Search results for: “throwback gadget”

Throwback gadget: IBM ThinkPad 701

Before we think about the IBM ThinkPad 701, I wanted to flag that I’ve been a Mac user for almost all of my computer-owning adult life. But there have only been a couple of devices that have ever given me PC-envy.

The first one was the IBM ThinkPad 701, my friend at college Jouni whom I lived in halls with at the time had a 701 and the product design blew me away.

The IBM ThinkPad 701 had a carefully designed set of accessories providing a full system of accessories that the road warrior would need including a desk dock, cable adaptors, spare batteries and a detachable disk drive. That was clever and as good as what Apple was doing with with its PowerBook Duo sub notebook. It’s hard to explain how connectivity pre USB was much trickier.

Surprisingly for a computer manufacturer, IBM turned out laptops that had interesting industrial design. They used magnesium alloy shells, titanium and carbon fibre in different model designs over the years and got less credit than they deserved for it.

Richard Sapper, a German product designer based in Italy came up with the design language for the ThinkPad which he modeled on the traditional black lacquer bento box. An ex-automotive engineer with Mercedes Benz Sapper was better known for his work with Alessi and the Tizio lamp for Artemide.

Sapper has kept a connection with the ThinkPad brand and is involved as a design consultant for the current ThinkPad range made by Lenovo.

What made the IBM ThinkPad 701 special was the butterfly keyboard designed by John Karidis solved the problem of making a portable computer with a full-size keyboard. It had a better action than modern laptops in terms typist feedback and was a compact full size keyboard. This was unheard of at the time. It was delicate the way it folded into place as one opened the lid on the laptop and robust enough to cope with travails of mobile working. More design related posts here.

April 26, 2012
Most popular blog posts of 2018
It’s that time of year again when I reflect on the things that I’ve done and what I can learn from the year. I wanted to get this out there whilst I still have a bit of respite from the holiday cheer.

In reverse order

Reuse, re-edit and remix – the quality and impact of creative is a key question that is being asked at the moment. Marketers have finally woken up to the power of brand building as well as performance media. Which then begs the question what’s the minimum viable creative tweaks to effective creative that can be used?

Apple – special event (September 2018) – trying to cut through the formulaic delivery of the company’s new products to understand what where the key salient points. I was surprised that this generated far more interest than a similar keynote at Apple WWDC which was much more interesting.

Enron and the net in 2000 – pre-Facebook the net was a much more decentralised place. Enron failed in their vision of a real time market for broadband, so I decided to work out what happened to some of their ‘partners’ at the time.

Ramblings on consumption – this started off as a collection of disjointed notes I made whilst travelling to see the family in Ireland

Recommendations for a marketers bookshelf – you can’t dismiss the power of a good listicle.

This wasn’t the internet we envisaged – looking at the media of the 1990s we were promised an immersive visually stimulating interactive experience. Unfortunately we ended up with Instagramers and Facebook

Throwback gadget: Bose Wave system – I still use a Bose Wave stereo due to the big sound that you get from a compact size. Its modular nature meant that it has weathered the iPod, DAB broadcast radio and internet streaming extremely well

Jargon watch: zhuang bi (装b) – an exploration into Chinese l33tspeak.

Oprah time: Operation Elop – Nokia accounted for 25% of the Finnish economy at one stage and then spectacularly fell from grace, with the iconic phone business being sold to Microsoft. Yet the definitive history of what happened has never been licensed and translated by business publishers. I got to read a crowdsourced translation instead.

Things I’d like to see in 2018 – included in this list was innovation in smartphone experience (which we don’t have at the moment), a leaner web and critical thinking around the hype of crypto currencies.

My web toolbox – some of the tools that I was using in early July this year.

How to use RSS – with so many people now getting algorithmically selected, part of the solution is by going back to RSS and Atom feeds from trusted sites. So I threw together a guide to getting started with Newsblur

The advertising industry post prompted by WPP’s 2017 financial results – how much of WPP’s difficulties are due to changes in the client and media environment versus WPP’s business?

Social networks 10 years ago – 2018 will be looked back on in internet history as when the elites finally woke up to the dominance (ex-China) of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. Looking back at 2008, it is hard to believe how much the social network eco-system changed

Mercedes Benz China Syndrome – Chinese netizens are still jumping the Great Firewall to vilify western brands who reflect views that ‘offend the Chinese people’ – even when this content is aimed at non-Chinese audiences. Mercedes’ offence was an Instagram image with one of their cars and a quote from the exiled Dalai Lama. Dolce & Gabbana didn’t learn from the Mercedes experience. Mercedes and other brands saw the Chinese government get involved in what would be considered to be extra-territorial exceptionism. This mirrors and contrasts with the Chinese reaction to the Canadian arrest of Meng Wanzhou. The Chinese foreign ministry accused the US and Canadian governments of overreach.

Oprah time: Directorate S by Steve Coll – book review of Directorate S which discusses the complex relationship between the US war on terror and Pakistan

Personal online brand – the perennial debate of should you own your own site or build your reputation on someone else’s platform?

Out and about: Sicario 2: Soldado – I was so looking to this film and felt so disappointed when I got to watch it and was presented with a grand vision at the start that quickly fizzles out to a mediocre homage of the original, with one eye on building a franchise.

Dawns Mine Crystal by Yunchul Kim at Korean Cultural Centre – amazing art installation that I was fortunate to see. It moulded art and science as part of the Art @CERN project.

The influencers post – a post on the irrational exuberance associated with influencer marketing. I suspect that we’re close to peak influence.

Chinese smartphone eco-system for beginners – I presume that its very Googleable – this post was inspired and featured a video on smartphones in China by Winston Sterzel earlier in the year. I then put accompanying background information to give it more context for marketers. China is changing a lot, one consequence of this is that Winston is looking to move to the US and visit China occasionally rather than live there, like he has been for the past decade.

The long and the BBH of it – Binet’s The Long and the Short of it has been a strategists go to reference for a while. BBH pointed out the benefits of expanding the data set. However its easier to snipe from the sidelines rather than doing something meaningful about it.

App constellations 2018 research – this built on research that I had done in 2014 and 2016. It was the most trafficked post for the first half of the year. It was also the post that took me the longest to research and I managed to lose my archive data file soon afterwards. I will revisit it, but will have to try and pull the data from these images for the basic numbers!

Innovation: a few thoughts – this post came from the coalescence of many things that were kicking around in August and early September. My friend Nigel Scott had come up with some interesting research on venture capitalists; disabusing any illusion of science in their investment selection. You had ‘struggle porn’ being championed on LinkedIn; which made the wrong correlation between effort and innovation. Finally you have big technology companies with an inflated sense of their manifest destiny a la ‘software is eating the world’ and the hubris of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tesla and Apple. I pulled ideas from across the board, borrowing a lot from Kevin Kelly’s concept of The Technium.

What if stories are brain code – storytelling is treated as a science within the creative sector. The reality is that its based a pretty shaky base. Whilst the formulation of storytelling is suspect; psychological research indicates that stories are even more powerful than we previously realised.

Some data points

30 percent of the top posts from the first half of the year made the cut through the whole of the year, which surprised me as I thought that they would benefit from additional ‘evergreen’ search traffic.

Lessons learned
- There is still an interest in long form content and research
- There was less of an interest this year in purely social platform based subject matter materials
- Evergreen content doesn’t seem to work as well as previously
December 14, 2018
H1, 2018 most popular posts

I took a little bit of time to reflect on the content that I have been writing, what can I learn from it and how I can reuse these learnings? Specifically what are people finding of interest? This couldn’t happen without people actually reading the content, so thank you for reading; feel free to come back on a regular basis. Over the past six months readers like you have found the following articles of most interest. In reverse order

Reuse, Re-edit, Remix and Recycle – if you read the industry publications we here about personalised ad creative driven by ad targeting. But often the core creative and is created unnecessarily. Instead, what’s the minimum viable creative tweak that can be used? How do we extend the smart processes of reuse, re-edit, remix and recycling into this world?

This Wasn’t The Internet We Envisaged – in the word’s of Terry Pratchet:

“If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.”

So it was time for reflection in order to get a perspective as the regulators and media discovered Facebook, Google and Amazon where not models of virtuous conduct.

The Biggest Public Relations Agencies Stuckness and Market Dynamics – The Holmes Report came out with their top 250 (biggest) PR agencies around the world in terms of billings. I decided to delve into the numbers for financial years 2014 – 2017.

This supports a hypothesis of slowing market growth and solidifying market dynamics at a macro level. Strategic acquisitions start to make less sense compared to improving efficiences and effectiveness.

Throwback Gadget: Bose Wave System – usually my gadget reviews tend to be some of the better performing content. The Bose Wave review was the only one that appears this time around.

Social Networks 10 Years Ago – a reflection on what a more diverse social media eco-system looked like.

The Advertising Industry Post – the macro effects buffeting the world’s largest marketing services conglomerates.

Mercedes China Syndrome – Chinese netizens are jumping the Great Firewall to vilify western brands who reflect views that ‘offend the Chinese people’ – even when this content is aimed at non-Chinese audiences. Mercedes’ offence was an Instagram image with one of their cars and a quote from the exiled Dalai Lama

Personal online brand – at a time when we’re seeing social media turning into walled gardens. David Gallagher asked the Twitterverse if he should have his own site?

Twitterverse: @wadds says I need a proper blog. I say I can do it on LinkedIn or Facebook. What say you? Build my own?

I weighed in on why he should and how I manage the process.

Chinese smartphone eco-system for beginners – Winston Sterzel did a good video for the average bystander on the Chinese smartphone eco-system. I thought it was a good film to share with marketers – with a bit more background information answering some of the ‘why’ in terms of market dynamics.

App constellations 2018 research – I built on work that I had done in 2014 and 2016, comparing the rate of growth across different companies apps based on Fred Wilson’s definition of app constellations. This was also the post that took me the longest to research!

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June 19, 2018
My 10 most popular (trafficked) blog posts of 2015

These are the ten most trafficked posts of 2015, in reverse order:

Throwback gadget: Nokia N900 – I tried Nokia’s first Maemo-based phone. It was amazing how useless it was as one forgets how linked the modern smartphone is to web services. Despite these problems one could see the now lost potential of the phone. More on the Nokia N900 at GSMarena.

Generational user experience effects – a meditation on user experience from the analogue era to the present

2015: just where is it all going? – I had a think about where digital and technology would go over the next 12 months or so. You can see how I did here.

Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation – by June this year, the product rationalisation that Yahoo! underwent provided ample opportunity to show that it’s core offering was collapsing in many international markets. Rather than it being a market wide condition, the data pointed to Yahoo! specific issues.

Traackr – beyond the buzzword event – a post about how a diverse range of organisations from Coca-Cola to a luxury jeweller were thinking about influencer marketing.

Throwback gadget: Made 2 Fade (by KAM) GM-25 Mk II phono pre-amp and mixer – a review of a mixer that has been lost in dance music culture history, yet was responsible for much of its popularity outside the super clubs.

That Jeremy Clarkson post (or lies, damn lies and sentiment analysis) – or why everyone from the mainstream media to PR Week got the story so wrong about Jeremy Clarkson’s departure from Top Gear.

An experiment on fake Twitter followers – I spent some of my hard-earned cash to see what difference if any buying fake followers had. I chose Twitter as a channel mainly because it would be easier to measure any impact, otherwise it could have just as easily been Facebook followers, Pinterest subscribers or Instagram followers. My overall conclusion on the fake follower business is that it almost purely about personal vanity rather than gaming a system.

O2O (online to offline) or what we can learn from the Chinese – East Asia is way ahead of marketers in the west in terms of multi-channel marketing particularly the integration of of online with offline aspects.

48 hours with the Apple Watch – hands down the most popular post of this year on my blog was my short experience living with the Apple Watch. I felt that it was a nicely designed, but un-Apple experience. It also convinced me that the use case for wearables wasn’t here yet.

That’s the end of my posts of 2015.

December 24, 2015
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.

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.

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.

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’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.

May 6, 2015

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