My old friend from the philosophy department at Columbia University, Marko Ahtisaari, got me started in blogging and I also started 3QD at his suggestion and encouragement. Marko has been head of design at Nokia for the last couple of years. Here, he introduces Nokia’s flagship phone, the N9, of which Marko and his design team are justifiably proud. It is creating huge buzz in tech circles and basically leaves other smartphones looking and feeling clunky and obsolete. It even has an 8 mega-pixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics! Sorry, don’t mean to sound like I am doing an ad for Nokia, but having worked for Nokia myself in the past, I am proud of Marko and his team’s achievement. Check it out:

Tom Service in The Guardian:

ENO’s viral video advertising Nico Muhly‘s new opera is a kick-ass three minutes of social networking lampooning. However, it’s got zippity-squat to do with the work itself. Far from questioning “how odd your online life is”, Two Boys is a human drama of obsession, love, fantasy, identity and detective work. It’s also not really about “what could go wrong” online. This is a bit of a euphemism for being induced to masturbate on-cam for someone you think is a hot chick but who turns out to be a teenage boy, and then be forced through months of psychological manipulation to stab them.

The point is, the drama of Two Boys will be, or should be, profound and tragic, rather than merely critiquing the trivialities of friend-inculcation on Facebook, as the viral video, produced in collaboration with flyer-merchants Don’t Panic and starring Jolyon Rubinstein, makes out. At least that’s how it seemed to me watching rehearsals for the piece, looking at the score, and talking to the composer himself.

More here.