Innovation, alongside disruption are two of the most overused words in business at the moment. Like obscenity, many people have their own idea of what innovation is.
Judy Estrin wrote one of the best books about the subject and describes it in terms of hard and soft innovation.
Hard innovation is companies like Intel or Qualcomm at the cutting edge of computer science, materials science and physics
Soft innovation would be companies like Facebook or Yahoo!. Companies that might create new software but didn’t really add to the corpus of innovation
Silicon Valley has moved from hard to soft innovation as it moved away from actually making things. Santa Clara country no longer deserves its Silicon Valley appellation any more than it deserved the previous ‘garden of delights’ as the apricot orchards turned into factories, office campus buildings and suburbs. It’s probably no coincidence that that expertise has moved east to Taiwan due to globalisation.
It can also be more process orientated shaking up an industry. Years ago I worked at an agency at the time of writing is now called WE Worldwide. At the time the client base was predominantly in business technology, consumer technology and pharmaceutical clients.
The company was looking to build a dedicated presence in consumer marketing. One of the business executives brings along a new business opportunity. The company made fancy crisps (chips in the American parlance). They did so using a virtual model. Having private label manufacturers make to the snacks to their recipe and specification. This went down badly with one of the agency’s founders saying ‘I don’t see what’s innovative about that’. She’d worked exclusively in the IT space and thought any software widget was an innovation. She couldn’t appreciate how this start-ups approach challenged the likes of P&G or Kraft Foods.
Evernote is in deep trouble – Business Insider – kind of glad I don’t have data in Evernote, if I did what would be my emergency migration plan? The lack of migration plan is one of the key issues with post-web 2.0 services – that use web 2.0 technologies. But businesses like Evernote lack the open data approach of forebears like flickr or delicious
Tor browser co-creator: Experian breach shows encryption may not be security panacea – “Experian differentiated between personally identifying information that was not stored encrypted, and credit card info which was stored encrypted — both were hacked,” Goldschlag wrote in a note to VentureBeat. “Experian added that it is likely that the hackers were able to decrypt the encrypted information too,” he said. (Experian’s CEO admitted this.) “So storing information in an encrypted form may not be the panacea that people expect.” – did they use a weak algorithm? Was it an inside job? What was the nature of the cryptography attack? More security related content here
SK-II opens SoHo pop-up to change consumers’ destinies – Luxury Daily – interesting campaign, just a few years ago how many beauty campaigns tagline would have been a hashtag? The hashtag came from documenting items in the C programming language, which in turn came out of Bell Labs and their work on the AT&T Unix operating system #unixrunningtheworldnow
Fairphone 2 – a pre-production review of the new modular smartphone – Computing – a review of a Project Aria-esque device. The Fairphone 2 is similar to Jolla, which also experimented with their ‘other half’ concept but no eco-system built up around it. It will be interesting to see if Fairphone 2 can be any more successful
16 Deals Feeding Chip Biz’s Merger Fever | EE Times – the flurry of M&A activity is the product of Wall Street’s relentless pressure on chip companies to show revenue growth that cannot be achieved organically
Will digital books ever replace print? – Craig Mod – Aeon – Digital books stagnate in closed, dull systems, while printed books are shareable, lovely and enduring. What comes next? – which is usually the kind of problem digital solves….
How Steve Jobs Fleeced Carly Fiorina — Backchannel — Medium – something that Steven Levy doesn’t not but in an added piece of irony of this is that Compaq had one of the first hard disk based MP3 players that no one remembers any more. It was a product licensed to Hango Electronics and sold as the Personal Jukebox
Strictly speaking this is a bit different from when I have written about books. This is the second time that I read Being Digital, the first time was during my final year in college.
I was curious to know how the book would hold up in the space of 20 years since it was first published. In twenty years we’ve seen televisions shrink as we moved from cathode ray tubes to plasma and LCD displays. The cost of telephone calls has declined, cellphones are really no longer phones but a type of mobile computer that happens to do voice calls poorly. The dominant form of personal computing is Android rather than Windows. The internet has facilitated a raft of services that used to exist in the real world or didn’t exist previously.
In the subsequent 20 years Negroponte has gone from being one of digital’s poster children with a column in Wired and his leading role at MIT Media Lab to a more obscure position in digital history. His biography over at MIT has him listed as sitting on the board of Motorola Inc.
It is easy to dismiss his showmanship and bluster, but the Negroponte did work that foreshadowed in-car sat navigation devices, Google Street View and the modern stylus-less touch screen.
The book first of all emphasises how far we have come when it talks about 9600 baud connections, I am writing this post sat on the end of an internet connection that provides 50mbps download and 10mbps upload – and that’s slow compared to the speeds that I enjoyed in Hong Kong. Negroponte envisioned that satellites would have a greater role in internet access than it seems to currently have, cellular networks seem to have brought that disruption instead.
It has the tone of boundless optimism that seemed to exemplify technology writing in the mid-to-late 1990s but with not quite the messianic feel of peer George Gilder. Negroponte smartly hedges his bets for where the ‘rubber hits the road’ as society brings some odd effects in on technology usage.
Online media
Negroponte grasped the importance of digital and the internet as a medium for the provision of media content. That sounds like a no brainer but back in the day the record industry didn’t get it. In fact record industry went on to make blockbuster profits for another five years, N’Sync was the best selling artist of the year in 2000 with No Strings Attached selling 9.94 million copies. Over the next decade or so profits halved in the face of determined record label countermeasures including suing their customers.
OTT and cord cutting
Negroponte was dismissive of high definition video and television considering it wasteful of bandwidth. On this I get the sense that he is both right and wrong. We are surrounded by high definition screens (even 4K mobile screens – where their size doesn’t allow you to appreciate the full clarity of the image). But this doesn’t mean that our entertainment has to come in high definition, much YouTube isn’t watched on full screen for instance.
Disruption of publishing
Negroponte grasped that it would also shake up the book industry and Being Digital has been published in a number of e-book reader formats, but at the moment the experience of digital books leaves something to be desired compared to traditional books.
Tablets
Negroponte labours a surprising amount of copy on tablet devices. At the time that he published his book GO was in competition with Microsoft with pen computing devices and software, EO had launched their personal communicator – a phablet sized cellular network connected pen tablet and the first Apple Newton had launched in 1993. Negroponte goes on to insist that the finger is the best stylus. MIT Media Lab had done research on the stylus-less touch experience, but reading the article reminded me of the points Steve Jobs had made about touch on the original iPhone and iPad. It is also mirrored in the Ron Arad concepts I mentioned in an earlier blog post.
Agents
Negroponte considered that we would be supported in our online lives with agents that would provide contextual content and do tasks, which is where Google Now, Siri and Cortana have tried to go. However his writing implies an agent that is less ‘visible’ and in the face of the user.
Negroponte’s critique of virtual reality at the time provides good insight as to how much progress Oculus Rift and other similar products have made. He points out the technical and user experience challenges really well. If anyone is thinking about immersive experiences, it is well worth a read.
Going back and reading the book provided me an opportunity reflect on where we have come to in the past twenty years and Negroponte’s instincts where mostly right.
Ron Arad is more famous for his architecture and art than product design. I went along to see him speak at an event that is part of London Design Festival last week thanks to the China-Britain Cultural Exchange Association. Arad’s presentation felt largely unplanned as the curator of the talk asked him to jump around from project to project rather than a clear narrative being presented. Arad showed imagery or video that he then talked around.
During the presentation he showed off the design concept that he did for LG that pre-dated the iPad. It sounded at the event like Ron Arad had started his thinking in 1997, but the sources I looked at online stated that this project was done in 2002 and the video copy I found on YouTube states that the copyright is 2003.
The video is quite prescient in a number of ways
The device was primarily about content consumption and messaging
He nailed the in-home use case, with the exception of realising that the iPad may be a communal shared device rather than belonging to an individual
It has a flat design interface (though this might be a limitation of their ability to create it on video and a spin on the circular LG logo)
The soft keyboard on screen
There is no stylus
There was auto-rotation of the screen
It has no user serviceable parts (this was at the time when cellphones and laptops came with detachable batteries)
Inductive charging with a table rather than the small pad used by the like of the Microsoft/Nokia Lumia devices
The way the controls where superimposed on footage of the user working with the device is reminiscent of the way TV and films are now treating parts of a plot that involves messaging
There were a few things that it got wrong:
Arad clearly didn’t understand the significance of the iPod, so the device had an optical drive rather than side loaded video content
The device is really big, more like a laptop screen than a phablet, a la the iPad Mini or Galaxy Tab
The form factor was too thick, understandably so when they are trying to squeeze a battery and optical drive in the device, the thickness had a benefit in that the device was self-standing. Apple relied on covers and cases to provide the standing mechanism
Chinese Soccer Prepares to ‘Fly Alone’: Will Success Follow? | WSJ – moving away from government. It will be interesting to see if China can displace the European teams in the world’s sports media markets. I suspect that a key component of that, which hasn’t been addressed yet, would be changes in sports betting
