After meeting with the Spiderdash team, it felt like a great match since we both have the same visions and beliefs about brands and their future challenges in the new world of socially empowered customers. Their hands-on knowledge of marketing in larger organisations combined with our expertise in interface design and technology complement each other perfectly.

Stay tuned for more news. And by the way – we’re hiring.

Hello Future Social Club

A little summary from January’s Hello Future Social Club. We gathered 12 clients and partners in our office for a discussion night about “State of the internet 2012″. Three hours of food, drinks and discussions.

We talked about two main themes that we see in 2012.
1) Internet Everywhere
2) Social Media is Dead

Internet Everywhere:
The boom of mobile phones, tablets, wearable technology (watches, bracelets, glasses), connected devices in the home (TV, fridge), internet connected travel (car, bus, train, airplane). We are definitely heading for the Internet of Things (but that might take another year or two). How does all this affect our behaviour, design methods and technology?

Behaviour: Life and work becomes more intertwined as people bring their own devices to work. People are getting used to beautiful user interfaces and pleasant user experiences. That spills over to business use and enterprise solutions as well. Mobile phones are used evenly all day, computers are used mostly business hours and tablet usage is high in mornings and late at night. E-commerce christmas 2011 grew approximately 20% compared to 2010 and mobile share of that grew by almost 120% according to IBM Coremetrics.

Design: Screen sizes, resolutions, formats… Internet Everywhere is very demanding for designers. They have to think about coherence on different screens, multiscreen patterns, screen sizes on android devices and so on. Responsive Design is starting to happen. Also the Mobile First movement is catching on.

Tech: HTML5 and hybrid apps could be a great way forward. Think API:s for everything!

Social Media is Dead:
We see more and more early adopters “quitting” or taking a break from Social Media. This is not because social media is dying, it’s because we’re finally focusing on using it as a tool, rather than talking about using it as a tool. Social is a feature, not a platform. Think where social can add value between you and your audience in your existing services and products. Examples: Social in disaster information and social in gaming.

That’s a brief summary of the things we discussed. Big thanks to all our friends, clients and partners who joined us for a wonderful night of inspirational discussions.

Stay tuned for the next Hello Future Social Club!

We did a little christmas movie this year as well together with Paulina and Cliff from Fotograf Paulina.
Hope you’ll like it ;-)

Elin, Leif and I visited Umeå Institute of Design this weekend to listen to some interesting speakers talking about everything from bomb disarming game experiments (?) to open hardware and co-creation.

The best insights came from Russell Davies, head of planning at R/GA London, who talked about what will happen when we put computing power into real-world objects and the rising culture of hacking everyday things.

He predicts that we will see something that he calls the “Geocities of Things” – putting 3D printers and other cheap personalized manufacturing in the hands of “non-designers” will create new kind of “ugly” objects that designers will shrug at, but normal people will be happy with it because they made them themselves. Just like what happened on Geocities in the 90′s, which essentially was a large gallery of hideous websites ;)

What this will mean to manufacturers of household items, furnitures etc. is still unclear, but it’s an interesting trend that once again put the designers’ role in new light – will it be about creating more white shiny objects, or more about creating tools that empower normal people to become better designers?

But, unfortunately, this doesn’t mean you’re out of trouble now. There are quite a few things to check: Is the live server able to save the uploaded images? Are all crucial plug-ins activated? The right theme selected? The timezone set correctly? And – by the way – did the developer really work off all open todos in the custom theme?

The first step might be making a manual checklist which works very well, if you love doing this again and again. But I am a developer and when I do the same stuff several times the word “automation” arises quickly.

That’s why we decided to write the WordPress plug-in Hello Preflightcheck. It tests a lot of conditions as the examples given above and many more. It’s a bit like an automated version of the pilot’s routine before they start a flight. That’s where the plug-in got its name from. You can download it on the WordPress Plugin site and use it for your own projects.

The concept of Hello Preflightcheck is open: Every time you run into a problem you should add a test to prevent this problem in future projects. If you have written your own tests – and you should do that! – we’d love to add them to Hello Preflightcheck and to share them with the rest of the WordPress community.

And best of all – the website is showing real results. Almost a 400% increase in sales. That says it all.

This is a great example of how to use “Internet of Things” in toys and games to create new kinds of experiences. Many examples like this will follow the next couple of years.

Read more about the project.

I hope to try some of the amazing sipping rums from the Caribbean while I’m there, but there’s not much time outside the official program, so we’ll see…