Outside Innovation

Crowdsourcing Condom Advertising—Will This Work?

You may have noticed this article in the New York Times, A Hip-Hop Contest to Promote a Brand. Trojan, the manufacturers of the Magnum brand of condoms, has grown revenues and marketshare for the Magnum brand, not through traditional advertisements, but through word of mouth: mentions in Hip-Hop music lyrics by artists such as Ludacris, Kid Rock, Lil Wayne, and Eminem. The NYT article doesn't make it clear whether the Magnum product manager engaged in product placement activities or simply fanned the flames. I suspect there may be some mutual promotion underway. ("I'll mention your product, you tell the world about my song.")

Now Magnum is building on the Hip-Hop momentum by launching a "Live Large" marketing campaign in the form of a contest soliciting more hip hop or R&B songs and lyrics from anyone, not just professional musicians.

You can go to the contest site, MagnumLiveLarge.com, download music tracks to use and/or use your own, and submit your own songs and lyrics about "living large." Fans can vote on the submissions and, of course, spread them around virally. The winner will receive a $5,000 prize and a trip to a hip-hop festival in mid-June in Atlanta, where they’ll be congratulated by Ludacris.

Apple’s Misstep Keeps Kids from Showcasing Their Innovations on iPhone

Oops. Apple goofed.

Last week, Apple did something that created outrage among educators and parents—one of their most important customer segments.

Apple banned the use of a $3.95 iPhone app called Scratch Viewer. Scratch Viewer would have let teachers, parents, and young kids view the 1 million applications that young kids all over the globe have created over the last three years using Scratch.

Scratch is a kid-friendly free programming environment which was developed at the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, based on the work of Seymour Papert and Alan Kay. Mitchel Resnick, the director of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT, had this to say to reporters and on the Scratch blog:

“We're disappointed that Apple decided not to allow a Scratch player on the iPhone or iPad (as part of Apple's policy against apps that interpret or execute code). As we see it, there is nothing more important than empowering the next generation of kids to design, create, and express themselves with new media technologies. That's the idea behind Scratch. Kids around the world are using Scratch to program their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations with Scratch—and sharing their creations with one another online. In the process, kids learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. Since the launch of Scratch in 2007, kids have shared nearly 1 million projects on the Scratch website. We hope that Apple will reconsider its policies so that more kids can experience the joys of creating and sharing with Scratch. (By the way, the Scratch player for the iPhone was created by a third party, not by our group at the MIT Media Lab. But our group is planning to make Scratch authoring tools for the iPad in the future, and we hope Apple will allow us....)”

Faithful Outside Innovation followers will recognize Mitch Resnick as one of the heroes in the LEGO Mindstorms’ NXT story. Mitch has been engaging kids as co-inventors at MIT since the early 1980s. He and Steve Ocko were the grad students who connected computers to LEGOs so that young kids could use Seymour Papert’s LOGO language to make their LEGO creations come alive.

Jon Seybold, Father of Desktop Publishing, Comments on the Apple/Adobe Feud

 The Adobe – Apple War by Jonathan W. Seybold

There's been a big furor the last two weeks about Apple's insistence that cross-platform development tools, and in particular Adobe's Flash, cannot be used to develop iPhone applications. Everyone has jumped on the bandwagon opining about why Apple would do something so developer-unfriendly, and maybe even, customer-unfriendly.

There are many who feel that this Adobe/Apple feud is based on some deep-rooted enmity between Adobe and Apple. I turned to my brother to ask the question: Why is Steve Jobs doing this? Jonathan was the consultant and evangelist who brought Steve Jobs, John Warnock and Paul Brainerd together to create the desktop publishing revolution and to provide the Macintosh with the killer app it needed.

Jon read various other accounts of the Apple/Adobe relationship and decided he could contribute the most by providing this earlier history that no one else has covered as well as his own take on what Apple's move means for innovation on mobile devices.

PART 1: SOME HISTORY

Jonathan Seybold: PARC

Like so much about modern-day computing, it all starts with Xerox PARC. Somebody should start assembling a history of PARC.

But, that is a much bigger topic for a later time.

We are going to follow just one of the threads that spun out of PARC:

1979: The Famous Visit to PARC by Steve Jobs and Some of the Lisa Development Team

Apple was already working on Lisa development. Xerox knew this. In fact, that was one of the primary reasons why Xerox invested in Apple. Part of the deal was that Steve and his team would get a full run-down on everything from the object-oriented programming languages to the Alto workstation, the Bravo WYSIWYG word processing software and the Alto GUI.

But, one of the essential functions of the office system for “knowledge workers” that Xerox had set out to build had to be the ability to send the pages created on the Alto workstations to a variety of laser printers. Xerox had discovered that this meant that it needed another piece of the puzzle: a standard resolution-independent way of describing the rich pages of text and graphics.

Xerox had been using a data format called “Press” for this purpose since the mid-70’s. But it found that this was not flexible enough.

John Warnock had previously developed what amounted to programming languages that described graphic pages first for Evans and Southerland, and later for PARC. By 1979, he and Chuck Geschke were developing a much more ambitious “page description language” (InterPress) at PARC.

Apple and Adobe Disagree about iPhone Development and Flash Support on iPhone and iPad

Apple Bans Adobe Flash Compiler for iPhone--Does Limiting the Development Platform Stifle Innovation??

My "Patty's Pioneers" group has been actively (and privately) debating the reasons behind, and the ramifications of Apple's recent changes to the Terms Of Service (clause 3.3.1) in the iPhone software development agreement described in this post by John Gruber: New iPhone Developer Agreement Bans the Use of Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone Compiler.

We've had interesting technical debates about whether there are good technical reasons why Apple should not support Adobe's development tools and compilers--too slow, too buggy, too insecure? Make it easier to migrate to a next generation chip?

We've also debated the pros and cons of using cross-platform development tools for mobile applications--write once, run anywhere--or writing platform-specific applications using platform-specific tools.

We've debated whether Apple is looking out for the customer to avoid a lousy customer experience, or looking out for Apple--to ensure a more profitable revenue stream by controlling the flow of money thru iTunes.

We've bemoaned the investment that companies with sophisticated Flash applications will have to make in order to re-develop them for the iPhone, if this war continues.

But what I think has captured all of our imaginations the most is the quite public feud going on between Apple and Adobe. 

Why I Think Amazon’s Cloud Computing Strategy Is Important

I have long wanted to write a non-technical article about Amazon's Cloud Computing/Web Services strategy because I believe that it is a game-changer. Not just for IT professionals, but, more importantly, for business start-ups and new ventures. I;m not talking about launching an e-commerce site, which is what people assume they can do using Amazon's infrastructure. I’m talking about launching ANY business in any industry that relies on computers and networking.

If you are starting a new business as a green fields initiative, or if you are incubating a new business within an existing organization, you can take advantage of Amazon's "pay as you go" elastic computing infrastructure to develop and/or use software applications without spending a dime on computers or data centers. As your business takes off, your computers clone themselves to scale with your business. As your business shrinks, your costs shrink because you pay only for what you actually use.

There is something quite seductive about using Amazon's elastic infrastructure to power innovative businesses all around the globe. I suspect that, when he is 80, Jeff Bezos won't reflect much on how Amazon.com changed the face of retailing. He will be proudest of how he changed the face of business creation. He provided the ability for entrepreneurs to develop and launch Web-based businesses based on world-class scalable infrastructure at very low cost and zero friction.

Here's a link to the full article, published in Customers.com Strategies on April 15, 2010:

Amazon’s Other Business: Cloud Computing
Why and How Is Amazon Web Services, LLC Shaping the Future of Web-Based Businesses?

Nokia’s Design by Community Phone

Scott Jordan sent me a link to Nokia’s “Design a Concept Phone by Community” site. I’ve been following the traffic and the dialog for a couple of weeks. What Nokia is doing is offering a series of interactive design polls about different aspects of a new concept mobile phone. Here’s this week’s:

Each week you get to “vote” by moving sliders on a different aspect of the phone design:

• Display and User Interface

• Size and shape

• Materials

• Operating System

• Connectivity

• Camera

• Enhancements