E-Marketer - Digital Marketing Intelligence for Business

E-marketer is a go to resource for topics such as Social Media, Branding, or Consumer Behaviors and more.  One of the best things about e-marketer is that every story comes with a companion graph or chart that illustrates relevant data pertaining to the topic like the one below.

Advertising Age – Ad and Marketing News

This industry benchmark resource allows marketers to compare notes and get inspiration from Fortune 500 companies and those leading the charge of Advertising innovation.  See the recent article below, ”Honda Signs Celebs to Stoke Super Bowl Ads”.

Honda Signs Celebs to Stoke Super Bowl Ads

Marketing Charts & Marketing Vox – Multi-Sourced Research Driven Charts & Graphs

There’s not much you can’t find on these sites.  Marketing Charts specifically, is one of the best resources to find data driven articles and the visuals to back them up.  Here is a great article siting Millennial’s dependency on UGC (user generated content) to make their buying decisions.

As designers, musicians and geeky people, we have our own taste of practical tools we can’t wait to get our hands on.  So we’ve put together a list of our favorite thingaverse STL models.

Headphone Shelf Hook

For every audiophile, having a dedicate place to put those big headphones away makes perfect sense with the Shelf Hook. The simple and clean design promises a clean and productive workspace with an easy access to those bulky portable stereos.

Apple Earbud Holder

Clear the clutter and untangle the madness with the Earbud Holder. If your like me, my apple earbuds are always a mess and makes my workspace look like I’ve eaten white cabled spaghetti.

Laptop stand

Not just for DJs, this acrylic laptop stand serves as a simple way to add height to your laptop. Perfect for anyone who works on their laptop while standing or in high setting positions. This design is simple, clean and in the right angle, almost looks like your laptop is floating.

Antichron

If practical, useful tools aren’t your thing, this clever artistic model really shows off the maker bots intricacy in printing detail.

Salt and Pepper Hats

Clashing design with function, these salt shakers are interesting and fun take on commonly used house-hold items.

BIC meal

For the workaholics, eating in front of your desk never has been more easy with the Bic tools. Who needs silverware?

Mobius Net

Another amazing piece of art that really shows the level of detail maker bot can print.

Cat Toy

Has your cat broken or tied of that old toy? Print a new one!

Tripod Adapter for the Kinect

3D scanning is possible the XBox 360 Kinect and the KinectToSTL app. Having the Kinect on a tripod is an awesome idea and this adapter will let you mount it on any camera tripod.

Canon Lens Hood

Photographers with the passion to take on DIY projects rejoice! Any photography would love to able able to replace their lost or broken lens hood with a custom one.

This new years eve, we decided to venture out downtown and capture a long exposure time lapse. Shorter then we expected, we put together a glimpse of our night in West Palm Beach. Armed with LED glowsticks and flashlights, we managed to capture a few cool light paintings. Interestingly enough, we captured the attention of two on-lookers who joined in the light painting fun (shouts out to you Nick & Natasha!) From everyone at the Pixil team, we wish you all a very happy New Year!

Camera Settings
Canon 7D
ISO: 125
F: 8-15
Shutter: 10-100+ seconds
Canon 70-200mm
Canon 24-70mm
Sigma 20mm
JJC-TM-A series remote

Most Media Agencies are going to give you an invoice this holiday session. At Pixil, we’re giving you a fresh batch of Pixels.

With Android development becoming ever more popular, we’ve decided to give away a free 3D Droid model for you to use as an asset in your Android projects. If your a designer or developer looking for a way to incorporate the Droid in a unique way, look no further! Our model was created from scratch using Maya and is super smooth and detailed. (It’s over 9,000 polygons, that’s 20,000 triangles!). So, if you do use our model, we ask that you please like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Help us spread the love and share it! Thank you guys for tuning in, from the whole Pixil team, we wish you all an awesome holiday!

Download Android 3D Model

Note: Files are in OBJ and MTL format. Files support Photoshop CS4+ and any 3D app that supports OBJ.

Since 2001, Pixil has undergone an evolutionary cycle of discovery and rebranding. Pushing pixels and telling stories of our clients has helped us redefine ourselves and our brand. From what started out as just two friends with a hobby, Pixil, Inc today establishes itself as a mature company with a definitive brand.

Our team tasked the very talented Natalia Elina to lead the creative art direction and design a character which would ultimately become the new pixil mascot. Natalia is a master in the arts of animation, illustration and design. She has over a decade of creative experience and has worked on projects with clients such as Nickelodeon studios, Johnson & Johnson and several independent animation studios.

Refinement and alterations lead the direction of what would become our new mascot. The team wanted to build a character that would make a connection with our clients and resonate an emotion of trust and attractiveness. A character that would define the type of people you want to be doing business with. Sleek, Fast, efficient and well.. cute. A creature that could put a smile on your face. Mischievous but obedient, we decided a robot cat would make a great mascot.

Why a Robot Cat?
Imagine a team of creative scientists building a revolutionary new robot capable of two core functions. To be a loyal companion, and to serve your business needs. The robot cat is designed to be the next generation in AI IT robotics. From developing your next app idea, to taking out the trash, our pixilcat can help you with your business.

The Importance of good branding
Leading brands take time to develop and define but it’s relevance has never been so important in today’s business. Engaging into the consumer experience enables producers to set a new standard of quality ultimately creating better products. Crafting a brand that stands out among the rest should resonate with the consumer and become the goal of every company. We encourage you to strive for a better brand and set a higher standard of quality.

The Pixil team took some behind the scene shoots during Jason Sadler (of iwearyourshirt.com) vist to the West Palm Beach GrandView Gardens. The tour of the historic 1925 Spanish Mediterranean. Grandview Gardens Bed and Breakfast Vacation Homes Resort, located in the Grandview Heights Historic Neighborhood.

Using Custom Post Types are a great way to segment different types of content for building large sites. Basically, a CTP is like a “blog post” with its own set of “posts” and “categories”. Have you ever wanted to just duplicate the blog “posts” and call it something like “portfolio” or “library”? Custom Post Types to the rescue!

We’ve been using CTP’s in almost every WordPress site we develop. I’ve ran across one issue that I haven’t been able to resolve until recently. If you have your permalink settings set to /%postname%/, you might have an idea as to what might be going wrong.

Heres the issue: Using pagination with CTP’s while permalinks are set to “postname” will render out 404 error once you goto the next page of the CTP. Until recently, my “fix” was to simply turn off “pretty urls” for all custom post types, rendering your URLs something like this (post_type=portfolio&page_id=886) Which is not very NOT pretty at all.

So what is WordPress doing here?

When you set your permalinks to “postname”, the CTP’s will render out “/the-ctp-title/postname”. But if you think about a url pagination renders out is something like this “/the-ctp-title/page/2/” WordPress actually thinks there is a page named “2″ thats a parent of a page named “page”. It all makes sense when you really think about it.

So here’s a work around: Set a new rewrite slug in your CTPs. This can be a singular term or an abbreviation. This has to be something other than the post type name. Please note each “post” item in your CTPs will then render out urls like this “/the-new-slug/postname”. So its important to choose a new term for the rewrite slug that’s relevant to your CTP. For example, we used the slug term “project” for our “portfolio” custom post type.

If your using a CTP plugin like Easy CTP or Post Type UI, you can quickly make the changes by following these easy steps.

Post Types UI

1. Goto “Manage Post Types”
2. Select “Edit” on a post type
3. Under “Advanced Options”, type in a new term or “slug” in the “Custom Rewrite Slug” input box. Make sure it is not the same name as the post type itself. This is what causes the 404s when using pagination.

Easy Custom Post Type

1. Goto “Edit Fields” and select your post type
2. Type in new a term or “slug” in the “System Key” input box.

With that all said and done, I’m still looking for a way to make CTP’s behave like the standard “blog” post type. If you made a custom wp_query loop with the blog post type, you”ve probably noticed that it actually handles pagination just fine with “postname” permalinks. If anyone knows a way to do a mod rewrite hack, we’re happy to test it out and share the knowledge.

Do you know another work around, have a good solution? Let me know in the comments below! We want to hear from you. Thanks for reading guys.

Armed with an arsenal of video gear, our team swarmed in without a script, shot list or storyboards with the one objective of capturing the “experience”. Motivated and inspired by the fabulous community initiative to host such an incredible event, we aimed to focus on the food and people, while showcasing the warmest moments of the event.

Our favorite parts of doing the video were the time lapses, of course! We woke up at 5am to capture the elusive morning sunrise just in time to taste the sweet colors of the sky that lasted only a couple hours. Enjoy the video below and stay tuned for Pedro’s forthcoming time lapse tutorial.

The 2011 Palm Beach Marathon sponsored by Publix saw mild 77 degree weather and cloudy skies with rather gusty but refreshing winds out the East/Northeast. The appeal of flat and beautiful views along the Intracoastal waterway brought runners from all over the world to participate in the Marathon of the Palm Beaches. Even congressman Allen West entered and finished the 13.1 mile Half Marathon.

Running groups like Palm Beach Road Runners and clubs like Running Sports of Juno Beach, FL members represented some of the fastest half marathon times, finishing well under the 2 hour mark.

A Pixil photographer set off, bright and early this morning, to capture the excitement and the emotions of the diverse field of runners ranging from handicapped participants to Ironmen, and enthusiasts from 12 to 60+ years of age.

Click on the photo below to view the complete gallery.

Most sports enthusiasts are enamored by their favorite team(s) but when it comes to watching them play, fans have limited viewing options because of the commercial broadcast and cable tv agendas.  Channels like ESPN 3 and Verizon’s on demand streaming provide some mobility to audiences, allowing them to pick up their mobile device and plug in on the go.

Interestingly, an industry that has little support from the mainstream public sector and very little Fortune 500 influence has, in my opinion, the most accessible broadcasting experience.  The Action Sports industry, particularly surfing, allows audiences to tune in to their events from all over the world right from the users’ mobile devices.  World Tour surfing sponsors Billabong, Quiksilver, Rip Curl, and Hurley invested in native app development which is proving to be a monumental success because the connectivity to its audiences is unparalleled in sports.

The NFL, MLB and every other major sports organization should take a page out of the ASP World Tour’s book because each ASP World Tour event has a unique landing page that includes live streaming, photo galleries, heats on demand, social integration, plus more.  That’s not to say that every event needs a unique page but the major ones like the World Series could benefit from such an on-the-go experience as that.

Simply put, it’s an incredible time to be a surfing enthusiast because the level of competition is at an unprecedented high and the accessibility is the best in all of sports.

Check out the landing page designs, technology and download the most recent and current event app from Rip Curl.

Website Design Screen Shot

Reef Road, an iconic surf break on the East Coast, is one of the only spots that handles a swell greater than 6 feet.  This surf spot has been a hibernating bear for while now as it hasn’t been seen going off in more than a year.  This day, August 25, 2011 was the first of several days that delivered 6-10ft. waves to South Florida’s shorelines.  Stand out locals like Peter Mendia, Baron Knowlton, Jeremy Stanley, and Tab Textor were in the lineup receiving and delivering punishment during the epic session at Reef Road.  

This is a long exposure time lapse shot with the Canon 7D. This test was filmed on the beach at night. Using 15-75mm f3.5-56 lens with a shutter speed of 4 seconds and a time interval of 4 seconds. We used the Time lapse remote: JJC-TM-A series remote. Utilizing LED glow stick lights, we were able to capture some amazing light paintings. With a shooting time of two and half hours, we managed to capture our entire photo session, light paintings and a few airplanes taking off. For future lapses, we’re hoping to get better results by keeping the time interval at 1 second.

Shutter Interval: 4 seconds
ISO: 500
Shutter: 4 seconds
F.Stop: 3.5-5.6

PS: Notice how the moon and clouds slowly move overtime!

Below are the photos taken while we ran our time lapse. Using 20mm and 10mm fisheye lenses, we captured amazing photos of mist like fog evaporating against the corral like rocks. Enjoy!

Over 5,000 developers traveled to one spot to spent a week learning the latest tech from one of the most biggest platforms. It was the meeting of the tribes, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference.

WWDC 2011 was a success! Armed with Canon 7D’s, we managed to shoot over 2,000+ photos.
Check out the pictures on Pedro’s Flickr Page

After a few weeks of our return, we’ve put together a short video of our experience using Final Cut Pro X. This was a great opportunity to test out some of the DSLR features in the new version of Final Cut.

Our video was shot with 2 Canon 7Ds, 50mm f/1.2, 10mm f/2.8, 20mm f/1.8

Based on what was shown at the Super Meet, we shot test clips for testing features:

• Image Stabilization
• Rolling Shutter
• Color Enhance
• Color Match
• Audio Enhance and Speed Ramp

Pedro spent the whole day editing this short from scratch to fully benchmark FPCX as a tool. Besides the obvious crashes and bugs, He was able to give it a full nine hours of solid editing. We think it’s performance was suffice and the magnetic timeline really does help in real world workflows.

The UI has been completely refined. New behaviors and metaphors feel like they’re inherited from iOS or Lion. It feels much more natural, the most commonly used tools are quickly accessible. We especially enjoy the subtle refinements like tiny switches, tool tip popovers, sliding-panel style attributes and the inverted color adjustment tabs. Window panels have a nice dark shade of grays and highlight are shades of bright and deep navy blue. A subtle orange gradient grows/shrinks in the timeline that indicates remaining render time.

Switches reveal contextual content inside of iOS like popover

Render indicators are subtle, clean and intuitive

Items like the Color Adjustment panel animate and slide left and right like iOS.

Auto saving your projects will be hard getting use to, but its great to know when it crashes, your last modification is saved. We can anticipate future updates like project versioning.

Overall its a great update with massive potential to be the next standard tool in the industry. You can be assured all of our future content will be edited in FCPX. Thank you for watching, don’t forget to subscribe!

In past WWDC events, there hasn’t been many decent video interviews on app developers and indie software companies. If you search on Google and YouTube you probably won’t find anything close to a decently produced video. The majority of the folks documenting the events are text or audio only interviews. This year, we’re hoping to change that.

The WWDC Experience

At WWDC 2011, The Pixil Crew will be attending and we’re bringing our mobile arsenal of video equipment. We’re making it our goal to film and capture the experience in the most cinematic way possible. We’ll be soaking up the latest info on iOS 5, upcoming Apple Hardware, OS X Lion, and editing in the new Final Cut X. Obviously, we won’t discuss topics that violate our NDA, but we’ll make these videos worth your time. We’ll be shooting video interviews of iOS developers and indie software companies to listen to their insights, experiences and share any forthcoming releases. Our mission is to create fast-action, edgy interviews that give you an inside look at the people who make great software. We’ll also be filming the night life, parties and tell the stories of the once-a-year experience of being an iOS developer at WWDC.

Why are we doing this?

In general, most dev tech conferences rarely have a video team shooting interviews. By filming this year, we’re giving back to the community and raising awareness to the indie devs who make the apps you love. We want to shoot the interviews we would want to see. We want to tell the story of the indie devs and offer them the spotlight to share their experience.

Who are you guys?

We’re a small team of designers, editors and programmers. We like making good video and make apps in partnership with DS Media Labs. We’ve been pushing pixels and capturing experiences for over a decade. We’re enthusiastic and take pride in our work. We mean business, but we also like to enjoy ourselves. Last year, we attended WWDC but missed the opportunity to film our experience.

What type of interviews?

We’d like to produce a 3-5 minute, fast-pace interview. The style of video we will be producing can be seen in our recent Surf Shop TV project. In this is a in-depth review, we’re at Surf Expo talking with Christy from Contour and showcased a new product line.

What types of questions will you be asking?

Although we plan to make each interview unique and custom, we will have a basic list of questions. We’re open to suggestions and ask if you have any fun ideas, drop us line on our contact form.

1. What are you initial reactions to public announcements made?
2. How will any of these changes effect future features in your app?
3. What are your thoughts on the future of the platform?

Why would I want to get Interviewed?

Besides a free high-quality video, we’re hoping these interviews to become resources for your company and apps. Within each interview, we hope to bring out the unique personality of each developer. WWDC is a knowledge sharing event, and we want to help share that experience with those not able to make it out this year. We will not make this your typical, boring talking head interview. We plan to make this a fun and an interesting experience and we hope to see you out there.

How do I get involved?

Please don’t be bashful! Drop us a tweet on twitter or contact us via our web form. We will do our best to make this a fun experience. If your interested in being interviewed, we’ll need the following:

1. Your full name, title, company name and app(s) you would like us to use in lower thirds titles
2. Website and Social profiles like Twitter and Facebook

We’ll be filming throughout the week. We will schedule our interview sessions on a first come, first serve basis. We will be posting follow ups, updates and let you know which developers we will be interviewing. Now, are you ready for your close-up? We’ll see you in a few weeks, safe travels!

OWC Data Double

Using the Canon 7D for time lapse photography was a great experiment. We spend the last 3 days shooting various tests and we’d like to share our experience. Our test shot were filmed with the Canon 7D. Using 10mm fisheye sigma f2.8, 70-200mm f2.8, and 20mm f1.8 sigma lens. Time lapse remote: JJC-TM-A series remote.

The JJC-TM-A series remote has a simple interface and is easy to setup. In our example, we’ve setup the shutter interval to 5 seconds which basically means a photography will be taken every 5 seconds.

Here are a range of values we set our camera settings to. Note: UV filters and polarizers were used with the 200mm and 20mm. The shot location was behind the Pixil Studios, in sunny West Palm Beach, Florida.

Shutter Interval: 5 seconds
ISO: 125-500
Shutter: 1000-4000
F.Stop: 1.8-2.8

1. Download the latest debugger (Studio Web Debugger) from zend.com
   1. http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/downloads
   2. The latest version available at the time of this tutorial is: 20100729 (I used the 64-bit version, the install process is the same as the 32-bit version)
2. First take a look at the phpinfo screen and notice the powered by zend logo
   
3. Let’s start by putting the zendDebugger.so in the proper directory
   1. Step into: /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3
   2. Create a zend folder in the php5.3 directory
      1. /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/zend
   3. Step into the newly created zend directory and create a debugger folder
      1. I named my folder using: zendDebugger-{versionNumber} as the name structure
      2. I named the folder accordingly: ZendDebugger-20100729
   4. Open and extract the compressed file downloaded from zend.com
      1. Locate the 5_3_x_comp folder and copy or move the ZendDebugger.so to the new folder we just created
         1. /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/zend/ZendDebugger-20100729

      

4. The next step is to update the php.ini file
   1. While in MAMP Pro
      1. In the upper menu navigate to File->Edit Template->PHP 5.3.2 php.ini (or use cmd 4 to open the 5.3 php.ini )
         
      2. Add these lines under MAMP_zend_optimizer_MAMP

         [ZendDebugger]
         zend_extension=/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/zend/ZendDebugger-20100729/ZendDebugger.so
         zend_debugger.allow_hosts=127.0.0.1
         zend_debugger.expose_remotely=always
         						

      3. If xdebug is enabled (no semicolon in front of it), put a semicolon in front of it to disable it
         
      4. Save the file and restart the services in MAMP
5. Check phpinfo and you should now see the debugger in the powered by logo
   

Today I’m going to show you how to force a www and a non www domain using htaccess.

It’s common knowledge that you can access your site with or without the www. By not forcing one or the other this will penalize your SEO, due to duplicate content. The most common method of doing this is via .htaccess using mod_rewrite.

When I was first learning how to use .htaccess this was one of the simpler methods to find examples of with any search engine. Now, if you are only needing to edit your. htaccess for one domain, the majority of these found examples will suffice; If you have multiple domains that tend to go to one directory this example will be much more beneficial. Also, if you put this example into your httpd.conf file, this can take effect on all domains on the server; so you won’t need to worry about adding each domains redirect.

I have provided the below examples as a method I use to manage redirects. I have provided an example for each method, www and non-www.

In order for mod_rewrite to work you must first enable it. This is easily done by adding this to the .htaccess.

RewriteEngine On
Force www:
# Do a www redirect on the domain
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.[a-z-]+\.[a-z]{2,6} [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ([a-z-]+\.[a-z]{2,6})$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Force non-www
# Do a non-www redirect on the domain
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.[a-z-]+\.[a-z]{2,6} [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ([a-z-]+\.[a-z]{2,6})$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

How this works:

When the URL is being received we check it to ensure it is valid to our method of choice. Regardless of our method, it checks the URL to see if it matches, checks if the URL contains the www or not. Next it will set the conditional variable to be used in the actual redirect.

Today, we’re giving away another free 3D Object. You can import it into Photoshop Extended and start designing your app mockups. Features fully editable textures and layers.

Downloads & LinksThe Goodies

• 3D Satellite Object

  Photoshop Extended

Today, we’re giving away a free 3D Object of the new Apple iPad. You can import it into Photoshop Extended and start designing your app mockups.

Features fully editable textures and layers. Realistic 3D iPad features buttons, speakers and editable screen.

• iPad 3D Object