Fluidesign Blog

So we were at a DealMaker event at MTV a couple weeks back and Michael Schneider, our very own CEO, did a quick interview with TechZulu.

Check it out now.

We’re delighted to hear that GumGum will be presenting at Under the Radar on June 3rd. Congrats guys!

Twitter has been awesome for companies seeking to know what their customers are saying about them. If you’re a company and you’re using tweetscan or summarize, great. Here is what you should do next.

So, Fred Wilson organized Lyrics of the Day (@lotd) on twitter. Twitters can post a short lyric that they think everyone will enjoy and direct it to @lotd. All that are following @lotd will see all lyrics posted to @lotd. This is both entertaining and smart.

You can apply this concept to events, conferences, new album releases, product launches, comments from your blog, whatever. If your audience is on twitter and is talking about your stuff, do your community a favor and streamline the communication by organizing the topic at hand and thus facilitating more talk.

Here’s a thought-provoking argument made by Clay Shirky about the idea of “cognitive surplus” and the ways we spend (or waste) it. via PSFK.

The interactive industry is lucky that the “open source” movement happened and succeeded. What this movement has proved, is that if you have something accessible to all, and you let others build on top of it, they will fix it’s problems, improve its capabilities, and thus make it a better product. It is a true testament to the concept that sharing your knowledge and collaborating will grow an industry faster and better at large. Conferences like sxsw are amazing because they create a platform in which we share our experiences from mistakes to successes and help the industry grow wiser, faster.

So, I am really excited to see SoDA, the new organization sponsored by Adobe (thank you :)), emerge and create standards to streamline business processes within interactive agencies. This means creating standards and guidelines for documents like RFPs, proposals, awards, etc. While this wasn’t discussed at sxsw at the panel, I hope that this organization takes an active roll in making more of our experiences “open”. Specifically, I would like see certain data regarding interactive products (not just developed by agencies) become free, accessible, and lack for a better term, “interactive”. This means share the following online:

1) actual costs and timeline of the web product
2) ability to view the web traffic statistics
3) allow people to read the actual business goals and marketing strategy for the product
3) thoughts on what the challenges were, what techniques were successful vrs unsuccessful
4) allow people to comment and ask questions and your agency responds
5) aggregate and create a visualization for this data so we can easily understand it (this part is probably the hardest, phase 2 maybe?)

The bottom line is that we have way too many great ideas, few talented designers and developers, and still not enough collaboration. I think the above will lead to smart standards, faster innovation, and aid in creating more usable, intuitive products.

I can pretty candidly say that in the last 2 years or so Fluidesign has actively created internal procedures to help share our knowledge within our internal team by encouraging our team to do things like share resources, talk openly about what works and what doesn’t, make a concerted effort to have collaborative meetings between designers and developers to ensure good design and usability, to attend conferences, etc. And this, has greatly contributed to our profitability.

And obviously we are not the only company that is practicing this type of collaboration. So I am putting it out there, aware of the challenges of creating a more open transparent market, but simply saying that the benefits will outweigh the costs for each firm and the industry at large.

We will be heading to Austin for SXSW on March 7 and staying til the 11th. The above artwork is from last year. I just like it.
Yea! I am going to attempt to keep all good SXSW resources organized here for us and for our readers. Feel free to post too!
1) The schedule.
2) Mobile access to everything you need to know.
2b) Text 47979 to get mobile updates.
3) Parties, all you really need to know, right?
4) Social network for SXSW, yes it exists.

What else!?

Some of us here at fluidesign will be attending the CommunityNext event on March 29th in West Hollywood.

Speakers include: Veronica Belmont (Mahalo Daily), Otis Chandler (Goodreads), Paul Cloutier (8020 Publishing), Mike Ghaffary (Stitcher), Martin Green (Meebo), Lucas Gonze (LAUNCHcast), Smith Forte (Current TV), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Scott Rafer (Lookery), Aza Raskin (Songza), Amy Raymond (Disney-ABC Family), Keith Richman (Break Media), Chip Ross (Playboy U), David Sacks (Geni), Robert Scoble (Scobleizer.com/Fast Company), and Mike Jones (Userplane).

And here’s a tribute to our favorite speaker and a shout out to Songza:

Went to Dealmaker 2008 last night at Michael Ovitz’s offices. It was great to see socal and norcal hanging out together, and more importantly L.A. coming into its own in the tech scene. We’ve been under the radar for far too long!

Hey team, Mike and I are going to twiistup tonight! YEAH, totally awesome!

Here are some quality photos from last time: