Browser Theme of the Week – Space, Planet and Sun Theme by Brand Thunder

There were so many great themes created last week by our users, it’s kind of hard to pick just one as the winner. We had new designs of space, various seasons, and even big brand names made it into our gallery courtesy of our fans. For the past several weeks, the top theme has been designed by one of the top Firefox Persona designers in the world, MaDonna. MaDonna consistently has some of the best designs online and continues to create quality Firefox and IE browser themes for our gallery.

This week, the top theme goes to a new designer by the name of “smee“, and the “Space, Planet, and Sun Browser Theme”. Again we have a space-themed browser design, but I think you’ll agree this theme is

Read the rest of this page »

Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: brower theme, Theme of the Week | No Comments »

The “Interactive” in Interactive Browser Themes by Kevin Dwinnell

Image via Wikipedia

Between Firefox Personas and Google Chrome’s Themes, browser themes are getting a lot of attention this year. Brand Thunder is pleased to be at the front with such distinguished company. While each of us helps you move beyond the dull gray of the standard Internet browser and personalize your browser with enticing visuals, Brand Thunder is the only one to move the theme into the realm of experience. We make things happen in the browser to increase engagement, connection and interaction.

And to go a step farther, we are the only ones to bring this level of customization to the Internet Explorer browser. It’s an impressive feat and is in the early stages of rolling out.

Here are some of our themes that showcase the interactive capabilities of our browser themes.

Weather

The Weather Theme is a full integration using WeatherBug’s API and Brand Thunder design elements to create a browser theme that pulls in weather forecasts, local conditions, alerts, weather maps and more. The theme itself changes based on your local weather conditions. It also pulls in up to three days of forecasts into the theme (the user can set the number). Location can be set by the user, or the can choose Firefox’s built-in location services. The multimedia sidebar is a full weather station window with current conditions, radar maps, local weather cameras and more. It’s a truly amazing infusion of weather information in a stunning visual context.

The Daily Beast

The Daily Beast is a leading news site and their theme pulls an image from the latest feature story directly into the browser theme. The user can hover over it to get the story headline or click through to read the full story. The sidebar keeps users connected to the latest news via special views of the Cheat Sheet, Buzz Board, Blogs & Stories and Video sections of The Daily Beast. The Daily Beast Theme demonstrates several methods to keep their users connected to the breaking news of the day, and how to get users back to your site more frequently.

Movie Premier

Brand Thunder’s Movie Premier Theme is a fun and functional theme for us movie fans. Like the Daily Beast theme, Movie Premier has a feature block that updates regularly with the movie posters of opening movies. Clicking on the poster takes you to an overview page of the movie with reviews, synopsis and more. The theme is also tightly integrated with Fandango for instant access to reviews, showtimes, tickets and even trailers and other videos in the sidebar. It’s a great example of how content and commerce fuse together in an interactive browser theme.

Baseball for IE

The Baseball Theme for Internet Explorer demonstrates a new frontier for building community and connection within the IE browser. The visual capabilities created through this add-on have not been seen in the Internet Explorer world. It makes the visual takeover as seamless of the end user as it’s been in Firefox. It’s a significant advance and will help us better meet the needs of our clients.

I think these are killer examples of what a browser theme can be – a better and more engaging browser experience. What do you think?

Posted in Commentary, News | Tags: brand thunder, brower theme, Browsers, firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Web browser | No Comments »

Why Start-ups Should Show Product Flexibility – Obama Inauguration Honored by Kevin Dwinnell

Or, maybe the title of this post should be: Is it an opportunity or a diversion?

If an opportunity for your start-up is:

1. An extension of your current work
2. Improves product or process
3. Boosts your cash flow

Go for it.

For us, the launch of a browser theme focused on Barack Obama’s inauguration (see it here) was a yes to all of those points.

Here’s the back-story.

Our product focus has always been to deliver custom browser themes for leading brands. NASCAR, Huffington Post, you name it. After all, we create a persistent presence with online consumers, which is a great value proposition. What we didn’t focus on was event-driven versions — until recently.

We figured the long-term relationship a fan has with their favorite sports team or music artist, and our ability to reinforce that, was the real business opportunity. It’s good, but it’s not the only opportunity. There’s also a big demand for event-driven browser themes as well.

We started the non-branded work with sports (baseball, football, basketball and so on), but when we launched Christmas, we saw a real nice spike in users. That was quickly followed by an “Oh, shoot!” moment (word choice edited to maintain our PG rating). The Christmas user base would evaporate after the holiday.

So, we scrambled to get a special “Make Merry or Make History” offering in place, which presented a product for New Year’s and one for the inauguration.

The entire effort was beneficial on several fronts. The non-branded and event-based browsers allow us to maintain our build cycles in between client builds (point #1 above). The need to keep these more transient users inspired our BOOM product platform (see related post here) allowing users to seamlessly move between our themes rather than work to get from one to another (point #2). These products have the same business model as our branded versions, so we continue to build a user base that generates revenue (point #3).

By looking beyond our original product focus, we’ve given our business a lift and hopefully more runway – a plus for any startup. And by delivering an Inauguration theme, we’ve given ourselves until the end of January to build our next event-based BOOM.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: Barack Obama, Branded Browser, brower theme, custom browser, Huffington Post, New Year, start-up | No Comments »