Apple’s apparent victory in their patent Infringement lawsuit against Samsung is really a victory for the entire mobile industry.  

Outside of Microsoft’s efforts around Windows 8, the rest of the marketplace as been settling into developing ‘iPhone like’ devices with marginally differentiating features or form factors.  There hasn’t been any significant innovation taking place here recently, and Apple hasn’t really come under any pressure to do more than marginal improvements these past few years to iOS, their mobile operating platform.

If this ruling is upheld through whatever remaining legal appeals Samsung has available, it will probably force a fundamental rethink of how platform developers decide to compete in the mobile space – especially Google with their Android Operating system. 

I’m hoping – maybe foolishly – that this might be a real inflection point, where radically different, truly unique, and even somewhat crazy ideas get considered, selected, and ultimately refined into new types of products, platforms, and environments.  The mobile market desperately needs real diversity in the approaches that vendors are taking today. That is one of the best ways to generate the kind of competition that drives everyone to innovate and deliver excellence.

Competition like that can end up fueling the long-term health of the industry.  This may just be the catalyst that makes that happen.

When all is said and done, Apple may be none too happy to find that there are far more innovative thinkers with incredible ideas in the market than they ever imagined.  But having that happen would be great for everyone.  

Even Apple and Samsung.

For more details, catch the NY Times article here.

Here is a video clip from Steve Jobs, made while he was still at NEXT. I had seen this a while ago and it really made an impression on me. It was done at a time of transition for him, when the things he had accomplished with Apple were still in the past, and he was really focused on creating something new and meaningful with the next phase of his life.

I just came across a link to it again, and wanted to share it with all of you.

We all need to write the script for our own lives, and refuse to be defined by others’ expectations, or dwell too long on the things – good or bad – that we have accomplished in the past. I know it is really a timely reminder for me, and hopefully can inspire some of you as well.

Enjoy!

Some big changes have been happening for me. While a few of you may already know this, just over a month ago I started a new company – GNURAL NET, INC. – and have been totally consumed with getting everything in place and moving.

In my two previous companies, the focus was on taking content that was produced by one group and organizing it in a way that it could be easily discovered and consumed by another. Multex dealt with financial information, taking research and estimates produced by brokers, and packaging it up for institutional investors to leverage. InfoNgen took the next step, organizing the content produced broadly on the web into specific industry taxonomies, and helping corporations discover and share the bits that were most relevant to them.

With GNURAL NET, I’m introducing this same model into a completely different market, integrating the content and social interaction found on the web into professional video production workflows. This is a fast growing and rapidly changing market, ripe for new ideas and approaches. I have been involved in the video production space since the mid-1990′s, and see a tremendous opportunity to impact how things are now done in this industry. I am incredibly excited to have the chance combine my love of technology with my passion for video in this new venture, and fully believe that what we are doing here will be transformative to this market.

As for The Digital Edge, I do expect that some of things I write about here will reflect my deeper involvement in both the New York startup scene and the video production world. Of course, I’ll continue to share about all the other tech related things that I love as well, so things shouldn’t change much. (WWDC is next Monday!!!)

I know I haven’t included too many specifics in this post about what we’re actually doing at GNURAL NET. I really don’t want to disclose too much yet, but will share more with all of you as we get funding and things progress.

I am so excited to be heading down this new path. Thanks for letting me share it with you!

Starting up a new company can be daunting, and is tough to do alone.

As the euphoria around the initial ‘big idea’ starts to transition into a more sober assessment of what needs to be done to actually execute on it, you will probably start reaching out to key people in your network for validation and advice. This is a critical phase in launching a business, challenging you to fully think through the premise of your venture and the details of what you’ll need to do to make it happen. If not approached with the right mindset, a lot of the value you’re looking to get from it will be lost.

Probably the single most important thing you can do when approaching this step is to avoid selection bias when seeking advice – picking the people that you think are most likely to say good things about what you are doing. You want to talk to people that will give you honest, constructive advice. This isn’t about getting told how great your idea is -even if it is. It’s about understanding where your weaknesses are, and what you can do to address them. Maybe the team you’re putting together isn’t right. Maybe some of your assumptions about market size are off. Maybe the technology you’re using isn’t ideal. Whatever it is, talking to people that can identify these things right up front is critical.

The closer you can get to doing the right things in the right order, the sooner you’ll be able to get your first minimally viable product into the market. The longer it takes to find the gaps in your planning, the harder it will be to deal with the issues that arise. Boosting your chances of success is more important than boosting your ego, so talk to the people that can really make a difference.

Now assuming that you are talking with the right circle of people, the next thing to remember is how to listen to what they are saying critically. Understand what biases they have (everyone has them), and factor that in. Try to validate any important points they make with other people you talk to, and don’t be afraid to get back to them later with follow-up questions if something doesn’t make sense or isn’t clear. Remember that things are constantly changing, and the approaches that worked great for them may not work as well for you. Of course, you should always respect the time and effort they are putting in to help you and truly consider their advice. But when it comes time to set your course, you should still be willing to go your own path if you think that’s the better choice.

The goal of seeking advice at this point isn’t to put together a plan based on pieces and parts of what everyone has told you. It’s to put together the best version of your plan that you can – a plan challenged, iterated, and refined by this process. Don’t worry about hurting anyone’s feelings if you decide to forgo the advice they offered. If you’ve been talking with the right folks, that won’t matter to them – they’ve been where you are and will understand.

In the end, success will be a combination of a great idea, great timing, excellent execution, and – of course – a little luck.

Do whatever it takes to maximize all of them.

If you have any experiences – good or bad – with taking business advice, please share them in the comments.

I was just introduced to an exciting new company called StationCreator. StationCreator is focused on creating the framework needed for the virtual aggregation, scheduling, and play back of web based video content. They have put together a brief overview of the framework they provide:

I have been working with StationCreator for about two weeks now and am very impressed by what they have accomplished in this first release of the product/service (in fact, it’s still in beta, making it all the more impressive)

To get the feel for what working with StationCreator is like, I put together a basic channel focused on Web Video Production. It is built up from web videos that I have watched in this area. The videos are all scheduled to play at specific times in a sequence – a perfect ‘lean back’ model familiar to everyone comfortable with today’s traditional television experience:

For those that only use a feed reader to access The Digital Edge, things have changed a bit on the site. I’ve done a complete refresh to make it more friendly to mobile devices – and hopefully make it a bit easier to get around and find things on. It’s a work in progress, and I’d welcome your feedback and suggestions on how to make it better.

There is one change in particular that I’d like to point out.

In the process of doing this refresh, I’ve added something that I’ve wanted on the site for quite a while – a direct way for readers of the site to schedule time with me to exchange ideas, discuss technology, or tap into my experiences with the tech startup scene in NYC.

I would love to connect with the readers of this blog face-to-face, and would be happy to grab a coffee and talk at any coffee shop around the city. And for those of you who aren’t in the city (which probably applies to most of you), we can still connect via Skype for a virtual chat. Either way, just reach out to me and we’ll get something scheduled. I’ve set up a TUNGLE.ME account to make my calendar available online, but you can also just email me to set something up.

My goal with this is to connect directly with as many of you as possible, and to open up the lines of communication with everyone that takes the time to read this blog. I get so much out of sharing on this blog, and look forward to connecting in-person.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

I’m looking to get a little more life out of my 2008 Mac Pro. I’ve already boosted the memory up to 32GB, which has helped quite a bit. The next step I’d like to take would be adding a hybrid drive like this:

For a 4 year old machine like mine, it simply wouldn’t be worth investing over twice the cost of this technology for a native SSD option. A hybrid drive really seems to be a good compromise between cost and performance, intelligently managing the placement of files based on how actively they are being used, and reducing the size required for the SSD component of the system.

That’s the theory anyway. There are a couple of brutal reviews citing a range of installation problems and DOA’s. I’ll need to dig in a bit more to understand if this is vendor specific, or if the technology is still too new and needs a bit more time to mature.

Once I do a little more research and decide what (if anything) to buy, I’ll definitely do a review. Of course, if any of you have experience with hybrid drives that you would like to share, please feel free to comment or drop me an email.

Although the iPad is my device of choice for “relaxation centric” computing, I also use it as a serious productivity tool when I’m working.

In fact, most of my web research, e-communications, task management, and note-taking happens with my iPad. I now use my Mac mostly for more demanding things like video/media work, or when I need to do a lot of long-form typing or page layout projects.

This means that I am on a constant search for top-notch iPad apps that can support the range of things I want to use it for. And while I am fully committed to the overall Apple ecosystem – Mac, iPad and iPhone – there is one Windows application that I always wished had an equivalent Apple based implementation – especially on the iPad.

Microsoft’s OneNote.

So why was a dedicated Apple geek like me waiting for a Microsoft application to port over to iOS?

A little history is in order… I have been looking for a satisfying, functional tablet form factor since people first started building any gadget even remotely similar to one. This started with PDA’s like the Newton and Palm, and eventually progressed to a Windows Tablet PC. And that is when I became a big fan of OneNote.

Around 5 years ago, I decided to give the Motion Computing Tablet computer a try. It was expensive and bulky, but seemed to be heading in the right direction. I had also seen a demo of the OneNote application that was bundled with it, and it seemed to be a perfect fit for the kinds of note taking/mind mapping things I envisioned doing with it.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out as I had hoped. While the hardware was close (at least for its time), the whole Windows Tablet OS experience was just a disaster. As much as I tried, the Windows Tablet approach was simply unworkable for me as a general productivity platform, and I eventually gave up on it.

But I did maintain an appreciation for OneNote – the one bright spot of that experience.

Of course, not too long after that, the iPad came along and was finally able to deliver the tablet experience I had been searching for since the early Palm days. It quickly became a core piece of my productivity toolkit, and from that point, I shifted my focus to finding and integrating the best applications available for it that could integrate with my workflow.

Fast Forward to now…

I have to admit that I was both surprised and excited last week when Microsoft announced that they had finally released a version of OneNote for the iPad. Combining the core OneNote functionality I remembered with the iOS touch interface and iPad form factor seemed like an easy win for Microsoft (and a great way for them to validate their own upcoming tablet efforts). I was really thrilled that they decided to make the port.

Well – at least until I installed it.

A "Functionality Bare" Version of OneNote

What a disappointment.

At the end of the day, there was no technical or experiential reason why Microsoft needed to cripple OneNote for iPad in this way and tie it to their Windows/Office versions. There was only a business reason for doing this. Unfortunately, by trying to develop a product that would please their accountants and investors, they ended up alienating what might be a far more important segment of the marketplace – the early adopters who could help them transition away from their dependency on legacy product lines. I wouldn’t be surprised if this approach ends up becoming a theme that Microsoft adopts with both Windows 8 and their mobile/tablet efforts – deprecating any version of a new product that may threaten one of their franchise revenue streams – effectively undermining their future to try and protect their past.

Ultimately, Microsoft needs to come to terms with the shifts that are already happening in the PC marketplace, namely that desktop computing (and more specifically mouse/keyboard computing) is being supplanted by mobile and embedded computing alternatives, and that high priced OS and application franchises are quickly being eroded by low cost or free alternatives. The more effort Microsoft invests in propping up their old products and unsustainable business models, the less relevant they will ultimately be going forward. It’s time for them to cut the cord with the past, and envision what a post-Windows, post-Office Suite world will look like.

Their customers and competitors already are…

I have had the good fortune to work with some incredible folks over the past 25 years, and to have had the chance to develop products that I was (and still am) really passionate about. To share some of these experiences in the startup space, I have been working on a web video series looking at best practices and emerging trends in early stage company development. This is an incredibly dynamic area, and there should be no shortage of topics to cover.

While I won’t have the first video out until this summer, here are five brief observations on starting up a business that I would like to share now:

1. Get Focused Quickly: It is very easy for great ideas to get totally lost in the process of translating them into actual products. The best way to minimize the risk of that happening is to clearly define the central value you want to deliver to your target audience as early in the design process as possible. Once your zero in on that, you can start to discard any product elements or features that do not directly enhance that central value.

   The goal at this early stage is to develop what is often referred to as a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) – the most basic, essential expression of your product that can be used by a potential client. This is fundamental to getting a rapid product iteration cycle started. The faster you can align your efforts with the needs of the market, the better your odds of success.

   A great example of this kind of focused minimalism in a product can be found in a recently released iOS-based Task Manager called CLEAR (iTunes link). You can get a quick look at it here:

   
   If this video doesn’t show up just refresh the page.

   It does one thing really well without a lot of bells and whistles – even ‘reasonable’ ones – getting in the way. There are definitely some take-aways from this.

2. Build Something People Want: I’m sure everyone went ‘Well Duh! Of Course.’ when they read this, but it is amazing how many times this doesn’t actually happen.The fact that YOU would want to use your product and believe in it passionately doesn’t mean you can build a viable business around it. 

    
   Instinct and experience do play important roles in starting and running a business, but can only get you so far. They can sometimes blind you to new things going on or narrow your perspective of evolving markets. One way to guard against that is to be in a constant dialog with your key users to understand how they perceive your product and the benefits its delivers. If someone is willing to take a chance on using a product from a startup, they are definitely invested in what you are doing. 

   Listen to them. You don’t have to do everything they say, but you need to listen and understand what they are looking for.

   With that said, numbers also matter. You need to think seriously about collecting metrics – both to validate your instinct and feedback as well as to better allocate your time and resources. When you designed your product, it was done with certain assumptions about what was important and how it would be used. Based on that, you should to determine what metrics could be helpful in understanding how successful that design was – both positive and negative – and then find ways to measure them. Most importantly, you need to be able to assess the numbers you do get back without applying a confirmation bias to the way you look at them. Don’t let your ego stop you from making the corrections you need to make to get the product right. The faster you can get alignment with the market, the better your chances of being successful. (I think I said that already…)

3. Measure Everything In Terms Of Time: A science fiction movie came out recently called “In Time.”

    

   

   The premise of the movie was that everyone had a built-in countdown timer that ticked off the minutes they had left in their lives. In this society, time was currency. When people worked, they were paid their salary in extra ‘time’ – longer to live. When they bought things they paid for it with the ‘time’ they had left to live. When they ran out of time, they died.

   And that is a pretty good summary of life in a startup.

   Everything you do costs time. Every feature you decide to add. Every client you work with. Every iteration and refinement cycle you go through. Whatever money you take in – either VC or self funded – simply buys you time to do what you need to do get the product ‘right’. And you should figure that you won’t it right get it right the first few times. The math is simple – the more complex you make something, the more time it will take to do, the more time it will take to iterate on it, and the more iterations you’ll need before you get it right.

   And time will always be in short supply, so think before you do, and then do what you do in the most efficient way you can think of.  It’s about learning enough quickly enough to live another day.

4. Don’t Do It For The Money: If getting rich is your goal, you’d have better odds just working hard to move up the traditional corporate ladder. Start a company because you are passionate about creating something new and committed to making it real. The culture that develops at your company will be a manifestation of this motivation.

    
   If you don’t have a core belief in the importance what you are doing and the positive ways people will want to connect with it, neither will the team you assemble to build it. Without that, it will be hard to convince clients and investors to take a chance on working with you. It will be hard to keep everyone focused and committed during the tough patches that every startup eventually faces. And it will be hard to make the difficult decisions that will need to be made in the course of growing a company.

   You simply can’t fake passion and there is no substitute for having it. You need to start a business for the right reason – and getting rich isn’t it.

5. Be Willing To Ignore Advice: When you start a company, you will get no shortage of advice. There are a lot of very smart, successful entrepreneurs that have done things in certain ways that have worked exceptionally well for them, and they will likely tell you about some specific things you really need be doing if you want to be successful.

   Welcome their advice, but don’t feel obliged to take it.

   What worked in the past won’t necessarily work moving forward. What applies to one industry might not be true of another. Processes and methods that help one company to thrive can stifle another. Approaches that work well in one business culture can fail miserably in a different one.

   Every startup is trying to develop something different, and will need to address their own unique set of challenges. When it comes to advice, its up to you to sift through it all to find the lessons that may have value for your business, and to discard everything else. Don’t worry about offending anyone. The people that will probably end up offering you the best advice will also be the ones that will understand why you might not end up taking it.

    

I’m sure there are a diverse range of opinions on some of the things I’ve written here – these are simply thoughts and extrapolations based on my own experiences and perspectives. I have been strongly influenced by lean methodologies and concepts like continuous delivery, so rapid learning based iteration is foundational to how I approach  this space.  I welcome any feedback or comments you may have, and look forward to exploring these things – and many more – in a lot more detail in the future.

I really love it when corporations look at their marketplace and visualize what it might look like at some point in the future. Corning, the maker of speciality glass and ceramics, has released a pair of videos looking at the array of smart glass surfaces that might one day be part of our daily lives:

There are several technology threads running throughout these videos that are worth noting:

• Touch computing will become the primary means of interacting with technology. Thanks to Apple’s success with the iPhone and iPad, this model of computing has become mainstream, and will likely be one of the dominant influences on technical innovations going forward.
• Purpose built interfaces – both physical and virtual – will be deemphasized in future designs. Functionally adaptive models will become the norm.
• Computing will move from being a distinct activity on specific device to a common activity on every device.
• Social computing will become broadly embedded, with appropriate social elements built into every device we interact with.
• Personalization will become pervasive. Everything we interact with will recognize us and conform to our specific needs and interests.

While not directly demonstrated in the videos, Cloud-based services will become the only viable way of dealing with both the content and context required to make this computing model work. Access to it will need to become standardized and open, allowing every device I own, regardless of manufacturer, to access it completely and securely. Getting past the walled garden ecosystems that are being leveraged today will probably be the most significant challenge to making this model of ‘diffuse computing’ commercially viable.

These types of videos always get my mind racing around different possibilities (and business opportunities!). What’s really exciting is that many of the elements demonstrated here are within reach of the technologies we know and use today – even if the applications being shown are not yet achievable.

If you think back to where the world was technically just a decade ago, it isn’t had to imagine many of the things shown in this video being real a decade into the future.

And that’s an exciting thought…

I came across this video showing some interesting interface elements for navigating through ebooks:

I have been a big fan of ebooks from back in the Rocket eBook days (Anybody remember this device?), and am really excited that the publishing industry seems to have finally reached the tipping point with going to digital. It’s clear that refinements like these will simply accelerate the ebook adoption process, and I love seeing innovation like this taking place in this space.

My current e-reader of choice is the iPad Kindle app. Amazon’s development and continued support of the Kindle has been the critical factor in getting the ebook marketplace to this point. Of course, Apple’s announcement of iBooks Author last week is a sign that things are starting to heat up here and I’m excited about that as well. Clearly, the future is still up for grabs, and there is no shortage of opportunity for creative minds to evolve and shape this space moving forward.

Kudos to the folks at KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence that developed this – it is really well done.

Microsoft has always been able to pull together great demos of pre-released products. Unfortunately, many of the most exiting features from those demos never seem to make it into the released versions of their products. Here is the most recent demo of their upcoming Windows 8 release for CES 2012:

‘Over promising’ isn’t something Microsoft can have happen with the release of Windows 8. Microsoft is playing catch-up on a lot of fronts – especially in the mobile arena – and needs to seriously ‘over deliver’ if they have a chance of grabbing some market share. With Windows 8 not slated to come out until the later half of 2012, there will be a lot of innovation that takes place on both the Android and iOS platforms before it arrives. What they offer will need to standup to comparison with both of these established players on every front: interface, features, stability, and applications.

Not an easy task by any measure.

Microsoft will also have a very small window to make headway and establish credibility in the tablet space. Apple will probably be releasing their iPad 4 (two full generations of the tablet from what is available today) in the beginning of 2013 – grabbing the media spotlight with rumors long before it eventually rolls out.

If what they are demoing here can make it on to lightweight tablets devices with true ‘all day’ battery life and price points starting at or below $500, they have a chance of success – especially if they can leverage their Office franchise as a differentiator.

If instead it turns out to be a bloated OS running on $1000 hardware with a laptop level battery life, they will be dead on arrival.

At this point, my money isn’t on Microsoft.

Samsung just introduced their ‘Transparent LCD Smart Window’ technology at this years CES, and I am really excitedby the potential of it. Here is a video of it in action:

In the same way that the touch experience ended up being different when moving from the iPhone to the iPad, touch on a ‘window’ scale also has it’s own unique attributes. The ‘blinds’ demonstration is a perfect example of the types of applications that could work at this scale. I could see this technology being equally at home in conference rooms, office spaces, or home settings – or even built into counter-tops or coffee tables.

In store settings, it could become an advertiser’s dream, with shop windows and display cases providing up to the second information about special offers, availability, or complimentary products. If that could be matched with personalization from a nearby smartphone, targeted retailing could move in an exciting new direction.

I could also see this become a foundation for augmented reality applications. Imagine a 24″x24″ panel of this that someone could look through as they work on something complex, with technical details overlaying what they are seeing. Combine that with Siri like capabilities for interaction, and you could have a killer commercial tool.

I’m excited to see touch moving beyond phones and tablets, and believe that both the scale and transparency offered by this type of technology can really open the door to a whole new class of applications and innovative uses.

Samsung claims that it will be shipping ‘soon’ – so hopefully we won’t have too much longer to wait.

My knees are in pretty bad shape. In fact, every doctor I’ve worked with over the past 10 years has told me that the only real fix available to me is to have them replaced.

But they always give me this recommendation with the qualifier “at some point” tacked on to it. Despite the difficulties my current condition entails, all of them believe I’m about 10 years too young to have the procedure done now. So instead, as a half step to delay the inevitable, I had knee surgery again last week (my 6th knee operation over the past 15 years) to try and provide some temporary measure of relief.

My reason for sharing this with you isn’t a play for sympathy. What I find so interesting here is the justification doctors have for wanting me to wait. There is no doubt that I would benefit from having this procedure done today. Their reticence instead boils down to a conservative view of the future:

I grew up during the 1960′s, when science established itself as the engine of progress and shaped my view of an unbounded future. With this as motivation, I have spent my entire post-gratuate career developing and commericalizing new technologies in a series of startups, seeing entire industries reinvented and new ones created in ways no one imagined previously.

In these types of creative environments, decisions aren’t made based on what you know can be done today – to do that would marginalize progress. Instead, they are based on what you ‘believe’ you’ll be able to do at a given point in the future. Innovation isn’t simply a happy upside surprise that occasionally interrupts an otherwise slow, predictable march forward. It is the ephemeral, yet paradoxically substantial, foundation that every significant thing you accomplish will ultimately be built upon. Innovation happens through strength of will and the conviction that you can accomplish whatever you set your mind to – even if the necessary details aren’t clear when you begin.

With this as context, having doctors defer taking beneficial steps today based on concerns about limitations that may exist a quarter century into the future seems counter intuitive to me. Believing in innovation isn’t a ticket to be reckless, and I do understand that there are risks involved. That said, it should give us the confidence to move forward with things we see as reasonable, even if we currently lack the clarity of detail we will need at some point in the future to execute on it.

To me, that is what believing in innovation is all about.

I do appreciate that doctors need to balance a range of medical, legal, and business factors that are all significant elements of these types of decisions. My comments here are really meant as a more general call for us to recapture that fundamental belief in our ability to solve the challenges we face and to the capture the opportunities we have in front of us – even when they initially seem overwhelming. We need to view risk in our society less as a yoke of uncertainty that we should avoid, and more as a liberating force of possibility that we should embrace.

This belief is an essential component of building an innovative culture. And it’s what makes America a beacon for so many people throughout the world.

My son recently took the PSAT exam, the first of the many standardized tests he will need to take as part of the acceptance process we have in place for admission to colleges and universities. He is still a sophomore, so this was really just a practice run for process that will kick in to high gear for him next year. There is a whole industry that has built up around taking these exams, with preparatory schools, private coaches and tutors offering students the ‘skills’ they need to score well on these exams.

Performing well on these tests is – in large part – a mater of practice and repetition. The questions have known formats on specific foundational material, with clear strategies on the best ways to approach selecting answers and optimizing guesses. The goal of all of this preparation is to avoid surprises and be able to instinctively play back the most appropriate approach for every type of question on an exam.

And this is really unfortunate…

Finding solutions to the most challenging problems we have will require people that can think creatively, identify previously unseen relationships, and suggest and tear down new models of innovation in a continuous cycle of refinement. We don’t need a generation of graduates who can play back solutions from the past note-for-note. We need people that can improvise on the past, seeing our present world through a different lens, and creating new and astonishing things to take us places we’ve never been before. We need people that are passionate about the course they want to pursue in their lives, and are looking for an opportunity to accomplish something meaningful.

And that has little correlation to being a well trained test taker.

In fairness, most Universities do consider a broader range of criteria in selecting candidates for admission beyond standardized test scores. That said, these “other factors” are now being prepped for in similar ways to the more structured testing models. Many parents are starting to build their children’s “college resumes” while they are still in grade school, making sure their kids are involved in those socially responsible projects and extra-curricular activities they think will help them stand-out on their applications. They bring in coaches for help with writing the necessary essays and handling any interviews as the application process kicks off – in addition to standardized test preparation. All of this is being done to create the most effective packaging of an applicant, regardless of their underlying interests, motivations, or abilities. Everything becomes subservient to just getting that acceptance letter.

With all of that in mind, it is unfortunate that colleges place so much emphasis on these types of screening methods for determining admissions. I simply don’t believe that the current approach can really identify those applicants with highest potential for success – the ones that can most benefit from the opportunities top tier universities can provide.

But with everyone trying to game the system to get a leg up, I not sure that there is any easy fix here. Perhaps the process needs to be less predictable, forcing applications to navigate off script and show how well they can think on their feet. Or maybe it needs to take place over a longer period of time, allowing continuous engagement with students throughout their high school years. This could help Universities see past any well-constructed artifices and really get to know the students that would like to go there.

While I am not optimistic that things will change any time soon, I think it would benefit us to start a discussion around this topic as part of the current national debate we are having about the future of our educational system. We need to find better ways to identify and nurture those individuals with the real potential to impact the fields they are passionate about.

If admission to our advanced educational institutions simply becomes a ticket to making a lot of money, we will end up squandering the true potential of a whole generation.

In any ecosystem, there is a natural resistance to change. From simple familiarity to structural interdependencies, many elements converge to support the existence of the status quo. That doesn’t mean that the status quo is ideal or even good – simply that the cost of changing out of that state is more expensive in some aggregate way than the cost of remaining there.

This ‘cost of change’ creates a form of static friction in the system, allowing it to continue in it’s current state even when pressure for change exists. But like at the fault lines that define the boundaries between the continental plates of our planet, this pressure for change will continue to build up until it reaches a level that can no longer be resisted. When that point arrives, the built up pressure gets released in a single, significant shift (an ‘earthquake’ event) that ushers in change – producing a period of instability as the system searches for a new state of equilibrium. This is an unavoidable process in any dynamic, living environment – be it economies, technologies, political systems, or even cultures.

And for those that need to go through these shifts, it can be very scary and painful.

I’ve been thinking about all of this in the context of two key forces that exist in most ecosystems – regulation and innovation. Regulation is typically put in place to ‘raise the cost’ of the system moving in certain directions. Innovation, by contrast, attempts to ‘lower the cost’ of the system in moving in certain directions. While both of them try to influence what the system should look like in a future state, they are fundamentally different in nature and intent.

Regulation can take two forms – proscriptions and mandates. Regulatory proscriptions artificially raise the cost of certain actions through the implementation of penalties. For example, fines can be imposed, businesses licenses revoked, taxes levied, or even people locked up if they try to do certain things that are no longer ‘allowed’. Regulatory mandates can impose similar penalties if certain specific actions are NOT taken, forcing activity to take place that would otherwise not happen on it’s own. Sometime, regulatory mandates will eschew penalties to take the form of incentives – rewarding certain actions by artificially lowering the cost of the system moving in a particular direction.

The whole premise for creating regulations is a belief that we can understand enough about a desired future state to formulate an optimal plan to get there. Because of this, the broader or more far reaching a regulation is, the harder it will be to get right. The more complex an ecosystem is, the harder it will be to change or influence predictably.

What makes innovation different from regulation is that the innovator, unlike the regulator, doesn’t get to impose their view of the ‘best future’ path on the system they operate in. Instead, they need to offer something new and compelling enough that it can lure people away from the status quo. They constantly need to compete with other visions of the future – other potential options that are being offered. This forces them to continuously adapt and improve what they offer, or to drop out of the ‘selection process’.

In an innovation driven system, bad ideas don’t last long. The costs and the benefits of every path tend to be exposed early, and choices made at one point can constantly be reassesed against new alternatives being offered and adjustments made. Nothing is ‘locked in’, lending an efficiency to the process that biases it to positive outcomes.

Regulation, on the other hand, doesn’t provide anywhere near the same clarity. Since regulations aren’t about choices, their benefits can only be measured against the hypothetical end state they were implemented to avoid (‘Millions would have lost their jobs if we hadn’t done XYZ…”). There isn’t an actual alternative path their effectiveness can be measured against, allowing regulators justify them against theoretical extrapolations of past conditions that normally assume nothing else in the system would have changed to provide a different, better outcome. The only time a regulation typically gets challenged is when the damage it does – the only real measurable cost of a regulation – clearly outweighs the perceived benefits of keeping it in place. This biases regulation to negative outcomes.

My point here isn’t that all regulation is bad and all innovation is good – just that it is easier to identify and correct bad innovations than it is to identify and correct bad regulations. Innovations need to prove they are better before being adopted, and are constantly challenged by new ideas moving forward. Once passed, regulations are not normally challenged, and usually need to reach a point where they are demonstrably bad before being thrown out.

This means that regulations tend to create a status quo that is highly resistant to change, making the inevitable dislocations extremely painful when they finally arrive. Innovations tend to reduce the strength of the status quo, allowing change to happen on a more continual, ‘just in time’ basis.

Both have their place, but I strongly believe we need to be looking to innovation as the defining component of our path to a better future.

FOCUS…

It’s one of the things that can give small startups an edge when they compete against bigger companies. And while focus on an aggregate corporate level is definitely an important piece of this, the real ‘force multiplier’ I’m thinking about here is the focus that takes place on an individual level.

Startups tend to be driven by survival. They don’t take their own existence for granted. Every individual in a startup recognizes that they play a role in their company’s ultimate success (or failure). More importantly, they also understand where in the company they need to focus their abilities – the specific things they need to concentrate their efforts on – to help make the overall mission a success.

In contrast, large organizations simply take their existence as a given. The company is perceived to exist independent and decoupled from the day to day actions of its employees. Most people there don’t feel any direct connection between their own personal efforts and the success of the overall business. They operate in a complex ecosystem where success or failure is hard to associate with any specific cause and effect – much less with the actions of any specific individuals.

Lacking any meaningful link to the overall well being of their organization, most people – on both the individual and group level – begin to focus more on their own parochial success within the larger organizational structure. Engagement is no longer around what is best for the company in the context of the overall market and opportunity. It is now around what is best for me as an individual in the context of the overall company.

Unfortunately, this is a completely rational way for people to act given that type of environment. Motivated people feel the need to compete and win. Absent a way to realize that in the market, it is only logical for this competitive need to transfer inward to their peers within the company.

This is why strong political climates seem to exist at most large companies. Walls get put up, allies and competitors begin forming, and compromises start to abound. Organizational maps end looking more geopolitical than operational, and decision making starts to take that in to account. Ultimately, their size advantages end up getting erased by in-fighting and inefficiencies, creating huge distractions to everyone simply trying to get the job done.

And it ends up getting reflected in what they are able to produce.

This is also why so many small companies seem able to out innovate and out execute much larger competitors. Its focus that gives them that power.

I find Sir Ken Robinson a breath of fresh air on the whole topic of educating the next generation. He is able to move beyond the narrow debates taking place in political circles to challenge the entire premise of our current educational structure. If you haven’t heard of him before, he is one of the thinkers you should have on your radar.

Here is an excellent animation done on top of one of his talks.

If the future of education is at all interesting to you, its worth your time to watch this.

A friend of mine sent me this picture of a math problem and it’s solution:

I though it was a great (and very funny) example of giving someone what they are asking for instead of what they really want.

Sadly, this happens quite a lot in the technology space. People often ask for something to be added or changed in a device or program with only a superficial understanding of the implications of their request. As engineers or designers, the challenge for us is to not simply come back to them with the “Here it is” solution, but to understand the context of their request and try to give them what they really want.

And that requires real engagement and iteration:

• What problem are they REALLY trying to solve with a given request?
• What will different solutions cost them in terms of complexity and usability?
• How should it work across the different platforms they may want to use it on?
• Is this a unique requirement or something that needs broader feedback?

All of this is as much a part of engineering a solution as any of the technical details needed to implement it. Without having a deep understanding of both their goals and their workflow, delivering a truly successful solution to a client will be nearly impossible. Engineering is ultimately about solving problems without creating too many new ones. And that involves more than just an understanding of technology.

Like doctors who have taken the Hippocratic Oath, our first duty to the people we try to help should be “Do no harm.”

For those who have wondered, I am still here and alive…

The past four months have been incredibly busy for me. I have been consumed by a project at work, and barely seem to have enough free cycles for sleep anymore.

One of the things that has suffered with all of this is my blogging. I have been MIA for the last couple of months, and only did a few posts in the months before.

I really want to thank all of you for sticking with me during this unplanned hiatus. I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and hope that I can resume regular blogging soon.

I miss it tremendously.

I’ve been asked many times about the best way to travel abroad with an iPhone without being hit at the end of the month with a jaw-dropping bill. Probably the best way to do this is to jailbreak your iPhone so it is no longer locked to AT&T. An unlock iPhone will let you use prepaid SIM cards you can purchase from local carriers – some even with data plans – giving you the full benefits of your iPhone wherever you travel.

The catch here is that you need to be willing to jailbreak your iPhone and deal with life outside the “safetynet” of the Apple ecosystem. Though the risk of problems with jailbreaking is low and the benefits are real, I made the personal decision a long time ago not to jailbreak my iPhone. I have enough technical complexity in my life, and just didn’t want to deal with another device requiring special attention. The entire iPhone ecosystem has worked really well for me, and I’ve never felt limited by the standard capabilities offered by Apple – except, of course, for the phone being carrier locked.

So can those of us with un-jailbroken iphones still make use of them abroad? Absolutely!

Here is a quick guide to maximizing your iPhone outside of the US:

1. Unless you have money to burn, turn off data roaming on your iPhone. This will prevent it from connecting to data network of the local carriers in the country you are in – and save you potentially thousands of dollars in data roaming charges.

   Just go into SETTINGS->GENERAL->NETWORK and make sure that Data Roaming is set to off:

   

   If you really want to be certain that you won’t be pulling data, you can also turn off the Cellular Data option above it.

2. If you don’t already have an account, you now want to sign up for Skype. Go to www.skype.com and click on the Join Skype button:
   

   It will give you a basic form to fill out to get your FREE Skype account:
   

   Once you have your Skype account set up, just log in to the site and you’re ready for the next step.

3. Next, you need to buy Skype credits. For pennies a minute, Skype will allow you to place calls to actual phone numbers – not just other Skype users. This ends up being a tiny fraction of what any carrier would normally charge.
   

   For a recent week long business trip I took to Minsk, I ordered $20 worth of credits. I ended up making about 3 hours worth of calls but burned through less than $10 in credits. Skype absolutely is the most cost effective way to call people globally.

4. If you would also like people to be able to call you via Skype from a regular phone, you can order what they call an Online Number. You can pick numbers local to any of 25 countries. I have a United States based Online Number from New York City, so anyone that has called me from there only needed to pay local toll charges – even when I was in Belarus.

   It costs about $60 a year to have an Online Number. Go in to your account details on Skype, and you will see the option to sign up for it:

   

5. The next step is making all of this available on your iPhone.
   
   
   With that all set up, you now need to install the Skype application on your iPhone. Just go to the App Store on your iPhone, search for Skype. Select the Skype application and click FREE to get it:
   

   The Skype application interface looks very similar to the standard phone interface on the iPhone and works in pretty much the same way:
   

So what’s the downside with this approach?

Skype requires that your iPhone be connected to the internet, and with Data Roaming disabled, that means you’ll need to be connected via a wireless hotspot. In most places you visit, there are many options available for this. Almost every hotel will have it available for guests, and many restaurants and coffee shops provide it for free. A useful resource for finding hotspots globally is a site called Hotspot Locations. You just need to choose a country and city, and it will give you a list of places there that offer wireless access. Make sure you pick several alternative locations in case certain ones are no longer available.

Another useful tip to keep in mind is that text messages can be sent and received even outside of hot spots. They will typically cost $.50-$1 per message, but can be a useful backup way of communicating when a hotspot isn’t available.

What I’ve outlined here is essentially what I use myself when traveling abroad. If any of you road warriors out there have other suggestions for world traveling iPhone users, just leave them in the comments.

One of the things that has been keeping me so busy recently is the release of our new iPad app – Curator HD. Curator HD is the first full featured curation application for the iPad, combining a great feed reader with commenting and sharing options for social channels, email, and even custom newsletters. It also allows for the creation of folders to store and organize stories that you might not be ready to share yet.

I put together a video overview of Curator HD, both to introduce it to the market and to help people get started using it:

Curator HD is available now for FREE in the productivity section of the iTune App store.

Just click here to download.

Microsoft’s has been struggling for several years to unhook their mobile strategy from their previous “Windows Mobile” initiative, and effectively reinvent their footprint in this space. This week, they took what I hope is just a first step down a new mobile path with the launch of Windows Phone 7.

Unlike Apple’s iPhone or most of the Android phones I’ve seen, Windows Phone 7 is not an “App Centric” device. It presents an interface built around ‘information tiles’ that provide a composite/mosaic view of the things that are going on around you. The following video offers a good overview of this design:

While I applaud Microsoft for actually trying to forge their own path in this space, I do have several concerns about the approach they have taken:

• Easy access to applications is an important aspect of mobile computing. In the mobile world, applications are replacing generalized search for many uses, and easy access to both productivity and entertainment tools is important to many people. In its current ‘first release’ version, Windows Phone 7 seems to provide a less direct way for people to access its applications – a real limitation in my opinion.
• Having used the iPad since it first came on the market, I can attest to the importance of the tablet form factor to mobile productivity. While I have no doubt that Microsoft understands this as well as anybody, I am not sure they are willing to abandon their Windows based focused in going after this market. I have yet to hear any mention of a “Windows Slate 7″ version of this platform in the works, which concerns me. The mobile and full size computing experiences are fundamentally distinct, and Microsoft’s entire mobile strategy should be built around a single mobile-centric OS platform – not a stripped down Windows hybrid. We’ll need to see where Microsoft and it’s hardware partners go with this.
• As Apple has shown, success in mobile requires not just great software and hardware, but the evolution of an entire ecosystem to support it. This is not something Microsoft can simply farm out to their hardware partners. They need to own it and focus on it. Unfortunately, this is not an area that Microsoft hasn’t been strong in historically, and I haven’t gotten a clear picture of their plan for developing this.

I am looking forward to seeing how Microsoft evolves this platform. There are clearly some well thought out aspects to Windows Phone 7 that are not (yet) available on competing platforms, and also some parts that seem to have received a lot less attention. That said, you really can’t judge what the ultimate impact of Phone 7 may be based on what we are seeing now. What will matter is how quickly Microsoft evolves the platform over the next year, and the strength of the ecosystem they are able to build around it.

For Microsoft’s long term prospects, this is far more important than the release of Windows 7. The success or failure of the Windows Phone 7 platform will define the impact Microsoft gets to have on the next major generation of personal computing.

It wasn’t that long ago that most of the computer technology used by people was provided by their employers. It started out being desktop systems physically located at their offices. Everything installed on these computers was work related. They connected to corporate services via an internal network, and accessed the internet in a controlled way through corporate firewalls.

As the workplace became more distributed and mobile, computing shifted over more to laptops. Since these systems were with people all the time, they started to get used for both work and personal things. Access to the internet became open, with people connecting via their home networks and public hot spots. To accommodate these mobile workers, internal corporate systems started shifting to browser based interfaces, letting them access these systems via secure connections back to the corporate network. Many corporations also supplied phones to these mobile workers – typically RIM Blackberries – to let them make calls and access email. In total, it was a fairly complete set of corporate sponsored tools.

But then a few interesting things happened:

• Laptop prices dropped dramatically, fueled in part by the popularity of very low cost netbooks.
• Apple introduced the iPhone and AppStore.
• Social networking tools became a popular way to communicate.
• Free, cloud based services expanded the range of capabilities available to people.

As laptop prices fell, people started to purchase their own systems to use. Some wanted to use MacBooks instead of corporate provided windows systems. Others wanted systems that had specific features or form factors not offered by their organizations. Instead of finding ways to squeeze the applications and services they personally wanted onto the systems supplied by their companies, these users flipped the model – looking at ways to integrate what they needed to do for work onto their personal systems.

The introduction of the iPhone continued the push away from corporate sponsored systems. The iPhone was the first mobile phone to offer a real browser, and people quickly gravitated to the promise of having the real internet available on something they could slip in their pocket. Despite little initial interest by IT departments to support the iPhone, people simply bought their own and used them for both work and personal needs. The introduction of the App Store a year later cemented the iPhone as a true mobile productivity platform, making it the smartphone everyone wanted to have.

Along side these developments, social networking started to grow in importance as a viable channel for people to communicate across. This led to more sophisticated social applications appearing – both on mobile platforms as well as PC’s – making social networking a practical tool for professional users as well as consumers. However, outside of cost saving tools like Skype, corporations have typically been slow to bring social applications into the sponsored fold.

Also during this period, cloud based applications started growing in both popularity and sophistication. Beyond the free emails services that had been popular for many years, this generation of cloud based services covered everything from comprehensive office productivity applications to services like CRM systems, cloud based disk storage, and even cloud hosted databases. Most were free or very low cost, and didn’t require technical sophistication on the part of users.

Collectively, these developments have had a real impact on the way employees view their corporate IT services, and where their expectations are now set.

People can now afford to buy their own equipment, and are comfortable using all of these tools on their own. There are now free or inexpensive applications and services available to these people that cover all the capabilities of their traditionally IT sponsored equivalents. There are also applications that people use on their own – like social networking – that aren’t yet being considered by most organizations.

In short, many people are now able to become their own IT providers, leveraging only a limited set of capabilities that are uniquely available from their employers. This represents a real shift in the ‘balance of power’ between users and their IT groups, and fundamentally blurs the role and mission of many corporate IT departments. Without acknowledging and adapting to the realities of this new environment, traditional IT departments run the risk of becoming irrelevant – or even worse, a liability to their organizations.

I find the tools most social networks give you to share with your contacts to be fairly primitive. They typically force you to explicitly organize people into a flat set of groups, and then use those groups as the granular basis for all of your sharing decisions within the network. This can be useful for interacting with groups that mirror actual real world groups (eg – family, coworkers, teammates), where a person’s membership in the real world group is the reason for sharing with them. However, I think it falls short for sharing around less rigid associations like interests or skills – the exact things I find be most valuable in my ‘real world’ relationships.

To better address this, I would like to see social networks offer tools for sharing that are based around taxonomies of attributes in addition to the typical ‘flat groups’ model. Conceptually, this approach would assign attributes to individuals in my network and share any content I post that I tag with a matching attribute. My posts could still be constrained to more structured groups like ‘Family’ or ‘Friends’, but they would end up being better targeted to just the members of those groups that would most likely have an interest.

The challenge with this approach is its complexity. A simple rule of thumb is that the more effort and understanding that’s required to use a feature, the less likely it is to be used. To have any chance of being successful, the ‘heavy lifting’ required to configure a taxonomy like this would need to be automated; letting individuals tune it over time.

The first step would be having individuals ‘self describe’ – defining the things they are interested in sharing around. The network could make a pass based on an automated classification of their posts and the content they read and link to. A user could then make any manual adjustments they wanted to directly, but could also train the system based on the content they see. By tagging things as either interesting or not, the platform should be able to statistically analyze the content and use it to tune their user profile.

The next step would be automated tagging of content that gets posted or linked to. This tagging can be based on the content itself, but tuned by the profile of the person posting it. There are well-understood and highly efficient methods for doing this type of analysis.

In this model, the ‘flat groups’ would still allow a poster to define the total audience they want to make something available to. However, the tagging and self-description then become the targeting mechanism to route it to just those members in the audience that would have an interest in it.

A multifaceted approach to sharing no longer requires the poster to know who in their network might be interested in something they post. By decoupling these two aspects, posters could share more broadly knowing they wont be spamming their network, and the value of an individual’s network can be preserved even at larger scale.

Networks built around information sharing will continue to grow in importance – both in personal and professional settings. I believe we are just at the early stages of this model of collaboration, and automated classification will play a central role in shaping it’s evolution.

This is a topic I’d like to explore a lot more of in future posts…

Back in the late 1990′s, the internet was starting to blow up into something big. Tiny companies with no revenue – but outsized ambition and fanciful business plans – started going public with astonishing valuations. More established businesses, looking on with envy, made getting on the web in some form a strategic mandate.

In those heady days, any company that wanted to be perceived as ‘hip’ started forming a digital division to manage their web presence, and advertising agencies rushed to form web consultancies to help them. Billions of dollars were spent setting up new ‘online’ divisions. It didn’t matter if what they did on the web really served a business goal – or even if had anything to do with the business they were in. It was more about flash than substance, and being digital was a virtue in and of itself. Everyone involved had a real sense of the major shift that was taking place, and no one wanted to miss out or be left behind. Even though so much of what was being done then was just bad business, it didn’t seem to matter.

At least until the crash of 2000 gave everyone a new perspective on things.

After that wake up call, businesses started reevaluating their approach to the web. It stopped being the ‘new thing’ and started becoming another tool – albeit an important one – in the suite of tools they used to service customers. Being digital shifted away from building a walled off silo of technical coolness, over to providing the technical foundation needed to support an organization’s overall business strategy. It was a tough way to learn the lesson, but the tech bubble collapse was – in retrospect – a positive turning point in the development and maturity of the commercial internet.

Unfortunately, history seems to be repeating itself in the mobile space.

Mobile is the new pillar of technical coolness. Companies are rushing to get their iPhone apps developed and approved. They are touting their ‘mobile strategies’ and setting up mobile groups to let them take advantage of this new channel. The sense of needing to be on a handset is everywhere. So many of the mobile apps being developed by businesses are poorly designed and executed, lacking the substance needed to make them valuable. But that doesn’t seem to matter because businesses are once again afraid of being left behind in the rush. Being mobile is good – no matter how it gets done.

Like the internet, mobile can be an incredibly important business asset – but only if its adopted in a rational way. Businesses need to think clearly about how and where their services can benefit from a mobile connection with their clients. They won’t win by simply showing up for the party – they need to bring something to it with real value. Mobile, like the internet, needs to become a foundational component of a fully considered business strategy – not just an expensive checkbox on a list of cool features and capabilities to deploy.

Lets hope we don’t need the ‘mobile bubble’ to burst before businesses start to see the connection.