Disclaimer: Arcade Fire are my favourite bestest best band ever. So I’m likely to be slightly biased about this!

Have you had a go at this yet? Go on give it a go… I really enjoyed it and found the experience quite moving. Given that I had grown up in the relatively protected ‘burbs of Newcastle, the overlaid streetview images fitted very nicely with the sentiment of the song and the album. Not sure how well it would work if you were brought up in Streatham though, or at the other end of the scale, a luxury pile in Monaco.

The whole experience has a feel of a ‘final project at university’ or something (in a very good way), where they’ve just decided to sod the taboo of having multiple pop up windows running at the same time. Ok so it  struggled with runtime a bit and made my laptop slow down to a snails pace if I tried to do anything else – but it’s an immersive experience and one that warrants a bit of artistic license.

The things I liked about it;

1. The use of multiple windows
2. The integration of streetview and google maps
3. The ‘unexpected’ 3d animation at the end
4. The text animation/effects on the ‘Postcard’ section
5. The fact that they’re using up loads of your processor power but just don’t care that much – even putting a processor disclaimer warning for you to shut down other programmes. ‘Ok so it might be inconvenient to watch this but hey – who cares!’

It’s also probably one of the most high profile HTML 5 experinces out there at the moment, passing the test as an interactive experience, although I think I’ll reserve judgement on the technology for a while yet! Would love to see more HTML5 experiences like this – send them to me if you have any…

I want to admit something publicly… something that I have been guilty of in the past.

Ok, here goes… I am guilty of… giving a ballpark estimate for a large project with a 20% variance in cost.

“Why’s that bad” you ask?

“Surely that’s great from the client’s perspective”

“it sounds like you know what you’re talking about and can narrow down any uncertainties before you kick off”

Well, yes and no, and I suspect that any PM, producer, or anyone involved in estimation has been guilty of this sin at one time or another in their careers to make it sound like they’re confident in their estimates.

The fact is, for any project, you can’t know everything at the start. Especially when you’re dealing with creative work. Technologies change, Platforms change, People’s minds change, that’s just the nature of what we do and how life goes on, and it would be crazy if we didn’t change if it meant doing something better. For the project in question

• I didn’t know for sure who the team working on it was going to be
• The scope, whilst detailed in parts, was loose at best in the unexplored areas of the brief
• The technical platform was not well-defined, and there were a large number of other uncertainties and assumptions that my fellow estimators had recognised.
• There were several factors that could not be accounted for (sickness, late feedback, unexpected bugs)

The reality of an estimate is to truly gauge the cost of doing something. Nobody on the client side, the agency side, or the production house side wants to be exposed to the risk of a project failing on time, cost or quality, which it will be if you underestimate the task in hand – everyone’s disappointed then. But then everyone wants “Value for money”.

But we have to kickstart a project into inception somewhere, and that somewhere is usually a place after concepting called budget signoff.

Now for my younger years, I was always a believer that a good estimate was one with a small variance.

“between 24-26k”

“this is coming in at 220-240k”

Several coworkers, all with more commercial experience than myself, albeit not on the estimating front, all told me that a good estimate removed the margin of error between the initial figure and the final cost, that made sense. Then later on, some other experienced folk – again with little experience of making estimates – told me that the top end of the ballpark should never be exceeded in the final cost, again, this made sense, but was sometimes tricky if you couldn’t ascertain every factor. Finally, at the same time as the last piece of advice, I was informed that this top-end figure could not be significantly higher than the low end of the spectrum. Anything else would be commercial suicide when it came to selling in the costs because it would look like you didn’t know what you’re talking about.

On the face of it, that seems to make sense, but when you delve deeper, it’s simply not true, in fact I would go so far as to say that it’s an outright lie in some cases. The variance of a good ballpark estimate should reflect the degree of unknown factors and use the experience of the team estimating and completing the work to remove as much error as possible. An experienced team will know that every project where serious collaborative endeavour goes on will throw out lots of leftfield problems and obstacles that simple cannot be rationally accounted for at the start.

In fact a good ballpark estimate should be wide because it highlights the risks and unknowns faced in a project. It’s only after you start to test through experimentation, prototyping and iterations that you dig out the real facts, get rid of assumptions and see how something behaves in captivity and then the wild.

What’s crucial in estimating is planning the most important areas of a project to be able to say with a high degree of certainty (some say 90% sure) that those things will be done. Passion, experience and good collaboration should then ensure that you get as much in the time as possible.

42 days, 17 hours and 20 seconds. A conservative estimate of the amount of time I’ve wasted over the years hunting high and low, trying to identify a specific font.

No longer. A dream.

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.

We 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!

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.

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”.

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.

Well – it’s been nearly 5 months of WEIR+WONG and we’ve barely had time to take a breather! We’ve been doing some great work for these great clients (and some clients we can’t mention!) and having a lot of fun on the way.  Onwards…

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.

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.

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!