Monday, April 25, 2011
Two Tickets to the Newport Beach Film Festival Opening Night Gala for the Price of One ($160 Value)!
Go to this site for a 2-for-1 from my favorite film festival on the planet –@NBFF. Two tickets for the price of one to the NBFF's Opening Night Gala ($160 Value)! hosted by my other love, @Adility.
Posted via email from Kellyfornia on the state of... well, things.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Q&A with Kiip Co-Founder Amadeus Demarzi
San Francisco has become the ground floor in a rise of social media projects, inventions, startups, applications architecture and more. Yet even among the cadre of social media app-heads running around there, a few outshine the rest. Amadeus Demarzi co-founder of Kiip, eightbit.me and FollowStyle has become one of those names to stand out within the masses.
Demarzi has a fluid resume including work with Chipotle, Chevron, Google Ventures, and most recently the creation of Kiip – the new wave in mobile advertisement applications. Yesterday he took some time to talk a bit about how he got into the “game,” some of the projects he’s currently involved in and few side projects that are still flying under the radar.
Tell us a little about your professional background.
I would say I am just really driven to build and create things. For me it's always about creating amazing user experiences using technology. If I haven't delighted the client/user, then I've failed. I feel very lucky to work on such a variety of projects like Kiip and EightBit, which allow me to express different creative mindsets.
I went to college for 3D animation, switched halfway through to film, dropped out in '07 to work in web, and had been doing freelance web design throughout college.
The first company I worked for was Eurekster, a social search company that essentially took results from Yahoo via an API, and allowed people to vote on them. I was there for about a year.
After Eurekster I went to work for a design agency called Sequence. There I got the unique opportunity to architect the Chipotle iPhone app – the first application that allowed users to order and pay for food on their iPhone. I also got to work on various other projects for companies like Chevron, Sonos, Google Ventures, Zinio, etc.
During my final year at Sequence, I started working on various side projects with a friend of mine, Courtney Guertin who was an engineer at Digg. Together we built an iPhone app (Skeemo) and a couple small fun sites like answer.to. Eventually we decided to leave our current companies and work on a fashion site together – FollowStyle. We iterated very quickly and had something up and running within a few months, but unfortunately we found it was a very difficult industry to gain any traction in due to our lack of connections.
Around this time, another friend of ours from Digg, Brian Wong a young 19 year old who worked in Business Development [at Digg] managed to raise around 300k for an idea: rewarding game players with real items for accomplishing things in [the] games. Courtney and I dug the idea, and Brian was in need of a couple cofounders that could fill his technical void to build the product, so we joined full time, Courtney as Co-Founder and CTO, and myself as Co-Founder and Director of Design.
Around this time, Addison Kowalski, an ex designer at Digg, had been getting some Internet props for designing these little 8bit avatars for people's twitter profiles. Soon the demand for them got pretty high, and so Courtney, Addison and myself decided to remedy that by making a web based avatar creation tool.
Over the next 5-7 months, Courtney, Brian and myself hustled on Kiip full time. In the moments we could find to spare on nights and weekends, we squeezed in EightBit. We successfully opened up EightBit to the public around SXSW, but also added a bunch more functionality in the way of an iPhone web app and a mini social game based on Foursquare. It still amazes me how often I see people using the avatars on Twitter and various other services.
A couple weeks later, we had an amazing launch for Kiip, which overall went out very well in the press. We have been absolutely inundated by great brands and game developers reaching out to us and wanting to use our service/platform. We just recently got our own office for Kiip, and have expanded the team up to eight, from the original three. We can even be considered bi-coastal since our VP of sales is out in New York.
Tell us about Eightbit.me. Where did the idea come from? What are your plans for it? What makes it so different? What have been some trials, triumphs, etc?
Originally birthed as an avatar creator, it has since evolved into a foursquare based social game. We ultimately would like to make it a very deep social game, that utilizes many other social platforms to create a sort of Internet avatar, which represents you, online. The ideas, concepts and designs have grown very organically over the last 6-8 months. Every project presents a unique set of difficulties. This can range from exploiting limits of a particular technology platform you are on, to solving user experience barriers.
With EightBit, the major challenge was getting a low powered device (iPhone) to create a native like experience in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. When building an 'app' for an iPhone, you have 2 basic choices. You can build a native application, which uses iOS libraries and Objective-C to build an application. These technologies take full advantage of the iPhone's hardware, allowing you to create very rich visual or data experiences that perform smoothly and efficiently because of this more direct interaction with the iPhone's hardware. On the flip side, the only REAL way to distribute these applications is through the Apple App Store, which means you have to abide by certain rules, and your release cycle is often controlled more by Apple.
Another way to build an application is using web-based technologies in the iPhone's Safari browser. Most people may not know this, but Apple has created far and away the best mobile browser currently available, and they have gone even further to provide excellent APIs allowing for some level of hardware acceleration. The major downside of building a web app is the dependency on a network connection is hard to avoid, the lower computing power of Javascript, because it's such a high level language, with so many browser/operating system layers below it. This means that your code has to be VERY efficient, and sometimes entire processes have to be re-thought in order to accomplish a smooth useable experience.
Kiip - that is a big release for you - what are you thoughts about it, and what do you think sets it apart from others like it?
Kiip is built on an advertising model of cost per engagement, or CPE. We are the vary first rewards platform that allows brands to highly target, much like the world of banner ads, using rewards instead of banner impressions. We also feel that the game experience is not very conducive to banner ads, since they require visual real estate, which on mobile devices is rather low to begin with. Our platform is about targeting users/player/customers when they are excited and happy, by providing a non-intrusive opt-in reward.
We have already had our initial public launch, announcing what we are doing, since we've been in stealth mode for the last 7 months or so. Soon we will be announcing which games we are going to be integrated with, so people can begin actually winning rewards for playing.
Some interesting obstacles with Kiip was around the fact that we are productizing the concept of a reward. Technically we have designed the first ever reward unit, a standard unit that can be used to reward a user for an interaction they had with an application. This is a far more complex usability problem than banner ads. Here at Kiip, we hold user experience in the highest regard, and have been doing everything possible to make the reward collection and redemption process as frictionless as possible.
We took a bit of a cue from Apple, by creating our reward units using html/css/javascript, giving us tremendous control over the design, without requiring game developers to update their Kiip SDK libraries.
Let us in on your thoughts on social media's usefulness, cool factor, possibilities, etc.
Hmm, I have mixed feelings about social media. I feel that it's mostly misunderstood by the general public. Every couple years in the web world we get new buzz words like web 2.0, Ajax, html5, etc., that mostly miss the point and don't really do any justice to what they are describing. At the same time, these buzz words also allow these concepts to become more mainstream, which ultimately helps our tech/web industries.
Overall though, it's hard to make any money in social media. Most of the time, money is not made off the product itself, but rather, by throwing advertisements into it since everyone ultimately accepts these platforms as being free. Ultimately this only works if there is a certain huge mass of users; otherwise it's not sustainable.
It's hard to really say what the future will bring, especially with the market being REALLY frothy right now. The big 'hit' things right now seem to be social tools that utilize the capabilities of mobile devices; always on and connected, location based, short message, photos, video, etc.
I think the far more interesting thing to watch though, is this transition away from 'personal computers' over to mobile phones and tablets. Think about it, kids that are born today, will be growing up in the world of touch based interfaces, always connected, cloud based, and no mice and keyboards. This, I believe represents a HUGE significant change in the world of computing, and personally I am really excited that it's my playground.
Posted via email from Kellyfornia on the state of... well, things.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
10 Creative & Entertaining Uses of Twitter
A new take on an old blog that can now be found on my new post as SF Social Media Examiner. Check out the full article here. Don't forget to click on the "like" button.
Twitter: more than a virtual text message sent to the masses. Tweeting can be a 140-character fun-filled adventure for the eagle-eyed user. Especially in this tech-savvy town where slews of techheads continue to burst through finite character restrictions and give us something new to toy with, one tweet at a time.
Take a look at these marvels blossoming within the seeming chaos of the Twitter-verse.
1. Chatrooms: hashtags (#) can be a wonderful thing, a tool to track entire conversations following a single subject, occuring right under our noses on twitter. #journchat is an online community of journalists who meet up once a week over the "t-wires" to chat about the state of the news industry through the use of the hashtag search function. An entire forum converging across time zones and geography to discuss in a virtual arena - and they're not the only ones.
Groups all over the world are engaging in a #chat forum of sorts, throwing out hashtags for people to add to the end of their tweets, bringing a virtual conversation alongside real-time events. Try putting a #-sign in your next search and see what surfaces.
2. Choose Your Own Tweet-venture: What child of the 80's or 90's can forget those tiny cream-colored paperback books that held a world of possibilities between there covers? Who didn't mark their last five choices with as many fingers as they could spare, a precaution to continue on in the adventure should you find yourself abandoned in a cave for all eternity on page 107? Well now, you can relive the childhood thrill, tweet by thrill-seeking tweet, thanks to Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed and Huffington Post fame. So, maybe take that 10 today at work and sign on to Choose Your Own Adventure.
3. Post like a Pirate: argh maytees, looking to tweet like the ruffians of the sea do? Well, ye be on the right track if yer headin' toward http://postlikeapirate.com/twitter.php. Simply enter in yer infermation and a message in a bottle ye wish to send out to sea, and the app will reformat it in pirate slang. Now everyday can feel just as fun as September 17, otherwise known as Talk Like A Pirate Day.
4. Read a Novel - tweet by tweet: Unable to afford a whole new e-reader? Forgot your book and your already on the road for that trip? Stuck at in the dentist's lobby and only Elle or Cosmo to read? Well here's the answer for literature lovers. Two projects on twitter are trying to share an entire novel tweet by tweet: James Joyce’s Ulysses or Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Read an entire novel, at your pace, taking in only a thought at a time.
5. Better yet, Write Your Own: Although the first novel has reached completiono, there could be a follow-up project in the future. You could start it. Even though it’s defunct, you can still read what was written at the 140novel site, color-coded by each author's contribution.
6. Alarm Clock Anyone? Need to remember something, but not as trusting of the old alarm clock? Send this @timer a direct message, and this account will automatically tweet you back. For example, 'd timer 45 call mom' sends you a reminder tweet in 45 minutes.
7. Keep April Fool's alive all year long: At TweetForger it's as simple as entering someone’s Twitter handle into the form on TweetForger's homepage, creating a zany tweet, and sending your victim a link to the resulting page. Then sit back and enjoy as your prank comes to fruition. The site creates a graphic that looks like a real tweet that is nothing of the sort. The site simply swipes your target's Twitter background and then recreates it with the new faux-tweet.
8. Track your packages: with @trackthis you can keep your eye on the things making their way to you from FedEx, UPS and DHL shipments. For those of us who order online at least once a month - loving the anticipation of knowing that soon something is waiting for you, sent to you (yes even if it was from you too), on your doorstep - this is a great tool.
9. Keep track of who's Adding and Dropping you on Twitter: Nothing's more disconcerting than to watch your following fall in numbers and not know who, why or how? Was your content lacking? Did you offend someone? Too many tweets about Martha Stewart's latest recipes? @chirpstats keeps a tally of the people who've followed and un-followed you over a week or a couple of days, depends on the traffic - just make sure you follow the chirpstat feed.
10. Sharpen your brain with some Twivia: Looking to take on the world in one oversized extreme quest for useless information? Look no farther; you want to play some twivia. Test your knowledge against some of the toughest minds in the Twitter-sphere through @playtwivia. Here's how it works: Twivia posts a question and the first person to @reply the answer gets points, specified in the next tweet. Plus Twivia posts answers after someone gets it correct, so you don’t have to keep wondering. They even take suggestions.
That's probably enough for now as new jewels keep cropping up all the time. Keep your eyes peeled for more unexpected and creative new uses of Twitter, be it a complete time suck or the answer to the world's power crisis.
Posted via email from Kellyfornia on the state of... well, things.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Know You Meme and Make Sure to Exploit The Hell Out of It
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Posted via email from Kellyfornia on the state of... well, things.
