Great talk by Jesse Schell, founder of Schell Games and former creative director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio. A veteran game designer, he is also on the faculty of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Found thanks to Agathe for the link to the Gigaom article.
Great post by John Battelle The Database of Intentions Is Far Larger Than I Thought.
This picture says a lot:
database of intentions
Taken together (and honestly, there’s really no other way to think about it, to my mind), these signals form a Database of Intentions that is magnitudes of order larger, more complex, and more powerful than my original concept back in 2003. And while the current players in each category are clear, what’s also clear is that the battle is on to control each of these critical signals.
All of this begs a new definition of Search. I’ve often said that Search should not be defined by web search, but rather, by what a search is in the abstract. To my mind, each tweet or status update is a search query of sorts, as is each check-in and even each connection in the social graph. A more catholic definition of search would allow for a reconciliation of all these fields in the Database of Intentions.
image recognition on mobile phones is becoming a must have feature.
An example with Amazon App.
I took a picture of a sea turtle,
the Amazon app sends the picture to the server and an email is sent when the results are ready:
And the result was pretty good:
I have been trying a few interesting mobile apps.
Google shopper, Shopper lets you find product information quickly by using your phone’s camera. It can recognize cover art of books, CDs, DVDs, and video games, along with most barcodes. You can also speak the name of the product you’re looking for. Use Shopper to make smart decisions about what to buy, what price to pay, and where to buy it. You can star items for later and share them with friends. Shopper also saves your history so you’ll always have product and price information at your fingertips, even when you don’t have a signal.
Google Goggles, showcases the potential of integrating Google’s machine translation and image recognition technologies.
Amazon App , ShopSavvy users can scan the barcode of any product using their phone’s built-in camera. Once scanned, it will search for all the best prices on the internet and locally. Mobile barcodes readers go mainstream, these application show what’s next.
The interesting thing is that these applications work pretty well already. Mobile phones are become more and more smarter.
From Wikipedia:
Culture shock refers to the anxiety and feelings (of surprise, disorientation, uncertainty, confusion, etc.) felt when people have to operate within a different and unknown cultural or social environment after leaving everything familiar behind and they have to find their way in a new culture that has a different way of life and a different mindset.
Good post by Jan Chipchase on When Professionals Get Culture Shock.
And remeber, there is also the reverse culture shock:
Also, Reverse Culture Shock (a.k.a. Re-entry Shock, or own culture shock) may take place — returning to one’s home culture after growing accustomed to a new one can produce the same effects as described above. This results from the psychosomatic and psychological consequences of the readjustment process to the primary culture.[9] The affected person often finds this more surprising and difficult to deal with than the original culture shock.
To fully explore the power of Google Wave, try the bots and gadgets that extend Wave in various different ways. To use the bots, add them in the conversation; gadgets can be added from the menu.
Some Google Wave Bots:
tweety-wave@appspot.com lets you access your Twitter account.
aunt-rosie@appspot.com translation bot, translates in real time what you write in different languages.
Some Google Wave Gadgets:
Checky – Basecamp-like checklists with drag-and-drop.
Napkin – Example of Flash/Flex Wave Gadget
Ratings – Lets participants rate and review a topic (movie, restaurant, etc) in a wave and shows a tally of the result.
Likely – A simple like/dislike gadget that can be added to a blip for intuitive user rating. It tells you how many people have liked, how many have disliked, and what you selected. You can also change your selection.
For more Wave Bots and Gadgets, just use Google search, Google Wave Bots and Google Wave Gadgets
A.G Lafley (former P&G CEO and current Chairman of the board) and Ram Charan write in The Game Changer: How Every Leader Can Drive Everyday Innovation
One gulf separates technology people, who produce and shape ideas, from the upstream marketing people who do the segmentation and study consumer behavior. A second exists between those who produce final prototypes of an innovation and the commercialization people who have to take it to the first moment of truth. Eliminating these gulfs and creating simultaneous interactions among experts for making the right trade-offs – through a smooth functioning integrated process of innovation -reduces risk and expands the opportunity.
Lafley and Charan mention eight ways to anticipate and minimize the risks of innovation:
Geoffrey A. Moore book Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution
Moore groups the different types of innovation in four innovation zones:
It is a very good book, however you can see that the author is a consultant, to read the book and understand the jargon you have to be either a consultant or have a MBA.
With a different business model, Google is entering and disrupting different industries by giving away software and services for FREE. In those industries, competition was traditional, based on features and price. But now, you can have the same features, sometimes even more, and all come for free. Just few examples: Google Android is open source and FREE. Google Map Navigation (turn by turn navigation) is now FREE and offered (at the moment) for Android 2.0 devices and in USA. Of course, this is not really FREE, money will come from other channels, in this case from advertising.
But how do compete in these cases? How should “traditional” companies react? Coming from a different industry and with a different business model is quite disruptive from the incumbents.
I do not have the answer to those questions. Certainly, companies must now offer a significant reason to pay for their products and services. For most people a good-enough-offer for FREE is just fine. Companies should also be creative and maybe take some ideas from Free of Chris Anderson. See the previous posts on Free!, Monetization in the Internet, excellent survey on the most popular business models.
How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In
and Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.
In this book Collins addresses the questions: How do the mighty fall? Can decline be detected early and avoided? How far can a company fall before the path toward doom becomes inevitable and unshakable? How can companies reverse course?
Collins in his research has found that the decline goes through 4 phases:
Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success
Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More
Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril
Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation
Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death
but there is hope, even in stage 5, companies can recover and get back to success. Here the inspiring conclusion of the book:
Never give in. Be willing to change tactics, but never give up your core purpose. Be willing to kill failed ideas, even to shutter big operations you have been in for a long time, but never give up on the idea of building a great company. Be willing to embrace the inevitability of creative destruction, but never give up on the discipline to create your own future. Be willing to embrace loss, to endure pain, to temporarily lose freedoms, but never give up faith in the ability to prevail. Be willing to form alliances with former adversaries, to accept necessary compromise, but never – ever – give up on your core values.
The path out of darkness begin with those exasperatingly persistent individuals who are constitutionally incapable of capitulation. It’s one thing to suffer a staggering defeat – as will likely happen to every enduring business and social enterprise at some point in history – and entirely another to give up on the values and aspirations that make the protracted struggle worthwhile. Failure is not so much a physical state as a state of mind; success is falling down, and getting up one more time, without end.
And the back cover of the book:
Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, depends more on what you do yourself than on what the world does to you
