Ged Carroll

Category: web of no web | 無處不在的技術 | 보급 기술 | 普及したテクノロジー

The web of no web came out of a course that I taught at the La Salle School of Business at the University Ramon Llull in Barcelona on interactive media to a bunch of Spanish executive MBA students. The university wanted an expert from industry and they happened to find me by happenstance. I remember contact was made via LinkedIn.

I spent a couple of weeks putting together a course. But I didn’t find material that covered many of things that I thought were important and happening around us. They had been percolating around the back of my mind at the time as I saw connections between a number of technologies that were fostering a new direction. Terms like web 2.0 and where 2.0 covered contributing factors, but were too silo-ed

So far people’s online experience had been mediated through a web browser or an email client. But that was changing, VR wasn’t successful at the time but it was interesting. More importantly the real world and the online world were coming together. We had:

  • Mobile connectivity and wi-fi
  • QRcodes
  • SMS to Twitter publishing at the time
  • You could phone up Google to do searches (in the US)
  • Digital integration in geocaching as a hobby
  • The Nintendo Wii controller allowed us to interact with media in new ways
  • Shazam would listen to music and tell you what song it was
  • Where 2.0: Flickr maps, Nokia maps, Yahoo!’s Fireeagle and Dopplr – integrated location with online
  • Smartphones seemed to have moved beyond business users

Charlene Li described the future of social networks as ‘being like air’, being all around us. So I wrapped up all in an idea called web of no web. I was heavily influenced by Bruce Lee’s description of jeet kune do – ‘using way as no way’ and ‘having no limitation as limitation’. That’s where the terminology that I used came from. This seemed to chime with the ideas that I was seeing and tried to capture.

  • Yakuza Apocalypse + more

    Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War Of The Underworld

    Awesome trailer for Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War Of The Underworld from Takashi Miike

    Yakuza Apocalypse is a visceral shock to the system. It strips away the glamour that surrounds the yakuza in Japanese culture, a bit like like the way the Krays are glamourised in British culture. The reality is rather more squalid, like Tadamasa Goto who is known to have provided information to the FBI. While they didn’t get anything, a grass is still a grass.

    Optical data communications technology

    Really interesting Panasonic technology for data transfer, is it more than a less obvious QRcode in terms of the data that it contains?

    Stüssy x Sophnet

    Stüssy have done a really good collaboration with Japanese brand Sophnet which dropped this week. I managed to pick up a Stüssy x Sophnet t-shirt and hooded top. I was surprised by two things. The quality was more up to the old school Stüssy standard than is usually the case now. Secondly, for a Japanese brand collaboration, they both came in western XXL size. We won’t see the like of this collaboration for a good while again, if ever.

    More luxury related content here.
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    SoftBank changes tack with adverts

    SoftBank seem to have moved away from their kooky ‘family’ adverts using modern samurai Isao Machii cuts many objects with ”Iaido” sword strokes

    Drones in advertising builds on work that has been done since the Beijing olympics on the use of drone swarms for massed visuals that are complementary to fireworks and 3D projections

    Audi advert: Kevin Smith, Jason Meyes. Enough said (oh and some cameos from actors who’ve appeared in Marvel comic film adaptations including pioneer Stan Lee)

    Enterprise storage outfit Box.net have a great interview with Stewart Butterfield of Slack (and Flickr fame). Some interesting comments on how a GUI isn’t always the right interface for people who use keyboards. This is so right. I remember working on terminal screens when I worked in a call centre and the ease with which I could quickly tab around screens, rather than having to reach for a mouse to click a multitude of radio buttons. More design related posts here.

    Scottish National Party member of parliament Mhairi Black gave an interview back in March. I found it interesting as it shows that kind of impact social media will have on future political careers, particularly when it it will provide greater clarity than the 2009 debate around David Cameron’s raving history. Imagine if you were presented at the age of 50 with selected fringe thoughts you had at 19 years old?

    As Black notes:

    My uncle summed it up when he said that, when he was a teenager, he just used to shout at the telly. My generation tweets and there is a record of it.

    What adult doesn’t look back to things they said when they were 16 or 17 and go, ‘Oh my God?’

    The difference is my comments are being dragged out for the whole world to see.

    No trite social media analysis or fantastic technical wizardry just a great idea, client belief and a budget made 3M Korea’s Unforgettable Post-It Proposal

    Finally Helios is a new Hong Kong film gaining traction in the Chinese box office. In the face of a lack of new Hong Kong actors coming through, it was interesting that the new blood came in the form of Korean boy band member Choi Siwon who also performs some of Super Junior’s mandarin repertoire

  • Virtual cockpit & things from this week

    Razorfish Berlin’s interactive brochure for Audi to promote the TT coupe’s virtual cockpit. I was reminded of an ad that Mercedes did where the phone became the rear view mirror of a car, emphasising performance. Also McDonald’s had used the mix of print and circuits with phones to create beat making place mats.

    But I find the intersection of print and digital an exciting space, even if the virtual cockpit concept doesn’t appeal to me that much.

    More related content here.

    Leo Burnett Italy created an app for P&G’s Always brand that directly addresses the insecurity women may feel in an unfamiliar area at night time; it connects them with a friend, to protect them on your way home.

    It is a smart play for the brand to maximise how it can be useful to consumers.

    Celebrity music streaming service Tidal faced critics at launch, this was probably the best of them

    I love this old video about Bell Laboratories’ complex in Holmdel, New Jersey that AT&T have put on YouTube as part of their efforts to digitise their archives. This is Silicon Valley before Silicon Valley

    At the other end of the spectrum, Ogilvy Hong Kong for Hong Kong Clean-Up produced a campaign that puts DNA analysis into an Orwellian future.

  • 48 hours with the Apple Watch

    My experiment with the Apple Watch is part of a larger project. I  decided to experiment with wearables a while ago. My first experiment was with the Casio G-Shock+ series of watches that takes the well-loved brand and drops some rudimentary notification function, BlueTooth LE capability and a companion iPhone app together as a workable but unambitious package.

    The Apple Watch is a different experience and has a different ethos to the Casio G-Shock+. The Apple Watch experience starts as soon as you receive the package.

    I was surprised to be presented the box by security in reception, mainly because it had roughly the same size and weight as a toner cartridge for the office colour photocopier / printer.
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    My immediate reaction was that Apple may have made the packaging look like this to mask the first drop of watches from over-ambitious eBay entrepreneurs in the postal service.
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    But it soon became apparent that Apple had built a packing equivalent of a Winnebago RV for the watch.
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    Inside a long heavy duty cardboard box is a giant whale of a coffin for the watch and space underneath for the charging cable and plug in charger. All of this seems at odds with Apple’s move over the years towards less wasteful, more environmentally friendly packaging.

    At the same time the experience didn’t feel special to me, just slightly perplexing, ok very perplexing. I have been involved in the launch of a new Huawei smartphone over the past few weeks and that packaging provided a more luxurious experience.

    An email arrives to my home account letting me know that I can set up a live video call with someone who will help me set up my watch. An alarm bell rings in the back of my head that makes me think that the product might not ‘just work’ which the a core tenet of the Apple experience.

    The watch itself has some nice industrial design touches.
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    The Apple Watch strap was easy even for a mechanical klutz like me to change, by pushing a button and sliding the strap in or out of a groove on the case.

    The case is nicely made (as something the price of a premium Casio or Hugo Boss watch should be). However as a bit of a watch head the case did not blow me away, if I didn’t know about it’s smarts it felt very much like a Fossil watch.

    Switching it on and pairing it with my iPhone was very easy, the problems began when the iPhone app schlepped across all my iPhone applications that had Apple Watch capability, without a thought for how often I use them. This means that the home screen is covered in an acne rash of default and third-party applications, 80 per cent of which I don’t regularly use.

    Whilst I am in awe of the the way the device hides the process of syncing with the iPhone I am less impressed by the slow speed of glance content loaded from the iPhone more slowly than it would be to just take the iPhone from my pocket and look.
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    When glances do appear, they appear in an amazingly high resolution.

    The killer app

    The haptic alerts were handy and Accuweather had made the best Watch app. WeChat shamed Twitter with its comparative usefulness. But ultimately I still don’t know a compelling reason to own an Apple Watch beyond trying to understand where it fits in a customer’s digital life.

    The Apple Watch is a two-handed device, for instance unlocking the Watch by typing in your PIN. Flashback to a childhood encounter with a friend’s Casio Databank flooded my memory whilst unlocking the watch.

    I found that I tended to use the crown when the watch wasn’t on my wrist, probably sounds a bit pointless.

    Like the Casio G-Shock+ before it, Apple hadn’t mastered prioritising alerts or putting intelligence behind them. I think that this a major issue, since app developers will try to go for maximum notification real estate as part of the ‘grab’ of the attention economy. I think that this is an Achilles Heel of wearables in general.

    Conclusions

    The Apple Watch didn’t encourage me to ‘play with it’ to find out its features, the way other Apple products from the original sit-up and beg Mac to the iPod and iPhone did. I can’t say that I have had any real enjoyment out of using one. So much so, that I was quite happy to leave it in its charger most of Sunday, whilst my iPhone is never an arms length away.

    Notifications are going to become very tiresome, very fast.

    It isn’t particularly friendly to use and at 48 hours in, I still haven’t really got to grips with the device.

    This feels like a first step in a long journey needed to fix the human smartwatch interface.

    The Apple Watch feels like a solution looking for a problem, just in the same way that the Mac only found its calling with Aldus desktop publishing software and an Adobe powered laser printer, so the Apple Watch is dependent on some clever app development in the future.

    I suspect the kind of programmable world that we would need for the device to thrive, for instance your iPhone seeing that you have enough time in your diary, ordering your morning coffee at Starbucks and then the Watch telling you to step in the cafe and pick it up just as you are about to walk past doesn’t exist yet.

    The experience did get me to marvel at the engineering that went into the device, but at the moment it feels that all that effort has been largely unrewarding in terms of customer experience. I still wear my collection of G-Shocks or fine Swiss watches on my right wrist. I don’t think that many watchmakers have much to worry about yet, except those targeting the mid-market of big brand, mediocre movements.

    More information

    On smart watches, I’ve decided to take the plunge
    On wearing a smartwatch
    On Wearables