We just found out today that RDVO’s work for the Gillette Young Guns has been named a 2008 Webby Award Honoree in the celebrity/fan category. Details on the awards and honorees can be found here.
Winning a Webby Award is a great honor – congrats to both our internal team and fantastic and wise clients at Gillette.
Last week I was a guest-lecturer to a business marketing class at Clark University. The subject of my lecture was Next: The Past, Present, and Future of Digital Marketing. The discussion focused on the elements of digital marketing and how the medium has changed and evolved with the advent of social networks, search marketing, and the mobile web.
I also called out several “buzz-cepts” like Web 2.0, semantic web, and others and discussed the buzz and what the realities are for marketers.
The presentation and discussion was very interesting. Of course, all the students were extremely familiar with the web but very few had an understanding of how digital marketing worked or, interesting enough, that they were being marketed to. The presentation concludes with a discussion of how to get into the digital marketing field.
My presentation is below (provide via slideshare):
Popular Mechanics has an in-depth article and video about the latest advances with Microsoft Surface.
Jeff Han from Perceptive Pixel talks about the benefits of multi-touch interfaces used by products like Surface.
It looks the project has evolved quite nicely since the initial announcement. The interactions with other devices are especially cool.
In his latest Alertbox, Jakob Nielsen publishes the results of a quantitative study on how time needed to complete website tasks increases as you get older. According to the study, there is a 0.8% increase in task time per year for users between the ages of 25 and 60.
Nielsen attributes the increases in time to the human aging process—erosion of cognitive resources, loss of visual acuity, etc. Apparently, the older you get the harder it is to process complex information and tasks on the web.
While there is not enough disparity between 30- and 50-year-old users to warrant different design approaches, Nielsen notes that there is a specific drop-off in ability after age 65. Websites designed for senior citizens clearly need to follow different usability guidelines.
It’s hard to disagree with the Nielsen’s findings, although concluding that older users struggle more than younger users is hardly groundbreaking. The study notes that the age at which people start using the web has some impact on their ability, regardless of age. However, the study does not take into consideration how the types of online tasks you perform vary by age.
Pew Internet released an interesting report on how online activities differ by demographics. While the findings do support Nielsen’s findings, there is equal variance across different demographics such as income, race, and education.
