I heard on CNN’s American Morning today and at CrunchGear that there will be three (3) NFL games broadcast in 3D at select theaters in three US Cities next weekend. This is really interesting news…we’ve seen so much in the movies and on TV about the future of entertainment and TV viewing, especially when it comes to sports. I find it interesting that it really does take a long time before these ideas actually become viable products and are available.
I remember watching the first 3D movies when I was a kid with those crazy glasses you picked up at the local convenience store (this was pretty weak and barely worked for me). Then watching Jaws in 3D was also a neat experience as are the multitude of 3D videos and exhibits and theme parks and museums.
I’m really interested to see how this works on the weekend and what people think of the NFL in 3D. In reality, TV has become slightly more interactive and picture quality has definitely taken a leap forward with the advent of High Definition Programming, but essentially I still look at the same old box (well flat-panel now) on the wall showing the same old two dimensional output.
On websites, we’ve tried for years to incorporate designs and interactivity that is more 3D…yet are always challenged by the fact that we have to make these designs and systems work on the good old 2D flat screen. I wonder how far away we are from websites and web applications that have a bit more depth? Will we shed the confines of the flat 2D screen anytime soon?
It looks like there are already some examples of real-world implementations of this as you can see here:
After reading the story this week that NASA and Google are working on a way to extend the Internet beyond the confines of our planet was intriguing. Of course I love hearing about anything that has to do with space exploration, and the concept of extending the Internet into space is interesting and strange at the same time. Of course, if that first manned mission to Mars ever does happen, the journey is no doubt going to be a long one (several months at least), being able to browse the Internet would be nice .
Now…according to the article in the Ottawa Citizen about this, it will take nearly three minutes for the signal to travel from the earth to the source. I guess instant messaging and real time communication are somehow out of the question.
What was interesting, is that the key technological hurdle needing to be overcome is the ability for a signal to be smart and be able to deal with disruptions and connection problems. The new concept is called “Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN. If a signal is blocked, the server can sense this, can save the content and send it on when the way is clear.” We are constantly building web applications that rely on communication with other systems, sometimes asynchronously. While there are mechanisms that can deal with disruption to a certain extent, this concept is interesting in that one could be sure that a transmission would arrive eventually, even if the system accepting the message isn’t available immediately.
I’ll be interested to see if this is one of those space program advances that actually helps us on earth, or if its just a cool idea that doesn’t yield any practical application.
Just in case you were worried whether spammers could still make a buck these days, a new study has found that even a response rate of 1 in 12,500,000 can produce a healthy income — potentially $7,000 a day. Now all we have to do is track down the 2 or 3 Canadians who are buying herbal libido enhancers and take away their email accounts…
This post is a commentary on the article that appeared in the Ottawa Citizen on August 16th of this year (a popular source of information for my posts in this blog, and yes the paper was still on my desk at the time I wrote this) in response to Mark Bauerlein’s book “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30″.
Here is a quick note about a piece I read in the Ottawa Citizen written by Daniel Drolet about a month ago. We’re often faced with coming up with ideas for customer websites that will help make them improve the utility of the site, or generate sales leads, or in many cases sell products and services. With the explosion of social marketing tools, Web2.0 interactivity can often be applied blindly without much thought to the potential outcomes or value to the site. So which tools are the right ones to use?
I won’t try to solve all of these for you in this post, but Drolet’s article was focused on the use of customer to customer interaction on online shopping sites. A study quoted in the article by Sam Decker of Bazaar Voice noted that 3 out of 4 visitors to online shopping sites seek out reviews when shopping, and a whopping fifty (50) percent now demand a review before buying!
While further research should be done, and I’ll post further notes as I find them on this topic, its hard to ignore this information when building an online shopping site in the future. Amazon.com is likely one of the earliest adopters of this type of system, and while there are risks that people may post negative reviews, it would seem the risk may be worth it if in some cases a full one-half of visitors won’t buy from your site if you don’t have a feature like this.
We’re just about to launch a few sites with some of these features in place, I’ll report back after those sites have been running for a while to comment on our experience on this.
In creating web applications we almost always turn to creating static prototypes so that we can present to a client or a prospective audience a picture of what the web application will look like when it is complete. When designing applications for a variety of clients and audiences this is a critical step.
So why create prototypes? The answer is obvious from the developer’s viewpoint – we want to give our client the best possible shot at seeing the finished product without have to invest all of the time required to build the finished product. Rework and rethinking at this stage is far less costly then later on in the process. For the client or prospective audience, they get to see the web application long before it actually works which can provide them a look at what is to come, and hopefully ensure that all of the required information and thoughts are taken into account as early as possible.
I’m back from a good day at the inaugural MeshU conference and wanted to write down some notes and impressions about the sessions both for my own reference and for anyone else who was interested. I’ve never been to an event to like this so I don’t have any basis for comparison but I assume the fact that I’m interested in coming back next year is a good sign.
It was interesting to have to choose between three concurrent seminars, especially when they were grouped into career-oriented streams. Although I would have expected that the Developer stream would have held the most appeal, I ended up in two Management stream sessions and one Design one. I’m not sure what that means…
You need a web project built…and you need to select a platform on which to base your new development project, and a partner to build it. So how do you do it? What are the key factors in the selection of the right platform? Is there a “right” platform? What are PHP, .NET, XML and all of these other acronyms anyway? These are all good questions and ones that need to be considered before making that all important decision.
We’ve always taken the stance that we should treat every project as a new challenge and base the decision on a number of factors including the timeline, budget, available resources, likely future direction and others. In some cases, clients rely on us to select the platform, in others, they choose the direction. In either case, the factors to decide are not always the same for both the developer and for the client.
This might be a bit heavy for only being the second post on our newly created blog but since everyoneelseand their lemur have already weighed in on the subject, I thought I’d step up as well.
There seems to be a lot of backlash to the idea and yet I don’t find myself that upset or opposed. I can’t really figure out who it is that is so negatively affected. In order to make sure I wasn’t just missing something, I started to look at the stakeholders in this decision and how they would be impacted.
We’ve been building websites here at MARSWorks Inc. for many years and have faced many challenges. We’ve often struggled to decide whether or not we’d become more of a FLASH shop or stick to our current style which can best be described as “build anything and in any platform”. We’ve always believed in the philosophy of determining the situation our client and the web audience is in, and then determine the best possible tools and technologies to apply to that situation. Often, the choice of a platform or tool like FLASH poses many challenges in making the site truly accessible, or friendly to Search Engines, or people without the ability to download the FLASH plugin.
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