We’re proud to announce that Paul Irish, a senior consultant on Molecular’s emerging interactions team, has joined the jQuery Developer Relations Team.  Run by a distributed group of volunteers, the jQuery Project is dedicated to making jQuery the best JavaScript library possible.  

Paul joined the jQuery team to help produce videos for the 14 Days of jQuery and to move the API documentation to its new home for the 1.4 release. As a member of the Developer Relations team, Paul will be responsible for ensuring that the expectations of developers are being met in jQuery itself, and helping the core team to communicate clearly and effectively. 

Paul has been an active member of the jQuery community for 3 years, participating in and administrating the jQuery IRC channels and frequently blogging about jQuery and its functionality. He is also a frequent speaker at jQuery events, and the co-creator of the yayQuery podcast. 

Congratulations, Paul!

Want to learn more about the jQuery project? Leave your comments and questions for Paul in the comments section below.

It’s finally here. miCoach has launched in the U.S. and is on sale here for the first time. Get yours now! It’s been a long time coming after three years of working on this project. The screen below shows what the adidas.com USA home page looked like today. Just below that is the newly designed miCoach homepage to coincide with this launch and some new branding/campaign work. Awesome work everybody!

Also, some really nice words about our site design on the FAST COMPANY web site today. These words are music to my ears and illustrate that all of our hard work has really paid off in creating a rich yet easy to use experience. This is much, much harder than it sounds.

• “The Web site, which was created by adidas along with Molecular, does not miss a step–it’s intuitive, fun to use, and keeps pace with almost everything a runner needs.”
• “The Web interface coupled with these devices is often where they trip over their laces, but not in this instance. The miCoach site is easy to navigate, and includes just about everything you need in order to track and improve your running.”
• “The Adidas miCoach Pacer is the most full-featured and enjoyable personal training device on the market.”

Click here to read the full article.

[Originally published on Ricardo Salema's blog.]

Interactive Game Designed to Engage and Entertain Fans, Help Team Gain Strategic Insight into Increasingly Important Facebook Fan Base 

Famed NBA franchise The Boston Celtics (www.celtics.com) has teamed up with Molecular to launch a first-of-its-kind interactive Facebook application for fans. The application, called “3-Point Play”, is part of the team’s broader interactive marketing strategy, which aims to harness and draw insight from the enthusiasm of 430,000+ Celtics fans participating in the team’s massive Facebook community (http://facebook.com/celtics). 

How the Celtics’ Facebook 3-Point Play works:

• Fans compete against their Facebook friends and Celtics fans from around the world, challenging each other to accurately predict the statistical output of their favorite players each game by Points, Rebounds and Assists
• Prizes are awarded throughout the season, with top winners competing for highly-coveted playoff tickets
• 3-Point Play is ready to tip off, launching on the Celtics’ Facebook page ahead of the regular season opener on October 27 against the Cleveland Cavaliers
• As fans make their picks, the Celtics glean greater insight into their online fans’ behaviors and preferences

Molecular’s goals in creating 3-Point Play were, first, to create an online experience that would resonate with fans and keep them engaged throughout the season, and second, to design a marketing tool that would help the Celtics get to know their Facebook fans even better, allowing them to create a more relevant and compelling marketing strategy for this community of digital consumers.  3-Point Play is the newest component of the team’s growing menu of digital media offerings, which include the team’s official Twitter feed (@Celtics has 20,000+ followers), its official YouTube page (http://youtube.com/bostonceltics), and GameTime Live, a first-of-its-kind in the NBA interactive game-tracking and blogging application found exclusively on Celtics.com.

Play Celtics 3-Point Play now! Get your picks in for tonight’s game and compete against your Facebook friends for Celtics prizes like tickets, jerseys and more!

On our way to lunch today we had a sighting that makes the average geek excited: a Google Maps car, live, in the flesh. These cars are deployed by Google to document the street view imagery on its maps. They also collect geospatial data. It is not the most nondescript article to travel with.

Parked outside a Friendly’s diner, a huge tower carrying telemetry and photography equipmentis installed atop the car.

Data collection equipment inside the car

Driver side view of the car featuring monitor, keyboard

As you can see, a long, methodical road-trip necessitates gummy candy and lots of music.

The data collection computer is stored in the car's trunk

Wireless data uplink using a Verizon data connector.

Definitely does not seem like the cushiest gig, but hey, it’s a tough economy.

Molecular is happy to introduce you to our first guest blogger, Dan Calladine. 

Isobar Global’s Dan Calladine

Who is Dan? 
Dan is an expert on social media and social media tracking, and also a keen user, being active on Blogger YouTube, Delicious and Twitter.  As the Head of Media Futures at Isobar Global, Dan has worked within the media industry for over ten years, tracking online and offline media trends and effectiveness.  He has been interviewed in the news media including on BBC Radio 4, the Financial Times, Campaign and the Guardian.

Glad to have you on board, Dan!  Looking forward to your future posts.

I checked out the Google Wave preview that was offered up at Google I/O 2009 and I was impressed. The demo itself was an hour and twenty minutes long, and when you watch it, you know they were doing some rather clever and special things, but it is more powerful to think about what they are building in the context of your digital life.

For those of you who don’t know what Google Wave is, it is a Google Wave is “a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web”. Another one?! Yep, it is another one, but I appreciated their take on communication and collaboration. The go to market strategy for this innovation will be the key to its success, because I believe it is dependent upon proliferation to be successful – i.e. you and I both need to have one to unleash its true power.

Let me come back to the ‘powerful to thing about what they are building, in the context of your day’ comment – above. And here, the little things matter. I believe the Wave team managed to answer the following challenges -

1. Don’t you hate it when you get an email, or a post on Facebook and someone rattles off a bunch of questions and you can only reply to one of them? Or you can’t split the conversation so that you can insert your answers at the end of each question they asked?
2. Doesn’t it both you to get added to a group conversation (on email) late, and you need to decipher the context of the content?
3. Don’t you wish you can combine your IM and email clients into one solution? And more over, take the content that you might have just collaborated on and spit it out into a document or blog?
4. How about contextual spell checker so that you don’t get suggestions for spelling correction that have nothing to do with the content you are authoring?
5. Wouldn’t it be cool if you can convert a conversation or document into a Blog and then see and respond to the responses to the blog from one interface? And do so for all the external ‘publications’ that you might have?
6. What about collating pictures that five different friends might have captured from the same event into a single album?

And these are just some of the day-to-day things that they thought about. The technology itself is pretty darn cool – like the fact that multiple users can edit the same content at the same time, and they call see what’s happening in real-time, while the system also manages history, tracks changes and mergers these changes. Oh… and you can do this on a mobile device!

See how Google Wave might answer some of the small (and big) experience challenges in your digital life… (I promise Google didn’t pay me to say that – I just appreciate technology with purpose!)

In a recent article in Online Media Daily, Tuesday was ranked the highest click through day for Facebook Brand pages. The study was conducted by ViTrue and posts some interesting data in the article. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday lead the charge with average click through rates at 9.4%, 9.89% and 9.87% respectively. The lowest click through rates were for Friday’s at 2.67%. These are of course averages of a variety of sites and it would be important to evaluate a site’s demographics and behaviors before determining which day would be the best to launch a campaign but interesting data as a departure point

Following up on my recent post about Facebook pages, AdAge has an interesting article about TGI Friday’s efforts. TGI Friday’s set a public goal – to get 500,000 people to fan their spokesperson, Woody, on the site. Supported by a freebie (free hamburgers for Facebook fans), television and online advertising campaign, the campaign was locked and loaded. It’s just that before they even really went out and started spending their media, they had 80,000 fans. It’s just that instead of taking a month, it took them 13 days to reach the target. Half a million free burgers leave a dent on any company’s budget ($2.5 million retail value, assuming the $5 burger price). Now the TV and banners ads are running, increasing exposure.

According to the article frantic calls and discussions ensued on how to handle the explosive success. TGI Friday’s did the right thing, though. Until the end of the month, apparently, they are going to honor their promise and give away free burgers to fans of Woody (who apparently, by proxy, seem to like red and white with articles of flair). What can we learn from this: overall – TGI Friday’s set out right. Getting fans by giving away stuff is the right thing to gain traction quickly. Maybe dipping the toes and seeing if fans need the extra media boost would have made sense. At the very least, it would help to plan for a good outcome, and apparently budget for it. At least they avoided the scorn of what are now tens of thousands of fans who would have been left out in the cold, burgerlss. I am keen to see what they are going to do with Woody and how they are going to sustain interest in absence of freebies. In the meantime, I am going to get my coupon.

I recently came across an interesting blog post on Mint, of 6 banks that are bringing about innovation in both online and mobile banking.

Since we serve a fair number of financial clients, its good to note the current trends that are taking place right now. I’ve outlined a quick gist of the post below:

• USAA – Allows customers to take pictures of both sides of their check using the iPhone’s camera, and send the images as attachments for approval and make a deposit, avoiding the need for you to physically deposit a check

• ING – Long commended for being one of the easiest online platforms to use giving them great buzz If offers several types of account, and have your paycheck deposited to each account automatically.

• ALLY – In order to accomplish the brand’s major goals of getting the highest return for customers’ money, and in offering  unparalleled customer service—Ally now emails their customers when a better rate of return come available. In adiditon they enable a ‘chat with agent’ window pop up when the user is on a page for extended time.

• MoBANK – A mobile based UK bank that can be self-stylized to your tastes. It has impressive commerce back-end functionality that enables users to purchase from web retailers right from its service, in addition to having tools  that track and categorize your spend. Currently just available for the iPhone and iTouch.

• SMARTY PIG – Makes Banking fun, social and breaks all traditional expectations. It let’s users make their goals public, allowing friends and family who are invited to your account, even help with them. Imagine that!  Admittedly, the name and branding also clearly talks to a younger and more socially inclined audience.

• WELLS FARGO – Have recently introduced super-smart ATMs that enable a single deposit of up to 30 Checks or up to 50 Bills, without the need for an envelope. And its ok to even leave your pen back at home, for Fido to chew on. Everything is instantly scanned and counted, a total displayed, and a receipt issued – all in one transaction. The ‘instant availability’ of the funds deposited however will still have to be a thing for the future.

More details available here. Thanks to Jay Bernasconi for passing along this link.

What do you think ? Share your comments. Have you heard of other trends in the financial industry, both in the US and abroad ?

Leading Athletic Retailer Looks to Isobar Interactive Agency for Help in Creating Exceptional Online Customer Experiences

Molecular has been selected by leading athletic retailer The Finish Line, Inc. (NASDAQ: FINL) to deliver a digital redesign program aimed at creating a highly differentiated online shopping experience for consumers of athletic footwear and apparel. 

The Finish Line, Inc. is one of the largest mall-based specialty retailers with 684 Finish Line stores in 47 states as well as online. The digital re-design work by Molecular will encompass overall strategic program planning and development, usability and customer research studies, data and analytics assessment, technical and visual design development, and implementation support.

“Our customers are young and technically savvy, and we want to deliver the very best possible shopping experience for them at every consumer touch point including in-store, catalog and online,” said Kevin Flynn, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Finish Line.  “We’re excited to partner with Molecular to create an e-commerce site that engages and satisfies our customers like never before.”

Molecular President Howard Kogan said, “As consumers become more experienced online shoppers, they become more discerning with higher expectations of their online retailers.  Finish Line is an exceptional brand with fantastic brand loyalty, and we’re thrilled to help them take their digital offering to the next level and fully realize the value of their brand in the online channel.”