Denuology: The Observation and Observations of Denuo. » Digital

CES 2012: The Return of Practical Tech

jdurbin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:33:56 +0000

Last year was my first trip to CES and frankly, I was disappointed. Everything had to do with 3D. 3D TV’s, 3D video games, 3D without glasses, 3D energy conservation appliances. I found this development disappointing and surprising for three reasons.

This year was a different story. I was amazed at the amount of practical technology that was being presented. Sure, there were still massive 3D displays (LG) but it felt more like a showroom floor where the theme is “we’ll make life better” as opposed to “isn’t this neat?”

"Cut the Rope" as arcade game. File under "Neat!"

Of course there was some opportunity to fall into each category. For example, TCL developed Dual Screen Television Technology. From one TV screen people can watch two different shows by wearing different glasses. Anyone who is married or shares a studio apartment (ew, seriously, find your own place) knows how useful this is. Now my wife can watch “Bridget Jones’s Diary” while I watch “Bridget Jones’s Diary 2: The Edge of Reason” from the same TV! (high five)

Casio demonstrated a watch that can sync with your smartphone. Someone calls you in a meeting and you can look at your watch to see who it is. Then awkwardly answer your phone. This is just one of many examples of device syncing that occurred all over the showroom floor but was definitely the most unique. Tapping into the cloud to sync was one of the bigger themes of CES 2012 whether that be syncing computing devices to save information or appliances to save energy. Tablets got a boost as they can now wirelessly connect to your TV. This is a big win for anyone who rents a movie through iTunes or just wants to experience a bigger display whilst playing Plants vs Zombies.

Despite the downplay on 3D, TV was still king of the show. This year just about every TV booth had a motion control TV. Which is great because now I don’t have to burn precious calories wandering my apartment looking for my remote. Technicolor displayed a panoramic TV technology that allows you to control the camera as you watch live sporting events. This was far more interesting than ESPN’s massive display pimping ESPN3D. Don’t get me wrong, ESPN staged a live boxing match and broadcast SportsNation from the show floor, which was super cool. But all of it was there to promote ESPN3D. Being able to point the camera wherever I want is far more appealing than feeling like Trent Richardson is coming right at me. The push of ESPN3D was interesting considering that a few months ago AT&T dropped it from it’s Uverse package. ESPN might be feeling the heat to recoup some of it’s high investment in the channel. My advice to ESPN? Ditch 3D as a separate channel and figure out a way to broadcast individual events in 3D on ESPN. Kinda like the way SAP or closed captioning works. Admission: I don’t know how SAP or closed captioning works.

Dish TV’s “Hopper” is a new set top box that has 2 terabytes of storage. This means you can record six HD shows while simultaneously recording four more HD shows. That sounds incredible. But as I walked by paper thin HD TV’s with unbelievable pictures, developing a box seems like a strange effort. I didn’t see any of the other major cable companies there, but they needed to be. They hold the keys to TV development now. Super thin TV’s are always going to look worse with a lot of wires sticking out or a box on a shelf nearby. AT&T has a new box that is wireless, which is a step in the right direction. But the first cable company who figures out how to stream their programming and push it onto the cloud is going to have the inside track in the cable race.

If you squint you can see a TV

This goes for video game console developers too. An XBox adds cables and wires and “stuff” next to a TV which hurts the overall aesthetics of the room. I don’t know the stats on it, but I am guessing a lot of gamers (15%?) are also renters and not in a position to drill a massive hole in their wall to install a wall mount. Of course of that 15% probably .03% are concerned with room aesthetics.

That’s not the only issue for game developers. I took some time to play EA’s Dead Space on the Samsung Galaxy Tablet. The Tablet was great. The game looked absolutely beautiful and was very responsive as I navigated through a spaceship with people impatiently looking over my shoulder. I did have some major issues, however, in trying to work the controls. It required swipes and taps and holding thumbs down in position. Overall, it was a very klunky gameplay experience. We’re very conditioned to use controllers and for deeper mobile gaming experiences, this is going to be critical. Companies are working on it, but it’s not here yet. In fact, given how prominent mobile and mobile accessories were this year, don’t be surprised to see some major tech players have some solutions to this at CES 2013 (assuming the Mayans were wrong). But until then, casual games or games designed specifically for tabs will dominate the marketplace.

There was no bigger sign (literally) as to the importance of mobile than Samsung’s promotion of it’s Galaxy Note.

The aforementioned sign. And yes, I will interrupt paragraph flow for a bad pun.

The Galaxy Note is a pocket sized tablet (bigger than a phone). It comes with a pen and is being positioned as taking on the role of a notebook you always take with you. To promote it, Samsung hired artists to draw caricatures of CES attendees on the Galaxy Note. Sounds kinda dorky, and I judged it pretty hard when I first saw, but it was pretty awesome. You could even get your caricature on a t-shirt. Which you should give to someone as a gift. There were several TV’s and mobile devices like the Galaxy note that came with pens for writing. Not unlike the Newton from the 90’s. Here’s the problem. If you have horrible handwriting (as I apparently do) it is a frustrating and pointless endeavor to try to take advantage of the writing capability on these devices. The thing that makes it all the more frustrating, especially the TV’s that could be “written” on, is that they make a lot of sense. They are very neat from a tech standpoint but also fill a void in our daily lives. Which is exactly what the tech industry needs to be doing and why this CES left me so optimistic for the future.

Caricatures on the Samsung Galaxy Note

A tip for anyone planning to go to CES next year: Go later in the day and later in the week. I was there Tuesday around lunchtime and it was a nightmare. It was so crowded that I not only gave up on trying to avoid running into people, I intentionally began running into people. But Thursday afternoon from about 3-6pm (the floor closes at 6) it was about as empty as you could expect it to be. I was able to move quickly around the floor and play with a lot of the devices that previously had lines 10 people deep. It was fantastic.

And with that practical advice, let’s open the floor. Anything not listed here you thought was especially nifty? Do you like 3D and I am just a curmudgeon? What do you predict will be the next big things based on what you saw? Did I run into you (sorry if I did)? Leave thoughts in the comments.

*Top Banner includes: Sony laptop that folds into a tablet, Art using headphones and paint by Jody Chestnut, Ford car that had doors that opened neat

I’m Still Hungry: A Rant to the Wonderfully Horrible World of Food Blogs

myoung — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 21:44:40 +0000

Food blogs, amirite? Those magical web portals that lure you in with their tempting photos and delicious titles, and then trap you amongst their pages for hours on end. Don’t pretend you don’t love them. If you can honestly say you don’t, you must only be looking at the worst ones, like Oat Bran Daily and Fun With Kale! (Turns out, 365 Days of Kale does exist, if you’re into that sort of thing.) The problem here is that it is impossible to remain hung up on one bad blog when there are so many good ones begging too be looked at. Far too many, actually.

The typical wasted hours spent food blog-hopping go a little something like this:

I would love to bake today.

It’s Fall, maybe I should make something with pumpkin.

I think I have a can of that in the pantry.

Google: “pumpkin recipes.”

Oh good, only 38,300,000 results.

Oh. Wow. Those brownies look so good!

What?!? 41 Yummy Pumpkin Recipes from The Gourmet Glutton? Don’t mind if I do! ….

Next thing I know I’m looking at fresh pumpkin stew recipes with some particular type of canned tomatoes and that omnipresent kale.

I don’t have the ingredients for that, or the desire to cook a stew.

Oh well. Looks good.

Bookmark that.

Email to self.

Somehow ensure that I can never find it again among all my other bookmarks of other things I don’t actually want to make.*

I end up spending all my potential cooking time just looking at pictures, variations, and related recipes. By the time I realize I still haven’t decided on a single recipe, five hours have gone by, I’ve finished the entire box of Oreos, and I’m too tired from clicking and reading to cook anything but a frozen pizza. Thanks for nothing, food blogs.

Even sites like Pinterest that offer recipes amidst everything else she-bloggers love (weddings, babies, fashion, quotes, bikes turned into sinks, etc.) don’t help. I see you, pins of “easy” workout routines. But I also see YOU, baked Alaska. Teach me how to create that in my kitchen, and I’ll totally go run a marathon later, right? If I can ever get off the computer. What happened to the days where you could sit down with Ladies Home Journal (my mom was really hip with it and kept good reading material like that on the coffee table at all times) and tear out the page with that delicious-sounding pumpkin bundt cake–the only one in the whole magazine–and stick it in a cookbook, making a real life bookmark instead of a virtual one? Even if you didn’t make the recipes right away, you could still discover them later, in one place, and decide if you wanted to make them or not. I wish there was a way to do that on my computer or my phone. Is there an app for that? A recipes-I-want-to-try aggregator? Can I virtually tear out the recipe page on my tablet? Is the recipe Amy Cooksalot adapted from that Ladies Home Journal recipe really going to be that much better than what I already have?

I do admire you, food bloggers. You mystical beings who seem to have their busy lives under control or else have been blessed with making a life out of simply cooking. And I appreciate that you want me to have the recipe for those to-die-for kale cookies, but it’s hard for me to (a) see your recipe, (b) trust that it is both simple and delicious, and (c) take it to the kitchen without doing a little investigating first. It’s easier for me to trust printed magazines. You know the editors selected this recipe because it’s the best around. Not just anyone can publish a recipe in a magazine, so I feel that it’s easier to trust them than Amy Cooksalot, just some lady who posted a recipe on a blog somewhere. I can’t count how many recipes I make regularly from old editions of Everyday Food. I can almost always find the recipes I remember ogling. And I don’t have to even know that 37,299,999 other pumpkin recipes exist.

The internet is supposed to be a place that makes everything easy and accessible. It also allows anyone to share their voice. But with all these voices, things get a little too cluttered and distracting for it to be easy. Is it so wrong to want to abandon the information superhighway in favor of the old-fashioned bundle of paper delivered to my door? Yet, hard as I try, those food blogs will never fail to lure me in for hours, until I feel like Amy Cooksalot and I are best friends and she’s cooking just for me. Only I never end up being able to eat any of her food. It’s a love/hate relationship. And I can’t tell if I really want to end it.

*Full disclosure: I definitely emailed myself those 41 pumpkin recipes. Odds that I will make any of them? Zero.

Instagram friends, it’s just a matter of time…

Matt Story — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:17:27 +0000

It was with a heavy heart that I joined team iPhone this summer. As a self-appointed Apple h8r, I spent the previous 3 years of my mobile phone life with Android devices. As with any relationship, there were good and bad times but at the end I realized that we needed to test the waters with others. I was not the least bit enthusiastic about this decision but it felt necessary at the time. Now that I’ve had a few months to adjust, I can say it was the right decision if not for one main factor…Instagram.

Most of us Denuologists find ourselves as early adopters of most apps. We convince each other to be friends in order to play around with social features (while blocking all Facebook notifications to ensure our non-nerd friends don’t catch on) so that we can intelligently speak to capabilities when asked by clients. However in the case of Instagram, I wasn’t able to nab that early adopter status given their lack of an Android version. The frequent tweets by friends with Instagram links led me to expect to show up to the filtered picture party late with many of my friends touting huge libraries and follower lists. Minutes after signing up I was surprised to see that this was not the case. I found roughly 25 non-nerd friends and 25 industry/nerd friends. Considering the app was released almost a year ago and is rumored right at ten million users, all my digitally connected, Apple loving friends should be using this right?

It then dawned on me that this situation resembles another fairly successful app’s trajectory and adoption within my circle of friends…Foursquare. There are a number of striking similarities:

Clunky UI – Both started with a rather awkward user interface. Neither does what you really want them to when/where you want them to. Though despite the frustrations, you find yourself still compelled to check-in/upload pictures because they are so darn…

Addictive – Each experience is improved and more valuable with more interaction. Before you realize it, you are compelled to instantly jump into the app at every ‘moment’ (Foursquare’s being when walking through any door and Instagram being when you anything that must be shared with a witty caption).

Multiple Uses – Where most apps focus on one distinct behavior and look to address it, each found a way to allow for multiple ways to engage. As an example, our Denuo LA office has daily conversations on how one person is using Instagram the right way and the other is not (for the record, my capturing of every Saturday night’s follies is the right way). Foursquare did the same thing where many of us approached it as a game to collect badges, points and mayorships, while others simply saw it as a way to connect with friends on the go.

Limited Web Functionality – They both have initially focused on pocket interactions and left the in depth web experience to third parties. Many would argue that this is leaving money (or impressions) on the table but as many predict we are moving to a browser-less future, you can’t argue with the decision.

Plethora of Competition – As first movers, they both have been confronted with many competitors (big and small). Just as Foursquare was able to weather this from the likes of Facebook, Instagram has seen Google give up on their own version (Photovine) in just the past month.

These comparisons may hint at continued success for the guys over at Instagram. Let’s hope so as I’d like to see more of my digital savvy friends in my feed. If they are lucky, it may only be a matter of time before I’m ignoring/blocking people on Instagram. I can’t wait.

The Ultimate Amuse-Bouche

Anisha — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 16:37:14 +0000

Quick, you’re late to Paris in 1906 and your go-to corset is still at the cleaners: what do you do? It is precisely occasions like these that I regret anchoring the bulk of my wardrobe in the Muppets heyday circa 1979. So I get over it and go. After all, this is the meal that’s a solid year in the making.

It’s my trip to Next, Grant Achatz’s restaurant masterpiece. Achatz is Michael Jordan in the kitchen, augmented by a Shakespearean bout with tongue cancer, a story coming soon to theaters. He continues to floor diners with Alinea, consistently ranked one of the best restaurants in the world, and is now upping the ante with Next and it’s impending neighbor Aviary, a ballsy reimagination of the cocktail lounge.

Next was announced in dramatic fashion, via a Transformers-esque trailer last May. It’s a culinary Back to the Future where the entire menu is reengineered every three months to painstakingly emulate a place and a time, starting with Paris 1906, moving on to Thailand and who knows where after.

Devotion is a cocktail, not a jigger of anything straight. A dash of stubbornness and helplessness laced with a splash of compulsiveness and unawareness poured into a shaker, along with two fingers of deep love and sorrow – Sportswriter Gary Smith

So Achatz is either insane or wildly devoted to attempt this edible tomfoolery. And it was exactly when this plot was announced that I submitted my email to the Next ticketing process, because it was like guaranteeing seats to Game 7 of a Lakers-Bulls final.

Earlier this month, access to the online marketplace was granted to the ones who signed up first on the capped 19k email list. There was digital drama in the form of email server failures, delayed passwords, confusion and questions, all quickly and transparently addressed by Next. Eventually I get my invitation to the highly nuanced pricing system with the option to pre-purchase a table for 2 or 4 (because ménage trios are a waste of money for restaurants). Prices per table fluctuate depending on the day, time and corresponding peaks in demand. Ultimately, the experience is entirely pre-paid and no money is exchanged at the restaurant. And the byproduct is a long overdue dining StubHub, a secondary resale market that creates a subplot with crescendoing intrigue. Even Gaga couldn’t stir up this cauldron of brouhaha.

And so we arrive.

Next exudes the feelings of a meandering train, patient movement and subdued time travel with its industrial décor and muted soundtrack that immediately exports you into a silent film. I can talk about the turtle consommé, the pressed duck with a blood-kidney jus that turned us into gluttonous vampires, or the supremes de poussin that is the most exciting bite of chicken you’ll have. Or even the tour of the kitchen after and a photo op with executive chef Dave Beran where I may or may not have grabbed his ass.

Yes, the entire Next experience is brilliant yet underwhelming, only because you expect Parisian dancers to descend from the ceiling and a mime with a waxed moustache to appear tableside.

See, that’s the thing about well-engineered hype. Because in life and food and sport and anything else- what is the ultimate amuse bouche? It’s when the bites of build up so geniusly whet your appetite that even the impeccable innovation in the ensuing execution leaves you selfishly and ravenously craving more. Because for Next, as much as it is about the food, it isn’t. And that’s what makes it so damn delicious.

And it’s for that reason that I’m hooked, boarding this food train to Thailand and beyond.

I’m Still Hungry: A Rant to the Wonderfully Horrible World of Food Blogs

REFLECTEUR – Issue 81

Lizzy Bogacki — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 15:50:18 +0000

There’s a lot of data out there about us. In fact, it’s easy to forget just how much information various companies and organizations (and the Internet in general) know about us. The first page of Reflecteur this week looks at the ways two separate sites used infographics to display a huge amount of information with very different results:

* Where Americans are Moving looks at 2008 IRS data to map county to county moves. It’s your one stop shop to US migratory information and it only takes a few minutes of playing with the maps to realize that there are a lot of stories hidden within this data. Just click on ‘Detroit’.
* Watch a Phone Company Stalk a Customer is, not surprisingly based on the title, far more disturbing. This site maps, via a video, all of the data a phone company in Germany gathered on one of their customers over 6 months. It seems more spy movie thriller than real life.

Travel over to Page 2 for a bit more fun:

* Classic Arcade Game Deaths is just that, a video of the death/Game Over scene from numerous classic games. We love that it ties into the nostalgia so promenent within digital culture but remains original. A large reason it stands apart from the countless other 90s video game tributes is the fact that it focuses on an often ignored (but important) part of these games while also playing with its context. Together these attributes help make this such an amusing and captivating view.
* The Reflecteur April Fools Overview discusses our opinion on why this holiday has taken off within digital culture. (Hint: because it shares so much in common with digital culture.) We also include links to some of our favorite website and brand April Fools Day efforts.

As always, Reflecteur is part of VivaKi’s intellectual capital and can be shared with outside parties including clients and partners. Reach out to Ellen Bird, ellen.bird@vivaki.com, or your assigned agency lead for more information about the publication or the other Reflecteur assets.

Download Issue 81 of Reflecteur here.