Outside Innovation

Amazon Kindle

I’m really enjoying my Amazon Kindle e-Book (http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA). I find the text display easy on the eyes. I find I use it just like a book. I read on planes, in bed, during solitary meals. For me, the most appealing capability of the Kindle is the ability to instantly download a book, newspaper, magazine, or article from Amazon at the drop of a hat. The result is that I’ve tripled my book purchases in the 3 weeks since I’ve been using my Kindle. This is great news for Amazon.

The Whispernet wireless connectivity is what makes this so easy. It’s virtually invisible networking. There’s no set up required. It just works. You can go to the Amazon store from the menu, navigate thru options (books, newspapers, magazines, etc.), or search for authors or titles. Then you can download a sample for free, and, if you decide you want to read more, you can buy it. The purchase is automatic. The transaction happens using your Amazon One Click settings. And it is possible to cancel the transaction if you change your mind or made a mistake. The selections available are good enough. There are a number of current and older books I would have liked to have on Kindle that aren’t available in this format.

Trends from Customer-centric Visionaries

On May 9-10, 2007, we held our semi-annual get together of “Patty’s Visionaries”—a handpicked group of customer-centric executives in a cross-section of industries, each of whom has impressed me with his/her accomplishments in designing their businesses from the outside in. This two-day meeting is always a treat for me. It’s relaxed, casual, reflective, and gives us all good insights into what’s up with customers, business, and technology and how we’re doing in harnessing technology to deliver a great customer experience and to grow our businesses. Everyone came away with actionable insights—several of which have already been put into practice!

Eight Key Patterns and Themes

Here are eight topics that rose to top of mind for me after swimming in this rich conversational soup. I suspect each Visionary may have had a slightly different set, based on his or her own context. Here are the themes that are still reverberating with me a week later:

1. Outcome-based ecosystems

2. Customer communities

3. The primacy of search

4. The disappearing home page

5. Cloning capabilities across channels

6. The opportunities and dangers of serving baby boomers

7. Online gaming, virtual worlds and kids’ innovative behaviors

8. Driving organizational change thru operational customer metrics

THE WEB 2.0 WAVE--WHY IT’S NOT A FAD

This week, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. It was a great conference--meaty sessions, thousands of smart people, great logistics--all the things that matter were well-orchestrated and unobtrusive. I continue to be impressed by the O’Reilly organization and its many partners (in this case, CMP). “Spreading the Knowledge of Innovators” is the O’Reilly motto. If you want to know where lead customers are taking us--this is the place to be.

The Web 2.0 Culture: Loosely-Coupled Innovation

The Web 2.0 Culture isn’t a youth culture. There weren’t a lot of kids at this conference (although admission to the keynotes and exhibits was free or $100). In fact, most of the Web 2.0 Expo attendees have kids. The 10,000 participants ranged in age from mid-20s through 60-somethings, definitely skewed towards 30-somethings. There were seriously optimistic business/technology strategists (like me), corporate IT renegades, seasoned architects, professional developers, marketing and design professionals, lots of entrepreneurs--some on their second and third ventures--and venture capitalists, as well as plenty of professional bloggers and reporters.

The mood was optimistic. There are no evil empires that can stop innovation. Anything is possible. It’s a culture of DIY, roll your own, solve your own problems, invent a new toolset, secure in the knowledge that:

• Whatever you invent will plug into and interoperate with everyone else’s innovations
• The simplest approaches are the most elegant and valuable
• It doesn’t really matter if someone else has done something similar before
• Esthetics count--clean, crisp graphical UIs are in

INCREASE SECURITY AND EASE OF ACCESS

There's been a rash of reports recently about identity theft and/or theft of real or virtual goods (that are worth real money) from peoples' accounts. The story that caught my attention this week was about the hacking of thousands of World of Warcraft accounts by keylogging software that had been surreptitiously downloaded onto players' Windows computers when they visited game-related sites. This is big news! Thousands of players have been affected. Many of them have had virtual assets stolen from their WOW accounts.

There's a nifty free software utility that I recommend to deal with password chaos and identity theft, which also streamlines your actions on the sites you frequent the most. It's an "Invisible Password Manager" from Actioneer.

GOOGLE: THE CAMEL’S NOSE IN BUSINESS SOFTWARE?

Our search and findability guru, Sue Aldrich, characterized Google’s latest enterprise software additions as the camel’s nose strategy. First, Google offered search appliances for the enterprise and the desktop to make it easy for employees to “Google” the information within their companies the way they use Google to find external resources. Then, Google offered consumer email, which many business people quickly adopted as an alternative personal email service. Now, Google is providing “Google Apps for Your Domain” which offers good-quality email with integrated calendaring, chat, VOIP and other features that will appeal to small businesses and to end users within large enterprises as well. Google Earth for the enterprise is picking up traction as more and more companies use the app for strategic applications from construction to oil exploration to logistics to environmental applications.