Blog-Archy in the UK

Jayson Jarmon
President, The Lux Group, Inc.



See, they even named a street after me!

13 years is a long time, and in Internet years it's a really long time. We've worked with multiple partners in the UK since 1995 when I was the original project manager for the BP corporate site, and I dearly love getting the opportunity to touch base in a city that is arguable darker and rainier than Seattle (somebody will have to consult Wikipedia on that). So, whenever we're in London it's fun to get a sense of what's going on in the design and development world (and the pub world, but that's an entirely different story).

So, this week Lux Creative Director Ben Thompson and I are off to the UK once again talking to folks about interactive development projects, and we'll be blogging from London and its environs on an irregular basis. We'll post photos, talk to designers, and see what's hot in London during the rainy month of May. Who knows, we may even get a glimpse of Ben's band onstage in Soho.

Nerd Alert!

Are you fond of retro-futurism? Each generation envisions the future a little differently than its predecessor. Jules Verne foresaw spaceships to the moon, Arthur C. Clarke imagined communion with higher intelligences. Even Hanna -Barbera envisioned a world of space needles and robots called The Jetsons. In time, these predictive fantasies are overtaken by history, encased in amber like the mosquitoes in Jurassic Park. They seem quaint.



Whole Lotta Rosie

The science fiction of each generation says more about contemporary thinking than any real future of course. Fritz Lang's Metropolis was more about class warfare and anxiety over the rise of fascism than it was about the distant future...the double-feature space monster movies of the 50's were always more about Cold War anxieties than the giant ants...don't even get me started about Starship Troopers.

As I was riding to work today on the retro-futuristic monorail, approaching the retro-futuristic Space Needle, I started thinking about computers and how predictive (or not) the sci-fi dreamers have been.

What does retro-futurism tell us about computers? Did anyone predict distributed computer networks, the World Wide Web, or the Internet? I don't think so -- generally, computers in science fiction come in three flavors:

• Super Computers that Threaten our Liberty (Colossus: The Forbin Project, I Robot, Tron, The Matrix)


• Defense Computers Run Amok that Threaten our Extinction (War Games, The Terminator)


• Cold, Disembodied Intelligences Rivaling or Superior to Humans (2001: a Space Odyssey, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)

I cannot think of a single piece of science fiction that predicted microcomputers, distributed computing, or the digital revolution. Perhaps that's because the digital revolution is so unique and democratizing, that it failed to elicit the angst of the apocalyptic sci-fi visionaries.

So let this stand as a challenge: if you know of any well-known retro-futurist or science fiction writer who predicted the Internet please send me a mail that I might stand corrected.

jaysonj@luxworldwide.com

Microsoft Silverlight: Lux Worldwide is leading the way

Jayson Jarmon
CEO, Lux Worldwide

New web application development technologies appear (and disappear) everyday, but very few come out of the gates as strongly as Microsoft’s new cross-browser, cross-platform rich-media delivery platform, Microsoft Silverlight. As web applications become increasingly media experiences as opposed to simple text content and navigation, a platform that is .NET-based while still flexible enough to support AJAX, VB, C#, and Ruby is a valuable tool for internet developer’s like Lux.

We used the technology recently to create the Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map: a tool to help developers to navigate that sea of technical content, to access the information they need quickly, and to see the depth and extent of the content available to them at a glance. The application that represents a synthesis of much that is new at Microsoft, but not just in its content: Lux built the application using the Silverlight platform and the Expression Blend development tool.

Lux Worldwide is a leader in Microsoft Silverlight development and design. It’s a platform you should consider for your next interactive application project.

Jayson

IKEA Comes To Lux

By Jayson Jarmon, President and CEO, Lux Worldwide

IKEA-inspired chaos in the alley – please send Starbucks!

There is a great commotion this morning in Post Alley beneath the lofty Lux Towers: video production companies with caterers, klieg lights, gaffers, grips, and gawkers – the whole nine yards – are filming a commercial for IKEA. Actors are coming and going, cars and packages are strewn about the street; a whole comic uproar is taking place. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the production has come between ourselves and our Starbucks, and that there seems to be no immediate resolution to affairs cinématographique … one begins to feel trapped. So this blog stands as an interactive SOS – if anyone out there is reading this, please send coffee.

Jayson

Blacklist Patrol

By Loren Skaggs, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, Lux Worldwide

I’d like to give a shout out to our IT Director, Rich Olson, who, in his apparently ample spare time, manages his own product line, particularly the popular anti-spam product SpamButcher.

Rich has just released a new product, and it looks like a winner: Blacklist Patrol. This product is designed for one very narrow, but very important purpose – it is designed to prevent you from ending up on an anti-spam blacklist.

If you’ve never had your domain blacklisted, then you may not realize the value of this product, but trust me – it could save you a lot of grief.

Here’s what happens: Many companies find their email servers listed on anti-spam blacklists even though they would never intentionally send spam. As a result, mail they send may never make it to the intended recipient. Often the problem is that either their server or one or more of their desktop systems has been compromised by spammers, and actually is sending spam.

Blacklist Patrol helps to address this problem by monitoring major blacklists to see if the your server is listed. Once the you discover that you have a problem, you can take action to get yourself removed from the blacklist.

Like I said, the solution is very narrowly targeted, but then, in my experience, the best solutions usually are.

Good luck with Blacklist Patrol, Rich!

Loren

Uniformity

By Jay Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

Everyone has a uniform of some kind, I suspect, but software people have eschewed the formality of business fashion since the days of short-sleeved white shirts, clip-on ties, Buddy Holly glasses and IBM.


During my formative years at Microsoft, the only people caught dead in suits and/or ties, were interviewees who were unfamiliar with the lax dress code. On the second day of interviewing, they would always return in what has come to be known as “business casual,” in an attempt to persuade the interviewers that they weren’t too stiff and formal for the company.


At my first company, Saltmine, things were even less formal. As a web development agency, we weren’t restrictive at all about appearance. The business casual of Microsoft looked positively glamorous in the early Internet culture… a patois of punk rock, gamer nerd, glue-sniffing geek, and how shall we say, things nebbish-ista.


I mean, take a look at this guy:


He’s my business partner, for cryin’ out loud!!

So now days, the Internet business is reaching a kind of maturity (although I agree it’s iffy to use “Internet” and “Maturity” in the same sentence). With this, ahem, maturity, there has come a ubiquity of clothing unseen since the days of IBM. I’m talking about the omnipresent BLUE SHIRT. As I cast my eyes down 1st Avenue here in Seattle, I can see blue shirts on every block, at every Starbucks, and in the lobby of every building I pass. Why blue? Why now?


So in the beginning was the end, the software fashion cycle has come full circle from conventional to unconventional and back again. As for me, I have a blue shirt and a Rat City Roller Girls T-shirt so I feel prepared for just about anything.

Fear Not the Metal Ones

By Loren Skaggs, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, Lux Worldwide

A hot topic around our office water cooler the past week as been the recent New York Times article that puts forward the idea by Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom that we might all be living in a computer simulation. What’s fascinating about the concept is not that it just might be possible, but that – if Bostrom’s calculations are correct – it is actually probable that we’re living in some sort of a simulation.

The logic goes like this: you calculate the likelihood that we will eventually develop a computer simulation that is sufficiently complex as to develop self-awareness. If the likelihood is high, as Bostrom estimates that it is, then the likelihood increases that such a simulation has already been created by someone else, and that we are living within that simulation.

My ramblings can’t do this concept justice. Just read the article.

Now, some people might find this disturbing, but I’m not going to start worrying about it. After all, if we ARE in some elaborate computer simulation, there’s no way we’d be able to find out for sure, and nothing practical we could do with the information if we had it. So, relax.

Besides, from long experience in working with start-ups who have had as their goal creating simulated environments, there’s one thing I’ve learned with great certainty: creating simulated environments is hard. It’s one thing to create a computer that can beat you at chess; it’s quite another to create one that will decide on its own that it prefers to play Madden 08.

This unease about the immediate future of technology is nothing new. Science and technology reporting, as well as science fiction, is rife with stories of technological nightmares that lie just around the corner. In the earlier parts of the 20^th century, there were dire warnings about the robots, the mechanical men who would rise up and destroy us all.

Westinghouse's H. J. Wensley and his mechanical man, "Mr. Televox" in 1928

In the latter parts of the century it was fear of the run amok computer, in films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Colossus: The Forbin Project. By the 1980s, the robots and computers had joined forces to rid the world of humanity in films like The Terminator. We always seem
to be one step away from having our tools take over for us altogether.

But it never happens.

Why? It’s because the nightmare we can imagine is a nightmare that’s already under our technological control. If we can build a killer robot, we can build an appropriate fail-safe. This doesn’t mean that things can’t go horribly wrong – they can and they do. It just means that, for now, the likelihood of our machines becoming more sophisticated than us is very, very
unlikely.

Until The Singularity comes, that is. Then all bets are off.

Run for your lives!!!

Loren