Publicado el 17 de febrero del 2012 por arnau en Sin categoría
When I was nearing the end of my Master Course in Interaction Design, I pictured myself working part-time as a freelance designer and developer, using the rest of the time to experiment on my own projects. So when one of the artists of my family asked me to build a website to show his abstract paintings, I accepted gladly and saw it as a perfect chance to play with StaceyApp and a fluid HTML5 theme I found on GitHub.
Well, it was fun, but play time was soon over as projects and jobs started coming and my uncle was left with no site for 2 months… until last week. I was reminded I owed my relative a site so I went the straight way: I purchased a theme from Themify – [disclaimer]; nah, I bought them all! They have over 20 high-quality WordPress themes, with professional finish and a very comfortable control panel where you can tweak the settings or embed your own code. And you can get access to all themes and their updates for 1 year buying a subscription for under $70[2] ($89 if you get the PSDs, which I did)! As a freelance I think this is a nice tool to have when someone asks for a cheap site and you can provide a stunning website in very little time. Of course if all your projects can be solved with vanilla WordPress and a premium theme your life as a designer/developer is nowhere as exciting as it could be…
So let’s have a look at this site, shall we? You can head over to it and enjoy it live or see the dull screenshots here (clicking on the image will take you to the site, too):
The slider is fluid down to mobile. Pure awesome.
Quotes are sweet. The bottom arrow gently scrolls to top.
Clicking on a painting shows a full-screen gallery.
[1] Disclaimer: If you purchase anything from the Themify links in this page, I’ll get some pennies. If you don’t want that, just type themify.me in your browser and they will never know I told you. I promise. I’m not recommending them because of $2, but because they make a good product that you may find useful.
[2] Tip: if you search Google before buying, you might find a promo discount code. I got a -25%, which made the Developer Club subscription cheaper than the Standard one!
Publicado el 27 de enero del 2012 por arnau en Sin categoría
Seems like yesterday we were eating grapes at midnight and getting Christmas presents, but we’re already seeing ads for Saint Valentine’s. It may be a good time to take a look back and see if we started working on our New Year’s resolutions or we just spent too much time procrastinating on social networks. This could be an excuse as good as any other to break the silence in this blog, right?
I must say I am surprised at how fast things seem to be moving this year. All kinds of people around me, close and strangers alike, seem to be full with ideas and energy to bring them to life. And, of course, most take shape into a mobile application or website, and need someone to have it designed or built. I am happy to be part of this ecosystem of digital makers in the area of Barcelona, and really glad I made the move to become a full-time freelance so I can engage in all kind of interesting projects.
One of these tasks, which I recently started, is teaching Web developmentand some basic server management skills in a community center in Sant Feliu de Llobregat. I’ve got 16 students who are eager to start working on this new career path and try to get a job in the field afterwards. It’s an exciting challenge and I have always enjoyed teaching so every class is real fun but also a lot of work preparing activities and slides.
Apart from this, which is going to be my main occupation for the following 5 months, I am starting a personal project with my brothers which at least is a guarantee of a few laughs. More on it in due time, if things progress as expected.
Publicado el 7 de diciembre del 2011 por arnau en PROCESSING
I tweeted about it (you’re following me, right?), but in case you missed it, Marià and I released the first version of our videogame. Check it out!
You can read more about the project in the videogame course blog and, of course, on github! We expect to continue working on this project after Christmas, we love it!
Publicado el 16 de noviembre del 2011 por arnau en PROCESSING
This post is part of our Videogames course, where we are designing a modification for one of the Atari 2600 games, called Outlaw. It is better understood with the rest of the posts on the course blog.
This Processing applet will generate a fixed-rate beat, and will mark the keyboard events (gun shots) on the time slots they have been generated. There’s a maximum of 6 events per line – 6 shots is the capacity of a standard revolver. When the line is over, a grey line appears showing the positions in which the shots were made. This is where we would plug the code of the second player trying to press the keys at the same rate as the first player did. If he doesn’t, he gets shots and the shooter scores a point.
Instructions:
Click with your mouse on the applet so it can capture your keyboard events
‘s’ to start or stop the applet
‘r’ to restart the applet
‘t’ to increase tempo (shorter lines)
‘m’ to mute the sound (gets annoying after a while)
Publicado el 3 de noviembre del 2011 por arnau en Sin categoría
This post is a delivery milestone on the master thesis I am writing for my Interaction Design course at IDAT. The information it holds is the result of my research on the topic of my thesis, a mobile application for music festivals in collaboration with Aer Studio. Data on this post may be inaccurate and subject to change at any time. I have given some formatting to the text hoping for a better readability; aside from that you should treat it as draft/raw material.
This document aims to describe a new mobile application (the product), including both the marketing research to investigate its commercial viability and the design process carried on to find a suitable solution to the problem at hand.
A human necessity (the problem) has been detected in the field of large live events, where crowds gather in a certain geographical area with the objective of attending several performances or sub-events. A live music festival like Barcelona’s ##Sónar or Belgium’s ##Rock Werchter would be typical examples for this, but similar problems exist in non music-related events.
From now on, the use case considered will be that of live music festivals, which consist of multiple performances scheduled over several days and located in stages at most a few kilometers away from each other. Festivals like this are proliferating in recent years, mainly due to a fall of revenue from recorded music sales. This evolution will be described further in the ##market research section.
These kind of events bring together dozens of artists of similar genres, from consolidated stars to latest revelations. They are effectively becoming a showcase for what’s hot on the sector and a first-class promotion platform for the lesser known bands. The public they target is easily identified while at the same time broad enough to find subgroups and variations.
The great number of artists playing in a limited time lapse means that performances are inevitably going to overlap. The scheduling process is itself a complex problem which we are not going to deal with. We are going to focus on the festival attendant instead, who needs to build a personal schedule combining band preferences with time and place constraints. Depending on the size of the festival, this process can be complicated and time-consuming, and traditional pen and paper methods may prove ineffective to organize and sort this kind of multi-layered information. Moreover, festival schedules are subject to change by the organization at any time, meaning the process may need to be restarted again during the event.
Aside from the scheduling, additional issues arise during the festival itself. These events are social experiences by definition; if it would be unlikely for someone to attend a music concert on their own, this possibility is even more rare in the case of festivals. A typical situation would be a group of friends with similar interests meeting before or, more commonly, inside the event venue to enjoy it together. Those meetings can prove quite a challenge as well due to the environment: extremely crowded, loud background noise and unclear meeting points. While cell phones have been an improvement in group coordination, voice communication is not very useful because of network overload and background noise. Texting (SMS) and increasingly chat are alleviating the problem, but it usually takes a few messages and even failed attempts to locate a friend in a middle of a concert. A map feature – like Whatsapp’s I’m here – to locate the members of the group would be of great help.
All in all, while the festival experience should only be determined by factors like performers choice, sound quality or venue infrastructure, there are many points which are key to the users’ enjoyment, and can make the difference between a great personal experience or a flawed one. back to index
Market research
Smartphone market analysis
Accenture Ametic:
También se puede observar que el núcleo de heavy users se concentra en el segmento de edad comprendido entre los 20 y los 29 años, que lidera el uso de ocho de los once servicios de IM más extendidos, tal como muestra la figura 15.
Gartner report:
IDC expresses in similar terms:
The worldwide smartphone market is forecast to grow 55% year over year in 2011 as a growing number of users turn in their feature phones for more advanced devices. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors will ship a total of 472 million smartphones in 2011 compared to roughly 305 million units shipped in 2010. That figure will nearly double to 982 million by the end of 2015.
The fast-growing smartphone market (…) is being fuelled by falling average selling prices, increased phone functionality, and lower-cost data plans among other factors, which make the devices more accessible to a wider range of users.
Operating System
2011 Market Share
2015 Market Share
2011-2015 Unit CAGR
Android
38.9%
43.8%
23.7%
BlackBerry OS
14.2%
13.4%
18.3%
Symbian
20.6%
0.1%
-68.8%
iOS
18.2%
16.9%
17.9%
Windows Phone 7/Windows Mobile
3.8%
20.3%
82.3%
Others
4.3%
5.5%
27.6%
Total
100.0%
100.0%
20.1%
Canalys:
Canalys today published its final worldwide country-level Q2 2011 smart phone market estimates, showing substantial market growth in all regions. Globally, the market grew 73% year-on-year, with in excess of 107.7 million units shipping in the second quarter of 2011.
Android, the number one platform by shipments since Q4 2010, was also the strongest growth driver this quarter, with Android-based smart phone shipments up 379% over a year ago to 51.9 million units. Growth was bolstered by strong Android product performances from a number of vendors, including Samsung, HTC, LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, ZTE and Huawei. The final country-level data delivered to clients today shows there were particularly strong performances from Android devices in APAC countries, such as South Korea, where Android holds an 85% platform share, and Taiwan, where it has 71%.
Google UK mobile behaviour:
Top Items Purchased on the Smartphone:
Perhaps more surprising, despite the hundreds of thousands of apps available for Android, a very small proportion of apps make up the vast majority of time spent. In fact, the top 10 Android apps account for 43 percent of all the time spent by Android consumers on mobile apps. The top 50 apps account for 61 percent of all time spent.
Count of Active Applications in the App Store [details]
Total Active Apps (currently available for download): 495,516
Total Inactive Apps (no longer available for download): 137,413
Total Apps Seen in US App Store: 632,929
Number of Active Publishers in the US App Store: 114,233
Most Popular Categories
1 – Games (83069 active)
2 – Books (58226 active)
3 – Entertainment (51568 active)
4 – Education (46340 active)
5 – Lifestyle (38890 active) back to index
On 17 March 2009, about 2,300 applications were available on the Android Market, according to T-Mobile chief technical officer Cole Brodman.[12] On 10 May 2011, during the Google I/O, Google announced that Android Market listed 200,000 apps, and had clocked 4.5 billion apps installed.[13]
On 21 May 2011, Google announced that the number of apps on Android Market increased by 28,000 in April 2011, making a total of 200,000 apps; by contrast, in April 2011 the listings on Apple App Store grew by 11,000 new apps, a total of 381,062 apps. Distimo and Germany-based research2guidance forecast that the number of apps on Android Market would surpass Apple by the third quarter of 2011, with some 425,000 apps.
Applications and downloads
On 17 March 2009, about 2,300 applications were available on the Android Market, according to T-Mobile chief technical officer Cole Brodman.[12] On 10 May 2011, during the Google I/O, Google announced that Android Market listed 200,000 apps, and had clocked 4.5 billion apps installed.[13]
On 21 May 2011, Google announced that the number of apps on Android Market increased by 28,000 in April 2011, making a total of 200,000 apps; by contrast, in April 2011 the listings on Apple App Store grew by 11,000 new apps, a total of 381,062 apps. Distimo and Germany-based research2guidance forecast that the number of apps on Android Market would surpass Apple by the third quarter of 2011, with some 425,000 apps. back to index
AppBrain stats
http://www.appbrain.com/
We know there are currently roughly 150,000 Android apps available on the Android market, but roughly about 37% of those are low quality apps. (But Google seems to be removing some of those lately!).
The Android category with the most apps is Entertainment (21K), but it also has a high ratio of low quality apps (51%). back to index
GIGBEAT https://market.android.com/details?id=fm.gigbeat.android
Android only.
Very consistent, pro app mainly tied to Songkick API but also scans library for artists, connects to LastFM, etc. Can favourite events, buy tickets via Songkick, add to Google Calendar, see events near me (not working great, but can manually add a location). Lacks social part and in-festival.
bandsintown.com and last.fm
adapted for tablets
very well done but without last.fm or music on the phone it’s hard to get info. When you look for artists you get info straight from last.fm, so collaborations (Coldplay + Bono) appear as well. This means multiple results for every main artist.
Very similar in concept, even with the now tab, but it is not social as all the starred items are local and there is no communication with other app users. Only festivals in Zaragoza.
Number of festivals and festival attendants
100 festivals in the US, 300 in Europe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_festivals
Rock Werchter: 80k every day, 200k all days. Ticket price: 195 euros 4 days, 76€ per day.
Glastonbury: 150k attendants. Ticket price: £195.
Festivals growing while record/album sales plummet. back to index
Market segments and target users
Ages of festival goers: 18 to 35 (approx).
Two segments: 18 to 28 and 29 to 35.
Smartphone penetration in those ages according to ##ourmobileplanet.com. The penetration in our second segment would probably be higher that the one shown on the chart, as it includes adult people on other age ranges.
Finland
France
Germany
Italy
Spain
UK
US
18 to 29
51
60
40
49
51
52
47
30 to 49
38
31
22
30
43
40
40
Sample target segment and revenue:
Glastonbury attendants * UK smartphone penetration = 75k people. iPhone and Android only (20% and 40% respectively): 45k potential users for a single event. Let’s explore the income possibilities in two cases: if 10% of them downloads the app and if 20% do.
Application unitary price
Income 10% potential users
Income, 20% of potential users
0.79 €
3555 €
7110 €
0.99 €
4455 €
8910 €
1.49 €
6705 €
13410 €
1.99 €
8955 €
17910 €
This gives us an idea of how much income the application could generate – using very low estimations in every step, except for the festival which is possibly the biggest in the world – and we see that they aren’t spectacular numbers. This leads to some business decisions that we will see later in the ##(market conclusions) section. back to index
Product extension possibilities
The same application and server components can be quickly adapted to provide a solution for any other kind of cultural events: e.g. cinema, theatre or circus festivals. In these other cases, where he public is not so knowledgeable of the offer provided, the application’s main value would be the possibility of previewing and suggesting performances so the visitor chooses artists that suit her taste.
Other fields of application that could be covered with minor adaptations would be professional (technical, medical) conventions and conferences, say the Mobile World Congress Barcelona. One example of this is the app for Seoul’s Dermatology Congress. The business model here would clearly involve an agreement with the organization that would include the application as a value added service for free to the event visitors. back to index
Market conclusions
There is no doubt that modern smartphones are becoming ubiquitous and replacing previous non-app-centred feature phones. Android OS and iOS are eating most of the pie, with Android tending to a 40% market share and iOS just under 20%. Young people (20-30) – the target of our application – are the quickest adopters of smartphones and mobile internet service, which is very positive for our interests. The number of festivals has exploded in recent years while album sales have fallen; it seems an opportunity to provide services around these kind of events.
The number of available apps is enormous, but many of them are not providing real value to customers, are outdated or simply of low quality. Of those applications that we have detected as direct concurrency, several are serious in terms of quality and feature set, but the number is quite low so it would still be possible – though hard – to compete against them on the application market. In this case discoverability by the end user would be the main problem and huge efforts would have to be directed to marketing and promotion.
We have also seen that the revenues of selling the app at different prices in a big festival would be quite modest, from over 3000€ to under 20000€. We suffer here the penny gap effect and maybe piracy, specially on the Android platform. This means that an alternative business model where the app is provided for free to end users would probably be more beneficial to the developer.
The fact that these events have around 50k unique visitors, with a minimum expense on tickets of 30-50€ and up to 250€ (multiple day pass), makes it easy to subsidize a 1€ or 2€ application in the cost of the entrance, or through a promoter (festival sponsors). This kind of agreements and the power of free would help our product reach a wider audience - easily 20 or 30% of all visitors.
Wider reach offers two benefits: on the one hand, we can use big download numbers to sell our services to other festivals, or to the same festival next year; on the other hand, we can promote ourselves as a successful mobile solutions company and get business leads thanks to this product. This is specially true if we go through the sponsoring path: they are typically done by corporations with big budget in promotion and marketing, which could become our customer for similar but unrelated projects.
Finally, if the application is flexible enough to be reused and adapted to different kind of festivals and events with little effort, it should be easy to recover the investment and become profitable in only a few events. back to index
SWOT
Strengths
Development skills potentially targeting 80% of smartphone OS (iOS, android, BB)
Knowledge of User-Centred and interaction design methodologies.
Previous mobile development experience in international projects.
Opportunities
Many festivals in Barcelona and Spain
Smartphone market explosion
Affordable flat data rates mean mobile internet access is growing fast.
Barcelona, city of conferences and tourism: market for derived products.
Weaknesses
Team of one, expansion required.
No previous iOS development experience on professional projects.
Anna: female on her 20s. Frequent smartphone user, owning a low-range Blackberry or mid-range Android phone (HTC Wildfire). Doesn’t consider paying for apps. Uses social media and messaging over all. Sometimes casual games. Music: the arctic monkeys, arcade fire, kings of leon, whatever is new. Zero or one festival per year.
Pedro: male, on the early 30s, iPhone or high-end android owner (HTC Desire, Samsung Galaxy S). May pay for apps. Uses mainly e-mail, news and entertainment apps. Music: Coldplay, REM, Radiohead. Music lover, plays in a band. Attends one or maybe two festivals per year. May go abroad for a festival in exceptional cases.
Features and unique selling proposition
Possible product features
Create my schedule
Update info when organization changes it
Get artist description and information
Locate stages/venues on the map
Hear artist samples (audio/video)
Communicate with friends
Locate friends on the map
Locate yourself on the map
Show festival catalog (around me)
See what is hot on the lineup (social priorities)
See which artist is currently playing on each stage
Suggest artists in a festival based on the music on my phone / music services
Suggest festivals based on the music on my phone / music services
Publicado el 18 de septiembre del 2011 por Mia Kos en Sin categoría
I have been away for some time and thus this blog has not been updated. We all know there are almost no good excuses for not updating blogs. So, I will not even try . Maybe it’s best to start again with some amusing things. So, here are some photos from my Machines & Interfaces collection from Flickr. These are some pieces I found interesting and was drawn to for some reason. Sometimes aesthetics, sometimes pure rarity, often both. Hope you will enjoy them as much as I do.
My favourite piece, an Avometer Emotional design in action
Publicado el 1 de septiembre del 2011 por arnau en Sin categoría
I am doing major upgrade operations to this site, including a change of hosting and an upcoming redesign. Meanwhile I will leave it with the new default WordPress theme, which is very polished BTW.
I apologize for the inconveniences all this may have caused, including broken RSS feeds and e-mail address (all should be back to normal now).
Publicado el 25 de julio del 2011 por pilari en Sin categoría
We spent the past week developing an interactive visualization for a data we took from the Official statistics website of Catalonia. Our data is about the population ratio doing the same activity at every hour’s start and, together with Arnau and Mia, we try to create a simple visualization to show the different data at the different time of the day.
Publicado el 24 de julio del 2011 por Mia Kos en Sin categoría
This project combines Fabrication, simple electronics and Arduino and is a part of my Fabrication workshop at FabLab Barcelona. The task was to do a project which uses Fabrication as a production tool. As lately, I have been fascinated with things that combine technology and emotional experiences I knew I wanted to do something along that line. So, an idea to do a Storytelling and a Poetry Reciting Chair was born.
Basically, it’s a chair that talks, or more precisely it is a chair that tells stories when you sit on it. If you prefer poetry, no worries as there is a model that recites poetry too.
The aim of this project is to explore human-object relationships and to try to discover how, with the help of technology, the functionalities of every-day objects can be alerted to create new and different types of experiences.
The chair works with a help of Arduino and a music shield with the sound data stored on a memory card. This is attached under the seat of the chair. Two microphones are placed on the upper part of the chair, closer to the ears of a person sitting on it. Under the pillow , on the seat, a small, switch based circuit is placed. The pillow has a some conductive material on it so when a person sits on the chair it closes a circuit and the signal is sent to Arduino which then starts a story or a poem.
The chair is based on SketchChair. Some photos of the first prototype production follow and more can be viewed at my Flickr As I’m planning to continue working on this, comments and suggestions are more then welcomed.
Pieces of the chair cut with a CNC routing machine at FabLab Bcn
Even their banners look nice!
. Maybe it’s best to start again with some amusing things. So, here are some photos from my 
