Altacircle

A few months ago I posted and circulated some work out of Sweden (Bonnier) and the UK (BERG) that was presented as a prototype for the next generation of magazines. 

Then everyone went tablet crazy at CES, the iPad launched and now Wired has released their new format. 

What is not surprising is that it is picking up a lot of the same design metaphores.  It isn't surprising because they make sense. 

My question is why is this limited to tablet devices?  We can replicate this on the web and it would be a big step forward for magazine content.  Especially when you consdier multi-touch track pads replacing mice as the primary pointing device.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/the-wired-ipad-app-a-video-demonstration

Love what gets forwarded around a good digital team.  This one goes to Ume for forwarding around an interesting YouTube link. 

This actually is a related video — a well presented and well thougt-out approach to spatial computing.  What is also really interesting is the quick intro into why our computers are the way they are:

–Command Line – the earliest interface relying on text commands – type in and it responds (1:20)
–Paper Paradigm – Current windows / mac desktop approaches where the computer manages 2D spaces (1:40)
–Spatial Computing – Current thinking about allowing computers to work in 3D space (2:45)

CES is awash with people talking tablets and slates, and e-readers are finally getting traction.  That is fine and exciting from a hardware point of view, but what about design?

Ever since Jakob Neilson gained popularity and promoted usability (often with top-left nav approaches), the web has been wrestling with usability versus design.  I've been looking for a good visual summary of web page design from single column early sites, to top-left, to innovations like flash navigation, cover-flow, panel-driven interfaces and tabbed content elements (yahoo) but haven't found one yet.

Regardless, there is some really exciting work going on for electronic delivery of magazine.

This video from Bonnier, a Swedish media group, shows some amazing thinking and a great prototype. 

It demonstrates what we all feel:  that electronic delivery of magazine content can improve the user experience and that magazines online are not just about putting their content on websites. 
 
 

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Or if you would only like to see the prototype in action from the video:

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Seem funny?  Actually this is the post from migrating my blog to a self-hosted environment.  Watch out developers, getting serious.  Seems only fair that I should understand a bit about plugins, CSS and social networking tools since I talk about it endlessly.

Only 3 hours in at this point, probably another 3 and I’ll be just where I was with Wordpress.com!

As my brother used to say when starting my truck and hearing a solid crunch, “nice starter motor, change it yourself?”

If anyone tells you digital marketing isn’t technical, tell them they are crazy.  It is true that you don’t need to understand compression ratios to drive a car, but you better have hand-eye coordination!

Many companies out there are researching digital usage and trying to undersand how we are all using digital technology in our daily lives — but few publish their findings as part of their marketing and brand building effort.  Talk Talk has.

The Digital Anthropology Report 2009 is a well thought out and easy to digest publication. 

Interestingly it also proves an point we’ve all intrinsically believed and is typically referred to by some variant of the pareto rule:  E-ager Beavers that love downloading and reading and searching but can’t be bothered to upload, run a blog or comment heavily like Digital Extroverts are the largest tribe.  And the lurkers outnumber the publishers 3 to 1. 

One of my favourite topics is the increasing complexity of media planning and how it is moving towards a search model where it literally is no longer planned in campaigns.  Basically the sophistication of what ad is served where gets so complicated it can only be managed by a computer. 

Automated Media-Buying Platforms Gaining Traction by Mark Walsh, Yesterday, 3:12 PM

As agencies increasingly turn to automated systems to buy media and manage online ad campaigns, more money is flowing to startups that provide that technology. In that vein, digital media-buying platforms MediaMath and Traffiq both announced new venture capital funding Monday.

New York-based MediaMath secured $12.5 million in venture capital and debt financing, with the $10 million venture investment led by Safeguard Scientifics, Inc. and including QED Investors and European Founders Fund. The $2.5 million in debt financing came from Silicon Valley Bank.

Started in 2007, MediaMath says it serves billions of ads per month through its platform on behalf of 20 agencies, including the major holding companies.

Online ad marketplace Traffiq, meanwhile, has raised $10 million in a second-round venture financing led by Grotech Ventures and Greenhill SAVP and including prior investor Court Square Ventures. In connection with the investment, Grotech general partner Steve Fredrick and Greenhill managing director Brian Hirsch have joined the New York-based company’s board of directors.

Last month, New York-based Traffiq announced partnering with Havas Digital to automate online media planning and buying in the agency’s New York, Boston and Chicago offices. Both companies’ systems are designed to help streamline the notoriously outdated process for online media planning and buying that includes faxes and paper notes. The startups are also competing with established players such as Donovan Data Systems and MediaBank in pushing to develop state-of-the-art media-buying systems.

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 launches 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.

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

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.

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.