Author Archives: Darren Wood
I’ve been away a while, apologies. I little hiatus, but not without reason –
I’ve spent the past four weeks thinking about MOBile mentality and how I’ve fallen susceptible to something I’ve always disliked – regurgitating news and thinking in one space.
Sure I know mobile really well, but I also know social, web, interactive, etc etc. I had to return to why I chose to write about mobile in the first place – it’s the new thing, it’s the next trending thing. The more I write about it, the more apparent it becomes that the trend is catching up to me. What’s next? Well it’s the fringe I love. That bleeding edge the encircles our industry. The bleeding edge is what I would like to capture. And hopefully not just the edge of tech, but the edge of art, of marketing, or our industry.
So a reformat is necessary.
There’s always new ways of solving problems as technology evolves. It might be mobile, it might be a new startup, technology, or piece of hardware, it might be a new philosophy, but whatever it might be there’s a discussion there. And it’s these discussions that are important.
So MOBile mentality will go the way of the minidisk, and will reboot as a post called “What’s Next” whenever there are ideas to share. Did you think I was going to say UMD?
SXSWi – it’s the birth of a proto-city: a hive of integrated people experimenting with the tools in the market that, without mass local adoption, would not have any poignancy. It’s where the early adopters can temporarily form a society of mutually founded infrastructure.
Obviously I like to consider myself a fairly early adopter. I am generally picking up the newest thing in beta and giving it a try. The proto-city certainly is a unique experience where these services just work and I’m not at the mercy of my family and friends to adopt the numerous new things I throw at them every week.
This week’s post is all about these services and how they work, a kind of preview to how they would work if a mainstream audience were to pick them up. There are some old and some new, but all based around the ever growing social–mobile & desktop–sector.
The prevailing theme this year was group messaging and location based services. Typically when you look back at SXSW there is one clear launch that will take hold and change the landscape of digital: Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, etc. I would say that this year there was no clear winner. This may be perhaps due to development becoming easier and faster than it was a couple years ago, which would correlate to SXSW being fettered with startup after startup, creating so much noise that no single one stood out.
There’s four services that I looked at primarily while down in Austin: Convore, Beluga, Hashable, & Yobongo.
Photo Credit: Richard Tseng
Today: two online media moguls. Well, as impressive as that might seem, I suppose, as the group had little knowledge of either party. Chris Hardwick of the Nerdist and Felicia Day of The Guild acclaim both made appearances in my schedule.
Most saw Felicia Day, she was one of the keynote speakers, the one for the day. Besides being the the subject of many a guys dream, she has a perspective of media distribution that may elude to the future of tv and the industry. Felicia is writer, director, and actor in the web show The Guild, she spoke on how she built the show using a meager budget that afforded her a camera and utilized her own house as the set. The Guild is an example of the self-publishing movement the Internet brings – and seeing the show itself caters to online gaming geeks, it would poised for success. The show is now in its fourth season, but has gained a bit more gravity now that it has a couple of sponsors that helps bring a higher level of production to the modest web show.
Touch technology is in it’s infancy, and quite frankly, it’s rude.
Sure it’s usable, and has a plethora of inspired uses, but there is an aspect of body awareness that a touch interface needs to adopt before it is considered something that is wholly profound.
Currently touch accounts for the tips of your fingers – somewhat. It considers the part of your finger touching the screen a touch on an x,y coordinate. But what about the rest of your hand? What about the way your arm bends to interact with a device? How about multiple people on a singular device? There’s a lot to consider as we start developing new language around the touch interface.
Current computer use is focused on one task, one user. Sure you can multitask with multiple windows, but the whole system is built person doing doing one thing at a time. The future of a touch UI should be collaborative – multiple people capable of doing independent tasks on one device. Neat.
But computers need to first understand the anatomy of people. Once that happens, it will be smarter, more intuitive, and capable of being more naturalistic.
And why are we focusing on just touch? What about the combination of touch and voice? Or touch and stylus? Touch and photosensor? What we should start aiming for is a “natural user interface” – build a ubiquitous around a device. A computer that know when your in the room, or when you get home. Something as simple as knowing you are there when you are not directly interactive with the device is a monumental step.
Data has entered the “cloud” so too should the devices.
–Inspired by a talk on the future of touch interfaces at SXSW
Iteration. Re-iteration, and more iteration. Just to iterate, you know. Serendipitously you’re bound to have some recurring idea crop up in various topics. Today it was iteration. Iteration in a free flowing stream of collective consciousness, and iteration as means of progression. Both aren’t mutually exclusive, but hold a different scope from each other.
The first iteration of iteration was proposed by Christopher Poole from 4chan and how the concept of iteration was the propellant that pushed 4chan forward. They were rethinking the message board, but what they ended up with is a means of reinterpreting ideas. An ephemeral place where ideas stay aloft through the iteration–ideas are lost as they fall off the page, irretrievable. A meme is the product of iteration – something collectively owned by the 12 million users of 4chan.
Iteration on a larger scale came in the form of a talk on the future of touch interfaces. They broke the progression up into three stages: new technology, integration with old language, and formation of a new language. An example of this is the mouse. When the technology was first introduced it was a means of using the command line prompt – it was new technology integrating for an old language. This is where we are with touch, at the beginning of that iterative process to a new language. Right now we treat a touch on an iPad like a mouse–it’s an x,y coordinate–we still use the intangible version of a hardware keyboard to type on these devices.
Where did the idea of consistency come from? What does it mean to digital? You could say that it means the we should be following the ebb and flow of traditional advertising, or perhaps we should delineate between the two. To what end does it pay to hold a brand hostage to it’s designated canon? Perhaps to no end. You could propose the canon transends mere colour, image, perhaps even language. What if the canon were an idea? What if the product was the connecting article rather than the message. As long as it all feels the same.
A wildcard talk in my schedule was a talk given by Justin Cox on Brand Consistancy that relished in the idea that a solid brand styleguide that locks down look and messaging can hold back the exact thing that it was created to propel – the brand. Perhaps it’s like green-washing, you gloss everything over with one message to the point it all carries the same meaninglessness. An example Cox put forward was a car grill that could have deposited on it any vehicle brand and look authentic as the auto brands all thrive on slick car shots that are not entirely unique to a specific brand.
Cox rightfully says “An integrated campaign feels nice, is easy: like crack and prostitutes” – it is easy to follow one message and image across all channels, but that doesn’t make it right – or good.
