Martin Lab

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The Mobile Payment Perfect Storm

Apple Pay and chipped credit card requirements are creating the best scenario for the future of payment to finally get a foothold.

I have a new game for you when you walk to the register at your favorite store; look for this:

  You should start seeing these fancy new credit card machines going into all of your favorite stores. Target, most notably, switched to new POS terminals after their very public security lapse. This machine, the VeriFone 915, has some really cool features. It can accept NFC payments (Apple Pay and Google Checkout) and even supports the new EMV standard (that little microchip you see on credit cards from other countries).

This little black box with a screen has started to represent something for me; the future of payments is here!

Years back Google and a few other companies introduced mobile payments as NFC started to become more prevalent in phones. It had a hard time getting adopted by the mainstream because it’s support was limited (7-Elevens and Macy’s) and it seemed that all was lost and we would be forced to use magnetic striped pieces of plastic for the foreseeable future. (See: Coin, a credit card-like technology which allowed you to use one card for multiple accounts, but with no EMV support, so it’ll be pretty useless when it finally ships.)

Then Apple decided to add NFC support, now all of a sudden it would appear that every retailer in the US is clamoring to support mobile payments. Well it’s actually a bit more complicated than that, it’s kind of a perfect storm of events that helped push stores to get new payment terminals. You see, while the rest of the world has had chips in their cards for a while, the US is lagging behind. That’s about to change, starting October 2015 all the major credit card vendors will be shifting liability for fraudulent purchases to the person who didn’t have EMV. Which basically means, you need a chipped card and your stores need chipped card readers.

What perfect timing, you get a more secure payment method, and support for NFC payments across the board. Now you have something interesting to bring up at the store while you are checking out. Tell them about EMV and NFC, it will distract them from the ridiculous purchases you are making.

[themartinlab]

The real power of Playgrounds

About a month ago, Apple dropped a bomb on the development community (in a good way) introducing their brand new language for developing iOS and OSX apps called Swift. They talked about how modern the syntax is in comparison to Objective-C (which I personally love). How safe it is for developers with strict typing, type inference and optionals. And how powerful it is with constants and 2 different collection types. It's an amazing language, and I'm enjoying learning the ins and outs of it as fast as I can.

In addition to the language, Apple also introduced Playgrounds, a way to write Swift code, and have it compile as you type. You can then see the results on the right side, monitor value changes and even graph out those changes from a loop. This is night and day different from what Apple developers have been used to. In the past, you would write code, hit compile and cross your fingers. Now that you can see the results as you code, the idea of play is finally possible within Xcode.

Image via Apple.com

Playgrounds are amazing, and I highly recommend everyone trying them out, but there is a feature in Playgrounds that wasn't mentioned (or I missed it) in the keynote, you can actually open documentation and even the Swift tour within a Playground. Follow these steps for the tour:

Open Xcode.

Select Help from the menu, and type in "tour".

When you see "A Swift Tour", click on it.

In the documentation, near the top, there is a link that says "Open Playground". Click it.

Now the entire Swift Tour is running with a Playground. You can see the documentation inline with the code examples. Those code examples are compiling, and you can see their values on the right side. Even better, you can manipulate the code and see those results as you make changes (the tour actually encourages it with Experiment markers under different sections.)

This is crazy awesome! It combines the depth of knowledge a book has, with the interactivity and room for play places like Code School have. It is one of the most powerful things I've seen in a while, and makes on-boarding a new language, or even just learning programming for the first time, so much easier. I can't wait to see more documentation work this way, not just from Apple, but from people making frameworks and other code to work with Swift in Xcode. Coding for iOS and OSX is finally fun!

[themartinlab]

Links for the week #9

A weekly (mostly) post of different links of interest ranging from new tools, run apps and crazy digital finds.

Skynet Updates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsD3uTUtPks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZdSMAG90Rs

Oculus & Birds (we had enough for a sub-heading):

Oculus rift for chickens.

Birdly

Crypto Currency Corner:

MIT is giving their students Bitcoin.

Apple allowing Bitcoin apps back into the app store.

Expedia begins accepting Bitcoin for hotel reservations.

Combining crypto currency and crowd funding, this is Lighthouse.

Tools:

Another nice framework for prototyping mobile apps, Framer.js.

A nice collection of web fundamentals from Google.

Everything you need to know from the Facebook conference.

A field manual for designing for the web.

A great way to find the perfect height for your desk chair.

3D Printing:

Carnegie Mellon & Disney Research have created a machine that can print teddy bears on demand.

Combining holographic projection and 3D printing to see what's being printed as it prints.

Open Source:

The White House goes to Github.

That's pretty cool:

A Chrome extension that reads test in images on web pages, and makes that text selectable.

A guitar cable with a built in recorder in the cable. 

Googles self driving car.

Insanely cool interactive sound experiment using sand, 3D mapping and projectors.

And by far, the coolest thing we've seen in a while, the SpaceX Dragon V2.

[themartinlab]

Links for the week #8

A weekly (mostly) post of different links of interest ranging from new tools, fun apps and crazy digital finds.

That's Pretty Cool:

Very cool and innovative 3D display.

A new way to re-color/re-design existing websites for your browser.

Music visualization using fire, and it's as awesome as it sounds.

An interesting experiment showing lag in the real world, to promote high-speed internet.

Go back in time with Google Street View.

3d Printing:

Solving a common problem with ketchup using 3d printing.

3D filament is about to get a whole lot cheaper, thanks to straw.

Games Corner:

Combining flappy bird and 2048 into an addicting game.

A beautiful and fun new platformer game for iOS.

Helpful Links:

Aggregating reviews from all over the internet to help you find the best things online.

The easiest way to make social icons for your site.

The five best libraries for building data visualizations.

Mac Accessories:

A simple solution to a common problem with using Mac monitors.

Hack Attack:

Create a mobile phone with a Raspberry Pi.

Skynet Update:

Tiny robots move around to make a color display.

Magnetically controlled micro-bots move at high speed to complete simple tasks.

Robot t-rex toy coming soon, and it gets angry sometimes.

Google self-driving cars are hitting the city streets, and they now how to get around.

[themartinlab]

Links for the week #7

A weekly (mostly) post of different links of interest ranging from new tools, fun apps and crazy digital finds.

Things worth backing:

A social game for parties where you can actually stare at your phone and it's ok.

New paper-thin, arduino compatible sensors and devices.

Skynet update:

Honda's Asimo gains serious dexterity.

Watch these cranes play a giant game of Jenga.

A sphere robot that can walk.

For download:

This app will monitor your Raspberry Pi and even give you access to restart it remotely.

Fun libs:

Allow the internet to see your locally running server with Node.js.

Beautiful shadow library written in JavaScript.

Turn your laptop (running Mavericks) into an iBeacon.

That's pretty cool:

A ring that reads the text as you slide your finger across a book.

Stop motion combined with 3d printing is more beautiful than I imagined.

A window display that helps you pick better colors for your outfit.

Learning:

A great place to find inspiration and receive challenges to push your coding ability.

[themartinlab]

Links for the week #6

A weekly (mostly) post of different links of interest ranging from new tools, fun apps, and crazy digital finds.

Things worth backing:

Small, reasonably priced consumer facing 3D printer.

A mobile printer that moves across the page.

Tools:

A great resource for all things JavaScript.

Awesome set of vector wireframes for mobile development.

Cheat Sheet for working with github.

Crypto Currency happenings:

Bitcoin's ambitious successor.

Digital fun:

Tetris being played at a large scale on the side of a building.

The sound of taste, an interactive music-playing poster.

A great spoof of the opening credits for Game of Thrones from Hootsuite.

An extension for Google Chrome that converts any reference to "the cloud" to "my butt" on web pages.

Good deals:

MediaFire offers 1TB of online space for $2.50 per month.

That's a pretty cool innovation:

Land Rover is thinking about ways for drivers to see completely through the hood of the car to see the road underneath.

Mattel spends 3 years coming up with a better toy blaster.

Mobile camera embedded in a contact lens from Google.

Drones (aka - Skynet):

Using drones to paint a canvas.

[themartinlab]

Links for the week #5

A weekly (mostly) post of different links of interest ranging from new tools, fun apps, and crazy digital finds.

Hardware:

A completely new type of Raspberry Pi.

Things worth backing:

Troll fighting with Adam Carolla.

Cool ideas:

Delta in-flight innovation class.

A collection of color palettes from Wes Anderson movies.

A very cool way to communicate to micro-controllers.

Lazer etching on denim.

Tools:

Very interesting set of tools from browserfy.

A list of commonly frustrating circumstances with HTML & CSS and how to fix them.

Easy parameter adjustment for iOS apps during development.

Fun digital things:

3D multi-sided dice.

Text recognition from images in the browser. It's a little buggy, but a great start.

Airdrop in the browser.

Granular materials plotter.

If you're nostalgic for MS-DOS, Microsoft has open sourced it.

Speaking of nostalgia, check out this web site dedicated to the Pump sneaker.

Good Reads:

Facebook is bringing the Internet to people via drones.

Drones:

Ice caves video is beautiful.

[themartinlab]

A Pokémon case study: marketers at the mercy of the mob

Martin Agency Creative Technologist Jeff MacDonald and Strategic Planner Lauren Prociv teamed up together to write this piece published on Digiday about the Twitch Plays Pokémon phenomenon and what marketers can learn from it. Check it out!

[themartinlab]

Links for the week #4

A weekly post of different links of interest ranging from new tools, fun apps and crazy digital finds.

-Last week was a busy week, so we missed the post. Don't worry though, it just means we have double the links this week.-

Libs:

Screen casting for iPhone.

Check PSD differences visually within github with this library.

Tools:

A great resource and collection of tools for understanding how your site is viewed by google, with actionable tips you can do to improve. #linkOfTheWeek

We created our first Yeoman generator to help quickly scaffold and start development on static web sites. You can grab it or better yet, fork it, here.

Generate random users (with tons of info including picture) through an API, or even a PhotoShop extension.

Good Reads:

Blend modes coming to browsers.

Google drive dramatically lowers their pricing at the same time Amazon Prime is raising theirs.

A good refresher on Objective-C.

A community sourced list of sites that support 2-factor authentication.

Cool Stuff:

New 3D printer material.

Android Wear.

If you missed Edward Snowden speaking at SXSW, here is the video.

A great list of old video game music.

Nostalgic screen savers done with just css.

Amazing projection mapping done on a basketball court.

[themartinlab]

Links for the week #3

A weekly post of different links of interest ranging from new tools, fun apps and crazy digital finds.

Libs:

Convert images to data-URIs to use in css with this lib.

Tools:

Package manager for XCode, includes plugins and themes. XCode 5 support is a little iffy, but it does work.

Cocoa Pods, an amazing dependency manager for Obj-C (like NPM is for Node.) They have a huge library of searchable libraries to add to your next project.

Koding is by far the most beautiful and rich featured browser-based cloud platform management and development tool we've ever seen. They had a rough week with all the new signups, but it's free to try, easy to use and very powerful giving you sudo access to your virtual machine right in the browser.

Have your chrome bookmarks gotten out of hand, and you can't find anything you meant to go back to anymore? This chrome extension will change that. Search through your bookmarks quickly and efficiently in a beautiful interface.

A pretty rad little keychain device that can plugin into your iPhone and instantly become a thermometer.

Read:

Scientist create ring to help visually impaired people read.

Learn how Facebook is using Quartz-Composer to prototype mobile applications, then go here to learn how to do it yourself.

Projects we backed:

Power Shield for arduino.

Gesture Shield for arduino.

Good listen:

Game of thrones mix-tapes.

Fun:

30th anniversary text based game of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Operating system that ran Jurassic Park.

Awesome Portfolio:

My static self.

[themartinlab]

Links for the week #2

A weekly post of different links of interest ranging from new tools, fun apps and crazy digital finds.

Libs:

cssShake - make your elements really move.

Probably the greatest use of github we've seen in a while. (hint: it involves tacos)

If you work in Node.js, you should check out this great collection of modules.

Tools:

A new text editor from Github is in beta (follow us on twitter, we sometimes have invites.)

And to do a deep-dive into more details about the Atom Editor, check this repo.

UIFaces.com - an online tool for finding avatars for comps and prototypes.

Fun Experiments:

A crazy/creepy WebGL experiment.

Project Tango - a new mobile experiment from Google adding 3D scanning to a cell phone.

SelfieCity - An exploration of selfies taken in a few major cities around the world.

Twitch Pokemon - an online experiment that allowed tons of people to collaboratively make decisions of a single pokemon game, eventually leading to beating the game in its entirety.

Bitcoin: There have been a ton of articles and stories about bitcoin lately, here are a couple links to help get caught up on the worlds most popular cryptocurrency.

Everything you need to know.

An interactive history of bitcoin.

Extra:

Apple introduced their in-dash version of iOS for cars this week. You can check it out here.

[themartinlab]

Links for the week #1

A weekly post of different links of interest ranging from new tools, fun apps and crazy digital finds.

Libs:

localForage - a great lib from mozilla for dealing with local storage in the browser in a consistent and easy to use API.

console.image - the most unnecesary library you will ever use, it helps put images (including dynamic memes) in the web console.

Tools:

You might not need jquery - a great collection of JS function you can use in place of some of the most popular jQuery methods.

JSON Generator - we all make dummy data for testing, and this makes it even easier.

Apps:

Hemingway App - an interesting tool to run your copy through

Threes - current time-suck game of the week, simple and addicting

Good Reads:

A look at the new creative team that is starting to emerge at agencies.

Random:

An amazing kickstarter campaign to get miniature museums in the hands of thousands.

3d printing experimental art.

[themartinlab]

One of our own is in Forbes, 30-under-30

Jeff MacDonald started at the agency as an intern the summer of 2011, and we were lucky enough to bring him on as a full-time Creative Technologist shortly thereafter. In addition to that, he’s also an adjunct professor at VCU Brand Center helping to mold future CTs (and I’ve seen the students work from his class, it’s amazing.) Of course, that’s still not enough for Jeff, as he volunteers for several RVA projects year round, including the successful Feast RVA (http://feastrva.com/), where once a month several local people pitch ideas to a voting (and well fed) audience in hopes of winning some funding.

He’s a busy guy, but being in the Forbes 30-under-30 takes hard work. And if you’ve worked with Jeff, you know hard working is just the tip of the iceberg with him. We’re fortunate to count Jeff among us and we are all super proud of him. Check out the full article here.

[themartinlab]

Here are some of the highlights from the Martin Agency Lab this year.

[themartinlab]

Hands-on with the Anki Drive

Anki, a little known company that specializes in artificial intelligence made a big splash at this year’s annual Apple developer conference, WWDC, by introducing a modern take on the slot car. At first glance, Anki Drive looks like toy cars controlled by an iPhone, which it is, but it’s how the iPhone controls the cars that’s interesting. The phone app contains Artificial Intelligence (AI) that instructs up to 4 cars simultaneously over Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) and tells them how to drive themselves around the track. They already do a better job than half the people on I-95. But that doesn’t mean you’re left as a spectator, you can always grab control of a car and race against the AI or a friend.

The package is well thought out and feels like something Apple would come up with. Setup is dead simple - charge the cars, download the app, and unroll the track. The app itself will walk you through how to play. And you know this is the future of toys when none other than Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard and Dr. Charles Xavier fame) narrates the tutorial.

Once that is done, you can practice or enter battle mode, but a race mode is promised in a future app update. The kit includes 2 cars, which is fun, but I imagine having 4 cars would be even more so. Although at $60 a piece for an extra car, you have to question whether you want to spend that kind of money for a high-tech slot car game.

Take a look at a couple of the guys testing them out (as well as testing out the iPhone 5s slow-mo cam).

We can’t wait to see how they roll out new functionality through the app store, but we are most excited about the possibility of having third-party libraries to interact with the cars directly.

[themartinlab]

Hacking Subscriptions, The Washington Post Edition

Growing up in Northern Virginia, exposure to The Washington Post was as common as rush hour traffic. As a child I looked forward to the Sunday edition brimming with pages of color comics. In my teens I gained a strong appreciation for Dave Barry’s hilarious rants. Even after I moved out of my parents house and landed in Richmond to attend VCU, I continued purchasing the Sunday paper as my weekend relaxation ritual. I would walk two blocks from my apartment and purchase a copy from a small market that also sold me beer as a minor. I guess I thought buying the paper helped me look older.

Twice I've previously subscribed to The Washington Post but never renewed after the first year. I frequent the website, and although reading online is an hourly occurrence for me, it’s very different than the relaxation that comes with newsprint draping over your hands on a humid Virginia morning. I love having the paper around, especially the Sunday magazine, so whenever I get an offer in the mail I let it linger a day or two before it finds its way to the trash.

Recently I received a mail offer from The Washington Post to subscribe at the discounted rate of 99¢ per week for an entire year. If you go to the Post's website and check subscription prices you'll probably see 99¢ per week for 12 weeks, then it jumps to the full price of $2.50 per week. That's $111.88 annually, and really not a bad price for the value. You could probably make that money back with solid use of Sunday coupons. But 99¢ per week for an entire year is only $51.48, that’s $60.40 less than the website’s base offer.

The offer sat hidden under other mail on my dining room table for nearly a week before I rediscovered it and decided to visit the website. While reading the terms of the offer I realized that the subscription website uses a different domain than the news website. It decided to use Google's site search feature to show all of the pages Google has indexed for a specific website… in this case: wpsubscribe.com. This turned up several distinct web pages, each with a unique subscription offer. I carefully reviewed each one and found a 52-week Sunday paper offer for only 77¢ per week. That's $40.04 per year!

I’ve tested this technique on the Smithsonian Magazine and Playboy (in the name of diversifying my research). Using Google to make informed shopping decisions can save you money, money that you can now reinvest in more reading material.

[themartinlab]

Data vs. Information

Looking through my rss feeds recently (I still miss you Google Reader), I came across a new device getting government approval for sale. It was an ultrasound device that could hook up to an iOS enabled device, such as an iPhone. Anyone else would have jumped passed this article, not really caring a lot about yet another at-home medical device that most people don't need, but as an expectant father to be (6 months to go), I thought about getting one. They said that cost wasn't too much, especially in comparison to going to the doctor to get an extra ultrasound to the tone of $250 for just a few minutes, this device would enable me to check on my future basketball player/astronaut/president/reason the rest of my hair will fall out, anytime I wanted. Then something occurred to me that made me move on immediately and not even consider ordering one. It would show me exactly what I want to see, sure, but not what I want to know.

I'm not a trained practitioner of ultrasound imagery, so I would have no idea what I was looking at. The first one I went to, I got the head and the body confused, that's a pretty fundamental difference in anatomy, so just imagine if could spend countless hours looking at my unborn child. I wouldn't have knowledge, I would have questions. Questions for my wife and our doctor. I would drive them insane "I noticed this on the ultrasound, is that normal?", "This morning the baby was facing the other way, is that ok?", I'm getting nervous just thinking about it.

This exact same thing has been happening more and more in digital advertising and a lot of other industries in the last few years. The age of data overload is upon us. Analytics, SEO, SMO, A/B testing, etc… We are getting more information everyday than we were getting in a month just a few years ago, but we are only gaining in small increments of knowledge. To make it worse, we can see everything in "real-time", causing even more anxiety about reacting faster and faster, before knowing the whole story.

Of course there is something to be said about being reactive and timely to changes, but if you see a sudden drop in participation, the reason behind it might be buried deeper than you think. 

That's why it's more important than ever to not only have the right people on staff who can interpret this mountain of data into digestible forms of information for the rest of us, but to also team them up with the right people who can make better creative and strategic decisions based on that information. 

What's the point of all this data, if we can't become a little smarter with it?