Never Mind The Extras, Feel The Fluffy Pillows

I haven’t worked this one out yet, so chime in if you know the answer.

Why is it that if you’re bumming around backpacker haunts you get free wifi everywhere you go and possibly even a complimentary thermos of sweet black tea if you’re lucky.

But if you’re staying somewhere more upmarket and pricey, it costs $20 or more a day to use their internet and $5 for a Coke from the minibar?

Is that some kind of inverse law of economics they don’t teach you in school? Pay more, get less?

pic by creativespark

I’m Just Not Feeling That Social

Dear Facebook

We’ve been bedfellows for a while now. I know it hasn’t always been an easy relationship, but we’ve got through the rough patches together one way or another and I’ve managed to forgive you, because my life is enriched by knowing what YouTube videos my friends are watching, and how their virtual farms are doing. And as you know, my Mafia Wars character has quite the bodacious arsenal of vehicles and weapons. So yes, there’s some co-dependency there.

You rummaged through my GMail contacts once without permission. Do you remember that? I was logged in in another tab, and when I was distracted you snuck in uninvited. It didn’t take too long for the secret to slip though, did it? You couldn’t resist asking me if I wanted to be friends with the people you saw there.

Speaking of which, could you stop asking me if I want to be friends with my parents? They deleted their account more than a year ago. They didn’t love you Facebook. You dated briefly and it just didn’t work out, so don’t be a stalker about it.

Oh… and I know you’re gossiping about me behind my back too. My cat has an account with you and you keep suggesting my friends to him. I tried to shut you up using your privacy settings, but it seems that “gossip level” isn’t amongst them. I assume if I secretively hide that information from everyone then you’d stop, but I’d like some kind of mid-ground where people can see it on my profile but you’re not shouting it from the rooftops.

You know I’ve got over all these boundary issues and moved on. I don’t want to be petty about it.

It’s just that things are starting to change, and I’m not sure you’re the same Facebook I married anymore. When we first met you let me exchange a little information with my friends, and that was kind of sweet. But now I keep bumping into you everywhere. You’re on web pages and in emails, and every business, community group, cause and promotion in town is asking me to be its friend.

I’m just not interested in getting daily updates from my mechanic or being part of the great community of people who wear the same sports shoes as me, and I know you’ll say “then just ignore them”, but it’s like some kind of mad cacophony out there. I just want to scream “I use you, but I don’t LIKE you” at everyone.

I shouldn’t be blaming you I guess. Such is the capitalist world we live in.

But I heard yesterday that Microsoft’s Outlook is now your new BFF (Best Facebook Friend), and that’s just creeptastic.

Mashable says:

“Not only does it pull Facebook profile photos so that you can associate a name to a face, but it pulls the news feeds of your contacts into your inbox. When you’re looking at someone’s email, you’ll also get a glance at their status updates, picture uploads and wall posts, among other activities.

“When you combine that with LinkedIn, MySpace, Windows Live Messenger, and Outlook data, you get a very detailed history of your interaction with your contacts, as well as an at-a-glance look at their activities and interests. Knowing that a potential client just returned from a trip to Hawaii can be all that you need to have the upper hand against your competition.

“Social data can be incredibly useful in the business world, especially when you need to understand what your client or colleague is thinking or doing right now. While we’d still love to see Twitter integration in Outlook, Facebook is far larger and, in most cases, has far more useful information.”

Oh Facebook, we’re just going to have to see how this one pans out, but I feel like our relationship is on rocky ground, I really do. It’s just getting so hard to tell you anything anymore without the whole neighborhood knowing about it.

Anyway, until then, love you. See you at home tonight. If you’re passing a supermarket, don’t forget we’re out of soy milk.

xx
Marc

pic by creativespark

Canis Lupus Familiaris

Here I go, revealing the sophisticated, high-tech tools I use on a daily basis.

When I suspect my network is down, I google something random using the search box in the menu bar of my browser. Usually I google “dog” because it’s quick and I like the little bouncy thing your fingers do while typing it.

Yesterday… double bonus. The network was up and the awesomeness of the little guy bottom right amused me no end.

Singapore Lights Timelapse

This is what Singapore feels like to me a lot of the time. A lovely piece of short film art by Weehan Yeo (discovered on the very cool Creative Roots blog).

Singapore Lights Timelapse

Shanghai Street Art

pics by creativespark

Shanghai Random 2

pics by creativespark

Shanghai Random

I can hear my mother’s voice in my head now, saying “why don’t you go anywhere nice when you travel darling?”

pics by creativespark

If A Brand Falls In The Forest

If you landed on another planet, and they’d never heard of your carefully nurtured brand mythology or what kind of “statement” being seen with your product makes… then what value is that history?

Because if no-one knows that only fashionably sexy people wear your jeans, or successful, technologically-savvy people carry your phone, then aren’t you just another item of clothing or piece of electronics?

A few days after I got back to Singapore from China, I was watching the news and there was a report about one of our health-product manufacturers (Osim I think, but it could have been OTO or Ogawa) expanding their retail outlet network into the 2nd tier cities.

Apparently they’ve had problems with counterfeiting of their product designs in China in the past, and the reporter was asking the talking head if he was worried about competition from cheaper knock-off products.

The company rep was confident that it wouldn’t affect their business because “the Chinese are now discerning consumers, no longer seeking cheap products but now seeking quality products from reputable brands”.

Which I suspect is an interesting, but quite dangerous, myth.

It works for brands like Gucci, Prada, Nike, Nokia, Apple, Uniqlo and the like, because those brands are so burnt into the fabric of the world that you’d have to go to a far corner to avoid their mythology.

But I notice that lesser brands assume that their back-story will follow them into China and somehow make them shine brighter on the shelves.

And here’s the thing. Chinese brands are equally capable of constructing back-stories. Their PR and advertising can be equally savvy. They’re just as capable of slapping a logo and inspirational tagline on a photo of an anorexic model as anyone else. Basically they can try to imbibe their products with myth and meaning too.

And because the many years of constructed brand mythology of imported products haven’t been drummed into them, and no-one knows that your product is supposed to convey some kind of special message or meaning, they’re not particularly selecting your product on that basis or willing to pay extra money for it.

In a way, the playing field has been leveled.

So, although I admire the confidence of our health-product company, and I know their products will be high-quality, wonderful, innovative and original, I suspect they’re going to have to spend time and money proving that they’re better than their competitors… knock-offs or not. It’s not a given.

pic by creativespark

It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing

The generation gap sneaks up on you when you least expect it.

The photo above is one of the (many) rooms in the Pavilion Of The Future at the Shanghai World Expo. An amazing multimedia “library” with stories of the history of urban planning playing out in giant animated books on the walls.

In each of the four corners are lecterns and I was standing at one, reading the information and feeling a bit edgy, futuristic and relevant.

I’d finished reading and was about to move on when a young kid, perhaps 8 or 9 years old, sidled up beside me, reached out and swiped the page, which electronically flipped.

I’m not a techno-nood. I’ve swiped an iPhone or two in my time and I work in design and media with stuff just like this, so I should have seen it coming. But it never occurred to me to try. There were no buttons, no instructions, no hints that the “book” was interactive.

And I noticed this a lot at the Expo. Every room, corner and turn was rich with interactivity, but where a few years ago there might have been icons or instructions, now it’s all about discovering things for yourself. And kids were going nuts over it.

Perhaps it’s a legacy of Apple products, which now come with almost nothing except a guide to turning it on. Or perhaps we’re now at the point where we’re expected to interact with electronics instinctually.

I was in a wonderland of swiping, flipping, pushing, poking and bouncing, and here’s my takeaway:

For anyone under 14, if it isn’t interactive it holds no attraction or attention at all, but if you can make it do something… secrets to be explored… there’ll be hands all over it, exhausting the possibilities.

If you’re in business, education or parenting, there’s probably some kind of lesson in that somewhere.

Here’s a couple more shots from the Pavilion of the Future. If you happen to be heading to the Expo, t’s in Zone E and it totally rocks.

pics by creativespark

Shanghai’s Little Blue Men

We were in Shanghai last week, and I figured if I didn’t get to the World Expo I’d face raised eyebrows when I got back.

So, with seemingly everybody jinxing it (“the queues are really long”, “there’s lots of shoving and cutting into line”, “the food is terrible”, blah, blah, blah), we braced ourselves for the worse.

And as it turns out, it was a real highlight. It might have been because we came in through a little-used entrance, or because we spent most of the day in the Urban Sustainability area, which is the lesser-visited “poor cousin” to the grand-standing country pavilions.

But wow, it’s a huge event and full of inspiration. The exhibits, the pavilions, the facilities, the scale. It was just fantastic. We covered… oh, about 1%.

I’ll post some thoughts in the next couple of days, but I wanted to share with you the Expo-related thing that tickled me most while I was there… which was the Expo Mascot (we affectionately called him “Toothy”, but I understand his mother calls him Haibao) popping up in all kinds of places. The whole city is kind of Toothy-mad at the moment.

pics by creativespark