kip/bot/blog

IBM recently rolled out a customer intelligence appliance (optimized for price and analytics) for retailers struggling with merging its large to big data. Interesting to me for three reasons: 1) creating an appliance for retailers of many sizes shows a big commitment to a hardware/software/consulting mix in the space; 2) IBM’s attempt to jazz it up and make it friendlier, and most interesting 3):

“70 percent of a customer’s first interaction with a product or service takes place online,”

Here is why we need to move into a-centric, non-linear, emergent thinking for customer purchase behaviors. For more than 2/3 of product awareness moments, a digital touchpoint will be the first go/no-go point or consider/shunt out of memory moment for a consumer.

The Future Belongs to the Curious from Skillshare on Vimeo.

From Clickz piece commenting on year end predictions, some unsurprising but potent stats:

‘Nuf said.

If you simply try Amazon’s revived mobile app during the holiday, Amazon will give you a $5 gift certificate at Amazon. That’s their holiday advertisement campaign.

Dominos introduced a new line of “artisan” pizza, and the ad they ran was this:

Really an anti-ad, hilariously spoofing advertising tropes while offering a discount so people would try the product.

eBay has come out of its years-advertising silence with this spot:

Why did they break the silence and run ads? To use TV for what it does best: announce something new that might not immediately be word-of-mouth. They re-designed their site, they have a mobile app, and they want to remind (or tell) people that eBay sells new stuff as well.

New ways of using (or not using) TV.

Nearly every product (or brand supporting it) lives in a category that a small, but influential, group of people wants to pursue with some extra zeal. For sports fans, fantasy sports allows a whole extra level of geeking out. For sports participants, it’s possible to geek out on equipment, training regimens, techniques, diet. For anything high price, of high consideration, or with moving parts, it’s possible to geek out.

SO prevalent is the nerdification of everything, that a more useful way of defining influencer might be: a person who geeks out in your product’s category.

GE has a new contest, inviting someone to fly out to the UK, visit one of GE’s jet engine facilities. It’s a free trip, a cool visit to see mind-blowing stuff (regardless of how you may feel about GE, especially if you went to college in the 1980s), and some exposure. To enter, you have to take some instagram pics that demonstrate the four global dimensions of GE’s work: moving (transportation), caring (health), powering (solar, wind, ocean, and yes, coal), and building (building). While these efforts are described as “turning innovative GE technology into instagram art”, they do lots of other things: 1) impress people with the complexity and magnitude of what GE does; 2) add cool factor to the work of engineers; 3) create what a client of mine used to call “party points” – data that people can drop as little conversation nuggets; and 4) focus outsiders on the innovation and invention happening at GE.

I had a chance to pitch GE once at a former agency. While I was one of those political activists in the 80′s who protested GE’s participation in Star Wars, I was so enamored of the transformative power of what they do (see their tidal power generators, for one example), that I was dying to get on the job. It was one of the few pitches that designers begged to be on the pitch. This is a different kind of cool and cultural appeal.

I’m into the sad part of Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs and have collected nearly a dozen new(ish) (to me, anyway) insights into technology, design, the intersection of liberal arts and science that are worth blogging about.

The first one highlights the engineer side of Jobs. It’s almost a reflex to praise his taste, passion for design, and drive for perfection. That reflex has made our view of him much too narrow. If the lesson you take from Jobs is heightened taste and higher standards, you could very easily turn into an unrealistic, bullying manager/leader – going into meetings saying “not good enough!”, pushing people to do impossible things, or mouthing platitudes that are inactionable by the people who need to do the work. Having vision while adhering to the laws of physics is a much harder job, and requires more than a passion for design.

While working the Macintosh, Jobs pushed hard for a faster boot time. People born before Reagan was President will remember why this was an important issue. In the early days of the PC, you could hit the power switch on your machine, go make a cup of coffee, let it cool, finish it and scan the front page of the paper before you could actually use the thing. Getting to a faster boot-up time would remove one of the dreary aspects of computing.

Jobs was pushing one of his engineers to shave ten seconds off of the boot time. When the engineer tried to explain why it was difficult to impossible, Jobs dug in:

“If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?” [Jobs] asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. “Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster,” Atkinson recalled.

Part of the take-away from this story, and the one Kenyon had, was that Jobs found imaginative ways to make people see a bigger picture. But what struck me about this story is Jobs’s judgment that the goal was achievable. Jobs was famously picky about hiring only A players and being able to recruit them. Now that he had one, he could have burnt out this A player by pushing him to do something that was impossible – by shattering his confidence, pissing him off, or exhausting him by sending him down a rathole so that he couldn’t do the rest of his job.

Yes, it was clever that Jobs made such a colorful motivating speech, but if he had been wrong – if he hadn’t had good enough technology and engineering instincts to know when to push – he could have lost a talent, not to mention that he could have jeopardized the deadline.

You can’t praise or mimic Jobs’s insistence on rounded rectangles, perfect bezels, crisp displays, near perfect type handling without recognizing all the engineering balances that had to be made to accommodate those changes. You can’t do what Jobs did, in terms of taste and perfectionism, without having some engineering chops. That’s the more interesting, and elusive, hard side of Steve Jobs.

A post today from GigaOm about the ways in which Siri can cut into Google’s business made me realize the ways in which much search traffic could actually be considered a commodity today.

Short version of the article: Siri, on the new iPhones, will allow users to ask (with their voice) their iPhones to get them some basic information from WolframApha, Wikipedia, Yelp, and other highly refined information services. Think of most of your smartphone searches during your day: trivia (who won which Oscar, what’s Jeter’s average), definitions or confirmations, and locations. The reflex is to go Google, because it’s a reflex. Many times, you already know where the answer is, but because the google bar is so readily available, even if you know you’re going to click the IMDB, or ESPN, or Wikipedia link, you Google it anyway. In these use cases, Google isn’t providing a real service. In fact, if you’re tired of sponsored links, or want to avoid the crowd (looking up Jeter’s average on the day he hit his 3000th for example), Google could get in the way.

If you build a service that focuses on the 80%, grabs information from major sites, and presents a single result . . . how much do you need a search engine?

More to the point, in the majority of ‘searches’ that you do in a day, are you in fact searching or finding? Is the Google algorithm really active in most of these searches, or is the search engine saving us the time of typing a URL and entering the very precise term in the local ‘search’ box. When Google started out, for most of us it was a way to navigate a world whose geography was unknown. More, it was a way to find out if the web had what we were looking for. Now, when so many of our needs are, in fact, clearly addressed, it’s not a search as it is a lookup.

I’m sure that, as always, I’m late to this party, but this feels like a big shift – for the industry, for search practices, and for design.

A couple weeks ago, I put out a plea for a Carl Sagan quote for an Ignite NYC talk I was going to do. I had to paraphrase the line as “This is the kind of problem that is fun to think about while walking in the woods on a winter morning.”

My friend Parfait found the quote last week!

“They are books you ponder over as the water is running out of the bathtub or as you walk through the woods in an early winter snowfall.”

Not crazy about the bathtub water image (or image of me), but it still works. It’s still the romantic, “Papa Carl makes the world of science and cosmology so interesting” line I remembered. Except:

The actual line is in reference to three Robert Heinlein novels (Oi!)! Not only that, but Sagan refers to them as “remarkable efforts! (Oi! Oi!). Not only THAT, but one of them has the word Zombies in it! (Oi! Oi! Oi!).

While I’m wondering if maybe he doesn’t use a similar image somewhere else (hard to imagine since I got the book right), it’s now more interesting to me how my initial processing of the quote meshes with my current memory of it and how I matched that memory to science problems and lofty things. I was every bit the snob then as I am today when it comes to Heinlein (not much, but enough to cringe at calling any of them “remarkable efforts”), so I must have been so overwhelmed by the romance of the image of walking in the woods with Saint Carl contemplating something rich and deep on a crisp winter morning that I glossed over it.

Novelist (and fellow alum of my alma mater) Nicholson Baker, went through an interesting exercise in U and I, a memoir of his obsession with John Updike. One of his many exercises in intellectual self-flagellation was to mortify his literary sensibilities by trying to reconstruct, from memory, the passages from Updike that made him want to be a novelist. Then he compared them to real one. He generally was further off in his memories than I was . . . though he didn’t stumble into praising Heinlein’s literary genius.

While Apple’s ascendancy to #1 most valuable company in the world is still fresh in our minds (though no longer true, for the moment), a revisiting of the importance of design in that company’s comeback from bankruptcy. It’s often used, but worth remembering how broadly Jobs define design:

“The thing that all of our competitors are missing is that they think [design]’s about fashion, they think it’s about surface appearance,” Jobs complained to me once. “And they couldn’t be further from the truth. The iMac isn’t about candy-colored computers. The iMac is about making a computer that is really quiet, that doesn’t need a fan, that wakes up in fifteen seconds, that has the best sound system in a consumer computer, a superfine display. It’s about a complete computer that expresses it on the outside as well. And [competitors] just see the outside. They say, ‘We’ll slap some color on this piece of junk computer, and we’ll have one, too.’ And they miss the point.” At a later interview, talking about the first iBook, which had a rubbery satchellike clamshell case, he argued that the very inclusion of a built-in handle had been an exercise in style. “Is that design?” he said of the handle. “I think it is. It’s not just about looking good, it’s about the use of the product. Not having a latch, is that design? Yeah, we think it’s design. The rubber on the product, is that design? Yes. It affects how the product looks and how you feel about the product, but it’s also incredibly functional if you happen to set it down too hard.”

Levy, Steven (2006). The Perfect Thing (pp. 131-132). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.