Volley Return – XBox 360 Project Natal
The latest announcements on the tech front are almost like watching a tennis game. Just when you thought it was safe to forget about Technology for a day or two, it keeps coming.
Start a week ago.
Microsoft laun
ches Bing — a search engine that has some interesting new features but got people more excited because it launched using its name as a verb in its tag line — “Bing & Decide.” The question that came to mind was Bing and decide if Bing is better? Like Avis’ famous “We try harder,” it is just asking us to give poor newcomer Bing a chance. No question the “stop searching and start deciding” is a real insight and I’m sure we’ll see more of it across clients.
Then Google shows off truly mindblowing innovation across a host of areas with Google Wave. Touted as e-mail had it been designed today, it covers a range of innovations from real-time IM to real-time translation and e-mail thread playback. As has been noted, could be too big.
Now it is Microsoft’s turn.
Project Natal for the XBox. Aside from controller-less gaming, this puts XBox exactly where Microsoft has always wanted it — the center of the home as the living room computer. Video chat, connections to e-commerce, media choosing and playing.
Hold on to your laptops, the next year is going to very interesting.
Google Wave – That is Innovation
This will be an interesting one to see, how Google’s Wave application or platform is adopted.
It is ambitious.

On it’s surface the screenshot makes it look like some form of new social network, and that is where it could be end up.
But the intent is much more profound. It is like these guys got started and just couldn’t stop. It is amazing it works at all!
–IM / E-mail integration for people online
–in line editing of documents
–image management
–playback of all changes and gadget events
And all opensource with ability to be hosted or used as a service.
Can’t wait to get an account to work with. Need to bribe a google developer.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/went-walkabout-brought-back-google-wave.html
Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009
Cognitive Surplus and Looking for the Mouse — Clay Shirkey
Just came across this speech from Clay Shirkey at the Web2.0Expo last year. It is a great piece of thinking — entertaining, informative and thought provoking. Makes you want to get back out on the speech circuit!
The premise is straightforward — we have a “congnitve surplus” since industrial revolution took hold and gave most of us 5 day work weeks and evenings off from farming or hunting and gathering.
At first on industralising and moving everyone to cities, society turned to gin. It wasn’t until libraries, local government services and parks were established that people left gin behind.
As society was given free time, we turned to sitcoms. I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island and Desparate Housewives have consumed our free time — to the tune of 200 billion hours a year in the US alone. Or the equivalent of 2,000 full wikipedia projects.
Today the solution has finally been offered through the internet and the “tools of participation” that allow people to pretend they are elves in World of Warcraft or write about Pluto on Wikipedia or send around LOL Cats.
Society didn’t want to drink gin and gave up drinking themselves into submission. People today are realising they don’t want to sit passively watching tv in a similar stuppor. They want a mouse. So if anyone asks “where do people find the time?” Simply point at the the TV in the corner and ask how many hours their family has watched in the past month.
We are in for significant changes as this Internet thing takes hold.

Current New Agency Thinking in Advertising
It is funny how you consume media in the internet age.
Some of us call it “information snacking,” some call it “managing feeds.” What is amazing is how we do still end up reading what we want to read and are able to keep up with significant stories or trends — even if they aren’t defined in a few media players editorial calendar as they were before.
I believe this is because the ease of publishing means strong ideas get enough coverage to still have a significant share of voice, regardless of the media fragmentation.
It is also because as humans we tend to build off of each other’s ideas. A more cynical view would be to say we herd around themes.
This WARC article does a great summary of the key themes I see frequently.
The changing art of persuasion in a downturn
There were a number of recurring themes throughout the day, but three were most prominent. First, the traditional “persuasion” model of advertising is broken. Second, the industry is becoming data rich but insight poor. Third, the structure and process of creating advertising has changed little since the days of Mad Men (while the customer, in the real world, has moved on dramatically).

Power of Good Production Values
Just watched an interesting presentation on augmented reality which must be the next big thing that we will all get to have lots of fun with in the next few years. For those of you who don’t know it, the poster child is the GE work recently launched.
GE Augmented Reality – Plug In To The Smart Grid
Just as Microsoft Surface was the pre-launch of gesture computing the iphone made real, the first baby steps of Cop Space are becoming a reality.
In the presentation, the guys from Inition showed an example of a car on a road where the reflection of the dotted lines were reflected on the car itself and speeded up and slowed down with the car, based on the users movement of the paper. Nice stuff.
Made me think of a scifi classic, of course. In SnowCrash by Neal Stephenson the protagonist, Hiro, visits a very powerful man in the book’s virtual reality called the Metaverse. He is ushered into the office and to Mr. Ng’s pleasure, Hiro recognises the statement he is making much like a wealthy collector would hope a visitor notices a Miro casually hanging in the corner.
“You working with Fisheye?” Ng says, lighting up a cigarette. The smoke swirls in the air ostentatiously. It takes as much computing power realistically to model the smoke coming out of Ng’s mouth as it does to model the weather system of the entire planet.
Don’t forget the impact of great production values. People recognise and respect quality. It makes an impression.

Book Notes – Halting State – Charles Stross
Where do you begin with this book. When books have great thoughts in them and I’m in a remembering mood I bend back the lower corners to be able to find whatever it was made you chuckle, or roll your eyes back and think, at the time. This book has a host of them.
First comment has to be the narrative style — I’d heard of Second Person narration, but can’t remember second person narration that shifts in each chapter and is identified up front. As Cory Doctorow points out, it works. And it makes the tech fiction in the pieces really punch.
Your smartphone’s nagging you about hitting your transferrable overtime limit, and you’ve already blown your quota for time off this month; if this goes on you’re gonnae have to put it on upaid hours and file for a time credit from Human Resources. It’s even been threatening to snitch it to the Occupational Health Department that your Work/Life Balance is out of kilter; if this goes on, it’ll be off to the compulsory Yoga and Aromatherapy classes with Stress Management for you.
Classic to think what a public service employee (she’s a Scottish Cop) will have to put up with when the phone is tracking time and talking to the bureaucracies.
In the office we’ve started using both enterprise video conferencing and local Skype or video ichat. No longer first generation, but hardly ready to jump the Chasm. Here is a great one for when video interviewing is in full adoption — and the computers have the ability to manipulate the signal in realtime:
‘Good.’ Mr. Pin-Stripe nods, jerkily, at which point the brilliantly photorealistic anonymizing pipeline stumbles for a the first time, and his avatar falls all the way down the wrong side of uncanny valley — his neck crumples inwards disturbingly before popping back into shape. (You can fool all of the pixels some of the time, or some of the pixels all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the pixels all of the time.)
And of course the implication of ubiquitous broadband wifi, gps-driven data overlays and internet-enabled glasses could be quite useful to the police — or Polis as they are called in independent Scotland in the 2020s.
CopSpace sheds some light on matters, of course. Blink and it descends in its full glory. Here’s the spiralling red diamond of a couple of ASBO cases on the footpath (orange jackets,blue probation service tags saying they’re collecting litter.) There’s the green tree of signs sporouting over the doorway of number thirty-nine, each tag naming the legal tenants of a different flat. Get your dispatcher to drop you a ticket, and the signs open up to give you their full police and social services case files, where applicable. There’s a snowy blizzard of number plates sliding up and down Bruntsfield Place behind you, and the odd flashing green alert tag in the side roads. This is the twenty-first century, and all the terabytes of CopSpace have exploded out of the dusty manila files and into the real world, sprayed across it in a Technicolor mass of officious labelling and crime notes.
Sound far-fetched? Consider the Lumus glasses that were at CES this year.
Of course it doesn’t have to be technology to be good science fiction. It can also be something as archane as describing bureaucracy … just in the future.
‘It’s about the car insurance.’ [...] ‘What’s the damage?’ ‘Well, Sally’s carrying six points on her license and she had that car-park smash last year. She’ll lose her no-claims discount, which’ll cost us about eight hundered extra when we renew the insurance.’
‘Ouch.’ Driving’s an expensive pastime even before you factor in deisel at €5 a litre, speed cameras every quarter kilometre on all the A-roads, and insurance companies trying to rape the motorists to recoup their losses on teh flood-plain property slump. ‘Who are you with?’
‘Nationwide.’
Well, that’s a relief – an old-fashioned mutual society, instead of a pay-by-credit-card web server owned by Nocturnal Aviation Associates Dot Com (motto: ‘We fly by night’) out the back of a cybercafe in Lagos.
Or just some fun — thinking of how unsettling virtual reality can be when mixed with real life.
Yesterday upon the stair I met a man that wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, I wish that man would go away.

Tech Fiction – We’re All Geeks Now
How can everyone not love near future fiction?
I’ve just finished Charles Stross‘ Halted State which is a great read on a whole host of levels — from 10 year out science fiction with pervasive high bandwidth wifi, smart location services, vision-enhancing glasses with data overlays and a second-tier economy between massive multiplayer online games. It is a nice vision of technology and when I get a moment I’ll tap in some of the amazing quotes this guy has come up with to share.
On another note finishing one book set me off looking up others and in the process came across a few videos of another favourite author, Neal Stephenson, which I came across it in classic web linking fashion seeing the link because both spoke at Google’s Mountain View authors series. Never ceases to amaze how uninteresting the TV becomes when you can watch 2 hours back to back of interesing writers. (And how effective putting good content online gives you a better appreciation for the brand the sponsors it.)
At anyrate I noticed Stephenson called out one of my favorite lines by saying in a commencement address that “we are all geeks now.” Not his best presentation but the content is excellent:
His idea is that we all have an area of passion that we can feed because of the freely available information today — and publish as easily.
My idea when I called the great and good of marketing and advertising at the Ogilvy Verge event “geeks” and said it was ok because “we’re all geeks now” was we are all become adept at using technology to live fuller lives.
Either way we should all embrace it — technology is here to stay and will do wonderful things for all of us.
Long life techno-utopianism.




