Innovate as if you are starting new

I've spent this week thinking about big changes in tech industry impacting incumbent market leaders.  Well, it wasn't that I was looking for case studies.  They were on front pages of newspapers through out this week.

A couple of days ago, there were rumors of Kodak running out of liquidity and looking to file bankruptcy to keep its doors open.  Research In Motion was getting heavy pressure to change its top management from investors to stop the falling stock price.  There were also rumors about Barnes and Noble looking to spin off its Nook business to adapt to changing retail environment, and Forbes ran an article talking about slow demise of Best Buy, another retail giant.

1.2 billion downloads over a week

That's how many times mobile apps have been downloaded between Christmas and New Year's Day.  Let's try putting that in perspective.

According to Gigaom, there are estimated 150 million smartphones in the market by end of 2011.  Let's say out of them, 70% of them were actively downloading apps (which I think is an higher-end estimate; about 50% of smartphone users are reported to enable WiFi according to Nielson).  That makes about 105 million smartphones and their users.  If we assume one user one smartphone, it comes out to each smartphone user downloading about 11 or 12 apps during the last week of 2011 on average.  These are new applications that people found somehow, probably through friends or media recommendations.

People are downloading new apps, and they are trying them to see whether it solves a problem at their hand.  From the evaluation of the app to purchase and download, it takes a minute tops.  And people are going through apps by volume (All things D estimates average iPhone user downloaded about 83 apps in 2011).

Number of these downloads will likely increase, download will become faster, and time that you have to make the first impression will become shorter.  Remember there are several other apps competing for user's attention per each week.  If yours doesn't work, users will move on.

Your app is your new website.  Build it, test it, and perfect it for those users on the go.

Very thin margin of winning

Last night in Iowa, Mitt Romney officially edged Rick Santorum by eight votes. There were 122,255 ballots cast. If our math is right (and feel free to check us), the difference comes to about 0.00654 percent of all votes 

- MARK MEMMOTT @NPR

By now everyone who follows American politics would have heard that Mitt Romney won Iowa Caucuses by 8 votes.  Out of hundred of thousands of ballots casted, margin of 8 votes come out to be less than 0.01% of all votes.  Talk about a thin margin, it could not have been any more slimmer margin than this (only 7 other even slimmer margins are possible!).

API strategy is a must

While researching the social networking API, I stumbled upon these slides by Sam Ramji at Apigee.  They are worth flipping through especially the first 70 slides or so.  Sam draws an interesting parallel of today's API-based application trend with Amundsen's South Pole expedition.

Why where we hang out is important

[...] we leave parts of ourselves all around us, which in turn, come to shape who we are.
By Alix Spiegel @NPR

I was listening to NPR Morning Edition this morning, and heard an interesting story about how we are shaped by our own environment.  You can hear the whole segment here.  It was talking about how we can do things without even thinking about it (sort of auto-pilot mode, if you will), and this habit is closely tied to the cues that we get from our own environment.

Happy New Year!

I want to wish everyone happy new year.  I hope everyone gets a chance to prove themselves and while doing so, can make a contribution to building a better society.  2011 has been a tough year for some of us: continued housing slump, unemployment becoming chronic condition for some, those who got hit by natural and man-made disasters and those of us who lost our loved ones oversea in armed conflicts.

Through all these human struggles, I think we became closer to realizing that we are one global community with shared destiny.  Struggle for freedom and justice in one part of world is shared and felt through out our globe, thanks to social media and ever-connected global psyche.

I hope that 2012 will be a better year for all of us on the earth.  Whether we are struggling to find the next job, new home; rebuild from devastation left by tsunami or hurricane; regain the freedom and dignity from oppressors; or recover from the loss of loved ones, I hope we all make a progress toward our goals and can be thankful for 2012 at this time of the year 2013.

Let's all toast to a constructive, peaceful, productive and healing year 2012.

Once out, it's not yours anymore; so make a platform

It's funny how we all get used to this idea of attachment and ownership.  When we spend time to work on a product, we often make a mistake thinking that we know how to use the product best.  We think we own the product because we designed it.  Of course we all start out with problem that we want to solve, and create a solution that best addresses the problem.

Look!  It's 24-hr live fish channel TV that runs without power.
Would TV designer thought of this use case?  Probably not... 

But in reality when users get their hands on the product, it's no longer your product.  It is now user's tool.  It's up to users to decide how to interpret the tool, and apply it to their problem to create their own solution in their own way.  I call it interpretation because it's really up to the users to decide how to use it in their own way.

I think we all tend to underestimate how creative users can be in solving their problems given the tools at their hand.  This user creativity (or improvisation as I blogged earlier) actually works for designers in some sense because as users create their own solution often far-stretching the intended the product usage, and this actually does a couple of things.  One is that product designer is led to believe that people are using the product because it's well designed.  The other is that product can be used to solve totally different problems other than the original intended problem.