Matt Grover

As Responsive Web Design continues to gain momentum, more and more clients want to talk about how it fits into the roadmap for their web experience. For many brands—particularly manufacturers—the benefits are immediately recognized and they tend to move forward with little hesitation. However, retailers tend to be less convinced that RWD (responsive web design) is viable for commerce sites, usually citing one of two perceived barriers—platform integration challenges or site performance. However, after closer examination, we find that these issues are rarely actual showstoppers.[...] Read >

In a previous post, we talked about the growing importance of Big Data to digital marketing and also the fact that it has to be broken down into more manageable pieces before we can apply it directly to a consumer touchpoint. The reality is that we need small and medium data too, along with a set of rules to help shape the experience and make it as relevant and personal as possible. In Responsive Experience Design (RxD), device-independent content is really just the icing on the cake—we also need to consider what goes into this data layer underneath. There’s isn’t a one-size-fits-all model for this, so for the sake of simplicity, let’s look at three possible “sizes” of data to see how they can fit into our recipe. [...] Read >

The term “big data” is a catchphrase that has started to enter mainstream vocabulary recently. It’s best understood as a new approach to a particular set of data problems—problems that cannot be handled using conventional database tools. The term is often associated with the massive data sets we can readily think of: search engine indexes of the entire Internet, social network records of the daily thoughts and activities of millions of people, or even the constant stream of data from the “Internet of Things.” But this outstripping of older technologies isn’t always defined by sheer size, as the name seems to imply—the information could also be moving too fast or it may not fit neatly into a traditional database structure. These three criteria were first characterized over a decade ago by Gartner as “the three V’s”—volume, velocity and variety. Here’s a quick look at each of these, along with some of the technologies being applied to them. [...] Read >

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” – Mark Twain

Adobe’s Flash technology has a deep and important legacy in the digital world, having helped brands and agencies innovate for well over a decade by bringing new kinds of web experiences to life. When it was first released by Macromedia (now part of Adobe) in the late 90s, it was a browser plugin designed to display graphics and animations that were not yet possible for web browsers to do on their own. It gained popularity quickly with web audiences as well as with the design and animation community because of the richness and expressiveness of the content that could be created and delivered with it. Over the next several years, Flash continued to push the web forward by layering in audio and video features and enabling hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D content. Read >

“In this new wave of technology, you can’t do it all yourself; you have to form alliances.” – Carlos Slim Helú

In a recent post we mentioned the emergence of Consumer Intelligence as a powerful tool for bringing Responsive Experiences to life. But there are plenty of great technologies that can be applied to help you get closer to your customers by providing more personal context to the brand experiences you offer them. Resource has developed key partnerships with companies all across the digital spectrum to help put the best of these emerging technologies to work on your behalf. Here are a few examples of how we can help you reach your customers in some unique new ways [...] Read >

In the world of digital marketing, managing Internet privacy and brand perception requires a careful balancing act. Striking that balance requires more than just a “do no evil” mentality—it’s about actively offering value in ways that consumers deem worthy of transacting their personal information. This means providing accurate and timely messaging that feels more like personalized customer service and less like spam. One might describe this holy grail of digital marketing as “providing decision support by getting the right information to the right people, at the right time, via the right channel” (save that thought for later). Taking into account the new breed of data-hungry consumers armed with mobile devices, Resource sees this as the perfect opportunity for introducing “Responsive Experience Design”, or RxD. The goal of creating responsive experiences is to put the consumer in the information driver’s seat, leveraging content on their own terms for their personal decision making. [...] Read >

The explosive growth of mobile and other “post-PC” devices, while staggering, isn’t exactly unprecedented. The graphic below draws a projection, based on the past 50 years of computing history, that mobile Internet devices will become ten times more prevalent than their desktop ancestors. Like each generation before them, these devices offer more and more services to us while requiring less and less of everything (space, power, complexity and cost). But note the abrupt disappearance of the 25+ year personal computing paradigm of the mouse and pointer interface. This new generation of devices has made a dramatic shift toward touchscreens to provide user interaction. At least one factor of this growth equation is the complexity-reducing effect these interfaces have had on ease of use. [...] Read >

For years as digital marketers, we’ve been preaching context-relevant, optimized mobile experiences. It was all true. But somewhere along the way marketers started confusing context with devices, making broad decisions for users based on those assumptions. Sometimes they were the right decisions, streamlining for key tasks. But at other times, the elimination of content and functionality was frustrating, confusing and condescending…and unfortunately supported by data that agrees that mobile web experiences are generally poor. The idea that “mobile” meant “mini” lost sight of the very purpose of the web: to enable users to access content, to complete tasks, to be entertained, and to interact. [...] Read >

The definition of the “Internet of Things” has been defined as the moment in time when the number of devices connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people on the Earth. This key milestone in the history of the Internet actually occurred back in 2008, thanks in part to the growing ubiquity of smartphones. Since then, the growth has only continued to explode, with projections showing that we have likely doubled this ratio of devices to people already, and it is expected to more than triple by 2015.

Although a comparison of human and device populations is helpful to quantify things, the Internet of Things (or “IoT”) is made up of more than just the devices that people interact with directly—about half of it consists of Internet-connected sensors that are transmitting data (such as temperature, pressure, light, or vibration) in real time from all over the globe. [...] Read >

Nowhere in digital is innovation happening faster than in the development of APIs. Just as the rush was on in the early days of the web for companies to have websites (properties), in recent years it’s been all about creating APIs (services). Right now we see API growth on its steepest upward trend yet—with the leading web API directory recently posting a count of 5,000 identified open APIs—just four months after breaking past the 4,000 mark. To put that growth in perspective, it took about 8 years to get to the first 1,000. You probably first heard about APIs in the context of major web platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google or Amazon. But these days brands everywhere are jumping into the fray. Why? [...] Read >