Beyond | IT : innovation

Huh? I wonder what else can you do with sonic pressure waves?

john.mullinax — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:36:51 GMT

It’s been a crazy week, so a few minutes ago I just felt the need to see some innovative and cool technology to re-charge the mental batteries. I went to bing and searched for “cool new technology”. What caught my attention was actually a USA Today article called Cool new technologies are right around the corner.

Ok, that sounds promising.

I was quite surprised to see the first part of the article was about refrigerator technology! Ok, so that’s “cool” technology, I guess… but I immediately began to doubt I was in the right place.

Nevertheless, I gave the article a quick scan, and it turns out that Ben and Jerry’s invested in research to create refrigerators that use sonic pressure waves to lower temperatures (instead of chemical coolants). That is cool! (And it’s also “cool”.)

Bing, I’m sorry I doubted you.

Aside: The second part of the article I mention above described something called the Magnetocaloric effect. Basically, scientists built a refrigerator by spinning a new alloy compound so that it passes in and out of a magnetic field. Also cool (and “cool”). Ok, back to your regularly scheduled blog post, and the cooling wonders of ultrasonic pressure waves.

If you recall my post on “touch-able” holograms, then you probably remember that the sensation of touch is delivered via focused ultrasonic pressure waves. And if you haven’t see the video and research abstract linked there yet, definitely do check it out – it’s super cool, too. (But only in the way you expect.)

Now that’s I’ve found two cool uses for sonic pressure waves over the last few months, it makes me wonder: what other interesting things could you do?

Seriously, I’m curious: if you were an sonic pressure wave genius (ultrasonic, “regular” sonic, or “other” sonic), what weird, awesome thing would you want to build?

Or, if you know of something unusually cool that you can already do with sonic pressure waves, please share! :)

I’ll keep my eyes out, too, and if find/think of/hear of ideas I’ll round them up in a “Top x weird, awesome things to do with sonic pressure waves” post. :)

Technorati Tags: cool technology,ultrasonic pressure waves

Use technology to make life better

john.mullinax — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 02:20:00 GMT

Use technology to make life better – for your family, friends, neighbors, customers, suppliers, partners, and yourself.

Sounds obvious, and yet sometimes it’s not. Take the so called “mobile web”, which excels primarily in sucking. So often people try to do the wrong things with mobile devices. Perhaps it’s human nature to take what we know from the web and try to move it directly to the latest new screen. In any case, it doesn’t do much to make life better, IMHO.

Here’s some advice on how to re-think the so-called mobile web (and thanks to Steve Clayton for the pointer).

An Internet Watered Down

View more presentations from John Pettengill.

Some really excellent advice in there! Also: the basic concepts are not limited to mobile devices. Whatever you’re designing, think about how you can apply technology with broad context of what users are trying to accomplish in their lives. I sometimes talk about this as understanding the consumer value stream (which this great cartoon helps illustrate).

To re-use an example from my post here: when my wife asks me to pick up milk on my way home, I’m not really shopping – I’m commuting. Any shopping experience I have exists within that larger context of my commute. My local Kroger store recognized this and now puts milk at the front of the store – which means it’s more likely I’ll choose Kroger the next time my wife calls and says we’re out of milk.

Creating a positive impact in people’s lives with technology often means spanning boundaries between compartments that exist in their lives -- showing those boundaries to be artificial -- and doing it in a way that helps them achieve things they value. This might require experience designers to expand the way they think about the business they are in.

A few good examples..

The car didn’t always have a radio – bringing entertainment to driving a car was huge!
iTunes figured out syncing, organizing, and acquiring new music are best done together.
Live Search on Windows Mobile brings together searching for a business, and then finding it’s location (and me) on a map. Plus, it lets me speak the search, and read the results. (And yes, this was copied on the iPhone, too, but original credit goes to TellMe and the Live Search folks).
Ford Sync lets me control my media experience in the car with steering wheel controls or voice controls, and yet also take my media with me on Zune (or ipod, or Sensa) when I leave the car.

And a few examples where things could be better:

My car tells me when it needs service, and my phone (with calendar) is connected… why doesn’t my car propose actual service appointment times that matchup when I’m free and when the service shop has appointments available?
On the grocery store front, here’s a sampling of opportunities… (and see here for a lot more thoughts on improving the shopping experience)…

Why do some grocery sites have up to 3 different online shopping lists – none of them connected to each other?
And even though the grocery store knows everything I’ve previously purchased, why is that information not available for me to create a shopping list?
And why is there not a task-oriented version of that list automatically on my phone so I can check things off as I buy them?
And when I get an idea for something to cook off of Food Network, why can’t I just click a button to send the ingredients to my shopping list?
And if my regular store is out of stock on an item, why doesn’t the grocery chain tell me about another store in the area that has what I need (or suggest an alternative ingredient)?

Why can’t I check rates/availability for hotels from within my Outlook calendar -- where I do my trip planning and store travel itineraries?

I’m not saying any of these examples would be easy to implement (but neither are any of them technically that hard, I suspect). And I’m sure other folks have better ideas and better examples than what I’ve listed here (and I’d like to hear them).

All of this is just my 2 cents, of course. My sincere hope is that the slides above, and this little post, will help at least a few folks think about how to enable and empower users in ways that make their lives better. :)

Technorati Tags: innovation,mobile,consumer value stream

Thumbtack improving on bookmarks + A Thumbtack collection on Microsoft's Data Centers

john.mullinax — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:08:00 GMT

(NOTE: Removed links as the Thumbtack experiment has ended... the service is no longer available. -JohnM, October 27, 2009).

Thumbtack is a handy little resource for organizing and sharing information you find on the web into collections. Of course, bookmarks already provide a rudimentary way to organize things you find online, and sites like Del.ico.us, favorites.live.com, and others provide a way to share your bookmarks.

Bookmarks and bookmark sharing services are cool, but they are fundamentally limited by the web page paradigm... and increasingly web pages are not the primary boundary for content on the web. Similarly, we have all seen web pages where a snippet of content is especially interesting but the page as a whole isn’t.

So the folks over at LiveLabs are exploring how to move past the page-level boundaries that bookmarks enforce, as well as how to make the sharing of content we discover online even better. They call their experiment "Thumbtack". You can try it out at Thumbtack.livelabs.com.

I just tried it myself yesterday, and I found it takes a little getting used to. But once I acquainted myself with the basic metaphors of the site it's very powerful. As a way to learn about the service I decided to create and publish a collection of information on Microsoft's Data Centers.

This particular collection includes whole web pages (bookmarks), snippets of text, links, and images grabbed from the various sites, and also text that I've directly typed or pasted into "clips". Clips are the organizing metaphor for content in Thumbtack. Each clip that I added directly was originally a separate bullet point in an email of publicly sharable information that I received from a member of the Global Foundation Services team (the people that run Microsoft's data centers). You can tell these clips from the ones I found online because there is no link within the clip.

To make grabbing content into clips easy, Thumbtack provides an easy to use bookmarklet and IE8 accelerator. The bookmarklet works best to include a full web page in a clip. To add only a piece of content from a web page into a clip, simply highlight the content you want in your clip and select “Collect with Thumbtack” from the Accelerator list and you’re done. This works with both text and images, and also preserves any links associated with the selected content.

In addition to clips, you can add gadgets to a Thumbtack collection. These are little bundles of functionality that pertain to your clips. For example, if you have addresses in your collection of clips, adding a mapping gadget will automatically show the addresses on a Virtual Earth map in a special area on the side of your screen. There are also gadgets for different clip layouts, editing the properties of clips, and even for automatically plotting data contained within clips into a chart. Cool!

The sharing feature is also notable. Of course, sending a link to a collection by email is one option. But there’s also a handy embed option. Here’s a direct link to my Thumbtack collection at the Thumbtack site, and I’ve also embedded the collection below. If you’d like to try thumbtack yourself, check it out at http://thumbtack.livelabs.com/ .

And enjoy the Thumbtack collection on Microsoft’s Data Centers!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Live Labs,Thumbtack,innovation

Symmetry between SQL Server and SQL Data Services – video interview

john.mullinax — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:32:05 GMT

Patric McElroy, Group Program Manager of SQL Data Services team talks with Michael Cote of RedMonk about what’s coming with the new SDS, and where there will be symmetry with SQL Server. Really nice interview!

This was recorded a few weeks back at MIX09. A few nuggets that stood out to me:

SDS will support TDS protocol and T-SQL at v1 release. More in the SQL Data Services FAQ here.
For 80% of apps deployment to the cloud will simply mean pointing the deployment scripts to a new location. The same rich toolsets used by DBAs and data programmers will still be the best way to work.
Improve compliance/management of departmental apps and data without the deployment friction of creating and enforcing internal centralized database hosting operations.

Technorati Tags: Azure,SQL Data Services,cloud

Making tool bars interesting again. No, really.

john.mullinax — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:04:00 GMT

Here's something interesting from InfoSpace... a tool bar! No, really. In fact, see for yourself over at Sam Chenaur's site. He's got a nice screen grab, too. This is not your "father's toolbar".

I tried to get my own screen grab from the Recipe toolbar I installed, but it's really quite hidden until you engage with it... so it's completely innocuous until you want to use it... and then it looks great. Other notes:

The requirements say IE7, but seems to work just fine for me on IE8 so far.
The UI is context sensitive, and uses some of the same conventions as the "ribbon" in Office UI.
I like this is as an non-traditional "software-plus-services" example to "get" what that's all about... (assuming for the moment you can have a "non-traditional example" for a term without too much of a tradition yet!) :-)

What I mean about "software-plus-services" is this: software that runs on a computer you control, plus services delivered over the internet from a computer you don't control, working together to enable cool new experiences that make both software and services better than either by themselves. There are certainly more complicated ways to describe software-plus-services (sometimes called "S+S" around Microsoft), and i'm frequently guilty :-) ... but that's the essence of it.

I'm guessing a bit about how this all goes together, but it appears that from a users' perspective, the software pieces include the tool bar itself, the XAML UI, and Silverlight to render the XAML. The services pieces come into play because the toolbar hosts a couple services (at least): recipes and pics from AllRecipes.com, and also a search product from InfoSpace called Nation that aggregates yahoo, google, ask, and live search as a meta search engine (that is, the search service itself is actually a simple composite of still more services).

You may be saying, "big deal -- none of these things are very interesting or unique by themselves." I fully agree. And yet together, they create something completely new in character as to be, literally, unique. And that's really the punch line in some ways with Software-plus-services -- thinking about how collections of software and services can go together and make each other better is a powerful way to create compelling new experiences!

So hop on over to Sam's site and check out his and pic and what he has to say about his hand in helping InfoSpace do this good work. Or, if you can't wait, jump straight to InfoSpace's toolbars here.

Filling the Boomer Gap in Automotive, post-SYNC what comes next?

john.mullinax — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 20:11:00 GMT

Ed Wallace has a great article in Business Week about the impact of mass demographics on the auto industry -- fun to read, and insightful. Years ago, I remember walking through Ford WHQ and seeing a distinct focus on Gen Y. Gen X isn't big enough to offset the void the boomers will leave. The auto industry has 2 great hopes to fill the Boomer Gap -- good healthcare to keep boomers driving longer, and Gen Y.

Gen Y didn't grow up loving cars the way the boomers did. And what reason did they have? Not a lot of great cars were made during their formative years. Today, cars are much better. Maybe even better than ever. But that by itself that's not enough by itself to attract Gen Y. Gen Y has a lot of other stuff -- a lot of other toys that they've wrapped their hearts and identities around.

Of course, people still like cars, and want their cars to continue getting better on many dimensions. One of those dimensions that is especially relevant to Gen Y is that they want their cars and other their toys to "just work together". IMO, this explains the energy around Ford Sync - simple in concept, simple in use. At some point down the road, every OEM will have something like Ford Sync. A question to consider: what then will differentiate the OEMs?

Imagining the future a bit... I think there are two answers to this question. The first centers around Sync itself -- if an OEM can turn something like Sync into a true platform that others (even owners) can innovate on top of, they will move far ahead of those who do not. In one way, this is simply another dimension to the already big business of vehicle personalization. BTW, this is also the platform business model that fuels so much of Microsoft's success.

The second answer continues to be Design, (with a Capital D, as my colleague Chris Bernard might say). Post-Sync, I think the mental model of designers, and the subsequent designs, will extend to the complete vehicle ownership experience in totality - beyond what is strictly in the car. How you select, finance, purchase, service, dispose, and replace your vehicle. Today these things happen -- but certainly not as part of a cohesive design. Design will thoughtfully embrace not just how we use our cars, but why we use or cars across the full vehicle ownership lifecycle.

This won't seem unnatural, it's what Gen Y (and later generations) will expect as the physical and virtual worlds become more fully integrated in all parts of our life. More over, they'll expect very personal experiences and significant control in defining their own experiences (see the first answer about being a platform). More than bringing our digital life into our cars, this kind of "Design thinking" will bring our cars into our digital life.

This will require OEMs to think differently about how they serve consumers, and how to be more relevant in more parts of a consumer's life. But I'm hopeful it will happen. Learning lessons from OnStar, ATX, and the Lincoln RESCU service that proceeded them, and especially from the failed Wingcast JV with Qualcomm, Ford and Microsoft have broken the ice with the SYNC implementation of Windows Automotive. Ford SYNC is just the first volley in a revolution that may take many years to play out, and for which the outcome is uncertain, but make no mistake, the revolution has begun.

Technorati Tags: Automotive,Design,Ford,Innovation,In-vehicle software,SYNC,Microsoft

Building brand and transcending walled gardens

john.mullinax — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 03:46:10 GMT

Ok - so I've been posting about Popfly a lot lately. Why am I so excited about Popfly? It's simple, actually. Popfly is more than a mashup maker. And it's more than a Mashout tool (for sharing mashups) -- though it is that, too. What makes Popfly so exciting...(read more)

Platform vs. Cool? My take on Apple's business strategy...

john.mullinax — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:03:47 GMT

Technorati Tags: Strategy , Apple , innovation , business , software + services , S+S Interesting article about the iPhone here . Although entertaining to read, I disagree with the premise. It did get me thinking about the Apple business strategy,...(read more)

Computing Is A Liberal Art, Part 3: Strategies for Reinforcing Loops and the Hive Mind

john.mullinax — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 17:59:05 GMT

Technorati Tags: innovation , systems thinking , complexity science , adaptive , change , learning , Popfly , computing is a liberal art , knowledge , cyborg Here's a conundrum: if knowledge is personal, how do I benefit from what you "know"? ...(read more)

Computing Is A Liberal Art, Part 2: Knowledge is personal

john.mullinax — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 07:34:00 GMT

Technorati Tags: innovation , systems thinking , complexity science , adaptive , change , learning , Popfly , computing is a liberal art , knowledge , cyborg In the natural world, few (if any) things grow without limits. In the case of information...(read more)

Computing Is A Liberal Art, Part 1: Education Inflation

john.mullinax — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 03:59:00 GMT

Technorati Tags: innovation , systems thinking , complexity science , adaptive , change , learning , Popfly , computing is a liberal art , knowledge , cyborg Education Inflation Most of us are familiar with the rising cost of education/tuition...(read more)

Build to last is dead, speed rules, competency is currency. Resistance is futile.

john.mullinax — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 19:09:00 GMT

Technorati Tags: innovation , systems thinking , adaptive , change , decision making , learning , context aware , cyborg An email exchange with a few colleauges last night, including Chris Bernard and Josh Holmes , got me thinking about the network as...(read more)

What is Surface?

john.mullinax — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 22:30:00 GMT

Well, by now I imagine many folks may have heard a little bit about Surface -- Microsoft's latest computing innovation. There's a reason Surface is getting a lot of buzz: it really is ground breaking! For those who haven't seen it yet, you owe it to yourself...(read more)

Want Innovation? Don't Build to Last -- Build for Adaptation!

john.mullinax — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 02:07:00 GMT

The pace of change in the world continues to accelerate. Business is global. Technology enables markets in New York to react almost instantly to changes in Shanghai. Technology gives us the power to be always on and always connected. Technology lets us...(read more)

The Best Payback in Technology History... Think you know what it is???

john.mullinax — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 07:38:44 GMT

Hmmm.... How about a giant ERP system? :-) Nope. Internet Explorer? Windows Mobile? Getting closer, but those are only "honorable mention" in my book. If you're a company with a large investments in ERP and Line of Business (LOB) applications, my vote...(read more)