Trying the Android app for WordPress (again).

I just came across Stephan Lindegaard blog and without knowing much about open innovation I found it quite interesting by reading through some of his articles. On one of his posts he lists a series of articles that talk and expand about it. I just wanted to quote from one of those the following that outlines clearly the benefits of open innovation:

What are the biggest advantages of using open innovation?

While this wasn’t a common question, and the participants were already sold on using open innovation, I want to address it to end on a positive note. The two key benefits are speed and the ability to capitalize on knowledge and labor regardless of where it resides.

Speed. Open innovation fostersfaster exchanges of ideas through innovation action networks and shared development. Open innovation is more agile, better able to deal with uncertainty of markets and enables technology development processes that are more adaptive and efficient. Every company is facing greater demands to respond faster to their market and open innovation can enhance those efforts.

Distributed knowledge and labor. Organizations can more effectively capitalize on skilled labor that is mobile and independent. We are reaching the end of knowledge monopolies based on conventional business models. Globalization trends require increased knowledge to compete in other markets. However, in practice, companies are reducing their internal knowledge bases in an effort to run lean. The best way to meet knowledge and labor limitations is to use open innovation methods.

Open innovation is about more than a small change in R&D. It has the potential to revolutionize business. But at this stage of the revolution, the open innovation process is chaotic. My advice is to get involved early, fail quickly and often, learn from your mistakes and develop best practices for your company.

Amazing and inspiring presentation by Seth Godin.

Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain from 99% on Vimeo.

1. It is better to be first than it is to be better.
2. If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.
3. It is better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.
4. Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions.
5. The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind.
6. Two companies cannot own the same word in the prospect’s mind.
7. The strategy to use depends on which rung you occupy on the ladder.
8. In the long run, every market becomes a two horse race.
9. If you are shooting for second place, your strategy is determined by the leader.
10. Over time, a category will divide and become two or more categories.
11. Marketing effects take place over an extended period of time.
12. There is an irresistible pressure to extend the equity of the brand.
13. You have to give up something to get something.
14. For every attribute, there is an opposite, effective attribute.
15. When you admit a negative, the prospect will give you a positive.
16. In each situation, only one move will produce substantial results.
17. Unless you write your competitor’s plans, you can’t predict the future.
18. Success often leads to arrogance, and arrogance to failure.
19. Failure is to be expected and accepted.
20. The situation is often the opposite of the way it appears in the press.
21. Successful programs are not built on fads, they’re built on trends.
22. Without adequate funding, an idea won’t get off the ground.

from wikipedia

This is an extract from the movie Network. Among the many interesting pieces of dialogs the movie has, this one I think englobe what the world currently is beautifully illustrated by the character Mr Jensen:

You have meddled with the primal
forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I
won’t have it, is that clear?! You
think you have merely stopped a
business deal — that is not the
case! The Arabs have taken billions
of dollars out of this country, and
now they must put it back. It is
ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is
ecological balance! You are an old
man who thinks in terms of nations
and peoples. There are no nations!
There are no peoples! There are no
Russians. There are no Arabs!
There are no third worlds! There is
no West! There is only one holistic
system of systems, one vast and
immane, interwoven, interacting,
multi-variate, multi-national
dominion of dollars! petro-dollars,
electro-dollars, multi-dollars!,
Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and
shekels! It is the international
system of currency that determines
the totality of life on this planet!
That is the natural order of things
today! That is the atomic,
subatomic and galactic structure of
things today! And you have meddled
with the primal forces of nature,
and you will atone! Am I getting
through to you, Mr. Beale?

(pause)

You get up on your little twenty-
one inch screen, and howl about
America and democracy. There is no
America. There is no democracy.
There is only IBM and ITT and A T
and T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide
and Exxon. Those are the nations of
the world today. What do you think
the Russians talk about in their
councils of state — Karl Marx?
They pull out their linear
programming charts, statistical
decision theories and minimax
solutions and compute the price-cost
probabilities of their transactions
and investments just like we do. We
no longer live in a world of nations
and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The
world is a college of corporations,
inexorably deter- mined by the
immutable by-laws of business. The
world is a business, Mr. Beale! It
has been since man crawled out of
the slime, and our children, Mr.
Beale, will live to see that perfect
world in which there is no war and
famine, oppression and brutality –
one vast and ecumenical holding
company, for whom all men will work
to serve a common profit, in which
all men will hold a share of stock,
all necessities provided, all
anxieties tranquilized, all boredom
amused. And I have chosen you to
preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.

A long awaited plan has come to its date. On friday I’ll be traveling to my hometown in Argentina for a period of two months.

So, the plan is, there is no plan. I just want to go there and spend some time with family and friends. What I have outlined is holidays during November and agreed with my company to work from there during December (very happy that the company agreed for me to work remotely). That’s it for now.

On the other hand, it’s been itching on me if I can quit for a month some platforms of communications I’m really addicted to. Primarily Twitter, secondarily emails and third and last but annoyingly not least Facebook. So to that extend, what I’ll set myself to do is at least, quit Twitter and Facebook during November. Not even pick though them. Next week it’ll be it. That’s it. As of email, unfortunatelly I can’t quit it so easily since I really depend on communicating directly with several people.

So, will I succeed? To be continue…

UPDATE: So far I haven’t been successful. Although it’s happening slowly or at least at least not posting at the same scale I was doing it while in Dublin.

A bit of a belated post but here it goes.

The 7th and 8th of October I assisted the conference Fronteers 2010 held in Amsterdam and without going around in too many words, I’ll say it was purely fantastic. Not only a great line up of speakers and interesting sessions, but great atmosphere, great location setting and concurrence of webbies.

So to cut to the chase. Here is a list of the videos for the conferences I collected and some other links:

Day 01

Jeremy Keith | The Design of HTML5 | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Slides here

Robert Nyman | JavaScript – Like a Box of Chocolates | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Slides here

Brad Neuberg | Vector Graphics for the Web | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Håkon Wium Lie | CSS3 | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Stoyan Stefanov | Progressive Downloads and Rendering | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Slides here. Stoyan gave a powerful presentation with a lot of performance showcases and examples. Definitely recommendable for this kind of topic checking out his website and what he is up to.

Jina Bolton | CSS Workflow | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Jake Archibald | Reusable Code, for good or for awesome! | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Slides here

Day 02

Stephen Hay | Real-world Responsive Design | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Slides here. Other interesting links to note on fluid design and the one I’ve got the most Rethinking the Mobile Web. An here a complementary and interesting article.

Paul Irish | The State of HTML5: Inaugural Address | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Here something to look at from Paul. Frontend Code Standards and HTML5 Boilerplate

Meagan Fisher | Creating lifelike designs with CSS3 | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Nicholas Zakas | High Performance Javascript | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Since this presentation required a high level of programming understanding, I went to the next room where Andy Clarke and Dan Rubin where sharing experiences on working with Design, clients and trends in the industry.

Steve Faulkner & Hans Hillen | HTML5 Accesibility: is it ready yet? | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Cameron Adams | The Renaissance of Browser Animation | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Chris Heilmann | Reasons to be cheerful | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Slides here

Beyond

A couple other useful links to look at:

• Videos from Frontends 2010
• Efficiently rendering CSS
• 45 examples of HTML5 sites

I just start reading The Collapse of Complex Societies. Title of a book that Clay Shirky mentions on his blog post The Collapse of complex business models which, by the way, is a very interesting read for anyone working on any industry where business models need constant change.

I can’t tell much about how good or not the book is since I just began reading it, but I just wanted to transcribe a few interesting lines listed in the first few pages about why usually societies collapse and these are because:

• A lower degree of stratification and social differentiation.
• Less economic and occupational specialization, of individuals, groups, and territories.
• Less centralized control; that is, less regulation and integration of diverse economic and political groups by elites.
• Less behavioral control and regimentation.
• Less investment in the epiphenomena of complexity, those elements that define the concept of ‘civilization’: monumental architecture, artistic and literary achievements, and the like.
• Less flow of information between individuals, between political and economic groups, and between a center and its periphery.
• Less sharing, trading, and redistribution of resources.
• Less overall coordination and organization of individuals and groups.
• A smaller territory integrated within a single political unit.

This, of course, aren’t the only reasons, but they represent the common factor on most of the societies we know from the past and didn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Reading this list, I see a prominent deficiency and that is the lack of communication or the lack of its use. Things like less sharing, trading, and redistribution of resources; less flow of information between people and institutions; less integration and acceptance of diversity. I can’t help but think that communication channels weren’t much of a priority or certainly they were overlooked.

Now, the book was written in the 1990′s when the author certainly didn’t know about the internet or even imagined how it would grow along with networks, computers, and you name it — devices of all kinds, sizes, capabilities we use today to communicate and stay in contact with everyone and everything. It seems that with the growth of social networks as tools to connect people, people with organizations, people with political parties from every one of the social stratum, we have solved a major communicational problem. Certainly today we would have solved 50% of the issues on that list simply with communication. Or maybe not because now we know too much from too many sources and in real-time. But that’s for another discussion.

However, since “civilization can die, because it has already died once*” ; what would be the reason ours will die from considering we are clearly aware of many of these issues now?

* extrated from the book which quotes Mazzarino [1966: 174]

Last week I finished putting up together a revamped hostelworld’s mobile site.

The work I did was to clean up old code, fix some functionality issues and redesign it with simple UI primarily aiming at devices such as the Nokia Z70, Sony Ericsson k750i and several others under the same category, which have basic level browsing and rendering capabilities and most likely very limited network connections.

The site should be very easy to use using only the numbers on the keyboard or other keys such as the * or # (except a few exceptions) to navigate through the pages. Should you take it for a spin, give me a shout how it goes or if there is anything to make it better

Recently the BBC went through a site redesign. The site now looks simple, load fast, most of the important news you would be interested in are within scrolling-pixels, and doesn’t feel that you have to do a lot of clicking like in the previously design homepage.

There’s no particular reason to dedicate a blog post on a site redesign (after all, sites are redesigned and designed constantly on a daily basis), but, what stroke me and fascinated me the most (as a designer) was the styleguide the BBC has put together. Not only is clearly organized with thoughtful information architecture, simple and straight forward design, but it’s also a big step on the commitment the BBC as a news organization has with its audience.

Via Mark Wallis through his post on Twitter.