Blog

Umbraco - officially Certified Professionals

Expanding the horizon - and the business - took us to a "Certification Course" in the open-source Umbraco CMS framework. This means that we are now - officially - certified to create new exiting web services on this platform too ("Level 2 certification" to be exact).

The Umbraco software is a rock solid CMS based on the .Net framework. It allows for highly customized services and/or out-of-the-box awesome websites. Take your pick.
Editors, users and developers alike will have a great experience with a website that just delivers...   

Thus the palette of in-house Content Management Software has been expanded to include not only Synkron VIA CMS, Dynamicweb CMS but also Umbraco CMS.

Looking forward to deploying even more user-friendly websites in the future.

Adaptive Path - let us treat people like people

Ended our busy day at Adaptive Path. First and foremost they design the experiences customers have with all kinds of products and services, and then they assist their clients bringing those products and services to market. they do user interfaces, evolve product strategies and integrates customer experiences for all. In short they are experience design consultants.

Adaptive Path has 3 lines of business:
- Consulting (Redesign, mobile apps, kiosk etc.)
- Events (Conferences, training etc.)
- R&D (Concepts like Charmr and Aurora)

Consulting takes up most of their time and they basically handle the same type of tasks as we do at Mindlab with one exception; they do not code. And another thing - while we focus almost entirely on digital user experiences, Adaptive Path also does "offline" stuff like for example creating the in-store experience for a bicycle store.

Adaptive Path is well known for their events and training seminars and everyone with even remote interest in customer experience design should consider attending.

An area of focus for Adaptive Path in the years to come is R&D. They told us about their work with Charmr, and how it all began. They also teamed up with Mozilla Labs working on the concept browser Aurora. It's interesting how they manage to use the outcome of such projects in the daily interaction with their other clients.

Adaptive Path is all about communicating efficiently to and with people - or just treating people like people.

Google - the secret sushi palace

Arrived at Google in San Francisco to attend a meeting with Erica Hanson and Austin Lau both from Google National Agency Team.

Google is usually not that keen about sharing company information, but we had a really nice discussion with Erica and Austin. Among lots of other things they explained how Google made way for a paradigm shift - now the customer search for your products and not the other way around.

Studies made by Google indicates that nearly twice as many users look on niche sites than on portals. Niche sites also have higher conversion rates. Another study shows that the average person spend about 41 % of their time online but advertising spend is only 9.6 % - which means theres a gap between ad spend and media consumption.

Erica Hanson also gave us a more in-depth tour of both Google Insights for Search stand alone application and Google Trends. How they can be used for monitoring your competitors and much more.

By the way - the rumor about Goggles dining facilities is true. There is a choice of all kinds of foods such as Indian, Mediterranean, and Chinese. Even freshly prepared sushi. It's all free and open 24 hours a day. 

Omniture - or is it Adobiture?

Exciting meeting with Omniture today. Omniture is one of the giants within online business optimization. The online marketing tools from Omniture empowers marketers to maximise their marketing spend - based on customer interactions.

According to Omniture they are leading within social media measurement. They can integrate both Twitter and Facebook - YouTube is still in beta. Omniture predicts rapid growth within this area. Another area of focus for Omniture is the ability to track customer interactions on mobile devices.

Naturally, we also discussed Adobes very recent acquisition of Omniture. A surprise to most of the industry - also among the employees at Omniture. But why did Abobe buy a leading supplier of Web Analytics technology? They have very different business models: Adobe is traditional software and Omniture is SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). Adobes sells to creative types and Omniture to analytic types. Will Adobe convert to SaaS? - they have taken their first step with acrobat.com. How will Omniture be integrated with the rest of the Adobe suite?

An interesting acquisition between two major players within the web industry that raises a lot of questions. It could have quite an impact on how we design and develop websites in the future.

Total recall @ Xerox PARC

Attended the exiting event at Xerox PARC; "Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything", promoting the brand new book (of the same name) by the authors Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmel.

They gave us a brief look into the becoming of the book and the thoughts behind the MyLifeBits project.

In short, a number of people were rigged with personal life-logging devices -  "SenseCams" - which logged every minute of the carriers life in images, heartrates, audio files and geotags. This combined with software to log all e-mail correspondance, chats, physical letters, documents and whatnot, creates an all-engulfing life-log for the person carrying the device and using the software.

This means, that a person can recall everything he or she ever wrote, received, browsed on the web, as well as conversations had with every person they ever met.

This is all tech-stuff, and we are all moving in that direction I guess. Today it's an active choice, but I'm sure, that we will all, in time, create and store more and more of our everyday life automatically. The interesting part is the questions it gives rise to: "What should and can I do with it?", "Should I let my lawyer release it, when I die?", "What should I make public?", "How do I manage all this data?", "Is it useful at all?" and many more.

Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmel think it will change the world, and maybe in time, it will.

One thing is for sure, however: We have just scratched the surface of life-logging in terms of software, hardware, services and billions earned and spent fighting all the short-comings of the human mind.

Kapow - data migration made really simple

Had a lunch meeting with Stefan Andreasen, founder and CTO at Kapow Technologies. Would be nice if all lunch meetings were just as interesting.

Kapow Technologies has developed an application that gives you automated access to any data you see in a browser. But not only that - you can enrich and serve real-time, noise-free web data. The best part however is that no coding is required.

Well worth looking into before our next big migration project.

Facebook - no trespassing

We went to visit Facebook today and the meeting was arranged by Innovation Center Denmark. Getting into the offices at Facebook does not happen just every day, so we felt kind of special…at least for an hour or so.

Facebook employs around 1,200 people and are still growing rapidly. We had a guided tour by Shaun McIntyre who's in Software Engineering and Design. He specializes in relating business requirements to custom and existing software solutions. We can't really say that much about the tour becuase we had to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement, but the questions we had were answered ;o)

All in all we are happy to finally have met some of the faces behind Facebook.

Chris Anderson - Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Tonight we attended a very exciting lecture/discussion at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The speaker was Chris Anderson, Editor-In-Chief of Wired Magazine, and author of the book "The long Tail".
He is now publishing (and promoting) his new book "Free: The Future of a Radical Price".

In an open debate he discusses the emergence of a new economy, where giving software, music or services away for free, is the best way to start, position and capitalize your business.

Facebook, Google and artists like Prince are great examples of businesses using the power of many to make money, by giving stuff away for free. The most prominent player is Google, who gives away the best search-results for free. In return they get the opportunity to expose millions of users to advertisements. Prince gave away some 250,000 copies of his CD in the UK, to make sure, that every single concert would be completely sold out.

This concept is hard to grasp for many companies, boards, venture capitalists and CEO's, since it shakes up the traditional concept of advertisement and business development. The examples are many and reach far into the world of newspapers, magazines, the entertainment industry or (primarily) any business providing the customer with services that can be distributed digitally.

The bottom line of the debate was a wake up call for all of those, who haven't realized, that times have changed. If consumers want something for free they can get it. The question is - how can you profit from it?

Heroku - hardcore ruby-on-rails development

Among other things, today featured a visit to Morten Bagai - one of the guys behind heroku.com.

Heroku is, in short terms, an ultra configurable platform for developing and deploying ruby-on-rails-applications directly from git-repositiories. Heroku.com provides a highly configurable and dynamically scalable platform ranging from the size of your uncle's train-fetish-website to facebook-scale web-applications.

Currently more than 35,000 apps have been deployed with Heroku.

Even though Ruby development is not our main focus, when it comes to web-applications, a lot of the thoughts behind the ease of deployment are very likely to be transferable to the agile web-development method we are using.

Coremetrics - Evidence Based Marketing

Today's meeting was an eye-opener to the prospects of Evidence Based Marketing. Our host was Roslyn Layton, Director of Agency Services at Coremetrics.

Coremetrics along with Omniture, Unica and Google Analytics are the front-runners of Evidence Based Marketing. Evidence Based Marketing is just that: marketing budget spending, based on solid evidence!

Long tales could be written about the inner workings of Coremetrics' product suite. Martin Frederiksen has done this so eloquently in this blog-post (in danish), so I won't go into that here.

For B2C-costomers even in a small country like Denmark, the way the marketing budgets is spent, is about to change. Every dollar and krone spent is now (very close to) completely trackable.

This means, that no CEO, CMO, Art Director or Marketing Planner will ever have to go by his or her hunches again. When first implemented, the analytics, will tell you where to go to, at what time and most importantly: Why.

So: Marketing-bogus-over-billing-scoundrels: Your days are numbered!

Arriving in Palo Alto

Arrived in Palo Alto today with the guys from Klean, in our quest for network and enlightenment.

The nice people at Innovation Center Denmark has set up a number of meetings with people and corporations based in the Bay area, within our own and related fields of operation.

Another main contact is Andreas Ramos, partner and guru of "Evidence based marketing" at CCG.
Andreas co-wrote and recently published the book "Search Engine Marketing" along with Stephanie Cota, the CEO at CCG. A must-read for anyone taking their search engine marketing seriously.

Exciting times ahead :)

Small campaign site for the Danish Red Cross. In this case we didn't do the design, so Anders was working overtime. 29 places and a lot of real life stories - all told in front of the camera.

It was time for a partial redesign. We did the first design in 2007 and now Loyalty Factory needed to implement a massive amount of content. We basically based the design on sections, smoke and icons. Oh, and the MooTools js-library was used once again.

Product, products and even more products. A massive site and we haven't even scrathed the surface yet. The cool gents from Klean came to us with this superb project. CodeCompany and Webwize joined the team as well and in great companionship we launched a very nifty site with extensive use of Prototype and Scriptaculous. It's all based on Synkron Via CMS.

Rethinking the way a travel site works. What if the website only presented destinations of your liking - wouldn't that be nice? Well that's exactly what happens at Unitas Rejser. Once again a job well done in companionship with Klean.

Great products and great design. A perfect match. But they needed the website to go along with it. With Synkron Via CMS as the platform we provided both design and the technical stuff. Although launch was early 2007 it still sets the standard in the industry.