House Fire!

Designers, when you post comps for open critique, switch on the hot box! It's like raising the flag on your mailbox. Never again will your amazing, creative, ground-breaking work hang on the whiteboard, unnoticed. Read on, if you want to know why and how I made this.

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PBDH encourages open-collaboration, cross-pollination and a lot of other great hyphenated phrases relating to idea sharing. One way this is accomplished is by posting new design comps on the whiteboard in "The Core" - our primary public space where we hold critiques, eat lunch and argue about last night's episode of Lost. Often a designer will hang up a few design roughs or ideas before the "real" internal review, to see what other folks have to say and get some fresh perspective. The system works fairly well, but I have noticed one flaw: Sometimes I pass right by those comps without realizing they are posted there for public critique. For all I know, they are just left over from a previous meeting and commenting is closed. There is nothing to draw my attention to them. Never again. Post your work, pull the chain and get ready for an influx of insightful, relevant, meaningful feedback.

And if you see the light on.... please take a look at what's on the board and offer your thoughts. That light is somebody's beacon asking for your input.

No doubt somebody will ask "How did you make that" which is usually a long answer, but I can give you one hint. I found a little laser-cutting shop right around the corner from our office. Take them a vector file and they can cut your design out of wood, paper, plastic - a lot of things. Check out Metrix Create Space, it's a haven for tech geeks, "makers" and design-nerds like myself.

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Ralph Lauren Steps Up the Online Shopping Experience

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Wow. Way to go Ralph Lauren. The Spring 2010 collection was presented this week with their first ever interactive online fashion show. The viewer can listen to the commentary of highly regarded fashion editors and even shop the look of the models while they strut down the virtual runway.

It truly gives a whole new meaning to the online shopping experience that challenges other retailers to take it to the next level.

Via psfk

Team PBDH hitting the streets

PBDH has a great bike team known on the roads as the Orange Freight Train (named by other riders when they see our pace line heading towards them in their rear view mirrors). It's that time of year to start thinking about ridin that bike! Once again, I am putting our team together to ride the BikeMS ride in September. There is lots to do between now and then. But the first thing I need is for you to register. Here's the deal:

1. The ride is September 11 and 12 up in Mt. Vernon, WA area.
2. It ends the first day with a free beer garden! and party.
3. You can do one or both days (different map each day).
4. You pay $50 to register, and agree to raise at least $250 (pretty easy to do)
5. PBDH supplies your kit (jersey and shorts)
6. You can ride between 22 and 92 miles.

Here is Team Phinney Bischoff link to register:

Team Phinney Bischoff will be participating in various rides over the summer, so get your friends to join up for the fun.

@anywhere: Twitter's Gold Mine? Or Twitter's Sock Puppet?

I remember a conversation I had with an acquaintance over a decade ago. "Amazon.com will never amount to anything," stated the man, a stock broker, "it's a company that captures market share by giving things away." Free shipping and discounts were helping Amazon get customers but not helping them make money and never would. (He was right for a few years, at least.)

Fast forward, then, to another conversation I had about other dot coms. "Yes, mom," I related over my land-based telephone, "I did get 70 pounds of kitty litter from Pets.com... and I'm waiting for HomeGrocer to deliver a bunch of heavy stuff, too. Why? Because it's cheap and there's no shipping! Those companies are doomed." (I was right, which was unfortunate given the number of Pets.com banners my agency was getting paid to produce at around that time. (HomeGrocer, interestingly enough, is now owned by Amazon.))

And, then, almost a year and a half ago, I had a conversation about Twitter. There is no single quote to sum up the chat I had with my friend, but it was about how Twitter might generate revenues and even, perhaps, make money. How the company can take the 20 characters in a txt message and convert them to dollars. How it can avoid losing money by giving things away: server space, bandwidth, and user experience improvements. There was no kitty litter albatross and there was no cut-throat competition with brick-and-mortars, but the underlying issue remained.

In December, things shifted, with Bing and Google paying Twitter $25m for its feed (known, fittingly, as the "Firehose"). Of course, a company like RealNetworks has managed to sign licensing deals, too. And that doesn't always end well.


Today, Twitter announced its @anywhere platform, which gives other sites access to the Firehose. Will this undermine the value of the deals Bing and Google made with Twitter? Will this be a big payday for Twitter, or will their efforts get snowed under by the Facebook juggernaut and/or nibbled to death by its innumerable, smaller competitors? Or something in between?

I'm not sure--no one is--but as I noticed that Amazon.com is an @Anywhere launch partner, I remembered that sometimes it's too early to write off a company with a strong market presence and no sock puppet mascot.

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