LBi London

A museum without walls

Posted by Owen Booth May 26th, 2011

So the other night I was reading art critic Douglas Crimp’s 1980 essay “On the Museum’s Ruins” (published in “The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture”).

Crimp’s subject is the way the emergence of post-modern art in the 1960s and 70s challenged the authority of museums and galleries to decide how art should be organised and presented (bear with me).

By quoting, copying, referencing and mixing up images from different historical eras and contexts, works like Robert Rauschenberg’s screen prints questioned the practice of hanging works of art according to discrete historical periods, art movements or styles.

If one of Rauschenberg’s pictures can contain elements of both “Venus at Her Toilet” by Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1615) and a modern (1960s) street scene, the argument goes, then who’s to say where it should be displayed?

All of a sudden, curation – the selection, caretaking and presentation of works of art by highly trained and trusted experts – became a tricky business.

Of course, everyone is a curator now. Umberto Eco at the Louvre (his theme was The Infinity of Lists). Laurie Anderson, Nick Cave, David Bowie (and others) at the Meltdown Festival. Audiences (especially bohemian ones). Robots. Even boutique shopkeepers (when they’re not getting celebrities to curate things for them).

Plus me and you, every time we like or link to something via facebook or twitter (or create a spotify playlist, or add something to a tumblr, or expand our Last FM library).

As author – and ‘freelance curator’ – Marvin Heiferman puts it “the title curator is increasingly being used to describe anyone who turns a critical eye toward the aggregation or highlighting of whatever content seems to be at hand.”

Which, these days, is all of us.

One argument says that curating things is easier than creating things. It costs less – in terms of time, equipment, and talent for starters. And you get to enjoy a little bit of the glamour associated with creation without doing all that hard work.

However, when there’s far more content than anyone has the time to consume (or even find), curation has become a valuable social act. Valuable because it helps “synchronise communities”, as Clay Shirky argues (though for the first few seconds of the video it looks like he’s about to start playing the harmonica).

And valuable to the people who want to talk to those communities.

But back to Douglas Crimp. As he points out, in a museum or gallery things become defined by the act of being included. They are defined as ‘art’ rather than rubbish, defined as belonging to this artistic movement rather than that one, defined as being part of a particular narrative (how many different ways could we tell the story of the benin bronzes, for example?)

Conversely, when it comes to our online personas, the things that we include – by linking to them or posting them on our Facebook page – define us.

Do I want to be seen as the kind of person who forwards two-year-old viral videos that everyone has already seen, or as someone who provides links to intellectually stimulating pieces of classic postmodern thinking? Should I use twitter to link to the same sort of things that I like on Facebook? And what do those things say about me?

If I’m going to present myself as a commodity, what sort of commodity do I want everyone to think I am?

Context is everything here. Museums and galleries give context to cultural objects.  And the cultural objects we link to give context to our online identities.

One more thing that Crimp touches on in his essay:

Gustav Flaubert’s unfinished 1880 novel “Bouvard and Pecuchet” tells the story of two Parisian copy-clerks whose search for intellectual stimulation ultimately teaches them that, among other things, real life is very different to what one can learn from reading books.

Our heroes study landscape gardening, chemistry, anatomy, medicine, biology, geology, archaeology, architecture, literature, aesthetics, politics, love, gymnastics, theology, philosophy, religion, education, music and urban planning.

But whenever they try to apply what they’ve learned, everything goes wrong.

So –at least in one of Flaubert’s sketches for the book’s finale (he died before it was completed) –they go back to their original profession. Like Robert Rauschenberg, they start copying things: “…haphazardly, everything they find… old newspapers, posters, torn books … real items and their imitations…”

And the problem of context? Like the rest of us, at first Bouvard and Pecuchet have trouble “putting each thing in its proper place – and suffer great anxieties about it.” But finally they realise the important thing:

“The page must be filled! Everything is equal, the good and the evil. The farcical and the sublime… the insignificant and the typical, they all become and exaltation of the statistical. There are nothing but facts – and phenomena.”

And lots and lots of stuff.

Tags: content strategy, curation, Facebook, Social Media, social networks, twitter

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my new ‘Social TV’ experience

Posted by Riaz Ahmed May 25th, 2011

It’s smart and social…

So, over the (Royal) Easter break not only did I treat myself to lots of chocolate Easter eggs and even a Royal Wedding street party (thanks mum!), I went out and bought myself a new TV. Well it turns out that not only does my new Samsung D7000 produce crystal clear HD/3D output it’s also very smart and social…

Ok so it doesn’t suggest the next big IPO to invest in or go out and watch the football with me, but with a huge array of very cool and useful Internet-enabled features, my new Samsung TV, has not only made my viewing experience a whole lot more enriched but I think Samsung are on a journey that will make them stand out from not only the competition like Sony, but rival Internet TV services such as those provided by Google and Apple.

Connectivity and Streaming

With built-in Wi-Fi and a very easy set up process I was up and running within a few minutes. The first thing the TV did when it connected to my broadband Wi-Fi was to start updating itself…after the TV came on it instantly discovered my laptop which had ‘media share’ software installed. Media share software e.g. Windows Media Center, allows sharing of music, video and image files stored on your laptop to externally connected devices. This meant without further configuring or cabling I could view almost any media file from my laptop over Wi-Fi. Because the TV could support many different and newer media formats (MPEG4, Xvid, DivX, MKV, MP3, WMA, JPEG) none of my media files needed converting. Ok ok so lots of modern TV sets have this already so nothing new there, but wait it gets better…

Samsung Smart TV Hub (click for a larger image)

The ‘Hub’ Button

While unpacking the remote control, I noticed a button called hub, upon pressing it I was taken to the Samsung Smart TV Hub which is a portal to all the Samsung TV apps and features. Because I enjoy tweeting I immediately went to try out the TV Twitter app. But before I could load the app, I was taken to the ‘Register Services’ screen. This screen allowed me to create a single Samsung TV login account that would store my credentials for social networking TV services that were available such as: Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google Talk, etc

Tweet tweet... the Samsung Smart TV Twitter App (click for a larger image)

Social TV…tweet and watch!

Once I finished registering and logging into the Twitter service, I immediately found myself immersed into the world of Twitter on my TV where I could start viewing tweets, replying to tweets and almost anything that a Twitter app for my laptop or phone could do. What I really liked about the experience was that I was able to switch from using the full-sized app to a real-time social interactive tv view to allow what Samsung calls a ‘Social TV’ experience. Whenever I wanted the ‘Social TV’ experience all I had to do was press the social button on the remote control and have instant access to my social networking services. What would be really cool would be integration with Windows Live Messenger 2011…but with Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Skype it will be interesting to see what will happen in this space…

Samsung Smart TV Social TV (click for a larger image)

Samsung TV Apps Store

The Samsung Smart TV Twitter app was very slick and I wanted to discover more….so the next TV app I tried out was the BBC iPlayer app, again this was also impressive and I was able to start watching BBC content with very few presses on my remote. The BBC iPlayer HD content was particularly impressive and the programme search worked well and fast. Oh and I would like to point out that I only have a 4MB broadband connection at home and all the streaming worked well with very few judders! Likewise while trying out the YouTube TV app I was very impressed how it worked so seamlessly well with the TV and made good use of the remote control buttons to navigate through the app. I wanted to see what other apps I could download for the TV so I went back to the Smart Hub and navigated to the Samsung apps widget. This took me to the very impressive Samsung Apps Store where I could search and download a variety of cool apps for the TV. I think the UK Samsung app store has about a 100 apps so far, with newer apps always popping up, like the recent Explore 3D App

Samsung Smart TV App Store (click for a larger image)

Two million Five million downloaded TV apps

In a January 2011 press release, Samsung stated that two million apps had been downloaded from the Samsung TV app store. The press release went on to say:

“Samsung reached the 2 million mark within a year of the launch of Samsung Apps and the number of apps downloaded has doubled since November, when it reached one million downloads.”

“After reaching one million downloads, consumers have downloaded an average of 100,000 applications every five days.”

The full press release can be found here

Update: as this article goes live, Samsung are reporting that they have passed 5 million app downloads

A TV SDK* for the developer community

Back in September last year, Samsung ran a competition for developers to build the best looking and most innovative Samsung TV app. The winners shared a pot of 500,000 euros and the voting public got a chance to win a new Samsung TV. These types of initiatives always encourage more and more developers to develop for your platform and now Samsung claim they have over 400 TV apps available in over 120 countries.

After a little bit of digging around, I found that to develop a Samsung Smart TV app, you need skills in JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Developing a Samsung TV Widget seemed quite straightforward; Liam Green-Hughes has a great write up on developing a “Hello World” app on his blog.

* SDK: software development kit

Full Internet browsing with Flash but not HTML5 yet!

Another very cool feature on my Samsung TV is that it has a built-in fully functional web browser. The browser is based on an adaptive version of Google Chrome. The browsing experience is quite good and the experience is enhanced even more so by a built-in pointer in the remote control which acts like a mouse. The menu items in browser are easily accessible by the remote control buttons and the browsers ability to play flash content was a very welcome feature. The only drawback was the browser’s inability to play HTML5 content, but I have read that HTML5 will be fully supported and available in the coming months.

Samsung Smart TV Web Browser (click for a larger image)

Search

A very useful and well thought-out feature of the TV is search. The search function can be accessed directly from the remote control or from the Smart Hub. When I searched for ‘Arsenal’, the search app started searching for all Arsenal related content from Facebook, YouTube, Websites, Samsung TV apps and even my own media library that was stored on my laptop.

Samsung Smart TV Universal Search (click for a larger image)

(credit for picture with Iron Man 2 search: http://www.samsung.com/us/article/the-wonder-of-samsung-smart-tvs)

A Google TV/Apple TV Killer?

Absolutely yes! If Samsung keep investing in TV app development and roll out feature-rich updates with new Internet based widgets, apps and services to the Smart Hub, I think Samsung television owners won’t need to purchase Apple TV or Google TV products. Last week, Samsung UK announced a deal with Channel Five about rolling out a Five on Demand app. These are exactly the type of deals Samsung will need to do to get consumers choosing Samsung over other rivals. The more content providers that sign up with Samsung the more appealing these sets will become to consumers.

Whilst talking about rivals, Sony, will be launching their Internet TV sets in June/July this year. They are offering Internet based features similar to that of Samsung but have one big advantage……..Sony can provide a huge amount of Sony owned content like Hollywood blockbusters and a massive music catalogue. Currently this is available through the Qriocity TV service but I can see this expanding and becoming very feature rich. The only drawback is that the new Sony HX TV’s are much more expensive than Samsung’s identical sets.

So yes, it is smart and social

Ok so it doesn’t suggest the next big IPO to invest in (smart) or go out and watch the football with me (social) but with an array of top notch Internet enabled features, services and lots of TV apps in development, surely Samsung are on a winner and this is certainly the year of the Internet TV — with social being at the heart of Samsung’s offering.

Thanks for reading!

Riaz Ahmed is the Head of Microsoft Development at LBi and can be found here @TheRealRiaz and here LinkedIn

Tags: apple, Apple TV, Facebook, Google, Google TV, Internet TV, Microsoft, samsung, Samsung Smart TV, Skype, social, social networks, Social TV, Streaming, Technology, Windows Live Messenger

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Weekly Social Media Update

Posted by Sinead Doyle February 1st, 2011

Facebook Places Deals Arrive in the UK

Three months after the initial launch in the US, Facebook Places Deals have finally launched in the UK and Europe (Germany, France, Italy, and Spain). Initial partners include Starbucks, Yo Sushi, Mazda, O2, Argos, Debenhams, Alton Towers and Benetton. If this can bring the ease of Foursquare-style promotions together with the group discount appeal of Groupon, Facebook could well be onto a winner.

Gesture Control

Last week’s Truman Session explored the future of connected TV, and got some of us thinking about the new user interfaces it might require. Microsoft’s Kinect, recently named the fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history, has the potential to be used as an input device, though most current Kinect hacks are more for entertainment than utility, such as this Kinect controlled robot:

Here’s an installation at the Yahoo! headquarters, showing how such technology could be repurposed as a usable interface:

Minority Report is only a matter of time!

Social Media and the Egyptian Crisis

Social networks continue to play a vital role in times of crisis. Despite internet outages and attempts to block Facebook and Twitter access, inventive users have been finding ways to circumvent these problems using proxy servers and third-party apps. Google has launched a Voice-to-Twitter service to help protesters make their voices heard, and the BBC is following the situation live, supplementing its coverage with user-submitted videos, images and tweets. The number of tweets mentioning #Egypt peaked on the 26th of January, with over 250,000 messages.

#Egypt on Twitter

To show their support, other Twitter users have been retweeting messages that highlight the themes of censorship and oppression.

Censorship Tweet

Tags: connected TV, Deals, Egypt, Facebook, Facebook places, Facebook Places Deals, foursquare, gesture control, Google, Groupon, installation, Kinect, Minority Report, robot, Social Media, social networks, Starbucks, Truman Session, Voice-to-Twitter, yahoo!

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Weekly Social Media Update

Posted by Sinead Doyle November 23rd, 2010

Boutiques.com

In the run up to Christmas, Google has launched Boutiques.com, an online retail site that mixes powerful visual search technology with the functionality of a fashion social network. Users create virtual boutiques based on their fashion preferences, and can follow celebrity boutiques to get style recommendations. Funded by an advertising-based business model, it’s not surprising Google wants to experiment with using retail interfaces more engaging than the existing Google Shopping search results. If the site takes off in the US, we may see a UK version sometime next year.

BrandYou on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is seeking to reinforce its position as the place to build your own personal brand. Take the BrandYou survey, answer a few quick questions, and see how you fit in amongst the world’s biggest brands. It’s a bit like your own professional horoscope.

Where Is Your Line?

A thought provoking interactive video campaign from The Havens, a specialist centre for victims of rape or sexual abuse in London. Where Is Your Line? explores the boundaries of acceptable behaviour by asking you to click when you feel the line has been crossed. Tied in with results from a recent survey of young people’s attitudes, the film shows how your answer compares with the rest of the respondents. Interesting use of video for educational purposes.

Tags: Boutique, Boutiques, Boutiques.com, BrandYou, ecommerce, fashion, Google, interactive, linkedin, retail, social networks, The Havens, video, Where Is Your Line

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