Shopaholic, Foodie or Wingman? No Friend Left Behind

We’re excited about the launch of ‘No Friend Left Behind‘, a program developed by Microsoft with the help of Delvinia, promoting the launch of Window’s Live Messenger for the iPhone and iPod touch. The iPhone app allows you to stay connected with the people that matter most and keep up with what they are doing across the web.

Through the research and discovery phase, a few key insights about app download behaviour were identified:

• 62% of people searched for apps in the AppStore, while 60% browsed apps. This made it critical to maintain position in the top 5 downloaded apps.
• 46% of iPhone owners found out about apps through Word of Mouth, so targeting Social Influencers that were early adopters of technology and active in social networks was essential.

The initial launch in US and Canada (primarily through PR) would automatically drive the app to a top download within the first few hours. The challenge was how to maintain this position, and increase the number of anticipated downloads, in the months following launch.

Enter “No Friend Left Behind”, a creative concept that recognized the importance of keeping the expertise of your closest contacts with you as you navigate through life (anywhere/anytime).

The marketing campaign highlights those critical moments when you need the expertise of your friends on your IM list the most; while poking fun at how we have different needs met by our different contacts and the value they bring us in our daily lives.

The strategy was to create a unique media platform, which leverages the power of social media to increase awareness and encourage activation. Users are challenged to earn “status” through peer voting and acknowledgement. The nature of the program, and personas created, played on the notion that we are different people to different social circles, which maximized the potential for sharing.

Visit ‘No Friend Left Behind‘, and start earning your badges today.

Muddy Mobile Waters – Part 2

As I discussed in Part 1 of this series, Apple is moving away from using a shared standard for distributing and running RIA content on their mobile devices. So how will we be able to efficiently create rich online experiences and have them work on the desktop and on mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPad? Let’s look at some possible solutions:

Target Only Apple’s Devices
I’m sure that there will be still be situations where it’s cost effective to develop an RIA that only targets Apple’s devices, at least for the near future. But the obvious problem with this approach is that you will limit your audience. While the iPhone is currently a very large slice of the mobile pie, Android based devices are rapidly gaining ground, Microsoft will soon release their new mobile OS, Windows Phone 7, and other mobile OSs are maintaining their market share.

HTML5
Creating RIA that works within the web browser, using the new HTML5 tags to handle video, audio and animation is certainly going to be a useful way to deliver cross-platform content.

However it relies on if a platform’s browser fully supports the HTML5 specification’s APIs. Currently most mobile device and desktop web browsers do not or only partly support HTML5 and all have individual quirks in how they handle older HTML and CSS. HTML5 also does not provide as fully featured an API as various plug-ins have (Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.), so it will mostly be useful for embedding simple video, audio and animated content into the user’s browser. For more complex RIA interfaces in the web browser we will likely continue to use Web 2.0 solutions such as server-side scripting, AJAX, jQuery, plug-ins, etc. Even for embedding video and audio there will be issues, as it will be up to the browser to render video and audio and they are not in agreement about which codecs to use.

Flash
The Flash plug-in is already widely accepted by Internet users on their desktop computers, so I don’t think it will be a big stretch for them to use it on their mobile devices, especially if it comes pre-installed. Clients are comfortable with having their RIAs built using it and Device Central integrates several the Creative Suite apps, including Flash, to make it easier to create mobile content. Flash also supports exporting animations to the HTML5 Canvas tag, which may be useful for creating alternate content for non-Flash users.

But the problem with Flash is that currently there are not enough mobile devices that have the Flash plug-in installed to guarantee a large mobile audience and Apple is not likely to support the plug-in any time soon, if ever.

Conclusion
I anticipate that the Open Screen Project making Flash as mainstream on mobile devices as it is on the desktop. But it is the mobile user who will decide what really works for them, and truly RIA capable mobile devices which support the Flash plug-in have not yet gone on sale.

I suggest that unless you need to develop a mobile RIA right now, you’re best off waiting until the Fall. By then we should be able to see how the sales of non-Apple mobile devices are faring and have a clearer indication of how people’s mobile habits are evolving.

5 Most viewed articles on the Delvinia Link Pool: March 22-28

Chevy Adds QR Codes to Cars | Branding Unbound

Flex 4 & Flash Builder 4 are Here!
| Everything Flex

IE9: Microsoft retools its browser with HTML5, accelerated graphics | TechFlash

The Lost Principles of Design | Fuel Your Creativity

Adobe smacks back Apple over iPad, again | Scobleizer

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