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Posts from the ‘Technology’ Category

Dec 7

Is iTunes the greatest scam of the 21st Century?

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This was a question asked by a Hi-fi supplier in Manchester City Centre yesterday.

Think about he said.

“You buy your iPhone or iPod. You buy an expensive laptop or iMac to manage your music library, you synchronise your music library, and dock your portable music player into the latest Bose, Bowers or JLB music speaker system.

And somehow it is all a little flat. It just sounds a bit rubbish.”

In my case, it often kicks out. Try transmitting your iTunes over wireless and your musical moment comes crashing down when you switch on the microwave to defrost the chicken.

2K’s worth of hard earned cash invested in the latest and greatest music technology known to man and it doesn’t even work.

But is this the greatest scam of the 21st Century?

We are all led to believe that Apple is the trailblazer for music. Buy Apple and you are at the forefront of music innovation, but it is all a big lie.

Apple has only offered us convenience. It is convenient that our music is now portable and we can carry 1000′s of album in the palm of our hand, but have we made a mistake in assuming that convenience equates to quality?

And the swindle continues. Because we have invested so much in the iTunes revolution we continue to invest and download our music from the iTunes store. But do we ever own that music? Can a parent pass on their music collection to their son or daughter? What happens to all that content once they die? It dies with them. You never truly own the music. You are just borrowing it from the cloud. You are in fact buying air.

And the air quality is thin. The files significantly compressed to save space. They are a long way from the full studio quality output often described as FLAC – lossless audio compression and decompression.

iTunes does not have a hold on this space. There are online music stores where you can purchase FLAC. You can also burn FLAC files direct from your CD.

The man in the Manchester store sat me down, he downloaded a FLAC file and networked this with losless cables to a high-fidelity sound system.

“I won’t use a CD he said, because even the turn of the CD and the laser will lower the quality of the overall result”.

And what a result. The sound filled the room. The orchestra was right there. The vocalist sat across from me. Music like nothing you had heard before. And all for significantly less than 2K!

My advice to us all. Love iTunes for the convenience – listen on the commute, listen at work, but don’t stop buying CD’s. You own them and have a tangible product in your hand. You can also share them without a complicated password and home share system.

Convenience has been a revolution, but quality should always prevail.

Demand the best media experience available.

Jan 23

Vinyl Revival

Saturday night. A good meal and a few beers to the better. I am sat in the living room of my parents house. I suggest to my Dad that we play a few LP’s.

Looking through the album covers is like looking at works of art, and then there is the experience of pulling the record from the sleeve. Pop, crackle, the needle hits the track. Fuzz, hiss and the first chord is struck.

To all in the room, it was like discovering music for the first time. The quality of the sound oscillating from the speakers tugged at every emotion. You could feel the bass and almost witness the guitarist strumming. It was media in its purest form. The crowd cried out for more, and before the end of the night the room was dancing.

Why did it sound so good? Why did it affect us so strongly? Some clues can be found in our tolerance for quality. The innovations and social pressures of the digital age has suckered us into convenience as a replacement to quality.

Listening to that Hi-Fi on Saturday night I was reminded of what it feels like to have a band playing right there in your living room and later it made me think about what we have lost in our great march towards iPods and online players?

According to the article ‘Are You Buying Pre-Ruined Music‘, the formats adopted by popular music players is about one-eleventh the size of a full resolution CD, so the quality is invetibitably far inferior. It goes onto say that that such low-resolution tracks played through an iPod docking station that feeds into a decent hi-fidelity sound system is a disaster area.

Digital was designed for convenience, carrying your music with you when travelling or out running.

“I for one live and continue to use vinyl” Daniel Ek CEO of Spotify. According to Daniel, they believe that a lot of people will dip into music first on Spotify, and if they like it, they will buy it on vinyl or CD. Spotify is not a replacement medium. The evidence seems to confirm this claim – 86% of music sold in the UK is in physical form. While sales of singles are now almost exclusively digital, albums remain physical, with just eight per cent downloaded (1).

Presumably the tech industry will respond by improving bandwidth to rival the quality found on CD or Vinyl, but will they ever replace the tacit feeling of holding a record or the sense of ownership one receives from owning that experience. Where does the pop and crackle come from?

Perhaps technology was only ever a convenience. It was never meant to replace life, simply here to help us out a little.

I suppose there will always be two camps. Those who see the convenience of the web channel as a replacement medium and those who look to technology to simply manage the data that sits around our experiences with media, possibly capturing, sharing and documenting our experiences.

I have an inclination that the model could shift back a little. Back to high-fidelity sound, pure music, where we actually listen to instrument, voice and soul. The Internet is only an add-on that we use to collect and feed data. It is just data.

As we move further into 2012 it seems that even bigger questions are being asked of technology? According to Daniel Sieberg, technology has overwhelmed our daily lives to the point of constant distraction. Many of us can no longer focus on a single task or face-to-face conversation without wanting to reach out—or retreat—to the virtual world every few minutes. This is a real and significant problem (2).

Looking to the future of technology, John Harlow writes in The Sunday Times that after a technological advance from the iPod to Twitter, the flood of true innovation seems to have dried up – “techies are running out of ways to rock our world… Apple, Google and Microsoft are now mature refiners, concerned about their environmental footprints, not radical change, and with share prices to defend” (3).

Stronger challengers take this much further. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, passionately argues that Silicon Valley is only interested in harvesting quick profits at the expense of creating truly disruptive technologies that will solve some of the world’s biggest problems, for example, famine, cancer and new social and political systems (4).

Whilst the media and technology wars will inevitably play out for how and where we access our next media hit, I think I might take a moment to sit back, source myself a record player and start putting together the components for hi-fidelity sound. Bring on the revolution. It is the vinyl revival people.

And if the tech industry can do anything for us, can they please figure out the basics like a phone that actually keeps a signal?

–

1. Is this the end for your CD collection? Andy Kerr, Whathifi.com, 04-Jun-2009.

2. The Digital Diet: The 4-step Plan to Break Your Tech Addiction and Regain Balance in Your Life. Daniel Sieberg, Souvenir Press Ltd, 01-Dec-2011.

3. Out with the old, in with the … arm, any ideas anyone? John Harlow. The Sunday Times, 15-Jan-2012.

4.Peter Thiel To The New Yorker: “I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough”. Techcrunch.com. 21-Nov-2011.

Jan 8

1 Comment

The true anarchists

I walked by a TV yesterday, and the presenter, talking about the Industrial revolution, suggested that there was a well known campaign against the movement towards mass production. Those individuals were concerned that society would lose too much in the way of creativity, skills and community.

I don’t remember hearing this debate at school (one side of the argument presented), but I think it could tell us a great deal about the state of The Great Technology Sitcom and how we should look at it.

Who are the true anarchists?

Oct 6

Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

…

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

…

“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

Excerpt from Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005.

Image from martincahill | photography.

Sep 30

The New Web

I am a small step away from closing down my Facebook (Fb) account, and from what I have heard amongst friends this week I am not the only one.

At its best, Fb keeps us in touch with a far reaching network. It would be an impossible task to be intimately connected to those we hold dear when they live in Sydney, Toronto, Seattle, Ireland and Mexico. On the flip side, we churn over a daily digest of parenting 101 coupled with images of hedonism from those who chose the other path. At its worst, Facebook has highlighted instances of cyber-bullying, flaming, addiction, marital breakdowns and job losses (although these trends are not limited to Fb).

Not only that, but Fb, driven by market pressures, continues to engineer the product without any real evidence of user need, design or want. The interface is ever more confusing, cumbersome and difficult to manage. It is trying to be all things, instead of being what it is – a social network.

Such a trend is now endemic in the current tech marketplace. We witness great philanthropic innovation, but then see it erode through stock market pressures – those pesky ads on youtube, twitter distracting us with photos, Fb tracking our web presence, Google building yet another distraction, Apple losing function for features, and ever more expensive ways to offer discount – groupon, living social etc.

Adrian Short writing in The Guardian describes Fb users as the Web Underclass. In the article he suggests that Fb was a successful tool because it made the web easy. We were able to build a web presence with little to no fuss, but by doing so we signed our rights away; facebook has full control of the service, and more alarmingly our data. There is no button to export. No option to try another service.

Such a downside will likely echo in a new innovation. A service that allows us all to manage our own domain. Design our own web-page. Manage our own profile. Own our personal data. The technology will then offer a social thread between these islands of self.

Such technologies exist today, but the barriers to entry are still surprisingly high for the average man on the street, and the drivers for such an innovation are unlikely to be driven by capitalist wealth. It will be a philanthropic mission.

For now, it seems as though today’s Internet is not the social web many of us once imagined. A web inspired by great thinking. A web contributing to the progression of science and mankind. It is looking a little dark. A little sinister. A web controlled by a handful of monolithic organisations, with the rest of the industry looking for a slice of the gold.

Perhaps it is time to launch a New Web?

–

Photograph from Oliver Bryce Yates.

Sep 6

Starting School

I’ve kindly been asked to present on the seismic changes currently occurring within education –  a result of new technologies, new media and a system creaking under the pressure of opportunity. This presentation is happening tomorrow.

Today, my good friend and business partner took his first-born Son, Aidan, to school. It’s his first day.

On leaving the family home this morning, Aidan knows more about the iPhone than me, has travelled around the world from Düsseldorf to Taipei, has lived in at least two global cities – Toronto and Manchester, speaks Mandarin and English, interchangeably, and has a character all of his own.

Leaving Aidan at the school gate, a photo is taken. The sign above his head reads 1907.

Mar 23

Break free from your desk and get to work!

There is something about the first real day of Spring. Winter is firmly defeated and you awake from a dark state of hibernation; there is a world out there, people really do live around you, and you really should stop eating chocolate.

Today was certainly that day, and to celebrate I took a walk in the local park and sat down to a coffee, outside! I took out my mobile phone, made two work related calls, replied to six messages, came up with two new ideas, updated Facebook and serendipitously made a new contact; the bloke at the opposite table.

In that small space of time, I did more work than when I glare into my laptop for hours on end. It struck me that work is process. Work is not a desk.

The desktop computer, with all its excitement, chained us to our booth, and for all the promise and freedom of laptops, they still resembled the layout of a desk. They promote hunched shoulders and tired eyes.

Work is, always was, about location, people, event and moment. A new idea is not inspired from an office booth, productivity isn’t just a word count, and a job well-done is not an empty inbox. A job well-done has a human end – a happy client, a child inspired or a baby born.

Advancements in mobile technology, and now tablets, we are again being presented with a really opportunity to unchain ourselves and get to work. Our only obstruction is our own prejudices of where and when work should be done.

I don’t own a tablet PC. I don’t actually think I need one (technology is now much like a menu that fits individual needs), but I will try harder to stop pretending that work is always done at my desk. I need to utilise one of the greatest tools available to me – my legs.

Do you feel like your time would be better spent away from the machine? What new approaches to work have you developed with mobile and mobile related technologies? Lawyers, Midwives, Managers, Musicians, please feel feel free to leave your comments below.

Feb 16

2 Comments

Nobody talks about albums anymore

I was sat with my Dad recently, rhyming nonsense over a pint or two, but I remember him saying “Nobody talks about albums anymore”.

I gave my usual, over hyped, over enthusiastic response to how digital downloads was a technology that leant itself to the track, and how much better we all are not having to spend our cash on fifteen tracks when all you want is two. The music industry recognise this, land the killer track Mr Cee Lo Green and you are at The Grammy’s and The Brits.

But what about the album? The technology that asked for a story. Two sides of musical escapism, where each track is carefully positioned before the next one. And when an album gets it right, they become (became) the must have item; the thing we all talk (talked) about. What’s The Story Morning Glory – Oasis, Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana, Bad – Michael Jackson, The Freewheelin’ – Bob Dylan. I could go on and on, but the tough question is to name a great album from the last five years.

They could well be there, but they don’t roll off the tongue. The track is more prominent, although more transient. Here today, gone tomorrow. Its value has some how been lowered, but that may not necessarily be a bad thing. With lower value comes greater variety. The album was of a time and a technology, but to the artist there is real creative potential in telling a story, bringing music together to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. To the listener, there is more to absorb, to take your time over.

To my Dad, I say pick up a copy of ‘The Defamation of Strickland Banks – Plan B‘. I’ve been listening to this album over the last couple of weeks. It is an album to talk about, composed as a whole, relaying a story, and until yesterday (The Brits 2011), I had thought this was the story of Plan B or Ben Drew. It isn’t. It is only his imagination and storytelling. That now said, it might even be worth buying on vinyl, just to hear the snap, crackle and pop and to really take the time to listen to this creative whole.

Jul 22

‘Are you having a laugh?’ – Disability and Television

‘Are you having a laugh?’ was a programme produced for BBC2 that took a lighthearted look at how disability has been portrayed on television over the past 40 years.

Kate talks about the inspiration for the programme, as well as some of the stereotypes she has experienced as a wheelchair user.

Watch ‘Are You Having a Laugh?’ on BBC iPlayer today at bit.ly/bnBVAg !

Enabled By Design, London 17 Jun 2010.

Film produced by Martin Cahill. Supported by Transforming Management http://tm.mbs.ac.uk.

If you would like to record your event or speaker please send a short email to mcahill@gmail.com.

Jul 22

When T-shaped met T-shaped

Julia Cassim on creative partnerships that foster design innovation and …

  • what do we mean by inclusive design?
  • the ageing population and the YoYo concept.
  • uber YoYos – Madonna and Mick Jagger.
  • repositioning disability and removing the metaphorical creative handcuffs.
  • how do you put on a band-aid if you don’t have any arms?
  • introducing products that are both inclusive and sustainable.

Enabled By Design, London 17 Jun 2010.

Film produced by Martin Cahill. Supported by Transforming Management http://tm.mbs.ac.uk.

If you would like to record your event or speaker please send a short email to mcahill@gmail.com.

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