CMA's Matt Kulcsar to Moderate Panel on Technology in Interactive Design

The New Jersey Communications, Advertising and Marketing Association (NJ CAMA) will kick off the new year with an educational networking event on January 10 from 6:00-8:00 PM at D&R Greenway in Princeton, New Jersey. Attendees will learn about new tools for communications professionals such as Open Source, Open Workforce and cloud computing and other design applications and e-marketing software that are changing the way agencies and freelancers approach creative work and deliver results to their clients. A panel discussion, moderated by Creative Marketing Alliance (CMA)’s Interactive Designer, Matt Kulcsar, will feature Ed McLaughlin, Chief Marketing Technologist and Co-founder of SVM E-Business Solutions and Brian Crooks, Executive Creative Director at Influence Interactive discussing “New Tools and Environments for Creatives.”

 

Formerly the creative director at Razorfish, Crooks has over 20 years of experience in the design field and has created several notable fully integrated consumer and BtoB interactive media campaigns, including those of Nestle, Dove, Sallie Mae, Neiman Marcus and General Motors. He will discuss how creatives need to be free to think and have access to the information that drives original thoughts. Attendees will learn to embrace new technologies that are catalysts for ideas, not simply an electronic box of tools. Crooks will focus on the convergence of the physical and digital—the space in which ideas can percolate and where information, observations and insights are the coin of the realm.

McLaughlin has executed countless online marketing initiatives with organizations large and small, from Fortune 500 to non-profits, across a broad array of industries. A champion of the emerging role of the marketing technologist, Ed has a professional passion for the business-changing potential of open source software, distributed workforce models and cloud computing. McLaughlin will focus on the concept of the “Distributed Agency,” meaning a shift from physical environments to digital environments and leveraging software-as-a-service, cloud computing, and the collaborative tools and ethos of the open source movement. 

Kulcsar of CMA has over 13 years of professional experience in website design and development. He has developed web content, managed websites, e-blasts, single-page websites and interactive displays also has expertise in combining SEO and SEM strategies with social media. 

The cost to attend is $25 members, $35 non-members, and includes catering by Christopher’s Personal Chef Service. The meeting will be held at D&R Greenway, Johnson Education Center, RWJ Auditorium, One Preservation Place, Princeton, NJ 08540. For directions, go to www.drgreenway.org/directions.htm. To register, visit www.njcama.org. For more information about this event, contact programs@njcama.org and for membership information, contact membership@njcama.org.

No Flash for Mobile Web Signals New Era

Software developer Adobe announced last week they will cease production on mobile versions of Flash…so what’s the big deal?

Essentially, this move signals the end of an era. Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. For nearly 15 years, it has been one of the mainstays of web-based animation. Now, tech-savvy insiders are saying Flash will be deemed irrelevant and that the influence of the late Steve Jobs of Apple cut mobile Flash’s chances of success very short. 

According to CMA Interactive Designer, Matt Kulcsar, designers stopped using Flash for full site development about 3-4 years ago because of technologies like jQuery. In the past year, it was widely believed Flash would not survive the transition to mobile platforms simply because of its unstable nature and intense battery drain.

“When I heard the news, I thought ‘happy days are here!’ From a designer’s standpoint, Flash was just a resource hog and was becoming more and more cumbersome to use,” said Kulcsar.

“Opting to use Flash would be like saying you don’t care if any Apple users can see your content. After a certain point, no one was willing to exclude that audience,” he added.

Kulcsar says HTML5 is the emerging Web language that many developers are using, even Adobe is leaning this way for its non-mobile software development. There’s no doubt Flash will continue on in some form or fashion but designers say it will not be branded in the same way that Flash used to be, or carry as much weight as it used to.

“It’s an exciting time of transition where within the span of just about a year, we are seeing tablet usage skyrocket—not just the iPad, but the Samsung Galaxy and the Kindle Fire have gained traction in the marketplace. We’ll start to see the stripped-down net book laptops also really takeover in the next two years or so,” said Kulcsar.

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