This morning I have been privileged with 30 minutes (maybe more) to myself, this never happens, especially in the office. I have been thinking about something that I don’t have an answer for. How did someone who was always interested in art and design from a young age (obtained from my mother) go on to get a degree in Photography, and then end up in the advertising industry?

I don’t know the answer to this, all I know is that I have enjoyed every step of it, well most of it, and I (much like Naked) have attempted to stand out with every opportunity regardless of the situation. Not using a camera for a photography degree made it much more interesting than it actually was. I always remember reading about David Ogilvy, who would enter conferences and meetings 10 minutes late on a regular basis so that people would always know who he was…’David Ogilvy, sorry I’m late…’.

This kind of brings me onto what we do in the advertising industry, we are different, we are paid to make brands stand out and in turn make money and gain more market share. We don’t produce the same as everybody else which gets us somewhere. We here at Naked but brands in a position to advertise, and to advertise well to the right consumers at the right times.
Traditional agencies say you need to advertise 100% of the time to all 360º of your audience, well actually we say that you need to advertise to the 67º (for example) who are listening and when the time comes, not 100% of the time. This is one of the many ways in which we are different. We love it.

I was reading a really fascinating editorial today from 'FEED: The Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report 2009'.

This article, which is exceedingly prolonged, discusses the transformation from 30-second television adverts to the digital composition of marketing. It’s very interesting and does get your thoughts churning. There’s a paragraph that mentions the future of digital photography and this got me thinking about the future of photography and the decline of 'printing' a photograph. With the expansion of an arena, there will of course become the decline of another.

It is progressively becoming more and more evident today that we are publishing images onto Facebook and Twitpic and other social networking sites. CV's are now favored in digital format, it is faster. We’re now able to view photo albums on the Internet and on our Smart Phones. The supremacy of the Internet has meant that we can view photos posted from a friend on the other-side of the planet. So my question is what’s happening to the photo as an entity?

With the now not so recent introduction of the Digital Photo Frame, it appears that there’s no need for hard copies of photographs. Especially now with ‘save the planet’ becoming more prolific, why use paper when we can store? Of course there are two arguments to everything. Is the future of printing images becoming obsolete and is the photo album becoming a thing of the past?

To a certain extent images look better on a screen than they do on paper, and although we can’t ‘touch’ the image, we are unable to touch the image when it is printed either. But we like having something to touch and hold. We also couldn’t take the images with us, but now with the ever-growing presence of Smart Phones, we can take 10,000 wallet sized photographs of loved ones with us wherever we go. Much more convenient?

Worldwide markets for both the Internet and mobile telecommunications are expected to grow in the next year or two to 1 billion in each industry segment. Inevitably, both are converging to form a single entity – the wireless Internet.

While most people today browse the Internet from their office or home, this scenario is expected to change. Within three years, about 1.3 billion people will access the Internet via wireless devices--all expecting desktop-like performance, and on-demand information from their carriers. While a huge amount of Internet content is already available and the number of computing devices (laptops, PDAs, smartphones, iPhones etc.) increases daily, one obstacle still exists--wireless download speeds.

Content is rapidly becoming richer, which places increasing demands on the wireless infrastructure to allow for an efficient web experience. However, developments in this technology are slow, costly and perennially delayed, causing a widening gap between the user and the wireless Web. Wireless carriers are looking for ways to address the demands by consumers and business for web content access over the Internet--anywhere, anytime. The key obstacle remaining is bandwidth. Which brings me to this – The MiFi 2200 by Novatel Wireless & Sprint Network.

This is the internet anytime, anywhere for a fixed fee, and the download and rate is always the same. The future.

I figured it was about time I wrote something, so here we go.

In the 1920s the buzz was that Marcel Duchamp was taking early retirement from art to devote himself to chess. Duchamp neither confirmed nor denied the story, but by then he had stopped painting and had dropped out of sight of the art world, sailing to Buenos Aires, where he spent a year or so plotting games, designing his own chess set and generally living the life of what he called a chess maniac.

Was he really finished with making art? No. Was he really devoting a huge chunk of his time and energy to chess? Yes. Were the two activities reconcilable? They were, according to a fantastic exhibition called “Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess” at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art. More than that, they were complementary, an ideal intersection of brainpower and beauty. Chess was art; art was chess. Everything was about making the right moves.

The show, which originated at the St. Louis University Museum of Art and has been shoehorned into the modest Naumann space, demonstrates these propositions with a trove of Duchamp relics. He had first played chess in his teens with his family in France. And the show’s earliest and choicest piece, a large, Cubistic 1911 drawing called “Study for Portrait of Chess Players,” depicts the two older brothers he played with, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon, bent over a chessboard.

Nearby you’ll find a pocket-size chess set with stick-on pins that permitted Duchamp to play while on the move. There’s also a poster he designed in 1925 for the Third French Chess Championship, in which he competed, and a letter to the art dealer Julien Levy with rubber-stamped chessboard diagrams indicating moves to be made long-distance.

One life lesson that Duchamp took from chess — that patience and restraint could be keys to success — has stood him in good stead. If his career was something of a sleeper during his lifetime, since his death in 1968 he has become one of the most influential and versatile of all modern cultural figures. Artists have related to him in countless ways, and one of those ways is through chess.

To give a sense of this, the Naumann gallery has supplemented its Duchamp display with work by contemporary chess maniacs, from conceptual grand masters like Yono Oko and Mike Bidlo to younger contenders like Charles Juhász-Alvarado, Trong Gia Nguyen and Sophie Matisse. Some of the work is participatory; pull up a chair and play

A product is actually a service. Although the designer, manufacturer, distributer, and seller may think it is a product, to the buyer, it offers a valuable service. The easiest example is the automatic teller machine (ATM), or as many people think of it, a cash dispenser. To the company that manufactures it as well as to the bank that purchases it, the ATM is a product. But to the customer, the ATM provides a service. In similar fashion, although a camera is thought of as a product, its real value is the service it offers to its owner: Cameras provide memories. Similarly, music players provide a service: the enjoyment of listening. Cell phones offer communication, interaction, and other pleasures.

In reality a product is all about the experience. It is about discovery, purchase, anticipation, opening the package, the very first usage. It is also about continued usage, learning, the need for assistance, updating, maintenance, supplies, and eventual renewal in the form of disposal or exchange. Most companies treat every stage as a different process, done by a different division of the company: R&D, manufacturing, packaging, sales, and then as a necessary afterthought, service. As a result there is seldom any coherence. Instead, there are contradictions. If you think of the product as a service, then the separate parts make no sense - the point of a product is to offer great experiences to its owner, which means that it offers a service. And that experience, that service, comprises the totality of its parts: The whole is indeed made up of all of the parts. The real value of a product consists of far more than the product’s components.

My first post from New York. Pressure on. Truth is, I have so much to write about that I have no idea where to start. I have been here now for nearly two weeks and am beginning to settle in and become a true New Yorker and constantly finding myself saying 'You're welcome' to everything. There are a few things, sorry lots of things, that annoy me hugely about being here but I am not going to talk about them because that would be negative and that is not going to help anyone!

My journey to the office is pleasurable, I leave at 8 and get into the office at about 8.45 ish, but I try to get there for 9 o clock. I grab a coffee on my way which I can drink when I get into the office. I like this. It is relaxed and New York coffee tastes good. I also bumped into Sarah Jessica-Parker on Spring and Greene, which is the road that our office is located, they are filming Sex and the City 2, I waved but I don't think she recognised me.

More soon.

Over the past 20 years or so there have been a number of scientific breakthroughs that have slipped under the public radar. A couple of genius' from Holland or the Netherlands, whatever you wish to call it have developed a fabric that can be used as television screen. So soon you will be able to watch TV on your tie whilst on the subway. Nearer to home, scientists have developed a heat resistant plastic bag and they are using this to make a light that goes on in a handbag every time it is opened. Wonderful. No more standing around on the door step or a cold winters day car park waiting for ladies to rummage for the keys. I guess I am just having a rant really. A scientific computer slap with a special pen that enables you to write on the slab and then 35 minutes later print it out. Fantastic. Let me just get a pen and paper and write that down. An advert today whilst I was driving my Michelin - The NEW tyres that save you fuel! That is rubbish, if you want to save fuel, keep the revs down and don't do 95mph on the duel carriage way and then moan that the car only does 4mpg. Its not the car, the engine, the exhaust, the air conditioning, although having it on does not help the situation, its how you drive.   

I am currently reading Malcolm Gladwell's 'Blink' a book about the conscious and unconscious mind, first put forward by Freud in the late 80's. One section of the book that is interesting is when he is talking about different signals that as humans we give off depending on our personalities. He cleverly relates this back to World War 2 and talks about how morse code was used to communicate. He says that different operators where known for their different styles in which they were translating code worldwide. The interpreters who were used to translate this code were then able to identify over time who it was who was sending out the signal from there personal style of 'writing' (longer dashes or shorter dots for example). This in turn meant that they could track where a certain squadron was based on the intel that was being distributed. If they were unsure about where a squad was they would track the morse code to distinguish if they were in Italy, or still in France. Very clever. 

I got the job at Naked Communications, sorry if I forgot to mention.

I begin work on the 8th of September which is a Tuesday as the Monday is a US bank holiday. I cannot express the feeling of joy that I experienced when I received the email from Kacy saying that the job was mine. Hard work pays off. I guess now I can really say New York City here I come!

www.houseofnaked.com and www.nakedcomms.com