Jane Fulton Suri is chief creative officer at IDEO, with special emphasis on the contribution of human insight, creative practice and design thinking to client companies. She came to design from human factors psychology to pioneer the integration of social science-based approaches with design, grow a flexible community of practitioners, and evolve human-centred design methods, including empathic observation and experience prototyping, across the company’s client projects worldwide. In addition, Jane published a book last year about intuitive design titled Thoughtless Acts?

The interview starts off right away with a future vision for an empathic economy:

“In an empathic economy the provider/supplier of goods and services would be keen to reach an empathic understanding not just of consumers, but also of many other people within the business network upon whom business success depends: the farmer who grows/gathers the raw material, the processor who creates the basic technology, the distributor who ships it around, the sales-person, the trash collector (think “life-cycle” and interdependent human network).”

“By calling it the “empathic economy” I’m emphasizing that part of the inspiration and motivation for innovation that comes from creativity sparked by emotional, human, empathic resonance with other people’s conditions, not only the more traditional functional analyses of interdependencies that might be more common. As our networks and supporting technology become more sophisticated the interdependence between many different kinds of individuals across the globe becomes more apparent, more accessible and more visible. It seems natural that companies will/can soon have a much broader view of sources and opportunities for innovation in their business than simply around the offer that they make to a consumer.”

Read full interview

(via the Idea Festival blog)

Mike Spang has the long job title: “Business Research Director, Document Imaging, Corporate Business Research, Eastman Kodak Company”. He spoke about how Kodak went about creating a satisfying global corporate web experience.

To put it in somewhat of a context, about five years ago Kodak had to rapidly reinvent itself as a digital camera company, and so the website had to also change from a portal for photography to a portal for digital imaging, with 80 percent of the web visitors being regular consumers.

The website also had to provide people with an experience beyond just camera purchasing. As one can read in an article in Business Week that was just published, CEO Antonio M. Perez “aims to make Kodak do for photos what Apple does for music: help people to organise and manage their personal libraries of images. He’s developing a slew of new digital photo services for consumers that he expects to yield higher returns.”

Spang described how Kodak through a clever use of user-centred design and a wide range of usability methods, was able to reinvent its web site, make it truly global and incorporate input from users worldwide.

The techniques used included open ended site surveys, heuristic evaluation, focus groups, cognitive walkthroughs, card sorting, usability testing (in lab, remote, web-based), visitor satisfaction assessments, multivariate design testing, and web traffic analysis.

Since there are more than 50 different national versions of the site, the research took place in the UK, Germany, France, China, South Korea and the United States.

Download presentation (pdf, 2.8 mb, 44 slides)

Emmi Kuussikko, Sulake Corporation

Emmi Kuussikko is a research manager with particular responsibilities for market and user insight at the Sulake Corporation, an interactive entertainment company based in Finland. Sulake is responsible for Habbo Hotel.

Habbo is one of the largest teen online communities in 29 different countries. It is a virtual world for young people, a massively multiplayer online game where teenagers create their own personalised virtual characters and interact with other characters in the community. It has 7 million unique users monthly, mainly in the 13 to 16 year old age range, and over 60 million characters have been created globally.

Since it is the community that creates a truly unique gaming environment and a great deal of the changing content is created by the users themselves, they strongly feel they own the brand and the Sulake Corporation just manages it with them.

Research in this online environment is of course also done online. The user base is very loyal and they are very eager to participate in surveys. So actual data collection is very fast. A survey can collect over 40,000 answers in just a few days.

Here are some of the results from a recent survey done globally.

Most teens spend more time on the internet (>90%) than TV (~60 %). Mobile usage is mainly used for text messages, followed by camera use and game playing. One third listen to music on the mobile phone, especially in the UK and Italy. Teens mostly use the web to stay in contact with their friends: IM and email. Then come games. The research provides also a more detailed insight into youth characteristics regarding life style and values:

• No 1 value: having warm social relationships with friends and family; no 2 value was having fun, and no 3 was security
• Many are rather conservative in their values
• Fame, wealth and influence are important to about half
• They generally have a very positive self-image
• They endorse a socially responsible world-view
• Even thought most claim to be tolerant, many have negative attitudes toward minorities. But they would like to have friends from other countries.

Kuusikko’s presentation started to become really interesting when she presented user segments, and the spread of these segments by country.

The user segmentation was based on a cluster-factor analysis. Trying to create maximum divergence between groups and minimum within, provided an accurate and reliable method for identifying groups with similar characteristics. The variables examined were personality, values, attitudes, subculture membership, areas of interest.

Five user types were found: achievers, traditionals, creatives, rebels and loners.

Sulake also uses a more selective community of 200 users to generate, co-create and test new ideas in a continuous and open dialogue.

I hope to be able to add a download to Kuusikko’s presentation shortly.

Mehmood Khan, Unilever

Mehmood Khan is the eccentric thinker who is the Global Leader of Innovation Process Development at Unilever.

Unilever’s mission is to “add vitality to life”. It manages 400 brands spanning 14 categories of home, personal care and foods products “that help people look good, feel good and get more out of life”.

Khan has been with Unilever since 1982 and has worked in wide areas of the business: marketing, exports, procurement, business development and innovation. He has been pioneering new business for Unilever in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia and North Korea, along with developing new portfolios in China and other countries in East Asia.

In his presentation, entitled “A holistic approach to innovation”, Khan described the key features of Unilever innovation.

According to Khan, innovation is about turning creativity in a successful enterprise. At Unilever innovation is customer-focused which allows the company to keep its brands connected to people’s lives. The innovation learnings and in particular the customer focus have also shaped the vitality brand strategy.

Download presentation (pdf, 136 kb, 17 slides)

James Surowiecki, author of “The Wisdom of Crowds”

James Surowiecki is an extremely well-skilled public speaker. He managed to give a detailed and well-structured 45 minute presentation on his book “The Wisdom of Crowds” with many examples, without notes and without slides.

His argument is that crowds are often smarter collectively than even the smartest individuals it contains. He claims that “If you can figure out ways to tap into the collective intelligence of your organisation and the collective intelligence of your consumers, you can radically change your capability to resolve problems and to forecast the future.”

Surowiecki gave many examples of how that is being done:

• NASA using volunteers to classify Martian craters in a programme called Clickworkers,
• Iowa Electronic Markets: the use of markets to predict elections. People buy and sell shares to predict the outcome of US Presidential elections. They were more accurate 3/4 of the time than any Gallup poll.
• Hollywood Stock Exchange. People buy and sell shares in how well movie releases will do. They give a better answer than any other method. They also picked 7 out of 8 of the major Oscar winners.
• Other examples include HP where employees could buy or sell shares in how well printer sales were going to do, and it outperformed internal forecasts. Siemens also used this technique to predict how long a particular software product development is going to take. Microsoft has also done something similar, and Google has launched PROPHET, which predicts 200 events of all kinds and they have been almost perfectly correct.

But crowds only act intelligent under three conditions:

1. Aggregation. It is about the aggregate judgment of lots of individuals, not about consensus.
2. Diversity. The crowd, the group is cognitively diverse with differences of perspective and differences of heuristics. Homogeneous groups tend to reinforce their own thinking. Diversity mitigates this effects of peer pressure, which can be very powerful.
3. Independence. The people within the crowd act independently. They think for themselves and rely on their own information, own ideas. Our natural tendency to imitate and protect our reputation can move us away from this independence.

According to Surowiecki, one of the implications for market research is that you want to ask people not what they think of a product, but instead you want to ask the question: “how successful do you think this product is going to be” or “how many people do you think will buy this product by February”.

Roula Nasser, P&G

Roula Nasser is Director of Customer and Market Knowledge of the Global P&G Beauty.

Her talk, entitled “Driving Consumer & Market Understanding to New Heights: A Roadmap for Success” set out a market strategy and vision, but was unfortunately a bit weak on examples.

P&G has put a lot of emphasis on focusing on the future, or in their own jargon: from hindsight, to insight, to foresight. To do that, they have been investing a lot on new capabilities to get at consumer attitudes; on understanding the changing dynamics of the marketplace, particularly the differences between the developed and the developing world; and on making research and researchers strategic.

Nasser then went on to say how important it is to have visible support from company leaders, and went into a long and elaborate praise of A.G. Lafley who is P&G’s chairman, president and CEO.

Lastly, she stressed how important it is to think about consumers in new ways, by seeing them as people and developing a more personal relationship, and to use more involved shadowing techniques, which they call “Walk with Me”: go and visit people in their homes; live on the budget of a low-income consumer for a week; shop with consumer’s grocery list, budget and children; serve in jobs where P&G products are used.

The examples, from China and South Africa, illustrated how such an approach can lead to real benefits for advertising. There were however no examples of what this deeper people-centred approach might mean for P&G’s product innovation.

The first issue looks at the Group’s involvement in the field of disability, from the designing of new communication services, to working on new interfaces.

This initiative is part of France Telecom’s strategic programme NExT (New Experience in Telecommunications), which aims to “make the customer the centre of his or her communications world”.

France Telecom takes a design for all approach: “Facilitating access for all customers to all its products and services”.

The Group is developing new communication services “that use the communication mode most suited to the person you are calling”. They are also developing new interfaces, including those that use haptic technology. The longer-term goal however is “to come as close as possible to real face-to-face conversation between two people”.

The presentation sets out why we need a new generation of public services and a new (design-led) method of creating them. She talks about the Design Council’s two healthcare projects, designing for behaviour change and transformation design.

- Download presentation (pdf, 12.5 mb, 54 slides)
- Download script (Word document, 104 kb, 6 pages)

My business partner Michele Visciola is the president of UPA-Italy, and in that capacity he organised the World Usability Day in Italy at the Bicocca University in Milan.

I could unfortunately not attend since I was in London for the European Market Research Event, on which I already wrote. The second day report will follow soon.

One of the speakers was Yaniv Steiner, Experientia’s director of R&D and the founder of Nastypixel which is a “prototyping sweatshop”. He has been teaching at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and currently also lectures at the University of Architecture in Venezia and the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.

The audio of Yaniv’s presentation on rapid prototyping is online (in English, with a short Italian introduction by Michele Visciola in Italian) and so are his slides and a number of links.

Régine Debatty, who was also a speaker at the Milan event, has a nice profile of Yaniv on her blog we-make-money-not-art.

Clive Grinyer, France Telecom Orange

In his highly entertaining presentation, thought-provokingly called “lipstick on a pig”, Clive Grinyer reflected on the relation between usability and design.

Grinyer once worked with Jonathan Ive in a company called “Tangerine”. After some time at Samsung and the Design Council, he joined the legendary Orange mobile brand where he is the head of design and usability and develops user interfaces on handsets, mobile portals and web services, thus helping to create the next generation of communication services.

During his talk, Grinyer spent a lot of time reflecting on the perceived and actual role of design.

Design is more than just the work of a magician designer, a decorator or an innovative engineer. It is more than fashion or product design (with all respect for Jonathan Ive).

Design is really about creating a complete service experience, an approach which has been pioneered by Steve Jobs.

But quite often companies still have the tendency to put lipstick on a pig, to render something attractive that is underneath unattractive.

Grinyer in other words is upset by the superficiality of design and advocates a people-centred approach. People, he says, are old and young, have different values and different levels of comfort with technology. They are not just between 16 and 25.

Because many people have different views of what simplicity is, also designers do, and Grinyer provides us with some funny examples of ‘simple solutions’ designers have come up with.

He says that we often end up with a situation where:

• Technology rarely works
• Usability is poor and uncovered too late in the process to correct
• Customer uptake is slow or doesn’t happen
• Revenue is reduced
• Customer experience is random and brand delivery is inconsistent
• In short, technology rarely just works

Did you ever try to set up email on a phone?

Orange tries to design the full experience across many touchpoints.

To do that well, you need to find out who your customer really is, what they really do, what they want to do, and somebody needs to show them what is possible, what is next, and make them want to do it!

Companies and designers also need to be aware that customers always tell the truth, but not always the way you think.

Experimentation is therefore important, designers have to come up with more than one idea, and you have to test things with real people.

In the end, Grinyer says, design has both a scientific and emotional side. Usability and ergonomics provide the physical and cognitive knowledge but design also delivers attraction, delight, comfort, safety, enjoyment, pride, clarity, wow and awe.

Designers in other words need to design the full experience.

Download presentation (zipped PowerPoint, 6.2 mb, 64 slides)
 

Valérie Bauwens, Swisscom

Another excellent talk took place while Clive was speaking, so I could not attend it. It was by my Belgian compatriot Valérie Bauwens, who is a senior user researcher at Swisscom’s Customer Observatory and who works closely with Stefana Broadbent.

Valérie was kind enough to guide me briefly through her talk afterwards.

Swisscom’s User Adoption Lab has been looking specifically at how people use technology in their daily lives, by doing in-context interviews and observing people in their homes.

A key result of the research is that each communication tool is specialised in its use, depending on its functionalities.

Download presentation (pdf, 875 kb, 29 slides)
 

Sarah Pearson, ACB/University of Sussex

Sarah Pearson, who is a managing partner of ACB at the Sussex Innovation Centre of the University of Sussex, presented the results of an elaborate ethnographic study on “the impact of personal video recorders on television audience behaviour during commercial breaks using video ethnography”.

In short, PVR’s (which are TiVo-like devices) allow you to fast forward advertisements and are perceived to be a massive threat to the advertising model.

Research done in focus groups and in labs confirmed the perception of this threat.

During initial research Pearson found however that there was an amazing difference between what people perceive of the technology, and what people actually do.

Pearson today presented a more elaborate piece of ethnographic research, which was funded by a (very worried) consortium of Ofcom, Channel 4, Channel Five, iTV and Initiative.

The research wanted to go beyond claimed behaviour and to get a deeper understanding of people’s actual behaviours.

It turned out that there was a somewhat surprising tendency among the majority of participants to initially watch live TV and only revert to the PVR as a kind of back-up. Not surprisingly, of the 3480 opportunities to see adverts, 70% were live and only 30% were time-shifted. And only two-thirds of the time-shifted ones were actually skipped. So 80% of adverts were still viewed entirely, which means that PVR’s are not going to have such an impact as once feared.

I was hoping for some more insight on the fast-forwarding behaviour. It seemed to me that ads were browsed and skimmed like pages in a magazine and some of them merited more in-depth investigation. However, Pearson didn’t provide much insight into this, in part because of NDA restrictions.”

Download presentation summary (pdf, 20 kb, 2 pages)
 

Francesco Cara, Nokia

Francesco Cara, who is the director of Nokia Design, Insight and Innovation, provided the last talk I attended during the day.

Cara, who has a cognitive science background, provided a talk on organic innovation, where innovation is created in dialogue with the end-user, in an open, interactive way.

Nokia, argues Cara, advocates a human approach to technology, with a strong emphasis on dialogue. Fast prototyping and ethnography are crucial, with the latter assuming a strategic role.

Cara provided the case study example of Skype, which is a typical example of convergence, bringing together voice telephony, instant messaging and broadband access.

The ethnographic and contextual interview study, which took place in Germany and Brazil, explored who the Skype users really were and how they used the service.

Some of the learnings showed that Skype should not be seen as a replacement but as an additional that has a number of quite distinct features: such as openness (the channel remains open), targeted and intimate, low virality and enriched communication.

My selection of talks is purely based on personal preferences and obviously only a snapshot of about a third of the event.

I have the conference CD’s with most of the presentation files and have uploaded some of those that I attended on this blog (with approval of the authors involved). If you are interested in the presentation files of one of the other talks, just let me know.
 

Flemming Ostergaard, LEGO

I started off the day with Flemming Ostergaard, Marketing Innovation Director at Lego, whose talk “Leveraging Ethnography and Anthropological Research to Innovate” describes how LEGO works on understanding kids and kids play and how to translate these insights into new products and play innovation.

LEGO as a company is facing some major challenges, e.g. the huge pressure from tech toys, the fact that kids are getting older younger, and the shortened production cycle, that have made innovation crucial for the company.

To innovate they need a much sharper understanding of the needs of kids. To achieve this, LEGO uses a variety of user research techniques, including:

1. Be the Kid – participatory observation where adults became kids;
2. Know the Shopper – observation & desk research, particularly looking at the interaction between children and parents and at how children shop;
3. Find the Forces – context and trends research;
4. Find the Fun – ethnographic research (15 days of hanging out with kids);
5. Map the Industry – innovation diagnostics with a focus of trying to understand the ingredients of successful innovation;
6. Find the Stories – context research through talking to authors and scriptwriters.

This research brought about an insight into some of the core values that are crucial now, such as complexity, new playing fields and the need for privacy.

LEGO uses a six pillar approach to turn these values into patterns and “innovation vectors”, and looked for instance at a privacy-inspired solution, called “Mutants by Mail” that covers all the needs of the parents, but also of the child, through a clever use of the mobile phone.

In addition to straightforward user research, LEGO also builds on the power of user communities, through its use of ‘Adult Fans Of Lego’ (the so-called AFOL’s) in the development of the second version of MindStorm, and in user co-creation, through its already well-known LEGO Factory.

A big issue is still the ‘creative leap’: how to take the insights that were gained from understanding and make these into relevant new products concepts. Ostergaard had to admit that the company is are not fully there yet. But one of the ways to make sure user research and creativity are well integrated is by involving creative people part of the full research process, not just the design process.
 

Tony Linford, Hi-Tec Sports

Tony Linford, the marketing director of Hi-Tec Sports, took a much more intuitive and much less formalised approach to user understanding.

Hi-Tec is an English manufacturer of sports footwear, founded in the 70’s by Dutch entrepreneur Frank Van Wezel.

The key to innovation, according to Linford, is a mixture of being very close to the end users, emotional and intuitive understanding of their needs, a highly scientific, problem-solving approach which leads to a series of steadily improving prototypes, and simple entrepreneurial guts to go for something that you think makes sense.

Hi-Tec works a lot with individual lead users, such as professional golfer Padraig Harrington, for whom they developed a set of new high-performance golf shoes.

The company’s latest concept is 4:SYS (pronounced “Forces”). It analyses the different forces applied by the barefoot during the running gait and came up with a sole that mimicked and helps this natural pressure.

Download presentation (pdf, 264 kb, 20 slides)
 

Anat Amir, O2

Anat Amir, who is the head of product experience and research at O2, a UK telecom provider, gave the last talk I attended in the morning.

Amir was one of the people in charge of a 6 month pilot study or user trial with 375 participants in Oxford, UK of Digital Video Broadcast (DVB-H), which is multi-channel TV broadcast directly to mobiles.

Although the pilot study had mostly a technical aim, and the results were quite positive, Amir hinted at a number of usability, context of use and user experience issues that I would have loved to hear more about, but that were difficult to discuss at this stage because of NDA.

More information about the project can be found on the Arqiva website.
 

She highlights that “it is just as important understanding people who are not using technology as it is to understand people who are using technology” and describes what the challenges were in changing Microsoft from a tech-centred company to a people-centred one.

She reflects on how companies can change to have a people-centred focus no matter what their products and services are, on the new 180º Academy where she is directing the programming, and on her new consulting activities.

The interview, which was conducted in October, is published as a prelude to the European Market Research Event that Anne co-chairs and I will attend and blog about.

- Read interview
- Download interview (pdf, 188 kb, 8 pages)

“John Maeda is a professor at MIT’s Media Lab, and a nationally recognized computer scientist. His early computer art experiments, for example, were a precursor to the interactive graphics common on websites today.” [...]

“Maeda is now a “repentant” technowhiz and a leading apostle of simplicity. In 2004 he founded the MIT Simplicity Consortium at the Media Lab, which works with major corporations to design technologies for simplicity-driven products. He’s just published a book called “The Laws of Simplicity,” a guide to simplicity in the digital age. He ruminates about simplicity on his Simplicity blog, and next week he’ll discuss strategies for making products simpler at a panel discussion in Boston on the future of design and technology sponsored by Core77, a New York-based design networking organization that publishes an influential design blog.”

“There is huge pressure to make products smarter and more technologically imbued, which ends up almost backfiring,” says Allan Chochinov, a designer and partner of Core77. “End users feel they can’t use them. They make us feel dumb or incompetent.”

Read full story

The technology is based on sophisticated gesture recognition, while the end-result for the visitor is a radically simple content navigation system in which the images are projected on a large screen, and interaction is performed via nothing but a flat luminous surface.

The project was developed by Jan-Christoph Zoels, Yaniv Steiner and Ofer Luft of Experientia, the Turin-based international experience design consultancy.

A prototype of the gesture-based interface was previously used to navigate Google Earth and to guide club dancing during a music rave. The various interfaces are all based on the smartRetina™ technology, which provides the designer with a programmable “eye”, allowing him to easily design new experiences and interactions which do not require a tangible interface.

YouTube video

I am listing here just a handful of the many speakers of the three-day event (in no particular order) to give you an idea: Anne Kirah, Senior Design Anthropologist Customer Design Center, MSN/Microsoft Corporation; James Surowiecki, Author, “The Wisdom Of Crowds“; Roula Nassar, Director Global Hair Care Consumer and Market Knowledge, Procter & Gamble; Flemming Ostergaard, Marketing Innovation Director, LEGO and Helene Venge, Global Marketing Manager, LEGO Interactive; Anat Amir, Head of Product Experience and Research, O2; Valerie Bauwens, Senior User Researcher, The Customer Observatory, SWISSCOM; Clive Grinyer, Director of Design, France Telecom Orange; Margaret Alrutz, Senior Design Researcher, Steelcase Iterative Design and Customer Feedback; Francesco Cara, Director Nokia Design, Insight, and Innovation, Nokia.

There are many more.

So read this blog if you want to know what the event is all about. A second edition is already planned for June 2007.

(And if you are around in London or at the conference, please let me know.)

It was created by the Norwegian usability consultancy Netlife Research.

Nothing beats humour in getting your point across.

Download calendar (pdf, 886 kb)

(via justaddwater.dk)

“In some cases museums—famously top-down institutions—are even incorporating the views, critical choices and contributed content of visitors into their programs. They are also re-examining the ways in which visitors interact with objects and spaces, as well as each other. For help with both of these approaches they are turning to a growing sector of the interactive design world; one that specializes in interactive museum displays.”

“Thus, the best interactive exhibits are open-ended. They encourage visitors to be active participants in the experience rather than passive consumers of information. They take their visitors’ views seriously and break down the hierarchy of institutions.”

Acknowledging the debate (”The idea of the audience taking control sends shivers down many a curator’s spine”), Kabat provides some very good examples of thoughtful integration of user-generated content in museum and exhibition contexts.

Read full story

Here is Marco’s introduction to the interview:

“Dr. Pieter Desmet is an assistant professor at the Department of Industrial Designof the Delft University of Technology. His background is in industrial design, and his research for his PhD degree focussed on emotional product experience. His award winning research has been published in several journals and presented at international platforms. Pieter’s dissertation “Designing Emotions” is one that can be found on the desks of many (designers) and also for me was one of the first real encounters with this very interesting topic. I would like to suggest everybody to order this book, read it and realise that this is the best starting point you could have wished for. Pieter has done a fantastic job in summarising the complex and transforming it into the understandable. He has used his product emotion measurement tool PrEmo to help companies understand the emotional impact of their products and is a frequently invited speaker.”

Read interview

“The new Internet boom commonly referred to as Web 2.0 is really an exercise in digital democracy,” he writes.

“Dubbed Digital Utopians by some, and Web 2.0 innovators by others, this latest wave of tech gurus champion community over commerce, sharing ideas over sharing profits. By using Web sites that stress group thinking and sharing, these Internet idealists want to topple the power silos of Hollywood, Washington, Wall Street and even Silicon Valley. And like countless populists throughout history, they hope to disperse power and control, an idea that delights many and horrifies others.”

“The core of the Web 2.0 movement resurrects an age-old debate about governance and democracy, one that was argued by political philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville: Are the benefits of democracy — taking advantage of what Web 2.0 proponents call the wisdom of the crowds — worth risking the dark side of mob rule?”

Fost realises that the Web 2.0 movement is not without its share of critics.

“Andrew Keen warns against the dangers of embracing technology’s level playing field. Keen, 46, a former professor and philosopher turned tech entrepreneur, published a tract this year, ‘Web 2.0 Is Reminiscent of Marx‘, and is working on a book lambasting ‘The Cult of the Amateur‘.”

“Keen dismisses what he calls the ‘militant and absurd’ buzzwords of Web 2.0: Empowering citizen media, radically democratize, smash elitism, content redistribution, authentic community.”

In his article Fost traces the notion of digital utopia back to the early days of computing, in particular the liberal politics of the 1960s anti-war and civil rights movements, arguing that “underpinning the technology movement has always been a sense of community.”. He then goes on to describe how utopians today organise themselves, but also how in the end business always takes over.

Similar warnings for realism come from Aleks Krotoski in an opinion piece in The Guardian, while reviewing the book “The Victorian Internet” by Tom Standage, who is the technology editor of The Economist.

Standage argues that today’s ‘electronic superhighway; is the heir to the more revolutionary 19th-century ‘highway of thought’. Like today’s utopians, the telegraph’s development was accompanied by cries that it would hold the answer to human fraction and foible. But in the end it was unable to stop the advance of the 20th century, economic downturn and its own inevitable downfall. It only helped spread the news faster.”

Discussing user-generated content, Krotoski writes “these spaces are increasingly being taken over by London stock exchange traders with agendas. Viva which revolution?”

- Read article by Dan Fost (San Francisco Chronicle)
- Read article by Alex Krotoski (The Guardian)

It includes a lead feature by award-winning novelist John Lanchester, which doesn’t contain a lot of new insights, but provides a good overview of the topic for those who are less familiar with it. The ending though is thought-provoking:

“It struck me that everybody on the net is sitting alone at a computer screen, and many of them are wishing they weren’t alone, while also, often, in some deep way, preferring that they are alone and being nervous of the alternative. Sit someone at a computer screen and let it sink in that they are fully, definitively alone; then watch what happens. They will reach out for other people; but only part of the way. They will have “friends”, which are not the same thing as friends, and a lively online life, which is not the same thing as a social life; they will feel more connected, but they will be just as alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is at the centre of the world. Everybody sitting at a computer screen, increasingly, wants everything to be all about them. This is our first glimpse of what people who grow up with the net will want from the net. One of the cleverest things about MySpace is the name.”

The Web 2.0 issue also contains a series of interviews of “the smartest and the luckiest entrepreneurs who demolished the old internet and built a brand new one”, i.e. the people behind the companies Bebo, Blogger, Craigslist, del.icio.us, Digg, Feedburner, Flickr, Last.fm, Netvibes, Technorati, Wikipedia, Wordpress and Writely.

“According to internal documents provided to Wired News and interviews with key executives, Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened ‘information centers’, and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like ‘data’, ‘digital’ and ‘community conversation’.”

The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.

- Read full story
- Post on Crowdsourcing blog with reprint of Gannett article
- Post on Crowdsourcing blog with reprint of memo by CEO Craig Dubow to Gannett staffers

“The book traces the impact of the cell phone from personal issues of loneliness and depression to the global concerns of the modern economy and the trans-national family. As the technology of social networking, the cell phone has become central to establishing and maintaining relationships in areas from religion to love. The Cell Phone presents the first detailed ethnography of the impact of this new technology through the exploration of the cell phone’s role in everyday lives.”

Authors are Heather A. Horst, a postdoctoral scholar at the Annenberg Center for Communication of University of California Berkeley, and Daniel Miller, who teaches at the Department of Anthropology of the University College London.

- Publisher’s web page on this book
- Amazon link

“Crucial to Blyk’s system will be creating advertisements that attract users, said Antti Ohrling, co-founder of Blyk and chairman of Contra Advertising, based in Finland.”

“We intend on only advertising information that people want and in a fun way,” Ohrling said. “To succeed, we must offer an enjoyable and simple user experience.”

As one could expect, the company’s staff list is filled to the brim with former Nokia people, including its CEO Pekka Ala-Pietilä, a former president of the Nokia Corporation, and Marko Ahtisaari, its highly regarded director of brand and design, who is a former Director of Design Strategy at Nokia (and son of a former Finnish president).

But claiming an advertising supported mobile phone operator as a “disruptive and potentially revolutionising new medium” seems a bit much.

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UPDATE: 7 November 2006

Meanwhile Business Week picks up on the story. It also underlines the “gold-plated” make-up of the company. Apparently the billionaire chairman of the German software maker SAP is one of the investors. But the question remains: “Why are so many smart people backing a company that has no revenue and doesn’t even plan to start operating until next year?”.

The trick is in the advertising. “Messages will be targeted to users and be integrated seamlessly with the handset.” Advertising will “never interfere with the primary function of the phone” and “if you do it in the right way, it’s something people [will] find useful and fun.”

“If the company’s approach proves successful, industry watchers say, it could dramatically affect the mobile phone industry and pose a serious threat to existing operators.”

Though Blyk will function as a “so-called mobile virtual network operator, or MVNO, meaning it will market service under its own brand but use the wireless network of an operator still to be named”, the company still faces serious challenges.

“For example, getting young people to sign up for the service will be a challenge, as will the logistics of shipping customers the SIM cards they need to use, and making sure the technology works. [...]“

“Blyk must also convince advertisers. [...] It will be difficult to measure what effect the ads are having.”

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