Nick Blogs Big Time

After a brief hiatus, Nick Blogs Big Time is back. Blogging big time, swagging hard. A lot has changed since we last spoke. I’m working full-time as a strategist for ad agency Grey New York. I’m also writing freelance for PSFK, a trend-spotter/innovation hybrid agency (whatever the hell that means) that runs a mean blog jam-packed with fun, thought-provoking, ingenious ideas (check it out at www.psfk.com). And I just sold a brand spanking new fiction tale to an upstart publication called The Bad Version (more details on that to follow). Oh yeah, and I moved to Williamsburg, BK, where the jeans are tight, and the beer is canned.

All-in-all, I’m feeling pretty darn good. The world is as exciting as ever (maybe even more exciting, now that I’m, you know… really in it). In any case, I’m thinking of re-focusing the blog a bit, specializing a little. I’ve been particularly interested in the ways that mobile technologies are revolutionizing the way we shop and eat, but more broadly, I want to know more about technologies that change the way we live our real lives, not just our digital lives. Yeah, that’s a little vague. But, well, it is what it is. We’ll figure it out from there. Hope that’s cool with you lot. Look for fun exciting stuff to come.

Cheers,

Nicky B

People ask me what this technology thing is all about. They say, “Nicky B, you majored in books, you like the outdoors, your inner hipster pulls you to analog like a magnet to iron, so what is this fascination with technology?”

The honest truth is that I don’t really know. It’s a perverse kind of fear, I guess. Like watching that clip of Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl—you know what’s going to happen, and you know it’s not going to be pretty, but you can’t stop looking. Over and over and over again.

Behind this freakish fixation is a steadfast knowledge that technology has the ability to do a lot of good. But that it will probably just end up doing a lot of bad.

‘The future’ is a term we hear a lot. It’s a term that is racy and sexy and frightfully intriguing. It connotes advancement and change, and seems to hold the answers to all of life’s greatest questions, like, “Why can’t I cook things with my mind?” and “When is Dick Cheney going to die already?” In the future, there will be no disease, poverty, or suffering. Or at very least rich people will be able to have talking screens that help them do menial tasks.

Here are some design predictions about the way the world will look in ‘the future’:

That wasn’t that bad, right? The music was a little freaky, a little, you know, Minority Report-ish, but on the whole, not that bad.

Now try adding a contact lens that filters your vision and adds the interminable noise of advertising:

Now, I’m not trying to be all apocalyptic on this shit (and if I am, I blame it on having been spoon fed a video game called Doom as a child), but we soon start to step into a world where the lines between real and digital become dangerously blurred.

This last guy was created in 2007 and already has a fair amount wrong with its predictions. But it also has a fair amount right…

What’s really good reality? What the f is good?

Nicky B

The Cloud doesn't actually look or function anything like this. But they tell me pictures make blog posts more pleasant.

Imagine: Your computer is a screen—no keyboard, no mouse, no hardrive. When you turn on your screen/computer, your operating system, your applications, your files, all of it is accessed using your screen/computer’s internet connection. Which is to say, it’s never actually stuck there on your tiny ass computer. It’s chilling out in the cloud, sipping virgin daiquiri’s, pinching butts, having a generally raucous time alongside everybody else’s operating system/applications/files.

Where is this cloud? you ask. Well, it’s on privately owned servers (read: big ass harddrives). The nice thing about the cloud system is that your computer will be with you everywhere there’s a screen. (The idea, I think, is that there’ll be screens everywhere.) So you walk into a library or coffee shop, sit down at their screen (screens will be cheap, because you’re not paying for all the software) and WHAM, all your files, right there.

In any case, I got you started in the cloud a while back with Drop Box (which is completely awesome—I now have all my writing with me everywhere I go.) Today, we’re going to take it a step further. Last week Amazon released a suite of web applications. Two of the applications, Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player, allow you to store and listen to up to 5GB of music in the cloud (read: iTunes is so fucked.) If you buy one album from the Amazon store, that number gets bumped up to 20GB.

Now, I’m into this idea. What’s particularly cool is that if you have an android phone, you can use another app (I think it’s called Android Cloud Player) in the Amazon web suite to automatically sync your phone with the music you’ve uploaded to the cloud. But the honest truth is that until I can put all my music online for free, I probably won’t put any of it.

Bangers and mash,

Nicky B

Deb Roy is doing some crazy things with language and technology. After creating a 3D model of his home and logging years worth of video and audio recordings, he’s compiled some incredible data on how his son learned to speak.

Just don’t teach language to the robots, na mean?… think Terminator meets Caliban.

If you want to see how your own use of language breaks down, check out this cool online text analyzer.

Nicky B

Help little indian children have fun BIG TIME!

Yo, team, it’s time for a pow-wow. There’s a lot of weird stuff happening in the world. An earthquake in Japan, social unrest in Libya, the rampant success of Rebecca Black, a girl whose mind-numbingly idiotic lyrics make Taylor Swift sound like mother fucking Paulo Coelho—it’s gotten me thinking, you know, maybe it’s time for a change.

Maybe it’s time for us to get up off of our couches and make a difference. I know it seems like a daunting task. You and me, we’re pretty tiny, and, well, the world, it’s pretty f-ing big. So how are we going to make a difference?

With ideas.

Ideas attract minds, minds bring bodies, bodies bring money, and you’re off on your snowball grizzy.

I’ll save the rest of the Obama inspirational mix-tape for the Boys and Girls Club of America and just leave you with this:

Kickstarter.com is a new way to fund your great ideas. Whether you want to set up a relief program that sends insulation tape to Japan, or a fund to urge celebrities (like Charlie Sheen… or Rebecca Black) to get off drugs, KickStarter.com will help you make your dream (for lack of a better cliche) into a reality.

The beauty behind KickStarter is its all-or-nothing funding policy—if your project doesn’t raise its target amount in a given amount of time, no money exchanges hands. This way you don’t have investors blowing mega wads on projects that aren’t ever going to get off the ground.

Get at me,

Nicky B

Remember back in Awesome Photos on Your iPhone when I said I wanted to start a night club for dogs? Well it looks like somebody else got to it first.

http://www.reuters.com/resources_v2/flash/video_embed.swf?videoId=196144514

…and it’s not as cool as I thought it was gonna be.

Sucks to be that DJ. He should’ve gotten VirtualDJ and launched a digital career. Womp womp.

Nicky B

THANKS TO DEATH AND TAXES FOR PUTTING ME UP ON THIS. CHECK OUT THEIR NEWEST WRITER, MY MAIN DUDE, DEVIKA BAKSHI, HERE.

I’ve been trying to rock out with my iPod dock out since I was knee high to a grasshopper. At 13, I got my first set of turn tables. Within a year, I’d snapped more records than Michael Phelps. Vinyl and me, well, we have a love-hate relationship. You see, as much as I love me some analog texture, I’m a child of the digital age.

Now I’ve found a set of turntables that even I can use.

VirtualDJ is one stop shopping for all your digital DJing needs. This ish is legit. I haven’t really gotten the hang of it yet, but the experts say it can do just about anything. So download it, get a couple of your favorite songs on the 1s and 2s, and start mixing it up.

Nicky B

PS. Check out this video of the insane technology they’re using for the 3rd gen of virtualDJ. Will anything remain analog!?

If you wish you had creative responses to difficult questions, you might want to take a look at the Rory’s Story Cubes app for your computer or iPhone. Rory’s Story Cubes is an app that generates story prompts using dice. Great for telling stories to kids or just entertaining your friends.

Here’s the video:

Cheers,

Nicky B

Daft Punk doing robot related stuff. Image by André Felipe via Flickr

Quick summary for those of you who didn’t read I Just Beat Up My Toaster : The robots are coming, and they’re probably going to kick your ass. Unless you buddy up with them first, that is.

Now, I’m a Daft Punk fan. Not a HUGE daft punk fan. Just a NORMAL Daft Punk fan. What I admire most about Daft Punk is that they somehow manage to remain anonymous, and that they get down with robot culture. If you want to get down with the robot culture and make sweet jams like Daft Punk, try iDaft. iDaft is a fun free online app that allows you to turn your keyboard into a daft punk music set.

Cheers,

Nicky B