Filed under: Abraham Harrison LLC

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about how the rise of location based technologies in cell phones and their integration into online mapping services. A couple interesting companies are Loopt and BrightKite.

I think this movement of the web to a more geography based system is really interseting. It is the flip side to the “global village” concept or the “globalization” concept where so much thinking is based around the reduction in the importance of location. You can effectively be a business based anywhere and have reach across the globe - space and place in this equation don’t matter.

However, the interesting feature that cell phones are bringing into the game is the importance of location. Where are you? Are we close? Where are all my friends? What business am I close too?

These are now questions we can answer in a way that we were never able to before. I am rather fascinated by this merging of technologies and reshaping of space and place.

I got back to the USA just the other day and while digging around on the net - checking in on some of my favorite blogs I came across a conference that started today in Burlingame, CA (just south of San Francisco). It is called Where 2.0 and looks rather interesting. In fact if I had $1800 to shell out I probably would have rushed off. In the meantime all I have is the ability to read whatever they put on their site. Maybe next year!!

I think that there is so much interesting stuff going on as the cell phone merges with the web and offers a huge amount of interesting and promising relationships as we move forward.

No Comments » Posted on May 12th, 2008 by Saul Wainwright

Filed under: Abraham Harrison, Abraham Harrison LLC, Abraham Harrison Staff, Chris Abraham, Crayon LLC, My ooVoo Day, bob garfield, ooVoo

Well, Abraham Harrison took part in the My ooVoo Day campaign as a subcontractor of crayon LLC and have spoken about it before but I just discovered a really groovy and cool redux of the entire day — well-cut and well done!

(I was the guy who took the video of Bob Garfield, see) What a fun project it was. Via Chris Abraham.

No Comments » Posted on May 3rd, 2008 by Chris Abraham

Filed under: Abraham Harrison LLC

This is gonna be a short post. I am tired, and my baby will wake me at 5am tomorrow. However, I came across a post about Nokia’s efforts in Africa on the Future Perfect blog.

Basically what Nokia is doing is setting up “open design studios” in the shanty towns of Africa (they are also doing this in South America and Asia) asking the locals (mostly teens) to come up with their design concepts.

You should check them out, it is really impressive. I am just amazed at what is going on in the cell phone world of Africa and how Nokia is focusing on this segment. They really get it somewhere.

I have to tell you that almost everyone I know in South Africa adores their Nokia phone. This is an incredible marketing feat for a Northern European company. Their efforts at meeting their customers on the ground and asking them what they want just blows my mind.

I am gonna post again about this soon - I have to spend some time digging around this blog - and a couple others that I have found.

No Comments » Posted on May 2nd, 2008 by Saul Wainwright

Filed under: Abraham Harrison LLC

While reading one of my new favorite blogs yesterday, White African, I came across this video of a presentation by Clay Shirky talking about his new book, Here Comes Everybody

I found the speech rather interesting, and I will have to try and get my hands on his book when I get back to the USA. In fact, I had never heard of Mr. Shirky until reading this blog post.

His main argument is that we have historically tried to find ways to fill our leisure time - first with gin, then with TV, and now with social media. In fact he quotes the fact that in the internet connected part of the world we collectively spend “roughly 1 trillion hours” watching TV. Heck, that is a lot of time. And he goes on to make the argument that if the internet and social media can garner just 1 percent of that time from TV we have the potential for a radical shift.

Why is this shift important? Because what this new media offers is participation - it allows me to write this blog and share it with all of you. It allows people to make videos, and share projects of all types. Basically to participate. Shirky points out that so far we have collectively spent 100 million hours of “human thought” building wikipedia.

I find this really interesting. What does this means for marketing, for products, for ideas and for collective citizenry? I agree with him, that we will always enjoy our TV shows - but maybe the younger generation will be much more into the “interactive” media. The type where they can affect it - kind of like “theater sports”.

Whatever the outcome it changes the landscape. It follows that we will have more and more participation - not all of it will produce good, and useful things. But, it will allow us to use our “free time” differently, and at the very least create the possibility for constructive engagement - at least part of the time, which TV never allowed us to do.

I say watch out TV world - you better come up with some new ideas.

No Comments » Posted on May 1st, 2008 by Saul Wainwright


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