Nowickipedia

"Get your phone and computer together for a classic boardwalk game. No apps. No downloads. Just Chrome and the web."

Basically, as far as ComScore is concerned, Blackberry is dead. If only it were so easy to remove other objectionable things from the "reportable universe".

Great film on user experience design.

The new Makerbot Replicator 2, in action!

Planetary gears printed in exactly 1 hour. Totally cool. (at Saatchi & Saatchi)

It's finally here!! My new Replicator 2 arrived at the office today! (at Saatchi & Saatchi)

FTA: "As of now it appears that the first paid channels will cost somewhere between $1 and $5 a month". Should be interesting to see how this plays out.

This is both a cool HTML5 application and the most entertaining corporate annual report ever.

Assuming we don't all evaporate in the Mayan apocalypse, it's time for 2013 prognosticating. (Really, I don't know what all the fuss is about. Their calendar ends tomorrow and everyone flips out. [The one on my wall](http://www.amazon.com/Outhouses-2012-Square-12X12-Calendar/dp/1421686791) ends December 31, but then I'll put up the [2013 calendar](http://www.amazon.com/Goats-Square-Calendar-Multilingual-Edition/dp/1421699249) and life will go on). Pinterest became a household name in 2012. They recently announced the rollout of brand accounts, despite many brands already having a presence there. Pinterest will continue to grow, better adapt itself to marketing needs, find a revenue model, and by the end of the year will be in near-stagnant growth, at least for U.S. users. When they finally release an API our brands will finally be able to do something interesting with the service, but we'll all flail around for a few months trying to figure out what works. Native advertising as a buzz phrase took root in 2012 and has proven powerful when done right. It works well for publishers, it works well for brands, and can be pure evil for users when advertising content isn't separated in an obvious way from real content, but abuse isn't rampant. BuzzFeed is the best-known player in this space and most everyone expects them to grow significantly in 2013. Facebook introduced sponsored stories, Twitter has sponsored tweets. Mashable, Gawker, and other content sites are getting into the game. As the number of publishers supporting native advertising increases, the possibilities for our brands grow, it provides another creative outlet for agencies, and the generally high-performing ad units make brand managers happy. Physical computing will continue to grow as a creative outlet, generator of PR-worthy campaign executions, and more electronics engineers will get ensnarled in ad-land. There's almost enough of this kind of work out there for a few small agencies to pop-up specializing in creative electronics design and implementation, and one of them will get big enough to become a minor household name (if everyone in your household works in advertising) before the end of the year.  The current sorry state of my little workbench. Windows 8 will help Microsoft's phone and tablet prominence go from basically zero to a little bit more than that. I don't see Windows 8 mobile devices being a major target for most brands in 2013. But don't underestimate Redmond's determination to be a major player in this space. They will be rapidly making inroads, but I don't think next year will be any sort of a tipping point, especially for the phones.  [2012 KPCB Internet Trends Year-End Update](http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/2012-kpcb-internet-trends-yearend-update) Responsive design principles will start to creep into ad unit development. We're going to see mobile-appropriate formats on small screens, large formats on desktop devices, with the unit placement handled through CSS media queries, not statically rendered ad tags. This will also help drive an increase in the number of HTML 5 ad unit placements. Responsive design principles have direct bearing on the concepting and implementation of native ad placements. The regulatory environment will continue to be a cloudy, murky place, especially with regard to privacy. But as more debacles like Instagram claim to its users' photos, the SpongeBob app that's in hot water with the FTC for the way they handle in-app marketing to children, and the proliferation of third-party analytics services continue to irk the public and the government, the regulatory frameworks will start to catch up to the technology and some of this behavior will get clamped down. Social CRM has been much talked about, but with the growing number of relevant social media channels, 2013 will be the year major brands start to incorporate this technology to better use the publicly available data on their customers and start to engage in social media space with greater precision and a more-informed strategy. Gestural and voice controls aren't just for the gaming console anymore. We're going to see these technologies incorporated into digital experiences throughout 2013. A recent example in the form of a Google Chrome experiment was the Google/Cirque Du Soleil collaboration called [Movi.Kanti.Revo](http://www.movikantirevo.com/), which used facial feature detection written in JavaScript to allow the user to control the UI by just tilting their head to the left or right.

You'll want a WebKit browser (Chrome or Safari) and your mobile device handy. Totally cool use of socket.io and fun to play with.

HTML 5.1 specification process has started. See also the [HTML 5.1 draft spec](http://www.w3.org/TR/html51/) (not a lot of changes, currently).

Mildly funny...

Brands worried about the decrease in reach for their posts on Facebook can take some solace in the increase in engagement for users who do see those posts.

A few days ago, [Pinterest](http://www.pinterest.com) announced formal support for long-awaited brand pages. Brands have been using Pinterest for some time, despite the terms of service agreement which prohibited such activity. The inevitable addition of support for brand-specific features has been an obvious road to revenue for the start-up, and a move that opens the platform up for more conservative brands, scared off by the T's & C's. So what do brands get out of the new feature? For now, not much. You can register a business account using a single brand name, instead of having to contrive something using a first and last name. A logo can be added. Using a system similar to how Google Analytics verifies site ownership, a brand can verify that they are the real brand and not someone trying to set of some sort of weird visual phishing scam. And that's about it. A business page is otherwise no different than a personal page. In the not-so-distant future, we expect to see the addition of some basic analytics, some ability to gain knowledge of the user community around that brand, and some additional tools to help businesses better understand content strategy. For now, Pinterest is providing none of those. Instead, startups like [Curalate](http://www.curalate.com/), [HelloInsights](http://helloinsights.com/), [Pinfluencer](http://www.pinfluencer.com/), [Pinfluence](http://pinfluence.com/) (not related), and several others. Curiously, Pinterest still has no available API for fetching data. I'm assuming these start-ups are gathering data via screen-scraping which is a very risky data source for a company to base its future on. Interestingly, the Pinterest [T's & C's](http://pinterest.com/about/terms/) don't seem to prohibit this kind of activity. It will be interesting to see whether they change the agreement language after launching their own tools.