innovation playground Idris Mootee

Random Thoughts On Maturing Companies and Start-Ups. When Do You Need A Reset?

In an interesting conversation with clients this week and discussions were around the question: “should companies plan for the distant future (10 years and beyond) and what is needed to get out of a death spiral where a slow death is in the making?”

There is a big difference between growing with age and growing old. With age, it sometimes comes with wisdom. With more than a dozen of C-suite execs that I have worked with or coached, for most of them, the wisdom came one day after they had passed the age of 50. Growing comes with age, which sometimes take away the energy and urge to make radical change. Ask yourself or your organization, the last 5 years your company or yourself should be referred to as a “growth experience” or “aging experience”.

A CEO’s job is to make sure the company is growing with experience” and not “aging with experience”. Company needs constant renewal, the leadership team is expected to generate enough energy to motivate the entire company. You need a strategy to energize and motivate. Not empty speech and propaganda video and banners. Time doesn’t mean we gain more experience. Reinvention, renewal and resetting are mantras for growing experiences. We shape what we become. When companies are stuck in a stagnant mode or worse in a downward spiral, it is because of the experience they have. Not because the new things that they try. They are usually too old (state of mind), conservative, naive and irrelevant and that managerial mindset is holding the company back for serious reinvention.

A look back at many failing leaders’ biggest attempts to bring their companies back for the past 10 years reveals an embarrassing series of missteps, mistakes, and flat-out bad products, culminating in a flurry of poorly-executed uncommitted attempt to create and own a distinct market positioning. Most of the time, the product failed before they are being introduced. No one can do anything at that time. Think about the following:

• We have been very good in making this and we should be fine.
• We always do things this way. It is too risky for us to change.
• Let’s watch where the market is going first. We can wait.
• We need to do what Apple, Nike, Amazon and Starbucks do.
• We should hedge our bets and try different things too.
• Let’s give the market what they want and make sure we have a competitively cheaper offer.

If you do one or a few of the above, you will most likely be somewhere along the downward spiral. For companies to end the spiral of death, it takes more than cost-cutting and requires an orchestrated effort for everyone involved to imagine and see the possibility forward. It is about applying a practical future-oriented foresight to drive strategy and unleashing the company from legacy people, thinking and even management board. There is no place for the “old" in the world of constant resets.

Five Deadly Mistakes of Organization Transformation That Leaders Must Avoid.

So you are ready to transform your organization? You want your organization to leapfrog the industry? You want to deliver above industry average growth? And do you know what are the most common mistakes that leaders and even very smart and experienced leaders make? The most common one is sticking with the usual way, the easy way and the proven way. There is no usual, easy and safe way if the company has not been doing well or satisfactorily underperforming. It is not just about making a good product anymore. Leaders need to ask how does one make a meaningful contribution to society with product?

Whenever I was tasked to help global enterprises to move the next level, the first thing I did was to stop them from doing things the same old way. It was never easy. You don’t go the next level without taking calculated risks, offending people and forcing people to do things differently. No one wants change despite whatever slogan or lip service about how people want change. And everyone wants breakthrough. There is no free lunch. No pain no gain.

I’ve been working with some of the best high performance global leaders for decades to breakthrough and manage large scale transformation. These are the five most common mistakes CEO and their executive team make and all can easily be avoided.

Failing to build organization energy and momentum. Organizational energy is the invisible force which an organization uses to purposefully put things in motion and drives positive behavior to advance the company’s mission and business objectives. The strength of organizational energy manifests in the extent to which a company has mobilized its emotional, cognitive, and behavioral potential in pursuit of its goals and it makes company resilient. Energy traps often endanger productivity and innovation. You must understand how to release them from being trapped. This is not a one off exercise and cannot be performed by consultants. It is the executive team’s job.

Failing to have a vision and to translate that into a compelling and relevant story. Company cannot develop a strategy without a vision. A vision is not just a statement that vaguely describes a company’s aspiration. It needs to be authentic and anchored on the industry’s competitive reality and illustrate how that future if realized will benefit the organization and allow it to prosper and thrive. The vision needs to show the shared common destiny and a path to get there. Vision without strategy is worst than not having a vision.

Failing to understand how to create value and understand the core value drivers. This is very common for management and it is critical for the top 10 and all C-2 executives to understand what are the critical drivers of value for the organization. These ideas need to be deeply embedded in day-to-day managerial decisions. In mapping out company’s processes and decision structures, the CTV (Critical to Value) notion needs to be reflected in CTQ (Critical to Quality), QTR (Critical to Revenue) and CTC (Critical to Culture). Three of the most important metrics to organizational health. Getting the right decisions on a few of these key CTV points, the company cannot be too wrong even though it may make many execution mistakes which sometimes is unavoidable.

Failing to assemble a super team fast. Any successful transformation needs to have the support of a small high performance super team. It takes time for an organizational to rebuild capability and even hiring new people from the outside takes time. It is crucial that a company needs to assemble a swat team for quick deployment to solve any problem. Any problems that are left alone will signify that new management’s inability to drive change. Problems need to be fixed fast. Otherwise there is no credibility. This super team should always be looking out for the organization. They are people who take decisive action to solve problems. They are people who understand the vision of the company. And they are the people with high analytical ability (typically with management consultants training) and ready to look at any problems even without the experience and domain knowledge.

Failing to get rid of bad organizational habits and the incompetents. Any underperforming organization has bad habits and usually a lot of them. Be it leadership habits or organizational habits embedded in the mental model of leadership or organizational design. The first thing leaders must do is to get rid of these old habits and dogmas and people that are underperforming. The bottom 10% of managers must go. Don’t waste time on them. What do we mean by being strategic?

At the end of the day, smart leaders must ask the following five questions:

1. Do you understand the critical drivers of value and what are critical to quality/competition/performance/culture? Are they part of your management team’s KPIs?
2. Are you doing enough to focus or leverage investments in your core value proposition and brand story? Are you cutting back or divesting fast enough on unnecessary and non-strategic investments?
3. Can you name the top 5-10 people in the organizations that could potentially become part of your super team? If you can’t name at least 5, you have a problem.
4. Where are you spending the time? Are you devoting enough attention to matters that are important to building strong energy and momentum?
5. Are you applying data-driven perspectives on all aspects of decision makings and what areas you are not feeling comfortable that data might not be right or not properly interpreted?

Thank You Robert Downey Junior For The Nine Creative Short Films You Created to Celebrate The HTC M9. Honestly, I Don't Quite Get It.

Thank you, Robert Downey Jr, for the nine inspirational short films you created to celebrate our all-new HTC One M9. Honestly, as HTC's CMO and the client who commissioned you the project and telling everyone it is a great idea, I am really not getting it. At least not all of it. I just want to be honest about it.

I am considered a very creative person and, as a designer, I appreciate all kinds of art from surrealism to post-modernism. I understood the concepts explained to me by team RDJ before we started this project and I deeply appreciate all the effort and enthusiasm you put into this. It was a lot of hard work and you did it for love (I will keep that secret between us). Thank you RDJ! But I still don’t get it! Ask the Internet?

Yes, I have my official explanation captured in a video of these nine playful vignettes juxtaposing the sleek, color-changing attributes of the new HTC One M9 with timeless pop-culture inspirations, from The Prisoner to Andy Warhol to Charlie Chaplin. I believe you drew inspirations from the features that I explained to you before you started your ideation process, and I can see those connections. The official launch of the films at SXSW last week was a great success, and we received very good feedback from folks in the creative industries. Whether they are viewed individually or as a whole, these nine films are not only entertaining, but they get us thinking.  And hopefully they inspire us to go out and make something!

The important question for me is, do these very creative short films improve brand presence, brand preferences, and brand relevance for HTC? Those are the right questions, and I don’t have all the answers yet. To put it in context these are not expensive productions, so to get our ROCA (Return on Creative Assets) is not an issue. 

Let's start with the first one brand presence; with millions of people viewing these videos within the first 48 hours, and now spreading across the Internet, the first one is not a question after all. It gets HTC the awareness we needed without spending any money buying paid media on TV or social platforms. So, it is a very effective way for maintaining awareness in an already noisy world. It is a lot better than chest thumping to get noticed. We don’t want to be Tarzan. We’d rather be Charlie Chaplain.

The second question is, does it create brand preference for the HTC brand? This effort itself is no easy undertaking. To make a brand more preferred over others in a defined category (in our case, the smartphone) is an expensive and long-term undertaking, and there is no short cut. The most common approaches involve highlighting certain unique selling propositions to make the brand more attractive; focusing on incremental performance (such as battery life) or improved service (extended warranty programs, and so on) as differentiators. These things don’t change brand preferences at all, and even highly visible sponsorships, celebrity endorsements, and more engaging social media programs rarely change it. Shaping brand preferences is not an overnight thing.

The problem is that over-investing in advertising (beyond the minimum level) rarely changes the market share structure. Customers are less inclined or motivated to change brand loyalties in established markets – emerging markets are a very different story – unless it is a low involvement purchase. Over-spending on marketing usually hurts margins, profitability, and, ultimately, results in a decline into irrelevance. HTC made that mistake before with the big TV campaign. Internal numbers showed an increase of just 10 to 15 percent of improved brand awareness. In short, it doesn't do anything at all. It was a disaster and a laughingstock. Sony made the same mistake by pouring out big ad dollars in 2014. Sony overall generated $17.4 billion in revenue, but posted a net loss of $1.2 billion during its fiscal second quarter last year. Sony smartphone units saw revenue rise 1.2% year over year to $2.8 billion, but slid to a $1.6 billion operating loss and effectively wiped out all the profits Sony made from other business units during the quarter.

The average tenure for a CMO is very short. Samsung and HTC burnt through a few CMOs in a short period, and so do many other companies. For CMOs to succeed, they must sit at the top of an ASS – “Agile, Scientific, and Social” – marketing organization, and new capabilities need to be built from the ground up based on these new requirements. The art and science of marketing is advancing towards the ASS model. Advertising agencies are further behind the curve than clients, and clients are demanding more.

The third question is, do these films create Brand Relevance? This is a question for debate. These short films are irrelevant on their own at least for some, including myself. But does it matter? Apple and Samsung are known to everyone as two market leaders, and so they need to market to everyone. They need to appeal to their served customers. But HTC is different. We are definitely not selling to everyone, even though it is fair to say that our products are for everyone. The reality is that awareness is not the main driver in increasing brand strength and relevance; how relevant your product is in the minds of your customers, and how your brand is being perceived to be unique is more important. The world is desperately moving towards being more individualized and personalized. Mass advertising works based on appealing to the lowest denominators and it has its place. 

I believe in the market of ONE. Industrial economics may not (yet) allow us to produce highly customized smartphones, and mass media is the same. Even though social media is slowly behaving like broadcast media, it is hard to create customized messages due to the economics of content production. Here this is a good experiment to allow people draw on their imagination to create their own interpretations. I hope this encourage more brands to take bolder moves to co-create meanings with customers and not brainwashing the with a message and a reason to believe. That's so 80s.

If you are able to achieve greater customization (through messages and meanings), it will be very relevant to your customers and it will resonate with them. As a result, customers will specifically seek out that brand or product. This is the hypothesis the super short mini-films are based upon. It is an experiment; they are not ads, they are not viral videos, and they are not micro-films. I don’t know what to call them – just some very short films.

Transformative marketing has no cruise control or auto-pilot switch. It exists in an accelerating paradigm: more dramatic changes, more often. Brands of the future will take risks and lead change, not simply respond to it. As marketers we need to have the courage to commit to finding new and bold ways of doing things and being relevant. 

I’ll now take off my marketer’s hat and switch to an art critic’s hat. The literal definition of artist as brand (Robert Downey Jr) is “a creator who has become a unique star, symbol, icon, Mr. Iron Man,” but the idea goes deeper that that. I believe marketing can empower an artist’s authentic purpose, identity and creativity. When an individual’s core purpose and creative talent are synergistically aligned and amplified with a product's design philosophy, they can become “transcendent symbols.” This is not about fame. This is about creative power in the truest sense of the word. Know thyself. The world will recognize it too.

One artist + One phone = Nine visions.

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Design Leadership Is More Than Simplicity. It Is About Design Discipline.

El·e·gant, an adjective and define or characterized by or exhibiting refined, tasteful beauty of manner, form, or style. Marc Jacob? Chanel? Jil Sander? Hermes? All are unquestionably elegant by design in the fashion world. How about smartphones or interfaces? Can they be elegant? Or what about customer experiences? Can you describe a banking or customer service experience as elegant? Most people don’t.

Is elegant a word reserved solely for tangible product? The design world likes to use words such as “elegant”, “simple” and “user friendly”, many designers understand how to subtract in creating simple and elegant design solutions. Human factors usually subtract more than add. Good designers often take away complexity in objects or interfaces. Design is more than just making things simple. They appears simple but not necessarily simple. Design is the most complicated process but least understood.

Design should be strategic. Being strategic also means being human. 9 out of 10 designers barely understand what that means. Most are trained as design craftsman. There are very few design visionary and I only know a handful of them. They are also very few design managers. And that’s the reason why designers never made it to the boardroom and they complain they don’t have a voice. Because they are not strategic. Design becomes a competitive advantage for corporations when it is used strategically. At a meta level, design connects the dots between mere survival and humanism supporting by the underlying economics to make it feasible to produce and sell.

I have been hiring and mentoring designers (including some of the very best talents) for decades and can tell you which typology they belong in 5 minutes. It is very easy to find designers, it is not too difficult to find good designers, it is very hard to find design visionary. Because they are not trained in design schools. They need to be cultivated.

But there are so much business can learn from design. If the best design can be elegant, then can a business strategy be “elegant”? Or can a particular management style be described as “elegant”? Anything elegant is often simple; not everything simple is elegant. Things that are simple are often user friendly, not everything simple is user friendly. Sometimes complexity is needed. Simplicity has different meanings. Good businesses need to be simple and easy to understand, and that’s the investment criteria for Warren Buffet. Businesses are getting too complex these days and same for design. Long gone are the days where a few talented young folks sketching out ideas in a room. That's a mindset that stops designers from growing up to a highly complicated world.

Design process is never simple, it is often very messy as everyone has an opinion. Don't try to make it simple. But the result shouldn't be complicated. Design needs strong leadership and no different from other disciplines. Design never works in a highly politically environment and as a result you get design by committee – which is a recipe for disaster. Design management is to take the politics out and allow the essence remains. And the process is true to the mission - design to delight and make profits - not one but both.

Design needs strong leadership. Design never works if it is not managed. Best designers perform well in a professionally managed environment. Not the most desirable for many, but it is necessary. Apple design team is professionally managed and same for Mercedes and Burberry or BMW. There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence. Strong design leaders are never popular, because they need to cut out the non-sense that designers to hide behind. To force people to unlearn old theories of design.

Designers wants to remain small, fully independent and less disciplined and that’s why most design firms cannot scale beyond certain size and fail after a few years. They want to ignore the commercial complexities and stay pure. I appreciate that too but companies cannot afford it. Unless it is your own business and you don't care about making profits.

Design for elegance is better for design for simplicity. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, “I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Elegance is “far side” simplicity that is emotionally engaging, profoundly intelligent, and artfully crafted to be two things at once: simple and powerful. In today's super connected world, the proliferation of digital devices and experiences require designers to create new ways of harmonizing software and hardware with elegant connectivity – connecting humans in an elegant way. Industrial designers, human interface designers and mechanical engineers need to explore new theories for them to make physical products real and meaningful and elegant. Why elegance? It is not an elusive target? Industrial designers should stop thinking about functional ease and simplicity, that is an over simplify way of thinking design. Some times people love things that are not so easy. Think about your personal relationships, you don’t go for the easiest one, you go for where your hearts is. Design is the same. How do you put love in an industrial produced object? That’s our job.

The Most Successful Wearable Design Is All About Balance, Benefit, Beauty And Behavior.

This is the billion-dollar question: “How do we create the iPhone pr Walkman of wearables?” and “How do we create sub-ecosystems around these wearables?” At the CES who this year, you can still see everyone displaying their newest or not-so-new wearable ideas. No one can afford to miss the train but most of the wearables out there now are just toys and eventually will become thrown aways. I can't find a reason anyone would want to buy most these so called wearables. Google glass is officially a failed experiment, or at least for now. GoPro is a stellar success and Apple will enter that game soon. They have been granted a patent for a wearable camera that could possibly challenge action cameras leader GoPro.

The path to mass adoption of wearables will not be a straightforward one. There are numerous technology, user behavior and production economics barriers to cross. With all this buzz and emerging innovative conceptual designs competing for the dominance, there are still many questions to be asked about what the future holds and how consumers will adopt a different product paradigm. Even the smartphone is still shaping our behavior and we are still actively reprogramming ourselves. The smartphone is becoming the operating system of our professional and personal lives, our relationships with the outside world and emerging systems around it. When it comes to the operating system, the main battle will be an OS that will interoperate across all devices. This is the big play. The success of any dominant design for wearables will be based on successfully tackling of the 4Bs:

Balance, Benefit, Beauty and Behavior.

Balance: To design wearables, one must ensure that they are, indeed, wearable. That means comfortable and adaptable to the various places and spaces the body inhabits in the world. To do this, design needs to include studying the anthropometric measures of the human body and of the equilibrium between the various zones of the body. One key to success is ensuring that the form or shape of the wearable fits the body and its actions in the world. Nerdy high-tech designs will not cut it. Balance reflects the highest level of design excellence, seeking an unselfconsciousness in interactivity languages, adding a sense of space to that of place with engineering overtones that are human at the same time.

Benefit: Designers must first determine the real problem the wearable concept is trying to solve, needing to solve, able to solve. Focusing on needs means designers can concentrate on the things that deliver the highest value. The benefit doesn’t have to be a known benefit today and there could be some needs users don’t even know exist until they see them. Sometimes these benefits appear to be small but actually can make a big difference in behavioral change. Contained product moments and the tiniest interactions are important in designing the customer experience of wearables, and designers must try to transform them into opportunity.

Beauty: The consumer needs to love the design. It needs to have visual appeal so, to the user, it doesn’t look like something you see in a Sci-Fi movie. The design needs to be expressive and not 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 trickiest part. The designers must translate the mass into energy, form and relationship. This is about creating order out of chaos, to put order into things, to make things more simple, to give meaning to objects through the presence of a design language.

Behavior: This is the least predictable part. Just look at all those health tracking devices, there is a tremendous gap exists between collecting and reporting data and changing behavior, there are little evidence to suggest that these wearable is making people more healthier. But for sure, the most successful wearable would be those who can influence our behavior as a mechanism for human behavior change and reinforcement. The subconscious mechanisms by which a human brain forms habits are still a bit of a mystery, and this can let us down a path to come up with devising tools for changing them.  

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.

Action Cam King GoPro Is Turning Our Life Into A Movie. HTC and Others Also See The Opportunity.

When I was at a GoPro event earlier this year I saw how the crowd reacted to it and it is more than a product, it is now a movement. The little mountable camera is a brilliant example of how innovation can shape the industry structure of digital imaging and created a new path of growth under the radar screen of all big players from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Lumix and others for cameras and the Logitech, Microsoft, HP and others for video cam.

This little wearable camera company did an amazing job (now a US$10 Billion market cap company) invented a completely new category. The digital camera business is in decline while smartphone replacing low end cameras and more affordable DSLR and micro-four-thirds are driving margin out of the industry. GoPro managed to innovate based on a simple unmet needs. A perfect example of taking advantage of a corporate blindspot.

GoPro has been developing wearable technology devices "before they were cool." Nick Woodman developed the first GoPro camera in 2004; it was a film camera that could conveniently be strapped to a person's wrist, allowing users to easily snap a photo of memorable moments in action. So people don’ t need to put their cameras inside a waterproof bag. It’s the age of the selfie, GoPro are enabling video and action selfies. They are the best (and until recently the only) tools to be used to bring authentic and extreme actions to share with everyone. It is an answer to our needs to share moments and capture experiences. It is the defacto adventure broadcast system. The accessories system is impressive and that is part of the reason for their success.

GoPro's success stems from its ability to use consumer experience as advertisement. Customers are basically marketing their products. Otherwise it cost tens of millions to produce those. Now the National Football League is launching a digital streaming network, called NFL Now using GoPro. This NHL season, you'll be able to experience hockey from a whole new perspective -- the players'. The NHL is teaming up with GoPro to provide footage of certain plays from the perspective of goalies and stick handlers. Now you'll be able to experience hockey from a whole new perspective - the players'. Yes, they've just reinvented sports broadcast. Think about it, it is more than a hardware company selling a commoditized product (video camera) that can be easily produced at half the price, and GoPro is not just a sports cam anymore.

GoPro is as much a content and media company as it is a hardware company. GoPro's lightweight HD devices and content management/sharing platform - through GoPro Studio and the GoPro App - enables users to capture, edit, manage, and share. So it is offering a full solution. The barriers for entry to compete with them is very high, it is not just hardware anymore but also brand, content and full suite of editing software. It is in fact in the business of content capture and delivery. In addition to the Xbox, new platforms have enabled GoPro to stream its videos on airline Virgin America through a dedicated channel.

Companies including Garmin, Polaroid, Sony and HTC are all joining game. Their products would have to be overwhelmingly better than GoPro’s for GoPro users to abandon their brand loyalty, which is hard. HTC is playing a different game and the product is uniquely different targeted for the non-consumers. This is a way smarter strategy than Sony and Garmin who try to compete head on. Panasonic's 4K solution was a joke.

HTC’s strategy is like Nintendo’s strategy with Wii in the early days (huge success unfortuantely they couldn't sustain) competing for the non-consumers. They opened up new markets not targeting extreme gamers but for family and casual gamers. HTC RE is playing a similar game and stands a good stance to carve out their niche. Or perhaps that niche is 80% of the market that are non-consumers. How many people actually do extreme sports? 10% or 20%? HTC RE will need to compete on a different model.

The HTC RE is a clean and simple product which is the opposite of GoPro. HTC's design philosophy is that users are all trapped behind the screens of our smartphones when we capture important moments in our lives, whether that's a sports game or a fashion show. HTC RE is lightweight, simple, and out of the way so that allegedly, documenting your life doesn't stop you from missing the experience. It is still very early stage in the game and whether GoPro will continue to dominate the category or it will fade away like the first MP3 player Creative Technology Ltd., we will have to wait and see.

Porductwsie GoPro range has a fixed f/2.8 aperture, the same as the HTC RE Camera, which should good enough in most lowe light conditions. Both feature an ultra-wide angle lens to capture a broader view than point and click cameras or smartphones. Both are supported by a good range of accessories. Both pair up with apps that can be used as remote control and viewfinders. In terms of look... that depends on what you wear. If you wear Roxy, Nike or Columbia you most likely will buy a GoPro. If you wear Y3, G-Star, Converse, Anthropologie or AX, you will most likely buy a HTC RE. Or you can have both.

The Biggest Idea These Days Other Than "Wearables" Is "Destructables". We All Need It.

I think the biggest idea today other than “wearables” is “self-destructables” and it is exactly what we need these days. OK this is the first time you hear this. "Destructables: is the biggest unmet need because privacy just might be the biggest enemy of big data and googleglass. This trend is gaining momentum - think “ephemeral media” which is a way to make any digital assets including photos, texts, emails, posts that can self-destruct once they’re delivered, read or triggered by an event. I would pay for that service.

With the big government always watching and with teenagers having a little too much fun doing silly things, there is something about what we used to see in Charlie’s Angels when the boss messages the Angels about their mission;  they were briefed on a radio that would destroy itself after being played. I think this should be a key feature for everything these days. Yes, there's SnapChat.  But we need more than that.

Encryption Company Silent Circle has a Silent Text app available for Android, which includes a “Burn Notice” feature that self-destructs the message from the sender and recipient’s phone. Startup Burn Note launched its vanishing text and mail service. It allows you to set a timer for how long you want your information to live on the internet before it explodes—virtually, that is.  And even Boeing, yes the airplane manufacturer, has launched a Smartphone that will erase all data and deactivate if tampered with or pried open.

Not sure why Boeing is getting into the cell phone business, BlackBerry should have thought of that feature long time ago.The Boeing’s device which runs on Android and will be sold primarily to government agencies and companies engaged in defense, intelligence and homeland security. The heads of the screws will be covered with tamper proof guards to identify attempted disassembly, breaking open the casing of the device would trigger complete deletion of the data and the device will render itself inoperable. But it will not generate smoke and physically self-destruct - I'm a little disappointed. They should put a bit of drama there as part of the customer experience.

The Bionic Man/Woman Is Now Possible! It Gives New Meanings To Wearables!

Remember that Six Million Dollar Man TV Series? When ace test-pilot Steve Austin's crashed, he ended up in a poor shape that his only chance of survival was to replace human spare parts with technologies. That was the beginning of “wearables” I supposed. The government decided to invest millions to use the latest technology to rebuild him with cybernetic parts which gave him superhuman speed, response and strength and the superagent.

Thirty-five years later, DARPA's Reliable Neural-Interface Technology (RE-NET) is working on it and  trying to improve the speed and accuracy of neural interfaces. Such interfaces can happen in the brain, as in the case of Hemmes, or someplace else farther down the line, closer to the missing limb. It is a highly complicated task to try to translate these commands to muscles that drives the myoelectric arm. Most important is that any of these won’t need a brain surgery or implant. The challenges include weather change and other external factors can affect the myoelectric arm and there is the issue of electrodes slipping on the skin.

The idea of implanted electrodes is very attractive with the goal to provide near-natural hand movement. Another sign og progress is FDA just approved the world’s first approved bionic eye. The Argus II, which treats patients with the rare genetic condition known as retinitis pigmentosa was approved by the FDA after twenty years of research and $200mm of investments. The Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System, which was approved to treat people with severe to profound retinitis pigmentosa, doesn't actually restore vision or allowing them to see, just enough to detect light and dark and the contrast can identify the movement or location of objects. Almost like the first generation of cell phones. We are a few years away before they have advance features. When the photoreceptor cells in the eye's retina are damaged, people can tell the difference between light and dark.

To restore light and dark vision, a tiny chip containing many electrodes is implanted on the patient's retina. The patient wears a pair of glasses with a video cam attached to it. The camera sends the recorded image wirelessly to the electrodes in the chip, which then turns the information into a signal that the brain can understand. It will be a low-resolution 60-pixel image only and enough to give people a sense of what’s in front of them.

The breakthrough in nanochip will open up tons of opportunities to improve our senses or replace in medical cases or enhance in other cases. In less than ten years, those who can afford to spend $25,000 can get a bionic eye to capture wider light spectrum or advanced your visual search functions through Google. I won’t be an early adopter for sure.

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.