I like the look of zhiing, a mobile location service emanating from California. The key things it's got going for it is that it's platform-neutral, service provider-neutral, free and straightforward.
But it's based on the idea that you drive, or that you're being driven around. That makes sense in the US, but it's a little limited here in Europe, where the directions you need might involve public transportation too - and even, whisper it now, walking.
Transport for London's brilliant Journey Planner gives travel options for trains, tubes, buses, trams and river buses. Look carefully at the advanced options and you can also grab a tailored cycling route. This would be immensely difficult to do well on current mobile platforms if the full graphic content were to be carried. But translated into the equivalent of turn-by-turn instructions, it could be zhiing-ified. And that would be great!
Monday, 5 January 2009
Friday, 2 January 2009
Lessons in Scaling Up
Esther Addley wrote a wonderful piece in the Guardian about Josh Silver's project "to offer glasses to a billion of the world's poorest people by 2020", distributing "100 million pairs annually" within a few years, with each pair costing only a dollar - and no profits being taken.
Professor Silver is clearly an inspired and inspirational figure, as well as being immensely practical. His project and his approach to it illustrate some key recurring themes of innovation.
Silver's story falls into three distinct phases. There's the sudden burst of insight, or the dawning of the idea: what if someone could adjust the power of their own spectacles, so that they didn't need an optometrist? The second phase is invention – in Silver's case, a period lasting longer than two decades, during which he and his team have developed an ingenious mechanism involving liquid lenses. The third phase, which Silver has now embarked on, is the diffusion phase, where the invention leaves the laboratory, enters production – and goes out to change the world.
The compelling core of Silver's idea echoes a number of breakthroughs in consumer goods and services. His self-tuning glasses remove the professional constraint on growth imposed by the need for a skilled middleman, just as Eastman's photography system turned us all into everyday photographers. Early automobile manufacturers doubted that cars could become mass market products because there wouldn't be enough people available to train as chauffeurs. In more recent times, skilled programmer availability was seen as a limiting factor on the growth of computers. The productivity advances we have experienced in white-collar settings also largely flow from technologies that cut out intermediaries, whether it's dedicated typing pools, counter clerks or, in these days of business process outsourcing, entire back office teams.
But I think the more impressive lessons that innovators can take from Silver's project are to be found not in the breakthrough characteristics of his idea and invention, but in his methods of diffusion. Firstly, Silver has declared very solid goals. Aiming to distribute 100 million products at a dollar each every year is an unambiguous goal that can be shared, broken down into component plans, and interpreted flexibly across different territories. The irresistible phrase "2020 vision" also helps the project's messaging.
Secondly, Silver is growing the project by networking. He is making use of organisations and connections that already exist in the places where he wants to make an impact. He is using networks to spread knowledge of the project and its benefits, to stimulate demand, and to recruit partners.
Professor Silver is clearly an inspired and inspirational figure, as well as being immensely practical. His project and his approach to it illustrate some key recurring themes of innovation.
Silver's story falls into three distinct phases. There's the sudden burst of insight, or the dawning of the idea: what if someone could adjust the power of their own spectacles, so that they didn't need an optometrist? The second phase is invention – in Silver's case, a period lasting longer than two decades, during which he and his team have developed an ingenious mechanism involving liquid lenses. The third phase, which Silver has now embarked on, is the diffusion phase, where the invention leaves the laboratory, enters production – and goes out to change the world.
The compelling core of Silver's idea echoes a number of breakthroughs in consumer goods and services. His self-tuning glasses remove the professional constraint on growth imposed by the need for a skilled middleman, just as Eastman's photography system turned us all into everyday photographers. Early automobile manufacturers doubted that cars could become mass market products because there wouldn't be enough people available to train as chauffeurs. In more recent times, skilled programmer availability was seen as a limiting factor on the growth of computers. The productivity advances we have experienced in white-collar settings also largely flow from technologies that cut out intermediaries, whether it's dedicated typing pools, counter clerks or, in these days of business process outsourcing, entire back office teams.
But I think the more impressive lessons that innovators can take from Silver's project are to be found not in the breakthrough characteristics of his idea and invention, but in his methods of diffusion. Firstly, Silver has declared very solid goals. Aiming to distribute 100 million products at a dollar each every year is an unambiguous goal that can be shared, broken down into component plans, and interpreted flexibly across different territories. The irresistible phrase "2020 vision" also helps the project's messaging.
Secondly, Silver is growing the project by networking. He is making use of organisations and connections that already exist in the places where he wants to make an impact. He is using networks to spread knowledge of the project and its benefits, to stimulate demand, and to recruit partners.
Sunday, 28 December 2008
Bringing a Social Dimension to Airport Limbo
What do you call it when you retweet a tweet, except that you're not retweeting it, because you're writing it here in a big ol' blog, and you've also censored the rude work? I have no idea - so let's move swiftly on to the payload:
@adarshp: Got a tweet from @boarding_ looks like a bot that recognizes airport codes. Innovation is f***ing fast.
@boarding_ only has three followers as I write this, but it's early days. As the bot says:
Waiting for your flight? Tweet #boarding along with your airport code to find other Twitter users around
Now that sounds like a good way to hook up with people in the strange nowhere space of the airport. And it's bringing a real social dimension to an otherwise alienated environment.
Find out more from innovator Damien Guinet here.
@adarshp: Got a tweet from @boarding_ looks like a bot that recognizes airport codes. Innovation is f***ing fast.
@boarding_ only has three followers as I write this, but it's early days. As the bot says:
Waiting for your flight? Tweet #boarding along with your airport code to find other Twitter users around
Now that sounds like a good way to hook up with people in the strange nowhere space of the airport. And it's bringing a real social dimension to an otherwise alienated environment.
Find out more from innovator Damien Guinet here.
Monday, 15 December 2008
140 Characters In Search Of An Author
This is a story set about one month into the future. Everything in it is true.
Jack is a high-up in a largeish corporate. He's not quite reached the heights of what I always hear as “sea level”. And he's wondering what he can do to fight his way to the next rung. It helps that ladders are turning into snakes all over the organisation, and that Jack is adept at swinging from trend to trend. He's going to survive this downturn – in fact, he's going to para-survive. If anyone deserves to wind up on top, it's Jack.
Jack realises that the world is becoming ever more complicated and interconnected, and that he needs to invest in his own reputation capital, an area of personal grooming that he has neglected since leaving university. For one thing, it would help his profile in the organisation if he looked like some kind of world-class mover 'n' shaker. For another thing, if he improves his standing in the wider world, he stands a better chance of landing a new position if everything goes pear-tastic at his current employer. That's two things that Jack has figured out already today: he now needs a nap.
When he wakes up, Jack gets a Twitter account. Now he can project his personality on a real-time basis to a growing audience of twepcats. He can send out 140-character bulletins about what he's thinking, what he's doing and, you know, how great and important his life is. What he'll be doing is building an evidence base as well as a fan base. He'll be lighting up the sky, creating a trail. He'll be somebody.
Thing is, Jack doesn't have much to say. He doesn't want to say anything too original, in case it makes him look like a nut, or offends somebody, or makes him look out of the loop, or behind the curve – or otherwise geometrically compromised. He can't say too much about what he's doing at work, because it's confidential and/or boring. He'd comment on the news but he doesn't know what to say about the news until he's got someone else's opinion on it, and then what's the point of being an echo chamber? Saddest of all, he has no thrilling appointments in his calendar and is scheduled to go precisely nowhere for the next few weeks.
So, Jack has a brilliant idea. He will hire a ghost. He'll get someone else to tweet for him.
He posts his requirement on elance and chooses from the array of eager respondents. He doesn't choose the cheapest, nor the most expensive. Jack chooses the ghost who seems to “get” Jack best. This is the ghost who's mixed together the right amount of sight-unseen flattery and desperation, together with a reasonable fee. Jack already feels three feet taller. He awards the contract and settles back to see just how smart and busy he's about to become.
And it's sweet. In twitterland, Jack is witty. His finger is on the pulse. He's helpful. And, above all, he's busy. Jack is forever on the way into or out of a conference, a meeting, a party, or a show.
A few weeks in, Jack's ghost suggests that Jack's identity could be further enriched with greater content, such as longer think-pieces in his blog, and pictures of the places he's visiting. The ghost will construct the textual content for him, using a tried-and-tested dodgy-dossier program that spatches together bits of pre-existing resources. The ghost will swipe the pictures from flickr and Photoshop them, adding Jack in to some of them. (The ghost calls this procedure reverse-Trotskying, after the hallowed Soviet practice of airbrushing fallen heroes out of photographs.) Naturally, the ghost's fees go up, but that makes sense. After all, you don't get anything for nothing.
When some of Jack's followers begin to suspect that something is amiss and un-follow him, the ghost suggests an expansion of the human team. He recruits people to generate original Jack content, including video that could have been taken with Jack's phone. It's easy enough: the ghost has control over Jack's imaginary schedule, and can book people to take the pix in the relevant locations at the relevant time. Jack's fees get sliced and diced and passed around this growing network of elves.
Nine months in and Jack is pretty proud of what he's achieved. Never mind that the company's toy budget set aside for social media has all been spent on some guy off of elance – Jack's riding high on every Twitter measurable known to humankind. In an online vote of business people in his industry, Jack rates in the top five for profile and approachability.
It's time to cash in on all this hard work. Jack braces his boss at a company party, held to celebrate the closure of another fifty outlets. The doors of the conference suite seem to be locked... This is because security men are removing all the computers and files and furniture from the headquarters building and taking them to a patch of waste ground where they can burned. The boss keeps looking at his watch (poor sap still uses one) as Jack tells him what an asset he, Jack, is to the company, and how it's time he was elevated to the board.
“That's great, Jack,” says his boss. “I see that you are currently in Berlin, talking about economic resilience and post-lean manufacturing.”
“Yes...” says Jack, at a loss for words.
“That leaves you with 137 characters,” the boss points out, as he walks away.
Jack prises open his laptop. He checks what his followers are saying and doing. They all seem to be busy, upbeat and articulate today. Maybe they can offer him some solace?
And if only they were real, perhaps they might.
Jack is a high-up in a largeish corporate. He's not quite reached the heights of what I always hear as “sea level”. And he's wondering what he can do to fight his way to the next rung. It helps that ladders are turning into snakes all over the organisation, and that Jack is adept at swinging from trend to trend. He's going to survive this downturn – in fact, he's going to para-survive. If anyone deserves to wind up on top, it's Jack.
Jack realises that the world is becoming ever more complicated and interconnected, and that he needs to invest in his own reputation capital, an area of personal grooming that he has neglected since leaving university. For one thing, it would help his profile in the organisation if he looked like some kind of world-class mover 'n' shaker. For another thing, if he improves his standing in the wider world, he stands a better chance of landing a new position if everything goes pear-tastic at his current employer. That's two things that Jack has figured out already today: he now needs a nap.
When he wakes up, Jack gets a Twitter account. Now he can project his personality on a real-time basis to a growing audience of twepcats. He can send out 140-character bulletins about what he's thinking, what he's doing and, you know, how great and important his life is. What he'll be doing is building an evidence base as well as a fan base. He'll be lighting up the sky, creating a trail. He'll be somebody.
Thing is, Jack doesn't have much to say. He doesn't want to say anything too original, in case it makes him look like a nut, or offends somebody, or makes him look out of the loop, or behind the curve – or otherwise geometrically compromised. He can't say too much about what he's doing at work, because it's confidential and/or boring. He'd comment on the news but he doesn't know what to say about the news until he's got someone else's opinion on it, and then what's the point of being an echo chamber? Saddest of all, he has no thrilling appointments in his calendar and is scheduled to go precisely nowhere for the next few weeks.
So, Jack has a brilliant idea. He will hire a ghost. He'll get someone else to tweet for him.
He posts his requirement on elance and chooses from the array of eager respondents. He doesn't choose the cheapest, nor the most expensive. Jack chooses the ghost who seems to “get” Jack best. This is the ghost who's mixed together the right amount of sight-unseen flattery and desperation, together with a reasonable fee. Jack already feels three feet taller. He awards the contract and settles back to see just how smart and busy he's about to become.
And it's sweet. In twitterland, Jack is witty. His finger is on the pulse. He's helpful. And, above all, he's busy. Jack is forever on the way into or out of a conference, a meeting, a party, or a show.
A few weeks in, Jack's ghost suggests that Jack's identity could be further enriched with greater content, such as longer think-pieces in his blog, and pictures of the places he's visiting. The ghost will construct the textual content for him, using a tried-and-tested dodgy-dossier program that spatches together bits of pre-existing resources. The ghost will swipe the pictures from flickr and Photoshop them, adding Jack in to some of them. (The ghost calls this procedure reverse-Trotskying, after the hallowed Soviet practice of airbrushing fallen heroes out of photographs.) Naturally, the ghost's fees go up, but that makes sense. After all, you don't get anything for nothing.
When some of Jack's followers begin to suspect that something is amiss and un-follow him, the ghost suggests an expansion of the human team. He recruits people to generate original Jack content, including video that could have been taken with Jack's phone. It's easy enough: the ghost has control over Jack's imaginary schedule, and can book people to take the pix in the relevant locations at the relevant time. Jack's fees get sliced and diced and passed around this growing network of elves.
Nine months in and Jack is pretty proud of what he's achieved. Never mind that the company's toy budget set aside for social media has all been spent on some guy off of elance – Jack's riding high on every Twitter measurable known to humankind. In an online vote of business people in his industry, Jack rates in the top five for profile and approachability.
It's time to cash in on all this hard work. Jack braces his boss at a company party, held to celebrate the closure of another fifty outlets. The doors of the conference suite seem to be locked... This is because security men are removing all the computers and files and furniture from the headquarters building and taking them to a patch of waste ground where they can burned. The boss keeps looking at his watch (poor sap still uses one) as Jack tells him what an asset he, Jack, is to the company, and how it's time he was elevated to the board.
“That's great, Jack,” says his boss. “I see that you are currently in Berlin, talking about economic resilience and post-lean manufacturing.”
“Yes...” says Jack, at a loss for words.
“That leaves you with 137 characters,” the boss points out, as he walks away.
Jack prises open his laptop. He checks what his followers are saying and doing. They all seem to be busy, upbeat and articulate today. Maybe they can offer him some solace?
And if only they were real, perhaps they might.
Friday, 12 December 2008
MoSoNe: Mobile Social Networks: 1 - Enriched Proximity
I'm grateful to the good people at Mobile Monday London who were kind enough to ask me to speak on a panel about mobile social networks this week. It's been eight years since I wrote my book Mobile Commerce: Opportunities, Applications and Technologies of Wireless Business and this was a great opportunity for me to assess how some of the stuff I wrote about then has come to pass – and how some of it hasn't... Yet.
The parts of the book that were the most fun to write were those about how society might change as a result of ubiquitous mobile connectivity. Howard Rheingold made a much better attempt at covering this ground, and I recommend you read his wonderfully thoughtful and articulate book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution rather than mine.
My feeling today is that mobile has indeed changed the way we all work and live – but that it hasn't yet brought us together with our immediate environment in quite the way I envisaged.
Mobile technology is darned good these days. I have (pretty much) all the services and apps I could want on a device that's small, reliable and good value for money. So the screen could be better, the battery could last longer, and there could be more room for skis in the back – but I expect device and service attributes to carry on improving in quality.
Mobile has made less of an advance on hooking us into our immediate physical and social situation. My GPS function can tell me where I am on the face of the planet, but it tells me nothing about the people around me. The built environment remains strangely silent too, whereas I'd kind of assumed that, by now, the Tate Modern would be telling me about itself and its exhibits as I walked around.
And I had a moment of personal revelation at MoMo this week. As I was spouting from the panel, folks in the audience were tweeting. As I wailed about mobile technology's failure to ignite relationships in the room, people around me were in fact communicating with virtual groups that overlapped the room's boundaries. There was more in-flight intelligence in that physical space than I could see or touch.
My good friend Jonathan Greensted of Sentient had asked me to be involved in the event, because we've been talking about Sentient's Bluehoo app throughout its (very rapid) development and launch. Now I'm wondering how Bluehoo and Twitter fit together. The evening's second panel made the same point: how can discovery methods be merged with social networks to produce more value?
I want my mobile device to help me meet real people. That's not because I'm on the prowl, or the mooch. Say I'm at a conference – it's only natural that I should want to find people to interact with as fast as possible. Knowing their interests and no-go areas would help maximise my time at such events. These are situations in which it's okay to wear a label, and to read other people's labels.
But the same principle applies increasingly in the workplace. (Or the blurred real-life/workplace.) Every organisation I work with is increasingly complex. The large ones are highly distributed and navigating them can be difficult – although, oddly, it's often easier for an outsider to connect the dots than it is for people on the inside. Small organisations are highly connected to others, making their value chains complex. Solutions like Bluehoo can give people back ownership of their organisations by letting them build real-time, concern-centric networks. They can be re-threading our necessarily fragmented organisations in their own image, to serve their own, collaborative, purposes. Then, when people get together, they're really getting somewhere.
Mobile technology is doing a great job at shrinking distance – making one's physical separation from people and information increasingly irrelevant. The user experience will only get better. But the industry also needs to invest in the local power of mobility. People don't just want reduced distance, they also want enriched proximity.
Another thought about Kosmix
My mind has been much on cupcakes, because "cupcake" was Google's fastest rising (ha ha) recipe search term in the UK in 2008 - and I own the domain cupcake.com. Which I am not going to link to here, because it's just a list of catchpenny ad links, designed and hosted for me by a partner company with which I split the revenue, and I wouldn't want you to go there. Seriously - this is an unplug.
I mention the domain just to point out that despite the soaraway popularity of cupcakes, I am in no way rolling in money as a result. Clearly, I'm doing something wrong. (Unless, of course, I'm doing everything wrong.)
So I started to wonder what an ideal "cupcake" landing place would look like. And the first thing that popped into my mind was Kosmix. Kosmix's results for "cupcake" seem to me to be right on the button. I want facts, recipes, great pictures, and reliable routes to more riches, and Kosmix gives me all that.
Now that I'm being patient enough to examine Kosmix's design, I see also that the disambiguation function is very elegantly incorporated in the layout. Maybe my habit of leaping away from a site when it's not exactly what I was looking for has dulled my appreciation of this kind of helpful signage. And so maybe getting along with Kosmix has something to do with unlearning my more twitchy search habits.
I mention the domain just to point out that despite the soaraway popularity of cupcakes, I am in no way rolling in money as a result. Clearly, I'm doing something wrong. (Unless, of course, I'm doing everything wrong.)
So I started to wonder what an ideal "cupcake" landing place would look like. And the first thing that popped into my mind was Kosmix. Kosmix's results for "cupcake" seem to me to be right on the button. I want facts, recipes, great pictures, and reliable routes to more riches, and Kosmix gives me all that.
Now that I'm being patient enough to examine Kosmix's design, I see also that the disambiguation function is very elegantly incorporated in the layout. Maybe my habit of leaping away from a site when it's not exactly what I was looking for has dulled my appreciation of this kind of helpful signage. And so maybe getting along with Kosmix has something to do with unlearning my more twitchy search habits.
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