Results for articles with tag 'hacking' (6 total)
07/21/2009 12:02:19 PM 
(1) 
(1) Make is a leader of a movement and someone that understands how media needs to behave in the new environment.
It understands that you need to combine the physical and the digital to succeed, but more that those rational touch points, there's real power in being part of an emotionally charged movement.
Make both reflects and supports the growing DIY movement in the US. The movement that's gaining momentum as people increasingly look to the skills that can provide them with self-sufficiency and satisfaction.
What I really like about Make's approach is that they are prepared to support and highlight the community they are part of and play a key role in encouraging and enabling others to join.
Maker Faire is the living embodiment of the Make brand and a chance to see what the movement is all about as the maker's showcase their cars, robots, skills and smarts to an adoring public. It's a concept that clearly has legs and Make has the vision to take it further.
In August of this year, a Maker Faire will take place in Accra, Ghana its designed to serve as a celebration of African ingenuity, innovation and invention.
Make also is also launching an effort to connect its Makers to their local communities by organizing events in local bookstores.
At a time when the future of print media is being questioned, Make stands out as a brand that's smart enough to recognize that print is just one slice and there's a whole world of opportunity beyond. More than, it's also knows that there's power in the concentrated focus of a niche with significant forward movement because it's part of a movement. In many ways, Make is micro media, not mass media and it's an important benchmark, because that's where the power base of the future lies.
Perhaps old media now recognizes this because Martha Stewart is all over the home page of Make's site.
Posted by Ed Cotton
01/05/2009 10:10:54 AM
This is not a unit inside Apple responsible for updating the phone software, quite the opposite; it's a team of unpaid renegades who are tearing up the phone and hacking it to pieces. These are a group of highly motivated, unpaid folks who just love the challenge.
Here are some of the key points I took out of the piece.
1. Real time transparent communication is key
The group use IRC and file serving technologies to make sure all team members are kept in the loop
2. Intelligent groups can self-organize
The group has no need for leaders, each person is smart enough to understand their role and find one that matches their expertise.
3. The group is unified by a core motivation
"The same interest that I had with tearing apart my Speak & Spell as a kid, then my Tandy CoCo, then my Atari ST. I want to see what is inside and see if I can make it better. If I find something cool I tell other people about it."
4. The core motivation has an additional edge
The attitude of the Apple brand to the way in which it restricts the way the phone is used.
"Apple places restrictions on what you can run on the device. They impose draconian restrictions on the type of application that you can run, they don’t allow applications to run in the background and they even restrict the applications by subject matter or if they compete with their own applications."
Posted by Ed Cotton
04/12/2008 07:49:47 AM (3)
(3) Meaning, do they allow themselves to be easily adapted and changed for new uses?
This is basically hacking.
The Wii is one of the more interesting ones of the moment because of its cultural presence and the interesting infa red and motion sensing technology that it has.
Here Johnny Lee shows a stunned audience at this year's TED conference, a couple of very cool hacks.
I think his comment about spreading the hacks through YouTube is especially relevant.
Brands could create whole ecosystems with communities of users who play, develop and share ideas in this way.
Perhaps, it's no longer about a closed box, but something that's open and can be constantly played with and its limits tested and explored.
Posted by Ed Cotton
11/08/2007 03:45:49 AM
A great example of this is Ikeahacker; a blog devoted to “playing” with Ikea’s flat pack furniture, in ways that don’t appear on the official list of instructions.
It’s the furniture equivalent of voiding your car warranty by installing nitro tanks. While many of this efforts is playful and come out of an endearing relationship with the brand, others might be of the “Fight Club” variety, all cynical and full of spite.
This type of attack was unleashed recently with this film that apparently exposes the contradictory motivations of consumer goods giant Unilever.
While Madison Avenue maybe cooling on the consumer-created trend, with the fabulous exception of the newish Apple’s iPod Touch spot (see below-original upload first- agency-consumer co-produced version-second), people are still going to do this stuff, regardless of whether you pay them, entice them and brands are just going to have to live with the consequences. The genie is out of the bottle, live with it.
Posted by Ed Cotton
08/21/2007 06:13:30 AM
In the later part of the C20th, two forces emerged that changed branding.
The first was the drive by marketing experts and ad agencies to suggest that brands needed emotional differentiation in a world where all brands were functionally similar.
Secondly, businesses discovered that a quick way to improve shareholder value was to strip out as much of the costs as possible.
We are now starting to feel the consequences of both these actions. We are starting to see a "brand vacuum" emerge, a fault line between what brands say they do and what they actually do. The rapid rise of the Internet is making it hard for brands to manage and control this ever widening chasm.
Recently, the notion of marketing experts that brands are at parity and that it’s therefore impossible to provide rational brand differentiation is being severely tested.
If the global factory, producing all our goods, China, can’t be trusted for safety, what does that say about the quality of the brands produced there?