To celebrate it’s 20th Annivesary, Armani Exchange collaborated with Sodamedia to create an iOS app with an e-commerce twist. The result was the launch of A|X VIDEOMIX, a couture-allure like app that lets users create digital fashion shows and then shop their looks.



The app comes with some looks from Armani Exchange’s Fall collection. Users can mash together the run of show, pick from eight music tracks and select backgrounds. These virtual shows featuring real models can be emailed or posted on Facebook and Twitter. Armani Exchange’s fall looks can also be browsed and purchased right from the app, with the idea being that people are more likely to buy a look if they chose it for their show.



To compliment the experience, a website AX Videomix, provided users a video gallery of all the user-generated fashion shows. Now that’s how you take fashion from the runways into consumers hands.

Furniture design and manufacturer Haworth, launched a new showroom in Shanghai. The destination serves as a central hub to showcase their products for designers, clients and consumers.


Sodamedia worked with Haworth to install large scale digital installations to set a cool background in the showroom. The design captured a unique and slow pulsating creative horizon. The installations were projected on Philips LumaLive technology, which enhanced the overall project with the latest progressive media. From sunset to sunrise, a natural vibe was brought to life with a digital touch.

From The Opposite House to The Upper House, Swire Hotels are the ultimate destination for the urban luxury experience in Asia and The UK. Sodamedia was tapped to create a social media campaign that included an animated short, a new blog concept, as well as the overall creative direction.

The blog aims to keep Swire’s fans in the loop with hot off the press happenings in the cities they so love and also features personalities from both within the hotels and in the fields of art and design, travel, food and wine in Beijing, Hong Kong and Cheltenham.

The tech world is a crazy place: new devices, SDKs, frameworks, games like scrabulous, etc emerge daily. literally. Each of them take time to learn and play with. You need to make educated choices about what to dig into lest you end up behind a stack of ebooks, javadocs, and obscure words with the letters z, x, and q in them for the rest of your days.  At Sodamedia I’m in charge of making the decisions about what to dig into and what to pass up.  We work hard to be experts in the technologies we work with rather than merely capable so these decisions are especially important to us.

Being of a mathematics background I like hard numbers and according to this graph, there’s a things vs. stuff which you should really take into account when diving into a new tech.  Let’s look into some things I considered when researching releasing our first pad/mobile app on the possible platforms:  Apple’s iOS4, Google’s Android2.2, Blackberry’s RIM, and Windows (TBD) 7

1)  Is this tech fluctuating or stable?

Is this 3.0 of the API or 0.1.25?  How long since the previous release?  How much changed since the previous release?  Something which has been around longer is less likely to have huge changes in the next release. This means less worries of porting, maintenance, backwards compatibility, and all those other ugly words including DEPRECATED. This is how it lined up for us from winner to loser:



iOS4: V4 (+), recently released but a year since it’s previous major revision (+),  a huge change in approach to architecture with faux multitasking.  Good thing we didn’t start developing before this release (-)


Android 2.2:  A solid V2.2 (+),  1/2 year cycles to date on their OS releases (/),  BUT 2.2 offers additional functionality stretching forward to future devices but hasn’t changed it’s underlying architecture (+)


RIM:  There hasn’t been a pad device developed yet but there are rumors of one in development.  Even so, there’s no knowing how much RIM will change to accommodate pad devices. At this point for us it’s not worth learning, but worth keeping an eye on.


Windows 7:  Similarly, it’s too early to say whether MSoft will go with their current Tablet Platform on mobile pads, or a version of their Windows 7 Mobile platform. It’s also not worth it for us yet to develop on, but certainly something to keep on the radar.



2)  Is this tech “easy” or “hard” to develop?



“Easy” and “hard” are of course qualitative terms especially so when they’re in quotes. What I mean in this case are things like how similar is this tech to previous ones you’ve had experience with, how “open” the development environment is ( do you need special development hardware, dev machines, software? ), etc. What it adds up to is that an easy tech will allow you to develop prototypes quickly and inexpensively so you can can get through the first rounds of development with less effort, get your app to market faster so you can start making money on it, and get you home on time to play more scrabulous. This is how it lined up for us, again in order:



Android 2.2: 2 words: garbage collection. To be honest, I’m personally a C++ over Java guy, but for me Java wins over objective-c any day. 1 more word: eclipse. Nuff said. (+)


iOS4: We have some devs who have a C background including myself, but Objective-C is a whole other story. Also, we tend to be eclipse people around here and love the vastness of team tools and productivity tools so at least for me the simple frustration of working in XCode was enough to get my ire up more than once. Granted, that’s partially because I’m a grumpy old man at heart, but that’s sometimes enough for me. (-) Additionally, the app store acceptance process is also notoriously “harder”. We’re not building porn apps here, but the release process is worth taking into consideration. (-)


Windows 7: Windows has in my personal opinion always had great development platforms ( full disclosure I worked for MSoft for years ). Again, this topic really boils down to your personal definitions of easy and hard, so for me this one will go more towards the “easy” column for now. (+)


RIM: See Android / Java rational above.



3) Where has this tech been in the market and where is it going?

There’s hardly anything on the market except for the iPad, but we can learn a few things by looking at the mobile counterparts of each of our targets and see how they’re trending. Let’s look at current market share via mobile app market numbers to get a feel for how pad devices may follow. In order:



iOS4: They have a large user base currently and a lot growth happening currently.  Being tied to proprietary hardware, development tools, and their hardline app store acceptance may make it less worthwhile to always include a version of an app for this tech, but for now it’s pretty much a no-brainer to focus on learning and developing for this tech right now.


Android 2.2:  Android has a rapidly growing marketplace, and by rapidly growing I mean nuts %300 growth since the graph at the left was put together. ( If we’ve learned anything it’s graphs are often pointless… ) it looks like this is a promising tech to put time into.


RIM, Windows7: Even though they currently hold a good share of the mobile app market, as we discussed in 1), they don’t have any pad devices yet to speak of so we won’t consider them, but will need to keep this in mind when analyzing the other techs’ numbers.



Which leads us to the real crux of this all:



0) Who’s going to buy it?



I jumped a bit ahead in the previous steps to make a dramatic conclusion (also, I’m a coder at heart so you should of known my lists would be 0 indexed). If you’re in the same business as Sodamedia, often times what your client wants is not always in line with what the future of the tech holds or the market usage numbers and really don’t care what’s easy or not.  For example, we do a lot of work with advertisement firms. Even though Safari 4 is somewhere around %3 of the market share there is inevitably some vp who has it installed on their laptop at home so the site better work just as well on this browser.  the same thing applies to our project:



iOS4:  There for the foreseeable future a consistent market for these devices and most clients looking for a mobile app are only thinking of iPhone/iPad.


Android 2.2: It makes sense for in-house apps, but it’s not what our clients are asking for.


Windows7/RIM: Nobody wants it, so who cares. … for now.



In conclusion, our client needs will drive this project towards the iOS4 on iPad first. However, we’re actually developing for Android 2.2 first. “HuH?” you ask? This is why:



It’s worth learning Android 2.2 to us and this is a great excuse to do so. The fact that we can get UI prototypes out at a 3 to 4 times faster rate on the Android platform means we can get past the internal design milestones quicker, port over to iPad to deliver to client, and in the end have a version ready (hopefully*) by the time the first Android pads are ready for the market. The client may never want to take that version to market, but we’ll have the experience under our belt and be ready to take on any new requests at that point.

So how did you stumble upon doing animation and graphics? I was working at MTV producing shows and was fortunate enough to
have bosses who encouraged me to experiment with what I had, which -
it must be said – was hardly anything. So my energy flowed into new
areas like set design and eventually show packaging and animation. I
ended up loving the graphic side more and a few years ago, made a
lateral move into motion design.

What do you think makes a good brand? A good brand has to surprise and delight you while at the same time making you think, “of course!” the best brands also have
something extra. It goes beyond sight. A lot of my favorite
companies/products are fun to type on keyboard. Think about it. Some
names just feel gooood. My friend has a company called Rare Icons.
It’s a blast to type out.

What do you love most about the Internet? The single best thing about the Internet is the idea that you can keep coming back to it. This idea of always “checking on your stuff,” is still amazing to me. It’s like a never-ending book. I always think
about how my grandpa used to check on his stocks everyday; we do that
too, only it’s traffic hits and bids and comments and likes and
retweets and news and unread mail. The Internet is our “stocks.”

Current album/song/artist that you’re loving?
The Black Keys album “Brothers.” I always liked it but my brother
discovered it will always, without fail, get his newborn daughter to
stop crying. It’s unbelievable. That makes me love it. That’s a good
brand.

The result reflects the brand’s masculine, strong, and creative heritage, polishing the original brand concept to give it a new fluidity and more modern sensibility.

With the website re-design, the minimalistic design allows for Fly’s amazing video work to shine.  We think it’s pretty fly.

As a start up, Affinity China was looking for a way to not only capture new partnerships and venture capital, but also elevate their brand in a relevant manner that reflected the sophisticated and chic consumer they were catering to. Affinity China is a private network offering exclusive luxury lifestyle events and unique travel opportunities to their members.

We developed the framework and an iPad app to showcase their exclusive offerings.  The overall objective was to design this application in a way that anyone who never touched an iPad could enjoy it while still communicating effortlessly the ideas around the core brand.

The Yoox Group from Milan’s partnering up with Fedex to add an extra perk: after the good are delivered, FedEx delivery folks will wait until the customer inspects the purchase, tries it on and decides whether or not they would like to keep it. With the new launch of The Corner.com.cn, this is bridging the gap of luxury service with the power of an interactive experience.