Adobe Experimenting With Semantic Autogeneration of 3D Worlds – ReadWriteWeb – Adobe has come up with a great application that goes way further than Microsoft Photosynth “Infinite Images is that it can assemble a world out of any collection of photos, logically connecting them based on the semantics of their descriptive tags. So, for instance, you could take a diverse group of street scenes and stitch them into something resembling Google’s Street View, except that you might start navigating down a street in London and find your self standing on a street in New Delhi.” Very cool and Adobe is the creative defacto standard so this makes sense. – I was thinking about how multimedia used to be assigned to an ‘author’. The idea of language (be it tags or prose) being used to do semantic autogeneration offers the opportunity to tear down the wall between adaptations and a story’s author.
Design
A New Look for McDonald’s – McDonald’s is rolling out new designs for its food packaging to “create unique personalities for our menu items by telling a story about each one.” Storytelling through packaging design
I have read a number of books on Silicon Valley, many of which allude to the impact of the beat generation and 1960s counterculture. Many of which tie it into the rise of what we now know as Silicon Valley. Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valleyis really an essay. In his essay is a deeply personal history of how the counterculture influenced Silicon Valley and then devolved into the yuppie culture of the 1980s.
The essay was originally written for a lecture to be given at San Francisco State University. I was particularly struck by a piece at the beginning of the book:
A few weeks before the lecture, a student in the Public Affairs Office at San Francisco State called me to arrange some campus publicity. He had a question from a student.
“Where’s Satori?”
“What?” I asked.
“Your lecture is called ‘From Satori to Silicon Valley,’ ” he explained. “I know where Silicon Valley is. But where’s Satori?”
“The Zen state of enlightenment … you never heard of that?”
“Oh. I never took any courses in Oriental religion “
I started to explain the term, spelling out its once obvious connection with the counter culture of the sixties.
This exchange was had by Roszak in 1985. My own views were rather different. For me the ideas that fired the counterculture revolution had a vibrancy that excited me. Yes hippies were a cliche, but they left a lot of concepts behind.
They had moved orientalism beyond interesting antiques to vibrant ideas. They had tried to marry libertarianism with utopianism that inspired early online culture. They had rooted down into the very nature of quality through metaphysics. This had inspired my wider view of things that gave this blog its name. In terms of eastern high and low brow culture and a holistic ‘renaissance man’ viewpoint.
Yet in that conversation, Roszak highlights the huge gulf that lay between the counterculture that had fuelled so much of Silicon Valley up until then and the new generation. A 30-something Steve Jobs would have choked with incredulity at that conversation.
Roszak’s work is credible because of his personal memories make it real for the essay reader. He was in the trenches shaping the brightest minds to find their way to Silicon Valley. This brings that transition into focus in a way that other authors such as John Markoff had been unable to do.
Roszak’s writing isn’t as witty or snarky as Robert X Cringely’s Accidental Empires.From Satori to Silicon Valley doesn’t try to build a mythologise around the messiness of the counterculture movement.
If you want to understand where technology is taking us (into a digital version of the robber baron gilded age) read From Satori To Silicon Valley. At 64 pages long and smaller than a typical paperback book it makes an easy read on the tube too.
I have been thinking about the role of the digital strategist recently, how will it be affected by the ‘lumpy’ nature of innovation and mainstream adoption. When I started in PR many things that were now mainstream were cutting edge: online press rooms, online journalism, sending pitches through by email.
As the fax machine finally got binned after we forgot how to programme in 100 number to do a fax blast and the press kits folders that used to be stuffed into envelopes became grey with dust in the stationery cupboard, technology started to evolve again.
The role of a digital strategist is cyclical, but is it economically sustainable as a specialist career?
With this in mind, I threw it up as a question on twitter as I was putting up a status post, below is the conversation with Stephen Waddington, Chris Reed and James Warren that came out of it.
r c: Busy on a workback schedule. When do you think the role of a digital strategist will be dead? My money is on soon.
James Warren: @r_c why soon?
r c: @jamesdotwarren because if ppl dont understand how to think about it soon they’re roadkill, so less specialist strategic thinking required
Stephen Waddington: @r_c everyone in PR in comms needs to be a digital strategist. agencies should be reskilling all staff if they haven’t already
r c: @wadds so the role of the specialist in the area should disappear as it becomes a hygiene factor
James Warren: @r_c agree, if time froze now. but there’ll always be new ‘digitals’ (technologies, techniques, outlets, opportunities, skills) to master
r c: @jamesdotwarren these things come in waves, we are near the end of the current one &also much of it is about a state of mind as bits n bytes
James Warren: @r_c agree it’s about state of mind. but digital won’t stop evolving, not sure we’re at the end of a wave. yet.
r c: @jamesdotwarren but does it require digitial strategists as a specialism or will it be a hygiene factor 4 all marketers and PRs & planners?
James Warren: @r_c bit of both. digital fluency is requirement for all, but I still see a role for digital specialists in creating/playing with new stuff
Chris Reed: @r_c Ah – the generalist specialist debate. Everyone will need digital skills. But some people will always be cutting edge. Same as all PR?
r c: @Chris_Reed I was thinking about the digital lifecycle: 1997 – press rooms are the new new thing, email woah! 2008 similar parallels
Chris Reed: @r_c i’m with you now.1997 – Rapid rebuttal unit – now mainstream. Online reputation management soon to be mainstream… So yes, I agree.
James Warren: @r_c which was my (kind of) point – there’ll always be something else round the corner we’ll need to keep abreast of
140 characters doesn’t allow you to have a full-on debate but it also focuses the communicator on their core message or soundbite. As for the question, I think that there’s more life in the idea of a digital strategist yet. I am less sure that the continuation of a digital strategist as a discipline is necessarily a good thing. I think that the digital strategist is bad for brands. They focus on the platform over the job to be done. They focus on sales and don’t understand the whole picture of brand marketing.
Performance marketing favoured by digital strategist types are really sales teams. Just in the same way that businesses moved in the 20th century from being sales culture businesses to marketing led businesses.
Of course, feel free to add your own comment or twitter @r_c with your viewpoint and I’ll update them here. More related content here.
James Earl Jones has one of the most distinctive voices in the entertainment industry as you can hear in this Sesame Street clip. You might recognise from his appearance in Conan the Barbarian film, but James Earl Jones has a surprising variety in his career across film, television and stage performance. James Earl Jones has done voiceover work for everything from Disney’s The Lion King to CNN station idents.
Hollow Spy Coins – talk about niche businesses, this is definitely on the long tail. You have to admire their dedication to engineering this.
Economics
Boomtown of Dubai feels effects of global crisis – International Herald Tribune – Until recently, credit in Dubai was growing by 49 percent a year, according to the Emirates’ Central Bank — a rate almost double that of bank deposits’ growth. That unnerved some bankers here, who felt it could lead to a collapse. “In the U.S., the challenge is about keeping the banks going,” said Marios Maratheftis, chief economist for Standard Chartered Bank. “Here, the economy has been overheated, a correction is needed, and it’s about making sure the slowdown happens in a smooth, orderly manner.”
Klein Verzet: Freaking doomed – the premise is that the demand for shipping of raw materials like coal, bauxite and iron ore have ground to a stand still and soon even the factories of China will be a lot quieter – so the economic outlook is nothing short of ammegeddon
P&G to launch washing gel that cleans at 15 degrees – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic – “According to P&G, Ariel’s Cool Clean campaign encouraged more than five times as many customers than normal to switch to low-energy washing programmes, with Ariel customers twice as likely as the average consumer to wash at a lower 30 degrees temperature (28% of Ariel customers in 2007 versus 13% of those using other brands). P&G has a partnership with the Energy Saving Trust, which encourages people to use energy efficiently and reduce their carbon footprints.”
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Data Debasement | PBS – cloud computing versus DBMS, interesting reading, I need to go back and look at it a few more times to understand it fully. But initial take is that parallel computing as well as parallel processing changes how computing works and databases have to be adapted (like Oracle’s Grid database concept from the tail end of the dot com era and cloud computing. It’s the failings of Moore’s law rather than progress that is driving this change
Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman – while I have sympathy for some of what Mr Stallman says, his argument misses the point about the benefits of social software. Open formats and APIs allow you to move from one service to another as needs must.
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Collateral Damage | PBS – interesting take on the mobile market, not one that I necessarily agree with, but interesting none the less. Cringely expect that Microsoft Windows Mobile software will fail and has some interesting ideas around the why. I think Microsoft has everything to play for with enterprise users and can leverage items like security authentication and Outlook email access – they might not be dominant but they could still be in with a shout
Beginning of end of megapixel marathon – Pixel count gives phones and cameras the ‘Dixons Factor’ – being able to be sold easily by some pimple-faced oik; but doesn’t mean you will have better quality pictures. I have a digital SLR which takes pictures at 5.1 megapixels and a phone camera that will do the same – no prize for which one takes the better pictures.
I saw this notice talking about 87000 possible combinations and was reminded of the car industry. Back in the 1990s, I remember being told that car maker Volvo had over 30,000 combinations of vehicles available as passenger cars. This included: body shell variants, diesel and petrol engines of different sizes and power, manual or automatic transmissions, interior design options, in car entertainment options, safety features, paint jobs, body accoutrements. Since then Volvo has hinted at electric vehicles and now has at least two models of SUVs.
While I don’t doubt the statistical capability of Starbucks marketing department, I was surprised to see that the coffee shop could serve up 87000 possible combinations of drinks based on relatively few options. This could be even larger in Starbucks other markets like Hong Kong or Japan, where there are more beverage varieties like Milk Tea or Matcha lattes, and more seasonal variation such as sakura season and mid-autumn festival alongside the usual Starbucks products.
All of which brings home the impact of mass-customisation to a business. How would the Starbucks EPOS (electronic point of sales) system handle 87000 possible combinations? How does this impact the training of their baristas? Is there an operational model like a decision tree for these coffee options?
I wonder is there a Starbucks long tail? What is the split between cold coffee drinks and hot drinks? Has this long tail altered itself over time, as the popularity of flat white drinks have taken off due to the influence of Australian coffee culture? How does the long tail affect the relative prioritisation that Starbucks might put on the different ingredients that go into their drinks? Mass customisation has gone mainstream. What does this degree of customisation mean for other service and retail businesses? How does this compare to what is seen in personalised products like NikeID or MyAdidas?
