Recently we needed to screen capture an entire website. There are plenty of tools around to capture the entire contents of an individual webpage, but there is not an easy way to capture a complete website.

Since we are working to expand the use of Selenium in our QA process anyway, it was an obvious choice as it has the ability to script the capture of a webpage.

Once installed, all you need to do the URL of your sitemap and the output directory.

Download SeleniumGrabber

By Ivan Todorov, co-founder and CEO, BLITZ

The most exciting innovations at CES this year push the boundaries of connectivity in remarkable ways. Opportunities for more contextualization of content, personalization of experience and a greater ability to capture meaningful data, promise a quantum leap in ROI for marketers with expertise in experience design and analytics.

New display technologies and interfaces will allow us to contextualize content through seamless integration into everyday life. The ability to embed products directly into the digital ecosystem, and advances in augmented reality, print electronics and sensor technology are blurring the lines between the physical and digital world.

Below are a few examples of the contextualization, personalization and data capture innovations on display at CES that will offer incredible new interactions between brands and consumers:

• Samsung’s Smart Window Technology: Samsung’s digital glass display, or “smart window” transforms from clear to opaque and enables real time data visualization of brand content on windows at homes, stores, and other environments, stretching the boundaries of experience design for content creators yet again.

• Flexi/Bendable Screens and Projection Mapping: These innovations allow the connection of content to products and product environments like never before. Marketers can bring touch interaction to new environments with flexible/bendable screens that can live on curved surfaces, and almost any surface can be turned into a dynamic video display with projection mapping.

• Printed Electronics: Printed electronics (which “electrify” printable surfaces) blur the physical and digital worlds and will facilitate widespread flexible displays, smart packaging, smart labels and active clothing. Wireless connectivity takes this to another level – imagine your box of Wheaties giving you a personalized “good morning” message over breakfast. Can you spot the “lit up” areas of the products below?

• IZGO “Ultra Retina” Display: 6.1 inches packed with 2560×1600 pixels (498 pixels per inch). Sharp’s low-power consumption, ultra high pixel density screens will revolutionize what we can do with the quality of text on digital reading devices such as watches, further expanding the possibilities for digital products. The screen you are reading this on simply cannot do justice of detail and picture quality, but try to imagine seeing all the detail of the cathedral below.

• Sensors and Recognition Software: Innovations fromdata-tracking forks to facial recognition in automobiles will give rise to exceptionally personalized content delivery. Combined with the principles of gamification, you get everything from “exer-gaming” as in UnitedHealth’s Dance Dance Revolution Wireless Physical Education Classroom to the Fitbit FLEX, not to mention the iPotty (Google it for yourself!).

• Glasses Free 3D TV: Feel silly wearing 3D glasses at home? VIZIO showcased their glasses free 3D TV tech that actually looked brilliant.

Twitter: @BLITZIvan

Integrated Agency to Lead Brand Strategy and Build Digital Ecosystem
for Multi-venue Entertainment Destination

SANTA MONICA, CA, December 10, 2012 – BLITZ, an independent integrated agency based in Santa Monica, has been awarded agency of record duties for Lucky Strike Entertainment. As lead brand strategist, BLITZ will build Lucky Strike a digital ecosystem to engage and entertain guests at the famed lanes and beyond.

“BLITZ’s strategic capabilities were a key factor in us selecting them as our new agency partner,” explains Lucky Strike CEO Steven Foster. ”The more we spoke with the BLITZ team, it became clear that they had the digital expertise and vision to position Lucky Strike as a destination that is about creating meaningful connections with our customers – taking us beyond being known solely as a bowling destination.”

BLITZ will direct Lucky Strike’s overall branding as well as social media, search, analytics, mobile and location-based marketing strategies.

“Lucky Strike Entertainment is a forward-thinking and digitally savvy company, and we’re thrilled to partner with them to provide the highest quality hospitality to their guests,” said Cathy Saidiner, President, BLITZ. “Together, we’ll make Lucky Strike a favorite destination for guests everywhere they experience the brand, at the lanes, online and beyond.”

Lucky Strike Entertainment is the latest in a recent string of new business wins for BLITZ, building on the agency’s hospitality expertise and adding to the roster of blue chip clients. BLITZ continues to experience tremendous growth, as one of the industry’s most sought after independent agencies with digital DNA.

About BLITZ:
BLITZ is an independent, integrated ad agency that makes brands favorites by creating durable connections with consumers. Recognized as an Advertising Age ‘Agency of the Year,’ BLITZ is a strategic partner for some of the world’s favorite brands, including Disney, TaylorMade, VIZIO, Adobe, FX, Dole, Naked Juice, Microsoft and Honda. A full service agency with digital DNA, BLITZ reaches consumers across every touch point in a brand’s ecosystem through strategy, creative, technical, social, mobile, digital product development, search and analytic expertise. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Santa Monica, the agency is over 100 BLITiZens strong.

BLITZ Names Cathy Saidiner President to Reinvent Digital Brand Leadership

SANTA MONICA, CA April 9 – In response to growing client demand to lead brand communication across all channels, digital agency BLITZ has named former McCann Erickson L.A. president Cathy Saidiner (47) to the new position of president, announced co-founders Ivan Todorov, CEO, and Ken Martin, CCO.

“Digital agencies are rapidly becoming the most powerful partner of progressive marketers. We recognize the opportunity for BLITZ to transform from a digital partner into a 21st century brand partner; one that is poised to lead all aspects of brand strategy and activation for our clients. We’re pleased to have Cathy (Saidiner) join BLITZ,” said Todorov. “She’s going to evolve our client relationships, allowing us to lead strategically while fortifying our existing offerings in brand strategy, creative, technology, social, mobile, digital products, search, media, and measurement.”

As president, Saidiner will lead client services and oversee brand strategy and delivery for BLITZ, leading brands from a trusted point of partnership. “Cathy has immense proficiency and knowledge around forming and managing client relationships. Our clients partner with us in our mission to create unforgettable communications and durable brand connections with consumers and Cathy’s leadership will help us sustain our recent strong growth,” added Todorov.

Saidiner’s hire comes in the wake of recent BLITZ account wins including Dole and VIZIO, and continued growth in key accounts. “BLITZ strives to give brands the courage to speak authentically across all consumer touch-points: digital, emerging and mobile channels, and traditional media platforms. Not only will Cathy serve as a leader in building stronger trusted relationships with clients, her experience makes her a valuable source of expertise inside the agency as we add new discipline groups and expand our account teams,” offered Martin.

“I couldn’t be happier to join this incredibly talented and innovative team. BLITZ is capitalizing on its digital DNA to provide a new level of brand leadership, and I look forward to helping them accelerate that trajectory,” said Saidiner.

Ms. Saidiner, who joined McCann Erickson L.A. as president in 2008, was previously global account director and group account director at TBWA\Chiat\Day (2004-2008). Earlier, she was in brand management at Mars, Inc., and was national advertising manager for Nissan North America’s Infiniti Division. She holds an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and a BBA in Marketing from the University of Texas at Austin.

About

BLITZ is an independent, full-service digital agency focused on building durable connections between brands and consumers. Responsible for strategy, creative, technology, social, mobile, digital product development, search and analytics, the agency is a partner with some of the world’s favorite brands, including: Microsoft, VIZIO, Adobe, Naked, FX, Dole and Honda. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Santa Monica, the company is over one hundred BLITiZens strong and recognized as an Agency of the Year by Ad Age.

BLITZ believes your digital agency is your most important marketing partner. Digital is the fabric of human communication and interaction, the foundation upon which progressive brands build their most valuable consumer connections. Traditional advertising alone is no longer enough. “Listening” is the cost of being heard. BLITZ has created a culture and methodology for strategy and storytelling across multiple consumer touch-points, powered by insights gathered daily from the digital and analog space. By developing an intimate understanding of human motivations and cultures we give brands the courage to behave and communicate authentically.

Recently BLITZ was asked about modifying an audio driven flash site we completed a few years ago. In that time, technology on the internet driving rich consumer experiences has shifted from a plugin based platform dominated by Adobe Flash to a reliance on the native capabilities of the browser. This is significant, as it’s now obvious that mobile is the current trend in browsing. The old project utilized flash’s ability to extract sound data from a playing song and displayed an on-the-fly visualization of the data, similar to a visual EQ. This ability does not currently exist in most native JavaScript engines, though it is proposed. It got us thinking whether or not we could get this same effect running on a non-flash mobile browser. Currently IOS doesn’t support the ability to get this data from a sound file. After spending a couple hours thinking through the possibilities, we settled on a solution. We would preprocess the audio file, extracting the sound spectrum data and process that data in the browser.

The jist of the data-extraction process looks like this:

An Air application loads the mp3 file and lets the song play. As it plays, every 100 milliseconds it will grab the sound spectrum and select parts of it to use. Originally we were planning on using all 256 data points from the right channel, but a single 4-minute mp3 file was spitting out an 11 meg JSON file. Obviously this was a tad excessive… So after some tweaking we settled on grabbing 50 data points (every 5 from 0 to 250), which decreased the file size from 11 megs down to 2.5 megs. And trimming the decimal values down to only 3 decimal points (Thank You Nick Vincent for the idea) got it down to 800k, a size we were happy with. At each 100 millisecond marker, we grab the data, and inject it into an object. we use the time in miliseconds as the key (we had to round it to 100 ms) for the object. Once we have the object populated, we then serialize it to JSON and save it as a text file.

Once we had the data it was just a matter of implementation. Drop 50 dots in the DOM, each corresponding do the 50 data points of the sound spectrum, and move them around as the song plays. Implementation can vary, so we didn’t spend any real time cleaning things up for reuse, the purpose was more of a proof of concept. If we were going to get serious about it, we would write a wrapper JS file that you would pass an audio element, and the path to the JSON file. Then you’d hook up your events and let it handle the rest. If anyone has interest in taking this task on please let us know. We’d actually love to build it out time permitting.

You can view the demo here:

http://dino.blitzstaging.com/demos/soundspectrum/

Please note, the demo only works in safari, chrome and IOS (that was the challenge). You could easily rig this to work on firefox, just wasn’t a priority.

And you can get the source here:

https://github.com/dinopetrone/SoundSpectrum

The source has both the air application and a www folder containing the demo. To get the air application running you have to open in flash and build. I didn’t create an actual .air file. You will also have to run sass to compile the css (sorry its just how we do things here at BLITZ)

Coming from the flash world, I was very much sick of sound visualization. So please don’t take this and just create another sound visualizer… that’s lame. If you have any practical use please let me know. Also, one disclamer, all of this needs a good deal of polish. Again, it was just a POC spike.

If you’ve read all the way to the end of this article and are interested in doing work like this, we’re always looking for people to join the technology team. Check out our Careers Page for a list of open positions.