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July 24, 2006
Watertown, MA
I don’t have any particular oral fixation but I will chew gum to stay awake or put off a meal. I do this more when I drive and road trips always result in gum wrappers strewn about the inside of my car. On the trip down to Wilmington, NC, for example, I picked up two packages of Dentyne “Ice” gum. I suppose the name fits because the gum is inundated with blue flecks. Originally I thought that the gum might contain diamonds or crystal meth (or, for that matter, 4-methyl-aminorex). In retrospect, I’m glad that the gum contains neither. I’ll bet that the folks at Dentyne are glad as well. Both additives would impact the bottom line.
This has not prevented the people at Cadbury (parent company) from making their gum packages as mysterious as possible. The sticks of gum are presented in the cardboard equivalent of an old cigarette holder and each gum elements (sticks? not really sticks, more like a short planks) come individually wrapped in small square of white cigarette paper that have been emblazoned with blue asteroids.
These asteroids disturb me. I don’t understand them. Was the gum intended for aliens? Are there creatures from foreign galaxies having appearances too terrible to describe chewing away at one hundred or two hundred sticks of gum at a time, realizing that they’d eliminate this planet save for the six tonnes of asteroid laden gum offered up each month by the visionaries at SETI? That would make for a depressing ending to the x-files.
Looking for technology today. I have this weird bi-monthly tech hunting assignment that always gets put off until the last minute at which point I end up submitting five or six new technologies that are always singular in their inability to convey either the new or the interesting.
Just now, for example, I found a company called Micro Target media that specializes in wraparound ad placement on the outside of porta potties. Soon the massed green walls, the open fields of porta potties will be gone, replaced by squat billboard ads for television shows, new movies, tools and other consumerist paraphernalia. Micro Target has gone beyond the call of duty here, integrating RFID and GPS technology to allow advertisers to watch minute by minute porta potty use. The idea here is that usage rate correlates to the number of impressions given by the ad.
For some reason, ad placement on porta potties makes me think of oversized refrigerator magnets. I’d like to make them. Single words, the size of license plates. People could put them on their cars in order to spell out messages for the reading pleasure of other drivers. We’d need to keep them clean but there should be a large market for this kinda thing. I went to the magnetic poetry website in order to place the suggestion and found out that it has a blog (http://magpo.blogs.com/davesblog/). The blog includes the line: “When it's 90 degrees and humid, you gotta air out the ferret...”. Now I’m not so sure about passing the concept on to these people.
That’s not entirely true. Their disclosure process prevents me from submitting this idea. I’m sure that they have already thought of refrigerator magnets for cars so this might just be repetitive. If they were bright, they’d get a list of every metallic surface used in consumer goods and then check off those that are amenable to refrigerator magnets. They would not get all of the concepts (the print your own magnet kits, the magnetic strips sized to provide backing for words crimped out via and old-style label maker, and the public surface magnets that could be used instead of spray paint/ market tags) but they could build an easy innovation process that would cover some of it.
Thinking along these lines, I’d like to see HP put it’s rice-grain sized chips in each magnet, forming a small mesh network on the fridge (you’d have to shield these of course). Each chip would contain the word written on the magnet and find it’s nearest proximal/distal neighbor. A fridge transceiver would take this information and relay it to an internet enabled device (such as a laptop). I could then show other people the refrigerator magnet poetry on my fridge. Social networks could be formed. It might revitalize the product.
An easer solution could already be obtained through camera phones. Submit a photo of your fridge to the magnet poetry site. One program aligns the magnetic squares. The next uses an OCR routine to approximate the fridge poem. This gets associated with a user account.
Now I’m kidding. I hate refrigerator magnets.
What else is going on in the world of technology? Apparently Ankit Fadia (hacker, India) has decided to apply some of his hacking and cracking skills to problems of consciousness. There may be something here. I could see a distracted state as the result of a denial of service attack. More importantly. I could see some human pattern recognition abilities employed to circumvent DNS attacks. Incoming packets, for example, could be scanned for “new” content and servers could focus on “newness” while batching “non-new” messages for later processing. On the user side, this means that consumers would occasionally be forced to add “new” content to a website query, possibly by going through a standard “make sure that you are human” process that involves typing a code word into a box and submitting this along with a request. On the other side, I could see a service that uses tokens to validate id and then allows validated users to obtain preferential treatment from websites that might otherwise be suffering from DNS attacks.
Lots of interesting things are happening in India. There is a fashion park under construction in Ludhiana. It involves the Knitwear Club, Shawl Club and Ludhiana Integrated Textile Park and seems to be intended as a one stop shop for designers. The park has apparently attracted a shortlist of 500 designers and 3,500 other groups who wish to do design work.
Why is this important?
Over the last few years anyone with even the slightest desire has been able to enter the worlds of publishing and video. Blogs abound. Photos can be bound into books and mailed with the click of a mouse. There are dozens of online sources for digital movies. At the same time, we have seen (rapid) growth in rapid manufacturing. There are at least five firms that will manufacture and sell t-shirts that I design. I’m sure an hour’s search could turn up a place that will manufacture bumper stickers signs, CD covers or other media to my specifications. A week’s work and I could find a firm in China to prototype and then machine manufacture something more substantial. This new ability is leading to a major cultural shift; from a consumer society to a designer society. This shift is important and is reflected in our changing attitudes towards work and schooling, both of which focus on creativity and conceptual flexibility (the high end stuff) rather than the day to day grind of equations and hard answers, most of which can be outsourced.
Here’s the thing. This is not just happening in the states. Technology is allowing the developing world to keep up with us. There will be no more than the merest gap in design proficiency. Design talent will not become an exportable good because everyone will be a designer. What will happen when the secondary roles of the finder and broker are also outsourced?
So this fashion park is interesting to me. I might become a reasonable hub. I can see kids sitting down with pieces of paper in small villages across India, drawing stuff that they see. The paper is then sent on to designers. The best designs are incorporated into the clothing that appears on out shelves. As our tools become better, design becomes democratized. I don’t want to sound too visionary grand-proclamation about this but it has always seemed as if many cultural conflicts have stemmed from two divisions: the divisions between those who invest and accept risk (this includes small business owners) and those who don’t and the division between those whose jobs have some essential creative component (this includes artisan labor) and those who don’t. Both of these are disappearing. I wonder what society will look like when they are gone.
Enough.
Posted by jb at 11:04 PM | Comments (0)
July 22, 2006
Wilmington, NC
At Ryan’s wedding today in Wilmington, NC. Spent yesterday evening driving from Wrightsville Beach to Carolina beach and back. I’ve later been told that Carolina beach is the redneck beach. I guess that explains the confederate flag bodyboards.
Speaking to Owen and Jenny about wedding gifts. This is one of the first weddings where the majority of gifts have been given over the internet. It’s time to make “internet gift tsotchkes." I’m thinking of little plaques, possibly made out of stop signs or license plates or old mirrors or tin cans or denim or other found items. These plaques will have a small brass or steel note holder with a note regarding the internet gift. They will also feature of big, blue circle with the letter "I" stamped on the interior. Now everyone will have something to place on the table at the wedding.
Noted in local bars: a revised version of the “your weight or fortune” scale. Now you pay 50 cents and then blow into a hole through a disposable black straw. The machine gives you your blood alcohol content and the likelihood of arrest should you be pulled over. A few years back, a friend told me about a party held by local police officers. They were seeing how high they could score on the breathalyzers.
Back at the Kampgrounds of America. It provides a weird mix of old world and new world camping. Old world: I can hear cicadas and smell campfire smoke at the picnic table by my tent. New world: I have a wireless internet connection in my tent.
I managed to leave my suit (by accident) back at my house in Massachusetts so I’ve had my first wedding dressed entirely in clothing (suit, shirt, tie, t-shirt, everything) purchased at Target. And it looked reasonably sharp, darnit. The effect impressed me enough to wax on about the purchase to anyone who would give me an ear.
The wedding was in Saint Mark’s church, off Everett (Evansville?) road on the way to Wrightville beach. A wonder of modern catholic architecture, which is to say it looked weird, futurist and terrible. H.L. Mencken complained about modern church architecture at the turn of the 20th century, wondering why the wooden clapboard church had been replaced by towering brick monstrosities. Evidently this trend has continued. Soon modern churches will look like modern synagogues, which are often awkward and angular: executed by some new school architect who has yet to realize that the Bauhaus died for a reason. I suppose there is a lesson in this. It’s too easy to be in love with the aesthetics of religion (this may be true for me). A more interesting problem is the loss of aesthetics in a normally aesthetically pleasing world. Maybe churches are designed to make us consider this, and the problem of aesthetic loss is pale, easier to tackle shadow of the problem of suffering. It’s as if Job had been sent to New Jersey instead of suffering the death of his wife.
Saw Dan (Ryan’s brother) and Stacey together today. It’s still, along with Jen and Steve’s marriage, one of the most encouraging marriages that I have ever seen. It seems to marked by goodwill, originally outside the marriage (before they knew each other), then within and then outside again, which is not something covered in marriage sermons. It would be kinda funny if the great passions (from great love to martyrdom) that are supposed to define our lives were in the end shown to be less important than goodwill (and maybe plain honesty). Ach, I feel like I’m bordering on one of those aphoristic Benjamin Franklin books. Anyway, Dan and Stacey, when together, often make the people around them slightly better, which is the main indicator of any sort of really great relationship.
Microsoft seems to be thinking in the right direction with Zune, the new music platform intended to compete with the ipod. From the WSJ: "We see a great opportunity to bring together technology and community to allow consumers to explore and discover music together." Napster made the concept of online music acceptable but Apple built it’s market by making it easy to download music without worrying about bitrate or bad labels or sudden static. The next frontier is probably music discovery. How do you find new stuff that you will like. www.pandora.com has done a decent job but Microsoft may be able to do better. I expect Apple to respond with new licensing regimens, including a licensing platform that will allow users to remix and repost music via garageband. This fits with the discover/manage/ create cycle that seems to characterize so much media. If Apple knew what it was doing, I’d be creating music videos on a macbook pro a year from now.
According to the WSJ, Michelle Bernstein, head chef at Michi in Miami has created a new soup comprised of “Cold corn with lobster garnish” Is the soup martini the next frontier? I can see a shot or vodka potato soup warming me on a late Winter night. I’d sell it under the “no more empty calories” tagline. I’d design a bar to look like a kitchen in one of the old Soviet Republics. Patrons would enter in the dead of winter and drink snifters of warm tomato vodka soup. In the summer, they’d drink shots of gazpacho and tequila. What should I call this? The patrons could be soupaholics. The soup could be soupahol or souperclear (for soup plus everclear). I hate that word. It Is nowhere near as good as rockstitutes (rockstar prostitutes).
Enough.
Posted by jb at 07:40 PM | Comments (4)
July 20, 2006
Reading the WSJ
Airport Ideas in Charlotte, NC in the morning
The camelback drink insert concept came up in discussion. Pre-filled camelback bags just need to be good enough to keep from breaking open under the stress of biking or hiking or running. That and a valve at the bottom. It does not need to be made of the high test polyethylene used in normal camelback pouches.
According to the Wall Street Journal, XOXO is reviving a classic supermodel-driven advertising scheme. The WSJ notes that stars are used to brand clothing today, not supermodels. Supermodels may be a better idea, though, because they require at least a bit of inside knowledge that would give the bearer slightly of the fashion insider mystique that many teens/ 20 something seek. It might be even better to use lesser-known models.
There is a kids toy store in the airport. As always, there is at least one construction kit that includes sixteen billion reconfigurable pieces. The trouble with these platforms in that kids (often with the help of their parents) build exactly one platform and then abandon the toy. When is Lego going to respond to this travesty by releasing Lego stop animation kits, with or without a simple video camera? Let teenagers (right, probably not kids) go and make movie shorts. Design the camera and support equipment specifically to support stop animation, including 3 frame or 10 frame shots, guidelines for smooth movement, and choreography sheets. This might be too complex to be a good idea, but I’d like to see these toys used more than once and I’d like to see kids escape excessive attachment to the first round finished toy models that they build. Otherwise, they may as well be assembling Ikea furniture. Ikea should look into this.
Why do the second tier advertisers allow so many spelling and grammar mistakes in expensive national newspaper ads? If you’ve just spent $50K to get a quarter page ad in the WSJ, you could spend $1K to have someone proof the darn ad. I’m thinking here of the Diamond Essence (manufactured diamonds) ad on page A13, which occupies ¼ of the second op-ed page. This is prime real estate. Your WSJ op-ed reader is well off and will be in the habit of reading the page instead of scanning headlines. Despite the obvious placement expense the ad reads like a "Grow Muscle" insert in the back of an old Mad magazine. It’s repetitive: "revolutionary scientific breakthrough"... "the diamonds are transparently clear." There are obvious statements: "the diamonds will scratch glass!" Of course they will. There are statements that seem decidely off topic: "Temperatures used to form the diamonds run above 5000 degrees F, twice the temperature needed to melt steel." Why steel? I’d wonder about other industrial diamonds. There are, further, missing words and misplaced commas “Why so many famous and wealthy people, including royalty, movie stars, celebrities and TV personalities, wear them instead of mined diamonds” Who wrote this? It’s an embarrassment. You can advertise performance and low prices without making the consumer think that he’s buying something that “fell off the truck.” Get it together grammarians!
I’ve also read that the United States Congress is planning to get rid of the penny. The 3% copper content dives the per unit manufacturing cost above the monetary value of the penny itself. Our legislators have considered abandoning the nickel for similar reasons. I’m fond of both of these currencies. There is nothing, after all, like being hit in the head with a bag of nickels and, as my grandma used to say, a sock filled with pennies is a great substitute for a shillelagh. Even if we can’t keep the weight and the metal content, we should preserve the currency; if only to keep the spare change a flowing to charitable organizations, (the WSJ notes that spare change actually does add up and con contribute to the bottom line at many donation driven services). I suggest that we replace the pennies with AOL subscription CDs.
If AOL had been smart, they would have reduced the software payload in each CD and then enabled a recordable surface. That way, the fraction of consumers suddenly short of recordable CDs could reach in a pinch for that AOL subscription CD, open the package, at least glance at the content, and use the CD with its advertising laden surface to record some music. The CD would then be traded back and forth and would stand out in stacks of music CDs instead of being thrown immediately into the trash.
Just a thought, though.
I've been watching people walk around the airport and thinking about the role of skin in controlling information flow. If you ever look at a face peel during reconstructive surgery you’ll see layers and layers of muscle, all swarming over each other between the forehead and the chin. The skin reduces the visual impact of this muscle and allows us to communicate in a reduced set of expressions. If our brains were better at processing visual information, the role and nature of our skin might change. I can imagine a second set of cheekbones or muscles under the eyes that would add a whole new dimension of social context to communication. A smile is one thing but a smile where the muscles under your eyes curve as well is entirely different.
Article in the 20 July WSJ on web pages for the blind. Many of the major websites are making navigation easier for blind people. Google, is creating a search service that will retrieve pages in order of utility for the blind. This is great. I might start to use this service in order to find pages where information is available without distracting frames buttons and boxes.
That's it.
Posted by jb at 12:00 PM | Comments (2)