07 23rd, 2008
Charlie Kalech just twittered the prayer news that the MacBook Touch — that mythical Apple-branded touchscreen notebook computer — will hit the market by October. He links to Apple Insider (although I don’t see an item there).
I hope he’s right. I’m glad I’ve held out on upgrading my PowerBook. Is mobile computing salvation at hand? (Sorry about that.)
UPDATE July 28, 2008: I found this rumor report on the D: All Things Digital blog. I have to keep reminding myself: It’s just a rumor. Don’t get too excited. It isn’t working.
Thanks to @CharlieKalech for the tweet tip.
Normobs: normal mobile users
…as opposed to early adopters and industry insiders, who think that everyone sends email / uploads pictures to Flickr / posts to blogs on his or her mobile phone.
I don’t know where the term began; I saw it used first on SMSTextNews a year or so ago.
A new study adds an unexpected method to the list of ways to spur memories about our past: body position. That’s right: just holding your body in the right position means you’ll have faster, more accurate access to certain memories. If you stand as if holding a golf club, you’re quicker to remember an event that happened while you were golfing than if you position your body in a non-golfing pose. […]
Dijkstra’s team believes that the effect may be due to the way memories are stored in the brain: one theory of memory suggests that memories are composed of linked sensory fragments — odors, sights, sounds, and even body positions. Simply activating one or more of those fragments makes the entire memory more likely to be retrieved. In any case, if you’re trying to recall a particular incident in your life, putting your body in the right position might help you remember it faster and more accurately. The key appears to be your body position when the memory occurred.
[via Cognitive Daily — one of my new blog loves]
This is a really fascinating topic, and the first time I’ve seen it studied methodically.
What is the long term impact of our growing involvement in virtual life and digital communication?
If you see all movies in the same general context (on your iPod or computer screen), rather than surrounding them with a trip to a theatre, candy, theatre seats…
If your reading material consists of Word and eBook files, without the sizes, fonts and thickness of books…
If your letters are all emails or instant messages, without stamps, handwriting or envelopes…
If your conversations are all via SMS, with no body language or tonal cues beyond emoticons…
…and if all that happens within a very limited number of positions and locations (on the sofa, on a train, in the kitchen, at the desk), then what impact does that have on your personal internal journal of your life?
Is that why we need our cell phones to journal our [digital] lives, with automatic uploads of pictures to Flickr, video to YouTube, status to Facebook, and stream of consciousness to Twitter? Is it because we might experience life as a giant blur of digital events that in retrospect are difficult to tease apart from one another… or even difficult to call up as memories?
What does it take to make a digital experience memorable in the way a fully physical experience is? I doubt that color or even sound are enough. New trends in haptic and scent generation might help… but I suspect that the real trick is to tie the digital experience to the surrounding environment (or at least to a discrete digital environment) — tying the mobile ad to the location, to the store, to the time of day, to the people in the room, for example.
A whole new meaning for Location Based Services.
If operator hardware sales behavior started to threaten a device manufacturer’s own revenue stream, would the manufacturer continue to be cautious about not offending carrier sensibilities? Or would they throw the first punch by offering service themselves?
It’s not so farfetched, is it?
Related and perhaps illuminating business cases:
- Helio / SK Telecom
- Vertu / Nokia / Ovi / Nokia-Siemens Network
- iPhone / iTouch / iTunes /.Mac
- Google / Android / YouTube / Flickr
Via Street Use (you want to click on this image to get the full impact):
This is an extreme closeup scan (2400 dpi) of a paint chip retrieved from the ruins of Belmont Art Park by Amy McKenzie earlier this year. The fragment is about 1cm thick, and appears to consist of about 150-200 layers of paint. (For a sense of scale, note the ridges of my fingerprint in the lower right.) This should give you an idea of the staggering number of pieces painted in this spot over the decades. The park used to be surrounded by one long wall covered with artwork, but that wall was illegally demolished by real estate developers earlier this year.
When I was about 11, we moved to a new house. My bedroom was a little 9×9′ square smothered in dark wood paneling. When we peeled off the paneling we found layers and layers of wallpaper; I had fun peeling, doodling, and “vandalizing” the walls before the painters came.
