The Boat Hack That May Change TV, and How Corporate Culture Affects Design

I just finished MIPTV, where I was liveblogging like crazy with fellow journo/blogger Stuart Dredge. This year MIPTV held an event called MIPCube, which focuses on better acquainting TV producers and network execs with the digital folks of whom they're so wary.

Over the weekend MIPCube hosted a Hack Day event in partnership with Rewired State. In short, a passel of hackers were put on a yacht and given less than 48 hours to hack something that would improve our TV experience. On Saturday night they presented all their projects, a whopping 12 of which 10 properly work and are now online.

But only one could win judges' hearts, and that was GrabMagic!, featured above. It was developed by Aral Balkan.

What I love about this Kinect hack is that it really does feel magical. It doesn't just produce a fluent connection between your TV and phone; it creates one between you and those devices as well. You behave like a connected organism, moving muscles without thinking, and that's beautiful.

During the Hack Day presentations I asked Aral how he avoids feature creep in his design. This was his response.

 As a designer, your greatest asset is the ability to say no. But that's simplistic - sometimes it's not your inability to say no, it's the structure of the organisation itself that doesn't allow you. If the organisation is design-led, it's easy; but otherwise designers may not have the authority.

A lot of organisations, because of their corporate cultures, because of their corporate structures, make simple design impossible. It isn't because of a team. That's very low level.

User experience begins at the top and trickles down.

See the other projects from the boat hack at MIPCube.

The Best QR Code Action I've Seen in Awhile

Look how useful and not pointless it is! Look how good it makes people feel, how it provides value (giving to the less fortunate) while compounding that with a captivating experience (animation)! I even almost forgot this was eBay.

We should be thinking more about intuitive integrations between the real world and digital. And, because you can't say that kind of thing without an associated buzzword, industry people are calling this golden solution "SoLoMo" -- a contraction of social, local and mobile. This combo has great natural implications for tourism and hospitality, but also consider how intuitive executions can change our everyday experiences, too.

Like this eBay thing. This time of year, everyone's susceptible to holiday altruism and the spreading of cheer, qualities which extend themselves nicely to social sharing. Make it as easy as possible for users to cash in on emotional investments they're already looking to make, all day long as they traverse those chilly streets, clutching their peppermint lattés and passing fleeting smiles of hope at small children and the grizzled homeless.

Viiiiiiiia.

God Would Like a Word With You, Axe Guy.

Cyril Paglino of Wizee demonstrates the punchline to Axe's angel thing. Unless you've lived under a rock for the past three years, you've seen the gimmick before, but this was also the case with Tippex and the world still went bananas over it.

All this is to say agency Buzzman has been able to find good steady work assembly-lining an executional niche that isn't often seen, not because it's hard or even imaginative, but because nobody wants to bother organising it and promoting it on the off-chance that it'll maybe catch (or not).

But hell, how often is it that you get a call from God? It's to be expected that He'll do most of the talking.

Post Enfatico, Dell Tamely Invites You on a 'Rendezvous'

Perhaps still smarting from the shrapnel of Enfatico, Dell turned to Mother London for its new Streak tablet. And "Rendezvous" is what Mother produced.

It's warm, just trendy enough, and inoffensive. Impressive handling by Mother of a socially traumatised and still-rattled brand.

"We wanted to show that our technology enables something important—relationships—and forge an emotional connection with viewers," explained Liz Matthews, Dell's global consumer brand director.

There remains the question of who'd buy one of these when everybody's swinging from Apple's nuts right now. The answer, at least according to Boston Consulting Group, is possibly a lot of people, actually: 49% of respondents from a May 2010 survey plan to scoop up a tablet in the next three years.

People want something multi-purpose (meaning Kindle's singularity may be a turnoff) but also blanch at the price tag of your standard iPad (which starts at $499). Dell's Streak is currently going for $299.99 - not a bad compromise, especially if you want to differentiate yourself without looking like a Luddite.

Hey, a Mobile-Optimised Agency Site!

I'll warn you in advance by admitting I'm not a developer (a fact that makes me very sad). So if at any point in this article you find I'm talking out of my ass, please correct me, and harshly.

Last month Nick Jones of Narrow Design (@narrowd) and McKinney (@mckinney) published screenshots of how the sites of major ad agencies - you know, the ones that claim to "get" digital - render on an iPhone. Most of them don't at all, or do with limited information, because most of them are heavily reliant on Flash. The list spread like anthrax in the agency social media sphere.

I like Flash and I get that Steve Jobs has a beef with Adobe or whatever. But in an environment where technology evolves faster than you can spin and say "hey presto," your digital front lines should be as lean and agnostic as possible: you don't know where that next client is coming from, or who's going to suddenly want to hit up your site in the middle of a conference from their handy-dandy first-gen iPad.

Humor me ››

The So-Called Mobile Era: AAPL and GOOG Start the Sumo

Long-suffering Bob invited me onto the BeanCast yesterday, along with Christopher Baccus, Bret Bernhoft and Al Gadbut. The episode title is Worse than Cancer on account of some typically awkward thing I said after thinking Bob was done recording.

You can check out the topics in the above link, but the episode basically revolved around mobile coming into itself: ad men hankering to incorporate their brands more intuitively on this most intimate of technologies, as well as Google and Apple beginning to butt heads, what with the former going into mobile hardware and the latter dipping its toes into mobile advertising.

As the 'net embeds itself into all facets of our lives, we're gonna see more tech companies stepping out of their respective métiers and going head-to-head against each other in unexpected arenas: competing to own audiences in mobile search, for example, and trying to control points of entry for wifi and ad penetration. 2008 and 2009 manifested the beginning of this blurring of specialization; now we'll see prominent names and new services start taking shape in the melting pot.

Google's foray into lead generation also dominated the conversation; applications for it are endless, but I can already smell the realtors and car salesmen jumpin' on that like there's no tomorrow. =P

Oh yeah, and then there was that whole H&M PR nightmare. (*coughs up a hairball*)

Tastebuds tingling? Have a listen here.

Joost: Fast Adopting All the Crap It Left Behind

It's been four months since I nailed my Joost beta invitation, and I think by now I'm in a fairly decent position to review the offering that either puts television to bed, or marries television to its longtime nemesis, the computer.

Cool things about Joost:

• The occasional brand-spankin'-new music video
• The occasional good show
• Throwback television (remember Ren and Stimpy? Hell yes)

Less than cool things about Joost:

• The ads, however short and occasional, are getting to be a drag. I don't know how many more times I can look at a Ballpark Frank
• The ad logos in the lower right-hand corner are not much better and, to their misfortune, remind us a lot of the logos that appear on the right-hand corners of daytime network TV
• The 'occasional good show' leaves room for improvement: I Hate My 30s was pretty funny at outset, but increasingly looks like it'll go in the same direction as That '80s Show: the bin. It's a cute idea in theory, but otherwise has a short shelf life. Can't wait for more competitive fare to start popping up, because...
  
• Most of the rest of the shows are trash. Really, The Guinness Book of World Records? Did I really need to see a dude juggling basketballs or a man who can pull tractors with his beard? This is the kind of stuff you feed people who can't afford cable

Will Joost put TV to bed? With TV already on its way out the door in terms of viewership, we probably can't attribute its death to Joost alone. But the service is certainly proof that we don't need the original king-sized tube to suffer the same angst.

Will it wed TV to the monitor? Joost proves, and impressively, that democratic TV-on-yo'-comp is doable, and well.

One awesome thing about the service is my newfound ability to zone out and watch a show in the middle of a coffee shop. That, coupled with Joost's On Demand-esque feature, is as hard as a coffin nail that's sealing in the television monarchy.

I definitely wouldn't pin Joost a YouTube killer; it's a totally different value proposition. I can't imagine kids uploading their dog chases or acting impersonations onto the Joost platform, and I don't think that's what the founders want either.

It goes without saying, I think, that the service could do with a little competition to inspire improvement. Increasing adoption of broadband in more rural areas certainly can't hurt, and the iPhone presents a savory opportunity to bring the platform to a more mobile place.

If it wants to be the TV of tomorrow, it needs to go mobile (these days, aiming for the desktop just isn't high enough). Overall, I'd say Joost has a couple of years to go before it sees ready mainstream adoption.

Update: MarketingVox reports Joost is also too heavy for US broadband speeds. Well, hrm, that sucks.