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?

Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

This is the driving force behind innovation, as well as the goal of Project Rethink.  There are times when you need to step back and times when you need to start from scratch.  I encourage you to examine your products, or business models, and ask yourself the question — “Has this product evolved beyond our original intent?”  At what point should you rebuild from scratch to better meet the needs of your consumers.

I am not saying Google Chrome will be perfect.  But there is something to be said about having courage to stand up and rethink something as large as the “modern” web browser; to stand up and say–”Maybe this really isn’t that modern.”

From the Google Comic:

 

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!

On Demand

There’s no doubt that as the Internet grows in popularity, so does On Demand service. The problems are not with the ideas or the media, but with their implementation.  The worst bottleneck in On Demand service is client side; bandwidth, system resources, etc.  High quality multimedia is out there, but often crippled to address the majority population, or full force to address only high bandwidth customers.

The nature of this blog is to find innovative solutions, and Move Networks has done just that. Move Networks has developed a product that lets anyone watch what they want when they want it with minimal effort from both the user and publisher–that is TV 2.0.

They are not using Adobe’s Flash Media Server, Apple’s Quicktime Streaming, or even Microsoft Silverlight. Move Networks is using standard HTTP requests over multiple TCP sessions between the client and the Web server.  In layman’s terms, you don’t need a special license–just a standard HTTP web server.

Making it easy to do more with less?  Absolutely.  The Move Networks streaming service removes the ambiguity of variable bitrate media files, or third-party streaming technologies and media servers.  With less effort from all parties involved you can deliver the most optimized media.  If your bandwidth conditions change, real time dynamic streaming prevents the “buffering” screen.

Move Networks’ technology divides the video content into smaller files called “streamlets” which are delivered continuously as the viewer watches content. Because streamlet delivery stays just ahead of the video display, you don’t have to pay for content delivered that might not be watched, such as when a viewer exits a video stream early.  No wasted bandwidth, no wasted time for the user.

– Move Networks

Bottom Line

How can you provide the best experience to your users?  Move Networks created a system that optimized the media experience to the user without the need for any additional services. Everything happens behind the scenes, and everyone is better off for it.  

“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.