Mimosa [mi · mo · sa] – A cocktail-like drink composed of one part champagne and one part thoroughly chilled orange juice. It is traditionally served in a tall champagne flute with a morning brunch as hair of the dog or to guests at a wedding…or of course, Rational Fridays!
It’s a Harry Potter kind of day…
July 14, 2011
It’s all about Harry Potter in the studio today. Check out the handmade t-shirts. Jose wins the award for best dressed. And for the fact that he rode the bus in costume, carrying a monitor.
Spending the last decade immersed in the Harry Potter craze, these three will be seeing the finale in its entirety late tonight. Looks like we’ll be getting quad-shot lattes in the morning…
-
- These three all came to work this morning in costume for the finale tonight. You’ve just got to love them for it.
Comments Off
Groupon Clone Wars: Are Daily Deal Platforms a Short Term Fad?
June 10, 2011
From whale-watching boat rides to pole dancing lessons, daily deal giant Groupon has made quite the footprint on global consumerism since its launch in 2008. Now at an estimated net-worth of 15 billion and counting, Groupon is featured in more than 500 markets and 44 countries. It didn’t take long for Groupon look-a-likes to tap into the daily deal pool; there are now hundreds of Groupon clones of all flavors flooding the scene. Even world-renowned Google wanted in, offering 6 billion for the ownership of Groupon—only to find rejection. And Google did as Google does, moved on to bigger and better things—Google Offers. Launched this month exclusively in Portland, this Groupon-esque service has proven itself popular. Google Offers’ first guinea pig, Floyd’s Coffee Shop, experienced quite a ‘jaw dropping’ response. Within minutes of the deal going live, customers were in the shop to redeem the–$3 for $10 worth of drinks and food–offer.
With this daily deal hoopla has come its skeptics. Groupon was originally created to give local businesses further exposure and to get new customers in the door, ideally resulting in a loyal customer base. Many people believe that, as Groupon struck gold, the once-humble business has grown a greater interest for its own profit. And the effect has landed directly on small businesses. Groupon’s rapid success has attracted attention from big-boy brands such as the Gap. Because Groupon acquires a slice of dough for each daily deal purchased, it would only be in Groupon’s best interest to sell more daily deals—at qualities and/or prices that are infeasible for smaller-scale businesses. It’s as if Groupon is becoming the “Walmart” of the online demand generation.
Many would agree that the local angle is what originally made Groupon so appealing. Now that it appears to be shifting focus away from local business owners to larger corporations, some consumers are turning away: “I think that if Groupon just keeps opting for the big nationals they’ll lose users. I don’t need Gap coupons. Heck, I get plenty of coupon spam already,” says one Groupon user. Most daily deal sites, however, are listening to these negative reactions. Google has been attentive to small businesses throughout its launch of Google Offers—Floyd’s coffee shop is after all a locally owned small business. And Groupon, for instance, has created the “Groupon Now” application where a user can open the smartphone app and be presented with two options: “I’m hungry,” or “I’m bored.” Clicking either button will prompt a list of time-specific daily deals, according to his or her location.
Even with the addition of these fancy bells and whistles, some still aren’t sold. Marketing professor at Rice University’s business school, and author of a recent Groupon study states, “The sites offer great deals to the consumers at the expense of the small businesses.” His study concluded that 32 percent of businesses found their Groupon promotion unprofitable, and a whopping 40 percent of his respondents said they would not repeat the promotion. Clearly many businesses that promote themselves on these sites do so at a loss, justifying their unsuccessful promotions by calling them, “marketing investments.”
So what if daily deal sites steered away from large corporations, remained loyal to small businesses, and found ways to become more profitable for the little guys? That might not cut it either. While it’s impressive that businesses have found a new way to gain customers during a dark recession, there seems to be little discussion about potential long-term effects. Some speculate that the “Achilles’ heel” of the daily deal concept will inevitably lead to its destruction. That is, essentially training consumers to be cherry-pickers as opposed to loyal customers. Once a consumer buys a product or service at half off, paying full price suddenly becomes superfluous. So instead of customers sticking to their preferred retailers they hunt for the better deal, creating a cherry-picking epidemic.
“It’s like dynamite,” says Jay Goltz, a Chicago business owner and blogger for The New York Times. “It’s a great invention, but it could blow up your house,” he adds. “I wouldn’t predict the end of the bulletin board.”
I guess we’ll stay tuned…
Additional Reading:
Groupon Smashes Sales Records with Nationwide Gap Deal
Groupon To Partner With Expedia For Groupon Travel
Google Launches Its Groupon Competitor Wednesday
Groupon Adds Self-Serve Deal Platform, Says It’s the “Future”
The Numbers Behind Groupon’s Meteoric Rise [INFOGRAPHIC]
As Groupon Grows, Will Small Business Be Left Behind?
Chicken Taco Thursday!
May 31, 2011
As if we needed more reasons to love Rational…it was “Chicken Taco Thursday” last week, thank you Jeremy! Stay tuned for more deliciousness.
Comments Off
HTML 5. What is it and when can you start using it?
March 28, 2011
There are some misconceptions about what HTML 5 is and what it can do. I’m here to clarify and inform you of some of the neat little things that are available to us through the currently-in-progress update to HTML. I say “in progress” because it literally is still being developed and is not entirely final. That being said, it doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t–or shouldn’t–start using some of the new features laid out for us. A good majority of browsers already support the current spec and there are ways around the ones that don’t.
To start us off, for some of the new people out there, HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML is the standard for presenting and structuring web content. It does this through the use of tags. Tags generally are semantically named based on the content they are enclosing. For instance, “<form> </form>” would encapsulate “<input />” in which the user could ‘input’ their email address or password. Or for another example, “<button>Click Me!</button>” would show a button with the text “Click Me!”. We also have the ability to insert videos and audio using the <embed> tag, but this will generally require the user to have the necessary plug-in, such as Flash, installed. Now this is all well and good, but as the web becomes engrossed with more innovative websites and browsers become more robust, the need arises for more tags and features. We also should have the ability to embed elements and have them run natively (without plug-ins) in our browser. This is where HTML 5 comes in.
As stated previously, HTML 5 is the latest update to the HTML specification and it encompasses lots of new semantic tags as well as many different features and benefits. HTML 5 is not some magic panacea, though. I’ve heard people “Ooh” and “Ahh” over neat websites that use fancy JavaScript and say “That must be HTML 5!” Really though, HTML 5 is not a single entity that you just start using all at once. It is a collection of features that you can pick and choose from. In fact, a lot of the new features are not even supported in a few not-so-modern browsers. Does this mean you should wait until the lagging parties catch up to start using the cool, new stuff? Well, as I said before, HTML 5 is not a cure for a terrible website, so you shouldn’t think using it will solve all your problems. Truly, most of HTML 5 is already being used on your existing website anyway. This is because HTML 5 is just an update to an already very old, tried and true, HTML specification.
“So what’s the big deal then?” Well, HTML 5 is all about making things simple and easier to understand. When it comes to tags, there are many new and useful semantic tags to dig your keyboards into. The HTML 4 way of creating a layout for a page was to create many arbitrary <div> tags and assign them an id or class. Some examples are: “<div id=’navigation’></div>”, or “<div id=’header’></div>”. With HTML 5 we have a much simpler way. Similar to how the <form> tag specifies form content, we now have tags such as <header>, <nav>, <article>, and <section>. There are many more of these new tags, but that should give you an idea of the usefulness that comes with them. Along with new structural tags, we also have new multimedia tags such as <audio> and <video> which allows you to embed audio and video natively in the browser without the use of any plug-ins or APIs such as Flash or Silverlight. HTML 5 also brings us other cool things like a geolocation API in which you can use to access the user’s position on the globe. (With their permission, of course)
“All this stuff is cool, but I can’t use it unless all browsers support it, right?” Well, actually the structural tags in HTML 5 are almost completely backwards compatible with HTML 4. For any of the advanced, spiffy things like embedded video, audio or geolocation, you can implement detection libraries that will let your code know if the current browser supports it, and subsequently enable or disable those specific features accordingly.
Basically what I’m trying to say is that the new tags and features that come with HTML 5 are ready to be put to use and played with. Even if you’re not going to be putting them to use in a production level site, you might as well get acquainted with them because they won’t be leaving anytime soon.
Anyway, I hope I’ve shed some new light on this buzzword that’s been flying around the Internet. For some of you, I may have just made it worse. Either way, I hope I got you excited to learn more, because I have hardly scratched the surface in terms of all the newly available cool things you have at your disposal.
If you want to read more, there are plenty of in-depth resources that you can dig your hands into. Here are some sites that I’ve found most useful:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5
http://diveintohtml5.org/introduction.html
Here is also an HTML 5 compatibility chart to use for reference:
http://www.findmebyip.com/litmus/
Now, get out there and start using HTML 5!
Mobile App or Mobile Web Presence: Building a combination that works
February 23, 2011
More and more users are connecting to the Internet through their Smartphone and a plethora of embedded mobile devices. While many businesses are still adapting their internet strategies, millions of users are going mobile every day. These days having a mere internet strategy just does not cut it. Mobile is the future and it is happening now. Do you have a Mobile Internet strategy?
It is very easy to buy into the current trend of rich user experiences using mobile applications. Everyone wants their own cool iPhone, Android, or WP7 mobile application, but it is neither viable nor cost effective for every business model. Here are just two things to think about when making the decision between trying to be relevant with a Mobile App and grabbing consumer mind share by building your Mobile Web presence.
Don’t just follow the trend for the sake of it. Mobile Apps are what’s in, but that does not mean it fits within YOUR mobile internet strategy. More often than not the mobile app route is chosen for the wrong reasons. Mobile apps should be utilized in situations involving lots of transactions and the exchange of large amounts of data. Does this sound like what you need? Many mobile web users are still using mobile sites as only a means of getting info like addresses and phone numbers. Creating a rich user experience may just be wasted effort, but more importantly wasted company dollars. Users want movies times and may not care about watching movie trailers. The biggest battle is going to be between how to stay relevant while remaining accessible to the broadest audience possible. The key to gaining consumer mind share is being accessible, and that will be achieved by creating a Mobile Optimized Web Presence.
It is important to have a Mobile Optimized Web Presence and User Experience, because everyone believes that their web site will perform the same on their mobile devices as on their PCs. Even with advancements in mobile device hardware and intelligence hence the smart phone, the caveat to this logic will be longer site load times. Many sites have gone ballistic with flash and rich media content. Without a separate mobile optimized user experience you will risk losing consumer mind share as more users go mobile with their internet surfing. Also as more users go mobile, creating a mobile optimized web presence will continue to give you visibility on search engines. This is because many users still rely heavily on search engines as the primary method of grabbing information from the web. Imagine users seeing your site pop up on Google, but then opt to go to the competitor because of your site load times. It will be a social circle nightmare. Soon, even being relevant won’t bring you back to life. Cool apps won’t be relevant without the proper amount of consumer mind share to be hypnotized by the app’s sleek and sexy appeal.
My opinion, you ask? Being relevant does not matter if you have an audience of two. A robust mobile strategy will first seek out consumer mind share through a pleasing Mobile Presence which will continue to be enhanced with a sleek and flashy user experience to keep their short attention spans. Be relevant but make sure you know the size of your audience. Otherwise you might find that you are throwing dollars out to capture an audience of two.
Comments Off
How do I make sure my website is optimized for the iPad?
January 24, 2011
With 14.8 million units sold it’s pretty safe to say that the iPad is another smash hit for Apple. Many marketers are now asking how to optimize their websites for this touch-enabled device.
Approach
When we approach a mobile strategy for our clients we often recommend an integrated solution which includes a mobile optimized site, or a stand alone application. That’s because users are interacting with smartphones on the go, so you want to make sure and optimize this experience for them. Task oriented and simplified presentations are often the best way to go. On the other hand, tablet computers, such as the iPad, are used in a different way. Sometimes on the go, sometimes on the couch, but usually not while driving, walking or shopping. That means that the user experience, while different, is still pretty similar to the experience that users have while using desktops and laptops. Most often, websites we build for those interactions are appropriate for iPad’s, with some tweaking of course.
Tweaking
There are many things you can do to optimize your site for tablet devices such as the iPad. We can’t cover them all, but here are a few that will get you on your way. First, think about the technology available. As many of us know, Flash isn’t going to work, so make sure your site has a back up if Flash is heavily used. Substituting HTML 5 for Flash elements is a good solution. Tablets are also a touched based interface, so the way we access information is a bit different. If users on your site roll over components to get more information (think dropdown navigation) those elements aren’t likely to work on a tablet. Think about changing to on-click to facilitate those interactions. Another important thing to think about: fat fingers. Human fingers aren’t nearly as precise as that little hand that pops up when we rollover a link on our desktops. Links need to be big enough to touch without inadvertently clicking the button right next to it; often a few extra pixels of space is all you need.
Interested in learning more?
Check out this article on Ad Age, or give us a call. We’d be happy to talk to you about how we can devise a mobile and tablet strategy for your website.