Numiko, an award winning Leeds based digital creative agency

Wouldn’t it be great to invent a twitter app that let you find out tweets EXACTLY  directly beneath your feet ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD from you?   That’s what I thought… but then the Map Tunneling Tool showed me its almost always water.  boo.

Numiko are very proud to have been selected by the NSPCC to work with them on web-based applications that will become a key part of the charity’s ChildLine service in the near future.

Working alongside the NSPCC’s other roster agencies, Numiko will apply their considerable experience of developing rich, dynamic Flash-based tools and services to deliver compelling and easy-to-use tools as part of the charity’s overall interactive plans.

Commenting on the work, Darren Navier, Numiko’s Creative Director said; “There’s no doubting this is an amazing opportunity to apply the agency’s extensive Flash experience to an organisation that is so valuable to so many. As an agency, it’s great to be able to do all the Flash games and the branded content that perhaps we are more known for. However being able to apply all those same skills and abilities for the NSPCC is personally and professional very rewarding.”

As well as the ChildLine web-services, Numiko have also been working on a series of rolling commissions to develop other content and gaming products for the NSPCC site.

Ian MacArthur, the NSPCC’s Creative Director and Head of Brand Marketing says; “The Charity has a huge array of campaigns and initiatives which need ongoing support. We are working for children, and it’s clear we need to be relevant and resonant on the platforms that they use. Numiko have been great in providing us with both proactive ideas for what we could do online as well as being responsive in delivering high quality end products.”

Apologies for the complete lack of blogging while we were away, due to a combination of hard work, hard play and a shortage of working net connections.  But, aside from that, MIP was great fun again.

In a whirlwind summary: we met some great people and saw some really weird stuff, pitched, many times, won and lost, ate croissants and got food poisoning from some dodgy chinese buffet, drank champagne and ate the smallest ravioli ever, met people to discuss TV, web and virtual worlds, typed, talked and argued late into the night, then danced like idiots even later into the night,winced as the bill for one G&T came to 17 Euros, cheered as other people bought rounds, networked and went to talks, fretted, commiserated and congratulated, veered between the VIP lounge and our insect-infested hotel and nearly went to the Emmeys. Went to parties on the beach, fought with wireless connections and a lack of French vocab, gave and received advice, travelled by plane, train, autobus, taxi, foot, was nearly run over by a rickshaw and was tempted to borrow a cool motor trike thing, saw the most French man ever (playing an accordian on the beach in a crumpled suit, like a Gallic Mick Jagger).

Oh, and Dave lost my umbrella.

Before the web it was expensive TV and even more expensive film… but lets fast forward to 1998 to at least start at the digital dawn.

Content is King. It’s what people used to say about online. ‘It’s all about content… and loads of it., loads and loads.’ Buy it, create it, syndicate it, beg, steal or borrow it….

Increasingly  though, it seems to me that context, not content is actually the king when it comes to riding the wave of populist interactive products.

Lets just look at recent history.

Blogs got big noise – people investing huge amounts of creative time and energy generating longform opinions and dialogue around topics close to their heart. Then the v-log and YouTube arrived, with mashup-ups and short-form snippits of video media capturing the column inches.

Next; Facebook. With it’s ability to track the activity and trivial postings of friends of friends and change your status. (Let’s all own up – the status thing is what we all do most on Facebook -right?)

Now, the big (small) noise is Twitter. At it’s heart, it’s nothing more than a shorter that short text message (140 characters) of what are often the banal thoughts that are passing through peoples heads or the pedestrian occurances that are passing infront of their eyes.

Yet, it’s addictive and compelling. And not just for the ego-centric of us who want to broadcast our every micro-thought – but also to consume; or ‘follow’ as Twitter would have it, too. And it’s the context, the immediay and the intimacy with which you can both publish and consume with Twitter that sets it apart. Built from the ground up for a mobile generation around the fundamental premises of human nature – egocentricity and inquisitivness – Twitter must be making those folk at News International who paid a fortune for MySpace (remember MySpace?) sick to their boots.

I’m off now to invent not a micro-blogging service (so passe) but a niche nano-blogging service – especially for geeks – where people express themeselves in a limit of 12 ‘o’s and 1’s’ – I’m going to call it Bynr (Bi-ner)… Url squatters beware!!! 10100010 : )

(Edit  – Wow, that’s a lot of twittering on about Twitter on just one blog. Just goes to prove – don’t ever think everything has been done. Think bolder and bigger. Just because something heads the market now – don’t think that with a little bit of creative thought you can’t challenge. The Internet truly is a level playing field! Todays Twitter is tomorrows MySpace)

I don’t like conceptual art; stuff like Tracey Emin’s bed and Martin Creed’s empty room leaves me cold.  I can kind of see the point… It can be kind of clever, in a half-hearted way – earning a slightly raised eyebrow of amusement, or acknowledgement that something expresses a mildly interesting concept, but I can never really summon up any enthusiasm, or feel that these ill-defined concepts are things that deserve to be put into words, and galleries, and stared at and bought and sold for millions.

I’ve just been reading about the Stuckists on good old Wikipedia, and while they’re still another bunch of flamboyant artists I find myself agreeing with the main thrust of their views.

Their manifesto “places great importance on the value of painting as a medium, as well as the use of it for communication and the expression of emotion and experience – as opposed to what they see as the superficial novelty, nihilism and irony of conceptual art and postmodernism.”

Obviously, as a digital media agency our business is more to do with videos, games and the web than it is with paintings, but I think the main thrust of the thought is still relevant to us.  As a company we pride ourselves on making experiences, rather than things – not just something you use, or play, but something you engage with and feel some emotion towards.  So far, so buzzwordy, but within that thought are some important, relevant ideas.

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I’m dying to find out what my Diagonal Thinking score is. I’m definitely going to do this tonight, I’ve promised myself and everything. This is a test developed by the IPA to measure your ability to think laterally and logically, the combination of which characterises successful people in the advertising industry.

I’ll post my score up here when I’ve done the test- presuming it’s better than my Brain Age on the DS

Also of interest is Imagini, which aims to build a profile of the user without putting them through a long winded series of drop down/check box type preference process. It poses simple questions, and the user simply selects an image from a matrix, that best fit’s their answer to the question.

It’s been used on mydeco.com to create a ‘visual DNA’ which is then used to suggest items of home furnishings etc. that would suit your visual style preferences. It’s also forming the centre of a social network called Youniverse, which matches people together based on how they think, how the love and what type of movies they like… absolutely superb!

It does presume to an extent however that you get on better with people who are the most similar to you, which I’m sure you’d agree is not always the case. Just because you are ambitious, good looking and successful doesn’t mean you’re going to get on

But, that small, social psychological point aside, there’s some very interesting things happening in this area of personalisation based on how people think. Comparing this, Richard’s earlier post about technology that automatically tries to determine your cognitive style by how you interact with the content of a website, provide two clear vectors for where this kind of thing is heading.

And for us, it’s very interesting because if we are seeking maximum engagement with consumers, it has to be on their terms, ideally on a one to one basis. Imagine [NAME], being able to personalise communions and touch points not only on the crude CRM-esque methods available today, but increasingly on past interactions, moods, cognitive styles and visual preferences.

No really, Musinaut are the developers behind the MXP4 player “available on all platforms” and the Brainwaves headgea which “allows users to control their MXP4 musical selections on the basis of their thoughts and frame of mind.”

What the this for more.

Cognitive style is a term used in cognitive psychology to describe the way individuals think, perceive and remember information, or their preferred approach to using such information to solve problems.  Examples of such styles are impulsive vs. deliberative, visual vs. verbal, or analytic vs. holistic.

Numiko have been developing our projects following user centered design processes for quite some time now.  Developing personas and putting these at the heart of the design process and the user testing which follows is common practice for us… but personas can’t account for the different ways people think… their cognitive style.  Recently we have been thinking more carefully about the ways in which information is structured and presented to help with conversion rates, so we were interested to read about the research that MIT’s Sloan School of Management have been doing to dynamically adapt website data to better match users cognitive style which in turn has been proven to increase sales by up to 20%.

John Hauser, a professor of marketing at the Sloan School explains that a website running the system would detect a user’s cognitive style.
The researchers built a prototype website for British Telecom, set up to sell broadband plans. The website is designed so that the first few clicks that visitors make are likely to reveal aspects of cognitive style. For example, the initial page that a user sees lets them choose, among other things, to compare plans using a chart or to interact with a broadband advisor. “You can see that someone who’s very analytic is probably more likely to go to ‘compare plans’ than to the direct advisor,” says Hauser. Within about 10 clicks, the system makes a guess at the user’s cognitive style and morphs to fit. “If we determine that you like lots of graphs, you’re going to start seeing lots of graphs,” he says. “If we determine that you like to get advice from peers, you’re going to see lots of advice from peers.”

Credit: Marketing Science/MIT’s Sloan School of Management

Two views into the same site: The prototype website that MIT researchers built for British Telecom takes different forms, depending on its guess as to the user’s cognitive style. Above left is an example of what an analytic, visually oriented user might see: a Web page full of charts and graphs. Above right is an example of what a more holistic, impulsive user might see. This version of the website minimizes the information, specifically recommending three plans.

Source of Information – http://www.technologyreview.com

Last night, four Numiko girls went to Leeds’ first ‘Girl Geek Dinner‘. After a bit of networking and lots of finger food, we settled down for the talks, the first of which was from Girl Geek founder Sarah Blow – via  a video post. In the post, Sarah challenged all Geeks to think about how we can change the technology industry to encourage more Girl and Guy Geeks into the industry; taking into account the disputes between what people consider IT and ICT to be, and what it actually is.

To inject a level of science into the debate, Sarah Blow went to a primary school in London to ask the kids what they thought IT was. The answers in summary were that they thought it was basic word processing and perhaps a little programming. There was no comprehension of such things as Facebook, Myspace, their computer games etc, having anything to do with IT.

A brief discussion at Numiko threw up that when people think IT, they usually think number crunching, and, mostly due to they way they were taught maths at school, they write IT off as a potential career as they’ve been put off by previous experience and lack of awareness as to what IT actually is.

It was clear that syllabuses (syllabi?) in schools should be adjusted to take account of the changing online digital and interactive worlds and the career opportunities presented as a result – summed up by Clare who said she would never have connected the job she does now (web developer) to anything that was taught at school, including IT.

The second speaker – who was there in person which was a bonus – was Lydia Machell who ‘was inspired by early ringtone formulas’. Needless to say we were a little hesitant, but it turned out that early ringtones had in fact inspired her to develop something which transcribes standard print notation into Braille for blind musicians. I can’t seem to find anything on Google (after a very quick search) worth linking to, but if you want to conduct your own search try ‘Prima Vista Music’.

The last and final speaker was Lorna Mitchell who encouraged us to ask questions, and be proud, not scared by being representative of the minority.

All in all, a great evening with inspiring and informative speakers!

…have been out for ages, but I’ve only just spotted them.  There are some wicked ideas there, and loads of really clever visuals.  See them here, and keep an eye out for the Phil Collins Kit Kat one, it’s great…