By Various frogs - April 30, 2013
Download Mobile Ecosystems Evolving
Mobile technology is more than the sum of the world’s portable electronic devices and the supporting telecommunications infrastructure.
Unlike earlier versions of the Internet, the mobile Web is a halo of information that follows us almost everywhere, an increasingly meaningful part of our most minute interactions with the physical world. It is an infinitely complex, dynamic system fed by billions of users and a growing variety of hardware and software programs that generate, transmit, and structure data.
These continuous streams of data are already transforming business on many fronts. How can improved user experience design make the vast trove of data more useful? What role does hardware play in the new digital ecosystems? And as the mobile Web continues to evolve, how will we prefer to interact with it?
frog explored these questions over the course of several weeks in our recent web series, Mobile Ecosystems Evolving. From healthcare, to retail, to enterprise—download the full collection of the insights and perspectives that were shared as we studied the future of mobile technology and its impact on diverse industries.
By Rob McIntosh and Holger Hampf - April 23, 2013
frog developed the Connected\Projected program to explore potential for emergent, integrated product solutions by blending key trends in technology and user experience design.
Using wireless product-to- product and product-to-user features as well as sensors and laser projection, we created a series of first level “Superprotoypes”. Our prototyping process and the prototypes themselves have triggered an avalanche of new use cases, ecosystems, and product concepts that have all grown out of the seeds of that first idea.
By Alex Conconi - April 18, 2013
I am discussing mobile application development with the IT manager of a provider of online content and services to millions of users, when the conversation touches on HTML5. He tells me:
“On September 11, 2012, Mack Zuckerberg stated that the biggest mistake made by Facebook was betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native. The very next day I got a call from my boss asking me if I was sure our company was not making the same mistake.”
Since that day, I've heard similar stories over and over again as the “Facebook dumps HTML5” headline spread through the web and reached even a non-technical audience. Many IT directors and software architects that had been pushing HTML5 as the future of mobile within their organization began to see their strategy questioned by upper managem
ent.
“We provide customers with native applications for iPhone, iPad, and Android to access our online content and services. Each application was launched at a different time and outsourced to a different supplier. Eventually the apps became misaligned to the point that managing updates and adding new features has become a painful process. HTML5 looked like the ideal solution to overcome that, but now I am no longer sure.”
Indeed, HTML5 was hyped as the ultimate write-once-run-anywhere solution for mobile, solving all the problems of cross platform development and device fragmentation. This has been proven to be plainly wrong. Not surprisingly, the old saying “no silver bullet” also applies to mobile applications. On the other hand, HTML5 remains a powerful technology for mobile development, a fact that is demonstrated by well-crafted executions like LinkedIn's original app. When it comes to choosing HTML5 over native or vice versa there is, of course, no universal answer. There are, however, key decision criteria.
By Andrea Bebber - September 12, 2011
In the Connected age, where everyone is engaged via mobile and available at a click, moments of being simply human turn into a true relief: a moment of playfulness and intuition, a moment of being weird or a moment of face to face interaction. These human interactions make way for experimentation, collaboration, and iteration on ideas: welcome to the art of superprototyping.
By Brandy Bora, Ron Rosenman - February 24, 2011
In early January 2011, frogNY Build-It was invited to participate in a 7-week challenge to hack a Kinect. We initially submitted three ideas for peer-review but fell in love with this concept early on.
By Ron Rosenman, Brandy Bora - September 23, 2010
Coming to you live from the Open Hardware Summit at the New York Hall of Science in Queens, NY.
http://www.openhardwaresummit.org/
details of all the speakers' talks after the break...
By Elliot Winard, Vicky Fang, Michael DelGaudio, Ron Rosenman - May 22, 2010
Live-blogging the TechCrunch Hackday, as we attempt to build a truly welcoming welcome mat.
2:00pm
And that concludes the TechCrunch Hackday! We successfully built a welcome mat that would welcome you with personal greetings based on your Foursquare and Twitter information, including empathizing with your emoticons, laughing out loud with you, asking about your activities and friends, and celebrating your badge wins with Price is Right music and blinking LEDs. An awesome time and a Build-It success!
And now we eat and sleep.
By VIcky Fang - May 18, 2010
Hello!
We’re Build-It, a group of frogs interested in exploring convergent projects that map across the digital and physical worlds. We’re a mixed group of designers, IxDs, IDs, and developers who get together every so often to build things... for fun, to learn, and to explore the possibilities. We'll be posting about the things we're working on or thinking about.
Check out what we've been up to lately
