Springbox had an exciting year building new client relationships, launching tools for the interactive community, creating interactive experiences and displays, and celebrating award-winning work. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights:   

New Clients
For Microsoft Advertising, Springbox teamed up with several partners to execute a multi-screen, live-streamed concert series campaign featuring artists like Robyn, Ellie Goulding, Cold War Kids and Rye Rye. For Michael J. Fox Foundation, Springbox created a trial finder tool that connects volunteers with clinical trials to help find a cure for Parkinson’s Disease. New Austin-based clients included New Era Portfolio, one of the largest fine art printers in the world, and CSID, leader in the identity protection industry.

Tools for the Community
In July, Springbox launched Mobilizer, a free mobile preview desktop application for the interactive and agency community. The Adobe AIR application lets users preview mobile content on a variety of phone shells. For agency folks, the tool also allows users to export PNGs of device previews – perfect for portfolios or presentations. 

Real-Time Interactive Displays
At SXSW 2011 we hosted a rockin’ party at the W Hotel, right outside of the new Austin City Limits studio, and as part of the party experience, we created a multiplayer mobile game called Capture the Swag. In December, we launched an interactive window display at our headquarters in downtown Austin as part of the Austin Holiday Sing-Along & Downtown Stroll. Visitors could use their mobile phones to dial into a 1-800 number and create their own snowflake using their phone's keypad. Upon hanging up their phone, the snowflake appeared in our windows, and we sent them a text with a link to an image of their snowflake to share with their friends online. 

Award-Winning Work and Culture
At the W3 awards, we took home three awards for our work on Tradewinds' website. At the Davey Awards, we took home Gold for our work on DG's site redesign and Silver for both Central Market's Chocolate QR Campaign and Tradewinds' site redesign. We also received a Bronze Addy award for our Springbox photography website that highlights our L.A. office’s expertise.  

For the second year in a row, The Austin American-Statesman named us a Top Workplace in Austin. The Springbox team takes pride in our culture, and to celebrate our win we decided to unveil a new tradition of bestowing personalized rock star mugs upon Springboxers who have been with us for two years and more. (It is still to be determined whether our Dog Day Friday employees will be honored in the future.)

Thanks to everyone for making the year such a success. Happy Holidays and we'll see you in the New Year!

Get to know the people who make Springbox an exceptional agency. What Inspires You is a series of posts that offer insight into our talented and creative staff.

Left to right: Zack Steele, Julia Ferguson, and Marcus Pope.

We enjoyed our “triple-threat” formula so much last month we decided to do it again. Meet Finance & Operations Director Zack Steele, Associate Producer Julia Ferguson, and Senior Developer Marcus Pope. 

Where do you find inspiration? 

Zack Steele: Everywhere. I’m a “connect the dots” kind of guy. I find inspiration in the connections between ideas, industries, and individuals. The world is becoming more complex due to the multiple interdependencies between the systems that hold our cultures together. The web is becoming the backbone of those systems, enabling the communication between previously disparate groups and allowing for new ideas from individuals to change industries on a more and more frequent basis.

Julia Ferguson: Friends, family, and the weirdness that resides in the city of Austin. It helps to work with such creative people every day.

Marcus Pope: I rely heavily on my social network to find the good sources. Conferences and local organizations have been an ever-growing source of ideas. Even concerts like SXSW and ACL deliver novel solutions as technology continues to bleed across traditional boundaries. But all of the above is completely trumped by a little imagination and a few minutes spent searching with Google. Following individual projects and people has always paled in comparison to searching a seemingly infinite network of ideas. And inspiration can be found with very obscure groups of keywords or through broad topic categories. It’s one of the primary reasons computer books are dying out. Even the blogosphere has begun to provide more accurate information than what can be found in a product’s knowledgebase or API documents.

Which websites have inspired you recently?

Zack: Content discovery and organization is most important to me when I’m experiencing the web. For those reasons, Google+ has been what I’ve been inspired by most recently, especially now that they are rolling out integrations for G+ into the other Google products that I use on a daily basis. For example, Google Reader has been my go-to site for keeping up with news and trends for 5 years. Now with the integration into G+, I’m able to share the different feeds and posts that have been coming into my feed reader with my social networks. I’m also able to discover more interesting content to subscribe to in Google Reader based on all the different individuals I’m following on G+. This allows me to stay on top of new ideas and trends in an organized and efficient manner which ultimately enables me to consume more ideas and information.

Julia: PSFK.com is a good place to get ideas and keep up with trends. Lifestyle sites like dailycandy.com and designspiration.net feature a variety of interests and are a great source of inspiration. I enjoy all things pop culture, so charlesphoenix.com and theonion.com are always a good time.

Marcus: StackOverflow.com has forever changed how I explore technology and solve problems, and it has finally converted me from a consumer to a supplier of tech-related knowledge. Node.js and MongoDB have shown me the power of evented and distributed processing respectively — something Google has used to dominate search since day 1. Facebook has taught me how NOT to write a developer API. And Twitter has shown me that if you can make feature-limited software expose valuable marketing metrics to corporations, then you’ve got a wildly successful product on your hands.

Which trends in interactive are you currently paying attention to?

Zack: The integration of different devices or form factors when it comes to the full experience of the web. We’ve moved from experiencing the web at our desktops to our laptops to our mobile phones and now to tablets. Along the way, we didn’t give up the other form factors; we just use them differently depending on the situation we are in. As technology advances, we will continue to add form factors to integrate the web even more into our lives. How all those devices and experiences will integrate is what I’m most interested in. Will they integrate on a closed platform that stresses design and usability over openness (think Apple); will the platform be the web architecture itself where the “browser” is the operating system that enables the use of applications across the different form factors (think Google); or, more than likely, will it be a combination of both?

Julia: I find myself watching the changes in information sharing through social media applications. It's interesting the variety of ways user-generated content is being utilized on sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. While some may be using these outlets for entertainment or just as a way to keep in touch, others are relying on these channels to relay vital newsworthy information to the rest of the world.

Marcus: The web is proving itself as the platform of choice for software development. What was once a one-way medium is now turning into the completely interconnected network that it was originally designed to be. UnionPlatform offers instant peer-to-peer communication in a way that before was only feasible via a Rube Goldberg chaining of technologies on the web and desktop. Phonegap has all but eliminated the need to invest in multiple complex and proprietary frameworks just to write applications for mobile phones. And with HTML5 finally getting around to fixing many of the problems that have plagued the web since I began developing on it 15 years ago, we’re only seeing the beginning of what technology holds for the future of interactive.

We're big fans of clear, straightforward language here at Springbox, but every once in a while one of us lets a piece of corporate jargon pass our lips. We decided to get something good out of our verbal transgressions and charge offenders per foul—you say an obnoxious corporate buzzword, you put money in the box. We're donating the proceeds to the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians. 

So watch your mouths, Springboxers, or have your dollar bills handy. Here are some resources for keeping it clean around the office:

• Unsuck It
  The folks at Mule Design ask, “What terrible business jargon do you need unsucked?” Type in your buzzword, they'll give you a replacement. They also have a good (but infrequently updated) blog, Necessary Trouble. (If there's an ancestor of Unsuck It would be have to be George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language.”)
  
  
• Center For Plain Language
  ”The Center for Plain Language wants government and business documents to be clear and understandable.” Lots of great information on their website. Check out their blog, where the most recent post makes a case for plain language as part of web usability. (Even the federal government is getting in on the plain language movement with PlainLanguage.gov.)
  
  
• Economist Alfred E. Kahn's 1977 Memo
  “If you can’t explain what you’re doing in plain English, you’re probably doing something wrong.” Sent to his colleagues at the Civil Aeronautics Board, this memo is still a huge inspiration today. Should be posted on all cubicles, everywhere.

What corporate buzzwords would you put on your naughty list? Tell us in the comments below, and feel free to borrow the idea and start a buzzwords box at your office. 

We’re all proud to call Texas home, but for some of us non-natives, it’s hard to get in the seasonal spirit in such balmy temperatures. To celebrate the holidays and participate in the Downtown Austin Alliance's Holiday Downtown Stroll, we created an interactive window display that brings some delightful snow and holiday cheer into the lives of downtown Austinites.

Using the same mobile phone-based technology from Megaphone Labs that we employed for our popular SXSW party game, we transformed our front windows at 708 Congress Avenue into wintery scenes set against a downtown Austin skyline. For the rest of December, visitors can use their mobile phones to dial into a 1-800 number and create their own snowflake using their phone's keypad. Upon hanging up their phone, the snowflake is saved to our display and we send them a text with a link to an image of their snowflake that they can then share with their friends online.

The windows have only been up for two evenings, but they've already caught the attention of many passersby, including the team at Fox News in Austin, who did a nice profile of the display:

We encourage all of our friends in Austin to stop by the office and make your own snowflake! 

For updates, follow us on Twitter. We'll also be posting video and photos from the display on our new Tumblr blog.

We’re happy to announce the appointment of Leland Means as vice president and general manager of Springbox. Previously serving as director of business development and account services, Leland will oversee daily operations and will continue to lead global business development. Leland took some time out of his busy schedule to talk with us about his background, his interests, and his vision for the future of Springbox.

Tell us a little bit about your background.

I’m a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, so I’m a long-time Austinite. Before Springbox, I was a German translator in the Air Force (this has actually come in handy twice over the past year with some of our global clients), a General Manager at Whole Foods, and an executive at Dell. I’ve always sought out roles that combine marketing, business, and technology, and this role definitely fits that profile.

What do you love about working at Springbox?

The people. It’s inspiring to work with a team of wildly talented and passionate people who eat, sleep, and breathe their craft. We seek out the very best, and I take advantage of the fact that I work with true interactive marketing experts. I’m constantly in learning mode, always asking lots of questions.

The way we’re structured drives our work—we have an open office layout in the heart of downtown, we’re the right size, and we have all the talent in-house under one roof, which drives collaboration and innovative solutions for clients. The “labs environment” doesn’t stop there: the team is constantly developing new internal tools to streamline our workflow and free external tools like Mobilizer we want to share with our peers.

We also have a lot of fun and take great pride in our company culture. Let me put it this way: I got to wear a kilt to our last Halloween party.
 
What trends in interactive do you have your eye on?

I have a great appreciation for infrastructure—I recently watched Long Distance Warrior, a documentary about MCI’s CEO Bill McGowan, and how MCI was the first to lay out a microwave “line” from St. Louis to Chicago for long-haul truckers. I'm fascinated by the infrastructure that enables interactive: for example, cheaper storage that supports greater cloud utilization and mobile devices, which allow us to access the cloud from wherever we are at the moment.

A short list of other interests: responsive design, mobile and the adoption of tablets and smartphones across mass market, social commerce, and gamification.

Read anything good lately?

For fun, I just read the Maze Runner trilogy by James Dashner, a teen literature fix after my teenager got me to read The Hunger Games earlier this year. Futuristic, dark, and full of adventure and human race survival sort of stuff.

I also recently read The Idea Hunter by Boynton, Fischer, and Bole. The book was about being intellectually open and available to consider alternative options — both professionally and personally. Easy, quick read that I will come back to regularly.

For those who care about their professional future and/or the professional future of their children, I recommend The Coming Jobs War by Jim Clifton. I don’t agree with all of his assertions about cause and effect; however, I do agree with his overall assertion that good jobs drive the economic and psychological well-being of a nation.

How do you see Springbox moving forward in the next year?

Interactive marketing is constantly evolving — remember when email marketing was cutting edge? Our agency is structured in a way to respond quickly to new marketplace dynamics and trends. Clients seek us out as partners to intelligently and responsibly navigate this space in service of their marketing goals — we don’t simply plug holes or do technology for technology’s sake.

Without giving away the farm, there are three major interactive trends and forces underway that continue to come up in current client and prospective client engagements: 1) marrying physical and virtual 2) social audience and measurement and 3) organizational enablement on a global scale. We’re seeing high growth in social media, mobile and tablet experiences, digital experiences in retail environments, and building internal tools to help solve global brands’ internal challenges, and I think we’ll continue to do more and more of that work in 2012.