This is an atypical Labs post, as it doesn't really concern specific code at all. It's more of a wake up call. It starts with the same thing you've been reading about everywhere -- the iPad. It ends somewhere much different and much more important for our industry. It's a conversation about what we're doing as experts in this field and how we move forward together.

The announcement that the iPad won't support Flash kick started a lightning storm of opinions. The alleged issue at hand is that the iPad doesn't support Flash. This is a bad thing. It's a bad thing for the same reason that it also doesn't support Google Chrome, Firefox and (even) Internet Explorer. It's a bad thing because it doesn't support Unity and Java. It's a bad thing because it supports what Apple wants it to supports and that's all. Which isn't to say that we don't love making Apple applications... because we do. It's just that the iPhone app store was an incredible leap forward from the previous generation of mobile applications and so was rightfully recognized as revolutionary. The iPad isn't revolutionizing netbooks, it's devolving them back to a fully closed era. One environment, one language. A cumbersome, time consuming distribution process.While you can certainly be expressive using Objective-C and with the iPad, the decisions on how a user engages with something we make should be left to the experts.

As many Think readers already know, Big Spaceship was one of the founding agencies in a non-profit association called the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA).  SoDA brings together a range of amazing digital agencies (41, at current count) from around the world, all of whom share a common desire to advance the field of digital marketing. This year, that shared desire led to the publication of The SoDA 2010 Digital Marketing Outlook, a fantastic collection of articles and thought pieces from SoDA members.

On Big Spaceship's behalf, I contributed a piece entitled "Stop Spreading Viruses and Start Giving Gifts," in hopes that 2010 might finally be the year when the marketing community moves past the generally flawed, frequently counter-productive, and fundamentally arrogant idea that "viral" is a specific type of work that marketers can choose to create, rather than the resulting pattern when people choose to share something with each other.

When it was announced a while back that Zend was going to include AMF (Action Message Format) functionality supported by Adobe, I was excited to hear that there would be an "official" way to use AMF with PHP, as I had used AMFPHP, an unsupported implementation, with mixed success. I experimented with Zend AMF a little when it was released, and there were two things that annoyed me about this implementation as compared with AMFPHP, but I revisited it this week and discovered remedies for both issues.

A brand’s vanishing act risks being seen as oddly plucky or, worse, patronizing. This is particularly true if the reasoning behind it is rooted in a short-sighted quick fix or a publicity stunt. You might as well slap a Band-Aid onto an ulcer. In Parts I and II of this series, I looked at Muji, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Freshjive and, briefly, Al Green. Their changes in behavior imply not “brandlessness” but a desire to define a new brand or reinvent an existing one.