Ged Carroll

Month: August 2014

  • Jim Yurchenco & other things this week

    Before IDEO was better known for corporate workshops and collaborative sessions; it did really good product design. This great interview / video by IDEO of veteran mechanical engineer and industrial designer Jim Yurchenco. Yurchenco is a throwback to when IDEO designed things.

    Yurchenco worked on the design of the original Apple mouse, in the video he discusses his approach to design. It is also great to see him actually using real tools, rather than just tapping away at a work station. Yurchenco was retiring last week and leaves IDEO with some 80 patents to his name. Alongside the original Apple mouse Yurchenco also worked on the Palm V, in his own words:

    That was a really important product for us, and the industry, Yurchenco says. “It was one of the first cases where the physical design—the feel and touch points—were considered to be as important as the performance

    You can read more on Yurchenco’s work here. I worked on the marketing of the Palm V and Vx. The exterior of the devices set the standard for the smartphones we got a decade later. The problem with the V and Vx is that they were held together with hot glue. Yurchenco made an object of beauty, but one that was very difficult to repair.

    The PDA launched with a lithium ion rechargeable battery around about the time that the Ericsson T28 came on the market. The T28 was the first phone with a lithium ion battery. This allowed Ericsson to make a really small clamshell phone. The Yurchenco design completely encapsulated the battery, rather like the first iPhone years later.

    Subtraction.com did a great job of collating the user interface (UI) designs done by Territory Studios for Guardians Of The Galaxy.

    In the same way that Star Trek, Ghost In The Shell and Star Wars have influenced engineers, who is to say that Territory’s work won’t be the creative DNA of new interfaces in the future?

    In the earlier days of the web, interactive content had a distinctly trippy feel, from site design to ‘Mind’s Eye’ videos and The Shamen’s generative screen saver.  Japanese group BRDG (Bridge) have gone back to that psychedelic feel with this brilliant discordant video:

    Twitter cards are something that is interesting me at work at the moment and I was particularly taken by this interactive one from Acura – the upmarket brand of Honda.

    Pizza Hut Japan, have managed come up with marketing gold by creating an interactive YouTube series based around the grand opening of a pizza restaurant run by cats. Japan is obsessed with cats, which explains the prominence of felines. I am just surprised that Jonathan Hopkins and Nando’s hadn’t done it much earlier…

  • Nearables

    Before we think about nearables; lets go back a few years. Back in the day shops and businesses where digitised using RFID tags that covered everything from lose prevention in shops and libraries (shop lifting to you and I) to providing payment systems like the Octopus and Oystercard. RFID tags are passive devices with a small amount of information on them; electromagnetic waves from a reader ‘powered’ them allowing the data to be read. In essence RFID is rather like the magnetic strip that used to be on the back of credit cards, bank deposit books and on some passports.
    My Oyster card for LDN & my Octopus card for HKG
    Estimote’s Wearables product takes the RFID tag and asks what could be done if the tag became active, self-powered. It is compliant with Apple’s iBeacon standard using low-powered Bluetooth LE radio transmissions to interact with a smartphone.

    Estimote defines the nearables as:

    … a smart, connected object that broadcasts data about its location, motion and temperature.

    The information that nearables can provide can be dynamic, based on simple sensors included in the electronics package. At the moment nearables in sticker form cost some $33/unit and a default battery life for three years.

    This initial version of nearables might be of interest for high value package tracking, like a consignment of vintage wine, fragile museum pieces or high end cigars.

    Although this seems like limited technology at the moment, imagine what improvements could be brought in over future evolutions of it. If I had been told about this in my 20s, I would have thought that nearables came out of the wild imaginings of a James Bond film or similar. Now its aimed at high end supply chain management and logistics.

    More related content here.

    More information
    Nearables are here, introducing Estimote stickers | Estimote Blog

  • Domain registrars + more things

    Anti-Piracy Lawyer Wants Domain Registrars to Silence Critics – interesting approach to the takedown to use domain registrars as a reputation management tool. Governments occasionally take this approach when dealing with websites based overseas, but its rare for a non-state organisation to try and manipulate domain registrars like this. It will be interesting if boutique shops like Consulum or San Frontieres start using domain registrars in this way.

    Android Fragmentation Report August 2014 – OpenSignal – looking at this gives an idea of the kind of challenges devs face

    WPP shares rise as profits come in ahead of forecast | City A.M. – as usual Sorrell’s business forecasts are more interesting than the results.

    The fashion case for mobile phone covers – FT.com – Keely Warwick, contemporary accessories buyer at Selfridges, which has increased its investment in phone and tablet cases by 30 per cent for autumn/winter 2014, says tech accessories are one of the store’s “most rapidly expanding categories” – are cellphone cases the new affordable luxury alongside make up and perfume? Back when I worked on the Palm V there was also luxury cases back then: Jean-Paul Gaultier, Mulberry, Coach et al (paywall)

    The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality (The Verge) – this feels more like a Wired magazine piece than a Verge piece, interesting nonetheless

    Behind Bold Designs, A Thin Skin: Zaha Hadid Sues Publisher For Defamation | Co.Design – this could be the architectural PR home goal equivalent of the McLibel trial

    The story behind the shrinking ranks of Goldman partners – Quartz – shrinking partners as it tries to cut its cloth to suit the new size of banking

    Kay Tye, Maryam Shanechi, and Other Pioneering Young Technologists | MIT Technology Review – its a shame that there isn’t great industrial designers in the group, but some great technologies

    Facebook Assault on Google’s DoubleClick Coming This Fall – The Information – (paywall)

    Adult Women Now Make Up Half of All Gamers, Outnumber Boys Under 18 Years Old – Gamers gonna game. – which moves gaming back to where it was when Atari made consoles. I wonder if the proportion of men over 30 playing games is still as high as it was

    Tony Alva Interview / Slam City Skates Blog – interview with one of the pioneers of skateboarding

    Smart wristbands gaining traction for site-specific payments and passes | JWT Intelligence – Disney showed the way, though it could be considered to be an evolution of the likes of Octopus and Oyster cards

    Jolla boss says mobile innovation has stalled | Marketing Interactive – stalled probably isn’t the word that I would use, I would say that we’ve hit a lull in mobile innovation and that innovation in general is ‘lumpy’ More related content here.

    The Internet of Things will be vulnerable for years, and no one is incentivized to fix it | VentureBeat – keep your home dumb

    Chinese internet censors target collective activities more than sensitive subjects, says Harvard report | South China Morning Post – implications in this for crisis monitoring

    Why John McAfee Is Paranoid About Mobile | Dark Reading – probably a reason why the US Government is now investigating stinger usage

    Most smartphone users download zero apps per month – Quartz – it kind of makes sense once I find something I tend to stick with it, am sure my app downloads would be below one a month now unless something with compelling utility comes a long. But then I don’t game

    Sony selfie camera pictures leaked ahead of launch | BGR – interesting idea. I know some people who have a Chanel perfume bottle shaped iPhone case so the look and feel makes sense. Would they use this alongside an iPhone though?

    Amazon China to Deliver Foreign Products Directly — China Internet Watch – Amazon is less than 3% of Chinese e-tailing

    Promiscuous media: News needs to go where the people are, not the other way around – Media companies like BuzzFeed, NowThis News and Fusion are increasingly creating content that is designed to live on other apps and services rather than just including links to their websites. – Web 2.0 model repeated with attribution being the important thing since that will bring people in to then see advertising

  • Nokia E90 Communicator

    The last time I was excited about anything coming out of the World Mobile Congress was 2007 with the launch of the Nokia E90. That year the World Mobile Congress  was held in early February 2007, some four months before the launch of the first iPhone. At that time, Nokia was king of the world, their beautifully made hardware was made with magnesium alloy chassis’ on the E-series business handsets. Symbian was a user friendly if flakey operating system.
    Nokia e90 and 6085
    It took business smartphones to the next level with the Nokia E90 Communicator; a powerful handset with a full sized keyboard hidden beneath the exterior of a candy-bar phone.
    Nokia e90 and 6085
    The Nokia E90 was a leap forward from the previous 9X00-series communicators in computing power and connectivity. The E90 supported Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, numerous bands of GSM, UMTS cellular radio and HSDPA – which heralded a near broadband web experience – network permitting. Beyond connectivity, the phone sported a decent-sized screen some 800 pixels wide, a full keyboard that I managed to type blog posts on in real-time and a GPS unit that allowed you to tag photos on Flickr or use Google Maps.

    There was also a built-in camera that was ideal for use with Skype when you had a wi-fi connection. Setting up an IMAP email account was a doodle. And unlike one of the current crop of phablets I could fold the clamshell case and put in the side pocket of my carpenter jeans. I used the E90 Communicator as a lightweight laptop replacement, similar to the way I currently use the MacBook Air.

    The achilles heel of the E90 Communicator was the Symbian software. I had some 3,500 contacts at the time in my computer, when I attempted to synch it across to my phone it bricked. I had to have it reflashed. It was not a memory issue, but that the OS seemed unable to handle a business contact book. I managed with a sub-set of the contacts on there. Eventually while in Hong Kong on business, the phone stopped holding a charge, it would chew through a battery in 30 minutes. I got a replacement battery for it but it made no difference. Given that mine was a developer programme model phone, no one in Shenzhen would attempt to repair the device.
    Nokia E90
    The sticker in the back of the phone was like kryptonite for the most hardened shanzhai hardware hacker.

  • Japanese week

    Things that made my day this week has a lot of a Japanese feel, this maybe some sort of invisible psychological hand of some sort as I am currently reading Ghost In The Shell Man-Machine Interface by Masamune Shirow, but more on that later.

    First up Bose have been positioning their brand as having a love for music through a series of short films, my favourite one was about how Japanese people have taken the Jamaican dancehall sound and done their own thing with it. Japanese dancers have won competitions in Jamaica. Like hip-hop and Chicano car culture before it, Japan put their own spin on it rather doing straight cultural appropriation. 

    Usagi Yojimbo is an American comic drawn by a Japanese American author Stan Sakai and based on classic Japanese chambara film, so you can imagine how psyched I was to know that this was a proof-of-concept prior to a possible animated film.

    Toyo Tires have combined their Japanese heritage with tire technology to come up with yakatas (traditional summer weight kimonos) with a tire tread based print that still didn’t seem out of place.
    Toyo Tire yakatas
    Toyo Tire yakatas
    Moving away from the land of the rising sun to China, Apple’s new iPad featuring Yaoband who use an iPad in a similar way to the way the Art Of Noise used the Fairlight CMI or hip-hop producers used the famous Akai MPC workstation series. It’s interesting that Apple is focusing the light back on creativity.

    Finally a vintage film about the MTR in Hong Kong complete with a stuffy voiceover and pseudo-Krautrock backing track. The trains look retro-futuristic in a Logan’s Run kind of way

    More Japan related content here.