Blenderbox is thrilled to announce this year’s W3 honors — two Gold awards in the Tourism and Homepage categories for Downtown Brooklyn Partnership’s “It’s the Moment” campaign site, and one Gold award in the Beauty and Cosmetics category for the Renée Rouleau Skin Care site!
This awards cycle received nearly 3,000 entries from ad and interactive agencies, in‐house creative professionals, web and graphic designers, and other web enthusiasts, and less than 10% of all entries were selected as Gold Winners. We are truly honored to be counted among these highly talented agencies.
“We were incredibly impressed by the quality and creativity of this year’s entries. W3 winners continue to set the bar in Web development and design, push the limits of web advertising creativity and advance the use of web video. We are thrilled to have reviewed such a diverse and respected pool of work” said Linda Day, the executive director of the IAVA. “On behalf of the entire Academy, we congratulate this year’s W3 Award winners as they continue to advance Internet creativity and greatly contribute to the robust and ever-changing online community.”
I am in the process of reading Socialnomics by Eirk Qualman. His books talk about how social media transforms the way we live, the business we do and the world we live in. In Chapter 4, Social-Media = Braggadocian Behavior, he talks about how social media is changing the way people date.
If we take a look at dating over the last 10 years, people use to give out their home phone number. Then people started giving out their e-mail address instead, which led to cell phones and text messages. Today people just ask “Are you on Facebook, hi5, or Linked In?” or another social media network.
Qualman goes on to say, “[Today] the first date is more like a fourth date, you aren’t asking questions like, ‘Where did you go to college?’ or ‘What are your hobbies?’” Common friends, photos along with what you do, and who you work for all provide insight into their personality. “It makes you feel more secure knowing that the other person isn’t a lunatic.” He later states that:
1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S last year met via social media
Some say that social media is a fad, others say that is revolutionizing society. Check out this video, Social Media Revolution, to find more facts from Qualman to form your own opinion. Whatever social media is, it is definitely interesting to say the least…
I started working at Blenderbox a couple months ago. Yet, it is only recently that people have started to ask me, “What is the best thing about your new job?” This seems rather ironic to me, as I knew the answer before I even began at Blenderbox.
I moved across the country to work here. I had never lived in the New York area before, and had no idea if I wanted to live in Brooklyn, Manhattan or somewhere in the neighboring New Jersey cities. Before I had even met anyone at Blenderbox, they were sending me apartment listing with descriptions of the neighborhoods, and writing to me what it was like in their neighborhood. It is the people I work with and company culture that are best parts.
Empire magazine is celebrating their 20th anniversary with a pretty cool flash based application. I have seen similar things like this before, but this in particular is very well executed. Try to find all 50 movies hidden within this painting
With our recent office move, it’s opened up a completely new world of store exploration options.
Ahem, in today’s special episode of “Connie goes out for lunch” –
* Beautiful day outside, 72 degrees & lots of fluffy cloud cover
* Quick phone call to my Mom after passing a bait & tackle store on Manhattan Ave
* When walking the aisles of the Polish “Dean & Deluca” style grocery store, the tension comes to a head with the decision between Polish corn curls and Polish corn springs. Both have an amazing graphic of a partially shucked ear of smiling corn. The ingredient list contains only corn meal. Vegan!
photo credit: Danielle McNamara
* The corn “springs” win! Eight servings! Per serving, 1 gram of protein & 31 calories!
* When you pull one end, the entire thing springs up and down! Tastes like Styrofoam!
* Back in the office, we learned that when placed in water, the corn springs floats and do not instantly expand. It expands SLOWLY in an “U” shape, as the middle on the bottom expands and the middle on the top remains tightly wound.
* The turtles were not interested in eating the pre-water soaked corn snacks.
End credits roll. Back to phone system wrangling and computer software license herding.
An in interview with O’Reilly, Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson had an excellent response to the obligatory twitter question. To paraphrase, he says that the kind of person that users the A is B, B is C, therefore A is C logic that “Twitter runs on Rails, Twitter Can’t Scale, so Rails can’t scale” simply illustrates their shallow level of technical knowledge.
Engine Yard has just closed a second round of funding for $15m, including contributions from Amazon, with the focus on increasing their hosting platform and community-driven open source projects. According to Ezra, “We’re going to use this money towards making Ruby the platform of choice for cloud computing and web development in startups and the enterprise alike.” Some of the exciting developments coming out of Engine Yard these days are the merb framework, which is a leaner/quicker Ruby framework insipired by Rails and Rubinius, a pure Ruby implementation of the Ruby virtual machine which aims to solve some of the current performance issues with Ruby. Perhaps most interesting is the yet to be unveiled Vertebra project that has been described as “a new application programming platform for building distributed cloud applications with XMPP”. Rails developers can sleep a bit easier knowing that EY has 80 employees and some of the smartest minds in the community cranking away on the remaining pain points in the Ruby platform (hosting, performance)
Recently it has been in the press that Apple has said they will not put the Flashplayer onto the iPod touch or the iPhone because they say the lite version isn’t good enough for the iPhone. Adobe then said they were going to make a player anyways using the newly released SDK, but quickly realized they couldn’t due to the extreme limitations of the SDK (more here).
At any rate, as the flash guy around here, I was not particularly surprised or thrilled at this news. On further reflection though, I realized the truth – what I am now calling the “Apple Flash Conspiracy.” There have been rumors of Netflix using the newest version of the Flashplayer (which supposedly has DRM capability built in) to start streaming their movies on Apple computers. Apple, now in the movie renting business, stands to lose potential business by allowing this to happen. If I can already watch movies using a subscription I’m already paying for, why rent from iTunes? If they can prevent it from happening on the iPod and iPhone, the better for them.
I realize this is most likely not what is happening, but it’s still something to think about.
A great PSA out of the UK about paying attention to cyclists. It’s an interesting lesson about focus and how it changes your view of the overall picture.
this is what happens when clients and vendors have a communication breakdown
Customer: ‘Yes, I would like to order a cake for a going away party this week.’
Employee: ‘Whatchu want on da cake?’
Customer: ‘Best Wishes Suzanne.’ And underneath that ‘We will miss you’.
