I was amazed when I first saw this as it combined two main technologies, one being their Seadragon image zooming and the other a technology that literally analyses and stitches together images in to a 3D space (no not the Quicktime equivalent).

For me though the future link is when they line up the idea of dynamically pulling semantic content from Flickr, because the content is already tagged, its a no-brainer to see how humanity could document the world through images.

The exciting part is linking this back to broader content through the existing semantic connections already created.

You maybe already interested in viewing the image you have in front of you, but at a right click you could view related content (Wikipedia?), or even take a look at the profile of the person that took the picture in the first place.

You can also see the connection of ‘Multi Touch Screens’ being able to navigate using your fingers would be more intuitive.

The long awaited release of both Adobe AIR and Flex 3 has finally arrived. AIR’s main purpose is to give developers the power to produce practically any type of application, concentrating on usability not just functionality.

This also puts back the creativeness back in to applications, limited only by your imagination. We can finally stop talking about it and get on with it.

The support has been amazing, most major brands have been involved in one way or another, from AOL to Salesforce and eBay to VW, Nike and Nasdaq.

Start-ups are also appearing everywhere, these are really pushing the boundaries of creativity, but I feel we are only on the first rung of the ladder as the combinations of interactivelty and functionality are endless now we have a whole movement towards open API’s and ‘mash-ups’.

Key features:

• Enhanced Desktop Functionality: Drag and drop to the operating system, copy and paste between applications, launching of AIR applications from the desktop or the browser, and run in the background with notifications.
• Data Access: Adobe AIR now provides both synchronous and asynchronous access to the local file system, as well as structured data within a local database. This database is implemented using the open source SQLite database.
• JS Library Support: Most major Ajax frameworks can be used to build AIR applications. Supported frameworks include jQuery, Ext JS, Dojo, and Spry. Adobe AIR integrates JavaScript and ActionScript to allow cross-scripting between the two languages, and integrated rendering of Flash and HTML content.
• Security: Applications built on Adobe AIR can only be installed through a trustworthy install process that verifies that the application is signed via industry standard certificates, providing users with information about the source and capabilities of the application.

Ad.WRIGHT are currently developing some applications promoted as ‘Branded Applications’. Adobe AIR is exactly the platform needed to create strong relevant connections with customers. This has been tricky and expensive in the past, but the whole Flex framework give a speed of development not seen before. Down to days or weeks instead of several months sometimes.

I think Brands now have a chance of building on application development that suits specific requirements without them becoming throw away items just for that month. It has also become less expensive to test and play out different experiences when searching for the ‘Holy Grail’ of usability.

Of course AIR also fits those ‘monthly’ campaigns, new skins and designs are easily rendered to fit a new project or promotion. There seems to be something for everyone and every Brand. A tall order maybe, but maybe Adobe Flex and AIR has the shoes to fit.

We think so…

We do a lot of research everyday to make sure we are aware of how the world is shaping up according to our own predictions and I think browsers are becoming an important part of how the future of us as users will interact with the internet.

In the past we only had a couple/few choices, which to be honest is all you want if you’re doing web development, but now with a lot of standards being adhered to and the core engines being used in other products, it is becoming less of a problem.

The upside is we all get more choice with out the hassle of sites not looking how the creators visualised them. Basically a page is presented properly without to much interference from of a badly coded browser (aka the old days).

Spacetime.com

Personally I think its an important step as a release, but will not become fully usable untill we start interacting with our screens with out the mouse. When we use multi-touch screens and OLED technology becomes more widespread, this type of experience will become part of the type of applications we use and build.

I only have to say iPhone and that hint of the future is obvious, the WOW factor is really our frustrations of us all being trapped in the same usability for such a long time.

I quite like this, its what they are calling a social browser. A mixture of web and desktop application.

You can manage all your stuff in a panel on the left, Facebook, Flicker, Youtube etc. plus keep track of your RSS and Bookmarks, very cool.

www.flock.com

According to an article from Packt Publishing, Drupal, the platform that Ad.WRIGHT team is very competent in, day in… day out… is voted the best overall Open Source Content Management System. That is great news for our Ad.WRIGHT team and at the same time, great news for our customers!

Here are some of the excerpts:

After three intense months of voting, Packt Publishing can today announce that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt’s website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, Drupal succeeds Joomla! as the overall winner and receives a cheque for $5,000.

Joomla! and Drupal occupied first and second places in 2006, with their quality proving to be popular with the judges again this year. Joomla! retains its position in the top three, coming second and winning $3,000, with CMS Made Simple in third collecting $2,000.

Initially released in 2001, Drupal has grown to become one of the most downloaded Open Source Content Management Systems with one of the most enthusiastic and committed communities. “This is a great honor for the Drupal community and the thousands of individual developers who’ve contributed to the project” confirms Drupal developer and core contributor Jeff Eaton. “We’ve worked hard to make Drupal as flexible, as scalable, and as accessible as possible. It’s a great week for all of Open Source; the winners in every category have shown that OSS can produce powerful solutions for a wide range of needs” he concludes.

According to a recent report by comScore in its first ever study of the worldwide search activity, Google retained its global search crown in August, but some smaller competitors in China and South Korea are giving the company a run for its money in Asia.

On the basis of data gathered for its qSearch 2.0 service, comScore reported on the top 50 worldwide Internet properties that use some form of search. The conclusion: More than 750 million people age 15 and older — or 95 percent of the worldwide Internet audience — conducted 61 billion searches worldwide in August, an average of more than 80 searches per searcher.

“With the tremendous volume of search activity occurring around the world, search continues to present an abundance of marketing opportunities to companies on both a global and local scale,” Bob Ivins, executive vice president of International Markets at comScore, said in a statement.

Google Power vs. China Power

According to the report, Google sites saw 37.1 billion searches in August. Of that total number, Google saw 31 billion searches and YouTube.com saw five billion. By comparison, Yahoo sites garnered 8.5 billion searches.

Whereas in China, a different giant is building up. Baidu.com, a Chinese language search engine, followed in third place with more than 3.2 billion searches. Microsoft sites ranked in fourth place worldwide, while Korea’s NHN Corporation, which owns Naver.com, ranked fifth with two billion global searches.

“Seeing Asian search engines like China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon,” Ivins said. The continued development of search in international markets will undoubtedly present compelling opportunities for savvy marketers on a global scale.”

Search Engine Advertisement

The trend / movement online is unstoppable. Clients that we speak to uses Internet more and more for research, validation and building a visually compelling site with well strategised plan for Search Engine Optimization / Marketing is very crucial moving forward.

The Asia-Pacific region, which includes large markets such as China, Japan, and India, outperformed the rest of the world with 258 million unique searchers conducting 20.3 billion searches in August. Europe reported the second-most searchers (210 million) and searches (18 billion), followed by North America, with 206 million searchers and 16 billion searches.

…

“The search distribution across the world and the fact that Asia is a bigger market than Europe and North America is interesting,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “It suggests that there is enormous revenue growth potential in those markets versus the United States, where most of the revenue is currently concentrated.”

Changing Ad Buying Behavior

For anybody that is skeptical about the power of search marketing, Sterling said this study demonstrates the global phenomenon. It’s not a passing fad, Sterling argued. In fact, he said he expects brand advertisers to shift more of their ad budgets online in the coming years.

Click the following link to find out more information on the shifting of the online advertising landscape.

On choosing Drupal… Harvard Science site recently went through a revamp and decided to go with Drupal platform for the development.

Here is a little excerpt on the process:

Choosing a CMS
During the six months before I began building the HarvardScience site, the Harvard News Office had been working with designer Claudio luís Vera of Studio Module. The result was 28 beautiful templates, which had been chiseled, filed, and polished to the client’s adoration. Unfortunately, during this time the News Office had still not made up its mind about what CMS to use. In fact there was still some muttering about how a custom CMS was the way to go.

So approximately six months ago, I built the first draft of HarvardScience using Drupal over the course of a weekend. The result was exactly what I had hoped for - the news office was so excited by the speed at which the site could be built they decided to go with Drupal. The rapid development of a prototype or draft site can be built using Drupal made the CMS issue a fait accompli strategy.

The sIFR Drama
My first draft of the site did not use any of the mark-up, styles, or sIFR that the designer had provided. I instead created my own custom theme, relying heavily on blocks and views. I had assumed that if the site looked very close to the original design and that the CMS was in place, everyone would be happy. This was a huge error on my part. The designer had been working with the client for nearly six months at this point, and everyone had become wed to the “Whitney” font used heavily throughout the site. So despite a devious experiment on my part proving that the client couldn’t tell which page used sIFR and which did not, I was asked to go back and add Whitney into the site.

Thus began draft number two. I installed the sIFR module Jeff Robbins and began to add in the style I had originally left out. The module itself is super easy to use. Sadly I didn’t find sIFR2 so lovely. Regardless how much I fiddled with font-size, letter-spaceing, padding, margins, height, and width, I could not get consistently sized sIFR text replacement. I was informed by the designer that if I moved to sIFR3, which was still in beta at the time, all my problems would go away. In short, at the end of this draft, everyone was pretty frustrated - most of all me.

Thus began draft number three. This time I did what I should have done to begin with. (What is that saying about hindsight?) First I threw out the theme I had built. Next I grabbed the directory the designer had used to store all his stylesheets, flash, javascript, and images to run his 28 templates, and stuck it at the root of my drupal install.

Next I copied the mark-up from one of designer’s templates, and named it page.tpl.php. Then piece by piece, I replaced the static content with nodes, views, and blocks - themeing as I went - ensuring that Drupal spit out the exact same mark-up as the original template. So after a very long journey through the land of sIFR, the site emerged as the designer originally intended.

With Google’s USD$3.1 billion buyout of online advertisement company DoubleClick and Microsoft’s recent USD$6 billion acquisition of digital marketing company aQuantive, the world of online advertising is dramatically shifting into high gear.

Both companies are moving rapidly into each others’ turf. Google, being a leader in the online search engine and advertising industry has in recent years, develop and acquire applications to bundle with its services (Google Maps, Picasa…) Microsoft, on the other hand has been a leader in building the entire computer industry around its Windows ecosystem and in recent years, moved a great amount of resources and acquisition to the online search and advertising market dominated by Google and Yahoo. Prior to aQuantive, Microsoft bought a company called Massive Inc for its expertise to insert advertisement into video games. Disruptive forces is happening in the software industry – where a shift away from desktop applications and toward applications / services delivered over the internet.

Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect of Microsoft has made it clear the importance of Microsoft focus on ‘Software Plus Service’ paradigm in the recent press conference held. And more recently, they announced that Microsoft Works, a trimmed down version of their office application suite will be provided for free, with ads supported.

From a personal point of view, Microsoft has not been the most innovative company in recent years to be the first to come out with applications / services but if you look at their history of acquisition and focus, you have to be very afraid when they do expand into a different industry all together. Microsoft has the tenacity and flexibility to adjust and align itself to new markets dominated by others and through play safe approach (letting others test and try out the market), and seeing the potential growth of the new market, Microsoft with its billions in cash reserves will make the second / third move. (remember Netscape in the 90s)

Google’s dominance has come primarily from its prowess at making money from ads placed next to Web search results. Google snagged nearly half of all Web searches performed in the United States in June while Yahoo grabbed about 25 percent and 13 percent were on Microsoft’s search sites, according to audience-measurement company comScore.

Some analysts see the search-ads market starting to stagnate and believe Microsoft’s bid for aQuantive, indicates a looming shift in online advertising.

The early online search-ads have really propelled Google’s growth for the past four years and is starting to slow down… according to Gartner Inc. The next wave of growth is going to be big brands shifting their advertising budgets, still largely invested in newspapers and TV, into the Internet.

For a team like Ad.WRIGHT, the shift to online advertisement market is a bonus for us as we aligned ourselves with the bigger players and focus on the technology / partners to provide a complete platform for clients to design, development and extend their online revenue stream through online ads well placed.

Ad.WRIGHT is constantly aligning itself with the market forces / trends and we are confident with our experiences gained over the last 6-7 years of web development, we can be a leader in the online advertising space, providing the creativity, tools for tracking and execution that will tie well with our clients marketing objectives.

Based on a recent data presented by the Online Publishers Association and Nielsen / NetRatings, the percentage of people engaging in content reading is now more than ever before. Based on a four year long Internet Activity Index (IAI), which measures the use of ecommerce, communications, content and search services over time, it was concluded that activities like ecommerce and communications still remain popular, reading and viewing content has skyrocketed between 2003 and today.

According to the data, about 34 percent of Internet users’ time was spent reading content in back in 2003, while content came in second to ‘communications’, which measured a 46 percent of Internet users’ time. Surprisingly, as of May 2007, OPA reports that those numbers have dramatically reversed! Content now came in at 47 percent of Internet users’ time while ‘communications’ came in only 33 percent.

For many businesses out there, this is very important shift of strategy and emphasis on their online media. Not only is the importance placed on good design website but more than anything else, a good quality content site will bring in consistent readers over time. The figures itself only confirms the shift in the behavior of Internet users from communications to content and some of the activities engaging users are like news reading, browsing listings, checking out information on certain products or services…

Adding onto the trend are social networking sites that pushes the content readership to new heights. Under OPA’s metric, social networking are counted as content site and only email are classified as ‘communication’.

However, it seems that e-mail’s popularity isn’t actually going down, but rather the availability of content to consume is going up. Within Ad.WRIGHT, we consume more and more of our everyday lives online than ever before, by researching client information or reading up on the latest technology to help our clients stay on the leading edge (AJAX, Silverlight…)

Many a times, when we meet with clients on web development needs, client would always place a lot of importance on the Branding / Design of the site, but rarely see the importance of putting in a good quality content to substantiate the overall package. We keep emphasizing to the client that getting a good content management system and well design site is not enough, but the support from top management to see the importance of getting a good writer (both internal or external) to write up the content for the site. Some have heeded the advice and are seeing the results of their site readership gone up over time.

With Singapore launching its island wide Internet coverage this December, we will likely continue to see this pattern in the years ahead as people continue to shift their offline activities online and the importance of quality content on online medium is not to be ignored.

A very cool video,

What is the definition of web 2.0?