IPG Media Lab – the future or a fail?

I have some insights to share from a trip to the IPG Emerging Media Labs in LA – current and former APOC students were guests of the lab for a tour and conversation on Tuesday.

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All in all, from what I saw at the lab (and the biases I have on my own) the technologies I think will impact our lives the most are the ones that seem simplest.  I could go on and on about the wow factors of some things (like a 3D television  or facial recognition software for POP displays, both causing lots of group discussion), but in truth, I think the things that will catch on the most are the things that aren’t such a stretch TODAY.

My top 2 tools to share from the tour?

1. SnapTell (an image based mobile marketing tool) which is already available for many phones.  I thought that mobile barcode scanning would be big, but image based has so many more positive benefits, including easier standardization and the fact that posters and advertisements wouldn’t have to try and work in an unattractive barcode to the images to benefit.  Look for this and SOON.
2. In-store displays with a 3D product views displayed on product packaging via webcam.  That has some wow factor, but with tools like GE’s Smart Grid animation (3 links, try them all, prz), I don’t see it being so far off that people will be able to access 3D content using a cell phone pointed at a map to show an image of the location they’re going or to see a 3D compass on any street corner to help them navigate their way.

I don’t think that the future of technology is to add more gadgets or steps to our lives; I think people are at the end of the number of hardware tools they will adopt (though I’m NOT saying what we’ve got are the tools we will still have in a few years).  It seems that a consolidation (convergence, anyone?) is approaching more quickly now as people decide they want and need many of these new tools but don’t want to have to use so many outlets to access them.

I do think it’s important to note a few things about the visit in general (if you’re hanging with me still, that is); I’ve got to say it was a very cool experience to visit the IPG (Interpublic Group) Emerging Media Lab.  One of the innumerable benefits to being in a program like APOC is the fact that we have access to people who usually charge a lot of money to share their expertise and experience in relaxed, conversational settings.

I think the group was a bit split on whether ANYONE (including a group that is basically a think-tank) could provide more insight than someone who lives and breathes these technologies.  And it’s definitely an imperfect science, as is anything related to marketing or advertising work.

In critique, I hope the social media presentation to clients is a bit more dense and hands-on than what we received, but  I realize how challenging it is to present us, a group of academics focused on online communities, something that seems new, different and engaging.  As for the other areas, there were some rather old technologies that were still being pumped for the “not everything works” value, which is difficult to appreciate when there are more modern examples of spectacular products that failed.  I think we were given a tour and less a consultation; I’d be really intrigued to sit in on a consultation or two to see the different approaches used by the Lab’s team.

Web Technology Basics – My Primer

I’m realizing that I’ve promised my friends and colleagues exciting, new information here on this blog.  While many of the things I’ve written about have been, in fact, new, I relate frequently to things that anyone who’s a general student of social media might have come across or found someone to help them tackle.  Be assured we are covering things of much greater depth in classes (which I why I’m paying so much money for them – I think…) but they’re generally difficult topics for me to address (novice that I am) in great enough clarify with the sort of brevity that a blog requires.

It did occur to me, however, that one class that is probably quite unfamiliar to most of my friends/colleagues working in communications would be the information we cover on technology or web design.

Here, then, is my very brief primer on keywords to learn and resources to consult:

1. HTML – Hyper-text Markup Language: Most people think they know what HTML is – I challenge that assumption.  If you can’t open the page source on a web-site and read a few tags, then you don’t know what it is.  The ultimate resource on HTML and XHTML is the World-Wide Web Consortium or WC3.  The WC3 gathers together many influential people in the Internet world to help set standards for mark-up languages.
2. XML – Extensible Mark-up Language: The mark-up language that is the parent of XHTML, the WC3’s choice for most recent standard mark-up language.  It’s role in building a website is to let the creator separate the information from the appearance (important because if you want to change the way something looked before XML, you had to re-create much of what you’d done before, now you just change your style sheets).  Check out XML at xml.com.
3. CSS – Cascading Style Sheets: I haven’t learned much about these personally, because our classes don’t delve into the actual process of designing a site’s appearance.  However, this is the most commonly accepted tool for coding the appearance of site (which you’ve separated from the data using XML).  Learn more about CSS from the W3 Schools.
4. HTTP – Hyper Text Transfer Protocol: This can get way more technical than I’m equipped to explain, but basically, this is the standard for how browsers (on individual computers) get web-page information from servers.  There’s a request sent which follows the rules of the protocol and information is returned to the requesting side.  If you want to get all geeked out on learning about HTML look at Wikipedia.
5. API – Application Programming Interface: API’s have been the big buzz lately; they’re the reason that new social sites like Facebook and Twitter have so many private people building applications related to those sites.  Basically, API’s are a library of information about how the owners of the original website built that website.  Other people can use this information to build programs that draw information from the original website based on what they’ve learned.  Get way more in-depth info on API’s at Wikipedia or check out a list of available API’s at Programmable Web.
6. Client-side or Server-side: This describes where the ‘work’ on a website gets done.  Many applications read all of the X/HTML in the browser on your computer (the work is done ‘client-side’) while others need some special help that can only be done in the server (’server-side’).  Most anything in XHTML or what’s called Javascript works on the client side, while the less publicly-recognizable programs (Ruby on Rails, Perl, C++, Java) get done on the server-side.  Here’s a bit of a dry (but well-explained) video on the concept.

I think 6 concepts is good for the time being, but I’ll be back in a few months with the low-down for you on design approaches and terms like “agile development” and “wire-framing”.    In the mean-time, you could also check out the blog of my Technology course teacher, Andrew Schrock (smart guy, that Andrew).

Straight, No Browser

The question of a new internet brought us to an interesting aside in my tech class the other evening; if the internet is revamped, what will that mean for the existing framework that we’re used to using?

While a new internet doesn’t HAVE to mean a new interface, why shouldn’t it? The web browser is becoming many people’s primary purpose for computer use (especially if cloud computing continues to grow and people stop saving to a desktop and start saving to a web space), so why should we have to open an extra window to access it?

For example, I use the widgets on my Mac increasingly and most are internet based tools. Maybe I won’t have to open a browser in the future – maybe I’ll be unboxed, set free, connected in any application I use and able to roll it seamlessly into everything I do on my computer.