English | Deutsch English | DeutschFifteen years ago yesterday, the World Wide Web became official and was put into the public domain. In honor of that fact, one of our colleagues at frog (thanks Ben Tomassetti!) brought in a birthday cake for it today:
(Thanks to Cary Gibaldi for the photo)
Note the nerd humor of the binary numbering for the year (there are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don’t…) I can’t say that it actually was the “moistest cake I’ve ever tasted”, but, like the web, it was free, so I’m not going to complain.
This blog post at SiliconValley.com from yesterday sums up the situation nicely:
It could easily have gone …
There is an interesting article in the April 2008 Harvard Business Review about how to be a successful services company, and one of the examples they talk about is Progressive Insurance. They talk about the two features of Progressive which are most distinctive and visible - their white vans, and how they list competitor’s rates alongside their own. As the article describes:
When someone insured by Progressive is involved in an auto accident, the company immediately sends out a van to assist that person and to assess the damage on the spot… Customers love this level of responsiveness and give the company high marks for service.
But customers are very price sensitive about auto insurance and so would …
Let’s look at a once-commonplace feature that has almost entirely disappeared from today’s consumer electronics. To illustrate my point, here’s a picture from my gadget archive, a perfectly ordinary Sony radio Walkman of mid-90’s vintage:
Now let’s look at the back:
Notice anything? No? Let’s look closer:
What’s that…a screw? Remember those? Yes, indeed, thanks to the constant drive for sleekness and cost-cutting you never see screws on CE devices any more, especially portable ones.
What does this have to do with Earth Day? A couple of things:
1. Screws facilitate repairability
Screws allow easy disassembly without potential for breaking housing parts. Without disassembly, easy repair or replacement of internal …
In honor of Earth Day, here’s a presentation I did a few weeks ago Design Green Now in Washington. This is the slide deck I used to introduce myself and frog for ten minutes or so before the panel discussion itself. It misses quite a bit without the talk over, but you’ll get the general idea!
If you view it on Slideshare, you can see a full screen version.
I believe we are about to see the birth of a new business organization - one that is optimized for complex systems of problems and solutions, rather than based on silos focused on specific functions, and which treats user experience as a core organizational axis rather than a meddlesome add-on: Org Chart 2.0.
Isn’t it interesting that in the latest airline quality rankings the top three spots were taken by low-cost carriers? JetBlue, Southwest and AirTran ranked the best while overall the industry had its worst ratings in twenty years.
Just goes to show that providing a leading user experience does not have to mean premium price. All three are relative start-ups compared to the likes of United and American, and they have been able to structure themselves (and therefore their) costs based on lessons learned from the older airlines.
Nevertheless, with issues like number of passengers bumped per flight, amount of baggage lost, and late flights that the survey measured, it’s hard to see how these three airlines would have intrinsic benefits …
I was part of a panel discussion at Western Washington University yesterday for Design Green Now, a series of talks about sustainable design taking place on the West Coast. Together with my fellow panelists Sophia Wang Traweek, Marc Stoiber and Arunas Oslapas I think we covered a pretty good range of topics with our short presentations, but the real heart of it was Q&A with the 70 or so students attending and some questions submitted via a website. It was also good to see a presentation about the various sustainability efforts going on at the WWU campus.
As often seems to happen in these discussions the daunting complexity of the challenge became an over-arching theme. The moderator, Sean Schmidt (who …
This last week at frog design we hosted a group of almost 40 global executive MBA’s from IESE, the renowned business school in Barcelona. It was an intensive and stimulating day looking at issues of innovation - what methods are successful, what mindsets are required, and how do you bring insights from customers into the picture?
The participants were from all over the world, and many of them were working in countries other than where they grew up. Their industries ran the gamut from tech and software to oil and gas and mining, with everything in between, so it made for engaging and wide-ranging discussion.
One of the …
A fascinating article in the February issue of Fast Company about Duncan Watts, a researcher at Yahoo, who questions some of the core concepts of Malcom Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point
[T]astemakers, Gladwell concluded, are the spark behind any successful trend. “What we are really saying,” he writes, “is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others.” In modern marketing, this idea–that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends–is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you’ll reach everyone else through them, basically for free.
Yet, if you believe Watts, all that money and effort is being wasted. Because according to him, Influentials have no …
The Huffington Post’s new “Fundrace 2008″ feature allows you to see who the big donors are in the 2008 presidential race campaigns, with a Google maps mash-up that lets you search by region, donor name, party affiliation and donation amount. It’s a light-hearted but also serious look at who the big donors are (it mostly tracks donations over $200) and, in some cases, you can see who’s playing “both sides”. They also track donations from employees at specific companies. For example, Microsoft and Google employees have primarily given to Democrats by over 2:1 ratios.
A great example of using technology to bring greater transparency to the democratic process.
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