Every year we see a handful of companies and products spring up from nowhere that reshape the technology landscape. I know it's hard to imagine kids, but in 2009 you probably had never heard of Farmville, FourSquare or GroupOn. What are the companies that are going to make a splash in 2011? Well, here's some that I think you'll be talking about.

I believe that brands should consider open APIs for developers. I just had an article published on Mashable.com that makes the case. Check it out!

There's more than one way to do things from a front end web development perspective. Tables vs divs? Layout and mouseovers in css or javascript? GIF and JPEG and PNG, oh my! Engineering is an art of tradeoffs in many ways. I'd like to illustrate some of the reasons you might choose one thing over another when designing and building your front end code.

Last month I was interviewed at the iMedia Agency Summit in Phoenix, Arizona. Watch me ramble on about the big issues digital marketers will face in 2011. You'll have to stick around to the end of the video to catch me, but it's definitely worth the wait.

Agencies develop a wealth of concepts and ideas that often never make it over the finish-line for a variety of reasons: internal politics, budget constraints, shifting strategies or aesthetic differences. Sometimes the lost ideas aren't worth crying over, but sometimes some real brilliance hits the cutting room floor.

Instead of letting these concepts gather dust and fade into forgotten obscurity; we occasionally like to parade them around to make ourselves feel better.

Earlier this week, I wrote an article on Mashable calling for brands to consider developing their own APIs. In it, I used Kraft as an example for how brands could do this. 

A question was put to me by the global head of communications planning at one of the biggest companies in the world:

Can somebody use that Kraft example and let me know how the api they described would work? How and where would a consumer be able to "type in any ingredient and get back a list of recipes from Kraft?"

Traction was just named in an article by Michael Estrin of iMediaConnection titled "5 agency blogs you should be reading." Why? Here's an excerpt

It's hard to pigeonhole the Traction blog. Sometimes you get funny posts that are somewhat related to the industry, like this one in which the agency's creative director explains why he isn't Don Draper for the digital age...

Are you hawking your wares online? Chances are you've focused a lot of effort into getting your customers attention, getting them to your site and making your product easy to find. Chances also are you've treated the actual act of purchasing your product as a commodity. A web form, what is there to think about? Well, online web comic The Oatmeal hasn't.

Some direct response marketers claim that the focus on ROI and auction-based media forces good creative. That notion illustrates a fundamental problem in advertising today—that the art of persuasion is dying. And it's simply not true.

Back in November, Facebook announced their new messaging system that integrates email (your own @facebook email address), instant messaging, and SMS/text all in one place. But this hasn't rolled out to everyone just yet.