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Astek Staff Meeting: Trending Planking, owling, and…well, let’s just say memes took over our Astek staff meeting this week. In fact, it got a little out of hand…
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Categories: Fun |
Astek Staff Meeting: On Vacation Andy is anxious to hear about the 3rd quarter figures. However he failed to consult the staff’s vacation schedule.
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Categories: Fun |
Turning a Hack into Art That’s what 25,727 passwords look like, displayed one per frame, or 25 per second. These passwords were stolen by the hacker group LulzSec (link to Wikipedia entry on them, not their site) from a porn site, along with their associated users’ email addresses. You may have heard of LulzSec recently for their role in hacking the PBS website in retaliation for their perception of bias in reporting about WikiLeaks. They also attacked Sony Pictures, releasing tons of sensitive company and user information. And this not long after Sony had recovered from attacks by hacker group Anonymous on their PlayStation Network.
A lot can be said about this recent rash of hacking, but I like the simplicity of this video. It doesn’t show the associated usernames, so the identities of the people behind them are relatively protected. Although you can find the leaked information from LulzSec if you put your mind to it. But the video just reminds you about the volume of sensitive data seemingly being compromised almost constantly these days. It’s also just fascinating to watch the patterns go by. Since it’s one password per frame, popular passwords (or password prefixes) stay onscreen longer. ’123456′ for instance stays up for about 25 seconds. That’s about 625 or 2% of the whole 26K passwords in this set. People use some really predictable and unsecure passwords. There are also some pretty funny ones in there, most of which are fairly vulgar, so I’ll refrain from giving examples.
Cheers to artist Joerg Piringer for such a simple, cool idea.
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Categories: Fun, General, Technology, Web |
Astek Staff Meeting: The Premiere…Something Last week during our office staff meeting, we were tasked with coming up with exactly what Astek was ‘the premiere’ at doing. We realized it was quite a lot. Weigh in on our brainstorming session!
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Categories: Fun |
Perrier Drinks Up the Video Campaign Craze It is a well-known (or perhaps not-so-well-known) fact that YouTube is the second most popular search engine behind Google. With that being said, whenever a brand or company wants to launch a social media campaign or initiative, it usually incorporates video. Some of the most successful company video presences I have come across online are as follows:
I am of course leaving many out, but this is at least a decent snapshot. These three video channels showcase brands that have really established a voice through video representing their companies’ missions and goals. Other companies have tried to gain notoriety in the video arena for one-off campaigns. Some examples include:
And now we have…Perrier! To exude its Parisian mystique, the sparkling water company launched ‘teaser’ videos on its YouTube channel. The more views, the more videos that are unlocked. There’s also a prominently-placed thermometer next to the YouTube screen showing how ‘hot’ the Perrier Party is getting. The presence is also supported by a website that touts itself as a source on nightlife, along with a Twitter account. The Perrier Facebook page also has an application letting you ‘in to Le Club Perrier’. Please note, there are also several other Society Perrier Facebook pages that seem to support the website and Twitter account, but not specifically the Le Club Perrier campaign. It’s a bit confusing, but the primary focus should be the videos.
The campaign is based off of some TV spots that were launched earlier this month. The digital campaign will be featured in the U.S., France, Belgium and Canada, and run through the end of the summer. And yes, there is an incentive involved. “Le Club Perrier” is offering participants the chance to win a trip to New York with VIP access to the “Le Club Perrier” party in September at a local night club.
I’d love to show you a video here, but alas the channel doesn’t allow blog embedding. Click on the image above and you’ll be escorted to their YouTube page to join in the fun times! Bubbles up!
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Categories: Marketing, Social Media |
Astek Staff Meeting: The Mayor of Astek Do you check in to your office on Foursquare? Well we do here at Astek…and we take those check-ins seriously.
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Categories: Fun |
Astek Staff Meeting: Toasted Leg Syndrome
Astek Staff Meeting: No More Coffee What would you do if your office cut you off of coffee? We at Astek didn’t react very well…
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Categories: Fun |
Easy, High-Quality Video Screen Capture, Cheap! Andy Swindler previously posted about our successes with producing videos to demonstrate the next phase of work for our My25 client. One key factor of those videos was capturing specific interactions in the prototype we built for My25. More specifically, I needed to record video of exactly what was on my computer screen as I clicked around within our prototype website. In order to do that I had to do a little research into video screen capture software. I came up with a couple (Mac-only) products that are pretty great, and thought I’d share them here. Having such software has already proved useful for other purposes too, such as demonstrating software configuration for people in our office. Rather than writing out step-by-step instructions, I can demonstrate exactly how to make a required change to VPN connection settings, for example.
One product, called Screenium, is notable for it’s ease of use and intuitive interface, and for the fact that its trial version is completely unrestricted except by the length of the recordings you can make. If you don’t need anything over 30 seconds, then you don’t have much of a reason to buy the full version. And that seemed to fit out needs for the My25 video, as each individual interaction we needed to show was pretty quick. However, one problem I ran into with Screenium is that its recording of mouse movements and other screen dynamics was a little choppy. I was never able to reliably get a totally smooth capture with it, so I then had to look elsewhere. But for simple uses, the trial version of Screenium is a great way to go.
We ended up buying a license for an application called iShowU, which is only $30, and well worth it. The interface is a bit more cluttered than Screenium, but it is very full-featured, and takes lovely, smooth video. The mouse movements and everything else turned out very fluid.
I was reminded of these tools more recently for a personal project where I needed to capture audio and video from streaming video online. Both of these tools will capture audio as well as video, taking it right from the internal sound card as it plays within a web browser, for example. Note that video is often presented online in a streaming format as a way to make it hard to redistribute copyrighted material. Astek certainly doesn’t condone copyright violations, so please do use these techniques within the bounds of the law.
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Categories: Technology, Web |
Happy Early Foursquare Day It’s one thing when a company and its users, or anyone for that matter, declares their own holiday. In this case, Foursquare decided that April 16 (4/16) would be the perfect nerd-derived day to support their brand (4/(4 squared). The genesis of the idea can be traced back to an optometrist in Tampa in 2010.
You can hear thanks from all of the Foursquare crew here:
What’s remarkable is when the Mayor of New York City extends Foursquare’s self-proclamation into an official holiday for the city, a first for any social media brand. Is this a sign of things to come when digital startups like Foursquare base so much of their value on connecting people and businesses in the real world? The real world has responded in a way that’s anything but square.
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Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun |
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