We’d like you to meet our new Producer/Video Editor, Erik Duda.

Erik worked as a multimedia specialist at the University of Connecticut where he produced, shot and edited video and multimedia projects for University Communications. His work included creating recruitment programs, marketing and news pieces.

He has extensive experience with non-linear editing, 2D and 3D graphic creation, shooting with a variety of HD camera formats, and video compression. And he sometimes even stars in his own work.

At Manning he’ll be responsible for video projects and integrating video into our digital interactive work. In his spare time Erik has a passion for stand-up comedy, guitar and playing ice hockey. Although he’s originally from Connecticut, he is not a Boston Bruins fan (so getting him to support the Blackhawks won’t be hard.)

We humans are social creatures that thrive on face to face interaction and communication.   Tom Erickson, interaction designer and researcher in the Social Computing Group at IBM’s Watson Labs defines social computing as providing an online place, application or service that have some of that “life” to them. 
His new report provides a though-provoking analysis of what is “social computing,” how does it differ from “social media,” and what is its impact on the way we work, live and play.

Erickson’s report and interview discussions provide insight for digital designers and developers like Manning, but also important ideas for those in online marketing and communications.  He likens digital designers to architects and urban planners who are creating public spaces to encourage people to interact, communicate, and live together.  He suggests that we look at online spaces in terms of the interaction they support and promote.

It’s a compelling analysis well worth the investment of time.

I’m not an absolute Apple fanatic (unlike other people at Manning) but we all today should be inspired by Steve Jobs. Char shared with me this article about an inspiring commencement speech Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005 encouraging student to find their passion and set out to do it — and you will never regret it for one day. Words of wisdom we should all continue to follow.

A New interactive  HTML5 app aims to convey personalized messages in the wake of Japan’s nuclear disaster.  Google Japan teamed up with a dance troupe Pilobolous and the band OK Go to create a video dance messenger that works in Chrome.

You should open the link in Chrome, but for your convenience here is a video version:

The programmed  choreography is truly amazing, as is the way the dancers spell out your personal message that your enter when you first launch the application.

I can only imagine the time and creativity that went into creating this. You can read more about the making of All is Not Lost – then try adding your own message to the global forum.

A Girl Story

“A Girl Story” is a unique new inspiration for a philanthropic campaign.  It’s based on a series of short animated YouTube clips that are seamlessly linked together.  The film series progressed scene by scene as donors made contributions to the Mahindra Foundation to help provide education to under-privileged girls.  This engagement is really an innovative alternative to the traditional passive video solicitation that non-profits have used in the past.

A new study demonstrates the rapidly increasing impact of smart phones on Internet browsing habits.  The Pew Research Center report shows that more than 40% of adult cell phone-users in America have a smart phone.  Surprisingly, a large number of these smart phone users prefer to go online using their smart phone rather than using a desktop or laptop computer.  25% report that their smart phone is their most common means of Internet access.

This growing trend will have a dramatic impact on online marketing strategies and the way web designers and developers build the next generation of web sites. Understanding how, when and why an end user surfs the Internet and engages with content is critically important to us, especially as smart phones become the web browsing platform of choice.

The legal profession has been turned upside down by changes in technology, new competition, globalization and the recent recession.  Firms have been forced to rethink their business model, to reevaluate their practice areas, provide alternatives to hourly billing and implement new technology, all of which are radically changing the way law is practiced. But many firm websites don’t reflect these changes – and remain the same static law firm brochure websites of 10 years ago.

We’ve spent a great deal of time looking at these sites in conjunction with the work we do for our law-related clients and are truly surprised by what we see. While there’s some variation from site to site, we observed five troubling practices with these brochure style sites. Continue Reading →

The worldwide smartphone market is expected to grow nearly 50% this year according to a report by IDC. The smartphone industry is growing faster than any segment of technology in history. Google predicts that half of all Internet traffic will be from mobile devices by 2013.

While we are seeing exponential growth in mobile technology, many web developers don’t take full advantage of the true potential of this market. It’s simply not enough to create a version of your current site that is based on mobile style sheets for different browsers. Our approach is to develop a new user experience model – to understand who your smartphone audience(s) is, what platforms they use, how they find your site, what information they want, and what action we want them to take. While there may be some crossover with desktop users, we believe there are significant differences that need to be considered when you develop for mobile platforms.

Mobile sites need to not only provide the best possible experience on handheld devices, they need to cater to an audience that is far more likely to be searching for content related to the local environment they’re in. It’s critical for us to be aware of emerging technologies such as QR codes, mobile augmented reality and Near Field Communication that give smartphone users the opportunity to engage with their environment in new and more meaningful ways.

With consumers expected to spend billions via mobile this year, it’s time to stop thinking of smartphones as an afterthought, and apply the same level of user experience research to mobile platform development that we do to desktop devices.

A while back (read: months) I happened across a very interesting survey done by Gomez, the web performance division of Compuware which focused on consumers shifting attitudes and usage of the web.

Specifically, the article I found talked about the general user’s increasing impatience with websites that are slow to load, bog down or are difficult to use. While this has been anecdotally discussed amongst folks in the web industry for years, it’s nice to finally have numbers that back up this feeling.

However, users’ ire with slow or difficult sites isn’t the part of the survey that I want to hold up for examination in this post. The second half of the Gomez survey has dedicated to the growing mobile market and users’ evolving attitudes to web access on mobile devices.

Continue Reading →

Heads up–this post is exceedingly boring and more than a little technical.

But at least the data loss was not as bad as it sounds. I recently had one large RAID 5 NAS (network-attached storage) array lose its partition table and wind up in a pre-format, factory default situation. With sufficient redundancy built into the system, it would have been easy enough to reinitialize the RAID, reformat the drives, and re-copy the data.  But that wouldn’t be much of a learning experience, really…

Continue Reading →