Ged Carroll

Category: gadget | 小工具 | 가제트 | ガジェット

What constitutes a gadget? The dictionary definition would be a small mechanical or electronic device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.

When I started writing this blog the gadget section focused on personal digital assistants such as the Palm PDA and Sony’s Clie devices. Or the Anoto digital pen that allowed you to record digitally what had been written on a specially marked out paper page, giving the best of both experiences.

Some of the ideas I shared weren’t so small like a Panasonic sleeping room for sleep starved, but well heeled Japanese.

When cutting edge technology failed me, I periodically went back to older technology such as the Nokia 8850 cellphone or my love of the Nokia E90 Communicator.

I also started looking back to discontinued products like the Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro, one of the best cassette decks ever made of any size. I knew people who used it in their hi-fi systems as well as for portable audio.

Some of the technology that I looked at were products that marked a particular point in my life such as my college days with the Apple StyleWriter II. While my college peers were worried about getting on laser printers to submit assignments, I had a stack of cartridges cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol to deal with any non catastrophic printer issues and so could print during the evening in the comfort of my lodgings.

Alongside the demise in prominence of the gadget, there has been a rise in the trend of everyday carry or EDC.

  • Kin logo

    Whilst I won’t be dashing out and getting myself one of the Microsoft | Sharp Kin phones. I did like the Kin logo. The logo seems to be completely unrelated to the devices. It’s an atemporal brand design it would be easy to produce on screen, as an app icon or in print and also looks as if it draws heavily on Asian influence. 

    You wouldn’t need to be able to read the characters to at least recognise the brand. With that in mind it would work in markets around the world. 

    All of that is makes for a really challenging design brief and the work done on the Kin logo is very impressive. 

    I’d go as far as to say that the Kin brand and products are unworthy of the Kin logo design 

    Microsoft Kin logo

    There is a noticeable stylistic similarity to the S|Double Studio logo from Shawn Stussy’s new clothing label.

    s|double

    And the S|Double logo reminds me of Asian seal designs used to sign documents and mark the ownership of artworks. 

    seal

    This is roughly what my given name would look like on a seal or chop in Chinese characters. 

    There is also a resemblance to Chinese design motifs in Chinese new year and wedding decorations. The one that immediately comes to mind for me is the double happiness character set that is incorporated into designs. 

    Such motifs are used in a repeated pattern across fabric weave, interior design prints and carvings. There is a certain irony in that the Kin logo: one of the most modern of graphic design assignments going back designs and principles that are millennia old. 

    I am curious to know if the Kin logo harking back to those designs was intentional, based on design research, or if it was happenstance. Both are probable likelihoods for this project. 

  • Palm troubles

    First of all some disclosure: I worked on the Palm account at my agency some ten years ago now and got to work with some of the smartest people in mobile device technology, notably the company’s chief competitive officer Michael Mace as an occasional media spokesperson back when his pictures had him with a Magnum PI-style moustache.

    At the time I worked on the account the company was riding high on the PDA boom, but the seeds of its current problems were sown back then.

    Even after working on the Palm account, I was a Palm customer. I had a Palm Vx which I used to death (quite literally) and spent a fortune on accessories including a Rhinoskin titanium slider hard case and a ThinkOutside portable keyboard. After that  I had a number of other Palm devices: a m515, a Tungsten3, a Treo 600 and a Treo 650.

    The last device left such a bad taste in my mouth because of an address book full of duplicates and corrupted data that I migrated to Nokia E-series devices, which provided a superior experience to the Treo 650 despite serious software stability issues.

    The company has been buffeted by critics over the years, many of them well-meaning.

    With the arrival of Jon Rubenstein to give it flare and product smarts and a matching injection of new money into the company, there was every chance that Palm could reinvent itself.

    Unfortunately it didn’t, and the company is now reaping the fruits of mediocre labours.

    To be honest the signs where there that the new product line wasn’t great and I wasn’t surprised:

    The communications-related signs are particularly damning as they indicate that at least some insiders at the company may have realised that the product despite the hoopla was not ready for primetime.

    Palm Pre

    The second good sign of a bad device is when after a decent amount of time virtually no one that you know owns one. I only know one person: the fashion-forward Rise co-founder Paul Allen; however on this occasion the Palm Pre has turned out not to be a fashion classic and more like a gadget equivalent of MC Hammer’s parachute pants.

    Interestingly, in his letter to Palm employees, Rubenstein puts much of the weight of corrective action on working short-term tactics with carrier partners to create demand push with no clue about what execution improvements in terms of product redesigns and quality improvements (if any) would be coming to shore up a poor customer experience. More gadget related content can be found here.

  • The Playful World by Mark Pesce

    The Playful World was written by Mark Pesce. Pesce was an early pioneer of the web. He was instrumental in bringing a 3d interface to the web through a standard called VRML. This was an early attempt to provide the kind of immersive ‘matrix’ experience envisaged by the likes of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson in cyberpunk literature. Were a digital double of the real world (or more likely a more attenuated digital version) provides for interactions in the virtual realm.

    Since then he has been applying his ingenuity and enterprise to academia  and futurism for the past decade and a half.

    The Playful World was written about a decade ago, yet was very prescient of today’s cutting-edge web and related technology trends:

    • Augmented web – the web provided a data overlay of the real world with applications like locative digital art and turn by turn directions for navigation. Putting this inside glasses rather than on a screen would mirror some of the human computer interaction work done since the 1960s for fighter pilots.
    • The web of things – items become intrinsically linked to the web with all the security risks that entails as well.
    • Custom manufacturing – smaller production runs, intellectual property becomes more important than manufacturing scale. Globalisation gets transformed. Waste could be reduced, though that would be affected by the kind of prototyping one goes through printing items in 3D printing from an existing file.
    • Gaming – lean forward entertainment becomes more immersive, though a lot of the growth in gaming has already happened

    Pesce knits his experiences together into an engaging narrative that would brings all of it together for the reader. If you want to get where things are going I recommend you have a read of Pesce’s book. You can find more book reviews here. More related content here.

  • Friendfeed & more news

    Friendfeed

    Revealed: why Facebook acquired FriendFeed – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic – Will McInnes talks about the Facebook | Friendfeed deal.

    Business

    Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

    Consumer behaviour

    Kids want to own, not stream, their music says survey – The Next Web

    Design

    Little Art Book – Limited Edition Prints – Art Gallery – I love the prints here mix of great illustration and Banksy like image subversion of cultural icons

    Gadgets

    Nokia outsmarted on smartphones

    How to

    boxee: the open, connected, social media center for mac os x and linux – I need to check this out

    Ideas

    Some Serious Freeconomics – interesting points from Fred Wilson

    Luxury

    brandchannel.com | Vuarnet – interesting brand history of the storied sunglasses brand

    Marketing

    NY Mag Commenters Get Hired for HSBC’s SoapboxCampaign – PSFK

    PR Communications: A PR Strategy Not Social Media Tactics Won The Presidential Election 2008 – cutting through the hoopla and looking at the substance. At the end of the day social media is just a channel

    Media

    Revisionist History: Bartz Claims Yahoo Was Never A Search Engine – Danny Sullivan shows the holes in Yahoo!’s spin around the search deal with Microsoft. When I was Yahoo! search was responsible for about 50 percent of revenue.

    Highfield joins Microsoft after just four months at Project Kangaroo • The Register – Ashley Highfield jumped from the BBC’s digital transformation to Microsoft in a manner that raised a few eyebrows

    Online

    UK PR people on Twitter | PRBLOGGER.COM – PR blog – Stephen Davies has done the hard work so you don’t have to in his list of UK PR people on Twitter

    Google’s new search update “Caffeine” changes both look and feel | VentureBeat

    WebWorkerDaily » Archive How Twitter is a Communications Game Changer «

    Software

    Yahoo’s Hadoop Genius Leaves For Startup (YHOO) – spiraling the drain

    Yahoo’s BrowserPlus continues to dismantle wall between browser and desktop » VentureBeat – Interesting features including drag and drop into browser

    Worst. Bug. Ever. – this is the best: the T-Mobile G1 Android handset sounds like a complete dog

    Digital Evangelist: 72Hours in what have I learnt about my Nokia? – interesting learning experience on Symbian and Ovi web services

    Wireless

    Total Telecom – Low-cost handsets to account for half of all mobile phones by 2014

    On its second try, Sandbridge promises a revolution with the Holy Grail of wireless chips » VentureBeat – software defined radio gets new silicon

  • Mirrorshades – The Cyberpunk Anthology edited by Bruce Sterling

    Cyberpunk is a type of science fiction that has been very influential in the creation of the web as we know it. As with most predictions about the future, the now has both over-and-under achieved. Since we are at an economic inflection point, I thought I’d revisit one of the seminal publications of the cyberpunk genre Mirrorshades.

    Mirrorshades

    Mirrorshades is a collection of stories that were created by authors considered to be representative of that genre by one of their own Bruce Sterling. Mirrorshades refers to the Oakley type-lenses in sunglasses that were considered to be a cultural artifact for this genre, in the same way that chromed rocket fins graced US-made cars of the 1950s and 60s.

    In some ways the stories echoed the kind of ideas I would expect appearing in feature articles of Wired magazine: private artificial islands based on a libertarian ideal to fuel commerce, artificial-eye implants, radical Islam-inspired cyber-terrorism and gene therapy. All of this feels familiar in a post-truth era of late stage capitalism where authoritarianism vies with liberal democracy for legitimancy

    Others were exceptionally dated: depending on the the Soviet Bloc to still be a bulwark against global capitalism. The rampant artificial drug use in the stories mirrored the US decent from hippy-inspired pot heads to mainstream cocaine use and new drugs that were then coming online including crack cocaine and MDMA. There was an assumption that the leisure pharmaceutical industry would carry on this spurt of commercial innovation through product development.

    Mirrorshades is a good read, but the ideas have been so pillaged by later works that you have to keep yourself in check and remember that for much of the films and books in this area, Mirrorshades (often filtered through other authors later works) was the genesis; the source material from which they sprang. More book reviews here.