Did you know that these existed? Well, now you do. And that, unfortunately, is something that you can’t un-know. Make sure to tell Benj thanks for bringing it to our attention (and @colinharman for bringing it to his).

Sonic Water, by Sven Meyer & Kim Pörksen, is an art installation that explores cymatics (or the study of vibration). What you see in the video below is the water inside a bottle cap as it responds to music being played close by. Jade found the surprising beauty in this simple concept fascinating.

John digs the in app animation of National Geographic’s new product “City Guides”.

Bonus Favorites:

This one is sure to put a smile on your face.

And last, but by no means least. Fellow ATLians- it is now safe to turn your radio on again. If you don’t already know, we finally have an alternative. Please welcome Radio 105.7. *and everyone stood to clap while wiping away tears of sheer joy*

The post Friday Favorites 5/24 appeared first on eyespeak.

The marketplace is full of a lot of positive energy right now.

I love this energy and conversation. Our scoreboard changed the life of our business when we adapted this mind-set a few years ago. It can be used for a lot of efforts—cultural alignment, accountability, competition and more—but it is important to understand the difference between a dashboard and a scoreboard.

A dashboard gives you quick insight into a dataset to tell you what’s been done or what is going on. It may show some real-time data points, but these are often trailing indicators of what has happened.

A scoreboard can do all of that, but most importantly it answers the question, “Are we winning?”. A scoreboard is focused on leading indicators. Are we individually and collectively doing the actions that will create a win? What will it take for us to win?

Maybe it is semantics.  Maybe it is a slight change in perspective. How can you leverage the power of a scoreboard to let your team know if they are individually and corporately “winning.”

Our generation grew up playing games, sports, and competing at anything where there was a prize. (We didn’t get trophies for showing up.) As leaders we need to do a better job creating feedback loops that reinforce our desire to win.

The post Scoreboards > Dashboards…or “Are We Winning?” appeared first on eyespeak.

As of yesterday, Yahoo! confirmed the rumors of acquiring the microblogging site Tumblr in a $1.1 billion deal.  This is in attempt for the internet corporation to tap into a younger audience and have more of a presence in the ever-growing world of social media.

The rumors of this merge have been going around since Thursday and it has brought a considerable amount of worry to Tumblr fans.

Mostly the worry is centered around the fact that Yahoo! is, well, pretty bad.  Especially when it comes to buying other companies.

Tumblr CEO, David Karp, ensures that this isn’t the end for his company and that their mission “to empower creators to make their best work and get it front of an audience” will stay intact.  Marissa Mayer of Yahoo!, on the other hand, simply added that, “We won’t screw it up.”

The deal assures that Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business and this is simply a chance for Yahoo! to monetize Tumblr in a way that is “meaningful to the user experience”.

What will be interesting is to see if this deal has any affect on the Tumblr brand, which is known for it’s anti-corporate appearance.  There is a resounding claim that that won’t happen, but what do you think?  Is this the end for Tumblr or a launchpad for them to become bigger and better than what they are?

The post Yahoo! Might Try and Ruin the Internet, Again. appeared first on eyespeak.

As a born and bred Atlantan, there is a lot I love about this city. Outside of my preferences, at eyespeak we love all our clients, but ideally our clients are in Atlanta as well. Our process is best executed with client facetime and in-person meetings.

But why else do we work (and love to work) here?

• It’s the USA’s 9th largest city.
• Atlanta was ranked #8 in the country for the highest number of start-up acquisitions in 2012.
• According to the AngelList website, which tracks start-ups, there are 363 tech start-ups operating in the Atlanta area.
• Atlanta ranks fourth in the number of Fortune 500 companies headquartered within city boundaries, only behind New York City, Houston, and Dallas.
• The National Venture Capital Association puts Atlanta as the No. 12 city in the nation for tech start-ups, with 54 start-ups funded in 2012.
• Between 2000 and 2006, Atlanta’s population grew by 20.5 percent, making it the fastest-growing urban area in the country.
• Georgia hosts at least 13,000 technology companies—including AT&T Mobility, CNN and Damballa Inc.—employing 250,000 tech workers, according to Sam Williams, president of the Metro Atlanta Chamber.
• Over 75% of the Fortune 1000 companies have a presence in the Atlanta area.

As you can see, Atlanta is booming. While we do work with many “tech” companies, we serve a lot of other industries as well and love the variety Atlanta provides us. We love start-ups and love the growth and excitement behind them in this city.

(Plus, we have amazing food, entertainment, sports, and landmarks. If only traffic would move a little faster.)

Why is your business in Atlanta?

The post Why We Work in Atlanta appeared first on eyespeak.

While searching the internet for material for his man-crush Pinterest board, John came across a collection of some pretty comical Vines. The theme.. Ryan Gosling refusing cereal. This is art, people.

This is a video of the completion of One World Trade Center. Really neat view and such a cool moment to get to see. Sarah shares:

Whitney’s fave is that the Paragon team (including Benj’s wife, Erica) is currently competing in the CrossFit Southeast Regionals. Go, Erica!

And last but certainly not least… our ultimate favorite this week is that Lars is officially a dad! Huge congratulations to him and Beth.

The post Friday Favorites 5/17 appeared first on eyespeak.

What is responsive?

A responsive website is a single website that displays differently depending on the user’s device.  For example, the site would display and navigate differently on your phone than it would on your desktop computer.  There are generally three site views for a responsive site—desktop, tablet and mobile—with the dimensions of the iPad/iPhone being the standard for the latter two.

Why should I care?

Web traffic is going mobile, this is not news.  Why should I care about responsive for my business?

• Traffic—Currently mobile traffic is estimated to be in the 25 to 30% range or one out of every three or four visitors to your site.

• User experience—Not only do you want traffic on your site, you want them to stay and become engaged.  Traditional sites don’t optimize the attributes of mobile devices.

• Single CMS—The responsive approach to solving the mobile landscape enables you to manage content in a single place vs. multiple locations for a desktop site, mobile site, and multiple native applications such as Android and iOS.

• Cost—Responsive addresses the mobile landscape without building costly native applications when they aren’t needed.

• Relevance—A responsive site will simply make your organization look good.

For fun:  you can visit http://ami.responsivedesign.is/ and see a (rough) approximation of what your site could look and function like if it were responsive.  Just enter link to your site in the URL box and go.  You can even click the links within the four devices and navigate around your responsive site.  This is not a perfect tool, but will help you get the idea behind responsive design pretty quickly. You can also see one in action that we’ve developed for RZIM here.

The post What is Responsive and Why Should I Care? appeared first on eyespeak.

I’m back to answer more of your questions.
This time it is, “Why don’t you have a phone number on your website?”

The answer is simple. We don’t have phones in our office. No landlines. No conference call systems. No voicemail. No fancy hold music. It became a waste…mostly good for people cold-calling us to sell us advertising in the phone book. (What is that?)

We found that most people called our cell phones. If you are a client, you have that access. If you aren’t a client, chances are you found us via a client that has our phone numbers, and if not there is always the contact form on our website that we are very responsive to. Our goal is to only have things that drive value directly to our clients and employees. Having an office phone didn’t fit that filter.

The post Where is Your Office Phone Number? appeared first on eyespeak.

Jamie thinks this little deal is pretty cool. IBM just made the world’s smallest video by moving atoms around.

It’s almost no one’s favorite season: bathing suit. Jade shares some hilarity from the always funny Ellen.

Benj is digging this new Land Rover ad. Probably mostly because he wishes that he were in it.

Summit Series just bought the largest ski resort in the US. Ansley thinks this story is fascinating and possibly very telling of the next generation of business leaders.

Dillan‘s favorite video on the internet:

The post Friday Favorites 5/10 appeared first on eyespeak.

I’m stupid-blessed by the folks I get to work with every day. They are some of the funniest, kindest, coolest people that I know. And the combination is nothing short of rare. On top of that, the culture in which we get to work magnifies the value of our relationships with each other. For example, last Monday during a weekly meeting we call SHIFT, we split into two groups—the fellas and the ladies—and got real with each other. We shared with each other our current struggles and fleshed them out as a group. After everyone shared, we prayed for each other individually.

As an introvert and a generally private person, the idea of this didn’t sit well with me as we began to dive into the process. Even as I was sharing, it was difficult revealing and explaining my vices because of both my pride and the feeling that no one else really cares to hear about the junk in my life.

I can’t deny the emotion that I felt as transparency circled the room. Trust was strengthened, and individual respect grew inside of me as our collective burdens were laid out and opened up on our conference room table.

I realize that this can’t happen everywhere. And the faith piece of our culture is certainly not found in too many other organizations. But I would challenge those of you who lead to attempt at least a portion of this within your team. You, of course, know much more about what will and won’t work or what is and isn’t safe in the context of your company. But if you are interested in solidifying healthy and understanding relationships, skin is going to need to be pulled back a bit. Don’t fear the awkwardness or what you assume your team will think about the idea. Take it from a person who is much more akin to a vault than an open book: I can tell you that everyone secretly desires the opportunity to be known by people they spend so much of their lives with.

Again, take it or leave it. These are simply my two cents.

The post Putting the Junk on the Table appeared first on eyespeak.

One of the awesome benefits to starting/running a business in current times is the ability to purchase products on a SaaS basis to manage systems, process and communication.

A few people have asked about our SaaS-Stack lately, so here is a list of our products we use…

Email/Cal/Docs // Google Apps: http://www.google.com/a

Accounting // Quickbooks Online: http://quickbooks.intuit.com/online/

Project Management // Basecamp: http://basecamp.com/

Priority Management // Workstack: https://www.workstack.me/

CRM // Nutshell: http://www.nutshell.com/

Proposals // Proposable: https://www.proposable.com/

Wireframes // Balsamiq: https://www.mybalsamiq.com/

Production // Creative Cloud: https://creative.adobe.com/

Tunes // Pandora One: http://www.pandora.com/one

These are not all perfect (some far from it), we even have some designs for a few of our own products if we can get to them.

The post SaaS Attack appeared first on eyespeak.