Easily THE tech news event of last week, the release of Apple’s iPad led to already vocal people being even more vociferous with their opinions, the Apple fanboys salivating with pleasure, and everyone else forced to have some sort of opinion about it one way or the other. And that includes me. Where I work, Apple rules the roost – indeed, I use a BlackBerry and as the only non-iPhone user, am the victim of constant ‘oh you poor thing’ digs. I use a Mac in the office though, and it is an infinitely superior experience to the PC. And I also own an iPod Touch.
So when PSFK asked the Purple List to air their views about the iPad, I chipped in, buoyed by a very interesting talk about it pre-release with James Higgs and Simon I’Anson. Here’s what I said:
The iPad will not fundamentally change the way data creators work, i.e bloggers, tweeters – the active web population like us. It will, however, change the way the large proportion of data consumers work; people like our parents who have minimal use for the web (surfing, emailing, perhaps booking tickets and so on). For people like us, the iPod Touch and the Macbook are necessary – I see the touch screen as not being very conducive to use for epic blog posts, for example! The iPad will be an addition to a suite of internet-enabled accessories that a person may have. It will be very useful on the go.
It’s high time I dusted the cobwebs off the interview series. Who better to do that with than Neil Perkin? Famously of the dodgy goatee (I didn’t say that, he did!), Neil was the Director of Marketing & Strategy at IPC Media till a couple of weeks ago. Here’s what he has to say about media, Pingu and then some:
1. What is the most interesting job you’ve ever held and what lessons did you learn from it?
I should probably say my role at IPC Media where I was for a number of years and from which I continually learnt, but I’ve just left to set up my own business so I have a feeling that my learning curve in the short to medium-term future will be even steeper. Oh, and I once had a job in the cassette department of Tower Records (that shows my age) where I learned that Prince is even smaller in real life than you expect him to be.
2. Name one creative project or idea that made you wish you’d thought of it.
Not one creative project, but more a revolutionary funding platform for many. Kickstarter crowdsources micro-funding for “artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, and explorers”. Like Kiva, it’s the human stories that make it so compelling. Platforms to connect people like this are what the web was made for.
3. Name one site or service that you’d invest in if you were a venture capitalist.
I’ve been mildly obsessing about Local Motors (I wrote about them here http://bit.ly/7v8eBq), the ‘next generation’ US car company that use designs crowdsourced from a community of thousands of passionate advocates to build genuinely different cars which can be sold and serviced through a network local units. It turns the high cost, lengthy design process and the highly centralized manufacturing model of traditional car production completely on its head. And that’s why I like it.
4. Name your favourite fictional character and an existing gadget or service they’d find useful.
Slightly off brief but my youngest daughter was once really into Pingu – now there’s a penguin that could seriously benefit from Google Translate.
(Anjali’s note: LOL!)
5. Do you think that for brands to reach out to a young consumer base, it has to have a digital component?
Absolutely not. There are so many options that I don’t think any medium is an absolute must for reaching any audience. Having said that, digital is clearly embedded in young people’s lives and an excellent medium for reaching them and for amplifying and spreading strong ideas. The Coke Happiness Machine is a good recent example of that.
6. What are your main hobbies and how do they influence your work?
Last year I ran my first marathon and I’m doing the Virgin London Marathon this year. Distance running is quite a zen thing to do. When you’re out on a good long run, it’s good thinking time. So you often come up with good ideas. As long as you’re then not too knackered to do anything about them.
7. Who’d be the best person to play you in a movie about your life?
Anyone with a dodgy goatee. If not, there’s always Pingu.
Can a film really be 1 second long? Well, the 1 Second Film (which consists of 12 giant paintings in animated form) is – and what’s more, I’m part of the 11,996 people so far who will be listed in the credits as an Associate Producer. No, I’m not mega-rich – all you have to do is contribute a minimum of $1 and you’ll get your name rolling in the 90 minute credit strip (though the film is 1/90th that time!). People who are part of this project include celebrities like Kiefer Sutherland, Pierce Brosnan, Spike Jonze and Kevin Bacon (woohoo!! – full list of celebrity producers here), and it’s all for a good cause – all profits will go to the Global Fund for Women. The film is being directed by Nirvan Mullick, an animator who began this project over a year ago while still in film school. Details here.
“We do not view this as a dead format,” says The Tapeworm’s Philip Marshall. “We do not view this as something which does not have a place right now.
“We were looking for a way to edition music in small runs that was cost effective and would also make the artists we were commissioning think about the ‘a’ and the ‘b'”.
He is referring to the ‘a’ and ‘b’ sides of the cassette.
“There’s a lost art to the ‘a’ and the ‘b’,” he says of downloaded music in particular, “a lost art to a sequence of music, a lost art to the album.”
So my love of nostalgia stands vindicated. In fact, there’s money to be made from it, if you look for your audience hard enough!
In a remarkable coincidence today, I read this post, an interview with an anonymous Facebook employee (the post’s authenticity is being highly debated on the web), which contains this excerpt:
How do you think we know who your best friends are? But that’s public knowledge; we’ve explicitly stated that we record that. If you look in your type-ahead search, and you press “A,” or just one letter, a list of your best friends shows up. It’s no longer organized alphabetically, but by the person you interact with most, your “best friends,” or at least those whom we have concluded you are best friends with.
And then on Facebook, I was messing around with my settings and I noticed this when I clicked the ‘edit options’ link:
So it’s true. I just think that’s quite an amazing thing – I almost didn’t believe it. And for the record, no, I’m not paranoid about privacy issues for the simple reason that I don’t have hundreds of photos on Facebook, though I am very much for privacy as a right.
I read this interesting article comparing and contrasting The Simpsons with typical happy Disney characters recently. One of the points discussed is that a generation of children are being introduced to events in history entirely based on what they learn from The Simpsons:
In contrast to Disney, with its lush visuals and stark storylines, the sophistication of “The Simpsons” was all in the scripts, which are highly literate, gaily referring to everything from Susan Sontag to “Citizen Kane”. Children who have been brought up on the show often have a weird general knowledge. When Al Gore was vice president, only 63% of American kids surveyed could identify him, whereas 93% could identify the cast of “The Simpsons”. Children may know the yellow versions of Richard Nixon or the Beatles long before they encounter the real thing. My ten-year-old son recently read “Lord of the Flies”. He didn’t find it that upsetting: he already knew most of the plot from “Das Bus”, “Simpsons” episode 192.
I thought that was fascinating. I also didn’t know that the writers of the show have included occasional New Yorker writer George Meyer and Conan O’Brien, of the Tonight Show fame. (On a not-so-related note, as I was rooting through the internet just now, I found the Wikia Entertainment wikis for some of the best shows on TV, which I didn’t know about before. Wow.)
In an excellent insight, the article ends with this paragraph that compares The Simpsons movie with Disney movies, where it says Disney clearly have the upper hand:
“The Simpsons Movie” seemed a shot at achieving a Disney-like immortality. But despite some inspired one-liners–and the genius of Spider-Pig, Homer’s pet pig which he plays with like a Spiderman doll–the movie lacked the density of the best short episodes. And it ended with another self-referential gag, Maggie uttering the single word “Sequel?” It confirmed that though “The Simpsons” may win best animated television show hands-down–Disney’s made-for-TV efforts are mediocre–it still cannot beat Disney at the movies. I suspect Matt Groening knows this. Behind all his mockery of the big Mouse is an admission that Disney’s big-screen sentiment ultimately sees off his small-screen yellow cleverness. Deep down, most of us are stupid and sentimental like Homer. Long after we forget why Spider-Pig was so funny, we will still be crying at Bambi’s mother dying.
How true. At the end of the day, all it’s really about, is emotions.
And since this post is about The Simpsons, here’s an entertaining interview with the voices behind the characters, that I saw a long time ago. If you haven’t seen it yet and you’re a Simpsons fan, you may enjoy it:
Nowadays, the curriculum in primary schools is to be revamped so that children are familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter. Aren’t kids already familiar with all of these? The average primary-school child is already more relaxed with computers than a NASA scientist. Talk about putting a strain on the teachers. The only people qualified to teach children aged 7 about how the internet works are children aged 8. Another problem with this revamping is that information technology is moving so quickly that by the time children leave school, websites like Twitter will be as dead as the dodo. Although pupils won’t have been taught what a dodo is; they’ll be saying ‘as dead as MySpace’. Teaching children about information technology is going to replace fad activities, such as reading books and learning about history. That might seem like a dreadful shame to us, but remember that future generations are going to have to fight the cyber wars and, unfortunately, knowing how to download plans for an electromagnetic pulse disruptor is going to be more useful to them than knowing how Queen Victoria reigned when they come face to face with an army of giant robotic bees.
A few months ago, I went to Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Avenue to get Cory Doctorow’s autograph on a copy of his latest book Makers, which I bought at the venue.
Makers marked (yes, pun intended!), a first for me as far as reading a science fiction book set in the web 2.0+ technological world is concerned (I’m not even sure there are that many books that belong to the genre in the first place, correct me if I’m wrong – emphasis on web 2.0+), and for the most part I really enjoyed it. Being as immersed as Doctorow is in technology, gaming, design and culture (largely thanks to Boing Boing), it was refreshing to read a story about people who really enjoyed being geeks. It was also the first time I saw terms like ‘teh awesome’ bandied about in a book as naturally as if they were part of the Oxford English Dictionary, which I am sure in due course they will be, and I felt very excited even as I read it, to be part of what I think is a growing band of people who actually understands these words.
Makers is the story of Perry and Lester, two creators who make things out of all sorts of junk – RFID tags that glow when you press a remote control so you can find stuff like keys that you invariably lose, seashell robots that make toast, and so on and so forth. Suzanne Church is a journalist-turned-blogger who documents their technological adventures, amassing a massive fan base in the process. The novel chronicles the boom-bust of what to me was reminiscent of the early 2000’s dot com era, through the changing fortunes of Kodacell, a company formed by the merger of Kodak and Duracell and owned by Landon Kettlewell, which employs Perry and Lester. There is also a subtle (and expected) sub-plot that follows the slow death of newspaper journalism – remember that it is set some time in the future and that it is fiction, all ye lovers of the press!
Doctorow is clearly talented and has an excellent command over the subject matter, but I felt that the story started dragging towards the end, with the relationships between the characters being overly descriptive and emotional. Agreed technology and emotion can go hand in hand – indeed it is the excitement about technology that drives the larger chunk of the story – but getting that balance just right is very difficult. I’d still recommend the book – it is certainly entertaining and well-written.
For people who have the stamina, Tor.com is publishing the whole story in parts here – just a couple more posts to go to complete the series (they started publishing it in July last year).
Google’s logo yesterday celebrated the birthday of Sir Isaac Newton, and for the first time was an animation, where the apple actually fell off the tree each time you loaded the page. I wonder if this means Google will now introduce more and more animated logos.
On another note, some people certainly thought the falling apple lost its novelty after a point – even I did!
One Size Fits One 