PhoneBlok: Build-A-Phone

The new iPhone was announced this week in all it's "meh" glory and I find myself thinking about upgrading to a new phone. Now, I also have a drawer in my apartment that houses every phone I've ever owned all the way back to my first Nokia stick phone. (Oh, the countless hours of Snake I played!) Why do I keep adding to this drawer? I want a newer faster phone. I also want a better camera, but there's nothing out there that fits all of my needs exactly. Dave Hakkens has come up with a really intriguing idea on how to curb this incessant need to upgrade to an entirely different device.

The PhoneBlok is like Build-A-Bear for adults. You choose the pieces you want and attach them to the main board. As time goes on, you replace pieces instead of the entire unit.

A phone you can customize to your needs and reduce waste? Color me supportive. If you like this idea, visit Dave's site Thunderclap to see how you can make this idea a reality.

Post Script: Oh hey, MT&HD, how are you? Sorry it's been a while. Busy, ya know? You look great. Did you lose weight?

Focus and Simplicity

There has been whole lot written about Steve Jobs yesterday and today, and there will no doubt be much more as it will take years – maybe decades – to fully decipher the impact of his accomplishments. What they mean to the fields of technology, communication, and art. 

In wading through it all, my favorite piece thus far was from Wired:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/10/jobs

It nicely overviews the multiple facets of the man - his successes and his failures, his inspirational qualities and his negative traits, his exceptional life and his untimely death. 

Personally, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Steve Jobs (and Apple) is the perfect fusion of art and science. Never abandoning the details of design and aesthetics for the realities of form and function. And vice versa.  The way Apple has been able to walk that razor’s edge is what makes them unique. 

Also when I think of Steve Jobs, my mind randomly goes back to that 2007 keynote when he unveiled the first iPhone. Not so much because of any of the technology he was presenting… but oddly enough I’m still drawn to the quote he used to end his speech that day:

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
– Wayne Gretzky

Elegant in its simplicity and inspirational in its enlightenment, it’s a classic example of a “why didn’t I think of that?” idea. Which is of course why it was so appropriate. Steve Jobs proactively considered how we’d use technology in the future; and the solutions he imagined are so seemingly simple and beautiful it makes you wonder what we did before they were around.

And if that's not something to aspire to creatively, I don't know what is.  

***

BONUS Steve Jobs fun facts!  

1. He was not responsible for the invention of the mouse, as some would have you believe.  Though Jobs was essential in popularizing it, those accolades fall to Dr. Douglas Engelbart.
2. But he did invent Halo - check out this keynote from May of 2000. No, actually not really. Halo was initially developed for the Mac by Bungie Studios, and Jobs was he was going to use it to jump-start gaming on the Mac platform before Microsoft bought it out from under him.  He was not pleased.
3. If you're interested in more reading, here's a pretty great list: 7 Best Reads on Steve Jobs.  Be especially sure to read Brian Lam's article, Steve Jobs Was a Kind Man: My Regrets About Burning Him, and the infamous iPhone 4 prototype debacle.  

Eat your heart out, Don Draper.

I know, I know. You've already come all the way here to M&HD, and now I'm going to ask you to click a link to go allllll the way over to Flavorwire? You're tired, and you're pretty sure Flavorwire isn't even in a nice part of the interwebs. I can't believe I'm asking you to do it, either. But see, I happened to come across this very cool post highlighting some submissions from a Photoshop contest over at Worth 1000 (I know, a site covering a site covering a site... it's MADNESS.) The idea was to come up with old school advertisements (or adVERtisments, if you're British) for today's technology. There's some very clever stuff, not the least of which is a tiny, almost throw-away tag line for Nokia.

My favorite? A toss up between the aforementioned Nokia and The Amazing Wii. Check it out for yourself.

Start Saving Your Pennies...

Let's face it: It's 2011, we're not going to get the flying cars or hover boards of our childhood dreams. Both you and I spent countless Crayola hours dreaming how sweet our life would be while popping a backside ollie 180's on the most gorgeous magnetized board your Mauvelous-colored crayons could handle. (Unlike you, there were also a good amount of unicorns painting rainbows off of which I would half-cab) But the fact remains, we will never have this.

Let me pick your spirits back up off the floor by sharing with you what we CAN have in 2011. To do this, we have to tap into that inner Boba or indeed your inner Rocketeer. Folks, it's here. Finally a jet pack that an individual can have without stealing it from the military to fight Nazis!

Martin Jetpack developed a jet pack that sustains longer flights than those of its predecessors. "Initially designed with the leisure market in mind, commercial demand for the Martin Jetpack has seen the research and development programme focus on readying the product for use in a number of sectors including emergency response, defence and recreation, with numerous applications in each sector."


For the price of just one Mercedes-Benz S-Class, she can be all yours.

I can tell what you're thinking. "Pretty impressive, but there's no way I'll strap gasoline to my back even if I would look like the most amazing human being ever and I dressed up as Cobra Commander for Halloween, so that's saying something." Not to worry, there's a jet pack for you.

JetLev has developed a non-conventional jet pack for the sports enthusiast. The JetLev R200 uses water pressure to rocket you right out of the water and fly with ease (Can be used in fresh AND salt water!) "It is designed for safety, stability, ease-of-use, and precise and effortless flight controls. Learn basic flight with video-assisted training on land and as little as six minutes of on-water instructions." I don't know about you, but I love it when it only takes me 6 minutes to learn something.

Pardon the awful music in this video:

The price of this beauty is a whole $500 cheaper than the Martin Jetpack. A steal!

See you in the skies!

Sometimes You've Got to Make Some Love...

Happy Valentine's Day MT&HD! Let's celebrate in the only high-tech, low-class we way we know.

Apparently there's an app for that or 'it'. Matt Berry's Sexytime Soundtrack app aids you in setting the mood with your lady-friend (or fella-friend):

"Whether you’re placing your device gently on a mattress before the main event, or taking it out and waving it around down the pub this app uses the iPhone’s gyroscopic and accelerometric capabilities to provide the perfect sensual soundtrack. Not only that but by measuring your rhythm and speed my app will also judge your performance accordingly."

Check it out, download it, and make sure it's locked so you don't accidentally set it off during your board meeting today.

Matt Berry's Sexytime Soundtrack

Help me Obi-Wan, you're the only way to Rawk...

Yet another astounding trend in Japan.

Crowds flocking to a sold out tour featuring a popular artist sounds pretty normal. What is not normally is that the artist is a 10 foot tall animated hologram. I watched the video for the "headliner" (WTF?), but to actually see how the hologram actually works, I thought this was a better video.

If you pause at 1:02, you can clearly see the glass wall where she's being projected with the live band in the background. Why are they in the back, cause SCREW those guys for being humans, am I right?


I'll give her and her engineers credit for the sweet dance moves, but when I envisioned a world with life-like holograms, it just wasn't this. I'm still waiting for the Jaws 19 poster to leap out and take a bite.

Hey, have you seen that online interactive film… music video… interactive piece… thing?

Google launched a pretty neato “HTML 5 experience” today in the form of “The Wilderness Downtown”. It’s essentially an interactive music video that uses your childhood neighborhood as the setting. Provided it’s on Google Street View, that is. (If it’s not, definitely plug in an address that is to see the full effect.)

But it’s also a pretty sweet way to show off what HTML 5 can do. Which, in this case, is a story spread through multiple viewing windows, all centrally timed to open and close at specific moments that correspond to the soundtrack, and are populated with user-generated content. Pretty cool.

They might not show videos on MTV anymore, but if you can interact with them on this level that might be for the best. Turns out the internet may be a better vehicle anyway.

www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire

Notorious M.A.P.

The internet is a modern miracle simply for it's inherent ability to easily mash-up the seemingly unmashable.

For instance, just the other day I was wishing there were a simple resource that compiled locations from rap lyrics and then plotted then in an easy-to-navigate map so that I might actually visit, say, the club where Jay-Z stabbed that record exec. And it would preferably do it with Google Maps, as that's on double-true record as "the best".

Lo' and behold, the internet provides.

Average iphone user ... yes, like you Carl

I hate me some iphone 4.

Good use of three hours (sped up), but raises many questions.

How are you going to price it? Or display it in a gallery for that matter? Print it? Email it? Hang the original iPad....or what?

Mental note - don't throw away iPad

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/iphone-and-ipad-lost-in-the-trash-found-with-mobileme/

Rock Band 3 is going to make me wish I actually practiced my scales

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/06/rock-band-3/