March was full of inspiration from emerging products like Color, Amazon’s Appstore and the iPad2. Not to mention Web 2.0 which is an annual event held in San Francisco’s Moscone Center – featuring startsups and plenty of Fortune 500 companies.

Keep your eye’s peeled for ad:tech 2011 featuring the latest and greatest of advertising, marketing and data oriented companies: pssst (free code for expo: GRA:TSF).

inDinero

Web-based small business accounting and cashflow planning. Features automatic imports of data from financial institutions.

Taproot Foundation

The Taproot Foundation enables business professionals to donate their skills to help nonprofits with their marketing, human resources, strategy management…

Sprout Social

Sprout Social provides comprehensive Social Media Management tools that enable you to find new customers and to grow your business.

VonChurch

VonChurch is a recruiting firm working exclusively within the video game industry.

Oven Bits

Ovenbits bakes up tasty apps and creates piping hot user experiences with every byte.

Fair Trade

The Fair Trade Federation (FTF) is the trade association that strengthens and promotes North American organizations fully committed to fair trade.

Angry Nerds

This Dev Team Don’t Stand for No Bugs. What do you do when you have bugs in your code? Send in the Angry Nerds. Consider these issues…resolved.

Zite

Zite is a personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.

A monthly showcase of inspirational pieces influenced by Bulent over @ COG1. Building a beautiful collection of design, development, and different start ups. Without further ado,.. I present you my March Inspiration:

Udemy
Udemy enables users to create webinars or online courses and share them with the world!

Sifteo
Sifteo is building the future of play with Sifteo cubes, a next generation game system consisting of physical blocks with color graphics that sense motion.

Storify
Making stories from the social Web, finding moments to remember in the real-time stream.

Rovio (Angry Birds)
Angry Birds features hours of gameplay, challenging physics-based castle demolition, and lots of replay value.

We Are Hunted
We Are Hunted tracks the world’s 99 most popular emerging songs on the social web in real-time.

Cortex
Share fast

Flora Grubb Gardens
Palm Broker, exceptional plants & garden furnishings

Adap.tv develops video advertising trading, serving and management technology that make video more profitable and less painful. It is the way video advertising works. The adap.tv marketplace (atm) is the industry’s first online video advertising marketplace. atm connects advertisers, agencies, publishers and ad networks with a robust marketplace to make smart buying and selling decisions in real-time. adap.tv is also the creator of OneSource, the online video ad serving platform that empowers publishers to succeed in online video. A complete end-to-end solution, OneSource helps publishers increase advertising revenue, grow streams, make the right business decisions, and simplify every aspect of ad operations.

Affine Systems, Inc.

Affine Systems is a venture-backed technology startup that was founded in December 2007 and is funded by Highland Capital Partners. Affine has spent the past two years building out its computer vision technology in order to shine a bright light on the current black box of broadband video.

Auditude

Auditude is based in Palo Alto with offices in Los Angeles and New York City. Our team comes from some of the top Internet, technology, and advertising companies in the industry, including Google, Yahoo!, Idealab, IDEO, PayPal, eBay, and DoubleClick.

FreeWheel

FreeWheel offers the most formidable system for digital video ad management and monetization.  Founded and led by a team of executives from the world’s leading technology companies, FreeWheel’s solution arms content owners and distributors with the tools and services necessary to make the most money possible from video content.

FreeWheel was founded in 2007 and is privately-held with offices in Silicon Valley, New York, and Beijing.  We are well-funded by Steamboat Ventures, Turner Broadcasting System, Battery Ventures, and Foundation Capital.

Visible World

Visible World is the leading provider of targeted television advertising solutions. Our suite of services enables advertisers, agencies, and media companies to deliver addressable, interactive, and measurable ads. Visible World campaigns increase ad relevance and engagement by providing capabilities to target real-time offers, products, and creative based on geography, programming, inventory levels, time of day, weather, and other data-driven conditions. Today, Visible World helps over 200 advertisers target consumers in ~100 millions U.S. television households and across more than 1,500 major websites.

Source: PepsiCo

Affine Systems -

Affine Systems is a Targeting Platform for Video, Making Broadband Video Safe & Effective for Online Advertisers.

BizGreet -

BizGreet powers video ads that change dynamically and instantly to reach each unique viewer.

i.TV -

i.TV is the top TV and movie guide for the iPhone and iPod touch. Download it for free through the iTunes App store.

Miso -

Miso is a social platform that makes watching media content more fun.

Spot411 -

Spot411 has developed an application called FoxPop that adds interactive elements to your movie watching experience.

PepsiCo10 is a program PepsiCo created to partner with the best start-ups in technology, media and communications. Learn more: http://pepsico10.com

www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7s3cXzXrO0

Simplicity is a state of mind for many tea drinkers, so it doesn’t surprise me how large and innovative the design community is. I just wanted to spend a moment and track down some inspiring/different designs in tea related products. Here are some gems I found, click the image to view the source:

Modern Tea Bags -

Modern Tea Pots -

Modern Tea Cups -

1). Adobe - Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information. For 25 years, the company’s award-winning software and technologies have redefined business, entertainment and personal communications by setting new standards for producing and delivering content that engages people virtually anywhere at anytime.

2). Askyourtargetmarket.com - Ask Your Target Market is a comprehensive, self-service internet survey software solution that allows businesses, students, and entrepreneurs to define their own consumer panel and conduct targeted market research for as little as $29.95 per survey.

3). Cazoodle - Cazoodle builds novel vertical search engines using its large scale structured data extraction technology developed at University of Illinois.

4). EffectiveUI - EffectiveUI is an award-winning, user-centered design and development agency that specializes in the creation and implementation of user-friendly Web, mobile and desktop applications. From strategy and conception, to development and execution, EffectiveUI’s tailored applications merge innovative technologies with user-experience strategy to help today’s most respected brands deepen customer engagement through more compelling and meaningful interactions that deliver competitive advantages and produce measurable results.

5). Elance - Elance, the world’s leading online talent marketplace, helps companies hire and manage professionals online to get work done and grow their businesses.

6). Engage - MangoSpring Inc., maker of Engage, is a privately held company based in Bellevue, WA. Founded in 2007, MangoSpring specializes in building business critical communication and collaboration software with access across the browser, the PC and the mobile phone.

7). FILTER - FILTER is a company dedicated to partnering with clients to solve creative and marketing challenges. In a single, unique agency, FILTER combines unparalleled access to creative resources with creative leadership and project management.

8). GazoPa - GazoPa is an image search engine that uses features from an image such as color and a shape to search for and identify similar images.

9). iPlotz - iPlotz is a comprehensive wireframing, collaboration, and task management tool that allows you to create and share navigable wireframes. Using simple drag and drop elements you can quickly develop a website layout to be shared with clients or developers in multiple formats.

10). Tap11 - Tap11 is the intelligent Twitter client that provides businesses with the best analytic and CRM tools to monitor, engage, and grow their real-time audience.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHKMUHvb2iE

I stole borrowed this idea from Kevin Rose and he was inspired by another dood. I figure this list will grow over time, finding new companies & products is what I love to do. Here is my 2010 products I wouldn’t wanna live without.

Gmail
Google Chrome
Google Analytics
Google Adsense
Google Talk
Google Trends
Google Calendar
ASUS
iPod Nano
Facebook
Flickr
Twitter
Linkedin
Adobe (Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, InDesign)
Notepad++
WinSCP
Songbird
WordPress
Oxo
SimpleHuman
Revision3
Smashing Magazine
VentureBeat
Xbox
YouTube

Pharmaceutical companies continue to compete in marketing a safe and honest health ‘solution’. Since websites are a key to a companies marketing, executives will spend thousands if not millions of dollars to prepare a fully functional corporate site. The message is simple, simple. The key to making a truth-worthy site is to make things clean with a clear hierarchy. Here I cover the top 5 best riches Pharmaceutical Websites reviewing the good & the bad.

Johnson & Johnson

The Good – Consistent theme w/ beautiful imagery and large readable fonts.

The Bad – Red is overpowering, even if apart of brand identity (mainly suggesting the submenu overlay onto the image banner. The homepage and main navigation elements are developed in Flash which increase load time and also is confusing for SEO & the user.

Pfizer

The Good – Top down hierarchy with contrasting colors and educational content.

The Bad – Little to say about the bad, they could consider reaching out to different demographics by tapping into social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, and other relevant health related forums.

Roche

The Good – Simple, Clean, Informative, Font, Effective SEO. Extremely impressed with 99% of the development/design.

The Bad – Same thing as said before, little to say. I think they should consider removing the Flash homepage banner and use jQuery/AJAX to achieve more SEO rank thou companies like Roche aren’t worried about achieving traffic since this isn’t a B2C relationship.

GlaxoSmithKline

The Good – Full catalog of information inventory of products, company overview and history. Images are effective but lack proper cropping.

The Bad – Oh, man… The problem’s I have with this site could be a page alone – but in the sake of time. I think they should start from step one and redesign the pages with their current content. The colors – awful, The Images(cropping) – awful, hierarchy - awful layout, alignment of type/layout/images – awful. I shouldn’t ‘bag’ on this site since some of my previous portfolio work were designed without research. But since, this company pulls in over 44M yearly I can’t really accept minor issues like this (and in comparison to the others above).

Novartis

The Good – In Touch with their Online audience. Great colors & fonts that allow your eye to easily rest of key elements within the page. Well thought out navigation and good contrast from brown to white type. Mobile application support and video content on display at multiple social media & video publishers.

The Bad – Some wasted white space will little focus on content (text). I think they should reconsider the images used in the homepage to their core clients. From a snap shot view you wouldn’t understand the company mission which is easily identified in Johnson & Johnson.