blogs.conchango.com

I was pointed at this blog post the other day by tommylee on Twitter it's from a blog called 'counternotions' by a blogger called 'Kontra':

http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/

Here's an extract;

It’s quite easy and fun to dig up “concept products” that really have no hope of turning into real, shipping products. Why then do commercial entities bother to produce them often at great expense?

Although Nokia and Microsoft gave us an endless supply of concept products over the years, they haven’t produced, for example, anything like the TiVo, the iPod, the iPhone, OS X, the iTunes App Store, or created brand new user experience paradigms, transformed calcified markets, captured the imagination of people, and so on. They didn’t have the organizational and intellectual discipline to go from concept to product.

As a test, it’s hard to remember a single groundbreaking or even a moderately inspiring product that actually shipped during Nathan Myrvold’s long reign as the head of research at Microsoft. That hasn’t apparently dampened the adulation he gets as a billionaire genius jetting among the world’s glitterati today. But there does appear to be a weak correlation between a company’s ability to churn out concept products and its ability to design, manufacture and profitably sell products based on those. So why bother indeed?

I started writing a comment on the comment thread, but when I got to about 500 words, realised this post had obviously got to me... The observation that this blog post presented was set out as 'Kontra's Law':

A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products.

There were a number of things wrong here...

But first... let's talk about innovation.

Innovation comes in many forms. Some small, some large. Some obvious, some not so obvious. What they all do though is create something. Whether it's wealth for the inventor, time in a user's life through increased reliability or better efficiency, or even simply a sense of pleasure.

What we know for a fact is that companies that innovate do well. Companies that stop innovating eventually grind to a halt.

We also know that there's a delicate balancing act between being market pioneers and first to market with every innovation under the sun, to being a successful market follower who brings products to market after that market has been driven by a competitor.

What is clear though, is that like IBM, who transformed from a typewriter company to a computer company, you have to innovate constantly to survive. This is an imperative that is even more vital in times of potential recession. You'll see soon why we believe this, as we've had a really good look at what it is that helps companies thrive in times of recession and we'll be telling you towards the end of the summer.

Exactly how you 'do' innovation is therefore pretty important to the success of this, and big companies are realising this. A fact borne out by the fact that I know more 'Innovation Managers' of heads of innovations for major UK and European companies today than I've ever known. Some have really successful innovation programmes and others are struggling.

We'll save the 'magic formula' conversation on how to do successful innovation for another day - but in the meantime, back to Kontra's blog.

So, just a small point of order;

Microsoft Surface was lumped in on this blog as a 'concept' product alongside some of GM's masterful concept cars and other such things that haven't seen the light of day. This was just a miscalculation on Kontra's part... Surface is a beta product.  I should know.. I've read and signed the SDK Licence agreement and I wouldn't do that for a concept!

Second is that many of the commenters and the blog-writer confuse different stages in the product development pipeline and miss the fact that the 'concept' is where pretty much every product starts - whether that concept is seen in public or not.

We said above that Surface is a Beta Product. This is a stage in the product pipeline way beyond 'concept'  where it is released to people like us to work with and to find commercial applications for before it goes into full production. It's experimental still, with some enhancements still to be made and kinks to be ironed out. Microsoft went public with Surface when it was a prototype - a stage beyond concept where you're trying to make it work in the constraints of the materials and technologies you have to hand in order to try to solve some of the feasibility and viability issues you have.

The first stage you would think is 'concept' - but there are even a number of stages of 'concept'. There's total dreaming, where you haven't even really considered the 'how' and you really are just being a futurologist - a 'dabbler' as Kontra puts it I guess. Then there's a more reasoned concept where many of the 'hows' have been answered i.e. you have looked at some of the viability and feasibility issues of the concept, and have probably identified a number of issues where you believe there to be an answer, but you just don't know what it is... yet. To get to this stage, you have to be cognisant in the challenges of developing the actual product. You have to be familiar with the materials, the science, the manufacturing process... in short, you have to be a good technical designer to produce a 'napkin sketch' like this one:

 

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalflyer

This was one of several concepts that Burt Rutan drew before eventually building Steve Fossett's Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer aircraft. This sketch is one he photocopied from his desk, before signing and giving it to me by the way... (name drop, name drop!) so I have talked to him about how he goes about the process of designing some unbelievable aircraft, that when you look at them you might think were 'only concepts' - but the difference is he made them all fly. There are an awful lot of clues actually in what makes a good innovation company in the way that Burt and his company Scaled Composites operates... but that's for another day also.

Of course, for every concept that he built and ended up looking quite like the original sketch, there are hundreds of sketches that never made it. Either because a client didn't have the kind of money to develop it, or there were just too many issues to overcome in the rest of the product lifecycle.

Interestingly, Burt's company worked on a GM concept car - the point of this car, was to show how there might be a better way to build cars that makes them much more fuel efficient. The use of composite materials would be key to this in lowering the weight of the car, and what Scaled Composites delivered was a body shell and frame that was indeed a feasible alternative to a traditional metal frame and skin. So actually, this was more a 'proof of concept' I guess, as the car was capable of 88mpg and Scaled Composites had helped GM prove how this was feasible with composite materials.

So that brings me around to a thought echoed by a number of commenters on the aforementioned blog, about internal and external concepts.

Burt and Scaled Composites certainly don't publicise their concepts. Why not? Because they don't need to, I guess. Burt Rutan is the most famed aviation designer of his day (if not ever) so he certainly doesn't need to enhance his reputation for being an innovator. In fact, he might give away an idea he later uses on something else. He mentioned several times to me that he would think of something for one project, only to use it years later on something else. So if he put all these out in public, he'd lose his edge and some of his better ideas potentially.

Is this the same reason Apple don't release their concepts?

No. I think they set about turning around their reputation when Jobs came back to the company by retrenching into the R&D labs and inventing something that they could get into the market that would do that for them.

What made them successful in this was focus. They stopped everything else, and thought about a limited number of things, and set out to do those really well. In short, they had focus on those things and didn't get distracted by other stuff.

They stopped chasing the market and decided to use the old Wayne Gretzky maxim. Wayne, one of the most famous ice hockey players is oft-quoted talking about the reason for his success like this:

"I don't skate to where the puck is, I skate to where it's going to be".

So all their resources, their effort, their funding, went into developing their concepts, and bringing a small number of them to market. Limiting their investment in this way limited their risk. Although according to most, the risk they took was still pretty massive. To do that, you have to be pretty sure about what you're doing, and this is where good innovation processes come in, but again, that's for another day.

And this focus made them successful as innovators. Now - they are in the Burt Rutan position... they have the reputation for innovation, and don't need to get their future-thinking concepts out there to convince the world of this. They have the luxury of being able to hold on to them in case they're useful later.

Whereas someone like Microsoft gets bad press all the time about this. Even when they release a product like Surface (albeit late), then they still get criticised for it, and it gets called a 'concept'. So no wonder they put effort into trying to improve this image through future-thinking and trying show what their technology 'might' do in a few years.

However, there is also huge value in having a vision...

We all need a goal. We need to set standards that are beyond what we can do today, and beyond the realms of what we deem to be feasible or viable for whatever reason.

The challenge is to set that vision far enough out that it is challenging, yet close enough that we know it should be feasible if we work hard enough (or wait long enough of course, but we try to make it a challenge rather than a demotivator!).

The timeframe we use is anywhere between 3 and 5 years for a vision that can be realised by a series of projects over that time frame, each lasting 9-18 months.

However, when we use this, it is generally something that is internalised inside a company. It is a part of its most secret strategy and business roadmap. It is not a 45 second TV ad. It is instead part of our Experience Planning process that the boards of companies like Barclays, Virgin Atlantic and others buy into and helps inform their strategies not only for digital channels.

So, what having this kind of vision gives companies is somewhere to go, and a focus for their current roadmap of product development.  It is something you present to a company's board and ask them:

1. Do you want to be here? Do you want digital products that do this, and drive this value?
2. Do you believe we can get here within X years?
3. Will you give priority to projects and developments that allow us to get here in X years time?

That vision then serves as a test for everything that follows. Does project Y move us closer to our vision? If the answer is no, then should we be doing it?

The key thing though is never to hit your vision, and always to keep it believable and challenging and one step ahead. We can look and laugh at concept cars that have microwave ovens in them and you should never have a current vision that can be laughed at.

So you have to revisit it every year, take the things that actually should now be hygiene factors and up them a level. Take away the things that we really have discovered in the last year are not going to be feasible within our timeframe. In short, make the vision always believable, and always tantalisingly just out of reach like the proverbial carrot in front of the donkey.

When you do this, it motivates people. It keeps them on track. It helps prioritise business spending and resource. It helps keep the customer in mind - always. It stops you from having to play 'catch-up'.

So that was a bit of a side-bar, but important, because you could consider some of our vision work to be 'conceptual' and sometimes our clients do choose to release aspects of it publicly.

So, to re-cap on "Kontra's law":

A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products.

Well, let's look at what "ability to innovate" means, but leaving that aside for the moment - we may have an observation of a perceived relationship between these two things. But we don't have a causal link. If you don't get this concept, read Freakonomics - or watch out for it in my upcoming "5 books you should have read but probably haven't" presentation at Conferences around Europe!

It may be a true observation, but is a company's reluctance to release conceptual work what actually makes them successful in innovation? No. It's other things, as outlined above... mainly focus, and process.

I think what maddened me most about this blog post though, was not the stuff above, but it was the definition of 'innovation'.

Kontra's blog outlined all sorts of innovation that they personally admired. Most were highly visible user interactions, form-factors that were attractive in the aesthetic sense, and of course useful in some way.

However, couldn't you equally argue that putting affordable, reliable mobile telecommunications in the hands of the masses, is an equally innovative and worthy set of innovations as a multi-touch screen.

It's the latter that Nokia has achieved. But that doesn't seem to merit a mention. Neither the way they have driven the solid state market over the last 20 or so years, to develop ever-smaller and more efficient transceivers and other processors that make not only their phones work, but Apple's too.

Now I'm as guilty as the next man at talking up the 'sexy' innovations. But it's very easy to overlook the less sexy ones that have actually made a much, much bigger impact on the world.

Here are a few of my favourites in this category:

• The plastic stacking chair - this radicalised how schools use their space, and instantly gave them a theatre, a concert hall and a gymnasium in the same place - thereby influencing and bettering the education of generations of school-children.
• Teflon - a heatproof coating developed in the space programme (not my favourite hotbed of innovation), but then made widely available so we don't have to scrub our pans any more. That makes quite a big difference to my life!
• The infra-red remote control - which of you noticed the transition from ultrasonic remote controls to infra-red? No, the big deal for you was the remote control itself. But there were huge problems with ultrasonic. First, your cat might yawn or you might drop a handful of change on the counter, or use a slinky (yes remember those too!) and it would change the channel on the TV. So some day, some bright spark invented infra-red remote control, and quietly, remote controls could then be happily produced for all sorts of devices without regard for ambient noise of yawning cats. So arguably, the important one was infra-red as a control transport, but I don't remember seeing a blog about it... whereas....

The iPhone - well, there are a few blogs on that one aren't there?

An orange plastic chair isn't sexy though. Neither is the black inside of a saucepan, but both merit an awful lot of 'worth' as innovation in terms of the business they drove for the companies that invented them, and the benefit they gave to end users. More certainly than a click wheel, or a multi-touch mobile phone. And much more than that is something like Nokia bringing communications to a developing world that otherwise never would have had them.

Don't get me wrong. I love multi-touch. I loved it when Jeff Han showed it to us, I loved it on Microsoft Surface and again on the iPhone. I love it because natural interaction, through multi-touch, gesture recognition, etc. is very much the future. Actually, it's the now, but the future will put this in the main-stream, and I do find it a very sexy innovation, but it's not the only worthy innovation in the world...

What I certainly object to is an argument that says "Nokia, Microsoft, GM bad, Apple good" simply because the arguer prefers the nature of Apple's innovations.

Finally - I have to say I do know of a good reason why you might make concepts public.

Some of the best innovations are the result of two or more innovations coming together. What a product designer thinks should be feasible one day, but doesn't know how today - someone else might have already solved.

So when Nokia or Microsoft release a concept like a wrap-around mobile phone, or a media-room wall projection it's quite possible that another innovator somewhere in the world will call up Microsoft Research the next day saying that they have solved some of those issues and have a product of their own that would fit perfectly. Take the guy who invented a washable fabric with electrical contacts in it. A completely pointless invention until someone says "here's a concept for a ski jacket that means you don't have to take your gloves off or take ipod out of your pocket to control it" and suddenly you have a real product that people will find useful, that has fabric controls for an ipod built in to the sleeve (I've got one and it works).

As we said before, the iPhone is full of technology from other people who solved lots of little problems involved in building the iPhone. If they hadn't already got the tech to do it, Apple wouldn't have been able to pull the product together. Apple presumably went out privately to their partners and asked what tech they had that might help. So given a more radical product where you know you have some really big bits missing (like the technology to project on an uneven surface yet keep focus as the media room would require), why not get it out there and see if anyone pops up with a technology that might help (like pico projection, using lasers maybe... that would do it, although the scale seems a bit wrong).

So, there may even be good reasons to go public with concepts after all.

Oh, and I can't count the number of times someone has said to me the phrase "a Minority Report style interface" to describe touch-less interactions. I'm pretty certain that was a concept from a film designer or script writer, but that didn't stop it inspiring a generation of interaction designers...

So not only is there certainly no causal relationship between disclosing concepts publicly and 'innovation' - but I would say that GM, Microsoft, Nokia, etc. are certainly innovators. In addition, I guess this tells a story:

Nokia's annual revenue: $86bn
Apple's annual revenue: $24bn
(source: Wikipedia)

Thereby I refute 'Kontra's Law' and turn my mind to thinking about how a bank customer will use a Microsoft Surface device... yes, that's right, back to real life!

 

ADDENDUM:

Was just listening to Business Week's innovation podcast, on which they had an interview with Moshe Safdie, the architect who first broke on to the architecture scene with "Habitat 67" at the Montreal World's Fair in 1967, a radical new housing development.

This is the interior of the Salt Lake City Public Library for example, one of Moshe's projects.

What was interesting, and the topic of the podcast, was that he had set up what he called a Research Fellowship.

This was a team of architects on stipend, from outside of this practice, who had been in the industry for only a few short years.

The 'Fellowship' would work in concentrated bursts of activity inside Safdie's practice, and apply themselves to some real architectural problems. But ones wherein the pre-existing assumptions and constraints were removed.

For example, Safdie's practice has worked on a number of 'interface' buildings. Projects where transportation meets people; an airport for example.

He said that typically, most of the decisions in an airport build are made before the architect gets hold of the project. In this particular focus piece, the team went back to 'first principles' and re-worked out the design of airports. This he said opened the way to real innovation, as you leave tradition and legacy decisions behind.

What was different from an academic "conceptualisation" piece, was that these Fellows were working collaboratively with the main practice. Using all of its facilities and people, much in the vein of the apprentices of old.

In my view, it's the drawing on this real world experience, that means this isn't simply 'dabbling' as Kontra puts it, but rather unconstrained thinking.

Safdie talks openly about this conceptual work, and uses its output to re-educate the commissioners of airport buildings in order to challenge their conventions and assumptions.

And that doesn't hold him back from being a real innovator does it?

A few weeks ago I came in to our offices at 36 Southwark Bridge Road, just between Borough Market and Tate Modern, and was confronted with scaffolding and a plain white hoarding. My immediate thought was that this was an awesome blank canvas...

So rather than procastinate around and think it was a good idea and have a bunch of grand schemes as to exactly how clever we could be with it, or refer it to somebody else to make a decision that they would never make without setting up a committee.... one of us checked a couple of legalities, then actually found someone prepared to help us do something about it. With a shelf life of only 6 weeks it was now or never.

So, meet Trav & Danny Wilson (http://www.myspace.com/trav_art)

And here's what they did in about a day:

 

Here are the stats:

• 17 cans of Montana spray paint
• 3 permanent marker pens
• 8 bottles of Becks
• 1 extra large pepperoni pizza
• 1 night on Anni's sofa
• 5 minutes on YouTube
• 260 tourists getting off coaches outside the office on their way to the Tate Modern or The Globe who got mightily confused
• 2 police officers who stopped and said "you s'posed to be doin' that son?"

It's also Tate Modern's Street Art festival right now.. so it all fitted together beautifully! Nice one boys.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/streetart/default.shtm

 

 

I don't want to make this post too Conchango, as it's really to show off Trav and Danny's work... but nonetheless, ...

I guess this came to me subconsciously as I did a presentation on the "Slash//Slash Generation" the other week and used this picture to give an example of a brand that was loved by this group. One of several that are loved not because of what they stand for, but the creativity they enable... and then for Trav and Danny to rock up with 20 or so cans of the stuff... Good on you Montana for making stuff like this happen.

Here's their story in their own words on YouTube.  Thanks Trav and Danny. I'm really glad you had a good couple of days. It was definitely worth it. Thank you!

Found at: http://betterneverthanlate.blogspot.com/2008/07/conchango-mural.html  Thanks!

By the way, if you want to come and work somewhere that thinks like this and isn't too worried to let two 19 year olds from Birmingham loose on their office without pre-approving their work, or art-directing them, and can get that going without reference to a marketing committee because they're empowered to make decisions and get things done... then come work with us:  http://www.conchango.com/join-us/

Ok, I've been meaning to post this for a while, so sorry it's late... but I talk a lot about 'experience' and user-centred design, and occasionally, I stumble across someone who doesn't come from my universe and isn't as keenly aware of what some of this means. So here begins, hopefully, a small series of blogs on the basic principles of User-Centred Design (UCD) and user experience generally. The aim is to do each in 500 words or less. Something I'm not very good at, so bear with me. Herewith, UCD 101:

User-centred design (UCD) is an industry-standard term for an approach to the design of a solution that takes a detailed look at the needs of the end users of a solution, and then specifically sets about creating things that satisfies those needs.

Done well and in an organisation that truly 'gets it', this approach will drive not simply how something works, but the overall 'product' the company has to offer. UCD is a very effective innovation framework, as it looks at un-met needs in its customer base and potential customer base. This basic approach has been the key driver of invention since forever, so UCD is a perfect framework to drive everything from product innovation to interaction design.

In order to be effective, UCD can't purely be 'user' design. i.e. it cannot simply be 'what users want'. Take a look at Homer's ideal car below to see how bad this approach can be. UCD is about understanding users' wants and needs, coupling that with an understanding of what will drive the commercial business and what the technology is capable of, and then design an appropriate, beautiful and enjoyable experience or product.

It's something often summed up as balancing desire, feasibility and viability. Unless you get all three right, the thing will fail.

• Lose 'desire' and nobody will come to use it. Thereby collapsing any business case you had built on it.
• Lose 'feasiblity' and you may not even be able to build it in the first place.
• Lose 'viability' and it will be too expensive, or hard to maintain and the business needs won't be met.

The best products balance all three very effectively. So a UCD process is actually one that also is business-centred and technology-centred. That's a lot of centres... but the secret is mutual gain.

Usually, unless we create something that somebody wants to do ('Desire') it's going to fail. So usually, the reason we call this user-centred is that unless we have users, nothing else works; but as we said in reality the game is mutual gain. We can give users lots of things they want to do, but where is the business value? When we find overlap between user-benefit and business-benefit, those are the magic moments that will make a system or business successful.

Sometimes a business just has to do something. It might be a regulatory requirement for example. But even this requires attention to the 'desire' element. In this case, the base system comes first. "We need a system to get customers to sign our new terms and conditions". Viability is ticked as it's a 'must do', but now we have to address 'desire'. How do we make people do this? It's best if they want to do it as it will happen faster and they will be happier - but what motivates them?

Finally - UCD should have a success metric of user happiness. User happiness is a user benefit that overlaps with business benefits, but is often left unconsidered. In internal systems it leads to staff loyalty and lowered support costs, in customer-facing systems it generates increased trade and loyalty. But more than that, because loyalty can be generated simply by having the right product at the right price and not letting people down on delivery. That's all good, but you can go further. When you get customers emotionally invested in something, you move from simple loyalty, to advocacy, which is a far more valuable attribute for business. It's 'experience' that generates this emotional attachment...

Words: 576 - Doh!

Thanks to / people to read: Alan Cooper - The Inmates are Running the Asylum; Lou Carbone - Clued In.

As more of us get 'hooked up' and start settling into our digital communications lifestyle, more people I know are going through a learning curve that for many of us we went through nearly 10 years ago. It's easy to forget this stuff, so when a friend asked me for advice on getting rid of spam, I thought I'd blog it too. Maybe you've got a relative or friend is asking the same question...

This is only one person's experience and opinion - there are others who have different approaches - and you should look at those too, but I offer it here in case it helps (it can't hurt, that's for sure).

This was the email I received:

"We have just been on holiday for the past week and I am now inundated with emails offering me viagra, etc etc (I had about 200 new emails of that variety).  I have used the 'message rules' setup on the computer to block certain words (the really obvious ones) but they just seem to come up with more and more different ways of wording the emails.  I find it a bit of a drag myself, but more importantly I can't even contemplate letting my daughter (who is about to go off to Senior school) have her own email account when we are getting emails like this.

"So can I ask - has changing your email address helped get rid of the spam?  and how does it work.  I would LOVE some advice on how to get rid of this problem!"

My reply:

The only way really to deal with it when it get to this level is to change your email provider and address. (Her email address was at her broadband providers domain e.g. @tiscali.co.uk, @sky.co.uk)

Certain email domains (i.e. the bit after "@") seem to be quite vulnerable to this. The basic reason is that certain email domains are simply more likely to have lots of real people at the end of them.

This is one of the reasons my wife's old email address was overloaded with spam (junk email), because hers was "@dawson.name" and anything that was a .name was obviously a real person, therefore the spammers think they’re on a good bet.

This applies to a lot of the internet service providers like Tiscali, Virgin Media, Sky etc.

What we have done is register a domain separately from our internet service provider. This provides us with a new email server, from which we download all our email, and the ability to create ‘throwaway’ email addresses that we can use on websites where we’re not sure how they’ll use it.

You can do this with someone like www.register.com (others are available).

Go and find an email domain that is reasonably memorable and meaningful to you.

You then pay to register the domain, and can also buy an email service from them. This is an annual fee (I use the $34.99 ‘pro’ one), and a fee every two years for the domain itself (I think around $60). Obviously this comes on top of your broadband fees, but... it’s only £20 a year. Cheaper than a mobile phone!

They also offer a service where they will register the domain anonymously for you – so they don’t publish an email address that can also be grabbed by the spammers. This costs a couple of dollars extra but I think is worth it, unless you use the hotmail address I suggest below....

After that you can then set up individual email addresses e.g. yourname@mytribe.org

And then it’s a case of keeping your email clean... this means, not putting your email address into websites, not using it on websites that you’re not familiar with or don’t trust, and so on.

It also pays to set up a few email addresses that you can throw away later if you need to. E.g. mynewsletters45@mytribe.org – that you can use when you need to put in an email address, but aren’t sure if it’s that kosher. Then, whenever you find you’re getting a load of email to that address, you can just delete it and all that spam will disappear.

All of these email addresses can be configured to go into your single in-box using a piece of software like Outlook Express. So there’s no hassle about having to go to different sites to check different email accounts.

From Outlook Express you can see to which email address something was sent – so you can start to work out if any of your email addresses has been compromised.

You can also set up different users who can then access their email separately and privately from a different PC or Mac, so you can also set up yourdaughtersname@mytribe.org as well.  Or give her a choice of what her user name is. In fact, you should include her in choosing the domain as well – she might thing having her surname in it is not good for example...

She can easily set up her own email on something like hotmail or Google’s Gmail anyway... so my belief is it's best to give her one you have faith in and she believes to be private to her rather than her set one up that you won’t even know about. If you really needed to hack into it at some point, you could because you have all the access details. Whereas if you don’t even know about it...

I also find it pays to have a totally throwaway address that you don’t care if it gets spam. I use a hotmail address – just go to www.hotmail.co.uk and set up anything you like. E.g myname733@hotmail.co.uk 

This means that if you need to give an email address to register for a site, and you really think there’s a chance they might be a bit iffy, you can use this one. You can check the account by just going to www.hotmail.co.uk if one of those sites needs you to click on a link in the email to verify it, but otherwise you can just leave it to fester knowing that nothing important will ever get sent to it.

Finally – when you do get spam email, don’t ever reply to it. That will reveal your actual email address – the one you only give out to friends and family and places you trust.

You can also get spam filter plugins for email packages like Outlook that are supposed to recognise spam – but as you point out, the spammers are so clever at constantly changing the way their emails work that I find they’re not very effective. The big online email providers like Windows Live and Google are quite good at this now, but then you have to use their web-based email systems.

I find there’s an advantage in having your email somewhere other than your broadband provider, because then if you decide to switch who your broadband is with, you can do so without changing anything else. Whereas at the moment, if you move away from Tiscali, you will have to change your email address.

I hope that helps...

By the way,.. none of this is guaranteed!

 

Stuart Preston runs all of our infrastructure at Conchango, keeping our business running and our people talking to each other and clients - oh and he develops Vista side-bar gadgets, VSTS plug-ins and a whole bunch of other stuff!!

After my blog post about the back of the ***-packet. He was kind (daft??) enough to send me the complete list of words that are automatically censored by the Community Server software that runs our blog site.

So here they are! Publish and be dammed!

***, ***, ***, *** , ***, *** , ***, *** , ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , *** , *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , *** , ***, ***   , *** , *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , *** , *** , *** , *** , ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , ***, *** , ***, ***, *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, *** , ***, ***, *** , ***  , ***, ***, *** , *** , ***, *** , *** , ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***, ***.

SO - what do you think? Are they all that bad??

Oh - I see what I've done there... never mind!

Anyway - you'll have to believe me that it's a collection of the words you'd expect. Also a lot that I have NO idea what they mean, and a whole bunch of extremely derogative homophobic and racist terms. However, apparently I can't have a blog about any form of homosexuality, as even the word for a female homosexual is banned.

Oh, and a really good one... in the UK, French Connection UK branded themselves rather cheekily as *** - that's F.C.U.K. - however that particular term is also banned. So no French Connection blogs on our site then! :)

Obviously we need this stuff, as it prevents malicious anonymous comments offending the world before they can be taken down. It's just interesting to see how the Community Server open source community developed this list that's all... and how it needs to be adapted to suit a particular cultural usage... or does it? Should we be politically and culturally sensitive to every culture everywhere? Is that our responsibility seeing as we have a global platform with universal reach? That's an open question...

 

My good pal Steve Clayton posted tonight about my session at MIX and referenced an audience member, who was indeed from Otto, the company who own the Oli brand. Yes, he said that the LookBook functionality we invented and then built for them has double the conversion rate from a standard non-LookBook user on the website.

And I agree with Steve's hastily put together napkin mathematics, that anything that shows product in deep, deep detail, and allows people to share it, play with it and generally do what they want to do with it, will increase conversion.

If Amazon can claim that adding their basic form of recommendations will increase sales using their ecommerce platform by 20%, then I'm all in favour of napkin (***-packet) maths that say that Deep Zoom could do the same!

Deep Zoom (the artist formerly known as Seadragon) is indeed a more capable beast than any of the current ecommerce image management applications out there.... I think it's only a matter of time (or contract periods) until we put one in for one of our ecommerce customers.

 

A few of you have been asking when we're going to organise the inaugural Silverlight User Group we said we would organise in the UK.

Conchango has been working with Silverlight 2.0 since its release into the early adopter programme a few months ago, and have been gagged ever since (in a good way!), until finally it was released in public at MIX08 last week.

So - now it's out there and we're not in danger of breaching our NDA, we've decided to sort out a date - and at the moment, we've got good space in the week of the 31st March to 4th April - so thought we'd throw it out to you to see what you prefer!

Venue would be our offices at 36 Southwark Bridge Road, SE1 9EU.

Email me, Rich Griffin or Michelle Flynn with preferred dates. We're thinking early evening. We'll provide the beer and pizza!

Steve Clayton sent this around a little earlier in his 'Friday Thing' - always a joy!

If you haven't seen this viral video and TV advert put out by Transport for London, then click through now and do the test.

Steve guaranteed that you would;

A) Laugh a lot

B) Send it to your friends

I agree.. so do the test now!

It's all about whether or not you can keep up mentally with the action on screen - it takes a lot of attention. So if you haven't seen it - do that now - do NOT read on until you've done the test.

No - don't read on yet - unless you've really, really, really done the test. Seriously, there's a spoiler coming - so don't read on! Click on the link above now, then come back after you've done the test.

 

when you've done it... scroll down....

 

Are you sure you've done the test?

 

a little bit more

and more

The test is still available if you haven't done it yet?

no you're not off the last bit yet... come on, you can do it

 

Ok, we're there I think!

 

It is good isn’t it?

About a third of people see the interruption the first time out, so it's not a guaranteed wow factor, but most people simply don't notice what should be obvious and is in plain sight.

I was a bit peeved actually, because for ages I’ve had it on my list to recreate what is quite a famous cognitive experiment with our own Conchango basketball team in order to use it at conferences and the like, as its impact is incredibly surprising and quite delightful.

It's an experiment known colloquially as ‘gorillas in our midst’ - you'll see why from some of the original experiments I've listed below. Some of the first experiments in this go back 30 years.

The phenomenon is called ‘inattentional blindness’ and is the reason why people don’t see things like instructional copy on kiosks or websites! (they’re too busy trying to use the thing!)

Your brain is so busy trying to keep up with the action, and keeping track of the task in hand - i.e. counting passes, that it simply fails to register what should be a very significant event going on right in front of your eyes - in the original, a man in a gorilla suit walking right through the middle.

It's in part a protection mechanism that allows you to really concentrate. Your brain shutting out extraneous information in order to reserve its processing power for the task in hand. Fighter pilots experience a form of this when they go into extreme action - and are trained to do so - in order that they have enough brain processing power to operate at such high speed and with continued high reaction times.

In a simpler form, it's what means you miss what seem to be very obvious things on kiosks or webpages. If the eye is drawn to a particular area where you think something might be that you're looking for, you will completely blank out what is otherwise incredibly obvious. We did an airport check in kiosk application where we put instructional copy in 54 pt black text on a white background right at the top of the screen. Many people didn't even know it was there despite the fact that it occupied about a third of the screen.

Here’s the stuff on it..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness

And here's where I first took the inspiration to re-create it. I wanted to use my boss in a pink ballet tu-tu (it wouldn't be the first time he's dressed like that - seriously!)

http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html (scroll all the way down to the bottom!)

And: Gorrillas in our midst - the best one I think...

Enjoy!

 Update: The storm over this ad isn't done yet - but this blog post gives an update - albeit one that seems a little biased towards someone inside the advertising industry!