As a group of marketing strategists and creative thinkers, Zoom Creates is always on the look out for new and exciting ways to market to the masses. We came across this marketing stunt via “Wired” and found it rather ingenious. See for yourself:
Archive for October, 2009
Happy Halloween from the Dev team.
Thursday, October 29th, 2009Here are a nice couple of pumpkin things we made in blender. Feel free to download the blend files and see how we made these happen!
Going Vintage
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009Lately, I’ve been inspired by vintage photography. I love its naturally faded colors, vignettes, and soothing tones. I’ve been on the lookout for Photoshop tutorials that will add bit of that historical and airy elegance to my own projects. On my search I found two tutorials, one focusing on a vintage feel, and another recreating a Lomographic style that gives a blurry and colorful look that you often find in the original analog photography. Below are two examples using both tutorial techniques, one features a muted pink tone, while the other focuses on a more contrasting, blurred effect. If you would like to share any additional ways to achieve a vintage style, I’d love to hear it.
Google + Twitter = Gootter or Twoogle?
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
I just read that Google reached an agreement with Twitter to include Twitter updates in Google search results. This has many cool possibilities and applications. The example used in the post on the Google Blog is “…the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”
Microsoft Meets Retail
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Well, we had to see it coming sooner or later… In true Apple/Steve Jobs/Best Marketing in the World fashion, Microsoft has opened it’s first retail location in Scottsdale Arizona. The store itself is “much like the Apple store, but with more colors” and seems to feature more gaming-driven offerings in hopes of appealing to a wider age group. Get ‘em while they’re young, I guess.
While I applaud Microsoft for finally extending their brand through retail, I wonder what the ever-ahead-of-the-game Apple has in the works to wow the public next. Theme park perhaps?
Read more about the opening and see new photos here.
Truth In Advertising: An Opinion
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
One of our former and much loved developers, KJ Coop, posted this opinion on her blog and I felt it tied in well with the post I added last week regarding the new FTC regulations for advertisers. Thanks KJ!
I consider being straightforward about what an ad’s intention is to be the foundation of basic decency in advertising. Anything less is predatory. Modern advertising is based on being fun and obfuscating who’s paying for it.
I have a certain respect for an advertisement that says, essentially, buy this product. Those that try to act like they’re just a fun game or PSA created selflessly for public good when their true intention is to manipulate your feelings for profit are truly offensive.
I know a lot of people “ignore” ads, but I don’t believe it’s as effective as they like to think. First off, you have to see something, and process enough of it to recognize that it is something to ignore. That is plenty of time to see a logo or get the gist of what it’s trying to sell you.
It’s said that the purpose of advertising is not so much to sell you on a particular product as it is to build brand awareness so that when you realize one day you need new shoes, the first thing you think is of a specific brand or store. If this is true – and I believe it is for at least some advertisements – then by the time someone has decided to “ignore” it, they’ve already absorbed enough information to accomplish the advertiser’s goal. (more…)
The Beauty of pyQT
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Here at Zoom Creates we (the Dev Team) mostly deal with online applications. We build custom sites, implement CMS solutions, build animations, create databases, and much, much more. One thing that you might not have know is that we also build standard desktop applications. One of my favorite toolkits to use for Gui applications is the QT4 toolkit. Of course, my favorite language to build these apps in is python. Here’s a quick rundown of the latest app that I built in about 30 mins, to help remove one annoyance from my daily routine.
I connect to our in office server via sshfs. I also use this protocol when connecting to my webserver, and it gets a little old doing the same thing over and over again in the console. So, to solve this I built a little app that runs the sshfs command with some paramaters and is much quicker to get me connected to different servers. Here’s how I did it.
First run QTDesigner (the awesome GUI builder that Trolltech, the makers of QT, give away) and draw out your new program’s interface. Then save it. My file is named server.ui. Now, if you run pyuic4 on this file, you can send the output to a file. I did this by running this:
pyuic4 server.ui > server.py
So now I have an automatically generated file called server.py that has a class in it. This class has all the references to my GUI that I created in QTDesigner. Now, lets make a new python file that will import that file (server.py) and extend it so that we can give it some functionality. I called this new file mountStuff.py.
We want to extend server.py because if we ever need to make changes to our GUI, then all our code will be lost when we run pyuic4 on our updated .ui file. Check out the attached .zip file to see how this neat little program works.
Wicked Designs
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009Let me tell you, the designer in me loves Halloween! I don’t know what I like more, the costume creation or the pumpkin decoration. When it comes to pumpkins, I love to go beyond the traditional jack-o-lantern and experiment with new designs, techniques and pumpkin varieties. Here is a little inspiration:
Check out these links to try some of these for yourself.
Monogramed Pumpkins
Etched Pumpkins
Pumpkin Carving with Cookie Cutters
Stenciled Pumpkins
It’s getting cloudy
Monday, October 19th, 2009
I ran across a great article in The Economist today about the release of Windows 7 marking the end of a computing era and the “beginning of an epic battle between Microsoft, Google, Apple and others” and how they, therefore we, will be using cloud computing more in the near future. You can read the article here.
What is cloud computing you ask? The National Institute of Standards and Technology defines it as a computing capability that provides an abstraction between the computing resource and its underlying technical architecture (e.g., servers, storage, networks), enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
I think webopedia.com defines it more understandably by saying it is a type of computing that is comparable to grid computing, relies on sharing computing resources rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle applications. The goal of cloud computing is to apply traditional supercomputing power (normally used by military and research facilities) to perform tens of trillions of computations per second.
To do this, Cloud computing networks large groups of servers, usually those with low-cost consumer PC technology, with specialized connections to spread data-processing chores across them. This shared IT infrastructure contains large pools of systems that are linked together. Often, virtualization techniques are used to maximize the power of cloud computing.
There are many people out there who believe the term cloud computing is just another buzzword that is used to describe too many technologies, making it confusing to many. The term Cloud computing has been used to mean grid computing, utility computing, software as a service, Internet-based applications, autonomic computing, peer-to-peer computing and remote processing. When most people use the term, they may have one of these ideas in mind, but the listener might be thinking about something else.
Welcome to the future, again.
Winning At Working: Carved In Granite
Friday, October 16th, 2009
As promised, here is the most recent edition of Winning At Working, buy Nan Russell. This post certainly speaks to most of us at one time or another. There are times when we get so used to doing things one way and one way only that we are closed minded to change. Other times the way we have always done things seems easier and often is. However, in an ever changing industry, in an economically challenged country, it is imperative that we become welcomers of change. It will be the key to longevity. A firm that is flexible and open minded has an unlimited number of tools for success available to them.
In the Black Hills of South Dakota, carved in granite, the six-story faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt create a grand impression viewed from a distant, or standing on the national monument’s viewing terrace. Visiting Mount Rushmore on vacation, I found the documentary of its making fascinating. Weeks later, one story stayed with me.
It turns out the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, planned to have the figure of Thomas Jefferson on George Washington’s right. But after painstakingly carving a portion of the massive face, Borglum reached such poor quality granite that he could not complete the stone portrait the way he desired. So, he decided to blast away the carved face he had worked months to create, starting again in a new location. (more…)
