Luncht Talk: (TED) Seth Godin on spreading your ideas.

In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to just ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes to getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones.

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tags: lunchtalk, information, innovation, diffusion, media

The brave new China: innovation by decree.

The mayor of Beijing has a simple policy. If you want to buy a gasoline-fueled car, you enter into this lottery, and if you win, you can drive that car four days out of seven. If you would like to drive seven days of seven, you have to buy an electric car. That looks like a great opportunity. They are, in this way, creating clean-tech markets.

This is from the MTR interview with Christina Lampe-Onnerud, founder of a battery startup, who moved her company from the US to China. Read the whole piece; it's a good example of how China tries to address its scalability problems I posted about earlier. Air pollution in Beijing and other major cities is one of those problems, which the drastic innovation measures are intended to solve.

tags: scale, problem, solution, innovation, diffusion, startup. storage

Lunch Talk: The Story Behind "TED: Ideas Worth Spreading"

"(May 11, 2011) Executive producer of TED Media, June Cohen, looks at how she brought a lecture series with an attendance of a few hundred to over 150 million people across the world. She discusses how innovation and the spread of ideas is key to keeping TEDTalks a platform for doers and thinkers to be heard by the rest of the world."

Invention of the Day: Hamburger Sandwich

Walt Anderson is generally credited with the invention of the modern hamburger, produced today in billions by major global corporations. There's even a "Big Mac Index published by The Economist as an informal way of measuring the purchasing power parity (PPP) between two currencies." And it all started in Wichita, on November 16, 1916, when Walt Anderson, armed with "a flat metal griddle, a counter, three stools, and a spatula" opened his first burger stand.

"The key to Anderson’s masterpiece was the bun. It was the bun that gave the hamburger its mobility; that allowed a person to eat it while walking or (more important) while driving; it was the bun that made it spe- cial, that separated it from all other sandwiches and gave it a brandable identity. The essence of a picture is the frame, as G. K. Chesterton once observed, and so the essence of the hamburger is the bun."

The Hamburger, by Josh Ozersky. p.29.

According to Ozersky, the business and marketing genius behind the success of the burger chain was Edgar Waldo “Billy” Ingram, a realtor who understood the potential of fast food for industrial workers in the age of Ford car factories:

“A revelation in the eating business has come. Instead of having to go to a restaurant and waste half an hour of the noon lunch, one may step into a nearby hamburger establishment and partake of the hot, juicy hamburger, prepared instantaneously.” p.31.

In later years, industrial refrigeration, an extensive network of roads, and American car-loving culture made hamburger restaurant a fixture in every town and every highway rest stop.

tags: invention, distribution, infrastructure, innovation, diffusion, 10x, history, 4q diagram, health

Invention of the Day: Jigsaw Puzzle

Year 1766, London, England. The British Empire is now a major sea power. John Spilsbury, formerly the apprentice to the Royal Geographer, designs and successfully commercializes first jigsaw puzzles.

For a good 20 years during the mid 1700s, all manufactured jigsaws were in the form of dissected maps like Spilsbury's.

The maps were designed as teaching aids for geography classes. As pupils put the pieces together, they would learn how different countries connected to one another.

In the space of two years he[John Spilsbury] marketed the eight map subjects most likely to appeal to upper class English parents: the world, the four continents then known (Africa, America, Asia and Europe), England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

It is remarkable that the jigsaw puzzle outlived the steam engine designed by James Watt approximately at the same time and considered to be a major driver behind the first Industrial Revolution. As always, fun and games win over work and industry.


tags: invention, innovation, diffusion, book, education

FIFA and technology

Certain important game situations in soccer, such as offside or hand ball, can be easily resolved in real time with the new video technology. Today, many TV stations already have equipment capable of showing replays of controversial plays within seconds after they happen on the field. It's hard to imagine any TV game broadcast without video replays. In addition to that, during important international games refs wear wireless audio headsets.  A TV operator could easily use the system to tell them, whether a goal was scored legally or not. Thus, technology exists to make the right call at the right time. Nevertheless, FIFA is not in a hurry to use it. Why? Are they afraid to undermine the authority of the refs?

tags:  10x, technology, diffusion, innovation, games,

Toads and innovation

Toads are one of the most common species in the world. The 2/5/2010 issue of the Science Magazine published an article about traits that have helped them proliferate throughout the continents over a relatively short period of time. Here's a summary table from the paper (click to enlarge):

The second part of the table shows that successful toads are quick to take advantage of temporary favorable weather conditions (e.g. small pools of water); produce a lot of eggs (most of them die later); minimize investment into their offspring.

Let's switch our focus and think about snippets of ideas (idealets) instead of toads. Today's communication environment encourages extremely short messages: twitter, youtube, blogs, and now google buzz. Attention span is getting shorter, competition for attention intensifies. Therefore, just like with toad larvae, producing a lot of idealets that ride hot media events and don't require much effort must be a winning proliferation strategy.
The only problem is: toads don't build cultures and cities that last hundreds of years. They live within an environment that is dealt to them by superior powers. This means that companies creating environments stand to benefit immensely from letting info-toads to reproduce and proliferate. They just need to find the right information taxation formula. Google found one - relevent ads - but there must be others.

tags: diffusion, strategy, infrastructure, niche construction,

The iPad paradox

Up until now, Steve Jobs had been incredibly successful at introducing the public to truly revolutionary devices disguising them as familiar products. For example, iPod was positioned as a better , much better, incarnation of a traditional audio player, either CD or MP3. In reality, it was a device that in combination with iTunes allowed for a completely new level of functionality in creation, transfer, and sharing of collections of music: intuitive custom playlists, podcasts, audio library navigation, and etc. Compared with competition, i.e. conventional audio players, iPod looked like a na'vi among humans. It was a revolutionary system, but it felt familiar enough for people to try and learn to love.

Then came iPod Touch and iPhone. Again, they were presented to the public as greatly improved versions of iPod and mobile phone, respectively. But in both cases audio content play-out and  communications were just a couple of software applications on a great multi-functional mobile computer. The combination of iPhone and iTunes was a different animal altogether, but it was disguised as a better phone+web system. These new Apple gadgets got rapidly adopted by consumers because they felt very familiar with basic functionality and the form factor. It was easy for everybody to try Apple's new technology and then experience the difference. You'd buy an Apple product as a replacement for your old player or cell phone, and later discover a totally new mode of interaction with the world of information.

But iPad is different. Really different. It can't be bought as a replacement. It's not a PC, smartphone,  netbook, e-book, picture frame, TV, or whatever. It's a new thing that, unlike Apple's other revolutionary products, feels completely unfamiliar. Bummer! No wonder, people are confused. They can't say, "iPad is just like my pre-school dream picture book, only much-much better."

tags: dilemma, problem, solution, apple, information, computers, psychology, diffusion

Sky 2.0.

Surveillance with unmanned drones is the most practical robot application of the early 21st century. I Over the last couple of years, it's been moving steadily from military to civilian environs:

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ­"routine" monitoring of antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.

In the future, this technology will have an even greater impact on our everyday lives, e.g. in "drive-by-wire" semi-automated car navigation systems, neighborhood security, home and auto insurance, virtual reality, life hacking, and etc.  And don't forget that drones can draw power directly from the sun - the ultimate green robot.

tags: information, tool, control, detection, system, evolution, scale

Let the battle of formats begin.

Physical books are on the way to extinction. The technology that started with the invention of codex and, arguably, enabled the spread Christianity through the Roman Empire, is ceding its position to electronic packaging of text:

In another milestone for the e-reader, the company [Amazon] noted that on Christmas Day, for the first time ever, Amazon customers bought more Kindle books than physical books.

tags: payload, system, evolution, 10X, control, distribution, course, information, entertainment

A graph from a 1954 article by Ernest Jawetz in Annual Review of Medicine looks remarkably similar to the Gartner Hype Cycle "discovered" in 1995. Both graphs have an enthusiasm peak, a disappointment pit, and a productivity plateau (see below).

Gartner Hype Cycle (courtesy wikipedia.org)

With Twitter we are probably still in the early stages of the cycle (see Google Timeline snapshot):

tags: innovation, cycle, diffusion, pattern, theory, book, infrastructure, niche construction, constraint

Necessity is the mother of diffusion

A good example of forced innovation (diffusion):

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has unveiled a plan to save money by phasing out school textbooks in favour of internet aids.

From the beginning of the next school year in August, maths and science students in California's high schools will have access to online texts that have passed an academic standards review.

Heavy backpacks no more!

The Great Junk Food Disruption

As an illustration to my yesterday's post about why and how America is getting fat, here's a 10X diagram that shows how the junk food industry disrupted the traditional family meal model.

In the traditional family meal "business" model, a homemaker, most often the wife, cooks once a day for the whole family at $10 per meal (the blue spot on the diagram).

In the junk food industry model, a packaged Fat+Sugar/Salt meal, e.g. candy or snack, is dispensed from a vending machine or a Starbucks store every minute at a cost from 10 cents to a few dollars (the red spot on the diagram). The model targets individuals, rather than family: children, teenagers, busy morning commuters, workers, and etc.

The junk food model is disruptive relative to the "family meal" one because it delivers a "good-enough" ultra-low price product to a large target market.

We can further anticipate that the obesity epidemic that is currently raging in the United States will spread around the world. Countries with weak cultural constraints and high demand for inexpensive high-calorie meals are especially vulnerable.

CNet on YouTube's slow march to generate a meaningful revenue:

Bernstein Research's Jeffrey Lindsay ... believes that YouTube has been able to increase the number of videos suitable for advertising to around 9 percent of YouTube's inventory. That doesn't sound like much, but it's up from around 3 percent last year, according to MediaMemo, and could reach 15 percent next year.

I am a little bit surprise that so many people still watch ads on the net despite the fact that ad-blocking browser extensions like AdBlock Plus are widely available. Do they think that it is unfair to use a resource without supporting its business model, or they are just unaware that ad blockers exist? The latter is more likely because a lot more people are interesting in distributing ads than distributing tools to remove ads.

p.s. hulu vs youtube would be a good "technology battle" exercise.

New Scientist on a new way to get rid of greenhouse gases:

CONVERTING a greenhouse gas into a clean-burning fuel offers two benefits for the price of one. That's the thinking behind a novel process for converting carbon dioxide into methanol at room temperature, developed by a team at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore (Angewandte Chemie International Edition, DOI: 10.1002/anie.200806058).

The catalyst used by Ying's team is a type of chemical called an N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC). The mechanism by which the NHC speeds up the conversion is uncertain, but it appears to change the shape of the CO2 molecule, "activating" it in a way that makes it easier for hydrogen to bond with its carbon atom, says team member Yugen Zhang.

Is this discovery a game changer? How do we know? And if yes, how long will it take to implement the solution and diffuse it into the marketplace? Will it be competitive with other "green" tech, e.g. solar, wind, and etc.?

Marketwatch on the surprising earning announcement from Apple:

Apple Inc. reported a surprise gain in net income for its second fiscal quarter as sales of the company's iPod and iPhone products came in ahead of expectations for the period.

iPhone has become a must-have device worldwide. It would be interesting to see the numbers next year when iPhone clones hit full force.

A good paper by Ronald S. Burt on brokerage-based innovation model:

Brokerage across the structural holes between groups provides a vision of options otherwise unseen, which is the mechanism by which brokerage becomes social capital.
The organization is rife with structural holes, and brokerage has its expected correlates. Compensation, positive performance evaluations, promotions, and good ideas are disproportionately in the hands of people whose networks span structural holes. The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable.

People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of genius; it is creativity as an import-export business. An idea
mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another.

A positive side effect for an enterprise-wide social network could be a clear map of structural holes within the organization. By analyzing connections between groups and people we could identify most valuable avenues for internal and external innovation. Especially so, if the company's suppliers and customers can be viewed/represented as a part of the network.