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

So it has actually been nearly 3 months since my last post, and quite a lot has happened in those 3 months.  I have been to New York and stayed with friends and I have also graduated, wahoo go me!  So although it may seem that there is lots to report, there is not too much.  Whilst in New York I met some great people who worked for a range of advertising companies, from Ogilvy, JWT, McCann & Erikson and Naked Comms.  Alex, Tom Bakers young lady managed to get me a couple of interviews with 'Naked' and I will find out in the next few weeks whether they would want to hire me or not, so there is an unbelievable amount of tension around.

I will try to be more prompt with my next post and will also endeavor to make it a bit more interesting.  In the meantime, there are two 'Naked' sites that are worth checking out:

www.houseofnaked.com and www.nakedcomms.com

Oh and a couple of quotes to leave you all with, that refer to determination and inspiration:

'We will either find a way, or make one'

'I may not be there, but I'm closer than I was yesterday' 

It has been 11 days since my last post, well 11 makes me feel better, when it has actually been 38 days since I have posted something useful. Quite a few interesting things to report over the last few weeks actually. Firstly I got got deferred from the Mountbatten NY Internship program, until March 2010, so we will see what happens nearer the time, on what it is I wish to do. 

Secondly, my Final Major Project is due on May 1st, so not long to go, and lots of work to do. This is then followed by a Professional Self Evaluation unit in on May 8th and then I am flying out to New York on May 10th for a few weeks to try to find some work and put things into my own hands.

I guess one thing that I wanted to comment on was the amount of shootings and homicides that have been happening in America lately. It seems that everytime I log into my iMac and check my 'Google US news bookmark' somebody has been shot somewhere. There were 391 cases of homicides in the US in 2007, thats over 1 a day, no wonder it is always in the news. 

I will attempt to post some more interesting stories on my next entry. One being the purchase of a packet of Reeses Pieces form Morrisons the day before last, for a mere 29p. Only to find that you only get an average of 8 per packet, and they are the size of Jelly tots. 

well it has been an eternity since my previous post, but I felt the time was right for a new entry. i have no idea what to discuss as there are no events as of late that have really interested me. and i don't really want to discuss books or writing and who i am reading or how the hell those whales ended up on that beach in australia, 200 to be exact. or why this morning the sun was out and it felt like spring and i almost felt the need for no coat, only to come out of university, come home and then for it to snow, what the hell is going on? so with that all i can say is that i am still waiting to hear about my application form, for which the deadline for is march 16th, getting close, and if they would like to see me then i would be contacted about 2 weeks after that. so we are looking at the start of april. what a birthday present that would be! as you can imagine, all of us on the facebook group are as nervous as can get, its a huge step.

nickelback

'if today was your last'

dark Horse, 2008

my best friend gave me the best advice, he said each days a gift and not a given right, leave no stone unturned, leave your fears behind, and try to take the path less traveled by, that first step you take is the longest stride

if today was your last day, if tomorrow was too late, could you say goodbye to yesterday, would you live each moment like your last, leave old pictures in the past, donate every dime you have, if today was your last day

going against the grain should be a way of life, what's worth the price is always worth the fight, every second counts cause there's no second try, so live it like you're never living twice, don't take the free ride in your whole life

if today was your last day, if tomorrow was too late, could you say goodbye to yesterday, would you live each moment like your last, leave old pictures in the past, donate every dime you have, and would you call old friends you never see, reminisce old memories, would you forgive your enemies, and would you find that one your dreaming of, swear up and down to god above, that you'll finally fall in love, if today was your last day

if today was your last day, would you make your mark, on ending a broken heart, you know it's never too late, to shoot for the stars, regardless of who you are, so do whatever it takes, cause you can't rewind, a moment in this life, let nothing stand in your way, cause the hands of time, are never on your side,

if today was your last day, if tomorrow was too late, could you say goodbye to yesterday, would you live each moment like your last, leave old pictures in the past, donate every dime you have, and would you call old friends you never see, reminisce old memories, would you forgive your enemies, and would you find that one your dreaming of, swear up and down to god above, that you'll finally fall in love, if today was your last day,

untitled, 2008

james e. ansell

psychological photography 

funeral for a friend

'maybe I am...'

memory and humanity, 2008

maybe I'm a pessimist, what if all the grey clouds in the sky, follow me home tonight?, maybe I'm an atheist, what if there's no god waiting to greet me, at the end of the working week, maybe I'm just delicate, maybe I am..., just not clever enough to persuade, everyone of the reasons, we're failing each other, ands it's not the same, not the same to me, no it's not the same, not the same to me, maybe I'm an optimist, what if all the damage that was done, was never down to me? maybe I'm a liar, what if all the truths that I have told, are better left, better left unsaid? maybe I'm just delicate, maybe I am..., just not clever enough to persuade, everyone of the reasons, we're failing each other, and it's not the same, not the same to me, no it's not the same, not the same to me, so I'll pack up my bags and leave, what sticks to me, sticks to you like glue

Human Library

Recently I have been swamped with books, and to be honest, have no idea where to begin. I have still got to finish Money, Martin Amis, which I think is a bit slow to me, and seems to be describing the life of a lazy individual in New York, with way too much money and a severe lack of sense, but there we go, I will keep going, mainly because I like the writing. I have also purchased Barak Obama's Dreams from my Father which, although I have only read about ten pages, is brilliant. Also having been interested in the TV series Mad Men, I jumped at he chance to pre-order The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the making of Modern Advertising. The book is about David Ogilvy who is played by Jon Hamm, an advertising king in New York. Very exciting. 

As well as reading and working on my Extended Major Project I have been listening to plenty of music from all genres. Lately having watched Five Easy Pieces (1970), I managed to get hold of Chopins Fantasy in D minor, Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and fugue, Mozart's E-Flat major Concerto, Chopins Prelude in E minor and finally Mozarts Fantasy in D minor. 

Road To Success

Gumption - shrewd or spirited initiative and resourcefulness, Determination - Firmness of purpose: resoluteness, Passion - Strong and barely controllable emotion, Strength - The quality or state of being strong (mentally), Desire - A strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen, leads to Success - The accomplishment of an aim or purpose

Martin Amis

'This Business with the yellows cabs, it surely looks like an unimprovable deal. they're always there when you need one, even in the rain or when the theatres are closing. They pay you up front, no questions asked. They always know where you're going. They're great. No wonder we stand there, for hours on end, waving goodbye, or saluting - saluting this fine service. The streets are full of people with their arms raised, drenched and weary, thanking the yellow cabs. Just the one hitch: they're always taking us places we don't want to go'

Amis, Martin. (1991). Times Arrow. Vintage Books Publications.

Just...well...I thought it was funny

Ok so here I am once again in Cafe Nero...

I am surrounded by middle aged women (most of whom I assume to be married), twelve to be precise, and six or seven empty seats. Sipping cautiously on my Earl Grey tea, no milk or sugar for me thanks. Overhearing whilst reading my extraordinary book, it seems to me that they were gossiping about everybody and anybody but themselves.  

Laughing and giggling, the usual, not about other peoples problems, but related more to fashion, me of course thinking, can we get a mirror over here please?  All of a sudden I realize that I am doing the same.  I have been sucked into this hole of society that I most certainly want no part in, albeit for a few seconds. I escaped. It seems they want to be seen as young women in their twenties (with exception to the overwhelmingly strong perfume), but some things don't work and will never work, for example, me walking on Mars. They on the other hand, are unaware of this, so I continue sipping cautiously on my Earl Grey tea, and continue to smile intently to myself.  Whilst reading Martin Amis' Time's Arrow. 

Whilst being aware that I am no trend setter myself. 

Dream

Last week I finally got the chance to watch 'The Pursuit of Happyness'.  One of my favorite films for inspiration and pure determination to achieve a dream.  The title of the film is intentionally misspelled as it also appears as graffiti in the film.  It is taken from an essay written in 1776 which argued that white and blacks were created equal.  The essay was written by Lemuel Haynes, and he quoted Thomas Jefferson's well known sentence which was taken from a little document called 'The Declaration of Independence' but spelt the last word of the sentence with a y.  

"We hold these truths to be self-Evident, that all men are created Equal, that they are Endowed By their Creator with Ceartain [sic] unalienable rights, that among these are life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happyness"  

I felt that this was an appropriate post as I myself am also in pursuit of an American dream, and will one day get there and look back on this 'blog' and think to myself 'I made it'. 

Seven Wonders of the World, apparently

Chichen Itza (Mexico), Christ Redeemer (Brazil), Colosseum (Italy), Great Wall of China (Obvious), Macha Picchu (Peru), Taj Mahal (India) and Petra (Jordon) are the official seven wonders of the world. 

Petra is an archaeological site in the Arabah.  It is renowned for its rock-cut architecture.  It has been used in films and games. Most noticeable in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Lego Indiana Jones.  Images of such a masterpiece certainly create a wow factor.  It is evident why it is one of the Seven Wonders.  See for yourself here.

Enjoyable

Today was mine and Clare's day-of-fun!  The plan was to spend the day having fun and interacting in adventures enjoyable for us both. Included in the day-of-fun were a) ice-skating b) walking on the beach or c) cinema. The day would then be concluded with a lovely meal at Emperial China, a luxurious restaurant in Lyndhurst.  Due to lack of funds and I'm sorry to say, a McDonalds consumed by Clare, which she enjoyed never-the-less, we decided to shop at West Quay and to then have pizza, enabling us to save the chinese for next week.  The need though to spend £4.99 on a 'Paddington Bear' calendar was also necessary.

It is very rare that we get to spend the day and evening together, to do both was brilliant, a very enjoyable day, especially for me, as the company was of course, second-to-none.  

As far as book reading is concerned, I have now finished Duncan Bannatyne's book and am on the look out for my next read.  I have no idea what this will be but I would like it to be advertising and marketing related.  Music wise I am currently enjoying Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits which include Gypsy, Go Your Own Way and Seven Wonders. Brilliant!

Just a quick update, I have still not heard back from Mountbatten, although this is not expected until mid March, so no need to panic just yet.  That reminds me, I need a contingency plan!