The book I read for my book report was The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. It was very interesting. The character I liked best was… OK, just kidding. But this post is a book report of sorts. I just got done reading The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation and it’s awesome for a couple of reasons.

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Over the past year here at Studiobanks we’ve been extremely fortunate to continue our growth by winning tons of new projects and bringing on new clients. With every new project (and even with our existing retainer projects), we put in a tremendous amount of work not just in delivering a quality end product, but building and fostering client relationships and managing expectations.

Throughout the course of my career I’ve been extremely fortunate to work with some amazing clients to create successful creative work. I’ve also worked on some not-so great projects that were ultimately failures. I’ve found that successful projects generally have several characteristics in common and that those same factors were missing from the failed projects. I continue to feel more and more strongly that in order to produce quality, successful work most of these elements (if not all) should be present.

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This just in: print is dead. Ok, well perhaps that’s an overstatement, but print advertising is not only declining it’s reached an important new milestone. For the first time ever, companies are spending more money on online advertising than they are on print.

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Occupy-NorthPole.com is now live and fighting the good fight against cookie inequality! Learn more about the movement on their site and then check ‘em out on Facebook and stay up to date about all the news by following the movement on Twitter:

@ChandlerWobble: Head spokes-elf for the ONP movement.

@Occupy_NP: The official twitter account of the ONP movement.

@Red_NoseRudolph: Santa’s 9th reindeer and proud member of the Reindeer Union for over 72 years.

@Sam_theSnowman: Lead reporter covering the movement for the North Pole News Network.

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I like G+ and I cannot lie! You other bloggers can’t deny. When a social network shows up with an itty-bitty user base and some circles in your face you get sprung…from Facebook.

Oh my god, Becky. The hype about G+ is so big. Everyone’s all like ‘It’s the Facebook killer! No wait, it’s the Twitter killer! It’s super cool! No wait, it’s lame and it’s going to fail.’ Wrong! G+ is the best blog aggregator you aren’t using. Let’s rewind, shall we, to early July. Once the initial euphoria of having scored a G+ invite wore off, I realized my Stream was not unlike the crowd at Spinal Tap’s Jazz Odyssey concert. After a few days of little to no new content, I did something I’d never done before: I circled a stranger.

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I got my first cellphone in 2001. It was a Nokia with a large 1.5 × 1 inch screen that could reveal the entire spectrum of colors as long as those colors were black or white. With the increased functionality (not to mention screen size) of today’s cellphones and tablets, one of the biggest changes for designers has been figuring out how to tailor their designs for mobile platforms and devices. Here at Studiobanks, we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of mobile-based projects that we’re working on. Mobile websites and apps used to be an afterthought—now they’re more important than ever.

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As a self-proclaimed Kindle addict, I was on the verge of hysteria when I heard about the “Kindle with Special Offers,” a new, cheaper version of the famed e-reader that displays advertisements. Horror struck me as I thought through the effects on the user experience.

Will I be reading The Help, about to find out the “God Awful” that Minnie did to Miss Hilly when all of a sudden an ad pops up for Crest Toothpaste? Ironic? Yes. But that is not the time nor the place where I want to be interrupted with an ad.

Will I be engulfed in the latest Sookie Stackhouse novel only to be blasted with HBO ads about True Blood? Don’t get me wrong, I sport my Team Eric t-shirt with pride, but I'm interested in reading about the magical town of Bon Temps, not watching it. And heaven forbid I go to “turn” the page while reading The Hunger Games and be mentally ripped out of the arena for a department store’s back to school ad!

After envisioning myself chasing down the Amazon execs, bow and arrow in hand, I decided to do some research and find out exactly what impact these new ad displaying Kindles will have on my fellow Kindle users.

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Fasten your safety belts boys and girls, Facebook is poised to announce a new feature at the f8 developer conference and this time it’s not something they ripped off from Google+! TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook will be introducing some new buttons into your life. Beyond their ubiquitous Like button, you’ll soon be able to note that you have Read, Listened, Watched, and Want various parts of the Internet. Still conspicuously absent is the long sought after Dislike button, but whatever. Big news! TechCrunch has some interesting ideas about this upcoming rollout—namely, why Facebook would want even more data from you (guess, just guess). Check out the full article here.

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