JOYS OF CHRISTMAS PAST – TODAY

In a world of every changing technology, products, and services.  Christmas offers a window back to a lifestyle that existed everyday in our yesterdays.   This Christmas was a special day for me in many ways.  Blessed with gathering of family and friends I took note of one of life’s daily companions that was not present……  Digital Communication.

Christmas was spent in traditional fashion.   The kids awakening the parents at early light.  The race downstairs to see the tidings that Santa and left.  Opening of stockings, large breakfast, and then presents under the tree.   The morning filled with laughter, surprises, pictures, conversations,  stories of childhoods past, well wishes, and thank you.   Each of which contributing to the shared memories and histories that create family legacies.

Design of Avatar Future Tech

Avatar was a fantastic display of technology.  First and foremost was the latest generation of 3D enabled CGI effects that created the characters and landscapes.  While those aspects set a new bar for movie creation, it was the “in world” technology that both caught my eye and yet seemed dated at the same time.   It featured both large screen imagery on transparent screens and holographically created images that could be rapidly transversed in their use of mapping applications.  Both of these representations seemed quite here and now as it where.  Though I didn’t like the large transparent displays, the seemed very plain in terms of their information and data visualization.   The transparent screens would have offered an interesting capability in terms of the pilots of the machines if they were actually looking through the transparencies at reality and having it a

ugmented by the transparent displays.   This combination of reality augmentation would be at more of the forefront of technologies that are emerging today and offer a real value proposition in terms of the human/machine & reality/virtual aspects of daily life.

Already in today’s world we see large screen displays, interactive media, multi-touch, voice recognition, and facial recognition.   We have mapping software that can render the earth and allow 3D exploration.   I wish we could have scene the same level of creativity explored in Avatar as we saw put into the world of Pandora.

Perhaps project Natal http://bit.ly/PRJNatal will offer the creative spark to designers to start thinking past the flat screen and into the next level of human interactions with machines.

TomorrowFromToday

http://bit.ly/7YYj3c

Digital Agency of the Decade

Advertising Age has announced R/GA as the digital agency of the decade.

See the best of the 2000:

http://bit.ly/BestAgenciesofthe2000s

TomorrowFromToday

http://bit.ly/7YYj3c

Cloud Computing Costs Up For Bid

Cloud computing is appealing for enterprises and consumers for many of the same reasons that include: Cost, Scale, Speed to Market, etc.

Existing service provider competition has consistently driven prices lower in terms of compute, storage, and bandwidth fees.   Providers are also competing for having the broadest reach in terms of global infrastructure and ability to rapidly meet scaling demands of their customers.   This means a significant investment in overall infrastructure to be ready to meet and serve market growth.  Having excess capacity is clearly a capital investment and the desire to convert this into a meaningful revenue source is of top priority.   Several of the providers are looking at the the unused capacity and a perishable asset in terms of opportunity loss over time.