PixelMEDIA Inc.

Distracted driving has been called a “deadly epidemic” by U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

According to the Department of Transportation, 5,500 people in the United States were killed and another half a million were injured in accidents related to distracted driving in 2009.

“It only takes a moment of distraction to cause a tragedy,” said Jim Guest, president of Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports. “No text or call is worth a life.”

Now a Portsmouth, N.H.-based company has launched a mobile phone application that will let others know when someone is unavailable to text.

Download at www.bzzyapp.com

“Bzzy” is being offered as a free download in April during National Distracted Driving Awareness Month. Bzzy automatically responds to texts using either a pre-set or customized message.

Activate the application and incoming texters will be sent a response: “I am driving,” “I am viewing (a movie)” or a custom message.  All texts received are still available on the phone once the person is ready to respond.

“It’s about staying focused, on whatever you are doing, but especially on driving when your life and others on the road are at risk,” said Erik Dodier, CEO of PixelMEDIA. “Bzzy will remove the urgency we feel to reply back right away, and instead let those who are trying to reach us know we are unavailable.”

The goal is to allow people to focus on what they’re doing, whether it’s driving or even watching a movie or playing with their kids, without being distracted by texts.

“There’s something about a text that seems so instantaneous,” Dodier said. “But we all know there are times we should just let others know we’re temporarily unavailable.”

Dodier said 10 percent of any future proceeds from the product will be donated to efforts aimed at increasing the awareness of the dangers of distracted driving.

Bzzy is currently available on Android phones only, however, PixelMEDIA  is looking at offering Bzzy for iPhones in the future.

“Take a step toward driving safer, download Bzzy for free through April 30^th at www.Bzzyapp.com,” Dodier said. “It will allow a driver’s focus to stay where it should be, on the road.”

PixelMEDIA is a finalist in the Consumer Goods category for Boston Beer Company’s new Samuel Adams website for the 15th Annual MITX Interactive Awards. Held annually by the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange, the MITX Awards recognize excellence in the creation of web innovations designed, produced or developed in New England.

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For the majority of my career I’ve worked on and around e-commerce sites, and I’ve seen a broad range of database designs and site architectures. Within that broad range I’ve seen many good and bad practices, and one of the worst is to design an e-commerce site that can’t scale to meet the business’s future needs. These sites tend to be havens for odd bugs and are likely to become maintenance nightmares. Read More…

Will 2010 finally be the year that Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) loses enough market share that developers no longer need to support it?  I know I speak for not only myself but for many of my developer colleagues when I say, “one can hope!”  IE6 will be 9 years old this year and yet there is still a column for it on our QA checklist.   Windows has come out with two newer (and better) browsers within the last 9 years that we also support; yet developers typically code for the most recent version of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.  So why do we need to support a version of IE that in today’s technology space is equivalent to a fossil? Read More…

In mid-July, two hockey sticks showed up on the desk of designer Onur Orhon. These weren’t the ordinary sticks you’d see at a sporting goods store: they were prototypes straight from the headquarters of Bauer Hockey, of the updated One95 stick and the brand-new Vapor X:60. All the hockey fans at PixelMEDIA crowded around and hefted the sticks, inspecting the technical innovations and admiring their lighter weight.

The sticks stayed in the office through the fall, as the PixelMEDIA team worked to bring them online. Bauer Hockey hired PixelMEDIA to tackle the MY BAUER project, a rich Flash application where players can purchase and personalize Bauer’s top-of-the-line sticks. From choosing a pattern, grip, and color to printing a player’s name right on the stick, MY BAUER walks users through their choices and gives a three-dimensional preview of their purchase. Read More…

This entry is a slightly updated re-post of an article found on my personal blog.

Recently we had a site that was getting ready to go live, hosted on a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 (IIS7). I won’t bore you with all the details of all the issues we worked through but we had one nasty issue that, as soon as it occurred it brought the server down; 100% CPU usage by the w3wp.exe process and memory usage steadily climbing. Our error logger was catching primarily one xml argument exception (but with a few variations).

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I was recently working on coding a design that included a simple type of faux select element. It was basically an unordered list that expanded and collapsed when you clicked a link. As it was styled similar to a select element, the JavaScript behaviors were similar as well. Clicking the link expanded the list underneath it, and you could then choose a link inside the list and navigate away from the page, or click the original link to close the list again.

The client, however, found this a bit confusing Read More…

An active supporter of the University of New Hampshire and the Whittemore School of Business, web strategy and design agency PixelMEDIA is giving its PixelMEDIA Web Marketing Services Award to three entries in the 2009 Paul J. Holloway Prize Innovation-to-Market Competition.

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Recently, we had a situation that required us to pull in some content from one server to another using an iframe. Generally, this is something we would try to avoid, but we needed to pull some data from a new .NET application into a legacy ColdFusion application.

Unfortunately, the height of the page being pulled in would vary wildly. This led to a fairly disappointing experience where the page was either far too long, or content in the iframe was cut off and the user had to scroll within the iframe to see everything.

We came up with what we thought might be an interesting solution. If the page loading inside of the iframe (the child page) could calculate its height, and somehow let the parent page know, the parent page should be able to reset the height of the iframe.

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Business Challenge
Move people. That was the challenge that Segway®, the creators of the iconic personal transporters, presented to PixelMEDIA. Segway knows that once people experience riding a Segway PT, they want to own one. They needed a partner who could bring that same emotional energy and feeling online. This was a key driver for their website redesign: drive interaction, encourage a test drive, and link potential buyers to product dealers. The new website needed to reflect the motion, innovation, and selling points of their products—all while serving Segway’s three primary target audiences: individuals, businesses, and police and government. Read More…