Hear Ye, Hear Ye!

The educational, interactive, and enjoyable oases for children and their parental figures known as Discovery Place and Discovery Place Kids have gone mobile.

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Social media management: it isn’t just for the neighborhood kid down the street who fixes your computer anymore. With the seemingly endless parade of social networks gaining and waning in popularity, it’s basically a full time job to stay engaged with customers or clients through social media. Which can be a problem for some people who, you know, have an actual full-time job that happens to be the whole reason they need to be on multiple social networks to begin with. That’s where a social media manager comes in.

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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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Nielsen, which is solely responsible for getting your favorite TV show cancelled because they let the networks know how few people were watching, have increasingly focused their hard-hitting data collection on social networking. Check out their State of the Media: Social Media Report for Q3 2011 for the latest research confirming everything you suspected all along. It's both eye opening and informative, though it will do nothing to bring back Arrested Development.

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With a fierce following of passionate fans for whom “Like” is an understatement, Bojangles’ wanted to expand its social media strategy with a branded Facebook app that encourages their fans to spread the word about Bojangles’. The newly launched, Friend Biscuit is a Facebook app that challenges users to amass the most friends who “Like” Bojangles’ on Facebook. The app fills a virtual biscuit with pictures of the users’ friends, and then rewards the user with the biggest Friend Biscuit with gift cards and other prizes including a grand prize of free Bojangles’ for a year. The only question we had was: where do we sign up?

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