Econsultancy posted a blog on making the most of m-commerce; it would appear that some retailers still aren’t making the most of one of the fastest growing shopping tools. They put forward a 5 step plan on how to get started. Read more...
As firm supporters and contributors to the (what will soon be legendary) 2011 Leeds Digital festival, thought we'd reflect on one of the events that we have been involved in recently.
Last Thursday, I was proud to represent MadeByPi, alongside an esteemed panel of experts that included Pete Robinson and Claudio Franco from Dubit, Dr Gianni Cassidy from Glasgow Caledonian University and Tom Evans from Numiko, in conveying and sharing valuable insight and expertise in delivering excellent digital experiences for youth audiences.
With our 15+ years experience in this sector, we/I added our learnings to the discussion (skilfully led by Dave Eccles) that covered key discussion areas such as the differences between the 'digital natives' (kids) and 'digital immigrants' (us) and what their expectations, experience and engagement levels are compared to ours.
Key points of difference are HOW they interact with digital content, WHY they interact with digital content and how best to ENGAGE this audience given their differences in ability (in terms of literacy, patience and appetite for learning and play) and technical know-how (in terms of technical, navigational and usability considerations). Within this, we have experience and insight in how fragmentation occurs within the youth audiences, boys v girls (action v nurture) and across age groups (interaction v information and engagement).
Best summarised, we think, in the words of others via some informative tweets, it proved to show that our shared experiences led to consensus on marrying insight on the audience with the social context, currency and content that the online platform offers youth audiences, it proved to be a highly informative discussion, at least from our side of the panel. Happy to share in more detail and in more context if ever required!
Happy reading!
Karen
@sospot
Boys still want action, gore, competition, points, to get up levels etc #LDFkids
@sospot
girls still want to nurture, explore, collect, decorate, glitter and work collaboratively #LDFkids
@anatomic
The panel love statistics, best/most horrifying one so far - average age a child is first exposed to porn is 11! #LDFKids
@sospot
Assumption is that most kids have access to a smart phone/iPad. Disney research suggests that this is the exception, not the rule #LDFkids
@anatomic
Smartphones are the exception, not the rule. Although there are lots of iPhones on Christmas and birthday lists! #LDFKids
@IdleSi
Games aside, Karen's suggesting a thought: does the Internet heighten/improve a child's social communication development? Or not? #ldfkids
@anatomic
Interaction online is one to one, child to website, spread of experience is word of mouth, offline #LDFKids
@IdleSi
Kids expect one on one connection with web. Adults lean toward transactional. #ldfkids
@anatomic
Game mechanics and terminology can often spill into real world phrases and behaviour for children. #LDFKids
@InspiredYouth
'Internet and game based activity a huge part of social currency in classrooms' the limits are only our will and creativity #ldfkids
@sospot
Authenticity is key: don't try to trick kids, it must be their own exploration. They know when they are being tricked
@LeanneBuchan
Sharing and social is still an important aspect for kids in digital 'Look what I've done/made' creates buy in #ldfkids
@anatomic
How to capture a child's attention? Make it fun and engaging! Games and content to share with their friends #LDFKids
Mashable Business posted this infographic by Lab42 to illustrate the power of online this Christmas, showing amongst other stats that Read more...
Gershwin, what a name, Gershwin is the name of the next update available right now from WordPress.
Version 3.2 offers plenty of new features including a really neat looking full-screen mode window for when writing blog posts, a brilliant cropping tool for images for your article posts, a generally quicker admin area and the dropping of support for IE6.
The WordPress update is available now via your WordPress Admin.
For more information check out this great introduction video.
Today is an exciting day, we’re having a party, but not just any party. Because today it’s our birthday party! Tonight we celebrate 15 years of making websites and an array of other digital stuff. If you hop on over to the www.madebypi.co.uk website you’ll see lots of information and case studies about what we’ve made in the last few years.
I’ve now been with MadeByPi® for almost 12 years, in such a dynamic and changing industry there's a real focus on looking what is coming next and rarely do we look back on how we got where we are today. So in a break with tradition, today seems like an ideal opportunity to get a little nostalgic and look at how we got from our humble beginnings to a team of 35 experts in digital solutions.
You see we weren’t always called MadeByPi®, indeed up until 2008 we were known as Pilot Interactive (or PI as we were known colloquially - hence MadeBy "PI"). Read more...
To celebrate our 15th birthday, we asked the boys in our studio to have a play around and come up with something to highlight a few of our most successful projects from the past decade and a half. The result is the showreel you can see on our website. Read more...
To the surprise of quite a few of us here in the MadeByPi office, Microsoft released a new website the other day, with the strapline "10 years ago a browser was born. Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we're in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it's time to say goodbye."
Yes, Microsoft are making the effort to try and get global usage of it's own browser IE6 down to below 1%.
Currently the global usage of IE6 is 12% worldwide - still rather high, but hopefully with this campaign which, developers can also contribute to by using their provided scripts to inform IE6 users to upgrade to the latest versions (IE8/9) we might eventually get there.
For information from the chaps at Microsoft themselves about why they are doing this, check out their blog.
You may remember, in August last year, I released FontSwffer - a tool to simplify the creation of font SWFs for Flash.
Several minor updates and bug-fixes have been released over the last few months, and now, I think, it's time for a 'dot' release. So, here comes FontSwffer 1.1 
Along with some little improvements, bug-fixes, and tweaks, the main new features are:
If you've installed an earlier version, the next time you run FontSwffer the update should be downloaded to your desktop and it will ask you if you want to install it right away.
Or, if you fancy it, you can grab the new builds directly:
Windows - FontSwffer_1.1010_win32.zip
OSX - FontSwffer_1.1010_osx.zip
