Sony Ericsson CeBIT 2006 site - new phones!

Hey! We just went live with the Sony Ericsson CeBIT 2006 site, in preparation for the annual Consumer Electronics fair which kicks off on March 9th in Hannover.

The site is a juicy looking little number, built in Flash and showcasing the new Sony Ericsson products - music (Walkman), business, imaging and touchscreen phones, plus headsets and more.

I must say, they're all looking pretty tasty, what with all the high speed internet 3G/ EDGE capabilities and - bloggy people take note - RSS readers and easy photo blogging functions in some models - w00t!

I'm not going to give you all the details - get over to the Sony Ericsson CeBIT 2006 site and find out for yourself.

 

Surf for free

Cloaked in an obscuring fog of legaleeze, the big players in the battle for control of the internet are making their initial moves . It's almost certainly the most important business / technology dispute of the decade, yet scarily, no one seems to know its even happening.

(Read more...)

 

Timeless wisdom

If you have some spare time, here is a good article about some of the origins of modern design, user experience and learning in general. What's a techy doing wandering around on an IA type site? Well I'm not only techy, I like other things as well like IA, photography, cooking, and making tapestry scenes of my favourite websites.

Anyway, this article is about a guy called Fröbel, who invented the concept of Kindergarten - which is essentially the concept of combining play with the process of learning. Fröbel's system was meticulously thought-through and used different 'media' (gardening, music, dance and storytelling) in order to encourage creative thought and experimentation.

He has had a great deal of influence on some major areas of design:

"Implicit and explicit traces of Fröbel’s philosophy pervaded the work and teachings of Bauhaus leaders Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Likewise, seminal architects Frank Lloyd Wright and R. Buckminster Fuller specifically cited the importance of their kindergarten experiences."

Have a kijk. Its a nice site in general - Boxes & Arrows

 

Playtime

A while ago, after having consumed a fair few glasses of wine during an excellent company outing, Omid settled back, looked me straight in the eye and told me that “Table football is deep, man”. He said it in a tone that implied that he had just found the answer to our existence, right there.

I should have seen it coming. You see, words could not possibly describe the passion and love that our football table here at Mediacatalyst receives. There may be heated discussions between the boys as to whether Macs should even be allowed to enter the building, but when it comes to the football table, they are a unison of infinite praise and admiration. It is not so much a game as what keeps the heart of Mediacatalyst beating.

But we’re ambitious folks too, so when the boys finally peel their fingers off the keyboards, it is as if somebody handed them the entire content of a PC-world, or a MacStore, depending on preference. Eyes are gleaming with excitement, there are encouraging hand-claps and warm-up activities including jumping on the spot. And although there are two closed doors between me and the center of all-things-important , I can still hear the screams of joy and pain, of victory and failure. I can FEEL the blood, sweat and tears, sitting right there behind my computer.

As you may imagine this company has never seen more effective project management than during the after-hour table football tournament, and if I suggested we stop conducting interviews and take people on according to their table football skills, some may not actually find it such a bad idea.

 

Recommended reading

Just finished a great book (thanks to Reinoud for finding it in the first place): Designing for Small Screens, by Studio 7.5, a design / education group in Berlin.

It's packed full of pictures, and is highly practical. Particularly nice are the detailed examples of mobile interfaces from Japan, stuff that's hard to get your hands on (unless you speak Japanese). On the down side, the authors are coming very much from the server-side presentation-layer mindset. I'm still on the lookout for people getting switched on to more web 2.0 type designs (the imminent RSS on mobile being the first mainstream example of this).

Still, if you have a mobile application to design and are wondering where to start, this book is well worth a read.

Here's the book on Amazon

 

Gaming on your lap.

This is not something you just did, say or think five years ago:
Buy a laptop, with a 17" widescreen TFT, with the fastest cpu and 2gigs of memory and an ultimate gaming card! And why? Just to play games on your lap!
Not only do the laptops get faster, they look smart too, it's like a phone, you can swap covers Oh, and the price is really not bad, about 3300 euros.
I can't wait till Dell releases the dual cores in a couple of weeks! A must have hands on!

Ok I am really bad at this... this is still not something you would do, it's silly, waste of money. No one needs an overpowered laptop that has only one good purpose: gaming. Applications really don't need those stats for at least another year.
Still Apple manages every time again to promote a machine with a price tag higher then the most expensive Dell I could find, and get people to write about it as if it were something totally new, never seen before, a "must have".

Did Apple mess up the previous times? Well, yes and we all know their fairytales:
"A Mac runs at half the clock speed, but all applications run faster then a PC, because we use a RISC cpu."
Thank god they switched to Intel. This drama I do need to see: All applications will run in a virtual machine, ouch! Or buy expensive software upgrades, 2x ouch!

"In this OS release we have built in a new animation, so yes it is worth the 200 euro upgrade from version 10.1 to 10.2"
For every release since OSX they have stated to be compatible with a Microsoft network, and now 4 versions of the OS have been released, still nothing (yes, new 3-D animations).
Speaking of upgrades; By doing so a lot of software stops working, so you need to upgrade those too, even more expensive. How come Apple doesn't have thousends of lawsuits from companies? I know if Microsoft did something like that, they would be stripped to the bone!

Say you bought this overpowered, overpriced Intel based Apple to play games on... Yes, boot Windows it is!

I could go on for a while here, so much more examples to choose from... but what I am trying to say here is:
Could the whole internet just stop posting those nonsense Apple ads, and just get real?
Stop misleading people and be honest: No there is not one application you are currently using that requires a Mac, and yes Mac's too can get virusses!
And please don't comment me saying: "but they do look good!", because I know, so do I.

Thank you.

 

Bloggers in Amsterdam

Yes! My favourite bloggers are learning dutch. As part of the most refreshing online marketing promotion I’ve seen in a long time, someone has put their thinking cap on, and realized the power of bloggers in a non-Google-ad kind of way. Obviously, had this happened a few years ago it would have been chewing-gum-minty-fresh-make-a-tornado-with-your-breath kind of refreshing, but this is good enough. Holland.com, part of the Dutch Tourism Board, are sending 25 of the worlds most popular bloggers to Amsterdam, in an attempt to promote the country. This means the bloggers get a free flight, free five star accomondation and free travel pass for five days. I should add that “no blogging is required”. “I will get a free trip to another continent, and I will not write about it on the website about me, me, me”. Didn’t think so. What is required however, is that they give an interview to Holland.com.

“There are so many stories to tell and more pictures to post, and we’ve tried to spend the last two days soaking in the city. Our experience here had been nothing short of transforming — we want to pack the local neighborhood bar into our suitcase — and I can’t wait to tell you all about it, about the local hospitality and the way the canal houses lean subtly toward the street,(…)"

Of course these guys are going to love Amsterdam, who wouldn’t?”

 

The Mac Book Pro is (already) updated!

I thought that Apple was keeping the CPU speeds low, so that they could later release the 17" with the faster CPU's. But now, even before the actual release of the 15" Mac Book Pro's, the CPU's have been upgraded. The 1,67 Ghz duo core is now 1,80 and the the former 1.8 Ghz is now 2.0 Ghz and has an option to be upgraded to 2,16 for an extra 300$. Hopefully people who already booked their Mac Book's are getting these offers too!

 

World Press Photo of the Year 2005 - winner announced!

I just got back from the awards ceremony for the World Press Photo of the Year 2005, here in Amsterdam.

As always, I was moved, humbled and inspired by a series of breathtaking images, covering the major events of last year, as well as other, less headline-grabbing stories.

You can see the winning photos from all categories at the World Press Photo website.

I can only say again how proud Media Catalyst is to work with World Press Photo. A great organization, doing superb work.

Links:
www.worldpressphoto.nl

[Update]

Gasp with amazement: I just heard that this year, the World Press Photo site pulled in 101,806 visitors on Feb 10th - the day the winner was announced.

That's a lot of visitors. Compared to last year's stats for the award announcement day, it's 30,000 more. Quite an increase!

 

Siemens takes the lead in next generation mobile gaming

Current games often use simple input devices and the interaction with the console is very basic. But the new generation of games are different, more and more games are coming on the market where you interact on a totally different way. For an example Sony has Eyetoy where you actually are a part of the game and interact with the webcam that comes with the game. Other good examples are Guitarhero where you play a guitar (who doesnt want to be a rockstar?) and Singstar Karaoke. Nintedo released last year images and video footage of their new console, which is totally based on this "new" way of interaction. The console has the codename "Revolution".

This trend has now made its way to the mobile gaming industry and Siemens is launching a football game which allows users to virtually kick the ball. This game is to be released at this years football world cup in Germany. C-Lab are the creators of this wonderful little game and now Siemens are thinking of using this technology on other things aswell.