Archive for the ‘Main’ Category

Tech-quote of the week

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

The first mobile phone invented by Martin Cooper weighed a kilogram and cost $1m to produce.

“The battery lifetime was 20 minutes, but that wasn’t really a big problem because you couldn’t hold that phone up for that long.”

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The old saying ‘Information is power’ has never been more true in the Online environment. With Search Engines and Social Media sites ratcheting up billions in advertising revenue simply by collating all the data that is freely available out there, its becoming quite a literally ‘a free for all’.

But where do they get all this free information and data from, and who writes it all? From Us. Me and you. As the amount of personal information about us all is being voluntarily uploaded via Social networking media, the web Megaliths like Google with its massive collating and repository resources, consume it heartily as its daily bread and butter.

All tends to sound a bit neurotic I know, but I often talk to cautious web users who are almost phobic about signing up to anything that snaps of social media irresponsibility. And in many ways I can’t blame them. I did think this was more down to a fear of the great ‘online unknown’ and a paranoia of all things technological. But could there also be a smattering of our naivity and passiveness creeping in, as Google street view cameras capture us and our homes in greater and greater detail (now 3D!).

We can so easily fall in love with our online social media apps and tools. They’re free but for a good reason. Very large amounts of data yield a proportionately increasing commercial return when packaged and served up correctly.

For a moment let’s indulge the scenario that all you have ever published on the web doesn’t ever disappear, but is archived. Archiving does make it sound all respectable and safe but data is archived rather than deleted for a reason, i.e. for future reference.

A recent move by US Library of Congress to archive every tweet ever posted publicly perhaps has come as a bit of a surprise. Its reasoning is that all our tweets will form a valuable social commentary of historical events – including all its momentous and trivial moments as they unfold in our public and often our private lives.

Is it my inherent distrust of government tinkering in our webspace or their moves to archive ‘Our’ information without ‘Our’ consent that sets my paranoic alarm bells clanging?

Embed me

There is also a massive surge towards sharing and embedding our social media interactions outside of their current Social Media framework, perhaps as a way of unifying all our separate online social involvements rather than having to start again from scratch every time there is a new kid on the block.

All reputable Social media sites and others including Google invariably have API tools so that content can hooked up to and extracted, repurposed, mashed up and processed on other sites.

A n example of this that proked some online controversy recently was the API-mashing of the site foursquare.com. This site leverages Twitter/Facebook live tweets to provide geographical local town movements we care to relay via mobiles etc in real time.

The site Pleaserobme.com then used Foursquare’s API to build its own site to highlight how easy it was to take all this shared information about individuals who had given their own home address, and using their realtime tweeting about their whereabouts could then publish which homes would be empty at any given (real)time.

The site now seems to have removed this feature, but made very a serious point: how easy it is to ‘pull’ in real-time social media data and for the wrong purposes, and also the fact that no-one is really regulating this type of embedded exploitation (self regulation aside).

The embedding of data is now becoming much easier and commonplace. Twitter has now announced its @anywhere tweet option, which will allow you to tweet your comments via other media sites that have this facility, (rather than via the SM bookmark icon)

There may well be virtuous ’drivers’ to develop a universally and socially coherent platform for us all to enjoy , although its more likely its do with a fear of a levelling off in interest (as has happened in Twitter recently) and consequent financial freefall ( the demise of Bebo) which commercially motivates the drive for Social Media sharing just to stay ahead of the competition.

And lets face it, their success and livelihood is built around how easy and frequently we can post our views and opinions, including our most throwaway comments – which of course aren’t actually thrown away.

Some web links:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8621297.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8570293.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8521598.stm

http://foursquare.com/

http://pleaserobme.com/

Tags: embedding media
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Bye bye mouse?

Friday, April 9th, 2010

The launch in the US the other day of the iPad was another nail in the coffin towards the extinction of our little wired tail hand held buddy. In fact its what our right has been doing since the rise and rise of the desktop PC. Ok, if we talk sematics the 2 fingered twiddling on the laptop touch pad – (or 1 fingered in the case of the case of the ThinkPad’s nub) has become second nature almost as much as that other textual tool (what was it called again- oh yes a pen)

I can remember back in 1988 first coming across the mouse for the first time and marvelling at the ingenuiuty and subtlety in terminology, and how we have so readily adapted to the apparent eye to hand juxtaposition tween desktop and screen (without realising it you’re doing it now aren’t you?). I remember trying to master freehand drawing for the first time as my precise mouse movements ended up like a scrawl from a crayon which had been clenched between the rear facing parts of my anatomy.

Market leaders and Market followers

Its a case of ergonomics I suppose – I remember watching a programme (15 years ago) on the evolution of the mobile phone and why they could never get any smaller than house brick size- simply because of the distance from mouthpiece to ear had to align with the relevant human audio and sound appendages. We all laugh now at the housebrick mobile but will we look back at out mouse antics one day and snigger?

Seriously there has been an underlying argument to reinvigorate the tactile on screen experience. Sony TRV camcorders I think were ahead of the game on this one some years back. they ditched the multi-multi-multi function button in place for OSD touch screen buttons -and …problem solved! Its all about making life easier and not just quicker, and if toucing the screen instead of the table does it for you its a big step forward in human-digital interaction.

Yes, I know the screen will get covered in butter and marmalade from time to time, but should this hold technology back? Not according to Apple who boldly reinvented where no other dared to reinvent. Enter the iPhone – tara! This little smartphone (there – I got that keyword in) has seen unrivalled success and has been unaparalled in breaking our love affair with ‘proxy button’ gadgetry. Now every other phone is clamouring to keep up in its wake.

Where is this all going?

I know I have been rambling a bit here but there is a serious point to all of this. There are two key drivers - as always is the consumer demand for a quicker and easier to use product, but secondly and more importantly perhaps, the ability to unshackle us from the workstation and do more and more from a mobile device – hence the reason and thinking behind the new iPad.
BUT guess what – the iPad doesn’t multi task and doesn’t come with 3G (wireless only) or Flash suppport (or..or..or)- what a huge DOH moment for Apple! You have to remember Apple has a reputation for doing 99% brilliantly and 1% a bit dopey when it comes to including the obvious (they would substitute the term dopey for protecting its market share)

Now if consumers are likely to access via mobile devices more and more – … you can guess where I am going with this perhaps… our associated thinking in terms of how we frame our offerings visually in the web landscape may also have to adapt .
Consider how an eCommerce site looks on a smartphone? More importantly the liklihood that shopping could be increasingly carried out through smartphone devices and IF (how big is that if) the iPad format takes off and spawns a whole generation of SmartPads. Early days yet, but in our relentless mission to seek out new life (went off topic there for a mo) and anticipate new consumer trends we will have to mark this one in our calendar… or in our iPHone App… or on our iPad…. or whatever screen you are currently touching at the moment.