Starting this Tuesday 3pm PST you can catch Jose and special guests every week on This Week in Web Design at www.ThisWeekIn.com.
Each week we will be solving your roadblocks and answering your questions.
Next week’s episode will be about online brand strategy and brand driven web design. Our expert guest will be Julie Glassman, Creative Director and Founder of BRAND.
If you would like to be on our show or have any of your questions answered, please watch our video above and leave a video response or comment. We will choose the most interesting questions and help you with your projects on our LIVE show.
In May of this year Myspace invited The Groop to provide their creative vision for its redesign. The new Myspace focuses on being a social entertainment destination showcasing music, movies, games, articles, events, TV and much more.
The Groop provided a new look and feel to the Myspace interface in addition to shooting video based user profiles, animated interface previews, and a promotional spot for the official launch.
“I am honored to have the opportunity to collaborate with the Myspace team in this huge undertaking both directly and by providing our extensive network of creative talent for this effort. It is a testament to creative collaboration and The Groop’s ability to help facilitate online opportunities for our clients,” said Jose Caballer, Chief Visionary at The Groop.
We just got back from the kick off party for Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution in New York City and we had a blast. Got to know our collaborators on the Food Revolution project and of course meet Jamie Oliver. This is a great project for a great cause and we’re excited to be redesigning Jamie Oliver’s web site and be helping with the strategy behind the movement.
Jamie Oliver’s wish is to build a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity. We aim to design a site that inspires it’s users, brings out the activists in them and helps them start their own revolution.
Jamie was also on the cover of this month’s 944 magazine. We’re excited to see the revolution take off. See pictures of the party below.
FOCUS (Families OverComing Under Stress) provides a training program designed to help military families learn practical skills to meet the challenges of deployment as well as create a happier, healthier family life. The Groop is translating this program into an interactive, online experience through FOCUS world. Parents, spouses and children will be able to explore tools, play games and learn from exercises designed by The Groop. The Groop has also recently launched their HQ website, where military families can discover the offerings of this amazing program.
Sean Bonner lives in Los Angeles though is often spotted elsewhere. He’s one of the guys behind Metblogs, the host of iPhun and has previously been involved with art galleries and record labels of the punk rock variety. He also is a big fan of bikes.
“Sean Bonner is a pioneer of social software, Internet memes and online publishing. In addition to being an excellent and highly sought-after speaker, he is quickly becoming known as one of the celebrated icons of the modern Internet subculture – his mere presence attracting huge crowds of fans. I for one am a true believer.”
- Joi Ito, CEO Creative Commons
He has been featured in GOOD, Wired, Playboy, Salon, Forbes and others, been included in Yahoo!’s Best of the Web, and has spoken at conferences, events, and coffee shops around the world.
As co-founder and CEO of Bode Media Inc, Sean helped create Metblogs, the worlds largest network of local media blogs. As a consultant, he has helped The Groop, Jack In The Box, LAPD, Suicide Girls, Obey Giant, Shopzilla and others interact with their customers, clients, and fans online. He also speaks frequently at conferences covering blogs, media, networks and grassroots journalism. Recently he’s spoken at IzeaFest (Orlando, FL), SXSWi (Austin, TX), Roboexotica (Vienna, Austria) and Re:Publica (Berlin, Germany). As an event organizer, Sean brought BarCamp to Los Angeles, produced the first art exhibition comprised solely of phonecam images, ran art auctions and benefits for the West Memphis Three. Sean is also a guest blogger/contributor for BoingBoingVideo and the host of the iPhone game review show iPhun.
We are reaching out to our network of friends and collaborators
because we still need a few more good people to participate in
Usability Testing for an exciting client.
To make it even “pimpier” we are upping the reward for your participation
(aside from getting to hang out with me, which is worth a lot already)
to a $50 iTunes Gift Card!
I know you are busy so thanks in advance for taking the time to check
out the survey and helping us out to make our websites even stonier.
What is Usability Testing you might ask?
We have been developing a website that helps people save money online.
We recently relaunched with a new design and enhanced functionality.
The goal of this testing is to understand how real people are interacting
with the website in order to discover what works well and what needs improvement.
The information that we gain from this testing will help us to further develop
the website’s design and usability.
We are looking for Participants with the following characteristics:
People who are interested in saving money online
People who shop online
Between the ages of 18-45
Available to come to our office (downtown LA) for 90 minutes on
August 31st or September 1st
Testing with take place at the GROOP office space in Downtown Los Angeles.
If you think you are the type of participant we are looking for
please fill out the survey by Noon on Friday August 28th. (tomorrow)
Please pass this email onto anyone you think might be interested as well.
We will contact you if you are selected to be a participant for
our Usability Testing. Your participation and feedback will be
rewarded with a $50 Itunes gift card. There will also be snacks!
And most important it will be fun.
Testing time is approximately 30-40 minutes (tho we ask that you
plan to spend 90 minutes at our office), and will take place on
either August 31st or 1 September 1st. We will contact you with
your exact day and time.
I am Seth Epstein, the Chief Catalyst and CEO of The Groop.
What attracted me to merge Broadtent into The Groop is the fact that The Groop is in a leadership position. It is one of the top interactive, digital agencies in Los Angeles, and it does unbelievable work, has an incredible track record and is a great strategy firm, a great design firm and great at execution.
I think it is important to shoot this interview on a iphone instead of our $10,000 camera sitting over there is because it really represents the future in that content will be created. In the short time that I have already been here, in about a month and a half, we have already tackled a project that is cross plat-formed, kind of a new form of advertising on the web using video so it was an exciting project that we did for Rite Aid with Adperk and it really represents the future of how the web, advertising and television are colliding.
When we merged the companies people would say well what does The Groop do and who are the clients, and basically our clients are Ad Agencies, Television Networks, Fortune 500 companies all the way down to startups who want to grow their business on the web– so everything from platform, all the way to content and really that’s what we do.
