Apple, Google and Microsoft moved into Nokia’s crosshairs yesterday as the Finnish company bought Symbian, the major threat to the iPhone and Android SDK’s and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS. read full post »

Sir John Hegarty

Sir John Hegarty joins Knitware to talk about the effect of digital technology on brands, craft and design.

Brands in a digital age

I think we live in a very confusing world. Technology is exploding all around us. We don’t need to all go into it, we all understand it. The fact that I’m sitting here blogging is an amazing development in technology and, if you’re a brand, what do you do? How do you navigate through all this stuff? In a way, you can’t. There is no blueprint for saying ‘This is how you do it’ - there isn’t a kind of formula that says, ‘Well you do a TV commercial, from the TV commercial you set up a website, when you’ve set up a website, you start doing that - blogs there, you go into video games…’ It can be a multitude of options.

In the end, when you’re in a world like that all you can really do is simply say, ‘Nobody really knows, so what I’ll do is try and think of better ideas.’ That’s the only guarantee. The guarantee is to say, ‘Actually I might be wrong in choosing that medium, I might be wrong in starting there, I might be wrong in doing that. But what I can do, what I do know, is if I have a great brand idea there’s a greater and better chance that that will communicate and get through,’ - and that’s the only guarantee. read full post »

I’ve just received an email post from our ‘man in the field’, Peter Sells, Knitware’s very own mobile phone expert. He’s currently wandering the halls of this years (2008) Mobile World Congress exhibition in Barcelona. Over to you Peter…

Day 1 - The iPhone effect.

Hall 8 is the handset hall, a cathedral dedicated to the god of convergence. We are most definitely in the Post iPhone age. Samsung, LG Sony Ericsson are all touting touchscreen media devices that attempt to mimic - whilst being careful not to fully replicate - Apple’s seductive UI. Perhaps Apple should be flattered by this homage, but really they should be worried. Samsung can knock these babies out way cheaper than Team Jobs. Soon, or at least “quarter 2″, I can buy a device without the commitment, without subsiding the handset, that easily runs all the 3rd party software, and is nearly, but not quite, as sexy as the iPhone.
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