July 2, 2008
Microsoft approached us with an (nearly but not quite) impossible task – create a video to showcase some of the main features of Windows Live for Mobile. With 29 days from briefing to final delivery, there was no time to waste. We shifted into high gear to get concepts approved and footage shot as the amount of post work involved was substantial: the interface animations would have to be synced to the video and audio.
Below is a cut-down version of the final product. Or you can check out the full version with complete audio.
Tags: Moving Image, Microsoft
July 2, 2008
Young Tran was promoted yesterday from Digital Artist to Graphic Designer. Young, despite his name, is a Gyro veteran who has played a crucial role in many of our key accounts. His passion for perfection has contributed to the success of our work with Borland, NetApp, Sun, Océ and many more.
Pictured here with something in his ear, Young is an amateur photographer in his spare time and he has a weakness for sugar.
Tags: Gyro Life, News
June 26, 2008
You don’t always have to tear down you site to improve it. Here’s 10 quick things you can do to improve your existing site. Do one or do them all, you’ll notice a difference.
1 WEB 2.0 STYLE REDESIGN
Make sure your site is fully designed in CSS. If your website hasn’t been redesigned in 12 months, it needs an update! Internet trends have changed, business to business or business to consumer websites are all changing in design. Not sure what the heckWeb 2.0 looks like? Here’s a good summary.
2 ADD A TAG CLOUD TO YOUR SITE’S SEARCH
Sites are now using tagging more and more as a way to label up content. All the resulting articles or products from a search can be tagged by you or your website customers.
3 ADD A FAT FOOTER
Add a fat footer to your website to increase usability, they are simple to build. They’re very en vogue and encourage clickthroughs around your website. Scroll down to the bottom of digg’s site for an example.
4 ADD A PODCAST
They are no longer a gimmick but a valuable business tool. Want customers to listen to you talk about your products or services? Podcasts can be played through your website as well as itunes and emailed to your customers directly to deliver regular updates.
5 GET A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY
Ensure your customers can add your content to their social bookmarking sites! Its not only good for your natural search results but also good for syndicating out your content.
6 RSS AND ATOM NEWS FEEDS
Are you making sure your website content is easily available for distribution? This allows you audience to subscribe directly to your site’s content. Best of all it’s really easy to implement, but remember that you must update your content frequently for maximum effectiveness. Wikipedia has a great summary of all the pros and cons of using news feeds.
7 ADD A BLOG TODAY
Google likes websites whose content is updated regularly through news and blogs. It takes about two days for Google to update Wordpress and Blogger.com blog stories. If you aren’t doing this you are missing out on essentially free listings in Google search results!
8 CREATE A SHOWREEL
Moving image has gone from a nice-to-have on the Web to something that people look for. You don’t need to create a Hollywood masterpiece. A quick 15-second video will go a long way.
9 CREATE A FIRST-PHASE MOBILE WEBSITE
Get your content onto a mobile site, regardless of whether or not the iphone and Opera revolution will negate the need to a mobile sites in the future, there is nothing to say. This is now.
10 HTML NEWSLETTERS
If you do are not currently sending your customers at least one nicely designed HTML email a month because you don’t have the time, then let us do it for you.
Tags: Web best practices
June 26, 2008
Want to impress everyone with your web savvy? Here’s 10 quick ways.
1 
Get an RSS reader for your mobile (if you haven’t already).
Start with newsgator.com.
2 
Make a long URL short use: tinyurl.
3 
Yahoo Pipes: a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mash-up content from the web.
4 
Aggregate all your contacts and social media sites through plaxo.
5 
Make your website an authority. Build rich unique content around your business’s website and syndicate it by adding RSS and post to share links.
6 
Get a business blog and link it from your website. Try Blogger or WordPress. Or better yet, contact us and we’ll help you integrate it.
7 
Get a Business Social Media strategy to communicate to your team, customers and prospects.
8 
Social Networking in Plain English. Check out Toby’s article here.
9 
Get a social bookmark site: del.icio.us is a great starting point, install the “add” icons on your browser!
10 
Set-up an open id: Lots of social sites are moving to a single login driven by Google.
Tags: Web best practices, News
June 26, 2008
Well, we finally did it. We went ahead and followed our own advice.
We tell our clients that in order to build their brand, they need to talk to their audience often, and in a casual manner about all sorts of things, not just their product – always allowing for their customers to talk back.
When they would ask to see an example of this in action, we found ourselves pointing to other companies’ sites. Frankly it was kinda embarrassing. Our excuses ranged from, “no time,” to “what if we have nothing to say?”
Well, the whole process took just about a week in people’s spare time. It isn’t perfect yet, but we aren’t aiming to win a Webby. We just want to provide a vehicle for us to showcase new work that we’re proud of, highlight trends that have caught our eye, and share a little of the Gyronaut culture.
Thanks for stopping by.
Tags: News
September 23, 2007
This stunning interactive calculator for NetApp visually demonstrates the advantages of optimizing your storage solutions.
View this project
Tags: Demos + Videos, NetApp
August 22, 2007
View more from our Sun Microsystems StorageTek campaign:
Tags: Sun, Banners
