Honey – a friendly old game

We recently completed a rather exciting project with the UN trying to work out how they might bring ethically produced honey from Mongolia to eco-hungry consumers in the UK. Not our average job, so the team made the strategic decision to start by searching high and low for anyone who might have the slightest idea what we should do.

Having spent a month on the phone to the exceptionally good natured Great British honey folk I now know the difference between a Scottish heather and a Spanish lavender, what the European Third List of Countries is, what to do with Royal Jelly, and why you can charge a tenner for a jar of Manuka! More importantly the beekeepers of Mongolia now know what it will take to bring their products to western shelves and can make an informed decision as to what that will mean to their businesses – all because of the good will of the UK’s very sweet honey community. Many many thanks! Next week it’s onto ethical fitness so if anyone’s got any ideas…

James Baderman

When the host becomes the hosted

Me and some of my ?What If! colleagues have just had the pleasure of leading the Big Boost Summer Academy for the UK’s brightest and best young social entrepreneurs - a week in west Sussex taking them through our thoughts on innovation and leadership and equipping them to better go forth and change the world.

Keeping the ‘gush’ to a minimum – this was a bit of a life changer. The individuals were nothing short of exceptional: hungry, passionate, honest, giving… and together as an entity ten times all that. This came to life wonderfully when we toured London’s social entrepreneurship scene. Walking round Green-Work’s recycling warehouse they stopped en masse to applaud the machinists, in Accenture’s corporate boardroom they banged the tables to thank our speakers, at the Big Lottery Fund they performed a well-mannered but seriously potent ‘pincer’ on the guy who looks after £600m of funding, and in Whitehall(!) they whooped, cheered and generally ‘made some noise’ as Phil Hope, the Minister for the Third Sector, walked into the tradition stooped room – this is the man in government who effectively rules their world. All this commotion was not just them being ‘yoof’, they were operating as a highly effective, sophisticated, collective entity – like some kind of advanced insect colony in a Planet Earth special. They occupied the space where ever they found themselves, and whoever we put in front of them. For our hosts it was disarming, flattering and invigorating all at once, and for the group it was an intensely powerful tool which they wielded well.

They’ve now returned to their projects up and down the UK but I have no doubt they will remain that powerful entity and be flipping tables on anyone who is lucky enough to host them for many years to come. We miss them and their unique energy, but I hear they’re planning to set up youth commission on social enterprise so something tells me it’s not the end!

James Baderman

Buzzword du Jour: Haptic

Haptic, from the Greek αφή (Haphe), means pertaining to the sense of touch (or possibly from the Greek word haptesthai meaning “contact” or “touch”). Haptic controllers allow the user to feel weight, shape, texture, and other tactile qualities of objects in a digital image. It's what the iPhone's interface promises, the Nintendo Wii uses and what Samsung's only-available-in-China-so-far competitor to the iPhone is. It's the new way of interacting with tech and it's coming to a mobile near you soon: tech experts predict 40% of new mobiles will have touch (haptic) screens by 2012.

Time says of our newly tactile tech:

"It's the realization of the core metaphor of modern consumer computing, dating back to the Macintosh or arguably to the first computer mouse, introduced in 1968. The idea was that we would all pretend that abstract digital information is physically real, that we could see it and manipulate it according to physical laws. The iPhone takes the graphical-user interface--the GUI, in the parlance, pronounced "gooey"--a step further and makes it a tactile user interface. You're viewing a little world where data are objects, and instead of just pressing your nose up against the glass, you can reach in and pinch and touch those bits and bytes with your hands. The word is made flesh. Any realer and it would be Tron."

Pictured is MIT's I/O brush from giladlotan's Flickr stream. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color, texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, artists can draw with the special "ink" they just picked up from their immediate environment.

How Apple Innovates

The Economist has a great article about how Apple gets the jump on most of its rivals ... key bits:

"The first [lesson] is that innovation can come from without as well as within. Apple is widely assumed to be an innovator in the tradition of Thomas Edison or Bell Laboratories, locking its engineers away to cook up new ideas and basing products on their moments of inspiration. In fact, its real skill lies in stitching together its own ideas with technologies from outside and then wrapping the results in elegant software and stylish design. The idea for the iPod, for example, was originally dreamt up by a consultant whom Apple hired to run the project. It was assembled by combining off-the-shelf parts with in-house ingredients such as its distinctive, easily used system of controls. And it was designed to work closely with Apple's iTunes jukebox software, which was also bought in and then overhauled and improved. Apple is, in short, an orchestrator and integrator of technologies, unafraid to bring in ideas from outside but always adding its own twists.

This approach, known as 'network innovation', is not limited to electronics. It has also been embraced by companies such as Procter & Gamble, BT and several drugs giants, all of which have realised the power of admitting that not all good ideas start at home. Making network innovation work involves cultivating contacts with start-ups and academic researchers, constantly scouting for new ideas and ensuring that engineers do not fall prey to 'not invented here' syndrome, which always values in-house ideas over those from outside."

Second, Apple illustrates the importance of designing new products around the needs of the user, not the demands of the technology. Too many technology firms think that clever innards are enough to sell their products, resulting in gizmos designed by engineers for engineers. Apple has consistently combined clever technology with simplicity and ease of use. The iPod was not the first digital-music player, but it was the first to make transferring and organising music, and buying it online, easy enough for almost anyone to have a go. Similarly, the iPhone is not the first mobile phone to incorporate a music-player, web browser or e-mail software. But most existing “smartphones” require you to be pretty smart to use them.

Apple is not alone in its pursuit of simplicity. Philips, a Dutch electronics giant, is trying a similar approach. Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, perhaps the most Jobsian of Europe's geeks, took an existing but fiddly technology, internet telephony, to a mass audience by making it simple, with Skype; they hope to do the same for internet television. But too few technology firms see “ease of use” as an end in itself.

Stay hungry, stay foolish

Listening to customers is generally a good idea, but it is not the whole story. For all the talk of “user-centric innovation” and allowing feedback from customers to dictate new product designs, a third lesson from Apple is that smart companies should sometimes ignore what the market says it wants today. The iPod was ridiculed when it was launched in 2001, but Mr Jobs stuck by his instinct. Nintendo has done something similar with its popular motion-controlled video-game console, the Wii. Rather than designing a machine for existing gamers, it gambled that non-gamers represented an untapped market and devised a machine with far broader appeal.

The fourth lesson from Apple is to “fail wisely”. The Macintosh was born from the wreckage of the Lisa, an earlier product that flopped; the iPhone is a response to the failure of Apple's original music phone, produced in conjunction with Motorola. Both times, Apple learned from its mistakes and tried again. Its recent computers have been based on technology developed at NeXT, a company Mr Jobs set up in the 1980s that appeared to have failed and was then acquired by Apple. The wider lesson is not to stigmatise failure but to tolerate it and learn from it: Europe's inability to create a rival to Silicon Valley owes much to its tougher bankruptcy laws."

Curry wine

The Guardian reports - as we did a few months' back - on the emerging trend of wines specifically marketed to be drunk with the UK's favourite cuisine.

Resignation by Flickr

We've seen resignation via blog but now comes (apparently) the first major Flickr resignation. John Curley, deputy managing director of the San Francisco Chronicle had this to say accompanying his photo of him clearing his desk:

"what's up with me

Last Thursday was my last day at the San Francisco Chronicle. I had been there for 25 years, which seems absolutely impossible, but is nevertheless true.

My last position was deputy managing editor. Over the years I had been a copy editor, a news editor, the sports editor, an assistant managing editor, and then a deputy managing editor.

I leave with great sadness, but not a trace of bitterness. We all know what is happening to the newspaper industry, and it is not pretty.

Even though this is officially termed a "reduction in force," I am surprised and dismayed that the organization thinks it can have a future without me. To be honest, I thought I'd get the chance to help lead the paper where it needed to go to compete successfully in the digital age. But instead, off I go.

Thirteen other newsroom managers are leaving along with me, including my boss, the managing editor, Robert Rosenthal. Shortly, union job cuts will begin. It had previously been announced that 100 of the 381 editorial jobs at the Chronicle will be eliminated at this time.

It's a bad time for me, and a bad time for the paper, but most importantly, I think it's a bad time for the democracy."

But not -- it seems -- for the new democracy online ...

A need to know of now

UK thinktank Demos has just published a new report on collaborative culture, "Logging on: culture, participation and the web".

Here are some of the key points made:

• Digitisation has changed everything. It has created public expectations for on-demand, constantly available, individualised access to products. It has also challenged the assumptions of cultural sector professionals that their role is to oversee public access to culture in the sense that they act as gatekeepers to what is produced, what is shown and how it is interpreted. In the analogue world, the public was able to engage with culture on terms set by experts and professionals: content, pricing, format and timing were all decided by the producer. In a world of infinitely replicable and manipulable digital content, this no longer applies. The full implications of this for the cultural sector are not yet clear. Big business is worried and confused and is seeking to hang on to as many 'rights' as it can. Meanwhile private, public and third sector innovations from Amazon to the BBC to Wikipedia march inexorably on, and internet phenomena like Second Life and MySpace revolutionise the landscape in the space of months.
• No more than one in four UK households had internet access at the start of 2000. And, even if available, the web was accessed via painfully slow dial-up or ISDN connections and the nature and extent of online content was reflected in this. Websites were typically text-based, with little in the way of moving image or sound, and the early adopters of more complex web presences were penalised: people just could not access sites with flashy graphics. The internet was generally perceived as a passive resource for searching and retrieving information; few websites provided opportunities for interaction.
  
• Today, practically anyone in the UK who wishes to access the internet can do so [claims the report]. A crucial development has been the introduction and rapid widespread take-up of broadband, set off by BT's launch of its DSL (digital subscriber line) products in late 2000. The proportion of broadband subscribers then increased annually, and reached 72.6 percent by June 2006. Funded by the National Lottery via the People's Network programme, 80 percent of public libraries now have an broadband internet connection.
  
• Recent surveys have shown that people in the UK now spend more time on the web than watching TV. In particular new technologies, from SMS to gaming to web usage, have been rapidly adopted by young people. This move -- from watching TV, to gaming and the web -- is significant because it involves not just a change of media, but a shift from passivity to interactivity. Schoolchildren today are as attuned to IT as past generations were to blackboards, timetables and spelling tests. How, our children complete their education with skills and expectations based almost entirely on the digital age - a radical generational shift. By the age of 17, the average schoolchild in the UK will have spent more time in front of a screen that in school.
• There has also -- and perhaps most crucially -- been a distinct change in the past couple of of years towards more interactive and collaborative online content - often dubbed 'Web 2.0'. Since 2001, a mass of services facilitating user-generated content, information-sharing and social networking have been launched and have gained phenomenal popularity. For example, Wikipedia, a free content online encyclopaedia, was set up in January 2001 and currently has over five million entries in several languages. The peer-to-peer filesharing service Kazaa was set up in March 2001, the video sharing site YouTube in February 2005. Blogging has spread like wildfire -- in April 2007 Technorati was tracking over 75 million blogs. The social networking site MySpace, launched in July 2003, surpassed the milestone of 100 million accounts in August 2006.
  
• (Google) is often called ubiquitous, but there is more to it than reach. It is not so much that Google is everywhere we look ... it's more that it is the means by which we look, and that, so often when we do look, we look online. Google does something new. Just as it does with all that it covers, it opens the arts and culture to a whole new audience. As well as reaching new eyes, it also presents culture in a totally different and more participatory way. Through the self-ordering preferences of its users it manifests the power of public engagement and displays a barometer of public will. This is an important point. New web tools enable users collectively to express their preferences through their actions, without having to be asked.
  
• Social tagging ... allows the user to apply keywords to any item of online content. Then the content can be viewed from the perspective of the users, not just the creators of that content. The results can be syndicated as feeds or viewed for navigation purposes as 'tag clouds' where the most commonly used words appear larger than other words. These tag clouds are sometimes called 'folksonomies' (the opposite of rigid taxonomies) because they represent the diverse perspectives from which people view a piece of content.
• What we are seeing now are tools that build on and extend 'Web 2.0' trends:
• mashups: linking of feeds of feeds so that content continues to be combined and 'mashed up' in new ways
  
• small social networking sites: alongside or instead of large, global social networks, some may find it useful to keep social networks small. See Vox.
  
• linking the online and offline in new ways: linking physical products with online services is just one way that online and offline networks are joining up. It becomes possible to unleash the power of social networking among people who share a product or geographical location. An iPod is much more useful when coupled with the music searching and sharing activities of MySpace. An advocacy website like avaaz.org will send targeted messages to people based on their postcodes as well as their interests.

• New tools are emerging that encourage interactivity, connectedness and creativity. Rival conceptions of intellectual ownership are being used ad hoc by people to negotiate their own paths into the world of culture and creativity. Lawrence Lessig has recently described the battle between read-only and read-write on the web in his book, Free Culture. The first is where professionals and corporations own the copyright of culture and the public are allowed access to it at a price. Amazon and iTunes are examples of this way of working. Amazon will not list a publication unless it has a price tag; iTunes does not sell music, it rents it out in order to keep reaping continual rewards. Read-write is a freer and more open concept where people build their own culture. Examples here include MySpace, where people can post their own music files, and YouTube, which performs a similar role for the moving image. Both the commercial and open source models have been phenomenally successful and popular.

Another 'way in' to all this stuff is to watch this short film.