Ged Carroll

Category: culture | 文明 | 미디어와 예술 | 人文

Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.

Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.

Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.

Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.

Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.

More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.

  • Mr Switch & things that made last week

    The winning set by Mr Switch from the 2014 DMC mixing championship. What becomes apparent from the Mr Switch performance is how much digital changes turntablism as an art form and skill. Mr Switch uses a Churchill speech before cutting into hip hop standards. In the past there would be people each side to feed the records in. There is no stickered vinyl to mark cut and start points. Instead these seem to be preset on the laptop using Serato Scratch Live.

    There was much more of a focus on cutting rather than ‘musical scratches’ a la DJ Supreme.

    But a good number of skills remain, look at Mr Switch cutting from one to another record. This would be familiar to someone who had seen Chad Jackson, Cash Money or DJ Cheese win their crown. The behind the back cross fader flick is a flourish popular from when I started DJing.

    Tai Ping Advertising Co. Limited’s advert for Audi is as much an advertisement for the city of Hong Kong as much as it is for the car

    There is also a ‘making of’ film as well. The execution is right for Hong Kong, but isn’t necessarily on brand for Audi. Also the sound effects are very overdone for the pedestrian driving manoeuvres being undertaken. It makes a refreshing change from the usual Audi marketing, sponsoring society parties in showrooms

    Carli Davidson shake puppies video is just too awesome. The slow motion video captures the amount of force going on. Look at the torque steer as the front and rear paws slide in opposite direction with  each shake. Secondly the fluid nature of biology is obviously looking at the shakes themselves. You can see a similar effect when you see boxers hitting each other, but this is much cuter. 

    Ice Cube on Sesame Street. I can’t believe I just wrote that, but this is for real. It shows how hip hop has moved from underground culture that those in power tried to crush, to the mainstream. So what is it like? Ice Cube and Elmo is really, really good. 

    And finally for more serious content, a great article in Advertisng Age about Kraft getting real about online advertising, I am curious to know what took them so long and how this will impact online advertising around the world. Agencies have known about this for years, Unilever and Procter & Gamble have been trying to get change for a few years. Kraft is very behind the curve with this realisation. 

  • Dorothy & things that made last week

    Dorothy

    Dorothy by iStrategy Labs is a really interesting use of haptic for discrete navigation information. Glanceable interfaces are important for smartphone devices and wearables to work in the next world. Haptics allow this to be taken to the next level, encouraging glances only when needed, or not at all in some circumstances. Technology mediated behaviour would become much more fluid, indistinguishable from a human with no technology, but perfect contextual knowledge.

    A very simple example of this would be the Jæger-LeCoultre Memovox alarm watch from 1950, that relied on a mechanical self-winding (automatic) watch movement.

    Kovert Designs

    Kovert Designs seem to be taking a similar approach with their jewellery; as does Casio with their BlueTooth G-shocks. BlueTooth LE (low energy) dramatically changes how the technology can be used, making wearables to wireless tags a much more practical proposition.

    William Gibson

    I am really looking forward to William Gibson’s new book and this interview with American magazine Mother Jones shows that he has not lost his edge in telling truths from the future. The scope of his   William Gibson: The Future Will View Us “As a Joke” | Mother Jones

    Porter Tokyo collaboration with Isaora

    Porter’s collaboration with Isaora are always interesting, but I have really fallen for the Filo pack, with its digital smoke print. Porter Tokyo have built the bag out of Cordura to create the kind of burley design you’d expect from more tactical vendors. The digital smoke pattern is ideal for urban living including hiding the grime of everyday commutes. Unfortunately I can’t justify buying it because I have a perfectly good Mystery Ranch bag.

    Physical interface design

    I really like this physical interface designed for use on iPads. The pictures under glass interface has its limitations which this design draws attention to.

    This design takes the best of software and physical design and melds them together. Of course, how this can be commercialised is another matter of finding the killer application.

  • Ontheroof & things that made last week

    Russian crew ontheroof took their skills to Hong Kong, hacking one of the city’s iconic electronic billboards mounted on the top of an unfeasibly tall building. Ontheroof have attracted sponsorship from large corporates despite the illegal nature of their work. They’ve worked with brands like Huawei and Canon cameras.

    Their risk profile would preclude many western brands from collaborating with them. I was surprised that Canon did a deal with them.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if they were weren’t demonetised on YouTube due to their risky and illegal behaviour. Even if landlords were open-minded, their insurance company certainly wouldn’t be. It isn’t about getting ontheroof to sign a waiver; but all the unintended consequences:

    • They could fall off and hit someone
    • The building could be sued for damages due to the trauma of watching one of them fall of a building to their death

    If they used safety harnesses their content would lose its appeal as they are competition with other crews looking to ever more extreme footage.

    Not too sure if the swiftly added disclaimer would be enough to stop the lawyer letters coming through the letter box with this ode to Invisalign braces. When does parody become slander.

    Wee Scottish travel agent Thorne Travel put together a unique YouTube advert. I am guessing that it go nowhere near a legal team before it was uploaded on YouTube. Not too sure that they have permission from David Guetta for the soundtrack or Disney for the appearance of Mickey and Minnie Mouse – which probably explains why it got taken down. I thought that the N.W.A. soundtracked remix of the video was inspired. It also provided material for The Poke.

    The Poke have remixed some of their videos including a Halloween themed one with Michael Jackson’s Thriller the soundtrack and strategically placed pumpkins.

    Warner Brothers are pushing out to Western audiences Black Butler, a Japanese live action adaption of a Faustian manga tale. If you like anime like Death Note, you’ll like Black Butler.

    Finally, Agence France Presse put together a really good animation on how Ebola attacks the body, surprisingly it was hosted on DailyMotion.

  • Walmart + other things

    Walmart online to offline retailing

    A really interesting video with Walmart that looks at the interface between online and offline retailing. Particularly interesting take on mobile payment form factors. Amazon presents an existential threat to the Walmart business. Walmart isn’t going down without a fight. It has innovated in the past on using technologies like data mining. More recently Walmart has been making strategic purchases across the online retail realm. 

    More retail related content here

    Water resistance

    The reality of watch water resistance is that it is usually measured in a pressurised laboratory rig. Five years ago Casio took their Frogman model from the G-Shock range and did the test in open water off the coast of Japan. It shows the reality of the watch being exposed to a depth of 200M. The two most disappointing aspects of this video are:

    • It hasn’t got as much viewer love as it deserves
    • They failed to come across any diakaiju during the dive and we don’t know what Japan’s beloved son Godzilla (ゴジラ Gojira) thinks of the G-Shock range

    Name generator

    Citizenfour the Edward Snowden documentary launched this week, which prompted a lot of NSA product name silliness including too much time spent on the NSA Product Name Generator

    Mascots

    The people at Rocket News have come up with a new take on the Japanese mascot meme with Hard Ku**mon. More here. Japan seems to have mascots for everything as a way to engage consumer attention. The mascots can build up to be big business in their own right and gain international attention. 

    NASA apps

    Finally I have been working my way through NASA’s collection of iPad and iPhone applications, more here. NASA has an amazing range of content. I would also recommend checking out their flickr accounts for high quality imagery.

  • Yahoo corporate culture

    I bumped into some former colleagues over the past couple of weeks and the experience reminded me of a lot of the items in this post. We shared a common bond based on our exposure to the Yahoo corporate culture. Given the circling activist investors surround the current iteration of Yahoo! this maybe a capsule of a soon-to-disappear culture. Many of the things below are artefacts, totems of the Yahoo corporate culture.

    • You know that Yahoo! was the brand and a Yahoo was a person who worked for Yahoo!
    • You were told that you bleed purple. There were values that were ingrained into you
    • You understood the struggle of constantly moving budgets and spending a quarter’s marketing budget in three weeks
    • You have an address book full of friends and aquantances working at great companies in digital media. The business was a rotating door for talent, in six months you had a great Rolodex full of contacts.
      Yahoo! timbuk2 bag
      Your have an old brand Yahoo! laptop bag that just won’t die. Not too sure what they made those Timbuk2 bags from but mine is eight years old, well travelled and still looks new.
    • Friends introduce you to former colleagues you were less familiar with by including their IM identity as well as their name.
      Yahoo! star
      You still have a star kicking around in a box somewhere from when you packed up your desk one last time.
      Lost
      Your colleagues gave you a list of tchotchkes to get from the shop in building D if you went to the headquarters campus in Sunnyvale.

    You’re still using at least one of Jerry and David’s Christmas presents around the house.