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At the risk of being a little MS heavy just lately, I’ve been catch­ing up on recent posts from TED and came across the demo of Pho­to­synth. It’s the res­ult of the acquis­i­tion of image tech com­pany Sead­ragon and some awfully smart thinking,

Pho­to­synth recog­nises the sim­il­ar­it­ies between pho­to­graphs in a way that allows it to cre­ate a vir­tual 3D envir­on­ment. You can then zoom in and out of that envir­on­ment, mov­ing through all the avail­able images of that scene. And it’s really rather impressive.

The TEDtalk can be found here. If any­thing, how­ever, the fol­low­ing demo gets it across better:

The oppor­tun­ity to cre­ate a sort of pho­to­graphic Wiki­pe­dia is enorm­ous. I also won­der whether the same think­ing couldn’t form the basis of a much more inter­est­ing OS inter­face that is bet­ter at show­ing the rela­tion­ship between files.

The recent TEDtalks also showed this demo of the Bump­Top interface:

I’m sym­path­etic with the approach – the demo looks like my desk (on a good day). And it’s great that more inter­face options are being cre­ated than at any time recently.

I can’t help won­der­ing, how­ever, whether inter­faces based on paper and doc­u­ments are really the way for­ward. It would be great to see options based more on how people think and relate ideas to one another.

I guess it was only a mat­ter of time.

Just goes to show how easy it is to re-cut and re-voice any­thing these days. Of course I prob­ably won’t find it so funny the day any of my work gets this treat­ment. But until then…

Just a quick aside that’s a bit off-topic, the best re-cut I’ve seen is the fol­low­ing trailer for the Shin­ing (the feel-good version).

Com­mon Craft has got a couple of ahh-sweet videos on the (abso­lute) basics of RSS and wikis.

RSS in plain English:

Wikis in plain English:

Not so sure about the boo and yay bits but I love this way of present­ing ideas. If any of our cli­ents are read­ing, expect to see this in a meet­ing near you soon.

Source: Bokardo

Geek.com has put together an inter­est­ing video ‘ad’ for the HTC Touch high­light­ing how you can get most of the iPhone fea­tures right now.

Over at Jupiter Research, Michael Garten­berg comments:

It’s a shame that no one over in Red­mond is think­ing like this and put­ting out an offi­cial mes­sage in this way.

Really? I don’t know. Sure, if we hadn’t seen the iPhone this device would be very cool. But we have seen the iPhone and all the deriv­at­ive mes­saging in the world is just that, deriv­at­ive. It’s the same with all the iPoda­likes on the market.

Sure the crew at Red­mond could go down this path but surely that just rein­forces the mes­sage that Microsoft simply joins band­wag­ons rather than start­ing them. Watch­ing the ad, I’m left with the impres­sion (rightly or wrongly) that HTC have dashed out a copycat device that works like an iPhone yet in every way shown isn’t quite as good.

As opposed to the actual iPhone:

Source: Jupiter Research

Even after the volumes of ink that has been spilt describ­ing China’s met­eoric rise to the “hot­test” eco­nomy on the planet, it is still a coun­try that defies descrip­tion. It is a coun­try that takes every pos­sible dicho­tomy – com­mun­ist vs cap­it­al­ist, 3^rd world vs 1^st, 25^th cen­tury vs 16^th, blind­ing wealth vs abject poverty – amp­li­fies them ten­fold and then puts them out on dis­play in a way that wrecks total havoc on the senses.

It was into this milieu that Rod Ban­ner and I dove. Attempt­ing to ascer­tain if there was the oppor­tun­ity to expand Banner’s offer­ing into Asia. To see the mar­ket for ourselves, chat to local experts and try decipher the com­plex­it­ies of China.

Our trip took us first to Singa­pore then on to Shang­hai and finally to the centre of China’s tech­no­logy belt, Beijing. Singa­pore has long been coveted as a nat­ural “hub” for many agen­cies. Con­veni­ently loc­ated between China/Japan/Hong Kong and India, Singa­pore also sports a deep advert­ising base exem­pli­fied by, as one local part­ner told us, more accred­ited agen­cies per cap­ita than any­where else in the world. After 48 hours of dis­cus­sions with numer­ous media own­ers, sev­eral part­ner agen­cies and one or two cli­ent con­tacts, Rod and I had merely scratched the sur­face of “deci­pher­ing Asia”. It was time to get immersed in China.

Shang­hai began with a white-knuckle taxi ride from the brand new Pud­ong air­port into the city centre. From the moment we got into the taxi at Shang­hai, China seemed intent on unset­tling every single pre­con­cep­tion we had about the coun­try. The express­way into Shang­hai was pristine and world-class in every way, the city­scape looked remin­is­cent of Blade Run­ner with world-class archi­tec­ture evid­ent in almost every city block, the buzz of activ­ity also sug­ges­ted Shang­hai was try­ing to unseat New York as a town that never sleeps. Shang­hai is def­in­itely a global city with all the euphoria and tur­moil that entails.

From our three days of meet­ings, a pat­tern was slowly begin­ning to form. How­ever in a uniquely Asian way, for every two steps for­ward we seemed to make in build­ing a pic­ture of China, we seemed to take one side­ways and another one back. Some insights though;

• China is still in the throes of a massive man­u­fac­tur­ing phase. Mar­ket­ing is there­fore seen in terms of stiff local com­pet­i­tion, price reduc­tion and increased man­u­fac­tur­ing output.

• Brands are an eth­er­eal concept in a place that places more stock in tan­gible, phys­ical con­cepts like price and distribution.

• Rela­tion­ships are cru­cial to gain access. Guanxi is the Chinese word oft thrown out. In short, it means influ­ence and access and it is para­mount. From know­ing the right gov­ern­ment offi­cials, to hav­ing cred­ib­il­ity with the key cli­ent influ­en­cers, no busi­ness is ever won (or lost) without guanxi. Gain­ing this would be imperative.

Beijing fol­lowed Shang­hai and was also a frantic dash to try to glean insights from our numer­ous WPP con­tacts. A week of almost back-to-back meet­ings meant Rod and I left both phys­ic­ally drained and emo­tion­ally charged. High­lights of the Beijing leg included a visit to ChiTech or the Chinese ver­sion of CeBit. 4 massive halls filled with all man­ner of gleam­ing Chinese tech­no­logy and hordes of local and for­eign brands; local play­ers Len­ovo and Haier rub­bing shoulders with Panasonic, Sam­sung, it was astound­ing. The design and innov­a­tion hall was par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing fea­tur­ing, amongst other great exhib­its, a live foot­ball game between work­ing robots. ChiTech was def­in­itely a glimpse into the future with many of the (cur­rently) unknown Chinese brands show­cas­ing truly phe­nom­enal products, products that would not look out of place in west­ern homes. The day when Chinese brands are found in all of our homes is fast approaching…

Des­pite our best efforts, China did not con­veni­ently open up all its secrets to Rod and myself. It did offer a fas­cin­at­ing glimpse into a mar­ket rich with oppor­tun­ity. Rich too with traps, for those who don’t exer­cise cau­tion and restraint. We are still digest­ing the China trip and map­ping out how we tackle this vast mar­ket. Need­less to say, hav­ing a China “strategy” is fast becom­ing a pre-requisite for any busi­ness. Stay tuned as Ban­ner unveils ours in the com­ing months.

In the mean­time, see the rest of the pho­tos we took on the trip here.

The world of con­sumer mar­ket­ing gets a good kick­ing from a pretty funny video by Microsoft Digital Media Solu­tions.

Per­son­ally, I think much of the industry has moved on from the cari­ca­ture but it’s still a good video and makes some fair points. There’s also a blog attached to it.

For me, how­ever, there are a num­ber of issues this brings up.

Firstly, not every cus­tomer wants a “rela­tion­ship” with a brand. I am happy if the toi­let cleaner I buy cleans toi­lets well. I’m even hap­pier if it does so reli­ably and without trash­ing the envir­on­ment. How­ever, at no point do I want to get into a dis­cus­sion about the finer points of toi­let clean­li­ness (life’s too short). This is true for many low-involvement products (both B2C and B2B).

What the video does show is the appallingly lim­ited range of options avail­able to old school advert­isers. Although, again, apart from the dino­saurs of the industry, most are begin­ning to wake up to a sig­ni­fic­antly wider range of pos­sib­il­it­ies. Not all of which involve either shout­ing at the cus­tomer or brib­ing them with coupons. Some agen­cies, and I hope we’re one, are even blend­ing them together is some pretty smart ways.
Maybe I’m being thick, but I struggle to see what Microsoft is offer­ing that really changes the game. It’s another chan­nel. Yes, it’s one where the con­text and beha­viour of the audi­ence can be bet­ter under­stood. But it is still about inter­rup­tion more than it is about a dialogue.

To be fair, they don’t claim to be a pan­acea for all marketing’s ills but if the real issue is a fun­da­mental change in the way con­sumers view brands and mar­ket­ing com­mu­nic­a­tions, simply chan­ging the venue is not exactly ground-breaking.

Source: PJA

Over at Present­a­tion Zen they’ve got a post about Ben­jamin Zander, who’s day job is as a con­ductor (with a par­tic­u­lar fond­ness for Mahler) and who, out­side of this, is simply an inspiration.

He is co-author of one of my all time favour­ite non-fiction books The Art of Pos­sib­il­ity which I can’t recom­mend highly enough. It’s one of those books you go back to time and again to restore your human­ity and pick you up.

(Another is Gor­don Mackenzie’s Orbit­ing the Giant Hairball.)

And the race to deliver the first multi-touch product is won by… Microsoft.

Of course they had to rename it. So for the people of Red­mond, multi-touch is now Sur­face Com­put­ing. Here’s a teaser video which fea­tures all the wow-stuff that gets people excited about this technology:

Check out their micros­ite here. Some addi­tional com­ment­ary can be found here and here.

At the moment (des­pite the impres­sion the video gives) Microsoft are aim­ing Sur­face squarely at a busi­ness audi­ence (in store, enter­tain­ment ven­ues etc). So we’re unlikely to see a rush of Sur­face office desks any time soon.

The thing that gets me excited about this tech­no­logy is the oppor­tun­ity it appears to offer for a com­pletely dif­fer­ent OS inter­face, one that can adapt to the user and applic­a­tion in ways that make cur­rent sys­tems look very one dimensional.

(BTW sorry for the lack of posts just lately, a com­bin­a­tion of tak­ing a quick week off and being as busy as a very busy thing with too much to do.)