Web users form first impressions of web pages in as little as 50 miliseconds (1/20th of a second), according to Canadian researchers. In the blink of an eye, web surfers make nearly instantaneous judgments of a web site’s “visual appeal.” Through the “halo effect” first impressions can color subsequent judgments of perceived credibility, usability, and ultimately influence our purchasing decisions. Creating a fast-loading, visually appealing site can help websites succeed.

As websites have matured from marketing brochures to daily business tools, this “halo effect” should have bearing on user adoption of web applications like Wiredrive. Our goal is to create a visually appealing interface that makes daily use more pleasant.

We will be in lovely Las Vegas January 22 to 24 for the Digital Signage conference at the Venetian Hotel. What is Digital Signage, you may ask? Video walls, displays in Airports, plasma screens in grocery stores… they are all part of a growing movement to build your own private label TV networks. Digital Signage is almost a cross between TV and the Web, showing video in the middle and information on the edges.

MS has announced a deal to offer for free the Flip4Mac plug-in from Telestream that will allow Mac OS X users to play Windows Media video and audio directly from Apple’s QuickTime Player software.

This is great news, as the WMP experience on Mac has always been sub-par. We recommend everyone download the free plugin from Telestream immediately.

So we’ve made it through 2 big conferences back to back, CES and Macworld. This is the first year we’ve actually cared about Consumer Electronics, largely because of one announcement - Viiv (rhymes with Live) from Intel. What is VIIV and why should you care? Reading through the press releases, Viiv is somewhat unclear but emerging in importance, so we wanted to tackle an explanation.

In a nutshell, Viiv is a platform for entertainment PCs, much as Centrino is a platform for mobile computing. Viiv is a combination of hardware - a processor (core duo) and motherboard - and coordination - including commitments from 110 OEMs (AOL, Dell, DirecTV) and content companies (NBC) to make their multimedia products and content work together inside the home. Clearly, this same equipment will be very useful for professional media making as well.

Viiv computers will easily play back 1080i HD shows in 7.1 sorround sound audio on relatively inexpensive hardware. Viiv will introduce video DRM capabilities, essential for highly sensitive digital dailies for movies.. It will also mean Set Top Boxes (read DirecTV) will work in this mix. In a professional setting, this means that Ad Agency executives will be able review high resolution spots easily in their offices.

Macworld followed CES one week later. Apple introduced the new iMac and MacBook Pro with the same CPU used in the Viiv platform, without using the word Viiv. Many people expected Apple to announce a Mac Mini with a digital media adapter to play nice with the new Intel Chips. What’s interesting here is Intel’s Viiv platform is build around Microsoft’s Windows Media format, where Apple uses Quicktime and Fairplay. So instead of focusing on media consumption (like Intel did the week before) with computers, Steve Jobs talked about media creation with the program iLife. So far, Apple has confined the media consumption to the iPod.