Category Archives: media

The Way Of Sony

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Naturally, it’s first-generation, and may be enabled only for the Sony branded parts of your livingroom and jacket-pocket.

But free content downloads as 8Mbps MPEG-4 (H.264/AVC) should yield great HD results: I have done tests at those rates and have had only positive reviews so far.

P-TV sample screenshot

Imagineering the approach Sony may take, I can see harmonious, elegant and profitable integration amongst the Sony properties of:

  • So-net
  • Walkman
  • Playstation Portable
  • Wega and Bravia
  • SonyEricsson

There’s no shortage of commentators ready and willing to pile scorn on Sony’s choices based on a creative set of interpretations of Sony’s failures and shortcomings.

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Yes, meme-tourism for-the-win

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Sigh. Meme-oriented tourism exists, as reported at the weekend:

Central Asia, one of the least-known parts of the world, is the perfect home for Borat Sagdiyev, the faux television presenter whose new film Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan, arrived in Australian cinemas last week.

…do I get some kind of badge for “First Post!” honours?

Mobile advertising in late 2006

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The current trend of articles built as “The Seven…”, “The Top Tips You Need…”, “5 Winning Strategies” (etc) are starting to grate a little on me. I can only guess that this is a Q4 2006 “minutes to midnight” attempt to grab social networking visibility.

But at least Ken has gone out on a limb and named some working/nearly-working implementations for marketing messages via mobile.

Real-world working models have been few and far between in my usage and visibility of them as a consumer. As a technologist, it’s clear that the device no-one can leave home without, and which is seen as a link to the rest of the world no-matter-where, is an advertising success story waiting to happen.

He’s right in that with regard to some blue-sky ideas:

It’s [the strategy] not clear, and by the time this one is figured out, the mobile marketing train will have left the station long ago.

In this context, as per his opener, the most-discussed strategies may not have the strongest long-term prospects.

The one I feel most strongly about is the corollary/inverse proposition of

3) Location-based advertising: Remember all the hub-bub about location-based services in 2000? Mobile phone users will merrily walk down the street as their mobile phone beckons them in to the nearest boutique or café with a well-timed ad. The scenario sounded nice…until you actually thought about it for more than two seconds.

Traveling in Europe and East Asia at the beginning of the year, I acutely felt the begging need of a location-based, customer-initiated, service to give me context-and-texture for where and when I was.

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Architectural form

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Abstract

Originally uploaded by atrium09.

I work as a visual thinker; I can’t draw or paint, but I have worked as a pseudo-Producer on projects with real, actual, talented artists.

The visual part of my memory and work processes means that I can “look” with my mind’s eye simultaneously at both the macro- and micro-levels of problems and solutions. Visual thinking may have come from my grandfather, an architect and artist.

So I get strong, even visceral reactions to architecturally-sculpted forms, and their (digital) media representations; seeing this go by on flickr made me reach for an image I clipped from my cousins’ portfolio:

Melbourne University School of Botany facade

They say

We thought of the Tin Alley facade as a hedgerow – an urban edge of artificial landscape.

I “feel” it more like a futuristic-retro anachronistic “funky workplace design”; translation: what people in the future might think that we of the present thought a retrospective of today might look like. It works, in an R-and-D/University Research building context, as well as a design and layout for a small media company.

The great thing about opinions on architecture?

Everyone has one, and they’re all different.

Infectious effective platforms

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Dion Hinchcliffe‘s diagram somewhat resembles a cross-section of an infection, and perhaps rightly so.

Highly Effective Sites

While I dislike the “Seven Habits Of…” angle/meme of the article, I did like his checklist, despite (in my opinion) the misuse of “leveraging” for “lever” or indeed the simple “exploit”:

  • Ease of Use is the most important feature of any Web site, Web application, or program.
  • Open up your data as much possible. There is no future in hoarding data, only controlling it.
  • Aggressively add feedback loops to everything. Pull out the loops that don’t seem to matter and emphasize the ones that give results.
  • Continuous release cycles. The bigger the release, the more unwieldy it becomes (more dependencies, more planning, more disruption.) Organic growth is the most powerful, adaptive, and resilient.
  • Make your users part of your software. They are your most valuable source of content, feedback, and passion. Start understanding social architecture. Give up non-essential control. Or your users will likely go elsewhere.
  • Turn your applications into platforms. An application usually has a single predetermined use while a platform is designed to be the foundation of something much bigger. Instead of getting a single type of use from your software and data, you might get hundreds or even thousands of additional uses.
  • Don’t create social communities just to have them. They aren’t a checklist item. But do empower inspired users to create them.

    • If you consider unintended use cases, it’s possible that the “inspired users” might create the social community themselves; cf. the critique of the World of Warcraft Social Network.