlight, cashforyourmustache.com was setup so that the general public could rate the growth process of each individual’s follicle progress. After a little bit of research and development, we created the Interactive Transitional Community Hair Evolving Engine (aka the ITCHEE app). In mid December the final design will be posted of each person’s final follicle formation. The winner of the contest will receive a cash prize along with all the bragging rights entitled there in.
We just launched another Silverlight project and this time it was an experiment in more ways than one.
Minorwhitestudios.com was built entirely in Silverlight 2 and heavily utilizes Deep Zoom. The main focus of the site was to showcase the studio’s work as a whole, and also to allow visitors to explore each photographer’s individual work. We really needed the deep zoom technology to allow gallery viewers to see the absolute detail of the photographs to truly represent each photographer’s attention to detail. After all, in the photography game, sharp photos are key. We also wanted a way to minimize the amount of traditional text on the website and the amount of time the viewer was taken out of the experience to get additional non imagery information like contact numbers and bios.
In the end, the concept was created around shooting all the material on the site as a photograph and utilizing the deep zoom technology to get the clarity needed to legibly read any text based info. Additionally, we wanted to feature sub-galleries for each photographer within the main montage, while still portraying each individual’s personality within their respective galleries.
The solution was embedded deep zoom controls within actual photographs of each photographer. This allows the gallery viewer to experience pushing through one gallery image into another montage. Kind of like deep zooming to “n” number of levels. Using these Deep Zoom collections we are able to let users navigate around extremely high resolution images using only the mouse wheel and a few shortcut links while keeping the interface simple, keeping the focus solely on the artwork. This accomplishment was not without hurdles though.
The biggest technical challenge for this project was to make the application dynamically resizable. Most Deep Zoom examples to date confine the width and height to a static value, which makes it a lot easier to control zoom levels and to fit images to the screen, but would not work for the MinorWhite site. Again experimentation and some research solved the problem and the site takes advantage of increased browser space beautifully.
Take a look at the finished work online at www.minorwhitestudios.com.
Everyday I hear about a new 3D carousel. It really seemed to start with that whole coverflow craze, which is still speading like a coldsore in a nightclub. I’ve done my share of 3D carousels, but the carousel for Quaker Heart Healthy presented a new set of challenges.
How do you keep a 3D engine that’s embedded within a flash site from using up too many resources?
How do you display an unlimited number of animated 3D models with a glow and a drop shadow without dropping frames?
Thinking about it, I foresaw that my usual weapon of choice, Papervision3D, might not be the best choice. That’s why I chose ND3D, that lightweight 3D engine from nulldesign. ND3D provides a great base for 3D projects. Since it’s so simple and stripped down it was a breeze to modify their code and extend it.
In the end, extending ND3D turned out to be a great solution for Quaker Heart Healthy.
Take a look at the finished work online at http://quakerlivingproof.com.
Phenomblue is crazy busy right now so we are a little late on this one, but we received our first Microsoft Surface machine a couple weeks ago and the office has been a buzz ever since. We were also informed by our friends at Microsoft that we have the first and only Microsoft Surface machine in the state of Nebraska!
As many of our clients are engaging Phenomblue for Microsoft Surface development and asking us to concept some engaging experiences based on the new technology, we are fully developing the infrastructure for a solution based approach. Not only are we working on a Microsoft Surface project workflow including brainstorming, prototyping, usability/experience testing, and deployment, but we’re also shoring up the other talents that significantly impact success with this technology including Microsoft’s XNA game platform an of course the Microsoft Expression suite.
Outside of the straight technology implications, our internal teams are working with clients to determine increased branding capabilities from an engagement standpoint, and how the almighty ROI fits into projects harnessing the Microsoft Surface capabilities. We’re taking a lead role with many major branding experts looking at how the machine delivers compelling content, integrates into current market strategy and on going campaigns, while leveraging new and exciting ways to call consumers to action. Lastly we are exploring the obvious point-of-sale, attract, and game implications which will undoubtably impact our clients looking for client acquisition in the field (ie. trade shows, industry events, mobile PR, etc..).
We’re currently writing a couple applications (1 demo, 1 commercial) , and have a couple others in the brainstorming phase. We’ll post details and video when we can. We have however, posted video of the un-boxing and SDK applications that come with Microsoft Surface. Some of the apps have been modified already as our Microsoft dev team becomes familiar with the platform, but the nuts and bolts remain.
You can see everything on our YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/phenomblue.
Back to work.
We’re constantly pushing the envelope in house with Papervision3D and today, one of the tools we developed to test/debug applications made it onto the front of the official PV3D website. One of our developers created PV3DDebug, a console for Papervision3D projects. You can download the tool and source on his blog at http://jasonbejot.com/.
There is also a nice write up about it at draw.logic.
With only a few days left until we get our first Microsoft Surface machine, we’re all a little fired up. Some crew from the office visited our local skeet shooting range last week to expend some energy and to see if all of our years of playing duck hunt had paid off. For most of us, shooting clay pigeons proved to be a little more challenging than Nintendo’s light gun but the experience allowed for a couple opportunities. One, we got to use fire arms, a great way to spend your Wednesday lunch hour, and two, it gave us a chance to use Microsoft’s new technology Photosynth.
Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. It then orders the photos together in a way that makes sense spatially based on what content was in each of the photos. Essentially you create a way of viewing environments or objects in a 3d space making a more immersive experience. We took a number of images that showed the environment and the people in it and Photosynth stitched together the images that had similarities based on the space the photos were taken in.
The technology has great potential from an advertising aspect in that, as people begin to link their images with other people’s images around the world, advertisers will be able to embed brand imagery into these large data sets. This would allow for marketing based on location, demographic and have the opportunity of new demographics discovering their brand inadvertently by coming across any number of possible photo links. Ie. You search for images of Hawaii and as your looking at a series of beach pictures, you see one that has a couple sitting on the beach holding a Corona bottle. The software matches a hi-res ad up to the image and you’ve got something.
Pretty cool. Take a look at what we came up with.
Everyone has heard at least some mention over the last few weeks about the Large Hadron Collider that came online last Wednesday. The “Big Bang Machine” has been the topic of much discussion and controversy as to whether or not it will unlock untold secrets of the universe or if it simply opens a black whole consuming our planet and putting an overall damper in everyone’s day. Well fear not. First off, you’re reading this so the world has obviously not ended. And second, msnbc has posted a simple little interactive breakdown of the machine and how it works, complete with 3d representations and descriptions of each part of the Large Hadron Collider. However, if all that education doesn’t convince you that the collider will not end the world and you require more reassurance, we found a link you can visit.
Check out hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com for a real-time update as to whether or not the machine has ended the world yet.
At Phenomblue, we love independent radio. Headquartered in Omaha, NE, the home of Saddle Creek Records, we have a special place in heart for Indie Rock in general. Most of us grew up with the Saddle Creek bands like Bright Eyes, The Faint, Cursive, and The Good Life. In fact, some of our team members have played in Saddle Creek bands and others currently play with touring acts outside of Saddle Creek. The bottom line is, we love music.
We also listen to WOXY all the time. It’s actually streamed throughout our office over the PA all day! WOXY is an independent Internet radio station based in Cincinnati,Ohio. The station features the latest and best Indie rock. The station has listeners from across the globe, and features acts live in their studio lounge “Lounge Acts” frequently. They also run a play list allowing you to go back and see which song was playing at a given time and then purchase the music from Lala.
While they have a pretty cool pop up web widget for the play list, we thought it needed an overhaul. This morning, we created a small Adobe Air application that features a play list, buy links, and the ability to temporarily hide the widget.
Anyway, we thought is was cool, so we are sharing it. You can download it here.
Hello all!
2008 is nearly half over and it occurred to us that we were embarrassingly long overdue for an open house. We invited clients, friends and family to see the new office and to partake in a veritable smorgasbord of food and drink with a side of Rock band thrown in for good measure.
We started construction on our new office in late 2007. It took several months to gut, redesign and rebuild and in early March we were able to move in. Our friends at RDG designed the space to accommodate our needs to have a more open and stylized feel as opposed to your typical cube farm. The office boasts an open development area, multiple conference rooms, a break room loaded with every possible combination of sugar imaginable, two outdoor patios with stellar views and a poison dart frog (which ironically is not poisonous at all). We also installed a sound system that allows us to stream in our favorite online radio stations. Everyone here loves it and we’re excited to continue to bring new talent into the space.
Check the video to see the before and after, along with the open house party.
Even though there is always a large amount of work that goes on here, it doesn’t stop us from taking a break once and a while to appreciate the finer things in life. Omaha has an amazing symphony and we are lucky enough to have one of the best venues in the country for the Omaha Symphony to play in, the Holland Performing Arts Center.
This year, in an extra effort to support the symphony we took out an ad that featured our Technical Director’s 11 month old son. Felix Clark Duggin was dressed to the 9s in a tuxedo, stylish diaper and dress socks. Bill Sitzmann and Scott Drickey, two amazing photographers from Minorwhite Studios, photographed Felix on stage at the Holland in his conductor outfit, complete with baton. The ad features Felix as the future music conductor of 2050 with the tag line “Supporting the Arts from day one”
Check out the video of the shoot with the final ad at the end.
A trip to the new Phenomblue.com is a voyage into the unfamiliar. We’ve updated everything with a brand new design that more accurately reflects our commitment to great digital design, technology strategy, and overall intelligent user interface design. As more of our clients ask for creative and design solutions and our business grows to embrace these adaptations, it was an easy decision to update our public face to reflect our talents and industry leading experience.
The first thing you’ll notice is the look which is reflective of the ever changing creative space we live in each day. Just as our projects come from concept, to development, to a versioned release, so does our business. The colorful palette and clean lines reflect our commitment to impact without all the clutter. Our new “Featured Projects” section is a quick snapshot of some of the work we think lends to showing the breadth of work, at least the work we can show publicly. ;) Navigating the website is much like a microfiche machine, reflective of our commitment to research and a dedication to past information sharing methodologies that came before us. Chalk line images throughout the website reveal pieces of our studio(s) while maintaining the inspiration of imagination and animation. Story boarding is a concept we used to define nearly every section of the new site. Lastly, you’ll also find this look carried across to this blog as well.
The entire site was a massive undertaking with more than 40% coming under the covers in the form of client CMS, full remote presentation capabilities, and a dynamic editing system that encompasses everything. The entire website was built on the Adobe Flex platform. Microsoft’s .NET platform was used for the back-end including ASP.NET, and SQL Server for data storage.
Not only is the recently released Wordle application a fantastic piece of classic research and development feeding the innovative use of current technology, the application has far reaching benefits into the creative world as an everyday tool. Whether your a creative director, an art director, a copywriter, or even in the research department, Wordle has an application for you. I’ll explain..
Wordle is a Java application that takes a string of words (up to even 10,000 in my tests), and displays the words back in the form of a "cloud", something very popular in the blogging community right now. A cloud is of course, the idea that displaying a jumbled group of words with more emphasis on words used more frequently than others, gives a visual representation of the context from which the words were derived. So in effect, taking a quick glance a a cloud image on a blog, quickly delivers the overall message or feeling of the blog. It’s a cool way to quickly asses the relevancy of information on any given blog to the what the user may be looking for. Unfortunately, the blog clouds are usually based on "tags", words the author uses to define each blog post. This sort of kills the 3rd party relevancy factor.
Wordle takes the cloud idea and extends it to completed written works. I took several blog posts from a very popular blog (to rename nameless) and it was very shocking to see what Wordle came up with compared to the tag cloud on the blog. For a supposed tech community site, his company and their services came up so much is was glaringly obvious it was self promotion. No doubt the author would surely benefit from knowing this as I my hypothesis is that a users takeaway is much like the takeaway from a Wordle cloud.
Anyway, The Wordle website has a ton of examples of user created clouds that cover everything from music lyrics in famous songs to speeches from today’s presidential candidates. You can find a link to our Wordle cloud here, which is built off the copy in our new website. Taking a look at the Phenomblue Wordle cloud, gives you fairly deep impression of our business in less than 3 seconds.
The implications of this technique within the creative process is pretty interesting. Researchers and creative directors comparing competitive product literature and web copy using the tool, looking for an edge or an under developed theme in current creative. I could see an art director looking at the copyrighting as a thematic inspiration as opposed to obligatory text. Finally, even the best copywriter could stand to throw copy into the Wordle cloud machine to see if that all important message is coming through.
It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. Also, found this through my religious reading of downloadsquad.com. DS is one of the best blogs on the web for new UI, R&D, and generally anything else cool happening in the interactive development community.
Getty Images recently launched a website call Moodstream which is quickly becoming more and more useful within our creative development process. The site rather successfully attempts to pair photos, video, and audio tracks to the “mood” defined by the user. Through the interaction with sliders covering several categories including happy/sad, calm/lively, nostalgic/contemporary, etc., you define your mood that drives everything. As a registered user, you can save imagery/audio combinations that you like for later retrieval. The goal of all of this is to drive purchases of the assets your viewing and listening to, but the site is super useful even if your planning to get your assets else where or you are developing them yourself.
With the imminent release of the latest version of Firefox looming, now is probably the last chance you’ll get to check out the bits before they drop officially in the upcoming weeks. There are quite a few differences in the latest version including separate UIs per platform (Windows, OSX, and Linux) that make the browser look more embedded than 3rd party. Additionally, they have made plenty of changes that affect developers, most of which can be found here: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Updating_web_applications_for_Firefox_3. Visit the website today and download the latest version. Click on the "Testdrive" link to the right in the news section.
**Before upgrading, remember that many Firefox add-ons will discontinue to work if the developers have not updated the code to the latest platform.**
Just a quick announcement that another Phenomblue Gatorade project has launched and live at http://drinkgatoradetiger.com/sendmoonshot/. The project is a viral campaign for the new Gatorade Tiger drink featuring Tiger Woods. The project involved the use of Papervision3D, which we seem to be using like wildfire right now. For those that don’t know, Papervision is a compelling way to use real time 3D in Flash and Flex applications. It’s actually Open Source as well so we have had the opportunity to build on the released versions of the software, adding features and enhancing existing functionality. Currently we are using the technology in 3 active projects. Fun times. Anyway, thanks to Element 79 for the opportunity to work on another imaginative emerging media project.
Were coming up on a jam packed couple of weeks of conferences with Tech-Ed in Orlando starting Tuesday and Flashbelt in Minneapolis starting June 8th. Both events are a great chance to keep up on emerging technologies in the interactive space and we’ll be at both. Drop us line if you’re going to be at either event and if you simply want to find us, we’re best known for lounging around our space in the exhibit areas.
HDC08 has announced several new presenters and sessions for Omaha and Minneapolis. This year’s line up looks to be just as star studded as the past with lots of great content and networking opportunities. The Omaha event is expecting over 600 attendees and Minneapolis (first annual in MN) is expected to be cut off at 300. you can email jolsen@heartlanddc.com for more information or visit the conference website at http://www.heartlanddc.com.
Some info about HDC..
HDC provides regional developers the opportunity to experience sessions usually reserved for Tech-Ed and PDC at a much lower cost while retaining the same nationally known presenters. 5 years since it’s inception, HDC08 continues to build on the success of the largest annual independent professional Microsoft development conference in the nation, organized by user groups, and focused on .NET development and other emerging Microsoft technologies.
Microsoft® recently announced a new feature for the Silverlight 2 platform called Deep Zoom. Deep Zoom allows us to break extremely large, high-resolution images into a collection of smaller images which can then be zoomed or scrolled without having to wait for the whole image to download.
The technology is similar to the approach used to view satellite images in Google Maps but Deep Zoom has smooth transitions and almost no latency when changing zoom levels.
Implementation is simple with the new Silverlight MultiScaleImage control, but like all of the other cool new Silverlight 2 functionality we have to wait for the official release.
Checkout a demo (requires Silverlight 2 beta install)
Flash Player 10 has been officially announced and is in Beta on Adobe Labs.
Flash Player 10 brings several huge new features to the flash world, including support for an entirely new set of dynamic filters and native support for 3d objects. This is due to FP10’s support for native hardware accelerated content - something that wasn’t available in previous versions of the Flash Player. FP10 also provides enhanced text support for typography junkies, better performance in general (again linked to the CPU acceleration), a more sophisticated drawing API, and enhanced support for video.
The new image filters allow you to do some pretty sweet stuff that was previously reserved for pre-rendered content or desktop-only apps, like these:
Blender filter: 
Swirl filter: 
Play with the "Pixel Bender" yourself here (requires FP10.)
Here’s a full feature list from the Release notes:
Creative Expression
Visual Performance Improvements
Rich Media
Other Community Requested Enhancements
For more detail on features, see the official release notes (same links as above.)
See the official Adobe press release here for more info, and be sure to hit the Labs page for the player itself and all the dirty details.
Wired coverage
Marketwire Press Release
Computerworld’s coverage of FP10
*Thanks to RJ Owen from O’Reilly for the article lift.
It’s always great to be noticed and over the past year, we have really started to get a lot of press in Omaha, Montreal, and the rest of the outside world. Tuesday, the city of Omaha is awarding us the 2008 Emerging Business of the Year, an award given annually to the business that has had the most significant growth over the past year and is positioned for a continuation of success in the future. A couple of the past winners of this award in Omaha are NetShops and PayPal so we are very excited to be in the same category, in the view of outside professionals. Additionally, the award is a nomination only kind of thing so we are super stoked that we are being evangelized outside of our Phenomblue circle. Pretty cool.
You can find out more about the award here.
We just wanted to take the opportunity to say congratulations to AbelsonTaylor on another stellar year and the recent Manny Award nominations and wins! This year, AT won "Most Feared Agency" and "Most Admired Agency", two of the most coveted awards given. Additionally, they were a finalist for "Most Creative Agency" as well. We put together a ton of great work with AT in 2007 and 2008 will be no different. Congrats and thanks again everyone and we’ll do it over in 2008!
Man what a first quarter. We have been slammed with the move, new projects, new clients, and a re-branding internally. We finally launched the new US recruiting website and just in time. We are growing rapidly and brining on another 4 developers next month in our Omaha office. Take a look at our latest internal development at www.workatphenomblue.com. We have several musicians on our team, but this specific piece is compliments of Jason, a member of the Answer Team, an Omaha based Indie rock band. For more information on any positions you think you would be prefect for, click on the post-it-note to see specific listings. Oh, and check back next week for our new Phenomblue.com website. It’s a whole new day at the P.
It’s that time of year again and college graduates are heading home to enter the workforce, landing that coveted entry level development position at the local Super Corp. While we can’t save everyone, we can save one of those individuals from taking the train to “Myfirstjobsuckedville”. We are again running our summer internship program which is basically a 3 month tryout for a full-time spot with one of the nation’s leading digital design and technology firms.
We are looking for basic knowledge of scripting and object oriented development principles. Some experience firing up Adobe Flash and Flex would be great. Knowledge of other emerging technologies like Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight would be Rad.
It’s a pretty sweet gig and you can find some details here.
