Innovation in Software

When the UK went to war in earlier this decade, I gave serious consideration to signing up to the Army with the intention of becoming an officer.

Not because I’m a blood-thirsty man looking to kill Taleban foot soldiers or because I had aspirations of heroism, but because I had (and believe I still have) a set of skills that would be of use on a battlefield. I might – just might – have been able to help save a few lives in the British ranks. The main reason I didn’t is because I really have a problem with being shot at just because I’d been told to be shot at. I have “problems with authority”, as they say.

There is a desperate lack of improvisation, innovation and lateral thinking in most battlefield situations. There are some stunning examples of tactical and strategic thinking, but the current row over equipment is an example of how we must wait a number of years for a handful of helicopters to turn up in order to conduct basic troop movements.

I am pleased then, to point to an example of innovative thinking on the battlefield by a US soldier.

In Iraq, Sergeant 1st Class Martin Stadtler had nothing. He was stationed near Mosul, at a base that covers 24 square kilometers. Surrounding the base was a wall, and at intervals along that wall stood watchtowers. Those towers were improvised; they were large concrete water pipes, stood on their ends.

Inside each tower is a pair of soldiers. They’re watching for insurgents. To communicate with the home base, they had standard-issue tactical radios. Unfortunately, these radios couldn’t reach home base — the base was too big. Soldiers had to play a game of Telephone to reach the base: one tower radios the next until they are finally in range of the home base. Obviously, this would not do.

Fortunately, SFC Stadtler knew how to use open source software. Using found hardware, like a laptop pulled from the trash, and wires pulled from collapsed buildings, he was able to establish a wireless network between the towers and the home base. He was able to install freely available voice-over-ip software on this recycled hardware, which turned the computer into a wireless telephone. The soldiers were now able to communicate with each other and the home base. At no cost.

Later on he adapted his night-vision camera equipment using software “invented by a young man in Germany who wanted to watch his cat while he was away from home”, to watch out for insurgents planting bombs beyond the perimeter of the base.

Of course, the flip-side of this is that because its low cost and using commodity hardware, the technical advantage can be lost quickly to the “other side” adapting – they can have improvised night vision systems and cheap long-range secure telecommunications, too. But that’s the nature of warfare.

It just goes to show though, there is a place for innovative software solutions in even the most dusty and difficult of situations.

Well, actually, that’s a little premature, but it’s hit news wires and is shaping up to being an interesting story:

According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

Well, that’s surprising and rather intriguing. More so given it’s not the only acquisition that they’re after according to EuroInvestor:

GGF has entered into an agreement to acquire the shares in Peerialism AB. Peerialism AB is a software technology company with its origin in KTH Royal Institute of Technology and SICS, Swedish Institute of Computer Science and which presently is owned by the employees. The owners as well as the employees will continue to work for the company. Peerialism develops solutions for data distribution and distributed storage based on new p2p- technology. The access to the technology is secured by the acquisition. The consideration amounts to in aggregate MSEK 100 [$13 million] consisting of at least MSEK 50 [$6.5 million] in cash and up to the equivalent of MSEK 50 in newly issued shares in GGF (according to valuation during a period of ten days after the announcement). The share part of the purchase price should not exceed five percent of the total number of shares in GGF after the transaction. In addition GGF has undertaken to make initial investments of MSEK 25 [$3.25 million] in the acquired business.

There is however, a catch. Isn’t there always?

Completion of the acquisitions are primarily subject to GGF obtaining financing for the acquisition, that any necessary resolutions are adopted by a General Meeting of GGF, and that GGF and the Board of Directors consider that the acquired assets can be used in a legally and appropriate way. GGF intends to issue new shares in order to obtain the necessary financing for the acquisition. The acquisition is deemed to be completed in August 2009.

Well, what does it all mean? Quite simply that The Pirate Bay, is no longer going to be quite so Pirate-y. In fact, so worried are some people that TPB had to respond to make sure people calmed down a little:

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And – you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That’s awesome and will take the heat of us.

The old crew is still around in different ways. We will also not stop being active in the politics of the internets – quite the opposite. Now we’re fueling up for going into the next gear. TPB will have economical muscles to let people evolve it. It will team up with great technicians to evolve the protocols. And we, the people interested in more than just technology, will have the time to focus on that. It’s win-win-win.

The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don’t worry – be happy!

In the final mix then, here are what seems to be the takeaway points:

1. GGF is buying up two new properties through issuing new shares. It’s not a given this will work, but they’re confident
2. If the finance is available they are going to take the technology from Peerialism AB that has some “new” P2P technology in its kit bag and ramp it up commercially
3. They’re also going to buy one of the most visited web sites on the planet and promise to “compensate rights holders” which it doesn’t at the moment
4. The Pirate Bay guys insist this isn’t in any way going to interfere with the site built on the premise that rights holders can go to hell
5. TPB insist in fact this is the start of a socialist utopia and will allow them to persue their political ambitions in the name of the users
6. The Pirate Bay users are already calling foul and looking to abandon them and go and create a new site somewhere else

I can’t see this working for GGF. They’ve walked into a political quagmire in the hope that there is some revenue in it. It seems the gambit they are taking is that Peerialism’s PeerTV product is going to fly when combined with TPB’s user base. However, it has several drawbacks including the need for a P2P CDN to be scattered across the globe at broadband operator’s expense (for which GGF is promising to compensate them), and for the TPB users to give up their insatiable desire to burn material to disc (perhaps to sell down the pub for £5 a DVD), and avoid incurring any charges or being interrupted with advertising. Doesn’t seem plausible to me.

This suggests then that the TPB users who already are screaming the words “betrayal” and “capitalists” from the roof tops in response, are going to move on somewhere else. This is a perfect example of how an innovative change in technology can produce the possibility of a new business model that the users do not want, but the investors don’t care and will plug on regardless.

However, it does create a new business model, with a new user base, that technologically and commercially is interesting. Watch this space.

There’s a lot of interesting things happening out there right now. HTML 5 is about to make a whole suite of new applications possible thanks to:

• Much better rendering of graphics on the fly
• Client-side storage of application data
• Drag-and-drop interfaces that make web apps feel more desktop-like

But there has to be something we are missing out on that is niggling us all at the back of our collective group-think mind. Perhaps watching the Google Wave introduction got you psyched about something that suddenly became possible. Perhaps the very way the web inherently works bothers you, and you envisage a new platform.

I’m interested in hearing about it now the comments are getting a little bit of love across articles. Go crazy. Throw them in there…

Development is a creative pursuit. Whilst many think of it as a purely technical challenge, it requires a level of lateral thinking about the World that is a cross between doing a crossword puzzle, composing a symphony and having an argument with people who don’t exist. It’s not surprising some of us are a little eccentric.

It reminds me of the writing process a lot. You sit down at a blank screen after having conducted your research and you have to just dig in and find some way of making progress. Many a developer struggles with a blank IDE screen much in the same way many a writer struggles to find influence. When I was learning how to write properly, I was told that “a professional writer can not be like the poet who spends a morning taking out a comma, and the afternoon putting it back in”. We need to work hard. Same with code. A block then is a real problem.

Slashdot this weekend asked How to Get Out of Developer’s Block?, or rather a user asked:

I have spent the past six months working on a software project, and while I can come up with ideas, I just can’t seem to sit down in front of the computer to code. I sit there and I just can’t concentrate. I don’t know whether this is akin to writer’s block, but it feels like it. Have any other Slashdotters run into this and if so how did you get out of it? It is bothering me since the project has ground to a halt and I really want to get started again. I am the sole developer on the project, if that makes a difference.

The comments that follow in the thread that range from the sensible to the bizarre. I have a bunch of tricks I use when I’m struggling, so thought I’d put them together

1. Get enough sleep – you have no idea how sleep deprivation can mess you up when you’re trying to concentrate. When I’m working on code, I take a minimum of 10 hours sleep a night. Anything less, and I’m not going to be able to think in purely abstract terms for 8 hours straight during the day.
2. Exercise – and whilst those of you who know me might laugh, it’s important. I actually do get regular exercise when I’m coding full-time. Just a long walk at the start or end of the day can be enough. Something that gets the hear rate up helps though (perhaps explaining why I always code better the day after… errr… private stuff that gets my heart rate up!).
3. Don’t drink alcohol – this was something I got when I was trying to sort out my pilot’s license. When you’re going flying, I don’t drink for 24 hours before getting into the plane. I found my workload was easier, my writing got more fluid and my code went up a gear. On big client projects I don’t drink at all on school nights. If I’m drinking in the evenings whilst on a project, it’s because the project isn’t challenging me and I’m bored.
4. Clear your environment out – I’m currently sat at a desk with perhaps 150 items of paperwork on it. In this environment, I can not focus on code. My mental processes are cluttered because my physical processes are. Tidying up might seem like a stupid way to get out of a block, but I genuinely find that a clear working environment leads to much clearer mental processes. I don’t know how or why, it fascinates me, but just get your physical environment fixed up and suddenly your mental environment starts to fire a little better than before.
5. Write a trivial test – this is the code version of “free-writing” that I sometimes use to unblock on writing an article. Basically write a small test (or spec if you’re BDD) for something almost trivial and then get it to pass. Repeat. Now you’re back in the game.
6. Work on the design – it’s amazing how bad we collectively are at really thinking through a problem. Go and work on some wireframes or develop some sketches of the underlying schemas and try and simplify them. Reduce things down, and suddenly you’ll see areas you can work on right away outside of the problem you’re blocked on. If you’re not able to delve into design or architecture because of the nature of the project, quite frankly you need another bunch of guys to work with.
7. Try and find it done already – I once spent a lot of time trying to work out how to solve a particular problem. The answer was non-trivial to implement in my mind. I kept putting it off. I was scared of how bad I could end up making my solution. In a fit of procrastination I spent an hour digging around the problem area and eventually found an open-source tool that did exactly what I needed, out of the box. Well, that solves that problem…
8. Are you scared of success? It might sound like a stupid question because success is good, right? But when we succeed at something, we conquer some barrier we have worked to overcome for a period, things change. Suddenly people might look at you differently. Perhaps you end up having to work on a less interesting project. You might want your current project to be a success for other reasons. Ask yourself whether you really want this project to succeed. And then realise there’s no getting out of it: failing, or staying where you are is just as bad an outcome and harms you, your self-confidence and your reputation.
9. Find a SCRUM meeting somewhere – one of the very best things about daily stand-up meetings in SCRUM projects is that the meeting only has three topics of conversation: outcomes from stuff you agreed to do in the last meeting; what you plan to do today to further the project, if anything; and obstacles in your way. Not everybody has a team (and sole development is the hardest form there is, trust me), so find a SCRUM somewhere else. Use Twitter, your blog, a group of friends down the pub, anything. Just talk about what’s stopping you and see if anybody can help you in any way, or offer suggestions. Obviously asking a friend about a tricky problem relating to class inheritance isn’t going to yield results if they don’t know what you’re on about, but ask around more liberally than you have done to date.
10. Work on something else – we all have other projects on the go. If the above isn’t working, just go and get on with something else. Your subconscious is dealing with the problem and will come up with a solution. Just make sure you hit your deliverables schedule if you have one!

Now comments are back up, I look forward to hearing of any other tips people might have.

Jessica Mah (who I’ll come back to in a minute) posted a great article this morning titled “Why 99% of Entrepreneurs Fail: Because they don’t do anything”:

“There are three types of amateur entrepreneurs out there, and in my young life, I’ve been every single one of them. By coming to terms with my failures, I’m more prepared to classify which type of amateur entrepreneur I am, and thus preventing myself from failing in the same way again.”

Reading through the three types of amateur entrepreneur, I’m ashamed to admit over the last 3 years over the two businesses I’ve been involved in I’ve fallen into all three. Thankfully due to client work I have not starved to death.

Realistically, for those of us who have to juggle multiple clients and projects in order to survive, pay the rent and still produce our own projects: having 100% dedicated focus is near impossible. That said, getting on with it, doing it well and not getting too distracted is probably a good plan, and certainly one that I had already sketched out at the beginning of this year.

Oh, and Jessica, yes, she deserves a comment. The phrase about her struggling to run a company as a ninth-grader made me want to find out who the hell this person was. The answer? A junior at UC Berkeley, pictured at the model UN at Harvard, and then this in the write-up about herself you discover:

“At age 13, I wanted my own website. In order to pay for hosting bills, I decided to host other people’s websites. The company grew and grew and 1,100 clients later, I decided to sell. The company made barely enough money to buy me a decent car. Firstly, I hate it when people say that everybody was in the hosting business. Unlike most others, I didn’t believe in reselling. I had my own datacenter floor space and owned every one of my servers. Now that’s what I call a real dedicated server company. I sold my clients off for several reasons: 1) I was getting bad marks in school. 2) I wanted a real social life. 3) Nobody in their right mind would invest into a 14 year old. We didn’t have enough cash to take our business to the next level and had the choice to sell off young, so we did. The rest is history.

At age 15, I went back to high school as a bored and unmotivated sophomore. I didn’t have a business to manage, so getting straight A’s wasn’t a difficult task. I then decided that high school sucked and proceeded to skip two years of school. I finally finished high school a week before my 16th birthday.”

Two points:

1. Watch her. You get that feeling the only reason she’s not on the front cover of Fast Company is because she’s at college and not yet 21, right? Me too.
2. Yes, I’m kind of sick too. I thought I was a young business person when I set up on my own for the first time at 27 years of age. Three years on, I now feel positively ancient compared to Jessica…

Oh, and if you’re reading this Jessica, you should stay in tech. Tech needs more women. We’re tired of being the fat white-boy club. Feel free to try and change the face of our industry, because hell we’re not doing too well on our own.

Over 2008 some remarkable technologies emerged quietly that seem to be gaining traction within the industry. Whilst around for years, I am confident their time is about to come proper.

If you were to ask most people on the street who the most innovative technology firm was of 2008, you are likely to see a familiar list: Google, Apple, maybe Microsoft or perhaps some of the smaller outfits that have crossed into the mainstream like Facebook or Twitter.

Few people will mention Amazon.

In fact, if you point out that Amazon is right now perhaps one of the most innovative technology firms on the planet, people will raise an eyebrow and ask “What? The online shop? Where I get my my books and DVDs from?”.

This typical reaction is perhaps caused by only industry participants having seen so far just how Amazon are disrupting the economics of doing business online. Now anybody can have access to infinite storage arrays, huge compute clouds, masses of humans to complete complex tasks and distribute content across the globe as fast as possible, all without a penny of capital expenditure: you pay only for what you use. You can even send your physical products to be stored in Amazon’s warehouse and they will for a fee handle order fulfilment for you, again only paying for what you use.

Capital expenditure is a start-up company’s biggest problem. Remove it and suddenly anything becomes possible in the start-up World. This is big. Very big.

The real beauty is perhaps the fact Amazon made this move originally to use their own infrastructure more efficiently. If Amazon has lots of spare compute capacity ready to serve pages during their busy season (the run up to Christmas), why not lease it out the rest of the year? And yet this strategy has started to offset their own infrastructure costs so much I wouldn’t be surprised if within a few years their operational costs tend towards zero. The most powerful e-commerce platform on the planet, and everybody else is paying for it for them.

This has caused people to sit up and notice. “The Cloud” is now the hottest buzz term in the industry and all players are trying to figure out a strategy to compete.

One of the issues is that Amazon’s infrastructure is not as simple to use as it could be. Plenty of firms see a gap to try and make things simpler: one of the biggest complaints about S3 is that you need to use custom APIs instead of open standards like SFTP or WebDAV; EC2 needs a more complex understanding of systems administration and data storage than traditional models; for many applications it’s overkill or too generic, and so on.

If you break the components needed for a web application into its constituent parts from platform and compute capability through to storage services, you realise that at each level there are numerous companies trying to find a place in this market from Google and Microsoft through to unknown start ups, some of whom are attempting to make access to other cloud services easier to use and therefore are some sort of “meta-cloud” service.

This is thought to be a paradigm shift in how developers think about developing and delivering applications, but what we have seen to date is likely just the tip of the iceberg. For a number of years now traditional engineering firms (notably Rolls Royce in particular), have realised substantial revenue growth comes not from product sales – competitors can easily counter advances in product development – but in services. It seems the computer industry is starting to cotton on, and companies like AMD are thinking about how to ride the Cloud hype into the services sector. Even Microsoft are considering versions of Windows that users pay for by the hour.

It is perhaps because these service revenues lock a user into a provider’s business that some point out the dangers but I believe in time we will allay such fears by changing how we describe, define and use cloud capacity: it’s perfectly possible for us to control our own data and rent storage and compute capability as we need it, perhaps without realising that is what we are doing, without surrendering our rights and privacy. It is not yet a trivial job to do so, but surely over 2009 we are likely to see services emerge that allow consumers to harness cloud concepts and capabilities without needing to understand the detail.

Ultimately though, the real benefit over the years ahead will be the possibilities these services offer the programmers wise enough to harness them: without the CAPEX requirements, the only limitation developers seem to encounter is that their imagination struggles to break free from the bonds that have dominated careers to date. It is hard after decades of worrying about RAM, storage and CPU limitations to have all them removed, or at a minimum re-shaped. This is the beginning – if we can struggle to imagine it – of something huge.

In my last post I said something some may have raised an eyebrow at:

“… I think this year is going to be perhaps the biggest shake-down in the sector we’ve seen since the crash in 2001, but I remain confident that recessions are when the foundations of the greatest businesses are made. Crisis is in the eye of the beholder, as is opportunity. The next few years are going to be incredible for those adequately prepared.”

It seems counter-intuitive to look at the economy right now and see opportunity. Specifically, the software sector seems to have rising costs (in terms of multiple platform delivery), and a general stagnant/tired air to it in 2009. We’ve all seen it before. Investment is harder to get hold of. Loans and overdrafts don’t exist. It seems the situation is made worse by a skills shortage.

This is all a distraction. The simple truth is, what we thought was shiny and new and amazing last year – from easy credit through to slick user experiences – actively worked against innovation.

Yes, you can do more of what you think is important with cheap and easy money to hand. But you really innovate when there is little money about and you have to do more of what your customers think is important.

It’s true that the first time you see it, a web app that responds like a desktop app is interesting. It doesn’t make you produce good ideas and then execute great business strategies though. It just makes you follow what everybody else is doing, it stops you carving out your own niche.

I’m going to be a hypocrite here and offer advice I rarely take myself on my own projects (but hope to buck the trend this year): release early, release often, refine, find out what customers want and need.

The last part – focusing on customers – is always important, but this year is more critical than ever. Just because it’s a recession, it doesn’t mean there is no money around, it just means the spending priorities have changed. There is a near infinite demand for tools that save time and/or money, you just have to create the right value proposition. Historically this has meant people have produced todo list manager. I think there is opportunity for so much more.

Maybe it’s hubris, but I refuse to expect the peak of this decade in the software industry is “Web 2.0” (whatever that is), or an obsession over hosting applications and data with a bookshop (albeit a good solution). Something good is in the air. Watch this space.

I posted a link this morning to the Vagueware twitter feed pointing to a very impressive video of augmented reality

The concept of a “digital layer” over the physical World fascinates me, and in many ways is perhaps more likely to be used in future than completely virtual realities: humans love to see the World around them enhanced. I thought I’d do some research and see where this field was going.

• CyberCode technology is becoming more and more familiar to more people. Tagging physical objects with codes that allow access to digital content may be the ‘new’ way to subvert the domain name system (Google was the first).
• BBC’s Merlin Games section has an example using technology similar to the above example
• Hawk Eye is familiar to sports fans all over the world and uses overlapping technology to AR. It’s perhaps the most visible commercial success story in AR right now
• Marisil hopes to provide user interfaces via AR – a system that turns your hand into a keyboard, perhaps?
• LifeClipper requires the user to don a ridiculous headset, which is a mode of AR that is quickly becoming less desirable
• Accessible AR is more like it – AR that works on mobile phones and “consumer” devices. Imagine how AR will take off when everybody can do it with their mobile phone
• Of course, we could just wear a near-eye display device, except users have in the past reported nausea. It looks like that’s about to change in the near future
• ISMAR is the biggest AR conference, and I’d suggest reading through the presented papers if you’re interested in more

The more I dig around in this space, the more impressed I am with the potential. Applications could range from education through to enhancing real World game-play. The main challenge at the moment is the portability of systems powerful enough to be able to do something useful. In essence though, the iPhone Maps application is probably the first mass-adopted AR application – we don’t need to do the fancy stuff with moving characters to get real-world benefit.

A fascinating thread has popped up this morning over at 37signals responding to the question “What would you do if you became the next Yahoo CEO?”

Fascinating because the answer seems so obvious: nearly all the serious answers suggest focusing on fewer things. Just take a look at Yahoo! UK’s front page this morning. Now, tell me this: what is Yahoo? Is it a search engine? Is it a news portal? Is it a dating website? Is it somewhere I do email? I honestly can’t tell you which of these is most important to Yahoo right now. Google’s segmentation allows for each product to stand on its own merits and for them to easily prioritise where users should be. Yahoo’s lack of segmentation means dating is seen in the context of being “versus” search.

Another important factor is that Yahoo can’t reasonably expect to afford to keep running all these services for the sake of it. Whilst the company as a whole is profitable, I’m willing to bet most of those services are not. I’m not even convinced they could quickly tell their shareholders which ones aren’t profitable and what they’re going to do about it.

That doesn’t mean they don’t have some great products in there – Flickr (an acquisition which is still loved by many), Finance and their fantasy sports are loved by their fans. By allowing some real innovation to happen in those corners, they could do some amazing things – opening up APIs a touch more to let users build on top of them would be one significant option.

One recurring theme from those closest to the company however is that they are stale because of the layers of managements who have settled in. Yahoo is a mature company, a grand-daddy of the consumer Internet era full of people happy with the status quo and not hungry for change. Every last one of them needs to be fired. Shareholders should be screaming right now – they have over 100 million humans looking at Yahoo every single day, and they’re tanking. Just how bad do your upper- and middle-management need to be to mess that up?

So, a plan of attack:

1. Tell all staff: innovate or die. Microsoft isn’t coming.
2. Offer a door to those who complain too much about change. Nothing personal, it’s just not the business they want to work for any more.
3. The ad platform needs improving and integrating to give targeting a la Facebook: if the user has told Yahoo! Dating that she is 32 and a liberal, Finance tells us she has stock in IBM and she’s asking a lot of questions about herpes in Yahoo Answers, we can sell some pretty targeted advertising with better return (and better profit margins) than Google could ever dream of. Google is “across” the user, Yahoo is inside them. It’s that simple.
4. The technology needs investment. Here’s the biggest secret software developers know must users don’t want to believe: Google search isn’t actually very good. It’s not hard to do better if you have the infrastructure. Yahoo is one of the few companies that does. Hire talent if you need to work it out, but PageRank is not the future. Develop CPA offerings because they are safer for the advertiser and yet more profitable for the company
5. Clean up the design. Strong, bold, clear, channel-driven sites. When I go to yahoo.com I should see the main product only with “hints” to other products, just like Google does. Become a champion of usability and strong, beautiful design. Purple and Gold (Yahoo’s corporate colours) make anything look gorgeous, yet Yahoo never use them online.
6. Re-consider being in China right now. You may be able to steal a march on your competitors, but only once you have a big pile of cash ready to throw at the markets. And anyway, pulling out for a while will quieten down people like me who will hurt your corporate image every time they get a chance.
7. Partner, partner and do some more partnering. Team up with 3 Mobile, Nintendo, Pizza Hut, whatever young and cool brands will have you. Standing next to them makes you look cooler, and slowly helps build presence in the mind of the users you want.
8. You don’t want Microsoft on your side. You want Apple. You have more in common from a technology perspective (Yahoo is one of the largest users of BSD Unix, Apple one its largest vendor), marketing perspective (if you’ve done the above), and user base. The potential for innovation with Apple and Yahoo has actually just made me salivate a little.
9. Cash is king. It’s all your shareholders care about. Every decision should be about increasing the bottom line strategically, but that means tactically you can do “good things” that help patch up Yahoo!’s tarnished image. Never, ever outsource the function that makes you money: build tools better than your competitors.

It’s going to take a while, but I think Yahoo! can, and maybe will, recover and become a giant once more. Focus, clarity, leadership. It’s hardly rocket science.

Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple), gave a keynote speech in Miami yesterday at Software AG’s Innovation World.

“You don’t have to convince people to do everything like you. Do what you want to do–you have to know who you are,” he said.

He developed a theme that a lack of resources – specifically a lack of money – forces you to find new ways to get a job done.

Whenever I’ve wanted to try and find some really new ideas, I try and find a way to do big sweeping projects with as few resources as possible. This then leads me to finding a whole bunch of components I need to make it happen, all of which are potentially stimulators for whole new projects in themselves.

When you want to innovate, think small.

via ZDnet Asia