Mobile v Electricity v Running water
Amazing.
Posts on innovation, user experience, research and design
I'm currently a product innovation manager with experience in product management, user-centered design, usability engineering, brand management and visual design.
Note: This is a personal blog containing personal opinions about research, innovations and experiences that I find interesting and informative. It is not associated with my employer in any way, shape or form.
Disappearing into the background
From Jack Dorsey (my new favorite digital aesthete, on the future of technology...
The best technologies, they disappear, they fade into the background and they're relevant when you want to use them, and they get out of the way when you don't.
...You don't have to keep an app open to keep value out of it. It's the concept of a push notification. I could be sitting on the grass, reading my newspaper, and suddenly I would get a tweet about an earthquake in San Francisco. And then I would feel it. It was amazing because it brought everyone closer together. But I didn't have to have the app open, I didn't have to know what to look for, it was pushed to me because it was relevant.
...The best technology always reminds us of our human-ness. We already have everything we need. We started with these big computers in massive rooms, and then we had these abstractions of the mouse and the keyboard, moving the mouse with a little pointer. Now we're just using what we already have, we're just using our fingers. And we're using that to interact with data. I think the next move is that the technology disappears from our sight completely.
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Ubiquitous navigation
Interesting possibilities for immediate e-coupon delivery... and something that will probably drive the tin foil hat brigade over the edge.
Broadcom has just rolled out a chip for smart phones that promises to indicate location ultra-precisely, possibly within a few centimeters, vertically and horizontally, indoors and out.The variety of location data available to mobile-device makers means that in our increasingly radio-frequency-dense world, location services will continue to become more refined. In theory, the new chip can even determine what floor of a building you're on, thanks to its ability to integrate information from the atmospheric pressure sensor on many models of Android phones. The company calls abilities like this "ubiquitous navigation," and the idea is that it will enable a new kind of e-commerce predicated on the fact that shopkeepers will know the moment you walk by their front door, or when you are looking at a particular product, and can offer you coupons at that instant.
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Seeing around walls
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge have created a camera that is able to record images of objects hidden behind walls. They fire a pulse of laser light at a wall on the far side of the hidden scene, and record the time at which the scattered light reaches a camera. Photons bounce off the wall onto the hidden object and back to the wall, scattering each time, before a small fraction eventually reaches the camera, each at a slightly different time. The camera captures this time-of-flight information and uses it to reconstruct an image of the hidden object (abstract).
Very informative video in 3...2...1
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LinkedIn is absolutely crushing it...
... with recruiters.
No surprise here, but LinkedIn is absolutely dominating their competition in the recruiting area. Good for LinkedIn. This is the niche they want to dominate and it's central to their revenue model. Seems to be working.
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Market research
Interesting story about a pretty successful product you've probably heard of.
Before launching, Mateschitz hired a market research firm to test his product's acceptance. The result was a catastrophe. "People didn't believe the taste, the logo, the brand name," he recalls now with a smile. "I'd never before experienced such a disaster." Despite the unbelievably bad showing, Mateschitz ignored the recommendations, and went on with his project.
And that was how Red Bull got started.
His decision to persevere is also the reason Mateschitz is now the wealthiest man in Austria.
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Modern ads
I continue to think that ads are the best part of television these days. As with all great creative and innovative endeavors, perhaps it is the constraint of time and resources that mandates editing and re-editing and re-re-editing, all of which refines the product down to a punchy, effective message.
The Honda CRV ad making the rounds today is a great example of this. Nothing groundbreaking, but it's a great call to the right demographic. Parents who grew up loving Ferris Bueller who are now in the market for a mom/dad SUV (or minivan). And the beauty of this ad? It's basically the best parts of a two hour classic movie distilled down to about two minutes... amd then turned into an SUV ad.
Then there are ads that I can only describe as ambient ads - ads that take place in the background or against the backdrop of everyday life. Luckily they are filmed for everyone's enjoyment via YouTube, whether you were there or not. I saw a good example of this today. Check out these RC planes rigged up to look like people flying through the air around the Brooklyn Bridge. All part of an ad awareness for the upcoming Chronicle movie.
And there are still plenty of these fake-but-made-to-look authentic ads that studios throw together to try to generate virality. Some are pedestrian. Others have a more authentic feel about them. One of my favorites in this vein was this video for Limitless, which I still think is pretty realistic. It seems just real enough to be plausible.
Man, I feel like buying something.
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