DesiSi

Serious eats finds the new Kellog's cereal straw. I feel that this product could be brilliant but lacks a little bit of focus.



quoting from the Impulsive buy, Serious Eats highlights a basic problem:

Ace says that even though the straw holds up to the milk being sucked up it, you can't eat the cereal and the milk at the same time as you would if you ate normal Froot Loops in milk with a spoon. Eating the straw makes it a useless tool for milk ingestion.

Once you take a single bite of the cereal straw, it becomes too short for drinking and the fun immediately dissipates. If you just sit there and drink the milk, you'll just be wasting the straw as it imparts no flavor and is generally useless. Once you get to the bottom, you realize you have a half-soggy cereal straw with no milk to wash it down with.

So, how could we improve this? There are maybe a few ways.

In one case, the straw could be built like a pixie stick. Closed with a thin cereal barrier at top and bottom, and filled with cereal dust. Take a straw out of the box, cut or break the end (I think of cigars though the image is understandably unpleasant), cut or crack the other end and then tap the cereal powder out into the milk. Now you can imbibe cereal flavored milk through the straw. Naturally, there are some significant engineering problems here. If the seals are too thin, they will break in transit, filling the box with cereal dust. If the barriers are too thick, breaking the end off the straw will become a pain. We also want to avoid breaking the straw in half. This might require perforations near each end. All told, this solution is probably too complex.

A different and more interesting approach might be to fill the straw itself with a solid milk gel, similar to the yogurt coating on the less healthy cereal bars, but preferably with a lighter consistency and less sugar. I wonder if it is possible to combine milk powder, sugar and an agar-like stabilizer. This strikes me as more compelling. It allows us to carry a self contained "classic" cereal with us, without being constrained to box, bowl and spoon- the "bell book and candle" of the cereal world. Usage would be determined by the type of cereal and the organic/ non-organic status of the ingredients. I could easily see a higher end, "Special-K", version of this product sold to the type-A weight conscious business crowd that has already woken up to the terrible fact that cereal bars are incredibly calorie-dense. I could see a different version sold to middle school and high school students. In fact, once Kelloggs works out the "fill it with stabilized milk and seal the ends" process, a full portfolio of cereal sticks could be produced.

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Jupiter Research Analyst Michael Gartenberg looks at the Twittergram, a mini-podcast 200K in size or less, built via Twitter, an SMS centered social networking service. Mr. Gartenberg sees potential in mobile applications, and I agree, but a few other uses come to mind when I look at a Twittergram as the post-it note of the voice communication world. These include:

TwitterShort: You are dating someone or are married or are close to a family member of friend. S/he gives you a Twitter number which you can call once a day in order to hear a special message. I had friends in college who loved calling the free "what is the weather like" service on a daily basis. This is similar, but much more personal. A bit of a pull rather than push voicemail. I could also see this as being very useful when groups are trying to meet up and one or more people are running late. Post a general message about your ETA that others can check rather than making repeated calls to different group members.

TwitterIndex: small excerpts of longer podcasts, in order to help me find the content that I want to find without wading through the less interesting stuff

I am sure that there are others. It might be nice to hear 10 sec capsule adverts about products that I want to buy, particularly if I can get a spoken message from the inventor/ creator, helping me to form a tighter, more personal bond with the product.

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The WSJ notes that Microsoft will be selling cheap (around USD $500) education PCs in India. I've always been a little bit curious about the "computers in classrooms" movement. Is is really enough to place a working computer with a Windows Operating system and a suite of desktop applications in a classroom?

It might be that I have not followed developments in Educational computing, but I am curious to see how these computers are actually used in the classroom, particularly in schools that have uneven power (does the school get an inverter with the computers?) and little or no Internet access (can we find a wireless card manufacturer who is willing to provide cheap connectivity?). How will the staff be trained on the computers? Is this a better option that installing used computers with opensource desktops/ operating systems?

It would be great to work with PEW or some other organization and really look at day to day computer use in a variety of classroom settings, if only to develop a "jobs to be done" approach to classroom computing.

Why jobs to be done? We already have 4 foothold customer groups (teachers, students, administrators, parents) and we already have the solution (classroom computer). We now need to look at jobs in order to improve the "fit" between the foothold customer and solution.

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I want to like the Microcab (via Treehugger). At present I see it as an incredibly sustaining version of either a golf cart or an autorickshaw. I'd probably buy a longer range golf cart before I bought a Microcab.



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Reuters reports that two of the major Amercian television networks achieved the lowest rating in two decades among the 18-49 demographic.

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - CBS and ABC fell to their lowest ratings among the coveted adults 18-49 demographic in two decades last week, as reruns and summer alternatives drove viewers from their couches.

Notice the assumption above. I'd like the see Neilsen hook their tracking boxes up to video game consoles. Advertisers might be interested to know whether the 18-49 year demographic remained couch-side, playing video games instead of watching television.

Actually, it should not be too hard to create a video game tracker that keeps tabs on the type of console and the game being played. It looks like Nielsen is at least considering video game rentals and that they may be launching a video game rental service in mid 2007 (I am not sure whether this has been launched, though). Of course this odes not tell me enough about actual use.

Google Answers has some great (if slightly outdated) links to video game rental statistics. I have not followed all of the links yet, so some of them may be broken.
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OhGizmo look sat a next generation parking meter:

[Photo Violations is] currently testing a new type of parking meter in cities like Vancouver and Niagara Falls that will call your cellphone when the time gets close to running out....But instead of dashing out to the street to feed the meter you’ll be able to make a wireless payment using your phone. Of course you can always just let the time run out and get a parking fine instead which not surprisingly can also be payed via the meter. On top of it all the Photo Violation meters are solar-powered and can even be setup as wifi hotspots

Next Generation parking meters are a popular subject but this is one of the most over the top. Unfortunately, the added functionality may end up fostering some of the problems that parking meters are designed to solve. Gizmodo points out that they may reduce ticket revenue for cities. At the same time, they may hurt retailers who benefit from higher rates of parking turnover near their stores.

A better networked parking meter system might allow me to bid on the nearest available meter. dangerous maybe for people that are already distracted while driving around a city, but it would be great if each meter had a two minute "no park" interval while soliciting bids from everyone within four city block who had activated the meter search service on their phone.

Posted by JB at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments

I like this quote from William Dunk, courtesy of MBA Depot. Visit the site, because I'm quoting in full:

Quote: Theory of Embedded Wrongs: If a problem has been around a long, long while, and there's a dominant prevailing notion as to what will cure it, the answer is almost inevitably wrong.

Author: William Dunk
Source: Global Province

This works pretty well when thinking about consumer product challenges. I'd add a corollary that sustaining extensions to standard answers to well entrenched problems are also likely to be wrong.

[UPDATE: Don't bother with the link. I like the quote but the originating article is...meh]
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This WSJ article on Franchising wins for "most relevant" today.

At first glance, I'd be tempted to dismiss this as a "market bubble" story along the lines of the teenage investment whiz kid stories that have me piling me money under a mattress, but a closer assessment of this phenomenon makes me think that we are seeing a real shift in the business world that stared in the 1980's and 1990's when cutting edge inventory management systems allowed retailers like Giordano to adopt a disruptive, low margin high volume-with-upscale-services approach to the value clothing industry.

Over time inventory management systems have emerged and have engaged in what I think of as downward innovation: innovative processes that simplify previously complex systems, removing cost and complexity barriers to widespread consumption along the way.

Imagine a franchise owner in the early 1990's trying to set up a remote management service for his franchise. At best he would be forced to get by with regular calls. It just would not work.

However, in the past 10 years, inventory management systems have been simplified and data capture/ communications have improved, all while a new class of outsourced billing and HR management services (such as Administaff) have emerged. All of these factors have converged to simplify management of small businesses and franchises, which are often defined by straightforward process, have been the first to really benefit.

And this sort of thing should be exciting for executives interested in rapid iterations. Soon, I imagine, we will have franchise service builders: companies that will set up a franchise backbone for you at minimal cost, using off the shelf components (and maybe the occasional Web 2.0 widget). These franchises might allow a comapny to experiment with new product offerings, opening a franchise, testing, it altering it, growing it and finally pulling it inside the company. In this world, professional franchise managers, like professional startup managers, will be actively sought by larger firms.

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Treehugger links to an inflatable roof rack. This product certainly fosters the consumer gives (does not support heavy loads, not as secure) and gets (ease of setup, ease of storage) that we like to see in a product. I expect that this sort of thing will be popular among consumers who have never owned a roof rack.

Pic from Treehugger



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Lifehacker looks at Chime.tv:

New video aggregator Chime.tv offers internet video from all the big providers in a slick, television-like interface...Browse video channels (like music videos, politics, tech, and OMG cute!) and see videos pulled from YouTube, Veoh, Google Video, Metacafe, Daily Motion and Blip.tv all in one place with optional full-screen viewing.

A number of video aggregators such as Chime, and ZapZap have gotten some attention in the last few months. Some, such as VideoJug, have received venture funding. I suspect that simple aggregators attempting to become, for example, a video version of an RSS feed, will fail, because users search for video by content and popularity rather than looking for specific directors. Instead, I suspect that the video aggregation space will be divided by affinity group (crunchyroll for anime, videojug for "how to" videos). If this is the case, then it is just a matter of time before some enterprising person (let's say someone over at Innosight in the US) develops a Weblogs, Inc-style service focused on video aggregation around specific affinity groups. Get all medical videos here! Get all automotive videos here! Get all DIY videos here!

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Strategy+Business looks at non-core business divestitures, commenting on a whitepaper paper by Booze Allen Hamilton. The paper is interesting because many of the "seven points to consider when divesting" are also worth consideration when setting up an experimental satellite business that will either be shut down, spun off, or brought in house.

I am most interested in the first three points in the paper:

-IT integration makes divestitures difficult
-Support services and facilities are hard to unravel
-Outsourcing adds third party issues to divestitures

Why these three? They point to an underrated problem facing firms running arm's length experiments, namely:

The more "arms length" an experimental mini-business, the less likely that a company will be able to learn anything from the success or failure of that experiment

and...

The more "arms length" an experimental mini-business, the more difficult it will be to bring that business in house or make rational long term management decisions about that business.

This is a real problem, especially for arms length companies that are running new business models which will generate process that may conflict with parent company processes. I don't have a ready answer to this but it is worth some thought.

Posted by JB at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments

Make Magazine has taken a look at DIY gliders with built in cameras. I see these as disruptive to the UAV market, since a UAV (unless it is used as launch platform) serves as a flying sensor system. In these cases, improved retail camera optics often provide "good enough" results for surveillance while the small form factor makes RC planes very difficult to detect.



And the technology on the DIY microplane front is improving! Last year, the Raw Feed pointed out an RC plane that fed images to Virtual reality goggles.

So, two questions come to mind:

1. You are a major UAV manufacturer, devoted to making big, expensive UAVs. Where is the value in the micro UAV supply chain? If not in the planes, maybe it is in the sensors, or in the data, or in methods of controlling an airborne fleet of microplanes.

2. Is it time for one UAV manufacturer to become the Linksys of microplanes, selling mid-sized easily deployed fleets packed with specs (such as simple representations total coverage and resolution) that make it easy to evaluate the strengths/ weaknesses of the product?

3. What countermeasures are required in order to prevent misuse of micro-UAV surveillance planes? Does it need to involve form detection or would it be better to just detect airborne cellphone/ wireless data transmission? How would you do this?
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NewLaunches points to Kaplan's new SAT prep offering for the iPod. This really joins an array of "small study" solutions, from cell phone services that administer pop quizzes to study guides for the PSP. The iPod, however, is the biggest of the "small electronics" platforms and it is used by a wider study-oriented school age demographic.

This product will probably succeed despite the limitations of the iPod. You can;t input answers, for example. And the screen on the smaller iPods is not going to display a great deal of information at once. Here is the question: do the limitations of the medium (the iPod) result in an improved product by preventing designers from overbuilding a solution or will consumers use this product despite these limitations because an inconvenient but familiar platform that has already been adapted (deeply embedded) in the spectrum of daily habits is far better than the prospect of learning to use and carrying around one more device?



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NewLaunches also points to John Sheperd-Brown, the Father of the ATM machine:

Inspiration had struck Mr Shepherd-Barron, now 82, while he was in the bath (that’s where most of us do some serious thinking!). "It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world or the UK. I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash" quotes Mr. Barron.

The ATM, what a perfect combination of consumer tradeoffs (get: all hours access to money, give: any sort of service) provided through an entirely new business model (vending machines). ATMs are remarkable, though, because they were promoted by the very entities (Banks) that should have considered them a disruptive threat!

Is there a lesson here? Maybe. At the very least, let's spend la bit ess time talking, big picture style, about disrupting our client's core "business" and a bit more time seeing whether it is possible to increase efficiency by disrupting one or more components in the supply chain or existing core business processes.

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CoolHunting looks at The Rise and Fall jeans company in Brooklyn, NY. Why is this getting mentioned here? Because it appears that- thanks to the high value of information (ie. knowing something that other people don't know about or doing something that other people at the top of a curve don't do) low end disruption is finding its place even in the rapid world of fashion cycles:

Since gaining a following that includes megastore Urban Outfitters for their tees, Brooklyn-based line The Rise and Fall made their first foray into denim that's refreshingly low-frill. Slim and straight, rather than skin-tight, it's a pair of jeans that's comely and comfortable yet utilitarian. "We have them made here in the USA and they're sort of a reaction to all of the ridiculously overdone denim out there now," co-founder Joshua Cohen recently told CH.

Unbelievably, they retail for less than $70 bucks. Similar to the Cheap Monday philosophy, that's saying something in a world where a person's jeans often run higher than their car payment.

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Information Aesthetics links to the Air New Zealand page, where some programmers have installed a widget that let's a user see how far he/she can go for a chosen sum of money:



Farecast provides a similar (more wide-ranging) form of this service. I'm really fan of Farecast and I wish that they'd launch services in India. I see both Farecast and Air New Zealand moving from order fulfillment to decision assistance, which is a very interesting direction. Tons of companies will enter this area in the next ten years and most of them will screw it up, either by driving user interfaces that are too complex, or by unduly restricting user freedom. Farecast is great because it offers intuitive user interfaces (slider bars, mostly) around only a few variables (how much do you want to spend, when do you want to leave, how long is your trip) but generates informative results in the process. Most importantly, Farecast does not attempt to make decisions for us but rather helps us model our decision outcomes. I could see a dating site that worked this way, allowing us to model different search outcomes depending on our changing requirements. Even better, employers could really use a better way of visualizing the impact of the requirement that they list in jobs wanted ads. Is it time for someone to start "JobCast?" I think yes.

Two views of Farecast:

Posted by JB at 6:37 PM | Permalink | Comments

A good article on avoiding turnaround situations from strategy+business magazine.

Kenneth Freeman, managing director at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.and former CEO of Quest Diagnostics, wrote the article, and it is relevant to disruptive innovation and in particular to pre-turnaround cases where a firm is bleeding at the edges and struggling to avoid disruption. Mr.Freeman points out, correctly, that many of these firms suffer from deep organizational dysfunction and customer relations problems. His turnaround approach seems to focus as much on these challenges as it does on profitability. he uses the examples of corning and Quest Diagnostics, both of which he turned around in the1990s:

In the early 1990s, as an incoming CEO, I led the turnaround of Corning’s television glass business in North America. Corning had invented color television glass 40 years earlier, alongside RCA. Now the television set business faced tough international competition, and Corning had reduced its exposure by creating a joint venture with Asahi Glass. Employees in the factories were very proud. They didn’t buy the fact that customers were unhappy with Corning’s quality and service. They simply denied that their products were anything but the best. The employees weren’t hearing direct feedback from the customers. “You’re the third CEO in five years,” they said to me. “You’re telling us the customers are going to walk away. We’ve outlasted the last two guys who told us that. Why should we believe you?”

How do you approach such a company and tell them to develop new business models and new product development approaches when upper management and the employees on the ground are no longer communicating?

In a perfect world, a struggling company would manage to pursue the benefits of a disruptive product development approach, using an outside entity to bring in new revenue streams while controlling risk and getting it's own house in order. In reality, struggling pre-turnaround companies are either likely to ignore potentially disruptive approaches or see them as a silver bullet that will magically allow them to meet investor demands without making painful internal changes. Wait long enough on the former, indifferent company, and it likely that you will see a flash of the latter before new management comes in.

If this is not bad enough, overweighting a profile of unrelated disruptive efforts can reduce the chances of profitability. To this end, Mr. Freeman cites his experience with Quest:

One typical form of behavioral excess is an oversupply of entrepreneurial zeal. MetPath (now known as Quest Diagnostics) was started in the 1960s by Dr. Paul Brown, who developed a unique model for providing high-quality, low-cost medical testing services grounded in sophisticated information systems. After Corning Inc. acquired MetPath in 1982, the executives of the merged company ran the lab business as serial entrepreneurs; they knew one primary way to make the company go, and that was growth through acquisition. By the early 1990s, Corning Clinical Laboratories had acquired hundreds of small labs across the United States. But the company was imbalanced: Its entrepreneurial zeal far outweighed any focus on reliable, responsive systems and processes. By the time I walked into the business as CEO in 1995, the industry was suffering from Medicare fraud and abuse issues, large numbers of customer defections, and a lack of process discipline. Predictably, profitability and cash flow were declining rapidly. This situation is common in many maturing companies

.

The problem is that many companies sit on one side or the other of this picture: ignoring the competition until it is too late or embarking on innovative acquisitions and multiple projects until the company itself loses focus. Part of a successful innovation strategy relies on the development of a balanced portfolio and the use of metrics that provide information regarding overall portfolio risk and growth prospects. Easier said than done for a struggling pre-turnaround company.

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OhGizmo points out the Dreamgate Sleep Aid



Design-wise, this reminds me of the snore stopper. This device, however, provides vibrating acupressure to three pulse points associated with sleep in Chinese medicine. Delivery, I suppose, is inaccurate since this is a "one size kinda fits all" device but it may work for some people.

I like this idea because I've wanted to see the acupressure adhesive bandage for a while. How difficult would it be to incorporate a small battery and vibration/ electrolysis unit into a fingerprint-sized bandage? Not too hard I imagine. How hard would it be to put these vibrating molskins on pressure points to relieve stress or cure an upset stomach? again, not so hard. The most difficult point might lie in training the consumer to find the right acupressure points. Templates could help. In this case, I could see a small wrist template that could be laid out on the skin prior to applying the vibrating molskins. Unlike the watch, the templates could come in a few different sizes. Let's call this whole area CAM/ Eastern Transdermals.

Posted by JB at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments

EE Times reports on a company called IMEC, which has made a piezo electric energy harvester:

Micromachine energy harvesters transform ambient energy into electric power. They can be used in environments where other power sources are not available and batteries cannot be replaced—for instance in autonomous sensor networks that are spread over large areas or in places difficult to access.

This is a big deal; if not today, then at some point in the next ten years, as the price of the PE energy scavengers comes down. I suspect that the military will adopt these first, and then, possibly companies seeking cheaper alternatives to fiber optic nets for detecting strain (I could see a vibration-powered sensor mesh on a bridge provided there is some way to allow the sensors to detect minute changes in nearest neighbor proximity). after that, green architecture and then, once the generators become cheap and sensitive enough, small electronics. SRI had a great sneaker powered cellphone charger a few years back. it worked on the same principle. I could see Nike powering their in-shoe running diagnostics using similar technology (if it did not change the dynamics of the sneakers too much).
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EETimes also covers the Freescale/ STMicro agreement on micro-controllers for automobiles. This field is interesting. I rarely see technological development race so far ahead of consumer feedback. I suspect that this may be a side effect of a strong regulatory environment, which dictates failsafe systems and strong performance requirements under a wide range of conditions. In these cases, products which come close to the core of the automobile will need to be overdeveloped and over-tested and the long lead time before the market has inspired automotive MCU manufacturers to compete in a bit of a vacuum. The response? Include the widest possible array of features in order to get Automotive manufacturers to lock in to long term supply agreements. The goal: to become the Intel of the automotive world. I am not sure that this strategy will work, if only because it seems to foster a vicious cycle. Complex systems tend to break down, driving more testing and overbuilding. It all looks like an arms race. The most demanding consumers will pay for these items, just in time for a smaller company to adapt the "best of" in a simpler and cheaper fashion and pull the bottom 80% of the market away

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Gizmag has a great article on Lenovo's struggles to implement the Dell model in china and elsewhere. They are reporting on a paper issued by CCID Consulting, a publicly listed consulting firm in China.

CCID notes that Lenovo may be struggling because supply chain infrastructure is not as powerful in Asia as it is in the United States:

In early 2004, Lenovo also wanted to attempt the direct business model but at last it chose to give it up and focused on the distribution sales model. CCID Consulting thinks that it is mainly because the supply chain system of Lenovo was relatively weak, meaning it cannot provide prompt responses to direct business models. However, it was because of the lack of courage to expose itself that Lenovo missed the chance of further management upgrades and improvement and it therefore decided to cover the existing problems in supply chain management.

How much would it cost to set up a shipping comapny dedicated to supporting JIT delivery models in Asia? What would this company look like and could it be run in a cost effective manner? I suspect that we could easily develop a company that specialized in pulling Lenovo components from 2-3 suppliers to one distribution point in a major city. It is the last mile that is troublesome.

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The Internet Scout Blog tracks down Loco, an online rideshare finder. I am surprised that we have not seen more of these companies. I am also surprised that more social networks and online event planning services (e-vite) have not done this.

Driving alone can be a lonely experience at times, and it can be fun (and good for the environment) to have company along the way. Billed as "the ride revolution" GoLoco allows people to arrange shared rides and to share trip costs online. Just type in where you'd like to go and when you'd like to depart and you can see if anyone is going your way!

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If you are curious about the Wii demographic, Gothamist is providing coverage of Wiinmbleton, an apparently off the cuff tournament that developed in New York after two guys registered the wiimbleton.com on a whim.



So, looking at the best of the wiimbleton crowd, it is clear that wii has managed to grab Apple's Hipster aspirational status. Also, hipster, not twee. And a big age range. Thankfully, this crowd is painfully media-aware so Nintendo does not need to go very far to develop interesting ad campaigns that position this as an aspirational demographic. If they pay attention to wiimbleton and similar events, they should be able to build a great, responsive sales platform in the United States. If they are really sharp, they might start here and then look at other affinity groups (post Sufjian Christian twee crossover, seniors on rollerskates, etc), tailoring their product and approach to each market, by allowing the end users to advertise the product rather than relying on irrelevant "cutting edge" ad campaigns. A potential hipster gaming message "It is okay to be really bad at these games, as long as you are having fun with someone else." This stands in sharp contract to the playstation, where life can be miserable for noob players who want to participate in somewhat exclusive online gaming environments. Another message: off line gaming with friends can beat online gaming hands down. A third message: you don't need to be an expert to have fun. Madden has been a great football title enjoyed by tons of people who don't play other games. There is a steep learning curve, though. How much better a user friendly online version of ultimate?


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Lifehacker points to a new Google Maps/ Ajax mashup, this time devoted to recycling.

A bit urelated, but this makes me think of the wide range of Google widgets, incluidng a new array of Google gears widgets.



I'm interested in seeing how Google competes with Yahoo on the pipes/ gears front. How many widgets are coming out of Yahoo pipes? How many consumers are using these things? Will the Web 2.0 OS really function to integrate hundreds of small widgets instead of major applications or will it do both? (probably both)

Posted by JB at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments

VentureBeat notes a raft of mobile payment plans now available in the US market. With this much competition, I imagine that many of the plans will attempt to differentiate themselves by offering easy sign up and access and by competing over an growing list of participating vendors, most of whom will be retailing items, from gasoline to coffee, which are not inordinately expensive:

Danal is the latest in a zoo of such companies, however, and it isn’t clear what makes the company unique. As the WSJ piece points out, San Jose, Calif.’s PaymentOne also allows people to bill online items to their mobile bills. Start-up Obopay, of Redwood City, Calif., lets people pay each other via mobile phone, and lets you use a debit card for this — and may also eventually allow people to bill items to phone bills. There are all sorts of other payment flavors popping up, including Payoneer, aimed at online payments (see our coverage), and Vivotech (see coverage).

So where is the opportunity? I suspect that it is on the phone bill side. Let's say I get three providers and make sixteen purchases, some of which should be billed as expenses while others are personal. What will this look like on my phone bill, which is already difficult to read? Are there third parties which are even now working to make these bills more transparent? I;ve written to my Dad about this (he is an expert in large information systems and had spent years working on phone billing systems) to see whether he has a take on this.

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It is worth some time to pay attention to Make Magazine. While few readers will go ahead and build their own radio transmitter circuits, publication in the magazine or the website lends garage designer status to the circuitry in question. This is important as micro supply chains develop. Let's say I invent a new household item using the MAKE transmitter. Within a few years, I'll be able to ship the design out to 1-3 small manufacturers who will send back 100 or 200 boards, enclosures etc. At that point I can file a provisional and bring a first batch of products to WalMart or some other entity and suddenly Linksys finds a new, totally unexpected competitor.

So MAKE and other magazines (Mother Earth News, I guess) devoted to the DIY movement will become steadily more relevant as standardized contracts and improved communications enable your average garage inventor to bring prototypes and first production runs to the table.



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AfriGadget Notes a Knife Sharpening Bicycle Operation:



The design efficiency is noteworthy. If I were to design this blind, I might force the cyclist to dismount from the bike each time he wanted to sharpen something. That would amount to lots of extra effort for $10 per day. Here, all transactions and services take place from the seat of the bicycle. Excellent.

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core77 points to the carpet alarm clock, which forces the user to stand up in order to shut off the alarm.



Microsoft and other "house of the future" companies have had some trouble coming up with a compelling package of services that would justify the learning curve and IT maintenance expense of a fully networked house. In part, this seems to be because the systems involved are far reaching (everything from music to lighting to heating to milk in the fridge and digital photos on your desk. In part these systems also seem to flood the user with data. The alarm carpet above makes me think tha we can re-work some of these concepts by thinking of the house as less of a provisioning entity (a vending machine for shelter, food, security, etc) and more of an interactive daily planner (ie, a storage unit and interface that let's us work with the outside world.) In this slightly different view, I would walk through the day wiht the same task list, but the house would sit as an entity in the background, allowing me to do simple things like mark off shopping tasks by brushing my hand against the fridge to more complex tasks like helping to arrange a Friday night meal or an evening party. Many of these activities can be done on a laptop today of course, but there is some physical dissonance in sitting down in a fixed spot to get most of our work done during the day. I'd be interested to see whether volume and quality of finished work increases when we move around during work, turning the house itself into a distributed computer and much more of an interface for the outside world.

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Engadget notes that Apple has passed amazon to become the world's third largest retailer (after Wal Mart and Best Buy) for music.



Since we are in the business of building disruptive businesses, we should always be a little bit curious about benchmarking growth rates for these businesses. I'm happy to put Apple at the ceiling. In general, if I a modeling growth for a potential business and my numbers suggest "faster than Apple" growth in a new market, I will re-test the assumptions underlying such growth.

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These shoes, highlighted at core77 remind me that the spartan interface/ simplicity movement, which getting old in electronics, still has miles to go elsewhere. Muji is pretty much based on the same aesthetic. (I'd like to see a Muji-redesigned ipod).



This reminds me that the clean form aesthetic was not created by Apple. We have seen this of course, in Shaker communities and I am sure that there are plenty of Western examples that predate this. Examples are even more plentiful in Asia where entire schools of art (such as the certain Chinese landscape painting schools (Ni Tsan, others)) were constructed around the use of empty, uncluttered space.

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Posted by JB at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments

NewLaunches points to this elegant and strangely retro alarm clock. It makes me think of the switchable plates used in the Enigma machine



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Under Pressure

We can add this to the plethora of blood pressure reduction devices:



Benefits: you can use this while you work without too much interference, and you can probably make best use of it while you are waiting for downloads to process and programs to open up, both stressful points when you are operating under pressure. On the downside, it probably does not really work.

Thankfully, many offices are pushing 20-30 minute afternoon naps, which do seem to have a positive side effect.

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Refrigerator

This is a great concept for a refrigerator.



Question: How else can we use the real estate on the front of the refrigerator. Home bakers often let the bread rise on the top of a refrigerator, for example, so why not a warm "rising box" on the top section. I could also see some slightly stronger door hinges combined with a set of hanging tool aprons. Need pens and pencils: right on the front of the fridge. Other concepts could include thick refrigerator doors plus akido pads for morning workouts or a refrigerator with a fold down "emergency shelf" just in case you have taken the eggs out but have no countertop space to work with. The dry erase fridge (or the chalkboard fridge) beat any of those suggestions.

I suspect that we would have more multifunction refrigerator doors if kitchen space were highly valued. I should look at the functionality offered by Japanese/ Korean apartment refrigerators, for example.

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Devolo

devolo dLan has gotten some recent coverage at OhGizmo:

We’ve written about devolo dLAN products before because quite frankly the company makes some interesting network accessories. You see instead of rewiring your house with network cable the dLAN system allow you to use your existing electrical wiring for transmitting data. One of their latest products now uses that dLAN technology to extend your network even further via wifi.

This is all fascinating and the household appliance angle may make it easier for users who are setting up a first home network, but I sincerely hope that someone at devolo is approaching hospitals and airports and other arenas where internet cable installs are a pain and where wifi networks can cause problems with interference. There might be a quality testing hurdle here, to make sure that the product does not degrade the power stability to the MRI & etc, but signal over electric could really help hospitals deploy interference-free networks that are easy to reconfigure.

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Medgadget points to an elegant solution to screw removal in surgery. I'd like to speak with the biomedical engineering students at John's Hopkins and ask them about the way that they arrived at the solution. In particular I like the aspect of reconfiguring the device mid procedure:

First, a small incision is made near the expected site of a tiny orthopedic screw that needs removal. The probe is then inserted to help the doctor home in on the head of the screw. Its movements can be observed by the C-arm fluoroscope imaging equipment often used in these operations....When the screwhead is found, the coil detector is carefully removed from the probe's hollow tube. This two-part design resembles the cannula and trocar tools commonly used in biopsies. After the coil detector segment is taken out, the doctor inserts a screwdriver through the tube section, which remains perfectly positioned for removal of the screw.

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Military Team Simulation Software

There has been a good deal of interest in team formation at Innosight & seein' as innovators and military teams both operate in rapidly changing, low information environments, it might be interesting to apply military team optimization software to innovation.

From Gizmag:

...we’re pleased to note the release of some new software designed to forge a highly functional team when the job is mission critical. Aptima’s DDD 4.0 is simulation software for military and civilian organizations involved in planning and preparing for complex team-based missions. A desktop software application, DDD is unique in its ability to cover a wide range of scenarios, including AWACS air battle management, civilian disaster response, search and rescue, Joint Task Force command decision-making, and business management. A fully functional 30-day evaluation copy can be downloaded for free

To extend that thought, a fast developing battlefield situation will always be more hectic and intense than anything in the R&D lab. Despite this, the military does a decent job of adapting to a wide variety of situations on the ground without losing their overall cohesiveness. They are able to do this in large part because they have been trained in basic procedures and are trained to solve the very bottom level problems (how to fire and clean a rifle, how to pack a bag, how to communicate over a radio) in a consistent manner. This allows higher level adaptation.

In the design lab, can we find comparable routines? What is the design lab equivalent of using standard call signals? Would establishing and training on some procedures allow us to concentrate on higher value innovative work with fewer organizational complaints?

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Core77 Vacuum Cleaner

core77 points to a great new vacuum cleaner design. Now I want to develop "Mr. Potato Head" style play appendages that can be attached to any number of household implements

Posted by JB at 9:04 PM | Permalink | Comments

Web Operating Systems

I love the concept of web-based operating systems. I had no idea that there were 20 different OSs up and running today. The Frantic Industries Weblog reviews ten of the operating systems here and another 10 operating systems here.

I should state here that, while I used OpenOffice for a bit, and I have tinkered with the Google online applications as well as Zoho writer et al, I still use Microsoft to produce all of my client ready material. I'm not ready to switch over to a web OS because (1) I work in Kerala and the internet connection is a bit slow, (2) I don't see anything that offers quite the functionality that I need and (3) the user interfaces still need work.

At the same time, I am going to pay attention as these applications develop. They still pose once of the largest running threats to Microsoft and I am sure that Microsoft knows this. Desktop hardware manufacturers should pay attention as well. any significant growth in Web OS may favor graphics chip manufacturers but will drive a good deal of the processing power back to the server. Server lifetime, ease of maintenance, and operating costs will outweigh small form factors.

I am also going to pay attention to the user interface development side of this. Microsoft has pretty much fixed in our minds the image of a user interface. Some of these web operating systems are trying to differentiate themselves by breaking away from this Microsoft mold.

Glide OS: Screenpic:

Posted by JB at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments

Why did Sony Connect Fail?

Jupiter Research comments on the failure of Sony Connect music service:

It doesn't come as much of a surprise but Sony is basically closing down the Connect music service. (the eBook version will still live for now to service the Reader product). It's a slightly bittersweet note for the company that once was synonymous for portable music. As we predicted, the market will simply not bear five different closed eco-systems for digital music distribution (especially when one player holds 70%+ share of the market). We've said it before, the devices still drive the stores and services and unless there's a credible iPod and soon iPhone challenger, it's going to be hard to compete here.

Sony is not shutting this down for lack of effort. It may in fact have spent too much money developing the service, from the Connectsets (Exclusive music performances by artists from Anna Nalick to the Killers) to the creation of a new (and buggy) media player midstream. It had a good deal of money to spend and, like any major media company entering a space where it perceived ownership, it decided to spend the money by offering, in larger volume, some version of just about everything on the market.

At the same time, the Connect playstation group is the only group that will remain after the business winds down. Perhaps this is where they should have started. There are thousands of gamers who live in virtual worlds and gaming avatars are, right now, nonconsumers of music. What if Sony had moved away from making music for the player and toward selling music that could be inserted in games from Halo (music mine: step on it and be frozen for a 2 minute song duration... mines can be purchased through connect store) to the SIMS, it might have found a small but committed customer base. If it had left this point to sell music for network services such as CyWorld and for other virtual platforms from SecondLife to World of Warcraft, Kaneva, etc, this user base would have grown. What does music look like in a virtual environment, I'd suggest that each song and album has it's own icon, in the shape of in world objects.
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Patents are about to get longer

The patent law blog looks at Biomedino v. Waters Technology, where a court found Biomedino's patent invalid since the patent claimed something that was then insufficeintly described in the specification.

To wit, "the court held that the structure must be disclosed in the specification even if one of skill in the art could implement a structure without such a disclosure."

This means that we need to describe, in detail, pretty much anything that is claimed. This is probably a good thing. It may make discovery easier by reducing problems of obviousness and construction.

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Business Schools for the Impoverished

Microcapital looks at the Udyogini Business School in Maharashtra (India). Designed for illiterate rural women, it offers courses on Fianance, Marketing and other skills. It is intended to increase the number of women participating in microcredit.

I'm interested to see whether this works. In general, the rural poor tend to work extremely long days and don't necessarily have time to attend day or evening classes. This also harks back to a popular NGO view that poverty is connected to a lack of education rather than a lack of access to affordable business inputs (through reasonable credit, among other things). I wonder whether these classes will present a more acceptable way for Women to learn about business and bring their families around to the concept of a woman managing finances. On the other hand, maybe the classes are given in an entirely nonstandard way.

I wonder if management/ finance classes would be better for someone who has made it through 2-3 rounds of microcredit and wants to expand a business (or look at insurance or other hedges against business failure) rather than someone who is just joining the credit pool.

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Online sales

JupiterResearch notes that online sales seem to have peaked for the time being and talks about implications for online retailers:

The key news here that the Times rightly points out is that online retail is entering into a period of maturity where growth will be more organic rather than explosive. That means that the competitive fires will continue to heat up and as we have written in the past, retailers must step up their game in terms of differentiating their product, service and communication offerings. They must also rethink their efforts to drive loyalty, not just frequency, among their customers in order to maintain and grow market share.

This does not seem to include growth in mobile sales, which may or may not catch on in the US. I am more interested in implications for offline sales. Business, such as bookstores, have been forced to change rapidly over the past few years in response to pressure from explosive online growth. As the acceleration curve for online sales flattens, offline retailers may be given more of a chance to work with the customers that they have. In major markets such as New York, Mumbai, and Tokyo this means making enough money to cover increased rental costs while dealing with savvy consumers who often treat stores as demo areas, sampling a product and then buying it from the convenience of home.

There are still tons of problems facing offline retailers. They may have a better opportunity to solve some of these problems-- for the time being-- if the roles of online/offline retail become slightly more demarcated over the next few years

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Why didn't we think of this?

Venturebeat looks at Daily Strength, a social network based on health problems. The name strikes me as cheezy but the concept is great. If it has not been done, someone should search the usenets and the major informal community posting portals. I wonder if there are other affinity groups that can match health interest groups for the mix of online and offline affiliation. Parents with young kids comes to mind (call it Neighborhood?), and we already have Dogster, for a subset of pet owners. We probably need something for cars or possibly bbq and well maintained lawns

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There has always been a difference-- in my mind-- between energy and biotech pursuits. Biotech looked at health and agriculture while energy looked at oil and gas. VentureBeat, however, points to Craig Venter's new project, Synthetic Genomics, which has raised a great deal of money from BP in order to develop genetically engineered organisms that do a better job producing alternative fuels. Between this and the plastic (announced last week) that has been engineered to break down into a liquid fuel in the presence of specific enzymes, it looks like biotech has really entered the energy market.

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Sequoia Capital is pushing more funds toward Chinese startups. It should be careful to seek small companies that can grow organically rather than under the auspices of the array of passive and active government subsidies that have made so many Chinese manufacturing firms competitive in the short run.

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Make Magazine looks at the gradual disappearance of Chem sets, underpressure from law and drug enforcement companies

In an attempt to curb the production of crystal meth, more than 30 states have now outlawed or require registration for common lab equipment. In Texas, you need to register the purchase of Erlenmeyer flasks or three-necked beakers. The same state where I do not have to register a handgun, forces me to register a glass beaker. In Portland, Oregon, even pH strips are suspect.

It is probably time for a Make magazine version of the Boy Scouts, something that will not only have kids running around in the woods but also experimenting with chemistry and Genomics, and design, and just about everything else out there that is both constructible and interesting.

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Small storage containers to MP3 players to Amplifiers. if I were a designer, I'd consider trying to make my next handheld object the size and shape (without the rim) of an Altoids can

Altoids Amplifier from Make via Octopart:



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Thi is the first time that I've heard the term "Manhattan Borealis" but I like it...

These upcycled benches would ideally be placed at strategic points throughout the city to accommodate a solar-powered LED light show ("Manhattan Borealis") highlighting various wooden water towers across NYC's skyline, enhancing the existing nighttime glow. Accordingly, the previously mentioned benches would become the "best seats in the house" for the nightly light shows...

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This is a little bit overshot, probably

Scientists at the University of Portsmouth, UK, have developed an artificial intelligence system to build the world's first thinking car wheel. The steering wheels use microcomputers which perform 4,000 calculations per second and communicate with each other. Then the wheels use AI to learn as the car is being driven, making calculations and adjustments according to travelling speed and road conditions. These intelligent tires mark the first time AI has replaced fundamental mechanics within a motor vehicle.

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Proton therapy

If we combine this with fluorescent cancer cell imaging, we might see the day when complex cancer surgeries can be done remotely in a relatively noninvasive manner:

Unlike high-energy X-rays, proton beams deposit almost all of their energy on their target, with a low amount of radiation deposited in tissues from the surface of the skin to the front of tumor, and almost no "exit dose" beyond the tumor. This property enables doctors to hit tumors with higher, potentially more effective radiation doses than is possible with gamma radiation

pic from Medgadget:

Posted by JB at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments

Innosight is very good at presenting risk through business development proposals based on iterations that carry the assumption of repeated partial failure and product development delays. At the same time, we still need to develop effective, transparent metrics that both communicate risk and help the clients differentiate between development failures that resulted from previously unknown factors (well we found this out so we know that the concept won't work) and the development failures that resulted from preventable human errors (Jones burned out and left the project while our outsourced designers took too much control and dragged the project the wrong direction)

Posted by JB at 7:31 PM | Permalink | Comments

I see day/ date release parties followed by higher price copyright unrestricted "day of" releases followed by "21 days later" remixes of said movies.

In a long tail environment, how could movie studios benefit from movie edits and remixes. This is not a new question in any way shape or form, but it seems to become more relevant year in and year out.

Posted by JB at 7:22 PM | Permalink | Comments

This may be dumb, but I'd like to see whether consumers would respond to an offer to place calls using a "next-top" extension. In exchange for the reduced rates users would agree to let their calls be screened, with the understanding that the best discussion quotes could be used in advertising (print/ voice/ video) or played during the show. I doubt that screening and pulling the best quotes from thousands of hours of calls each night is really feasible at this point but I'd expect lots of consumers to use the service. We are- most of us- addicted to activities that bring us to the periphery of fame.

Posted by JB at 7:19 PM | Permalink | Comments

This is a bit Apples-n-Oranges. CBeyond provides VOIP solutions packaged for legal, medical, and real estate SMEs. To this end, it is competing with Skype et al, not Cingular and it is adding value by offering unified messaging support and some data storage on the back end, neither of which (as far as I know) Skype offers at present. For its part, Skype is now offering dozens of widgets (such as whiteboard) that might help an SME conduct business but it can't be bothered to organize its offerings enough to target a particular customer. Skype might do very well to take a page from CBeyond and re-bundle into SkypeLaw, SkypeMed and SkypeEstate.

Posted by JB at 7:11 PM | Permalink | Comments

This is small but neat. Fifty years ago, this would be a low end disruption. Today, it targets non-consumption. It makes me wonder, though, whether any enterprising breeder has bred chickens for bones that are easier to use when prognosticating.

Posted by JB at 7:07 PM | Permalink | Comments

A network of tubes...

Will this be more or less stable in the event of an earthquake?

I guess that I am just wondering how much of this is aesthetics and how much of this is the result of an ingenious solution to a problem that I can't quite identify.

Posted by JB at 7:02 PM | Permalink | Comments

Somewhere, somehow, a disruptive innovation will be enabled by this tape. Working backward from solution to foothold market, it will probably be in spots where electrical/ battery lighting is too expensive, during short use periods (I doubt that it glows forever), in cases where high intensity light is not needed. Okay, well that might hit night lights even if the stuff only lasts 75% as long as a night light, it can be laid in ways that provide more info to someone stumbling around in the dark.

Posted by JB at 6:58 PM | Permalink | Comments

ZipBike. Maintaining the bikes might be a pain, and there is some overhead for bike shelters (and a serious disclaimer to discourage lawsuits in cases where a bike malfunction leads to a crash) but it probably still offers better margins than Zipcar.

Posted by JB at 6:55 PM | Permalink | Comments

Personal disgust preventer, how neat is that? How about this? A transceiver is mounted in a box on a tree or near a vista or statue & etc. A user sends a short SMS to the transceiver along with the phone number of an intended recipient & it is stored on an attached drive, along with the inbound phone number. When either stands within 5-10 ft of the box, they can receive the message, just as if they were reading the carving on a tree. A bit like SMS graffiti but used to hide secret messages to friends and loved ones around a city. The messages prevent boredom. A telephone number taped to the tree could work as well but the box lends intimacy.

Posted by JB at 6:52 PM | Permalink | Comments

While it is great that EMI has released its catalog over 7 Digital, I'd still like to see the releases made available with creative commons (or similar) clauses. These might say "5 second samples only" or "must remix" or "no full quotes." It may be that such licenses will become available as song analysis (song copyright analysis) software improves.

Posted by JB at 6:38 PM | Permalink | Comments