When someone neatly encapsulates the cycle organisations pass through, there’s not much more you can add…
From the Fast Company Now blog :
First, he said, you concentrate on making something cheaper than anybody else. And when you can no longer make something cheaper than anybody else, you concentrate on making something better than anybody else. And when you can no longer make something better than anybody else, you concentrate on making something different than anybody else.
You may recall the movie ‘Inner Space’ where a submarine is shrunk down the size of a pill and then inserted in a living body.
While it’s not quite the same thing, similar results will soon be availbe via the SmartPill > – a pill sized monitoring device which – once swallowed – passes through the body gathering information as it goes.
From the website :
The SmartPill pH.p Capsule is a miniaturized disposable telemetry device, about the size of a large vitamin pill and weighing little more than 3 grams, that is encased in inert, bio-compatible, medical-grade polycarbonate that makes it safe for human ingestion. Internal to the device are the data transmitter, three sensing elements (pH, pressure and temperature), and a battery chamber housing the power source.
The SmartPill pH.p Capsule transits the intestines by peristalsis or the normal rhythmic contraction of the intestinal muscles and is capable of transmitting data continuously for greater than 72 hours. The single-use capsule is excreted naturally from the body, usually within a day or two, without pain or discomfort.
There is also a receiver which records the information in real time as it is transmitted from the pill. This data then transferred to a PC for analysis.
Why is this interesting?
Science fiction authors have always been at the bleeding edge of technology product design. Unconstrained by current limitations they are free to imagine without limits. The early Motorola flip phones were inspired by the communicators featured on the Star Trek TV series.
So where are people looking today for inspiration? According to a BBC interview one of the current favourites is Harry Potter.
Yrjo Neuvo, Chief Technical Officer of Nokia mobile phones, reads JK Rowling’s Harry Potter to get him thinking.
“I have read all the Harry Potter books, including the last one,” he told BBC News Online.
“And when you read them with my kind of mindset, technology orientated, I always ask myself how we can implement that.”
JK “is very good when it comes to predicting the future”, according to Dr Neuvo, and “many of the things she is painting in her books can be implemented in phones in five to 10 years. It’s really exciting,” he says.
The ghostly moving people in framed pictures which deck Hogwarts’ staircases, and the mysterious pensieve which shows 3D images of memories are just some of the ideas he sees as a reality.
Designing new products that incorporate a high degree of usability is always problematic. Inevitably feature creep invades the design, and you end up with the VCR – a product that 90% of the population simply uses to record and view programmes. They never use the myriad of other features because the usability has not been factored into the product design.
The same design philosophy is seeping into DVD recorders – engineers packing a product with features that will never be used.
At the risk of sounding cliche, Apple is one company that bucks the trend by taking the complexity out of potentially complex products.
In a different sphere altogether is the grobag egg.
This is a digital thermometer designed for baby rooms which glows different colours depending on the temperature – from blue for cold through to red for hot (with two more gradients on the way).
Products with interfaces which are understood at-a-glance have a significantly better chance of success in the market.
Via Boing Boing comes this frankly mind boggling move in the advertising world – make your adverts large enought to be caught by satellite mapping services such as Google Earth.
More about this at the MIT Advertising Lab
I’ve seen farmers plough fields with large messages to be seen by passing aircraft, and some roofs near airports painted, but this is a whole new ball game.
One of the first and most useful podcasting sites – IT Conversations – has now morphed The Conversations Network. While it started as a storehouse of IT related conference podcasts, it now carries material from a vast range of different events from pure IT geekfests through to PopTech.
When you cannot get to an event, this is a great way of hearing some of the worlds most interesting speakers on all sorts of topics.
While it was initially donation supported, the concept has grown to the point where the model now require subscriptions to grow the site. It’s a mere US$5 per month – great value.
The network states it’s mission as follows :
Every day scores of educational, inspirational and entertaining conference sessions, lectures and other spoken-word presentations are lost. They simply evaporate because no one records them. Some of these presentations are by the greatest and most inspiring minds of our time, and many would be important to people in the far reaches of the planet, if only they could hear them.
The Conversations Network (a California non-profit corporation) captures presentations, processes the recordings, and publishes them online for free under Creative Commons licenses.
From an Always On podcast with George Gilder comes this illuminating quote about the effects of lowest common denominator television :
“A TV culture could never produce a TV. A book culture could produce an entire civilization”
Over the break I have been reading a book called Blindsided by Jim Harris. It tackles the issue of how companies can miss crucial changes to their markets. One of the more interesting examples deals with how a chocolate manufacturer started losing revenue for the first time at the end of the nineties, but could not understand why. It turns out that one of their biggest markets – teenagers – now were spending their pocket money not on sweets, but on pre-pay mobile. They were – to use the phrase of the book – blindsided.
However the quote that interested me the most concerned the breadth of scanning that a company needs to undertake these days in order to prevent being caught out by changes :
“Move and explore in a direction you know the least. The principle is critical for businesses today. Send some people out to move in a direction you know the least. In other words allow some individuals to explore new areas that individuals and the organisation don’t currently understand as being related or relevant to your business”