Outside Innovation

Tagging the Physical World

When I was a young French teacher, I used to put big signs on all the objects in our classroom (which was actually an old farmhouse) with their French names—la table, le cahier, la chaise, le mur, la peinture, le chat (the cat didn’t like it very much!). I was reminded of this practice when I stumbled upon a similar real-world tagging phenomenon that is cropping up in odd places around the world. It’s a form of mobile tagging, using Semapedia and QR Codes. Semapedia is a research site that lets people create two-dimensional bar codes for physical objects, paste a label with the code on the objects, and link those objects to a Wikipedia article. QR codes (which stands for Quick Response) are the specific 2D bar codes that people seem to have gravitated towards. A QR Code is a matrix code created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. While the patent is held by Denso-Wave, the company encourages broad usage. QR codes were originally used in Japan for tracking automobile parts. But they soon began to be used by advertisers who placed them on posters and products in order to provide a quick link to a specific promotion via customers’ mobile phones.

Citizen-Tagging for Fun and Edification

Now, all over the world, people are pasting labels with 2-dimensional bar codes on them onto buildings and objects of all kinds. The purpose of these tags is to provide a link to a relevant Wikipedia article. It’s a citizen-led, guerrilla approach to linking objects in the physical world to useful context and information in the virtual world.

These tags are turning up on stores, museums, paintings, ATM machines, bridges, street corners, parks, records, books, and other types of merchandise. (I found a tag on a carton of San Pelligrino bottled water and another tag on a shelf with Perrier.) If you have a mobile phone with the right software installed, you can point your phone’s camera at the bar code, and the code will be converted into a mobile-URL link to the Wikipedia article about that object. If you take a photograph of the object and upload it to Flickr and add your geographic coordinates, it will also appear on a map which is maintained at Semapedia.org.

What Frightened Customers Want to Hear

The financial market meltdown is frightening for everyone. If you are a financial institution, you're putting your fingers in the dike while reassuring employees and customers. If you are in a different business, you're watching closely to plan for a business downturn and to spot opportunities.

What do you want from your bank or other financial institution?

1. Proactive outreach with recommendations for how you can best protect your assets. Blanket reassurances won't work. For example, customers want to know what to do if they have more than $100k in your bank—where specifically they should put it. They want to know what the penalties will be if they sell stocks or move funds out of equities. Customers with smaller accounts are just as concerned as those with large holdings. They are afraid their bank or broker or insurance company will go bust.

2. A personal call or face-to-face meeting. An email or link to a set of useful steps to take. Delight your clients by switching channels. If your clients interact online, reach out by phone. They'll be impressed. A phone call is helpful—particularly a personal one from a someone who knows what your exposure is and who will provide relevant advice. Or, for a customer who calls a lot, invite them into the branch or offer to meet them for coffee! Or send them an email with a set of tips and advice.

3. One or two actions you can take that you won't regret. If you want to reassure people, give them things they can do to let them feel in control. It may be as simple as setting alerts, or monitoring particular news events, or investing in a coveted stock when it falls below a threshold.

In just about any stressful situation, the brand you continue to trust is the one that understands your fears and proactively reaches out with a personal touch to help you feel more in control.

Long Awaited Spore Launch: Customer-Created Content and Protests via Amazon!

I wrote about the evolutionary computer game called Spore as the ultimate example of designing a business strategy around customer-created content in Outside Innovation in 2006. Remember that Spore is Will Wright’s (designer of Sims and Sims City) epiphany. After watching how much time, effort, and creativity Sims users put in to the design of their characters’ clothing, wallpaper, furniture, and other paraphernalia, Will Wright decided to create a gaming environment in which the entire object of the game is to create your own world—starting with single celled organisms and moving through five stages—cell, creature, tribe, civilization, galaxy. You play Spore on your own computer or game console. There are also stages of the game (like creating creatures) that you can do on hand-held devices, like the Apple iPhone.

A Spore Creature designed by Sander Miller, Garrett Miller and Sophie Lance, inspired by their lobster dinner!

There are many “gamers” who will never like Spore. It is not a procedural game, e.g., one in which there are challenges that you need to figure out and master in order to win. Nor is it a game in which you need to recruit 50 strangers to join your league in order to beat the other guys. It is also not a multi-player game. You play by yourself, creating your own creatures and your own civilization, but you can reuse creatures created by others. Some early players have called it tedious and boring. Others are intrigued by the “open-ended” environment that Spore offers.

The Good News: Customers Are Creating MILLIONS of Creatures and Sharing Them

My grandkids LOVE creating creatures with the Spore Creature Creator. “Spore is truly a revolution in gaming,” my veteran gamer stepson, Tod Hagan, told me. “This is much more creative than any other game.” Tod is a Linux, open source, technology-savvy geek in his 40s. Tod is also a doting uncle. He brought Spore’s Creature Creator to each of his nieces and nephews and loaded it onto my Mac so we could all take turns creating Creatures. The age range of our young creature creators is three years old to eight years old. And, I can tell you that it was tough to pry the kids away from the computer to do more mundane things like go sailing, swimming, or blueberry picking. They loved creating creatures!  

Spore creatures created by Trillery, Dave, and Sarah

What makes this activity so much fun is that, as you assemble and mold your creature, adding legs, arms, mouths, and other appendages, your 3D creature comes to life, and you can make it dance, roar, laugh, have babies (no sex act required), and move around. You can animate a routine and automagically capture it as a YouTube video. It’s great fun, and if a three-year old can do it with a minimum of coaching, the rest of us may be able to figure it out. I realize that many of the full game capabilities may not be appropriate for the younger set, but we adults can certainly enjoy creating our own little worlds, and the youngsters can share their creatures happily with each other and begin to populate worlds with creatures from friends and family as well as others’ creatures they come across and want to use or modify.

20 Million Creatures and Rising Daily. Electronic Arts launched the Spore Creature Creator last spring in order to prime the pump. It’s a free download from the Spore site. They expected several hundred thousand creatures to be created. Instead, 20 million creatures sprang forth! And these are just the ones we know about! (You can create creatures using Creature Creator on your own system, but they’re only registered and uploaded into the Sporepedia when you register online. I’ve only uploaded a handful of the couple of dozen we created in a couple of days.)

It’s SOA Time: Do You Know What Services Your Customers Need?

Service-Oriented Architecture is finally coming of age. Those of you who are designing or refining your SOA strategies shouldn’t ignore many of our early reports on this topic. Many of the best “how to’s” and conceptual overviews were written by Brenda Michelson. Brenda is now the Principal, Business Technologist, of Elemental Links. You can check out her blog and Web site for an update on her activities. Now, thanks to Brenda’s evangelism and that of many other enterprise architects, SOA is finally becoming a best practice in IT enterprise architecture to support the design of adaptive applications and infrastructure.

However, if you want your organization to have a CUSTOMER-adaptive architecture, you’ll want to take an “OUTSIDE INnovation” approach to designing your Services-Oriented Architecture. The good news is that Brenda and I collaborated a number of years ago (2005!) on developing such a methodology. We used customer co-design techniques with our proven Customer Scenario® Mapping interactive design tools to capture customers’ “Ideal State” scenario designs. Then we identified the customer-critical services and used Brenda’s service classification scheme to help the technology architects on the co-design team correctly identify and describe these customer-critical services.

Brenda and I were a bit ahead of our time back in 2005. We think that many folks may finally be ready to take advantage of this streamlined and powerful technique. So this week, I’m re-offering her seminal report, entitled Service Discovery Using Customer Scenario Mapping.

Google Chrome: Browser Plus a New Platform for Web Apps

Whenever Google announces a new major application, it's big news. This week, Google announced a new browser. I have to admit that despite my discomfiture at having yet another browser environment to learn, and to support for our end-customers, I am intrigued.

Comic Book Used as Launch Collateral

Google appears to be targeting technorati first—not just the usual technical early adopters, but the developer/architect community. I found the most interesting and useful part of the Chrome launch collateral to be the 38-page Chrome comic book. (Comics are a great way to convey a lot of information quickly. Product marketers of many other categories of products should take note!)

User-Generated Comic Book Parodies!

I wonder whether Google expected users to immediately begin creating spoofs using its own marketing collateral. But that's what has happened. If you want a quick way to see all the negative reactions to Google Chrome, check out these comic parodies:

* From Conde Nast's Portfolio.com
* From The Register

For those of you who want a shortcut to the technical pros and cons of Chrome, check out Charles Nutter's A Few Thoughts on Chrome.

Why You Should Pay Attention to Chrome

Anything Google does is important, since Google is the most powerful and most widely used platform on the Internet today. From a business/marketing standpoint, you'll want to be sure that your Web sites and portals are Chrome-friendly. From a technology strategy standpoint, you now have yet another browser and Web application platform to support and to consider when designing information and tools for your prospects, customers, employees, and stakeholders. Think of Chrome as a next-generation Web OS for rich Internet apps.

Google Strategy #1: Track Everything We Do

The biggest "aha" in Google Chrome is that the browser bar and the search bar are now one and the same. This makes a lot of sense to those of us who have become used to just typing a word or phrase to get to the right site(s).