Wired online is carrying an article, “Straight Dope on the IPod’s Birth” (Link), that’s worth reading if you’re an industrial designer. Here are some quotes that I thought were of interest:

They found that digital cameras and camcorders were pretty well designed and sold well, but music players were a different matter.

“The products stank,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of iPod product marketing, told Newsweek.

Digital music players were either big and clunky or small and useless. Most were based on fairly small memory chips, either 32 or 64 MB, which stored only a few dozen songs — not much better than a cheap portable CD player.

But a couple of the players were based on a new 2.5-inch hard drive from Fujitsu. The most popular was the Nomad Jukebox from Singapore-based Creative. About the size of a portable CD player but twice as heavy, the Nomad Jukebox showed the promise of storing thousands of songs on a (smallish) device. But it had some horrible flaws: It used Universal Serial Bus to transfer songs from the computer, which was painfully slow. The interface was an engineer special (unbelievably awful) and it often sucked batteries dry in just 45 minutes.
Continue reading →

I’ve been finding ever-increasing amounts of spam in my email inboxes and have to wonder at which point the cost of using this technique will outweigh the benefit. But in the meantime, another kind of spam which I’ve been expecting to become seriously disruptive for some time, appears to be gaining an increasingly firm virtual foothold. While spam inside the Second Life virtual world isn’t new, the levels of it haven’t been so bad that it’s gotten the kind of attention it now appears to be getting (or maybe it just seems like it’s getting more attention since the information is posted on a blog instead of on a forum). Anyway, from the Linden Lab official blog (Link): Continue reading →

Just wanted to post a quick note regarding Long Tailer (“Tailor”?) Chris Anderson’s appearance inside Second Life. Wagner James Au (aka Hamlet Au, formerly aka Hamlet Linden) sent me an email alerting me to the virtual event which he was arranging and so I took some time to drop in. Those of you who recall some rather old posts on my 3D Long Tail forms (“ecoToroids” – reLink 1, reLink 2) will understand my interest.

The event was okay. I’ll confess to wanting something more technical, but at least it got me out of the current grind for a bit. Anyway, I saved the raw chat log (Link) for those of you who might be interested. I don’t recall seeing any talking genitalia shouting out, so it’s probably safe for work. Enjoy.

I very recently started reading my first Ayn Rand novel, The Fountainhead. People have said that I remind them of something having to do with Rand, so I’m thinking I should read one or two of her books. Although just started, I happen to be far enough along to find the recent architectural critique of Libeskind’s Denver Museum of Art extension to be especially interesting and worth mentioning here (along with including this Link). There are times when I find product design and architecture to be especially alike, so this piece in The New York Times intrigued me; even more so after finding something on the PBS site comparing Libeskind with another architect, David Childs (Link). I think I’ll make some time to watch the associated video on the PBS Frontline site. I could use a break right now.

Lastly, I wanted to call out the photograph above. What’s nice about trying to give proper credit is that I go looking for the originators of the images I post here, and in this case it led me to the Bitter Bredt Fotografie site (Link). Nice stuff on their site and well worth a visit.

{*Minor update… forgot to add these when I posted this: there’s more coverage on Arcspace – Link – and I also happened across an article on Constructor Magazine about this and 3D modeling – Link}

{Image Copyright © Bitter Bredt}

I just received another email from Paul Hemp (you might recall him from an earlier post of mine – reLink) that included a link to his latest article over on the Harvard Business Review titled “Are You Ready for E-tailing 2.0?” (Link – good while supplies last). Those who’ve been active inside virtual worlds the last year or so won’t really be hearing anything new, but importantly people who read Hemp’s article are probably not active and still new to the whole idea of conducting business inside online 3D spaces. The question is: will they see the big picture? I’m not sure they will, even with the Harvard Business Review effectively telling them this is the future of online retail. Considering that the opportunity to get in and learn the ropes before the competition only comes once, I’m a little amazed we’re not seeing quite a bit more activity already. It’s certainly not cost prohibitive.

Truth be told, I suspect most marketers see this as only advertising and want to know what the returns are going to be in the context of that perception. It doesn’t seem as if anyone wants to invest in learning. Personally, I believe they need to put these early efforts under the R&D umbrella and expect losses… just like conducting early tests and research in any new technology. Because if they don’t, they may find themselves regretting missing the opportunity. And in my opinion, there won’t be many as big after this.