Robin Wong is the co-founder of digital production company Weir+Wong. He tells Julian Blake why this year in tech is about creative technology and the onward march of the mobile
This year in tech it’s all about getting creative. In this fast-moving world, where social media and mobile apps are delivering new interactions at a frightening pace, it’s the folks who can bridge the science and creative thinking who are set to thrive – understanding what people want as well as knowing what’s going on underneath the technical bonnet.
“Creative technologists are the ones to watch,” says digital production specialist Robin Wong. “These people can mix up ideas and actually apply this to hardware and software. There are very few of these people around, so they’re very, very valuable.”
For Wong, the best and most obvious demonstration of creative technology in action is the iPhone. “It’s a perfect combination of technology and design,” he says. “It’s taken some brilliant minds to marry together all the chips, components and software into a single device, and this is a magical combination of design, engineering, software and hardware.” Elsewhere, he says, creative technologists are deploying early stage technology like HTML5 to produce cutting edge solutions on tiny budgets.
Wong, a career creative technologist with a CV that includes Agency Republic and awards for Flash work, could be accused of bias towards his own trade. But the coming together of creative ideas and technical know-how has been at the philosophical centre of Weir+Wong, the agency he co-founded two years ago with partner Andy Weir, from the start.
Wong sees that the best technical people are currently being snapped up by the world’s two competing social media superpowers. “There’s going to be massive arms race between Facebook and Google Plus this year,” he says. “Each is trying to outdo the other with social features that tap into various different parts of your life. Google is going all out with that reclaim some ground from Facebook.”
The rise and rise of Google (despite recent relatively disappointing results), is in itself forcing technological change. Wong predicts more social platforms on Android, and a very tough time ahead for Flash as a software platform. “With all the wrangling from Google about it not being a modern technology, Flash is definitely going to get more of a wallop this year. I was a Flash developer but there’s a lot of very smart developers who are moving over towards using HTML5 technologies. It’ll be interesting to see how many move, and how many stick with it.”
The fast-moving and often unpredictable nature of technological change has informed how Weir+Wong itself works. “We’re basically two producers, but we reach out to a global network of people with technical design backgrounds,” Wong explains. “We create teams for clients for specific projects and we try to use the best people in the business. This makes us very flexible. I’m a very big fan of doing things in as lean a way as possible.”
This agile philosophy has informed not only W+W’s personnel structure, but its infrastructure and way of working. “We moved all of our material into the cloud last year. It’s made a big difference to how we work and how we share stuff. We’re big fans of Basecamp and Google docs and other tools that encourage collaborative working. It’s also made us very lean in terms of infrastructure.” Wong predicts that more companies will move their systems away from physical servers as they start to see the benefits.
On projects, W+W has quite literally been aiming for the stars. YouTube Spacelab is a major science education project working with NASA and featuring the likes of Stephen Hawking. “It’s a global space science competition to get an experiment that can be streamed on the international space station,” he explains. “It’s pretty massive.” Massive indeed. A viral ad campaign has had more than 40 million views and the competition has just produced 60 finalists from 22 countries.
Back on earth, Wong points to new projects for Google Chrome that could help redefine the company’s business. “It’ll be pretty hardcore, pushing at the forefront of technology,” he says. “We’re doing some experimental HTML5 work now and we’ll be able to say more about it at the end of May.”
Wong surveys the scene for technology in the year ahead and has little doubt that 2012 and beyond will be about the smartphone. “In the next five years smartphones are going to overtake traditional feature phones, even in the developing world,” Wong says. “By 2016, more than nine out of 10 phones here will be smart. The big force for change is going to be the way people around the world see computers. As a business we’ll have to build in much more thinking about mobile technology, looking at mobile browsing, app development and new platforms.”
While technology accelerates, the global economy remains a major questionmark for the months and year ahead. “The willingness to take risks is obviously a big issue with the recession, and people being more cautious about how they spend money,“ says Wong. “Getting people to try advertising that is more far out is becoming more difficult. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to people’s marketing budgets.”
