Those of you who took high school economics will no doubt recall the way in which a product market works: we start with design, then production and manufacturing, then distribution, advertising and finally purchase and consumption (I invite any high school economics teachers to correct my over-simplified explanation of complicated market dynamics in the comments below).

As a company involved in mostly early stage market activites – media design and content creation, audio and video production – we rely on other companies in our market to supply us with manufacturing and distribution, and ultimately we need consumers to complete our existence.

These days, audio and video distribution is easily accomplished via the web. But in a crowded marketplace with more choices than ever before, consumers rely on search to bring them what they want, when they want it.

For this reason, it makes a lot of sense for Google to offer a media server gadget, essentially bridging the gap between the TV set and the vast content offered on the net.

Sure there are other media player/content services out there that promise to deliver web content to the home theater, but none have the power of Google’s search to find virtually any audio, video or photo file on the web. And while Google is notoriously boring in the GUI department, no one can argue their superiority in their stock and trade. Combine that with the content from Google’s subsidiary YouTube, and this is clearly the future.

For now, it’s a Windows-only gadget, and judging from the comment thread, it is not without some beta-stage issues. Still, who can blame Google for testing the waters and extending the usefulness of its search to the TV?

(Self-Promotional Addendum: I think this gadget would be made all the more amazing if the content it displayed became participatory through the CrowdAbout Social Media Player technology!)

Harkins Creative took on the challenge of using viral video posted on YouTube to stir interest in a web project we were involved with. It was like research into what makes web video work, and with 100,000 views as of Sunday morning, I think we are proving the point and the concept petty well!

This was a fun little project, and the intent was to simply make an entertaining video with a “hook” (pardon the pun, watch the video and you’ll understand) that would get people to visit a site. We did very little promotion, other than posting it on YouTube, but we thought very strategically about what might work there.

Harkins Creative produced a site intro video for Planet2025.tv. 18 months later, it is still being used on the home page of their site, and today we received notice that it had just been announced as a Panda Awards finalist in the Wildscreen Film Festival! Final judging will take place in October.

Below is the video entered into the New Media category:

We finally released a series of 8 video tutorials covering the most basic tasks in using a WordPress site. We plan to release many more titles over the summer months, covering specific tasks and commonly asked questions.

Since almost ALL of the sites we have designed over the past two years have utilized this increasingly powerful content management system/blogging application, we thought it would be a way to give back to the WordPress community and serve as a quick refresher for our clients. Enjoy!

(NOTE: This post is for the audiovisual creatives among our readers.) The new CS4 suite of creative tools from Adobe is already trickling down the pipe, with Soundbooth CS4 making a particularly impressive mark, in my mind.

Perhaps the most genteel new feature is the simplest one: the ability to preview mp3 compression settings before rendering a whole file. How considerate of Adobe! And what a time-saver, especially in the typical web production workflow we employ around here.

Other, more revolutionary features of note:

• Multitrack!
• Batch track volume matching
• Beat Detection technology (pretty accurate, too!)
• Improved volume and pan drawing controls in the waveform mode
• Audio extraction from imported video files (works with an impressive slew of codecs)
• Audio “Snapshots” in the history state, similar to Photoshop

While a good number of these features aren’t truly inventive (programs like Cakewalk’s SONAR have been doing some of these things for years), their addition to Soundbooth raises the level of usefulness of this particular production workhorse a good deal. With the multitrack functionality, I might be inclined to reach for this app over Audition for a lot of projects.

Go Adobe!

In this short video, Carter Harkins talks about what works in an online video strategy. Tutorial videos can be an excellent way to get more in-depth about your products and services, and connect with visitors who are really hungry for more information, not just “fluff”.