A Lamp That Keeps You From Crawling To Find A Power Socket

Why aren’t electrical sockets and charging docks standard on other common devices like toasters and lamps?

A few designers are catching on. Last year, Philippe Starck and Eugeni Quitlett introduced lighting with built-in iPad docks; and today, Form Us With Love launched Plug: a bulbous, dimmable LED table lamp with opal glass shade and a base with built-in socket that stands out as a decorative detail. And as the Swedish studio points out, “by integrating the socket in the lamp, it also takes away that annoying process of searching for a socket or having to unplug something in order to access an electrical point.” Which means no more crawling underneath tables to recharge.
Plug is available from Ateije Lytkan in black, grey, white, or green, though only with a European Schuko socket.

Sweet Genius: An ATM That Dispenses Cupcakes 24 Hours A Day

Design: A Clever Lantern Whose Light Changes When It’s Standing Or Hanging

The Tulip Lantern ($150), by Snow Peak, has figured this out already. It’s an LED-based light, switching modes between lamp and lantern--depending on your particular qualifications* of luminary device nomenclature--for indoor-outdoor use.

A flexible neck sprouts from the base, and the bulb is surrounded by a series of mirrors on hinges. So then the bulb is upright, the mirrors fall open, creating a wide field of ambient light. When the bulb is upside down, the "petals" collapse, thus turning it into a spotlight.
The result is a one-size-fits-all light that can snake around your shoulder to read a book, or dangle from a tent roof to give the feeling of hearth and home. Just make sure to pack spare batteries. This tulip isn’t fitted with a rechargeable core, and it promises to last anywhere from 8-300 hours (a tough range to gauge!), depending on how bright you like your light.
* To clarify, a lantern is typically defined as a light enclosed in glass or plastic. But that tulip bloom resembles a sconce more than any enclosure. Of course, if it is a sconce, then maybe the proper term for the Tulip “lantern” is really a “light fixture.”

Next-Gen Retail: When Physical And Virtual Worlds Merge

Imagine the scene. You’re standing on the subway platform heading home, with eight minutes before your train is due. On the wall is a huge poster of a grocery store shelf, stocked with all kinds of daily essentials. You use your phone to scan the five items you had planned to pick up on your way home anyway, and ask for delivery later that evening. The store already knows your details and preferences and works accordingly, helping you to save time while you kill some dead time.
Welcome to the start of context-based services, where the physical world can merge with the virtual, and when supplemented with the information already known about you, can provide new opportunities and better experiences. This isn’t simply imagination, but a real example from a local offshoot of Tesco, the British grocery retailer, in Seoul, South Korea.
The simple idea is that businesses will increasingly look to draw on a range of inputs, all at the same time, to take the user experience that they offer their customers to the next level, making it far more context-sensitive. There’s several elements to this: one is in being able to identify you; another, knowing something about your location or environment; and a third, understanding what you’re doing – and, in some instances, what your friends or colleagues are saying about it.
This will occur across all manner of industries, although it will likely be more noticeable in retail. Mobile app Shopkick is one example. It seeks to enrich the in-store shopping experience with personalized offers, highlighting products that others have liked, and rewarding customers for walking into selected stores. The reward for walking in is just the bait; the context piece comes from location (knowing you’re in the store), understanding interests and intent (scanning an item you’re thinking about), and social (knowing what others liked). In turn, it enriches both the physical and virtual shopping experience in a wholly new way.
Underpinning context-based services is the ability for firms to aggregate and apply smart analytics to a widening array of new data – from customers’ location information and social networks, to mobile apps, blogs, tweets, purchasing history, and more. The more that firms know about where their customers are, and what they’re doing – analyzed in real-time – the more they will be able to deliver immersive and valuable services specifically tailored to them. In essence, a context-aware service is one that makes use of a person’s location, activities and preferences to provide a better quality and more target service. Reach.ly is an example: it scans Twitter data to help connect hotels with individuals potentially travelling to their area, based on their tweets, so that they can provide specifically customized offers.
This ability to combine specific information about people, along with other contextual information, can result in wholly new approaches to services or product offerings. For example, a car rental company may already provide its frequent business customers with a service to minimize any queues at check in, but might build on that by ensuring that their car is waiting for them – along with the child-seat they always request – when they near the outlet. Or immediately dispatch a replacement vehicle to your specific location in the event that a fault or accident is alerted from the rental car.
This may sound like a privacy-threatening world akin to that of the film Minority Report. But the reality is that firms can already infer a huge range of information about their customers based on their existing interactions with them, or with their peers, or simply by asking users to share new information themselves. As many have learned, when given a meaningful reason to do so, people will often share useful personal information about themselves. Scan a QR code from a poster of a model, for example, and you might happily share some personal information, such as your waist size, in order to check availability of a particular item in stores near you. By 2015, analyst firm Gartner estimates that 40% of the world’s smartphone users will opt-in to context service providers, which track their movements and digital habits, in exchange for better services.
Misys gives a different kind of example of this in practice, illustrating how context can impact a range of sectors. It is working to combat bank fraud with GeoGuard, its new consumer location-based offering that runs on the Force.com platform. This gathers geographic information and enables customers to allow their banks to request their most recent location information, regardless of the services they use. Customers can enjoy hassle free use of their cards, while banks benefit from being able to cut the considerable costs of confirming a customer’s location abroad and having to reimburse any fraudulent transactions.
As such services proliferate, leading firms will use context to help deliver mass-personalization for their customers, enabling them to better differentiate themselves from their rivals. In turn, consumers will be among the clearest beneficiaries from this trend, enjoying richer user experiences that are more tightly customized to their individual location, needs and preferences. And as context becomes more commonplace, consumers will increasingly start to expect it. This is the primary challenge for CIOs in the year ahead: a need to start getting to grips with context and how to adapt it, or else risk being left behind in a rapidly evolving marketplace.

Case Study: Is subscription based model useful to retail

ShoeDazzle Ditches Monthly Subscriptions For Boutique-Style Pampering

The online shoe company cofounded by Kim Kardashian announces it's scrapping the monthly subscription model and adding lingerie and dress lines. The moves reveal its true secret sauce.

ShoeDazzle started out as one of the new generation of consumer startups centered around a monthly subscription model: Sign up for the service and you get a new pair of pumps (or wedges, or boots, or stilettos, or…) every month for a mere $39.95. And they were celebrity-endorsed, no less.
But today, after just three years in operation, ShoeDazzle is announcing it is jettisoning the subscriptions. Does that mean they were a bust? Or is there something more profound at work?
The latter, say ShoeDazzle executives and investors. The subscription angle certainly garnered the company signup-fueling coverage when it first opened its doors back in March 2009 (as did the fact that cofounder Kim Kardashian was helping curate the company's selection of proprietary footgear).
But ShoeDazzle's real insight, CEO Bill Strauss tells Fast Company, and the thing executives say will send it zooming ahead of its competitors, is something that has gotten a little less play: the site's personalization and pampering strategy that is perhaps the real key to the company's astronomic growth. Over the last year, the site's number of "members" has tripled from 3 million to 10 million.
(The company doesn't release revenue figures, but Strauss says the growth in those numbers is "following in a similar growth pattern" to the surge in users.)
Every month, the ShoeDazzle system culls its new inventory and drops a curated selection into each user's personal "Showroom." The curations are based, initially, on a survey the user fills out to establish their taste profile. Over time, the recommendation algorithm gets more sophisticated as it takes into account the user's actual purchases. The result is a collection of items users feel have been handpicked just for them.
Strauss calls this experience akin to one you'd receive at a high-end boutique, where salespeople know your name and your tastes. "If you walk into a boutique, and they say, 'These new shoes just came in, and they fit your style and personality,' you feel good about that, and you're more likely to buy," Strauss says.
Therein lies ShoeDazzle's real innovation. If Zappos got us all used to shopping online as easily as we would our local department store (with a wide selection of items and a free-returns policy that lets shoppers try items on risk-free), then ShoeDazzle believes consumers are ready for the more intimate shopping experience they get at real-world boutiques.
In fact, the idea for ShoeDazzle came out of an exchange between cofounder Brian Lee (a tax attorney who previously cofounded LegalZoom with O.J. Simpson attorney Robert Shapiro) and his wife. "She came home one day from the expensive showrooms in Beverly Hills, and he asked her, 'Why do you buy these expensive shoes? Why don't you go to Payless or DSW?'" Strauss says. "She replied, 'Brian, you don't understand. When women shop, they want to feel beautiful and pampered.'"
ShoeDazzle's stab at simulating the boutique experience doesn't end with the website. Its customer service agents are rigorously trained to answer customers' fashion and styling questions, as well as more prosaic inquiries about shipping and returns.
"Customers will call in and say, 'Look at these dresses. Which one do you think goes with those shoes?" Strauss says.
Questions like these have led to another decision ShoeDazzle is announcing today: It's expanding its inventory to lingerie and dresses. "Our customers want us to dress them from head to toe," Strauss says.
As with just about every successful consumer startup these days, ShoeDazzle has spawned a passel of imitators and competitors. Executives and investors say they're not worried. "It's relatively easy to get an e-commerce company to $15 or $20 million in revenue," Andreessen Horowitz partner John Farrell tells Fast Company. "But it's the ability to execute at a large scale that gets you to hundreds of millions of dollars."
Last year, Andreessen led a $40 million Series C round of investment in the company. It also helped lead the search for a replacement for Lee, who had declared his intention to step down from the CEO slot in order to start yet a third venture (The Honest Company, cofounded with actress Jessica Alba, which sells chemical-free baby products).
Strauss, the cofounder and former CEO of ProFlowers, was tapped for the top slot at ShoeDazzle because of his experience retaining high levels of customer satisfaction at a booming consumer Internet company. "He's very heads-down and focused on operational execution and delighting the customer at a large scale," Farrell says.
The decision to jettison the subscription model was one of Strauss's first major strategy decisions. The subscriptions were a clever way to get the company off the ground, but it turns out they don't match customers' real-world purchasing preferences. "Some people liked the model," Strauss says, "but a lot of customers told us they'd like to buy two or three times in one month and then maybe not for a few more months."
Opening up the purchasing model will allow the company to "capture as much of that demand as possible," Strauss says.
The practice of using celebrity stylists--of which Kardashian is just one (actress Denise Richards recently signed on to "create" a pair of high heels)--will persist. In an era where Hollywood stylists have become celebrities in their own right and the number of magazines and websites showcasing the latest trends has exploded, consumers are hungrier than ever before for a trusted, gilded source to guide them through the fashion wilderness.
But the key to busting out of the pack remains execution, Farrell and Strauss say--the ability to retain the "high touch" experience even as the company grows to tens of millions of customers. "Celebrities and subscription models are great ways to get a business going," Farrell says. "But what will differentiate ShoeDazzle in the next phase is building the company out to a gigantic scale."

Creative Tinkering

  Creativity lessons that emerge from a review of the way Edison worked:
1. CHALLENGE ALL ASSUMPTIONS. Before hiring an assistant, Edison would invite the candidate over for soup. If the person salted the soup before tasting it, Edison would not hire him for the job. He did not hire people who had too many assumptions built into their everyday life. He wanted people who consistently challenged assumptions.
2. QUANTITY. He believed to discover a good idea you had to generate many ideas. Out of quantity comes quality. He set idea quotas for all his workers. His own quota was one minor invention every 10 days and a major invention every six months. It took over 50,000 experiments to invent the alkaline storage cell battery and 9000 to perfect the light bulb. Edison looked at creativity as simply good, honest, hard work. Genius, he once said, is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. For every brilliant idea he had there was a dud like the horse-drawn contraption that would collect snow and ice in the winter and compress it into blocks that families could use in the summer as a refrigerant.
3. NOTHING IS WASTED. When an experiment failed, he would always ask what the failure revealed and would enthusiastically record what he had learned. His notebooks contain pages of material on what he learned from his abortive ideas, including his many experiments on will power. He conducted countless experiments with rubber tubes extended from his forehead trying to will the physical movement of a pendulum. Once when an assistant asked why he continued to persist trying to discover a long-lasting filament for the light bulb after failing thousands of times, Edison explained that he didn’t understand the question. In his mind he hadn’t failed once. Instead, he said he discovered thousands of things that didn’t work. Finally, he completed Patent 251,539 for the light bulb that ensured his fame and fortune. Whenever he succeeded with a new idea, he would review his notebooks to rethink ideas and inventions he’d abandoned in the past in the light of what he’d recently learned.
4. CONSTANTLY IMPROVE YOUR IDEAS AND PRODUCTS AND THE IDEAS AND PRODUCTS OF OTHERS. Contrary to popular belief, Edison did not invent the light bulb: his genius, rather, was to perfect the bulb as a consumer item. Edison also studied all his inventions and ideas as springboards for other inventions and ideas in their own right. To Edison, the telephone (sounds transmitted) suggested the phonograph (sounds recorded), which suggested motion pictures (images recorded). Simple, in retrospect, isn’t it? Genius usually is.
Edison would often jot down titles of books, failed patents and research papers written by other inventors. He would research them  and try to figure out where those inventors quit or left off, so his own patentable work could begin. He advised his assistants to adapt the ideas of others. He told them to make it a habit to keep on the lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others have used successfully. To Edison, your idea needs to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you are working on.
5. TURN DEFICIENCIES TO YOUR ADVANTAGE. No one knows for sure what caused Edison’s hearing problems, but after the age of twelve he could no longer hear birds singing. As a teenager working in a telegraph office jammed with clattering telegraph machines, he viewed his poor hearing as a distinct advantage because he could focus on his instrument on his desk and not be distracted. As a renowned inventor, he received pleas from hearing-impaired people all over the world to invent a hearing aid, but he declined believing this so-called disability gave him valuable mental space in which to think.

6. RECORD YOUR IDEAS AND THOUGHTS. Edison had a deep-seated need to articulate his ideas on paper, to see for himself the relentlessly cause-and-effect nature of many of his works. Leonardo da Vinci was Edison’s spiritual mentor, and his notebooks illustrate the depth of their kinship. An obsessive draftsman, hoarder of ideas, supreme egoist, engineer and botanist—a conceptual inventor, scientist and mathematician, Edison recorded and illustrated every step on his voyage to discovery. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Michael Michalko is the author of the highly acclaimed Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques; Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius; ThinkPak: A Brainstorming Card Deck and Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work.

If you're really passionate about what you do, but it's not going to make you a lot of money, should you still do it?"

What a great question! It seems like just about everyone who has ever addressed a graduating class of high school or college seniors has said "Do what you love, the money will follow."
Inspiring. But it is true? Couldn't you do what you truly care about and very well go broke, as the question above (recently sent from one of our readers) implies?
Based on the research we did for our book, we're convinced that when you're heading into the unknown, desire is all-important. You simply want to be doing something that you love, or something that is logically going to lead to something you love, in order to do your best work. That desire will make you more creative and more resourceful, and will help you get further faster.
And, it will help you persist. When you're trying something that's never been attempted before — beginning an unusual project at work, or trying to get a new business off the ground — you're going to face a lot of obstacles. You don't want to be giving up the first time you encounter one.
But, let's be real. None of this guarantees wealth, or even financial success.
A friend of ours was hanging out at a bar with a few fellow professional musicians after a recording session, talking admiringly about another musician they all know. One of them commented on how fortunate it was for this musician that his music was commercial. In those four words, you will find an enormous truth. We all have our music and there is no guarantee that anyone will buy it. Absolutely none. These are two entirely separate things.
So this reader question attacks us straight on and says, in essence, "I have the desire, but I am pretty certain it's not going to lead anywhere that's monetarily profitable. Now what? Should I still go ahead?"
Of course you should.
Now let's qualify the answer a bit:
If you can't afford to do the thing you're passionate about — for example, if you do it, you won't be able to feed your family, or it would keep you from graduating college (which is something you think is more important than whatever you're passionate about) — then no, you'd better not bet your economic life on it. A basic principle concerning how you should deal with an unknown future is that every small smart step you take should leave you alive to take the next step. So, make sure you attend to your lower order Maslow needs of food and shelter and the like.
But even this doesn't mean you can't work on your passion a little — even if it's just for 15 minutes a day.
And you should!
Why?
Research (such as The Power of Small Wins that ran in Harvard Business Review May, 2011) shows that people who make progress every day toward something they care about report being satisfied and fulfilled.
We're in favor of people being happy. And we're also in favor of provoking people into pursuing happiness. The nice thing about this reader's question is that it might get people who have — by any objective standard — more than enough money to reconsider whether they want to continue to do things that are not making them happy, just because it'll make them more money. More often than not, these people say, "Once I get enough money, I'll do what I really want to do. I won't worry about the money." But somehow, they never get to that point. Time is finite. The question might be enough to get you to reconsider how you're spending it.
And of course, the assumption embedded in the question could be wrong. You might, indeed, end up making money if you engage in your passion, even though you currently think you won't. Remember, the future is unknown. Who knows what people will buy, or what you might invent after your very next act. At any moment in time, you are only one thought away from an insight — an insight that can change everything.
As we said in our previous post, when you are facing the unknown, they only way to know anything for sure is to act. When you are dealing with uncertainty — and whether you are going to make any money from your passion at this point is definitely an uncertainty — you act. You don't think about what might happen, or try to predict the outcome, or plan for every contingency. You take a small step toward making it a reality, and you see what happens.
Who knows? Even the smallest step can change everything.
So take those small steps. You might discover that your passion does, in fact, make you money. After all, who knew you could make huge amounts of money figuring out a way to connect all your friends (Facebook) or make a better map (pick your favorite GPS tool).
Even if you don't, you want to spend part of your day doing at least one thing that's making you happy. Otherwise, something is terribly wrong.

Taiwan’s 7-Eleven Could Be A Solution For Indonesia’s E-payment Problem

I travel to Taiwan very often. It’s a nice place. And it is filled with 7-Elevens. You can find one of the franchises’ convenience stores on pretty much at every corner in Taiwan. You can buy and do almost everything there: you can photocopy, use a courier service, book taxis, purchase train tickets, and make payments. You can even buy bento, hot dogs, and guan dong zhu, at any time of day.
In Taiwan it’s a mega hit franchise owned by “Tong Yi” in which aptly means “dominate” or “rule all” in Chinese. What impresses me most is that the 7-Eleven stores there are able to collect all sorts of payments. For example, if you buy an item through Yahoo Kimo Auction, there’s an option for folks to pay cash-on-delivery (COD) through 7-Eleven. The seller will ship the product to the 7-Eleven store nearest to consumer’s location. The customer will pay in cash upon collecting the goods.
Alternatively, the seller can pass the customer a unique code, say abc123, which the customer will then key into an ibon machine to generate a receipt. The 7-Eleven counter will then charge the customer based on the receipt and then transfer the payment to the seller. Once the seller receives the money, he/she will ship the product directly to the customer.
Of course, consumers can also opt to pay through rival Family Mart, another smaller chain of convenience stores. Somehow these stores have become a logistics and payment partner for e-commerce stores in Taiwan. We saw this yesterday with the events and ticketing startup Accupass.

Taiwan’s 7-Eleven ibon machine also allows customers to buy train tickets, concert tickets, pay telephone bills, top up phone and gaming credits through the machine and pay cash directly at the 7-Eleven counter after making purchase. Going through a physical third-party player makes the customers a little more confident that the deal is trustworthy, and it provides a cozier environment for e-commerce in Taiwan to flourish. Plus there’s an ATM at every store which makes cash withdrawal and payment very convenient.
It is important to note that credit card payment is pretty common in Taiwan too. But that only caters to the middle classes who have access to credit cards. For folks who don’t have them, it is common to pay via convenience stores like 7-Eleven. Paypal is allowed in Taiwan, but unfortunately it isn’t popular.
I’m fascinated by how e-payment, or rather, COD works in Taiwan. It made me wonder if a similar COD system could work in Indonesia. I’ve heard of similar solutions in Indonesia already. But they aren’t widespread or seamless.
Folks who are new to the e-payment problem in Indonesia might assume that providing a Paypal-like solution would be sufficient. It’s more than that. The problem drills down fundamentally to human behavior: Indonesians are more comfortable paying via COD or bank transfer. Credit card payment is unfortunately not that common. In fact, we actually learned and localized too to adapt to Indonesia for our next Startup Asia conference.
Ultimately, it is the confidence level and habits which explain why people prefer to pay cash or do a bank transfer upon receiving their goods. It’s a decent solution but not ideal for e-commerce businesses. China’s e-commerce market has grown a lot faster in part thanks to the prevalence of mature online payment systems such as Alipay, UnionPay, and Tenpay.
Delivering goods to homes is expensive and having to counter-check if payment has been transferred by the right person (and in the right amount) means resources are wasted. It would be perfect if convenience stores in Indonesia could shoulder the logistics of e-payment to foster e-commerce. Anyway, driving more people to the convenience stores would also encourage more purchases. This way, the e-commerce sites can focus on what they do best, which is to sell more items online. But it wouldn’t be easy. Tong Yi took about seven years to make 7-Eleven the “de facto convenience store” in Taiwan. So if this ever happens in Indonesia it would be boom time for e-commerce in the country.

Levi’s launches Online Store on China’s Largest E-commerce site, Taobao

Levi’s is the latest international brand to set up an online shop in China. Well, that is made possible through Alibaba Group’s Taobao Mall. It’s a wise choice as Taobao is China’s largest retail website with more than 370 million users and receives over 50 million unique visitors each day.
In Levi’s new online store, users are spoilt for choice with over 200 Levi’s products to choose from. On top of that, Levi’s will also introduce exclusive online-only styles on Taobao, a bonus to keep users coming back.
Despite in early stage, Levis’s effort seems to be paying off well. Several thousands pair of jeans were already sold online, according to Taobao’s statistics. Apparently, Levi’s isn’t the only brand that has entered China’s online market through Taobao.

“UNIQLO, Adidas, Procter and Gamble, L’Oreal Paris, Lenovo, Li Ning and Revlon have all launched official online retail storefronts on Taobao Mall as part of their e-commerce strategy,” a Taobao spokeswoman told Penn Olson.
“For corporate retailers, Taobao Mall offers the infrastructure for complete management of their own brand and online retail channel while providing access to consumers situated in second and third tier regions across China in addition to urban centers such as Shanghai and Beijing,” she added.
Business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce is booming in China. Last quarter, China hit a new high with a total of 64 million B2C orders. Without a doubt, a large number of orders comes from Taobao. If you’re a retailer and looking to capture the Chinese market, Taobao seems like a good place.

3 Rules For Building A Collaborative Consumption Business

WRITTEN BY: John Zimmer

The cofounder of Zimride talks about the keys to building a business that hinges on experience instead of ownership.

Five years ago, I was sitting in a college lecture when I heard a frustrating stat: 80% of seats in cars are unoccupied during travel. Even today, the U.S. sees 2.3 billion long-distance car trips a year running at only 20% efficiency.

This piece is part of a Collaborative Fund-curatedseries on creativity and values written by thought leaders in the for-profit, for-good business space.

Filling those seats has enormous potential to improve the economy, the environment, and our overall well-being. Though we’re just starting to understand the macro effects of this single-occupancy lifestyle, many startups have gained traction attempting to solve U.S. transportation’s myriad flaws. The alternative to innovating is bleak: Traffic leads to 16 million hours of lost productivity in this country every day, which accounts to a staggering $80 billion annual cost to the economy. And this cost is expected to double by 2050.

Why have we accepted such a low “occupancy” rate on our highways? Especially considering transportation is the second highest household expense in America, with $8,000 going towards owning a car. The transportation sector is the second largest source of carbon emissions in the U.S., accounting for 27% of total emissions. Once the numbers are crunched and we think about their implications on natural resources, it’s no wonder that an incredible number of ride and carsharing businesses have cropped up in the last five years, attempting to solve--and profit from--this major inefficiency.

In 2008, my friend Logan Green and I saw major potential for college campuses to be an entry-point into promoting transportation innovation. We quickly conceived what would become Zimride, a social rideshare website that harnessed the social networks of existing college networks and Facebook profiles. The platform focused on facilitating 50 to 500 mile travel, making it easy for drivers to easily get paid for the extra seats in their cars. Passengers book seats online with a credit card just as they would for a trip by plane, bus, or train.

A few years later, and several thousands of rides shared, we came up with a few lessons on building transportation businesses that hinge on people’s experiences (like sharing a ride) over ownership (like buying a new car). 

BUILD COLLABORATIVE INFRASTRUCTURES

Build platforms that encourage community, trust, and credibility between peers. This is key for any collaborative consumption-based startup. The solution to transportation inefficiencies lies at the intersection of collaborative consumption and the social graph: Shifting transportation from ownership to access. My vision for the future of social transportation is one that places more value on information and community over a physical product. Move over multi-billion-dollar high-speed rail infrastructure and welcome social information-based solutions.

PROMOTE ACCESS OVER OWNERSHIP

A recent study on shifting attitudes of car ownership in Germany concluded that three quarters of 18 to 25-year-olds, would rather live without their car than their smartphone. The independence once represented by the car has been replaced by cell phones and social networks, which are now at the forefront of people’s expression of freedom and access. Once a symbol of “coming of age,” many drivers are waiting longer to get their licenses. Car ownership, especially in congested cities is increasingly perceived as a burden, no longer associated with freedom and personal identity as it once was.

The infrastructure for transportation’s future is rapidly coming of age. Just this past month, I hailed a yellow cab with Cabulous (a taxi hailing mobile app), requested anUber (an on-demand black car service mobile app) when I couldn’t find a cab, ran a few errands with car-sharing leader Zipcar, and took a few Zimrides (rideshare social network). All my choices were largely made based on convenience and cost.

NURTURE COMMUNITIES

Through social, location, and mobile technologies (SoLoMo) we now have the ability to leverage our virtual communities into the physical world, to bring our online experiences offline. Take the new "social paring" initiative announced by Ticketmaster that gives you the ability to see who is sitting near you at a concert as a great example of this growing trend.

The collaborative consumption revolution is not just about changing trends in ownership and independence, but also about the importance of building community.  In the future, I hope, our transportation will bring us closer together.

With the knowledge that the SoLoMo movement is just getting started, let’s imagine cities connected, not by off-ramps or elevated highways, but by tight social networks of people traveling and spending time together. The next time you’re stuck in traffic, look around at all the empty seats around you. Imagine them filled with your friends, interesting new acquaintances, and people building communities rather than just moving between them. 

A 10-Cent Paper Sensor That Tests For Malaria And HIV

Residents of the developed world may not think twice about heading to the lab for a blood test, but things are a little more complicated in the developing world. Blood tests are expensive, and in any case, it’s often difficult to get them from testing sites to the lab. In places where potentially deadly diseases like HIV and malaria run rampant, this is a problem.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed what they think could be an alternative to traditional lab tests for malaria and HIV: an origami-inspired paper sensor. The sensor costs less than 10 cents to produce.
Paper sensors aren’t exactly new--they’re commonly used in home pregnancy tests. But pregnancy tests use one-dimensional paper sensors, while the folded 3-D sensors developed by the UT researchers can test for more results in a smaller area, giving them the ability to do more complicated testing.
The sensor consists of a hydrophobic material (like wax) laid into "canyons" on chromatography paper. These canyons direct the sample (i.e. urine or blood) to specific places on the paper where test reagents are located.

If it’s one color, you’ve got a problem, and if not, then you’re probably okay.

“Biomarkers for all kinds of diseases already exist,” says Richard Crooks, one of the researchers involved in the project, in a statement. “Basically you spot-test reagents for these markers on these paper fluidics. They’re entrapped there. Then you introduce your sample. At the end, you unfold this piece of paper, and if it’s one color, you’ve got a problem, and if not, then you’re probably okay.”
The UT sensor can be printed out using photolithography or just a simple office printer. Once it’s printed, folding it takes under a minute.
No word on whether the sensor will be commercialized in the near future, but if it is, the device could work well with cell phone-based programs that gather malaria data in real time. If a sensor detects that an individual had malaria, for example, an aid worker could quickly upload that information to the cloud. When enough people report cases, an outbreak warning can be dispatched to health workers via text message. The technology could be used even using traditional lab tests, but a 10-cent sensor makes tracking outbreaks a whole lot easier.

Wal-Mart Challenge Draws Wacky Products

For the first time, the world's largest retailer is giving any small business, entrepreneur or individual inventor a shot at winning a spot on its store shelves nationwide and virtual shelf space through walmart.com. The contest is called "Get on the shelf." The competition has pulled in 4,000 entries. Here's a sampling of a few creative ones vying to win the grand prize.

(Courtesy: Val Arnold)A fork for dogs

Company: My Best Friend's Fork
Price: $18.99

Val Arnold, who calls her two Rottweilers her "two children," would often feed them vitamins and table food off of her own fork. One day, one of the dogs snatched the fork from her hand and wouldn't let go. That scare got Arnold quickly searching online for a safer animal-friendly "fork."

[Video: The Accidental Entrepreneur]

Instead, she found many images of x-rays of dogs that had accidentally swallowed forks. Tired of searching, she decided to invent a dog-friendly fork. She started selling the product in January. She said the curved handle of her fork prevents it from getting pulled from the hand. Her doggie forks offer a lifetime warranty, and some even come embellished with pink, blue and clear Swarovski crystals.

(Courtesy: Rick Pescovitz)Your own mini tent

Company: Under The Weather
Price: $69.95

Like many soccer dads and moms, Rick Pescovitz found himself attending several of his kids' tournaments year-round. Many times, he and other parents sat through games with teeth chattering, drenched in rain or shivering in cold temperatures. "Once we were in a town in Virginia for a game. It was windy and freezing. I thought this was crazy," he said.

On the drive back home, Pescovitz was inspired by portable toilets he saw at the game and mentally sketched a fully-enclosed portable tent that could fit a folding chair. That idea resulted in the "Under The Weather" tent, which he launched in late 2011. Pescovitz is currently selling the tent online and soon at soccer events. He's also working on the next iterations of the tent -- heated ones and tents that connect together to fit two people.

(Courtesy: Eddie McKenzie)Sweet-smelling sports bag

Company: ScentFan Duffle
Price: $49.99 to $79.99

Eddie McKenzie said his two daughters inspired him two years ago to come up with the idea of creating a sports duffle bag with a fan built into it.

"My daughters play a lot of sports, and they don't wear socks with their shoes," he said. "Their feet would smell bad, their shoes would smell bad, and their sports bags would smell, too."

Tired of dealing with smelly clothes and eventually a smelly closet that stored their sports bags, McKenzie did something about it. He noticed how his wife would turn on the fan after she did the laundry to dry out the clothes. So he created a duffle bag with a built-in cigarette lighter plug.

"Plug it in to your car when travelling and it gets to work," he said. On the end of the bag, he said users can put a scented sachet and the fan will spread the scent throughout the bag.

(Courtesy: OJ Concepts)A clock that talks to you

Company: Oishi Time Talking Dolls

Oran Elmaleh and his wife Jayde conceptualized the idea of a squeezable, talking clock and alarm clock when they were on their honeymoon in Hawaii. "I hated the idea of being woken up by a loud alarm clock," he said. "I thought wouldn't it be great to have something that could gently tell you the time?"

So he created a line of six squeezable talking clocks with different chimes that fit under or in your pillow. You squeeze it and the doll will tell you what time it is. "You can also program each doll as an alarm clock," he said. "Oishi is a word that my wife and I use for something we love." The dolls are already sold online and in a few stores.

[Related: New wacky kitchen gadgets]

(Courtesy: Julie Condy)Decorative toaster cover

Company: Toaster Tops
Price: $9.95 to $19.95

Julie Condy was grossed out when her husband sprayed the kitchen counter with ant spray and got too close to her toaster.

"I was putting bread in the toaster shortly after and thought it was disgusting if some of the spray had gotten into it," she said. So she jumped online to look for a cover for the toaster slots. But she couldn't find one.

Last July, she started working on Toaster Tops, decorative plate covers for two-and-four-slot toasters that feature fun knobs on top. "They keep the toaster clean and decorate the kitchen at the same time," she said. The knobs are interchangeable, featuring cheeky themes, such as "Cocktail ladies and shopping" and other life events, such as weddings and graduation. Condy's been selling her Toaster Tops online since January. "I'm trying to see if I can make some for college and pro teams now," she said.

(Courtesy: Jeff Brown)Cool water for your dogs

Company: FrostyBowlz
Price: $26.99

Inventor Jeff Brown said his miniature poodle Jager inspired him to come up with "FrostyBowls." Jager didn't like to drink a lot of water in the summer, because the water would become warm. But he would lap up water from the fridge.

"I would put ice cubes in his bowl, but they didn't last long," he said. "It made sense to me, I like cool water, why wouldn't he?"



Two years ago, he started on a prototype for FrostyBowlz -- a stainless steel dog bowl that opens up to fit a freezable non-toxic gel inside -- to keep your pooch's water cool for longer periods. He launched FrostyBowlz four weeks ago at an industry event and is now looking to sell it through major retailers.

Don't Build Products. Build Platforms

Google, Facebook, and Apple all went from single products to entire ecosystems. Five reasons why you should be just as ambitious.
shutterstock images
These days, you can’t go five minutes without hearing someone talk about platforms. The term is almost a buzzword. As I explain in The Age of the Platform: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Have Redefined Business, a platform is merely a structure made up of “planks,” or integrated features. For instance, Google in 1998 wasn’t a platform; it was a really neat search engine. By adding planks such as Gmail, Maps, Docs, Voice, YouTube, and countless others, it became a true platform.
By comparison, a traditional business based on a 20th-century model produces one or more closely related products or services, then uses marketing to try to attract customers. This business model can no longer compete with 21st-century, platform-based companies that have learned how to integrate an ever-widening universe of consumers and partners into their ecosystems. Consumers are driving today’s economy—not enterprises. Consumer-driven platforms matter more than ever.
Wondering whether to investigate—and invest in—the platform as your company’s business model? Here are five benefits that may motivate you:
All companies face limits; not even Google has infinite resources. But you can dramatically expand those limits. Building a powerful platform lets you cultivate an ecosystem of developers, partners, users, and other collaborators who contribute to—and may drive—innovation at your company.
Think of Apple’s app tsunami. By inviting thousands of users to develop apps for its iPhone and iPad, the company generated billions in new revenue. It has tapped into an endless stream of inventors and innovation.
Tip: Offering tools such as application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs) only gets you halfway there. You have to create incentives for prospective partners to extend your platform and build different planks for your mutual benefit.

Quicker Response Times

Platform companies move faster than their traditional counterparts. When your core products and services frequently change, it forces your employees and your organization to embrace change quickly. Bad habits are less likely to get ossified.
Think of Amazon. First it sold only books. Soon it started selling virtually everything. In 2007 the company launched the Kindle. In 2010 it started publishing books to read on the Kindle. In 2011 it introduced the Fire, to compete with the iPad. The Fire brings everything together—shopping, reading, and consuming media—and introduces more e-commerce and social networking opportunities. Can the company handle all this change? No problem!
Tip: Find employees who are comfortable with change. To build a platform, you can’t rely on people who consistently resist new ways of doing things.

Reduced Risk

What if your company only does one thing, as mine did in 2008? What if the market for that thing suddenly dries up? Platforms encourage diversification and thus reduce risk.
Imagine if Apple had remained only a maker of stylish but expensive computers? Chances are it would be struggling for its very existence right now. But with its multi-pronged platform extending into music, telecommunications, media, commerce, entertainment, and education, Apple is beautifully positioned to withstand any surprises the market sends its way.
Tip: Try to find potential partners with complementary interests—and don’t be greedy. Grow the pie together.

Greater Brand Awareness

Platforms and ecosystems mean that customers are out there extending your brand in innovative ways.
Facebook is a beautiful example. Although it began as a social networking site for college kids, Facebook, through continual growth and invention, has expanded its offerings to include business and marketing sites, community gaming sites, email, instant messaging, groups, blogs, advertising, consumer data mining, and much more. More than 50 million Facebook "likes" are clicked daily, and by some estimates one out of every eight people on the planet will be a Facebook user soon.
Tip: Think about innovative ways to extend your brand. Survey trusted customers and clients to find out what services or products they wish you offered.

A Bigger Customer Base

This one is simple. More products and services mean more customers.
Tip: No, a local butcher can’t also offer ballet dances. But what if he creates an app? What if he blogs about recipes and cooking tips? What if he cultivates a tribe?

The Masters of Innovation"

My intent was to provide a simple entry point to innovation literature by describing people I've found consistently insightful, distilling their key lesson to a single sentence, and pointing to where to go to learn more.  
So what makes a Master? I didn't create any kind of ranking algorithm while making my choices, but did consider three basic criteria:

1. Do the individual's ideas bring clarity to the quest of improving the predictability and productivity of innovation?
2. Are the ideas presented in a way that a practitioner can put them to work immediately?
3. To what degree has the person's work affected me personally?

These three questions lead to obviously biased selections. For example, I'm sure that most innovation practitioners wouldn't put baseball researcher Bill James on their list, but his mission to find patterns, develop theories, and overturn orthodoxy has greatly influenced my own thinking. Michael Mauboussin doesn't write about innovation, but his clear writing that blends finance, strategy, and psychology puts him on my list. Some readers have asked why I put A.G. Lafley and not Steve Jobs on my list. While Jobs and everything he accomplished at Apple is certainly worth studying, in my mind Lafley is a better role model for practitioners. After all, Lafley's bent is to manage innovation in a systematic, disciplined way. From everything I've read, Jobs's approach relied more on his singular genius. It's much easier to become more disciplined than to become more of a genius!
There were a ton of great thinkers that didn't quite make the cut, such as Chip and Dan Heath, Geoffrey Moore, Constantinos Markides, Robert Burgelman, Henry Mintzberg, Gary Hamel, Michael Tushman, W. Chan Kim, and Renee Mauborgne. And I'm sure there are many more people with great ideas that I just haven't encountered yet.
One natural question is, "Who is next?" There continues to be a steady stream of interesting ideas describing practical ways to improve innovation predictability and productivity. There are seven "next-generation" innovation writers and thought leaders that are worth watching (in alphabetical order):
1. Horace Dediu. I first met Dediu when we did an engagement with Nokia back in 2004. He is one of the most thoughtful students of disruptive innovation you'll meet. He runs a popular blog called Asymco, and his well-thought-out takes on the mobile phone and related industries make him worth following.
2. Jeffrey Dyer and Hal Gregersen. The duo (who are affiliated with Innosight) wrote a great book with Clayton Christensen last year called The Innovator's DNA. The book details the five behaviors that help power innovation success (associational thinking, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting), and provides a raft of practical tips to get better at innovation.
3. Braden Kelley. Kelley's most recent book is called Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. He is one of the leaders of the must-read Innovation Excellence website.
4. Stefan Lindegaard. Lindegaard has spent the last few years developing practical guidance about "open innovation." Last year, he joined a growing number of self-publishers by releasing Making Open Innovation Work. His website, 15inno.com, is a useful read.
5. Alexander Osterwalder. Seemingly everyone has seen the results of the book project that Osterwalder led — Business Model Generation — and has seen his "business model canvass" in action. Osterwalder's open-sourced, tool-oriented approach makes him a practitioner's dream.
6. Eric Ries. Eric is very well known in the start-up world and is beginning to become known in the corporate world. Ries builds off the teaching of Innovation Master Steve Blank and urges entrepreneurs to "remove waste" from the creation of new businesses by being very scientific in the management of unknowns. His 2011 book, The Lean Startup, is a must read.
7. Peter Sims. Sims wrote one of my favorite books from last year — Little Bets. The book is very approachable and actionable, using wide ranging examples to describe the importance of experimentation in the innovation process. Sims opens by describing how comedian Chris Rock perfects new jokes through a disciplined process of trial and error, and the book keeps rolling from there.
It's great to be in a field that is still emergent enough to attract such great talent, but now defined enough that practitioners can put ideas to immediate use. I look forward to continuing to play my part in synthesizing the writing from academics and practitioners with personal lessons learned from Innosight's fieldwork.

Uncork your Brain with Mind Maps

That great idea you are looking for is already somewhere in your mind or in the collective mind of your team.  The real effort in coming up with a great idea, is all about getting out of your own way so that your great idea can reveal itself.  I want to refer to this as the “idea release” process, rather than the idea generation process.
A very useful tool in the idea release process is mind mapping.  In this post, I will discuss how we inadvertently trap our great ideas in our mind; strategies for getting out of our own way; and finally how mind maps can help.

WHY OUR BRAINS NEED TO BE “UNCORKED”

We are all familiar with those situations where we can’t seem to get our thoughts together in a clear, organized, and useful way.  The solution to that vexing problem just keeps eluding us.  Or we are cursed with a frustrating case of writer’s block.  We try to get our thoughts down on paper, but many times it just produces unsatisfactory results.
There are two general reasons why we run into this and similar problems:

• We try to do too many things simultaneously: generate new ideas, evaluate their merit, and organize them.  This is something most of us do, and we don’t even realize it.
• We aren’t in a relaxed enough state to let our thoughts freely flow.  Essentially, we stress ourselves out.  And when you are stressed, it is hard to think of anything other than what is stressing you out.  This will happen when we are rushed to deliver the solution NOW.  Panic is an extreme reaction to this kind of stress.

STRATEGIES FOR “UNCORKING”

There are three general strategies I want to mention here.

• Slow Down the overall “idea release” process
• Speed Up individual “idea release” events
• Maintaining a relaxed state-of-mind so that your thoughts and ideas can freely flow

Slow Down the overall process … You should not rush the overall idea release process.  Try to give yourself and the team as much time as possible to find the right idea.  Create many situations to revisit the search for ideas.  Some could be scheduled team meetings, and others could be alone time set aside for yourself.  Don’t demand the right solution be the result of any one meeting.  I know that most of us don’t have the luxury of infinite time to find the right idea, but taking an extra week or two to find a better solution, can save months later on in the process.
Speed Up individual events … When you are doing a brainstorming session with others or doing a sole brain dump, fast is your friend.  By expressing your thoughts in a rapid fire way, you don’t give yourself the chance to evaluate or organize your thoughts.  You just capture them.  This is a good thing.  Your goal is to get as many ideas down on paper, as fast as you possibly can.  This is because only the tiniest fraction of ideas will reveal themselves to be “great ideas”, therefore it’s a numbers game.  You need a large number of ideas if you hope to find that one great idea.  Alternatively, only coming up with a few well thought out ideas will usually amount to nothing.  So generate lots of ideas, and be reckless about it!
Maintaining a relaxed state-of-mind … A lot of what I said about slowing down the process will help contribute to reducing stress and getting your mind in the relaxed state required to release ideas.  Additionally, you can remind yourself to think about ideas when you are in relaxed situations.  These might be situations like … watching TV, sitting on the porch watching the kids play, doing your favorite hobby.  How many times have we heard about people and the revelations they’ve had in the shower?  When you find yourself in one of these relaxed situations and you want to think about new ideas, go for it, but please remember … Keep it a no stress situation for two very important reasons.

• If the situation goes from relaxed to stressful, then you are no better equipped to reveal ideas
• Don’t ruin those low-stress high-quality moments in your life.  They are way too important!

WHY ARE MIND MAPS USEFUL?

I mentioned earlier that we attempt to do too many things simultaneously when trying to come up with ideas.  These are idea generation (aka release), evaluation, and organization.  We want to separate these into individual tasks.  Mind maps are a great tool for doing just that.  Ideas can be captured in a structure that is relaxed and informal.  It’s easy to later modify the organization and relationships between items.  And items can later be emphasized and de-emphasized based on their importance and relevance.
Its visual layout makes it easy to see and understand the relationships between items.  It’s also very easy to visually scan all of its items.  This means that existing items can and do inspire the addition of new items.  This is why mind maps are such a fantastic brainstorming tool.
Mind map from MindNode Pro

MIND MAPS IN ACTION

During the idea release process

• Start with the core idea or objective as the central node. I will typically circle it to indicate it is the starting point
• Looking at the center note, quickly write down the first thing that comes to mind.  Draw a line between the center and new node.
• Looking at the nodes on the sheet, continue to quickly write down what ever comes to mind, and draw a line between the new node and the existing one that inspired it.
• Don’t worry if you duplicate any items; don’t worry about spelling things correctly; and don’t worry about ensuring the relationships are all captured correctly.  You can fix these things later, so don’t let them slow down your progress during this step.
• Continue to do this until your pace slows down to the point where you feel it is no longer productive.
• Remember that the point is to quickly write things down.  This is so that we don’t give ourselves time to evaluate or organize these ideas as we come up with them.  Those are the separate steps that follow.

Adjusting the organization

• If you are using mind mapping software, then reorganizing is a very simple drag-and-drop action.  The exact method may be slightly different in each application, but it will be very straight forward in all of those tools.
• You will have the ability to reorder items and change their locations within the hierarchy.

Evaluating ideas for their importance and relevance

• Finally you want to emphasize any great idea that has been captured.  I will typically draw a box around those few nodes in the mind map.
• There may also be items in the mind map that just have no relevance at all.  Remember, that capturing these is absolutely fine, and even encouraged.
• If you wish, you can put a strike though these items.  Don’t delete them or black them out.  A strike through is enough to show that they are not important, yet leaves them understandable … just in case.

MIND MAPPING TOOLS

There are many mind mapping software products available today.  They run on Microsoft Windows, Mac, iPads/iPhones, and some are cloud-based internet services.  The prices for these products also go across a wide range from free to a couple of hundred dollars.
Don’t forget that a pen and pad or whiteboard also work great.  As a matter of fact, my paper journal is littered with mind maps.  In the spirit of total transparency, here is the mind map that I created one day while having lunch.  It was when I was first considering this AbsurdlyIdeal blog.

I also use a software product called MindNode Pro (www.mindnode.com).  Sorry Windows users, it only runs on Mac.  I opted for fast and simple in my choice.  There are very few options and manipulation of the mind map is fast and easy.
If you do an Internet search for “mind mapping tools”, you will find many choices on all platforms and at every price including free.

PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE

I mentioned earlier that we want to get out of our own way.  Breaking down the idea release process and relaxing, are the two ways we go about doing this.  Making the use of mind maps second nature is a very powerful way to accomplish these two things.  We want to get to the point where using mind maps requires no mental capacity at all.  This way we can fully focus our mental energy on revealing ideas.
In a brainstorming session, you want your mind map creation to be fast and effortless.  You don’t want to slow down the process because you are struggling with the tool.  Struggling produces stress, which does NOT produce ideas.  And if you are struggling with the tool, you will have a tough time contributing to the meeting.
So to make mind mapping fast and effortless, you just need to practice using them.  Spend a day using them for everything.  Creating your daily to do list, note taking, creating a shopping list, etc.  Also practice for speed, because this is what a brainstorming session will be like.  You might try practicing this by occasionally giving yourself a time constraint.  An example would be to generate 20 nodes on a mind map in 30 seconds.  Achieve this pace and mind mapping will be an indispensable and fun tool to have in your arsenal
Now it’s your turn …

• Do you think mind maps would be useful to you?
• Do you use a mind mapping tool that you really like and want to share with others?
• Do you use an alternative approach to mind maps that you feel is just as useful?