I started blogging because I wanted a place where I could capture all of the things that I see that I like and trigger me to think a bit.
Its pretty humbling then when you come across blogs like afrigadget, a site with genuine purpose and meaning.
Afrigadget is a blog dedicated to examples of African ingenuity applied to everyday issues faced by African people. Its an inspiring collection of hacks and workarounds from improvised lamps to build-your-own electric bikes.
What I love about the blog is that its just got so much purpose. Each idea showcased is powerful in its on right, but by pulling them together in one place, afrigadget is opening up the pathway for the ideas to be shareed, and built upon, right across the continent.
I have been spending some time on a site called Quirky recently, which is quietly socializing the design experience to create better and better products.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if these powerful concepts could come together - matching consensus process expertize with ingenuity and imagination. That feels like a genuine helping hand to the developing world.
Laugh all you want about the concept of blogging, but for every ihatemyparents, there is a blog like afrigadget sparking some real change.
Its announcement day over in SF today, and all indicators are that we will finally see the Apple tablet computer. Its a big launch for Apple, and I believe they are about to enter and take control of another emerging technology-format, in the same way that the iPhone has set the bar in smart-phone technology.
Andrew makes a great point on why he believes the tablet will be a huge success - much like the phone, it is developer-friendly, and the developer community is pretty excited about the potential to create apps that can capitalize on the reported 10” screen. I agree completely - by opening up the device to the app store, Apple has outsourced the development of pretty much any type of functionality that users of the device might want to see. If you want your tablet to do something, there is probably an app for it out there already.
But I am really interested in the larger implications at play here. The attention that an Apple device focuses on a media-form can have a profound impact on the way that content is consumed (just look at what the iPod did for music). I believe the tablet is about to have the same impact on publishing. The Kindle has been around for a while now, and digital sales of content have been chugging along, but then there were plenty of MP3 players before the iPod came along and they had a limited impact on digital music sales.
I would imagine that Apple is hard at work putting together distribution deals with the major publishers, of books, magazines and newspapers to bring their content to the tablet device. In the same way that it took a beautifully designed ipod to persuade the public to buy music digitally, it can often take a force like Apple to persuade content owners that they need to accelerate changes in their delivery mechanisms. If publishers are smart, they will have their content ready to stream to the tablet by the time it launches. In 3 years time this will be how we all consume content.
I find it so interesting that once again it might be a hardware manufacturer, rather than a content creator, that really sparks a change in the way that we consume content.
Generally speaking , you can stick some data on a map and I am in. Not many people are doing a better job of smart data presentation than the NYT. Their latest effort is a projection of DVD consumption by county within the New York area. Nothing too groundbreaking, but its pretty interesting to see how Vicky Cristina Barcelona polled by region versus, say, Tyler Perry.
Not the first time its been said on this blog, but if you can find the right way to package and present data, it can take on a whole new level of meaning and implication. I hope the distributors are paying attention, no one stands to gain more from understanding this data than they do.
