innovation playground Idris Mootee

Millennials Are Disrupting Media Again. Media Companies Now Need To Play Catch-up.

Digital disruption to the media began early in the days of the Internet throwing every media company into a crisis mode. Now this is happening again - this time, even homepage viewership is on the decline. I am not saying this is the death of the webpage, having a webpage or content site is simply not enough.  Content is now distributed and stories are best shared and read through new platforms such as Facebook’s Instant Articles, Apple News, Buzzfeed, the Starbucks mobile app or through Reddit, a bulletin board platform that doesn’t sound like something new since the early days of the Internet. It is an entertainment, social network, and news website where registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links, making it essentially a crowd sourced news channel.

Today all Millennials are gravitating to social networks and news media sites and assume everything is free. This generation, (confident, always connected, ramen-eating, ultra short attention span, impecunious, underemployed, some over-educated, gaming obsessed, and so forth) millennials are not only the largest generation in US and world history, they’re on the cusp of commanding the largest influence and voice of our consumer culture. They expect technology to work and simply-work and if it doesn’t, you will have a big problem. They are tech-loving consumers but have unrealistic expectations that technology needs to be seamless (thanks to Apple) with a new standard of intuitiveness. They align themselves with the latest technology and will try anything new and cool and quick to critic and quick to find workaround. Computers don't crash and smart phones should be able to handle everything.

Millennials don’t watch TV (and others are following) and they sleep with their cell phones next to them perhaps 9 out of 10. Probably 10 out of 10 have no landlines and no interest in watching TV. Smartphone is the most important tool in their lives and when people are saying the smartphone is becoming a commodity. It is not. How can it be when it is the most important tool or digital companion? Smartphones are not doing well because the expectation is rising and Smartphones have replaced the cigarette (good thing) as things to do in those odd moments, lonely moments or simply filling up every minute of downtime. It is replacing newspaper, cigarette, chewing gum, calculator, wallet and many other tools…. hookups, meet-ups or start-ups. 

There is no online or offline, social is social and other opinions matter. They get along well with their parents and even have friendship with parents, which didn’t happen in the older generation.  They actually influence what products their parents buy, what apps their parents use and where to travel. They have a  “we can fix it together” mindset and “we can change it all” attitude. That’s why they love working for start-ups and game changing companies with a purpose.

More millennials than non-millennials integrate their beliefs and causes into their choice of companies to support, their purchases, and their day-to-day interactions. They put the money where the mouth is. Millennials also care about what’s genuine and authentic. They are looking for somewhere between a retro aesthetic and a search for honesty and authenticity.  Something advertisers are still struggling with. For many millennials, they prefer to climb the Himalayas then corporate ladder. They are raised to believe they can do whatever they want and they are hitting the realities as they enter the society.  Millennials are hard to catch. Media companies are not getting it. You need to work harder.

 

 

Virtual Reality Is The Next Big Thing. Beyong Shocking And Disruptive. It Will Create Tens Of Billions Of Value. Who Will Win This Game?

The world is becoming crazier and more exciting as Virtual Realities are becoming more real and the lines between our physical world and virtual word are fast becoming blurred. Next year 2016 will be an important year as companies are finally making virtual reality real with only 2 main players participating on the race: HTC/Valve, Facebook/Oculus will be making VR products available. Microsoft is partnering with both Valve VR and Oculus while Sony is pushing hard not to miss the bandwagon with Morpheus.

The user behavior of VR has yet to come to shape and will be evolving for the next 5 years, the idea of information conveyance is interesting and playing a special role in the realm of virtual and augmented reality. We are learning to design cues in the VR world to tell users where to move or go or to touch. This is still a challenge as don’t think about it that much in the physical world. We walk into a room assuming the chairs are moveable and the cabinets are not. That sense of reality has changed in the VR world. Anything can happen to everything. It is like living in a dream.Those who have experienced the HTC/Valve Vive were completely fascinated by the experience. HTC Vive is clearly ahead of the game.

For VR, unlike 2D gaming or in the real world, we have arrows and signage to tell people where they can go. In the VR world when user is wearing a head-mounted display, the users are actually operating in two realities – the real, knowing that the user is wearing these gears and the virtual, which is so immersive (more so for the HTC/Vive roomscale technology that allows you to walk around the room) and therefore difficult to find a frame of reference.

The question is do we want user to have the feeling of wearing a space suit or simply feeling they are acting as normal with no gears on them? The awareness of wearing a suit will remind people they are in a VR world unless the suit is a normal suit. While body motion sensing is great when body movements are being interpreted by motion sensors as perceived input and turns it into commands and controls. Basically, with this technology, you are the controller.

KOR-FX is making an interesting gaming VR vest that uses acoustic feedback that, in turn, is processed into haptic feedback. Its software analyzes the feedback felt by the user, depending on what’s going on with the on-screen and what the user is doing it with. The controller “acousto-haptics” is to define acoustic feedback that is being felt.

Sixense is another company currently developing a wireless solution to hand input in virtual reality with the STEM System making use of alternating current (A/C) electromagnetic field to accurately track body movements in terms of position and orientation within a radius of a stationary base.

In designing VR experience, the haptic side of things is perhaps the most difficult to address. Oculus has yet to demonstrate an “official” control mechanism for the Rift, instead letting each developer use the peripherals they find most suitable. I am speculating they may end up figure out a visual hand-tracking technology from a front mounted camera. So what is the best way to navigate in the VR world? Input is still a key challenge for VR as a pure look-based movement (turning your heads) supported with some analog input (mouse in your hand as an example) but sometimes the head is looking at a different direction and the hands are not in sync. This can causes problems as if the system is receiving two very different commands.

Expanding information conveyance is still early in the usability learning curve and we are a few years away before arriving at a dominant model. There are still many creative options we can explore and they are not mutually exclusive either. A voice based system guiding the user as an example. Once we start adding social interaction in shared virtual environments, it will explode. Social VR means social presence and this is a $20 billion dollar business at a minimal.

The inevitable evolution of inputs in some form of controllers will keep coming. Xbox and Playstation will need to think how to migrate their current controllers to take advantage of the new requirements (not easy) and we can expect to see more innovation from start-ups including companies such as Razer Hydra from Sixense, or camera-based systems which are limited by the camera’s line of sight. HTC/Valve is also working on some cool solutions aiming to provide the best and not just the first.

Immersive VR systems that alter your sense of physical reality can give user the illusion that you are located inside an unreal virtual environment – or a telepresence - the ‘sense of being there’ or ‘feeling of being there’. In the early 1990s this idea was transplanted to virtual reality, where instead of being at the remote physical environment, the participant was in a virtual environment with a sense of being at the place depicted by the virtual displays.

A Swiss healthcare hybrid MindMaze announced its pioneering move into the VR and gaming spaces with MindLeap. Combining headset-mounted neural sensors and motion-capture cameras, the system is designed to “facilitate neuro-powered immersive virtual and augmented reality” on consoles platforms as XBOX, PlayStation and Android. This is still in development and I am not sure if it can be done soon. They leverage technology developed by the company for a range of medical applications in treating neurological deficits, such as helping amputees control robotic limbs. Neurologial control is still a bit of science fiction and will be a long way before it can be mass commercialized. I like to dial my HTC M9 with my brain some day.

For now, we will be sticking with head-mounted and handheld controllers. They are enough for us to re-create boundaries and rethink presence. Every time you pick up a HTC Vive,  you are about to enter a virtual boundary that didn't exist before. Exciting and also scary!

The Come Back Of Hardware. Is Software Becoming A Commodity?

The world is suddenly obsessed with smart technologies and this time around it seems unstoppable. Our everyday electrical and mechanical industrial object will now be occupied and ran by software and connected to the cloud. It also means each object (as small as some smoke detectors and as large as automobiles) will now be equipped with tons of sensors and can be able to adapt to different environment and individual needs.

It is essential that the next wave of industrial revolution will make us more efficient and empowered (and more human I hope), and data will be at the heart of this revolution. That's another big conversation. All the Nest, GoPro and Beats received multi-billion-dollar valuations through private investments or acquisitions and everyone is wondering why these hardware companies suddenly in such high demand. Because hardware and software are going through different commodity lifecycles and now software is becoming a commodity. They used to be difficult and expensive to develop and even to deploy, that that is changing. It is hard for software company to get into hardware much as hardware companies struggle to get into software. Hardware cannot be done by a few geeks in the basement, and involves massive R&D and specialists including megatronics engineers, electrical engineers, industrial designers, wireless engineers and usually takes a longer time to develop.

Software you can fix it with a download, and hardware you can’t. They are massive supply chain challenges when it comes to logistics and component supplies. The value of firms who can marry software and hardware will have a competitive advantage over their competitors. Essentially everything we use today will be fitted with some sensors, processors perhaps, and may be a screen and will recarnate and become of Internet of Things. For the last three decades, software engineering has advanced to a state that sophisticated codes can be embedded into machines. And the availability of cheap sensors and super powerful processors is powering this cycle of data revolution. All of a sudden, software, hardware and communications infrastructure are advancing us into a new era. Old world manufacturing + low cost computer processing + ubligious computing + cloud = smart new world and many cool products.

It sounds like the Apple story all over again, does it? The hardware and software integration capability of Apple, the ecosystem, the brand and user experience are now not only inspiring consumer gadgets company, not it’s influence is beyond its own industry. I know this is an overused story, but he Apple influence is still here, and perhaps it will be here for a long time even when the company stop creating great stuff one day. Microsoft ex-CEO Ballmer saw that coming in 2012 in a letter to shareholders. "It's important to recognize a fundamental shift under way in our business, we see ourselves as a devices and services company." Microsoft had the strategy right but couldn’t execute it fully with the exception of X-Box. Microsoft’s future revenue will still be coming in from software and it isn't going to change anytime soon. The transformation from software to hardware is harder that you think.

The idea that hardware is now the new software is pretty real. There is a business model implication here. These hardwares are mostly priced between $100 to $250 and they a gateway and great way to sell software. We are seeing a revival of hardware and this time, it is hardware first and software and then date on the cloud, it will bring new technological advances in cloud-powered hardware that boosts productivity, efficiency and manifests as beautifully designed objects that fit into our hands and homes.

Does Social Media Makes All Of Us Phenomenologists?

It is every designer’s dream to design a chair. I have yet to meet an industrial designer that doesn’t want to design a chair or a car. It is designer’s dream for those who study transportation design is to design a car and I get it. Chairs and tables? The reality is how often designers get a chance to design their own chairs? And every transportation designers ended up doing is styling a car that was designed by a computer. There are disproporationately large amount of chairs being designed than to other objects and products.

Any object whether it is chair, a table, a smartphone, or a coffee maker does not exist in a vacuum and are part of a informal system that links to a complex set of interactions both human and machines. And even a complex layer of meanings for a relatively simple object – a chair or a functional tool – a smartphone. For some, the term “phenomenology” is only restricted to the characterization of sensing qualities such as seeing, touching, hearing, etc.: what it is like to have sensations of different kinds that forms a human experience. But our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation.

Sensational experience is great but short-lived. To create meanings is the ultimate human experience. To design, in phenomenological terms, is to address the meaning of things or objects have in our own experience, in our own “life-world” and how we "experience" them. Just ask any designers if they see their discipline this way? Mostly not and 90% of designers’ effort are on aesthetics and not phenomenology. Is there a discipline called "design phenomenology"?

Phenomenology is the examination of the structure of various types of experience ranging from a broader and deeper perspectives and including deep diving on perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activities, linguistic activity etc. We need to apply that before we strategize a new business concept, a new service design model or an innovative new product.

It is what we need to understand context of anything. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Edmund Albrecht Husserl (German philosopher who established the school of phenomenology) called “intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something and this is what makes the jon fun. It is not for someone without imagination. It is all about seeing “intends” as well as “jobs-to-perform” and “concepts of the world”. The idea is studying the units of consciousness is like “giving voice to” and these units of consciousness are called intentional acts or intentional experiences. It is basically the most human centric approach to understanding human experiences.

When designers try to design experiences, perhaps they should need to first consider phenomenology. It is not really a rocket science, for centuries poets, writers, painters, film producers are born phenomenologists. I think most of us are born phenomenologists particular in the days of Facebook and other social media where we share everything, we understand very well by means of words, videos and images, our insights with our friends — we are all practicing phenomenology without knowing it.

The Future of Wearables? Everyone Will Get It Wrong. And The Winner Won't Be Google, Apple, Sony Or Microsoft.

Wearable is hot. It is supper hot. The billion-dollar question remains, “How do we create the iPhone of wearables?” and “How do we create sub-ecosystems around these wearables?” and "What new business model opportunities will emerge?" The buzz is here but the money is not here yet. Everyone is betting on it and no one can afford to miss the train. Most wearable out there are just toys for the geeks. I can't find a reason anyone wants to buy this Sony Watch. Wll now everyone can see my Facebook messages. What is dumb idea! OK I can use it to tell time and the weather.  Apple’s iWatch or whatever it will be called and Google Glass are getting so much attention and everything is figuring out what are the high value potential applications. Google has openly promoted its potential as an always-on, always with you computing device but it has yet to find a killer application beyond the obvious. They are hoping someone out there can figure that out for them.

And China is watching and Baidu is rumored to be working on a "Baidu Eye," an internal code name for a wearable device that features speech recognition for Mandarin, as well as image search technology, which pulls up relevant information based on a photo. So if you see a product, it will search for product info and price and availability. That take 'showrooming' to a new level.

 
The path to mass adoption for wearables will not be a straight-forward one and there are technology, user behavior and production economics barriers to cross.  Apple, Google, Samsung, Sony and LG are all committed to play this game. Apple recently acquired a small company Passif Semiconductor founded by two Ph.D. students from the University of Berkeley, worked on developing chips with radios that consume very little power and work with the Bluetooth Smart (a.k.a 4.0 and low energy) standard. The acquisition will provide Apple with addition al expertise and expect an acquisition boom as players gearing up for the big game.

With all these buzz and emerging innovative conceptual designs competing for the dominant design there are still many questions to be asked about what the future holds and how consumers will adopt different product paradigm. Even the smartphone itself is still shaping our behavior today and we are still actively reprogramming ourselves. Smartphone is becoming the operation system of our professional and personal life and our relationships with the outside world and emerging systems around it.  And when it comes to Operating System, the main battle will be an OS that will interoperate across all devices. This is the big play.

Expect to see all sorts of novelty design coming into the market. There are lots of novelties out there including a wearable electronic synthesizers to be embedded into T-shirts turning them into human musical instruments. There are also people using neurophysiological signals and brain waves to play video games. These will never be mainstream wearables.

The success of any dominant design for wearables will be based on successfully tackling of the 3Bs: Balance, Benefit and Beauty.

Balance: The design of the wearables needs to fulfil the requirements of fitting comfortly with our bodies and many human factors considerations. The design needs to include studying the anthropometric measures of the human body and of the equilibriums between the various zones of the body. The connection between the physical form of wearables and their active relationship with the human form will be key to the concept success. These nerdy high-tech design will not cut it. Other considerations include comfort, the design to adapt to different body type (male vs female, tall vs short) and study of non-obtrusive shapes and the optimal conditions to let the sensors work well.

Benefit: The designers must first determine the real problem the wearable concept is trying to solve and needing to solve and able to solve. The benefit doesn’t have to be a known benefit today and could be some needs user don’t even know they exist until they see it. The design can open up new possibilities for people and  must fit within the context of the user’s lifestyle and experience and the infrastructure around us.

Beauty:  Consumer needs to love the design. It needs to have the visual appeal that the user won’t look like something you see in a Sci-Fi movie. It needs to be expressive and it doesn’t only limit to the form factor, but the overall interactive experience. The connectivity piece is key it needs to allow for seamless wireless connection. The interactions or interface design is the most tricky one. Are we thinking touch screens, gestures or eye tracking?

More next week. I won't tell you what works. I can tell you what definitely won't work. And like everyone else, I could be also be wrong.

At CES Everything Is Touch, Touch, Touch. Will Touchscreens Make Typing Obsolete Soon?

At CES this year everything is touchscreen, TV, laptops, tablets and kitchen appliances. Is the future of interfaces is moving to touchscreen? Is this the end of keyboards? We are seeing a completing transition in the design of user experiences to software based and touchscreens. The notebook computer is the final piece of the migration. Most people would find no reasons to touch a screen on a laptop or notebook, but we are also increasing used to the habit of touching screen even most of the time even we’re not aware of. Thanks to the iPhone and iPad.

Our view will change even when we don’t think touchscreens on laptops are useful; just see someone use a keyboard with an iPad or Galaxy. For many, it just feels more natural to touch the screen. I sometimes find myself touching the screen forgetting that it is not a touchscreen device.

Blackberry will join it even they will still keep the keyboard as an option for people like me. Automobile entertainment will move there too. Your next laptop will likely be touchscreen and you might not have any choice, whether you like it or not. I wonder when will Apple launch a touch screen macbook? I think it is only a matter of time before all laptops become touch-enabled. LG was showing a prototype of interactive retail display so you can try differetn outfits without going into the changing room.

With touchscreens, we will never worry about spilling coffee onto your keyboard but will have to deal with the problems of greasy fingers. I think touch will become the key user experiences but there is still a lot of room for innovation. Touch-enabled devices will accelerate adoption in the enterprise market and next will be education market. The next generation of workers will forget what a physical keyboard looks like.

Hong Tan, a professor at Purdue University who works for Microsoft came up with an interesting way to add the feel of buttons and other physical controls to a touch screen by using vibrating piezoelectric actuators installed on the side of a normal screen generate friction at the point of contact with a finger. The nice thing about the innovation is it can make an ordinary sheet of glass feel as if it has physical buttons or even a physical slider with different levels of resistance. That is a bug jump forward from just touchscreens. The haptic feedback could help users find the right control on compact or enable the use of a touch screen without needing to look at it.

RIM is working really hard to win this. They called it a “writing without typing”, a technology only apply to the keyboardless Blackberry London devices. This is a riksy bet as Blackberry loyalist (like me) likes typing on physical keyboards rather than tapping on a screen. I am eager to get my hands on the new Blackberry London... a few weeks I will know if that works for me.

The Tablet War Is Moving To The Next Level. It Is Not Just A Game Of Interface And Content, It Is A Service Platform Game. It Will Be Google, Apple And Amazon.

Idea Couture San Francisco was excited to sponsor and host the Tofu event last week. The Tofu Project is a nicely curated boutique program created by TokyoMango journalist Lisa Katayama and designer Tomo Saito that brings 10 of the most innovative young entrepreneurs from Japan to the San Francisco Bay Area for a 7-day design thinking and innovation boot camp.

These isn't just another Silicon Valley-meets-Japan tour or incubator. It is not just a start-up meet and share, it is more of collaborative think tank where cool Japanese people and experts on Japanese culture from all different sectors gather together to re-imagine the future of Japanese innovation and globalization. I wish I was there. Here are some pictures to share.

A busy day driving to Waterloo for a several meetings and everytime I stopped at a book store I wonder how the tablet war will evolve in the next 12 months. The tablet war is moving to level two and there are only 3 finalists. Samsung and Amazon are the only two that are strategically qualified to play this game. Sony’s new tablet may have a small chance; if it does it will be domestically. Sony has been sleeping at the wheels and has no idea what the world is like.

Amazon's forthcoming Kindle Fire tablet will be hurting the sales of iPad and put price pressure on Apple. They might end up having to reduce the price to keep shares. I don’t see any new features that can keep iPad ahead of the game or sustain the growth. Many will hold off the purchase of iPad for themselves or chose to buy Fire because it is a great alternative.

Kindle Fire, launching next week at a price of $199. They are using a Gilette strategy of subsidizing the tablet and make money from content. Apple will never do that. And for the Nook, I am not sure. It is nicely designed and engineered product, a lot of good thinking on the UI level too but lacking a strategy to play this game. Yet the sales jumped 140% the first quarter due to overall demand growth.

Amazon Fire will have a dual-core processor, a fast browser, a good display, and lots and lots of content. Preorder is already tracking to exceed a million. Amazon will build a big user base and leverage this to launch a service platform. They are not viewing the tablet as an eReader game like Nook, they see this one piece of a larger emerging strategy to go against Apple. Amazon just purchased a voice startup Yap few months ago, a technology that could transcribe voice commands into text. Amazon is quietly building out its voice-recognition service platform and will be competing with Apple Siri. That’s the next big game.

Interactions Design Will Enable New Social And Cultural Behavior. How Do You Research These Emerging Behavior And Their Implications?

Back from London and a very productive week. Many are still sadden by the loss of Steve Jobs. I quote Ginsberg: "I saw the best minds of my generation... angelheaded hipster raging or the ancient heavenly connection, in the machinery of night...". The world misses Steve Jobs.

Apple said he had been "the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives" and had made the world "immeasurably better".VC and ex-Apple executive Jean Louis Gassee - who Jobs recruited to Apple - said that Jobs should have 'seven statues' built for him - 'One for the Apple II, one for the Mac, one for Pixar, one for coming back and reviving Apple and the Mac, one for the iPod and iTunes, one for the Apple Stores and one for the iPhone. This picture of Steve was taken in an emotional moment knowing this was his last keynote.

Everyone is obsessed with Apple and how to disrupt the master disrupter, but what everyone is doing is either copying each other or try to make small changes to Apple’s designs without the power of the Apple brand/user experience and the powerful Apple ecosystems behind them. Let’s say if your army has the same uniform, equipment and the same Hummers as the US military doesn’t mean you can compete with the powerful military intelligence system linking everything. Apple is a system with central command and control with highly sophisticated logistics system and deep R&D budgets. It is truly a textbook example of sustainable competitive advantage.

Most companies got it wrong when they believe 1/They think Apple is only about clean design and nice features 2/They think what they do is easily replicable 3/They think people are willing to save some money buying a non-Apple substitutes. Look around how many MP3S out there and how cheap they are, anyone buying them? The same can be said about tablets.

We’ve spent a lot of time on researching the future of ‘devices’ or ‘personal technology’. It will be the single largest growth opportunity for the coming 10-15 years and will eventually be bigger than the PC business. It is the next game. I am not talking about mobile phones, smart phones or tablets. I am talking about a convergence of these portable devices that utilizing haptics, gestures, facial, biophysical, voice, movement or any combinations that could create novel ways of interacting with a devices or entertainment appliances.

There is simply no way to predict what would become the dominant interactions paradigm of the future and which one will prevail and which one is transitional. Is multi-touch transitional or something will come and leapfrog this intereaction paradigm?

Apple is milking everything ‘multitouchables.’ One of the latest idea is the Apple's Magic Mouse may include multitouch display. Earlier this year Apple filed a patent application on a multi-touch mouse that can display information and allow users to input directly from the mouse such a number keypad. The screen would then change to a different functionality for each application when they're switched between active and non-active and depending on whether you’re play games or chatting with friends. I think the next one would be a multi-touch Macbook cover that let you do things without opening the laptop. That would be a nice crossover to bring some tablet functions to a laptop. If I want to play music with my Macbook I may not need to open it.

And Apple is getting close to offering cloud-based movie streaming,working with Hollywood studios to get movies streaming through iTunes. LA Times this week said that Apple was hoping to get that service off the ground by the end of this year, or early next year. Apple now streams TV shows and movie to devices like the Apple TV, but Apple TV has small penetration. This would add that feature to purchased content, and widen the range of devices that could stream and most importantly iPads.

Functionality available through the input device is something worth exploring. When we do research work on how devices (or tools) from both an anthropological and design perspectives evolve and how they shape our everyday interactions, we see emerging complex cultural artifacts that connect different kinds of social and cultural practices.

The increasing emerging interactions and sociability makes the behavior hard to research using conventional research approach. The three main central affordances of the personal technologies for social actions are 1/the very personal nature of these devices (at least more so in the west) and getting more personal with increasing access to critical information and 2/ the idea of anytime anywhere always on, everyone and always connected 3/ the sensing and reacting capability of future devices. Like many I carry my Blackberries around in the office, at home and everywhere I go. Many of us are tied to our iPhone/iPad/Android phones/Blackberries and must carry a functioning smart phone at all times. For our research, we focus on how multitouch can interact with geospatial information and on how other modalities can be combined to enrich the interaction with spatial differences. We have a lot of very interesting findings. I may share some here next week.

Apple: A Rare Case Of Successfully Building A Truly Sustainable Compeitive Advantage. It Is Definitely Worth The Current Valuation Premium.

Here's the cover model for the coming issue of my M/I/S/C magazine. We shot the cover in London and here is a picture of her taking a picture of me. The concept seems surrealistic. The next M/I/S/C Design Thinking and Customer Experience Issue will be in book stores Sept in the US and a bit later in Europe and Asia/Australia. Now I am working on the Dec issue which is Design Thinking and Creativity. I am thinking of who to invite to write for this issue. BTW this is a picture below of Idea Couture's latest window display. I am liking it.

If you've just upgraded your iPhone you will not be happy if Apple is bringing out a new one in a few short months. In addition to launching both iPhone 5 and iOS 5, there will be the new iTunes 11 bought to you from the Cloud.

Expect a very clean design and iCloud will be closely integrated with iTunes. iTunes Store is actually turning into a browser (funny without we seeing it that way) and it will actually be integrated into the entire app. Your music will be backed up by the Cloud and everything will be fully synced.

It is harder and harder to beat Apple with its deep integration between apps, OS and devices. It is reported that iCloud will be offered for free initially, and at some point users will be charged $25 annually for subscription of the service. That’s another way to get another recurring revenue stream just like MobileMe service.

Apple has finally locked-in deals with big record labels Warner, EMI, Sony, and Universal. With 30% of revenue from iCloud’s music offering with the major lablels, 12% with those holding the songwriting rights, and the remaining 58% for Apple to keep. That’s a good profit margin. Not only it is helping with the bottom line, it is further stenghtening the Apple fortress with all these integration.

Apple is building a fortress around its suite of product/services/experiences and it is almost impossible to break that. It is not only around music and devices. They have just filed a patent application that an iProjector that I believe is in the making. It makes perfect sense, a minisize slim projector that sells for $600 to $1,000 and most of them have problems with setting up. And you thought it should be easy. I will not think for a second of getting one if it is fully integrated with my MacBook or iPhone or iPad. With interactive presentations and sharable contents between devices.... and not to mention a really good looking Apple design.

The patent application "Projected display shared workspaces" was filed in February 2010 and it is basically a system for taking what's on screen and projecting it onto a nearby surface such as a wall etc. The true innovation is that about the system proposed in this filing is that it can combine projections from multiple devices into one screen, in what's dubbed the "shared workspace." So you can simultaneously show power point from your computer, a video from your iPhone and notes from your iPad. No switching between apps anymore. Called it a “presentation canvas”?

Apple’s horizontal integration strategy across devices and channels and vertical integration strategy from chip design to software and retail is creating a truly sustainable competitive advantage that is hard to replicate. For that reason alone, its valuation skyrocketed. This is a brilliant example of classic business strategy theory at work.

Every single Apple products complement (compete) and complete each other. Get an iPod, and you can download content via iTunes and access them trhough iCloud and use that to move content to iPad or other devices. The sort of control over the entire user experience or process, from hardware to software, strengthens customer loyalty and provide lock-in. You cannot leave Apple once you’re in. It is becoming the consumer equivalent of IBM for business.

When We Look Back After Ten Years From Now, We Will Call This A Facebook Decade For Sure.

Maria Jesus Galan, a nun who has spent 35 years with the Santo Domingo el Rea convent in Toledo, Spain has been spending a lot of time on Facebook and digitizing the Dominican convent's archives.

When the local government gave her a prize for her hard work and she has over 600 Facebook friends, but she is not making any friends in the convent. Some nuns reportedly claimed that Sister Maria's Facebook activity "made life impossible" for them. So she was therefore asked to leave the convent and now back to live with her mom. There are still so many who are afraid of technology, not just the crazy leaders of Iran or Libya.

Today the keyboard is mightier than the sword. It bought down Tunisia and then Egypt and not sure who is next? Libya? They wish there is a kill switch but even there is one there is still no use. There are always channel for information to leak and eventually you cannot shut down the world’s Internet and mobile networks.

The Egypt case has proved the power of social network. It sparked biggest challenge to the regimes that are not democratically elected but also to corporations and brands. Twitter played a less important role this time, but it is till part of the social networks that power up revolution.

Called it "Social Revolution Networks". Ideas flow back and forth in real time and momentum multiplying every second. No one can control or dictate these voices anymore, they echoed through Facebook and it is the ultimate freedom of speech. Facebook is probably the number media today, more powerful that TV for sure. But I still like my New York Times. And for Linkedin, I won’t sleep well if I am running the company. It is easy to tell your staff and investors that people want to keep their professional and personal profile separate; I think it is a false sense of security.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner thinks many of us prefer to keep their professional online personas and their personal personas distinct. Weiner argued that while LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are often lumped together in a broad social networking category, all three represent separate social platforms that serve different needs for people. Well, yes and no. I think linked in missed a lot of opportunities to go beyond what they do and the interface is pretty bad. They can use a lot of help.

Here is a big idea. The next big magazine should be entirely Facebook based. There will be a print version but online context is entirely available through a FB app. The stories gathered all the feedback and perspectives from the users and fully incorporated into the content.

I have one more killer feature to make this work……. but I will keep it to myself as I think I have a buyer for that idea. Think about it this way, FB reminds us that everything in this world is organized around people. Somehow people forget that. If we rethink our business and organize them around people, I think we can come up plenty of new ideas to leap forward. Businesses are transforming how they relate to people and operate. CMOs that can throw away their notion of mass media and start recognizing and embracing this shift will gain strategic advantage over competitors. I think this is the new theory of marketing, time to write a new book. But I don’t have time.

A man in Egypt wanted to express his gratitude about the victories the youth of 25th of January have achieved and chose to name his firstborn girl "Facebook" Jamal Ibrahim, The girl’s family and friends gathered around the new born to express their continuing support for the revolution that started on Facebook. Facebook hold a special place in Egyptians' hearts because of its role in the revolution. I don't know anyone named their sons or daughter Twitters or Linkedin or Skype. Do you?

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?

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.