ouroboros

Brain Belches and Sentience

Somewhere this past year, I effectively traded blogging for brain belches.  Blog posts gave way to tweets, FB status updates and foursquare check-ins. "@"replies and retweets replaced blog comments as my virtual crack.

I'm not proud of it, and I will  rectify that this year (resolution #3, just after #2's "ripped abs")

In Katie Hafner's NYT piece "Driven to Distraction, Some Unfriend Facebook" (a piece dealing with kids attempts to self-regulate their Facebook addictions) she quotes Michael Diamonti, head of school at SF University High School:

"[I support] these kids recognizing that they need to exercise some control over their use of Facebook, that not only is it tremendously time-consuming but perhaps not all that fulfilling."

Hafner goes on to quote Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, who writes of an 18 year old male who quit FB while working on his college application:

"Facebook wasn't merely a distraction, but it was really confusing him about who he was."

Jonathan Harris, in his recent piece on World Building, writes

"Our online tools do a great job at breadth (hundreds of friends, thousands of tweets), but a bad job at depth. We live increasingly superficial lives, reducing our relationships to caricatures and our personalities to billboards, as we speed along at 1,000 miles an hour.

We trade self-reflection for busyness, gorging ourselves on it and drowning in it, without recognizing the violence of that busyness, which we perpetrate against ourselves and at our peril."

There is something beautiful, terrifying and powerful about the rise of ambient intimacy, and our willing adoption of the latest and greatest tools to feed it.  We feed it with our hearts and souls like a confessional booth after a Las Vegas bender, but occasionally forget that every wry observation and catty tweet is now searchable, indexable and forever. 

But seeing is not knowing.  Telling alone does not create understanding. And the fact I can't actually deal with the immediacy of a restaurant until I've "checked in" in pursuit of my "Crunked' badge is...well, a little sad.

Sad, but I believe it will evolve into something beautiful.  This stuff would not survive, we would not be obsessed by it, if it did not meet a fundamental human need.  Our job is to understand that need and work to meet it with technology that enhances our humanity, and deepens our connections, rather than reduces our rich world of experience to 140 character bleats.

But it does make you think - children learn interaction by observing our emotional states.  How much of our hearts and souls can we pour into the technosphere before it develops its own api to tap our raw data, and begin to react?

It feels inevitable that a status update will someday generate a reaction - "feeling blue" may generate a skype call from an unknown (but somehow familiar soothing) voice, suggesting you "look on the bright side - you've got that Mexico trip coming up!  You'll be tan and happy, and you'll probably hook up!" - and when the line goes dead, you'll feel great, and maybe slightly, momentarily unsettled.  But you shouldn't be - you put the trip into dopplr, booked it through Expedia, and you've got a profile that matches someone else who did the same (and is single)...weather.com predicts sun for the 10-day forecast, and the tweets you posted from Tulum the last time were, algorithmically speaking, the happiest of your 8,956 posts. 

You can't miss!

Toilet Paper Users and Facebook Users

We social media wanks often earn our fear money through hyperbolic/histrionic presentations laden with "you're business model is f***ed" slides, typically including a gasp-inducing image that compares the population of users of Facebook to the population of actual countries.

But Facebook isn't really a country.  Individual users of Facebook have as much in common with each other as individual users of toilet paper. 

And come to think of it, there may be more TP than FB users for a little while yet.

(FB heatmap when they were limping along with 200MM users back on april 8th,2009, stolen from Dave Know's HardKnox life blog...and interesting to note that if in April they were "admitting" 200MM, and in December Zuckerberg claims 350MM, HOLY HOCKEYSTICK, batman.)

If FB were a country, it would be an interesting one - a preselected technological "upper" class who have sufficient material resources to at least guarantee access, so they probably aren't hurting for basic needs - food, shelter, etc. 

They'd be the world's third most populous country - 350MM+ people, all a few rungs up Maslow's ladder.

And in spite of various valuation discussions, this "country" of tech "haves" wouldn't be a G-7 or G-20 candidate.  Various estimates peg the FB "GDP" at about a billion for 2009 - with about half that coming from ad revenue, the other half from monetization of the FB platform via third party developers.  that puts them at #169 for global GDP, a few steps behind St. Lucia, and just edging out Dijibouti.

The smartest, wealthiest, tech saavy folks in the world, 350MM strong, barely edging out a win on Dijibouti?  Golly.

But there is something much more interesting and a little sad going on here.  A real country has many things that make for an engaged citizenry.  The two I think are relevant here are

1. economic/social/emotional barriers to leaving, and
2. a national mythology/narrative

Friendster, MySpace and Facebook are cheap, easy, and addictive, but their glue is driven by the critical mass of friends (network effect) and the difficulty of porting your entire life onto the NEXT BIG PLATFORM.  Facebook Connect is a brilliant way to deflect the need to re-port, but at the end of the day, FB loyalty will be proportional to its perceived utility.  Like toilet paper.  If there is a softer better cheaper toilet paper, I'll use it.

(stolen from extremefunnyhumor.com)

But none of these social nets has an embedded narrative or mythology.  they have a perceived "cool" factor, or not, but they are social tools, little more.  FB is doing its best to become the Leatherman of social nets, with a tool, port or app for every need, but I question the loyalty of its users and the longevity of its position.  Because they have no narrative.  The US Army/Marine Corps CounterInsurgency Manual (available as a pdf here - Download COIN-FM3-24) defines a "narrative" as:

"a story recounted in the form of a causally linked series of events that explains an event in the group's history and expresses the values, characters, or self-identity of the group.  Narratives are means through which ideologies are expressed and absorbed by members of a society."

There is no common purpose to FB, no shared mission, no shared narrative. 

Like Toilet Paper. 

We flush (TP) and upload (FB) our crap every day.

When will a virtual social net nourish our souls?

W+K+Schmidt+Birkett+N900+OneDotZero = fun

As part of our effort on behalf of the Nokia N900, W+K London partnered with computational designer  Karsten  Schmidt and software architect Gary Birkett in conjunction with OneDotZero to demonstrate what happens when

per Birkett:

“we are using a 3 inch display to try to control a 70 foot display”. Based on the N900’s accelerometer, the software uses an interface that takes movement data from the handset and sends it to the projection app, created by Schmidt."

This is so cool, it must be 37 degrees

OK - so that's a reference to the "perfect pour" temperature of Coke - 37 degrees Fahrenheit - that optimizes the drinking experience to the point you have to sit down to drink it or your brain will explode with pleasure.  And frankly, that'd be a mess, what with the bubbles and all.

I know that because (disclaimer) I have the pleasure to work with Coke.

Read about Coke's "interactive fountain" in Fast Company today.  Touch screen + 46-ounce concentrated flavor cartridge = your perfect Coke.  That in and of itself is pretty neat.

But I like it for two reasons - one that was stated in the article, one that wasn't:

(1) According to the article, "Another perk is the business data the dispenser sends back to Coke's headquarters in Atlanta. The machines upload data about beverage consumption, peak times, and popular locations. Coke can also talk back to the machine, letting it know if a particular flavor needs to be discontinued or recalled and causing it to stop serving the drink immediately."  This is FANTASTIC.  The machines become real-time focus groups and interactive sales terminals.  As long as the info generated isn't left in the hands of the inventory department but rather feeds the broader marketing organization, this has significant implications.

(2) This machine will feed a fundamental behavior intrinsic to Coke's target audience - sharing.  you can't create a witch's brew flavor without the friend next to you asking for "just a sip" to compare to their concoction - and you'll probably see an uptick in sales as people 'experiment' with different flavors.  Expect different flavor combinations (the more esoteric the better) to form fan groups and passion communities online.  Expect #Coke flavored hashtags cropping up on Twitter, etc. etc. etc.

The machines don't just mix flavors, they start conversations.  probably not unlike the ones that mmay have happened at soda fountains.  Even better?  Good-natured arguments.  And THAT is cool.

"My Diet Vanilla Black Cherry Bomb is tastier than Biff's Crap-tastic mix..."

Kudos to Coke for harnessing a technology that speaks to both their heritage (the soda fountain) and their future.  And for turning their product into a participatory experience. 

Win.

Coraline Marketing

[ Mike Baker's reconceived pulp 'Coraline' cover, from his blog 'Knack for Art':]

You haven't seen a lot from me on W+K's marketing efforts behind Coraline. 

The best gauge of a campaign is what other people say about it anyway, right?   And other folks have done a great job of covering it - Ward @ Drawn and The Future of Ads pretty much nail it, and if you missed anything, 'Evil Buttons' is the unoffical blog we've all been reading to track the campaign and its offshoots. 

Phil Knight was interviewed by AdAge about the Coraline marketing effort and had this to say:

"The original agreement was that Focus [Features] would do the advertising, but in some of the early meetings, it was clear that we had a difference of opinion on the advertising -- "target audience" being one. They were used to doing "data" advertising: They wanted to push this more as a kiddie film, because that's what the data told them. And Nike and Wieden & Kennedy together had grown up with what I call "emotional essence advertising" -- the essence of the product is its emotional core, and you push that. It was two very different approaches, and it kind of became clear in some of those early meetings that we had a very strong difference of opinion. And to Focus' credit, they said, "OK, why don't you guys try it? There's no use in fighting this thing. Let's negotiate a different way to market this thing."

Marketing Quals ("emotional essence" types) and Quants ("data" advertisers) have been slugging it out for a while, so I wanted to share this nugget:

Pundits projected a $9MM opening weekend for Coraline, and $32MM total run gross.

We are damn proud that after a $16.3MM opening weekend take, Coraline's 3rd week US gross stands now at $53.93MM and counting. 

Social Media Personality Types

for design - via Adrian Chan's SxD blog - thnx to @karllong!

Social Media Personality Types

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: sxd ixd)

Mobility at the Youth Ball

and this image via Adam Frucci @ Gizmodo:

 

What's the sound of one hand clapping?  Ask Barack.

Mobile drama

[via mobile marketing magazine]

"20:20 London, Incentivated and the COI (Central Office of Information) have collaborated to launch ‘THMBNLS’, an interactive, ad-funded mobile soap opera for the Department of Children, Schools and Families. THMBNLS follows the lives of six teenagers and raises awareness of sexual wellbeing. The 22 weekly episodes will be available exclusively via the mobile Internet, and will be free to download. 

Viewers register online via their mobile browser at: www.thmbnls.mobi Traffic is being driven to the site via mobile banner ads placed across the six operator portals; 3, O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Virgin and Vodafone. The first of the weekly 30-second episodes was  released at 7pm on Friday 9 January, with viewers reminded to watch the next episode by text message or vCalendar entries they have previously downloaded to their phone thereafter. The ‘vCalendar’ can be downloaded to activate the handset’s alarm function, thereby avoiding the cost of additional SMS reminders."

I like the interface they've built to replicate the mobile experience online.

See the Future in Malmo

Unsworn Industries, maker of the 'Telemegaphone Dale' have just announced the launch of their 'Parascopes, Malmo' - site-specific "binoculars" that show not the present, but the future.  Specifically, the impact of a proposed urban planning effort.  Rather than put the plans on view in Malmo city hall, they built immersive viewers people can use to see the potential of the proposals in situ.  Nice.

Runs in the family?

My six-year-old wanted to make a birthday card for my wife.  He grabbed a pen and mumbled something about "doing a computer thing", then came back with this.  He informed me that the 'Happy Bir' is followed by "a blinking cursor, because I'm still typing".  He put on the 'Caps Lock' and though my wife uses Safari @ home, Daddy uses Firefox, and that browser made the cut.

Geek waters run deep chez Gleeson. 

Detail:

Can't wait to see his Linux/Maemo version next year.

NIN: Lights in the Sky, PDX

Been a NIN fanboy since Pretty Hate Machine got me through college. 

"Lights in the Sky 12/7 PDX"?  Hellz yeah. The article in Wired only got me juiced.

All images and video courtesy of my ROCKING Nokia N96.

ticket:

 

The guts behind the scene: 2 of 3 Moment Factory Linux workstations at stage right, with more processor power than NASA, stayed lit even when the lights went down:

The closing screen:

Vids -

And one more:

Our boy Trent puts on serious show.  VERY VISUAL - and damn serious.

From Wired:

"I'm not really a purist," admits Reznor. "If I'm in the studio working on an album, I try to only please myself. But when it's a tour, it feels a bit more like I have a responsibility to some degree to entertain people."

These boys rocked CLEAN: no tats, no breaks, bottled water.  Adrenaline-fueled chest whomping crazy-ass bass.  Machine gun drum, vibraphone and...a cello?  More Lemur touch pads than you could shake a stick at.  And Trent tossed his tambourine.  A visua-musical mash.  Operatic.  Pandemonic.  Tech-ed to the gills and the roof.  Like Gattaca on crack, but with bass, sweat and oomph. [btw: Uma rocked that one.]

Trent says his next NIN tour will be as pared down as this was over-the-top. 

Ain't no way I'm missing it.

NIN Secret concert...finally

Maybe my favorite bit about the NIN Year Zero ARG was that damn concert that I had heard about but never actually saw documented.

The story went that players and fans were made aware of an 'Art is Resistance' meeting...then climbed into vehicles (I had heard buses, but apparently it was vans ok, it WAS buses) and driven to an undisclosed location in the LA factory district for a wild 'experience'. Sounded cool, but though I kept coming across references, I couldn't find documentation. Until now.

Karl Bode's WordSoup blog mentioned the concert back in 4/07, and though his video's been yanked, he links to one of the YZ websites 'Open Source Resistance' where the video still exists. bingo.

It's worth watching to see

• the crowd reactions - they shift [frequently] between willing disbelief, outright disbelief, mild discomfort, wild euphoria and s--t scared. Just try to quantify the 'engagement metric' on that puppy, Holmes.
• watching the intersection of realities between Trent and the actors/assistants with the fans - Trent is firmly embedded in the album's alternate worldview, and for once, the fans don't just imagine it after huffing airplane glue and cranking it up, they get to be there when the SWAT team bursts in. Shooting.

Trent and 42 Entertainment built the Year Zero roller coaster ride that turned music into a game you could play. And kudos to 42 Entertainment, but make no mistake: Trent has spent the better part of the last two decades doing the heavylifting of brand narrative world building. And with the dystopian foundation laid and the narrative arc in motion, you can subcontract/modularize the activation to map to technographic, demographic, and psychographic subsets. And net a solid selling album in the process. Yes, I am a NIN fanboy. Sue me.

For anyone unfamiliar with this year's Cannes Viral Advertising Gran Prix winner, here's the synopsis, from their entry:

"The ambitious Year Zero alternate reality game (ARG), a work of cross-media art involving websites, emails, phone calls, album packaging, tour t-shirts, thumb drives, music videos, murals, interactive games and live concert events with the new music of Nine Inch Nails at its core. Playing out over 10 weeks, the Year Zero ARG engaged over 2.5M participants. It started with a message hidden in the back of a concert t-shirt that lead to online websites, ultimately over 29 websites discovered over several months, 7.5M page views, 7M forum postings, 2M phone calls and thousands of original art submissions."

Are you letting people play YOUR brand communications?

Technology - what does it really mean?

What is technology?

Dictionary.com: "Technology is the sum of the ways in which social groups provide themselves with the material objects of their civilization."

Wikipedia: "Technology is a broad concept that deals with a species' usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects a species' ability to control and adapt to its environment."

Merriam-Webster, via Wikipedia, "[Technology] is mostly used in three different contexts: when referring to a tool (or machine); a technique; the cultural force; or a combination of the three."

Technology is not 'other' - it is us.  Check it.

Immersive Worlds (Hold onto your hats)

I had the opportunity to catch up with Ken Brady, gadfly and immersive world guru-type fella.  Now for a lot of  folks, conversations about immersive worlds goes 'Second Life' fast.  Between them, Hipihi, and metabirds, you cover a lot of ground.  And miss a lot.

Oh - and you lose everyone.  I mean c'mon.  Walk into a marketing department and say 'Second Life' and you may as well be selling Dutch tulips.  Or plague bandages.  Or dead, really stinky animals.  Or barf.

So for those of you who class immersive worlds somewhere near "Klingons vs. Furries Bowling", Ken had some interesting insights.  And there's even a chance to win a prize somewhere in this entry.  Like at the end.

Back to Ken.

I asked him to share four important things everyone should know, here's the knowledge bombs dropped:

1. Everything you learn now will change in two weeks.  Ken knew thirty new platforms in various stages of development, each with a range of strengths and weaknesses.  The platfrom-specific knowledge from an experience in any would, he suggested, have the shelf life of sushi.

2. Fast retreat = Community Backlash. In other words, don't treat immersive world brand experiences like campaigns with a hard start and finish.  The social contract of entering an immersive world requires a real community engagement (read: committment) to earn the respect of the in-world inhabitants.  Hence the creation of the SLLA - originally formulated to resist marketing incursions (including "shooting" people entering SL American Apparel stores, though of late they've taken a political stance seeking in-world political rights...)

3. Own the IP and/or 3d models built to support your in-world efforts - otherwise you'll need to rebuild them the next time you need them.  Also, the models may (and this is a big 'may') be cross-platform compatible, so while you may need to re-stretch some polygons, don't pay twice for the wireframes/skeletons if you don't need to...

4. Engage communities on their terms, not yours. A brand conversation in Gaia online (e.g., 'The Last Mimzy') versus a Second Life dialoge are different experiences entirely.  Before you can relevantly message or "plus-up" an in-worlder's experience, you gotta know what makes the eco-system tick - what are the goals, rewards and social currencies (explicit and implicit) built into or minted in those locations?  How do you enhance what's going on and provide real value?

As we talked, we also discussed the role of a community manager/virtual brand manager in virtual space, and the outsourcing of marketing functions by real world brands to virtual world teams.  This gets real interesting real fast.  To whit: Brand management as classically understood in the command and control systems of CPGs has to evolve to community management. 

With IP dissemination in virtual space (literally and figuratively) control is effectively gone.   (This is the irony of "UGC" - if your brand  is relevant to people, there is UGC around it.  The choice isn't whether it makes sense, the choice is how to engage)

So you can fight the loss of total brand control in interactive space, or leverage it.

Virtual worlds, dealt with attentively and respectfully, have the potential to become crowdsourced brand forums where you can learn a lot about how your brand could better meet the needs of virtual customers and advocates - and the lessons learned there may well feed real world conversations as well.

Leveraging the power of those spaces means participating relevantly in the communities themselves and being a part of conversations around your brand - aiding and enabling, or correcting as needed. 

How's that sound: "Brand guides, not brand managers."  Nice 2.0, 2.5 and 3.0 ring to it.

Or you can just bowl with Klingons and Furries.  But remember you gotta dress the part.  Who knows - they may even love you for it.   By the way?  disturbing number of SL sex forums with Furries.  One innocuous Google search netted this gem.   Jeepers, people.  I'm not saying, just sayin'.

Thanks to KenekeB for posting up a whole gallery of images from what looked to be a heartwarming communal gathering in ATLANTA.

Special Prize Opportunity:
First five people to post a mailing address in the comments section (if you don't want to go public, email me at [email protected]) get a real world copy of the "Girls of Second Life" calendar. 

No, I'm not kidding.

Sex-bot's coming. Hey wait a second...

Calling the Porn industry: your future has arrived...PreSurfer digs this one up.  Thanks to the magic of a Head Mounted Display (HMD) and a force-feedback robot, you no longer have to deal with pesky humans.  Cast their avatars over a handy, easy-to-wash green screen mesh and take "interactive" to a new level. Brrrrrrrrr.

Virtual Realities - San Francisco, New York, Dubai-land, Falcon City, Second Life, Cloverfield, oh for gosh's sake

Some I'm going to apologize in advance for bad logic, poor application of social theory, bad understanding of the neurologic basis of memories and the like.  And I welcome any thoughts anyone has on the following.

I was talking with Penny Brough of W+K London about the Golden Gate Bridge.  I'll admit, I was a little jet-lagged, but from what I recall, she was saying more folks know San Francisco through images of the Golden Gate bridge than will ever see the real bridge...so there are probably more virtual Golden Gate bridges traveling the world in folks heads than real memories experienced by folks who've actually seen it.  And the SF of the mind may be as real to the non-visitor as the real one is to folks who've been there.   And sometimes when you finally do see something, the real one isn't as pretty as the cumulative virtual one you remember though you'd never really seen it, anyway.

Maybe, somehow, getting a gray day downer the first time you cross the Golden Gate is like when you meet a movie star like Tom Cruise, and find out he's REALLY SHORT.  Or not.

The power of cumulative virtual memory, not Tom Cruise, may be part of the reason why NYC seems to keep getting blasted to bits in movie after movie - it's a quick cheap "gimmie" for a filmmaker/storyteller to leverage the virtual NYC in viewer's heads, built from postcards, movies, TV shows and commercials - to create an instant pang of connection. 

Below, does Lady Liberty get her head torn off so Cloverfield can tap the collective unconscious?

Side note - Lady Liberty gets the short end of the stick in quite a few movies - Planet of The Apes, The Day After, Escape From New York, etc. - she's even in the movie posters for them all.)

A good storyteller, one who engages and moves an audience, weaves the most effective tale when they leverage their listeners' cultural conventions, ideals, shared images, symbols, archetypes, creation myths, known characters and historical situations to create entry points - think Aesop's fables, Grimm's tales, Disney, Tolkien, The Apostles.  NYC, through the cumulative weight of visual imagery and narrative, has entered the world's global memory bank.  It is a virtually 'shared' city, though few (proportionally to the globe's population) have actually been there.  A terrorist attack there, then, became an assault on a real thing AND on our global collective virtual memory.

We're familiar with taking a real thing (Golden Gate Bridge) and provide virtual copies (postcards) to create a virtual visual memory (of the card initially, but ultimately of the "Bridge").  Now we can personally create a virtual thing (an avatar) and create real copies (paintings, figurines, etc.) - like a 3-D printed 'Spore' figurine, a World of Warcraft figurine, or a portrait of your second life avatar.  In the former, shared virtual memory is gleaned from a representation of the real.  In the latter, real is distilled from virtual.   Is one of those more real, less real, or more virtual?

Something happens, anything, and if the experience makes it out of your short term memory into long term, you are left with an accessible memory.  Is the similarly accessible memory of a virtual experience  (say finally mastering and manning the turret guns in Gears of War - FTW!) somehow less real than the memory of a real experience? 

 

As worlds become truly immersive, the distinction between real and virtual is going to get awful gray, especially since you'll be able to upload your brain to the data cloud by 2050 and get rid of that pesky meat-space interface we call a "body".

Second Life is a real thing, and a virtual place and a collective memory fed by its citizens activities and preserved by Linden Labs infrastructure. It's a place where people can live out their fantasies (mundane and/or bizarre).  Players create real space (and value) in a virtual place, 'real' because it can be perceived by the senses, remembered accurately by the brain, bought and sold, and it adheres to a rule system that preserves and protects the reality it creates.  And players pay for the privilege of creating more value for others with each interaction.  Sweeeeet.

Dubai-Land is a real thing, too.  But it started as a (mind-numbingly expensive) dream, and is being forced, inch-by-terra-formed-inch, onto an incredibly inhospitable landscape.  Watch the video below and be simultaneously blown away and appalled...and not just by the "action-movie-voiceover" narrative with memorable quotes like "think eco-tourism, but BIGGER", or "watch your kids turn into adults INSTANTLY, and live out their DREAM professions", but by how much this promo video reads like the opening sequence for a soon to be released post-apocalyptic film riffing on the follies of man:

 

Falcon City of Wonders, my favorite part of Dubai-Land, is a land mass tastefully formed to resemble a falcon spreading its wings, and features scale reproductions of the Pyramids ("with retail space the Egyptians would never have dreamed possible!"), the Eiffel tower, Big Ben, and the Taj Mahal.  To keep this thing humble, the designers thoughtfully put in a jogging track around the scale Central Park in the form of a section of the Great Wall of China.

Falcon City of Wonders = big.  Tom Cruise = not as big?

Are virtual worlds creating new collective memories?  Yes.  Will Dubai-land create a new collective memory pool (before its overrun by nuclear/plague/ebola/alien infested zombies)?  Yes.  Is Master Chief the new Luke Skywalker?  Yes.  What happens when you can't tell the difference between a virtual world and a real world?  When does the difference not matter anymore?

 

Twombly Tate Tracks

Wandering the Tate, I came across "Tate Tracks", an inspired program where artists find a piece that inspires them, then create a track to accompany the piece.  The music debuts in the gallery for 30 days, then appears on the Tate Tracks site.  From the site:

"Tate Modern invited Union of Knives to walk around the gallery and find a work of art that would inspire them to write a track.

It was Cy Twombly's Quattro Stagioni which blew them away. It's a series of four vast paintings about the cycle of the seasons. They chose it because they 'liked the feeling that it gives of the earth just being one great big creature and the seasons are merely this creature breathing.' The result is their latest track, Four Seasons.

       

        

 

 

Barbie Becomes an Authentication Device for Pre-Teen Friendship

[from Threat Level]

Pre-teens in Mattels' free Barbie Girls virtual world can chat with their friends online using a feature called Secret B Chat, but that relationship first has to be authenticated by way of the Barbie Girl, a $59.95 MP3 player that looks like a cross between a Bratz doll and a Cue Cat, and was recently rated one of the hottest new toys of the 2008 holiday season.

The idea is, Sally brings her Barbie Girl over to her friend Tiffany's house, and sets it in Tiffany's docking station -- which is plugged into a USB port on Tiffany's PC.  Mattel's (Windows only) software apparently reads some sort of globally unique identifier embedded in Sally's Barbie Girl, and authenticates Sally as one of Tiffany's Best Friends.

Now when Sally gets home, the two can talk in Secret B Chat. (If Sally's parents can't afford the gadget, then she has no business calling herself Tiffany's best friend.)

It's sort of like an RSA token, but with cute fashion accessories and snap-on hair styles. THREAT LEVEL foresees a wave of Barbie Girl parties in the future, where tweens all meet and authenticate to each other -- like a PGP key signing party, but with cupcakes.

Friendships authenticated (and validated) via the purchase of a $60 mp3 housed in mind rotting plastic sleeves.  Sweet.  Sure, this has been around for a while - the phenomenon of friend validation through purchase of accessories has existed since the first Tory Burch Lucinda Hobo in pony emerged from the primordial ooze (product as badge, anyone?  cultural signifiers? shirtflags?) - what's interesting here is the layer of tech over it - actual interaction quality changed through the ownership of mutual authentication keys.  Now you can buy your way into the club.  On second thought, there are a few of these as well - T-Mobile faves and in network wireless calling come immediately to mind.

And this gets incrementally more interesting now that RFID chips have survived several rounds of hype to become significantly more viable - freed from the USB tether, the idea of smart products recognizing you and other "owners" could take the idea of "membership has its privileges" in whole new directions.

Human Video Games

Pong:

Space Invaders

Master Chief masters all

The first 24 hours of Halo 3’s release = $170 million in sales...Halo 3 is now the biggest launch in entertainment history - bigger than any Hollywood movie.

Google Earth, now Google Sky. Holy Cow.

Wow.  Honestly, wow. 

Google Earth shows you our world from satellite height down to the cars parked in your driveway.

Google Sky knits together astronomical images into a navigable universe, as seen from Earth.

As a failed astrophysicist, this one blows my mind.  I like features like the 'planet slider', the 'users guide to galaxies', etc.  I just spent way too much time wandering around the universe.  Virtually.   I am drooling.  I am actually drooling.  I also love the awe inspiring banality of the naming scheme.  Google "earth".  Google "sky".  Next up, Google "Air".  You are breathing it. And they want it back.

Claudia Cristovao from W+K Tokyo found this article outlining the features.

Here's a quick video demo from Google about their new application:

download it here.

Nike 'Leave Nothing' campaign, Live in Madden 08

In partnership with Microsoft/Massive and AvenueA-Razorfish, W+K's Nike 'Leave Nothing' football campaign goes XBox Live!

Nokia 070829

Marcelino Alvarez of PDX caught this one on Creativity, entitled "Nokia's latest could be judgment day for Apple"

With so many tech-savvy, sleuthing bloggers on the web nowadays, subversive viral campaigns for NIN’s Year Zero and JJ Abrams’ Cloverfield were quickly unearthed and pieced together. The same seems to apply for Nokia, whose upcoming N Series is at the heart of a mysterious, brain-teasing website simply dubbed “070829.”

According to rumors circulating around the blogosphere and even in Fortune magazine, the viral site, traced back to global interactive design firm Lightmaker--whose offices aren't permitted to discuss the project at this point--is part a new full-scale music service launch from Nokia on August 29th (hence the above URL), which will include an offline London event at the Ministry of Sound nightclub and more importantly, the launch of the new Nokia website.

The destination, which already includes a WAP profile for the N81, will let consumers download songs to their PCs and then transfer them to mobile phones and other portable music players, which is a similar model to iTunes. Also it's expected that Nokia will let users transfer songs to non-Nokia phones using digital-rights-management software.

Gaming to a better world (pt 1)

A point really popped for me from an interview by Henry Jenkins, writer of Convergence Culture and co-founder of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, of Eric Zimmerman, CEO of GameLab:

"...there is an emerging form of media literacy that we sometimes call 'Gaming Literacy.' Gaming Literacy has to do with information management, understanding complex systems, social networks, a critical design process, and creativity with digital technology. Increasingly, this new form of literacy will be crucial in the workplace and in our social and civic lives. The process of game design, which combines mathematics and logic, storytelling and aesthetics, writing and communication, systems and analytic thinking, among other elements, is one of the best ways of engaging with this form of literacy."

Gaming may well impact the ways we consumer and process information.  Given the ever expanding reach of so-called "casual gaming", the open sourcing of the Wii (which brought scores of "non-core" gamers into the console gaming mix), and the proliferation of gaming titles distributed via interactive media, this field bears close watch.  Companies all over this space include PlayFirst, Oberon, Wild Tangent, etc.

Boise redux - virtual worlds

Boise's probably a great town, with most anything you could want.  But I may never go.  Like many interactive social networks (new and brand created) with no unique differentiation or compelling reason for me to engage, there's simply no reason for me to participate in what Boise has to offer.  And I've got nothing against Boise.  In fact, if you are from Boise, I love that town, and you.

Nick Wilson, in his 8/13/07 Metaverse article, comments on the trends and the hype around social networks and 3D environments.  Three key takeaways worth mentioning:

"Clueless Corporations"
For wont of a little observation, understanding and immersion within the culture of virtual worlds we see all kinds of mischief befall the unwary.

--> immerse to understand

"First Fever"
Be First.  It doesn't appear to matter what at, [or why,] but dammit, you just gotta be first! "Clueless Twonk Inc Are First Walrus Tickling Company to Enter Second Life"

--> Experiment with objectives

"Selling Picks and Shovels"
In any gold rush, the ones that are really guaranteed to profit are not the gold miners, panning through grit to find nuggets, but the ones selling the picks and shovels. What we havn't seen yet, but must surely come, is the 3D equivalent of the CMS.

--> consider how you can empower your end user with branded tools/apps/functionalities beyond any single destination property
 

The question any company should be asking regarding social networking is: first, why?  then, how will the program I envision create real/perceived value for my audience?   If you can't look at your planned efforts through the [jaded] eyes of the consumer and see real/perceived personal benefit, you are DOA.