Hooray Holiday!

Happy Holidays everyone.

The 2009 year in review includes:

• A huge win in the inaugural bowling Agency Throwdown
• Fantastic new clients
• First ever Phoenix Design Week
• A slew of new case studies
• Urban exploration
• A few awards and accolades
• A year's worth of happy hours
• New additions to the Keane family
• Becoming an approved iPhone developer
• Augmented Reality

But most of all: a great year with all our friends, clients and family. Thanks to each and every one of you.

In fulfilling a request made by President Obama in a December 3rd summit calling for community-level discussions on job creation and retention, ASU is hosting a forum this evening at 4:00PM at the AE England Building in Civic Space Park in Downtown Phoenix. Read the university's press release here.

Russ Perry and Russ Maloney from Keane will be officially participating in the forum, sitting on the forum's panel and leading a discussion break-out group following the panel, respectively. The panel will focus on issues related to and the connections between ASU, job creation, entrepreneurship and social networks – kicked off by a brief presentation by Russ Perry on our local design industry and the recent community-building triumph that was Phoenix Design Week. Other members of the 6-person panel include:

• Representative Krysten Sinema, Arizona House of Representatives, District 15
• Dennis Hoffman, Professor of Economics; Director, L. William Seidman Research Institute; and Director, Office of the University Economist
  
• Debra Friedman, University Vice President and Dean, College of Public Programs
• Audrey Iffert, University Innovation Fellow, Office of University Initiatives
• Sean Coleman, Orange Slyce, ASU student entrepreneur

A main objective of this forum will be to organize all the notes from the event into a comprehensive report, which will then be sent to the White House. We know that you, dear reader, are affected by the economy and jobs situation. Indeed, there is no voice more qualified to speak or command a room than yours; please come to this meeting, participate and contribute. Come to this meeting and let our community – let Congress, let the President – know your thoughts and ideas.

If you haven't been to our site in the last week or so, we have new items under the "Selected Work" sections.
Expect to see a shotgun blast of new work before the year is up too. Lots of great things getting buttoned up over the next three weeks.

A new (but temporary) office denizen: my 8" Meade Schmidt-Newtonian telescope, which I'm sure is just happy to be out of the closet and facing skyward for the first time in about 8 months – even if we are in the middle of one huge light dome.

I've always been intensely interested in astronomy since I was young, and pulled the trigger on this scope in college. Many a night spent under the stars, hunting down doubles, clusters, nebulae and galaxies. I bought it just in time for the much-hyped Mars apparition in August of 2003, which was a spectacular sight for a new telescope owner.

While I was still in Idaho, I was able to take it out a few times a month – but whenever I think about the telescope now, I'm hit with a rueful wash of sadness. Astronomy is a difficult hobby; not only is it insanely expensive, but, of course, it almost requires one to adopt a near-nocturnal routine. I was initially very excited for the move down to Arizona, as this state is renowned for some of the best skies in the country – indeed, in addition to some of the most celebrated professional/research observatories (Lowell and Kitt Peak), we have outstanding astronomy departments at U of A and ASU. Oh yeah, and it's warm here, too.

But, as things often go, I've found less and less free time to go out with the telescope. In order to reasonably escape the city lights, I have to drive nearly an hour outside urban limits – and even then, conditions are far less than ideal. I'm hoping that having it set up in the office will encourage me to take more frequent action...Keane Star Party, anyone? Stay tuned!

With the holidays fast approaching we wanted to share our holiday hours with everyone, including our Happy Hour event of the month.

For anyone still in town we will be hosting the second to last happy hour event of the year on Wednesday, November 25 2009 at RA on Mill starting at 5pm sharp! The first $100 of the tab is paid for by us, as usual.

As for the rest of November and December:

Thursday 11/26 and Friday 11/27 - Closed

Wednesday 12/23, Thursday 12/24 and Friday 12/25 - Closed

New Years week (12/28 through 1/1/10) we will be open, but operating on a skeleton crew with some of the team on vacation.

Looking forward to seeing you all hopefully next week!

An article by Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal on Facebook spam. I think
one of the best parts of the article is towards the end where he hints
at what's possible with legitimate advertising:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a-pro-an-insiders-confession/

We decided it was time for a change of atmosphere – as we all often do – so we devoted the last few days to rearranging the office. Not always the easiest of tasks, but always the most rewarding when it's all said and done. Buoys the mind and refreshes the spirit.

All in all, we:

• Tacked up several more shelves, six of which are in this picture. What you see here are a collection of childhood artifacts and funtime miscellany – and, yes, that is a live hand grenade. (Editor's note: No it isn't...unfortunately.)
  
• Freed up nearly 100 square feet of space, which we turned into a gathering/chill/reading nook. If it were music, it would be Post-Lounge. Or Cozycore.
• Peppered the walls with several new artworks – including painter Ricardo Guevara and poster gods Crosshair Design, Burlesque of North America and Guy Burwell. 
• Hung two custom-built whiteboards – cut, framed, painted and then liberally scribbled upon. Its inaugural words were Here be Dragons, christening the surface whereupon unseen lands are yet to be explored. The monsters lying in wait shall be given a choice: be slain without mercy or profess allegiance to the Keane flag.
  
• Innumerable other upgrades, including: a bathroom overhaul, a polyptychal grid of our work (icosikaioctatych?), several new botanical comrades of the Phalaenopsis variety, a maple-topped work surface and the most organized closet ever. Really.

After an outing that took us from the outskirts of the East Valley to the extremes of Avondale, we decided to poke around our very own backyard in downtown Tempe. To the North, pitch-black rooms lit only by our cell phones housed ancient machines, gears sealed by decades of rust, whose motors once drove steam and smoke up, up and up through a wild crop of pipes. Only a handful of blocks away stands a modern analog, Centerpoint Condominiums, with that chic glass silhouette belying its dusty lifelessness. Some places grow old and retire; some never see a respectable birth.

To the South, a subterranean stairwell and a lucky yank on a heavy door led us down into a flip-side place – a section of the underground tunnel maze that every city or large institution has. This particular network was a utility system, distributing heat, water and electricity across its many nodes and extremities. No matter where you are, there's this entire mirror-world beneath your feet, and it's not always as unexciting as heat tunnels; I've read about a bowling alley buried under Central and Pierce in downtown PHX – unbearably curious, isn't it, but even more so is simply thinking about what's down there, just six feet below the sidewalk, that someone forgot to tell someone about, and so on, until its existence is known to only a few. Or none!

An update from a very recent trip should go up later this week.

         

Click here to download:

Halcyon_Days_2.zip (2142 KB)

Click here to download:

1025entrepreneurlist.pdf (3428 KB)

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Russ Perry | russperry@keanecreative.com
www.keanecreative.com
602-904-6478 - office