The Million Dollar Idea Inside You

Interesting article over at Harvard Business Online about open source innovation.

While what BIG is doing may seem exciting at first, it's not until the comments that you see how they've gotten it wrong. To quote Phil Meyers' (from TunedIn Blog) comment:

Interesting stuff. I'll have to pick up Michael's book. Our research found that the best innovations didn't come from inventors looking for big ideas but practical folks looking to solve a problem that they found a bunch of people had.

That's what so many of these crowdsourcing/open innovation/open invention plays seem to be missing - Engaging the crowd is only innovation 1.5. Having the balls to let the crowd lead your innovation process is Innovation 2.0 (of course OneEyeDeer will be Innovation 3.0 ;)

Why do so many people find it so difficult to get over this company-centric view of the world?

Secrets of online advertising

Interesting Panel the other day at Microsoft Mix08.

Duncan Riley made has posted a video over at Techcrunch.

Featured in the panel and video is Frank Arrigo (Microsoft), Bryan Biniak (CEO Jacked), Tim Kendall (Facebook), Loic Le Meur (CEO Seesmic), Chris Saad (Particls).

Quote of the day? Must go to Tim Kendall of Facebook with :

“Facebook believes the best ads are the ones users don’t know are ads”

Hold on. If what he means by that is that traditional advertising is broken and that companies are going to have to find new ways to engage the people that choose to use their products and services, then that's what Umair over at Bubblegen has been saying for ages and is a great step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, what he probably meant is that the best ads are the ones that trick you into thinking they’re something else. Just another example of the the other thing Umair has been speaking about a lot lately - i.e. Facebook's impending demise because of the inherent evilness of their DNA

haha - nice job demonstrating why Facebook will eventually fall back to earth, Tim.

Other than that, props to Chris Saad. Definitely the most interesting guy on the panel.

We're back!

Time for us to start blogging again.

Same focus with a little more info on how we're progressing with our startup

It's good to be back.

Big Boys <3 The Wisdom of Crowds

Check out Yahoo and Google and how they're harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds

Yahoo has had their Buzz Game for a little while.

Now Google is starting to muck around with it as well

Should be good to see what comes out of their efforts

An Overview of the Attention Economy

Nice post over at Read/Write Web on the Attention Economy.

It's a good overview of the whole attention economy issue at the moment - something which is worth getting to know more about as it will be affecting us all more and more in the near future.

And, for those interested in the actual economics of the attention economy, don't miss Umair Haque's notes over at Bubblegeneration

Note as well that Umair wrote his article in late 2005. Just another example of why he is one of the few economic thinkers who gets what's going on.

More Data Visualisation - Part 3 - Stamen Design

Check out Stamen Design

Some of you might be familiar with their work at Digg Labs

Their data visualisation work is great.

The thing I love most about it is that it is both conceptual and practical

v nice.

3D mailbox - worst app ever or revolutionary?

Not sure if everyone caught the press around 3D Mailbox over the past week or so.

I guess the general sentiment can be summed up by the Tech Crunch Article - 3D Mailbox: Worst. App. Ever - lol,that's pretty harsh

Anyway, I think alot of people are missing the point on this one.

Sure the graphics kinda suck, the James Bond theming is a bit odd and it's debatable as to whether this app could scale to handle the thousands of emails that exist in many mailboxes - but that's not really what this is about.

In my opinion this could very well be a revolutionary first step in the way that we consume and organise information. I'm very serious about that. Chances are that 3D mailbox, in this form, will disappear and be replaced by either a more useful iteration or a better competitor, but that doesn't discount its value.

Let me explain a little more.


The Internet as we currently know it is a very artificial and rudimentary concept. It's essentially a set of 2D pages that are linked together. We don't go around in every day life relying on 2D sources to gather information, rather, everything in our real life is 3 dimensional. The fact that we are so adept at using email and other applications, as they have been developed, says a lot for our ability, as humans, to adapt as opposed to the appropriateness of the applications as a means to gather, assess and organise information.

Now enter 3D Mailbox. It presents information using the types of stereotypical visual cues that many of us can understand from our experiences in real life (whether you agree with them or not is another story). Because of that it allows the user to more rapidly and more efficiently deal with information, in this case types of emails, than traditional folders, tags, colours etc.

This type of stuff is gold and in my opinion will be the basis of the next generation of web based applications.

I'm looking forward to seeing what else comes out of this, especially considering the publicity the launch has received.

What do you think?