4 triggers of the flat world (and collaboration)

• 11/9/89 – The fall of the Berlin Wall – allowed conversations to open up.
• 08/9/95 – Netscape went public – 1) Netscape Navigator brought the Internet alive, everyone could use it 2) Netscape commercialised a set of open standards to ensure the interoperability of the Internet removing any walled gardens 3) they triggered the dot com boom, triggering over $ 1 trillion dollars accidental investment in fibre optic cable.
• Work flow – Applications being able to talk to each other gave us a global platform for collaborating on stuff. People are able to work o stuff like never before

Other expressions of collaboration

• Outsourcing – Really took off around y2k
• Off-shoring – When China joined World Trade Organisation
• Open sourcing – As a verb
• Supply Chaining – A la Wall Mart, as a complete science.
• In-Sourcing – What UPS does, they don’t just deliver packages, they do internal logistics “your world synchronised”
• Informing – Google – I can inform myself, i can collaborate with data all by myself

What’s the 10th?

• ‘The Steroids’ – Wireless, Voice of Internet, File Sharing – These turbo charge all of the above, anywhere on any device

Interesting OPML experiment, originally uploaded by matmorrison.

Hmmm I’m not sure where Mat is going with this but depressingly it shows that we all subscribe to the same bloody people. makes me feel highly unoriginal and a bit of a sheep. sigh. (larger version)

How do you follow? Who is interesting? Who’s not at the bloody top of this diagram?!!

[A copy can be downloaded from Sapient's web site here]

However the one things that’s quite funny here, is that already people are slating this as ‘push marketing’. Well uh, it’s not…. it’s permission… you make the choice to follow, they just messed up on the hash tag spam, that’s the mistake. Dell, who everyone lauds as being a twitter success do just that. They just do it with a little more finesse.

Oh and before anyone says it will impact their reputation as a brand, well it might, but only amongst social media experts. lol.

Touchwall Demo from Joel on Vimeo.

Persistence – Evernote notepad, Jolicloud netbook OS. Apps that sync your data across multiple computers and can be accessed from any web browser if you’re not at any of them.

Augmented Reality – Still awesome, still has untapped potential. Why’s do I like it? It’s the only thing in the last year that has made me smile. Massive potential for mobile apps. Will be huge.

Web site + Desktop App. Twitter on it’s own is a bit pants, Twitter + Tweetdeck works. More app / web-service combos please.

Spotify. Doesn’t need explanation. Movie version next please.

That’s it. 5 things. I guess the sad thing is these are all pretty much old news. You all need to work harder. Chop chop. Jog on.

Umagination Labs: Innovation Techniques presentation from nextlab on Vimeo.

“De-average” buyers and users

• Which customers use or purchase our product in the most unusual way?
• Do any customers need vastly more or less sales and service attention than most?
• For which customers are the support costs (order entry, tracking, customer-specific design) either unusually high or unusually low?
• Could we still meet the needs of a significant subset of customers if we stripped 25% of the hard or soft costs out of our product?
• Who spends at least 50% of what our product costs to adapt it to their specific needs?

Explore unexpected successes

• Who uses our product in ways we never expected or intended?
• Who uses our product in surprisingly large quantities?

Look beyond the boundaries of our business

• Who else is dealing with the same generic problem as we are but for an entirely different reason? How have they addressed it?
• What major breakthroughs in efficiency or effectiveness have we made in our business that could be applied in another industry?
• What information about customers and product use is created as a by-product of our business that could be the key to radically improving the economics of another business?

Examine binding constraints

• What is the biggest hassle of purchasing or using our product?
• What are some examples of ad hoc modifications that customers have made to our product?
• For which current customers is our product least suited?
• For what particular usage occasions is our product least suited?
• Which customers does the industry prefer not to serve, and why?
• Which customers could be major users, if only we could remove one specific barrier we’ve never previously considered?

Imagine perfection

• How would we do things differently if we had perfect information about our buyers, usage, distribution channels, and so on?
• How would our product change if it were tailored for every customer?

Revisit the premises underlying our processes and products

• Which technologies embedded in our product have changed the most since the product was last redesigned?
• Which technologies underlying our production processes have changed the most since we last rebuilt our manufacturing and distribution systems?
• Which customers’ needs are shifting most rapidly? What will they be in five years?

[Breakthrough Thinking From Inside The Box , by Kevin P. Coyne, Patricia Gorman Clifford, and Renee Dye, Harvard Business Review,December 2007]

If you’re a knowledge worker, your boss shouldn’t make you come to the (expensive) office every day unless there’s something there that makes it worth your trip. She needs to provide you with resources or interactions or energy you can’t find at home or at Starbucks. And if she does invite you in, don’t bother showing up if you’re just going to sit quietly.

via Dean in the data warehoue

via ligress. hilariously i just listened to it about 5 times cos i actually liked it as a song.

WiiSpray Teaser from Martin Lihs on Vimeo.