The trouser-rubbing hordes of Macolytes are all in a lather about Apple’s newest device: the oddly-named iPad (insert menstrual humour here). If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the introductory video. It features the usual legion of starry-eyed, breathless Apple senior staff speaking reverently about their newest saint.
It’s a big, thin iPod. And it’s dead sexy. And surprisingly cheap, with prices starting at US $499.
It looks like a cool toy, but which of my computing, communications or entertainment problems does this device actually solve? It’s a sexier Kindle (with, no doubt, the same level of vendor lock-in)–a cool-looking reading device, for newspapers, books and the Web. I’ve been pretty ambivalent about the Kindle and other ebook readers up to now. I’ll probably buy one eventually, but I find I have an affection for the analog reading experience of dead tree books and New Yorker magazines.
And I don’t sit down to ‘read the Internet’. My ‘web surfing’ experience, if you will, is this mix of reading, blogging, tweeting, sending emails and chatting online, and all of that is usually intermingled with my doing actual work. The iPad looks to be great for reading the web, but worse than a laptop for each of these other functions.
I do watch TV and, rarely, feature-length movies on my laptop. I’m usually either on a plane or in bed. In either case, I appreciate the fact that my laptop can sit all on its own, without me holding it up. I know there will be docks and sundry other, uh, mounts for the iPad, but I’m not sure how else it would be superior to my MacBook Air.
In short, it’s a great-looking device, but I’m not sure it’s right for me. What are your initial impressions?
Two years ago, almost to the day, we moved from Malta and Morocco. We lived in Essaouira on the Atlantic coast. We rented a lovely riad (according to Wikipedia, “a traditional Moroccan house or palace with an interior garden”) called Dar Zahira (caution, autoplaying Berber music ahead).
The owners of Dar Zahira recently produced a great-looking four-minute video on the city. It really captures the mood of the place. Here’s the video, but it’s worth watching it in HD:
Somebody recently pointed out to me that ‘Essaouira’ has all the vowels except for sometimes-y.
I thought I’d observed this trend in recent movies. The best way I could figure to illustrate it was with a little video. I think it’s self-explanatory:
What do you think?
As an interesting side note, I first attempted to upload this video to YouTube. I didn’t use any movie or actor-specific terms in the title, description or tags, though I did identify the video category as ‘Movies’. The video was immediately blocked because my video “may include content that is owned or licensed by these content owners: Content owner: FOX Type: Audiovisual content.” Presumably they have some fancy image recognition software running to identify the video’s content.
I’m pretty sure my usage here falls under fair use in the US, but I’m not going to bother disputing YouTube’s automated system.
I’m working on a new project that has some particular requirements. They’re not that unusual, though, and surely others have already solved this set of problems:
We need to sell online videos (of, say, 20 to 30 minutes in length). They’ll be viewable online, behind a some kind of password protection, or available for download as well (again, with password protection).
Users will choose from a menu of videos, add them to a cart, pay for them and then get access (through streamed videos, downloads or both) only to those videos.
Ideally this happens within our own site, or something we can tweak to look something like our own site.
No, we haven’t branched out into pornography.
I checked out some courseware systems, but they’re really about delivering structured multi-part classes. I’m also aware of E-Junkie, which is what Common Craft (among many others) use to distribute their videos. They’re a good option for downloadables, but don’t offer flash-based video for viewing only.
I’m happy to pay for a turn-key solution, assuming it doesn’t cost a ridiculous amount of money. That’s preferable, actually, to messing around with Drupal or whatever. All suggestions welcome.
Today I saw this ad on TV. It’s for Jack in the Box smoothies:
It seems pretty offensive to me, particularly given that it describes menopausal women as ’street rat crazy’. When I compare it to the Motrin ad that caused all the furor back in November (I wrote about it here) it seems much worse. Sure, criticisms of the Motrin piece focused on insidious details, but the sexism of this Jack in the Box seems both overt and, well, nasty.
I found a few blogposts criticizing this ad, and some complaints (as well as some support) on Twitter. There’s nothing, though, that matches the uproar that the Motrin ad earned.
So what gives? Why isn’t this ad causing the same fuss? I have a variety of theories, but I don’t want to bias anybody’s responses.
There’s something lovely and ephemeral about this ‘live’ video for Lisa Hannigan’s “I Don’t Know”. It’s shot through the window of a snug in a bar in Dingle, with the patrons (and their kids) looking on with a particularly Irish kind of quizzical indifference.
Ms. Hannigan is obviously easy on the eyes, but there’s more to the video’s success than that. The band is packed into this tiny space, her grinning, bald drummer is playing a piece of newspaper and everybody seems to be having a bloody good time. You can easy forgive that she comes in on the tambourine at the wrong moment. I wonder what number take this is.
We saw Lisa Hannigan live at SXSW and, I’m sorry to say, I was underwhelmed. The je ne sais quoi that makes this video so great was nowhere to be found.
PopVox is the people’s choice awards held during Vancouver Digital Week. The PopVox Awards recognizes all major sectors of the digital media industry and celebrates its creativity, talent, and achievements. Creators submit their projects and the people vote online for their favorites.
We’re submitting in the ‘Best Do-Gooder’ category, talking about our work to help save the Great Bear Rainforest. I recorded a quick YouTube video for our submission, in which I woefully mispronounce the word ‘tract’:
While you’re at it, you could also vote for PhoneGap (a client) and friends of Capulet, Giant Ant Media. If you’ve got other favourites, feel free to post them in the comments.
The first time I saw an LCD display built into the back seat of a taxi cab, it was last New Years Eve in Mahattan. It mostly ran advertising, with intermittent weather reports and news clips. At the time, I wondered how long it would be before I saw them in BC. The answer, it turns out, is about four months.
This latest intrusion was in the back seat of a Vancouver Taxi cab. The company that offers them is Moving Media Group, a Vancouver-based company that specializes in digital screens in cabs. The screens have apparently been in operation since last November.
In my taxi, the screen replaced the headrest on the passenger side front seat. The unit is actually surprisingly thick (here’s a side view), and with the seat reclined, the screen really imposed itself on my field of view. In New York, the display was built into the back of the cab’s front bench seat. Its commercials had audio, which (thus far, at least) my Vancouver cab didn’t. As in New York, the content seemed like it was mostly advertising combined ‘breaking news’ headlines and weather updates.
Dumb Display Ads
Does anybody not find this development totally egregious? In an age where marketers and media companies are re-evaluating the fundamental efficacy of ‘dumb’ display ads, why introduce yet another distraction engine into the consumer’s view? Does the Moving Media Group imagine that we don’t yet have enough commercials and advertisements in our daily life?
Besides, I’m already paying the driver to take me from Point A to B. I’m not paying for the privilege of watching ads for the balance of my journey.
A couple of years ago I went to the bathroom in a pub. Stepping up to the urinal, I looked up to see a video display showing a beer commercial. Increasingly, we’re ceding space to useless, ineffectual advertising. This trend is particularly offensive where, in places like pubs, hockey arenas and taxis, we’re already paying for a service. Shouldn’t we be able to enjoy the experience of, say, riding in a cab or micturating without the intrusion of a commercial?
I touched the screen (I know, kind of gross, no?) only once. Following instructions, I touched the “Touch for Menu” button at the bottom of the screen. And I apparently broke the thing:
By fixating consumer attention on the screen, all advertisers can take advantage of this captive audience.
The next time I flag a cab that has a video monitor instead of a head rest, I’m going to wave the driver off and wait for the next one. I encourage you to do the same.
I’m a descendant of the McLeans. Emilie Delphine Robb of New York granted Zavikon to Andrew McLean of Passaic, New Jersey on June 27, 1918. Andrew was a cotton goods manufacturer. He died in March 26, 1931. His property was then divided among his children. On August 22, 1931 they sold Zavikon to Philip A. Castner of Philadelphia. The Great Depression caused the McLeans to end the family’s business and sell Zavikon!
I’m always pleased when something on this site enables a little connection like this that didn’t exist before.
I tried to write this post a couple of times, but faltered. So, I figured I’d try to articulate myself using video. The result, I’m afraid, is really no better. Remember–that’s four minutes of your life you can’t have back.
Building on what I ramble about in the video, consider the example of somebody receiving 1000 tweets a day. Let’s imagine that they actually read 200 of those. The other 800 just float by in the endless Twitter river while they’re working, interacting with other humans and so forth.
If each person in their Twitter network posts 10 times per day, then, on average, 2 out of 10 of each person’s tweets get seen.
Now imagine that the size of the average network doubles, to 200. That means 2000 tweets a day. The user still only sees an average of 200, so only 1 out of 10 tweets get seen.
Everything increases but our attention bandwidth. Is there some kind of threshold where the river o’ Twitter becomes too diluted? If the average follower count continues to go up, will we someday rely almost exclusively on DMs and @ messages? Or, as I speculate about in the video, will we just get better at filtering and personalization?
