If you went to bed on a Friday night, and woke up to realise the infomercial-inspired game your company just released is killing it on the iTunes charts, then you probably know a thing or five about successful product design.

Shainiel Deo has over 10 years experience in various roles in the IT industry with over 7 of those in game development.

Shainiel is the CEO of Halfbrick Studios, one of the world’s most successful, and independant games design houses. He sits on the Board of the Game Developers Association of Australia (GDAA) and was formerly the President of Electronic Games Queensland.

Shainiel successfully developed a number of titles from start to completion on different hardware platforms including console game development across multiple platforms (nintendo DS, Sony PSP, GBA, XBOX, PS2, GCN).

Fruit Ninja, the recent success story, finished at #2 on the iTunes store in 2011, with over 100 million downloads.

While Halfbrick is still based out of Brisbane, as it has been since day one, they are in the process of opening up a studio in Sydney.

Shainiel will be presenting at Portable’s first ever mini conference Product Design 2012. Joining him is the founding investor of 99designs, Leni Mayo.

The Portable Talks series has been especially curated for creative individuals and companies wanting to make the leap into designing online product for international audiences. Touring Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, this two hour salon style event includes talk, discussion and informal drinks.

If you were to overhear Leni Mayo’s thoughts on innovative companies and concepts to look out for in 2012, you might want to have a pen handly. He has been involved in numerous hugely successful companies over his extensive career including Learnable.com, Flippa.com, Sitepoint.com and of course as a founding investor of the 2011 smash hit 99designs.

Skip to 2012 and 99designs is the world’s number one crowdsourced graphic design firm and recently raised $35 million. It still has its offices in Collingwood, Melbourne, but also in Silicon Valley.

Leni lectures in entrepreneurship at RMIT but he doesn’t believe in reading start up literature as he’s applied none of those rules in the projects he’s been involved in.

Leni will be presenting at Portable’s first ever min conference Product Design 2012. Next week we’ll profile Shainiel Deo, CEO of Halfbrick.

The Portable Talks series has been especially curated for creative individuals and companies wanting to make the leap into designing online product for international audiences. Touring Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne this February, this two hour salon style event will wrap with informal drinks.

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Never has it been easier to come up with an innovative product idea and deliver it to the world. This February, Portable is proud to present Product Design 2012. In a two hour salon style presentation we will be exploring the complexities of conceiving, designing, funding and launching online products to an international audience.

We’ll be joined by Leni Mayo, founding investor of 99designs, the world’s largest online marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design and Shainiel Deo, CEO of the game design company Halfbrick, who’s behind some of the world’s most popular mobile game apps. Both will draw upon their own success stories in designing products for international audiences, while also highlighting the most important global trends in product design.

This Portable Talks series has been especially curated for creative individuals and companies wanting to make the leap into designing online products for international audiences. Designed to be a conversation, the event will run through the main points of starting and scaling a product business, from conception, to investment and future planning. In doing so, Portable Talks will provide a comprehensive forum for networking with designers, product developers, technologists, entrepreneurs and investors.

Please note, previous Portable events have sold out so book early in your city to ensure your place.

To book tickets, or for more information click here.

SPEAKERS
Leni Mayo, Founding Investor, 99designs
Shainiel Deo, CEO, Halfbrick
Simon Goodrich, Co-Founder Portable

VENUES
Brisbane
Tuesday 14th of February, 3pm
The Edge, State Library of Queensland

Sydney
Wednesday 15th of February, 3pm
Museum of Sydney (TBC), Phillip and Bridge Streets

Melbourne
Thursday 16th of February, 3pm
Australian Centre of the Moving Image, Federation Square

For more information please contact Madeleine on maddie@portable.tv or (02) 9380 9488.

The default behavior of the iPhone when viewing HTML is to pretend that its screen is bigger than it actually is, the pages display in full but are essentially ‘zoomed out’. Pinching, pushing, and tapping are often required from the user to get in closer to be able to read the text. However, with some simple coding tweaks, the same set of content is easily transformed into an easy to read experience from the instant it is opened. Images are scaled to display at the full width of the screen, while text is adjusted to larger sizes and shorter line lengths, to read more naturally.

There are many important differences in user experience to take into account when designing for a small mobile device and its touch screen. Large bodies of text take more time and effort to scroll through than on a desktop, so if you’ve got a lot of articles stacked on top of each other, those toward the end will be buried. To remedy this, we want to use a technique called progressive disclosure. Showing a headline, and small lead in to an article, then hiding the bulk of the text behind a link or button which can be clicked to show the content. If there’s a ‘call-to-action’ somewhere in our content, for instance a ‘buy now’ button, it needs to be bigger on a mobile device. The most effective placement to fill the width of the screen, towards the bottom, because quite simply, the thumb most people use when one-handedly-multi-tasking along side the rest of their day is much more comfortable tapping that spot than stretching to reach the top of the screen. Clumps of links and buttons need to be bigger and further apart to avoid mis-taps.

Designs built for email are never going to look the same in every mail client, so accept it, and focus on graceful degradation. Luckily, iOS mail and Android mail, which make up the majority of mobile email viewing, are built on Webkit. Webkit is capable of rendering rich CSS effects and treating HTML real nice, so you can be fairly confident your mobile designs are being viewed as you intended them.

Earlier this year, we created a video with our friends at The Wilderness Society to demonstrate how working together can make such a huge difference for the environment.

Portable Talks is one of Portable’s newest initiatives that we are excited to see grow and expand. 2011 saw us present two guests at the top of their fields – Scott Belsky and Soraya Daraba are both top players and inspiring young guns working in the digital and creative space.

Scott Belsky, author of Making Ideas Happen and co-founder of Behance.net joined us in August for a whirlwind tri-state Portable Talks tour. Together with our partners at the Creative Innovation Industries Centre we created an “in conversation” video series with local design company DesignByThem.

Soraya Darabi, the most influential woman to emerge from todays social media-scape and co-founder of Foodspotting.com, joined us in Sydney and Melbourne during April to present on the role of social media and where it is heading. We also headed out on a Hidden Secrets Laneway Tour with Soraya to do a little foodspotting of our own!

To view the interview series with Soraya Darabi, click here.

We have worked with Tourism Victoria on a number of projects over the years and we always enjoy sharing in their ideas and projects. Recently, we produced a series of three experiential videos covering a road trip down the Great Ocean Road due for released early next year  - so stay posted! Earlier in the year we also worked on a Tourism Victoria video that explores Melbourne as a backpacker destination, and, as you can see below, a video for the gorgeous Royal Mail Hotel Dunkeld that was used for a presentation in Spain.

Environment Victoria, the peak non-government environment, educational and campaigning group within the state, relaunched their brand. To assist, we created a promotional video that is both engaging and conveys the key messages they need to get across to their audience.

99designs won a coveted Webby Award and were understandably stoked about it. In tune with their authentic, confident style, we helped produce a truly triumphant “We are the Champions” video for the team which has been viewed over half a million times online.

Portable put together three documentary style videos for the Office for Housing, Department of Human Services (Victoria) to evaluate the Neighbourhood Renewal Project in inner city Melbourne locations of Fitzroy, Collingwood and Braybrook. We took a hands-on, up-close approach in order to create video content that is far more engaging and inspiring than just producing an evaluation report.

With one of our offices based out of Melbourne (flanked by the Sydney and New York City office), AFL runs thick through our blood. We worked with the AFL Players Association (AFLPA) to document a short history of the Association featuring such personalities as Paul Roos, Adam Goodes and Michael Moncreiff.

We would love to discuss your digital, video and audience building aims in 2012, so please get in touch with Madeleine on maddie@portable.tv or on (02) 9380 9488.

This year, Portable has been pleased to work with Macquarie Group, specifically the Macquarie Global Investments arm, to create an iPad application that outlines the opportunities for investing in the new economic world.

Portable worked with close friends and design house SouthSouthWest to develop a HTML5 application for the purpose of presentations throughout Canada.

With the main aim to present their findings and reports to audiences via the iPad during conferences, this sleek and well presented application has and will continue to be used for Macquarie’s marketing needs.

With a strong commitment to economic and environmental sustainability, this application effectively helps to demonstrate Macquarie Global Investments aims as well as leading the way in innovation within the financial sector.

The iPad web app was built in HTML5, CSS3 and JS, whilst the coding leveraged SenchaTouch technology.

At Portable, we not only create innovative digital solutions for brands and clients, but also for consumers and the public. Portable Shops is one such project: a boutique e-commerce platform with the fashion industry in mind. Since launching the platform (previously named Swappler) in January 2010, Portable Shops has expanded globally and now powers over 80 stores in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand (see our full client list below).

We’ve meticulously worked at refining the platform over the years, incorporating new and exciting technical features — from mobile and Facebook Apps, to our soon to be launched Showroom: a curated page featuring key looks from each of our stores. The Showroom will operate as a marketplace for consumers to browse and seamlessly purchase current trends, while providing an additional layer of marketing and exposure for our store owners.

Portable prides itself on understanding and curating both the technological and aesthetic elements of fashion e-commerce to create clean, easy to navigate themes. We offer a range of free themes for designers and just recently introduced The Kelly Bergin —the first in a series of boutique themes for designers. Portable collaborated with the luxury womenswear designer and New York-based design firm, RoAndCo Studios to create The Kelly Bergin, offering high-end, yet affordable solutions to e-commerce and a wider web presence.

Another initiative born from the Portable Shops platform is the introduction of Managed Plans. While many online stores have the potential to grow consistently, not many store owners have the time or know-how to successfully monitor and enhance the traffic and sales growth of their stores. Our new service provides the foundations, activity and support to grow online businesses and is can be either bundled with your current Portable Shops plan or offered as a one off service to non-Portable Shops clients.

Australia:
Akira Isogawa
Josh Goot
Manning Cartell
Gail Sorronda
Therese Rawsthorne
Pretty Dog Shop
May the Label
The Eleventh Hour
Dhini
Tato and Memi
Aurelio Costarella
Bul
Woodford and Co
Down Yonder
Lilya
Milly Sleeping
Sara Phillips
Zara McKenna
Michi Girl
Milk Boutique
Boutique de Chouette
Catherine Leon
Sovii
Eliana Gamboa
Coco Repose
Ultrasuite
Dani M Designs
Yellowcake
M d’amour
Frou Frou Designs
Mylk Bottle
Chicrabilia
Tydi
Manhattan Portage AU
Empire 47
Thom Finch
Vanity Flair
St Frock
Cashmere Crush
House of Ezis
David Parker
Pearls for Girls
Indulge Clothing
Gina Kim
Lucky 13
Neo Dia
Chitra’s Closet
United States:
Arnsdorf
Kelly Bergin
Study NY
Candela
Isoude
CZ Falconer
Paper Finger
Orley
Tina Huang
13 Phobia
Robb and Hugo
Soxxy
Lady Grey Jewelry
Ursa Minor

United Kingdom:
Peter Jensen
Tuesday Night Band Practice
Jahanaara
Red by Wolves
Agnes Valentine

New Zealand:
Lonely Hearts
Silence Was
Kate of Arcadia

Sweden:
Jenny Grettve

Canada:
Renata Morales

Portable is very proud to announce one of its boldest technical achievements to date. Earlier in 2011, Museum Victoria approached Portable to help execute their very ambitious Talking Difference project. Part physical, part virtual, the Takling Difference Portable Studio (a nice coincidence!) was designed to capture the cultural experiences of participants in audio, video and print, while providing a private setting.

Portable worked closely with Museum Victoria to design and develop the software user interface for people to record their stories and directed the architect team Edwards Moore to oversee the development and design of this interesting and tactile space.

Senior Programs Officer at Immigration Museum, David Henry, says “the Talking Difference Portable Studio offers participants a unique opportunity to engage in dialogue about cultural diversity and race-based discrimination through multimedia creation”.

Participants can choose to record a video, make an audio recording, draw or write, resulting in candid contributions that are nothing short of inspiring, moving and engaging. Works will be featured online in phase two of the project to spark further conversation and dialogue around difference and culture.

Talking Difference is supported by the Vic Health Arts About Us program.

The Campfire Film Foundation is one of the most innovative of its type in the world—it’s a hybrid film festival and distribution channel targeted at secondary schools, which creates dialogue and discussion between students and filmmakers.

Earlier this year, Campfire’s founder, Richard Leigh asked us to help design a digital platform to connect secondary students, teachers and librarians. That plaform is now live and you can explore it by clicking right here.

Campfire is a fully-fledged social enterprise which directs money back to filmmakers who are involved. It allows filmmakers to showcase their insightful and meaningful films to a relevant and targeted audience, and it assists teachers and students the opportunity to broach sensitive topics. It also acts as a library of high quality short films to schools that help to introduce difficult and important issues. This valuable tool allows discussion, understanding and respect for different belief systems whether spiritual, cultural or philosophical.

If you are a filmmaker, teacher or student it’s easy to get involved.

Cast your mind back to 1992, the year in which Microsoft introduces Windows 3.1, the reusable alkaline battery is available for commercial use, AT&T released the first video telephone for a sneaky $1,499,Reservoir Dogs was released and Miley Cyrus was born.

Enter, the Big Day Out.

Australia’s answer to Glastonbury and Lollapalooza is launched, forming our first independent music festival, first held in front of a Sydney audience of nearly 9,000.  Fast forward to the present and we’re on the eve of the 20th birthday of the Big Day Out.

Portable has worked with the Big Day Out to build a vault website (in HTML5) that rocks and rolls through the 20 year history, giving you an audio and visual scrapbook of the bands, the people and the stories.  A new year was released every couple of hours, catapulting us forward to the 2012 Big Day Out lineup reveal-all.

The site features candid interviews with bands, promoters and photographers. There are live music recordings, stories of Powderfinger and Ian Astbury from the Cult, taking part in a backstage sports and more.

This site has been designed by The Downie Breitkreuz Group.

A little about us…

Portable is a creative studio that designs innovative products and experiences using portable and digital technology. With professional staff spread across New York, Sydney and Melbourne, the company merges mobile technology, video and the web to create products that can be taken anywhere and experienced anytime by people all over the world.

As a result, Portable works with a range of clients across fashion, film, music, art, design, government and the green sector while also producing its own world class platforms. Portable TV is one of the leading channels for fashion, music, film, art and design video internationally. The Portable Film Festival takes place around the world across small and portable screens and in cities, open fields and on rooftops. Fashion designers use Portable Shops to share and sell their creations to the world.

We have a small development team (4 devs) in Melbourne, and your role will be to lead, support and mentor these developers – whilst also aiding in all technical aspects of the organisation.

A little about you…

You are an accomplished developer who thrives in a programming oriented environment. You enjoy conceiving projects for clients and seeing them through to their completion, along with choosing the best people and technologies for each project, and guiding it to completion.

Having an enjoyable work environment is important to you—it’s equally as important as being able to shape the organisation you work for, along with its team members and clients. You’re looking to expand upon your leadership skills in 2012 and help shape and lead a team of people who are as passionate about technology as you are.

What experience you should have…

• 5+ years experience working in the industry
• Advanced programming skills –  PHP, HTML, CSS (ideally HTML5 and CSS3). Great, but not required, skills in some or all of: CakePHP, Drupal, CiviCRM and WordPress
• Mobile Application Development (Android/iPhone)
• Project scoping and documentation
• Mentoring junior developers

What you’ll be doing in the role…

• Leading on technical decision throughout the company
• Supporting and mentoring junior developers into senior developers
• Scoping, wireframing and functional specifications on large projects
• Technical specification of projects (language, framework, and any required research)
• Design sign off and validation
• Technical support for account/project management
• The role will be based in the Melbourne office of Portable

Send your CV to jobs@portable.tv by Monday October 10.

Simon Goodrich recently interviewed Martin Hosking, Australian internet luminary, as part of the Melbourne Domain Series. Martin was very candid in this 45 minutes interview and QnA about his role in the development of the internet in Australia and the US. Well worth a watch.

Martin is best known as an Internet veteran. He is co-founder and CEO at RedBubble, one of the most successful online companies to come out of Australia. Prior to this he held a number of senior executive roles at LookSmart from its founding and to when he participated in all aspects of launching the company  onto the global stage. Prior to LookSmart he was with McKinsey. He is currently also the chairman of Aconex, a global leader in the SaaS space.

Check out the video here.

Talking of online execution and digital strategy, I wanted to share the outcomes from our tour we did with Scott Belsky from Behance last week. In summary:

* 549 people came to the events in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane over three days
* 4,978 visited the Portable site in preparation of the event
* Whilst the event was on it was a trending Twitter topic in Melbourne. Sydney and Brisbane.
* 484 people tweeted about the event, reaching 92,958 people and making 686,078 impressions.

Scott was a fantastic presenter and he certainly lived up to the calibre of people and content we like to share with our audience through Portable Talks.

We look forward to announcing our next Portable Talks events for later in the year.

Behance is the the online platform which has a network and membership base of among the most creative people on the planet. The platform works by empowering and inspiring millions of designers and creative professionals each month. Scott and the Behance team have found a series of best practices used across some of the world’s most productive creative people and teams. Behance puts the focus on actions and real work, changing the way recruitment happens for creative professionals the world over.

In 2010 Scott Belsky was named in the Fast Company Magazine’s “100 Most Creative People in Business”. He is also a frequent contributor to MSNBC and works with some of the world’s leading companies including General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, the United States State Department and the CIA.

Over 550 people have registered to see Scott as part of Portable Presents in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. We’re looking forward to sharing the experience.

I caught up with Jeremy Weinstein last week, the founder of Docummunity. Jez is completing his PhD at Swinburne University of Technology in conjunction with the Smart Services CRC. Prior to this study, Jeremy was a feature film maker.

He is heading out of the country to present at two conferences about the collaborative video editing site we developed together. He’ll be presenting at Australia New Zealand Communication Association 2011 in Hamilton, New Zealand as well as the inaugural London Film and Media Conference at the University of London.

We’re excited to hear the outcomes and look forward to developing the community around this online docummunity collaborative community. See if for yourself here.

Portable had its planning retreat over the winter solstice just out of Melbourne. We were lucky enough to do this at the Boyd Baker House, designed by one of Australia’s best architecture writers (The Australian Ugliness is one of my all time favourite books) and not a bad architect in his own right – Domain Park Towers (my favourite Melbourne building), Robin Boyd.

Unashamedly mid century modern (no mobile and interent reception) the building inspired us to come up with what we’re planning to work on next collectively. As Robin would say (and other modernists) form is function. No unneeded ornamentation (or stupid banner ads in the modern form), we discussed 25 concepts for the next 12 months to explore. Watch this space as we start rolling one (or two) of these in the coming months.

Portable Studios has been working on developing the Live China initiative, as part of Live Council, for over 18 months now. Starting out as an idea with Mei Ling Dorey, doctor / public health advocate / entrepreneur, Mei has been able to get a enviable list of supporters to assisting in developing an online campaign to help curb smoking in China. A big ask, yes, but something we’re excited to be involved with, especially in developing digital strategies to get cut through. We’re looking forward to informing you as this project develops but it’s not often you can merge a technology platform with meaningful and this is something we’re really excited to be involved with. It’s been great to work with the design guru, Nick Ling from Pregnate in developing the concept.

We built the site around Kaltura, an online editing tool and developed the systems for community around it. Go check out the site at www.docummunity.com to see it in action.

The application cuts out the use for paper, allowing fundraisers to securely collect information, donations and credit card details by using their phones. The app then automatically syncs the information with the database, reducing the costs associated with data management and improving donor’s credit card security.

Cath Hoban, Acting Chief Operating Officer of The Wilderness Society says, “Being able to use this kind of technology for our street fundraising cuts down our use of paper & significantly reduces the cost of fundraising, which means more money for the environment. It’s faster than filling in a form and the almost immediate transfer of information to our database in Hobart means our member’s details are safe & secure.

The Wilderness Society relies largely on funding from membership dues, regular donations and public fundraising. The introduction of this application will significantly improve the business operations of the environmental advocacy group by improving productivity among their staff and volunteers. The app allows The Wilderness Society to receive the donation immediately by automatically charging the donators credit card, reducing time spent on chasing up invalid credit cards and declined payments.