Forming a good creative habit.

Forming a good habit requires repetition. The more complex the task, the more repetition is needed to get to a plateau where the behaviour becomes automatic. This appears to be a conclusion of the study reported in a research blog:

" It seems the message of this research for those seeking to establish
a new habit is to repeat the behaviour every day if you can, but don't
worry excessively if you miss a day or two. Also be prepared for the
long haul - remember the average time to reach peak automaticity was
66 days."

Usually, repetitive work is not associated with creativity. But Edison's name comes to mind, b/c of his constant focus on developing new inventions. Over his lifetime he accumulated more than a thousand patents, some of them turned out to be seminal in the history of technology. Edison's lab tried to be creative "repetitively" and, obviously, the succeeded.

In Creativity, by now famous psychologist M.Csikszentmihalyi, the idea that creative people are very repetitive, almost stubborn, in things they are trying to create comes out loud and clear.

From my own experience, writing for two hours a day was key to making progress with my own book. Zerubavel's "Clockwork Muse" helped me immensely to understand and implement this simple recipe. Also, my best patents came out during the time when I literally forced myself to think up an invention a day. Most of the ideas died, but a good 50 or 60 of them made it into a patent application.

Of course, the problem with the repetitive approach could be that you get stuck with the same set of tools and in the same concept area, developing, even if you are very successful, a tunnel vision. Then, an antidote to this problem would be to work in many areas at the same time. That is why I really like working with various startups, learning new technologies, and teaching different invention techniques. Listening to UC Berkeley podcasts on topics ranging from electronics to philosophy of language, also helps.

tags: creativity, process, problem, solution, science,  invention

... is power

Remarkably, the Forbes' list of most powerful women tops Michelle Obama, a woman who married the right guy, rather than, let's say, Lady Gaga, who rose to power, whatever the Forbiates think it is, through her own efforts.

tags: selection, niche construction, information, control

Creativity Quote of the Day: Explaining things.

"Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan."
"Then I'm dumber than an eight-year-old," Miss Pefko mourned. "I don't even know what a charlatan is."

Kurt Vonnegut. Cat's cradle.

Genrikh Altshuller used to say that you should be able to strip your idea of all technical jargon and explain your invention to a 12-year-old because the 12-year-old would need only some understanding of physics. The more I work with inventors, the more I realize that most concepts can be easily explained to much younger kids. Unless, of course, adults package their explanations in layers of professional buzzwords, the buzzwords often designed to signal affinity with a certain group and repel the uninitiated. When stripped of packaging, ideas become much easier to understand, and, more importantly, develop  much further into additional inventions.


tags: quote, creativity, knowledge, communication

Invention of the Day: Industrial-scale warfare.

What made the American Civil War so unprecedented was that it was the first great war of the industrial era. This allowed not only greatly increased production of the materiel of war but a revolution in command and control as well. Railroads and steamboats made possible the rapid movement of large number of troops, and the telegraph enabled the entire war to be directed from Washington to Richmond in real time. When President Lincoln, on April 15, 1861, called for 75,000 volunteers after Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, the call reached the most distant parts of the Union states almost immediately.

A Thread Across the Ocean, by John Steele Gordon. p.163. (c)2002.

Communications are even more important today, when weapons are required to be a lot smarter than the cannons of the Civil War. Remote control drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, operated by soldiers on the ground thousands miles away from the field of action, guided by NSA intelligence collected through eavesdropping on internet and phone messages throughout the world, can deliver precision ground strikes only if they have the right information at the right time. Otherwise, they turn into expensive dumb pieces of hardware, indistinguishable in their impact from their 150-year old Civil War cousins.

tags: scale, communications, warcraft, drones, infrastructure, detection, system, telegraph, information, control

p.s. this post, besides being a note on technology evolution, is also an exercise in writing cumulative sentences.

An article in NYT about how market for electronic chips evolved toward ARM, a company that today rules the world of low-power processors for mobile and other devices:

“Apple and the Newton made the company exist,” said Mike Muller, one of the founders of ARM and its chief technology officer. “The Newton never went anywhere, but it got ARM started and gave us some credibility.”

Dealing with hand-held devices and cellphones forced ARM to operate under severe power restrictions. It chased milliwatts, while Intel chased horsepower.

Mr. East and other ARM executives point to the difference in the companies’ business models. Intel designs and manufactures its own PC and computer server products, commanding about $50 to $1,000 for each chip. ARM chips, by contrast, are made by a handful of contract chip manufacturers and cost 65 cents to $20 each. ARM earns pennies or fractions of a penny off each chip through its licensing deals.

tags: 10x, 3x3, evolution, environment, mobile, niche construction

Cloud computing: the gossip of virtual crops

Each day, Facebook game developer and FarmVille creator Zynga delivers about a petabyte of data — that’s 1 million gigabytes, or more than six Libraries of Congress — for its array of social games, chief technology officer Cadir Lee said.

The challenge for Zynga is unique compared to other large sites that are “read-only” or “input-only,” such as photo-sharing sites like Flickr or e-commerce sites like Amazon.com, Lee said. Zynga instead faces an environment that is constantly updating, with each new crop planted or fertilized and each message left on a friend’s farm.

In many ways today's gaming environments create a ubiquitous communications fabric reminiscent of the planet Pandora from James Cameron's movie Avatar; environments where virtual plants and animals communicate to real people, generating enormous streams of information, connecting experiences bordering on magic, giving players a feeling of being a part of a growing social organism.
It would be an interesting experiment to use these messages to drive Leo Villareal's LED art mentioned in my previous post. Some incredible light patterns may emerge from the gossip of virtual crops.

tags: games, cloud, information, communications, environment, virtual, art, 10x, content, synthesis

LED art

Leo Villareal uses LED (Light Emitting Diod) canvas to create his immersive art:

"Solid state lighting is exciting for several reasons including longevity and energy efficiency," Villareal said. "The ability to create over 16 million colors is truly incredible and offers a tremendous range of subtle and sophisticated possibilities."

Skip to the 1:20 mark in the video (below) to see an installation that impressed me the most.



tags: technology, control, tool, energy, art

Invention of the Day: basketball

Social gaming, 19th century style:

In the winter of 1891 after moving to Springfield, Dr Naismith was faced with a challenging class of "incorrigibles". This antagonistic group had to be kept fit indoors through a harsh New England winter.

After failing to occupy the men with popular indoor sports of the day, he turned to "duck on the rock" for inspiration.

Instead of a rock, the players would throw a soccer ball at two peach baskets nailed high up at each end of the gymnasium. The janitor later punched holes in the bottom of the baskets after he became tired of climbing up to retrieve balls.

tags: entertainment, business, education, scalability, problem, solution

Google's China lesson

After being hacked last year by Chinese either students or government agents or both, Google decided to add a new security token to the good old password system:

Google is making it harder for Gmail and other Google Apps accounts to get compromised by adding an optional feature that will send a security code to your smartphone for logging in.

The two-step verification feature will put an additional roadblock in the way of online criminals by generating a onetime six-digit code that will be sent to the account holder in order to be able to successfully log in. The code will be sent after the password is provided.

This looks like a good protection for a system where users don't bother creating strong passwords. Criminals capable of hacking into a password database can probably defeat it by changing the address of a smartphone associated with the account which requires additional authentication. Also, imagine a nightmare of replacing your old phone and being stuck with the task to update all "clouds" with your new phone info. Nevertheless, it's a step in the right direction because even the smartest system can be compromised by dumb users.

I wish a similar system were introduced for accessing our personal information by third parties, enabling us authorize the access or at least track it.

tags: information, security, google, communication, problem, solution

Buy more jeans, at least they are bio-degradable.

Carl Chiara, director of brand concepts and special projects for Levi Strauss and Co., doesn't believe in washing jeans:

Mr. Chiara, who says he wears jeans every day in both work and social situations, believes that "the less people wash their jeans, the better their jeans become. Denim really does shape to people's bodies, and when you wash a jean you lose some of that shape."

Of course, if you don't wash your jeans they tend to get dirty and smelly, making you look bum rather than hip. What's the solution? Easy: BUY MORE JEANS and don't clean them much. Just like Mr. Chiara.

This is not to say that Mr. Chiara doesn't ever clean the 15 pairs of jeans that he owns. He gently spot-cleans spills with a damp sponge and "whatever is under the kitchen sink—usually Windex or 409."

15 pairs of jeans per person - what a concept from a Levi Strauss marketing guy! Who would've thunk?!

tags:  10x, information, market, business,  psychology

This Fall quarter, I'll be teaching "Model-based Invention and Innovation" at Stanford University Continuing Studies program. The class starts on Thursday and we still have several spots open. Please forward the link to the course to your friends and colleagues who might be interested in the opportunity.

Promising ideas deserve the best innovation development tools. This course will provide a practical guide to advanced systematic innovation techniques. We will consider invention and innovation models in technology and business methods within a variety of industries such as information technology, manufacturing, finance, entertainment, and others.

read more...

Invention of the Day: artificial ovary

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Researchers at Brown University and Women & Infants Hospital have invented the first artificial human ovary, an advance that provides a potentially powerful new means for conducting fertility research and could also yield infertility treatments for cancer patients. The team has already used the lab-grown organ to mature human eggs.

To create the ovary, the researchers formed honeycombs of theca cells, one of two key types in the ovary, donated by reproductive-age (25-46) patients at the hospital. After the theca cells grew into the honeycomb shape, spherical clumps of donated granulosa cells were inserted into the holes of the honeycomb together with human egg cells, known as oocytes. In a couple days the theca cells enveloped the granulosa and eggs, mimicking a real ovary.

tags: invention, innovation, health, tool, infrastructure

Paper books will last another 39 years.

An unbiased opinion on the future of digital books from a 3-year old:

For Mr. de Halleux...and his wife both read to their 3-year-old son, Tristan. He reads Winnie the Pooh to the child on a screen. She reads it in old-fashioned paperback form.

Mr. de Halleux said he was confident the boy would eventually favor the digitized version. “He really likes it because you can zoom in on things,” he said.

Zooming in on things is a must have feature for an e-book. Children know it better than adults.

tags: content, information, payload, dilemma, problem, solution, packaging

Invention of the Day: Futures markets

The idea of forward trading -- buying now goods that are to be delivered later -- is said to have originated around 1620 when a Nagoya rice merchant named Chozaemon met a friend from Sendai, in the north of Japan, who was passing through Nagoya on a pilgrimage. The friend reported that the rice harvest in the north was going to be bad. Chozaemon promptly bought the future Nagoya-area rice harvest, paying the farmers 10 percent upfront and owing them the rest. After the harvest came in, he stored the rice for several months, selling it for a tidy profit once the north's poor harvest had driven prices up.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets, by John McMillan. 2002. p. 23.

Future markets work as long as people keep their promises, their commitment supported either by law or culture. No wonder, forward contracts were invented in Japan, a country where culture is built on mutual respect and commitment to one's word. Being and island nation, Japanese farmers and merchants had no place to run from public shame and economic ruin, caused by one's low business ethics. Most likely, in a not so distant future, Facebook, LinkedIn, Farmville, or some other transparent social environment, will provide a similar honor mechanism for markets of novel digital goods.

tags: market, information, invention, innovation, quote, economics, social, network

Invention of the Day: Patent for an Invention

...in 1447 Venice passed the first general statute providing for patents covering inventions. It allowed that inventors or introducers of devices new to the Venetian territory would be protected against imitators for ten years; at the same time it formally compelled all inventors to reveal their inventions to the state, which was exempt from the patent restriction and could freely appropriate them.

Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Guttenberg to Gates, by Adrian Johns, 2009. p. 200.

This is how the perpetum mobile of human society works: invention has value because we agreed, some six centuries ago, to think it has value.

tags: invention, innovation, space, law, information, distribution, control, quote, history

from 9 to 5 to 24 by 7 in 3 seconds

Here's some new data to support my thinking on hidden growth in office productivity inflicted upon the society by new communications tech:

According to the company, which in conjunction with Harris Interactive surveyed 2,200 American and British adult workers in August, 72 percent of Americans and 68 percent of Britons check e-mail outside of regular business hours. On sick days, 42 percent of Americans check their e-mail, compared with 25.8 percent of British workers.

...27 percent of Americans and 20 percent of British workers check their e-mail when they're off-duty because they feel that "they are expected to provide quick responses, even outside regular business hours."

 from Maui via iPhone

A $1.2B blunder

A funny paragraph from a CNet review of Windows mobile 7:

Above all, Windows 7 is--dare I say--elegant. Even my foreign-language spam looks beautiful on the device. It almost makes me wish I understood all those messages in Japanese, Korean, and Arabic.

Huh? Who cares about Windows 7 Mobile on a day when Steve Jobs introduces a whole slew of elegant mobile media devices? As far as mobile applications are concerned, Microsoft appears to be destined to fight with Google and Nokia over a distant #2 spot behind Apple. But that, in turn, means that HP's $1.2B acquisition of Palm last April looks like a total blunder. What kind developer in his right mind would spend any brain cycles on writing software for a marginal #5 OS?

tags: mobile, business, technology, market, 4q diagram, software,  source

Evolution of the Hamburger.

I just finished reading The Hamburger, by Josh Ozersky, and wanted to capture key inventions and innovations in the evolution of this remarkable food item, which in many ways rhymes with the evolution of the Personal Computer.

- Ground meat on a bun instead of bread (fast food) - Walter Anderson, White Castle. p. 29
- Cooking process standardized across tens of restaurants to guarantee quality and sanitation of the food - Billy Ingram, White Castle. p. 30.

- Double-size burger ("Big Boy") - Bob Wian. p.46.

"...a bass player came in one night and asked for something different. Taking up the challenge, Wian took a sesame seed bun, sliced it in thirds, and proceeded to make the first designed double-decker hamburger. (This could never happen today, when all buns are presliced.)"

- Big Boy franchise - Bob Wian. p.48.

- US government gets into the burger picture, p. 91.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1946 did an inestimable service to the beef industry, and its tireless lobby, by decreeing that hamburger could contain only beef and beef fat—that even the slightest bit of pork or pork fat disqualified it from the dignity of being called hamburger. This was a decisive blow for the beef men in the eternal war against the pork men, since it meant that they had an effective monopoly on the most popular meat product in America.

- Large-scale, limited menu, continuous high-speed burger cooking and service operation; drive-in restaurant (social networking) - McDonald brothers. p.53.
- McDonald's franchise, with uniform cooking and service process - Ray Croc. p.58.
: a combination of conformity and enterprise:

"...it was a franchisee who invented the Big Mac, a fran- chisee who invented the Egg McMuffin, a franchisee who invented the point-of-sale protocol (“May I have your order, please?”). A franchisee invented Ronald McDonald! Franchisees have conceived and developed most of the marketing and product innovations that have propelled McDonald’s to fast-food supremacy." p. 64.

- McDonald's financial model: lease restaurant from a real estate owner, sub-lease to the franchisee at 40% markup, use as a financial leverage to enforce process conformity - Harry Sonnenborn. p.78.

"McDonald’s became what it is for two reasons. One, because it was the first and the best hamburger franchise restaurant, with the most far-sighted senior management. And two, because Harry Sonneborn figured out a way to finance a multibillion-dollar empire without cash, collateral, or even a significant show of profitability.
Sonneborn would frequently go so far as to tell investors that McDonald’s was a real estate company, not a hamburger company."

- Hamburger University, rigorous training for McDonald's franchise managers - Ray Croc. p. 78.

"...the system was invaluable. It made McDonald’s predictable and productive, and a veritable moneymaking machine in the best franchises."

- Fully automated broiled burger cooking ("insta-burger") - Burger King, p.98.
- "Whopper" - a large burger - Burger King, p. 99.

- Meal combo of soda, fries, and burger for one price - Burger Chief. p. 100.
- Automated conveyor-belt broiled hamburgers - Burger Chief. p. 101.
- Giveaway toy with a meal; movie tie-in (Star Wars in 1977) - Burger Chief. p.101.

- Global expansion of the franchise - McDonald's, p. 118.

- Drive-through window - Wendy's, p. 121.
- Half-pounder, three-quarters pounder, salads, and baked potatoes - Wendy's, p. 121

- The gourmet burger - various NY restaurants. p. 130.
 
To add the most recent developments,
- McCafe - "gourmet" coffee to compete with Starbucks - McDonalds
- a "social networking" burger recipe restaurant - 4food.com

tags: health, payload, finance, evolution, system, infrastructure, brainstorming, social, control, 10x

Creativity Quote of the Day: Anti-Creativity.

In his humor piece "The anti-creativity letters", cognitive psychologist Richard E. Nisbett, implies that the best way to destroy your creativity is to get you worried about creativity:

But worries about creativity are the best. Regardless of your patient's real or ascribed intelligence, he is bound to have doubts about his creativity. It is hard to believe, but humans actually think there is a properly of creativity that one can either "have" or "not have," as opposed to a talent for some field -- a love of its content that keeps them thinking about it all the time--organization, and a willingness to work. Because your patient hasn't the foggiest idea what the property of creativity might be or how he would know whether or not he has it, you can keep him constantly searching for signs and flinching at chimeras. And, of course, worries about his creativity will have the same salubrious effect on his work output that worries about his potency will have on his love life.

Nisbett, R. E. (1990). The anti-creativity letters: Advice from a senior tempter to a junior tempter. American Psychologist, 45, 1078-1082.

tags: creativity, psychology, quote

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

RIP: Blockbuster, Inc. (1985-2010)

CNET reports:

Blockbuster reportedly plans to file something called a "pre-planned bankruptcy" and will continue to pay the studios and other most other major creditors. This development shouldn't surprise anyone. For years, Blockbuster has closed stores, laid off thousands, and generally been tumbling towards extinction. Driving to a video store to rent a movie is rapidly becoming as unnecessary as hiring a travel agent, developing film, or listening to music on compact discs.

In a new content distribution environment, a recipe for success turned into a recipe for disaster. Now, even Google wants to be a video-on-demand provider. I wonder, how long this business model will last and what will come to replace it?


tags: entertainment, payload, distribution, control, information, business, model, destruction

A billionair sues billionairs over patents

WSJ reports:

They're the everyday fixtures of the Internet experience: pop-up stock quotes on a website, suggestions for related reading near a news article, videos along the side of your screen.

Now, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen says he owns the technology behind all these ideas, and he's demanding that some of the world's top Web companies pay up to use them.

The patents in question are:

- United States Patent No. 6,263,507
- United States Patent No. 6,034,652
- United States Patent No. 6,788,314
- United States Patent No. 6,757,682

Defendants: AOL, INC.; APPLE, INC.; eBAY, INC.; FACEBOOK, INC.; GOOGLE INC.; NETFLIX, INC.; OFFICE DEPOT, INC.; OFFICEMAX INC.; STAPLES, INC.; YAHOO! INC.; AND YOUTUBE, LLC,

tags: patents, example, commerce, licensing

How many inventors does it take to pull the US out of recession?

Several tech sites, including CNet, reported Paul Otellini's remarks about the future of the hi-tech in the US:

Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini offered a depressing set of observations about the economy ..., coupled with a dark commentary on the future of the technology industry if nothing changes.
...he predicted, "the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here."

Well, over the last 300 years, with a very few exceptions, "the next big things" were not invented in China, nevertheless, we don't hear her CEOs complain about the decline of hi-tech employment in their native country. So the problem is not the impending drop in US inventions, but rather a lack of business opportunities for scaling them up using local workforce. The article lists several common reasons: high taxes, high medical costs, hostile business environment, etc.

But forget about taxes for a minute. One way to get around this problem would be for the US to become a nation of pure inventors. That is, everybody's job would be to genate lots of big ideas, while letting other countries implement them for a reasonable licensing fee. Of course, we would have to hire an army of lawyers to bomb sue those countries should they refuse to pay up. Much the same as the Hollywood does today.

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

Girlscout cookies burgers, 21st century style.

A very interesting idea from a food startup:

Then there is the marketing strategy. Rather than spend money on traditional marketing, 4food encourages customers to save their favorite burger combinations in the 4food system, give them catchy names, and use the likes of Twitter and Facebook (and even YouTube video ads) to convince their friends to buy them. Every time a custom burger is ordered, the creator receives 25 cents in 4food store credit.

tags: invention, innovation, social, networking, startup, information, licensing

Догнать и перегнать Facebook!

Yesterday, after several years of using Gmail to satisfy most of my e-mailing needs, I finally clicked on one of those in-line ads that regularly run just above the Gmail toolbar. To remind you, the ads, superbly matched to customer interests and efficiently delivered at the proper time, were thought to become a money-making machine for Google. Until yesterday, the original intent worked neither for Google, nor for me. Finally, the spell broke. I don't know how much PennState University paid for the e-mail display ad, but the article linked to it was well worth reading. There, professor Hambrick described four major factors that bring about extreme risk-taking by CEOs:
1) recent [good] performance;
2) lavish media praise;
3) CEO's narcissism;
4) incentives with large upside payoffs but small downside penalties.

According to Dr.Hambrick, these factors often lead to unjustified acquisitions because CEOs think that the acquired companies will perform better under new management.

I parked this information somewhere in my brain and switched to reading Bloomberg technology news, which mentioned among other things Google's recent acquisitions: Slide, ITA Software, and etc. Google CEO Eric Schmidt justified the acquisitions by the large amount of cash the company had in its bank account and a long-term need to get into social networking.

Hmm... What's the difference between Google's old acquisitions that lead to the development of many excellent products, such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Docs, Gmail, etc., and the new ones? To me, the difference can be summarized by one word: "platform". With old acquisitions Google could fairly easy move them onto its existing, highly efficient storage-and-retrieval computing platform developed for search.
But now, Google doesn't have a consumer social networking platform to accommodate the acquisitions. Wave didn't work out, Buzz is not doing that great either. Rather than acknowledging a missed opportunity and concentrating on something more promising, Google continues imitating Nikita Khrushchev's strategy for Soviet Union circa 1957 to catch up and overtake America. Well, it didn't work out for tovarisch Khrushchev, and, I'm willing to bet, it won't work for Mr.Schmidt.

tags: 4q diagram, innovation, business, strategy, social, networking, information, platform

Today, my Ambature colleagues and I had a series of meetings at JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) and CalTech, where we discussed a wide range of topics, from quantum computing to invention disclosure ratios at major universities. Somewhat predictably, quantum computing is amazing, but I was surprised to learn that CalTech, which files on average only half a patent application per faculty per year, is one of the best in the US. Another related statistic: one million dollars of research money produces one patent application, which, probably, results in no more than half patent. That is, for $2M spent on research one of the best universities in the world gets one US patent. MIT has similar numbers, while public universities, like University of California, file at least 4 times less.

Assuming, generously, that one US patent application costs $50K over its life time, the amount of grant money universities spend on IP is less than 0.5%. In contrast, administrative costs are around 40%, which is 80 times higher. I wonder why this is the case.

Now, for your amusement, here's a picture of a test bed for Mars Rover. This is where JPL researchers investigate ways to rescue their remote machines when they get stuck on the Red Planet. This time, it's  the rocks, which you can see in the middle of the whitish surface, that cause the trouble.

10 thousand monkeys with 10 thousand VCRs

A good example for explaining the 4Q diagram: a new technology was created to address a totally new market. Even people who had no clue how devices worked bought and used VCRs.

In the early 1980s, an apocryphal story made the rounds among video storeowners concerning a hapless customer who brought his VCR back to the store where he’d purchased it a year earlier, complaining that it had stopped working. The storeowner looked it over, wondering if there had been some mechanical failure, but found none. Upon ejecting the videocassette currently in the deck, the storeowner found that it had been played and recorded over so many times that the magnetic tape had worn to the point of snapping. Handing the customer the tape, the storeowner asked if all of his tapes were this worn, to which the customer responded, “I didn’t even know that piece came out!”

Greenberg, Joshua. From Betamax to Blockbuster : Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2008. p 41.

Another story from the same book shows the deep roots of IP TV:

Creativity Quote of the Day.

Psychologist M.Csíkszentmihályi on the meaning of creativity:

In his [A.Maslow's] opinion it is not the outcome of the process that counts, but the process itself. According to this perspective a person who reinvents Einstein’s formula for relativity is as creative as Einstein was. A child who sees the world with fresh eyes is creative; it is the quality of the subjective experience that determines whether a person is creative, not the judgment of the world. While I believe that the quality of subjective experience is the most important dimension of personal life, I do not believe that creativity can be assessed with reference to it. If creativity is to retain a useful meaning, it must refer to a process that results in an idea or product that is recognized and adopted by others. Originality, freshness of perspective, divergent-thinking ability are all well and good in their own right, as desirable personal traits. But without some form of public recognition the do not constitute creativity. In fact, one might argue that such traits are not even necessary for creative accomplishment.

Source: Implications of a Systems Perspective for the Study of Creativity, in Robert J. Sternberg (Eds.) Handbook of Creativity (p313-335). Cambridge University Press

The view emphasized above is particularly important when we consider invention (a novel idea) in relation to innovation (scalable implementation of the idea). For example, subjectively we might experience a "spark of genius" while inventing a solution, but it's no guarantee that the idea we came up with has any value. Creativity, along with money and other fixtures of the modern society, can be considered a status function. That is, somebody is creative because we think she is creative. Creativity itself is probably one of the greatest human inventions.

tags: creativity, invention, innovation, quote, psychology, system, status function

Creativity Quote of the Day.

...autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward are ... the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and work­ing in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I'm guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that's worth more to most of us than money.

Malcolm Gladwell. Outliers, The Story of Success. 2008. HC ISBN 978-0-316-01792-3.

tags: creativity, quote, technology, control, social, networking

Reportedly, Facebook spent $40M on a social-networking patent porfolio:

A set of documents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) reveal that Facebook acquired the 18 patents earlier this summer from MOL Global, the Malaysia-based payments company that purchased Friendster last year.

Most likely, it's a defensive move and has nothing to do with the intensifying Google-Facebook rivalry, as the CNET article alleges. Had the patents fell into the hands of an experienced IP litigation firm, Facebook would face massive legal costs and huge potential financial damages claims. I'd say they got away fairly cheaply. Especially, in view of a Bloomberg report that "Facebook Inc.’s biggest advertisers have boosted spending by at least 10-fold in the past year as the social network crossed the half-billion user mark."

In any case, Friendster's patents turned out to be worth a lot more than the business itself.


tags: patents, licensing, 10x,  high value, social,  network

Dead on arrival

A good example of how NOT to innovate:

Jolicloud, the netbook and web services-focused operating system by Netvibes founder Tariq Krim, has finally launched with an official version 1.0 release.

With Netvibes, Krim managed to create a personalized startup page site with a massive widget (or web application) ecosystem. In many ways, Netvibes acted as an online operating system — bringing access to services like Twitter and Facebook into one convenient location.

There are three strikes against the company.

First strike: the startup enters an extremely competitive existing market - ultra–portable web devices, e.g. netbooks, tablets, and, potentially, phones.

Second strike: the market is dominated by deep–pocketed players like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, willing to play a "war of attrition" game.

Third strike: the product that the startup offers doesn't bring to the market a significant (10X) change in user experience and/or performance.

In short, it's a classical "better mousetrap" innovation that has very low chances to succeed. Really unfortunate.

tags: moustrap, innovation, 4q diagram, example, startup

More on Amazon from VentureBeat:

Amazon Web Services has become a huge business, with revenues of $500 million in 2010, according to UBS Investment Research. And that success is due in no small part to the rapid rise of social games such as FarmVille on Facebook.

...Amazon hosts six to eight of the top 10 games on Facebook at any given time. That includes top Zynga and EA Playfish games, meaning that hundreds of millions of players are playing games on Amazon’s servers, without even knowing it. Overall, Amazon has hundreds of thousands of customers in 190 countries for its web services. It also powers big operations such as Netflix, NASA, Autodesk, NASDAQ and the New York Times.

Cloud services is only about 2% of Amazon's revenue. But still it's a good, and growing, chunk of change. I wish I bought their stock around July 1, this year.

tags: cloud, information, service, source, games, virtualization, commerce

What's good for shopping is good for Amazon.

Ian Freed, Amazon's VP in charge of Kindle:

First of all, with regard to the iPad, it's a totally different product. I mean, the product is a general-purpose tablet. We love that product because people use their iPads to buy a lot of products on Amazon. It's a tailwind for our e-commerce business.

But for book reading it's substantially heavier than a Kindle; the battery life is 10 hours versus 4 weeks on the new Kindle, and you can't read it outside in the sun. The Kindle is absolutely purpose-built for reading and it's a product that people consider a tool for reading. It's not something that's more of a gadget.

Amazon is the Wal-Mart of the Internet age. Within its shopping empire Kindle is just another gadget and book is just another piece of sellable content. Until a new format of the book, as a content wrapper emerges, Kindle ( device & app) will stay competitive with iPad and other tablets. It's the recommendations and reader reviews that matter.

tags: control, payload, control point, distribution, market, commerce, information, tool

Electronic gold

I just finished re-reading A History of Money, by Glyn Davies. It's a very competent book on evolution of money from cowrie shells to electronic transactions. Since I believe that money is one of the greatest innovations of all time, I'm going through this and other books on history of finance searching for recurring invention patterns that can be re-used in various technology domains. After all, transaction money is just a control signal that the buyer sends to the seller in order to obtain the goods. Capital is another interesting function of money that follows innovation patterns in storage technologies. The days of the gold standard are long gone, but even today all central banks hold tons of this precious metal in their secure vaults. Just in case, people will trust useless metal more than useless paper or useless electronic signals.
It is interesting though that something very similar to the gold standard is being developed in the virtual world today. Here's an excerpt from an article on Facebook Credits:

How do I set up my own currency?
You permit the user to purchase only one thing with Facebook Credits: your currency. Once the users have exchanged Facebook Credits for your currency, they can participate in the broader game economy. There should be no direct purchase of any items or anything other than your currency with Facebook Credits.

Once the exchange is made, you’ve locked up the value of those Credits in your own currency, ensuring it won’t move off to another application.

Replace "Facebook Credits" with "Gold Coins" and you get the good old gold standard. In Facebook we trust! Funny, how history runs in circles.

tags: control, money, business, signal, commerce, games, virtual, market, payload

"We still don't know what we are doing."

Economist Tyler Cowen, of the www.marginalrevolution.com fame, notes that he and his fellow economists don't quite understand why high unemployment persists while US companies keep reporting near-record profits. Some kind of structural change is suspected, but the economists can't put their collective finger on it. "Macroeconomics is rarely simple," they say.

Why is it so difficult to understand? Companies make more profits because for the same revenue dollars they have, after multiple rounds of layoffs, much lower labor costs. In other words, compared to pre-recession levels, fewer people do the same or even greater amount of work.

How is it possible and why this productivity burst doesn't register with standard economic statistics?

It is possible because of two structural changes:
Firstly, over the last 30 years, manufacturing moved from the US and Europe to China and other so-called developing countries. That is, most work in the developed world is done at the office, not on the factory floor.
Secondly, over the last 10 years, communication technologies globalized and virtualized the office. That is, individual contributors and managers can do their work via web or e-mail anywhere anytime (which, with the advent of Blackberries, 3G laptops, and iPhones everybody does on a regular basis, now.)

As a result, from a highly regulated 5-days-a-week/8-hours-a-day sedentary work style we've transitioned to a largely unregulated 7-days-a-week/18-hours-a-day nomadic life. This means that the 40-hr work week ceiling has been effectively tripled to 120 hours. During the recession, office people work a lot more because ... well, they don't want to be fired. Working 60-70 hrs a week and being paid for 40hrs is still better than being unemployed. This structural shift is not reflected by the standard government statistics because, technically, it's not overtime. Rather, people work at home or Starbucks at their "pleasure".

To summarize, the persistent high unemployment in the US is not a fluke. It is due to the changes in technology(communications) and business methods(globalization, outsourcing). We can expect companies continue invest in information technologies because they make their workers more productive, e.g. by increasing work hours, without increasing the labor costs.

tags: information, technology, trend, economics, detection, problem, solution, communications, mobile, infrastructure, office, social, networking

A couple of quick links showing a converging trend between zoomable interfaces and zoomable data:

1. Microsoft Research Street Slide View (youtube video). Unfortunately, they are still stuck in the "computer mouse" world.

2. Flipboard interface that takes advantage of new information flows.


In system terms, we're seeing emergence of a new Payload that matches capabilities of the Tool. This indicates the beginning of a major technology shift in the information technology industry.

tags: trend, payload, tool, system, model, example, interface, synthesis

Why startups have lousy patents.

After helping several startups strengthen their IP, I feel like writing down some of the key problems they face in developing good patents.

Quote of the day.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

George Bernard Shaw.

Creativity as a function of language.

From a recent article in WSJ:

Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs.

It turns out that if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. When bilingual people switch from one language to another, they start thinking differently, too.

This is a yet another reason to ask problem solvers, e.g. engineers, managers, entrepreneurs, to reformulate the problem in jargon-free terms. Very often their ability to find a solution is constrained by their inability to describe the situation in language that does not imply a specific approach dictated by past professional experiences. Switching from verbal to graphical descriptions, e.g. by using the Three Magicians method or Five Elements analysis, helps overcome this issue.

tags: creativity, method, magicians, five element analysis, problem, solution, example, information

hi-tech + haute couture = ♡

I wrote earlier that Apple sells its devices as fashion items. Now, the fashion industry is waking up to high-tech opportunities. With the proliferation of iPad and its clones, as well as emergence of 3D consumer devices, fashion shopping is going to be a very important application for high-end customers.

VentureBeat: Historically the fashion industry has been slow to adopt technology, so most venture investors have stayed away from investments in the sector. But that has begun to change. Entrepreneurs are focusing on fashion-related online services, and more customers are willing to buy fashion items over the Internet, and investors are following.

Japanese market is also a good indicator of a possible marriage between high-tech and haute couture:

One of the iPad’s eager customers is Novarese Inc., a firm that offers wedding services and wedding dress rentals, with spokeswoman Kazuka Nohara saying the iPad is a more effective communication gadget between the firm and its customers, especially the grooms.

”Whereas grooms before used to be less participative, we were surprised at how grooms became more active in speaking with our coordinators and choosing wedding dresses since our coordinators have been giving the iPads to customers to look at them freely,” Nohara said.

tags: commerce, information, interaction, business, apple, entertainment, trend

Throwing stones in glass houses.

Using a new laser technology, a ship can now shoot down a drone:

Built by Raytheon Missile Systems of Tuscon, Arizona, the 32-kilowatt infrared laser is shown illuminating and heating the wingtip and then the underside of what looks like a radar-seeking drone – until its remote pilot loses control and the aircraft catches fire and plummets into the ocean.

Imagine you are a remote pilot and you've just detected that your drone is being illuminated by a laser gun. What do you do? With little hesitation, you press a button that launches a missile that uses the laser to guide it straight to the enemy. Kaboom!!! The ship goes up in flames! Game over.

tags: detection, control, drones, military

East vs West: twitting [un]happiness

tags: emotion, source, map, 10x, psychology, process

The Survival of the Luckiest.

It looks like Intel's grip on the semiconductor industry is being disrupted by ARM. Not because ARM did something extraordinary clever, but because the world shifted to applications that care a lot more about electric power consumption than computing power. In biology this is called preadaptation.

Driven by the success of the iPad and iPhone, Apple is expected to pass Samsung as the world's No. 2 chip buyer in 2011, second only to Hewlett-Packard, according to market researcher iSuppli.

The firm is projecting that Apple's semiconductor spending in 2011 will hit $16.2 billion, surpassing Samsung Electronics, which is forecast to be at about $13.9 billion. HP will stay in the No. 1 position with $17.1 billion in spending, iSuppli said.

"This is a an indication of where the technology is moving," said Min-Sun Moon in a phone interview. "Apple is contributing to the trend of moving away from Microsoft-Intel to ARM-based systems," she said.

One of the more interesting aspects of this transition would be the abandonment of legacy applications. Especially, those that were written for the WYSIWYG environment tied to sharing/exchanging information via printed documents.

a 10X change in mobile app revenue model

About a month ago, I cited a study showing that on average revenues from iPod/iPad applications don't cover development expenses. But it appears that a certain type of applications emerged to solve this problem. The key to revenue seems to be in-application purchases:

Apple turned on the in-app purchase feature for the iPhone last fall. That enabled game developers to embrace the same “free to play” business model that has made companies such as Zynga so successful on Facebook. In that model, companies offer their games for free, but they charge real money for virtual goods such as better weapons or online multiplayer play. The in-app purchase feature allows gamers to purchase their goods without leaving their games at all.

The results are surprisingly good. In January, Flurry said that the games that it tracked generated revenue of $9 per user per year, on average. In June, that number had risen to $14.66 per user per year. Previously, these games were generating around 99 cents to $1.99 per user per year.

I think this approach can work for all kinds of digital content, including books. Essentially, we need to create a new product placement technology where the product is sold, rather than advertised, within the context of the story.

A 10X diagram note for my students: by increasing the frequency of transactions, we are moving to the left along the time axis of the diagram.

tags: 10x, content, commerce, money, business, games, mobile, apple, market, book, virtual, problem, solution, course

Recessions are great for entertainment companies because people have a lot of free time on their hands. Moreover, playing social games is much cheaper than even going to the movies, so we can expect a strong new industry emerge from this economic downturn.

TechCrunch: Google has quietly (secretly, one might say) invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in social gaming behemoth Zynga, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The company has raised somewhere around half a billion dollars in venture capital in the last year alone.
...
Zynga’s revenues for the first half of 2010 will be a stunning $350 million, half of which is operating profit. Zynga is projecting at least $1.0 billion in revenue in 2011.

Another quiet milestone along a similar path was reported by Bloomberg about a week ago:

Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox Live online video-game service probably broke the $1 billion revenue mark for the first time in the year that just ended, helped by sales of movies, avatar accessories and extra game levels.

tags: games, internet, business, industry, entertainment, economy, microsoft

Creativity Quote of the Day

From "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", by Gregory Bateson

I once knew a little boy in England who asked his father, “Do fathers always know more than sons?” and the father said, “Yes.”

The next question was, “Daddy, who invented the steam engine?” and the father said, “James Watt.”

And then the son came back with “—but why didn’t James Watt’s father invent it?”

Predicting future is not that hard.

In 2001, guided by the invention principle I call "Telegrams before the train", my son and I came up with an idea of a portable playlist (US patent application 20040057348). This year, a new music service Songvote pushed the concept a little bit further:

...about 70 percent of music enthusiasts don't want to spend hours creating the perfect playlists, meaning that unless you're a DJ--or just really hard-core about music arrangement--you'd probably prefer to just listen to your library on shuffle or have someone else do the mixing for you.

Songvote is the service for you. This extremely nifty (and completely free) Web-based app lets users create collaborative playlists based on a simple time-restrained voting system. Using it is ridiculously straightforward: visit the site; create a theme-, event-, or activity-based contest; and then sit back and wait for the votes to roll in.

This "Telegram" principle is hard at work within any large-scale system that aims to optimize its performance. According to it, in order for the system to become more efficient, it has to shift upstream (to the Source and Distribution) the task of solving detection problems, e.g. determining the "quality" of a particular song. That's how it was done with the telegrams and train schedules 150 years ago; and this is how it is being done today with playlists and songs.

tags: detection, control, telegraph, example, course, payload

The ultimate shopping channel is coming to a smartphone near you:

Twitter is getting into the online shopping business--or at least pointing to places where deals can be had.

The company's new service, aptly named @earlybird, is an official Twitter account that the company plans to feed with deals at both online and offline retailers, as well as "sneak peeks and events." Users who follow the account will see these entries just like any other tweet in their stream.

This is another sign of the upcoming revolution that is going to produce a change in information consumption comparable to the emergence of the world-wide web in the 1990s. I need to stop procrastinating and write an analytical post about this transition.

tag: trend, system, payload, interface, search, business

$400K per green job

Last week, Business Week published an article by former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, where he, among other things, pointed out that now it takes tons and tons of money to create jobs in America. The chart below shows that in 2010 dollars high-tech job creation costs went from about $2K in the 1950s to $100K in the 2000s.

Andy Grove thought it was a gruesome trend that spelled doom for American workers. He said that unless we learned how to create jobs more efficiently, the gap between the haves and have-nots is going to grow. Pretty bad, isn't it.

But just three days later, real life events exceeded his gloomy forecast:

"President Barack Obama, under pressure to spur job growth, said on Saturday two solar energy companies will get nearly $2 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to create as many as 5,000 green jobs."

It's $400K per job! Four times greater than the current already absurdly high level. This looks like the disruption pattern described in The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen. That is, we keep "producing" more and more expensive jobs (products/services), while our growth model is being disrupted by China and other formerly 3rd world countries.

tags: innovation, problem, trend, energy, infrastructure, disruption, economy, growth

Psychology of creativity

In the Authors at Google series, Rick Hanson, author of Buddha's Brain, talks about brain plasticity, i.e. how consistent thought patterns restructure brain's connections. Among other things, he links creativity (a generative state of mind) to core psychological systems, Avoidance, Approach, Attachment (see below).

Maybe that's why having an attitude, either justified or unjustified, that you can solve any problem often helps to develop breakthrough ideas. In addition to that, this attitude allows to overcome fear and generate a lot of problems during reverse brainstorming sessions.

A related dilemma:

On one hand you don't want to be aware of a lot problems because it activates the threat response and inhibits creativity; on the other hand, you want to be aware of as many problems as possible, so that you don't miss the one or two that represent the greatest opportunities.

tags: creativity, method, psychology, control, mind, brain, reverse brainstorm, stress, dilemma

Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, talks about scaling up, a key difference between processes of invention and innovation:

Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.

He also notes the decline of innovation-related jobs (scaling-up) in the US:

Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000 -- lower than it was before the first personal computer, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975.

Since the early days of Silicon Valley, the money invested in companies has increased dramatically, only to produce fewer jobs. Simply put, the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs.

tags: invention, innovation, scale, problem, technology, business, model, quote

Catch me if you can.

In a couple of generations human pilots will go extinct.

The US Federal Aviation Administration this month kicked off what could be the first step in a journey towards the full automation of the airliners we all travel on.

The FAA commissioned the Boeing subsidiary Insitu, based in Bingen, Washington, and the New Jersey Air National Guard to begin investigating ways for civil aircraft to share their airspace with remotely piloted uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Once UAVs can avoid passenger jets, remotely piloted cargo planes are likely to take to the skies, pushed by some compelling economics. "The cargo airlines want very much to lose their pilots. The money that would be saved in salary and benefits, including retirement and healthcare costs, is pretty staggering,"

Wright Flier II. 1904.

update: Ryanair to sell standing-room only tickets for under $10.

tags: tool, control, transportation, commerce.

History in the making.

According to VentureBeat:

Crowdstar is giving a big endorsement to Facebook Credits. The social gaming company has made a five-year commitment to using Facebook’s virtual currency.

The use of Facebook Credits is important to Facebook as a way to monetize its vast audience of nearly 500 million monthly active users. Davis said early results show that Facebook Credits is increasing both the revenue per paying user and the number of people who are buying things in apps. He acknowledged that changes that Facebook made to its platform this spring have slowed growth of games, but he said that newly launched Facebook games are seeing rapid growth.

History of money shows that introduction of a widely accepted currency is key to the development of a market for services. So far, we've seen trading in goods only. One reason for that would be narrow scope of most gaming scenarios and lack of service development tools. Another, a steep tax (30%) that Facebook imposes on all transactions.

tags: commerce, money, payload, service, control, market, scale, games, virtual

On Monday, President Barack Obama signed a memorandum that commits the U.S. to making an additional 500MHz of government and commercial spectrum available for auction and for unlicensed use within the next 10 years. This goal of getting 500MHz more spectrum in the hands of wireless broadband providers over the next decade is a key part of the National Broadband Plan that the FCC presented to Congress earlier this year.

This initiative is very important because it aims to unclog wireless pipes between the cloud and the mobiles. In the world of the 21st century's communications, this is equivalent to building railroads that connected American East and West coasts and provided a platform for country-wide industrialization.

tags: distribution, growth, mobile

AppStore economics

Like in any other Long Tail business models, iPhone/iPad applications seem to make money for the store owner, not the content developer.

The development of the typical app cost $35,000 and the median paid app earns $682 dollars per year after Apple took its cut. You see where this is going.. We get to break even on our App Development costs in... 51 years.

h/t marginalrevolution.com


tags: distribution, business, model, control, control point, mobile, apple

According to research cited in Wired, travelers seem to think that south-bound routes are shorter than north-bound ones of the same length. The authors of the study explain the effect by a common perception that north is "up" on all maps, therefore people instinctively associate "north/up" with working against gravity.

For journeys that averaged 798 miles, time estimates for north-going jaunts averaged one hour and 39 minutes more than south-going trips, he and his colleagues report in an upcoming Memory & Cognition.

“This finding suggests that when people plan to travel across long distances, a ‘north is up’ heuristic might compromise their accuracy in estimating trip durations,” Brunyé says.

Moving up through a company hierarchy is also more difficult than down. It must be the gravity :)

tag: psychology, effect, example

A new technology that has the potential to become a game changer in residential energy consumption:

The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory has invented a new air conditioning process with the potential of using 50 percent to 90 percent less energy than today's top-of-the-line units. It uses membranes, evaporative cooling and liquid desiccants in a way that has never been done before in the centuries-old science of removing heat from the air.

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,

1963. A demo of a Graphical User Interface with the computer. During the interview, the reporter asks, "Can the computer work with a three-dimensional object?"

Isn't it amazing how in 50 years breakthrough ideas become "obvious".



tags: interface, computers, information, history, example, technology, video

The high fashion of iPad

Reuters reports on iPad's success in Asia:

In Japan, wedding service firm Novarese Inc is using iPads to help customers choose a wedding dress at its flagship store in Tokyo's Ginza shopping district, and plans to adopt iPads at seven other stores and its wedding ceremonial halls.

The firm now shows customers video clips of models strutting with dresses on the iPad, making it easier to see things such as how a hemline flares.

I still think iPad is the ultimate shopping device: from food to cars to media. A dedicated interactive product application can do much better than a browser script with embedded flash. Amazon, if they play it right, could be the company that benefits the most from iPad proliferation.

tags: commerce, interface, tool, source, interaction, apple

Experiments in creativity: Lucid Dreaming

Here are some top tips on how to achieve lucid dreaming:

Step 1: The reality test.

Ask yourself whether you are awake or dreaming throughout the day. Later on, in the land of nod, you might find yourself pondering this question. If you succeed, congratulations! You have opened the door to lucid dreams.

Step 2: Focus your thoughts.

People who focus single-mindedly on a task during the day, be it a computer game or playing a musical instrument, are more likely to experience lucid dreams, says Jayne Gackenbach at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada.

Step 3: Plan your fantasy.

Almost as fun as the dreaming itself. Before you go to bed, think about what you want to dream lucidly about, in as much detail as possible.

Step 4: Total recall.

When you wake up, try to recall as many of your dreams as you can.

Step 5: Wake up and get motivated! ...And then go back to bed.

To solve a stubborn problem, on step 3 do a complete problem analysis, e.g. using the Three Magicians technique.

 tags: creativity, tool, method, magicians,  analysis

The future of abundant green energy might be nuclear:

TerraPower, a company seeking to commercialize a novel nuclear-power technology which has the enthusiastic backing of Bill Gates, has raised $35 million in venture funding.

The basic idea behind traveling-wave reactors is to use a small amount of enriched uranium and spent uranium fuel from traditional nuclear-power plants to produce electricity. Rather than needing to refuel every several years, these reactors would be able to operate for decades without refueling.

The company's goal is to have a working machine by 2020.

tags: energy, problem, solution, source,

The best keyboard for your iPad

tags: interface, creativity, mobile, apple

Road to new ideas: skiing in swim trunks

NYT writes in its obituary for a Russian genius mathematician Vladimir Arnold:

Dr. Arnold had an unusual approach when he got stuck on a problem. ...he would ski for 25 miles or more, wearing nothing more than swim trunks.

“According to him, this practice would always lead him to a new idea,” they wrote.

tags: creativity, example, quote, brain

The future of video conferencing

Here's how creators of the Avatar technology solved the problem of producing realistic facial expressions:

Weta’s specialty is motion capture, which relies on sophisticated software and hardware to transfer an actor’s body movements and facial expressions to an animated character. The actor wears a black suit with light-colored dots; to detect his movement, optical systems track those dots.

More virtual goods for your real money

June 7, 2010. VentureBeat:

Zynga is the biggest success story to come out of the new wave of social game companies, buт it has been curiously absent from one of the hottest new game platforms — the iPhone. That’s changing today with chief executive Mark Pincus' announcement that Zynga is releasing FarmVille for iPhone.

One question is whether virtual goods purchases on FarmVille for iPhone will be as lucrative as they have been on Facebook.

Buying and trading virtual goods using a mobile device is becoming easier, which means the frequency of transactions is going to increase dramatically. Furthermore, beginning with this generation of users, purchasing with digital money will become routine and start the process of gradual disappearance of physical bills, credit cards, and wallets. They will follow hand watches to the museum of extinct human artifacts.

tags: money, ideality, 10x, payload, system, social, market, commerce

Lying: an out-of-the box experience

Here's a study that may hint at a reason why so many people are bad at thinking "outside of the box":

A team of researchers has conducted a study which argues that liars betray their actions through drawing.

"Another distinguishing factor was the perspective of the drawing. Fifty-three per cent of truth-tellers penned a drawing from their own first-person perspective at the scene; 47 per cent opted for a birds-eye view. By contrast, 81 per cent of liars went for the birds-eye view and just 19 per cent for the first-person perspective."

When we invent and/or work to develop creative ideas we have to lie. That is, we have to use our imagination to come up with a description of events that haven't happen yet. These events are still in a possible future, therefore we can't tell the truth about them. But, since most of the people are trained to tell the truth, they have trouble creating the big picture, e.g. draw the birds-eye view of a problem situation and its potential solutions. Over the last six years that I've been teaching my Principles of Invention class at Stanford, seeing and drawing the big picture has been by far the most difficult exercise for the students. Here's a snippet from a recent e-mail from one of them:

Even in the class discussions one could see people getting trapped in linear thinking and unable to climb above the problem and see the big picture. Practicing “climbing on the roof” to see the big picture is what I will focus on to improve as an inventor.

Drawing by itself is not going to make people more creative. To produce good results, it needs to be combined with systematic tools that teach people how to step out of the first-person perspective.

tags: creativity, magicians, imagination, class, example, dilemma

reference: Vrij, A., Leal, S., Mann, S., Warmelink, L., Granhag, P., & Fisher, R. (2010). Drawings as an innovative and successful lie detection tool. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.1627

The cloack and dagger war between Apple and Google continues. It appears that Google might be locked out of the emerging market for mobile advertisement on Apple devices:

Apple quietly changed the terms of service for the iPhone developer agreement Monday along with the release of developer version of iOS4 at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, according to MediaMemo and several other blogs. If preliminary interpretations of a key section are correct, Google's newly acquired AdMob subsidiary will be unable to share ad analytic information with its customers who have placed ads in applications on the iPhone, rendering those ads much less valuable.

Either this is a legal quirk, or, more likely, Apple intends to extract from Google a heavy price for playing on the wrong side of their prisoner's dilemma game. In the meantime, Google protests the agreement.

tags: battle, technology, apple, google, advertisement, business, law, information, tool, detection

Wanted: Invisibility Cloak

A new camera that makes the idea of privacy in public places a total joke:

[the camera] gives law enforcement high-def, 360-degree footage of a scene. The feeds are integrated with image-stitching technology.

The ultrawide camera system streams distortion-free, real-time stitched video and has a resolution capacity of 100 megapixels, which is "as detailed as 50 full-HDTV movies playing at once, with optical detail to spare," the DHS said in a release. It has been built with off-the-shelf cameras, image processors, and software.

If we put it on a drone or some other surveillance vehicle (a cat, a hat, a mouse) we get the ultimate multi-scale anti-privacy system. The amount of video processing, storage, routing and stream management is going to be staggering. Especially, if we add 3D capabilities, which should no be a problem whatsoever.

tags: video, control, detection, payload, system, evolution, problem,

Killing brain cancer cells with electricity

June 5 (Bloomberg) -- Doctors treating brain cancer have a limited toolkit. They can cut tumors out with a knife, burn them with radiation or try to poison them with drugs.

NovoCure Ltd., a closely held Israeli company, has added a fourth option for hard-to-treat tumors. It’s an array of electrodes resembling a tight-fitting helmet that bathes the cancer in a faint electric field, scrambling the inner workings of the rampaging cells and preventing them from multiplying.

We can probably expect a whole new range of cancer therapies to come out this initial application. In a few years, debilitating chemotherapy may be a thing of the past.

tags: health, problem, solution, tool, 4q diagram

Schools and Creativity

A 2006 TED talk by Ken Robinson. Sir Ken is a brilliant speaker and he raises an important issue of how children are taught to dull their creativity in school.

The Greatest Innovations of All Time

I will be teaching BUS 200 (The Greatest Innovations of All Time) this summer. The course starts on June 24 and will go for six weeks. Last time I taught it, in Winter 2010, we had a wonderful class, people had lots of interesting ideas, and we found a number of good innovation opportunities even in a recession-stricken economy.

Here's a brief description of the course and weekly syllabus. Feel free to pass along.

This hands-on interactive course treats the current global crisis as a unique opportunity for breakthrough innovations. Individuals, businesses, and societies that take advantage of such opportunities propel themselves to the next level of prosperity and growth. Our goal will be to explore five areas essential to modern human endeavor: energy, transportation, information and communications, money and commerce, and health services.