March 13, 2011
Wherever You Want To Go is a four-part documentary by BMW Documentaries that paints a unique picture of technology, culture, cities, our past, present and how it all relates to the future of mobility.
“If aliens were looking down on Los Angeles, they would come to the conclusion that the dominant life-form is the automobile.”
“One very interesting concept would be vehicles that are shared… you don’t want the insuring part, the maintaining part, the storing part, all these things that aren’t about getting from A to B, we don’t really want those things… it’s not to say these kinds of cars will go away because we all like to travel with our family and do things together with other people. This is not about taking things away from people, it’s about enabling a whole new level of freedom.”
“What we’re really beginning to envision… are three internets, three ways of information. The first one we’ve become all familiar with, that’s the internet of bits, information, and we use it everyday. The second one is right around the corner is what we call the internet of electricity, some people call that the smart grid. But now we’re gonna able to manage our electricity much more intelligently. The third one is what you might call the mobility internet. ”
Cellphone Networks and the Future of Traffic, a related article on Wired that may also be of interest.
April 23, 2009
Objectified, a design documentary by Gary Hustwit, the director of Helvetica. Screening at film festivals, cinemas, and special events worldwide.
1. Trailer, Objectified.
March 25, 2009
Yahoo defined internet search a decade ago, but since then the brand became somewhat strained in each and every aspect of its services. Google is to Yahoo where Yahoo was to AOL. The company did expand, but they made little effort in improving. It’s hard to dilute what direction they’re taking, or interestingly enough if they know the answer themselves. The fact is that the Yahoo brand has a lot of potential, and a substantial user base, but it needs a lot of work, and what good time it is during a corporate restructure. Here are a couple of suggestions and pointers to hopefully help them out.
Keep up. If the company is losing behind being competitive, one easy check-box is to improve user experience. Yahoo hasn’t changed much in years, and their design isn’t even good in the first place. Numerous companies managed to refresh their pages last year, though Yahoo supposedly being one, it shows how re-design is able to capture interests, and good re-design defines how users interact; it helps to keep users coming back, and this should be basic. The reason I choose other services is because their user experience is simply better, and it helps for example, going through relevant results and information, even searching.
Refine and define services. There isn’t a race to expand your portfolio, so don’t try to acquire and cover other services without refining what is already on the catalog. Yahoo has been very eager in trying not to be left out to what others are offering, but it does so briskly and impetuously. There is never a very well refined service offered by Yahoo, and while this is hard to realize, at least respond to user feedback and implement occasional upgrades. Yahoo Mail has remained the same ever since it was refreshed two years ago, and not to make it worse, but the classic interface is still an option. Third-party content is all over Yahoo, and while this keeps advertising revenue in-check, it’s not good for users. Content becomes diverse and dissipated, not to mention undesirable and in-your-face; it is like having the contents of an entire newspaper summarized on one page, and this brings us to consistency.
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January 22, 2009
Matthew Honan’s experiment with the location-aware lifestyle.
“Simply put, location changes everything. This one input, our coordinates, has the potential to change all the outputs. Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search for, where we go; they all change once we merge location and the Web. I wanted to know more about this new frontier, so I became a geo-guinea pig. My plan is to load every cool and interesting location-aware program I could find onto my iPhone and use them as often as possible. For a few weeks, whenever I arrived at a new place, I would announce it through multiple social geo-apps… I would become the most location-aware person on the Internet…
The trouble started right away. I was going to be gone for a week on business. Did I really want to tell the world that I was out of town? It wasn’t just leaving my wife home alone that concerned me… anyone who cared to look at my Flickr page could see my computers, my spendy bicycle, and my large flat-screen TV all pinpointed on an online photo map. Hell, with a few clicks you could get driving directions right to my place…”
Continue Reading »
1. Matthew Honan, Issue 17.02, Wired Magazine.
November 12, 2008
“On November 5th, a launch campaign began in Tokyo, with two McDonald’s locations in Shibuya and Omotesando being totally converted to ‘Quarter Pounder’ shops. The restaurants offer only two choices on the menu: a Quarter Pounder set for 500円, and a Double Quarter Pounder set for 600円. The interiors are minimal black, and feature Le Corbusier sofas. Interestingly enough, there are no discernable connections to McDonald’s: no golden arches, no Ronald. Japanese consumers are not likely to know exactly what a pound is, or a quarter for that matter, but no clues are even offered on the ultra-minimal Quarter Pounder website.”
1. fivebyfifty » QUARTER POUNDER.
2. NO LOGO, Naomi Klein.
September 22, 2008
Revised on September 26, 2008.
There has been a surge of webpage re-designs in 2008, though some may be controversial, the momentum of Web 2.0 has continued to revitalize content delivery in the digital age, and how far have we come. Not only has the front-end interface been upgraded to cater for more intuitive, efficient surfing, server load on the back-end has been reduced, and upon the client-side, next generation browsers have promised enhanced performance and sophisticated features, under even tighter security. Not to mention the unprecedented growth and potential of mobile browsing. Now all that I need is free city-wide Wi-Fi.
1. 10 hot web re-designs of 2008, CNET.
