OTOinsights

OTOlabs Develops Stewie Tile for ZenZui Launch

Microsoft Corp. announced the launch of ZenZui, an independent company with the mission of transforming the way people engage, consume and interact with Web content through a revolutionary mobile user experience and information ecosystem. OTOlabs built one of the first ZenZui content tiles for Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment featuring Stewie from Family Guy.

 ZenZui's high-frame rate Zooming User Interface employs up to 36 individual "tiles" that are selected and customized by users to reflect their interests and lifestyle with relevant content, interactive communications and fresh data. From the connected communities of social networks and the immediacy of pop culture to the have-to-know sports and weather info, this modular tile interface lets users sync, surf, and share digital content quickly, easily and in a distinctly new way.

"OTOlabs develops and deploys products that put our clients' brands, like Fox Family Guy, where today's audience lives. ZenZui provides a powerful and unique platform to accomplish that in the mobile space," said Chris Heitmann, executive vice president and general manager for OTOlabs.

Gizmodo has an excellent review and more pictures here.

Forrester Research Points to OTOinsights

Thank you Brian Haven, Senior Forrester Research Analyst, for pointing to OTOinsights  in a recent report titled "Interactive Marketing Channels to Watch in 2007" as an example of how marketers should leverage their email and RSS content to support their initial steps into the blogsphere. 

Brain writes:

" Make your first strides into social media with RSS and blogs:  Last year, we said holding off on social media was OK>  But rapid consumer adoption of these channels indicates that the time is now to enter this space.  How to dive in?  RSS is relatively simple first step for marketers with mature email marketing programs in that initial RSS feeds can consist of repurposed email content.  Likewise, email or RSS content can also create initial blog posts.  For example, interested users can find insights from interactive agency One to One Interactive from its blog, via RSS, or in email alerts."

In addition to leveraging existing e-mail/RSS content to support initial blog initiatives we would like to add to Brian's advice by recommending that marketers actively educate their internal constituents on their company's corporate blog strategy and, when appropriate, seek regular contributions from their staff as a way to begin generating new and more relevant content.  Additionally, marketers would be well served by incorporating social bookmarking (like De.licio.us) into their blog strategy as a way to augment their existing content with complimentary content on the Web authored by external sources.

Jeffrey Bardzell, PH.D. joins OTOinsights as Guest Blogger.

One to One Interactive welcomes Jeffrey Bardzell PH.D.as a guest author to it's corporate blog OTOinsights.  Bardzell is an Assistant Professor of HCI/Design and new media at the School of Informatics in Indiana University - Bloomington. He specializes in the aesthetics of software interfaces, amateur multimedia design communities, and digital creativity.

Bardzell first started working with One to One Interactive at the end of 2006, where he served as a moderator to the firms joint panel with the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange regarding the popular metaverse Second Life.  His first contribution to OTOinsights is titled "WoW's Lunar New Year Festival: Experience Design Gone Awry".

WoW's Lunar New Year Festival: Experience Design Gone Awry

As a player of World of Warcraft and husband to a Chinese woman from Taiwan, I was delighted to see that Blizzard had introduced a Lunar New Year set of quests in World of Warcraft, complete with firecrackers, red lanterns, interracial harmony, and dumplings.

So it was, on the final evening of the 14-day holiday, the day known as Xiao Guonian, or "Little New Year," my wife and I, at the end of an evening of power leveling, decided to indulge ourselves in the Lunar New Year quest sequence. We dutifully began a quest in our home area, the Undercity (home of the undead), where we were pointed to the Undercity celebration area. Once there, as instructed, we purchased and set off a number of fireworks. Next, we received our invitation to join the celebration in Felwood, and we promptly teleported ourselves to a moonlit hill filled with revelers represented WoW's eight original races, dancing within a circle enclosed by red lanterns.

Moonglade is a "contested" region in WoW, which means that neither of the two factions ("the Alliance" and "the Horde") engaged in a bitter war clearly owns it. That the celebration was in such a space, and that it enclosed and included all of its races, sent a positive message about setting aside racial and political hatreds in the name of shared religious and cultural holidays.

The final phase of our Lunar New Year WoW celebration was to speak to a non-player character in the nearby town of Nighthaven. Now Nighthaven, unlike the meadows of Moonglade, is a night elf town, which means that it belongs to the Alliance, and under normal circumstances, our characters, who are undead, would not be welcome there. But the Lunar New Year quest sent us there as our final step, and enjoying WoW's recreation of this major Chinese holiday, we embarked on the final steps of our journey.

We did reach Nighthaven, and we did speak to our quest-ending interlocutor, and even earned for ourselves a nice set of virtual dumplings, a traditional symbol of prosperity in the coming year. Delighted, we set out to leave Nighthaven and return to the silvery meadow, so that we might teleport back to our home area.

On the road back, a night elf on a mount rode past us, stopped, dismounted, and killed both of our avatars. When he was done, using World of Warcraft's built-in emote system, he spat on each of us. Twice.

The two of us were stunned and offended. The very word for "death" is forbidden in Chinese culture during this holiday time, and our casual race-based killing goes profoundly against the values, traditions, and symbols of the holiday. That other player, the night elf who killed us, had no way of knowing that we had just completed a cultural observance; to him, we surely looked like two morons who had the petulance to go somewhere they had no business going and who got what they deserved. I do not blame the night elf who killed us, and his spitting on us is encouraged at every level by the game.

The mistake here is on Blizzard's end. Blizzard put significant effort into creating this "Lunar Festival" experience, which included interaction design, original 3D models and textures, sounds, characters, quests, and storytelling. The festival was clearly done to show honor to the Chinese traditions on which it drew. The sequence also established a clear experience trajectory that created expectations about what would happen as players went through it. When the sequence reverted from universal religious celebration to typical WoW PVP race-based combat, it radically altered that trajectory without signifying to the player that this change had occurred. Stated more abstractly, it's not the element in isolation that bothered us. We play on a PVP server and get killed all the time. It's the syntax: the final element of the Lunar Festival sequence was not a syntactically valid conclusion to what had preceded it. This oversight undermines the substantial efforts Blizzard put into creating the festival in the first place.