Now, onto the topic at hand: the latest round of Pecha Kucha presentations held over cake, tea and the like brought with them a combination of art, film and technology. For those of you who haven’t immediately popped out to the bakery, here’s a rundown of what went on at Cogapp’s Pecha Kucha 3.0:

In his own unique style, Colin kicked off proceedings with his long anticipated ‘Sketcha Kucha’ (again, really sorry about the dire puns). Having, over the last two weeks, asked us all at varying points to do quick self portraits, Colin displayed these to us with a few musings about his first love: pencils. Re-igniting in us a passion for the importance of designing with our hands rather than mice, Colin displayed the incredible results achieved by using age-old tools over modern techo-easels.

Following Colin was Niki with her 6 minute 40 second delight entitled ‘Hitchcock and Me’. During her studies in Newcastle Niki earned her keep by working at the Tyneside Cinema, where she became engrossed by the work of Alfred Hitchcock. She shared with us her fascination and introduced us to a few insights into Hitchcock’s mind and work; aside from delving into the depths of his psyche to discover the root of his passion for crime thrillers and explaining to us the reason for his infamous cameos, she also elaborated on his extensive legacy and the many pastiches and homages that have been paid to him over the years.

Sam came next with his presentation, ‘I’ll wave you’, all about Google’s new Wave technology. With it’s nomenclature rooted in sci-fi, Google’s new creation is being created with the principles that real-time is useful, rich media is powerful, open-sourcing is invaluable and that ambitious beginnings will create potent results. Still in its alpha phase, Wave is looking to be that rarest of beasts: a subtle and yet at the same time radical evolution in online communication. We’re waiting eagerly to see how it pans out.

Rachael gave the penultimate presentation of the day, but I’m afraid that as it was closely related to a project we’re working on, I’ll have to let its topic remain a mystery for now. All I can tell you is that it was met with equal amounts of delight, intrigue, awe and cake-scoffing.

Last, but by no means least, came Eleanor with her talk, ‘Hands (& other things)’. To draw things to a close, Eleanor spoke of her love of getting hands-on with projects and having a tactile involvement with them. She told us about recent designers who are rediscovering their love of physical engagement with their work. By getting up close and personal with projects, Eleanor revealed how the visible human involvement really adds to the final product rather than detracts from it, and how she’d rather spend a day screen printing than five minutes on Photoshop.

So, just as we ended the presentations there, so I’ll end the blog post here, and leave you looking forward to the summary of our next Pecha Kucha sessions (and dreading the inevitable dire blog title, ‘Pecha Kucha Episode 4: A New Cake’ anyone?)

The hype around real-time search, particularly focussed on everyone’s favourite micro-blogging service, has certainly caused the major search engines to take note. The power of real-time data, most obviously encapsulated in Twitter’s trending topics, seems to prove itself weekly (or, if you like, instantly).

At the core of my previous post was the inclination that, despite the hype, major search engines and services like Twitter have entirely different missions – and they know it. Both the widespread creation of real-time data, and appetite for its consumption, are relatively recent phenomena. If this information is being created, and is valuable, Google will work to index it as part of its mission to organise the world’s information. Indexing tweets is one important step towards this, and… hey look they announced it. As did Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine. The latter seems to have rushed out a rather confusing solution, the big G is taking its time, and I for one will be watching carefully to see how they roll this out without disrupting their archetypal search results page and carefully honed user experience.

But wait, there’s more. Discussion in the comments of my previous post touched upon the possible ways Google could introduce social components or ‘filters’ – social, that is, beyond my point that the Google machine has fundamentally always been social, since the web itself is social. As people take greater control of their networks, and discover more and more content through social recommendation instead of search, how can search evolve? Google Social Search is a new experimental product, announced this week, which seems to be a first stab at that very significant challenge. The idea is that you create a public Google profile, and add your sites to it (such as your Twitter page). It will then bring results to search queries from (but not limited to) content published by your wider social network, including your Gmail contacts, people you follow on FriendFeed, and more.

Such experiments bubble up from the Googleplex quite often, and frequently don’t reach the surface; but the intention to add a social nuance to personalised search clearly exists. Search just got a little friendlier.

Joe dug deep into the back-end of Google Maps, scouring miles of code and a nigh on infinite amount of pictures to find the deeply hidden algorithm that reveals how Google Street View works according to Google Japan:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ben stumbled upon this gem from the Ukrainian version of Britain’s Got Talent, cunningly titled, ‘Ukraine’s Got Talent’ (what will they think of next?). There’s not much that can be said about it that isn’t summed up by one of the judge’s comments: ‘It was an honour to watch.’

Click here to view the embedded video.

Finally, for all you out there who love mechanics and who love dogs, this mechanical dog that Joshua found should be just up your street:

Click here to view the embedded video.

To those of you looking for Top of the Pops who have come to this blog-post accidentally I say “fret not wandering searcher”, for you have stumbled upon a treasure far more substantial than the much-mourned TOTP. You have stumbled upon Cogapp’s TTOP: Tech Tuesday Outreach Program.

Firstly, let’s get a bit of background out of the way. Tech Tuesday is a fortnightly occurrence here at Cogapp central. The Technical Department gather round Japanese food in our conference room and discuss all manner of tech related trivia, from iPhones to ICONS and anything else they’re musing about. This has tended to be the realm of digital gurus, technological masterminds and computational wizards in the past, but this week Tristan decided to mix things up by opening the invitation to the entire office (and holding Tech Tuesday on a Wednesday, but that’s less dramatic). Not only this, but having recently been to London’s Over the Air event, he had been inspired by the presentation given by Tom Hume (MD of Future Platforms) and Joh Hunt (a postgraduate researcher at the University of Sussex) called “Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain”. So with material generously lent to us from Tom and Joh, and an invitation to the hallowed halls of Tech Tuesday extended to everyone, we descended upon the gathering. With almost all of the Cogapp team involved, Tristan had a much larger audience to demonstrate his digital delights to; the Tech Tuesday Outreach Program had begun.

Tristan started with background information and a brief about what we were going to be doing before swiftly moving onto the main event of the TTOP. “Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain” is a group exercise designed to get people with different skills working together on one project at the same time. This interdisciplinary approach creates a hotbed of creativity and ingenuity as ideas are proposed and almost instantly analysed by experts in various fields. With specialists from design, tech, production, user experience, finance and business development all bouncing ideas off each other, the inventive juices really got flowing.

But enough of the build up, “What was it you were actually doing?” I hear you cry. The exercise splits the group into several teams (in our case, 4 teams of about 5 people) and introduces us to the fictional Jeremy, a 34 year old married civil engineer with 2 young children. He is a novice in the world of mobiles – using his allocated texts, minutes and data allowance sparingly – but considers himself technically aware. He is dyslexic and enjoys nothing more than exploring his local peak as part of a spot of mountaineering. Each team was asked to design a mobile application for Jeremy that would allow him to interact with his workmates and family whilst on a mountain, and given a swanky dummy mobile on which to design it.

The teams all went to different corners of the office and got prototyping. Whilst I can’t speak for the creative methodology behind the other groups, we had a discussion and created a Journey On inspired mountain route planning and sharing application that we dubbed Journey Up. After hours (or minutes) of intensive (or lighthearted) prototyping, we had our idea, and we welcomed Mr. Joe Baskerville from a competing team for a bit of vigorous (or easygoing) user testing. This part of the exercise really highlighted the necessity of even the smallest amount of user testing, as clearly apparent but previously unidentified kinks in our product were brought to light by Joe’s scrutinising eyes.

After a reconvening session where teams displayed their designs so far, the proverbial spanner wasn’t so much thrown into the works as it was hurled in with wild abandon as Tristan instructed us to swap the mobiles on which we had been developing our apps. In all cases this completely changed the capability of the technology with which we had been working. All the teams had to adapt their development to accommodate the new technology and whilst some (a campfire emulator was adapted to incorporate a music purchasing program by one team) were more successful than others (Journey Up took a big hit when GPS was removed from our phone’s spec), it showed how important it is to keep the wider audience in mind at all stages of development.

After a quick discussion of the lessons we’d all learned and a riotous round of applause, TTOP ended. Hats off to Tristan for a brilliant and welcoming Tech Tuesday, and indeed to Tom Hume and Joh Hunt for creating an imaginative and thought provoking exercise (read about their successful running of the event here and here).

The day kicked off with a panel debate centred around the idea of ‘Post Digital’ asking the question, ‘If everything is digital, then what’s next?’ In a world where everything references digital media, how does our industry need to respond? This was a fascinating insight into the minds of the panel members more than anything, with the illustrious Adrian Shaughnessy leading the discussions.

This then lead the way for the first 5D interlude of the day by MOTH who beautifully showed their passion for experimental technology and for pushing the boundaries of traditional VJing. MOTH bridge the divide between video mixing and street art, generating site-specific video graffiti designed in response to the morphology, texture and ambience of the spaces and structures of the outside world.

Another presentation that particularly caught my interest was one by Lichtfaktor. You might recognise the work of these lords of luminosity from the TalkTalk television adverts (which also bookend each segment of ITV’s popular X-factor). Their work in light-writing is spectacular, ranging from relatively standard incarnations of the practice, through to an amazing light-printer that allows pre-written messages to be created and captured in the same way as standard light-writing.

Wet Design also grabbed my attention. They’re known for their work on the incredible Bellagio fountain, and are just finishing a new fountain installation on behalf of Emaar Properties for the Burj Dubai Lake. This new attraction – which incorporates 6,600 lights and 50 colour projectors – is 275 metres long and shoots 22,000 gallons of water 150 metres into the air… that’s a lot of big numbers I’m sure you’ll agree, and the end result is extremely impressive.

Joe Baskerville of Cogapp fame also contributed a 5D interlude. His talk focussed on human-computer interaction and the various exciting technologies that are being implemented in this realm to allow us to interface with technology in new and unusual ways. One of my personal highlights from his talk was a projector that could detect when people came near the image it was projecting and adapt so that their bodies became part of the canvas for the display. The result was eerie but awesome.

I also particularly enjoyed his information about Sony and Microsoft’s recent divergence into experimental interactions, and the display of digital graffiti (which we demonstrated to partygoers at last year’s Cogapp Christmas party). Reactable – a new musical instrument created by placing objects on aninteractive surface – was also fascinating and showed how progress in interaction is racing along.

Joe rounded off his presentation by enlightening the audience about our recent exploits in combining the world of people and the world of pong to create… People Pong! This game revolutionises the classic concept of pong by allowing players to control the paddles with their eyes! Read more about it here.

All in all, i-Design was a great day and really showed how interactive design is a fast-moving realm. Who knows what incredible feats will be on display at next year’s conference?

First up to the stand this time around was resident User Experience Consultant Cathy. Giving a presentation on the CERN Common Control Centre and some work she conducted there before she joined Cogapp, Cathy’s talk taught us all a little about physics, a lot about user-centred environmental design, some things about Switzerland and a huge amount about how captivating an audience can make them completely forget about the cake in front of them.

In Cathy’s wake came the illustrious Martin Edwards, Front End Web Developer and Hong Kong knowledge fountain. His talk, about his recent trip to the Far East, featured highlights including fires on rooftops, a theatre made entirely of bamboo, electronic plastic darts and the most dubious use of Photoshop known to man:

Producer extraordinaire Gavin stepped up next to take us through progress he’s been making on a project he’s recently been working. Whilst details on the presentation will have to remain elusive for now as the project is still a work-in-progress, I can let you in on a quiz Gavin had us playing mid-Pecha-Kucha: can you guess which 2 Cogapp projects the following image is trying to describe? Answers at the bottom of this post…

Tristan followed Gavin’s presentation with a talk about British Sea Forts. Having the honour of giving the first in house presentation to include handouts, Tristan gave a riveting talk about these rare beings – including information about them being built, sunk, owned, invaded, converted, renovated, experimented with and even turned into artistic installations. Turns out our sea forts are things of many talents!

Programmer by day, free software aficionado by night Alex Bridge stepped up to the mark next with his talk entitled ‘Free Software – what is it and why should you care?’. In this talk, he elaborated all about free software, what it is and – surprisingly – why we should care. He explained the methodology and principles behind the incredible concept of free software, and the pros and cons of using and developing it over its proprietary kin.

Billy and Calum rounded off proceedings with an insight into the good, the bad and the downright ugly parts of our student tech coding competition Codeo. Being the lowly Business Development Coordinator that I am, most of the technical side of this presentation flew over my head like Superman on a Concorde, but I could tell by the looks on the faces of the tech department that it was a great insight into how the competition is coming along and how the universities are integrating it into their semesters.

That rounded up the presentations for this time, and once the remainder of the cake had been eaten we all headed back to our desks much enlightened. Oh, and for those still wondering, Gavin’s slide was referring to the Kidney Patient Guide (kid, knee, patient, guide) and ICONS (eye, cons). It’s easy when you know how!

Given that there’s a keen group of photographers in the company, and music is a big part of office life, I thought I’d highlight a couple of projects relating to these interests that were developed in Open Frameworks. The first is Portrait Machine: this is an interactive photography installation by Theo Watson that “visualises the connections between visitors” to the gallery. Museums and galleries are amazing places but I think that sometimes they are too inhibited, almost library like. This installation really breaks down this habitual attitude to viewing art in an institution. The people in the images are involved in the installation and look very happy to be so. They will have gone away feeling enthused to tell others to make the trip to the CBK Amsterdam.

The second project I’d like to tell you about is the Youth Music Box. This installation celebrates the 10th anniversary of the charity Youth Music.

“The aim of the Youth Music Box is to allow people of any musical ability to have a hands-on music making experience using cutting-edge digital equipment and, in particular, to inspire more children and young people to get involved in music-making.”

This is another example of an innovative, collaborative project aimed at making visitors part of the installation. Engaging people in the experience of making art is, in my opinion, the best way to get new and regular visitors exposed to the amazing things on offer inside the world of art.

First, look to the Far East where the landscape is remarkably different – Baidu holds a mountainous 69% in China, while Google has only a hilly 25% (July 2009). Second, stop thinking about search purely in terms of the ‘traditional’ search engines, since these now represent only one of many powerful ways to discover content, and the picture is less clear.

The classic tussling for search engine market share remains, without doubt, critically important to the web’s dynamics. Despite its ‘Don’t be evil’ motto, some people are fearful of Google’s dominance, and rooting for its imminent downfall. But it didn’t reach the top through coercion, foul play, or even clever marketing – it did so because it had the best technical solution to one of the web’s biggest problems: organising its mind-boggling masses of data. The most fascinating questions to my mind are not whether people might desert Google in fear of their privacy, but who can provide the best solutions to the web’s increasingly complex problems and keep up with dramatic changes in user behaviour?

The topic of the moment is real-time search. Relative new kid on the block Twitter has made a small but prominent dent in the web with its microblogging service. Its internal search engine provides near instant updates of what people are discussing, and the service has proven to be a powerful tool in breaking news and covering real world events. Google has admitted performing less well in this respect, and rightly so. But it has a far bigger job to do than Twitter, which is only indexing data on its own servers and can only organise information through chronology. It’s not a threat, but an indirect prod that says “there’s an appetite for this real-time data – how are you going to handle it?”

One of Twitter’s most compelling features is its display of trends. They’re fascinating, but isn’t Google effectively viewing the web as a huge collection of long-term trends, within which people can search very specifically? After all, the method with which Google gives a page ‘authority’ is by the number of links directed towards it, links that should (and, despite unscrupulous techniques, still for the larger part do) show people recommending that page. Google was always social, it just operates in slow-motion.

A form of recommendation was at the root of Google’s first (and reigning) superior technical solution. Now the web is both bigger and more social, the role of recommendation has never been more profound. There are three prominent models, which I shall liberally over-simplify:

• Look at everything you can find, weigh up what everyone values as best you can, let people search it (that’s Google, kinda)
• Create interconnected networks and let people see what their friends find value in (Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon)
• Look at what a person does, compare it with what other people do, make suggestions (Amazon, Last.fm)

The points at which these models intersect represent, at least to me, some of the most interesting developments in search. One cannot be shoe-horned into the other, but imaginative overlaps can and have been emerging. Search engines promoting results based on what you searched for and clicked on in the past. Social networks recommending you new friends based on what you talk about or comment on. Popular e-commerce sites letting you search what your friends are buying without invading each’s individual privacy.

The tussle continues. The scale of the web will always require computers to do the heavy lifting, yet sometimes people power is the only thing that makes sense.

If the digital door is closed, can this create a frenzy?

I was watching a BBC documentary about The Beatles first visit to America a couple of weeks ago. This little nugget of film making was a collection of behind the scenes clips of the fab four and the madness that unfolded around them: no narration, no colour and no surprises there. We’ve all seen the photos a million times and this is certainly another brilliantly timed peice of Beatlemania PR to coincide with the 2009 re-mastered back catalogue. But one of the things that struck me most was not the music, but the obsession that grew from the demand for sightings and snippets of information, however mundane, that could make headline news and make or break a die hard fan. They just couldn’t get enough.

Everybody knows their name

It’s interesting to consider that this lack of access to information fueled the obsessive demand for the band even more. I’m not claiming that this was deliberate, and it’s obvious that the restrictions to media, scheduling and getting physical products on the shelves was very different back then. This is a far cry from the current revolution/revolt in the music industry and its attempts to convert downloads into dosh. The demand from fans is to make music ‘real’ again.

There are lots of attempts to add value to our digital music; iTunes are releasing sleeve notes, lyrics and exclusive photos with some downloads (Dark Side of the Moon double gate fold anyone?).

Is this better…

…than this?

The ever outspoken Jack White has launched a new ‘closed network’ called The Vault, funded by his label Third Man Records. The project is described on the site as “not your typical networking site. The Vault gives you special stuff that will not be available anywhere else”. It’s a ‘closed door’ model and it looks like there’s a lot of interest in it for that reason.

It remains to be seen whether The Vault will be successful, but I applaud anyone that tries to bring back  romance and resonance to the experience of music. Open or closed…

The KPG is a project that we here at Cogapp continue to be proud to have created and to still maintain pro bono ten years after it first went live. It is an information sharing hub and forum for people who suffer from kidney disease and those affected by it. The site has an interactive social media aspect that has been continually active since it was launched – visited by sufferers, their support networks and healthcare professionals alike. We recently revamped the site to give it a sleaker, more modern appearance and better navigation, to even further improve its usefulness for those who use it.

Eleanor and I, who both worked on the recent redesign, jet-setted off to Manchester on the train to attend the Fresh Awards ceremony with high hopes for the KPG. While walking through the train, we noticed that the only real difference between the first class carriages and our regular seats was the inclusion of a nice little reading lamp, so we made our own.

Upon our arrival we checked in at the hotel, put on our best frocks and headed to the awards in… an Odeon cinema. Though it was a bizarre choice of venue, we all got some free popcorn and were directed towards our seats usher-style, so the festivities suited the venue.

Everything went swimmingly with the compere teetering on the edge of acceptable behaviour throughout. When our category came up, we waited with baited breath as the results were revealed until much to our delight, we were announced as the first place winners and recieved the gold award! The multi-coloured swirling spotlights started flashing, some suitably cheesy 90s song came on and the video camera (pointed at us) was projected onto the cinema screen.

The evening saw us eating hot dogs, pizza and fish and chips, which were oddly advertised as ‘nibbles’. We built up a bit of dutch courage, talked to some friendly faces, never quite made it onto the dance floor, then returned to the hotel with a feeling of impending normality.

All thanks goes to Fresh for putting together a fantastic, unique evening. I’ve never gone through such a myriad of emotions in such a short period of time.

Waking up in the morning, I couldn’t help thinking it may all have been a dream…