Hi, my name is Andy and I am a technologist. I’ve been monkeying about on the web since the mid 90s in one form or another, and I seem to have somehow turned some initial tinkering with very early HTML [^1] whilst avoiding my University coursework into a subsequent career in the London digital industry.
There's an awful lot of buzz at the moment about chatbots, conversational interfaces, and digital assistants like Amazon's Alexa - it seems like there is a steady march of AI into our lives, but is that a good thing?
For marketers and advertisers it may appear to be he beginnings of a brave new world of opportunities to deliver messages to consumers in new and "innovative" ways, but that is a fundamentally naive approach.
In the rush to be part of this brave new world it is this very simple question that is overlooked - "what is the value exchange"?
It seems like everyone is talking about AI at the moment, from your humble correspondent to Barack Obama
It’s been a few days since the Brexit vote dropped a metric (damn you, EU bureaucrats, with your pesky decimal systems) shit-ton of depression and uncertainty on the UK, European, and global economies, and after a few more pressing matters were attended to I have now had time to think about it in a bit more detail.
On 23 June 2015 I took part in my second Pecha Kucha session, talking about one of my hobbies — liqueur making.
Despite the fanfare and prolific advance sales of the Apple Watch when it was launched, many technology commentators are struggling with an existential issue: what is it?
Apple is no stranger to breaking new ground or creating wildly successful product categories in areas where big names had hitherto either failed or experienced marginal success, but there appear to be some fundamental questions about what kind of device the Apple Watch is.
On 24 March 2015 I took part in my first ever Pecha Kucha session, discussing the topic of calm technology.
Mobile World Congress 2015 is happening this week, and that means that a slew of shiny new slabs of technology will be touted with much gusto and hyperbole by their proud makers, and you can also rest assured (with a certain grim inevitably) that there will be a mountain of new accessories and companion products doing the rounds too, many of which will fall under the current buzzword du jour, "wearable".
"Wearable" technology and personal "smart" devices are seemingly ever-expanding categories of product that we are assured will fill all of the hitherto un-noticed empty niches in our lives - from health tracking to... more health tracking, but for my money very few of them are particularly compelling.
One of the things that has always sat awkwardly with me is the traditional ad agency idea of the "creative team" as epitomised by the symbiotic art director / copywriter partnership - there's no doubt that it has its place in traditional ad agency production work where the output is some variant of words and pictures (whether that be for print or TV), but in the context of a modern, digital agency it feels narrow, blinkered, and hopelessly anachronistic... yet it still persists.
Prompted by a recently-resurrected thread on Facebook from 3½ years ago, I thought I’d share a few snippets of my observations and opinions on the whole explosion of “steampunk culture” in recent years, because, well… because I can, I guess.