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Kickstart in the buds

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on July 22, 2010. Filed under Blog. Tagged , . No comments.

I’m not sure what came over me this morning, but I suddenly realised how exciting it would be to invest in this kickstarter fund for Bud Caddell. It came to me when I was thinking that I actually wake up every morning and look at a bunch of stuff that this guy has curated from all over the place on his website and twitter account, and it’s always gold. Why wouldn’t I want to be part of this thing.

I’m also really interested in the whole process of how this comes together, especially with the group of superconnected and switched on people that have been contributing funds and will soon be contributing their thoughts to this endeavour.

Future Inputs

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on July 20, 2010. Filed under Blog, Future gazing. Tagged , . No comments.

input devicesWe live in a world where the keyboard, mouse and button rule supreme, very little comes close to the rates of human interaction these devices get, other than potentially keys, door handles, steering wheels, knobs and taps. Have a think about what other things your hands touch in a day to get another inanimate object to do something. Clearly as humans, we use our other senses and body language for communication, but we’re not quite there with those sensory inputs for inanimate objects like computers are we?

or are we?

News is just out that NEC has built digital billboards in Japan that use face recognition to work out your gender and age (to within 10 years) and then serve you a more targeted ad. Mobile and social media apps increasingly want to pin you to a place and a time to give more relevance. Sound activated devices (think lighting in a cheesy 80s bachelor pad) have been around for ages. Motion sensors can be found in burglar alarms the world over. Come to think of it, it’s everywhere, it’s just not in many devices yet.

Like the billboard, all these devices try and give you a more personalised experience.

I personally love the idea of ads so targeted that you want to see them. In fact if your e-clone could help arrange this, I wouldn’t mind at all, if someone wants to tell me whilst I’m out of the house about a cheap holiday deal last minute that I could surprise my family with, or that a particular place I like is doing a special deal on my favourite sandwich, it would be great!

But how far would people go? would you like it if every device you owned could use any number of input devices to make a more compelling and useful experience for you? Would you like it if your web browser sniffed not only your flash player version, but your breath, make of aftershave/perfume, looked at the clothes you were wearing in terms of styling, colour and age, and then served you some ads that would make you look, smell and feel great?

I bet someone out there is making a computer that can detect these things, and if they’re not, surely it’s a whole new industry of device creation, gadgets, data collection, marketing data and advertising to be taken advantage of!

Which adserver rocks?

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on July 14, 2010. Filed under banner advertising. Tagged , . 1 Comment.

For the last 5 years, I’ve been giving feedback to the various ad serving platforms in the hope that they improve their platforms in areas that make a difference (at least to me and the good people I’ve worked with).

These platforms serve up billions of ads every year to the unwitting public. But the public don’t really see the hard work, craftsmanship and ingenuity that go into building some of these ads, and then getting them to work on different platforms.

In the past, I’ve sought feedback to pass onto the adservers from my in-house development team, who’ve all slaved away at some point trying to get their masterpieces to work on Atlas, Eyeblaster, Flashtalking or Doubleclick. This year, since my team is actually a network, I’m keen to cast the net a little wider, and ask you what you think is working well, what needs to be improved.

I have to say, that my current favourite has to be Flashtalking: They have the best made, most developer-friendly components, helpful customer service and tech support, and easily the fastest, least-crashworthy browser interface for uploads and testing.

All comments welcome.

The Technological Horoscope

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on July 14, 2010. Filed under Blog, Future gazing. Tagged , , , . No comments.

The Chinese Horoscope

What Chinese Star Sign are you?

I’m a Snake, specifically a Fire Snake (1977).

That’s down to the 60 year cycle of the Chinese lunar calendar, which passes through 5 elemental states (Metal, Wood, Fire, Wind and Earth), and 12 creatures (Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Ram, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and the Pig).

The soothsayers of our modern age have been proclaiming that this year is finally the “Year of the Mobile” for quite some time now. And I for one feel like this has now arrived and is officially here to stay. Perhaps that’s because I’ve been living not in the “the year of the mobile”, but rather “the Decade of the mobile”.

With any technology, by the time it hits the peak point, its value as a marketing medium for innovators and advertisers diminishes. No longer will be people be so wowed and turn their attention to this technology, because it’s plateauing out and the market has hit saturation point.

And what makes something the leading technology of that year? It’s reach? It’s percentage growth? It’s wow factor? The Marketing spend? The amount of noise people make about it? Well, surely all those things and more.

But what about last year, or next year. If one was to chart what has actually happened and see what people have said, what would each year be called in terms of the Technology that’s captured the imaginations of the most people? is 2010 the year of the Tablet? was 2009 the year of the App? that’s a whole post in itself that I’m going to have to come back to.

Now based purely on supposition, inspired somewhat by this post about the future from Mr Russ Tucker, and where we are with devices like smartphones, iPads, and the rate of increase of broadband speed etc., I’m going to throw out some ideas about what future years might be called.

The year of the networked earth – broadband and wifi technology becomes so pervasive that even giant squid at the bottom of the sea and eagles above Everest could log into their gmail if they needed to. The cost of broadband drops through the floor, and the industry becomes state-run whilst some governments try to cling onto the thought that they can control information. This “Dataflow” raises the possibility of every single object on earthbeing able to talk to each other, providing a record of every living and inanimate object in time and space.

The year of the uncomputer – further advances in nanotechnology, superconductors, quantum computing, and micro-kinetic power sources will see high powered computers woven literally into the fabric of daily life. Always on, always plumbed straight into the internet, always working harder to change the way we live. Your socks will recognise when one of their thread’s circuits breaks when they wear out, and send a signal to your watch, which in turn will tell you that it’s time to get some new ones, and order them for you, in the right size, in time for the next time you need to put some socks on (your socks know your daily movements after all).

The year of the HUD (aka the year of the iGlasses, and then the year of the iBall). Apple will invest heavily in Head-Up Display technology and eyeglass nanotechnology, aiming to miniaturise the display device for their now ubiquitous app platform, and beam their products straight onto the lenses of their legion of fanboys. Augmented Reality will become an actual reality, and brands will fight to become the person controlling yours. Location awareness on the micrometre scale means that people will be able to see in the dark, and overlay all the data of the internet on the world around them. Apple dub their first prototype iSee. This is all just a diversionary tactic though, as the real surprise is that Apple’s been investing even more money via a shell company in visual cortex biotechnology, and whilst their competitors have been trying to build rivals to iSee, Steve has had his retinas fitted with a nanochip in an operation akin to laser eye surgery, so that with the blink of the eye, he can switch on his HUD and truly be the first layer between the brain and reality.

The year of the voice – A new generation of oxbridge and MIT students raised on the appalling voice recognition technology used in call centers enhances the existing technology by tapping into the research that’s been carried out on alpha waves and brain patterns during communication. Combining the two by capturing alpha wave radiofrequencies in a new kind of earpiece receiver designed to capture a much wider band of the aural and radiomagnetic spectrum, the voice recognition technology combines the information to capture not just words, but intent as well. A whole new dictionary of emotions is searched alongside the databases of words and sounds giving rise to a whole new industry, “Communication recogniton”.

What is a Creative Technologist?

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on May 21, 2010. Filed under Blog. Tagged , , . 1 Comment.

Question

An interesting discussion took place recently on linkedin, in the Creative Technologist group (if you’re not a member, I’d suggest you join, some interesting folk on there). The question posed at the start was what does “Creative Technologist” mean?

Some saw this as a shift from the traditional creative providing all the creative ideas to someone with a technical background being a driver of creative thinking. Some saw it as someone who uses technology in the field of design, art or advertising. Some thought that it was an empty term, and some even thought it actually devalued being a technologist by feeling the need to add the word “creative” in front of it.

My first realisation that there was such a phrase was when one of my old CDs (a certain Mr. Andy Sandoz) coined the term back in 2005 when I started working at Agency Republic, I think he used it back at his old agency. The idea was that it was someone who knew the ins and outs of technology and they were able to work out the creative possibilities of an idea. This person didn’t sit at the end of a factory-line creative process, but got involved in the strategy, the big idea, and then the implementation and how it grew from there.

One idea that epitomises this is something this CD used to say, “you can’t say no to any idea, there’s always a way”. I agree with this sentiment in that there’s always a way to do something, even within a certain time and budget, it’s about trying new ideas out by using different technologies, prototyping, collaboration and responsible risk-taking.

Creative Technology is what lies at the heart of good digital work, and Creative Technologists are part of the team that make it all happen, along with a whole plethora of other interchangeable disciplines.

Facebook Open Graph

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on April 27, 2010. Filed under Future gazing, production. Tagged , , . 1 Comment.

Just read about and now tried out Facebook’s new Open Graph protocol on our website. This is apparently Zuckerburg’s attempt at putting people and their recommendations at the centre of a semantically linked web, which makes perfect sense.

Take your content into Facebook

One of the ways that it works is by letting developers add “Like” buttons to their pages, a bit like the one above, and also on the right hand side of this page, which can then be used by visitors to sites outside of facebook. When someone clicks on the “Like” button, it then appears in their newsfeed, thus driving others to the content.

taking Like outside Facebook

After all, if your friends like it, you might just be into it as well, and anyway, it might be more relevant than the 365 results that Google returned when you searched for “Trololololoooo”.

The links themselves contain the semantics that the protocol specifies, ranging from the type of content in question, down to things like ISBN numbers and longitude and latitude.

There’s clearly going to be a few people complaining about the fact that you need to be a member of Facebook to get this to work, but I see this as being a very useful tool going forward, especially in advertising, to get more people power behind a campaign.

I Like!

How do you learn how to do stuff? Fail!

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on April 21, 2010. Filed under production. Tagged , , . 4 Comments.

fail keyboard

I was talking to someone new in the industry this week when they said that they were looking for ways to understand the ins and outs of digital projects and the many technologies that one could use.

Ideally they wanted a quick way to understand technologies like AJAX and Flash. Unfortunately I had to disappoint them.

Maybe there is a quick way, but I don’t know it. I’ve spent years prototyping, testing, reading, trawling through coding forums, reading and refining my bloglists on google reader, listening to selected tweets, attending countless meetups and forums and expanding my horizon in terms of new technologies. This has literally taken years.

What I can tell you, is that most people in this industry who have progressed in their careers have tried (and probably failed at) a lot of things, and probably from the point of view of a creative, a designer, a developer, a producer, an information architect, a tester and maybe even a client.

What’s key is that people take time to try things, review what they’ve done, looked at it from different perspectives and then try to understand why things have gone wrong if it hasn’t gone to plan. This approach allows you change your methods in the future and to be more mature in your planning (allowing for risk and contingency) and responsible in your change management (doing what’s best for the project and the end user).

Try it, Fail, review, learn to do it better! Then rinse and repeat.

2010 Mobile metrics

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on March 22, 2010. Filed under mobile. Tagged , , . No comments.

Nice little PDF about mobile metrics from Admob.

You’re twisting my melon man!

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on March 17, 2010. Filed under Review. Tagged , , , , . No comments.

Decode at the V&A – Visualisations and Interaction

I’d been meaning to go to the V&A to see the Decode exhibition for ages, and I’m really glad I went. Many of the usual names associated with work of this kind were mentioned – Karsten Schmidt, John Maeda, Joshua Davis, Robert Hodgin, Jonathan Harris – and there were gladly a few that I hadn’t yet been introduced to.

It’s always fun and interesting seeing live interactive displays in person, watching the looks on people’s faces as they play around with strange gadgets, trying out different movements, or tapping screens in different places, or even wiggling digital hairdryers around (Sennep’s Dandelion installation).

It’s also really interesting to see how people turn data – statically mined or digested in real time – into something beautiful and mesmerising. It’s playing with numbers, or “Math” as the americans call it, in it’s most fun form.

Many of the visualisation pieces are great because they keep the number of parameters low, and then are expressed using lots of simple visual metaphors. The results often look complex, but that’s the result of the inherent complexity of a few changing parameters. Simples yes?

The following, in no particular order, caught my eye, partly because I hadn’t seen them before “live”, and partly because I had the most fun watching/playing with them.

Flight Patterns, by Aaron Koblin

Aaron Koblin

This is a beautiful visualisation of Koblin’s work, taking data from America’s flight times and flight paths to show the wave of criss-crossed plane trajectories as they take off and land from airports across the US. You can see the rhythms of the day, as wave after wave breaks from the atlantic seaboard at sunrise to the pacific coast at sunset. It’s a really nice effect.

Flight Patterns at the V&A Decode exhibition by Aaron Koblin from Robin Wong on Vimeo.

House of cards, by Aaron Koblin

Another great piece of work from Koblin -Radiohead’s House Of cards video, translated into a touchscreen interactive installation, as opposed to the online mouse-controlled one. Play with the music video whilst you watch it.

House of cards at the V&A decode exhibition, by Aaron Koblin from Robin Wong on Vimeo.

Weave Mirror, by Daniel Rozin

Probably my favourite piece of the whole exhibiton, because it didn’t involve a traditional display device, ie. a screen. In a nutshell, this is an interactive sculpture, taking the input from a video camera to set the positions of a grid of motorised bands each with a strip that goes from dark to golden, to replicate the effect of a mirror, or a screen. The grid is set into a pattern that mimics a weaved pattern, but they are in fact individual motorised unit set at perpendicular positions.

Daniel Rozin

Watch me try and film badly whilst moving around with the grace of a toddler.

Weave Mirror at the V&A decode exhibition, by Daniel Rozin from Robin Wong on Vimeo.

Digital Zoetrope by Troika

Nice take on the old fashione victorian zoetropes by Sebastien Noel

Troika – digital zoetrope from Robin Wong on Vimeo.

Spikes

Apologies to the artiste, but I couldn’t remember who did this one, but it looks lovely

Spike from Robin Wong on Vimeo.

All in all, I can thoroughly recommend going along. £5 well spent.