middledigit.net | jonathan hopkins

Uh oh. So awesome, I just reached for my credit card of the future. Waiting for iPhones to be used as turntables at some point this Summer and loads more impossibly cool stuff like this. Bring. It. On.

Final Product // ATTIGO TT from Scott Hobbs on Vimeo.

UPDATE - Just looked more closely and it looks like Mac OS X in action, using touchscreens with the software action running on the side.

[Via here, source of much goodness]

Hammer, meet nail. Just watched this and had one of those spine tingly moments. A short video on the We Think proposition from Charles Leadbetter A great little piece of video based communication about an amazing take on how the web has changed the world. Wow. Big stuff.

More here. Illustration by Debbie Powell. Audio by Something Non Descript. Via here.

I saw this headline, got VERY excited, then clicked on it and was only a little bit excited. You see, I immediately jumped into thinking that all you’d have to do in the near future is make sure you’re near a Chrysler car to be sure of getting a WiFi connection. And not just your own car as it turns out to be - I mean any car. Surely this could be an option though, as a kind of mobile version of Fon using cars to share their WiFi connections?

Anyway, as ever, the future looks pretty cool but one full of questions that are often unanswered. Personally, I just want to pay one amount of money for my data stream and then be free to connect whatever I like to it and use it how I like. Not pay separately for everything and be told how to use it.

More here at USA Today.

Fair play. After much talk recently on this here blog of advertising, here’s a great one from Honda - a LIVE advert featuring sky divers broadcast on Channel 4 from Spain. Over to Jai & Wal to tell you about it. I’d love to see more live online adverts and stuff. It’s been done I think, but back to ‘data is the new advertising’ . . .

Yesterday evening at 8.10pm Honda and Channel4 broad casted a live advert. We understand it’s not the first live commercial in TV history, but it’s bloody great. It fits very well in the rest of the Honda Accord campaign Difficult is Worth Doing. The ‘real’ advert, also about skydiving formations, will break this Sunday. We’re curious what W+K has up their sleeves.

I went to the Chinwag Micro Media Maze event last night to talk about micro media and web stuff. The panel was really good and included Umair Haque (Director, Havas Media Lab / Bubblegeneration), Gerd Leonhard (Media Futurist, Author, Entrepreneur), Mitch McAlister (Product Director (Europe), MySpace), Miles Lewis (SVP, European Advertising Sales, Last FM) and Neil McIntosh (Head of Editorial Development, Guardian Unlimited). Steve Bowbrick also did a great job of chairing the thing and keeping it all ticking over nicely.

We didn’t really talk about micro media that much though. Instead with the heavy music bias to the panel, talk was a lot around music and the future of content on the web - which ultimately boils down to the same old argument of ‘consumers want music free and everywhere, the industry wants to be paid and control distribution’. In particular I thought Miles from Last FM (in the true spirit of transparency, openness etc) gave away some great insight into Last FM and the struggle faced by people pushing boundaries with technology. And, Umair too delivered some fairly strong opinions on what we should be doing with the web, advertising in general and as agencies to make the world a better place.

I was going to write up some notes but Ben Matthews has some good stuff up already, so I’ll just add the following little thoughts:

1> 3% of traffic to Last FM comes via the homepage and more than 40% comes from widgets (with 55% predicted by the end of the year). Evidence of brands being distributed around the web. Setting up home in one place and spending all your money on some nice curtains, a swanky drive and a big impressive hallway might not be the best thing to do now. Time to become micro and distributed - part of the flow of data and value around the web.

2> People look at their mobile screens an average of 25 times a day and 95% of the time their mobile device is less than one metre away. Blimey. We all know that the mobile web is going to blow up this year, but in what other ways is this going to impact on our lives?

3> Gerd said that ‘data is the new advertising’. I like this thought a lot. It reminded me of the concept of spimes and got me thinking about providing value to people though data control, manipulation and enhancement.

4> Everyone agreed that we should be doing more stuff that genuinely makes people’s lives better. I thought to myself about what would happen if advertising disappeared overnight. What would happen? What if all that money spend on advertising was re-channelled simply into making products and services better, in order to make people’s lives better?

5> Twitter or micro blogging wasn’t really talked about. Yes it’s a bit yada, yada but I really do think it’s demonstrating the power of thinking small. Neither were new micro advertising formats (like Pistach.io) even though there were blatently some really smart people in the room (including a guy from Double Click I chatted to before kick-off). Or the fact that the whole world is getting smaller while brands seem to still be thinking big all the time.

There’s so much more to come in this space, it’s incredibly exciting. The fact the event was crammed last night was a definite sign of that. Now we just need to start thinking and acting micro. Because as we all know, being small usually means you can move quicker and with the web, speed is everything.

Update - missed Jemima’s post which contains some great quotes and some rather more succinct analysis.

[Picture thanks to Little People]

Yes, I know . . . another post about Twitter, just like the one before and like so many others right now. But, just wanted to acknowledge this great example of a massive company using Twitter really well as a way of keeping an eye out for customers with problems and doing everything it can to solve them. Enter Frank Eliason from Comcast, who seems to be doing everything he can to help people out. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed either - this post is currently riding high on Techmeme and look what happens if you Google Frank. Also, check out this profile of Frank here. Comcast need a bit of love, given the fact that comcastmustdie.com (blog here) made the front cover of Business Week at the beginning of the year.

Customer service and so-called social media relations/online PR are pretty much inseparable these days don’t you think?

Here’s some of Frank’s latest Tweets, closely followed by a Tweet Cloud giving you an idea of what Frank is tweeting about. Plus a user generated anti-Comcast ‘ad’ just to give you an idea of what Frank is up against.

The LA Times reports on lifecasting and Qik.com, the software I got all excited about earlier this week when a live video stunt took place in Norway using Qik.

Jason Calcanis is interviewed in the piece and besides calling himself a “nerd who builds websites” he predicts that “The worst moment in almost everybody’s life is going to be captured on film”.

That’s lifecasting for you.

Right now (and I mean as I type) there are some guys in Norway spraying the Qik logo on a wall and broadcasting it via a mobile phone using Qik. People are watching as they “talk” to the Norwegian police and generally have a laugh doing something very cool using mobile technology. They’re also using their laptops connected via 3G to keep a check on comments and also engage with people further. Paul Walsh even got them to spray segala.com on the wall too. (Nice hijacking there for him). Live and engaging guerilla activity for a brand. It’s the way forward.

PS I asked for a smiley face too and by the sounds of it, they’re about to do one (will update if it happens).

Because then I wouldn’t have to get really frustrated at seeing stuff like this and not being able to get my grubby mitts on it - the Korg DS 10 synthesizer for the DS. There’s blatently going to be so many more things like this out over the next year. And I CANT WAIT.

With the iPhone/iPod Touch SDK out and Nintendo showing all the right signs - mobile music is getting even more exciting all the time. New Macbook Pro for me next week - means I can crack open my copy of Logic Studio and get Live and Reason up and running again. I haven’t done any tunes for a couple of years and now the potential to do so is just round the corner . . . I’m really rather excited about the whole prospect.

Via Wired (one of the only magazines I still absolutely have to go and buy in print, which actually gives me an idea - say you were reading Wired whilst clutching a mobile device, then let’s say that the cover had an RFID device in it and your phone could read it, wouldn’t it be cool if your web device served up supporting multimedia content whilst you were reading the mag? Hmmm, back to thinking about making music again.)

As with I suspect most people I’m suffering from a slight bit of green overload. Not that I don’t think it’s important (it is), it’s just everywhere and my brain is doing the natural thing and starting to filter. Amongst all the noise though comes this from Honda/Inferno. A really simple idea that does the job well - a letter containing embedded seeds that you are supposed to plant. I reckon if I received it I might just go plant it. Or at least look at it rather than whack it (ironically) in the recycling bin. If you look at the comments (as I just have done) - looks like it’s not a completely original idea but never the less, it caught my interest.

Oh and while we’re on the subject of the future of the planet, you might want to read this. ‘Climate science maverick’ James Lovelock encouraging us to ‘Enjoy life while you can’ [via PR Blogger]. He basically says that we’ve got 20 years “before it hits the fan”. And he’s the guy that predicted lots of things that have since become true . . . eek.