Rebel&Bird

[rebelandbird]

Meet us at SXSW!

We are in Austin for the full week of SXSW, keeping Austin weird. Ping us if you want to meet up! We have a bunch of fun stuff going on:

Promoting Spy University: We are actively seeking funding for the next phase of our product Spy University. It's awesome and it will help kids everywhere learn, better :-)

M2M Change the world meetup: We are hosting the official meetup on M2M at SXSW. That's happening on Sunday

SXSW Trade show: Come meet us in the Swedish Boot Camp booth, 1023/1025

Looking forward to seeing you here :-)

[rebelandbird]

Flirting is out! - Customer communication strategy in the Post-campaign era.

Rebel and Bird just participated in the New school marketing tour, a conference on insights and trend spotting within the field of customer communication and marketing. The main topic this year was how to reach communication goals by interaction through email, SMS and push messages.

Two big trends we spotted were the death of the campaign, and an increased focus on personalization:

We have entered the post-campaign era. The focus is no longer on the campaign. Instead, it’s all about establishing long-term relationships through all communication channels. Less focus on click through rates in a specific email, and more focus on low opt out rates.

Messages should be personalized. This includes the content, as well as the time you choose to send the message. To do this, you need to research and track your customers’ interests and previous actions. To succeed, you need to test, measure, analyze, and test again.

Visit us and let us know whether you agree, or whether you have other experiences to share?

[rebelandbird]

Rebel&Bird is nominated for the award Best Business Service in this year's Mobilgalan. Here's the motivation:

Springworks och Rebel&Bird i samarbete med Stockholmsmässan

Med hjälp av den plattform som Springworks och Rebel & Bird tagit fram kan Stockholmsmässan utan att skriva en rad kod erbjuda sina kunder och deras kunder unika appar för varje aktuell mässa.

Do you want to know more about how we make it possible for our client to create close to fifty apps yearly without writing a single line of code, and without adding substantial administrative load? Contact us now.

[rebelandbird]

Good design thinkers observe. Great design thinkers observe the ordinary and in that ordinariness find great insight. Try getting into the habit of stopping once a day to look at an action or an artifact as though you are a detective at a crime scene. Why are manhole covers round? Why do I dress this way to go to work? How do I know how far back to stand from the person in front of me in line? What would it be like to be colorblind? You will be shocked how inspirational it is to look carefully at mundane things.

Tim Brown, IDEO

[rebelandbird]

Stockholm Makerspace

Last week we paid a visit to Stockholm Makerspace, a crowd funded non-profit organization with an awesome location right in the center of Stockholm. 

A Makerspace (also called hackspace / fab lab) can be described as a location where people with common interests, often in computers, technology, science, digital or electronic art (but also in many other realms) can meet, socialise and/or collaborate. 

Makerspace's vision is to encourage creative tech tinkering and drive innovation through interdisciplinary collaboration. We love the concept and got really inspired.

We checked out lots of cool machines and met interesting people who were busy exploring the intersection of tech, art and craft.

Think this sounds interesting? For a small fee the lab is open for anyone ready to let the creative spirits run wild. In their own words, you can do anything from CNC milling to orchid cultivation.

[rebelandbird]

Four user experience conferences you should attend

Conferences are great places to get an understanding for what's going on in your field and, if it's a good one, broaden your horizons to include new perspectives.

There are quite a few to choose from within the field of digital product development. Here's our list of most interesting conferences within the field of UX. What's your favorite?

South By Southwest Interactive March, Austin USA, 5 days It doesn't get more inspiring than SXSW. Every year in March, you can meet us in Austin. Don't miss. Also, hang around for SXSW Music, starting the day after the conference. The most intense music festival you're bound to experience.

User Experience Lisbon May, Lisbon Portugal, 3 days UXLX has grown to a respectable event which gathers many of the top minds in the industry mainly from Europe and USA.  

Dconstruct September, Brighton UK, 3 days This conference has the ambition to enlighten and inspire, rather than educate and inform. Depending on your need, this may or may not be the right place for you. In all fairness though, once you're beyond the basic level of your trade, the educational aspect of conferences is questionable. And information can be easily sought online.  

UI18 October, Boston USA, 3 days In contrast to Dconstruct, this conference is more focused on education. It's organized by User Interface Engineering which is run by Jared Spool. Spool is one of the Ancients within the field of UX, having been around since the seventies doing research.

[rebelandbird]

SXSW 2014: Vote to hear us talk!

South by Southwest is one of the most creative, intense, buzzing experiences you can have legally, if you're into digital product development and design. It's where Twitter was launched and it's where every internet focused VC and startup go if they're worth their salt.

The talks at the conference are selected from thousands of submitted entries, through voting by all attendees and then a jury of peers.

We've submitted two talks for next year. Here's the first one, focused on the potential of the internet of things to improve quality of life. If you think it looks interesting, please vote for us now!

Be a force for good in the M2M revolution

Machine to machine/internet of things is heralded as the next big thing. It will bring about changes to our lives on par with what the web has delivered and in ways we are struggling to comprehend. Most efforts are centred around making business more efficient. Services that reduce costs, streamline processes and in many cases make people superfluous. Instead of looking for ways to make what we already have cheaper, can we instead explore how we can be a force for good in this revolution? Is there an opportunity to improve quality of life and actually make the world better? This talk will provide inspiration and insights into the area of M2M, highlighting opportunities that not only leverage a new disruptive technology, but also has the potential to benefit real people and be a force for good.

[rebelandbird]

Digitizing medical records - helpful or an implementation nightmare?

In the past year, healthcare systems in the U.S. have been switching from handwritten notes and records to electric forms, with incentives from the government.  But many doctors question or outright oppose change, arguing that new systems will not save money or time, and are difficult to implement in many cases. 

The government has paid doctors and hospitals nearly $14 billion in incentives to make the change, and argue that hospitals and care facilities will likely save both money and time. However, doctors need to understand the new systems to use them, a clear threshold.

Some smaller facilities are also refusing to make the switch based on monthly costs of running the digital services, which, in some cases, diminish the cost-saving benefit of the government’s incentive payments.

Our view is that going electronic has the potential to improve healthcare, and to realize that potential the user experience quality needs to be the focus for the projects, rather than system integration requirements.

From our experience working with healthcare in Sweden, we've seen that the system complexity involved sometimes drown out all other priorities, meaning the user experience's nowhere near as thought through as it should be. User studies are rare and incremental releases for testing almost unheard of. We've also seen that when we bring our passion for creating real value to the projects, there is massive opportunity for high quality user experiences that relieve doctors of administrative tasks and help patients get better care.

[source]

[rebelandbird]

On monday we hosted a party in Austin at SXSW, for our friends that are here. We picked the spot to communicate the curiosity and explorer mindset that's core to us in all we do – a beautiful quirky island right in the middle of Austin, a short boat/kayak ride from a wonderful little gazebo. One of our guests had lived in Austin for twelve years, yet had no idea this place even existed.

Finding heartwarming places like this requires that you step off the trodden path and risk getting lost. The same is true for finding solutions to the problems we work with every day. And we love getting lost :-)

Thank y'all for being curious enough to come, you are all wonderful people!

[rebelandbird]

Thanks to everyone attending the @rebelandbird island party today, loved sharing this secret hideaway with you, you made it awesome!

[rebelandbird]

Totally valid patent. Precut paper. Glue. All salute the geniuses Mark and Conrad. http://www.google.com/patents/US6644498

[rebelandbird]

Halleluja. Talking internet of things, open platforms and the future of humanity. Good times.

[rebelandbird]

The once groundbreaking frog is about to be eaten by a bird with an attitude problem

[rebelandbird]

Halftime first day of #sxsw and still hungry for inspiration and tacos!

[rebelandbird]

The next rogue wave of tech is without a doubt M2M/Internet of things. We are curiously investigating how our view of the world will change as things and pets join the human conversation with a voice of their own. Read more in our #concat article. Me and the gang are at SXSW to explore this topic. Ping us if you share our passion or if you're just plain curious.

/Peter