Digital Jam

Twice a month a group of like-minded individuals at Wunderman get together and indulge our collective digital appetite with a session of link sharing and discussion. We call this Digital Jam. Everyone is encouraged to show off the most cutting-edge content they’ve found and we vote on the best at the end.

We had a delicious spread this time, including an augmented reality postage helper from USPS, online buzz visualisation for FIFA 10 and a demo of amazing video graffiti technology.

Runner-up was the new Uniqlo collection site; an innovative showcase of the 2009 Uniqlo range in the form of a catwalk show linking out to their ecommerce store. Sharing second place was a page takeover for the French TV show Braquo; a clever piece of media where cops jump out and start “smashing up” the MSN France homepage.

Our fortnightly winner was The Fun Factory - the bottle bank arcade. The Fun Factory has featured in Digital Jam before, it’s an initiative of Volkswagen based on “the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better.” It’s a competition open to anyone with ideas for how to prove the ‘fun theory’. The world’s deepest bin, piano stairs and the bottle bank arcade are all just real-world implementations of this. We love all of these; hopefully they’ve got more great inspiration around the corner.

All in all it was a very successful Digital Jam. We’ll share how the next one goes and what great stuff we discover! Keep up with the latest on Twitter by looking out for the hashtag #digitaljam.

Silverlight, Blend 3 & Sketchflow

Our very own webmeister Andrew Spooner shares his views on whether Microsoft is merely simplifying the complexities of Flash…

Originally posted on Spooner’s blog, 12.10.09.

“Had an interesting day today being shown around the various applications used to create Silverlight projects. It seems to me that Microsoft have gone down the same route that Google went down with their review of email which gave birth to Google Wave. Blend 3 has made simple the tasks that are complicated and drawn-out in Flash and brought rich application development up to date with all the functionality you'd expect of a modern web application.

“I'm interested to see how Silverlight changes the way we use the web. There are clearly some functions that are easy to implement and as such I’d expect them to become more prevalent in Silverlight applications. Its dynamic video handling properties impressed me the most and that's where I can see it adding value over Flash. Apart from that, it is a very different way of working for most Flash developers and of the excellent designers out there, many are just too loyal to their Macs to make the switch (currently it is only possible to develop on Windows).

“I'd love to produce some work with Silverlight, a subtle excuse to develop something for use with MS Surface. I imagine it is only a matter of time before the Silverlight plugin penetrates deep enough into the average user's browser and developers are willing to propose to their clients that the Silverlight framework is the right place to work.”

Good examples of sites using Silverlight:

• Favourite Website Awards
• The Beatles Rockband