12 posts
Wired have an interesting post about researchers in South Korea experimenting with semiconducting ink that would allow manufacturers to replace bar codes in supermarkets withRFID signals. As the article points out though, it’s a proof-of-concept but the technology hastonnes of benefits, not only for consumers but for shipping and logistics.
Yesterday I listened to a very inspirational talk on TED by Steve Jobs ’How to live before you die‘. By telling 3 stories from his life Steve is urging people to pursue their dreams and trust their intuition.
Steve always followed his intuition. He never graduated from the university. He didn’t know what he wanted to do in his life and didn’t think that college would help him figure it out. He dropped out of Reed College just after 6 months. By dropping out he could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest him and join the ones that looked interesting. For example he took calligraphy class to learn about typefaces, about what makes great typography great. 10 years later when designing the first Macintosh computer he used his knowledge and skills to design the first computer with beautiful typography. Much of what he stumbled into by following his curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Key learning points:
Whilst wandering around an unfamiliar supermarket at the weekend (looking for Cous Cous) an idea for a mobile app suddenly hit me.
How about a store-based product finder?
It would work like this:
One of the most enjoyable things about being at SXSW this year was sitting in some of the larger and more disastrous talks and reading the tweets roll in from around the room. I’ve heard a few social media muggers call this ‘the social media backchannel’. It’s consistently amusing. It’s like passing notes around a class full of your best friends in front of a blind supply teacher.
Recently, Jeff Jarvis’ post on how the ‘one to many’ format of Ted talks is ‘bullshit’ caused a bit of a ‘hear hear’ reaction online. His point is that the educational system has not changed to accommodate the “crowdly” influence of the web, that the lecture format where one person speaks and the rest of us listens no longer makes sense, because today we’re ‘many to many’, ‘co-creators’ of knowledge.
Most of us agree that the educational system desperately need to change, but why attack TED’s format? This seems like a cheap shot, dragging a great name into the mud just to gain a bit ofattention.Most of us agree that the educational system desperately need to change, but why attack TED’s format? This seems like a cheap shot, dragging a great name into the mud just to gain a bit of attention.
On the recommendation of fellow cyclist Brian Sheridan who I met at SXSW (the conference that keeps on giving) I downloaded the iMapMyRide iPhone app last weekend to track my latest jaunt out on the bike.
I’ve been a cyclist for about 20 years and have used many different handlebar mounted computers over that time. These show all the predictable stuff like trip distance, average speed, current speed, overall distance, pedal cadence and a few other things. All measured by magnets on the wheels and sensors attached to the frame. I’ve even used heart rate monitors when I was really serious (and fit).
But this iMapMyRide app takes geekyness + sport to a new level.
Hidden among the details of Apple’s announcement of the next version of the iPhone operating system last week was a nasty, snide little addition to the terms and conditions that iPhone app developers must agree to in order to get their apps into the App Store.
In effect, it says that you must use Apple’s developer tools and preferred programming language to develop iPhone apps. Which, on the face of it, is uncontroversial. It’s Apple’s platform, so you use Apple tools and languages. The problem is that there are significant efforts from other companies and projects to make it easier to transition to iPhone app development from other platforms, such as Microsoft’s .NET and Adobe’s Flash, as well as to make it easier to write apps that run on multiple mobile platforms. Apple’s devotees have had problems with these alternative platforms before, as I wrote a few months ago, but now Apple have taken the extraordinary step of embedding their own language preference in the terms and conditions of even being an iPhone developer at all.
Task: A day in the life of a project assistant (me!) at Made by Many
Tools: Main weapons of choice -
Optional – copious quantities of coffee, post-its (to promptly lose), Spotify/we7 (prog rock all the way as you can see from my last.fm!), Twitter (TweetDeck is my client of choice) and Pages.
It’s been a tough month for Umair Haque. First, he conducted the world’s most boring and pointless interview at SXSWi, and now he blogs his extraordinarily muddled thoughts on theiPad.
It’s tough to sum up what he’s saying because it’s so confused. He seems to want the iPad to be more open both physically and in terms of installing apps and content. This is understandable in some ways, but he’s an economist, and his argument seems to be saying that Apple will not succeed with the approach they’ve chosen for fundamental market-based reasons. It’s just that he fails to provide any evidence at all that this is so.
Let’s take it one paragraph at a time.
Over the last year or so, one of the kinds of planning that I’ve been hearing more and more of is propagation planning. Propagation planning is planning that reaches a tier of people beyond those your agency directly connects with through its work, by providing a core group of people with material they find useful enough to spread on their own.
In the words of Griffin Farley, Strategy Director at BBH New York, “planning not for the people you reach, but the people that they reach, by giving them assets to propagate.”
