People are always asking us, “what do you do exactly”?  It’s a difficult question to answer if you’re wanting a one-line response.  That said,  keep seeking out the truth and eventually you may just find it.  The past works may not define the future works as our ideas and directions change as we continue to seek out adventure and journey on down the sometimes lonesome road of living and dying.  Ideas are merely the beginning of our works because it must be matched with the execution of our habits, which prevent us from the good and bad emotions within us.  The emotional bag check we have in mind is one where people help us when we need help and people step up to the plate even when the dirt is covering the entire home.  Maybe we’re getting a few paces ahead of ourselves on this post.  In any case, wishing you a wonderful day and reminding you to keep your emotions lively even when others try to destroy them.

Yes, this is what I would look like if I were your barista and providing you with a good ol’ morning pickup.  For a moment, let’s talk about customer service because well, it’s important.  Oh, and we could improve upon ours’ a little bit.  As a smaller studio with few bodies at present, we’re unable to hand hold as well as many of the larger agencies who work on much larger accounts.  That’s okay with us, but we really wish we could be better and know we can be better at customer service.  Let’s take the neighborhood coffee shop.  You know, the one that always has a smile on their face and nicely finished off your latte with some floral design.  They are doing one thing right :: making me feel good about coming back over and over again.  Gripe all you want about Starbucks, but they do things right when it comes to customer service, especially after Schultz came back to the company to improve upon that neighborhood feeling in the stores across the country after the air seemed to have less of a friendly feel a few years ago (I think it was just a few years ago?).

The one thing that we can all do as it relates to customer service is simply tell the customers they care.  Sounds cheesy and no, you don’t want to go over the top with it like what’s his butt in Office Space (the Chotchkie’s guy with tons of flare if you need specifics).  If I really were a barista (and I have thought about doing it as a side job), I would be the dancing barista.  The guy who will show you a little move, thrusting and showing a little booty shaking while I pour your morning latte because 1) I’m just “that guy” and 2) I would make you laugh either at me or with me.  Create a positive emotion.  That’s good customer service.  Okay, that’s all I got for tonight.  Coffee and dance moves bright and early in the morning.  Ringgenberg, out.

I had an idea today for a learning technology that would help people to type as Kanye West would describe as “better, faster, stronger”.  In short, it would be a learning platform allowing for users to type to the beat of his or her favorite song as the lyrics are displayed on the computer screen.  For instance, being a total gangster rapper from Iowa, I know how it is to want to know the lyrics to some songs and completely messing up these lyrics whenever I attempt to rap a particular song because, well, I’m a terrible rapper.  I blame that on the whole Caucasian from Iowa part.  Anyway, I just think it would be a great way to improve the speed and accuracy of typing abilities while listening to some trendy beats.  Maybe this would revolutionize the field of court reporting or at least increase the popularity of court reporting schools around the country.  Here’s to gangster rap court reporting.  Get your type on without anymore typos playas.

Welcome to the new digital look of evolyte.  As one of our many new year’s resolutions for 2012, the company website was built with much love and in a push to expand into a creative outlet for talented, ambitious individuals across the United States from Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and our hometown of Sioux City, Iowa.  Our goal for 2012 is to have physical presence in Chicago, New York, and Sioux City.  It will happen, mark our words.

As for the website, this is the first time that we are publicly mentioning many of our clients and project works.  We are so incredibly thankful for our incredible roster of clients who have been so trusting, understanding, and supportive of us over the course of our company life.  We’ve gone through many growing pains as all companies do, experiencing a lot of successes and plenty of failures.  All of which have helped to define who we are as people and as a company.  Our culture is one that embraces transformation.  By accepting the challenging journey and process of building a company, our company culture has been humanized.  We understand defeat.  We have felt chaos and experienced shutting down an office.  We have also lived with saying things we probably shouldn’t have and kept our lips sealed when we should have spoken.  We tried things that others would not even dare to consider trying.  Sometimes we right.  Sometimes we were wrong.

To date, we are proud of the journey we have had and very much look forward to the beautiful horizon ahead of us.  We want to thank our clients for all that they have allowed us to do for them, apologize to anyone for any mistakes we may have made to date, and encourage anyone who has not yet inquired about who we are, what we do, and how we can help to give us a call or send us a note.

From the bottom of our hearts, we will continue to work hard for our existing and future clients, spend our time and energies building out our own emerging technologies for the consumer marketplace, and do our best to improve as both individuals and as a company.

Thank you for being you and we appreciate you all.

The app is affectionately called EvoMotion (TM).

Caveats

1. Watch the short screencast above that talks through the point I’m trying to make
2. Obviously this is an extremely basic app, but does use complex animations (one of the animations you see is actually a time-series of 25 separate images)
3. Additionally, the animations and graphics are most definitely not subtle, and a bit heavy-handed, but did it this way to make the point obvious and hard-to-miss
4. For some reason, when the video was rendering on YouTube it created a delay between the sound of the mouse click and the actual click. This delay doesn’t actually exist.

In Summary

We at Evolyte call this concept I’m about to describe (e)motion.  It’s about the combination of emotion and motion/interaction, hence the play on words (download the PDF).

In case you hate watching videos, I’ll just jump right into the point I’m trying to make.  Namely, that gamification isn’t about badges and points.  It’s about taking the emotion and interaction/motion of games and applying it to more utilitarian apps.

In the example above, I did the following:

• Splash Page — Instead of a static, opening splash page, I used a steel shutter that rolled up like a garage door. Did you know that these loading pages are, more often than not, not even necessary? It’s just a way for the app developers to make you stare at their branding/logo for an arbitrary amount of time, and the app is already loaded.  The more you know…
• Fly-Ins — Rather than the screen loading with each of the assets already in place, I animated them to add some visual appeal.
• Explosions — Seriously. When I check a box, I want some some crazy ass sh*t happening.  I don’t want a measly little two-pixel width checkmark to just appear.  I want a damn, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Total Recall, Die Hard With A Vengeance type explosion.  Give the people what they want, man!

Ok, so I tend to get a little “fired” up about this stuff.  Get it?  Fired up?  Uhh…

Take-Aways

So what should you take away from this?  Well, how about making a to-do list with explosions everytime you check something off?  Or better yet, confetti!

And in project management-style software (I’m looking at you Basecamp , why not add a bit more interaction when something gets completed that makes the person completing it feel good about it.  Instead of deleting a project when it’s finally completed, why not shoot it out of a rocket into outer space?  Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Anyways, that’s about it for this one.  If you’ve got questions or want to play around with the app, feel free to shoot me a note:  sean.everett@evolyte.com

Until next time, boom goes the dynamite.

We put together a deck explaining some lesser known information on consumer behavior and viral marketing, with a bent towards startups and apps.

We’ve also introduced a new concept that we think we’ll be seeing a lot more of in 2012 and beyond.

We call it (E)motion.

We just realized we never put this on our blog.  We built it about 6 months ago, never really marketed it heavily, but it still has a core group of users.

People have used it to express their joys and pains on death, suicide, cancer, anorexia, sexuality, relationships, and almost everything under the sun.  Give it a try, the purpose was to make you feel better

http://confideapp.com

We organized a Viral Marketing panel at the TechWeek conference in Chicago this past Monday.  There were some really great nuggets of information in that panel, and included both online and offline marketers.  The other panelists included Jason Seiden, Joel David Barnes, and Jonny Immerman.

The Evolyte team discussed marketing geared more towards blowing your hair back.  The framework we developed is the following:

Viral Marketing Framework:  CCSS

• Comedy – Remember America’s funniest home videos?  Watching parents get hit in the crotch with a whiffle ball will always be funny and viral.
• Cuteness — Puppies, kittens, and babies.  From Charlie Bit My Finger on YouTube (painful) to every kitten that ever played with a ball of yarn, cuteness kills.
• Sex — Pretty self explanatory, any beer ad will suffice.
• Shock — The news media and reality TV works for one reason and one reason only:  shock.

Combining more than one is totally advanced mode, but if you can pull it off like Kenny “Motherf*cking” Powers & KSwiss, well, you may just have a goldmine on your hands.

We’re Lazy, We Don’t Want to Wait for the Weather to Load

Weather Notifier Get push notifications with the current temp, forecast, and chance of rain for any city in the US.  For example, set a daily alert for 8:00am Chicago and wake up to the weather! You never have to open the app again.  It even looks good in Apple’s new iOS5 notification center:

Sick of Ugly Digital Clocks? Let’s Get Creative.

Design O’Clock Spice up your desk, nightstand, or kitchen with a series of beautifully designed clocks, inspired by famous artists and our local sailing club. You can also submit ideas for your own creative clocks!

While these are both customized for the iPhone and iPod Touch, it also works on your iPad (remember, there’s no native weather app so get notified there too

Blasting Off on an Urban Airship

Weather Notifier relies heavily on one very important, yet often overlooked, piece of technology:  push notifications.

We’ve relied heavily on our friends at Urban Airship, a platform that allows us to leverage their pre-built systems for push notifications, which are extremely scalable.  And the best part is it’s free until we start sending over 1 million notifications a month!

Man, we hate things that save us time, don’t fail, and grow as our demand grows.  Just like how Apple always boots up so fast and never crashes.  We just hate that.

The best part?  They contacted us to see if we were having any issues, if they could help in any way, and if they could help market our apps.  Ummm, let me think…ok, sure.

So What’s Next? We’re Going Bananas for Stocks

We loved our service so much with Urban Airship we’ve decided to double down on the marriage between our technology and theirs.  Coming soon is the sister app to Weather Notifier, called Stock Notifier.  I think you can figure out where this is headed…

You know we’ve got mad love for the 80s and Bananarama (it really is a cruel summer), so next up after that?  Let’s get crazy:  Bananatime…

Evolyte:  apps to save time or make time fly.