Ged Carroll

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  • PSP + more news

    PSP

    The PSP has fired the imagination of grass roots developers already, which bodes well for its competition from Gizmondo – the Tiger and Microsoft-backed alternative. Nintendo’s DS doesn’t make claims to be any form of ‘convergence device’, but an honest mobile games console which focuses on playability rather than speeds and feeds. iPSP allows you to synch music with iTunes, carry your iPhoto library around with you and back up game data on to your Macintosh. Whilst Sony would probably not approve of this close linkage between the PSP and Apple’s iLife suite, it will not harm sales of the device amongst generation iPod.

    Expect sales of PSP movies and Sony Connect sales to be on the low side as PSP early adopters rip from their DVD and MP3 collections instead. Sony’s best option as with games is to go for exclusive movie and music content for the PSP.

    Folksonomy

    Folksonomy seems to have caught the imagination of both News.com and Charles Arthur’s contribution of netimperative. Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr is seen not only as a way of getting hold of a great info-imaging service, but also of harnessing a grassroots approach to creating true contextual searching.

    Mobile TV

    According to the Global Telecoms Business top five stories newsletter that NTL and O2 have announced which TV channels will be available to the 350 test subjects during their six month-long trial in Oxford. The 16 channels involved come from BSkyB, Chart Show TV, Discovery Networks Europe, Shorts International and Turner Broadcasting.

    Customised Nike sneakers

    In New York, Nike has extended their design your own trainer programme to billboard signs that you can manipulate via phoning a free phone number. Your specification can be shared via an SMS message. There is still no option to allow people like Jonah Peretti have Sweat Shop sewn on his set of trainers.

    8vo: On The Outside

    Finally ‘8vo: On the Outside’ is going to be launched. Written and designed by Mark Holt and Hamish Muir, based on their work designing for the likes of the famous Hacienda nightclub and changing and its influence in the emergent typographically-led design movement in the UK during the late 80s and through the 90s.

  • How We Got Here

    Over at R/C Towers we have been a bit quiet being all bookish, reading Al Qaeda by Jason Burke, When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein and a preview PDF of Andy Kessler’s forthcoming book How We Got Here.

    Through a former work colleague of mine, I managed to get an invitation to a lecture run by The Policy Exchange, a UK think-tank. The lecture was given by Jason Burke on the subject of Islamic terrorism. I found the lecture enlightening as it highlighted the fragmented, loosely connected, fluid nature of Islamic extremism. The credibility of Mr Burke’s lecture was heightened by the amount of ‘FCO and Home Office’ staffers in attendance. Burke’s book expands on the themes of his lecture and goes into much more detail. He writes in a clear and concise style that gets a lot of information over very quickly. One of the big takeouts is the long term difficulty in achieving victory in the war on terror by hard measures alone.

    The collapse of Long-Term Capital Management was something I was only vaguely aware of, as I was too focused on keeping up with the latest technology news starting my PR career representing TMT clients. When Genius Failed documents how arrogance, dogma and market conditions almost tore apart the world’s stock markets. It is a very easy read and tells the story of the hard and soft issues behind the collapse. The collapse affected some of the biggest names in Wall Street economics including Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, both of whom were responsible for the Black-Scholes model used by investors to calculate the ‘true value’ of a share or other financial instrument.

    (In a six-degrees of separation sort of way, one of my friends had met Myron Scholes when they went for an interview at Salomon Bros many years ago. The meeting went badly, Scholes was described to me as very arrogant and opinionated. Though in When Genius Fails he comes across as one of the more human characters.)

    Finally, How We Got Here tells the story of how the technology sector and the market economy got were it went today. Written by financier, perfect-market advocate and writer Andy Kessler, he traces the technology sector from the steam engine, patents from when they were awarded by royal warrant and stocks and shares from the privateering ways of Sir Francis Drake. Whilst you may not agree with Kessler’s views on economics (he famously riled Wired magazines readership with an op-ed advocating getting rid of the US Postal Service), he writes in an intelligent, accessible and humorous fashion. I would go as far as to put his forthcoming book as essential reading for anybody looking to work with modern technology companies alongside Accidental Empires by Robert X Cringely and Steven Levy’s Hackers.

  • America’s Secret War

    I recently finished reading America’s Secret War: inside the hidden worldwide struggle between the United States and its enemies, George Friedman’s book on the war on terror as George Bush calls the fight against Al Qaeda. America’s Secret War is interesting for a number of reasons. It discusses the war in a dispassionate manner, it slices rather more neatly than the media has ever been able to splitting the facts and propaganda from each other. Most importantly, in my mind it highlights a war that was not about oil or weapons of mass destruction, but a very expensive ‘Kirby Cleaner’ pitch. Years ago in an effort to make money, I considered selling these overpriced vacuum cleaners (even more overpriced than a Dyson). Anyway a key part of the sales person from Kirby is when they do a demonstration with a machine and show you what it is capable of (think HSN or QVC-type demos in your own living room).

    According to Friedman, the invasion of Iraq was part of an effort by the Americans to persuade the Saudi’s to get serious on terrorism. A demonstration of regime change through ‘shock and awe’ to show what happens to rogue regimes.

    George Friedman is a respected and very credible geopolitical pundit and heads up Stratfor.

    Who is Stratfor?

    Stratfor is an organisation which provides analysis of global and regional political and socio-economic issues to companies, organisations and government agencies. It has a client base made up of a wide range of blue-chip companies including the usual suspects in the energy sector, defence contractors, management consultancies and the media.

  • Folksonomy


    I wouldn’t have thought about tagging for community sense using the idea of the folksonomy if it wasn’t for my friend Uri. Uri introduced me to the ‘For Immediate Release‘ blog. The blog and podcasts focus on both PR and new communications technologies like podcasting and blogging. One thing of interest that came up was the concept of folksonomy, particularly with regards to web content. Folksonomy as a word is derived from taxonomy – where an item is strictly categorised into one area, think of a real book library where books are sorted by subject area and then sub-categories.

    Intranet designers are keen to sort items into clearly defined areas and this is often forced on e-tailers who purchase an off-the-peg online shop – I remember hearing stories of a famous UK online retailer where customers could not find how to buy their mobile phones online, the reason being is that the company had set up its online venture in a rush not to lose ground to the pure play dot.coms and went with an off-the-shelf US e-tail solution that categorised the product only as wireless phones.

    Folksonomy is about community-based classification, relying on the similar kind of goodwill that has made Wikipedia such a force.

    A key example that Hobson & Holtz discussed in their For Immediate Release podcast and blog on March 17, was photo repository Flickr and community bookmark site De.licio.us, both of which use their communities to classify content. This cluster of classifications resembles the lexemes that linguists talk about that associate words with meanings. This attachment of meaning from a user point of view could be the key to true contextual searching.

    At the end of the day Google is more like a savant, trying to use blind mathematics and processing power to compensate for its inability to establish meaning.

    Imagine going to the supermarket and asking the assistant for an item, they run down the corridor and run back with their arms full of different stuff. They empty the stuff into your trolley and say to you ‘Your item is in there’. If you are lucky, the item is at the top of the pile, it you aren’t you may sort through it all and find you don’t have it anyway. You complain to the manager and he dismisses you with ‘Its your own fault, you asked in the wrong way’. The analogy is actually what web search engines are like today, Google is just a fool shop assistant that can hold a lot more stuff.

    Yahoo! had previously tried to provide that context through a directory approach. This organised websites along a taxonomy approach. Categories had other categories nested in them, for example

    Arts >Literature­ >World Literature­ >British >Renaissanc­e >Drama

    This approach would be very familiar to librarians who would be used to every book having a categorisation. But sites can fit into multiple classifications and the average consumer has to know exactly the right classification.

    Efforts to make a ‘semantic web’ seem to have have gone nowhere. Hence efforts put behind the idea of a folksonomy. More related content here.

  • Renaissance

    Platform Art and Renaissance

    At Gloucester Road there is a series of self portraits by a photographer who has desguised himself in each picture. It is part of London Underground’s Platform Art series.

    I boought the tenth anniversary reissue of the original Renaissance mix album by Sasha and John Digweed. Renaissance is hailed by many clubbers as being revolutionary. I thought I would comment on some of the innovations:

    – Renaissance was the birth of progressive house: no it wasn’t you can hear a natural progression between early Renaissance and Sasha’s sets before the club was formed. Renaissance was built on the back of the reputation that Sasha had earned at Shelly’s in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent. Progressive house had been put out for a fair while by artists, most notably the Italian acts Sueno Latino and Last Rhythm. Fabi Paras had championed the sound in London.

    – Renaissance changed the visual language of clubbing: kind of. Renaissance got its name from borrowing fromrenaissance paintings, which were deconstructed and repurposed, however from the early days of house, many club flyers and imagery was borrowed from the cheesier ‘catholic’ religious art.

    – Renaissance was a life changing experience: It depends where your head was at. Renaissance was a good club, they managed to get all the ingredients right: the security, the staff, the clubbers, the venue, the ambience, the music and the DJs. People had a great time, but then in club culture during the early 1990s there was a lot of great times to be had every weekend all over the country.

    – Renaissance revived clubbing: Don’t believe the hype. Renaissance caught the top of the clubbing wave. It was one of a number of clubs that issued in a glitzy waye: straight lads wearning Versace shirts and leather trousers. Another trend to benefit was the mixed gay straight clubs like Vague in Leeds. The reasons why this came about was as much to do with getting a licence as baggy clothes for dancing meant wholesale drug use and possible dealer rumbles. Mincing around the club in clothes you would be afraid to sweat in was supposed to prevent it, it didn’t it just heralded the arrival of wholesale cocaine use. It replaced the egalitarian nature of house and rave with snobbishness.

    My recollections of Renaissance

    It was towards the end of 1992, a friend of mine had got a gig on a Friday night at the Venue 44 in Mansfield playing what would now be termed drum and bass. I knew him as we used to play house sets together. He had met a couple in some ski resort where he had gone to play for a couple of months. The couple were involved in putting club flyers in shops and bars throughout the Midlands and the North of England. When he came back, he got in touch with the couple and they got him the gig.

    I turned up to a half empty night decked out in decorations. After I made some enquiries, I got into Renaissance for free a few weeks later. I remember having a nightmare parking the Austin Metro I had at the time and stiff legs from the two-hour drive that did not welcome the stairs I had to climb to the front door. The building looked anonymous and whitewashed on the outside.

    The main dance floor had the DJ booth well above it and there was a chill out area between the front door and the barn like dance floor with bench seating and some sort of trellices. Most of the lads going there looked like rugby league players and the girls like night wear models. The club had a buzz, but it was not the raw electric feel of Shellys, The Hacienda or the Quadrant Park. More related content here.