An intriguing tweet popped up today:
The source of that tweet is a website/design firm, Onyro. I imagine word must have gotten around via friendship or other contacts.
Palm wouldn’t have made a mistake here. Cuban Council also did work for Apple:
Apple iPod Store (2004)
Just in time for the holiday season, Apple contacted CC to help them design & develop a dedicated online store for the iPod. The project ended up being quite successful in that it helped lead a stunning 4.9 million unique visitors to shop at the Apple site, more than any other computer manufacturer.
One of Cuban Council’s icon designers, Michael Schmidt, participates in a roundtable with other designers in three parts starting here.
An interesting revelation from part two:
We still do mostly pixel icons, so Photoshop is where it’s at for us – pixel by pixel
Schmidt also mentions Moodstats. I wonder if that will eventually wind up on the Palm Pre too?
And then there’s this post: Blast Radius developed Palm Pre marketing strategy, Palm webOS and Mojo SDK? — which is really a good bit of sleuthing!
Update: Nice sleuthing, but we all jumped to the wrong conclusion on this one! PreCentral sets us all straight: The Straight Story About That Mysterious Mojo.js File
Now the actual code was not the most interesting part of the mojo.js file. From this file I found out that Blast Radius is the likely partner behind Palm’s marketing strategy of Pre, including the development of webOS and Mojo:
“* The Mojo Framework
* Copyright (c) 2008, Blast Radius, Inc.
* All rights reserved.”
Blast Radius specializes in using the Internet.
Here’s how it used to be. Marketing was about landing customers and migrating them across your product lines. The process looked something like this: acquire customer, cross-sell, up-sell, repeat. People used terms like ‘wallet share’.
But there’s something off kilter about this. It’s like we’re describing an assembly line rather than a branding strategy. Are your customers widgets or people?We assume they are people.
And this assembly-line mentality is why consumers are rebelling. It’s why they’ve stopped paying attention to advertising.
We believe there is a way to get people to tune back in. It has to do with a certain magic that happens when brands become innovative experiences that make people’s lives easier, better, richer.
This magic happens when a brand becomes a forum for sharing interests and passions (check out EA’s Madden Challenge). People get interested. Customers turn into fans, and fans turn into advocates who spread the good word, doing more for your brand than any ad ever could.
Emphasis added by me.
What I don’t understand is this: That used to be Palm. How did it lose its way?
I hope Palm is back for good this time.
