Jadestone Interactive

You don’t need to burn the haystack to find the needle.

jadestoneinteractive — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 20:01:38 +0000

I just came back from the first day of Guldäggsdagarna conference, and my greatest take-away was Will Sansom’s keynote. Will is from Contagious Magazine, a quarterly focusing on “future-facing marketing ideas and emerging technologies across a diverse range of media channels and product categories” – to put it in their own words.

Anyway, Will did an inspired run-through of examples of non-traditional creative digital solutions that companies are doing to reach out and engage their users. His message: people don’t need advertising! You cannot merely communicate a message anymore. Instead, in order to reach consumers, you have to give them real value, not something you want them to use; something they want to use…

Make everything useful, relevant or entertaining!

So digital communication is not about banners or “integrated campaigns” as we used to know them anymore… we filter away all that. I hold this as very true, and our team is working according to this mantra on a daily basis – to provide meaningful and qualitative experiences for our client’s users. But Will had a bunch of other great, inspiring examples from around the world that I would like to share with you:

Gatorade Replay

Gatorade’s “Replay” takes an over 20 year old conflict in the form of a football game that ended in a tie – and got the two original teams from Easton and Phillipsburg to replay the game decades later. The result was a captivating and engaging happening; the stadium was completely sold out, and fans were frantic – really embracing and sharing the experience. The result: 154 million impression and an impact equivalent of 3,4 mUSD in spent media!

Philips Carousel and Parallel Lines

The next example was Philips with their navigable “Carousel” movie scene done by Tribal/Stink Digital. The site had Zero media spend but huge impact globally – and is a brilliant example of using advanced technology and high production quality to really stand out.

Sagami’s Love Distance

Another example is Sagami’s Love Distance – a truly coherent integrated production using blogs, streaming and web technology to convey the concept of two lovers running to meet each other. Sales of the condom brand behind the campaign increased 125% in Japan!

Burger Sacrifice

Burger King is up next; a campaign that really put the mechanisms and emergent behavior of Facebook to use in a formidable way! The app challenged us to de-friend ten Facebook friends – and trade them for a Whopper. And they did it in a really clever way – “gaming” the Facebook system to such an extent that the app got banned after a number of weeks. Which of course just gave BK more bang for the buck. A beautiful example of using new technology creatively!

Volkswagen Real Racing GTI

VW is the first Auto Maker To Launch a Car Exclusively on a Mobile Device. Challenging all advertising rules, VW launched its new 2010 GTI in the US through only an iPhone racing game. Having spent 30-60MUSD on their previous introduction, this one cost: 500kUSD to build and zero media spend. Results: 3M downloads in 3 weeks! I look forward to working with our European clients to create similar results!

Nike Chalkbot

By combining a good cause, a web-site where people could enter messages, and a pneumatic robot traveling with the Tour de France circus painting these messages on the road for the riders and all the world to see through the TdF TV broadcast; Nike Chalkbot allowed for great, meaningful interaction endorsed by the Nike brand. Very clever and highly effective.

Canon EOS Photochains

[Vimeo=http://vimeo.com/7479269]

Canon EOS photochains is an australian campaign that really put social networking and game mechanics to use, allowing people to create growing chains of photos, where each shot inspires the next. The campaign pushed EOS to 67% market share in Australia.

Cadbury Nibbles

[Vimeo=http://vimeo.com/8053379]

Another campaign using some interesting game mechanics. Cadbury wanted to introduce ‘Nibbles’ - and did so by offering an online pop-up store, where people could get a free designed scarf by designer Charles Deacon. With a closed store-front on Carnaby St. in London; the only place you could get the scarf was in the virtual popup store. But, like all popup stores, this one moved around! Basically a widget jumping around to different fashion blogs sites, people had to chase it around. It was all orchestrated through Facebook, with clues on where to go and how to get in line. Results were really impressive – check out the video.

ARhrrrr – An augmented reality shooter

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNu4CluFOcw]

Finally, an augmented reality project from Georgia Tech – a gaming integration example in the form of a tech horror shooter using a physical map with 3d overlay. Candy Skittles is integrated into the game as bombs.

The point

With creative digital applications providing real value to your customers; you won’t have to spend the money on expensive media purchases… Your customers will find you. So… you don’t need to burn the haystack to find the needle. The needle finds you.

Over and out,

Robert Henrysson

Knowledge vs. understanding…

jadestoneinteractive — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:00:50 +0000

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”. You’ll know Malcolm as the author of “The Tipping Point” – a defining piece of non-fiction reading for the social media addicts of our time trying to understand how viral works. He also made a great TED talk on Spaghetti Sauce that has influenced the way I think about user testing. Most people who know me professionally will also know that I am a huge fan of user testing; it allows an organisation to navigate around the various guesses that are made every day about a consumer and their tastes. By doing user testing and adapting your product development to take the results and build the wisdom into your product – you get closer to what the market wants, faster to market and at a lower cost than ultimately failing and having to redo.

Stop Guessing… but ask the right questions!

We’ve advocated “Stop Guessing!” in Jadestone for years now. But what the TED talk that Malcolm did was show that you had to do user testing right in order for it to lead – and not mislead – your product development efforts. In many cases, he argues, you cannot rely on what a user says he wants, because people will rationalize when they give you the answer. So you have to observe their behaviour and draw conclusions from that.

One episode in Blink goes even further in describing how wrong you can go… He describes the old Pepsi challenge – which pitched Coke and Pepsi against each other, with Pepsi coming out on top. It turns out that the reason for this was that the tests were quite far away from how people actually enjoyed a cola – just a small sip in a plastic cup and then BOOM a verdict. When tests were redone with people drinking a whole can – Coke again came out on top! So not only do you need to observe rather than ask, you have to create very life-like circumstances for the conclusions to be right.

Will more information help?

But all in all – the thing that Gladwell really hammers home in Blink is that more information sometimes actually can distort your decision-making rather than improve it. We have sooo much information at hand today… does it always help? Or do we sometimes shut off our mind and our creative thinking and problem solving just because we are over-whelmed by all the information and just sifting through it takes up all of our time?

Malcolm ends Blink with a quote in the afterwords that I think was extremely worthy of thought:

“The key to good decision-making is not knowledge. It is understanding.
We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter”.

My take-away is – if you have to chose between getting more information or spending the time trying to understand the information you already have in order to make a decision – you should spend your time on the latter.

Anyway – Jadestone Interactive is committed to bring equal amounts of thinking as doing to it’s clients. We are convinced that this will pay off for our clients in the end.

/Robert Henrysson

iPhone vs iPad – What performance should game developers expect?

Peter — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:44:18 +0000

In just four days Apple’s online store will open the iPad section for pre-orders. Somewhere just shy of a million units are expected to ship april 3rd. Apple has as usual kept the lid on the actual specifications of the device, so we’re left with only speculations and rumors regarding what to expect. And oh do Apple users love to speculate

Like many others, I’m very curious as to what performance the iPad will be able to deliver for games. So, I’ve scouted the interblag searching for clues, and this is what I’ve come up with:

Comparison: iPhone 3GS vs iPad
	iPhone 3GS	iPad
Chip architecture (SoC)	Samsung S5PC100	Apple A4
CPU	ARM Cortex A8 600MHz 32-bit	ARM Cortex A8 1GHZ 32-bit
GPU	PowerVR SGX 535 200MHz (28 MPolys/s)	PowerVR SGX 535 Unknown freq. (28 MPolys/s)
RAM	256 Mb	512 Mb (very speculative)
Screen Pixel amount	153 600	786 432
Screen PPI	163	132

A look at the CPU

As you can see, the CPU in the iPad is rumored to be the same as in the iPhone, only running at a higher frequency. Unlike the A4 SoC, The ARM processor isn’t manufactured by Apple. Some bloggers have based on this questioned why Apple then acquired processor engineering company P.A. Semi back in 2008. The answer seems to be that we might see a brand spanking new CPU in the next generation of iPads or iPhones, when enough time has been given to development. The P.A. Semi people may also have worked with the A4 to minimize its power consumption.

What to expect from the GPU

The GPU is manufactured by Imagination Technologies, which Apple as of 2010-03-08 owns 9.5% of. The SGX 5 series, which the iPad GPU may be part of, has the following characteristics:

OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL ES 1.1 + Extension Pack
Desktop OpenGL 2.0 (SGX535/545) and 3.0 (SGX545)
OpenVG 1.1 enabling Flash and SVG
PVR2D for legacy 2D Support (BLTs, ROP2/3/4)
OpenWF enabling advanced compositing
OpenCL Embedded and Full Profile (SGX545) for GP-GPU

Imagination’s Series 5 lineup also contains the following similar GPUs (I would love some comments based on real world experience on this):

SGX520 (7 MPolys/s, 250Mpx/s) for the handheld mobile market
SGX530/1 (14 MPolys/s) for the handheld mobile market
SGX535 and SGX540 (28 MPolys/s) for handheld high end mobile, portable, MID, UMPC, consumer, and automotive devices
SGX540 (1000M pix/s, 20-35M Polys/s), SGX545, SGX555

Intel uses the SGX535 in their GMA500, and they describe it as (PDF):

A flexible, programmable architecture that supports shader-based technology, 2D, 3D and advanced 3D graphics, high-definition video decode, and image processing. Features include screen tiling, internal true color processing, zero overhead anti-aliasing, programmable shader 3D accelerator, and 32-bit floating-point operations

The speculation that the iPad runs on a SGX535 is to some extent based on best guess, and on a paragraph in the SDK documentation (To access the documentation you need to be part of the iPhone developer program):

Using OpenGL ES on iPad is identical to using OpenGL ES on other iPhone OS devices. An iPad is a PowerVR SGX device and supports the same basic capabilities as other SGX devices. However, because the processor, memory architecture, and screen dimensions are different for iPad, you should always test your code on an iPad device before shipping to ensure performance meets your requirements.

I would hold it as probable that he first model of the iPad runs the 535 GPU, while upcoming versions may run the much more powerful SGX545.

Conclusions

It is very likely that we will see great increases in performance over the next year or two, both for the iPad and the iPhone. It will be interesting to see if Apple continues to keep the devices more or less in sync. There are good market reasons for doing so, but the iPad is a device that will create different expectations than the iPhone, both regarding performance and battery life.

For now, I would hold it as likely that the spec table above is correct, and that the iPhone 3GS performance should be used as a benchmark for iPad development. The first update to the iPad will definitely pack more punch.