John Browett + more stuff

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John Browett

It was a bad day for John Browett this week. A US technology site used the British word ‘shite‘ as a descriptor for Apple’s new head of global retail. It makes sense when you realise that John Browett, was formerly CEO of Dixons Retail – the people behind PCWorld and Currys. Currys and its sister company Dixons own brand products were long a textbook definition of the word shite; as was their customer service and whole retail experience. They were a shop that UK consumers loved to hate – so the association of John Browett and Apple was alarming. Whilst I was alarmed that the Apple Stores were likely to go horribly wrong there was something strangely gratifying seeing European English slang used on an American site.

Design

Tom Hovey introduced me to the work of the Dead Sea Mob – a collective of illustrators.

Iittila Ultima Thule glassware – I first came across these flying with Finnair and they are a wonder of product design. Designed by Tapio Wirkkala in the 1960s after being inspired by the melting ice in Lapland. The surface patterns gradually change as the glass burns the surface of the wooden moulds. Iittila apparently spent thousands of hours perfecting the glass-blowing technique for these glasses

IBM and Eames Office released a free iPad application Minds of Modern Mathematics that captures work that Charles and Ray Eames did in the 1960s. Mathematica: A World of Numbers… And Beyond was an IBM-sponsored exhibition. The app captures the artifacts and the history in a great interactive application.

How to

10 Free Data Visualization Tools « Social Web Thing

URL Design — Warpspire

Luxury

How the celebrity gravy train is gathering pace | SCMP.com – product placement and spokesperson roles become more abstract in Chinese luxury market (registration required)

Marketing

Land Rover Edible Desert Survival Guide via The Inspiration Room – was a great marketing artifact developed by Y&R Dubai that reinforces the Land Rover brand story far more than Victoria Beckham

Media

Nielsen Numbers Glitch Results in Low Traffic Numbers

Industry Reference: The Social Business Stack for 2011 (Slideshare) « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang

5 Anti-Piracy Strategies Designed to Hurt Torrent Sites in 2011 | TorrentFreak

Online

blog · RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried – Mozilla and Google killing RSS in the browser. Google probably in favour of Google Reader. Mozilla’s reason is less clear.

Google Keep is an interesting lightweight challenge to services like Evernote. It is a move way from from Google’s recent over-featured products like Google+.

Doodod (pronounced Doodoh) is a small Beijing start-up doing some very interesting things with visualisation of posts and reposts on Sina Weibo.

Technology

Apple and I.B.M. Aren’t All That Different – NYTimes.com – classic bit of PR by IBM trying to tie their innovation message to the brand cool of Apple

Windows Surface convinced me that Microsoft was going to attempt to drive innovation no matter what it cost their partner eco-system. This is likely to spell a faster cycle of innovation from rivals like Apple and Google. The wild card in all this process is whether it will kick-start innovation in the Android eco-system with over-laid UI, exclusive applications and more integrated software | hardware design. Things are going to get interesting

Web of no web

Apple Missed Getting Xbox Kinect Tech, Patents Smartphone Motion Gaming Anyway | Fast Company – interesting that Beracha rejected Apple as a pain-in-the-ass and sold the tech to Microsoft instead. Apple must be really awful to work with

Wireless

W+K Shanghai Guide for iPhone and iPod touch on the iTunes App Store – really cool.

Did Angry Birds eat the iPad mags market? | FT.com – you heard it here first