Predicting smartphone addiction in kids

A study of South Korean elementary school kids has found that stress and lack of self-control are the strongest predictors of the "smartphone" addiction. Although the device to deliver the addiction is the smartphone, the real hooks for the addiction are Social Networking (SNS) and entertainment services (via BBC news).

Since the mobile has become a dominant platform for delivering entertainment services, in a period of two generations we can expect a migration of television advertisement money into online services. The TV and the web are going to go into oblivion like the newsprint. We can also expect that Twitter will not catch up with Facebook or other major SNS'.

Also, it appears that the humanity is running a large-scale Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, dividing kids into those who can exert self–control and those who cannot. 

The first follow-up study, in 1988, showed that "preschool children who delayed gratification longer in the self-imposed delay paradigm, were described more than 10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were significantly more competent."
A second follow-up study, in 1990, showed that the ability to delay gratification also correlated with higher SATscores.^[5]

From an innovation theory perspective, the smartphone represents the Dominant Design, while online services - the Dominant Use.

Is Apple in long-term trouble?

A survey of software developers shows a sharp drop in Objective-C popularity, Objective-C being the main programming language for Apple's iOS.

Source: tiobe.com

Fewer developers means fewer apps for consumers and businesses. One could argue that with hundreds of thousands of apps already available in the AppStore Apple should not worry about the trend. Furthermore, Apple's move into its own services, including media streaming, may also decrease the need for independent developers. In general, the mobile apps space has matured well beyond its heydays.

Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine a popular software development platform that is of limited interest to developers. We might be seeing the beginning of the end of Apple's rapid expansion.

tags: technology, apple, software, services, dominant design

Invention of the Day: Kindergarten, learning by playing.

In 1837 Friedrich Fröbel, a German educator, founded care, playing and activity institute for small children in Bad Blankenburg. Three years later he came up with a short name for his creation - Kindergarten. Fröbel's idea was based on an insight that young children learn best while playing, rather than working on specific tasks assigned by the teacher in a formal school environment. Remarkably, Fröbel himself was an orphan and never had children of his own. His entire life was devoted to educating other people's children.

Although today the concept of "learning by playing" seems obvious, in the 19th century it seemed revolutionary and even subversive. In 1851, the Prussian government banned all Kindergatens as “atheistic and demagogic” for its alleged “destructive tendencies in the areas of religion and politics”.

Most societies in the developed world have adopted the Kindergarten model as a key part of formal elementary school education. In the US, kindergarten education is compulsory from age 5 or 6. Kids must learn by playing!

From an innovator perspective, the Kindergarten education "technology" succeeded because it 1) leveraged young children's natural ability to learn by playing; 2) helped parents, especially working women who didn't have neither time nor educational background, to prepare their children for school. As education became a critical element of a person's social success, the market for Kindergarten expanded worldwide.

tags: invention, innovation, education, gaming, dominant design

Invention of the Day - Instant Messaging

It's hard to imagine today's life without instant messaging. The service has become one of the Dominant Designs in the Internet era. As we write in Scalable Innovation (Chapter 13):

Dominant Design is an implementation of a new functionality that the market adopts as the prototype for future implementations. Simply put, the dominant design is what everybody thinks all products or services in the new category should imitate.

US Patent 6,449,344

Today's IT giants — Google, Facebook, IBM,  Microsoft, Yahoo, Alibaba, and others provide instant messaging services as a "must have" feature. Recently, Facebook paid $19B for Whatsup, a company that built its mobile service using the instant messaging ideas. 

The original technology was developed in 1996 by an Israeli company Mirabilis and released during the same year as ICQ chat software. The service was extremely successful, even despite being characterized as the world's "ugliest website." 

In 1998, AOL bought Mirabilis for $287M - a pitiful sum by today's Internet M&A standards. Eventually, AOL rebranded the service as the AOL Messenger. 

Instant Messaging had other important implications for the world of technology. First, ICQ influenced the development of other peer-to-peer (P2P) services, such as Napster, Gnutella, Skype, and others, which revolutionized content distribution and communications in the beginning of the 21st century.

Second, the business success of Mirabilis put Israel on the global map of Internet innovation and served as a catalyst for the creation of a thriving tech entrepreneurship culture in the country. 

Third, Instant Messaging helped initiate the Internet services era that exploded with the introduction of the iPhone and other smartphones.

Arguably, the invention of Instant Messaging is as important to the world as Graham Bell's invention of the phone in 1876. 

tags: invention, innovation, facebook, google, microsoft, dominant, design, 10x

Quote of the Day: Thomas Kuhn on discovering "paradigms."

Attempting to discover the source of that difference [between social and natural sciences] led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called “paradigms.” These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners. Once that piece of my puzzle fell into place, a draft of this essay emerged rapidly.  -- Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

A paradigm plays the role of the dominant design in scientific systems. It takes a while to come up with it, but after the paradigm is established, everybody focuses on making the process for its "manufacturing and use" as efficient as possible.

Examples of dominant designs: bathtub, smartphone, online shopping, shopping cart.

tags: design, innovation, science, technology

Lunch Talk: (@TED) Sketching with Electronics

Designing electronics is generally cumbersome and expensive -- or was, until Leah Buechley and her team at MIT developed tools to treat electronics just like paper and pen. In this talk from TEDYouth 2011, Buechley shows some of her charming designs, like a paper piano you can sketch and then play.

tags: lunchtalk, design, innovation, research