Today we are happy to publish a new Dachis Group XPLANATiON about Social Business.
What’s a Social Business? It’s a business alive with energy and big ideas. It’s collaborative, authentic, customer-centric, trusted, open and real-time.
Today we are happy to publish a new Dachis Group XPLANATiON about Social Business.
What’s a Social Business? It’s a business alive with energy and big ideas. It’s collaborative, authentic, customer-centric, trusted, open and real-time.
Once again XPLANE | Dachis Group has teamed up with Dr. Scott McLeod of Iowa State University to create a thought-provoking video. The brand-new “Iowa, Did You Know?” kicked off the School Administrators of Iowa Conference yesterday morning. This DYK video contrasts the world’s exponential growth in technology and learning with Iowa’s struggles to best prepare K-12 students for this new future.
Intended as a forceful wake-up call for Iowa educators, the video stresses the importance of an educational approach that moves away from “low-level mental work” and towards stronger development in critical thinking and problem solving.
XPLANE | Dachis Group and The Economist teamed up to create the “World in Figures” application for iPhone. Based on The Economist’s popular book, Pocket World in Figures, the application provides a unique, visual way to discover and display global data so that it’s compelling, understandable and easy to use. Here’s a quick video overview of the project.
Hi. It’s Monday — the start of the work week for most of us.
But before you get started, let me ask you a few questions… Did you know that 40% of workers say they bring work home to complete at night, or work overtime at least once a week? That 15% of people admit that they are addicted to email — some confess to checking their email at the beach, at weddings and even at funerals? That the number of workers who work remotely is on the rise — in 2009, 28% of the global workforce worked remotely and by 2016, an expected 43% of the workforce will become remote workers (and did you know that studies show that working remotely improves productivity by 15%)? Did you know that a whopping 26% of Americans say they never take vacations?
If you didn’t, kick off the work week by watching this:
It’s kind of fascinating peeking in on other people’s iPhone screens. What apps do they use? Are they organized or a total mess?
The other day I casually mentioned Genius Scan to Dave and it quickly became his favorite app (at least for now :-)
Most of us have our favorite apps and our guilty pleasure apps, some of us have those “it’s for my kids” apps and all of us have our can’t-live-without apps. And everyone has their own system for arranging things. Click the image to see mine…
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Or, the nib cursor
I love my iPad, but the finger-only interface has been a continuing frustration for me. As an artist and designer, I want to do things that I can easily do with a pen and paper, like write, scribble and sketch. But these are not things we typically do with our fingers, any more than we eat soup or salad with our fingers.
Apple apologists will say that you can sketch and write with the iPad, and indeed we can. Yes, and indeed we can also eat salad or even soup without utensils if it’s absolutely necessary. But that’s not ideal, is it? Over the years we’ve developed tools, like forks, spoons, knives and yes, pens, that make life easier. We should expect no less from our interface designers.
XPLANE is happy to present Did You Know? 4.0 — another official update to the original “Shift Happens” video. This completely new Fall 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist.
As Garr Reynolds mentions over at Presentation Zen this morning, yes, this project was created with “off-the-shelf slideware” (Keynote and GarageBand, actually, along with Photoshop and Illustrator). Content by XPLANE, The Economist, Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Laura Bestler. Design and development by XPLANE.
For more information, or to join the conversation, please visit The Economist’s Media Convergence conference site at mediaconvergence.economist.com, or stop by shifthappens.wikispaces.com for all things Did You Know.
“Ever seen a great font in a magazine ad, poster, or on the web and wondered what font it is? Whip out your iPhone and snap a photo, and WhatTheFont for iPhone will identify that font in seconds!” Yeah, I’m a little too excited about this.

Check out this video we made for Kronos to help celebrate International Women's Day, 2011. Learn more in this xBlog post or jump over to YouTube and watch it there.

XPLANE | Dachis Group developed a A vibrant, engaging poster showing how Microsoft Azure enables developers to run applications and store data on Microsoft servers. The poster recently took top honors in the American Business Awards.