Inspiration - Smashing Magazine How JavaScript will lead the way to open video Editor’s note: This story is part of our Microsoft-sponsored series on cutting-edge innovation. Shay David is the vice president of business and community development at Kaltura, a company offering video tools for publishers. The “open Web”, a vision for the future of the Internet that is participatory, collaborative, and free from vendor lock-in is finally coming to fruition. Following Mozilla Firefox’s successful wedge of open Web standards into the browser platform, today we see every browser vendor and every web-enabled device gravitating towards supporting a vendor-neutral platform for rich media web experiences. Like many contentious agreements, the devil is in the details — and there are a lot of details. Businesses looking to take advantage of the promise of a single platform to deliver rich web experiences should also be looking towards middle layer solutions to help bridge the small gaps in rich media implementations. However, HTML5 requires a transition period.
Designing Memorable Websites: Showcase of Creative Designs - Smashing Magazine Advertisement One of the main goals of having a website, whether it be a portfolio website or a business website, is to declare your presence on the Web. There are thousands upon thousands of websites out there; it’s pretty well established that you are competing for your audience’s interest and attention. There are many things happening in web design today. In responsive web design, as described in Ethan Marcotte’s article, fluid grids, flexible images, and CSS media queries are used to create more adaptive layouts and hence more elegant user experiences. We also see a rising popularity of soft :hover and :active/:focus-effects, where buttons, navigation items and links feel more responsive and engaging as well. How To Design A Memorable Website? Make use of original and unique graphics. Let’s now take a look at some recent examples of striking, memorable designs. Zinguh! Modern Minimalism and Cool Green Accents United Pixelworkers Pixelly Images: A Visual Pun! Outback Creative Studio
NOTCOT.ORG The State Of Web Development Ripped Apart In 25 Tweets By One Ma There are few people who know the ins and outs of the web as well as Joe Hewitt. For the past decade, he’s had his hands deep in everything from Netscape, to AOL, to Firefox, to Facebook (where he currently works). Hewitt also knows a thing or two about the iPhone. Following Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ post about Flash this morning, Hewitt went on Twitter and started going off with some of this thoughts. Redirect your hatred of Flash to the W3C, whose embarrassingly slow pace forced devs to use a plugin because the standards were so weak.Also, I am looking at you, developers who bitch whenever a browser offers “non-standard” but innovative APIs.Browser makers need to go nuts with non-standard APIs and let the W3C standardize later. So basically, Hewitt’s take is that Flash (and all plug-ins) only exists because the W3C (the governing body for web standards) is too slow to formalize and approve innovative new technologies. The core of Hewitt’s argument. An interesting point.
38 Mobile (iPhone) Sites As you may probably know mobile design is getting more and more popular, particularly the iPhone design. Almost every popular website or web app offers a mobile version now. In this post, I've collected a list of 38 nicely designed sites (ranging from personal, blog, portoflio, editoral, web app, etc.) that are optimized for iPhone. I hope this list will come in handy when you need to design a mobile site for yourself or clients. Now have you iPhone ready and enjoy the list. Nclud Mail Chimp iA Viget Labs Tabo Bell Element Fusion Snook Coosh Smashing Magazine A List Apart Procab Studio McDonald Victoria's Secret Ars Walmart
Sci-fi illustrations by Shigeru Komatsuzaki ::: Pink Tentacle Here is a collection of sci-fi illustrations by the prolific Shigeru Komatsuzaki (1915-2001), whose fantastic work appeared on plastic model kit boxes and in magazines and picture books in the 1960s to 1970s. Click the "+" under each image for a larger view. The Missiler, 1970 [+] Giant Shocker Machine, 1975 [+] Space colony, 1980 [+] Crawler, 1968 [+] Mobile marine airport, 1980 [+] Tokyo volcano, ca. 1965 Attack Boy, 1970 [+] Undersea super tunnel, 1981 [+] SHADO-mobile, ca. 1970 [+] UFO, ca. 1970 [+] Solar City, 1982 [+] Thunderbird 1, 1964 [+] Thunderbird 2, 1964 [+] Thunderbird 3, 1964 [+] Thunderbird ships, 1964 [+] Rikishi Boy, 1970 [+] Frog car boat, 1961 [+] Baron car boat, 1961 [+] Highway rescue boat, 1981 [+] Space train, 1981 Moon bus [+] Air car [+] HariHari, 1970 [+] Sea monster battle, 1954 [+] The Mole (Jet-Mogura Tank), 1968 [+] Thunderbird 6 - Sky-Ship 1, 1968 [+] Thunderbird Mars Explorer - Zero X, 1967 [+] Proteus Bluebird CN7, 1963 [+] Long John - Spirit of America, 1963 [+]
A TC Teardown: What Makes Groupon Tick Editor’s note: Group buying sites are growing like mushrooms. In this teardown, guest author Steven Carpenter goes through a detailed teardown of the largest social commerce site, Groupon, and its competitors to see what exactly is going on here. Carpenter was the founder and CEO of Cake Financial, a TechCrunch40 Finalist that developed a service for mainstream investors to manage their investments, which was sold to E*Trade earlier this year. Before Cake, Steve worked in digital music managing strategy and the day-to-day operations for Rhapsody. Much has been written about the rapid growth and success of Chicago-based local daily deal company, Groupon. The Teardown To find out, I did a teardown of Groupon’s business with data available on its website over the most recent quarter, compared my findings to what I calculated for the final three months of 2009, and then looked at how all of this compares to the top competitors. How Groupon Makes Money Traffic What Are People Buying?
69 Sexy Portfolio Designs To Inspire You - Smashing Magazine Advertisement Today designing a unique, compelling portfolio has become a crucial task for designers, studios, companies and everyone whose business is on the Web. Not only does it help one stand out among the numerous competitors, but it is also a great tool for self-expression and demonstration of skills. Now designers face new challenges in attracting the capricious web audience – a plain web page with a project list on it is out of date and boring, while fancy Flash websites with intricate navigation are annoying. Fortunately, despite all difficulties beautiful and artistic designs are appearing in an endless stream. In this post you can see a collection of 69 new, ingenious and beautiful portfolio designs that will hopefully become a decent inspiration source for you. 69 Exquisite Portfolio Website Designs This By Them1 The portfolio of This By Them is done in cool retro style. Carlos Cabrera3 This design successfully combines features of portfolio and online store. Alt Design5 DaZa14
The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world. So, over the past few months I’ve been talking to tons of entrepreneurs about the tools that curators actually need and I’ve identified seven things. First, who does curation? Bloggers, of course, but blogging is curation for Web 1.0. Look at this post here, I can link to Tweets, and point out good ones, right? But NONE of the real time tools/systems like Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, give curators the tools that they need to do their work efficiently. As you read these things they were ordered (curated) in this order for a reason. This is a guide for how we can build “info molecules” that have a lot more value than the atomic world we live in now. A curator is an information chemist. 1. 2. 3. 4.
The Age of the Mobile Mash-Up By Lars Erik Holmquist of the Mobile Life Centre, Kista, Sweden The rate of innovation in mobile services is just about to take a quantum leap. We are going from a divergent and messy ecosystem, where every new concept has to be made into a specialized ”app” that works only on a small sub-set of mobile handsets (even the mighty iPhone only has around 3% of the global mobile phone market), to an environment much more like the web. Today, new services can easily be composed out of existing components and run on a common platform – the browser. We are entering an age where the creation of a new mobile service – taking advantage of such features as the user’s location, social network, personal data, and even phone-specific functions such as the camera and accelerometer – can be mashed-up and put on-line just as easily as Web 2.0 services have been for several years already. So what does this mean? Today, of course, we could have done the same as an app and reached many more users.
chris dixon's blog / The problem with online “local” businesses One of the most popular areas for startups today is “local.” I probably see a couple of business plans a week that involve local search, local news, local online advertising, etc. Here’s the biggest challenge with local. The problem is that, for the most part, these local business either don’t think of the web as an important medium or don’t understand how to use it. People who have been successful monetizing local have done it with outbound call centers. To add insult to injury, local businesses often have very high churn rates. Hopefully this will change in time as local businesses come to see the web as a critical advertising medium and understand how to make it work for them. * This is what I hear from industry sources.
Deep Packet Inspection Circles Back for a Second Look: Tech News « Deep packet inspection, a creepy and invasive targeting technology, is looking to make a comeback, this time armed with opt-in consent and incentives for users. The technology, which involves scanning data packets for information on where they come from and what they contain, fell out of favor a few years ago following consumer uproar and congressional hearings, after ISPs tried to use it to target subscribers with ads based on where consumers surfed online. But the Wall Street Journal says two major operators – Kindsight and Phorm – are ramping up their efforts, working with Internet service providers to deploy the technology. Kindsight, which is owned by Alcatel-Lucent SA, said six ISPs in the U.S., Canada and Europe are testing its service though no ad targeting is underway. Phorm, which touched off a firestorm in Britain, is actively working the market in Brazil, where it’s signed deals with two ISPs and is looking to expand to the U.S. and South Korea.
Stowe Boyd • Pilcrows And Flows: The Fragmentation Of Media In A Web Of Flow A pilcrow is a typographic term for the paragraph marker that many publishers use, such as the New York Times. It looks like this: ‘¶’. This has come into recent prominence since the NY Times has implemented anchors on every paragraph of its news stories, so that every paragraph has a distinct URL. To access the URL you can double tap the shift key when viewing a NY Times page in a browser, and pilcrows appear at the head of every paragraph, serving as the place to copy the paragraph specific URL. This allows a simple way to direct someone to a specific paragraph in a news story, instead of qualifying a URL to the story’s page by saying ‘3/4ths down the page, he writes…’. This techniques is also called Winerlinks by some in recognition of Dave Winer’s use of these anchors, and the NY Times is referring to them as Deep Links. Here’s one: Or one that highlights a specific sentence in a specific paragraph: