Jordi Romkema

The Nickelodeon Cartoon Creator is an interactive application where kids can create their own Spongebob Squarepants. They are literally the director of their own cartoon: they decide on the story, how the characters will be animated, what the set looks like, what background music is playing and much more.

The kids can edit and customize their cartoon, save it and come back later to work on it again. If they’re happy they can decide to publish their cartoon online. This will send the cartoon to Nickelodeon for moderation because every cartoon must be checked for explicit content first. When this is done the cartoon can be seen online and they can send it to their friends.

The Cartoon Creator is entirely made in Flash/Actionscript. The cartoons aren't actualy saved as cartoons or movie files, instead the keyframes are saved into an XML file. So everytime you view a cartoon it needs to be build up from the XML data. This has the advantage that resources used in the cartoons such as characters can be swapped by newer version anytime whereas regular movie files are static.
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On February 20th Nickelodeon launched a new website in The Netherlands and in Belgium. We created a new interactive playground for the kids. We got fed up with the old site, especially when it came to the content management system. Besides the CMS the site desperately needed a new and fresh design because the navigation on the old site was terrible. Anyway, now all of that is in the past and luckily the new site is a huge success. Read the rest... »

I came back just a week ago from Salt Lake City but it feels like it has been months ago, figures what just a week of work can do to you... Anyway I finally had the chance to sit down and upload my pictures to Flickr. Also, I made a photo album at MyPublisher. I ordered it on Friday and according to Fedex it will be here on Monday, hooray! It's an awesome service where you can create your own photo books with different layouts and other customizations you can do in a program called BookMaker. I can't wait to see what it looks like when I have it in my hands, 50 pages of pretty pictures. Meanwhile you can see the photo book I made online here.

Around 4000 Nickelodeon fans have helped launch the new Nickelodeon website on Wednesday February 20th. Kids could ‘earn’ puzzle pieces by answering questions together about Nickelodeon characters and shows. When all of the pieces were put together the new site was launched which was much faster than expected because the children gave 72.000 correct answers within just 10 minutes. That’s about 150 correct answers per second! The launch was therefore a great success. Patrick Alders, General Manager North Europe Nickelodeon: “The new and improved website is more visual and interactive to better connect with the way children browse the Internet these days. The site offers children more possibilities to express and develop themselves creatively. With a broad selection of games, video’s and the Cartoon Creator Nickelodeon stimulates creativity.”

The first day
A total of 30.000 children (unique visitors) have visited the website on the first day. On average they have viewed 17 pages per person and stayed around 19 minutes on the site to discover all the new things. The Cartoon Creator was already extremely popular from the moment the new site launched. On this first day around 800 cartoons have been created by enthusiastic SpongeBob Squarepants fans.

The first week
The success of the first day continued the rest of the first week. At the end of the week the new site generated 245.000 unique visitors. On average the visitors stayed around 18 minutes on the website and together they viewed almost four million pages. The average visitor viewed 5.1 videos in TurboNick, Nickelodeon’s online video-on-demand service.

The Cartoon Creator remained successful: in a week the children made 10.383 cartoons! Just like the Cartoon Creator the games remained popular with the kids. The generated great figures: the different games were played 243.000 times by visitors.

It has been an amazing two weeks full of sun, snow and fun in Salt Lake City and Park City. Utah truly has the greatest snow on earth. We arrived back in The Netherlands early Sunday morning and it has been raining ever since, go figure! Back home to work again... I'll place the pictures of the trip on Flickr very soon, just need to sort them out first because we made around 800 of them. Probably not all of them are that interesting.

Oh and I would like to get back to the greater SLC area and stay there! So if anyone has a job offer in the area... I can only imagine: work during the week and skiing in the weekends! Ahhhh, dreams dreams dreams...

Almost time for my vacation! This time tomorrow I'll be sitting in a chair on an airplane to Atlanta and then after a quick stop-over I'm off to Salt Lake City! Two weeks of sun, snow and skiing in ski resorts such as Park City, Alta, Brighton, Solitude, Snowbasin, Powder Mountain... ah I can't wait!

So in the coming weeks I probably won't update my blog, unless the weather is terrible but hopefully that won't happen. See you in two weeks!

Oh meanwhile, Nokia Trends Lab is being held in our MTV studio's later this evening. It's an event about mobile technology where you can experience it hands-on. It's being presented by MTV, looks promising so far...

Finally the two Nickelodeon sites I mentioned earlier (See: New Nickelodeon sites to launch in 14 days...) have launched succesfully today. You can see them at www.nickelodeon.nl and www.nickelodeon.be, both sites are obviously only in Dutch. Screenshots and more information will follow... but for now, have a piece of cake:

For more pictures, check my Flickr photostream.

Nickelodeon will launch two brand new websites in February in The Netherlands and in Belgium. At nickelodeon.nl and nickelodeon.be the characters and presenters kids see on television will come to life and they can really join in on the action with the innovative new tool called the Cartoon Creator. With the Cartoon Creator the kids are the director of their own SpongeBob Squarepants cartoon. They create the cartoon, animate the actors, change the background music, create the story, in other words: The kids are in charge. Their own cartoon can be just as good as the one you see on television!

Apart from the Cartoon Creator, the website will get a more interactive and social feel. Kids want to be entertained obviously, but on the Internet they especially want to experience something, do something and share it with other kids. That's why there are lots of new options such as weblogs of the presenters, send-a-friend, a new highscore system for games, interactive photo albums, TurboNick (Nickelodeon's video-on-demand player) and the Cartoon Creator. The kids can also create their own myNick page which is a private page where they can manage their favorite Nick games and videos and will always be able to rediscover their own creations.

Also special about the new site is its launch. On February the 20th the site will go down in the morning. From 2 o' clock in the afternoon we trust on all the kids in The Netherlands and in Belgium to help get the new site live. All of the kids who will visit either nickelodeon.nl or nickelodeon.be will be able to answer questions about different Nickelodeon characters. Each correct answer will help to get closer to the end result: piece by piece puzzle pieces will appear with each amount of correct questions from all the kids. If all the puzzle pieces have appeared the site will be accessible for everyone!

Obviously the sites will have Dutch content only but I still wanted to share it because this has been my project since September 2007. Only 14 days to go!

It's easy to turn on the TV and get bombarded with ringtone commercials. I normally create my own ringtones from downloaded mp3's with Adobe Audition, but I understand that for the average phone user it's not that simple and they have to get them elsewhere. Some of you pay for your ringtones, but why pay if you can get it for free? That's probably the same thing the creators of Nakko.com thought when they launched their site. On Nakko you can download not only free ringtones but also wallpapers, movies and games.

When you are a registered member you can add stuff in your locker which you can download later on. When you download ringtones you can send it to your phone with a text message. Or you can download the ringtone to your computer first and then send it with Bluetooth or a connection cable to your phone. It seems like you can only download WMA files so I had to convert them to MP3 first for my phone, but it worked and with just a few clicks I had about 20 ringtones on my phone! Check out my profile on Nakko.

Uploading your own stuff is fairly easy and intuitive with the Nakko editor. You upload your mp3 file and then you can drag markers to the part of the song you want to create a ringtone from. I suspect the ease of uploading and downloading content attracts a lot more people in the future and Nakko will become very successful.

Today I stumbled upon the portfolio of Melissa Hie. When I first saw the entry page I wasn't really that impressed but when I clicked the "Ready, Go!" button I was hooked to this site! When you click the Go button the screen slides away and the next screen comes up. Looking under the hood, it's a pretty simple but impressive combination of CSS and Javascript that enables these slide animations from screen to screen. It's a technique that made me say to myself "Why haven't I thought of that?", which happens multiple times a day

The design is excellent, just wish there was more content. But it's a portfolio and it will obviously grow in time since Melissa Hie is a very skillful developer/designer. I added some screenshots below but it is best when you experience it yourself