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As I sit here and write this post, it’s been a crazy week in the digital world. Come to think of it, it’s been a crazy month…a crazy summer…a crazy year…ahhh, I digress.

As I’m sure you’re aware (I make that assumption because you are reading this blog), Facebook announced and released “Places” this week — yesterday, actually. If you follow the industry at all, this has been a long time coming. Nevertheless, this is facebook’s entrance cannonball (from the high-dive) into the location space.

I’ve already heard all kinds of things about how “this is going to kill foursquare” and “Yelp’s in trouble” and…blah blah blah, but that’s not what I want to write about.

Foursquare is growing like a weed to the tune of roughly three million users. Gowalla is the consensus #2 player in the industry, and they’re just under 400,000 users. Despite some great national partnerships on both counts, neither has really reached mainstream in terms of awareness, let alone acceptance.

So…here’s the thing:

Facebook is in a place unlike anyone before them. Facebook isn’t a search giant like Google and they’re not a shopping giant like Amazon. Rather, Facebook is a one-stop destination for its visitors to consume what they want to consume and interact with whom they want to interact. More than that, Facebook is a change agent:

Facebook is well on it’s way to well over $1.2 billion (BILLION…that’s nine zeros) in revenue. They are in such a strong position that they acquire whole companies just for their talent — Facebook is assembling the most diverse, forward thinking, intelligent team imaginable. You’re not a success when you’re on facebook’s radar…because EVERYONE is on their radar. There hasn’t been a startup making noise of any kind in the last 24 months that Facebook hasn’t been aware of. That said, it’s fair to say that you’ve made it when Facebook implements your core functionality into their own product.

First, Twitter knew they “made it” when Facebook implemented the News Feed, “@” mentions and all.
Then, Aardvark and Quora knew they “made it” when Facebook announced Questions.
and now…foursquare know’s they’ve “made it” because Facebook has announced Places.

I don’t say those things to badmouth Facebook — I say those things in awe of Facebook. I marvel at their agility. They’re not set in their ways, they’re not afraid to fail, and they’ve got more money than they could EVER spend and they can pivot on a dime — all the while maintaining commitment to an overarching vision and a dedication to their culture.

Up until this week, they’ve only been on the web. As of yesterday, with the announcement of places, they’re in the real world. They’ve taken a market with unlimited potential, validated by both success and competition of players like Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt, and they’ve shifted the paradigm. It wasn’t but two weeks ago that I published this tweet, and the ability of facebook to expose emerging trends to an enormous audience is exactly why. Facebook, and this is part of the reason I’m in awe of them, continually pushes the envelope, bringing new trends (what’s next) to the mainstream…to mass audiences…exponentially faster than anyone else could dream of.

I’ve tried and tried to get my “non-digital” friends to use fourquare and/or gowalla for the last eighteen monts and I’ve received nothing but ridicule in return and so i realize that, sometimes, no matter how great the reason, people are just too set in their ways to adopt change — unless, of course, you force them to.

For that, I simply say…Thanks, Facebook. I don’t care what anyone else says about you, I think you’re doing great things.

In this day and age we hear a lot about ‘personalization’. The concept is prevalent in areas such as healthcare, retail, banking and financing programs, and digital identities on social networks. Data translates to individual profiles and treatment that drill down to me, my preferences and my tendencies.

When The Ohio State Medical Center talked to us about ProjectOne – the 1 billion dollar initiative that will realize state-of-the-art facilities, environmental preservation efforts, thousands of jobs and advances in medicine that will change the face of prevention and treatment – we heard a lot of numbers. Those numbers were phenomenal, exciting and impressive. However, we knew the core of ProjectOne was the people the project will enable and serve at the Med Center, in the community, and the economy. ProjectOne will ultimately be the sum-total of effort, dollars, energy and visions shared and contributed by people.

So, we set to work developing a campaign and an experience for the official groundbreaking to surface the people who will build, grow and be served by ProjectOne.

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The solution needed to be utilitarian. We had functional goals to accomplish. It also needed to coincide in vision and experience with the gravity and future-orientation of ProjectOne. Truly, ProjectOne is helping evolve The Ohio State University from excellence to eminence.

Visit the ProjectOne website to learn about the vitals, to donate and to keep up on progress.

The design showcases the physical representation of the project – renderings of the incredible facilities that will be a reality in the coming years. It utilizes visual RNA blot test results as inspiration to house the fundamental building blocks of ProjectOne: One University, The Future of Medicine, Economic Impact, Community Impact and The Environment.

Click into one of the pillars and see the stream of stories. What makes ProjectOne a success is the personal ownership held by the OSUMC, Columbus and medical communities. The initiative will create jobs and enhance what is already one of the top academic medical centers in the world. However, without people, buildings, laboratories, beds and offices are only spaces and objects. The website acts as a sort of digital time capsule: gathering stories at the groundbreaking and in the months to come which will guide the project and lay the foundation for the future.

To capture these stories, we built an iPad application and installed it on a group of iPads. These iPads made their debut during the groundbreaking event on June 18th. They visit events, meetings and satellite facilities at OSUMC. They make guest appearances in cafeterias, in hallways and parking garages. The app allows people to tell their stories, share their vision and state their expectations for ProjectOne. The stories are collected in a web-based administrative area where OSUMC staff can review and push them live to the website. The stories can be read and shared as they collectively benchmark and articulate the excitement and dedication so many people have to the Future of Medicine and an initiative that will benefit communities in so many ways.

The combination of modern devices, software and experience has allowed the OSUMC staff and community to ensure that the single largest project in Ohio State University history begins and is infused with people.

If you’re around the medical center, keep an eye out for iPads. Pick one up and share your vision for how this endeavor will impact you and your community.

If you won’t be near one of the iPads, hop over to ProjectOne.osu.edu and click ‘Share Your Story‘ on the homepage. Use the site to be a part of this amazing story.

In an always-on, broadband-prevalent digital world shaped by the likes of YouTube, video on the web is commonplace. We interact with video in its various online varieties everyday. However, before the end-user can experience the video it must be sent to them in one of many digital formats using a specific delivery methods. How this happens is currently evolving in order to provide the best quality video to the most people with the least effort.

Whether the delivery method is live streaming, on-demand streaming, or canned progressive download, there has traditionally been a wide array of formats in which the video can be encoded, each with a different browser/OS/platform for which they were designed. For example, Windows Media Player works best in, you guessed it, Windows.

Flash Video Content

For a long time, web types had been looking for that single format that will readily play a quality video to all web users independent of browser or platform. Enter Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash and the Flash Video Format (FLV). The Flash plugin, love it or hate it, is running on 99% of internet browsing desktop computers. This incredible penetration effectively solves the accessibility problem as sites such as YouTube can serve up video in FLV format and be confident that nearly all internet users can easily view it. Today, Flash remains the best solution due to its high level of compatibility as well as its ability to handle high quality videos.

HTML5 Video

The HTML5 Specification, which defines the future of in-browser web technologies, introduces a native video tag that will allow for easy delivery of video content. Moving forward this is the way to go as it works towards every goal of web video usability. The quality of video with HTML5 video is unmatched as it uses newest video formats and the latest in compression technology. Implementation calls for the least effort — it is as simple as dropping in a simple HTML tag. No more building a player and figuring out how to embed it into a page. This aides web developers certainly, but also the web content editor as a Content Management System will be more capable of handling video. Finally, because it is a web standard rather than relying on a plugin, it will have support across platforms and devices. This means videos will be served on mobile devices such as cell phones and tablets that do not support certain plugins (read: iPhone and iPad).

The Future of Video

The future of video will use the HTML5 video spec exclusively, but it won’t happen overnight. The solution will be excellent for content providers, web developers and web consumers alike, but the journey there will not be easy. Many things must happen first.

1. Browsers need to evolve: the support for HTML5 is growing, the latest versions of  Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox all support some form or another of the <video> tag. The nightly builds of IE9 also provide support for HTML5 video. But, the compatibility needs to continue to increase.

2. Old browsers must be phased out. It doesn’t matter how advanced new browsers become if they don’t get widespread adoption. Flash has been such a boon to internet video because of its 99% market penetration. If people still use old browsers the compatibility issues will continue.

3. A single video format must prevail. We are almost seeing a small step backward in terms of video encoding. Presently, there are three common HTML5 video formats (OGG, MP4, and WebM), one of these must prevail (or at least gain support from all major browsers) if HTML5 video is to succeed.

Either way, it is exciting to think of a web where video is as simple to implement as a static image.

Examples and Resources

Several major players are already experimenting with HTML5 video. We’ve been playing around with HTML5 video a little bit ourselves, but presently there are many hoops to jump through to keep the video playing correctly in all browsers with HTML5. Here are some links to examples and resources if you’re interested.

• HTML5 Working Draft
• Wikipedia HTML5 Video
• YouTube and HTML5
• CBS Publicly Testing iPad-Ready Video
• Video for Everybody

Yesterday’s Columbus AMA June Luncheon featured a presentation by Google’s Head of Retail, Mark Marinacci. After delivering last year’s most heralded presentation, Mark was invited back — this time to discuss Google’s latest search innovation.

Keeping the presentation relevant to the marketing community, Mark discussed Procter and Gamble’s research on the importance of the First Moment of Truth (FMOT). In 2005, P&G defined FMOT as “the first interaction between a shopper and a product on a store’s shelf.” This has become a foundational concept in any academic marketing curriculum and, though only five years old, is an absolute given in B2C marketing.

“Yes, and…?” is, as Mark puts it, Google’s approach to everything – they accept truths but always look further. Google decided that, while FMOT is inarguably true, its antecedent must also be true: and so the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) was born. Backed by research in IRI’s 2009 Economic Longitude Study and validated to the general public by John Battelle‘s 2005 The Search, ZMOT is the phenomenon that says a majority of interaction between a brand and a consumer occurs before the consumer ever sees the product on a shelf. With access to – and creation of – data exploding, the ZMOT occurs online.

Where Consumers Are Making Their Purchase Decisions

Having now built rapport with the audience, Marinacci jumped right into his talk about Google’s innovation in search. All else aside, I walked out the door certain of two things:

1. As evidenced by its Super Bowl campaign this year, Google believes (as strongly as ever) in the importance of search
2. With overwhelming evidence on its side, Google believes that the future of the internet is in mobile.

While it might not seem like it, Google is selling out for those two beliefs. Need proof? Look no further than Android. Yes, Google and Apple are battling to be your mobile platform of choice, but as MG Siegler says, they’re doing it with different motives:

At the end of the day, Android exists so that Google can get more people searching — and keep them searching as mobile devices overtake computers. The iPhone exists to be one of the mobile devices that overtakes computers so that Apple can keep selling high-margin machines.

There is no doubt, either, that Google understands that search is fundamentally changing. Just because they’re selling out for search, doesn’t mean they’re selling out for the search we remember from 2005. The six trends Mark says Google is using to innovate search are personalization, language, localization, realtime, video and, of course, mobile.

After looking at these trends, it’s definitely not hard to see why Google believes in mobile. First and foremost, experts are already in agreement that, sometime between 2013 and 2015, mobile devices will surpass desktop computers as the primary vehicle with which we access the internet.

Taking that assumption as a given, mobile is clearly where search can best be personalized, localized, and delivered in realtime. While I’ll be accessing google from the palm of my hand via iPhone, I’m certainly looking forward to everything Google has in store for my mobile search future.

One of the coolest things Apple did with Safari on the iPhone (and now iPad) is implement JavaScript APIs that allow ordinary websites to interact with some of the device’s unique features.

My favorite example of this is the multi-touch events that can be attached to standard HTML elements. With just a bit of extra coding, your website can recognize touches and gestures on the iPhone and iPad. For more information see the Safari Web Content Guide provided by Apple, this reference provides a good overview of how this all works.

I finally got a few minutes to play around with this stuff today, so why not see if I can take a common carousel and have it navigate to the next or previous slide on swipe.

I grabbed a client at random that has a carousel on their homepage and went to work on their free upgrade. I learned a couple of things along the way (for example, using the jQuery bind function to attach these special JavaScript events cause event.touches to be undefined), but all in all I was able to crack out the basic swipe gestures without too much trouble. Check out my source code to see how I am defining my swipe gesture.

If you have an iPad or iPhone handy, have a look at Charley’s Grilled Subs (http://charleys.com) and navigate the main banner carousel using a swipe. Swipe left to go to the next slide or swipe right to return to the previous one. It works on the Charley’s menu too.

Pretty cool, huh?

Whenever we create a web application for a client, we spend a significant amount of time and effort thinking through how the application should behave for its users. It is a priority for us that each element of interaction in an application help the user accomplish their intended goal quickly and efficiently and with a minimum of confusion.

Just last week, Bill and I had a lengthy discussion about a checkbox labeled “copy information from above.” What information should be copied? Should the checkbox be disabled or disappear once it is checked, or remain active to allow the option of unchecking it? If it is then unchecked, should it clear all fields in the entry, or only the unmodified ones? The answers to these questions that we choose to implement will have a significant impact to the usability of the application for its users.

A new generation of touch-enabled devices (iPhones, iPod Touches, iPads, etc.) is forcing application designers and developers to rethink application interfaces from the ground up. Without the typical mouse and keyboard interactions of hover, point, click, or drag, the opportunity exists for applications to expand their interfaces to include more complex gestures like pinch and swipe.

While there is a lot of carryover in how people approach these devices (e.g. “tap” on a touchscreen is roughly equivalent to “click” on a mouse), there are many differences as well—I would never consider rotating my laptop 90 degrees as a means of interacting with it, but on an iPhone or iPad it may enlarge what I am viewing, stretch the layout to accomodate the width of the viewport, completely relayout the design, or even act as a means for navigation or control. These changes can make for a shaky transition for many traditional computer users, and even lead to reasonable questions about the usability of the devices themselves.

In spite of these challenges, I have been fascinated by one particular case study: my 3-year old daughter, Leah. Ever since a particularly long car trip where we required a means for keeping her entertained, Leah has possessed my old iPhone 3G (sans cell service) loaded with games designed for preschoolers as well as the impossible-to-remove default Apple applications such as maps, weather, and camera.

With the exception of the occasional visit to the Apple Store, Leah does not regularly use a mouse and keyboard interface. This frees her from the years and decades of traditional computer use that form much of our initial interface behavior expectations. Once Leah was exposed to the idea of touching a screen to interact with the application displayed on it, she started tapping and swiping all over the place, often discovering points of interaction that I had no idea existed.

Between her regular iPhone use and occasional borrowing of my iPad (she calls it my “big phone”), I have made a few key observations:

• Touch interfaces can indeed be amazingly intuitive. Stop looking for menus, dropdowns, and “standard” navigation. If something looks like you should be able to touch it, then touch it and see what happens. It’s fascinating to open a new app and watch Leah touch whatever she can find, just to see what it will do. If we can get ourselves past looking for these traditional (and possibly outdated) elements and explore openly like a toddler, I am convinced we will find new joy (and features) using the new generation of devices and apps.
• The enjoyment found using a touch-enabled app is often inversely proportional to how “normal” its interface is. This seems especially true when using apps that rely heavily on the accelerometer to detect motion of the device as a means for interaction. It makes sense to tilt an iPhone or iPad like a steering wheel to steer in a driving game or tip it away from level to cause a ball to roll “downhill” through a maze. These are the same natural physics mechanics that have made the Nintendo Wii a worldwide best-seller. On the other hand, “traditional apps” like word processing programs pretty much still feel like typing out a document.
• Our hands are the most natural interface tool we have. We already use our hands to manipulate keyboards and mice to achieve a desired result displayed on a screen. Why not remove these intermediary devices and interact directly with the content? I have yet to meet someone hesitant to “figure out some new device” who hasn’t fallen in love with touch computing once they have the device in their hands, free from the added complication of a keyboard and mouse. Children discover their world through touch, and that means of discovery translates seamlessly into touch computing.

As application designers and developers, we have a special opportunity to completely redefine how people interact with machines as these touch devices infiltrate the mainstream. It will be interesting to watch these new patterns (or lack thereof?) develop in the coming years. In the meantime, I hope designers and developers will be willing to take some risks and try ideas not possible with our traditional computer usage patterns.

Even more interesting will be watching how my daughter Leah’s expectations of computing will grow differently from mine, seeded from such an early age by these enchanting touch-based devices…