Last week I was asked to comment for Crain’s article this morning on Yuuguu. I had to offer up a disclaimer, as I do now, that I have done a little bit of work for Yuuguu and I’m under NDA on what I know about the specifics of the internals of their technology.

Typically when asked to quote I give the journalist way more than they need in the knowledge they’ll pick out the one sentence that fits the story they want to tell. On this occasion what I said in full was:

“Yuuguu is interesting because they’ve executed a plan quite wisely. Rather than get overly clever about technology as many start-ups in the web sector do, they’ve used a suite of established technologies, understood user expectations and then combined them expertly. You don’t know how hard it is to do that right until you try.

They’re also very different to the other IM services out there - they’ve skirted around the problems people have with VoIP in a way that gives them a solid, proven business model.

They’ve taken on multiple markets at once in a way established players in those sectors are going to have a problem responding to quickly.

Even better, they haven’t spent years trying to come up with proprietary protocols and re-inventing the wheel, but instead cleverly blended together the best of what works and extended it to produce something greater than the sum of its parts.

They’re in a tough area and they’re competing on multiple fronts, but I think they’re in a strong position. The IM sector is not engaging with the audience Yuuguu is and uses technology that would scare most IT admins away from deploying it anyway, the web conferencing sector still don’t “get” the modern Web in my opinion, and the companies selling shared desktop solutions have just had Yuuguu chop their business model out from under them - but many have yet to realise it yet, so aren’t responding.

The only real threat might come from better SIP services threatening their revenue model and customers communicating on voice outside of the Yuuguu system. Having spoken to the guys at Yuuguu though, I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t already have an answer to that.”

I think Yuuguu are a clever outfit that are doing something quite unique. They aren’t innovating in the madcap “let’s reinvent the wheel way”, nor are they jumping on a bandwagon and trying to use the words “social networking” in their business plan. They’ve looked at what does and doesn’t work, found a way to make something that works better and then established a set of technologies based on best industry practice to make those ideas happen. And all the while, the business model is sat right at the core of what they’re doing.

I hope Yuuguu does take off, and does make considerable profits in the long-term. It would be great to see a local tech start-up fly.

When I started my business, I didn’t do things the way you’re “meant” to. I didn’t go out and get a nice office, or spend money on a brochure. To this day I don’t own a printer, and I send all my invoices electronically. For the first 18 months I worked on creaking hardware. My website was nothing more than a blog and I concentrated on just trying to get customers and pushing code out of the door - the shift into working for myself was big enough that it kept me busy without worrying about letterheads.

And at meetings, people politely laugh when I make a joke about “being too Web 2.0 and signed up to the digerati to bother with business cards”. Except I need business cards for all sorts of reasons these days. A year ago, I didn’t. Today, I do.

Last week a long-standing friend (and occasional colleague) launched Doddle, a printing service aimed at designers needing plain, simple, easy printing at low prices. It’s not true that I modeled for his logo - “Mr Doddle” - however I concede the resemblance is uncanny.

With a bit of prepped artwork - I needed help getting it into CMYK, because I don’t ‘do’ design packages - I went along, uploaded a zip file with the front and back graphics in there in TIFF, and filled in my billing and delivery details. It took about 5 minutes. That was Tuesday, and 10 minutes ago my new cards arrived.

I have to say I’m really pleased with the result. My cards are a little ‘unique’ in that they have a large block of text [1] on the back in quite small print, so I was worried if that would become a splodgy mess, but thanks to them being litho-printed, I’m pleased that it’s perfectly legible.

If anybody is looking for business cards, I’d challenge you to find a comparable quality at the price (especially for double-sided). I’m pleased therefore that recommendation of my friend’s business isn’t down to a form of nepotism, but because the product is actually worth the money.

[1] If you want to find out what exactly that block of text is, you’ll have to ask for a card. :-)

Yesterday I ordered a copy of iWork ‘08 from the Apple website. I got an order confirmation in my inbox by 12:23 estimating delivery sometime ‘on or before the 13th’. When I got shipping notification late last night it had become ‘on or before the 10th’. I had it in my hand, delivered by UPS, in time to play with it whilst eating my Cornflakes this morning.

First impressions are never really very useful, but some of the things they’ve done in Numbers are quite nice.

For example, whilst in Excel you have multiple sheets and each sheet has one huge grid/table, with Numbers you can have multiple tables per sheet. That means that you can move inter-acting grids around and keep them self-contained, put bar charts and graphics next to data, and so on. It’s subtle, but makes more sense than one ‘big grid’.

You also don’t need to remember that the C column is Quantity and the D column is Unit Price and you’re on row 6 - if the header of the columns are set to the right titles, you can simply type ‘Quantity*Unit Price’ in a cell and it “just works”.

They’ve realised that most people use spreadsheets as single-table databases and have made it as simple as possible to do that. They don’t expect it to be a fully-functional Excel replacement for the kind of person who uses Excel because they don’t know how to use SQL, but for 99% of use cases out there, Numbers shapes up to be a fair bit easier to use than Excel and for the SME is good fit. More templates might be nice, but not a deal-breaker.

Keynote has features for interactive presentations that mean it becomes much simpler to provide interactive brochures - basically, you can embed hyperlinks to slides, web pages or e-mail addresses within the presentation itself. It has also borrowed some of the image editing functionality from iPhoto so that within Keynote you can muck around with graphics: given the trend within the Apple and Web Design community for much more visual presentations (no bullet points allowed) this seems like a great direction to take it. I’m not quite convinced by the ability to add Web 2.0-style reflections, but time will tell…

Within Pages, the interface has had a tweak to make it feel more compact and they’ve supposedly made it easier to separate word processing from page layout, but at first glance I can’t see the major difference just yet. Change tracking and Address Book mail merge are items I don’t recall from previous versions and they might be quite useful in some contexts.

I intend to play with it all over the next week and update my invoices, proposal templates and presentation templates to the newer versions and work out what I can do with the new features that is of any real value. If I find anything uber-cool and innovative that hasn’t been mentioned yet, I’m sure I’ll be updating stuff here.

In the meantime, if you want to see what you can get up to, Apple have placed all their iWork tutorials online

I don’t know if I’m one of the lucky few first people to get access, but I’ve just received my PIN number for the BBC Archive Trial which places some of the content of the BBC Archives online.

Right now, there are around 1,000 pieces of content up in the site, which the BBC approximate to be around “0.01% of the total material available” in their archives. They’ve provided a mixture of video and audio content, and obviously focused on some of the more memorable items. The abdication of King Edward VIII is in there, as is British coverage of the Apollo moon landings.

The good news is that it all works with OS X, and the layout is pretty straight-forward and simple. These screen shots were done in Firefox on OS X, and the video playback on my machine was using Flip4Mac WMV codec for Quicktime, but Real Player was an option if you wanted it.

It really would be better for most people though if they embedded a Flash player in there - it’s how people understand video on the web these days, and they’re going to get confused with codecs and plug-ins.

A few years ago I was talking around about what would happen when archivists at the TV networks got to grips with Video on Demand (VoD), and I think this is an important first baby-step in the right direction. I personally think the Freeview switch-over debate is a load of noise, given nobody will want to watch TV coming over an aerial 20 years from now: VoD is the future, and the networks need to work out how they are going to serve that World if they want to justify continued existence.

Interestingly, they’re already dealing with some of the more complex issues - they have included content that some people may find offensive, because they believe that this should be as much about the historical value as it is the entertainment value. Personally I’m not interested in seeing a guy black-up and do a minstrel routine, but I’m glad that if I wanted to grab that out of the archive for historical research purposes, I could.

This might be a weakness though. For a lot of the Web 2.0 crowd, this might all be a bit “dated” and “fuddy-duddy”. I’m fascinated by it, but I’m also fascinated by Enlightenment-era art, 16th-century choral music, Rosseau and theology - I’m not a mass audience kind of guy. I listen to Radio 3 & 4, I read Steinbeck for fun and not because I have to. The BBC might have made an error in asking me for my opinion here…

There is also the question of how things have been organised. For 1,000 pieces of content, ‘Programmes’, ‘People’ and ‘Collections’ combined with a search box might be enough for people to find what they need. What happens after the trial when they want to put 100,000 pieces of content in or even 1 million? They’re going to need to start working now on tag clouds, collaborative filtering and other technologies “long tail” websites use to help people help themselves.

The fact you can save programmes to “your page” is handy, but the power of that needs strengthening, and is a good place to start around classification, the social aspects and even collaborative filtering of content (i.e. “People who liked this, also liked…”).

It might be nice to rate content, review it and discuss it as well. Right now it feels a bit like a PVR with a small playback screen loaded with old content - they need to get the web parts of it right in the long term.

What this trial should allow the BBC to do is work out how the underlying technology works, then work out how to use the power of it being a website and then get the other 99.99% of the content up and online - if they use this trial just to look at how people view the content, rather than try and work out how to get people to interact with the content in new ways, it’ll be a waste of time in my opinion.

Stay with me. This is about software. Eventually.

Last night, Channel 4 broadcast once more the only “chick flick” I can stomach watching: Jerry Maguire. In fact, not only can I stomach it, I actually like it. I can’t put my finger on it, because I normally hate soppy films. Maybe it’s that Renée Zellweger kind of looks a bit like a girl I once loved. Maybe it’s that when I had hair and was a little thinner I thought that if I worked out I could pass for a fat, podgy, Tom Cruise (now I’m not 18, but 28, I realise how ridiculous that sounds). Maybe it’s because I’m an old romantic who believes in love conquering all. Maybe it’s because I’d probably love the little boy too if I ever met him. There’s just something in it, I can’t put my finger on.

One thing that nearly everybody remembers about the film is the occasional interjections by “Dicky Fox” a sports agent who taught Jerry everything he knows. His quotes are pretty worthy of remembering:

• The key to this business is personal relationships.
• Roll with the punches. Tomorrow is another day.
• If this [points to heart] is empty, this [points to head] doesn’t matter.
• I love getting up in the morning. I clap my hands and say ‘This is going to be a great day!’
• I’m not saying I have all the answers. I have failed as much as I have succeeded. But I love my life. I love my wife. And I wish you my kind of success.

He’s eternally optimistic, he has a positive outlook on life. I like that. I think when you start a business, you kind of have to feel this way, even if you don’t want to. You have no idea how important it is at 5am when you’re getting out of bed to make sure a deployment went through OK to clap your hands and say to yourself ‘This is going to be a great day!’ - for me, it’s the only thing that helps get me as far as the first cup of coffee.

Last night, I was wondering where the character of Dicky Fox came from. I knew he was played by a real-life exec at the studio, but nothing more. It turns out he was played by Executive Vice President of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Intellectual Property Department, a man by the name of Jared Jussim. But where did the character come from, who was he based on?

The answer, I did not find. What I found instead, astonished me.

If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know Jerry basically screws his career by writing a memo/Mission Statement to all his colleagues about how they’re all bastards, that he then places in all their pigeon holes to discover on waking the next morning? It would appear that in creating the backstory, somebody, somewhere, actually wrote that Mission Statement. Parts of it are in the voiceover on the film, but I think there are substantial parts that aren’t in the film. You can read it online right now if you wish. I’m going to highlight some bits, so you don’t have to read it, but you might want to. If you do, I advise you go print it out, sit down with a cup of coffee and then come back here. Done? Weird, wasn’t it?

Weird because it was an interesting piece of fiction, never seen by anybody but a few cast members until somebody “put it out there” for us to digest. Weird because even though SMI isn’t real, Jerry isn’t real, Dicky Fox isn’t real, the audience he wrote it for isn’t real, it feels real. Weird, because it has so many truths in it.

I said this would be about software. I lied. There is no Ruby snippet or insight into Agile here, but there are some pieces of that Mission Statement that were so weird, they’ll haunt me as I go to sleep tonight.

Here are some of those things that I think people who want to be great coders should try and remember, or at least, if somebody came to me tomorrow and asked for advice on how to enjoy this industry more, or how to start a software company, or hell, how to do any job or start any company, I expect my answers would try and include the following quotes (with my notes in square brackets):

• My father once said, “Get the bad news over with first. You be the one to say the tough stuff”.

• “You and I are blessed, he said, “we do something that we love.” [note: if you aren’t loving your job, resign. Today. Life is too short]

• We are pushing numbers around, doing our best, but is there any real satisfaction in success without pride? Is there any real satisfaction in a success that exists only when we push the messiness of real human contact from our lives and minds?

• I have said “later” to most anything that required true sacrifice. Later I will spend a weekend reading real books, not just magazines. Later I will visit my grandmother who is 100 and unable to really know the difference. Later I will visit the clients whose careers are over, but of course I promised to stay in touch. Later later later later. It is too easy to say “later” because we all believe our work to be too important to stop, minute to minute, for something that might interfere with the restless and relentless pursuit of forward motion. Of greater success. Make no mistake, I am a huge fan of success. But tonight, I propose a better kind of success.

• How can we do something surprising, and memorable with our lives? How can we turn this job, in small but important ways, into a better representation of ourselves? Most of us would easily say that we are our jobs. That’s obvious from the late hours we all keep. So then, it is bigger than work, isn’t it? It is about us. [There is no industry on the planet like software. Trust me. We are like a collective, a Borg species moving across Usenet, Majordomo lists and blogs, interconnecting ourselves. We work late, we start early, we live the job. I just got an MSN from a colleague at 00:12am about a DNS change. We are our jobs. Or at least, those of who love it are. We should think about that more].

• It is not easy to hide a winning formula. Take a successful t.v. show. The following season, you see twenty others just like it. Same goes for our company. [How many Million Dollar Homepages have you seen in the last year? How many video clip websites? How many price comparison search engines? Copying a winning formula is easy. You might even make money. It won’t last though, and it’s not what you got into this business for] … But the great ones all do one thing at the time of their greatest success. They change the game. They make it harder for themselves. They raise the bar. They work not just harder, but they work smarter. That is why the great athletes, politicians, musicians, philosophers all got stronger instead of more weary. We must do the same.

• Coffee tastes different at night. It tastes like college. [Any coder who doesn’t know this, isn’t really a coder. You code for work, not for love. Change your career, or you’ll hate your life when you look back on it in forty years time]

• How many rich people have said this in our presence: “I thought I would feel better when I was rich, but I don’t.” [Too many people get into IT because they think it is a path to riches. Right now, Computer Science and “Informatics” labs are full of kids who are hoping to get rich, and hoping to get rich quick. They will either fail in getting rich, or fail in feeling happy when they’re there. Those of us in this for the job, we’re here because of the game, the Zone, the challenge, we’re going to win]

• I am wondering what that exact moment is when we truly, truly love our jobs. Is it during the day, or at the end of the day, or is it years later looking back on all we accomplished? I think perhaps truly loving something is the ability to love it at that moment. It is an elusive ability, something I have never been able to quite accomplish. I must go home, and take my experiences like a squirrel, and consider them, before I can truly enjoy them. I must work on this. The daily journey is everything. Being able to enjoy enjoyment while it is happening.

• A life is not worth living if you are sleepwalking through it. Because that is what feels like death. That is what causes athletes to, out of despair, get drunk and wrap their cars around a pole. Or lash out at someone they love … It is the feeling of sleepwalking. Of others living life around you, keeping their fists tightly wound around whatever dollars they can muster, caring little more than nothing about those around you. We cannot sleepwalk. We cannot just survive, anything goes. We can take control of our lives, we can quit sleepwalking, we can say - right now, these are our lives, it is time to start living it. It is time to not second guess, to move forward, to make mistakes if we have to, but to do it with a greater good in mind.

There is no doubt that 37signals have had a deep effect on the web development community. Most people didn’t wake up to their antics until relatively recently, but the truth is that they’ve been dishing out design tips and hacks on their Signal vs. Noise blog for a while now. In the last couple of years though, things have become a little… ‘funky’.

First, there was Basecamp a.k.a. the ‘anti-MS Project’ for project management. It was cute, handy, useful and for the market it was designed for (web designers) almost perfect. From that, they extracted the undercarriage and realised they had a framework for not just producing project management applications, but almost any web application - Ruby on Rails - which has gone on to be one of the biggest growing development frameworks on the planet. Vagueware (as in, me) now codes exclusively in Ruby and specialises in Rails development.

The products kept on rolling out - Ta-da, Backpack, Writeboard, Campfire - and the fandom got more and more intense. As a result there are now people known simply as ’37signals fanboys’ because no matter what the guys produce, there is a queue of people ready to hand over the cash. Sometimes people asked what the hell was the fuss about. Writeboard, is after all, nothing more than a text box with version control.

As a result of all this attention, expectations for their first venture into online book publishing as a company were a little mixed. Some people were thinking ‘same old stuff, re-hashed’ whilst the fans… well, let’s just say they were ready to replace various holy texts with copies.

You won’t find Getting Real in any bookshop. It’s available online-only as a downloadable PDF. Every copy watermarked with a ‘Specially prepared for (your name here)’ at the bottom of every page. This is an unusual way to enter the mainstream book market, but as their July 20 update shows, a more than profitable one.

So is it worth the $19 to buy? Well, I bought a copy ages ago, skim-read it, and didn’t get a chance to sit down and give it a thorough reading until this last weekend. I thought as I had finally given it some love, to share what I found.

First things first - there are 16 sections, each having between two to nine chapters, with an average of about seven or eight. Each chapter is quite light, and generally tends to expand a little on the title. As a result you could, in theory, just read the list of chapter titles and get a good idea of the best ideas from the book. Most chapters are less than two full pages long, and include quotes from Kathy Sierra and Seth Godin, so the real ‘meat’ is in the concepts, not in the writing.

In fact, I am reminded here of a part of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where the principal character describes reading with his son. He suggests reading a sentence - just one - and then stopping and thinking about it. Talking about it. Dissecting, pulling, morphing it. At the end of it all, decide how you feel about it and then move onto the next sentence. After you’ve read that sentence, stop, and analyse that as you did the previous one.

I tried reading like this once and it was an extraordinarily hard process, however I got a real insight into the material I hadn’t thought possible before. If I’m honest, if you look at the list of chapter headings, do the above, and you’re probably going to be able to get the core concepts down in your head without spending $19. That said, that’s an option for the poor - it’s not a lot of money, and the lazy would do best to save their mental energy and just shell out for the book.

Project management theories are all alike in one sense: they are codified common sense. PRINCE2 is basically a book that could be re-titled “Common Sense for Idiots” whilst agile is a way of letting developers work their own way whilst keeping management happy - mainly because management don’t think programmers have any sense whatsoever.

Getting Real is no different in this respect. It’s an “Agile-light” that concentrates on user experience above all else. However, it also stretches the boundaries of project management and touches on how to run a web product company in general. Sections that wouldn’t normally belong in a straight PM book include staffing, pricing and signup strategy, and how to keep customers happy would not belong in a traditional book on development methods.

It is also a book that is not meant to teach, but rather help you evangelise. It comes in a site license version (which at $49 is quite reasonable) so that you may spread the word amongst your team and help get the company on the same page. And that’s what this book is about - getting your team pulled together and heading in the same direction.

Project methodologies often concentrate on how best to document a project and how best to present that documentation within the team so that all concepts are clearly understood. Getting Real sets fire to that concept and suggests there is only one thing the business needs to worry about at any point in time: code that does what the customer expects.

To get a team to the point where they no longer need the traditional software lifecycle can take time and energy, and in many ways Getting Real can help short-circuit that. Reading it through with real-life examples can help convince you and your team that it’s at least worth a go - and that’s the biggest obstacle in changing any working style.

Some of the concepts do feel a little strange in places. For example, they suggest you should always have three people on the team: one developer, one designer, one person who can straddle both. This is just arbitrary and doesn’t make much sense. One programmer with design skills (or the money to get some if he can’t use OSWD or similar) could easily pull a project together with hard work - I should know - and a programmer with a designer on their own could easily do it. Where the third person steps in, I don’t know, or why it would be so dangerous to have four people, I’m not sure, but I’m guessing this ‘three person’ set up is just the way 37signals handled things themselves internally.

Their staffing advice is also a little strange. How can you assess a designer based on a week’s work? I’d rather assess them on a lifetime of work. Same with a programmer, if I’m honest. I also understand the point they make in saying that good wordsmiths will be better communicators, but only if the primary form of commuication is written - if you’re spending most of your time coding in ‘alone time’ and it’s the pub conversations where the real team collaboration is worked out, the fact they can write in iambic pentameter isn’t going to help you one jot. I’d say: hire people who fit, regardless of wordsmith skills.

The overall push with this book is one of getting something out of the door as quickly as possible. Interestingly it suggests we develop simple solutions that work well instead of complex solutions that are in perpetual beta, and in this I find myself in wholesale agreement. We live in an age of Web 2.0 where getting anything that feels as though it might impress out of the door is seen as a greater acheivement than getting the right thing - just enough to get customers using the product and being surprised by it - out of the door.

Overall it’s a pleasant read, inspiring in places, and has practical knowledge that beginners could make use of if they’ve never worked on a software team before. For those of us who might be considered ‘old hands’ by now, I’d say it’s an interesting twist on how to get over the procrastination of starting your own software product line, and I intend to make use of a lot of the advice - but not all of it.

That said, you need everybody in your team to be signed up to it for it to work, and it will take time for people to adjust. For example, last week I had a discussion with somebody on a project who had read this book and wanted to work in the Getting Real style, but had to be held back from drawing an entity-relationship diagram as the first stage. It would seem that old habits die hard, and despite all the good intentions of Getting Real, might take some time to overcome even with the converts.

I’ve been a fan of Seth Godin for a couple of years, ever since I realised that if I was going to run my own business there was a whole bunch of skills I needed to pick up that spending my teenage years in front of a compiler didn’t prepare me for. Like, for example, marketing.

Seth is by no means unheard of, his name is now quite famous within marketing circles and he is definitely one of the few marketing geeks who the blogging crowd think “gets” what the Web is about. As a result, his books get widely read, widely commented on, and if you interested in the web as a marketing tool - and I’m talking blogs and user engagement here, not spamming - you should get familiar with his work.

Free Prize Inside is not a new book. It’s been published and in circulation since May 2004. So why am I reviewing it now? Well, because I only got around to reading it last weekend. :-)

As with nearly all business books, the amount of original thinking you’ll find in FPI depends on how widely read you are, how imaginative you are yourself, and how exposed you are to methods of innovative thinking as part of your daily work life. I can’t imagine many businesses embody innovation to the extent that I, or Seth Godin, would suggest it should be, but if you work for an ad agency you might find some of the content of this volume a little ‘beginner level’.

The core of Seth’s thesis is that soft innovation is an easier sell for everybody - your colleagues as much as your customers - compared to ‘hard’ innovation/blue-sky thinking. I’ve covered before how I think about innovation - push edges and boundaries, it’s quicker and easier and more productive - but what was startling when reading Free Prize Inside was that he had managed to put the time and effort into synthesising it into a series of basic tools.

The value for me in this book is this simple reduction to basic steps things I’ve always known - i.e. I now have a vocabulary I can share that explains what I’m talking about.

For example, the ‘fulcrum of innovation’ is basically a fancy way of asking yourself three questions before you take an innovation to colleagues, in order to determine how likely it is they’re going to support you:

• Is it going to work?
• Is it worth doing?
• Are you the one to get it done?

These are of course the questions running through people’s heads when you take them through any new idea you want to put in place, and by thinking through how to get a ‘yes’ to every one of those questions, you’re going to be in a better position to pitch your idea. You might be wrong, but at least you’ll have gone through a methodology before you start trying to pitch your idea. A simple technique, but worth learning.

In fact, pitching your idea is such an important aspect of innovation, Seth actually suggests you work out how to sell your idea before you actually come up with it. Selling your idea, he claims, is as important a step in making it happen as coming up with the idea itself. If you come up with an idea that isn’t going to work, isn’t worth doing, or nobody thinks you can do, there’s no point in trying to develop it past the scribble you just made on your whiteboard or notebook.

This is sensible advice, but I’m concerned this is going to stifle those people for whom self-doubt is the modus operandi of thought. Convinced that they can’t have an idea colleagues will think they can execute, they will refuse to actually try and create an idea at all.

That said, Seth’s methods of ‘edgecrafting’ (or as I called it in the past “evolutionary innovation”) lowers the barrier of resistance by allowing people to easily see how to improve a product so as to create an excitement in the customer. Seth specifically looks to try and give every customer a “free prize” or a bonus that they weren’t expecting. In actual fact, this isn’t about shoving a free plastic toy inside the box (well, not always), but rather is about finding the edge/boundary that you can push a product to. Doing more, doing less, treating people the same, treating people equally, whatever it is, find an edge and push your product there in a way your sector isn’t used to.

He also suggests brainstorming is the wrong way to innovate, but for different reasons I think it’s useless. He claims that within a group it’s too hard to get people to speak up and contribute ideas for fear of ridicule or that they’ll be asked to actually do some work. Instead, he claims, if you ask people to work individually on a problem the results will be better. I think the flaw with brainstorming is that you end up asking people to do the impossible: start with a blank piece of paper and re-invent from scratch. If instead you were to give people a set of constraints and asked them to push them around, it’s still perfectly possible in my opinion to come up with quality ideas as a team.

In general the book is filled with clever techniques, but I’m not sure whether it’s because I’ve read so much of Godin’s other work - and work by others - in recent years that it doesn’t feel particularly remarkable or original any more. That said, if you are struggling with innovation and how to make it happen within your own workplace, it’s an affordable shot in the arm that should get the creative juices flowing.

37signals posted an interesting article about the two sides of a consumer - the one who makes the purchasing decision (and wants features) and the one who has to live with the product afterwards (and wants ease of use)

In turn, they point to a paper on ‘Feature Fatigue’ which I think misses a point.

If you take their argument literally, product convergance is a bad idea because the aim is to put as many features into one device as possible. Thing is, we know that if the user interface is designed well, product convergence is a great idea.

In my pocket I carry a voice memo recorder, mp3 player, FM radio, web access device, digital camera, mini flashlight, alarm clock, electronic diary and address book that synches with my mac and my mobile phone. Actually, I just carry my mobile phone, but it does all those things. It does most of them pretty well. I have no doubt that the next generation of Sony Ericsson phones - or even better the now semi-confirmed Apple Smart phone - will do them even better.

So we know packing a device with features works. The trick however is not to just leave them all dangling out there, but to provide a great way of using them. I don’t turn my camera on, for example, I just slide the lens cover back. I can assign shortcuts to functions I use often to the little joystick in the middle. I can easily find what I need after learning the interface for about 5 minutes. It’s a great tool.

From the paper’s abstract:

Because consumers give more weight to capability and less weight to usability before relative to after use, consumers tend to choose overly complex products that do not maximize their satisfaction when using them, resulting in ‘feature fatigue.’

And later on in the abstract:

Our results suggest that firms should consider having a larger number of more specialized products, each with a limited number of features, rather than loading all possible features into one product.

This is a flawed conclusion. If you go on to read the paper, you realise that what they actually mean to conclude is:

1. Some users buy features they don’t want, because to get the features they do want, they have to buy the bundle and this causes “stress”
2. Some users find a product with more features confusing because they don’t know how to use them all, even though they want to
3. Trade-offs have to be made to reduce product complexity, and that can impact sales

Well, the solution to that lot is not to reduce the number of features, but to reduce the complexity of using those features, and perhaps add the ability to hide features a user doesn’t want. In software in particular, tailoring a user interface to a particular user’s needs is a standard thing to do - if somebody logs in who would only ever need to see reports, why bother offering them a view of a load of data setup and configuration parameters?

The solution is not more specialized devices - I don’t want to carry 9 devices in my pockets, I like to travel light - the solution is to produce a better user experience for the converged device. To think through the problems of user experience is hard, but worthwhile. For my money, Sony Ericsson does this well, and I expect more product manufacturers will refine this process over time.

And I’m never buying a stand-alone camera again unless I plan to go pro.

Everybody loves video on the Internet - sites such as YouTube have shown the power of video, particularly in a network of people who are fed up with traditional media. However, it’s bandwidth-hungry, and low-quality webcams are the norm still. This means watching video on your PC is slow if it’s high-quality - a DVD quality BitTorrent can take days to download - and makes you feel sick if it’s fast but low-quality.

MotionDSP have created a new technology that tries to improve low-quality video by working out information that is ‘lost’ through aliasing of pixels. It’s impressive stuff, originally developed for the military. Now it is likely to find a home on the numerous video sites that are changing the way we all think think about film and video.

The demos look pretty good, but you can still tell there is something low quality about them - the blurred nature of the refined video makes me feel like I’ve lost my reading glasses and after a while, I think I’d feel a bit ill.