All the phones I've owned

I was thinking about all the phones I've owned and how dramatically each one was an improvement of the other. Comparing what I have now (iPhone 4S) to my first phone (That BT Cellnet brick) - it's just remarkable the speed technology is improving, allowing us to do more and more, and in more beautiful ways.

The number one entry - The BT Cellnet brick and I have since discovered this is called the Philips Savvy (who knew?).

From memory, this was actually a good solid phone. 9 Speed dial numbers - assigned to the 9 number buttons on the front of course, the ability to SMS, and I think it could probably be used as an alarm. With an OS that simple, not much went wrong with it. I remember that being the phone I took to University - so 1999. 13 years?!

I'm sure I must have had something between the 'Savvy' and the Sony CMD J5 (notice no 'Ericsson') - but I cannot remember - I doubt this will pose too much trauma to people. So around 2000-2001 I got hold of this phone and it was quite a cool phone for the time, a really loved the look and feel of it. Weighed nothing and was pretty slick. Although it had a greyscale display, I remember it having quite a cool UI, which you navigated with the multi angled scroll wheel (up & down, 'away from you click' and 'towards you click') on the left hand side for your thumb (very cool) and it had a half decent speaker with nice ringtones. This phone met its death on the Broadstairs seafront during my summer swan song to non working life. After a 10 pub crawl at Broadstairs' finest establishments, I decided to run into the sea at around 11pm, whilst fireworks were being fired on the beach. As I ran towards the water, my friends were screaming at me that I had my wallet, keys & phone on me. Nevertheless the water was calling me, I naturally felt like Andy Dufresne in 'The Shawshank Redemption' having a rebirth.

The walk home whilst soaking wet, covered in sand and seaweed did manage to sober me up - as when I returned home I did manage to have the sense to open the phone, remove the SIM and pray it would dry out and work in the morning. Of course it didn't work. So off I went to Dixons to get a new phone and got this pioneering piece of tech - the Nokia 3510.

This was the Volvo of phones. You couldn't break it if you tried, it always worked and just kept going. I also loved the fact you could operate it blindly, memorising the pattern of button presses to write a text - you could almost pretend you were Jack Bauer secretly sending a message to CTU about where the nukes are (or telling Mum you'd be home a bit late for dinner). This kept me going for a good year though.

I'd since moved to London in search for what Peter Gabriel would refer to as 'Big Time'. The lyrics in his song didn't allude to half a shift at Wetherspoons, and three months at Virgin Megastore - but I guess you have to prove to the London gods that you really want it.

I did eventually get my break producing and editing a variety of work for a company in Soho, called Loki TV. I justified it to myself that I should get a smartphone, so I could work in a more 'professional' manner. Even now I create some kind of justification for buying something, it's just getting more and more pitiful explaining why it's necessary to have a PS3 or an Apple TV to my wife.

2004 - I think my wonderful boss at the time, Derek Hanlon, had a Sony Ericsson P910, and I was pretty transfixed with it. It seemed to do everything, and looked pretty cool. I loved the way you could remove the hardware keyboard if you wanted, and yes I did. I was getting rid of physical keyboards long before Steve Jobs. I really loved that phone at the time, it's only real downfall was it was quite a hefty beast. It was touchscreen - responsive to touch and the included stylus. It had that multi directional scroll wheel that my J5 had, except this could go in 5 directions to navigate menus without using the touchscreen - super cool and great for one handed use. It had GPRS, so I dabbled in mobile internet now and again - most memorably trying to find the local Chinese whilst on a shoot in Leeds - Google had a very quick mobile site even then. It's home screen had 9 touch screen speed dial's - which was brilliant - interesting why Apple never built that into iOS. It also had some apps, and you would have to forage through the web to find some. Apple really made that process remarkably easy (and successful) with the App Store - it was a massive pain to find mobile apps in those dark days.

It had a camera, which was only VGA - so I used it sparingly for video mostly. The Bluetooth allowed Apple's iSync to work - which was awesome, so I could sync my contacts with my MacBook.

It also had a native email client, that was pretty great for the time. That must have been one of the best phones at that time, maybe the Treo's were up there too? Here's a review of it from the time. It interestingly has almost the same dimensions of the original iPhone (apart from the depth) - but it did have cut, copy & paste!

I used that phone very happily for some time, I then received a free upgrade 18 months later from Vodafone - the Sony Ericsson M600.

This had a lot of similarities to the P910, upgraded Symbian OS - but almost similar UI and touchscreen with a stylus. It had a basic scroll wheel which I thought was a bit crap. It had a built in keyboard, which couldn't be removed - but was quite cool in that the keys were really designed for quick typing. I'm guessing they copied some Blackberry keyboards - but that was one of the best features of that phone - super quick and accurate to type on.

One strange omission, was no camera. I read some odd justification at the time - which was this was Sony Ericsson's attempt to really go after the business sector (read Blackberry), and that many large corporations frowned on cameras as people could capture imagery of workplaces/sensitive data etc relating to said business. So they omitted the camera in the hope businesses would buy tonnes of them. I don't think that happened though.

Around this time production of 'Casino Royale' was occurring, and Sony did what Sony does, and rammed a load of product into the film - including the M600 - it was Vesper's phone (the white version). Not sure if that had any effect on sales either...

Ultimately the phone was no where near as good as the P910 (apart from the extremely addictive golf game !). And failed to capture the business market it seemed to be chasing. So back I went to my fabled P910.

Like most people with a pulse, I was aware that Apple had been working on a phone from the endless rumours in all the tech blogs. I was excited by it and when it was announced I was going to get the iPhone, no matter what. I didn't care about lack of 3G - I wanted that device that would fit seamlessly into the ecosystem I loved. Up to the point of getting the iPhone, my trusty P910 was in a holding pattern of being passed over. I think I even changed the wallpaper on the P910 to that image of the clown fish, to make it that little bit more like an iPhone. Deary me.

Getting the iPhone was a special experience. Just an incredible device, and it did very little back then compared to what it does now - no 3G, no cut and paste and no Apps! What I really loved was that now one device could do it all - I didn't have to carry a separate iPod for music. And having the headphones with the mic & remote on was so cool to control the iPod and use for the phone. Let's not talk about the design decision to have that recessed headphone socket - lets just say a scalpel was used to 'amend' my headphones of choice at the time...

When the iPhone 3G was announced, the fact that apart from the 3G chip and the new design, everything was the same internally as the original iPhone. So I was going to stick it out, and wait for the next design. The even better one...

Apple then announced an 'incremental' update to the iPhone 3G, and instead of a complete overhaul they kept the design the same and updated the internals. Much like all other (original) iPhone owners - I kind of wished for a total overhaul. "How could they do that to us?" Yeah, anyway - not the biggest problem in the world.

But deep down I knew it was a way better phone that the 3G - completely new innards - 2x faster, better camera (the first really acceptable camera on the iPhone) - compass (which was really helpful when you do that thing where you come out of the Tube and are visiting a new location but unaware of which direction to go). It was a huge update from the original iPhone as well, especially that now I finally could use 3G - which just felt like WiFi compared to the old EDGE connection.

Then we come right up to date with what I have now - the iPhone 4S. Again I was a little miffed it didn't get a redesign from the 4 (which of course the next release will get - but I've now resigned myself that I will forever miss out on any new redesign - and always get the ultimate version of said design a year later!).

The 4S is a tremendous gadget though - I cannot fault it on any level. The display is gorgeous, the speed is phenomenal - is one of the fastest computers I've ever used - regardless of mobile or desktop. The camera is just stunning - the stills and video from this phone have rendered all other cameras I have redundant. Every week I seem to find another use for the phone - iOS, the App Store and now iCloud are three phenomenal platforms to use each and every day. I can't wait to see what happens next with this product line.

Obviously I'll be quietly angry when the next gorgeous release happens, and I know I have another year to wait - but I'll be getting the best version of that new gorgeous design - and no doubt will be incredible.

Losing touch with popular culture

Charlie Brooker raises some great points here about being cut off from popular culture.

Many of which I'm experiencing myself, through my pseudo experiment to not watch broadcast TV, read papers, see print commercials etc. (basically anything that is push media).

This quote rang true:

It's like I live overseas, in a small sealed cube.

I am definitely moving into that realm, losing the ability to have those 'water cooler' chats on Monday in the office about something on TV, or a major sporting event. Let's talk about the tech landscape or a recent mental Reddit post instead!

This needs a bigger post explaining to others how to convert from a push media life to a pull media life (if you fancy that sort of thing!).

Inform, Educate, Entertain… and Engage

Cross-posted from the Across the Pond Productions blog

This is a blog post based on Robert Waddilove's talk at The British Library on 20th April 2012. For more info on that event, please visit here.

As this is part of a series of talks in relation to business models, I thought it would be interesting to explain how we as a company respond intuitively to the world of online video.

We do a lot of work with Google, which is fantastic, not just because it's one of our generation's most interesting and important companies shaping the internet, but that it's so diverse in its interests. Their mission statement to 'Organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful', means there's almost no boundary to where it can go.

One of our most recent pieces of work is for the newly relaunched Google Art Project, which is a brilliant marriage of art and technology using gigapixel photography, Street View imagery and art from over 150 museums. It's an amazing way to view art - and for many people, their only way. It's one of the things I love about it, which speaks to the core mission of Google as well.

We were tasked with creating a launch film that would capture the breadth and beauty of content in Art Project, but also the emotional attachment we have with art. Ultimately we wanted to know how it would feel if you 'fell' into Art Project.

We're extremely happy and proud of the finished piece and it really works in capturing what we set out to do. Most importantly, it helps engage the viewer in what Art Project is and drive them to the website to use it themselves.

In 2008, when we started working on the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, this was something very, very different to what we had been producing previously - and it was a clear indicator for the way brands would start to engage audiences online - through entertainment and interaction.

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra is a crowd sourced orchestra using YouTube as a platform to learn, collaborate, and enter their submission videos. In 2008, the composer Tan Dun composed a piece of music called "Internet Symphony No. 1 'Eroica'". Musicians from around the world could choose their instrument, get tips from professional musicians from the London Symphony Orchestra, film their performance and then upload it to YouTube. The chosen orchestra were then flown to New York in order to perform at Carnegie Hall.

The project was a huge success with impressive statistics: over 38million video & channel views on YouTube, and over 3,000 people submitted entries from 71 countries. Most importantly, it proved that by making something fun, entertaining, and interactive you get fantastic engagement.

When I wrote my notes for this, I was going to say that the core content or product should be exciting, new, interesting etc, But then I remembered I once produced a viral video for beds...and beds are not at the cutting edge of cool!

In 2009, I was still freelancing as a producer whilst working at Across the Pond, and most of this work involved producing quite standard (but nice!) TV commercials for Bensons for Beds.

The agency where I was freelancing saw a video online of some students messing around in their dormitory and pitched the idea of Mattress Dominoes to the client. I think the fact we were going to do it so cheaply and quickly meant it could just be a bit of fun. It wouldn't cost them a great deal and if it failed it wouldn't hurt. So they let us have our fun, and we produced this:

I edited and uploaded that from a Travelodge and we devised a rough strategy to create accounts with every online video sharing website, upload to all of those and have links within that to the YouTube video, thus creating a neat loop where, hopefully, all roads would lead to YouTube (where view counts are king). In a matter of days coverage started to snowball - traditional press, news, breakfast TV - then it went global - USA, Australia, Brazil etc.

Then people started to copy it, and make their own record attempts - The Morning Show in Australia, other bed companies, even Blue Peter on BBC1 beat the record. We received over 1 million views on YouTube with a lot of comments from people not even aware it was a commercial.

One of my favourite comments from YouTube was "this should become an advert!!!"

This was a very interesting response to something that actually is an advert, it just happens to also be quite silly and entertaining. Since it's not explicitly advertising a product or telling you that a sale is on or trying to force information on you - it becomes acceptable. It becomes viral because it's new and entertaining and people suddenly have an element of emotional connection with your brand, which you may not have had previously. As they enjoy it so much, they want to share it with their friends.

Last year, we began work on the launch film for probably the most exciting project we've worked on at Google, which has one of the coolest names too - 'YouTube Space Lab'. 'Space Lab' is a competition to get kids aged 13-18 to design an experiment which will be carried out on the ISS, 250 miles from earth.

We had to create a promo that spoke not only to those kids, but their teachers as well. It had to be universal and not look specific to a country. Most importantly, it had to be 'cool'.

The video did tremendously well, being the focal point for much of the advertising YouTube did for the project. Currently, the video has well over 13 million views on YouTube and helped the project not only reach the 13-18 year olds, but it spoke to their parents and creative communities just by having a relevant and cool film to summarise the emotion of the project.

At its peak, in one week, it achieved 2.8 million views which earned it the number one spot on Ad Age's Viral Video Chart, beating out Apple's iPhone 4S commercial.

Let's talk about shopping online.

We've all experienced problems shopping online whether it's not understanding a captcha code, having something added to your 'basket' that you didn't want, or forgetting your login and password. It can often be very frustrating.

Google has a product called Google Analytics that can help website owners determine how their site is being used at a granular level. The problem is lots of website owners may either not have heard of Google Analytics, or they're not using it to its full potential.

ATP were approached to make a comedy sketch turning an online shopping website into real life. It was approached with the view that we all live through this, we've all had this experience of getting incredibly frustrated trying to buy stuff online. So we decided to use that painful experience to communicate how it can be improved by incorporating Google Analytics into your website.

The film was uploaded to the Google Analytics YouTube channel and embedded in a blog post. This was to target website owners who were already using Analytics and subscribing to the blog, or people interested in learning more about Analytics but may not be using it yet. It slowly started to gain traction, though, with people outside its initial target audience and quickly went viral, gaining over 500,000 views. The film has since been nominated for several awards and recently won Gold at the IVCA Awards in March 2012.

To paraphrase the BBC's mission statement, it's our way to help inform, educate, entertain, and ultimately, engage the audience. To do this we like to strip stuff away - like any content that could distract from the entertainment value of the video (usually facts and figures). Video is a visual medium, so we find it best to take away lots of text and heavy use of voiceover, you can have a supporting website with all the detailed information you need. If it's successful, audiences will inevitebly want to know more, and they will visit the website for more information, investigate the product/campaign or even buy it!

Coming back to the title of my talk 'Inform, educate, entertain... and engage'. It's so important to try and get those three elements in your communications in order to engage audiences and ultimately interested in what you and your clients are doing.

I'm a fellow at Digital Transformations!

I think this must have been added quite recently, as I hadn't seen it before. But my details have been added to the list of fellows at Digital Transformations!

I'm very proud to have been invited to take part in this fascinating project, and looking forward to more of the events and stimulating discussions.

I think this quote says it best about the project:

A generation ago, cultural and media organisations – such as the BBC or the National Gallery – had a reasonably straightforward relationship with their audiences. They created material – such as TV programmes, publications and exhibitions – in a ‘broadcaster’ mode, and it was consumed (or not) by the public.

But today, these organisations are merely one part of a creative ecosystem, within which communities of amateur enthusiasts may be the producers of the most innovative material.

This project studies those changing relationships, and explores ways in which cultural organisations can work with creative communities to make great things.

Blade Runner Ephemera

On Reddit this morning I saw this very pretty cinemagraph.

A comment on Reddit really caught my eye, which referred to the spinning ceiling fan as having the 'Ballerina Effect'. Upon clicking the link, I saw this GIF (loving the renaissance of GIF's!).

If you stare at the female humanoid shape in the middle, you will perceive 'her' moving in one direction, clockwise or counter-clockwise. If you then look at the image to the right or left of 'her', which is moving in the opposite direction - it seems to shift the perception of direction 'she' is moving in. Totally weird!

I've never heard of the 'Ballerina Effect' before, but find it quite extraordinary that your brain can perceive that kind of movement in two completely different ways.

To continue the Blade Runner theme this weekend, there was a gorgeous video of London uploaded to Vimeo containing amazing aerial views of London. The first part of the video, with the night shots, just look incredible and very 'Blade Runner' indeed. Interesting to see aswell how London is becoming much 'taller' and built up as a city in recent years. One of my first short films, 'Practice Makes Perfect' includes a time-lapse of London, without any Ghurkin or Shard - it looks quite naked!