Check out these awesome user interface sketching tools from UI Stencils. Here’s a browser sketch pad, and a web interface stencil that’s scaled to suit the pad perfectly.
The web elements stencil features a pixel ruler. While obviously pixels aren’t real measurements off-screen, it does provide you with a scale reference for working with the sketch pad.
Here’s the iPhone interface stencil, built to iPhone 4 dimensions and scale so you can map out your apps at the size they’re actually going to be built for:
And finally, an iPad dry erase board for quick and dirty interface brainstorming sessions.
If you don’t want to shell out real money for wireframing tools, there are plenty of free alternatives that you can print out–though you will be missing out on the metallic goodness of a real stencil!
On Monday, we brought you the house equipped with a water slide. Today, I present you with this awesome house in Tokyo, designed by LEVEL Architects that integrates a 3 story slide into the building. Talk about a child’s dream come true. With a slide instead of stairs, your kids will not only be safer, they’ll never be late to dinner again.
There’s also a ball-pit room! Look how much the kids are having!? #jealous
Considering its location, let’s hope the house and everyone in it is OK… <3Jeannie Jeannie
10 years ago, if you wanted to plan a family vacation to the Caribbean, you likely had to go through a travel agent. Today, there are a slew of travel planning sites like Gogobot, TripAdvisor, Expedia, etc. that help you navigate to warmer waters.
Today the business of buying outdoor advertising space, a 6 billion dollar a year industry, is stuck in the 90s. To buy billboards, wallscapes, transit space or innovative street art campaigns requires lengthy excel spreadsheets, phone calls, and driving from site to site.
Adstruc, a 4-person startup based in New York City is changing the future of outdoor advertising space, by providing an online auction and listing-based marketplace for sellers and buyers. Founder and CEO John Laramie brought his team together last summer under the mentoring of David Cohen’s TechStars program in Boulder, Colorado, to build the entire system in just three months.
Last month, ADstruc released a campaign titled, “Billboards for Everyone.” Their first billboard, which depicts a play on the immigration policy and is aptly displayed in Arizona, was designed by Shepard Fairey’s creative agency Studio Number One. The campaign is supported by partnerships with BA Reps, Spread ArtCulture Magazine, and JWT New York. Each month, Adstruc puts out a creative brief to host a similar project in various states. For future campaigns they will work with popular street artists like Ron English and experiment with 3D digital outdoor campaigns.
“What’s fascinating about these projects is how full circle they are,” says Laramie, “The deal starts out online [on Adstruc], then they are produced in the real world, but end up gaining the most visibility back in the online space as they virally spread across blogs and websites.”
In September of last year, Adstruc closed a $1.1 million Series A investment led by DFJ Gotham, with participation from RRE, Founder Collective, Jeff Clavier, David Cohen, Kal Vepuri, David Tisch and Social Leverage. This gained them quite a bit of popularity in the New York area, catching the attention of notable businessman, Gary Vaynerchuk, better known as Gary V.
To promote Gary V’s latest book titled, The Thank You Economy, Adstruc partnered with Twilio to launch an innovative campaign on the streets of New York City featured on telephone kiosks throughout Manhattan from Titan Outdoor and a subway platform ad at 23rd Street and Park Avenue. The campaign engages consumers with a unique phone number on the advertisement that enables people to speak directly about the book with Gary V – all through Twilio, a web app that makes calling and receiving phone calls through the Internet easy. The campaign was created, produced, bought and installed without an advertising or media agency and cost less than $20,000 in total.
“It was a no brainer to work with Gary and Twilio,” says Laramie. “We thought about who Gary V is and that his new book is about 1 on 1 communication and the relationship with your customers and those poeple around you. We said, how can we have some sort of interaction other than QR codes or texting a number? There isn’t enough call to action and outdoor ads are flat. Integrating Twilio into the ads made sense.”
Earlier today, I tested it out and gave Gary V a call, and he answered! Since the ads went up last week, he’s received only 25 calls, answering all of them unless he’s on a plane or asleep. The first four people freaked out and hung up on him right away and many others asked him questions like “What’s the ROI of your mom? What’s the book about?”
“Dollar for dollar, I’ll have to look if the campaign was totally worth it but I wanted to do it because I think these guys are disrupting media. I’d never have been able to do this without them. I think being creative in outdoor advertising is a very big opportunity,” says Gary.
Adstruc gives buyers the ability to say, “OK, here’s who I want to target, the location, here’s my budget and let’s do this right away.” Adstruc gives buyers the ability to see a space and using photoshop like tools, play with their ad within that space. For sellers, Adstruc scrapes all of their available data on the spots and uploads it to the Internet so they have one place to manage it. On average, Adstruc saves buyers 2-3 weeks of time ad 15%-25% off of costs depending on location and timing. For sellers, Adstruc helps sell otherwise remnant ad space.
A smartphone application is also in the works. Imagine being able to see a billboard, and submit a proposal right then and there? Why not? The future is here.
There’s been a noticeable increase in the use of QR codes in marketing of late in the west, long after they became a common sight in Japan. However there’s still quite a way to go, it seems, before these little square blocks of data become truly accepted.
A survey of 1000 British teenagers has found that 72% of 11-18 year olds don’t have the software to read QR codes or aren’t aware their phone can read them. Additionally, only 43% believed QR codes could be read by a phone, 8% of girls thought they were a magic-eye picture(!) and only 33% knew what they were called.
This lack of awareness is understandable – most phones don’t ship with a dedicated QR Code reader built in, and limited space in marketing materials often makes displaying detailed instructions on what you need to do to scan such codes a little difficult to achieve. It’s not a new problem – in late 2008 I wrote about a Pepsi campaign that went as far as listing twelve tips for scanning a QR code – including the desperate-sounding “Try anything!”
The findings of the new survey, issued in a mailshot by youth research agency Dubit, shows that if the codes are to take off beyond curious early adopters, consumers need to be educated on how to use them. Whose responsibility is this though? Should phone OS designers add a large QR button right into the interface? Should an enterprising developer create and market a QR code reader with the aim of becoming a widely known brand that everyone knows they need to use? If so, where’s the economic incentive for them to do that when charging for the reader software would be pointless?
There’s no easy solution, but without one these handy physical shortcuts to the Web might remain strange little ‘magic eye pictures’ forever.Image source
March 6 marked the day a new type of Facebook page was created for popular movement in the Middle East. The page’s title reads ‘Third Palestinian Intifada’ (Intifada meaning revolution) and has gathered some 180,000 fans and counting till the time of this post. But possibly not for long.
After the disruption of 3 Arab governments so far, 2011 is proving to be a decisive year in the Middle East. A year that historians, politicians, and social media enthusiasts will discuss long after it’s over.
The struggle with repressive Arab governments has been the general theme so far, with the regimes in Bahrain and Libya still struggling to stay in power.
Power politics aside, the Western Hemisphere has without a doubt been in favor of the semi-chaotic popular and democratic revolutions the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Oman, Yemen and Bahrain and practically ripping democracy out of their governments firm grip.
Yet one Facebook page may just be the decisive factor that proves to the world just what the Arab and Muslim people want in reality, and whether or not the world can deal with that reality.
The page calls for all Arabs in neighboring countries who believe Palestine is a free land under occupation by Israeli forces to march to Palestine for liberation on the 15th of May 2011. An ambiguous call not specifying what a march (denoted literally with the word ‘crawl’ in Arabic) really means.
We at TheNextWeb Middle East make it a point to avoid direct political side taking, but that does not mean stand idly as a page that could trigger a possible popular uprising is attacked not by logic, but by a blunt insinuation that it is the right ‘Jewish’ thing to do is just unacceptable.
In reaction to the page, a popular blog dedicated to everything Facebook posted a story calling for Facebook to remove the page titled ’Third Palestinian Intifada‘ stating it being ‘created by militant extremists’, an apparently unsubstantiated allegation altogether.
The massive support of the page rapidly approaching 200,000 ‘likes’ reflects not a militant extremist dogma, but a popular belief shared by potentially millions undistorted by a media twist to instigate change in Palestine.
Whether or not this page amasses to become the propeller of millions of Arabs in neighboring countries to Palestine, causing them to actually march for freedom of a country other than their’s, will remain a highly unlikely event that we believe should not be decided by Facebook administration.Image Credit
