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Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson captured this scene depicting preparations for the Baris Dance by two young female dancers in the town of Ubud, Indonesia in 1949.

It’s a compelling image, and a work of art in it’s own right. In looking beyond the descriptive/narrative/travelogue pleasantries of the image, some creative tensions emerge.

The two subjects display signs of distress. Be it from the Cartier-Bresson’s intrusion into the dancers’ private lives in a Heisenbergian sense, or perhaps a photographer-subject/male-female dynamic or it may simply be performance anxiety, and/or stage fright. The elevated viewing angle contributes to a sense of infantilization and together with the not-fully-dressed aspect of the dancers plus allusions to passive-aggressive affect, result in an undercurrent of tension and averted eyes and, which in turn draws our gaze.

The Baris Dance is described as a solo warrior dance, and so Cartier-Bresson probably erred in his description – the 2 dancers look too old to be in the Legong, so the photographer may well have witnessed the Kris or the Ramayana Balinese dances.

The Eye of the Century – Cartier-Bresson – 24 Hour Museum

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The London Times has a pithy article on the cost-effectiveness of many common household gadgets. The Times chose to rank items by cost-per-use so as to determine which items are a waste of money and which deliver the most value. The least efficient gadget by far was deemed to be the ice-cream maker, which worked out to £19.48 per use in the first year. Other wastes of money include fondue sets, exercise bikes and the rowing machine.

At the opposite end of the scale, consumers were most likely to get their money’s worth from the lowly kettle and the electric toothbrush.

Which kitchen gadget is the biggest waste of money? – London Times, April 28, 2006

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The New York Times in a recent article, describes the ascent of Samsung Electronics to the rank of world’s premiere gadget maker. Samsung, or ‘Three Stars’ as it’s known in Korea, has long strived for recognition as an innovator by developing products that can legitimately have the adjectives world’s & first attached to them. Some examples noted in these pages include the world’s first 5 and 10 megapixel camera phones, the first LED sourced DLP TV and world’s largest TV (at the time) at 102 inches. And now, thanks to having become world’s largest and most profitable consumer electronics company, the honorific of world’s first can not only be applied to some of Samsung’s products, but to the company itself … Samsung is now considering renaming itself to Sasung (4*) or even to Osung (5*) to properly reflect it’s new status.

Much if not most of the credit for Samsung’s performance can be attributed to Kun-Hee Lee, Chairman and CEO of Samsung Electronics since 1998. He is famously quoted as saying “One genius can feed millions of others. For the upcoming era where creativity will be the most important driver of business success, we need to hire the best. The economic value of 1 genius is more than $1 billion” … which is probably self-referential, but almost certain to be true nevertheless. More info on Lee’s handiwork can be found at 2004 Samsung Electronics Annual Report … the EBIT is astounding at $12,583,438,000.

Some clouds on the Tristar horizon include Korea’s very low birth rate of 1.08, the eventual demise of the Lee dynasty, it’s massive outsourcing (US$18.5 billion in 2006) to China and the resulting increase in competition from China from the rapidly expanding consumer electronics industry in that country. China is expected to produce US$94 billion worth of gadgets in 2007, thanks largely to labor rates that are just 13.2% of that in Korea. One surmises that labor rates in China will start to normalize and that production will then shift to Vietnam and Indonesia and that Samsung Electronics will eventually be called Ilsung (One Star) Electronics.

Raising the Bar at Samsung – New York Times, April 25, 2006

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Panasonic announced the world’s largest TV, at 103 inches, a few months ago, and it’s still making the trade-show and marketing rounds. The TV, which has no model number as yet, made recent appearances at Display 2006 in Japan and at the NYSE.

Some specs include 1920 x 1080 resolution, 3000:1 contrast ratio, size of 7.5 x 4.2 feet, weight 400 lbs.

It’s a nice TV and a good accomplishment by Matsushita, but we believe that the future of very-large-screen TVs lies in printing them directly onto the walls of our rooms. Philips already uses high-precision inkjet printers to create 40-inch polymer OLED displays and there is every reason to believe that this approach can be ramped-up to wall-sized TVs.

And so, the tech staff at Gadgetmaniac would like to take this opportunity and go out on the proverbial limb, and hand you a metaphorical saw and issue the following prediction: In the future we will not buy large-screen TVs as such, but rather rent 3D printers to embed those same TVs into our walls.

Panasonic 103″ Full HD PDP TV – Akihabara News, 21/04/2006

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Sharp is now shipping the world’s first cell phone that has a VGA display. The model 904SH will be sold by Vodafone with the main selling point being the outstanding 480 x 640 pixel screen, which quadruples the resolution of other phones.

Other phone-ish features include a 3.2 MP camera with 2x optical zoom, Bluetooth, GPS and a miniSD card slot. Works with WCDMA/GSM. The screen is a natural for GPS and other hi-res apps.

Vodafone 904SH – Sharp News Release, 2006 4 13

Happy Birthday Adam!

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Consulting firm Oxford Analytica teamed up with insurer Aon to publish their revised 2006 Political and Economic Risk Map back in January of 06 . The map identifies the relative danger of working in or with the 200+ countries that make up the political map of the world. The low risk countries are shown in green, with the high risk ones depicted in a sepia tones.

It would appear that Somalia has the dubious distinction of being the riskiest country in the world largely because it has all nine of the potential specific geopolitical risks listed in the report: economic, money transfer, strikes/riots/civil strife, war, terrorism, sovereign risk, legal, political and supply chain vulnerability. Tied for second place are Iraq and Tajikistan each with eight specific risks, thus making them 11% less risky than Somalia … at least in theory.

The report also identifies oil price shock and avian flu pandemic as the top two potential disrupters of the global economy in 2006. Oil prices are certainly a concern, with The International Energy Agency in agreement with OA and AON on this matter, whereas with the passage of time and the advantage of several months of hindsight, an H5N1 avian influenza, aka bird flu, epidemic seems increasingly unlikely to be nearly as devastating as the infamous 1918 Influenza Pandemic.

In looking beyond mere cost avoidance and towards positive revenue generation, we at GadgetManiac have a modest proposal, namely ad hoc anti-vacations, which will involve danger-fraught excursions to risky countries. Appropriately enough, our start-up company is to be called Gadgetmaniac Tours, or perhaps Put-Yourself-at-Risk Vacations. Our business model: sell adrenalin vacations to the inured. We plan to market to those who are bored by their already high-risk jobs, e.g. miners and lumberjacks, and are tired of their already high-risk sporting activities of smoking while BASE jumping and mountaineering, find that local pok-ta-pok tournaments just don’t cut it any more, and take them to the next higher level by organizing package tours of the sepia-colored countries.

2006 Political & Economic Risk Map – Aon publication, January 2006

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The mobiBLU DAH-1500i digital music player made a big impact when it was introduced last year. It’s ultra-compact at 0.94 inches cubed, well-reviewed, stocked at Walmart and backed up by good marketing.

But that was then and this is now and the DAH-1500i is continuing it’s slide off the CNET Weekly Hit List after a solid run of 30 weeks. So what can/should mobiBLU execs do to counter the trend? Their considered response seems to have been to double the memory to 2GB from 1GB, and to hire more marketing reps and product placement specialists to demo the device by holding it up between their fingers. Product specs are at this link.

Aside from the use of the letter ‘i’, the USA-specific DAH-1500i differs from the DAH-1500, which is intended for the rest of the world, by virtue of the addition of WMA Digital Rights Management, USB 2.0 and FM and voice recording. While the 1500i has been well received, some negs include the batt life and the skimpy control buttons.

mobiBLU 2GB comes into the market plan – CDPkorea, 2006-04-12

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Toshiba informs us that the Gigabeat S series will be available in Japan starting April 28, 2006 and that the higher-end 60GB model S60V will sell for $399, with the lower-capacity S30 going for -100.

We’ve made note of these hdd-based iPod-esque music and video players from Toshiba before, continue to think well of them, but still feel that the iPod provides a cleaner, simpler look, as compared to this new Gigabeat offering.

The Apple iPod has all of it’s functionality clustered in the Click Wheel controller. By contrast, the Toshiba has the Plus Touch controller and 2 buttons on the front of the device, as well as 5 more buttons along the right-hand side, for a total of 8 different controls – seems a tad much.

The superficial amongst us might be tempted to conclude that Apple is run by architecturalists motivated by the saying form follows function, and Toshiba by engineers determined to deliver mostly function … not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Complete specs for the S series are available at this link … Kanji alert.

The gigabeat S series (4/28 sale schedules) it added – Toshiba press release, 2006.04.10 … as rendered by Babelfish

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The Nikon Coolpix S6 camera has been available for a few months now, and reviews are trickling in. The 6-Megapixel camera has 20MB of on-board memory plus an SD card slot, offers built-in Wi-Fi to avoid all those cables, and is intended for novice to intermediate users. Specs are here.

Reviewers at Steve’s Digicams just had a look at the Coolpix S6 – they liked the ’stunning’ 3-inch LCD screen, and thought the images were saturated & sharp but suffered from a bit of fall-off in the corners.

Their conclusion: the camera provides ease of use with good image quality in a nice compact package, and is a fairly good value at the street price of less than $400.

Nikon Coolpix S6 Review – Steve’s Digicams, 4/7/2006

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Japanese co Horiba Itech has a new in-vehicle video recorder intended to capture the moments before and after an auto accident. The device has a small camera that starts recording after detecting an impact to the car and records video for 15 seconds before and five seconds after the impact. The device also records the position of vehicle via GPS, speed, acceleration and brake data, turn signals and allows the data to be downloaded to a PC for analysis.

Those at-fault might well find themselves reaching for the Erase button after an untoward event.

Horiba Itech to release new in-vehicle recorder for accidents – Kyodo News, April 6, 2006

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