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I’m calling it early. Something smells fishy about the recent article I read in Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone recently covered a band called Jericho Thunder. They were given the most glowing review I’ve ever read in the magazine. There is one problem… They don’t seem to exist! This is the only result I found relating to Jericho Thunder.

Think about it, a BAND, with no website. No MySpace, no iTunes, no Facebook, no YouTube……

I’m calling bullshit. What do you think?

If you don’t wanna run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don’t have the time or resources to do ‘em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you’ll get to later.

Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themselves of how perfectly that idea should be executed. And they imagine it on a beautiful platter with glitter and rose petals. And everyone’s clapping for them. But the, but the, but the, but the bummer is most ideas kinda suck when you do ‘em. And no matter how much you plan you still have to do something for the first time. And you’re almost guaranteed the first time you do something it’ll blow. But somebody who does something bad three times still has three times the experience of that other person who’s still dreaming of all the applause.

Kinda what I started out fighting with jacobmake, but lately I’ve been high on brain crack. Watch the video here.

Dream Jacob said:

“The best brands fulfill an emotional need.“

He continued:

“We all use certain products in our day-to-day. The products that we decide to use have passed some kind of internal cost / performance ratio. If the product performs well and was at high cost OR has low cost and performs adequately, we see value and we use these products.

I think what Dream Jacob was getting at is that well designed products with the right kind of branding can invoke emotion. We go from using products to needing them, experiencing them, wanting them.

Dream Jacob continued standing in my bathroom talking about soap,

“Someone buys a bar of soap. If it passes their cost / performance threshold by successfully washing their bum for under a buck, the product now has the opportunity to make an emotional impact. Maybe the  fragrance, texture, color and name of this soap helps me feel fresh and re-energized enough to tackle another monotonous day at the office and plow through all my to-dos.”

This dream made me think about the fine line between good product design and good branding. Companies have choices where to put their money when trying to help the bottom line. If I had to rank those efforts from most honest and effective to least honest and effective. It would look like this:

Public Facing Efforts To Improve Product Sales

(ranked by integrity)

1. Product Design (most honest / effective)
2. Branding
3. Marketing
4. Advertising
5. Gross Immoral Shady Stuff, Spam, etc. (least honest / effective)

Now you could probably point at some Forrester research that says, “72% of people buy crap-in-a-box if it has a yellow smiley face on the package” or similar. That may be, but I’d like to think Dream Jacob would argue with the ethics of that.

Download audio file (star-light-star-bright.mp3)

From the book I learned that the actual animal used for the model lived a sickly caged circus-type existence in New York City. Not exactly the symbol of adventure and wide-open prairies it evoked for me as a kid, but a perfect metaphor for the relationship bison had with North American settlers.

These are the output from a little Flash experiment.

There were 6 bays total and each one highlighted areas of cultural interest in the city. We installed 3 touchscreens behind a glass bay that included an interactive fireworks display and served as an information kiosk for activities available at the arch grounds.

Here is a video that shows a little bit of the preparation and the finished product. It was a really fun project!!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Flash Heatmap

There are some really good Flex based examples out there, but I wanted a pure AS3 option. I found Michael VanDaniker’s examples the most beautiful and easy to understand. So I pulled out what I could to just AS3. I also got some help from sunild. I manually convert pixel to lat / lng coordinates on each map move. There is probably a more efficient way to do this. But I’m going to put to rest AGAIN, tinkering w/ math that is way over my head!

Did you ever notice that if you try to navigateToURL() from inside Flash in Safari it will refresh the Flash on the page? Here is a quick work around

You need to setup a JavaScript function that uses the DOM to fidget w/ the window.location.hash. It looks something like this;

function mapAnchor(anchor)
{
window.location.hash = anchor;
}

Then from ActionScript setup a navigateToURL() like this;

var _anchorlink:URLRequest = new URLRequest("javascript:mapAnchor('"+anchorname+"')");

where anchorname is your anchor.

This is definitely a team effort. More when we roll out the beta.