A perfect depiction of how we will use computers in the future

By Mitchell Geere | Published: December 24, 2009

Imagine you just bought a new home and faced with a whole bunch of empty rooms. Mr. and Mrs. average get a little overwhelmed not knowing what will look good or not, lucky for them Apple* created the Apple View and Pottery Barn* created an augmented reality catalogue. Through the viewer combined with the catalogue you can outfit your new home and see what it will look like. Should you take the three seater or four, is there space for a 6 seater dinning room table, what combination of scatters and curtains would look good. Once you created your perfect home, you simply select checkout and done. Pottery Barn deliver your furniture the next day and you arrange your new furniture as per your plan.

viewing the propertioes of an apple through a viewer

How about you just got off a plane in don’t really know this new location. You whip out your Apple* View and start looking around, searching for hotels, restaurants or whatever. Once you know where you want to go, you can just point your viewer at a taxi to see where it is going next and what the charges are – because new country, different prices – and what people say you should expect to pay in this location.

Perhaps you’re a concious eater, as you shop you look at products through the viewer it shows you nutrients in the product and the price and other added information about the product. It can also recommend a meal based on products you have already looked at, and recommend additional products and specials.

check out the concept here

*real companies and fictitious products.

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A better life without god

By Mitchell Geere | Published: September 19, 2009

The more I see poverty and the whole slew of desperation and sadness around the world I realise that it is all because of a god – or the believe there in. Humans have believed in a god whether depicted or believed in as being anthropomorphic or otherwise there has always been this crutch or excuse called god. We surrender all responsability over to this crutch called god and believe that we have and are what we are because some external thing decided it shall be so.

We believe that the world is in the state it is in because of the opposing god, that commonly known as the devil and brings on actions of sin. This all is a fairytale, it’s an excuse we use not to have to take responsibility for our actions – this believe has also served governments and oppressors of humans and rights well. We use god to get away with horrific things and write it off as he wanted it so, it was his will or the other one the devil made me do it. You are responsible for your life, you are also responsible for your actions. The only way you can be forgiven for what you have done is if you ask the person you have wronged for forgiveness and have corrected the wrong through action and not merely praying to something that doesn’t exist – this does not absolve you.  

We are killing ourselves and everything around us and then expect it to be made okay just through prayer or some other ritual. Get real. You and only you are the cause of your situation in life, it is brought on from how you act and respond to situations. There is no god and I think you need to start taking responsibility for your actions.

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Hudsons Burger Joint

By Mitchell Geere | Published: September 14, 2009

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Gourmet Burger

By Mitchell Geere | Published: September 14, 2009

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Browser Annoyance

By Mitchell Geere | Published: August 1, 2009

This post is so old in the grand scheme of the web, that is it is a dead topic we all hate that the web progresses to fast yet the vessels in which it resides take so long to change and develop. More than anyone Microsoft has been the biggest cause of pain to web developer and design a like, they implement their own standards – badly I may add – and not really ever those set out by the W3C. The W3C works hard at creating standards and seeing what and how people use the web, they understand information and how to present it. Microsoft understands hype and dollars. However this post isn’t to rant about Microsoft’s soulless business, it actually touches on Mozilla, Apple and Google as well. These companies make the leading browsers in the world, that tool that opens up the world of the Internet to you.


My annoyance is this, there are so many cool things in CSS3 that will 1 allow me to design and develop pages to be smaller and more concise saving you bandwidth and loading time. It will also safe me – the collective me as an online professional – time in creating awesome sites and applications therefor allowing me to spend more time on creating even more awesomeness.The problem is as I said before the browser companies do not implement these standards correctly and they also do it very slow when they eventually get to it. They spend more time on silly things like being able to have widgets and wobblets and shit in the browser allowing you the ability to twitter, facebook and all the other super neat things – I am being sarcastic – instead of them focusing on getting the core of the application right. That core being the ability to serve web pages perfectly with all standards in place.

Some browsers are better than others, like Safari is really awesome they spent a lot of time on loading speeds etc. and so does Chrome but they both implement a shared standard, where FireFox implements their own, and Internet Explorer well they miss the boat on everything with each version being vastly different from the previous. This all said browsers implement their own standards in spite of those which the W3C have put in place and these differences makes me have to code – in many cases – whole separate pages and CSS and javascript for each browser, mostly Internet Explorer is the worst. This is where the time wasting comes in I code like this. I firstly use a CSS reset file get the CSS down to a standard level for all my browsers, then I code my files against the W3C and other standards ensuring that its all perfect then once my perfect site is done I start hacking and chopping and twisting and bending the code to make sure that the end result is the exact same for ever browser.

Okay so I have given context – well to those who are in the web industry know what I mean at least – and I have given you my gripe. My proposed solution is this, allow the cores of each browser to be extensible. I’m not talking about FireFox’s ability to allow people to write plug ins and widgets and wobblets. I mean allow access into the core through plug ins allowing us or anyone to write their own CSS rendering plug in. What this would do I would imagine is give W3C the ability to get their standards out into browsers quicker and allowing the browser companies not to have to worry about this stuff. I know this is easier said than done, but if the browser companies create a good API to allow for this I think it could change the browsing world.

This means that the browser companies can then spend more time on better usability, faster rendering, more wobblets and bits and bobs and leave the grunt work to us the community. I would happily dedicate some time to help write these plug ins with the W3C.

Anyway so that was just a bit of a rant, now how do we get to get this to action.
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A lesson to learn…

By Mitchell Geere | Published: May 31, 2009

I have been working with and using this concept for a long time, I have allowed my mind to wander and ponder things for what I think they truly are. So that said the principle I have been thinking about is that there is no such thing as good or bad – evil to some. My reason is this, what I do for myself or those I care about might be bad for someone else but good for me, right? You see it everywhere, someones house burns down they loose all they have yet it also puts the fireman in a job and fulfils his passion to help people. So is the house burning down good or bad, its neither – lets exclude the person who started the fire, I want to keep it simple with just two sides for now. A simple example but you get the point I hope, every action has the opposite or equal reaction (Sir Issac Newton’s third of  laws of physics). I’m not really that interested in the physics of the situation, I am more interested in the reaction to the situation (whether the reaction is to the action or reaction itself) in psychological terms.

Let me explain, when someone harms you or your family you see it as bad and the doer of harm as a bad person. Sure this is true for you, and those who sympathise with you and your situation. However what about the wrong doer, do they see it as bad or good? They may see it as bad yes, however they might be far less fortunate than you are – in whatever respect – and they may see it as equaling justice therefor they see it as good. So why all this rambling about good and bad and physics?

Well it is because things will always happen to you, whether you choose for it to or not. Whether you think you are standing still or not you are always moving in a direction. This moving puts you into situations where you need to make decisions, again even not making a decision is making a decision. So in making a decision you are acting or reacting. Now what is important here is not the action or the reaction to the present situation but rather the lesson you learn during or in retrospect. If you do not learn from what has happened it will keep happening in different forms because you are making decisions based on what you know – minus the lesson that should have been learnt.

So what I have learnt in my short time might not be profound or earth shattering to anyone, but I believe it is a fundamental issue in our society. We blame others for our misfortune yet we passively let things happen to us, or even aggressively and actively so or the same onto others. The greatest shame is that instead of learning from what has happened we either wallow in self pity about our situation or rejoice egotistically in our victory blinded it so that we don’t see the next turn-off, leading us into the next situation which we are potentially even less prepared for.

So the less is this, there is no good or bad there is only what we learn from it, and the next decisions we make based on the education we have gotten from lessons gone by.

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Damn it not another ad break!

By Mitchell Geere | Published: December 14, 2008

So we have all said that before at some point or another, right? You get deep into the plot of your favorite show and then it stops for a few minutes so some company can tell you about their washing powder or new better than ever dishwashing liquid.  This is the traditional model of advertising on TV; it is based on the viewing patterns of the baby boomers and their parents. This model assumes that the whole family is gathered around the tube at a certain time of day, or the mom is home alone cleaning.

This model has been dead for years, for instance I go to bed at 4 a.m. most nights my movements are so out of sync with the perceived norm it is unreal. So how will they target me, the short answer is they won’t. They could get clever and base the advertising on the content, however again it’s flawed for the reason that I don’t watch regular scheduled television and when recording the show I skip the ads anyway.

So now you have advertisers spending millions on ads that never get seen. However the producers of the shows aren’t too worried they get their ad revenue and they also sell the discs. Here comes the next problem, I stopped buying DVD’s about 3 years ago if not longer, I also stopped renting DVD’s because I am always late with the damn things and get fined. What I can tell from listening to the people around me this is normal. How do you suppose these producers and advertisers will survive with a drop in DVD sales and rentals? The short answer, again, is they won’t unless… they change their model.

I watch a popular show called Chuck; I got into it while on a trip to the US. My friend had recorded a few episodes on his XBox and I watched them when I could. Now back in South Africa I, admittently, watch it illegally – for the reason that the season in my country is what I have already seen and it is on regular scheduled television so I tend to miss it anyway. I have a friend who sources each week’s episode for me from the US. I tend to watch them while I am busy with other things such as work, blogging even reading at times.

I am impressed by this show for more than its mindless comedic scenes. They have been doing a great job of placing products in the show without it looking like product placement. If you remember a few years back there was a movie called The Truman Show with Jim Carrey where the show, in the movie, was doing some serious product placements with actors announcing the benefits of these items trying to sell it to the viewers. There was even a scene in Chuck where he rattled off some stats about a Toyota which, I think, they got away with because it was pretty contextual but they could have been a bit more subtle about it.

The key to placing products in shows is it needs to fit the profile, the story being told and it needs to be subtle. If an actor is using a product that is out of character it won’t sell, it will stand out as product placement. If you product story is framed to fit that of the story line of the show together you will come out as a winner. Not to everyone but those who subscribe to the show and the story you both tell of course.

What this is creating is an environment where advertisers and producers would start working very closely together. Ensuring that the product fits the character persona and getting the timing of the placement right. I do caution though that I don’t think the advertiser should have a hand at the plot or subtleties of the story itself because again you don’t want create a telemarketer show. The content should never fit the ad the ad has to blend with the content.

This takes care of the advertising and the producers have been paid, advertisers are getting their story out to the people who want to hear it. Now what about distribution seeing that probably very few of us would go spend the money to buy full seasons of shows we would probably only watch once.  Also the model of print, box, ship is old it has no value to anyone and isn’t very friendly to the environment. The content should be disposable, easy to get and easy to get rid of. More often than not I don’t have a TV near me to plug my USB stick into to watch a show, so I watch it on my laptop or iPod while busy with something else. The video is kept small so it not the main feature for me, so in this case I would only want to download the small version of the show and wouldn’t want to waste time downloading the 1Gb High Definition version.

The other problem with traditional distribution is it’s not trackable, there is no way Universal can tell me how many people really got to watch their show based on DVD rentals, purchases and cinema goers. I may have watched the DVD at a friend’s house or borrowed it from him etc. This will happen it is intrinsic to who we are, even people who don’t like sharing will do it if they get to be the one to show it you first.

So why not distribute it through systems such as Vimeo, you get stats on each view, duration of the view and even when the user paused and resumed. This data is honestly very valuable, knowing when someone paused is important it shows a few things. Things like how much time the user can dedicate to the show – should we get to the point sooner, did he pause for just long enough to get a beverage or when did the user exit. The producers can build the show around their audience now and advertisers will have a better understanding about the movements of their viewer.

I tend to have a bias toward Vimeo, they support HD and the viewing quality just seems way better than that of YouTube – I tend to only use those two the others have very weird and slow loading capabilities and crap interfaces.
Distributing to a central source like Vimeo allows you to still serve the shows from you site, allowing you to perhaps promote similar or spin off shows et al. Through having this video in a central location a dialog can get started per show, where you can again draw more feedback from your audience such as what people expect, what they hated and so on. Knowing what your audience expects is very useful. ;)

With the model suggested above you can enter into a per view agreement with your advertisers. If their part of the show was only streamed by say 4 million viewers they pay a smaller fee than say a placement that was viewed 40 million times – say in a really funny part, or intense scene, you know the one you rewind a few times. This creates a lot more flexibility for both producers and advertisers. Advertisers will have a better idea of the times their audiences watch their ad placed shows allowing them to attribute certain purchase to a specific show.  Also it is an ongoing revenue stream for producers; I would imagine the stream would be time boxed. A product placed today has little relevance in say 5 years and why would the advertiser pay for that viewing then.

An example of this attribution would be I watch Chuck where Apple placed a new phone or Toyota a new car. I pause – along with say a few million others – just after the introduction of the product to go check out their web site and get more info about the product. So through the union of you web analytics and viewer analytics you can attribute a certain amount of traffic to your product site and acquisitions to the show.

So there are centrally a few great reasons to distribute your show on a video streaming site, one more is organic viewers. You know those who endlessly search Vimeo for entertainment, or those who googled a product and your show came up – allowing the advertiser to advertise that product. You audience can distribute your show on their blogs without compromising statistics and helping you sell your show and products through them merely liking it or even hating it.
You can still box and ship your product the market is huge someone will still want to own the disc or download the show to watch the show later – better movie viewing software could store the info about your viewing habits and upload it when it is online again.

I am afraid this model of ad placing won’t work for everyone though, unless you are damn creative. Who would place an ad in say a Wild West show and what would they place there.
It can get tricky, but what about introducing your company, that is if you go that far back, telling the viewers something about say Coke allowing them to feel closer to the company because they got to see their humble beginnings – for example.
Documentaries I would think would be easy, what gear are they using in it? If they love the gear they will more than likely give a quick rundown of why they chose to use a Toyota Land Cruiser in the Serengeti as opposed to a Land Rover Defender. So documentaries will give you – the viewer – facts, a story, the emotion, and practical advice or recommendation from an authority or someone using it for real.
Shows shot in the future I would think are pretty simple as well; it’s a great platform to introduce new product concepts. Audi did a great job of this in I, Robot with Will Smith.

So advertisers and producers get your thinking hats on and create those shows and stream it to me for free.

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How we will use computers in the future.

By Mitchell Geere | Published: December 2, 2008

Okay so this isn’t a new concept, really just the way I see it happening. This post came about through a conversation I had with two of my friends – Ernst and Benny. We were having the usual Mac/Pc discussion and it all just unraveled from there. The way we use computers now is silly and completely ineffective. We couldn’t have done it another way though it was the route we had to go, to get to the point which I will show you now.

So the problem, why are computers so ineffective? I need to just highlight that it is only ineffective now. When it was designed it was brilliant for what it had to be and that was that the computer needs to be smaller and anyone should be able to have a computer. However with the advent and maturity of the internet and distributed cloud computing this game will and has changed. This change has made it unreasonable for us to have to have a location based machine to work from. Why should I have a home machine and then also have a work machine the thing is I don’t. The concept of having so many machines is silly, and a waste of material to create the physical machine and a nightmare to manage.

I propose that we have a single device much like say an iPod or a Zune that has a larger processor and far more memory and say 80Gb to 160Gb of storage locally (solid state of course). That device can interact with keyboards, mice, printer hubs, screens and more through lets say a USB exchange or to the devices themselves. Your cached data and perhaps some thick client software gets store locally but essentially your profiles and the data relating to it gets stored in the ‘Cloud’ – to use a buzz word.

So how I think it would work is you would get to work place your device on the desk or keep it in your pocket and be ready to work. You simply choose the profile you would like to work with and start. Once you are done at the office you go home to perhaps go work on your blog, or during lunch time you sign into your home profile. You get to seperate the data between them easily with this concept but still have a shared area or profile allowing for moving files and favorites between profiles.

Once at home, internet cafe, a friend’s house or even your car you simply just have to link up your device with the peripherals available to you at the given time and you can start working using keyboards, mice and monitors available. This allows designers to still have huge monitors and tablets; it allows stock brokers to have their multiple monitors and so on. You could be in business development and would need to do loads of presentations; with this model it is fine. You get to simply sign in with your presentation profile – a safe profile with none of your personal items on it – and sync with the boardroom allowing you to present with little or no effort.

The same business developer could be driving to a meeting and needs to have a conference call, he simply would again sign into his presentation or work profile and connect to his car – depending on the model what you have available would vary of course. This concept plays into my post about ‘Radio and the internet‘ where now your car radio is in theory always with you. This system also breaks into a new market and is something I am very passionate about. That market is real-time consumer data, knowing that I just made several purchases and knowing the details about it. This is through your device interacting with the cashier machine and actually allows the transaction to occur – your device will be the authentication method for payments. Allowing me to through some software model and view my data to better manage my life.

This whole concept assumes constant good access to the internet, which is where the problem will start. Software such as Adobe Photoshop would have to change to only bring down file data as needed. I see companies like IBM, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon playing a huge role in this with their products Azure, Surface, Zune, iPod, EC2 respectively. However I think living like this with a ‘Uniputer’ would actually do much more for the economy in terms of productivity and lifestyle. This systems would allow you to better your lifestyle, with the access to your work profile from anywhere you could simply stay home and work as though you are in the office.

I can’t wait for this to be a reality, for me to simply have one device elegantly designed, light, powerful and connected. Having access to my life from anywhere in the world is an amazing concept. Having all your favorites, your trash, your documents etc. all there and ready for you to use. Just add peripherals to taste.

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Radio and the internet

By Mitchell Geere | Published: November 23, 2008

Traditional radio will change. I can’t remember when last I listened to the radio, it doesn’t actually even feature in my list of mediums to entertain. I do however still listen to a streamed music on last.fm and I wish I could get it in my car. I am sure this will be an option soon where I can simply select from a few livecast providers or streaming music providers from in my car, ipod, notebook/desktop or mobile.

This won’t kill the market, it will however kill regional monopolies. It will change how musicians get exposed and how content gets distributed. Much how the internet has changed print media and how it will change visual media.  We know this already of course its been the thorn in the sides of these companies for the last few years. However I think this change is creeping up faster and faster. 

How do you monetize this? The first logical thing we think is edit it with ads shove ads in between every 10 songs, or 10 minutes of broadcasting. Sure this will work if your ads pertains or ads value to the content that came before it. However what I have seen is few if any advertisers get this right, even if they know everything about their audiences worldview. So advertising will work but will become an annoyance, which brings me to my second way. That is the one I think will work best, until advertising can actually become relevant, will be subscription. Gosh I am even willing to pay for Wikipedia and Google. 

There is of course another way, perhaps you could buy a song when it plays. Why would you do this if you can just hear it again later or tomorrow, well you might want to ringtone it, or if you are like me you’d want to have it to listen to over and over until you hate it.

I do think though that this new form of radio will be far more advantageous to marketers who can actually then track duration of listening, and of course derive relevance from the audience based on what they listen to and what location. The latter being very important, imagine a world where you are listening to your favorite station on your iTouch and as you walk into a mall the next ad you hear is from the store 10 feet away. The ad was broadcasted to you for two reasons one it was relevant to your location, two relevant to your current mindset and the persona you fit into. 

Obviously the online marketing industry will have to mature a bit more before we can really push right ad at the exact right time but it is getting there. So until then all we know is you like a particular brand of rock at noon, and listen to CNN in the afternoon and would generally be found shopping for groceries in the evening or driving past a particular mall. So even though the marketer knows very little about you he can at least now advertise closer to your persona and also keep it location based. 

So the major gain the radio industry would get from this medium change would be trackable actions and linked information through social profiles. As apposed to nothing through analogue mediums.

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Passion drives your Success

By Mitchell Geere | Published: November 23, 2008

I was sorting through my books a little earlier and stumbled up on a book I bought a while back and then sorting through my mail box. Now the thing that stood out here was that there are so many people trying to tell you how to get rich, everyone is touting that they have the answer. They can bring your riches beyond your imagination and in 21 days even.

I have a problem with this; the focus here is on money and purely money. In my opinion if you focus purely on the monetary reward gained from your actions then I am afraid what you have created or done was probably of inferior quality or has no substance. The success will be short lived and will disappear faster than you got it.

I believe that if you focus on what you are passionate about the better your result will be. Try doing something purely because you love it, you find that you enjoy the time spent doing it, you produce/accomplish something amazing. If you were to sell that product or service you will come out on top – if there is a market, or at least if you can reach the market will to pay for it.

I find this in my every day job, mostly what I do is boring as hell and I am sure this is the case with you too. Not all circumstances are great and ready for us to just do what we are passionate about; however you can apply passion to what you do. You can create passion for what you do, the first step would be to not focus on finishing but focus more on doing. This may sound counterproductive because all projects are about the result. Yes you are right the result is what your client is interested in, however if you spend time focusing on enjoying what you are doing pegged against a timeline you will find that you inevitably reach the goal sooner.

Initially changing your mindset and getting enthused about what you are doing will take time but eventually the result of you being excited about what you do will show in the end. The result will be inspired no matter what it is, and it will most probably result in you getting to more of what you are really passionate about. Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying be fake and pretend to be passionate about the task. This will result yet again in sub standard quality; I am saying get genuinely passionate. Start by looking at things differently, instead of bitching about clients or environment focus on something else. The thing is the more you focus on how things are just not right the more it won’t be right because you are highlighting these things and finding similar things. So it is a spiral, rather spiral in the opposite direction.

In the end if you can’t change how you feel about what you do change it. Do what you love doing, it will be hard but you will be happier in the end and the result will be great. The result of passion is all around us; look at Apple, Microsoft, 37Signals.com and so on. These people perhaps not the staff there now but certainly the people that started it. Their success lies in the product of passion.

So in short success isn’t money, money is a product of success. Success cannot be gained by a “Teach yourself in 21 days” nor is it a tablet you can take in the evening and success will just be on your door step. However success is also not the result of hard work, it is the result of passion and enthusiasm for what you are doing. Try it, change your mindset or change your situation but get enthusiastic and passionate about what you’re doing.

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