Unstoppable

As a Londoner – particularly one who uses tries to use the Jubilee Line each day, the media campaign from TfL in the run up to the 2012 Olympics has fostered largely negative expectations. We have been told to expect 90 minute delays when trying to board Jubilee line trains at Canary Wharf and encouraged to stay at home rather than travelling to work.

Over the past few weeks, I have been trusting that overseas (and non-London) visitors to the Games are being given a much more positive message.

Whilst many Londoners may be forgiven for hoping for the games to end before they have started, the Games do not finish with the Men’s 100m final. They don’t finish when the last able-bodied award recipient claims their gold medal (the Modern Pentathlon). They extend far beyond that.

The Paralympic games have historically not had nearly as much air time as the original Games, yet I sense this is now changing.

The Canadian Paralympic Committee certainly seem to think so having engaged BBDO for a series of iconic images and videos which focus on the purely competitive elements of their Paralympians. With 115 or so days until the 2012 Paralympic Games commence in London they have released some remarkable work.

I wish them well at this year’s Games – both of them.

 

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YouTube and the Teletubbies

It’s been challenging this morning trying to convince my 15 month old that a MacBook Air screen isn’t the same as an iPad – particularly when the Teletubbies theme tune is playing on YouTube.

But when the 3 min video was complete (68 million hits and rising), the recommended videos splash screen took me by surprise. Perhaps it was the stark contrast of the single monochrome panel amongst the hugely colourful other stills, but I wonder what algorithm they are running today.

 

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Archives – New York style

The New York Municipal Archives have released over 800,000 images online including these ones:

Sunlight floods the vaulted main room of Grand Central station.

Painters on the Brooklyn bridge pose for the camera

The online archives include photographs, maps, motion-pictures and audio recordings. Unfortunately, due to understandably overwhelming demand, the online archives are currently down, but it’s a tremendously rich resource to explore here.

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Colossus

Giving their audience exactly what they’re looking for, Business Insider today ran another article revealing some plain-language stats following Apple’s recent quarterly financials.

Apple logo rainbow fruit

Summarised here:

- Apple has generated $29billion of cash in last six months. $32 billion cash in; $3 billion cash out. (Apple is essentially generating $7m of cash per hour).

- Based on their latest quarterly filings, their profit exceeds Google’s revenue ($11.6billion vs. $10.7billion).

- On the iPhone business model alone (one which did not exist 5 years ago), there are only 53 companies in the world generating revenues larger than the iPhone business (on an annualised basis).

- If the profit margin is as high as expected, the iPhone profit generated could exceed the profit generated by ExxonMobil in 2011 ($35billion est vs. $30billion FY2011)

- Of course, we shouldn’t ignore the iPad – bringing total revenues for iOS devices to $130billion – twice the size of Microsoft.

- Apple’s retail stores have the highest sales per sq ft of any retailer in the world – including Tiffany.

- If Apple were a country measured on a GDP basis, it would be the 56th largest country in the world.

- When is iPhone 5 going to be announced?

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Lotte

I’ve watched this with considerable admiration. And a little regret. I wanted to do the same with my daughter, though I would have shot stills, not the video shorts.

In hindsight, this chap Frans Hofmeester has made a much more engaging piece of work than I would have.

Just look at how much more confident Lotte becomes once she passes 10/11 years of age. Would stills alone have captured that?

I don’t think so.

A beautiful and tender journey. To be continued.

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Innovation Starvation

In an essay over at The World Policy Institute, Neal Stephenson contends that society now simply has an inability to “get big things done”.

From lamenting the decline of the US manned space program, to believing that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 suggests we have achieved little in the energy space since the OPEC oil shock in 1973 despite all the talk of wind farms, tidal energy and solar power.

Using Science Fiction, he illustrates how far back we may have been holding some of our industries – industries now driven to the margins of safety by a quarterly accounting cycle and fear of litigation.

Innovation can’t happen without accepting the risk that it might fail. The vast and radical innovations of the mid-20th century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable.

 

Competition between Western democracies and communist powers obliged the former to push their scientists and engineers to the limits of what they could imagine and supplied a sort of safety net in the event that their initial efforts did not pay off.

A grizzled NASA veteran once told me that the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest achievement.

Perhaps only the alternate reality offered by science fiction now creates an environment where “Get Big Things Done” scale innovation can consistently take place. Whilst, back on [this version of] planet Earth:

Researchers and engineers have found themselves concentrating on more and more narrowly focused topics as science and technology have become more complex.

Yet I believe there is much cause for hope here.

It takes relatively little for a large community to form around a shared vision – an agreed-on goal.

Much like the oft-recycled – yet apocryphal – story of the janitor at NASA who, when asked by President John F Kennedy “What do you do?” answered: “I help to put men on the moon.

Science Fiction may offer some an easy way of visualising a better, more accommodating future, but we are already in a more accommodative environment than at any point in recorded history. One where people with shared visions and passions can freely communicate and readily collaborate around their ideas, beliefs and goals.

But Stephenson seems less sanguine about the prospects and offers few immediate answers here – his position being well supported by his observations.

Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.

Most daunting of all is his concluding paragraph:

“In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.”

 

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