A few weeks back I received an invite to check out JumpChart.com, a tool designed for the quick gathering, editing and deployment of web content. Ironically, we’ve discussed building a tool very much like JumpChart; to assist us with our client content gathering woes. JumpChart beat us to the punch and they did a great job executing the overall application.

Imulus is just like every other agency / development house out there who is frustrated with trying to gather client content for web projects. Typically we start with a timeline which is dead-on and very achievable, yet the project gets delayed because client has under-estimate the amount of work which goes into content writing, gathering and editing. The second part of that problem is the client’s inability to visualize the content they are tossing over the fence in Word, Excel, and PDF format.

JumpChart goes a long way toward solving these problems. The interface is intuitive and extremely useful for quickly building web structures. It took me 10 minutes to layout the structures of a 30 page site. And it took me another 15 minutes to copy & paste in all the client’s content. The resulting effort produced a clickable website skeleton which was publicly accessible by the client. It quickly became apparent to the client that there was much work which needed to be completed before the site could go live. By stripping out information architecture and content from the actual design, it forces the client to evaluate their content structures, page lengths and overall voice before that content is formated and embedded in the website.

Once the client has signed-off on the JumpChart content you can export all the goods in CSS / HTML which can later be imported into your favorite content management system.

To really do this service justice I suggest visiting their website and looking at the video tours. http://www.jumpchart.com/video-tour/

There have been many websites rushing to be “social” due to the success of Facebook, MySpace and Digg. With so many social sites making noise these days it was easy to miss one of the best social websites, patientslikeme.com.

Patientslikeme.com is a community of users with various diseases and illnesses that share their successes and failures as they battle through their experiences. The most refreshing aspect of this website is that it was the brainchild of three MIT engineers, not by some huge pharma corporation. The operating costs of the effort are covered by partnerships with healthcare provides that use annoymized data from the permission-based community.

Users are able to chart their progress, compare stories and rate the effectiveness of various medications. It helps network together shared experiences and provides a community of people who can relate to each other. Although I currently have no use for this site I am glad to know that in the event that I or someone I love gets ill, there is a community of people who I can turn to.

I’m a sucker for heatmaps. I guess I watched the Predator too many times as a child. Map of the Markets gives visitors a heatmap view of the hottest / coolest market sectors, along with the largest movers of the sector pie.

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Today while browsing Digg I came across an interesting video presentation (shown below) that talks about next generation image resizing techniques. The primary focus for such techniques is to combat today’s wide variety of multimedia devices and screen resolutions. In essence, images today don’t degrade across different screen resolutions adequately, rather they just become smaller and harder to see. Therefore it seems more beneficial to crop and re-target the image to focus on the important elements. According to the video the most practical way to do this is by a using a complex set of algorithms. These algorithms determine what parts of the image are “important” and then snip “less-important” parts as needed.

As a designer who has been taught to never stretch an image out of scale it’s hard for me to see this technique working well and looking good. But I do have to admit the video offers some compelling evidence that, if refined, could offer an answer to resolution independent image viewing. Either way, apparently Adobe feels this could be the future because they just snapped up one of the co-creators of the project.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qadw0BRKeMk[/youtube]

It’s not often that I can give props to two Denver area companies, but today the Imulus crew went out to lunch to one of the frequent stops, Spicy Pickle. Before we entered the store we were greated by a guy obviously trying to solicit business for something; this time it was Boulder based Mocapay. His sell was compelling: send a text message to this number (I forget the number) and you will receive a code which will give you an $8 credit on your next purchase inside Spicy Pickle. Not afraid to sell our souls for marketing purposes, Bruce and I decided to partake.

To my surprise it worked as sold. I ordered my Athena Pizzette plus a Half n Half Ice Tea and my grand total of $10.23 only cost me a $2.23 after the $8 discount. If you complete the account setup and deposit $10 in your account, you’ll receive $700 total of promotional offers, not bad!

Once I had a chance to digest both my pizzette and the Mocapay service, I came to the conclusion that just swiping my credit card was a bit easier. The cell phone was a nice convenience but usually I have my wallet handy and that seems to work fine for me. I really think Mocapay’s target market is the youth between ages of 10 and 16. That age group often lacks credit cards but more and more they are carrying cell phones. Perhaps mom and dad can load their kids up with Mocapay moolah rather then giving them plastico-fantastico. I haven’t completed the account setup yet, but it appears to be a pretty sound service, which I’ll likely mess around with in the future.