Amsterdam is picking up the new Google Buzz social networking tool that was announced last week. Google has linked Buzz to Latitude as well (depending on the privacy settings). This means that people can see where their friends and what they’re doing. It’s interesting that not only your friends are visible, but all Buzz users nearby. This opens a lot of possibilities for creative minds and discussions on the privacy issues!
LG Digital has announced that a full A3 sized e-paper that will be introduced in April. The novelty in LG’s latest marvel, is that it makes the physical distribution and the every day hustle of printing millions of newspapers obsolete.
The Gutenberg era of mechanical reproduction is changing into digital reproduction. The smell of ink and the touch of fresh paper soon will be nostalgia. Newspaper corporations are sluggish and conservative in their approach to new media. The distribution costs rise dramatically and the product is a static, disposable, environmentally unfriendly medium. What is the USP of a news paper? Is it the content? The Smell? Selling Paper? Selling emotion? A combination of these elements? In this post, I will briefly elaborate on the contemporary distribution. And I will propose a distribution model that is based on digital reproductivity and its positive effect on the contemporary environment, distribution and costs.
Locative media should be mobile. Apple has mentioned, in a recent keynote at the introduction of the iPad, that their annual revenue for its mobile devices is almost 16 billion US dollars. That makes Apple the number one manufacturer of Locative Media. The iPhone and the Macbook will be accompanied by a tablet, the iPad. It is not a mobile phone, nor a laptop. It’s a hybrid. The iPad is mobile in a sense that one is able to carry it around in a case, but that’s not really mobile, is it? It’s hybrid in a sense that it is in between the high resolution of a static newspaper and LG’s flexible e-paper mentioned before. It’s the Toyota Prius of new media. A step in the right direction, but just not nearly there.