The LDS Church has been running some ad spots in trial markets across the US (and has also posted them to Youtube) which owe a creative debt to Microsoft’s I’m a PC campaign. But I have to admit that this video featuring motorcycle fanatic Jeff Decker for the Mormon’s campaign beats any of the I’m a PC spots hands down.
His sculptures and the vintage bikes in the video are underpinned by an awesome rockabilly soundtrack.
Doug Engelbart gave this famous demonstration of technologies in 1968, it still blows my mind watching it, you can see the future of modern computing right here. Contrast, Engelbart with Paul Allen. Allen co-founded Microsoft which went on to make him billions of dolars from the ideas in this video, (as did Apple, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics and the whole Linux economy).
Which makes Paul Allen’s current law suit against the computer industry seem petty, parasitic and grasping. There is a parallel between the Allen case and BT’s past claims over hyperlinks, at least some of Allen’s patents stand a good chance of being invalidated due to prior art.
My trips home tend to be part family catch up, part sociological and anthropological expeditions into the heart of Merseyside. I use this time to watch the way my parents and my friends use technologies.
On previous expeditions trips home I found that peer-to-peer networking had proved an unsatisfactory replacement for collecting and that sat nav devices where the second coming of the gadget Christ.
On the way home I saw a baby boomer couple from Runcorn deciphering their son’s Facebook page pictures and messages. This was fascinating as it came so soon after I had read a piece by danah boyd about social stenography. Unfortunately their son’s social code was easily cracked as they poked and prodded their iPhones. A call to the son ensued and the expression ‘busted’ came to mind.
My Dad’s current tech obsessions are digital photography and his home cinema set-up.
My parents discovered digital photography for themselves by accident when they needed to sell their old caravanette, so they used my cast-off PalmOne Treo 650 to take pictures of the van to help sell it. They also took some more shots of the inside for memories sake. Since then they have been taking pictures on a 1GB SD card I have given them.
The SD card had proved invaluable has my Dad had used it to show his friends images since they could load them on to their computers. But since I was home, they wanted to get prints so we took a trip to ASDA to get some prints made. I cleared off a significant amount of videos that were about 3 seconds in length, my Dad told me that the Treo would sometimes record the video ‘by accident‘ when he was trying to take a picture.
This gave some interesting moments:
Digital in their minds was something of impermanence and something that lacked quality that was probably partly due to design and partly due to a job poorly done.
On the way back home, my Mum asked me about my pictures that I put on flickr and why don’t I sell them to someone. I tried to explain the concept of creative commons and that my social media content was my ‘personal brand’, something that helped my career. My Mum didn’t grasp this, but my Dad did, putting it in these terms that ‘I guess if you see the job of a good tradesman, its the kind of person that you want to work for you‘.
I found out that they used the Treo 650 just for pictures. I found this surprising as I had originally thought that they would find the QWERTY keyboard useful for texting, now that their Motorola V.box (V100) had finally given up the ghost after close on a decade of service. I had originally purchased the Motorola for my Mum one Christmas as she had found texting on her Nokia 3310 such a hassle. I managed to pass on an Nokia E61 a bit later on.
My Dad put it like this: “I tried learning the Treo, but it was inconsistent in the way you did things like for instance getting back to the beginning, and it was easier in the end to teach your Mum to use the Nokia (1100) than it was to use it“.
So I pushed him on the Nokia E61 and got: “Sure that thing is even more difficult than the Palm thing. It’s shocking difficult all together“.
Not exactly a Jakob Nielsen level of insight, but still a damning indictment on the state of user experience design. They both use the drug dealers handset of choice the Nokia 1100 as their current handset. This was given a begrudging ‘It’s alright‘. by both my parents.
Back at home my Dad was quite happy that he’d managed to get a PlayStation 2 I had given him to play DVDs. He was also delighted with the Tevion Freeview box. He’d worked out that it had a signal strength meter and he had improved the signal and performance of it by tweaking and then replacing the aerial. It was less about whether he was able to get CSI Vegas and more about the joy that comes with tinkering whether it’s an old car on the drive or an invention in the garage.
A couple of younger work colleagues had taught him how to connect the audio channels of the DVD up to his mini system which previously played a collection of Jim Reeves and Chieftains CDs
Take-outs
Google has thrown its weight behind HTML5, most tellingly with this informational site for developers. Day 1 of Google’s I|O conference in May sheds further light on their standpoint.
This puts JavaFX, Flash and Silverlight in a difficult position, though Flash may be the least adversely affected because of its ubiquity and ability to handle video.
An old but good Google talk by Fred Wilson about disruption and innovation. Fred is a partner in Union Square Ventures and a popular blogger on all things that fit in the nexus between technology, the web and entrepreneurship.
YouTube – Googlebeat’s Channel – Google produced magazine show based on what’s trending in search that week
The Look Ahead: Google Narrows Its Acquisition Focus | paidContent – 2 billion USD per quarter.
Slashdot Linux Story | Native ZFS Is Coming To Linux Next Month – this is an interesting move, hopefully ZFS will go mainstream. ZFS allows efficient usage of storage since existing file systerms were designed for disk sizes orders of magnitude smaller than present sizes. The cloud needs this because at some point the data needs to be addressed at disk-level.
Microsoft Co-Founder Sues Google, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Netflix, Yahoo, Apple, Etc. | WebProNews – Paul Allen patent troll. A bit disappointing
Older Adults Embracing Twitter And Social Media | WebProNews
China’s Godson vector, 28nm – wicked smart Chinese silicon design work
Web users in the United Arab Emirates have more to worry about than having just their BlackBerries cracked. – By Danny O’Brien – Slate Magazine – man-in-the-middle attacks easy due to proliferation of certificate authorities
Graphene fabrication gets a boost – post silicon semiconductor tech
China bar Cisco, Motorola and HP – comparison of Hauwei and US firms given the recent US senators concerns over Hauwei
Microsoft To Spend Oodles On Holiday Push For Win Phone 7 – Barrons.com – 500 million USD. You can’t fool the people however
Character Amnesia: Forgetting Culture In China And Japan – PSFK
Why LG Will Continue to Invest in the E-paper Front | Fast Company
Weakening economy catches up with Intel | VentureBeat – are iPad | iPhones substitute purchases for PCs and what does this mean for Windows 7 sales moving forwards?
Tao Heung serves moon cakes online | Market-interactive.com – online store helps sales for mid-Autumn festival
MediaPost Publications Chartreuse Is The Real Green For Gen Y 08/27/2010 – sentiment often doesn’t turn into action
Hey Facebook, Here Are Some Other Companies You Can Bully Or Sue – yet more proof that Facebook is a corporate sociopath
ReputationOnline » Kaspersky Lab and ‘branded journalism’ – interesting article by Vikki, although it misses out a secondary reason that many of the savvy tech publications may not survive (the sector is already much poorer with the loss of publications like Byte)
danah boyd | apophenia » Regulating the Use of Social Media Data – danah boyd adds her tuppence on online privacy
Analyst: Samsung on track to pass Intel as No. 1 IC vendor – kick in the teeth for US knowhow and innovation
What would your persona do? – Blast Radius – development of, and working with personas to improve online marketing
Amazing short film about Japanese tattoo artist Yoshihito Nakano aka Horiyoshi III. Nakano is based in the Japanese port city of Yokohama and hopes to pass his business on to his son.
Whilst Nokano uses an electric needle for the design outlines, he uses a traditional bamboo needle for the fills of colour on the tattoos. The film was shot by photographer Johnny Shand Kydd.
Hat tip to Nowness.
Thanks to the folks at BNTL for this bizarre cover version of Bitches ain’t Sh** from Dr Dre’s The Chronic. The group take the track, own it and stamp all over the offensive lyrics. Enjoy:
Lovin’ it like a fat kid loves cake.
For those of use working with companies during the first web boom of the late 90s, two companies personified the web itself. One was Cisco and its dark-coloured router faces still dominate internet infrastructure. The other was a computer company recently bought out by database giant Oracle. Sun Microsystems at that time was the archetype hot Silicon Valley company. They made computers which ran on a UNIX operating system called Solaris which still had a lot of power under the hood that other operating systems like Linux, Mac OS X and Windows are still running to catch up with its features.
The purple colour of the boxes were iconic compared to the beige boxes of the competition; even Apple sold beige boxes for professional uses at the time. Sun Microsystems claimed in the advertising that they put the dot in dot.com. That claim was not an immodest one. Their computers also put the decimal point in your mobile phone bill and your bank statement.
This was their second chance, originally they built powerful workstations for engineers and scientific computing. Personal computers got progressively more powerful so Sun moved more towards servers.
Sun had a natural affinity with the web because so much of the web was unix-like anyway. Tim Berners-Lee had developed what we all know as the ‘web on a UNIX-like computer system called the NeXT workstation (funnily enough that is the operating system that has underpinned Macs for the past decade, the iPhone and the iPad).
Thankfully the Computer History Museum captured the early days of Sun in the early 80s, before it becomes a footnote in geek history.
A Chronology of Brands that Got Punk’d by Social Media « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing – some classics in here
A Botched Hostage Rescue in the Philippines | STRATFOR – a really smart thoughtful analysis of the Manila bus hijacking
The Freshest Kids in China | China Youthology 青年志
demographics are the real problem :: Influxinsights – aging population affecting economic growth
Text Message Reminders Don’t Help Women Remember the Pill, Study Finds – sometimes technology just doesn’t work
Top 10 YouTube Videos About Internet of Things
Technology Review: Blogs: Jason Pontin’s blog: The Japanese Model – SixApart is big in Japan apparently
Many Chinese consumers unwilling to spend – Warc
Apple To Dominate Tablet Market Through 2012, iSuppli Says – Barrons.com
Alibaba.com Buys Auctiva – Barrons.com – interesting move, gives Alibaba relationship with eBay’s top sellers
How to Tell When Your Boss Is Lying – corporate executives that is
The BBC Is Going To Wait This 3D TV Thing Out For Just A Little Bit Longer – standards not clear yet
Chungking Mansions phone hub links world | SCMP.com – cheap Chinese brands and refurbed new European mobile phones from Hong Kong doing good business in Africa. Interesting that HK contract law and trade routes are keeping the business going despite razor thin margins (registration required)
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