How dramatic?

1. Client Demand: In the past 2 weeks I have had 3 clients request iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) apps and even more request mobile versions of web and micro-sites. That’s right, request, not something we were pitching. We’ve pitched iOS apps before, but a client has never specifically requested one (keep in mind we are not primarily a business-to-consumer agency). To be clear, they’re not just requesting simple HTML5 based apps, but true gesture driven, direct manipulation-designed, Objective-C apps. Previously iOS projects came up maybe once a month, and even then rarely became a reality in StudioNorth’s B-to-B client sphere. Here’s a graph showing the approximate growth curve.



2. Driver Shift: As I mentioned in my earlier post, the entire technology industry has shifted due to mobile. To understand this point go back and read the last part of my post, here’s an excerpt:
   

   The entire technology industry has already shifted right under our very noses. How? The enterprise used to drive the technology industry. People used what IT gave them. IT locked things down to keep the company, and the employees, safe and secure. Now things are different. The consumer is driving technology, not the enterprise. Now the market share swap between AAPL and MSFT makes all the sense in the world.

3. Advanced Software: Autodesk Inc. recently announced that it’s bring AutoCAD® WS to iOS. While this is impressive, even more impressive is what’s going on with 3D and gaming. Epic Games Inc. just released an iOS version if their Unreal 3 Engine. This is, no pun intended, epic. The Unreal Engine is a fully baked real-time 3D engine that can, and will, be used for massive multiplayer online gaming systems. Epic has already released tools for developer to create environments. This is a testament to what’s possible now, and a predictor of what is to come. These devices are personal, intimate, windows into new, uncharted, even uncreated lands. Literally. You can read more about it on Epic’s site, but here’s an except to give you an idea:
   

   “This is a testament to the sheer power of iOS devices as up until now, Unreal Engine 3 has typically been used to create high-end gaming experiences on game consoles and computers,” said Epic Games President Dr. Michael Capps. “And we’re not just keeping it to ourselves. We’re putting Unreal Engine 3 technology into the hands of game developers all over the world, and we can’t wait to see the apps they make next.”

   A small team of Epic’s programmers, artists and testers created “Epic Citadel” in just eight weeks of development time. Unreal Engine 3 is scalable yet packed with the same tools hundreds of thousands of users work with to create games, simulations and animated content.

4. Seven Mass Media: Mobile has the potential to reach anybody through ANY MEDIUM. Mobile can, and is, doing everything that all forms of earlier mass media can do. The previous six are, in order of inception: Print, Recording, Cinema, Radio, Television, and the Internet. In addition to the abilities of these six, mobile has its own unique attributes:
   

   Mobile is the first personal mass media
   Mobile is permanently carried
   Mobile is always-on
   Mobile has a built-in payment mechanism
   Mobile is available at the point of creative inspiration
   Mobile has the most accurate audience measurement
   Mobile captures the social context of media consumption
   Mobile allows augmented reality to be used in media

   Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_mass_media

So, forget about clinging to the past, things are changing more now than ever before. Forget what you knew about what was possible before and start thinking about hyper-local, social, interaction design, and the cloud all in a mobile framework. Don’t say there’s nothing new under the sun, because this is all new. It’s everything that’s old…plus. In my book, that spells new.

Andy leads the interactive offerings and staff engineers at StudioNorth. He consults with clients on strategic technology direction and personally oversees the key phases of the iterative development cycle for many large technology projects. Whether for public web sites, private extranets, or custom applications, Andy uses his rich experience to provide results-driven solutions to our clients. He’s known for being a visionary and for coining the phrase, “conservative wow” in reference to StudioNorth’s ability to create high-impact projects for some of our more conventional audiences. If you want to bring your brand beyond “2.0″, Andy is your connection.

Want to track Andy a little closer? You can follow him on Twitter.

“Cloud Computing”

More and more services online are competing for our lives. They are asking us to invite our friends, store our documents, entertain us, and streamline our lives. What’s more they aren’t just asking to do it, they’re actually making our lives better, providing a return on our “investment of information.” I can say without a doubt that online services make my life easier and more convenient. On the flip side, they also add clutter. However, once you figure out how you work best online it becomes somewhat easy to cut out the clutter and actually simplify things.

Think about these services for a moment… How many of them have you had to install on your computer? How many of them are available offline? Hardly any. They only exist or make themselves available when you are connected to the Internet and because of this you are drawn into the Internet more and more.

The future of marketing, software, services, and products

This is where it gets interesting. Many of the leaders of these services are developing vast data centers using cheap hardware on cheap or free operating systems. Companies like Google, Yahoo!, IBM and Microsoft are moving very quickly to create the facilities to enable and store the services and data that allow people to function in the cloud. Because of this, the ability to find computing power and data storage online is becoming extremely cheap and ubiquitous. It’s actually becoming very much like a utility for companies that take advantage of these data centers in the cloud. Amazon, for instance, has two offerings in particular that they call the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). These can be used by software engineers and .com start-ups to host virtually unlimited amounts of data and virtual computing power. They can turn them off and on as needed and only pay for what is used…and it literally costs just pennies.

As these services become better and more available people are flocking to use them. Companies like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube have attracted people in droves, and keep them engaged. That means that more marketing and advertising dollars must follow. We are only beginning to see what context-based and pay-per-transaction advertising will become. The media game is changing and it will be interesting to see how media buying and selling changes with it. There is tremendous opportunity within this transformation to change the old crusty advertising industry.

How StudioNorth is taking advantage of “The Cloud”

At StudioNorth we are very highly aware of how to use the cloud to help our clients. We use it to host high traffic/high bandwidth “components” of websites. Components like videos that are attached to direct marketing campaigns. We are also using the cloud to create the future of our agency service offerings. It’s very cost effective for us and highly scalable. We’ve always been a custom online software application agency, but now we are able to offer much more. Automating and moving some of our core processes into the cloud to achieve usage and reach audience we’ve never thought possible before is very exciting and rewarding.

So…

As Sun Microsystems used to say back in the 1990′s, “The Network is the Computer.” It wasn’t then, but it is fast becoming true today (too bad Google and Adobe are eating Sun’s lunch). Only the future will show for sure how far the cloud boundary will permeate our lives. And once it has, what’s next?

-Andy

Some references for more info.
Wikipedia: Cloud Computing
Advertising Age: What Cloud Means to Marketing Forecast
O’Reilly: The Network REALLY is The Computer

Andy leads the interactive offerings and staff engineers at StudioNorth. He consults with clients on strategic technology direction and personally oversees the key phases of the iterative development cycle for many large technology projects. Whether for public web sites, private extranets, or custom applications, Andy uses his rich experience to provide results-driven solutions to our clients. He’s known for being a visionary and for coining the phrase, “conservative wow” in reference to StudioNorth’s ability to create high-impact projects for some of our more conventional audiences. If you want to bring your brand beyond “2.0″, Andy is your connection.

Want to track Andy a little closer? You can follow him on Twitter.