Month: May 2011

  • Sennheiser HD250 II Linear headphones

    The Sennheiser HD250 II Linear came from a time before Dr Dre and Lady Gaga had their own headphone lines. Quality headphones were dominated by German and Austrian companies. The three companies were AKG, Beyerdynamic and Sennheiser. These companies had a number of things in common: their headphones were very well made, sounded amazing and many of the parts were user serviceable.

    Sennheiser, AKG and Beyerdynamic now

    AKG designs haven’t changed that much (because they don’t need to), but the company has moved production from Austria to China since it is now part of the Harman conglomerate of audio equipment. The main difference that I have noticed is that the plastic mouldings aren’t as good as the Austrians used to do.

    Beyerdynamic is still a German family-owned business that keeps making technological progress. They have still managed to keep on building headphones to the same high standard it always has done. The most recent headphones that I bought were a set of Beyerdynamic DT150s. They look crude, but are robust, well-made and sound great.

    Sennheiser like Beyerdynamic is still family-owned but taken a more fad-centric attitude to it’s headphone design. Its HD25 and HD25-SP models hark back to HD414 which was originally sold back in 1967. Most of the rest of the designs take their cues from the Sony and Technics headphones from the late 1990s onwards.  I have a set of HD25 headphones but they aren’t my favourite Sennheiser set, I tend to wear them when I am traveling as they are pretty space efficient.

    Sennheiser have been on a role since the HD414 in 1967, by the time the early 1979 came around Sennheiser bought out the game changing HD420 with a modernist design. These were noticeable for their great comfortable headband, lightweight, great sound and value for money. The problem was that they were ‘open’ in design. That means that they allowed other people to hear your music and could easily hear ambient noise from your surroundings. Eventually they created a closed version of these headphones and tweaked them to come up with the Sennheiser HD 250 II Linear.
    Sennheiser HD 250 II Linear headphones
    These headphones are big, but don’t look bulky. They are aesthetically pleasing which is more than you can say for their peers back in the day or even now. I have worn them all day without any discomfort or sweatiness. Pretty much every part is user replaceable making them ideal as a long term purchase (and environmentally friendly to boot).

    The rivals

    I’ve worn most of the rival headphones to the Sennheiser HD250 II Linear:

    • Sony’s MDR-7506 are loud and reliable. Which is why they are popular in APAC and amongst many people in video
    • The AKG K270 are comfortable and light, but sound less accurate than Beyerdynamic’s DT150.
    • Beyerdynamic’sDT100 and DT150 are great headsets, but they feel bulky. The sound is pleasant accurate but doesn’t have the space and detail of the Sennheisers
    Sennheiser HD250 II Linear pros and cons

    Sennheiser HD250 II Linear headphones have an open sound more like listening to loudspeakers. They are still insulated enough for DJing and being a good citizen on public transport. They are very accurate allowing you to hear flaws in digital sound sources. For instance iTunes on my Mac and my iPod sound clipped with a slight metallic quality and the bass sounds thin; even when compared to CD. (I use an old HHb CD-Recorder player based on the old Pioneer ‘turntable’ CD mechanism and a Technics SLZ-1200 as my primary CD players). Vinyl sounds warmer and more rounded. It does make me wonder how digital dance music can become without decent bass response but that’s a whole other blog post.

    There are some aspects of the Sennheiser HD250 II Linear that are an acquired taste from a design point-of-view. They have a straight cable rather than a coiled ‘telephone’ style cable. I prefer the coiled cable design but some people find that it pulls so its a matter of personal preference. The cabling design is a simple ‘Y’ design rather than running around inside the headphones like the HD 25. However this means that they are easy to service and there is less to go wrong.

    Sennheiser, if you get to read this article please bring the HD250 II Linear model back, or at the very least keep making spare parts for them and keep the parts readily available to consumers. More related content here.

  • I want to work in PR…

    I’ve had a number of messages on LinkedIn and emails over the past few months as graduates started to look for first jobs and start with ‘I want to work in PR’. So I figured it might be useful sharing the advice here. There are lots of obvious things you can do to make you more employable in terms of highlighting potential useful skills and getting the basics right – spelling and grammar being a major bugbear.

    But beyond all that generic advice here are some things to think about that are PR-specific:

    Don’t lose heart. I want to work in PR means commitment to beat out thousands of other talented smart graduates.

    Let’s start off with the maths, the job market is basically a numbers game, I got my first agency role after sending out over 200 CVs/ job application forms. It is just a matter of being at the right place at the right time

    When I started off, being a mature graduate, coming from an Irish working class household in the North West of England put me at a disadvantage. The clients and colleagues were all bothered about mojitos, wine and six nations rugby. The industry is still as white, middle class and English as it ever was. You have to be the change and that is really lonely. You’ll be on your own. Mentors can help, but you’ll be relying on your own resilience whether you’re:

      • From another country
      • Working class
      • Teetolaller
      • From an ethnic minority
      • Being older than the ‘norm’

    Classism and age are the last acceptable prejudices, but the others will be signalled through micro-aggressions, gaslighting and omission. Your allies won’t always be allies, dragging you down will help them get a leg up.

    So how can you tilt the odds in your favour?

    • You can increase your odds by becoming more visible through social media, just in the same way that you probably wouldn’t buy a brand that you couldn’t find on Google, having your own personal brand that is visible in a positive way online can only be a good thing. I realise that this isn’t necessarily easy however if your name is John Smith
    • Many of applicants have read all the pieces about innovative ways of applying for jobs and every second CV seems to have a QRcode on it. Innovation is great; my former colleague and friend Doug Winfield got himself noticed using Facebook advertising a year or two ago and is now holding down a senior role with with MS&L in New York. All I am going to say about innovation is that whilst it might get you  on to the initial pile of CVs to read; you also need to think about your CV also in terms of usability. When interviewing people you want to get the salient points of the CV prior to meeting them as easily as possible mainly because your working life will be time poor. Many larger HR departments will look to save your data on a database that they can interrogate, that means your information needs to be easy to put in. So there is a balance in your decision: getting noticed versus getting a job in competitive environments
    • Go where there will be less competition. How about applying to agencies working in less popular sectors and by looking to do PR at small-to-medium sized firms or even junior roles in-house.  Whilst people want to work with brands that their friends will know, third sector PR where they can feel good about themselves, or do celebrity PR – that is only a small part of the industry. I focused on the technology sector when I started off mainly because it was (and still is if we’re honest about it) deeply unsexy. The vast majority of the population don’t care about ERP, SCM, BPM and BPO; nor should they
    • Take advantage of disruption in the PR industry. Digital has started progressive change in the PR industry. The media industry is being disrupted; there are less gainfully-employed journalists writing more coverage, and publications  are earning less money from product and recruitment ads. This means that there less opportunities for traditional media relations. So PR has had to look to new influencers like bloggers and having direct dialogue with perspective product / service purchasers. This overlaps with business functions such as sales and customer services and other marketing disciplines. At the moment media buying, search and advertising agencies are staffing up with digital PR expertise and are killing PR agencies in new business pitch situations. Consequently it is worthwhile looking beyond the PR sector for PR roles
  • IBM fellows + more news

    IBM fellows

    New IBM Fellows push computing frontiers – IBM fellows are the company’s most prolific innovators. This batch of IBM fellows is interesting because it is a good indication of technology areas which will be hot: question-and-answer systems, a holistic approach to hardware and software design (like Apple), mathematical modelling for environmental risk management, stream computing, network optimised computer operating systems, cloud services, virtualised data centres and semiconductor design verification tools / processes (presumably to deal with increasing complexity and parallel processing at the silicon level)

    Business

    Helen Wang On China’s Opportunities. She’s Not Dreaming. : China Law Blog – luxury, healthcare, education and green tech are foreign companies opportunities. Basically most of the west is screwed

    Design

    Warm Respect for a Scottish Ruin – NYTimes.com – I love the way you have a house within a house on this design, could think of a few places in Ireland where this would work a treat

    Economics

    Revenge of the Invisible Hand – By Bruce Everett | Foreign Policy – this of course also means that much of the FTSE-related portfolios depending on Shell and BP for its value is screwed

    Big Oil In Turnaround – By Edward C. Chow | Foreign Policy – good write-up on the current state of what were the 7 Sisters of the oil industry. I’d be more worried about energy security than the environment now

    What exactly is made in China? | FT.com – rising wages encouraging clothing to move elsewhere in Southeast Asia

    Luxury

    Chanel’s cruise control | Material World | Vanessa Friedman blogs on the fashion and luxury industry for the Financial Times – FT.com

    Media

    U.S. Bill To Criminalize Illicit Movie / Music Streaming | TorrentFreak

    Leaked “ACTA” Lobby Letter Reveals Hollywood Pressure On EU | TorrentFreak – what is of interest is that they want to bypass the judiciary and push this into law

    Online

    Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions – NYTimes.com – interesting that law enforcement hasn’t been looking at this

    Security

    Why you can’t really anonymize your data – O’Reilly Radar – the ethics of big data need to be thought out and you have to ask questions about the ethics of how healthcare research is executed in the future

    Software

    Android vaults to smartphone lead as Nokia faces ‘ugly’ future | guardian.co.uk

    Did Microsoft pay for the wrong Skype? | asymco – interesting analysis

    Technology

    Zennstrom: private investors take the profits | FT.com – interesting ethical questions brought up

  • Bomb warning on social

    Last Monday, there was a credible bomb warning in London by dissidents within the Irish republican movement. The bomb warning information swept across Twitter as everyone looked for credible sources. The Metropolitan Police’s own press statement was linked to at least 139 times according to backtweets.com.
    Met Police - Press Bureau JPG
    Its a great well-written piece of communication. What was more interesting to me however was a piece of text at the bottom which says:

    IMPORTANT NOTE: This site is for the use of media organisations only.
    Media organisations should not publish links to this site.

    Given that the medium of Twitter had become the media it showed a lack of understanding in how social and breaking news now operate. There could have been numerous reasons for this:

    • Not wanting to have the press office deluged with calls from the general public
    • Not having their web server come down with a high-volume of inbound traffic

    But it struck me that a real opportunity was missed. Why not have a separate version of the page sans contact details that the media could link to, rather than having the social media swarm trying to second guess mainstream media sources. When the July 7 bombings took place in London, I worked at Yahoo! and the front page team took down the home page of the site, took all the hard-to-load elements off the page like banner ads. Instead they hard coded updates to minimise server loads and keep the information flowing for concerned Londoners.

    A simple updated page on a well-hardened web infrastructure is one of the best ways of communicating with people at times like this. Thankfully this time it wasn’t put to the test. But this will become more important in future events when as the internet fills will fake news and state sponsored online bad actors. More online related content can be found here.

  • Palm Vx

    When I started agency life I still had a trusty Filofax that had my contacts I had built up from DJing, working in the oil industry and being in college written in barely legible text on address sheets or plastic sheets stuffed with business cards. It had a reassuring heft to it like it contained both the old and new testaments of the bible. In my first 12 months working at the agency, my contacts were further swelled by journalists, suppliers, clients and colleagues stuffed into two Rolodex frames and 99 numbers on the SIM of my then new Ericsson PF 768 mobile phone.In addition to all this, I also had built up a database of over 200  industry contacts on ClarisWorks running on my by now ancient Apple PowerBook. This presented me with the kind of problems that businesses sorted with CRM software. A second problem that I had was making all this data portable. The solution to all this was the Palm Vx.
    Palm Vx
    The only device that was compatiable with my Mac was the Palm series of devices and flush with cash from my first year’s bonus. I got myself a Palm Vx from Expansys. In many respects despite its lack of an always-on wireless connection, the Palm Vx was the benchmark I have in mind when I look at smartphones.

    At its core the smartphone lives or dies by its personal information manager and its ability to sync with your computer for your contacts and calendar. When I used a Palm Vx, I never had the machine brick when I loaded too many contacts on to it, it never endlessly duplicated or corrupted contacts and it didn’t freak out when you scheduled events more than three months ahead.

    Unfortunately the same can’t be said for subsequent devices I owned including Palm’s Treo 600 and 650 phones, or the succession of Nokia devices I owned up until my E90 communicator gave up the ghost and went to the great Carphone Warehouse in the sky.

    The Vx was primitive, which was one of its main strengths:

    • Its screen which showed 16 types of grey was easy to view in direct sunlight
    • It’s electroluminescent backlight allowed you to view it in a darkened room and still have enough battery left to last you a week
    • It didn’t have an app store, but then there wasn’t any productivity sucking software and you could find new applications with your search engine of choice
    • It had to use a stylus for all but the most basic items on the resistive touchscreen, but Palm’s original single stroke handwriting called Graffiti once you got the hang of it is faster to use than the soft keyboard on my iPhone. Unfortunately a long-running patent dispute that went on until 2004 meant that Palm had to move to the inferior Graffiti 2 based on a product called Jot
    • It did allow you to sync your desktop PC’s inbox with your device so you could go through your email on the commute home, but you wouldn’t be bothered by the always connected aspects of push email. Push technology was a big thing then so if you got tired of clearing out your inbox you could read highlights from Wired.com or CNBC via the AvantGo service which sucked in content via your PC that you could then browse through offline at your leisure; in many respects an RSS reader before RSS became well-known
    • Location-based software before GPS was a subscription service called Vindigo that provided recommendations on restaurants, clubs and bars, and shopping. It also had maps that provided turn-by-turn instructions from a look-up table of  directions and was updated by syncing via serial port or USB connected cradle
    • Wireless connectivity was an IrDA infra-red port which was pathetic. I once tried to use it in conjunction with my Ericsson phone to surf the web but it was too much effort to keep both of them lined up. It was perfectly fine though for exchanging business cards electronically. I remember being at a Red Herring conference during the summer of 2000, demoing Palm devices and spent half the time beaming business cards with consultants and lawyers. It involved a curious ritual akin to an animal courtship display where two people would hold their devices in front of each other and move them closer or apart until their contact details had been exchanged. But it seemed to work better than any solution since. Moo cards are now my common currency of information exchange instead

    It was the industrial design of the Palm V and Vx that feels the most prescient parts of the product in many respects. Some of the decisions in this were forced on the designers by the hardware specifications. Palm used to use AAA batteries in their earlier devices and held the OS and resident apps in ROM. ROM was expensive at the time so the V and the Vx had everything in RAM which meant that there always needed to be a power supply which meant they had to use a lithium-ion battery. Since the battery wasn’t designed to be user serviceable the case was hot-glued together. This allowed the industrial designers to make the device much thinner so that it could be slipped into a set of jeans or a shirt pocket and weighed in at a paltry 114g, some 20g lighter than my iPhone without its case.

    The need for a ‘picture frame’ around the screen provided the designers with a way of making the device feel nicer in the hand by making it have rounded edges. It wasn’t that far off the iPhone in terms of size, but felt nicer to hold. When I first got my iPhone 3GS the device felt too wide in my hand. The product design encouraged premium brands like Burberry and Jean Paul Gaultier to make Palm V cases (which is a bit nicer than the silicone rubber jacket most people have on their iPhone. I used to have a slider case by a company called Rhinoskin made out of laser cut titanium plate that was indestructable.

    At the bottom of the Palm V and Vx was a connector that Palm continued to use on the M500-series devices. This connector meant that lots of companies made great accessories. A company called OmniSky sold a GSM modem that the PDA slotted into, ThinkOutside made the best folding keyboard I have ever used, again using the connector at the bottom to connect with the PDA. I once wrote a by-lined article on the train back from London to Liverpool without any at seat power and with both the keyboard and the Palm Vx slipping into my jacket pocket when I reached Liverpool Lime Street. Something I just couldn’t do with the iPhone due to its greedy battery life and the bulky keyboard accessories currently available.

    Looking back on it, the Palm Vx was the high point of of Palm the company. Missed technological opportunities, numerous management issues, poor quality product and software engineering together with wider market technological progress meant that the company and the PalmOS developer eco-system was a shadow of its former self by the the time the company was sold to HP.