my confidence in its ability to satisfy my (very reasonable) expectations grew day by day that i’ve come to casually ignore the whole “remove this device” or “drag it to trash” thing and just plug it out whenever i felt appropriate. ha- big mistake.
a few days ago i lost everything i had on my ipod. it was such a refreshing sensation when i walked outside, and press the menu button and tada- an empty ipod, back to its factory condition. i was lost for words. it was unexpected in every way.
although it was a fault of my own, i started to blame the technology: “well, you’ve never done this before so why did you decide to start being silly now? this is just ridiculous!”
so now i’m a little short on the number of albums on my ipod. i’ve been too busy to go through my computers - desktop and laptop - and transfer tracks scattered here and there. right now i have:
chocolates & cigarettes EP - angus & julia stone
dummy - portishead
french for beginners podcast
high times singles 1992-2006 - jamiroquai
let’s get out of this country - camera obscura
on the rocks! - ego wrappin’
philosopher’s zone podcast
i’ve been listening to the same things over and over, and as a result i’m getting addicted to certain tracks like lloyd, i’m ready to be heartbroken; well come to think of it, all camera obscura’s songs are highly addictive.
anyway, i wished “repeatedly” ipods had wireless data transfer capabilities. no need to plug things in and out. no need to lose all your songs and find yourself outside songless when you could really do with some. i wonder if there are any plans to implement this.
soon there will be wireless electricity.
US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players without wires.
original story here
when this becomes reality for everyday life, it’s going to be absolutely crazy in a country like korea, especially with wireless broandband technologies like WiBro. it would be really strange (and dangerous) to walk outside and someone just suck all available (public and private) information about me out of me - or my wireless device, more like. the sensation that i had with my empty ipod would be nothing compared to how i would feel then.
it’s only a beta version and available on the invitation-only basis at the moment, and the orange-pikeo association is not apparent anywhere - maybe it’s a whole metaphorical approach? after all, there’s no orange in orange pekoe tea… i’m not sure.
pikeo is a picture-sharing platform like flickr, but with a lot of mash-up features. i haven’t been invited (feeling pretty virtually unpopular at the moment for this reason) so i don’t know exactly what features they are and how they work, but from screens shots and breif descriptions, it seems to incorporate things like geoTagging and mobie integration (well, it’s orange who’s behind this thing anyway) - it looks like the user can enter three basic tags: WHO/WHAT/Where is it?
here’s some info from the site:
Pikeo is a beta product from France Telecom Research and Development LLC in South San Francisco and is not a “certified” France Telecom product. What does this mean in normal language? It means that:
Bugs are possible. Maybe even inevitable. Like nasal hair.
We still have a long way to go before everything runs perfectly, but please let us know when (gulp) things go wrong - at support@Pikeo.com.
There is limited customer support right now. But it’s nice and friendly limited support. You can reach us at: support@Pikeo.com - and we’ll do our best to sort you out.
We think that pictures tell better stories when you can give people some idea of where they were taken. Pikeo lets you look at your pictures along with a map showing ‘the scenes of your crimes’.
Pikeo also helps you organise your pictures in smart albums based on ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘who’ information (called ‘tags’). You can decide which of your pictures you want to share with your family, friends and everyone else, and which ones you want no one to see. Ever, ever.
Best of all, you’ll be in full control of your community via our innovative ‘Contacts’ browsing tool – which lets you keep the riff-raff out (unless your family and friends are riff-raff. That’s for you to decide…).
i’m not sure how successful this is going to be. the timing is crucial when it comes to online business, and i wonder how many people will be willing to go through the painfully arduous migration process frm flickr to this - or any other new platform in that matter. looking at all the new things popping up like wild flowers in the backyard of my old place, i can’t help but be amazed at the clever achievement of SK Telecom in scoring cyworld in 2003. perfect timing - it introduced the concept of blogging to korea (cyworld was first launched in 1999), it combined main features of all these huge then yet-to-be-seen services like myspace and flickr, while fitting perfectly into the techno-social environment of south korea. although i do doubt its success in US (mainly because of the timing of its introduction), i still think it’s a fantastic business model, and i’m still very much fascinated by it on many different levels (apart from the fact that it doesn’t work in safari and only kind-of in firefox).
anyway, it’d be interesting to see how pikeo does globally. and something completely irrelevant - there’s also a japanese band called orange pekoe. they’ve got some lovely, sometimes boring, easy-to-listen-to tunes.
Just in case I was too subtle last time about the race and gender politics of the personification of technology in the ‘Get a Mac’ ads, here are two new ones (one, two). I’m speechless.
this sort of attempt has been talked about and experimented with many times in the past, and to be honest, i don’t really like the low-quality graphics. however, the fact that this sort of attempt is being actively pursued and communicated clearly shows that we’re fast and unavoidably becoming “becoming borgs,” processing - through editing and re-editing - the multi-faceted iconic reality. interesting.
microsoft’s latest os, vista, was previewed, or rather was “reborn” as a frumpy woman or fowl in latvia not long ago. i don’t know if microsoft’s choosing latvia was intentional or not, but i couldn’t stop laughing at this paragraph in this enquirer article:
Microsoft Latvia is trying to get around the problem by playing up Vista’s positive aspects and the more poetic, international definition of the name. A spokesVole said that when Latvians learn of the technical opportunities the system offers, they will pay more attention to its advantages, not its name.
apparently “vista” means fowl/chicken or frumpy woman in latvian. perhaps this is ms’s marketing strategy - obviously people are talking and laughing about this. i fell in love with macs once, broke up, and once again, i’m really enjoying my macbook’s company. we’ll see how vista goes - looks ok, but it may actually be really dodgy like xp… i hope it’s good; i’d love to have the dual booting thing going on my macbook.
fresh from sony is mylo, which combines media player with wifi, skype, browser, and messaging, according to this gizmodo article. functionality wise, it’s pretty cool. just like a nice little clie (ok, not little) in a psp suit!
it features 1GB of flash memory (+ MS Pro Duo slot), 2.4-inch LCD (320 x 240). so functionality wise, it’s not all that bad. it’s nothing so fantastically amazing but it’s ok. but really, i’m not sure what’s going on witn sony’s design department. sony’s been putting out all these really disappointingly unintersting looking products like
sony used to be (and still is) well respected for their quality products and excellent design. i used to be a big fan (whose fondness was significant enough to spend most of her savings to purchase a sony silver flat-screen tv, which back then looked beautifully cutting-edge). well, ps2 wasn’t bad when it came out. it had a futuristic feel to it (hmm.. how long ago was that? about 6 years ago?). psp was slightly disappointing with no pleasant visual surprises or appeal. and such an unpleasant shock: they thought it was a great idea to recycle the psp design for mylo! wow. just what are they thinking?
samsung and lg have been working really hard to catch up and despite some design hiccups, they’ve been doing a pretty good job. if sony’s design department doesn’t wake up and realise how crucial it is to do something about it, i really don’t see how sony would be able to continue on. alvin toffler coined the now-ubiquitous term “prosumer.” consumers are no fools. i guess sony did know the importance of this power transition, as evidenced in their previous fantastic design efforts. but somewhere along the way - possibly when “prosumers” became “prousers” as axel bruns calls them - they lost the plot. seeing aesthetically pleasing things is great. i really hope that sony will smarten up and come up with more clever designs like they used to.
this mp3 player (ouch!)
this walkman mobile phone (err… boring!).
