It makes sense to start this category with warning. Marshall McLuhan was most famous for his insight – The medium is the message: it isn’t just the content of a media which matters, but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate.
But McLuhan wasn’t an advocate of it, he saw dangers beneath the surface as this quote from his participation in the 1976 Canadian Forum shows.
“The violence that all electric media inflict in their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the physical bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity. The loss of individual and personal meaning via the electronic media ensures a corresponding and reciprocal violence from those so deprived of their identities; for violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.”
McLuhan was concerned with the mass media, in particular the effect of television on society. Yet the content is atemporal. I am sure the warning would have fitted in with rock and roll singles during the 1950s or social media platforms today.
I am concerned not only changes in platforms and consumer behaviour but the interaction of those platforms with societal structures.
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
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.
FT.com – Vodafone slams curb on rates – The curb on rates is complex. I agree with Vodafone that consumers would not like to pay to receive calls as well as paying to make them – this would bring the UK more in line with the US experience. However, I can understand why a curb on charges is proposed. The curb in charges is inspired by roaming charges that are expensive and the stuff of modern-day horror stories. The curb on charges will be implemented More related content here.
Yahoo Bleeds Purple. And You Thought Microsoft’s Marketing Campaign Was Weird – not sure that as a consumer I would be clear about what the call to action is, but some of the elements in this are quite nice. For sneaker freaker completists; you may want to catch on to a set of limited edition Yahoo! vs Pony in a purple and white colorway. Without giving too much away I have spoken to people in the know and it will all make sense over the next couple of months. Keep an eye on Yahoo! UK for some changes sooner, rather than later
Urban Tours – interesting way for Blackberry to try and differentiate itself from the ubiquitous mapping applications now on smartphones. It also breaks out of the Brooks Brothers-clad Crackberry image
Artificial DNA Could Become Savior Of Technology | PSFK – Trends, Ideas & Inspiration – PSFK isn’t normally the place I would go for futurism but their take on artificial DNA is interesting. Artificial DNA offers opportunity as a storage medium that could be much more compact than today’s flash storage or hard drives. Artificial DNA also offers opportunities in new classes of medicinal treatments that might be personalised.
Lost In Translation: Japanese Market Not Sold On iPhone Cool Factor – In Japan, like elsewhere, gadget fans lined up to be some of the first to buy the new iPhone last week. However, after the initial rush, it appears that consumers there aren’t completely sold on the device. Part of this is down to the high quality level of services that they have been used to on their flip phones with added carrier based services and even a social network called Mixi. The iPhone will need to provide a better experience optimised for Japanese consumers
Rob Enderle does not know the meaning of surrender. Or disclosure. – MacUser – industry analyst gets called out on astroturfing. Rod Enderle is old school Silicon Valley, he worked in finance, and IT business analysis roles at Rolm. Rolm sold military specification computers to the US armed services and for other applications like oil exploration and various telecoms products. Rod Enderle would have worked with partners like IBM and Data General – in their time big enterprise technology firms. (Data General would be later bought out by EMC, now part of Dell). These connections probably helped Rob Enderle throughout his analyst career. He started as an analyst in the mid 1990s, which was a golden time. Rob Enderle was meeting large corporates rolling out ERP and CRM software, his opinions and research at Dataquest and Giga helped sway multi-million dollar deals around the world.
WordPress for iPhone – this is going to get a lot of hype, whats wrong with using the update by email option? I think this is brand over requirement. You are not a credible digerati brand unless you support the iPhone platform.