Top Gear!
Well, I just entered the Top Gear “My First Car” competition, hoping to win a trip to the show for hunter and I. I’ve watched so much Top Gear in the last few weeks, I’m starting to sound like jeremy Clarkson. Anyway, I originally misread the rules and wrote a 1000 word story, then discovered it was a 1000 character limit … sigh, here’s the story i wrote, just for posterity:
I’m a nerd. I’ve always been a nerd. From the very early days, learning to program in BASIC in the back of my dad’s photo studio, to placing 5th in the 1993 world final computer programming competition. When I was 16, my dad set out, after much badgering, to teach me to drive. Forty five minutes later, he stormed inside, deeming me unteachable, leaving my mum and granddad to teach me to drive. But what my dad did manage to do, was buy me my first car: a 1969 Vauxhall Victor. A whole year older than I was. I was the first of my friends to have a car, and what a car it was. Originally silver, but by the time I inherited it in 1986, a matt/shiny patina-ed grey was it’s general tone. My best friend Steve, christened it the “Silver Sausage” due to the colour and general body shape. The Victor couldn’t decided if it was a muscle car, a boring family sedan, or a shag mobile. It had the haunches and legs of a true muscle car, a 2.5L v4 muscle car. The soft ride and amenities of a family sedan. Finally, it had the red vinyl upholstery of a true shag mobile.
One of my most interesting moments in the Silver Sausage was the horn incident. Between my high school and home was a small junkyard. Late one summer, I was walking home and came across an old truck horn, lying in the gutter outside the junkyard. It was huge, two horns, coupled together with a grimy piece of wire. I hollered “Oi, can I have this?” to the junkyard workers, which was met with a noncommittal “yeah whatever”. I grabbed it and ran home. This was my first “mod” to my car. I managed to extricate the original horn, jerry rig a mounting bracket, and wire it up. HOOOOOOOONK. Holy crap, what a horn. The silver sausage sounded like a frigging Kenworth! Of course, not everything went according to plan. A week later, around 2am on a Sunday morning, I was dropping off a mate at his flat, just off Buchanan Street. My hometown of Dunedin, New Zealand boasts the steepest street in the world: Baldwin Street. Buchanan is right at the top. It was a quiet, dark, still night in Dunedin in the sleepy north east valley. As I turned onto Buchanan, the horn stuck on. No manner of hitting the steering wheel, horn, or dashboard would stop it. There I was with my new truck horn blaring through the quiet Dunedin night. I managed to drive quickly to the Botanical Gardens, away from most of the homes in the area, where I stopped the car. Turned off the engine, the horn still blaring I opened the bonnet trying to work out why. I had managed to short the wire against the chassis. I finally ripped the wires out of their connections, stopping the awful noise, and silencing the North East Valley once and for all.
I got rid of my first car after what henceforth shall be known as the steering wheel incident. I was driving to see a friend in Mosgiel, a small town just outside Dunedin. I was slightly dressed up, meeting a friend, who was a girl, for lunch. For me and my social life, it was a pretty big day. Of course, I was running late. I rushed along the motorway, at the limit you could do, avoiding obvious speed traps a few miles per hour above the limit all the way. There was something off about the Silver Sausage, I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I could feel it. Had one of my wheels lost a counterweight and gone out of balance? What was that slight wobble? No time to worry about it now as I drove, calmly into Mosgiel. Mosgiel is a small town of about 15,000 jovial kiwis with small shops, familiar second hand car yards, the odd supermarket and people strolling through the peaceful afternoon. Mosgiel, having been built much later than Dunedin, and with more land and forethought had much wider, more reasonable streets than most of my hometown.
Barely 3 minutes late, I turned left onto my friends street, my heart rate finally dropping back into the normal range, I was on time! Or close to it. As I drove along the wide Mosgiel street, I picked a spot to execute a smooth u-turn and pull up, dramatically, right in front of my friends house. As I entered the turn, I had a premonition, something was gonna happen. A few seconds later, perpendicular to the road, BANG, whizzzzzzz something deep inside the steering on the silver sausage broke, the steering wheel spun in my hand. PANIC, wait, DON’T PANIC. I slammed the brake, stopped mid street, akimbo to traffic. Oh my. What had happened. I tested the wheel, sure enough it turned, but was totally disconnected from the steering. I was stuck, in the middle of the road, unable to turn. I rallied quickly, pushing my car gently towards the curb. Of course, to actually turn the wheels, I had to get out, kick the tires, to make them stay turned. After 15 minutes of pushing, kicking, grunting, and inventing swear words, I finally got the car pulled up to the curb. Now I was late, sweaty, grimy, and without a mode of transportation. What a fabulous lunch date, this was turning out to be.
I loved my car. It was huge. So totally not me, and yet, it defined my high school and early university years. I was the guy with the car, the guy with the silver sausage, the guy with the red vinyl interior. When I look back, I’d really not do it any other way. Now I just with I could buy a Vauxhall for my kids, but living in the US, I don’t think that’ll be on the cards.
2010 in review
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Minty-Fresh™.
Not bad given there was literally no care or feeding of this blog last year. I did post a lot (ish) to creativetechnologist, but it was mainly link sharing not thought sharing.
Crunchy numbers
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,900 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 2 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 204 posts. There was 1 picture uploaded, taking a total of 2mb.
The busiest day of the year was August 31st with 27 views. The most popular post that day was Mexico-touchers.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, mycrazyreader.info, messingaboutinboats.typepad.com, en.search.wordpress.com, and twitter.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for action icon, ample sufficiency, dean mcrobie, fush and chups, and spine.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Mexico-touchers January 2006
Ample Sufficiency February 2007
2 comments
Fush n chups February 2006
4 comments
About December 2005
When in Texas … October 2008
2 comments
Interface – the ultimate mockup & prototyping tool for iPhone – Handcrafted by Less Code
Birth of a storyteller
Kylie, thinking about her next story
So this weekend my daughter went to the Young Writers Workshop, a great school district wide program to help young writers develop their craft. Kylie selected her favorite 5 sessions, but got assigned “Ha Ha Very Punny” and “First Person Fiction”. Despite saying that the Very Puny session was more fun, this is the result of her first person fiction:
One day I was playing tag … do you really want to hear what happened? Oh all right, I’ll tell you.
One day I was playing tag and my friend was it. She can run fast and I mean very fast. I was wearing shoes that were way too big for me and I fell! Hard. I was crying so hard!
Suddenly, I felt myself being lifted up and carried down the street by my dad. One of the girls on the street was having a picnic outside and they let me go inside their house and get bandaids and have a picnic with them. And we did.
- Kylie McRobie
What do YOU think?
AppBooks for all yer mobile app prototyping needs
Mac News: Mobile Apps: Need an App? Ask Your Creative Technologist
EXPERT ADVICE
Need an App? Ask Your Creative Technologist
By Dan Neumann
MacNewsWorld
12/01/09 4:00 AM PTGenerally speaking, creatives do not keep up with the latest trends in consumer technology, and developers do not care about a brand’s strategic goals. This is why marketing departments and agencies are increasingly establishing positions for “creative technologists” who can steer these two teams toward platforms that enable direct connections with consumers.
Leveraging Social Media To Boost E-Commerce Holiday Sales
Addressing the power of mobile messaging, social media and other word-of-mouth technologies, this paper provides concrete advice on how to integrate them into an e-commerce business plan. [Download PDF: 8 pgs | 665k]Digital advertising is evolving beyond the desktop computer, leaving companies relying solely on Web sites and display advertising woefully behind the eight ball. More and more, brands are relying on software development to create engaging consumer experiences that span multiple open platforms. Branded mobile applications
are fast becoming an important element of this new digital ecosystem as evidenced by Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) announcement that its App Store had surpassed 100,000 apps in early November.
This shift away from more familiar mediums for brand communication has important implications for the composition of, and interaction between, established groups within agencies. The pervasive dynamic between technology and creative groups is not always conducive to more technically demanding campaigns because of a fundamental disconnect between these two groups’ proficiencies.
Companies need people who are passionate about the creative aspects of branding and effective messaging, as well as the technical elements of software development. Without someone to bridge the divide, brands risk winding up with apps that are either unsuited for their purpose or projects that make unrealistic demands on developers.
While an influx of “do-it-yourself” app platforms have reduced the cost of entry into this new channel, these solutions often depend on inflexible frameworks that limit creativity, leading apps to fall short of the mark when delivering an engaging customer experience to a brand’s target audience.
Considering that enterprises must still invest a significant amount of capital into these template-based apps, it makes more sense to leverage a creative technologist’s expertise rather than create a cookie-cutter app. Leveraging one app build and reskinning it for multiple brands is an efficient way to enter the channel, but companies need to focus on how their consumers engage with their brand within the context of a mobile app to ensure they are creating a positive experience for customers.
Catalysts for Big Ideas
CTs bring creative and technology groups together to develop branded software. That’s made plain by their title, but what does that really entail? How do they create value? The first area seems like the most obvious but is critical to the success
of any marketing campaign — education and evangelism.
To attract interest in a new technology or platform, a CT needs to be able to communicate its value in terms that everyone, both clients and agency peers, can understand. People are scared of what they don’t know. It is still difficult to connect the dots from clicks to sales to real ROI. So then, if after 10 years, the industry is just now getting good at calculating ROI for display advertising, who wants to invest in tactics that don’t have established measurement practices attached?
CTs are the catalysts behind big, new ideas that get marketers excited and then validate their strategies by identifying key consumer interactions within an app/platform and help analytics groups craft measurement plans that will accurately tie back to strategic goals.
The ability of a CT to identify best practices before they are established provides confidence and guidelines for brands seeking first-mover lift. In a development phase, CTs should ensure that their best practices are observed within the architecture of the application.
While this can be very difficult to do, depending on the category, the key here is to remember that the number of downloads is not the only means to measure success. Because it does a brand little good if an app is downloaded and seldom used, consumer engagement is an important metric that should be taken into consideration.
Speaking the Language
A key consideration when establishing metrics for success and promoting your application is its role within the brand’s broader campaign or messaging. It is the CT’s responsibility to craft sensible connection points between the campaign and your app.
How does your audience move from media, to engagement, to realization of a strategic marketing goal? Does your online advertising promote the app? What sort of CRM model makes sense for people using your app? Should actions from within the app generate a post to Twitter or Facebook ?
What, if any, content generated by your campaign should be consumed from within the app? Where are the friction points between discovery, download and regular usage? A CT should be able to create user-flow and experience map documents that illustrate the experience as a whole, and how users are expected to move through various elements of that experience without requiring users to create an account.
While the experience architecture is important, CTs create value for clients and agencies by understanding the nuances of users’ interaction on new platforms and develop apps that work within these behaviors.
Consider developing an application for a newly open platform — Verizon’s FiOS widgets, for instance — that allows users to stream video content from your library. Do you make search a primary navigation element without realizing that users will need to rely on a virtual keyboard? The better alternative would be to design a menu structure optimized for the remote’s D-pad.
CTs are often the quickest route to effective branded apps because they can serve as translators who are fluent in the languages of technology and creative groups. This skill allows them to help brands temper cutting-edge ambitions with the realities of building experiences that work across multiple platforms in multiple channels.
As connected open platforms approach ubiquity, opportunities for marketers are proliferating at an astounding rate. A brand’s ability to capitalize will be vastly improved by staffing with people who can predict which platforms have the potential to alter consumer behavior and which will fade into the sunset.
Dan Neumann is emerging platforms strategist for Organic.
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Great Article.
asciibnPosted 2009-12-01
I totally agree with your premise. Agencies are producing highly branded software, in terms of …Next Article in Mobile Apps
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A good take on what it means to be a truly creative technologist
First VFF treadmill run!
http://www.dailymile.com/people/mtbdeano/entries/683694
I can’t wait to run again tomorrow and see how things feel! There is a slight rubbing on the inside arch of my feet (fabric I think) and when I tried them on I thought the toes would be too tight, but they appear to be working just fine.
About « TastyCupcakes.Com
Tastycucpcakes is a toolkit for project management and software development professionals to create better and more effective teams and build better products. These games, techniques and approaches are here for you to use and explore. All we ask is that you tell others about us and give us some feedback on the games themselves.
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despite the CREEPY header image, there are some great team building games here for both agile and non-agile teams alike!
Johnny Holland – It’s all about interaction » Blog Archive » How UCD and Agile can live together
A nice lay up of how user centered design and agile can play well together. Is this the secret to creative technology?
Vibram Five Fingers
Well, I did it. After months of running (sometimes 100's of miles, sometimes 10's depending on injury) I've invested in some Vibram Five Fingers.
Deano's flickr
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