Thoughts around innovation

Here are some ideas I have been playing around with that I thought might be of interest to anyone trying to build a new product or website:

Always focus on the tasks users are trying to accomplish, not the functions of the product or services currently being used. It makes no sense to build a site framed under the premise that you are trying to enter the social networking space or that you are trying to build a better facebook. You have to think about the tasks that people undertake on such sites (sharing photos with friends, finding long lost friends, etc) and find a way to make that task better.

Making a task “better” means making it faster, in fewer steps or cheaper. If users take pics on their mobile, then sync the phone with their computer and then upload the picture from the desktop to the social network, having a one click button that posts the image directly from the phone makes the task of sharing pictures easier and hence better.

Not all innovation opportunities are created equal. One way of thinking of the iPod is as a device that helps people carry with them as much music as possible. The main tasks that the iPod does for you are (a) help you mobilize your current music library easily, (b) allows you to store a lot of music in a small mobile device and (c) provides you with the navigation tools to find the songs you want as fast and as easy as possible. Now, if you ask someone how important memory is as a feature users are likely to say 10 out of 10. But if you ask them how satisfied they are with the current memory offer, they might say 8 out of 10. An iPod killer with 1 terabyte of memory is not really a game changer; saying memory is important does not equal saying that the more memory, the better.

The fewer the tasks you differentiate by, the better. Explaining a user what your product or site does is very difficult. You understand it, your investors understand it, but users are far less patient. Moreover, even if users understand it, they are very difficult group of people to impress (very few people  said WOW! when they went to twitter for the first time… most of us needed the critical mass of tweet streams to jump on board). If you want to have a chance at users remembering your product or site, pick one feature or task you are helping users with and make sure you make it significantly easier to do.

Some recommended reading:

Something Really New: Three Simple Steps to Creating Truly Innovative Products
by Denis J. Hauptly

What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

by Anthony Ulwick

First look at Reframeit (and how it can ease information overload on comments)

Reframeit , in their own words,  is “a browser extension that lets you comment right next to any text or image that you find on the web”.   Comments on news sites and blogs are clearly set up in an inefficient way.  By being placed at the end of the whole text, the comments either revolve around the main idea or if they dwell on different issues the comments quickly turn into a set of silo and discontinued discussions.
Threaded comments are a way of dealing with this issue, allowing commentators to set aside sub conversations. Yet, the individual who makes the comment pivots the conversation and if someone does not agree with the way the issue has been framed she or he may very well start another “pocket” of comments which can in effect be quite similar to the first.
Reframeit does the trick with a Firefox extension allowing you to comment on precise sections of the text.  This way the discussion revolves around specific sets of content. In a way, it works like crowd sourced notes on a text.  Image Reframeit integrated with the Kindle; you could for example have your whole class make notes on a given textbook.
In short, Reframeit allows us to better contribute and digest the stream of comments that adds up to the overloaded information available on the Web. There is already more to read that we can have; adding up the comments made on top of that enormous mass of text only increases the information overload. Hence, tackling information overload on the comments is both reasonable as well as useful.
One of the lessons reaffirmed with the Reframeit experience is that we are going to have to come up with innovative user interfaces to deal with the information overload.  I am hesitant as to how far browser extensions can take us, but it is clearly worth the try.

Excerpts and the new online news ecosystem

I recently read a interesting article on the nyt titled “Copyright Challenge for Sites That Excerpt”. Here are what I found to be the ideas of the article:

Generally, the excerpts have been considered legal, and for years they have been welcomed by major media companies, which were happy to receive links and pass-along traffic from the swarm of Web sites that regurgitate their news and information.

But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content

“A lot of news organizations are saying, ‘We’re not willing to accept the tiny fraction of a penny that we get from the page views that these links are sending in,’ ” said Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard

The legal disputes are emblematic of a larger question that has emerged from the Internet’s link economy. The editors of many Web sites, including ones operated by the Times Company, post excerpts from competitors’ content from time to time. At what point does excerpting from an article become illegal copying?

After reading it I remained wondering if people reading aggregated excerpts at the Huffington Post are getting their news there instead that on the New York Times and whether Ariana Hufington could do without the New York Times (that is considering she is indeed undermining the economic foundations of traditional news papers and traditional – data gathering, fact checkers – journalist).

To me it does not makes sense to do without the aggregated excerpts so  the question is what we can do to either make the New York Times sustainable under these new environment  or at least make the “traditional journalists” viable under these new conditions.
I will be getting my head around these issues.

Original article here

Seth Godin’s Five pillars of success

Here are the five pillars of success according to Seth Godin:

The five pillars of success

1. See (really see) what’s possible
2. Know specifically what you want to achieve
3. Make good decisions
4. Understand the tactics to get things done and to change minds
5. Earn the trust and respect of the people around you

- Original post

The first point is tricky: if you indeed know what’s possible and what’s not, you will have a hard time innovating. If you don’t have a clue as to what is possible and what’s not, than the odds are you will end up holding to a thin branch at the edge of a 10 story building high cliff. So, what should we take away from this first point? Well, if you are looking to infuse technological innovation into a specific industry, you better know darn well the limits of technology.  Is the tools you use that you need to understand and master. You need to know how to use them and envision how it can affect the world around you.

The added value of a Government API

I just finished reading a great article on The Atlantic regarding what they call the
iGov. Here is what I understood are the three key benefits of having a government agency using an API.

• Multiply the way data can be processed and presented to the public, increasing accountability, transparency while at the same time reducing operational cost for the agencies. An API allows any programmer to “grab that data and slice it, dice it, chart it, graph it, map it, or mash it up with new feeds”.
• Data is recorded and stored in a way that anticipates public use. “Data sharing is no longer an afterthought” says Greg Elin from the Sunlight foundation.
• It encourages agencies to release data in real time rather than on periodical reports
• I would also add that by integrating the need to share the information in the process of collecting and storing the data, governmental agencies themselves make it easier to communicate with each other.

Geek joke of the day

Helpdesk: Double click on “My Computer”
User: I can’t see your computer.
Helpdesk: No, double click on “My Computer” on your computer.
User: Huh?
Helpdesk: There is an icon on your computer labeled “My Computer”. Double click on it.
User: What’s your computer doing on mine?

A venezuelan blog on the 2008 Weblog Awards

For  the 2008 Weblog Awards the judges have nominated for the best Latino, Caribbean or South American blog a Venezuelan blog called Dolar Paralelo that records the musings of the currency exchange in Venezuela.  I say we support a fellow venezuelan, vote here!

The New Work Ethics

Lifehacker and Amy Leblanc comment on this interesting post regarding the new  work ethics by Mike Elgan found on Internet News: http://www.internetnews.com/commentary/print.php/3793561
Quoted @ Lifehacker:

A person who works six hours a day but with total focus has an enormous advantage over a 12-hour-per-day workaholic who’s “multi-tasking” all day, answering every phone call, constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, and indulging every interruption. It’s time we upgraded our work ethic for the age we’re living in, not our grandparents’ age. Hard work is still a virtue, but now takes a distant second place to the new determinant of success or failure in the age of Internet distractions: Control of attention. Hard work is dead. Are you paying attention?

via – http://lifehacker.com/5121914/controlling-your-attention-is-the-new-work-ethic

Quoted @Amy Leblanc

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book called “Outliers,” made a statement as profound as it was accurate:

Control of attention is the ultimate individual power

via (linked at lifehacker) – http://www.amyleblanc.com/2008/12/the-new-work-ethic-just-paying-attention

5 web services that left a mark on 2008

Here is a list of 5 services I either discovered or start using this year and that I wish I had invented or been a part of their founding team:

1. The Hype Machine: Music blog are the best venue to discover new music. Hypem aggregates those blogs, plays you the music they suggest and plays around with the gathered data in useful ways. Their biz model is pretty straight forward: they charge a referral fee for suggesting you new music (the radio industry should take note). Why I like it: simple, game changing and clear monetization strategy. My suggestions for 2009: FB app/ FB connect.
2. Rescue Time: Tracks you activity at the desktop and on the web and seemingly categorizes the sites and applications to brake down activities into core tasks (e.g.; communications, social networks, news, design, programming, etc).  Is very difficult to assess the actual productivity of multitasking: work is spread and goals are approached in small increments of effort and attention. Is crucial to assess how much time is being wasted. Rescue Time also provides several ways to organize and play around with the data to optimize your use of time. ). Why I like it: simple and useful tool to combat Information Overload  which is  the main backslash of the current state of technology and the “now” culture . My suggestions for 2009: Share data on top of social graph (compare computer/desktop usage with other users like me –my age, my profession, etc-) and integrate with mobile (we spent significant amount of time talking, texting and browsing on the mobile).
3. Dropbox: Share desktop files. Why I like it: It works flawlessly and  it takes away two or three clicks from sharing files via email or IM. Also, is idiot proof. Finally, it also serves as a nice file backup solution. My suggestions for 2009: Log of document modifications.
4. Evernote: Take notes, snippets and even pictures of thing you write or see and store them and organize them on Evernote. “Remember everything” is their motto. An interesting article (or as section of it) online, something you read on a book or a note taken at the back of a napkin can all be centralized and organized at evernote. Their image to text conversion technology is beyond impressive. It is in effect an alternative memory. Why I like it: Kick ass image to text technology, fluid multi platform integration (including mobile) and perhaps the best solution out there to expand the otherwise information overloaded clutter memory. My suggestions for 2009: Generate auto tags from the text, semantically organize those tags and build a new Wikipedia from meaningful sections of content and quotes (on the other hand…I might just do that myself )
5. Covestor: Share your stock market trades. As simple as that but it makes all the sense in the world.  I just  started using it but I  have been looking at the site for a long long time. Other services like Mint.com and other personal finance solutions where you get not only to save your data but also compare it are of great value because they can help you make more money and spend less. They teach you something.   Why I like it: Gives you access to smarter investors and hence it helps you make money. My suggestions for 2009: Not a long time  user so can really comment on it. Perhaps there is a place here to make a note for myself and remind me to start using it more in 2009.

There are two common threads on these companies: info aggregation and re distribution and information overload solutions. Also, they all have clean and easy to use UI.

Illicit by Moises Naim

I just finished reading Illicit by Moises Naim, a fellow Venezuelan. I am in a semi vacation mood so I don’t have the necessary inertia to comment as I would like on what I found to be an extraordinary book written with detailed research and solid arguments. So, I Will just point out to what I thought where the key findings of his work:

• Illicit commerce and trade is massive and global. It may well account to 10% of the global GDP and in any given transaction there might be involved several agents from countries in each of the continents.

• In the old  days those who controlled production and retail where the kings.  Today the money is in transport, logistics and finance/money laundry.

• · Those in transport, logistics and finance/money laundry will work with any industry: today they can move human organs, tomorrow cocaine and the next sex slaves.

• The regular guy is now more prone to be involved in Illicit businesses that he or she would like to think, and this for at least two reasons:

o What we consider more “soft” forms of illicit commerce (say copyright infringement by buying “pirate” CDs) are in effect form of payment and intertwine merchandise with slaves and weapons used for terrorism. I was impressed to learn that most terrorist cells get by selling “burned” CDs.

o Illicit merchandise travels along side licit goods and is sold and bough by legal business. As a case the author points to Malaga where a %1600 increase in business activity in the last 5 years is allegedly due to money laundry.

• Illicit business cannot prosper without the complacency of corrupt government and government officials. The real, biggest enemy threatening national sovereignty and national interests are not other states but rather criminal networks and organizations. To a significant extent, other nation states are a threat in as much they have been captured by or a part of illicit commerce organizations.

• The key differentiators between criminal organizations and governments seem to be:

o Criminal organizations are networks; governments are centralized and hierarchical.

o Criminal organizations have a wider and deeper adoption of new technologies.

• Among the author’s more prominent recommendations I found the re organization of government, the de-criminalization of specific illicit goods and the focus on the demand side of the equation the more insightful.