Green Tomato are a Hong Kong mobile agency that I have a lot of time for. They were responsible for TalkBox a proto-OTT voice messenger solution. TalkBox moved way from being a consumer product to become an enterprise push-to-talk competitor. More recently Green Tomato have done a lot of work on the integration of mobile apps, with ‘other screen content’. They have done great work on digital retailing experiences in Hong Kong. Unfortunately their work has been ahead of its time and risks eclipsed by other people building on the likes of iBeacon.
I particularly like the demo below. It works with a Coca-Cola video advert to increase engagement. It could be applied just as easily with with traditional media like cinema or TV advertising or new video advertising formats on YouTube or YouKu. It makes the advertising spend work harder which is one of the key reasons why Mondelez are so excited by mobile marketing.
The challenge with this technology is that it makes the job of creative directors harder. Interaction becomes a key part of the experience rather than just a story amplifier. The technology is less amenable than social media to be bolted on to the side of a campaign like a rocket motor.
Squeeze on international-school locals | SCMP – I don’t understand why schools are so expensive in the first place, and if I had a kid starting them off in school I would want to put them into the local school system to learn Cantonese and Mandarin (paywall)
How Bad is China’s Moral Crisis? | New Republic – not convinced given that western society tends to view things in black and white and traditional Chinese morals tend to be more nuanced and contextual
I’ve blogged a few times before about the merits and flaws in the current iterations of Google Glass. I consider Google Glass to be an interesting idea; because of the potential contextual nature of its content provision; but the product is flawed and ultimately a failure in the consumer space due to its product design and current limitations of technology. The Atlantic carried a very interesting piece that hyphothesised that Google Glass was failing because it was an assistive technology and assistive technologies make use feel week. However, if that was the case Glass should be fine with just a rebranding exercise, rather like glasses moved from being a weakness to a hipster accessory.
Whilst I agree with the hypothesis that Google Glass can assist people, I don’t think that ‘disability aids’ are the correct analogy for Google Glass; instead Google Glass augments the majority of current users in theory; it is a telephone rather than a hearing aid. It is about making the user even better; think of it as having the personal assistant who whispers in your ear at a party the names of the people that you should know and where you met them previously, a personal concierge service like a shopper or a tour guide.
Failings in Google Glass
Google Glass isn’t discrete. The glance up display Google Glass has a level of social and user awkwardness similar to early implementations of the touch display that tried to incorporate it with a keyboard like the HP-150. Google are on to something, the use of sneaky applications that would provide the right information at the right time. But the very act of using the device is a big tell that is both distracting and takes away the social impact of the information provided
Google Glass is interruption-based media. From point of view of someone conversing with a Google Glass wearer, the sudden pauses and ‘zombie-like’ eye drift are disconcerting. Rather like if someone kept answering their phone in a meeting. The problem here is one of technology, Sony’s smart eyeglass prototype and Epson’s Moverio BT-200 which display the content directly in front of the wearers vision are more likely paths for a future successful solution as would some sort of discrete earbud with aural content delivery
Google Glass has too short a battery life. With a usable battery life of just 45 minutes usage time, users have to manage the device to husband power resources. Whilst Google calls this a design feature to try and prevent wholesale privacy invasion; the downside is the audience distraction. The reality is that I don’t think battery life is a feature but a function of battery technology failings at the moment. This could improve overtime with improvements in chip power consumption, power management techniques and incremental improvements in battery chemistry formulation
Glass Rage
Google Glass incidents happen for a number of reasons:
The wider socio-economic tensions that are breaking out in San Francisco between the digital haves and the local have-nots. It is a similar but more visible tension to that seen in Dorset or Cornwall as moneyed London city workers buy a weekend place or telecommute from the country and in turn drive up property prices out of the reach of local people. You can see it in Central London with bankers, foreign investors and Russian oligarchs looking for sanctuary and safety from the British legal system. The problem is of course, that gentrification kills the very elements that attract tech workers to San Francisco: authenticity, diversity, a little bit of risk-taking, arts and culture. This is what happens when Richard Florida’s cluster theory reaches a ‘point of inflection’; when the creative classes devour and destroy what they craved just by the nature of their sheer numbers
The unknown. The majority of Glass users who have undergone a well-deserved drubbing seem to conduct themselves in an anti-social way using their device as if they have some divine right. Without wearing Glass they would be described as foolish, stupid or even borderline sociopaths. It is the same with most technologies, early adopters through their social normative compass out the window when they are trying the new, new thing and are then surprised when the world pushes back. Common sense and good manners should be a hygiene factor rather than a service pack. It takes years or longer to get this right; mobile etiquette is still an issue, some three decades after cellphones started to become popular
There are some use cases for glass that make sense
Glass would be much more useful, (at least until the technology is able to address some of the shortcomings listed above) in an industrial environment; for instance working in a tight space servicing a jet engine or augmenting a warehouse picking team’s work. All of this is dependent on the device being sufficiently robust to deal with a dusty, solvent-laden environment safely. It is probably no coincidence that Google is now trying to pivot towards the enterprise, but I could counsel against using Glass at the moment in customer-facing / front-of-house roles.
Daring Fireball: No One Said Following Is Easy – what John Gruber misses is that Nokia’s Symbian phones also had touch for instance the Nokia E90 Communicator had both a qwerty keyboard and resistive touch screen
Coming back to the UK reminded me of how much Hong Kong is a cinema-centric culture despite the technology, mobile devices and amazing restaurants. Going to the cinema there was literally half the price of London, which means that I am much more critical of the entertainment shown. The first film I have seen that was actually worth it’s ticket price since I have got back is The Raid 2.
The Raid put the Indonesian martial arts scene on the map with a highly kinetic film that owed much of its visual intensity to computer games. The Raid 2 follows on just hours from the first film; but is an entirely different beast. As you can see from the trailer, there is still lashings of Indonesian-style ultra-violence
But the film’s pace ebbs and flows in order to tell a more detailed story this time around, which feels very much like an early John Woo, pre-Hollywood. There is a nod to Quentin Tarantino with some of the gimmicky characters such as Hammer Girl.
The usual list of things that made my day this week. I have made a point of excluding Heartbleed related content just because it is so depressing. Instead I give you:
What seems to be a mix of hacking, techno-political comment and locative art; Watch Your Privacy app for Google Glass acts as a kind of dynamic ‘dead spot’ map showing CCTV cameras and other public surveillance systems based on OpenMap data.
Bob Hoffman’s ITV Spotlight keynote at Advertising Week 2014 on The Golden Age of Bullshit which was designed to spur debate on the failed predictions of advertising experts over the past decade, with particular focus on the social media marketing of brands.
Kids React To Walkman. What was interesting about this is how the children struggled to understand the industrial design since they were so used to the pictures under glass metaphor of the modern smartphone.
At the other extreme is this video made by German watchmaker NOMOS Glashuette showing the process that goes into making one of their watches, which is I found breathtaking.
I love this film about Neal Unger, a 60 year old man who is a self-professed beginner at skateboarding. His tao of skateboarding is very interesting; where he is talking about being in the moment. It reminded me a lot of what I liked about the process of DJ’ing or scuba diving back in the day before I came to London.
I spent much of January in Shenzhen and went to a concert played by a local band. I can’t remember much about their music save that the lead singer work a bowler hat and seemed to influenced by 1990s Brit Pop and A Clockwork Orange. What was remarkable about the gig was that for the first time in about 10 years I saw concert goers dancing, swaying, being in the moment. More importantly I saw them watch the concert with their view unmediated by a smartphone screen which allowed them to actually participate rather than record the event.
It was remarkable that digital technology had not invaded this happening as the audience were tech-savvy Chinese middle class, a demographic where the smartphone has already achieved ubiquity.
Kevin Kelly’s book What Technology Wants posits that technology like progress is a natural unstoppable force moving forward. This movement forward changes life, sometimes in ways that aren’t necessarily great. Part of the issue is that social norms don’t move at the same space as technology.
I was looking through Smart magazine: a Japanese men’s magazine and came across an advert for a digital wedding ring box.
ENUOVE is a costume jewellery brand that has come up with the movie box; a small media player built into the wedding ring box which can accepts a small video clip in a number of popular formats.
I found this advertisement interesting and cut it out of the magazine because it was a great example of digital inserting itself into social norms of one of the most important life events of all. I tried to understand what role the digital technology would play. Usually in the west, the ring is presented with the man down on one knee whilst he asks the object of his affection to marry him whilst presenting the ring.
My initial reaction was to think that the video allowed the man to use technology to mediate the discussion rather than having to worry about fluffing whatever speech that they had put together. But what would the recipient think this cop out of doing a proposal by box.?
I asked two colleagues who were currently engaged. The first one pointed out that a non-verbal proposal was considered ok if it was suitably grandiose:
Flying over a tropical beach in a helicopter where the proposal is written in the pristine sand below in two-storey letters
Having the proposal appear on an advertising board on Time Square
Hiring a sign writing plane to proclaim the offer across the skies
I thought that these were pretty extreme examples? Outlier proposals? My colleague indicated that this was the case.
The second colleague I asked introduced me to this video below, billed as the first lip dubbed wedding proposal that seemed to involved a whole neighbourhood as the cast.
Isaac’s lip dub proposal has been seen over 25 and a half million times. She thought that the digital box was ok; it was a nice novelty and would be reasonable for a proposal if the prospective groom didn’t have the gumption to pull off something at least as epic as Isaac’s lip dub wedding.
She might keep the box longer, as she didn’t even know where her current ring box was, it got lost after the first few weeks after the engagement.
Now admittedly my study is very unscientific, but my conclusion was that digital had permeated the wedding proposal in a different way to what I had anticipated. YouTube has had a thermonuclear effect on what my colleagues thought was an acceptable / adequate wedding proposal. It had to have drama, spectacle and a uniqueness to it. Their major life moments would take on a large scale cinematic element.
The movie box offered a lower key alternative that was still acceptable due to it’s unique nature for a groom who couldn’t drill family numbers for a few months in performance of a lip dub or have their feelings writ large on a beach in the Maldives.
Digital had already permeated our big life moments and we’re all as eccentric as Stanley Kubrick.
Need for speed: Testing the networking performance of the top 4 cloud providers | GigaOm - I was one of the original non-US beta testers for WeberWorks – an online environment / workflow tool for doing and running PR programmes with real-time reporting and the thing that kept killing my usage of the tool was network latency, it was like working in treacle. Interesting to see GigaOm bringing this up as a key performance indicator
Another Chinese Counterfeit Product: Social-Media Followers | Advertising Age - One Asian ad exec who asked not to be named described buying fake fans to give an ego jolt to a new venture in China. The rate, he said, was about 5 U.S. cents for a zombie that’s just a name, and 16 cents for higher-quality fakes with some content on their profiles. In addition to zombie fans, there’s a market for faux re-tweets and comments too
Chinese Exports and Imports Unexpectedly Fell in March | NYTimes - the significance of the data for the Chinese economy was clouded by uncertainty over the extent to which exporters and importers were timing shipments to profit from currency market shifts (paywall)
Ok so this is actually a day late, but here are the things that have made my day this week.
I love this spot for Thai life insurance that has been doing the rounds on Facebook for a week or so
Oreo partnering with a gourmet food truck operator to come up with new creative ways of using Oreos and trying to engage audiences on the Oreo Tumblr account
A custom-made arcade ride and Oculus Rift glasses provide this awesome hacked together Tron lightcycle gaming experience. The game itself came from from Overflow Interactive
Starck Design came up with functioning libary designed around flight cases for troubled regions that I think would be awesome as office furniture or as a home work space.
Finally the new Liverpool kit launch had pre-occupied the office this week and was a multi-channel effort with experiential, PR and online channels all being used to build an event that reverberated around the world
At the end of last week Amazon unveiled Dash an accessory to aid ordering from its Fresh grocery service. Fresh promises free same-day delivery on orders of over $35 of more than 500,000 Amazon items including fresh and local products; including products from respected restaurants and coffee shops. It has been rolled out in three major US markets: San Francisco, Seattle and Southern California.
Fresh has a mobile application on both Android and iOS to aid in shopping – which makes the launch of Dash much more curious. Dash is a piece of dedicated hardware which implies a failing in terms of ease-of-use for the smartphone application. Amazon obviously thinks that Fresh customers will be heavy high-touch, high-value consumers in order to spend this much trouble engineering and manufacturing the hardware and supporting services to make Dash work.
Dash is a product that wouldn’t be out of place in a collection of Braun kitchen appliances. It’s hardware interface so simple it looks really intuitive.
The Dash can be seen as part of a wider movement from converged general purpose devices to dedicated hardware. It is interesting to compare and contrast the Dash with the :CueCat; how just over a decade can make such a difference to a product.
Back in 2000, Wired magazine sent out the :CueCat to US subscribers of their magazine. The :CueCat was a barcode scanner that allowed readers to augment the print content with a link to web content. Think a prehistoric QRCode. It didn’t work that well for a number of reasons. The codes were proprietary, partly due to consumer privacy requirements and intellectual property around barcodes. In order to use the :CueCat one needed to be connected to an internet-enabled PC via a wired USB or PS2 connection. Using the :CueCat was no easier than typing in a URL or searching via Google; a search engine on the ascendancy at the time. The :CueCat was a spectactular failing for the media industry looking to get to grips with digital media.
Moving forward to the Dash, the equivalent computing power of that desktop PC has been squeezed into a device that fits in the palm of your hand. Wireless connectivity provides a more flexible connection that removes contextual restrictions on the Dash compared to the :CueCat. The web extended computing so that the website and the PC or mobile device in a symbiotic relationship where it isn’t clear to consumers just were one starts and the other finishes.
The Dash takes inputs via a product barcode and voice memos. Despite the technology advances over the past ten years with the likes of Siri and S-Voice; there will likely be some sort of human intervention required to make these voice memos work. This is at odds with Amazon’s warehouse robot systems and lack of a human customer service face over a telephone line.
This voice memo challenge is not trivial, it was a contributing factor in SpinVox’s failure. The Fresh programme because of its logistical challenges will be hard to scale, and the economics of the Dash have to be carefully balanced between existing products that are repurchased via barcode scan and new or fresh products that would use the voice memo. Acquiring basket growth becomes incrementally more expensive. Over time the system may learn voice commands rather like Google’s old telephone-powered search; on the one hand local area focus is likely to limit dialect variations, on the other sample size maybe hard to scale to be statistically significant for machine learning.
Talk gets cheaper | The Economist - Of the 1.2 billion smartphones that will be shipped this year, almost half will cost less than $200 and one-fifth will cost less than $100
2014 China smartphone market and industry – Digitimes - China market to reach 422 million smartphones in 2014, with 278 million units contributed by China-based smartphone vendors. The continued expansion by international vendors Samsung and Apple will push up their sales to almost 144 million units, accounting for nearly 4% growth from 2013 (paywall)
