innovation playground Idris Mootee

The Most Important Feature Lacking In ERP Systems Is The Kill Switch. If You Want Innovation To Happen Fast, Look For That Switch.

Innovation happening in different sectors, such as adcanced technology, government, social enterprise, multi-national corporations and non-profits is exciting. As we explore different organizational design that best support innovation, we are always missing an important ingredient for success, the human factor adn the system constrains. Ideas are easy and in many ways a commodity.

Ideas are cheap and the whole concept of a creative director is such a thing of the 80s, who is not creative. Who can afford not to be creative these days? Every design grads tell me they have lots of ideas and want to work for Idea Couture, I tell them we have too many already and ideas are in oversupply. Let’s talk what else you can bring to the table. It is usually followed by a 10 minute of silence.

As we look at innovation from coming up with new ideas to making them work, we have to be equally interested in the human factor and organizational design and structure charged with making ideas actionable. Our current organizational design and management systems were not designed to support innovation. Actually it is designed to work against innovation. Almost most components of our management systems are designed to improve predictability. In an idea world, we know what we want to be; we know how much it cost to build, and how much it cost to sell and how many we can sell. Then we align that with our resource allocation system. In an idea world we can predict out topline as well as bottomline and ideally over a period of 5 years.

We know all these are bullshits. We all buy into that and B-schools and capital markets all use the same bullshits. So these bullshits are fully institutionalized in our system and everyone ended up playing the system at whatever costs. As increasing regulations, management systems, business processes and efficiency initiatives become less flexible, new organized spaces need to be created in order facilitate product, service, and experience innovation on a global scale.

Any corporation can drastically benefit from a 24-hour open innovation network and the process of innovation can also benefit from this open ideation network – essentially, it would allow for innovation beyond product development functions. It is the new open enterprise. And it is time to press the kill button on your ERP and start thinking what an open enterprise will look like. Think about it, many innovation be in product or service opportunities span industries and business units, things can become complicated.

Even the line between product innovation / development and corporate entrepreneurship will blur and the mission extends beyond conceptualization and prototyping of a product, to new business design and business model. You might be interested to read the piece I wrote for PDMA on product development which was published yesterday. I talked about number of ways companies can organize around innovation and to what extent each model opens up outside the enterprise. Each model has its own merits and pitfalls and there is no one size fits all. It explains why some companies innovate more successfully than others? Please share your thoughts.

We Have Proved Once Again That Brand Marketing Can Drive Social Change, Further Customer Engagment And Build Brands. And Won A Gold Award For Best Financial Service Marketing.

Aviva Canada just announced winners to Aviva Community Fund with half a million dollars payout to programs across the country. This is the second year of a very successful campaign created to use brand to drive social change. The Aviva Community Fund, a unique competition designed to lead, empower and support positive change in communities across the country, was first launched in 09 when we presented the idea to the client.

The idea is an open source idea platform for people to submit and decide how to use the money to drive real social change and provide positive impact to their communities. We are grateful to our client's team who worked with us side by side and our design and development team working day and night to accommodate the evolving needs of the program. This is year two and we won a gold award for this campaign. Great work team!

The sustainable impact of the idea or campaign is another proof to show that the world has changed so much since the early days of advertising. The events of the last decade and the Internet has made us aware of the challenges around us.

Advertising has always been the primary mechanism to create awareness and build brand equity, but it is not a question of which 50% of the money is wasted, it is a question of why 80% of the money spent is not building brand equity and merely creating awarness?

Our research shows that 79% of consumers are willing to change the brands they buy or if they believe their actions contribute to making our world a better place, and over 67% would help a brand “promote” (by using Facebook or other social media) if a good cause were behind it and is credible. Also, 73% of consumers (under the age of 35) said it is their mission to contribute to a better society and environment.

Among all respondents, “helping others and contributing to their communities” was cited as the second-most important source of personal contentment, after “spending quality time with loved ones.” Over 54% respondents are not fully convinced that corporate social responsibility advertising is credible when they cannot associate that with real action. The power of PR is diminishing when the program is not designed to engage consumers. This study was part of our ongoing research to look at how social causes can help brands which are low involvement in nature to drive engagement.

One interesting take away point, 67% of consumers are comfortable with the idea that brands can support good causes and improve our societies and make money at the same time. When is Wall Street ready to factor in a second or third bottom line into their valuation of companies? It is time.

Social Technologies Are Changing Many Aspects Of The Future Of Enterprises. We Have Yet To Understand The Full Implications. But It Is Not Happening Fast.

I came across a recent article “Making Social Business Strategy Work” posted on AMA and I forgot who wrote it because I didn’t want to know. The title is bad enough but it managed to attract me to spend three minutes reading the article. The article was written by a ‘consultant’ obviously and advocating that formulating a sound social business strategy requires understanding the key factors driving current market opportunity which includes the following:

• The changing nature of work. We have shifted to an “always-on” culture, where definitions of where and how jobs get done have radically evolved. Time-shifting, hoteling, and telecommuting are increasingly accepted as life-style choices, not just cost-cutting tactics.
• A shift to cultures of public sharing. Social psychology tells us that humans harbor a fundamental need to connect. In more analog times, the public display of this inclination was a 6,000-card Rolodex on an executive’s desk. Maybe two. Today, professionals put their networks on display via LinkedIn.
• Evolution of personal technology. The Blackberry that most executives carry around in their pocket packs more computing power than many of the international business machines that helped them rise up through the corporate ranks. We are living in the midst of a perfect storm combining powerful hardware, fast networks, and robust applications, allowing productivity to skyrocket.

What is new here? Well the changing nature of work didn’t happen yesterday just in case the author didn’t realize. Since the days of Lotus Notes, VPN and laptops, people like me have been doing this for 20 years. The migration of Rolodex to Linkededin happened long time ago, did he just notice that? Let me check his total number of linkedin contacts and when he first joined Linkedin.

And the evolution of personal technologies ..ah Blackberry… it doesn’t do much other than allowing me to read word doc (barely), and I got my first Blackberry in 1999. I don’t think there are any drastic changes in the way I use my Blackberries (Yes, I am using two) – which are primarily used for reading and sending emails and making calls and sending a few texts. OK may be a few pics upload once in a while. What perfect storm?

If I was sitting in a boardroom and some dude showed up and asked me “What’s our Social Business Strategy?” I would probably kick him out of the room.

A business strategy is a business strategy, it is about scanning for shifts and looking deeper into needs of customers and signals for change. Then making the choice (and trade offs) of where and how to compete and then analyzing the capability and resource gaps to get to the future state. So we don’t need to call it ‘Social Business Strategy”. If we need to address any environmental shift, that's part of strategic planning. If we start doing this we will soon be asking whether we have “Business Strategy for Cloud Computing” or “Business Strategy for Social Change” or “iPad Business Strategy”.

Social technologies are slowly impacting organizations, on how people collaborate, share ideas and make decisions, but it is not a business strategy. And it is not about linkedin, Blackberries and Facebook.There are huge implications over the long term, but the article failed to illuminate the deeper implications.

The author talked about parsing signal from noise, articles like this is definitely all noise.

Adorno Refuses To Choose Between Music And Philosophy. Now Idea Couture Refuses To Choose Between Design And Business. We Wanted Both.

My dining room as well as other 6 rooms in the house are now turned into back office and soon we will move in the SAP servers. Between my work, hobby and personal projects my life is a mess and I really have no time to eat and sleep. The paper monster is taking over the house and the kitchen is the last defense…not for long.

On another note, I am very excited to recieve the advance copy of my magazine M/I/S/T which will be in newsstands in London, Germany, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney and every Barnes and Noble and Borders in a few weeks. I love the cover design and it stands out among other magazines. Why another magazine? I don’t know but I think it is just a good idea. What's next after a magazine? I have another idea.

I wanted to see a design-thinking magazine that talks about design and business as one. Design and business is part of our culture. Question for myself is if I have to ask Therodor Adorno what magazine should I publish, I think this is it. M/I/S/C is a about ideas, it is about culture, it is a magazine about business innovation and design thinking.

Every issue the content are organized around four key concepts: Movement / Intuition / Structure / Complexity (I jsut thought of the name one night while having ice-cream) The magazine original idea was originally devised as a straightforward collection of random thoughts around innovation, design thinking, business, culture and technology. It is for exploration of creativity, collaboration and co-created meanings that sits at the intersections between the culture of art, design, business, filtered by an unique editorial lens.

When it comes to media, I think I belong to the Frankfurt School. It has been more than 20 years since I last read the English translation of Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (1947 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno). The English title is called Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.

My favorite part of the book is what Horkheimer and Adorno called the culture industry. It was their contention that the culture industry was the result of an historical process that with an increase in technology (including mass communication technology or social media of today if you wish) there was an increase in the ability to produce commodities, which then enabled increased consumption of goods.

The consumption of mechanically reproduced cultural products—predominantly magazines and film—led to formulas of producing them for entertainment purposes, and it did not occur to consumers to question the idea that the entertainment presented to them had an ideological purpose or purposes. Consumers adapted their needs around these cultural products, and in doing so no longer knew of anything else that they might desire, or that there might be anything else they could desire. While we’re all part of the Facebook culture and occupied with media streams from everywhere, we don’t even notice that we are being manipulated (maybe there is a better word) and in fact even our lives are going through a commodization process.

According to Thomas Mann, Adorno refused to choose between music and philosophy throughout his entire life, believing that he was pursuing the same objective in two disparate fields. Sometimes I think about myself, I have been pursuing business and design my entire life and for a long time I kept them separate as two disparate fields. Now I realize it is one. Business is not just about the economies or making money, it is a great part of our culture, just look at Fast Company or better Monocle. Now business, design and technology are co-producing our culture and it is to be debated whether we’re destroying authenticity or promoting it. For Adorno, popular culture on film and radio did not bother to present itself as art. They were instead a business, and this in turn became an ideology “to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce”. Can we say the same for social media?

In 2012, Facebook Will Give New Meanings To 'Social Services' And Will Pass Yahoo In Revenue And A Key Player In Mobile Space.

A week away from Christmas and we're not slowing down yet. Still plenty of things going on and I plan to spend the next 5 days in the office (a first in a year). This is the time I usually make predictions and I am working on a long one to share with our clients. Give you some ideas of what I am looking at:

At the end of 2012, there is the mass push to the clouds and consolidation will happen and India will probably own 25% of the world’s market. Not finished with my spreadsheet models, 25% is close.

At the end of 2012, the idea pf 'customer engagement' will finally emerge as a disciline that sits on top of all CRM, direct marketing, brand activiation or social media marketing activities. Big agencies continue to struggle as they are far behind the curve.

At the end of 2012, social innocation will hit a new high as corporations come to realization that CSR needs to be more than just corporate public relations. It is about issues management, stakeholders dialogue and social empowerment through emerging technologies and interactions design. True experts will emerge to help corporations to navigate this landscape.

At the end of 2012, Yahoo will not exist as a public company and will reach the end of a slow death; its valuation would dropped drastically and ultimately get acquired. The shareholder value destroyed over the next 18 months will be significant and they wish they’d sold it earlier.

By the end of 2012, smart phones/pads will significantly take away from PCs as the most common Web access device globally both from consumer device sales and usage.

By the end of 2012, someone will figurte out how to use iPad as a platform for education. It is a school for everyone and everywhere. Earn your credits or even degree with just your iPad. And free iTunes music for high score students?

By the end of 2012, Facebook will be a key player in the mobile space. What’s the big idea? They will have a platform that includes hundreds of standalone cross-platform applications for iPhone, Android and Blackberries. They would provide mobile developers with tools and support to create and push new 'social' apps.

Today Facebook generates only a little less than $3 per user per year in revenues while Google generates about $25 per user per year (more than $25 billion in revenue from about 1 billion users). Facebook has plenty of rooms to rethink and create new “media” space to capture some of that money. Facebook targeting potential is more attractive and it is an always on for many user (including me) already, it is far better than TVs.

But the bigger disruption is outside the 'media' space; it is payment and shopping – FB social shopping and payment mechanism. Imagine if they plug in product targeting (with what they know about you) and allow users (to be categorized as searchers/opinion shapers/advocates) to use some form of Facebook money to pay for it. Do the math here: FB Shopping + FB Mobile + FB Money.

Facebook will give new meanings to 'social services' and create new shareholder value. Facebook’s value (currently privately held valued between $35-$50 billion) would surely surpass Yahoo’s (publicly held current valued at $21 billion with operating margin at 12%) revenue by end of 2012 and Facebook can get a margin of 37%, multiply that by a moderate 14X P/E and you get a sense of what’s Facebook worth.

If you're interested in trends and forecast, here's a company TrendHunter that produced a good general trend reports and used by many firms. Will provide a review of some of the themes in the next two weeks.

Apple Should Forget The Movie Studios. Go After The Banks Instead. I Want My iMoney.

This sign is up for our San Francisco office. The archtiects and the girls are working day and night to get this right and a lot of furniture are still in the Atlantic Ocean. Shipping furniture from Europe to US is always slow. Hey we need to get the righ stuff we need to wait.

Congrats to Nick Hughes (managing director of Signal Point Partners and LBS alum) for picking up the Social and Economic award at the Economist Innovation Awards a few weeks ago held at the Science Museum in London. Nick was recognized for his part in creating the M-Pesa venture in Kenya, a mobile money-transfer initiative – something that is long overdue in the world of banking unmet needs.

M-Pesa was first launched in 2005, allow people to transfer money, pay bills and save using a mobile phone, without NO bank account. Handset to handset money transfer, you would wonder why we don’t have it here. Now it is widely adoption in different parts of Africa with over 12 million users in Kenya alone. I see this is more than a technology innovation; it is a social innovation to facilitate economic development in the developing world.

Today, it still takes weeks to clear a check, transferring money is still a pain and fees are hefty. It is time for disruptive change. PayPay was great; never really get beyond the web. It should have been Twitter Wallet or Facebook Money that we are using now. Twitpay is one of those; the service has only 15,000 users to date. They are not the only one trying to attack the payment ecosystem, seeking out ways small and large to tear down the fortress the banks and credit card companies have built to defend their businesses.

PayPal is trying to harness the creative powers of the open Innovation to rethink payments. ClickandBuy's Facebook application allows Facebook users will be able to easily execute money transfers among each other and purchase Facebook apps quickly and conveniently. Another one called Square, a new company founded by Twitter cocreator Jack Dorsey, lets anyone accept physical credit card payments through a smartphone or computer by plugging in a free sugar-cube-sized device — no expensive card reader required. I don’t know why Google is not attacking this seriously, big markets and big money. I guess that’s the problem with bottom-up innovation and efforts are not aligned with opportunities.

And I'd rather using Apple i-Money and use i-Tunes to manage my banking. Steve, forget the movie studios..go for the banks!!!! I am looking forward to getting rid of my wallet…so I have more rooms for gadgets.

Off to San Francisco for IC Innovation Masterclass and BTW our street sign is up. Competitors alerted and we are in game. Magazine gone to the printer. New staff starting this week. Partnerships discussions with a few firms. Busy week and now looking forward to catch up with my couple of dozens of frineds in the Bay area.

There Is Texting For Business, Texting For Emergency, Texting For Health, Texting For Love And Texting For Seduction. We Have Yet To Understand The Effects Of Excessive Texting Impacting Our Communications And Realtionships.

San Francisco weather is perfect this week, yes unusual for late Sept. Exhasuted but a lot of things get done. Will be spending a lot of time here.

I realize I am texting more these days as it is faster and easier. Texting is one of our everyday activities, for the younger generation, it is the primary method to stay connect with friends. I have seen a couple texting each other even when they are in the in same house. And some text while they drive, eat and even in an intimate situation. Imagine that?

It is also becoming a common tool for business as customer services. Airline texts me update on flight status and that makes sense, as it is time sensitive. One significant strength of text messaging is its ability to remain unintrusive, particular we are in meetings or on conference calls.

A company called StartTalking is making texting easer by allowing you translate talk to text. You just talk to it, and have it send what you say as a text. Likewise, when someone sends you a message, it will read it out. Is that a good idea? Are we turning text into phone calls? The thing is free of charge and once installed on your Android phone (and available soon for the iPhone and BlackBerry), it works quietly in the background and listens for voice prompts in order to activate.

The two prompts that are coming in this first iteration of the product are "computer" and "operator," though in future versions you'll be able to program in whatever word you want. It's as simple as saying "operator: text message for (insert name of the name of the receiver)." It confirms you want to send a message to that person, and then you just begin speaking. When you're done talking, it runs that speech through conversion, and plays it back for you.  Works like a voice mail. But other than when I am driving, it is defeating the purpose of texting. People do it most in classes and meetings when they can't talk.

Texting is actually an interesting behavior that is affecting many aspect of our life. There is texting for customer service, texting for emergency, texting for socail causes, texting for security and testing for seduction. It is now ubiquitous in our society. Think about the future of seduction and flirting, texting will be a perfect medium. Just add location based capability and a people matching algorithm.

I can see a bestseller book titled “100 Proven Techniques - Texting to Attract And Seduce?” Think about it, all it takes is one single funny text to makes one laugh and remember you. There is a whole new set of techniques in how often, what style, what teaser, when and that becomes your brand. You can't over do it, too much texting is bad. It is sort of like direct marketing, and sometimes you need a call for action. What we are looking at here is to tantalize and tease her/him. Bring out your brand personality and always leave her/him wanting more. Texting is a great seduction tool if you know the right techniques.

It is easy to envision using texting to engage audience in entertainment, particularly terrestrial radio to interact with live programs, a new revenue stream too. Local politicians can use this to drive engagement with constituents since people can use it to send complains to their local councilors as most would not write a letter and make a phone call after the event.

Here is an innovative idea. You can build a business with this overnight. Starting a SMS–based training services. Whether it is for improving your general social skills, seduction skills, customer service skills, negotiation, self-improvement and even language skills etc. Or an SMS-based MBA? Anytime and anywhere. For $10 a month, you can learn new skills anywhere and anytime you want. And each session can be 5 min while you wait for your burger or 30 min while you wait for your flight to take off. I can come up with a list of 50 ideas to offer. May be this our next start-up incubation idea?

Interaction Design Has An Important Role To Play In Our Future, It Has The Power To Transform Cultures.

There is two articles on IC today, one on Inc. magazine and the other in Globe and Mail. We're getting some good press coverage and we need to continue to make our story heard. In the meantime, we continue onto my journey of building global capabilities. Interaction design (IxD) will be a core focus, and I don't mean just web or mobile interactions. IxD will be one of the most important strategic capability for companies to build meaningful engagement and sustainable differentiation as part of their enterprise level experience strategy.

How would interaction design change in the next 10 years? It is a relatively new area of practice, beyond traditional GUI design or web interface design. Interaction design go beyond just the clicks and links and is becoming an indispensable aspect business design, product design and service design. Interaction design is traditionally define as the study of devices with which a user can interact, in particular computer users or screen related. The practice typically centers on "embedding information technology into the ambient social complexities of the physical world. I think the word 'device' will eventually become irrelevant. I think IxD is about to take on a larger mission -- empowering communities and transforming cultures.

Here's my point of view, traditional industrial design focuses on a product’s form and function, but interaction design requires very different perspectives and approaches for increasingly complex business and design problems. Think media industry, it is transforming itself from a traditional broadcast medium to an interactive one and this change will accelerate faster and faster extending their ubiquity and interactivity to devices, objects and spaces. Rapid technological development is introducing new types of functionality, for example to sense, feel, control, monitor, connect, search, respond and transact for different types of applications.

I am talking about the circle of influence with interaction design. How does interaction design transforms culture; it begins when a small networks of people simply start sharing ideas, feelings, hopes and frustrations etc. and that is when culture emerges. Their behavioral patterns, mindsets, emotional responses as well as aesthetics, rules, norms, and values that are being shared influence culture and as a result produce certain artifacts.

These 'virtual artifacts', through people’s interacting with them, influence cultures and facilitate emergence of new culture. Interactions then become transformative social mechanisms whereby these ‘virtual artifacts’ are made accessible or shareable through networks of communities further facilitating more connecting and sensing, their creations are further linked to specific interactional, locational, cultural and economic context.

The ‘virtuality of our everyday life’ as a result of the interactions powers up new creation and distribution of culture never before in the modern history of mankind. This is where the real disruption is for marketers and media producers. It is hard to distinguish one’s role at the complex juncture of creation/production and consumption in our everyday activities. Interactions of our everyday life take on new meanings. Interaction designer have bigger jobs to do.

My favorite French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) gave us the tools to understand the media society and counteract the total assimilation into capitalist overproduction. Truls Lie finds a previously unpublished interview he made when Baudrillard visited Oslo in 2000. "Disappearing", says Baudrillard, "should be an art form, a seductive way of leaving the world. I believe that part of disappearing is to disappear before you run dry...." An idea for all interaction designers, make sure you include a 'disappear' function in all your designs.

What Do You Know About The New 3G? Girls, Gaming and Gender. Look Out For The Sony PSG (Playstation For Girls)

Gaming is mainstreaming these days with average gamers over the age of 34 years old that has been playing games for 12 years. The average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 40 years old. Surprised? And many are women.

Social gaming is become a global phenomenon, last year was a breakout year for virtual goods in the US which had been only an Asian thing. The virtual goods industry in Asia generates about $7B a year in revenue, seven times the US, this means major valuation differences between Asia and US with China's nine largest public online game companies valued in the $50B range compared to the top four US companies that are valued in the $22B range. Expect to see continuous growth and new competitors, Apple will eventually join the party, may be 2013.

Many still think gaming is a boy’s things and I think this is worth challenging. Historically speaking, probably yes. Women and video gaming doesn't sound like a fit. In Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering work (1949) on women, The Second Sex, created impressions of girls at play with their dolls. After the French Revolution then came the eloquent denunciation of housework. Then in the 60s, women in the US pushed liberal feminism that the pre-1914 period never done before. If you looked at the advertising between 1950s and 11960s you will know what I mean. Femininity has come a long way.

There are still a lot of mystique on femininity, these mystique transformed doing housework, bearing children and shopping into almost a religion, a lifestyle many women accept or reject. Consumer ideology continued to reinforce this mystique. Do women like this whole package or it is the ideal lifestyle projected onto them by advertisers and marketers? Did marketers and male media executive try too hard to fool women into paying for a femininity they did not need at all. Or was it a good thing after all? I don't want to get into this debate. But I do have a POV.

No question men like video games. Or there are simply not enough titles that are designed for women? I think women equally like video games. Columbia College Chicago hosted high school girls in a summit focused on gaming and gender equity. What they did was bringing together female game designers and academics to look at the female voice in the digital gaming industry. It is called the 3G Summit, like the name? The Future of Girls, Gaming, and Gender.

It was a four-day event that engaged young women from Chicago-area high schools in a series of discussions about young women’s place in the gaming culture. Video game is rapidly evolving and now delivered over smart phones, iPad and social network sites as part of social connectivity, consumer engagement, and cultural expression.

I think the women’s gaming market is largely untapped. Many games are beginning to look like interactive movies. Where is the equivalent of “Titanic” for video games? I can’t think of any video games that are built around romance. May be the 2008's Prince of Persia, but there's no player involvement, you simply follow the story along and the attempt at non-linearity makes the development of the relationship muddled and mostly nonexistent. I can’t think of a RFG that has a strong romance and sex theme. Here is a screenshot from a sex scene in the God of War.

Sex (not romance) is now part of many popular games, gone are the days when Mario and Luigi were jumping around looking for magic mushrooms. Some video games allow the player character to have sex or romantic relationships with NPCs, wonder how the logics were built behind those romantic relationships. I guess it comes down to enough talking and pick up some good weapons; they will start to like you. I am looking forward to see the first person romantic video game designed by women for women… the PS3 free online feature will proof to be very useful, the age of video gaming romance is here.

50% Of All Market Research Spend Is Wasted; But It Is Not Difficult To Know Which Half.

Over the years I have seen a lot of companies producing tons of useless market research mostly telling them things they already know or useless data collected using the wrong methodologies or not properly interpreted. In most cases they commissioned the research, simply because they had allocated the budget for it, so they do it on a yearly basis. I guess the research vendor simply take out last year proposal and updated it slightly. So data collection and interpretation are on autopilot.I think we should tax these market research companies for wasting too many papers, they need to buy some carbon offsets.

And in some cases they did not even know why they were doing the research in the first place, and in other cases, management could have saved the company a lot of money and get better output by just spending a few days talking and listening to the feedback from the front-line people or customers.

Market research can be an extremely valuable tool when properly designed and with a very specific goal in mind to support a strategic initiative. The important questions to ask yourself before undertaking any research are:

• What do I want to know? Can talking to customers directly give us the answers or we need alternative way to get those data?
• Why do I need this information? Are we exploring new unknowns or validating some strategic decisions? Can the results link to a direct decision or help us to enrich our insights and make educated decisions?
• Do I want a research vendor that has been doing this for 10 years with all our competitors and carry the same inertia and legacies as we do? Or we need someone with fresh perspectives and creative methods to help us to reframe the problems?

I remember an old saying that "50% of advertising is wasted, except we don’t know which half." It is probably fair to say 50% of all research effort is a total waste, the thing that is different this time is it is not difficult to know which half. Here’s an example. Some Harvard and Northeastern universities researchers wanted to know or ascertain just how happy Americans are. Because they needed to place their fingers upon every wrist of American in order to get a sense of that, they creatively turned to Twitter.

The researchers analyzed 300 million tweets to determine just when and where people are happiest and saddest in the US. And the result...very unsurprisingly .... that the highly civilized, caring, relaxed, open-minded, and more delectable West Coast is "significantly happier" than the miserable folks in the east.

OK that’s nothing new here, people living in the west are always happier. People who love ice-cream are happier. Those creative spirits and geeks living our west that are constantly thinking about bettering-the-world, and never have to worry about the ‘hows’, at the same time some of the world’s smartest engineers are working on some disruptive apps, but have no idea of how it will make money. If we don’t need to worry about execution, we will all be a little happier too.

Let Me Propose To Limit The 'Intenet Kill Switch' To Just Facebook And Twitter.

For me, the Internet is more important than the phone, television and even electricity in some cases. When the Internet is down, we can't work and suddenly we're disconnected from our world. It has become so important for many of of us these days. I can't imagine if the Internet is down for more than a few hours. 

A US Senate Bill is proposing that if there is a "cybersecurity emergency" the President should be able to "seize control of, or simply shut down, portions of the Internet," with broadband providers and search engines required to comply. It is called the 'Internet Kill Switch'. The US President could be awarded absolute power to control the Internet in the case of a nation-wide emergency. I wonder if he will be too busy for that in such a situation.

This bill is so ridiculous. This is not the same as shutting the down US air traffic during a terrorist attach, this can inflict an enormous damage on the entire world and this should not be in the hands of one country. All our systems (banks, hospitals, transportation) and societies will simply be shut down. The proposed switch is effectively a switch to shut down the world. I suggest just give the government a kill switch for just Facebook and Twitter as terrorists hate our social networks because they don't have access from the caves.

Rethinking Memorial Day. Let's Not Forget What It Means And The True Costs.

Today is a special day in America, particularly now and it is not another holiday. Over lunch I was watching TV, these military moms talked about their fallen loved ones. My heart aches so much when I hear each of them telling how old their sons were when they lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are 19 to 22 year old young men (and women) that never had the opportunity to experience life. My heart goes out to every military mom and dad who has a child fighting over in Iraq or Afghanistan. How I wish we could just bring our boys (and girls) home. It is time to bring them home. The war has become pointless. And yesterday I was watching the movie Green Zone, depressing indeed.

For those Americans that are shopping happily in malls today, I am afraid you’ve forgotten what this day is for. This is not a holiday for shopping or vacation. Suddenly this day has turned into 48 inches LCD sale and 30% off your Armani jeans. This is the day for Americans to rethink their role in the world and remember the fallen heroes. We need to limit commercial activities and instead organize events and to think about what have gone wrong and to help the families of all those fallen heroes.

For those designers out there, you should be thinking about how to turn this day back into what it should be. Not only, you should think about new ways to make it relevance to the younger generation. War is not what they see in PS3 ‘Modern Warfare’ or 'Call of Duty.' Today's young people see and understand things differently and often lack the patience to think about things. Let's start with every video war games to have a history section. I like this idea. And may be all war games sale should contribute some profits to help the returning soldiers or educate young people the true cost of war and why we should avoid it at all costs. Why not? They're making tons of money from them.

Forget the marching bands parading down main streets, it is boring. We need to make this relevance to younger people so that they understand what price we have to pay for freedom and sometimes bad policies.

Here's an example. There is an Iraq Body Count Exhibit, a traveling installation that plants red and white flags in public spaces around Memorial Day to help visualize the deaths of both Iraqi soldiers and US associated with the Iraq war. It takes 200 volunteers to set up, very powerful and experiential. It helps people visualize the impact of war in a relevant way, and disrupts behavior. Steve McCallion (Ziba Design Creative Director) presents a few interesting ideas (Fast Company Article) from quieting our social networks in observance to asking companies to celebrate country over commerce. I think we can use a little design thinking here. Reinventing the Memorial Day. And please don't go shopping today.

CRM Is Just A Fancy Name For Customer Data Management System. CRM Don't Do Anything For Most People As A Customer. Now CRM Needs To Get Social.

Remember 8 years ago every VCs were pouring money into CRM (Customer Relationship Management), I never liked that word. It is a fancy name for some overbuilt customer data management system. What does it do for me as a customer? Nothing. Amex is worst, when you talk to them on a call center, I can predict what they are about to say. I might as well do a chat online. But what do I care?  Siebel built a $5 billion company (and making a few people rich along the way), its market share peaked around 45% in 02. And in 05, it was sold to Oracle for $5.8 billion. Siebel is now a brand name owned by Oracle Corporation.

Then came Salesforce.com, an on-demand CRM Company that came as a disruption for all CRM players. A very smart company whose value proposition is you don't need big software, just pay a few hundred dollars a month. They killed all the mid-market players which shouldn't be funded in the first place. Salesforce.com is the first SaaS provider to hit $1 billion in annual revenues. They didn’t stop there, this month they rolled out private beta of Chatter, which is basically “Facebook for the Enterprise” or whatever it means. I think this is a big winner.

Chatter has integrated a lot of Facebook’s elements into its layout and configuration so FB users will find it very familiar. There are user profiles, status messages (where you can leave your status on a current project or make a request for information), groups and individualized streams that you can customize to feed information. But is is not a social network, probably fair to call you an enterprise knowledge collaboration tool. It is Lotus Notes all over again?

What about CRM for social networks? One start-up got it right. What this 4-year-old FanBridge does is pretty simple: help musical connect with their fans. It connects tens of thousands of artists with more than 50 million registered fans, sending out close to a million emails per day (and adding nearly a million fans per week). You can collect mobile info from fans and send last-minute show reminders or live updates from backstage with our mobile text messaging platform. You can even schedule text messages to automatically send in the future, so you can always stay connected with fans.

They serve 200 fans garage band or  2 million fans up-and-coming rock band. This is a very smart idea when my friend mentioned this to me over dinner in NYC a few weeks ago. His son Spencer Richardson started this company 4 years ago and it is flourishing. And there is a reason.

The second smart thing is in order to compete big guys such as ReverbNation, FanBridge borrowed a page from Nordstrom and Zappos, service is the key competitive advantage. Typically an artist will convert after four months, to plans that start at $7/month and run all the way up to $250. Very stable revenue model and they are getting angel funding in March from Dave McClure at the Founders Fund, Jeff Clavier and Chris Sacca.

I think this idea has legs, imagine going beyond musicians to include motivational speakers, cosmetic surgeons, celebrity chefs, social enterprises, fashion designers, interior designers, architects, published authors? The value proposition is strong and clear, technology is generally pretty easy to implement and pricing structure is very friendly. The latest feature that they launched SocialStats, a new feature that will allow you to easily monitor your key social network statistics. With Social Stats, you will get a clean dashboard of the total number and weekly change of your fans, friends, followers, plays and pageviews on the most popular social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Last.fm, PureVolume, iLike). Watch this one.

Social Media Is Very Complex And Social Relationships Online Are Messy And Erratic. But It Works When You Know How To Use It.

Remember the saying about advertising that “I know half of our advertising spend is wasted, I just don’t know which half……” I first hard about this quote 20 years ago and I think it is from 19th Century merchant John Wanamaker. I think I can comfortably say “I know 80% of my advertising spend is wasted, I just don’t know the alternative….” The problem with TV and print advertising today is that it informs rather than sells, it rarely engages with consumers at all. Online ads are worse and currently lacking in brand advertiser value and the creative formats are outdated and ineffective.

What about social media? Consumer perceptions, social relationships and human behavior are messy, erratic, and maddeningly unpredictable. The debate on the effectiveness of social media to build brand and provide effective reach is ongoing. When marketers want to reach and engage audiences of social networks such as Facebook, they have two choices: buy advertising or start a social media viral campaign. Advertising on FB is of limited use we all know it. How often you read or click on any ads on Facebook. But we read the wall, we click in the links published by friends and go to Cafeworld to pick up gifts. These connected worlds are like new found oil hotspots. It is not only important to understand who influences purchase decisions in online communities but also the degree of impact. I don’t think we can use a broadcast paradigm if we really want to understand what is means.

Idea Couture’s senior interactive designer Jackie Siddall was featured in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. A WSJ writer discovered her story in our Noodleplay site and decided to publish her story. It is an very interesting one. It is about how Jackie was prompted by a Twitter post by the retailer that led to her purchase of a folding kayak for $1,900. She doesn't use that go to work, she rides a bike...summer, winter or fall.

The vessel was one of about just 600 sold in 2009 by Folbot Inc., a small retailer in Charleston, S.C. "You can't buy that exposure," says the firm's co-owner, David AvRutick, who claims the incident speaks to the value of using social media for marketing when he was interviewed by WSJ. Mr. AvRutick says he dedicates about an hour a day—could also go to waste.

Mr. AvRutick says he regularly searches Twitter for tweets that mention kayaking and then sends messages to the people who wrote them. He connected with Jackie, the blogger who credited Twitter for exposing her to Folbot, after she posted a tweet that mentioned she wanted a kayak.   Jackie later asked Mr. AvRutick via Twitter if he would send her some photos of her folding kayak being made, and he provided about 20. After it arrived, she says she decided to write a blog post about the whole experience.

Let me see if this works for me. I am looking for a Leica M8 so I will be posting that and see of anyone would contact me through Twitter or Facebook. Many brands are embracing social media. One success story is Starbucks. Starbucks Official full time Tweeter is Brad Nelson and Starbucks isn’t just any brand on Twitter, with Brad at the helm, they’re doing many things right. A former barista, Brad is now manning the Twitter ship and he’s responding to questions or mentions of Starbucks, trying to help customers find resolutions to their problems, and putting out fires left and right. Twitter will soon be part of a company's call center,,scary.

Your Smart Phone Could Also Be A Spy Phone. It Is Possible That It Broadcasts Your Location WIthout Your Knowledge. There's No Place To Hide.

I was watching Eagle Eyes last weekend, I was thinking what happened there is actually not unlikely, we’re being watched every second. Forget about your PC spyware, they’re nothing compare with mobile phone spyware that enabled call- and text-monitoring and most of all allow anyone to tap into the phone from remotely and activate its microphone, even when it is turned OFF.

So It doesn’t matter if you have an iPhone, Blackberry or any Android phones. These spywares are not expensive (often free) or difficult to purchase or install. Your cell phone can also tell your location. We all need our cell phones, now there's no where to hide.  There are many of these spy services out there for people who are desperate to monitor their children or employees. Companies such as Mobile Spy will help you monitor their call, mobile web browsing and text message activities. You can just log into your Mobile Spy account from any computer and see everything including GPS locations too! Scary!

One popular spyware for mobile phone is the Flexispy. They come in four packages with the high end Flexispy Pro-X which include features such as listen in on LIVE calls, secret mobile GPS tracker, read SMS messages, phone call history, email, and secretly listen in on the phone's surroundings.The entry level is the Flexispy Bug which allows remote listening only. It turns your phone into a bug so you can listen to everything.

Are you safe? probably not. A quick way to check if you phone is bugged, look for sudden drop in battery power, and then unusually billing activity with random numbers. If you for whatever reasons need to engage in a secret conversations, take the battery off.

As early as 1997, the National Reconnaissance Organization warned that any cell phone can be turned into a microphone and transmitter for the purpose of listening to conversations in the vicinity of the phone. This is basically done by transmitting to the cell phone a maintenance command on the control channel. This command places the cellular telephone in the 'diagnostic mode.' When this is done, conversations in the immediate area of the telephone can be monitored over the voice channel. 
This diagnostic mode was originally designed for remote software update. Now with LBS, not only they can listen in, they can locate you within feet. OK, when do they start making anti-spy software for cell phones?

Don't expect these privacy risks to go away. The reality is all government have no interest to fix it or make these products illegal. The more they can find out about you the better protected they feel. It is like 1984.