The Bella Buzz podcast devotes an entire episode to the vast change that is taking place in the web development world regarding the use of Flash.  As anyone with an iPhone or the new iPad from Apple knows, Flash applications are not supported on these devices.  Since these types of devices are becoming the norm for our mobile computing, we thought we should address the subject with an eye towards the future.

The topic has really come to the forefront as Steve Jobs was questioned about the lack of Flash support on the iPad, and he has written a post title Thoughts on Flash that is prominently featured on the Apple.com web site.

We are heading into an environment where we have moved away from the desktop as the sole form of computing, with a keyboard and a mouse as the way to navigate, to a more mobile device that requires touch and tap capability to access the information we desire.  It is this lack of functionality that removes Flash as a way to distribute rich media content.

The uses of Flash really flourished as bandwidth allowed for quick rendering of larger file formats in the browser. It provided designers with a great way to include animation and rich graphics on their web sites, as well as a way ultimately to wrap multi-media elements such as video and podcasts.  It has also flourished in the online gaming environment.

As sites are redesigned in the near future, migration away from Flash should be a priority conversation with consideration given to jQuery, HTML5 standards or Quicktime.

Desiree is starting to investigate some solutions for sites with major graphical elements including one for a photographer at A Day in the Life Photography, which will be going towards a jQuery solution for his portfolio. Desiree is suggesting that site owners make this change sooner than later so that they can be assured all devices will properly display the site and not some missing plugin icon.

NOTE: The Bella Buzz podcast will be taking a hiatus as Desiree does some international traveling.  We will look for some great insight into overseas technology as well as some uploaded photography upon her return.  The next podcast recording is scheduled for June 14th.

Theme music for The Bella Buzz is Fallen by Digital Chemistry, available for download at the Podsafe Music Network.

Jim Kukral is an example of an internet marketing practitioner who has embraced the live web, and uses his Ustream Channel as a way of inviting real time interaction.  Recently, Jim was speaking to a group in Cleveland and streamed the presentation.  He posted a tweet inviting others to join in, and participants could interact with his presentation via the chat functionality on Ustream.  (Note, I’ve noticed they have added a simple Twitter capability on the show pages as an alternative to the chat.)

A major application of live web technologies will piggyback on location based tools such as GPS or Google Latitudes, which will distribute content based upon where you are at any given point in time.  This will be of particular interest to local business such as restaurants and service companies.

We talk on the podcast about a music festival that decided this year not to offer a live stream of the annual event.  Rumors circulated about funding situations and conflicts with selling recordings … but a common consensus stated that the festival was concerned that live streaming was a hinderance to tickets sales!  We want to make sure to turn that perception around and state wholeheartedly that distributing the content to a worldwide audience can only capture a wider community and grow the ticket base.

And for those that absolutely cannot attend or will not become a ticket buyer, you have new content to build a monetization strategy around.  Look for ways to attract some form of conversion.

Sporting events have become a great place to participate in the live web by participating on Twitter.  Watching a baseball game with an entire community of Red Sox fan conversing on the Twitter stream has become an extremely enjoyable element added to broadcast.

It has gotten to the point where NOT having that interaction during a live sporting event is a negative.  In order to preserve the final results of the Nascar race from Talladega before watching a Tivo’d version, avoidance of Twitter was required at all costs. Watching the event later that night was lacking because there were no more conversations taking place live and in real time, because I was the one who had time shifted my viewing.

From a business perspective there are certainly live web applications. One is encouraging live tweeting of conferences and meetings via the use of a hashtag, to promote and expand delivery of the content that is being presented to the audience.

We are also about to see an explosion of Virtual Trade Shows as a way to eliminate exorbitant travel costs, booth design and development, and costs in terms of time.  Having a real time interaction with vendors and partners through a well designed, immersive, online experience might just be complete enough to supplement the face to face events.

We are looking for any input that listeners might have regarding good retail or consumer goods virtual trade shows.  Please share with us in the comments if it has worked for you.

Does the downturn in the economy propel the expansion of live web technologies?

NOTE: After recording this podcast this morning, good friend Desiree Scales , co-host of The Bella Buzz podcast, appeared on a live streaming video show http://startuplucky.com/live/.  Way to go Desiree! Great use of the Live web …

There is precedent for this type of transition when the Mac introduced desktop publishing to the world and many thought that self produced collateral material was sufficient, and the creative skills required to professionally design a piece was overlooked, and in some cases have been lost to history, such as typesetting.

However, as competition tightened a quality control was implemented, it was understood that the knowledge regarding how to use the tools and how to art direct creative materials would return greater ROI and better results. This is the stage that we are just now entering in online content.

This is a Call To Action to start considering elements within the rich media content that you are producing, and to lead the field in elevating to higher standards of production quality.




Basics for art directing a video:

What kind of lighting do you have?  Are you shooting against a bright background so that you end up appearing in  silhouette?

What kind of ambient noise might be interfering with your production?  Even the smallest sounds that you may not even notice every day like fans, refrigerators, typing on a keyboard .. outside noises like leaf blowers will be picked up by the omni-directional microphones that are in use.

Background & Framing of the shot — what is going beyond the focus of your primary element?  Have you taken a look through the camera before hitting the Record button to see that there is nothing that will detract from communicating your message?

Have you thought about adding bed music to the recording so that it helps to set the scene and to communicate the emotions that you are trying to portray? Have you produce brand reinforcing opening and closing segments and credits.

It may not be happening now, but in the very near term if you don’t consider these factors when developing your content .. you will be going up against competitors who ARE doing this, and the more professionally produce pieces will win in the end.

Let us know if you are taking these factors into account these days, drop us a comment.

Let’s share with you some of our initiatives:

First, to touch on the logo design for the brand.  We were brought in on the tail end of the design process and Cameron was able to salvage some of the elements that had been developed, but immediately the concern regarding the “distressed” look revolves around replication issues on merchandise and smaller collateral.

So to avoid losing the little K in custom and other smaller bits, a non-distressed application is being created for certain usage.

We also added a secondary color palette and font styles for use on the web site and collateral materials.

The intention of the web site is to ultimately act as an online community where friends of King Kustom Cycles can interact, exchange tips on great places to ride, discuss new gear for their bikes … or just pass the time during the intervals when not on the road.  In order to achieve this objective we are integrating some exciting new applications and are waiting for others to be released from beta testing!

We set up shop owner Laura King with a Facebook account so early on we can take advantage of the Fotobook plugin allowing her to upload pictures from the Shop, shots from sponsored rides and all the cool events they have planned … and they can be ported over to the site from Facebook.  More importantly the photos and her activity stream are distributed directly to her growing circle of friends (her social graph) in the Facebook community.  Short term marketing objective is to promote the benefit of joining Facebook to her customer base, and to encourage the millions of Facebook users to “friend” her & become a fan of the King Kustom Page.  This direct form of communication is the future of internet marketing strategies.

We’re also waiting for the ultimate rollout of Facebook Connect from beta and the development of a Wordpress Plugin that provides for the portability of a user’s web presence. What this means is that as a Facebook user you can log into your Facebook account and via OpenID have a single login point for any site that has integrated Facebook Connect.  Instead of having to login to comment and participate in numerous communities (and my how we hate to keep track of all those User Ids) your Facebook Connect ID provides you a solution.

Beyond the login aspect of Connect you are also gaining the integration of commenting and posting appearing in your Facebook activity stream so that your network of friends are aware of your activity.  Using Facebook Connect on King Kustom Cycles we will be able to deliver marketing messages, event updates, and activity streams to our exponentially large friends network.

We also determined that it would be beneficial to set up a weekly podcast for Laura and Phil.  This rich media content is an easy way to communicate all of the exciting activities happening at the shop while eliminating the grind of trying to write a weekly post.  We’re in the process of trying to name the podcast so that we can develop a brand around the weekly shows. You can check it out at the bottom of the post.

These are the early stages of this site, and we could ramble on about long range micro-blogging communities and the setup of the Disqus commenting system distributed content, but we’ll save those topics for another day.