I admit that the term “app store” is quickly making its way onto Buzzword Bingo boards across the country. But sometimes, a buzzword is worthy of just that – buzz.

In truth, the term sells itself short. When referring to app store, we’re not just talking about a commercial market for applications (although that’s certainly a primary focus). Instead, this is a place for a software company to show how extensible all of its engineers’ hard work really is. And, of course, it’s also a showcase for the platform extensions themselves – letting the independent developers shine.

From a marketing perspective, launching an app store can be smart. But you really need to be a first mover in an industry. Otherwise, you become more noise than signal.

All of this is why I’m proud to have been part of LocaModa’s recent DOOH App Store launch – the first of its kind for digital out of home.

Loca’s move (with design help from StudioNumberNine & Daly Creative) continues what the company has already worked very hard to do to standardize a rather splintered industry. The company’s platform extends across multiple media to bring client content together with user interaction. And now it has a great showcase to explain what that actually means.

I badmouth this town a lot. I’m not from here, so it’s easy.

The weather is cold (like I grew up in a tropical paradise?). The sports fans are near sycophantic (and no, that’s not better than the bitterness I grew up with). The drivers are schizophrenic (ok, sure, there’s reason they called I-76 Schuylkill Expressway the “Sure Kill Expressway“). I won’t complain about the politics though…there’s really no contest there.

But the truth is, it’s a beautiful city. It’s got a skyline that defines but doesn’t smother. The river and harbor weaves through the city, providing water views to nearly every window above five stories. And it is, I admit, my home of the last eight and a half years.

So when I saw the NYTimes put up a great travel review of the harbor front, I found myself getting chills (and not, for once, due to the temperature). From the neighborhood in which I live, to the path on which I run, and even the place at which I’m going to get married (to a home-town girl, of course) – I like it here.

I’ve participated in the 48 Hour Film Project two years in a row now. While 2008’s entry marked my debut not only as a participant, but a writer and actor, the experience was surely hectic. The 2009 experience, however, proved to be much smoother sailing. We had a smaller, more focused team. I was also fortunate enough to avoid being cast as any character and instead got to try directing out for a bit. And would you believe, I enjoyed it.

We weren’t recognized with any awards, but I wouldn’t have changed much if we had to do this again. Hats off to my production team, Barry Frechette and Bob Holt, for seriously knowing what they were doing.

Cold Feet from Gabi Schaffzin on Vimeo.

It’s hard to survive in this cross-platform, cross-media, cross-channel, cross-everything-but-dressing world without, well, mixing up your executions a bit. So building VH1’s The Great Debates campaign was both entertaining and relevant.

VH1’s The Great Debates ran for a week after July 4th, providing its viewers with the answer to such debates as “Star Wars vs. Star Trek” or “Beatles vs. Stones.” LocaModa was tasked with bringing this debate to the general public. Using digital out of home and web executions, we gave users the ability to text or click their votes and then we showed live updates in Times Square, in bars across the country, on VH1.com, and on Facebook. We also used some “social polling” to check in with how popular each topic was on Twitter. And VH1 carried the baton even further, displaying live text-in results during the show. How’s that for a little buzz-word bingo action?

(Note: Video shrunk a bit to fit here. See full size.)

The campaign garnered a large number of interactions, especially considering its short seven day flight. And it’s already been named a finalist for a 2009 MITX award. We’re hoping the accolades continue through 2010.

ATT’s digital out of home presence at pop star Demi Lovato’s summer tour was really my first major launch at my newest gig. We gave concert goers (and online participants) the opportunity to text or email messages and pictures to screens at the show, then provided them with a “playback” viewing of all the messages at that show. Users could go online after a concert and see a virtual replay of the DOOH screen. They could then capture the screen as an image and post it to Facebook.

Turns out 12-18 year old girls love to text. Who knew?

This campaign, one of Loca’s most successful in terms of user numbers, is a great example of engaging an otherwise bored [albeit captive] audience. AT&T had hundreds of eye balls staring at their brand; and by the end of the campaign their brand was on thousands of handsets (in the form of mobile text-backs).

CEO Stephen Randall was at the Boston show to capture the excitement users get by sending a message and seeing themselves up on a huge screen. The “Vanity Play” if you will:

The NYTimes also picked up on Demi’s connection with the texting/tweeting crowd and Loca made a cameo in the print edition:

The Flex debugger provides an “uncompressed” size of your application in the trace output, but there’s no obvious way in the UI to show that breakdown. Being that Flex’s guts are in the command line, however, that’s where we can generate the size report.

If you check out your project preferences, click on ActionScript Compiler and add the following to the text field under “Additional compiler arguments:”

-link-report output.xml

where “output.xml” is the path to the file generated.

Once you’ve got your file (which is really a thorough report on class linkage and more), though, you’re not yet done; if you open it up and take a look, it’s quite confusing.

Fortunately, there are a couple apps that will parse and clearly display the size report. I haven’t really tested them fully, but both look promising:

ItDepends by Joe Berkovitz

AIR Link Report Visualizer by kahunaburger

h/t to Tim Walling for help on this

I could also pretend I have an audience.

In fact, over the past six months of near blog dormancy, I have had quite the audience – at least if the comment moderation queue is any indication. These dear readers have been very helpful. Many offer free drugs. Some provide sex advice. But perhaps the most valuable comments come in the form of a free joke (followed, of course, by a link to ch3ap v1agr@!!!11).

Over the next few weeks, as holiday schedules hopefully provide a slow down to day job related chaos, I’ll be posting some work and other notes. I’ll cover Digital Out-of-home, Arduino, some photography work, and some other topics. I may even add a captcha to my comments form.

For now, however, here is as complete a list I can compile of the jokes left in my comments over the past few months…after the break.

Why can’t a woman ask her brother for help? Because he can’t be a brother and assist her too.

What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire? Frostbite.

Why do Vampire have to brush their teeth? Because they have Bat-Breath.

When should you use milk to irrigate your fields? When you are growing creamed corn.

What kind of flowers grow in outer space? Sunflowers.

What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t work? A stick.

What do you call a crazy baker? A dough nut.

What do ghouls wear on their feet in the rain?!? GHOULOSHES!!!

What kind of lettuce was served on the Titanic? Iceberg.

Why are there so many Johnsons in the phone book? They all have phones.

Why did the bunnies go on strike? They wanted a raise in celery.

What’s a chimney sweep’s most common ailment? The flue.

What do you get when you cross a squirrel with a kangaroo? An animal that keeps its nuts in its pockets.

Where does all the pepper go? No one nose.

Why did the cannibal rush over to the cafeteria? He heard children were half price.

What is a cannibal’s favorite type of TV show? A celebrity roast.

How do they put out fires at the post office? They stamp them out.

How many Microsoft employees does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None. We’ll just declare darkness the new standard.

What do you call it when instead of raining cats and dogs, it rains chickens, ducks and turkeys? Fowl Weather!

What kind of necktie does a pig wear? A pigsty.

Why is an evil witch like a candle? They are both WICKED

What kind of bird can write? A penguin.

Did you hear about the man who was tap dancing? He broke his ankle when he fell into the sink.

What do you call bedtime stories for boats? Ferry tales.

What did the painter say to the wall? One more crack and I’ll plaster you!

What do you call a bunch of dancing pebbles? The Rockettes.

What do you call a knife that cuts 4 loaves of bread at a time? A four-loaf cleaver.

Extremely simple solution that took me a bit to track down, simply because there were no explicit use cases coming up in my searches:

Pulling Images From TwitPic Related Tweets [via Nerdery]:

TwitPic Tweet: joespinelliLooking good so far http://twitpic.com/bvltx

TwitPic Image: http://twitpic.com/show/full/bvltx.jpg

TwitPic Tweet: [@joespinelli] Looking good so far http://twitpic.com/bvltx

TwitPic Image: http://twitpic.com/show/full/bvltx.jpg

Pulling Images From yFrog Related Tweets [via Image Shack]:

yFrog Tweet: [@studionumber9] 92 in my kitchen at 7:30 pm is too hot. http://yfrog.com/59ecwqj

yFrog Image: http://yfrog.com/59ecwqj:iphone [use iPhone no matter what platform this is used on]

- Launched Stride on MTVTimesSquare last week. Send your message/photo to MTV’s 42ft screen (Broadway btwn 44th and 45th). Then get a ‘memento’ screenshot of what it [probably] looked like. Legalese and logistics have forced this one to be kept under wraps for a while now. Hopefully we have the opportunity to improve the whole concept as it runs.

- Posting and processing my latest shots to my Flickr account last week reminded me how much I miss taking daily photographs. Doubt I will get back to that frequency, but need to make sure I keep the camera with me more often.

- Have moved to XCode for my Arduino development. Struggling significantly with decoding IR messages from the Apple Remote. Speaking of homebrew-geekiness, congrats to Mr. Saunders for some great recent work.

- Wedding planning is flying, thanks to my wonderful partner in crime. Have some initial pages posted to sg.weds.gs. Starting to think about the registry now. Extremely conflicted on this part. More on that in the future.

- Finally, I leave you with a relevant shot, taken this weekend. Sixty-three years of marriage. And counting. Too bad I’m marrying into this family; I could certainly use some of those genes.