Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Sex in High School

Love this quote on a Videoplaza blogpost of their CEO Sorosh Tavakoli. So true!


“Online video advertising is like sex in high school: Everybody talks about it, nobody really does it and the ones doing it are pretty bad at it

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Home in 2040

Academic

There was an interesting article in Tekniikka & Talous webzine in Finland about a design vision of a home in 2040. Below is the English translation.

vision 2040

”I wake up in my multiroom box and go from the bedroom to the bathroom. When I return through the same door, bedroom has turned itself into a kitchen, as my home will guess that it will the step in my morning routines.

The breakfast is already made. I spread the table wider with my hands and look around. I'm in a Parisian cafe. With a gesture of my arm the view changes in a safari scene. I pick up a banana, peel it up and throw the rubbish on the table, which instantly drops it into the waste disposal system.

I go to work at a wikibar, which is at the street level of my condominium. At the wikibar, I go to the brainfloor, which stimulates my senses and wakes me up for thinking. At the workconsole I will save the intuitive created thoughts and continue to the team working space. My colleagues are gathering there as well.

Our ideas are displaced on the walls, the space will listen to us and saves all the new thoughts from the brainstorming.

We have a break at the bar, where I get a new idea. I go the information display, which does offer me more info about the subject. After the break, our team goes to simulationroom to have a look at the plan, product or project would look like when completed.

After work I go to the condominiums meeting space. I will meet my family and friends, pick up an apple and sit by the river under a blue sky. In reality the meeting space is part of the series of rooms, but with display systems and mirrors, it looks very realistic outdoor space. In our room its spring, though elsewhere it could winter wonderland or a tropical sunset."

This is a vision of architecture engineering student Juuso Kangas about living in 2040. He is a member of the group which won a Finnish award for future visions.

The core idea around the vision is "metamaterial", in which the material will mold into the needs of the user guided by AI. Bedroom will become living room and the bed becomes a couch. The design sculpture becomes a table.

Metamaterial creates a wealth of opportunities. In the future, shops are not selling pieces of furniture anymore, but codes for materials that creates certain shapes.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Staggering Teenage Online Habits

Business

videoI repost this info from a great blog site of Flypaper.tv. Go the flypaper post for links to more in depth data of the surveys.

Telegraph.co.uk reported that Teenagers spend an average of 31 hours a week online, according to a study by CyberSentinel. The study interviewed 1000 teenagers, all between the ages of 13 to 19 years. In addition, Paidcontent covers a music-related study around youth, which asks: would you rather go without sex or music?

Below we gather a few key statistics, in the hopes such insight helps us cater to our customers in more profound and effective ways.

Internet Habits Per Week (CyberSentinel):

* 3.5 hours communicating with friends on MSN

* 9 hours spent using Chat rooms, forums, MSN, and social networking sites such as Facebook to communicate with friends

* 1 in 4 teenagers polled admitted to regularly chatting with strangers online - the majority of whom think it is harmless

* 2 hours watching videos on YouTube

* Over 1hr is spent looking at cosmetic surgery procedures

* 1.5hrs are devoted to family planning and pregancy websites

* 1hr 35minutes spent on diet and weigh loss websites

* 14hours per week are spent surfing the net un-chaperoned

* 1hrs and 40 minutes browsing sites for pornography (If you do the math that equals 87 hours per year!)

* 1hr and 40 minutes spent downloading or listening to music

* 33% of teenagers surf the web in the bedroom, while 27% surf in their parent’s study or living room

* Thankfully, its not all fun and games, as these teenagers also admit spending a minimum of 3hrs per week use the internet as a homework and academic resource

SEX or MUSIC?

A recent study by Marrakesh Records and Human Capital shows that:
(Surveyed 1,000 15 to 24-year-olds)

* 60% of young people would rather give up sex than music
* 70% say they don’t feel guilty for illegally downloading music from the internet
* 61% feel they shouldn’t have to pay for music.
* 43 to 49% of the music owned has not been paid for
* The majority think £6.58 is a good price for a CD album
* They also believe downloaded albums should be £3.91, singles 39p

* 75 % have watched a music video online in the past three months
* 70 % bought a CD in the past three months
* 62 % played music on their phone in the past three months
* 52 % have paid for a music download in the past three months
* 45 % have played music on their games console in the past three months

* 67 % think radio is still the best medium for hearing about new bands
* 63 % say they rely on recommendations from friends for hearing about new bands
* 49 % prefer music channels like MTV for hearing about new bands
* 21 % prefer newspapers for hearing about new bands
* 17 % prefer music magazines for hearing about new bands
* 14 % prefer blogs for hearing about new bands

* 38% think YouTube is the best way for exploring new music
* 15% feel MySpace is best for exploring new music
* 8% think Facebook and official band sites are best for exploring new music
* 4% think NME and Last.fm are the least important sites for exploring new music

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Brain Hacking

Visuals

I guess these projects in advertising were inevitable. In a blog run by Taneli Tikka, he explains geniously the way to "hack you brain". Or more perhaps way to fuck up the way brain functions and operates the evolved and learned patterns of understanding the world around. Read the blog post for the explanation.

I wonder how many examples of such there is in the arts? What kind of experiments? There are many I know, most well known maybe Dali using this hacking of brains idea.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Web Real Estate vs. Content

Business

Raising funding in the current economical situation is tough. However,Twitter has raised $35 million from Venture Capitalist. Well done for them for the amazing service that I as well use. Thou this raises some questions about the current state of online business and so called real estate.

For me, working on the online's content side, all the technological development and platform systems with API's are like real estate land. Currently everyone is racking up users as fast as they can, still not aiming to make money from the huge amount of users populating their service. Like Facebook, over 200 million regular users and very low income compared to their size. Obviously there are few examples like Finnish Habbo Hotel, which are actually racking up a solid cashflow.

I think all this architecture building should start looking for more opportunities. Like what to build on this land they have acquired? Technology, or kinda infrastructure is important and a base on everything, though the actual service and monetizing that service is very important.

Just relying on user generated content is not enough, because no one is really not interested to pay anything for it. It is low quality, badly designed and it is not regularly generated.