Touch me
The chaps at Berg and Touch have produced some interesting work that does a lot to push perceptions of RFID and NFC beyond access and payments. Check out the videos:
Immaterials: the ghost in the field from timo on Vimeo.
Archived entries for Good stuff
A diet of Dieter
A recent trip to the new Dieter Rams exhibition at the Design Museum really hammered home how his work for Braun influenced the likes of Jonathan Ive and Jasper Morrison, and subsequently how his legacy plays a part in our everyday lives.
Check out the similarities here:
Checking out Dieter Rams at the Design Musem
For good measure, here are Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design, which can work for a range of different products (including handsets and iPhone apps).
• Good design is innovative.
• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design is aesthetic.
• Good design helps us to understand a product.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design is durable.
• Good design is consequent to the last detail.
• Good design is concerned with the environment.
• Good design is as little design as possible.
My O2 leads the way
There’s nothing more distracting than a new baby for taking your eye off the ball, hence no posts for over a month.
However, things move on apace in the world of mobile apps. Perhaps the biggest mover has been O2, whose myO2 app has finally been released to the App Store, meaning the getting on for 2 million UK iPhone users can now manage their accounts efficiently. While I have to declare an interest as we at MIG did the design and build, I have to admire its nice design and simple interface. Now that O2 have a really firm foothold in the App Store, it will be interesting to see how they go on to develop this: with such a raft of content and sponsorship opportunities just crying out for an iPhone execution, and the brand looking as good as ever, I would hope to see some updates to the app very soon.
The mobile agency conundrum
A journalist called me the other day as he was writing a piece on whether brands are better off using their existing agency set-up to deliver mobile services, or to use the services of a mobile specialist instead. While I would have an obvious natural bias towards the specialists, having been in that field for nearly 10 years now, it’s not an open-and-shut case.
The argument for the specialists goes as follows:
Mixed up reality – Nokia’s Future Technologies
Nokia’s R & D team are a reliable source of conversation-starting predictions, like Phillips they put a serious amount of effort into visualising and prototyping their glimpses of the future.
This video shows a future controlled by augmented reality (or a variant of), but with handset that looks suspiciously like the old Nokia Communicator…
Now you see it
At New Toy towers we’re seriously digging data visualisation. It’s more exciting than it sounds – check out the Information Is Beautiful site and Good Magazine’s Transparency.
Oh, the Futility!
While going over a mobile application brief from a prospective client the other day with a technical designer, we were assessing the feasibility of the job on both iPhone and standard java phones. Unfortunately many of the features required just aren’t possible on one or both of the platforms. After stripping out all the unworkable elements we were left with a proposition that delivered much less than originally envisaged.
“If we deliver this, it’s an act of futility,” wailed the project manager. “Yes”, I replied instinctively, “but it’s an act of branded futility”.
Home Office Beatz Knife Crime – with mobile…
While this blog, as with pretty much anyone dealing in mobile apps, is likely to be diverted for much of the time by the wonder of the iPhone, it’s well worth remembering that there is another 99% of the mobile market which is, frankly, non-iPhone.
So how do we address this market through mobile apps, and who out there is going to receive them?
Taking out the Trash
With spring apparently just around the corner, I have the sudden urge to sling out loads of all junk and make things shiny and fresh for the new season.
Of course I could spend hours going through the attic and taking old carpet squares, dried up paint and more to the tip, but a much easier form of spring-cleaning is going through my old apps from when the AppStore was just a novelty, and seeing what horrors have managed to survive on my phone since then.
It’s Art, but do we like it?
We all have preferences in art, and one man’s Picasso is another man’s Tracy Emin, so it’s nice that BMW went out on a limb to make art the focus of their recent campaign for the Z4. For those too idle to click the link, it features the boy-racer-mobile driving around a large blank canvas depositing paints of different hues from its wheels to create an auto-matic masterpiece.
But while the TV ad is disappointingly coy in not revealing a full view of the masterpiece, the iPhone app (search for Z4 in iTunes) gives you the final result. After viewing a tantalizing clip of the live car in action, you get to drive the paint-wagon yourself, and the results are captured as a picture for you to save to your phone and… well whatever you want to do with that image. I’m quite pleased with mine – maybe all those handbrake turns are paying off.
Welcome to Beyond SMS!
So – welcome to Revolution’s new mobile apps blog! Here, I’ll be looking at the good, the bad and the downright weird on iPhone, Android, java, Blackberry, and the myriad of other technologies springing up, as well as the new app stores being launched by all and sundry.
As anyone who’s been in mobile for as long as I have (9 years and counting…) the fact that there are now not one but two mobile blogs in Revolution surely means that this is the long-heralded but often-delayed ‘year of mobile’? Right?
Can I see your RFID?
We all know about Oyster and Visa paywave – but how can you have fun with RFID and NFC?
At New Toy towers we’re bringing some exciting ideas to reality – we’ll keep you updated. For now, there’s been some interesting development at the Science Museum and Alton Towers. See…
The flashing tower of Dexia
As interactive installations go – this one aim s pretty high.
At the Dexia Tower in Brussels 4200 windows can be individually illuminated by LED bars, at the bottom of the tower, an installation allows people to interact with the visual tower display via a multi-touch screen the pattern they create can then be sent as an electronic postcard.
Marvellous.