Ged Carroll

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  • 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.
    stussy

    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

  • Nokia N900

    This throwback gadget the Nokia N900 comes from before Nokia decided to go with Windows Mobile as its smartphone operating system. It had started to develop Maemo as a successor operating system to Symbian Series 60. Meamo was a Linux kernel based mobile operating system which owed its heritage to the Debian Linux distribution.

    The N900 was the first phone which showed Nokia’s ideas in developing an alternative to the Android and iPhone eco-systems. Symbian was a powerful operating system, with true multitasking but there were issues that just tidying up the UI and introducing capacitive touch wouldn’t address.  For a mature operating system, I had to reboot my Nokia phones surprisingly often, basic apps like the address book didn’t work if you had over a thousand contacts – so most sales people out there.

    The predecessor of the Nokia N900 was the 770 internet tablet which was launched back at the end of 2005, which was the iPad before the iPad.
    Nokia N900
    Trying to trial this device is a bit hard as it relied on web services such as an app store that no longer exists. Secondly it offers an experience comparable to an Android or iPhone powered by a processor that is several generations older, so you have to make allowances for the fact that the Nokia N900 can feel slow at times.
    Nokia N900
    Let’s start with the industrial design. The phone is relatively thick, partly due to its keyboard and replaceable battery design feels good to hold.

    The Danger Sidekick-esque slide-out keyboard which would be handy for the world of OTT messaging services like WhatsApp, WeChat and LINE. It isn’t a full keyboard like the Nokia E90 Communicator that I used to own but it is more usable than say a Blackberry Bold. The keyboard feels solid and stable.
    Nokia N900
    The camera surround on the back has a stand that pops out for when you want to use the phone to watch content or as a glorified desk clock.

    The dialler on the phone is easier to use than the iPhone and did what it came on the tin – its slight gradient feels like Apple pre-iOS7. Nokia’s HERE mapping service was responsive, it seems to be the one thing on the phone still supported.
    Nokia N900
    Nokia’s Mozilla-based browser still works and provided an experience similar to modern smartphones, but slower (this is partly due to the processor inside the phone).

    Now the Nokia N900 stands a testament to lost potential, the following Nokia N9 and N950, looked like polished products. Stephen Elop saw things differently and despite the Nokia N9 selling well in the few markets that he allowed it to sell, put the company on its fateful relationship with Microsoft. Presumably Elop and his team felt that they couldn’t sustain the innovation of Maemo, which would have required a move to Qualcomm processors away from Intel. Nokia had backed WiMax rather than LTE with Intel, so the company was on the wrong foot. The decline is now a matter of well recorded history with Microsoft having eventually taken over a much diminished phone business. Some of the N9 team went on to build Jolla – a small phone company that built a smartphone and tablet to showcase their SailfishOS operating system. It remains to be seen if other phone manufacturers will launch products using it. But it does offer consumers outside North America a more secure option to an Android handset. More gadget related content here.

  • 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.