Noise Between Stations

Month: November 2008

  • Nokia Offers New Email Accounts Via the Mobile Phone

    Niti has an intriguing post including this quote describing service for the Nokia 1202:

    the new devices will allow users to set up an e-mail account on Nokia’s Ovi Web portal without ever going near a PC. That’s an important distinction for the millions of mobile-phone users who live in regions without reliable electricity, much less computers and Internet connections. “It gives those millions of users their first identity on the Internet,” says Alex Lambeek, Nokia vice-president in charge of handsets aimed at low-income users.

    A brilliant move, IMHO, and makes me wonder about which other bits of the PC-oriented Internet could be mobilized.

    But Niti goes on to explore how an email address changes our identity or online presence differently.

  • Designing Better Proposal Price Tags

    Not long I was talking to a project manager who was writing her first request for proposal, explaining the common wisdom on budget disclosure: “You’ll want to give them a ballpark idea of what your budget is without telling them your actual budget; agencies will sometimes configure the work to take all the money on the table.”

    But as I, with fresh eyes, watch her go through the proposal process, I do wonder if simply telling the agencies the budget wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Floating this idea on Twitter sparked these replies, mostly from peeps on the agency side:

    “I always make them tell me the budget. If they can’t then I don’t send a proposal. That’s my tough love policy. Very few balk. I [tell them] we could propose $1M site, but its best that I know what the constraints are. 99% find it helpful.”

    “It would certainly decrease wasted effort.”

    “Absolutely! It would eliminate spinning our wheels too. Why waste the time proposing something they can’t afford?”

    “I’ve worked at agencies where we lost jobs because we proposed too large a project. This could have solved it.”

    “Agree…”

    Money is a great constraint for spurring creativity. And if the same budget were disclosed to all agencies, the client can still compare the relative value of each proposal. The only drawback I can think of is if the budget is far out of alignment with the work requested, and if this is the case the client should be working with an expert outside resource to craft the RFP anyway.

    (I’ll add this is specific to RFP situations. I still agree with the usual consultative selling advice to not talk about price until the very end of the sales process.)

  • Designing Lower Legal Fees

    So we all know that at the heart of creativity lie constraints. And one constraint I love is money.

    I thought of this today as I read about a friend’s company who spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on legal fees just for their domain name. Maybe that was money well spent, but from personal experience I know legal fees are one of those line items that is almost always expensive, difficult to predict, and difficult to control once set in motion. For a start-up, this problem can be turned around into a creativity driver to say, “Here’s how much similar companies say they wished they had spent on legal fees. We’re going to stick to that. Let’s figure out how.”

    Note that this is different than merely setting a limit on how much to spend. A simple cap could still allow for business-as-usual behavior that doesn’t generate any new solutions: “we did what we usually do until we ran out of money.”

    A real design approach would involve experimentation.

    With prototypes for solving legal problems.

    Working with lawyers.

    Measuring the costs of iteration and the opportunity costs.

    I haven’t heard about anyone doing this yet; it’s one of those ripe areas for true business design innovation.

  • Social Media as a Product Testing Audience (e.g. for Motrin)

    To catch you up, Motrin posted the below ad and people, particularly baby-carrying mothers, were so offended that the makers of Motrin pulled the ad.

    Many of the offended people (“Motrin Moms” there were dubbed) were on Twitter, as well as blogs and YouTube. As a result, marketers are starting to get scared of social media, just as social media is taking off as a legitimate communications approach.

    But another way of looking at it is, better the Motrin ad underwent a social media firestorm than a mass media firestorm. (more…)

  • Interview With Me Discussing Tangible Futures

    Stuart Candy, researcher at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies and research fellow of The Long Now Foundation, asked me a few questions about tangible futures and published the interview on his blog. While I’m more focused on near-term concept design these days, it was helpful for me to reflect on why and how I was originally drawn to the practice…

    …So we started to consider this problem through the lens of our design experience, asking, “How can we help managers experience futures and strategy so that it can more substantially be understood, shared, and acted on?” The working definition became: Tangible Futures are the output of applying design-fueled disciplines like visualization, drama, and film to represent futures and strategies.

  • Finally, The Iraq War Ends

    Iraq War Ends

    …not really, unfortunately. But that was the headline on a “special edition” of the “New York Times” today. The credibility was in question from the start, as the paper was handed out free at the subway which is never the case with the Times. The production is quite accurate, but a quick glance at the date reveals July 4, 2009.

    I love it as a clear example of a tangible future. But the editorial is so far to the left that we’re not really fooled. Only those that already hold these positions will think, “Yes! This is what we could create by July of next year!” So essentially, it’s propaganda. Personally I would have liked to see an editorial stance much closer to reality but with enough difference to be inspirational. (Just for the record, I’m fairly progressive socially, and excited about the results of the elections.)

    Of course, we’re talking about the future, so I could be completely wrong about what happens.