Month: July 2013

This week it seems I have been collecting articles that actually relate to my job, which is increasingly rare these days. The fact it is half year review time and our team is going through some organisational changes I am sure has not had a subconscious impact on my reading of choice. A heady mix of innovation stuff, organisational working attitudes and styles, Google’s attempts to become a real enterprise software provider, the failure of platform thinking at Facebook, two interviews with innovators (innovatorviews?), dark UX patterns and what happens when you test the prisoner’s dilemma with actual prisoners (not obviously work related although maybe it is). Read them and be ready for your appraisal…sort of.

Slow Ideas

In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability.

Stop Backing Visionaries

…if you examine the births of the most successful consumer internet companies, you’ll quickly realize that initial product and “vision” are flawed criteria. More often than not, founders, early employees, and investors of the largest tech companies will tell you that the product that took off was never part of (at least not fully) the original “plan.” Twitter spun out of Odeo, Instagram was a Burbn pivot, BuzzFeed evolved from one of many “for fun” experiments?—?the list goes on and on. By and large, innovative products aren’t strategically imagined ahead of time – they’re stumbled upon while experimenting on-the-go.

What gets done is what gets done

The opposite of the work hero is the person on the team who has kids. Well, they’re probably more of a hero than the work hero, but that’s another story. They do good work, they’re prompt, professional, committed and they’ve got experience. The trouble is, that if you have work-heroes around, you’re bound to have a nasty moment where the people who just can’t work late or drop weekends to satisfy the heroic workload pattern end up looking like they’re slacking or are uncommitted.

To Do to Done: Jank ‘n’ Drank

According to Ford, who came close to dubbing the Tuesday night sessions Work ‘n’ Twerk,”jank” is a very specific category: “Long-standing bugs, slightly broken user experiences, processes that could be automated or improved, visual imperfections in the product, development environment annoyances, hacky code that’s on the verge of causing that one bug, again, and other tasks clinging to the bottom of a to-do list.”

The sad story of Platform, Facebook’s gigantic missed opportunity

Today, just after its sixth birthday, Facebook Platform is a shadow of what it could have been, a missed opportunity that might amount to tens of billions of dollars of squandered revenue. Outside of games, there has been no killer Facebook app. Other than Zynga, you’ll struggle to name a single business that has built itself entirely inside the Facebook framework. Once-promising startups Slide and iLike would ultimately abandon their big bets on the platform, selling to Facebook rivals Google and MySpace for amounts smaller than their one-time valuations.

Google wants to own enterprise, but it’ll do it Google style

Petlon didn’t want end users to perceive that this new technology was being jammed down their throats, so nothing was taken away and growth toward Google Apps was organic. If users wanted to use an Outlook client to access the Gmail back end, they could. Two years in now Petlon estimates that 90 percent or more users are happy Googlers. Collaboration using Google Apps probably doubles every month, he estimates, and having to use Microsoft Word documents with “track changes” turned on feels as old school as getting a fax.

IFTTT Puts the Internet of things in your pocket

“But with the Internet, there’s no common understanding,” he continued. “There are things everyone gets like email or hyperlinks, but there’s still this lack of concrete rules. Could that cause-and-effect thing be turned into one of these fundamental rules? How do we productize that? How do we make this available with an interface anyone could use? What are some of those other rules that might exist?”

Interview with Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh, inventor and CEO of Sugru

One night, I was giving myself a really hard time and my boyfriend, James, brought me into the kitchen and pointed out all the humble little solutions I had done. He said, “What if it’s not you that’s the creative person, and what if it’s not one perfect design or solution? What if this could be a humble, handy household product thateveryone could use to make their things better?” Suddenly, it was about everyone’s potential; users know why things don’t work, from the teapot that doesn’t pour properly to the shoe that’s really uncomfortable. That was a real light bulb moment for me. I saw this huge potential and everything clicked. I thought that if I could make it simple enough and attractive enough, then millions of people could use it—I felt very sure from the start that it had the potential to be something universal.

The slippery slope

So how would you react when your boss says to you that you have to cut wait times to under 5 minutes per patient or you’re fired. Just think about this for a moment. You’ve got no spare capital, no spare staff time, no way to stretch your resources. How can you possibly do this? Well here’s a little idea. How about you create a job role for a nurse where their job is simply to say hello to new patients. Nothing more. That way the patients are seen to, that way the wait time problem is solved. You get to keep your job. Sounds devious – but this really happened throughout the NHS in the 90s.

They Finally Tested The ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ On Actual Prisoners — And The Results Were Not What You Would Expect

In sequential games, where players know each other’s previous behaviour and have the opportunity to punish each other, defection is the dominant strategy as well.  However, on a Pareto basis, the best outcome for both players is mutual cooperation. Yet no one’s ever actually run the experiment on real prisoners before, until two University of Hamburg economists tried it out in a recent study comparing the behaviour of inmates and students.

Bonus Aden Link i.e. blatant inclusion of my own writing.

Six Little Fields

I assume that most people who own financial services products, be they current accounts, credit cards, loans, savings, insurance etc. do not have them all from the same organisation. Even though I work for a bank, and I should probably whisper this, I do not have all my products with that organisation. This is of course the benefit of a free market, competition and choice, which is a fantastic thing. The big issue from my point of view is what is known in the banking industry as single customer view i.e. the ability to see your full financial picture in one nice shiny interface. This is not a new problem in the industry it is also something I have written about before, but it is one that seems far from being solved or even on any of the banks to do list.

 

Enjoy the rest of your Friday. Feel free to subscribe to these reads via email or via the much cooler (and more content filled) RSS here

The hot weather in the UK has been a delight, the rare feel of warmth is showing off our best and least pasty side…although there are a few lobsters about (there is even mention of lobsters in one of the articles posted below).  As well as being joyous weather wise, this week has also been good for interesting things I have read on the Internet. Topics covered this week are a real mixed bunch, Do things that don’t scale, design fiction pedagogy, unhappiness is good, and so is shyness, why we should all have something to hide, interviews with Vint Cerf and Marshall McLuhan, Cricket technology and the theory that all the Pixar films take place in the same universe. Get yourself an ice lolly and enjoy.

Do things that don’t scale

Startups building things for other startups have a big pool of potential users in the other companies we’ve funded, and none took better advantage of it than Stripe. At YC we use the term “Collison installation” for the technique they invented. More diffident founders ask “Will you try our beta?” and if the answer is yes, they say “Great, we’ll send you a link.” But the Collison brothers weren’t going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they’d say “Right then, give me your laptop” and set them up on the spot.

Design Fiction as Pedagogic Practice

What first seems like a good idea, can have unexpected, unintended and undesirable consequences. Use fiction as a way to think through a full range of possible consequences. The interesting (and often dangerous) impacts of objects happen on the outskirts of intention, like a ripple effect on reality. Pretend before you mess the world up.

A Case for the Pursuit of Unhappiness

Forgas’ idea is that a happy mood inclines you to feel that the world accords with your beliefs and emotions. Conversely, he argues, unhappiness inclines you to think that the world doesn’t match your inner state—so you’d better adjust. Accordingly, a happy mood inclines people to pay less attention to detail, rely more on stereotypes, give credence to what they’re told and even to argue less effectively.

The crystalline wall

Shyness is something different: a longing for connection with other people which is foiled by fear and awkwardness. The danger in simply accepting it, as Cain urges us to do with introversion, is that shyness can easily turn into a self-fulfilling persona — the pose becomes part of you, like a mask that melds with your face.

We Should All Have Something To Hide

Over the past year, there have been a number of headline-grabbing legal changes in the US, such as the legalization of marijuana in CO and WA, as well as the legalization of same-sex marriage in a growing number of US states. […] What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf talks online privacy, Google Glass and the future of libraries

“I just moved to London and I’ve already been accepted by Barclaycard. And you know that reader they send you (a personal device required to log into your Internet banking account), I was thinking ‘what’s that?’. Now I understand that this is two-factor authentication right there, and I’m damned impressed. And I’m also impressed that people are actually using it, because it’s slightly annoying having to carry one around with you.”

The lost Marshall McLuhan tapes

Newman: What’s ahead? What is the most surprising trend we can expect?

McLuhan: The biggest job in the world will be espionage. Around the world, people are spending more and more of their time watching the other guy. Espionage at the speed of light will become the biggest business in the world. But the CIA and the FBI are really old hat using old hardware by comparison to what’s coming, in which everybody earns pocket money by watching his own mom and dad or his brothers and sisters.

Test Match Special and Technological Agency

A number of different approaches, one based on Hawk-Eye, another using chips implanted in footballs, are currently under trial. However, Blatter has long opposed these, based partly on their accuracy, but also going on the record to say that “Other sports regularly change the laws of the game to react to the new technology. … We don’t do it and this makes the fascination and the popularity of football”. What underlies this statement is a fundamental belief that sport is a human undertaking, with all the confusion, fallibility and debate that that involves.

The Pixar Theory

Every Pixar movie is connected. I explain how, and possibly why. Several months ago, I watched a fun-filled video on Cracked.com that introduced the idea (at least to me) that all of the Pixar movies actually exist within the same universe. Since then, I’ve obsessed over this concept, working to complete what I call “The Pixar Theory,” a working narrative that ties all of the Pixar movies into one cohesive timeline with a main theme. This theory covers every Pixar production since Toy Story. 

Another week done, enjoy the sun, fingers crossed for England to win the second test and tell your email obsessed friends to subscribe and your cooler RSS using friends to add this feed. Bye.

A sunny and busy week. Coincidentally I had a fewer links to choose from which shows what impact nice weather can have on my usage of the web. No real theme or big topics this week, although there are two stories with connections to drugs which might have some meaning.

You Are Not an Artisan

People substitute creative for sexy in describing their aspirations (to themselves and others) because it sounds less narcissistic. If you seek sexy work, you could be viewed as self-absorbed, entitled and attention/status seeking. If you pretend it is creative work, you’re suddenly God’s gift to the world, basking in the gratitude, admiration and adoration of all simply for existing.

Heat Death, Crap Systems, How Connected Studio Will Save the BBC

Money and ideas went in one end; those of us unconnected with the innards of the black box hung around and eventually watched or listened to what came out the other end: a naked production of Shakespeare, the Six O’Clock News, a documentary about Hitler’s Killer Sharks, an exhibition of Rutger Hauer’s artwork. No doubt what went on inside the box was complex. But the processes were invisible and the box was not connected to the outside world.

When To Give Up

A simple measure to know if you need to kill something, is to be aware of how you’re feeling when you’re talking about the thing you’re working on. In giving the latest in a long line of elevator pitch summaries to a stranger, how are you feeling? When you’re talking to friends, are you excited about other things, and when asked about how it’s going with your main thing, do you deflate, feel flat, change the subject? How’s your body language when you’re talking about it?

The #indieweb as a minimum viable social web ecosystem

Although there have been significant advances in the field over the last five years, there remains a need to prove the business value of decentralized web technologies. To many of us involved in both the industry and the movement, this seems silly: after all, the business value of other decentralized technologies, like email and the phone system, are hardly questioned. Nonetheless, in a world where centralized data siloes regularly receive multi-billion-dollar valuations, the onus is on those of us who are building more open technologies to demonstrate their worth. Note, it is not enough to argue their worth: we must build, ship, and actively demonstrate a profitable product or service with a business model where the decentralized social web is an inextricable component.

Why I’m hiring graduates with thirds this year

So my game theoretic instincts suggest that if we confine our recruitment efforts to people in the lower half of the degree ladder we shall have an exclusive appeal to a large body of people no less valuable than anyone else. And such people will be far more loyal hires, since we won’t be competing for their attention with deep-pocketed pimps in investment banking.

Can a Low Dose Go a Long Way?

He’s been in the trenches of legitimate mind-altering research for over four decades, and with time has become a sort of champion of the micro dose. Nowadays, he’s tickled to find himself almost sober, if you could call it that, among the brain-blasted, self-important new gurus and high priests of what could be called a psychedelic renaissnace. Speaking at the 2013 Psychedelic Science conference in San Francisco, Fadiman did not mince words: “It’s wonderful to be conservative in this crowd.”

Have a nice sunny weekend (assuming you are in the summer half of the world). Subscribe to these reads via email here or via RSS here

I have recently read Bill Moggridge’s wonderful book, Designing Interactions. It looks at a number of key points in the lifecycle of technology as we know it today and the people and processes involved in making it a reality. Chapter one of that book is dedicated to the desktop interface we know and love today and the interaction device that made computing more accessible and usable to billions of people, the mouse. The man widely credited with the creation of that device, Doug Engelbart, sadly passed away this week. To say he ‘just’ created the mouse would be to do him a great disservice. His pioneering thinking on the collaborative uses of technology to augment the ability of humans was revolutionary back in the 60s and has still not been realised today. This classic video demo, from 1968, of a multitude of technologies and methods of interaction with computers is still mindblowing, I can’t even imagine what the reaction was 50 years ago let alone the impact it had on computing. There is a quote from Doug at the beginning of this video which resonated with me strongly;

“If in your office you, as an intellectual worker, were supplied with a computer display, backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that”

Watch the demo and you will see all kind of wonderous things such as collaborative editing, video conferencing and a method of interacting with computers that along with computers themselves was alien to most. As I sit here writing this on a very flaky work machine which has limited collaborative capabilities I can only hope that in another 50 years time the truly pioneering vision that Mr Engelbart had will have come to fruition in all large enterprises.

The other things that I read and enjoyed this week include a look at where the next innovation hotbeds will be, a look at the rise of African mega cities, Oracle & Salesforce suddenly getting all friendly, what we dreamed of in the kitchen before the microwave, quantified self whoring, technology’s threat to retail, how to get a Klout score of 60 in under 4 weeks and the problem with pilot announcements.

The Click Heard Round The World

All of a sudden – wham! – I got an image of myself sitting at a big CRT screen with all kinds of symbols on it, new and different ones, manipulated by a computer that could be operated through various input devices. All the material on the screen could be controlled with great flexibility. Other people had their display units tied to the same computer complex, and you could connect them. Everybody could share knowledge. The vision unfolded rapidly, in about a half hour, and suddenly the potential of interactive, collaborative computing became totally clear.

A few words on Doug Engelbart

The problem with saying that Engelbart “invented hypertext”, or “invented video conferencing”, is that you are attempting to make sense of the past using references to the present. “Hypertext” is a word that has a particular meaning for us today. By saying that Engelbart invented hypertext, you ascribe that meaning to Engelbart’s work. Almost any time you interpret the past as “the present, but cruder”, you end up missing the point. But in the case of Engelbart, you miss the point in spectacular fashion.

In Innovation Quest, Regions Seek Critical Mass

Unhappily for regions that have spent billions attempting to become the next Silicon Valley, the answers to these questions are still in debate. “Clusters exist—it’s empirically proven,” Yasuyuki Motoyama, a senior scholar at the Kauffman Foundation, told me. “But that doesn’t mean governments can create one.” What’s certain is that they are trying. The largest such effort we know of is the Skolkovo complex outside Moscow, where $2.5 billion is being invested in a university, a technology park, and a foundation. Another, in Waterloo, Ontario, aims at gaining a lead in a particular advanced technology, quantum computing. The price tag there: $650 million so far.

How Africa’s New Urban Centers Are Shifting Its Old Colonial Boundaries

For decades, Lagos suffered one of the worst images of any city in the world, known widely as a place of thieving politicians, streets that crackled with danger, rotting infrastructure and “go-slows,” the monstrous, daily traffic jams in which people melt in their seats in the stifling, humid heat while praying they won’t be held up at gunpoint by robbers. The city’s most famous native son, the late musician, Fela, even coined a shorthand term for the Lagos’s litany of hardships: “impossibility-ism.”

The week Oracle suddenly became BFFs with everyone in enterprise software

Thankfully both Benioff and Ellison promised it wasn’t the end of the potshots and drama: “I’m sure we’ll try to continue to be entertaining,” Ellison said, “while making sure the entertaining never distracts from working together.” Benioff admitted things had gotten a bit rough between Oracle and Salesforce lately. Maybe they’ll start a reality television show called “Oracle OpenWound.”

How We Imagined The Push-Button Kitchen Before Microwaves Existed

In the mid-1950s, the promise of our food future was the push button. The microwave oven was still decades away from becoming a mainstream reality in the American kitchen. But soon — very soon — all your food would be cooked automatically in just a matter of seconds!

Pick your favorite foods! Then this imaginary SUPER CHEF assembles your choice from a vast freezer storage, cooks it to perfection by infra-red ray and serves it by conveyor in a matter of seconds!

Mad Scientist Sees Future Where We Sell Our Quantified Selves on eBay

Wired: So what do you think of Vinod Khosla’s prediction that 80 percent of doctors will be replaced by machines?

De Brouwer: Everything is going to be replaced one day. This debate between carbon and silicon has long been lost. Khosla is right. In telecom, a lot of people were fired in the ’90s. We replaced them with switches. Because, you see, a switch does not make mistakes. The introduction of a human being is an opportunity to make a mistake, so the more little machines you put in your network of course the less you’re going to make mistakes. A machine doesn’t have a hangover.

Death of the Salesmen: Technology’s Threat to Retail Jobs

Should we mourn the end of retail? The exodus from American farms marked the end of self-sufficiency and an uprooting of families from their heritage. As manufacturing sputtered, so too did a jobs engine that could carry people with few initial skills into the middle class. It’s harder to get nostalgic about mall jobs and supermarket cashiering.

The Future Of UX Design: Tiny, Humanizing Details

These atomic design moments, Saffer argues, are what whole products, and even whole systems and “wicked problems,” ultimately boil down to. If microinteractions are delightful, humane, and effective, then their success accretes and trickles up into the broader user experience in general. “Most good designers have been doing this for decades, especially some of the great industrial designers like the Eameses and Dieter Rams,” Saffer says. “The on/off switch is often the first microinteraction people encounter with a product.”

Two weeks and $40 got me a Klout socre of 60

Back in April I had a Twitter conversation with @wildebees about fake social media followers.  I mused whether I could artificially acquire a Klout score of 60 in a month, for less than $50.

The pilots announcement problem

When the hotel asks if you’ve had anything from the mini-bar. Grrrrr – there must be a better way of getting that information that doesn’t delay me when I’m trying to leave your hotel. Or better still get rid of the stupid mini-bar…

I do hope those links delighted you. If so then why not subscribe via email or subscribe via the increasingly rare RSS feed, for even more witterings from me. Have a wonderful weekend.