nil desperandum

TBWA\HAKUHODO website

Here's a good corporate website. Not because it's a affiliated agency to the one I'll be working for but I just think it's pitched at the right tone. It's not trying to be too cool for skool or too web2.0 mash up style-ly. It's just a good creative corporate website if you know what I mean. Anyhoo.

Doraemon still rocks my world.

Bit of a retrospective thing going on here but when I was growing up I spent hours watching Doraemon. It's one of my favourite cartoon. I was in Hong Kong at the time so I watched all of it in Cantonese. I found the very first episode again on Youtube. It's in Japanese with English Subtitle. The ideas are as fresh today as they were in the 80's. Enjoy.

Web 2.0 paranoia continues...

Hello friends.

I thought about your comments a bit more. Here are some of my thinking: backup for disparate content in multiple destinations is still not good enough. ride the bandwagon is great for backing up itunes but useless for my 30boxes calendar. Ultimately, under this model, you'll end up having to pay, manage and worry about multiple data backups. I want to take this idea of backing up a bit further.

Web2.0 is predominantly about encouraging ordinary people to participate in content generation - blogs, twitter, flickr etc etc. may be Web3.0 is/should be about encouraging people to develop tools for themselves as well. So if I have a flickr account all I need to do is store the source data (however they are compressed) some where on the interweb (as Faris suggested) may be with Gdrive. then ,if flickr buggers up, I will have the tools to rebuild my own flickr-esque platform. Simple tools, no coding. Web3.0 is/should be about getting people to participate in tool creation, not just content creation. Here's a TED talk that I think is relevant to this debate.

Development of the web is just like development of anything else right? Why don't we let the people generate tools that they want, as well as content that they want. The Web 2.0 development language (Ajax) is still too complicated. Marx and Engles are probably right yet again...in order for there to be a more equitable society we, the digital proletariats, need to take ownership of the means of production. Fundamentally this is about tools designed by the peeps, for the peeps. This should, at least in theory, reduce production cycles, making stuff more tailored, effective and fun. That's all. Comments on a postcard.

Web 2.0 paranoia

Apps born in the era of Web 2.0 are great. They are easier to use, much cheaper to buy (often free), and the rate which they come out really excites me. It's like having Christmas every week or something. Brilliant stuff.

However, recently, I got rather worried/paranoid about the whole thing. I actively use more than 20 different apps/sites/services/things. I put my photos, my sound files, docs and everything on these sites.  It's kind of scary that all over the past year or so my digital life's become pretty much entirely third party dependent. And that scares me.

What if, say Flickr goes bust tomorrow (unlikely now that it's been brought by Yahoo) ,where will my pics go? Yes, I should probably back my stuff up in local drives and such, but I don't - cos I'm lazy. Now multiply this by 20 other sites - I'm really quite screwed.

I reckon there's probably a market for companies to help people backup stuff from disparate sources. You will pass over your access codes and they'll backup the stuff for you. Bit like a digital version of warehouse storages. Obviously, to differentiate itself from yet another volitile web 2.0 business, it must be credit worthy, has scale and all that  other stuff you would use to assess a brick and mortar businesses. May be a traditional bank can take on this role?

OpenSky 2.0

If anyone's in Japan they should check out the OpenSky 2.0 exhibition at the NTT Intercommunications Centre. It's well cool. Stuff from Miyazaki's Nausicaa is finally coming true!

Check these out:

The Return of the Han

The Han is back with his cool touch screens but this time with more demo on its applications. Enjoy

Top Chap

Today, I had tea with an extremely nice bloke called Simon Waldman. Simon is the Director of Digital Publishing of the Guardian Media Group. Simon has quite a plush office but he's not one who's afraid of getting muck in with the ol' Web 2.0. He showed me stuff like Devon Technologies which is a cool bit of kit to grab stuff of the tinternet and available for search, Google-style at a later stage.

Anyway, the chat I had wasn't so much about the Guardy - it was more about the web, how Simon sees the media landscape changing and his favourite businesses and restaurants.

I'll be in Paris this weekend. I'll try to get a connection and upload the interview. Here's a pic of this very lovely chap - and a loving husband and father I might add. Thank you Simon.

This is hot.

In a previous post I talked about the need for people in advertising/marketing to emulate our cousins in the design industry. They prototype things day in day out and there's no reason why we shouldn't/can't do the same. Let's shoot some ads real cheap and distribute it online and see how it fares. If it cuts the mustard we'll figure out how else to share the content on different channels/platforms or even reshoot the ads with proper production investments. May be we should pick the best blendtec clip (these could be based on users votes) and put it on TV or cinema? This method beats focus groups and story boards because it's easier for consumers to "get" it and it's shown in a real life environment. Watchu fink?

This is hot...

So it's finally here. The iphone and it's hot. The user interface looks great. The camera is not quite but to scratch but hey, it least it syncs with my mac properly.

Lovely friends

Met some lovely friends from Sennep last night. Hege (how do I pronounce your named again?) and Stu. They visited us at Naked. We had a chat and they were kind enough to showed us their work. They have some really cool flash stuff and my favourite is their latest project(?) The Dandelion (sorry folks don't know how to link to that page directly).

The love and care the put into their work is very evident. You can just tell from they way they talked about their work. And they're lovely people as well. So thank you Hege and Stu for coming in. And visit their site!