Okay, back. Been gone for more than 2 months. One month in India and a month working getting ready for a pilot with a group here in Chicago for BettrAt (Which is going well — my favorite part of the webinar we held yesterday: “This (BettrAt) could be the next Facebook, [...]
Archive for the 'Innovation' Category
I’m surprised I waited so long to read this book by Randy Komisar, now almost a decade old, titled The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur.
The book is a light read, I finished it between two short airplane flights to/fro Philly. Lots of this stuff is intuitive if [...]
Yesterday, I was helping a friend and colleague at ID work on an exciting new platform for eBooks delivered on a backlit display and was shocked and pleased with how easily I was able to provide feedback, give and receive ideas and inspiration. Not only was this (hopefully) helpful to Dan, but also to [...]
I loved the zefrank show (zefrank is where i got that black shirt i have with the small fuzzy black duck that people always think is a stain) I’ve now referenced this video in conversation at least 3 times so I thought I might as well post it.
I saw this while I was [...]
Tim Brown’s article in Stanford’s SSIR this month covers Design Thinking for Social Innovation.
In the article, the importance of direct observation, and ethnographic inquiry, standard design staples are covered. Design thinking is defined as being “inherently optimistic, constructive, and experiential”.
Most of the stuff in the article is old hat to those [...]
I read this post a few weeks ago by Joel Spolsky about growth and the need for speed (The post is entitled “Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?”. I thought to myself for a while and nodded… and all of the examples were spot on: Word vs WordPerfect / Oracle vs Ingres. [...]
Great TED talk by John Gerzema. I won’t make another comment about skating to where the puck is headed, but you get the point.
“Did you know that 68% of Americans now carry a library card: The highest percentage ever in our nation’s history. What you see in this consumer trend is also the accumulation [...]
Via the BettrAt blog:
Hmmm. As it turns out, we (BettrAt) actually want you to be awesome at what you do.
I just stumbled upon this by Kathy Sierra from O’Reilly radar. I always knew that Kathy was into helping users get better, but I guess I hadn’t kept in touch when she stopped blogging. [...]
Late last week, the University of Michigan had their BOP conference, limited to a core and exclusive group of BOP notables (Patrick Whitney, Dean of the IIT Institute of Design, and BettrAt’s “Thinker-In-Residence,” was in attendance).
I had a chance to catch up with a friend tonight I hadn’t talked to in several years and we [...]
If I don’t know you, I seriously doubt I care what you think about a product. Stop trying to make me buy it.
If I do know you, and you’re trying to sell me something because there’s a monetary award attached to it, you’re either in some network marketing MLM scheme… and I’m probably not your [...]
Nan Hu, Paul A Pavlou, and Jie Zhang wrote about J shaped distribution curves for product reviews in ACM. I found it interesting because it cuts across behavioral economics, technology, statistics and visual communication.
For some time now, I’ve been interested in how companies can (or already do?!) positively or negatively use user generated content about [...]
via huffpo
I guess they’re down but not out. They certainly don’t show you much, but check this out:
The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple’s tiger style. It’s complex: Two screens, a mashup of a [...]
Okay, as promised, here’s my Pandora makeover. Don’t get scared off by the red text. Pretend this is an undergraduate design critique or something. Here are some things that Pandora might do to truly improve the experience for users and garner more revenue to boot.
First, let’s take a look at the current [...]
Lately I’ve been thinking about high concept pitches. I read pitching hacks by Naval Ravikant and Nivi, and I’ve looked over lots of stuff before that says you need to have the simple, high concept pitch.
Here’s how it usually goes:
”We are the X meets Y”
Most of the time, this is X.COM meets Y.COM.
I’m sure [...]
I enjoy listening to streaming music from Pandora while I’m working. (Special thanks to big Dave for sharing his channel with me so I don’t have to spend time sifting or curating the good stuff)
Pandora is an awesome product- it allows for discovery, evolves with me, and is generally a pretty good experience. I’m putting [...]
