In 2012, I’m looking forward to using ‘Experience Mapping’ as a UX tool to thoroughly define and document the customers’ experience of a service and the needs that arise on their journey towards their goal.
Nikolas Head, Information Architect.

With more and more different types of devices on which you can browse the internet becoming available, I think responsive design will have a greater role to play in 2012 in order to create great interfaces that work across multiple platforms. 2011 saw the beginnings of this but I think 2012 will be the year when more focus is put on displaying content that it relevant to the device, which you are viewing it on.
Nathan Parris, Designer.

2011 saw brands really embracing the idea of storytelling, and I look forward to seeing how this will evolve further. I will also be watching technologies such as mobile computing, gesture control and augmented reality, as I expect their growth in the industry will continue to soar, bringing with them exciting new brand to consumer experiences.
Melissa Bennett, Copywriter.

Mobile Commerce has been growing fast and I believe it will be bigger in 2012… Most people never leave their mobile and with longer working hours and people having less free time to actually ‘go to the shops’, browsing and buying via a mobile device or tablet is starting to fit into people’s lifestyles naturally – Bring on 4G!
Georgie Pares, Project Manager.

With online games starting to popup using Canvas, (such as Cut The Rope www.cuttherope.ie) you can really see how Canvas is easily as good or better than Flash on a performance level, without any need for a single browser plug-in, purely native, along with being GPU powered it really is quite good. JavaScript is becoming almost real-time in processing, due to the latest browsers JS engines’ precompiling code on load to really speed things up, they make a great partnership in what will be the  mainstream medium for graphically rich websites.
Joe Angus, Senior Developer.

2012 is the year of the first digital Olympics. In the UK, the BBC will stream 2500 hours of digital coverage of the games for TV, desktop, mobile and tablet, allowing users to personalise their Olympic experience via the media platforms they use. I predict social media will play a big part in this. Allowing users to act as commentators through real-time posts and tweets. This simple yet personal experience will hook the interest of even the uninitiated and encourage digital media consumption to rocket in the future.
Nia Lonergan, New Business Co-ordinator.

If Microsoft releases Windows 8 with their own app store and with IE 10 (which is planned for this year), to fully support all HTML5, it will be huge step for mankind and it will rapidly increase the standardisation of HTML5. There is still long way for HW acceleration for advanced graphics and 3D. But most of the microsites and apps on the web are not using that much graphical effects so people will turn to HTML5, which would work on most devices and doesn’t need any additional installation (unlike Flash Player).
Stefan Vadocz, Creative Developer.

2012 will be the year of the Smart TV, with us accepting the digital world into more and more aspects of our life, counterbalanced with it being (I think) the year Facebook crumbles!
Simon Beale, Designer.

Agree or disagree? Let us know what you think will be big in 2012!

What we are looking for…

An individual who can be responsible for innovative, well conceptualised and well developed multi-platform solutions for projects within the tech / creative department. You will be supported by a dynamic team in delivering high-quality end requirements for International clients.

If you think you have what it takes, visit our jobs page to find out more or get in touch.

For our recent Sprout Christmas competition, the development team were tasked with the creation of a 360 degree spinning representation of our prize jar of sprouts.

Having some keen photographers within the team, we jumped at the chance to bring our gear in, and convert the kitchen area in the manor into a quick photo studio.

First we decided upon how many photographs / angles we wanted to have, which came down to every 10 degrees (36 shots). To ensure we got it right, we marked down every 10 degrees around a template that the jar would sit on – unfortunately we didn’t have a turn table available so we relied on our calm and collected coding hands for the movement.

Armed with a roll of brown paper, we covered the kitchen table and wall to remove any items which may cause post production an issue.

Consistency was key for making this work seamlessly, so we setup our DSLR on a tripod, with a nice fast 85mm 1.4 lens and used a remote to fire the shutter. We did a couple of test shots for lighting and reflection testing, then our photo studio was complete!

We focus locked the camera, and carefully rotated the sprout jar whilst taking the 36 photographs needed. The design team then did all of the post processing and beautification necessary, and handed us back the files.

As we were going to use a sprite sheet method involving just one image file, we had to collate them all together in a row – thankfully stitching them together was nice and easy due to Photoshop’s distribution alignment tool.

The HTML was nice and easy, just needed a div container with the correct dimensions, with the background of our sprite sheet set.

Next was to setup the JavaScript, using the jQuery library we were able to quickly track mouse movements when the jar had been clicked, to determine which direction the user would be panning around.

A little logic to decide what frame number should be next displayed, and/or if it should loop back around to the beginning, the background position on the sprite sheet that sprite number relates to and we were there! A HTML only method of creating a controllable spinning sprout jar.

This month, .net magazine asked our development team the big question. Maybe the biggest question everyone is asking at the beginning of a new year. What will be the most significant trend of 2012? Some believe it will be the end of the world but not our two senior developers…

So what will it be? Both Joe and Stefan believe there will be continued boom in the mobile and tablet device market, more standardisation and inventions around HTML5 and mobile apps…  And we will be really excited to bring these great technologies to our clients this year.

See what we have to say in Issue 224, which is out now!

When a Quick Response (QR) code is scanned by mobile phone, it directs information and messages to the device. The use of QR codes is increasingly popular among marketers as a low cost method of communicating brand information, and according to one study, code scanning has increased by a huge 4549% between 2010 and 2011. For the consumers who are using them, they are a quick way of engaging with brands and receiving vouchers and other brand related rewards through their mobile phone.

Despite the clear benefits to brands and consumers, it remains that only a small proportion of consumers uses or understands them. Barriers to use include the consumers lack of knowledge, not owning a device which is capable of scanning the code, and the apathetic – those who feel there are little benefits to their use, and they can use a website more easily and quickly. Marketers, though using them, are generally not making them integral to campaigns, tucking them away in the corner of advertising and packaging, leaving them easily missed and remaining outside of the mainstream.

How can these barriers be overcome? I think most important is to define a clear USP for the code, and do this creatively, inspiring consumers to engage with the technology and the brand.

Some cool examples of QR code positioning:

In Korea, a leading supermarket has created a virtual store in a subway. When commuters scan the QR code on the image of an item, the item is added to their shopping list and delivered to their home, resulting in greater brand awareness customer loyalty.

In Tokyo, it is popular to project huge QR codes onto the sides of buildings. When scanned, consumers are taken to a website which offers discounts for local shops and restaurants. Away from the cityscapes I seem to associate them with, this one was mown into a field in Germany. The message decodes to “Hello World!” and could be seen from Google Earth.

It’s not only for shopping; BBC3 has integrated the first QR code into on air animation to advertise new drama The Fades, as a way of engaging with the digitally minded target audience, and the NHS is also tapping into this audience by using QR codes to connect clubbers to drug advice.

Which QR codes you would recommend?

Mobile computing is currently the fastest growing IT market, with mobile information retrieval ranging among the foremost activities of smartphone users. Marketers and global companies are excited at the prospect that it will soon be common place for their users to point their mobile device camera at anything in the real world and create contextual information/visuals.

There were a few major announcements at this year’s event; including the fact that metaio will be releasing a free version of its Mobile SDK to bring latest AR features to a broad developer community. It will also be publishing a tool called ‘junaio Creator’ to allow virtually anybody to create AR content for junaio. This information is of particular interest as it will become increasingly easier for creatives to enrich the user experience and extend the story we take them on.

Thomas Alt, CEO of Metaio, commented:
“We predict AR to become a common feature on every smartphone and tablet. Of course we are pleased that our solutions have emerged as benchmarks for advanced technology and excellence in our industry, used by developers’ worldwide.”

Software from companies such as Metaio and Layar now makes it possible for social networking to become a real world live experience – when at a bar, shopping or at a gig:

Here’s another example of what can be achieved at the moment with augmented reality: Rofo on junaio

A great brand example is Lynx, who extended their campaign to Victoria train station in London, asking passers-by to look up at a giant screen where they saw, not only themselves, but fallen angels alongside them:

Services such as Google Goggles – a visual search tool, which in basic terms helps define what you see in the real world and wants to monetise the process. Once the public gets used to navigating their environment with tools like Goggles, everything we see and share will become searchable data. Combining environments with predictive technology, Google will be able to serve visual experiences that benefit both the consumer and advertiser.

Although consumers have been confronted with advertising messages for decades and the future could see a positive change of more targeted and relevant messages in our environment, I do worry that this real world product placement could also have a negative impact, for example, instead of someone looking for an item in a shop, people will become reliant on using an app to scan a room for it – almost like putting on your glasses to see. If this was the case, would we lose part of our real-world connections and daily communication with others.

Questions to ponder on… Who owns the advertising space in an augmented world and has the rights to the GPS coordinates? At the moment, anyone can create a message and attach it to specific coordinates. What will stop brands’ realities overlapping, and will this be a movement not just for entertainment and advertising purposes, but for how we see the world in the future? Will the divide between virtual and physical realities become blurred?

Other food for thought is whether ads in the virtual world have to match ads in reality. For example, brands could take over competitors’ outdoor press – presenting an alternative virtual world. Although treading on potential dangerous ground, there is nothing currently in place to stop such a thing.

I find this whole area of our industry fascinating. There is so much opportunity for virtual advertising, projection mapping and Kinect. This mix of augmented reality, social data and interactivity is a real game-changer. My only worry is that without structure and processes in place, the market and our everyday environments will become over-saturated and eventually lose value, becoming a lonely virtual world that no one wants to visit anymore. But, let’s make sure this doesn’t happen by working out rights ownership and allowing virtual ads to evolve into content that users can choose to experience on their own terms.

Is this a genuinely a new indispensable tool for creatives to replace our prized Wacom tablets or just another gimmick which just slows down the creative process?, it has a few draw back it only has ball point pen refills at the moment and according to a few reviews doesn’t deal with detail very well. We will have to wait and see with its official release date penned for early October perfect Christmas timing, I know it will be on many creatives Christmas lists this year.

At the end of the last week Google released version 14 of Google Chrome. The
biggest thing about this release is the support of new technology called Native Client. Google
Chrome now allows applications (currently only through Chrome Web Store) built with C++ or classic C. This allows developers to create new applications supported across all operating systems, which will be significantly faster than applications written in JavaScript. Question is if the milliseconds we save will be worth it. We will see…

From Microsoft, we’re getting little news about Internet Explorer 10. We know now that it
will be strongly supporting HTML5 and some other new emerging modern technologies. We also know that it will have a special version for touchscreen devices, which won’t support Flash and Silverlight. It isn’t a big surprise because Microsoft stopped development of Silverlight earlier this year, but it seems that this is the official confirmation from Microsoft that they will be mostly supporting applications made with HTML5 and Javascript in the future. Sure, it’s still some time until IE10 will be released, but this is exciting news.

And finally, Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 7 this September. The biggest thing will be the reduction of application loading time and the tool for sending performance messages voluntarily. This brings not so much new for us developers, but hopefully it will increase the user experience for all Firefox users.

Available on a limited release (only in the US this week) to users of the Sprint Nexus S 4G phone. Users can download an app that links through to a Near Field Communication (NFS) chip inside the phone. It currently only works with Visa, Citi MasterCards and Google Prepaid Cards.

Take a look at the Introducing Google Wallet demo video to see it in action.

Critics might ask why is Google jumping on this new method of payment if it is still some time away in the future to becoming mainstream. Well, tracking what consumers are purchasing will be hugely important to Google and advertisers – giving them a deeper understanding into consumer behaviour and opening up opportunity for sustained engagement through loyalty schemes.

“For retailers, the attraction is not just to ease the payment process for customers, but also to increase engagement with them – tapping on the readers can also add loyalty points or allow digital coupons to be spent”, noted Chris Nuttall of The Financial Times.

Google is also in talks with  major retail partners to install next-generation tills that work with NFC chips. One question everyone will be wondering though, is whether Apple will now release NFC for the iPhone 5?

This new software has huge potential but what we are witnessing are the very early stages of development. It is yet to have full retailer buy-in. Although, Google Wallet is available at various retailers, it is only available at select locations. As consumers we are used to our ‘shopping habits’ and changing these won’t be simple. It will take time for people to trust in NFC as a secure and efficient payment method. Consumers will need to own a smartphone with NFC capabilities and it may challenge and alienate the not-so-tech-savvy-consumers of the world.

Ulitmately, I think that this is a great step forward in NFC technology and an insight into the way we will shop in the future. While it seems as though the smartphone will soon hold all the details to our day-to-day functioning, I think we’ve only just had a glimpse at the future and how NFS technology will change our shopping behaviour. So, it’s not quite time to chuck your wallet away just yet…

I say dotBrand – you say What? So, let’s start with the basics. DotBrand is the moniker that’s been given to the new raft of impending top level domain names.

We are all currently aware of at least a handful of the 22 existing traditional endings to a domain address such as .co.uk, .com, .org, .net, .biz, .fr, and we get along quite nicely with them for the most part. People have come to understand that a ‘.co.uk’ site is the UK version of a website, or that ‘.edu’ is limited to use by educational institutions, and is likely to be the domain name for your childs primary school, or your university.

dotBrand opens up the top level domain names to ‘.anything’… It could be .coke, .london, .music… and so on, creating with it an entirely new online landscape. Brands could essentially have total ownership and management of their own unique name space. No longer would they have to check whether a domain name was available at the start of a new product launch, or advertising campaign. Instead they would simply just add it in their repertoire. For example if MGM studios launched a new film, lets say it’s called Violet… they could simply have www.violet.mgm (instead of a) not being likely to get www.violet.com as another company will probably already own it and b) not having to use something along the lines of www.mgm.com/movies/newrelease/violet). Obviously the latter is a lot less effective, less memorable and holds less retention with the audience.

All dotBrand domain name requests have a 90 day period to be submitted to ICANN – the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, starting Jan 2012. After which time a review process will take place, and names granted or declined… More of this later.

So, next comes the fact that a new digital landscape calls for a new digital strategy. Obviously there are immediate pluses and minuses to the arrival of a dotBrand era, and questions to be considered.

• How will it be received by the public? There is likely to be early confusion and potential reticence to change.
• How will brands educate the public, and encourage them to use their new dotBrand top level domain?
• Will cybersquatting increase? Will dotBrands be bought up by people who have no right to them?
• Will dotBrands be perceived as more or less trustworthy?
• How will dotBrands affect the online search strategies and effectiveness for non-dotBrand’ers?
• Will dotBrands give a competitive advantage to their users, or will they be yet another top level domain name in the mix of the existing ones?
• Will the obvious simplified url’s create a noticeable amount of stickyness for a campaign?
• …And the list goes on…

One immediate problem is that credible and agreed names that are submitted for registration will not only be approved, but will ensure that similar names, or different versions on a similar theme will be declined. The example given in the recent webinar was for Deloitte – if registered, .deloitte will be acceptable, but .delloite / .deloite / .deloittr will all be declined. The irony for me is that dotBrand itself is a company name… Will ICANN buy the .dotbrand top level domain for all registrations, and if they do, do they have ‘more right’ over it than a company whose registered name is DotBrand?? Wow… the mind boggles. Gap is another great example, as a colleague pointed out. There is currently thegap / gap/ gapadventures / gapinc / gapantenna / gap-software… Who can lay claim, and who will be shoved out of a dotBrand world? Or will it come down to those that can pay will muscle out those that can’t and stake their claim on a name?

The digital landscape may also change more dramatically than one would first envisage. There is the potential that dotBrand websites will eliminate the need for a website hierarchy, as you will be pointed exactly where you need to go by a short, snappy, memorable dotBrand url (www.contact.amazon or www.soul.kia). No website hierarchy and a direct route of navigation potentially means no Homepage doesn’t it? – a concept that all website users are currently familiar and comfortable with using and navigating. Obviously the immediate question raised in my mind, is around the interconnectivity of pages within the same dotBrand domain, and how users will find their way from one place to another if the navigational homepage is made redundant…? This may currently appear to be one step too far.

Now back to the process of registering for a dotBrand, as promised. There will be an initial 90 day registration period, after which the current schedule is that further registration for dotBrand domain names will be closed until 2016. That is a long way away! My initial fear on hearing this, coupled with the fact that each submission for a dotBrand domain name will cost a whopping $185,000 (please don’t gasp aloud as I did upon hearing this figure), is that all of a sudden the internet will become yet another landscape of have’s v’s have-not’s. For me the beauty of the internet is that it allows everyone an equal playing field – whether you’re a small start-up, or a big fish in the marketplace; equally it has allowed some amazing entrepreneurial successes that may never have got that first break had it not been for a unified global online space…

And let’s not brush over the $185,000 price-tag itself. What exactly are brands paying for? I’ll repeat that. What EXACTLY are brands paying for? And frankly, aren’t we simply saying to companies over a certain size and turnover ‘welcome to a brand new web’, and to all you others ‘goodluck’…

Whilst you read this, there will be more Top 100 companies publicly setting their stall out (to register or not to register, that is the question?), with the likes of Deloitte and Canon quickly announcing that they would be buying their respective dotBrand domain names. It would seem that there are therefore two options – dotBrand, or don’t. A third, slightly questionable, route is also being put out there by ICANN: register and then retreat. You register and essentially ‘reserve’ a domain name so others can’t get it, and then withdraw your application after the 90 day deadline. This would mean that between April 2012 and sometime in 2016 no-one else would be able to get your dotBrand domain name, however it would also cost you $55,500 for the privilege (30% of the original fee would be retained)…

I guess we shall just have to wait and wonder…