A few weeks ago I got a call from a friend asking me if I wanted to try out a car. – Well sure, I said, what kind of car? I have to admit I wasn’t overly excited when she told me it was a Hyundai. – It’s fun! she promised.

This was the Hyundai she brought me:

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is a 3.8 liter V6 Hyundai Genesis Coupé. And I’m telling you, it was NOTHING like what I thought a Hyundai would be. It’s probably the most fun you  can have in this price range. Boasting a good chunk over 300 bhp, all delivered to the rear wheel pair, this thing flies. And the Brembo brakes are great for when it’s time to land. Sure the interior finish and build quality is far from a Porsche or Audi, but the price tag is even further away. If you’re looking for a fun small car, this is in fact not a bad choice.

And I NEVER though I would say that about a Hyundai. Think about this in the context about brands and communication. If you’ve ever worked with us at Honesty you are very likely to have heard me rambling about “the communicative truth” more than enough. I don’t care how many times Hyundai pushes ads on me saying that they’re fun unless they have some hard evidence to prove it.  And this is exactly what the Genesis provides. It’s a brand statement. A communicative truth. It’s nothing new of course. In fact, launching a sports car is standard practice to ad “joy of driving” to your positioning diagram for car manufacturers, just think about the Audi R8 as an obvious example, but what’s fun about this car is that it, unlike the R8, is an affordable sports car, and as such it also says “affordable” about Hyundai without making it a boring proposition. And this is a pretty smart thing. What other brands can you think of that could adopt a similar strategy? I can think of a few.

One reason why I love Leica is because they follow their own path and aren’t shy when it comes to asking for cash. They have the audacity to ask $8000 (56000 SEK) for their M9-P, a camera most ordinary people would easily mistake for a large old (albeit retro chic) compact. And that’s for the body only mind you. The lenses put you back another few thousand a piece, like the 35mm 1.4 Summilux-M for $4995 (yes, Dollars) or why not a nice 21mm 1.4 Summilux-M for $6995 (a world record breaking lens, but still).

Now Leica are putting up another irresistible treat for us gear lovers, listen to this: The Leica M-Monochrome, a version of the M9-P that shoots… wait for it… only black and white! And the asking price? Well, it’s actually $500 or so MORE than the color version. You got to love Leica for this!

And though this might sound as pure provocation to the best of us, there is a logic behind all this. For those shooting black and white only, color enabled cameras do have some drawbacks as enabling the sensor to pick up three colors puts certain compromises on top resolution and noise, but going full monty and doing black and white only in an $8000 camera is the longest extension of a middle finger I’ve seen in a while. It’s fun. It’s bold. And I love it.

And do I want the camera? Are you kidding?! Saving up for it as we speak!

In only a few hours Tictail will launch their public beta. Make sure you sign up for one of those beta invites if your in the least interested in e-commerce. To me it’s looks revolutionary. Suddenly it’s not just that you can set up an e-store really fast (no, REALLY), but that somebody that is completely new to e-commerce and online marketing will actually get all the help they need throughout the entire process including marketing. And the basic version is powerful add-ons that you can buy for a buck a month or so.

And while everybody says that their service is “simple”, I’ve checked under the hood of this thing, and trust me, it’s simple. My dad could set up an e-store using this service (he would sell used vintage grand pianos I would imagine), and that says it all.

Oh, and it’s got a great feel to the design as wall and a big scoop of that “I don’t know what it is, but I want it”-magic that you sometimes see in the best internet startups. Very excited to see where this is headed.

I‘m out at Tech Days today to participate in Microsoft’s panel debate on future trends, I thought it could be nice to revisit a blog post I wrote last year in Redmond about my first thoughts on Microsoft’s new design language Metro.

Since writing that post I’ve gotten some more hands on time with my Lumia 800 and Window’s Phone 7. As I’ve written about before, my new Lumia never got me hooked since it forced me to reinvest in an all new batch of apps (or live without them as they don’t exist on the Windows platform yet). Design-wise however Window’s and Metro struck a note with me early on since I saw it as an unusually strong statement from Microsoft compared to earlier products.

Metro delivers on being true to a philosophy of clarity and function and clearly takes a “data first” approach to it’s design and let’s digital be digital without any analogue references to alien materials like wood or paper. There is only one problem – is this philosophy really the right one?

And that is a difficult question to answer. As I wrote back in that post, Window’s Phone 7 are Metro is in many ways more sophisticated and evolved than iOS. You can slice your data in more ways than only in the “app”-dimension (like for example in the “person”-dimension). But this also makes it more complex, and complexity is a tough route to take when challenging the dead simple.

Metro as a design language of it’s own less complex than the more eclectic mix of analogue references that iOS incorporates, but this also makes it less intuitive on a basic human level. I think a 3-year old with a Windows phone will take longer to get going than with an iPhone, partly because the lack of real world references and partly because the more complex data representation capabilities. (And partly because it looks less like candy. No joke).

And why does it matter what at 3-year old thinks? It comes down to intuition. 3-year olds use their intuition in a way that is much like how prospective customers use theirs when evaluating an alternative to something they already own and love. And given the iPhone-penetration, this is exactly the situation Windows Phone often finds itself in when presenting itself to the market.

For the marketing of the Windows Phone, this is super important to take into account. Two concrete ways to deal with the situations would be to:

1. Focus on the product and how it functions in a very specific way in the communication for the phone to help intuition along the day people actually pick up the product for the first time. Keep it simple, fun , concrete and inspiring.
2. Have a simple, disarmingly fun and inspiring little tutorial the first time you fire up your Windows Phone (like the ones you often see in iPhone apps). Also in the service of helping intuition along.
3. Rinse and repeat for the app developer community.

This amazing video makes me wonder why on earth airline commercials have to be so darn boring. There is just such amazing raw materials to work with. Just love what can be done with the GoPros and the Contours out there. Inspiring.

The Hardware

I just got my hands on the new Nokia Lumia 800 with the Windows Phone 7 OS installed. The first impressions are quite nice. The phone is surprisingly well designed and built, with a few exceptions like the slinky and fragile cover for the charger port. In terms of build quality it’s not at par with the iPhone 4, which is a piece of art in that sense, but probably one of the best runner ups I’ve seen.

The OS

I have mixed feelings about the OS as I’ve written about before. It’s modern and integrated in a way that I miss in iOS, but it also has a few flaws that I don’t see in Apple’s system. To be fair, Apple had flaws early on too, and the WP7 is a much younger system, so if the engineers and designers at Microsoft really put their noses to the grindstone in fixing flaws and striving for absolute perfection, this product could well be a challenger to primarily Android. I never thought I would say that about anything outside the realm of the iOS-Android superpowers, but there is something interesting about the different path that WP7 takes that makes Android seem… well… a little uninspired.

The Problem of Dual Citizenships

But as much as I love new and different things, there is one thing that really irritates the hell out of me: It’s just too complicated to have dual citizenships in both the Apple and Windows worlds. I still have to invest in one system or the other and set my life up for one of the two. The Apple world works beautifully when you stay true to Apple, and the future of Windows with the upcoming and probably game changing Windows 8 carries some promise in the same direction, but mixing the two does not sound like a good marriage to me.

In some ways it works fine. Google takes care of all contacts and emails that flow seamlessly into my new Lumia, and the same goes for Facebook and Twitter of course. But for me to be able to switch between the two systems smoothly I would want to have Apple’s photo stream for the WP7 phone (perhaps a detail, but an important one once you learn to appreciate photo stream). And more importantly, I would like to have a single market to buy my Apps and other software (content included) from. I realize that this is not likely to happen in the form of being able to log into Apple’s App Store on a Windows Phone, but it shouldn’t be impossible for a company like, say, TomTom to sync their customer database to Apple’s App Store, Window’s Marketplace and Android’s Marketplace; thus having a cross-platform “buy once, use everywhere” philosophy for their products. This would be the fair model as it doesn’t make sense for me to have to buy the product again just because I switch brands on my phone. The same should hold true for other products like books where you shouldn’t have to pay two license fees to read the same book from, say, Kindle’s and Apple’s bookstores. When this works, things become very interesting indeed as you don’t get locked down to either system and could pick up whatever device you like and switch seamlessly.

But until that happens it feels difficult for me to put away my iPhone 4S in favor of the Lumia 800 despite the fact that it does have both magic and performance to it. It IS a quick, well built, smart and even sexy product. And for those of you who don’t mind Windows for your desktop and tablet experience (like I said, Windows 8 does look interesting), this device could be a great choice.

Ok. So I’m wearing a kimono, at a beautiful Japanese spa halfway out to the Stockholm archipelago, surrounded by an explosion of colorful fall leafs, carrying a small basket in which I’m supposed to only carry around my towel and my slippers. But instead of slippers, my basked is full of tech gear. And instead of bathing my feet in a fish tank (yes, they have one for that purpose) or practicing Qi Gong, we’re coding away on an iOS-app and a web-app, both of which will be taken from start to finish in 24 hours.

This is the 24-Hour business camp, and we’ve just started count-down 7 minutes ago. I’m surrounded by my 4 team mates who are all SWAT-class coders (and one designer), and the other teams are just as sharp. The building is just boiling of brainpower. Very cool.

The clock is ticking now, so I probably won’t have time to write you any long posts for the next 24 hrs, But I’ll be back with an update and hopefully a link to something that works. Wish us luck.

Click This Image to Read Wired.com's Obituary

I woke up today to the news that one my biggest sources of inspiration, Steve Jobs, is dead; and that the world has lost one of the greatest thought leaders of our time. He will live on in the millions of people he inspired, the amazing leaps of innovation that he led his company to and the legends that always surrounded him and Apple. Rest in peace you insanely great mind, and thank you for everything. I promise to keep thinking differently.

I just read in tomorrow’s issue of our Swedish advertising business paper Resumé about the forthcoming recommendations for how the pitch process for advertising agencies should work. From a quick look it seems to me to be more comfortable for the ad agencies but somewhat dangerous for the clients.

On The Plus Side

• A quicker process without unnecessary cost will be good for both parties.

On The Minus Side

• The idea to have “workshops” where the parties “talk” instead of presentations of actual creative work would make me worried if I was a client. There is a risk that clients end up with the best salesman rather than the best advertising agency. If it was my budget I would prefer an agency that walks the walk over one that talks the talk any day. 

Looking forward to see who takes what side in the upcoming debate. My guess would be that it will be a fight between talkers and walkers.

A lot of times, it’s not the content that matters most, but how you present it. I give you… drumroll… How To Open a Door!

The devil is in the details.
(Thanks to Johan Dahlfors for sharing)