After consuming The New York Times in its web-based digital editions for several years, I read an actual Sunday paper edition recently. It made me think about the advantages and disadvantages of digital and print media, and about two key challenges that digital media hasn’t yet solved: news as real estate, and tactile sharing.

Digital news products have lots of advantages over print: they’re faster and more timely. They eliminate paper waste. They simplify the archiving and finding of news and information. They enable customizable, highly interactive versions of news from multiple sources. They make it extremely easy to share news with people far away.

I once helped IBM tell the story of new prototypes for personal computers, and one prototype from more than a decade ago was an electronic newspaper. Tablets have now solved much of this problem, but I remember what a colleague, the industrial designer David Hill, told me about print newspapers – that they had a user interface developed over hundreds of years, and it was a highly portable and efficient design. Website design has improved enormously in 20 years, but digital editions do not yet offer the expansive, wide-open-real-estate, open-choice display environment of a newspaper that is 2 feet wide by 2 feet tall (61 by 61 centimeters). Digital editions also make it harder to share a story with someone across the table, and make it impossible for one person to read the opinion section, while another person reads the sports section. Digital news products enable a virtual conversation, but they complicate an in-person conversation.

The layout editors of print editions still have the ability to convey the value and importance of news by size and placement. Identifying importance and priorities in a digital edition is more difficult. Stories are still usually presented as lists, and the headlines all tend to run together, and it’s difficult for me as a reader to determine what’s important.

Both of these problems appear imminently solvable. The diagonal measurement of a print newspaper is about 32 inches (81 centimeters). High-resolution monitors are already close to that size, but a touch interface comes close to making the physical size irrelevant. You can use fingers to swipe, pan, and zoom in on stories. As for the sharing and passing-back-and-forth of sections, it may be dependent on each person holding a tablet. But right now, digital news makes it easier to share a news link with someone across the world than to hand a story across the table.

This is my viewpoint as a news consumer. Khoi Vinh, former design director of The New York Times, examines this topic regularly on his website, subtraction.com. He addresses these challenges from the viewpoint of a news producer in a September 2010 lecture in the “Freitag am Donnerstag” series in Zurich.

Social media create terrific ways to meet people virtually. They’re great tools for distributing news and ideas. If you’re an Irish expatriate blogger in Turkey, like Catherine Yiğit, they enable you to build a community from behind a computer. But they’re less good at introducing us to the basic mensch-ness of people.

Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells are changing that. They founded the Social Media Club almost five years ago in San Francisco as a way to make social media even more social. With more than 200 chapters on six continents, the group helps people share their understanding of new media. The club’s mantra is “If you get it, share it.”

One of the group’s programs is organizing clubhouses for bloggers and communicators at social media conferences. Last weekend Social Media Clubhouse 4 took place in Las Vegas, at Blog World Expo 2010. Lenovo, the personal computing company that makes the ThinkPad on which I am creating this post, sponsored the house. Baltimore blogger Amy Phillips summarizes the value of Blog World, one of the leading social media conferences, as being focused on business, brand interactions, honing content, Radian6 and Google. (Among other things, the house provided the opportunity to learn about WordPress solutions like page.ly, founded by club members Josh and Sally Strebel. And among the organizations with truly surprising stories to tell at the conference: Ford, Kodak, Southwest Airlines, and the U.S. Army.)

One highlight was the serendipitous opportunity to attend the wedding of Emma Merkas, a blogger from Melbourne, who renewed her vows with husband Denis at the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel on the final night of the conference. Emma had met my friend and colleague, Lenovo social media strategist Gavin O’Hara, while waiting for coffee at a Starbucks in the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Emma edits “$30 Date Night,” a crazy website focused on ways to keep a marriage interesting. She invited Gavin and his crew to attend the ceremony.

The event distilled the awesomeness — as club member Zane Aveton would put it — of Las Vegas and social media into 15 minutes. Bride and groom arrived in a pink Cadillac, driven by an Elvis impersonator in white cape and rhinestones. After vows to give each other a hunka hunka burning love, not to treat each other like hound dogs, and not to step on each other’s blue suede shoes, punctuated by bursts of white mist, broadcast in real-time over the Internet, documented on YouTube, promoted on Facebook, real-time reported on Twitter, Emma and Dennis were married again. And then they trooped off to karaoke at The Palms casino. But for those 15 minutes, 20 people from both hemispheres met and celebrated with inspiration and hope, recognized each other’s mensch-ness, and vowed to write cross-promotional blog posts. Designed for Search Engine Optimization. In Elvis We Trust.

Among the crew of the Social Media Clubhouse 4 at Blog World Expo 2010, 14-16 Oct. in Las Vegas. From left, Bob Page, Chris Heuer, Nano Serwich, Kristie Wells, Erik Yowell, Jessica Murray, Sally Boldt-Strebel, Josh Strebel, Gavin O’Hara, Zane Aveton and Amy Phillips. Photograph by Bryan Haraway. Top photograph, of Emma and Denis Merkas, by the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel.

The New York innovation consultancy PSFK created an inspirational report about the future of health and technology for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Imagine the creativity of thousands of medical, technology and creative professionals applied to persistent global health problems. Amazing work, very dense, more than 200 pages of new solutions, presented in simple visuals. Solid evidence for encouragement about the future.

Above, an instructional baby blanket prototype by the advertising agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay, from page 133 of the report.

“It’s quite obvious. You’re seeing a knuckle-ball effect.”

– Rabi Mehta, an aerospace engineer at NASA, on the official ball of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.

FIFA announced the official ball of the 2010 World Cup — the Adidas Jabulani — in December 2009. Adidas called it the roundest and most accurate ball ever made, citing wind tunnel testing at Loughborough University in England and its own laboratory in Germany.

In June, NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, released analysis indicating the ball wobbles at speeds of 45-50 miles per hour. It doesn’t look like the Loughborough people were talking to the NASA people.

Two observations:

1. NASA’s timing and use of sports to teach concepts of physics is brilliant.

2. Experts in computational fluid dynamics, such as physicists at NASA and designers at Formula 1 racing teams, have an opportunity to collaborate on equipment for future sports events. The potential for co-branding, education, and credibility is substantial.

]]> http://www.mercurybrief.com/2010/07/nasa-on-the-world-cup-ball/feed/ 0 http://www.mercurybrief.com/2010/07/andy-grove-on-a-job-centric-economy-lessons-from-east-asia-in-the-1970s-and-80s/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=andy-grove-on-a-job-centric-economy-lessons-from-east-asia-in-the-1970s-and-80s http://www.mercurybrief.com/2010/07/andy-grove-on-a-job-centric-economy-lessons-from-east-asia-in-the-1970s-and-80s/#comments Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:35:24 +0000 Bob Page http://www.mercurybrief.com/?p=3520

After getting out of one industry after another, the USA is running out of businesses to get out of. From an opinion piece by former Intel Chairman Andy Grove in the 5 July edition of Bloomberg Businessweek:

“Manufacturing employment in the US computer industry today is about 166,000. One company in Taiwan and China, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., also known as Foxconn, employs more than 800,000. This is more than the combined headcount of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Sony….

“New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently wrote that if Washington really wants to create jobs, it should back startups. Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment….

“In a thorough study of the industrial development of East Asia, Robert Wade of the London School of Economics found that these economies turned in precedent- shattering economic performances over the 1970s and 1980s in large part because of the effective involvement of the government in targeting the growth of manufacturing industries….

“If we want to remain a leading economy, we change on our own, or change will continue to be forced upon us.”

Funny how things in work and personal life converge — maybe because one is feeding off the other. I’m building a communications consulting and training business in Singapore, LINEA, and meeting some really cool, independent businesspeople as a result. I’m also working with volunteers to beef up the learning program for children at the Whampoa Family Service Centre.

Through these seemingly unrelated events, people and places, I’m learning that diversity and differing points of views are crucial in strengthening the collaborative process. Yes, it takes longer to get to a conclusion and if not managed well, becomes a spaghetti-like mess of meetings and endless talk. But without it, originality, creativity and ah-hah moments would be few. And how would we develop if we don’t take in new ways of looking at things?

Take something as simple as goals, for instance. The small-and-medium (SMB) businesspeople I’ve met have an independent streak tied very tightly with pragmatism and a link to their business goals. Paradoxically, their goals aren’t measured purely by numbers but whether they’re doing something tied with their beliefs and ideals and ultimately makes them happy. In my mind, business success had always been tied firmly to the bottom line.

After starting LINEA with a focus on public relations for small businesses, I also quickly realised that small businesses don’t care about putting marketing disciplines in silos — they don’t have the time or resources, and they want everything linked together. So I’m working with other independent partners to meet SMB needs so they don’t need to go hunting around. Larger companies call this Integrated Marketing and sometimes view it as, uh, a Utopian state. Happily, I’m meeting other independent consultants like myself — and am looking forward to meeting more potential partners and learning from them.

Through a photography class, I’m also meeting independent shopkeepers who are totally going against the grain. Each photography student is shooting a single travel-related theme. I’m shooting “Singapore Retail: Beyond Orchard Road,” to extend the boundaries of the usual Singapore shopping experience.

I’ve discovered that stores in the area of Ann Siang Hill, Club Street and Haji Lane (away from the usual tourist belt called Orchard Road) have strong, distinctive personalities and are run by young people with guts and strong vision. Their view is that the books, clothes, accessories, homeware and other products that make them happy will also make their potential customers happy to hang out there — and buy stuff.

Tying this back to the volunteer work I’m doing, I’d like to take some of the older, 11- and 12-year-old Whampoa kids to visit the area and meet these store owners and hang out in bookstores. There’s a really cool kids’ bookstore called Woods in the Books on Club Street. I’d like the kids to be able to chat with entrepreneurial young people who aren’t confined to the mainstream, so that the kids realise they’re not on some unchangeable hamster wheel that defines conventional success.

And at Whampoa, new volunteers have come up with some really cool, specific suggestions to improve the program. One volunteer suggested we weave in some mathematics rather than focus on English all the time. So we’re experimenting with a “manufacturing and commerce” game. We placed the kids in teams and gave them Monopoly money that they “earned” by answering mathematics questions. With this money, they bought raw materials to make simple stuff — like bookmarks and decorate clothes pegs. Next week they’re going to make goods, price them and “sell” them back to the volunteers.

Quite honestly, our strategy was good but execution less than perfect. We’d forgotten the power of little boys’ cliques and weren’t prepared. Pandemonium broke out when the boys didn’t want to be in the same team as the kids from a different neighborhood. (Sound like the real world much?) But – we’re learning.

While work, retail, and voluntarism seem like diverse worlds without natural links, I’m discovering an independent streak does exist in a country many have called, rightly or wrongly, a Nanny State. I’m hoping this streak develops quickly into strong brushstrokes that bring colour, originality and innovation to our canvas.

Top, a staff member at “Books Actually” on Club Street in Singapore. 2010 photograph by Geraldine Kan.

Geraldine Kan recently founded LINEA in Singapore.

The Nielsen Company released its latest three-screen report on 11 June 2010, documenting significant changes in media consumption during the last two years. The report has implications for the way stories are told, including format, duration, content and production values.

In the USA, moving-picture storytelling expanded from the movie screen to the television screen in the 1950s. The Nielsen reports show expansion now taking place into the smaller screens of smartphones.

The pace of strategy and tools to integrate storytelling for multiple screens is accelerating. Last month Adobe, for example, announced HTML5 extensions to Dreamweaver software that enable website developers to optimize content across multiple screens.

Highlights from the Nielsen first-quarter 2010 three-screen report on televisions, personal computers and smartphones:

• HDTV: More than half of US television households now have a high-definition television and receive HD signals. HDTV penetration grew 189 percent between 2008 and 2010.
• DVR: More than a third of homes have a digital video recorder, up 51 percent since 2008. This makes it possible for more viewers to watch TV programs on their own schedule, or “time shift.”
• Broadband: 63.5 percent of homes now have broadband Internet access, with high-speed connections that improve online video delivery.
• Smartphones: Nearly a quarter of households (up 38 percent year-over-year) have smartphones, simplifying the process for consumers to “place shift” and watch video wherever they are.
• Mobile Video: The audience for mobile video grew 51.2 percent year-over-year, and now includes more than 20 million users. Fifty-five percent of the audience for mobile video is aged 25-49.

Above, on 19 May 2010, Adobe released HTML5 extensions to Dreamweaver CS5 to support web developers optimizing content across multiple screens. Graphic by Adobe.

Seven hundred people in North Carolina are basing a new business model on the idea of me and my family changing our behavior when we go to the beach this summer. They are re-inventing the T-shirt, and they are some of the most optimistic people you will ever meet.

Going to the beach is a series of rituals. We overload the car. We drive six hours from Chapel Hill to Hilton Head Island although other beaches are only three hours away, because that’s the place our family adopted. We pack cold drinks in coolers and sit in the sand under umbrellas and build castles with moats and turrets. We ride bicycles along paths shaded by palmetto trees to the plantation ruins of William E. Baynard, who grew cotton before the Civil War. We pay $18 for T-shirts that say “Salty Dog Cafe.” Sea Island cotton hasn’t been grown on Hilton Head since 1920, but when we return home, these T-shirts from Honduras and Peru remind us of happy days.

We buy T-shirts because of the messages printed on them, but we spend very little time thinking about where they come from, what they’re made of, or who makes them. This is what Eric Henry and Tom Sineath want to change.

They run TS Designs, a small apparel company in Burlington, North Carolina, and they ask a simple question. Would my family make different decisions if we knew who made the T-shirt? What if we could point to the Stanly County farm of Ronnie Burleson, who grows cotton for TS Designs, on our drive to the beach? Or to Wes Morgan’s cotton gin in New London, where the cotton is cleaned? Or Mark Leonard’s yarn spinning plant in Thomasville or Brian Morrell’s knitting plant in Wendell? It’s a 750-mile path for their shirt, about the same as our trip to the beach and back. But it’s much shorter than the 17,000-mile global supply chain for most T-shirts.

What if knowing all this would cost us $21 rather than $18? Henry and Sineath (pronounced SIGH-neath) believe we’ll spring for the extra $3, because we all want to help our neighbors and we all want to reduce consumption of petroleum. So they and about 700 other people in the textile business created a brand, “Cotton of the Carolinas,” that connects you with the people behind your shirt at the same time you’re showing personal connections to beaches, universities and football teams.

There are other reasons to buy their shirts, or, more accurately, to suggest that beach shops, schools, companies, brewpubs and athletic teams source them from TS Designs. Their smallest quantity is 200 shirts — where the price is about $10 each — but starting this summer they’re offering one-off designs on their website for $26. They use ring-spun yarn, which is more expensive than open-ended yarn, but stronger and softer. They patented a printing process that embeds the design into the fibers of a garment-dyed shirt, in a high-tech version of batik. They print with water-based inks rather than non-breathable plastic inks containing polyvinyl chloride or phtalates, which have questionable effects on people and the environment. They maintain a company garden so their 25 employees can afford to eat local organic produce. They sew on a thoughtful tag showing where and when the cotton was harvested.

Almost 40 years ago, based on her experiences in southern France, Alice Waters launched a local food movement in Berkeley, California. Henry and Sineath believe the same kind of movement can happen with cotton. Like William E. Baynard and cotton from the Sea Islands, they believe we’ll pay a little bit more to know where and who it came from.

Above, a ‘Dirt to Shirt in 750 Miles’ T-shirt from TS Designs. Below, the state flag of South Carolina celebrates the role of palmetto trees in the Revolutionary War battle of Sullivan’s Island on 28 June 1776.

I walk my daughters to the bus stop each morning, and today is the last day to do this before summer vacation. When they get on the school bus I tell them that I love them and hope they have a great day, and then a Piglet line from Winnie the Pooh, “I wonder what exciting thing will happen today?” If I forget, Annie insists on reciting it.

Annie and Colette

These daughters are twins, Annie and Colette, and they have one year of elementary school left. Only 180 more walks to the bus stop, and then middle school, where their older siblings have not been as interested in parental accompaniment.

Last week, Amazon released the third in a series of literally handmade commercials by Angela Kohler and Ithyle Griffiths. Kohler and Griffiths are still-image photographers in Los Angeles with almost no experience in motion photography, and they made their very first commercial in one exciting week last summer as an entry in an Amazon competition. They won. In an interview with Lou Lesko, another Los Angeles photographer, they said they wanted these storytales to be childlike and magical in an increasingly digital world by appearing to have been made with materials found around a home. They show how the Amazon Kindle, a digital storytelling device, holds lots of stories.

Annie Little

At one point in the interview Kohler holds Griffiths‘ hand to stop him from fidgeting, and they seem as charming as their commercials. They praise Annie Little, the actress of the first two commercials who also wrote and sang the childlike songs in all of them. My Annie and Colette look like miniature versions of this Annie.

Kohler, Griffiths and Little inspire us to tell more stories with the simple tools we have on hand. They also invite us to buy one more device for our household digital zoo. But when their pitch is this enchanting, when it celebrates the joy and escape of reading, I can live with that. I wonder what exciting thing will happen this summer?

Lou Lesko interview with Angela Kohler and Ithyle Griffiths.

Above, still image from Kohler and Griffiths’ third Amazon commercial, released Thursday 3 June. Actress Paula Miranda and child model Melissa.

How do you persuade someone to buy a $4,000 Rolex watch, use it for two years, then throw it away and buy another?

You call it an Apple iPhone.

Watch companies describe the unbelievable precision of their products, the engineered glass and the specially machined stainless steel. They create images of a thin, durable, useful, elegant device.

Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple, used this vocabulary to launch the iPhone 4 today. People under the age of 30 no longer wear watches — fashion guides advise baby boomers to look younger by telling time with a phone, not a watch — so this is remarkable marketing judo. When people stop wearing watches, sell them phones styled like watches and charge nearly $4,000 over a two-year period. The anthropologist Genevieve Bell, director of user experience at Intel, says mobile phones have become a form of jewelry. They stay close to the body, like an amulet, and function in social and spiritual ways unrelated to technology.

The iPhone 4 looks like a classic Leica camera, as Jobs pointed out, and also resembles a classic tool watch. The Rolex Submariner created the tool watch category in 1953. The Submariner features brushed stainless steel, a ceramic bezel and a black dial. Sean Connery wore one as James Bond in the 1962 movie “Dr. No.” The iPhone is so pervasive today that Apple doesn’t need to place them in movies or pay celebrities to use them.

In March, the Swiss watch company Ulysse Nardin launched a $50,000 smartphone called the Chairman. Swiss companies do an unfathomably brilliant job of marketing watches. But after comparing the Chairman with the iPhone 4, I believe the Swiss will have their asses handed to them by Californians who stole their best moves. Beyond design elements, 200,000 apps make iPhone the Swiss Army knife of the 21st century.

In December 1969, after Seiko launched the quartz Astron watch, the Swiss watch industry went through gut-wrenching turmoil and then recovered. Forty years later, the question is: How will it respond to mobile phones?

CrunchGear video of an Ulysse Nardin Chairman smartphone.

Above, images of a Rolex Submariner, an Ulysse Nardin Chairman and an Apple iPhone 4.