If you didn’t know, the Co-Founders of Nest Labs previously worked at Apple on the iPod and iPhone. They’ve stated that their experience has shown that every detail matters – physical design, user interface, usability, packaging and marketing.

Their product is elegant, functional and has a purpose to help people save money.

Over a week ago, I read that Honeywell International is suing Nest Labs for infringement of seven thermostat tech patents. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

Now, of course, I think companies have a right to defend their patents. But all of the infringement lawsuits going on between big companies are just sad (Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Google… the list goes on). It’s a patent arms race to see who can stockpile the most.

The situation between Honeywell and Nest Labs is slightly different. Honeywell International has been around since 1906 and Nest Labs is a startup. It’s probably very difficult to consider oneself an “inventor” these days, but that is kind of what startups are.

Invention today is often tackling new problems or re-inventing the products and industries that are stagnant. That is what Nest Labs has done. They identified a stale product and completely re-defined it. Except for the most discerning, I suspect homeowners could care less about thermostats, or in the least only think about how distracting they look on their walls.

Although the latest Honeywell model does have some modern technology, it just doesn’t have the elegance of the Nest Thermostat. Honeywell had plenty of time to innovate, but didn’t. They didn’t design from a fresh perspective, only an incremental one.

Nest Labs has provided an option to have an eye-catching piece of gadgetry that supports an “eco-friendy” lifestyle and just might save some cash on the energy bill. Even with the question of “Did we need a new thermostat?” the Nest Learning Thermostat is the type of product that the gadget-minded wants to have.

Similarly, the Apple iPod wasn’t the first portable digital music player when it was released in 2001. I had previously owned a Diamond Rio PMP300 MP3 player around 1998. It was a piece of plastic junk that held about 12 MP3s. It and every other portable music player was left behind after the iPod launch. Everyone just wanted one, including me, even if it had less features.

The catchy term in Silicon Valley for re-invention is “disruption“. Startups often aim to disrupt a product or service that is tired. Bonus points if the objective is to do one thing and do it well.

What Nest Labs has done should be seen as an inspiration – not just for independent inventors, but all companies and industries that are complacent with their products and services, those that take no risks. This is your wake up call to innovate.

Nest Lab’s position that Honeywell’s lawsuit is simply a strategy to stifle competition comes as no surprise and I hope that they prevail. I know I’ve been jonesing for their product since its introduction — now I just have to order one.

Update 04.12.12: Nice! Nest Labs Hires Apple’s Former Patent Chief for Honeywell Lawsuit.

I heard that a Dieter Rams exhibit recently opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). I was happy to discover that the exhibit, titled “LESS AND MORE – The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams“, runs until February 2012. Phew, now I just have to remember to go!

In looking around for info, I ran across an interesting post over at Swiss Miss and followed the trail to THE BLACK CUBE project.  The project looks to have been an interesting study by a group of designers to create the “perfect product”. They invited other designers and artists to participate and/or provide comment.

Below is a video of Dieter Rams weighing in. He opens with the proclamation that “The term ‘design’ is worn out and has lost its attraction.” He offers up some opinion on ‘The Black Cube’ briefly making reference to his 10 design principles, which I wrote about last year when the topic of comparing Apple Sr. VP of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive‘s work to that of Dieter Rams was all the rage.

But I digress.

Rams concludes his thoughts on design impact with a question: “Do we have a chance to improve the world, to make it more humane, to make it more ethical? We do!“

CUBE Dieter Rams (www.the-black-cube.com) from Andreas Unteidig on Vimeo.

The Story of Eames Furniture: Marilyn Neuhart with John Neuhart – Interview from Gestalten on Vimeo.

Not sure how I missed this exclusive interview with Marilyn Neuhart, author of “The Story of Eames Furniture“, and her husband John. It’s an amazing invitation to their close experience working in the Eames office for nearly 30 years, closely with Charles and Ray Eames.

Someday, I’ll get my dream chair, the Eames Lounge Chair, check out the attention to detail and reverence in manufacturing this classic piece of furniture.

“Ethnographers are a kind of somewhat exotic breed of scientists, we study people.” – Victoria Bellotti.

Bellotti, who manages PARC’s Socio-Technical and Interaction Research team at PARC, studies people to understand their practices, problems, and requirements for future technology, and designs and analyzes human-centered systems, focusing on user experience.

She explains how ethnographers analyze data to determine how technology can help, or get in the way, of tasks being studied. The research helps to build successful products and services or address problems. This sounds particularly useful for technology-centered business ventures that are clients of PARC’s Opportunity Discovery research and strategic investment targeting program.

Scoble mentions that this practice is missing from most start-ups, but notes that it is part of larger companies such Microsoft Research and Facebook. Bellotti agreed, adding that most startups learn as they go along and some entrepreneurs do [this] by nature – look at people and ask lots of questions.

Below is Scoble’s video interview with Bellotti. You can see additional interview topics: “Future of Networking“, “Ubiquitous Computing Research” and “Keeping our Cloud Computing Safe” and read about the rest of his PARC visit on his blog.

Foursquare

Foursquare has stated that in addition to dominating in the realtime check in space, they intend to lead in the area of “anticipating” where a consumer might like to go.  That’s where their latest areas of development came in a few months ago: Explore and Recommendations.

Today they announced that they are extending their API for developer access to Explore and new Leaderboard features.  This should be a major boost for Foursquare’s ecosystem, much like Twitter’s widely adopted API resulted in hundreds of Twitter-related apps.  It will be interesting to see what developers come up with.

What do you think?  Are you a Foursquare check in junkie?

“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.”

- Thomas Alva Edison

Looks like creative people have been thinking about the “pivot” for a long time!

App Rock Stars

The next panel that I caught featured developers behind several hugely successful apps.  I have to admit, even after downloading several hundred apps and games personally, there were a few I hadn’t heard of.  Why that is interesting – some of the panelists’ apps have surpassed the hundred million download mark.  Pretty amazing.  The discussion was pretty conversational and the panelists had a lot of similar experiences to share.  These were the highlights that I caught:

• Berkeley Melagon of DistinctDev, creator of “The Moron Test” app: We spend about 50% of our time on development and [game] content, the rest is on brand building and marketing.  Expect to treat your game as a service, you will need to iterate
• Thomas Chung from The Playforge, makers of “Zombie Farm“, shed some light on to the “free” app/game model – like all objectives, it’s about penetration – gaining the user base to upsell full games/apps or to cross-promote other apps
• A few of the developers shared that they were expanding their brands beyond the apps into licensing (particularly those spinning off toy products from games).  Although Angry Birds wasn’t cited as an example in this specific conversation (but did come up in many others throughout the day), I immediately thought of the awesome plushies!
• All developers easily responded that iOS is their number one target and a few stated that the Apple ecosystem has worked well for them.  Several, however, did state that they also have apps on Android, but brought up the often heard complaint about the Android app store ecosystem fragmentation.  They also added that flow of converting users from free apps to paid apps is much more of a challenge on Android.

So Many Platforms

What I liked about this panel was the range of speakers that participated and a perspective broader than gaming.  The panel was moderated by Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies and included Brandon Lucas from BET Mobile, Hardie Tankersley from Fox Broadcasting, Mahi de Silva from Opera Software and Tyler Lesssard from RIM (makers of BlackBerry and the just released PlayBook tablet).

Bajarin opened the dialogue with a critical point, “People are going to the closest ‘screen’ to get content from the cloud.”  Hardie, agreeing that not all screens are the same, stated that “people still get content many ways such as free broadcast, iTunes, Netflix, and (even still) hardcover books.”  The challenge for networks like Fox is managing each platform in its own way.  He added that Fox is trying out content interaction with tablets while watching TV and that everyone is still experimenting.

Lucas reminded the audience that one needs to not forget about your specific audience needs.  With a background point that the BET audience “were early adopters of technology like the T-Mobile Sidekick” (referring to it as the poor man’s BlackBerry!), he says that they are very focused on mobile apps for feature and smart phones.  Like Hardie, Brandon says the BET is concentrating on viewer interaction with their broadcast content – to the point where they have “tune in” campaigns from their apps that prompt  users to immediately tune in specific shows being broadcast for interactive experiences.

EVP Of Consumer Mobile for the Opera Browser, de Silva brought back the discussion started by Trip Hawkins in the opening keynote – the browser could and should be the primary way that users interact with content and apps.  He cited a statistic indicating over 100M users using Opera Mini/Mobile browser on handsets. (Here is one post that backs that stat).  de Silva’s point is to not overlook being platform agnostic by supporting web technologies in your app deployment and even development of lightweight apps that run directly in a browser.  It certainly sounded like Opera’s long-term objective.  To this point, de Silva announced the Opera Appcelerate app store developer program.

RIM VP of BlackBerry Alliances and Developer Relations, Tyler Lessard, brought a unique perspective from a less crowed app ecosystem (vs. iOS and Android). BlackBerry is taking a strong position of embracing technologies that work across platforms including HTML5 and Flash to give developers more freedom of tools to create apps.  In conjunction to that, he offered that the BlackBerry platform supplies ability to integrate with native device functionality, such as the widely used secure BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service.  Lessard’s welcoming invitation to developers reminded me of Aydin Senkut’s advice from an earlier Investor Panel about being a category leader.  If you are a developer, now is a great time to think about building that “killer app” for BlackBerry, while its landscape is less crowded.

In conclusion, the panelist agreed that developers need to look beyond just the U.S. There are different ecosystems around the world and outside of the U.S., there are still lots of opportunities to partner with distribution channels like carriers.

Lucas summed it up nicely, though: “Just deliver something incredible.”

I spent a little bit of time on the Expo floor and wish I could have spent more time to sit in on a few power sessions and Day 2 presentations.

However, I plan to keep an eye on AppNation’s new app and tech blog where it intends to continuing building its brand as an authoritative resource.  Be sure to check it out at http://appnationonline.com/.

• Most people are still discovering apps via regular web browsing, which is faster and driven by search
• Tablets are browser friendly
• Mobile and TV browsers are getting better
• Specific devices will matter less in the long run

The next big panel was made up several investors; Ianni proclaimed “We’ve got the money in the room!”  There was various shades of sentiment on whether or not the technology sector is in a bubble or mini-bubbles or no bubble at all.  Very clear.  That aside, they did agree that investors are putting money in. The other point they agreed upon is that there are more different types of financing available than ever before.  One can’t help but to spot the headlines of 2-person companies to those that have been building for years getting funding from traditional VCs, Angels, Super Angels and even crowdsourced.

When asked for final remarks, a few of the panelist had a few wise (and interesting) things to share:

• Aydin Senkut advised app developers to look for smaller categories that don’t have mobile leaders, such as health since games, news and social network already have leaders and an increasingly crowded landscape.
• Steve Eskinazi stated that he still prefers investing in small nimble teams finding that they often outperform larger lumbering teams.
• Raj Singh had a surprising statement – a feeling that the mobile [app] space has had a lot less disruption than the first internet revolution and that the opportunities are not quite as broad except for some specific categories like location.  A few of his co-panelist seemed perplexed.  Unfortunately, the panel ran out of time for further discussion.

Look out for my next post featuring App Rock Stars and the Platform Problem.

Living in a technologically progressive area and being in the business, our children are no strangers to computers and gadgets at home. They also have computer lab at school where teachers guide them to educational game and activity websites.

But this story is a little different. A school district in Auburn, Maine has decided to shell out $200,000 for the purchase of 285 iPad 2 tablets for Kindergarten students and teachers. The decision was based on a video that demonstrated the progress made by Kindergarteners who were previously struggling with literacy basics. The school committee immediately saw the benefit of the new tool in the classroom.

iPads cost less and are easier to maintain than laptops. The small size is more manageable and the touchscreen interface is intuitive for younger students to use.  There is also a broad range of inexpensive educational apps.

What are your thoughts on this level of technology in the Kinder classroom?

Props to the Geekbeat.tv Podcast where I first heard this story.