Interesting and funny film from Mercedes for the SLS coupe AMG. The way the businessman loses his mind trying to define luxury feels like a parody of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Are the metaphysics of luxury and the metaphysics of quality the same? The SLS coupe AMG is a very impressive looking vehicle. But surely its performance is a bigger draw than its luxury, it’s ride is likely to be very firm. Especially given the AMG heritage.
Vice put together a great documentary about a veteran tattooist in Hong Kong. His work goes back to when Hong Kong was a port of call for the merchant navy as well as the US and Royal navies. More Hong Kong related posts here.
I love the way Honda taps into the inner child of potential customers. With there being no truly bad cars now and green pressures, so brand and emotion becomes so much more important for car brands. Honda has been consistently been ahead of the curve.
PBS have animated interviews that were done with Robin Williams back in 1991, and they’re really good. Really smart and thoughtful stuff that makes you realise the huge hole that the loss of Williams made in the entertainment industry.
TOMY’s Cocoro scanner which detects stress (and according to the maker, lies). I could see managers thinking that it would be a good idea to keep the Cocoro scanner ton their desk. Though I would keep it out of view if I were you, as the display would be stress raising in its own right.
Blog
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SLS coupe & other things that made last week
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Artificial intelligence + more things
UBS uses artificial intelligence to deliver personalised advice to wealthy clients | South China Morning Post – should this artificial intelligence have to be registered and certified as a financial advisor? I could see a number of legal issues with this. Artificial intelligence brings up questions around legal liability and how could it have personal indemnity insurance? More related content here.
The DRC (Desktop Record Cutter) – a future for vinyl cutting by Machina.Pro — Kickstarter – want
Singapore’s mobile path-to-purchase | Campaign Asia – interesting research from Yahoo! and Mindshare
Netscout unwisely sues Gartner for “Pay for Play” | Influencer Relations – it is often the case that Gartner salespeople claim that clients get better placement in its research
New offline-to-online (O2O) sports lottery contract with Heilongjiang Province and commencement of live trials of virtual horse racing game | Investegaate – DJI Holdings launches sports betting in China
PayPal and WePay bigger threat to high street banks than tech firms, according to research | Out-Law.com – YouGov and Prinsent Masons
South Korea’s KakaoTalk Adds ‘Secret Mode’ | WSJ – now encrypts messages
Marketers delve into true meaning of real-time social media – Is it a waste of time? | The Drum – not that impressed for what it does
CCC | Chaos Computer Club on the blocking of our website in UK – blocked under a catch-all censorship of extremism – in this case extreme geekiness
An Illustrated History of Mac OS X | Git Tower – interesting run through I’d not even heard of Kodiak
AOL’s Bob Lord: Brands’ In-House Programmatic Teams Driving Growth | Advertising Age – interesting and bad news for WPP
What would music sound like if record labels went out of business? | Quartz – it would likely suck less
Have You Resigned from The New Republic Yet? | Vanity Fair – curiously like the new media figure attempting to buy the fictional network in The Newsroom
Next year’s iPhone-killers are already in trouble | BGR – Qualcomm issues apparently
Does PR have a PR problem? | Marketing Interactive – yes basically
So-called “dark social” traffic turns out to be mostly Facebook — GigaOM – not sure I agree with this and would like to see more data around it. From an analytics point of view does this mean that there is a similar hole in advertising analytics
Popular New App in China Removes Selfie Touch-Ups to Show What’s Really Underneath | TheNanfang – I suspect that its applying rules rather than ‘reversing’ the files given that they are PNGs or JPGs
Power Book 2015: iPhone is most popular must-have item for PR top brass | PR Week – 24 going for their iPad and 18 picking their BlackBerry.
Here’s what’s really scary about China overtaking America as the world’s biggest economy – Quartz – interesting economic analysis on China
How Defense Offsets Help Drive the Global Defense Industry – Defense One – this could all go a bit Enron in a worst case scenario
Connecting with Digital natives | Huawei – Huawei has surveyed over 6,000 digital natives in China. Hear from a few of them here
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Sharing economy & more
Leo Burnett on sharing economy
Leo Burnett put together this great presentation on the state of the sharing economy (Airbnb, Uber, Lyft etc.) The presentation on the sharing economy is well thought out and handy to keep one side as a reference. More related content here.
The Sharing Economy: Where We Go From Here from Leo BurnettCode Rush
Code Rush – an amazing documentary on Netscape and its Communicator product: a mix of email client and web browser. Netscape Communicator was the first desktop email client that I used. I remember that we had it at work and then were put through the trauma of moving to Lotus Notes at work. Communicator had been the first email client to support HTML, so going to text only on Lotus Notes as a culture shock.
At home I switched to Eudora until I eventually moved to mail.app when I set up an Apple services based email account.
The Hundreds x Reebok
The Hundreds X Reebok collaboration movie is a great trip back to the early 1990s and some serious sneaker love. The Hundreds may not be the hippest brand, or the one with the most hype. But they don’t just do clothing, instead the publish content that captures the culture of streetwear. Observers as well as originators and creators in the streetwear scene.
Alan Watts
The creators of South Park put together some great animation to accompany recordings by the philosopher and buddhist Alan Watts. Don’t worry it isn’t done a South Park style and Alan Watts voice is very soothing. Watts’ work was very influential from the 1950s and again in the 1990s as the interest was rekindled in Zen buddhist philosophy and practice.
Video game music origins
Finally, Red Bull put this great documentary together on the origins of video game music. The process that they used to compose the music is amazing. It shows how limitations can enhance creativity.
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Qualcomm China problems + more
How Qualcomm China Problems Could Hit Xiaomi – WSJ – likely to start Chinese device maker patent war. Qualcomm China problems are an example of China’s technology ambitions and China’s strategy of war by other means. Qualcomm China problems are likely to be the start of a gradual attempt at eroding Qualcomm’s innovation base. More on Qualcomm here.
Bristlr is a Dating Site for Beardy Blokes and the People What Love ‘Em | Lifehacker – interesting specialist social networks offer highly targeted marketing opportunities. Not sure having a beard is a passion that people can form around, if nothing else it will appeal to hipsters
A $30,000 smartphone with four wheels and a motor | Luxury Daily – interesting take on the modern car as a connected device that happens to be transportation
Google is funding “an artificial intelligence for data science” | GigaOM – there goes SkyNet. Which fits close to their own needs for search engine needs
Huawei and Inspur Electronics challenge Q3 server status quo • The Register – not terribly surprising post-Snowden. Inspur is winning a lot of high-end business from Chinese banks which will roll down their range as well
Google Drive now lets you edit Microsoft Office attachments right from Gmail | VentureBeat – works back to feature parity with iCloud and Office 365. But its nothing like editing a document in a proper desktop client
Bits Blog: China, a Fish Barrel for Cybercriminals | New York Times – using social engineering and the law of large numbers to commit fraud. WeChat also lends itself to fraud since its an app that can both message and send payments
RIP Clip Art: Microsoft axes yet another foundational piece of computing history | ExtremeTech – the move away from clip art reflects consumer behaviour but does it have IP implications beyond the saving made in not licensing bad drawings?
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Oddpost webmail
Before Oddpost
When you think about Oddpost, you have to cast your mind back almost two decades in 2002, the web was a very different place. In order for applications to do anything they would have to refresh the whole page. You couldn’t dynamically edit a document with other colleagues like you can with Google Docs for instance. Which made applications like time tracking, or updating the basket on an e-commerce site a bit of a pain.
The catalyst for change for app like performance in the browser was a webmail client called Oddpost.
Oddpost.com
Oddpost was different in a number of ways to anything else at the time. At first glance, it looked like a three pane desktop mail client, there was less navigation controls than your webmail interfaces at the time. Which heralded a very different design approach in subsequent web 2.0 companies. It is hard to articulate now, Gmail wouldn’t arrive for another two years and when it did it was invite only which meant that for the average Joe it took a while to come around. There was no download or application required to make it work (like a Java applet for instance). Oddpost, instead used technologies which are now humdrum, but a decade ago were the web equivalent of a revolution. Dynamic HTML, XML, and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) allowed individual elements of a page to be updated that provided a desktop app-like experience.
Design
Oddpost’s design approach didn’t lend itself to advertising that would slow down it’s dynamic interface and its method of updating components of a page rather than the full page adversely affected the page view metric advertisers cared about at the time. Storage was more expensive than it is now, so it made sense that Oddpost was a paid-for product. In return for your subscription of $30/year got you a whopping 30MB of storage in your email box and an integrated RSS reader (rather like mail.app with OSX or Outlook with Windows). In addition to the unique interface Oddpost offered support for both POP3 and IMAP standards which allowed access over an email client. IMAP allowed you to keep the files on the system providing you with a standard view using the web interface, your own computer, PDA (using Bluetooth and your cell phone as a wireless modem) or early smartphones like the Nokia 7650 and Nokia 6600 which came out in 2003. I was unusual at the time in having an IMAP email account, the entry cost for this service was purchasing an Apple computer.
Oddpost was rough around the edges. It would be another few years before the metal lid of an Apple laptop would be as common as it is now, so it wasn’t as much of an issue that Oddpost only worked on Internet Explorer (version 5 or better) for Windows. The search functionality only did the headlines of messages not the body text. The company was eventually acquired in April 2004 by Yahoo! as it looked to bolster its position as an email provider against the then new Gmail service.