I was looking at blog publishing alternatives yesterday to see what new developments are available, and after a stop at Twitter that led me to Facebook, I had an epiphany. Facebook is going to rule the online world, and here is why:Before the invention of the automobile, towns were built around town squares or high streets. Town squares were gathering places, often populated by churches. Italy has the piazza, Germany the platz. Clusters of stores and restaurants often were nearby. In the UK, these clusters of retail businesses are called a high street, in the United States they became known as main street. In the United States, main street is dead or dying, replaced by shopping malls, strip malls, and big box stores. The negative consequence of this is the loss of community as these stores have larger catchment areas and lack that neighborhood feel, resulting in further isolation of … Continue reading →

Intel and AMD are making processors faster, ATI and nVidia continue to accelerate graphics and video, while faster memory and buses underpin both. Meanwhile, hard disks are spinning a bit faster, but getting bigger at the same time. Maybe I am wrong, but it seems like hard disk access speed continues to be the bottleneck. So can our laptops really get much faster?The answer is hopefully yes, and here is an idea that hopefully will make them faster and more reliable at the same time. Some of you may have heard of SSD (Solid State Disk), but probably only a handful of you have ever had your hands on a machine with one built-in. For those who don’t know what an SSD is, it is a small capacity “disk” made of flash memory chips that retain information without power. By small capacity I mean that most current implementations are 32gb … Continue reading →

I finally got my password to the beta program for hulu.com and I must say it is what I thought it would be, a site where you can watch advertising-supported Fox and NBC programming for free. This article is a followup on innovation article #75 of November 11, 2007. ABC.com has been doing this for some time, but this marks the first time that two competing networks have gotten together to share development costs on such a venture. The real question is not whether it will be successful or not, but how successful it might be.The site sounds a near-certain death knell on iTunes future capacity to offer television content profitably. ABC already has their content for free online, and now NBC and Fox do as well. While some people may want to be able to watch content without commercials, I surely doubt that the size of that market segment … Continue reading →

I wanted to followup on innovation article #23 of August 20, 2007 where I campaigned for double-decker buses in Seattle as a way to reduce traffic congestion and improve the speed and the trip of public transit riders.I was surprised to see a double-decker public bus cruising through downtown Seattle the other day. It was a route 417 on its way to Mukilteo and it effortlessly cruised through a yellow light to get the last spot in the bus zone (one a bendy bus wouldn’t have fit in).I don’t know if the regional transit bureau serving areas north of Seattle has more than one double-decker bus in their fleet or whether this is a test bus for a future purchase, but it sure looked better cruising through downtown Seattle than a bendy bus bouncing up and down. There is nothing quite like the view from the upper-deck of a double-decker … Continue reading →

I was hesitant this weekend when a man at Costco asked if he could scan my Costco card while I was standing in line, thinking that he was going to try and sell me on their executive card. I was pleasantly surprised when he then scanned my items with a portable scanner/computer and gave me a slip of paper to alert the cashier that he had done so.It is a pretty simple system:Scanner/Computer reads my Costco account number and creates a recordIt then associates the item numbers scanned with that record, and sets a flag in the system that this temporary record exists on my accountCashier enters my Costco account number and retrieves my accountThe flag in the system enables the cashier to transfer the scanned item numbers into a live orderThe cashier verifies the number of itemsThe cashier processes paymentThe system deletes the temporary recordI thought “wow!”, this is … Continue reading →

I’d like to start today with a quote from a NASA article in Fast Company – “But sometimes the better part of innovation, is not invention but effectiveness.”I’ve detailed my views before on how invention is not the same thing as innovation, but to build upon them and the quote above – sometimes progress or innovation is achieved by taking value out of a product or service. Southwest Airlines created innovation not by giving passengers more food, more legroom or more options, but fewer. Apple succeeded with the iPod, not by providing more capacity or more features, but by making the features they provided more beneficial than the competition.People ultimately do not care whether a product or service is better at the tasks it is asked to perform, but whether it more effectively meets their needs. These are not the same thing, and in fact make success far more difficult.A … Continue reading →