High tech, kids, interactive toys and the "why" question

Yet another article about how toy makers push high tech for tots, nothing so new there but it tackles some issues related to this phenomenon:

"The cool thing about that is that kids are role-playing what they see around them, and they see their siblings using digital cameras and using digital phones," Rice said. "They see their parents using those, and so that's what they want to role-play with." (...) Newborns may be too young for plug-and-play TV games, but that doesn't mean they're left out of the digital revolution. VTech, for example, has a high-tech toy aimed at newborns, the Explore & Learn mat -- where infants are introduced to numbers, letters, colors and shapes as they touch various parts of an electronic but machine-washable play mat. (...) The toys are popular not only because they help impart cognitive and emotional intelligence, but also because they involve parents in the process.

"When kids are that little, parents are one of their favorite playthings, so having their parents' time and interacting with their parents is great," Rice said.

It also underline a very important trend:

"Today's kids understand computers and the technology from the get-go. It's part of their world; it's like the air," he said. "They don't question it; it's just there."

Why do I blog this? I am wondering about this would impact the relation society has with technology. Anne discussed the issue of the "inevitability" of technology from the designers point of view; in this case here it's a bit different since it's a reflection of what market researchers perceived from kids' behavior towards technology: as a natural component of their world.

Junk prototyping

In the last issue of ACM Interactions, there is an intriguing article about prototyping with junk by Nancy Frishberg. The idea is to go beyond paper by using the materials of kindergarten to the world of design. This can be used to achive four goals: encourages communication both within a team, gives a product concept or workflow a physical instantiation, quickly visualizes proposed solutions with little investment of time or money and promotes fun at work (this would please people from imagination lab).

What Is Junk?

Materials collected from the recycling bin are great additions to those found at school supply shops, the dollar store, and sale tables of your favorite craft counter. Picnic supplies, such as paper plates, as well as cafeteria (or fast food) cardboard trays work well as a base or frame for other structures. Pipecleaners, packing materials, coffee stirrers, toothpicks, wooden ice cream sticks, wire hangers, egg cartons, and the usual selection of old magazines or gently used gift-wrapping paper and ribbons also make great prototyping materials. We supply inexpensive plastic toys, party supplies, twist-ties, modeling clay, candy past its expiration date, and beads, as well as various sorts of cutting implements, glue, and tape. Paper, pens, and crayons are invited as well

The only drawback the author mentions is:

"One downside of prototyping with junk is that its benefits accrue to physically present participants. We've attempted to include people remotely by audio or even video conference, but so far have found it difficult to integrate the local and remote.

The overt, externalized results appear as these representations made of otherwise useless materials. The covert, intangible results include lasting communication within an ephemeral or stable work group."

Why do I blog this? even though we often use this kind of technique during our workshop, I am sometimes dubious of the outcome of such activities. Some others have pointed on the drawbacks of prototyping: it can't emulate complex interactions, it can't find complex issues or it can't simulate “real” interaction with a live system. But perhaps the point in prototyping sometime is not to create something altogether but rather to tighten team relationship, make colleagues/partners aware of specific phenomenon and for instance, for R&D/foresight people to translate ideas, concepts and content to marketing or people more in the production process. And this is already a huge achievement (given certain types of organization for which ideas are difficult to transfer to support innonovation). And then that's why we still do that :)

Anyway, the whole issue of the journal about this topic and there are worthwile paper about good examples!

Entrepreneurial spirit is alive in Europe, on the web

The IHT has an article showing how "anyone who thought that Europeans were not as entrepreneurial as Americans has not been watching people doing business on eBay".

Over 170,000 people in 12 European countries make money selling on the site and 50 million Europeans buy or browse, according to research commissioned by the company. Trading activity generated sales worth $947 million in 2004.

In the United States, buyers and browsers total roughly 90 million. EBay's home market generated 55 percent of the company's $4.55 billion in global sales last year.

"Europe is one of our fastest-growing markets,"

And about what is sold:

in France, someone uses eBay to sell a comic book every minute, on average. In Germany, someone buys a bulldozer every three hours, while in Britain a teddy bear changes hands every two minutes on the online auction site.

Somehow related to the minipreneur or consumactor trend.

Jan Chipchase and blogjects

Jan's blogpost about Traces of events is very well-connect to our blogject workshop:

In our perfect future we can accurately track everything - the exact location, temperature, who and what is in proximity for how long, the information that was exchanged - every last minute detail. Some of this data could help ensure that your luggage arrives in tip-top condition, in the right place and on time. Or not. You land in a new country and immigration doesn't only check your luggage, it checks the history of your luggage. (...) It's 2012- your luggage in the hold of the plane and can communicate with the other luggage. What would they say to one another? Would they even speak the same language?

Why do I blog this? this is what we discussed last wednesday: traces are one of the feature of blogjects and indeed luggages could be an interesting examples.

Amateur content creation

The IHT has an interesting article about the pro-am debate. It starts from the rise of the amateur digital content producer and the corollary problem that this situation fosters: regulation are quite difficult to create. Some excerpts:

Established media companies that have already seen their business models emasculated by illegal file sharing are nervously watching the rise of the amateur content producers and distributors. These amateurs are changing the media landscape again and in some cases becoming the new entrepreneurs with the hot product that may make what is new today obsolete tomorrow. (...) How do you define an amateur? If somebody distributes content over the Internet, does that person have to follow regular broadcast laws, or should there be special regulations for the Web? Should the government step in to shut down blogs that incite illegal behavior? What about blogs that provide a forum for people to sympathize with outlawed groups?

Why do I blog this? this concept of amateur content creation is larger than just cultural product; I think it's interesting because it reshape the boundaries of organizations and work. I connect this amateur concept to the idea of independent workers: people in no organizations (or creating their new one far from the big structures) to do what they want to carry out: creating content, doing research, performing arty activities...

LIFT06: X. Comtesse on the new economy (2006)

Xavier Comtesse's talk is about how the new economy is following a new trend: it's based on ordinary people who are now what can be called 'consumactors'. It's basically a neologism based on consumer and actors or consommacteur in french; it expresses the fact that consumer are now ‘actor’ of the system, e.g. for Amazon.com in which people’s review give more and more power to the platform. This is definitely a new business model. So, for Xavier, 2 concepts are important:

• transfactors: people who by using new algorithm are able to transform what has been previously done by machines or organizations. Example. Marc Bürki who started a bank after his engineering degree at EPFL but had never worked in a bank. The same goes for Amazon: Jeff Bezos had never worked in a book shop.
• consumactors: as said earlier, it's when the users are empowered by the company/platforms and clients have to do part of the job, as with low-cost airline companies such as easyjet:

I would say that , simply, the economy is following the Web 2.0 trend: the most important part of the process is the people: be it consumers or web users. Alain de Vulpian said something like: "from a rigidly regulated mass society to a living networking society"

Technorati Tags: lift, lift06, consumactor, transformactor

Lift06!

Today and tomorrow I am at LIFT 06 as an organizer so I am note sure whether I would manage to do both organization/supports and blogging, time will tell.

del.icio.us and digital marketing

A BW article about digital marketing

Del.icio.us could be extremely useful for his business. Wiredset helps entertainment companies develop their digital strategies. By following the tags for a band, Ghuneim could let a record company know the level of buzz after a radio interview or live performance. He could find chatter about budding artists. Essentially, del.icio.us would allow him to listen in on the conversations on the Net that he cared about, minute by minute. He's now obsessed. (...) companies are figuring out ways to take advantage of this phenomenon. As they tag, subscribers end up collectively highlighting changing trends and raging discussions all available at the del.icio.us site. Increasingly, innovative advertisers and other companies are trying to make sense of these discussions. "The conversation we're having with clients is, 'How do you stay on top of tagging? Because you need to, and it can be hugely beneficial,"' says Dan Buczaczer, a vice-president at ad firm Starcom Media Vest Group. (...) Wiredset is on the leading edge. It's developing a service for record labels that pulls together a variety of online data -- sales on Amazon.com, number of blog posts, tags on del.icio.us. The idea? Allow labels to see, in real time, the impact of their marketing. If Sony BMG Music Entertainment releases an MP3 from the band Franz Ferdinand on MySpace, it can track the buzz. Or watch how an MTV video affects Amazon sales. As a test, Wiredset is tracking the tags of a London band, Bloc Party. Wiredset follows the chatter around the band's new album to pinpoint influential online players. "It's good to find and establish relationships we might not know about,"

Why do I blog this? It's interesting to see how a field of digital marketing emerge based on Web2.0 applications (technorati, del.icio.us...). Besides, my favorite part is when they say "It's good to find and establish relationships we might not know about," because it's really what I like to do: finding and understanding connections between different concepts.

Last minute speaker at LIFT06

I finally managed to have the last minute speaker for LIFT06: it's going to be the US sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling. He will talk about spimes and the internet of things.

Technorati Tags: lift, lift06

Drucker on 'tribes'

During the coffee-break this morning, I serendipitiously ran across a printed paper of Peter Drucker, in which I found this quote that I like. To a journalist who asked "What will the organization of tomorrow and the executive of tomorrow look like?"

"You'd better stop studying the history of science and start studying the history of tribes, because that's what you're going to be. You're going to be the elder chieftain of the Cherokees." And they have no authority other than that arising from wisdom and competence and accomplishment.

What I like is that back in 1996, Drucker foresee how today's organizations would be: a network of acquaintances, contacts, alliances, joint ventures, minority participation, and very informal agreements... This is exactly like this, the 'tribe' concept is very relevant.

Gadgets of 2005, small improvements rules

The NYT has an interesting list of what they think are 2005 gadgets:

THE FOLDING MEMORY CARD / THE VOICE MAIL VCR / THE FRONT-SIDE TV CONNECTOR / THE BIGGER-THAN-TV MOVIE / TV A LA CARTE / THE OUTER-BUTTON FLIP PHONE / THE FREE DOMAIN NAME / THE MODULAR DVD SCREEN / THE FAMILY-PORTRAIT BURST MODE / THE HYBRID HIGH-DEFINITION TAPE

The list is very intruiging with some nice examples, the most interesting comment was certainly this:

And there you have it: some of the year's best small, sweet improvements in our electronic lives

That's it, we're in a process of small improvements lately. Big things (mass usage of the Internet, web explosion, wireless communication...) happened few years back and now things are improving (web to web2.0...), user-centered applications are developed, etc.

An ebay of idea to answer to R&D outsourcing

Outsourcing research and development seems to be a new trend, as attested by this article in Der Spiegel. It's about small businesses and major corporations which use the Internet to advertise monetary awards for inventions. They call this concept "innocentive", the name is a fusion of the words innovation and incentive.

The business principle behind the company's idea exchange is quite simple. A company has a problem it wants to solve, but its own R&D department is unable to develop a solution on its own. So the company describes the problem it wants solved -- using a few sentences, formulas or graphics -- posts it on Innocentive's Web site and names a sum it's willing to pay for the invention. (...) Some 80,000 inventors have already tried their hand at solving the various problems posted on Innocentive. The rules are straightforward: Whoever produces the best solution gets the money, while everyone else gets nothing. The Web site charges the companies a fee to post their questions. In return, they remain anonymous, in order to protect company secrets.

Still, there are some drawbacks:

"Some full-time researchers, apparently worried about losing their own jobs, are intentionally flooding online innovation marketplaces with unsolvable problems, in order to frustrate their competitors on the Internet." Furthermore, the rigid contract policies are also the source of disgruntlement. Says freelance researcher Hügin: "It's difficult to get accustomed to the idea of giving up all intellectual property rights to an anonymous company, as is often the case."

Why do I blog this? I think freelance research is starting to be a new mode (judging on companies new way of managing innovation/R&D). Innocentive seems to be an interesting model (very web2.0).

Update: what is impressive is this banner (on the innoventive project page), about how to find your lab gear...

World Economic Forum 2006 about innovation/design

According to Bruce Nussbaum in Business Weekl, the World Economic Forum 2006 in Davos "may as well be called Design in Davos because for the first time there is an entire category of programs, meetings, dinners and late-nite talks called "Innovation, Creativity and Design Strategy". This year the conference may as well be called Design in Davos because for the first time there is an entire category of programs, meetings, dinners and late-nite talks called "Innovation, Creativity and Design Strategy." Is that cool or what? The program says that "Business, government and social innovators are taking on new creative capabilities and innovation strategies in response to a rapidly changing global landscape." OK. For those designers out there still seeking validation for what you do--this is it folks! And for those folks battling it out in the innovation vs. design arena, well, there's meat for discussion here for you as well.

Davos is just discovering innovation and design stuff so the panels are all over the place. There one on Doubt and Decision-Making that talks about CEOs and risk. OK. There's also one about Biomimicry--Nature's Innovation. "What has biomimicry taught us about design in nature?" Interesting? There's a panel on Innovating in Innovation that sounds like Larry Keeley (I don't see him listed as a participant). There's one called Video Game Zombies and New Innovation that I am going to attend for sure.

The panel entitled "Video Game Zombies and New Innovation" seems amazingly intriguing!

Leapfrogging: rapid system adoption without intermediary steps

I like this concept very much: Leapfrogging and Worldchanging has a good definition of it::

"Leapfrogging" is the notion that areas which have poorly-developed technology or economic bases can move themselves forward rapidly through the adoption of modern systems without going through intermediary steps. (...) Rather than following the already-developed nations in the same course of "progress," leapfrogging means that developing regions can experiment with emerging tools, models and ideas for building their societies. Leapfrogging can happen accidentally (such as when the only systems around for adoption are better than legacy systems elsewhere), situationally (such as the adoption of decentralized communication for a sprawling, rural countryside), or intentionally (such as policies promoting the installation of WiFi and free computers in poor urban areas).

The best-known example of leapfrogging is the adoption of mobile phones in the developing world. It's easier and faster to put in cellular towers in rural and remote areas than to put in land lines, and as a result, cellular use is exploding.

Ray Ozzie interview

In ACM Queue, there is also the interview of ray Ozzie (by Wendy Kellog. There are some very clever ideas raised in this article:

When I was at Lotus in the early ’90s, companies were a lot more vertically integrated than they are right now. At that time, people were attempting to use fairly nascent technology to break down the walls within the organization, meaning they were trying to get different departments within an organization to work together. They were trying to flatten organizations internally and get people to work together across stovepipes, within organizations, just to make processes operate more smoothly. Fast-forward to today, and you find that we all take that for granted. Most companies nowadays use a mix of technologies: certainly e-mail and, in various flavors, some other types of collaborative technology internally. But now the business imperative is much different. Essentially, many, many companies have to integrate outside business partners into their core practices. Companies are, for better or worse, needing to distribute their operations geographically, in many cases into Asia and other places where people are operating on the same project but in different time zones. Essentially, the walls are coming down in so many different ways, and organizations have to figure out how to effectively do what they need to do in a very, very decentralized manner. (...) The default technology for collaboration is e-mail because it seamlessly crosses those enterprise boundaries, but e-mail is 30-some years old and has been stressed well beyond its original design center. That’s why I believe a number of customers are looking for other types of technologies to support those cross-boundary interactions, and that’s why you see products such as Groove, products that are appearing out on the Internet, that are more or less boundary-spanning, whether they be wikis or blogs or Skype or a number of interesting technologies like that. (...) Enterprises are really different from the public Internet in that they have fairly substantial compliance issues. They have control hierarchies related to technology acquisition and enablement of end users. They mandate the use of certain technologies and mandate that others not be used. They control the upgrade tempo. I’ve never seen the technology environment as divergent as it is right now between what’s going on outside enterprises and what’s going on inside enterprises. (...) A lot of the social software that is now appearing on the public Internet, which is a bit like a petri dish, really must be thought of from the perspective of how it would play inside an enterprise. How can some of that software be adapted for use in the enterprise? It’s difficult for me to conceive of how some of that petri-dish software will become accepted inside the enterprise because of some of the overwhelming compliance and security issues that exist there.

The most interesting issue is certainly the following:

WK What should technologists within businesses be worried about or thinking about in the area of emergent collaboration technology? What technical challenges do they face?

RO The first thing to recognize is that collaboration and communication technology is not a panacea. Many people, particularly in the early years when I first brought Notes to market, would have problems that they were trying to work out within their company, and they would deploy this collaboration software thinking it would solve the problem. In fact, many times what they were really trying to do was institute business process or culture change at the same time the technology was deployed. When the initiative failed because of inadequate recognition that they were trying to change the process, or the culture, they would blame the technology. Technology can assist the change, but it can’t make it happen on its own. People really have to understand what the role of technology and the role of leadership are when it comes to effecting change within corporations.

The conversation offers good food for thoughts; besides, I particularly like when technologist put the emphasis on the fact that technology is not the best solution to world's problem.

Meeting at Imagination Lab, Lausanne

Today I had an interesting meeting with Johan Roos, the Director of Imagination Lab Foundation. Imagilab is an independent, non-profit research institute founded in 2000 and operating from Lausanne, Switzerland.

Its raison d’être is to develop and spread actionable ideas about imaginative, reflective and responsible organizational practices. The Foundation’s underlying philosophy is to value imagination as a source of meaningful responses to emergent change and play as an effective way to draw on this human capacity.

Johan's point is that strategy should be practised in ways that fuel our minds by engaging our bodies in new ways: "When we do strategy rather than think strategy, we engage our senses so that we describe, create and challenge what we know in ways that pure intellectual reasoning cannot". Johan's work is directed towards developing ideas and activities that can help leaders transform strategy into a more imaginative, reflective and responsible practice. For that matter, he used for instance interactive drama or lego play.

I was impressed by the word they did with LEGO, it's called Serious Play. Some examples are here:

LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is an innovative, experiential process designed to enhance business performance. Based on research that shows that this kind of hands-on, minds-on learning produces a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the world and its possibilities, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is an efficient, practical and effective process that works for everyone within an organization. Participants come away with skills to communicate more effectively, to engage their imaginations more readily, and to approach their work with increased confidence, commitment and insight.

Scientists, please share your data!

A step towards publication-sharing: scientists must embrace a culture of sharing and rethink their vision of databases, a great article in Nature. I fully conccur with the vision presented here. The point is that research can be empowered by webservices in multiple ways. This idea is well described with this excerpts:

Web tools now allow data sharing and informal debate to take place alongside published papers. But to take full advantage, scientists must embrace a culture of sharing and rethink their vision of databases.

Upload and share your raw data, and have a high impact factor for your blog — or perish? That day has not yet come, but web technologies, from personal publishing tools such as blogs to electronic laboratory notebooks, are pushing the character of the web from that of a large library towards providing a user-driven collaborative workspace

Why do I blog this? This shows that a revolution is happening: from publication to data-sharing, the scientific practices can be fully reshaped to be more efficient, less lab-centered and is based on 'networked collaboration' ideas. Of course there are some limits:

As web services empower researchers, the biggest obstacle to fulfilling such visions will be cultural. Scientific competitiveness will always be with us. But developing meaningful credit for those who share their data is essential, to encourage the diversity of means by which researchers can now contribute to the global academy.

Call for project presentations

In the LIFT conference , aside talks and keynote presentation, we are organizing a specific moment devoted for projects presentation. The format will be simple: presenters will have 15minutes to describe the project (there will be 4 projects = 1 hour). After this quick review, there is going to be a break in which we will set dedicated rooms wherepeople are invited to come over and ask questions/discuss about it. This is a tremendous opportunity to get some insightful feedback from people with various background and expertise.

We are looking for 2 projects that would meet this constraints:

• technological and user-oriented (architecture, web, interactive art, ubiquitous computing, open source platforms...).
• original and innovative (nobody wants to listen to presenterrs who reinvented the wheel). So please no 'rate this restaurant on a mobile phone' or 'social software for cheese eaters' will be accepted!
• it should not be marketing gig nor an elevator pitch, we are not VCs, we want a relevant account of how your project might be used (scenario-based approach for instance), what can it shows or what needs it may fulfill.
• at least at the prototype level so that attendees could see what is.

Please send your proposal to lift06 (at) gmail (dot) com before december 15th.

The editorial board will review them and get back to you.

Update on LIFT conference in Geneva

Now we're in the tuning phase of LIFT, this tech conference I co-organize with pals like ballpark.ch. We managed to get an interesting european figure: Thomas Sevcik, a guy who defines himself as a "corporate anthropologist". His company is called Arthesia. Here is how he desrcibes what he does:

As a Corporate Anthropologist I create atypical communication projects to capitalize on intangible assets of companies and brands. I did plenty of brand experience projects worldwide. And I still do them.

What is also interesting is that one of my project is directed towards the investigation of creative economy in Switerland/Zürich, the report is available here (even though it's very zurich-centered, it offers relevant insights about existing companies as well as links between creative groups and innovation).

Google and the networked economy

Red Herring latest piece about Google is an insightful explanation of how the company from Mountain View stay in touche with open-source projects.

Google founders (...) wanted some way to support young geeks, and hey, maybe it could tie into open source at the same time. (...) Mr. DiBona, a veteran advocate of open source, came up with a scheme of farming out coding projects to various open-source organizations and paying both students and mentors a stipend. The “Summer of Code” got the thumbs up —and $1 million to pay 200 students $4,500 (if their projects were successfully completed by September) and their mentors $500. (...) rather than earmark that money for charity or a public relations campaign, showing a little bit of goodwill to the geek crowd—even if somewhat haphazardly—could go a long way. The company’s leadership obviously likes the feeling of playing the role of benevolent university rather than corporate machine. Plus, Google uses the Linux kernel and plenty of open-source code, and it always wants to know about young developer talent, points out Mr. DiBona, so some benefits are more direct. “Some of these kids have done such a good job that we’d be fools not to hire them,” he says.

What is striking here is how Google benefits, supports and also sets the trend of a new economy based on networked and competent persons who jointly work together all around the world:

the company is functioning as a university as it creates a new kind of distributed lab. The Summer of Code students essentially sat in front of their personal computers in 49 countries for two months. Each one’s communication methods might have included message boards, phone, VoIP, email, instant messaging, video conferencing, and blogging—but hardly ever face-to-face conversations. “Developers should get used to the idea of globally distributed work groups all over the place, all over the time zones,” says Mr. DiBona. “It’s the future of software development.”