Since support for Ajax techniques is a very important component of the Apollo run-time, I’ve been spending a lot of my free time getting more familiar with Ajax. While digging around for good examples of Ajax at work, I found Kayak.com, a very cool “Web 2.0″ site that lets you search for flights, hotels, rental cars, etc. I could imagine a company like Kayak building a desktop app with Apollo that combines much of their existing functionality with tools for frequent travelers, including things that travelers may want access to while offline (on a flight, for example).

Kayak is a travel search engine. We help people like you find travel products from travel suppliers all over the world. This means a better travel search experience, more complete search results and best of all, savings for you every day. If you use Kayak for your travel planning, you are going to save time and money.

Kayak is an excellent example (some would say the poster child) for Web 2.0. We are considered a meta-search engine and that means our website searches hundreds of other websites in real time for the best travel deals available. Kayak lets you look at a full range of airlines, hotels and car rental agencies quickly and efficiently based on the exact criteria you select. We have put a lot of thought into the design of our website, and it has won accolades from consumers and the press alike (2006 Forbes Best of the Web for example) because of its simple, straightforward design and ease of use. Building a better travel search product is what we are about here at Kayak.

I was just checking out one of my favorite sites, the favorite website awards (thefwa.com), and I found a link to a cool site for interactive advertising firm, WDDG.

I thought this site was so cool. I really like the creative way that the made all of the content look like one of those old WWII war propoganda films.

Go check it out.

One of the top five digital creative agencies in the world (in my opinion), Big Spaceship, has decided to contribute back to the community with Big Spaceship Labs.

On the site they offer examples, source code, and tips taken from their collective experience with building high-end sites like Nike’s US site for “Nike Air“, “The Da Vinci Code” movie, and games for sites like “Casino Royale.”

Find posts that cover performance optimization (example) as well as cool apps that they’ve built in order to speed up their development process, such as this very cool app, “Visualizer“, which let’s you create cool run-time effects (introduced in Flash Player using a visual interface that writes out the AS code for you (VERY designer friendly).

Check out Big Spaceship Labs for some great tips and resources. These guys do great work.

A friend of mine just forwarded me a link to this site. Wow.

The folks at flashpanoramas.com have released a service that takes advantage of the new fullscreen mode option in the recent update to Flash Player 9 to do high res, fullscreen panoramas.

I imagine this will be HUGE for the real estate market.

Nice work.

People who know me well know that I am a huge aviation enthusiast. So naturally I was completely drawn to this cool new site from Boeing, newairplane.com, which provides a great multimedia introduction to Boeing’s latest aircraft innovations.

Check out the 787 Dreamliner site and click on “Step on board the 787″ to see how the developers integrated an innovative overlay of hotspots that pause the video playback to seamlessly offer detailed information on various areas of the aircraft interior.

For those of you who are also aviation enthusiasts, I have been told by a pilot friend that one of the most interesting new features in the 787 is that it is built with composite materials instead of aluminum which makes the aircraft lighter so it can fly further on less fuel - and more interesting - it means they can pump more moisture into the cabin during a flight because they don’t have to worry about rust, which means no more dry eyes by the end of those transoceanic flights.

I just found this site via a banner ad. I’ve always been impressed by the quality of the interactive work commissioned by the US Air Force. The US Navy also does a good job on interactive, but I can’t rate them as highly until they improve the site for the Blue Angels. If you take a look at my Flickr account, you’ll see that I’m a big fan of the Blue Angels and I would love to see the Navy put together a site that actually gets potential recruits excited about flying for the Navy (something I came very close to doing myself).

Since military recruiting is a form of extreme marketing, it’s interesting to examine what marketing tactics could make the site more effective. What could the Navy do to improve the effectiveness of one of (if not *the*) most expensive recruiting programs they have, the Blue Angels? In this marketer’s opinion:
1) Add an interactive experience that walks visitors through the performance (see Red Bull Copilot for inspiration). This gets the visitor (potential recruit, or “prospect”) more engaged with the subject, and invested at an emotional level. The more a prospect understands about a product, and the more eager they are to seek out more information, the more likely they are to buy/sign-up.
2) Allow visitors to listen to comm traffic (radio communications between the pilots) and explain what it means. The benefits of this are the same as number 1.
3) Feature interviews with pilots and crew talking about what it’s like to be a Blue Angel. This helps make the prospect of becoming a Navy flyer more real for the potential recruit. Show real people that look and sound just like them, talking about how they were able to realize their dreams.
4) Provide more high-res images. I’m happy to donate mine.
5) Provide downloadable videos in iPod and PSP format. This lets the potential recruit take the experience with them and share it with others. I have no idea if this is the case, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the viral influence of friends and family were one of the biggest contributors to people deciding to join the military. Why would the military be any different than consumer marketing?
6) Sell souvenirs and donate the profits to charity. As Joseph Pine points out in The Experience Economy, providing souvenirs makes the experience more personal. Allowing those souvenirs to be personalized is even more effective. How many military pilots do you think had toy models, posters, pictures, etc when they were growing up?
7) Add a community forum that allows visitors to ask questions about the Blue Angels and Naval aviation. Connect to fans. Allow people to contribute their own content. Add links to Flickr groups full of Blue Angels photos taken by fans like me. Allow people to connect with each other and share their tips on the best places to stand during the show.

In any case, check out the new Air Force site and enjoy the collection of videos.

http://www.dosomethingamazing.com

Each year Red Bull (energy drink) sponsors a contest that asks people to create wild sculptures out of empty cans of Red Bull. It’s a fascinating contest that results in some really nice artwork. They are still taking submissions for the Oct 6, 2006 event in Atlanta.

The Red Bull Art of the Can is a nationwide hunt for creativity and is open to everyone, from fultime artists to simply those with a creative flare. Build, sculpt, weld, glue, hammer, bend, fold, print, tape, and paint. Whatever!

(note - I had to type out that quote by hand because the page author disabled selecting of text in the SWF. Don’t do that!!!)

Check out their (Flash) site:

http://redbullartofthecan.com

This site is nicely done. It’s nice to see a great example of mixing Flash content (a rich stock chart in this case) with AJAX-style functionality. In this case, when you select an item in the Flash chart it highlights the corresponding HTML.

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=adbe

This is a nice Flash piece designed to help aspiring photographers (like me) learn more about photography and how Canon digital imaging products work.

http://www.photoworkshop.com/canon

This is a really cool site. The guys and gals at Big Spaceship have been doing a fantastic job of putting some of the new features of Flash Player 8 to work to build a very engaging experience for Sony Pictures upcoming flick Underworld Evolution.

I believe the only remaining component to the site that hasn’t been launched yet is the game. I just received an invite to the beta so I’ll have to check it out and let you know what I think.

It looks like they have also recently released their second Flash Player 8-based site for the upcoming movie Wolf Creek. It’s a great use of video. Check it out.