BigMother.dk

The blogsphere has been pitching The Kleptones the last couple of days and if you happened to have missed it or haven’t have time to listen to it yet, check out the latest album 24Hours now. I’ve only heard a couple of very well turned tracks so far (I’m busy listening to exiting forthcoming WhoMadeWho material – stay tuned) but I will download the whole album very shortly.

Via Evhead and Josh Spear

It’s time. Reboot’s in the air. Now with grand ‘renaissance’ theme and “More female speakers and participants than ever seen before at a halfway tech oriented event”. Sounds good. See you there.

Go to the webpage of this years reboot meeting: reboot8

Hurry up to get your own surveillance resistance t-shirt. The t-shirt maker Klaus Industries is offering these bold statements for you civil rights activists and soundly alert out there.

Sad they do not come in anti-surveillance fabrics shielding your torso from the penetrating eyes of Big Brother.

Via Cool Hunting

We’re slowly moving towards launch of Actics.com (which is presently in no-show-pre-beta) amidst investor negotiations, staff recruitment, publication deals, research projects and other everyday Actics stuff. We begin by firing up under our community with the Actics blog on everything related to an ethical social software startup with galactic aspirations. Currently the blog is manned by a sweet mixture of entrepreneurial, bright and visionary Actics personas namely Nicolai, Adam and yours truly writing on the new paradigm of users in charge and corporate transparency, the emerging ethical economy, and more mundane issues relating to the creation of useful social software. We will widen the scope, improve our arguments and encrease the number of contributing authors down the line so you might as well subscribe right away and improve your chances of winning one of our ‘dedicated reader’ trophy awarded sometime in the future… As always, comments are appreciated.

The Danish news paper Politiken wrote yesterday that they received nine awards for the design of their printed paper. This is how the online version of paper looks today. Either I’m loosing it when it comes to judgment of good design or Politiken just apply very different criteria to their various channels:

Sorry, couldn’t help it

Mads got me thinking yesterday, about what all this about Danish Sound Design actually means. And seemingly himself too (see his 2. comment). And while typing this and being about to write a catchy executive summary of our Manifesto for Danish Sound design, a business development promotion from the Danish Foreign Ministry dumps into my mailbox. And it clearly represent the old school ‘we-beat-them-on-technology’ which both Mads and I want to avoid.

Well, one thing’s for sure, it’s not interesting let alone lucrative to compete with the iPod wonder. Only in the sense, that Apple’s success with the iPod is due to an intelligent (and probably quite lucky) multidimensional thinking far superior to a pure hardware driven approach. When I’m thinking Danish Sound Design I think of audio services and design, for which we of course should deploy world leading Danish technology for (from the fields of acoustics, sound production and control). Services that might end up continuing the Danish tradition for clarity, simplicity and quality rather than the extremely lucrative ‘teen-segment-services’. But it is admittedly a new frontier, so we might not yet understand the full implications of all the competencies build up in Denmark and a world wide almost totally neglected field of design. There’s simply too much territory to get a proper sense of direction (that’s when technical ‘inventions’ come in handy, as they naturally point out directions). In early phases of innovation you always tend to extrapolate from a look backwards and sideways (a fallacy my iPod post was very close to commit), but the ambitions of our Danish Design exploration is actually more fundamental and thus also more challenging. It covers political, educational, regional and of course business aspects and already that broad probably block us from fast disruptive innovations. But it might build a more solid fundament for long-term value creation. At least our timing is right as witnessed by the stream of events and publications that have surfaced since we started this December 2004. But please help me with your ideas and opinions on the horizon: how do we build on existing leading qualities in Denmark and still avoid the ‘tech-driven-or-too-nice-and-neat’ approach that we’ve lost ground on lately? I’ll try to keep a mental diary here for what I come up with.

Link: The foreign Ministry promotion

Apple presented its new ‘fun products’ yesterday. What a disappointment! Not that the Mac mini is not a great product to upgrade to the Intel era or that a portable sound station for the iPod isn’t useful - but come on. We were waiting for something a little less incremental. But what probably annoys me most is to see Apple doing something that ought to come out of Denmark’s world class sound design that I’m trying to promote. I’ve been arguing for a while now, that we ought to take advantage of the truly innovative Danish digital amplification technology developed by B&O to leverage the digital-portable revolution. Putting in one of B&O’s IcePower amps would boost performance incredibly in a mobile system, reduce weight (and perhaps size) and lower powerconsumption (almost al energy is converted into sound instead of heat in digital amps). And with drivers from Scanspeak and Peerless you would simply get an awesome mobile High End system. Come on Danish Colleagues, what are you waiting for?