Archives: Interactive

I have been wondering for a while what was going to happen when all the best .com domains were exhausted. First the acronyms went, then the obvious choices like yourcompanyname.com, then the clever ones with taglines or thoughts that stick with your audience.

Apparently the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the governing body of the Internet, has been working on this for years. The next big thing will be to allow customized .brand extensions. Think: .nike or .honda or .nordstroms or .seattle.

Check out http://tinyurl.com/3ctu74p

This is an exciting evolution and will create some interesting new opportunities once they become available. I have 2 concerns:

1. Will it be easier for the public to remember the domains, now that they don't have the common .com at the end, or more difficult?
2. This is going to open up another window for opportunists out there who make a living buying high profile domains and reselling for profit. Companies will need to be careful not to get caught in this trap.

Keep an eye out for their release! Should be interesting to watch this 'trend' spread across the WWW.

So I see AIGA (our design industry association) has just launched a new Web site http://www.aiga.org

They state the new features include:

Enhanced profile pages (exclusive to members)
Ability to share links and write short blog posts (exclusive to members)
Conversations, a place to bring up topics for discussion and ask questions
Tools & Resources, a section that collects all of AIGA’s advice—articles, case studies, publication and more—in one convenient spot
Why Design, an area devoted to design’s capacity to benefit society
Chapter spotlights and featured student portfolios
A more visual experience overall

Just wondering what others think of the new version.

Our clients are always looking at new ways to bring awareness of their business value and/or products to new customers. They hire us to think of out of the box ideas (and sometime in the box) to drive awareness and promote selection within their markets. So I love it when I see organic ideas like this one http://tinyurl.com/3pjrb7z pop up. The Greenwood-Phinney Chamber was working on a better way to market the neighborhood to bring customers into shops, restaurants and art galleries. So they are developing a website that is focused on promoting neighborhood businesses with a tag line "Do Phinneywood." In this day in age it's crucial for company's to be able to communicate who they are and why they matter in an effective and captivating way to their customers, online. It looks like the Greenwood-Phinney chamber gets that. Although the site is not live yet, I hope it will feature areas for people to post and make comments and potentially rate the businesses they frequent. At PBDH we've developed many organic sites (similar to what this one will hopefully be) that rely on realtime dynamic content from users/customers to promote the business they patron. It's paid off for our clients as I hope it will for this fabulous neighborhood!

Mobile usage is continuing to grow at lightning speeds, and with that, our connectivity to the digital world is becoming merely an extension of our daily lives and routines. It is estimated that 788 million people will access the web solely through their mobile device by 2015 and many will use it for activities other than talking. Our digital footprints or data, along with geographic location-based services, will only allow more companies and applications to tap into our mobile device's capabilities and serve up deals that "reward" us for our behaviors with targeted, customized, and on the spot special offers.

Hotels will continue to reward loyal guests with free nights for more Foursquare check-ins. Living Social will drive traffic to certain businesses by offering us deals tailored to our location and time of day. And new apps like
LocoPing will track our history and give us the ability to connect with people/other users we may have encountered within the last 24 hours (at a convention, in an office building, or at the local coffee shop). And just yesterday, the introduction of Google Wallet. Wow.

And companies can work together to share this data to cross-sell and expand their customer base. Data and the technology used to process that data, can offer more relevant, personalized and rewarding service to all of us, which in theory improves our daily lives. But at what cost?
What's the trade off between exposing more personal interconnected information, and gaining more social currency (whether credits, points, badges, or connections from the past 24-hours)? Just maybe pulling out the good old pros & cons list will help:

Pros:

• You get the information tailored to you in the right moment, making your life better.
• You're "connected" everywhere you go, all the time.

Cons:

• Your personal information and life is transparent and exposed.
• You're "connected" everywhere you go, all the time.

Obviously there are pluses and minuses to having our lives increasingly interconnected with the mobile web, and much of it is based on personal preference. I for one am interested in striking a fine balance between human life, content sharing and technology. I'll adopt some of these tools, but with caution in so that I don't become interchangeable with my mobile device.

Since we are going to be around for at least another year (the rapture last weekend not having taken place, the one in October being a bunch of hooey, and the Mayans being a reasonably intelligent group), here’s what I see happening.

Everyone’s life is going to be wrapped up in one little box. I say little, because data can be compressed into surprisingly small areas. And when I say box, I mean a server. Or any data hardware in general. I’m not especially hardware savvy, so forgive the terminology.

Our lives are online! We socialize and have friends online. Meet people. Order food. Pay bills. Engage in entertainment of all kinds. Virtual realities, even. You barely have to leave your house to have a 'full life’. Many people don’t! If all this data is out there, it’s only a matter of time when we all just have our own little box with all of our information in it. (Or perhaps a card would be better so it fits in your wallet.) It’ll be tied to your SSN and phone number, I imagine. It’ll plan bus routes for you, create your shopping list, schedule meetings and more. It can do all these things because it knows everything about you. So you don’t have to think about it. So it’s automatic.

This is all starting to sound very Matrix-like, which isn’t what I intended but it was the natural thought progression. Interesting, isn’t it? Perhaps that really is where we are headed, even if we are arriving there naturally. In this case though, the Matrix would be voluntary, and it would be our real lives. Augmented reality? Hmmm.

What does this mean for our businesses? For humanity? Both are making a push towards being a fully integrated information society. For better or for worse, that is where the opportunities lie. But companies have a responsibility not to abuse it. It isn’t a power tool, it shouldn’t be treated that way. But it should be used to supplement our lives for the good.

Challenge: How can we create more integrated data tools that will augment our lives in a positive way?

And…. Go!