“When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.” - Tuli Kupferberg

In the previous post, we saw how the old communication model of ‘one-way’ message dissemination or broadcast was a monologue and how it has changed over the last few years. The communication is more ‘two-way’ now, and is not monologues but dialogues or conversations – vibrant, authentic, honest and consumer-driven.

How did this transformation of seismic proportion take place from which a totally new world emerged? To understand this is to understand the evolution of the social media, its antecedents and its milestones. But before we do this we need to define ’social media’. And that’s no easy task! Because social media is not a static and stagnant subject but a dynamic phenomenon, changing everyday. But we do need a working definition. (more…)

If you are hunting for royalty free music for your corporate videos, multimedia/flash presentations, then check out www.opuzz.com.

With a huge collection of soundtracks under different categories, www.opuzz.com offers royalty free music at pocket-friendly prices. The exciting thing about this site is once you buy a track, you can use it for all your Audio Video presentations. There is no need to pay each time you use the soundtrack. Also, there are many cost-effective offers available in this site. So, you can choose the one that best fits in your budget. For example you can buy 10 cd’s (100 tracks) for $249.00.

We continue to experiment and work with blender

You can download this model from the link below:

http://www.nextwavemultimedia.com/html/3dblendermodel.html

You can download this model the link below

http://www.nextwavemultimedia.com/html/3dblendermodel.html

With wmode = transparent, input fields doesn’t allow special characters

Try to avoid using wmode = transparent in the html file and try to do its equilvalent wordaround in Flash itself.

This is Adobe’s bug, not fixed yet.
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-12420

For multilingual testing - change your keyboard language in Windows

You can change the keyboard language from default English to Polish or Spanish etc., With this you can test your application or website for multilingual support and no need to ask the client to do so.

Change keyboard language in XP
For Windows XP, you want to go to the Control Panel and click on Regional and Language Options.

Next click on the Languages tab and then click on the Details button. (more…)

My post on the evolution of social media has to wait a couple of days. So much is happening in the new communication landscape at such a feverish pace that we have to do a Usain Bolt sprint just to keep up! In my previous post, I had mentioned three recent events that demonstrated social media’s power, but last week I came across another instance of how social media empowers consumers to take on big companies. This incident is so hot and powerful that I couldn’t wait to share it with you. (more…)

This is the first in a series of mobile comics to be launched by us.

Universal and practical, Panchatantra, the engrossing tales of wisdom, written around 200 BC, serves as a survival kit for people of all ages. From school kids to college students to business professionals, everyone could learn a thing or two from this unique genre of stories.

Panchatantra Lite Version contains- The History of Panchatantra, The 5 Strategies of Panchatantra, 2 Stories from Panchatantra

The full version of Panchatatra is to be launched soon. Check the link below for downloading to your Iphone or Ipod Touch.

http://www.nextwavemultimedia.com/iphone/panchatantra/index.html

SOCIAL MEDIA – A 360º VIEW: Part 1

Business publications, daily newspapers, blogs, webinars, unconferences… Social media is discussed everywhere. It’s the new phenomenon that has turned conventional wisdom of brand building and corporate  communication on its head. In this series of articles, we shall take a 360º look at social media. Some of the aspects we shall explore: what constitutes social media; traditional media vs social media; how big companies are using social media; can social media be used for B2B communication, and more.

Three events that happened within the last one year or so, illustrate the enormous power of social media. The first is Barack Obama’s use of social media to mobilize funds and volunteers for his presidential campaign. The second is a socio-political event: the aftermath of Iran’s recent elections. And the third, the contrasting marketing strategies being used by McDonald and Starbucks – a battle of epic proportions between traditional media and social media. But before we discuss these contemporary events, let’s see what constitutes the traditional media and the social media, and its evolution.

Traditional Media – One-way Communication

Before the advent of Internet marketing, traditional media meant Print, Television, Radio, Outdoor. All these are ‘one-to-many’ media. Also included, are ‘one-to-one’ communication channels like Direct Mail. These are all ‘one-way’ communication. From the marketer to the target audience (TA). Of course, some of these media did include response devices like a coupon, the marketer still remained in control of the communication. That is how brand managers believed they could create brands, by having a consistent message delivered to the TA who remained a passive audience. The ‘voice’ of the consumer, his expectations from the brand, his experiences, all remained with him, because there was no channel he could use to make his voice heard.

The brand managers and the advertising agencies were aware of this lacuna, and so, sometime in the 60s, developed the role of ‘account planning’ to get an insight into the consumer’s mind and heart. In practice, however, the ‘voice of the consumer’ was, in most cases, not really representative because of the methods used to ‘record’ these ‘voices’. As a result, the ‘insights’ were not totally reliable.  The brand managers were still in control of the brand. The consumer was far removed.

Then Came the Internet

And things started to change. But the brand managers and their advertising agencies were blissfully unaware. Consumers started to take control. They were not prepared to be mere receptacles of messages, but had become the creators of brand messages. They formed into communities and shared their experiences of a brand. Check some of the brand hate websites. Do a Google search by adding a brandname before ‘ihate’ or after ‘isuck’ and you might be surprised to see how many such sites exist. These sites are built and funded not by the hated brand’s competitors, but by their consumers who feel that the brand did not deliver on their promise. This shows how disconnected the brand managers and their ad agencies were/are with their consumers, who now are real persons, and not just a ‘psychographic profile’.

The Consumer is in Control of the Brand now!

True democracy is all about people having the power to influence events and things that affect them. Today consumers are doing what was unthinkable even two years ago. They are taking a brand, creating a commercial and putting it up on YouTube for millions to see. They are becoming brand marketers! They have the power to engage with the brands more deeply, in ways that can enhance its reputation or destroy it in no time. Companies  who  understand this and are quick to build deeper relationships with their the consumers, can only thrive in today’s consumer-driven marketplace.

In a later post, we shall see how some of the big brands are using the consumer-generated content to their advantage

Next post: The Evolution of Social Media

This example uses the mx.graphics.ImageSnapshot class, which lets you take snapshot images of Flex user interface components. The underlying Flash Player API is flash.display.BitmapData.draw(). The maximum dimensions that BitmapData.draw() can capture is 2880×2880 pixels. By default, ImageSnapshot is also limited to this. ImageSnapshot has the following additional features:

•    Ability to specify an image format encoding (PNG is the default, JPG is the only other implementation.
•    For components that extend mx.core.UIComponent, calls UIComponent.prepareToPrint() and when finished calls UIComponent.finishPrint(). This lets you change the appearance of the component for capture; for example, remove selected item highlights.
•    Conversion of captured images to Base64-encoded Strings for text-based serialization purposes, such as embedding in XML)
•    Simple API to specify a desired resolution in dots per inch (DPI) that works out the underlying matrix required to scale the off-screen capture to a particular resolution.
•    Ability to controls whether the ImageSnapshot class tries to take multiple snapshots to support resolutions higher than 2880×2880 by stitching together several snapshots into one big ByteArray representing raw bitmap data before applying the encoding (for example, PNG). However, this is limited because a ByteArray can only hold 256 megabytes of data. Total composite image resolution is limited to about 8192×8192 . By default, the requested DPI is reduced until it fits inside 2880×2880 to avoid runtime errors.

The maximum DPI allowed when taking a snapshot depends on the dimensions of the component being captured and the on-screen resolution. The scale factor is the requested DPI divided by the on-screen resolution, which is then multiplied by the dimensions of the rectangular bounds of the user interface component being captured.
For example, suppose you have a component that is 400×300 pixels in area, has an on-screen resolution of 96 dpi, and a requested resolution is 300 dpi. The resulting scale factor is 300 / 96 = 3.125 times. Therefore, the captured image will be 1250 x 937.5 pixels.

Happy printing!