–+ ROAM DIGITAL +–

Bruce Sterling’s comments and responses are relatively interesting…

Also check out his keynote at http://www.transmediale.de/en/keynote-bruce-sterling-us-atemporality

About Apple’s iPad via here and via iWorry …

“iWorry” is my foray into the iPad discussion, focusing less on the product and more on its support infrastructure:

But the iPad isn’t a phone; it is a general purpose computer. It does email and Web and documents and presentations and games and all of the other kinds of things we do with our “regular” computers. Yet it will suffer under the same restrictions as the iPhone–prohibition of any application that Apple doesn’t like, for whatever reason. Sometimes that means the application uses undocumented features, but startlingly often it just means “duplication of features”–the application does something that Apple’s own software does, but does it differently. (This raises the uncomfortable question as to whether the Kindle app for the iPhone–which works quite nicely, actually–will run on the iPad.)

As futurist Jamais Cascio told io9:

This is Apple’s big push of its top-down control over applications into the general-purpose computing world. The only applications that will work with the iPad are those approved by Apple, under very opaque conditions. On a phone, that’s borderline acceptable, but it’s not for something that is positioned to overlap with regular computers.

The iPad has all the problems of television, with none of the benefits of computers.

I haven’t read much critiques of internet activism/protest – and here’s a good article to consider.

Yet even if the internet doesn’t always bring people out onto the streets, its adherents have another, subtler argument. For democracy to succeed, they say, you need civil movements to help make protests more intense, frequent and well-attended. A vibrant civil society can challenge those in power by documenting corruption or uncovering activities like the murder of political enemies. In democracies, this function is mostly performed by the media, NGOs or opposition parties. In authoritarian states—or so the story goes—it is largely up to lone individuals, who often get locked up as a result. Yet if citizens can form ad-hoc groups, gain access to unbiased information and connect with each other, challenges to the state become more likely. And social theorists like Robert Putnam argue that the emergence of such groups increases social capital and trust among citizens.

Also, worth keeping track of a story by Victoria Police sharing information with corporations about protestors.

Google are doing some very interesting research in to visual recognition … So much for putting up weird codes on billboards.

Roberto Verganti’s DESIGN-DRIVEN INNOVATION

Changing the Rules of Competition by
Radically Innovating What Things Mean

How to create innovations that customers do not expect, but that they eventually love? How to create products and services, that are so distinct from those that dominate the market and so inevitable that make people passionate?

Design-Driven Innovation unveils how leaders such as Apple, Nintendo, Alessi, Whole Foods Market build an unbeatable and sustainable competitive advantage through innovations that do not come from the market but that create new markets. These leaders compete through products and services that have a radical new meaning: those that convey a completely new reason for customers to buy them. The cases, data and stories in the book show how to create this new vision and how to successfully propose it to customers. A strategy and a process that leverage the rich and multifaceted network of a firm outsiders, looking beyond customers to those “interpreters”– such as scientists, customers, suppliers, intermediaries, designers, artists – who deeply understand and shape the markets they work in.

Once upon a time, I thought that ‘anyone could an anything’… But I don’t think this now – not so much… Crowds  are useful to get a sense of trends. The world is curated and our stories are edited by a top down machine that, as written above, “convey a completely new reason for customers to buy them”.

But within that curated (=controlled) space, there still remains holes to intervene and glitch the system. A little hope…

Also see The Customer Isn’t a Human Being and the more comprehensive Marketing, Innovation and the Creation of Customers.

Full Story – Real Nature is not Green

At the edge of the woods along the motorway near the Dutch town of Bloemendaal, there stands a mobile telephone mast disguised as a pine tree. This mast is not nature: at best, it is a picture of nature. It is an illustration, like a landscape painting hanging over the sofa. Do we have genuine experiences of nature any more? Or are we living in a picture of it?

By Koert Van Mensvoort

Blood Coltan is a documentary about the West’s demand for Coltan, used in mobile phones and computers, is funding the killings in Congo. Under the close watch of rebel militias, children as young as ten work the mines hunting for this black gold. ‘Blood Coltan’ exposes the web of powerful interests protecting this blood trade. Meet the powerful warlords who enslave local population and the European businessmen who continue importing Coltan, in defiance of the UN.

A documentary by Java Films – Year : 2007 / Duration : 52 min / Production : Tac Presse / Director : Patrick Forestier / Version available : English, France.

Watch the film on Google Video, embedded below:

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