I love my Kindle.  As a Boston commuter, it really is a remarkable device — but that is another post for another time.  One of the reasons I frequent Christensen’s “The Innovators Dilemma” is to be reminded that:

“Good management is often the cause of failure when managing disruptive technologies” Clayton Christensen, The Innovators Dilemma

The central thesis of the book outlines the idea that the decisions and behaviors of management for sustaining technologies — technologies that are simply advancements within the same value network — are often the reasons for failure in emerging markets.

Take the eBook for example, but specifically the textbook market.  Presently, the ease of use, convenience, and cost of these technologies do not meet customer standards.  Additionally, the profit margins for producing these eBooks do not meet management standards.  So, “Good Management” would say,

1. EBooks don’t make enough money to be profitable
2. Our customers don’t think eBooks are better than traditional books

These two conditions would lead traditional management to ignore eBook technologies. However, Christensen’s book suggests management should look outside of the traditional market for textbooks (educational institutions, learning centers, etc) and explore the need in emerging markets.  Historically, this is best achieved when a smaller company is branched off or acquired to handle the emerging market.  This prevents competition from resources with traditional product models with larger profits.  It also keeps managers and developers of these new products excited with small gains.  A $20 million market can hardly compete with a larger business’ $40 billion market.

The problem with emerging markets is that they are hard to find — they are emerging.  A company should not invest all of its resources into what they “think” the next emerging market is for a disruptive technology.  The initial goals surrounding the entrance into emerging markets should be to learn, not to succeed.  If you enter a market with the preconceived idea that you know what it should be, you will likely fail.  Emerging markets evolve as disruptive technologies mature.

So what are the emerging markets for eBooks?  I’m not entirely sure, but I can tell you that eBook technologies for textbooks are a hot ticket in new startups focusing on open access technology and “free” learning.  These startups are still developing, and their quality of education still falls behind that of traditional institutions.  However, as technology progresses, these open access environments could either become absorbed by traditional institutions (to help facilitate distance education) or become a direct competitor of these traditional institutions.  In either case, unless publishers continue to explore these technologies, they could eventually be replaced as the “primary” source for text and education.

I have to take a new train to work, I have to shop at a new grocery store, I had to find a new place to get a cup of coffee.

I hate moving, it is always a hassle. There was nothing wrong with the place I lived before; it had everything I needed, and it was convenient. 

I knew that if I wanted to make things better than satisfactory it would require a lot of hard work. Nothing was broken, but I still moved.  

We have a tendency to fall into routines and learn to accept little problems.  

Now that everything is moved, my daily routine has a few new additions.  Before I was about 2 miles from my gym, now I am about 2 blocks.  The result?  I have gone to the gym more times in the last 3 weeks than in the last 3 months.

We need to shake things up a bit.  It’s harder in the business world, especially corporate.  These kinds of change typically only come with a change in management, a reorg, or a merger.  

Like moving, it’s hard work; but in the end sometimes you just have to get up and do it. Talking about it isn’t enough.

Before I moved I could have told myself, “I am going to go to the gym 5 times a week”–in fact, I often did.  But it wasn’t until I was proactive about the change, it wasn’t until I moved, that I was able to actually reach my goal.

Don’t expect change, don’t expect innovation, unless you are willing to shake things up and do things a little different.  Maybe a new vendor? Maybe an unproven business model or technology?

Change is risky, but without change we cannot innovate. Innovation is by definition something different; it requires a change. If you want to redefine your market, you have to make a change; you have to take a risk.

This is a very good case “shotgun marketing”; but it also shows how an advertisement can make the consumer stop and wonder, “What is all this about?”  You can’t ignore them, there are too many.  But you find yourself reading all of them, trying to figure out what you are being sold.

At very least, it caught my attention.

The take away, catch the attention of your consumers. It could be in an ad, or in your final product. Innovative products get noticed.

*I apologize for the photos. I was in a hurry and didn’t have a camera, so I had to snap them from my iPhone.  The iPhone does well in some light conditions; unfortunately, subway is not one of them.

Recently I wrote an article about Google Chrome.  I think it’s important to point out that I was not blindly supporting Google Chrome; being a Mac user, I had to run it through Parallels.  However, I thought it a positive step towards the approach of modern browsers.  I feel that it is important step back and create something new; so I gave it a shot.

Over the last few days I have played around with Google Chrome, and have found it to be “ok”. Being a web developer, I was excited to see that they included some developer tools.  I was surprised to find that Google pretty much copied Safari’s web developer tools:

Safari Right Click:

Google Chrome Right Click:

Safari Web Inspector:

Google Chrome Web Inspector:

This is not what I had in mind when Google said they had a “fresh take on the browser”.  It seems, all they did was put the address bar under the tabs, emphasized the base URL in a domain by graying out the rest, and created a custom home page with your most visited items?

I’m just not sure it’s worth as much hype as it received and would love to hear your thoughts on the subject; please comment below.  What are your impressions of Google Chrome?

More of the same, then something new

The iPhone did something unique.  The iPhone really isn’t a cell phone, it’s not even a “Smart Phone”. Realistically, the iPhone is a computer with a fully functional OS Kernel, a development API, and a graphics core; it just happens to also make phone calls.  I’m not saying it’s perfect.  My iPhone makes mistakes–battery life being one of them, a few dropped calls. I am not one of those people who thinks Apple can do no wrong.  The Apple TV has yet to “get it right”.  They still haven’t figured out how to bring digital content from the Internet to the living room–nobody has.  But Apple did do something right, and creating a completely mobile platform for third-party developers was one of them.

Here is an excerpt from Mossberg’s presentation on why the iPhone matters:

So What?

It comes down to taking technology to the next level–reinventing from the ground up when necessary.  A lot of people think the iPhone was Apple’s first crack at the cell phone market, but many forget the MotoROKR, which failed miserably.  After the failure of the ROKR, Steve Jobs decided they would have to reinvent the phone.  This Wired article tells the impressive back story of the iPhone.

So you have to ask yourself the question, “Does this device make it easier for me to do more with less?” Apple recently told the Wall Street Journal the App store brought in close to $30 million in sales during its first month.  Because Apple takes 30% of revenue sales, that means close to $21 million was distributed to third-party developers.

The iPhone/iPod Touch not only brings more power to the consumers, but also gives developers a unique opportunity to create innovative applications for the mobile market.  How can your product have the same impact in your market?

The next step in wiki technology is found in a company called Kaltura. Kaltura is a great idea; bring wiki technology to video. But it’s not the idea that I want to write about.  Instead, I want to try and illustrate why I feel this idea is actually innovative. 

Why is Kaltura Innovative?

I’ve said countless times that our “boxes” prevent us from creating truly innovative solutions.  At some point in history the idea of a wiki was innovative.  Creating a wiki page that allowed users add video content might also seem innovative at first–but it’s not.  In this sense, our perception of a “wiki” has become the box.  Even though at some point that box was innovative, we can’t stay there; we have to move on.  

We see this problem a lot when we create a new piece of technology; let’s take wikis for example. Later down the road we take something else innovative like streaming video and try to create a mash-up of the two, somehow expecting that innovation + innovation = new innovation.  It seems like a breakthrough, but it’s not; it is just another iteration of wiki technology.  Innovation is not iterative.

It is important to realize what aspects made wiki technology innovative.  A wiki allowed a community of users to collaborate on one document. The purpose was collaborating on articles–collaboration towards a complete form of media.  Adding video to articles is not innovative because you are still producing the same result; only now the article contains video. But taking that concept of collaboration and adding it to the video itself; that is our next innovative leap.

We often get caught up in the idea of something and forget what its true purpose was.  The purpose of a wiki was to produce collaborative articles–not to allow users to add the newest form of media to a webpage.  That is where Kaltura sets themselves apart.

Kaltura allows a community of users to easily: remix videos and images, upload and import videos, add  soundtracks, add transitions, trim video clips, add effects, and more… Kaltura is about editing the actual media as a community, not just identifying various media sources and combining them on a single web page.  The same way a community of users produces an article on a wiki, Kaltura allows a community of users to produce video.

Kaltura is actively developing new tools for MediaWiki software, and earlier this year formed partnerships with Wikipedia.  It is very likely you will be seeing these tools more prominently in the apps we all know and love.

This slideshow was entered in the SlideShare.net World’s Best Presentation contest.  Be sure to cast your vote for Project Rethink!

It’s not about the media

We live in a world where bringing new multimedia to the web is not enough.  At this point, multimedia is expected.   What’s important is that media becomes discoverable. More often than not, people are so focused on getting their rich media platforms to the web that they forget about making it discoverable.  Imagine a world where a google search returns results of an instructor’s lecture series in iTunes University, or an instructor’s YouTube Channel.  Adobe’s efforts to include automated transcripts for videos is the first step in this process.  It is important that your media remains easy to access.  With the abundance of media out there, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle.

“If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”

So what do we do?  It is important that you know your audience.  Notice I didn’t say, “know about” your audience.  If you only know about your audience, you will only be able to give them what they are asking for.  But if you truly know your audience, you will be able to give them something they don’t know they want.

Lessons About Knowing Your Audience

Here we have 2 clips; the first is from a few years back.  This first clip is from The Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.  Here Triumph is interviewing people waiting in line for Star Wars Episode II.  It is approached with obvious humor, and seen as comedy.  The Conan O’Brien Show knows their audience and the people they are interviewing.

This next clip comes from recent television coverage of the iPhone 3G release. Here the reporter tried the same tactic as Triumph, but failed miserably. Maybe it’s easier to take insults from a toy puppet? Or maybe Apple fans have less of a sense of humor than Star Wars fans. The bottom line is, this guy did not know his audience.  (The hyphenated “i-Phone Mania” in the lower third of the news clip is only more evidence to that fact)

Another important lesson…Don’t try to insult your audience on Live TV.  Late night was smart enough to pre-record their bit.

The Cloud

This actually falls very much inline with a recent entry by Seth Godin.  In this entry, The Clowd, Godin describes a system that handles much of what we do now.  Pictures are uploaded to a “cloud”. The cloud is able to analyze the picture and automatically know: who is in it, where it was taken, and how it can group with it other photos.  

This is the heart of innovation.  New systems need to make things easier on the people using them.  A new feature on the website that lets you zoom in with Ajax, or change color correction is nice–but is that the purpose of your web based photo service?  Social networking is no longer an “extra”; it has become expected.  For some it is too much of a hassle to try and network with people, the next step?  Create a system the is smart enough to handle the legwork of social networking, without compromising privacy.

Of course, if this system is created, we would need to create a new buzzword.  Geomicrophotoblogging is too long.