iPhone App Review: Kotoba!

I’m often asked what it’s like to live in Tokyo.

I usually say that it is chaotic and inspiring.

Sometimes the chaos is a little too much, and I need to find a way to organize it all. That’s when I’ll make a drawing, make a list or try to learn a little bit more of the language.

My attempts at self teaching myself Japanese have been largely unfruitful until recently. I finally feel like I am making some strides thanks to a great iPhone application.

It’s called Kotoba! (the exclamation mark is a part of the title, personally I refuse to use them for showing enthusiasm, just irony.)

The app is a highly functional English/Japanese bilingual dictionary. You can either start with entering an English word to find the Japanese, or you can enter the phonetical roman character equivalent of a Japanese word, and it will back translate it into English.

If I am out to dinner, or in a primarily Japanese speaking meeting, I have the app running constantly.

Other translators I have tried pale in comparison. Usually they don’t accept romanized Japanese word queries, but require you to have a mastery of the actual Japanese characters.

Once you find the word you are looking for, it shows you the characters that make it up. It also translates the word into Spanish, German and French. And it gives you a sample sentence with how to further use the word.

Fantastic! (damn, broke my own rule…)

Now my constant curiosity about what kind of bad things are being said about me right in front of me can be satisfied in damn near real-time. (keep that in mind coworkers…)

There are two things I would add to improve this application.

1. Include audio recognition. So you could speak into the microphone what you heard, and it would spit back the translation results.

2. Improve the phonetical search. Right now you have to spell the phonetical version of a Japanese word in the exact precise way to get any results. It would be nice if the search allowed you to spell out what you heard, and for the application to give you a range of ‘near matches’ that you could then look through and contextually decide which one you are looking for.

This is the kind of iPhone app I get excited about. It is a lifesaving tool for this fish out of water. It has tangibly improved the quality of life over here. This coupled with the Metro finder and a handy restaurant guide have started opening up more portals in this city.

Grade A technology. A couple tweaks and it earns the A+.

Digital Philosophy

Don’t do everything.

Do one thing well. Don’t turn every project or brief into an opportunity to show you know the comprehensive digital landscape. You are not reinventing the internet here. You can do simple, small things in this space. Do them well. And do many of them. Comprehensive knowledge of digital is demonstrated over time, not in a single glorious campaign.

Be Beta/Update minded.

Releases or launches don’t have to be definitive. Be open to consumer feedback. Take a ‘let’s work together to make the best service possible’ approach. No brand or program is perfect. When media was confined to traditional outlets like television and print, brands could pretend to be perfect. They could take months crafted the absolute bulletproof appearance of perfection. But times had radically changed, and in digital, no one is perfect, because the whole scene is evolving. You just need to jump in, and upgrade as you go. Make every step make sense for right now, but be flexible to go back and make the same thing better later. Be incrementally minded.

Be responsive. Be real-time.

Free up your thinking and some budget to be timely. Relevant responses to hot issues and topics have a greater chance to ‘go viral’ because they are acting as a parasite to something that is already consuming mass mindspace. Sports brands should be insanely timely. They should think like newspapers, but in their brand voice. ESPN gets closest to this. But there are some other brands out there that could really get some serious hangtime if they committed to a more real time approach to sports marketing. Brands should present the information and put their unique spin on it, not just be a news service.

Rally groups of people to a common goal.

Digital media connects us all more than Kevin Bacon connects Hollywood. Key in on those pockets of passion, and give large groups a collective assignment, with minimum involvement, that results in something memorable. That’s as vague and jargon sounding as I can be about this.

People still love video.

Digital doesn’t mean that video, TV or filmmaking is dead. Everything doesn’t have to be a Flash application. Stories told as one-way, well made, moving images still have crown jewel status in the overall media landscape. You can start with an amazing piece of video, and then find smart and relevant ways to disseminate and surprise people with the digital extensions. Keep making films people!

Keep it simple.

Do your one thing, with style and strong branded voice. Don’t let the technology stifle the personality of your brand. Use the functionality of modern technology to fuel something human. Something emotional. This can be accomplished in a microsite, a banner ad, an iPhone app, or something that doesn’t even exist yet. Execute your one idea, and then move on to your next triumph.

I look forward to see what you do next.

The Creative Machine

Human creativity has run its course.

It’s time to turn the future of art and storytelling over to the machines.

Why must machines always be our servants? Why must they only be endless columns of databases? Is it their inescapable fate to serve the rest of eternity as elaborate calculators?

Give me a program that runs complex algorithms capable of outperforming a room full of inspired artists. Surely with technology these days, one super charged computer could be inputted with every feature film ever produced, and be able to analyze with razor sharp scrutiny the merits of filmmaking to the point it could predict where to take film next.

With a database consisting of everything from Citizen Kane to highly obscure and experimental projects screened at even more obscure festivals, this computer could cross pollinate the creative gut of masters and virtuosos enough to understand a superior range of aesthetic than 50 Steven Spielbergs sitting through 50 years of film school.

Give me a machine that can get behind a camera, and quickly reduce the framing of a shot down to its best, most provocative framing. Ultimately this will save hours of haggling and studio time, as the machine will be able to make split second creative decisions. It will also be able to act as director and director of photography, in another budget friendly development.

Give me a machine that can observe an actor’s performance and be able to deduce when the line was delivered with the purest human emotion, at its most natural and raw level. Give me a machine that can yell ‘cut!’ once it has seen the exact take it was looking for. Give me a machine that is cognizant of the apex of human emotion, yet also keenly aware of overacting and other acting contrivances that would fool a lesser director.

Hell, give me a machine that can straight up simulate a human being and guide it through the exact performance required. We’ve witnessed exponential improvements in the CGI arts, lets wrap all those developments into the same package here.

Give me a machine that can look at a sequence of film in the editing suite, and determine the most surprising, most impactful score to set against it. Give me that same machine that is equally adept at licensing existing music as it is in creating its own custom tracks. And let this machine have instruments that have not been invented yet in its arsenal.

On the business side of things, let this same machine be able to haggle and convince hard nosed studio executives into realizing now is the right time to release this new film and to invest heavily into it.

Let this machine also be a master level marketer, able to create the perfect campaign leveraging new media to not only hit all of the ideal targets, but also able to turn every person into the ideal audience through a series of persuasive yet authentic arguments.

There should only be a limited number of these machines, as the creative overload of perfect pieces of art would ultimately cancel eachother out in the eyes and ears of the unprepared. We need to be introduced to creative perfection slowly. We are not used to master level works of art being disseminated through the popular channels. I suggest just developing one of these machines to start with, and releasing it independently of any studio system, and just letting its work emerge as a natural force.

More to come.

I’ve gotta go look over some complex algorithms.

The New Storytelling

Mankind’s original stories existed on the walls of some cave.

Fast forward significantly and we have people lining up around the block to see the latest series of moving images flickering against the posh walls of a movie theater.

Stories have been stalled at a certain level for some time now, and I’m just wondering when the advent of all this ubiquitous new media is going to lead us to the promised land of new storytelling.

Effectively, new media has made ALL PREVIOUS MEDIA able to coexist in the same space. Video leads to text which flows into animation which takes us to a series of photos. Every arrow of storytelling dating back to those early cave paintings is now available in our quivers and ready for us to deploy in the name of finding new ways to tell stories.

Seriously, what if these multimedia options had been available to some of the great storytellers throughout the ages.

What kind of paranoid experience would Orson Wells cobble together with a mix of sounds, images and interactivity?

What if you could have decided where Indiana Jones should’ve started digging to unearth the lost ark?

You think Mark Twain wouldn’t have dabbled in some kind of additional storytelling device to take with him on his lecture series?

What if the interactivity of our age had been at the disposal of Jack Kerouac when he tapped out On the Road? What would he have added to Dean Moriarty’s cross country travels? Would Kerouac have embedded a little jazz bop to play as we encountered the first few paragraphs? Would he have built a hallucinogenic montage to play during some of the road tripping soliloquies?

With great creative power comes great storytelling responsibility.

Tragically, it seems most of the conversations I hear or articles I read about any kind of new stories, all center around commercialism. Corporate giants are looking for new ways to ‘tell their stories.’

Gag.

Skip.

Pass.

What about lone individuals seizing the power of this new media to tell their personal stories, just for the hell of it. New media stories, tackled with the same conviction as the Great Gatsby, 1984, or any of the other stories that have become essential and required fiction of past eras.

Who is to say that the traditional ways of storytelling will be the only ways of storytelling that will last in the future.

What about experiential storytelling?

Interactive storytelling?

There is a new promise and a new hope in the combinations this new technology has granted us. So far, this technology has primarily been harnessed to disseminate information. To educate, to inform, to update.

Let’s get fictional with it peeps.

What if wikipedia were pure, riveting, interconnected nonsense? What if news feeds were not just for celebrity and technology gossip? What if there was something like ‘story feeds’ or ‘story updates.’ The internet has well mined our collective consciousness with it’s constant boops, beeps and tweets. And what are we finding? We are discovering what everyone ate for lunch and what shoes are about to come out. We are regurgitating information. Not creating anything new.

I hope the next great leap in this new media saga is a leap forward in fiction.

I am ready for the new storytelling.

The Groundhog of Technology Saw Its Shadow

When we jumped from radio to TV, that was an instant advancement.

When we flickered back and forth between TV and the internet, it was us questioning what the advancement was exactly. The benefit wasn’t immediate. Certain enlightened folks got in there first, and slowly made things that garnered a wider acceptance. It was a new civilization that needed building.

But I don’t think the transformation in near completion yet.

What is the stand alone benefit of this technology? There is something interactive now, and something about endless possibilities. But there is no core singular benefit. Yet we are relying wholly on the power we claim this digital realm has. The belief has come well ahead of collective understanding. Hence the confusion?

Hence ‘internet radio’ and ‘internet TV.’

But, what is the internet on its own? Why does it always need an additional metaphor for it to make sense to us? Or is it less a format and more the most comprehensive way to archive media to date?

Connection is a benefit, but does it render moving pictures irrelevant, the way radio formats were killed off by the advent of television?

Or is the internet more akin to a new postal service? The mode and method of connecting and transferring information, but not a pure replacement of what we can gain and experience from the quote unquote traditional media?

Traditional media is collapsing, but is it being replaced by a meaty enough alternative? Are we losing value and something human by encouraging a full switch to digital? What does that even mean? Does anyone know the implications?

I long for the charm of analog, and the not instantly connected. I long for the charm of human discovering, offline experience. I long for deep understanding, not just instant wiki-like access.

Was radio completely killed by TV the way they suspected? No, it evolved. It got more interactive, compelling and multi-dimensional. The same is needed of today’s media formats. How can a newspaper or print magazine reinvent what it does and offers, be enhanced by the inclusion of digital thinking?

Let’s enhance, not replace, where we can. Less of a restart and more of an evolution. More touchy feely, and less clickety clack.

John Maeda pointed out in a recent talk at Wieden+Kennedy Tokyo, that technology has expanded exponentially as we all know, but that our lives remain largely unchanged. He said we were stuck in a Groundhog Day. Reliving the same day, with superficial advances in technology tricking us into thinking everything has changed. How do we break free of this repetitive loop and forge new ground? How do we get to new places if the technology has limited us to certain predictable outcomes? Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator make good examples. How much have those programs evolved and led to new means of creation? Or how much does an Illustrator piece of art largely look the same as it did five years ago? Things like this have become less a tool and more a style.

Let’s try new things. New combinations. Not just use the repetitive and predictable function of technology today. How can we use it in a new way? Can it make the human experience better? More textured?

We are all connected, and that seems positive. I’m interested in how this instant connection can lead to new collaborations. Collaborating across time and space. Ideas mixing from different cultures. We have the access and the bandwidth to do this. What new things could be make together?

Let’s take this connection and make some new stuff. Some new stuff that exists physically maybe. Things that live in this world, that are impermanent and beautiful in their fleeting, analog way. Let’s leave an evidence of our ideas together. Let’s take this world to new places and fill it with new thoughts.

(Sometimes you just wake up in a really philosophical place)

How do you make your digital a little more analog?

On New Media

I think the temptation with all the new interactive bells and whistles out there these days, is to bring everything you’ve heard about into each campaign. There is this pull to prove you know the entire lay of the landscape, instead of focusing on the one or two ways that would effectively communicate your idea.

Maybe learning how to be tasteful with the digital space is akin to a beginning photoshopper who is compelled to use every filter in the program. Rainbow gradient? that makes my idea look important! Ohhh, and then I can make it look like it was rendered in oil pastel! Eureka!

I’m thinking more bite sized, strategic thinking on digital might be in order. Take your idea, and extend it in the best way you can think of. You don’t need to have five microsites, ten widgets and three interactive music videos. We get it, you understand the space. Now use your knowledge in tasteful, but potent moderation.