Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
Technology and the Too-Fast Swimsuit
Despite many lessons and summers reluctantly spent at swim practice I was never much of a competitive swimmer. Perhaps the high-tech Speedo LZR Racer suit could have been of some help?
Introduced in February, Speedo’s new suit and it’s ultra-lightweight technology are transforming the sport while creating a great deal of controversy in the run-up to the Olympic Games this summer. 18 of the last 19 swimmers who have broken world records have worn the LZR, and many claim that the groundbreaking technology helps them float and feel as if they are swimming downhill.
Great news or cause for concern? In short, nobody’s quite sure.
Developed based on NASA intelligence, it is clear that the LZR gives its wearers an advantage of sorts — but is this advantage unfair? FINA President Mustapha Larfaoui is adamant that all swimmers be able to access the technology but the issue of accessibility is only the tip of the iceberg.
Who gets credit for world records broken by wearers of the LZR — the athlete or the technology? Should the suits be banned for giving athletes that extra edge? Swimmers already regularly shave their legs before big races, is this really that different? Can this really be considered technological doping (if there is such a thing)?
Questions abound– and in the meantime “swimming’s fastest year” continues.
Lifan: The Guys Who Are Freaking Out The Auto Industry
I’m not a big motorcycle guy. In fact, I was a little freaked out when my kid sister, a grown-up AP reporter, bought a Yamaha scooter. But I’ve got to say, I’ve been fascinated with the brand Lifan Motorcycles, ever since I read about them in Don Tapscott’s
Wikinomics.
They’re decently large company ($900M annually), but they’re only about 1/50th the size of, say, BMW. They’re based out of Chongquing, a growing metropolis near the Yangtze River. It’s no little city-state, either - Chongquing is the most populous of China’s provincial-level municipalities. Lifan burst onto the scene fairly recently (around 1992), initially beginning as a motorcycle repair shop. Today, they’re cranking out over 700,000 cycles a year, shipping to over 100 countries.
It’s no surprise that Lifan and its Chinese compatriot brands are really taking over the motorcycle industry; they currently account for nearly 50% of the global motorcycle output now, according to Tapscott’s book. It’s what they’re doing with cars that’s beginning to really freak out the global automotive industry. They make a car called the Lifan 520, which I’d position against a Kia Optima or a souped-up Honda Civic. This car has leather seats, dual airbags, a DVD system and a huge trunk. It retails for $9700, which is about $6000-8000 less than the other two cars.
The reason Lifan made it into a book that was largely about knowledge management and peer collaboration was because they used these methods to create tangible goods, rather than information-based services, which is usually how this type of technology is leveraged. Lifan’s physical assembly model is totally modular.
Remember, this company sprang out a repair shop not too long ago, so the idea of using interchangeable parts to accomplish larger tasks is in their blood. In the car and motorcycle industries, traditional production networks resemble a pyramidal structure, with one leader commanding network segments to crank out whole products. Lifan has trumped the supply chain challenges that the hierarchical model encountered by working in clumps, or clusters. These small entities collaborate on development, design and manufacturing.
By the way, don’t bother looking for a Lifan 520 on Craigslist. I already checked. They’re not in the States yet. To learn more about how Lifan is using peer collaboration, pick up a copy of Wikinomics
Tech Blogs - Oh, The Humanity!
Robert Scoble had an interesting post a week or so ago, about tech blogs losing their soul - or “humanity” as he called it. It raises an interesting question: Can tech blogs have soul? Of course, anything created by human beings reflect human biases, emotions and experiences (i.e. humanity) but is it really possible for blogs about technology and business – both decidedly mechanical things devoid of any soul – to have a sense of humanity?
Of course it is. There are blogs in every category from sports to television and politics that approach their subjects with humor, passion and intelligence and the tech world does too. What Scoble worried about were blogs simply becoming a repository for unexciting product news and blind devotion and reverence to companies and personalities, rather than driving creativity and thought leadership as they have for the past couple years.
Scoble’s concern may stem from the sheer number of tech blogs out there. There’s plenty of innovative, insightful and daring blogs out there – Scoble’s is one of them. During a press conference Friday morning for Google’s new OpenSocial platform (check out our client NewsGator’s Didja Hear!? application), Scoble was Twittering the conference and then decided to open up questions to the 7,000 people who subscribe to his Twitter feed, and then acted as a gatekeeper, relaying the incoming queries to the Google folks. Instantly, a press conference with an industry giant that had originally been limited to about 25 top bloggers was open to anyone who wanted to ask a question.
That’s a fantastic story that evokes everything that blogs and social media should be – open, egalitarian, collaborative, free … and distinctly human.
Microformats: Do You Need To Know This?
I’ve been reading up on microformats for the last few weeks and spending a bit of time over at Microformats.org. Today, I came across a pretty interesting but very dense book by John Allsopp called Microformats. (For your convenience, I’ve added the title to the Metzmash Canteen). The point of understanding how microformats will play in your future communications and marketing is all about figuring out how your brand is going to answer questions.
How is your toilet company, for example, going to answer a question like, "What is a toilet that will fit into a 38" x 24" x 24" space in our new bathroom, that doesn’t use a lot of water and is available in black?"
It would probably take a human searching on the Kohler website and about 15 or 20 minutes to figure that out (have you figured out that I’m in the bathroom remodel market yet?). But there probably is a toilet on that website that meets those exact specifications. That’s where microformats could feasibly come in - product pages and PDFs can be enabled for better searchability. That’s what John Allsopp’s book is all about.
Chapters One and Two are a sturdy preview of what you need to know about microformats, and there’s a fairly solid breakdown of publishers who are currently using them (Yahoo, Cork’d, Eventful, Apple, edgeio). The later chapters get into some real heavy stuff that you’ll want to look over with the I.T. department, but Parts One, Three and Four look like they’re gonna be required reading for marketing and brand managers in the next few months.
The bits and pieces of Alsopp’s book that I’ve investigated are definitely on the geekier side of the marketing spectrum, but if you’re looking for a pretty solid download on emerging best practices of the semantic web, this is a helluva place to start.
