Social Hardware

Phones that show your friends where you are, books that automatically highlight passages marked by friends, shoes that post your running speed to your facebook page, that’s social hardware, it’s the future, get used to it.

Social Hardware has spawned a whole new challenge to manufacturing.  Once upon a time you could come up with a good watch design and you’d be done with it.  Not true anymore.  All the new design houses now have full fledged software teams that do nothing but try to figure out exactly how that new piece of hardware will fit in to your social world – it will make or break the design.

The push comes from humans fundamental desire to connect.  What started as a rather simple Darwinian need to find suitable mating partners, has expanded into a near full time rather frantic endeavor.   Nearly half of the U.S. population is now on Facebook, a lesser percentage tweets.  We blog, and tweet, and post, and willingly share nearly everything with strangers – from our daily purchases (blippy) to the baby’s latest in utero kick on twitter.

 

Kickbee watching baby's every kick

 

For a long time getting connected was just about talking face to face.  Then came the pen,  books,  the telephone, and the web.  Hardware was the last hold out.  This desire is rather frantic, and lots of bright people write about it – but at its heart it’s all about this need to be ‘seen’ – most shrinks would say it’s all about sex and death, but that’s a little hard to translate into design principles.

Consumer electronic hardware startups have had a hard enough time as it was, in the pre social hardware era.  And recently with the global economic meltdown and the resurgence of caution and greed, most venture firms are concentrating even more on trying to find the next ‘overnight’ social software company.   This, despite evidence that investing in hardware actually makes more money, at less risk than software.  But, no one ever said logic had anything to do with it.

So now you’ve got hardware entrepreneurs facing a rather daunting task – how to come up with a new device, AND how to show it’s going to connect with facebook.  Now this isn’t all bad, mind you – connecting to facebook can get you a huge, free, marketing kick, but it doesn’t always fit with the invention, nor is it actually appropriate.

What makes it both exciting and challenging is that we’re at the very beginning of the era, which can make for some rather startling successes, from rather unknown companies, using the equivalent of open source marketing and manufacturing.  Just check out social funding platforms – such as Kickstarter if you want to see some great examples.

Next year – social biomedical devices – embedded, cloud based, heart pace makers that keep learning and modifying their electrical signals from the crowd.

 

 

 

 

The Ecology of Success

Sorry, but success is never overnight, despite what the press wants you to believe.

 

 

Overnight success

 

 

It’s in the category of American myths that the media just loves.

College student starts company on Monday.  By Friday is purchased

by Google for 14 billion dollars.

I suppose we like these stories because we all want to think it could happen to us – screw all the hard work, all the years it might take, maybe your wi-fi connected, hands free teflon potato peeler WILL make a fortune, if you could only get that one mention in TechCrunch….

The truth is that overnight success take years.  Twitter is a great example.  In a recent interview on NPR, founder Biz Stone talked about twitter’s success and what it took to get there.  First, he had been working on social media start-ups for years – most recently on the failed podcasting site called Odeo.  He had worked at Google, and he met two other founders that were in a similar place as he was and both were looking for something new, something in their lines of work.

But that’s just a start.  Five years ago when twitter was founded, text messaging was growing quickly.  The growth had started in Europe and was just coming to the States.  So the timing was perfect.

So, take five years of working on other projects in the same space, add – founders, throw in good timing, a bit of luck and the passion to stick with it through the nay saying (he had plenty) and you’ll come up with an over-night success.

This leads to the ‘ecology of success’.

1.  You need a good idea.

While it’s true that ideas are a dime a dozen, good ideas are not.  Good ideas imply that you know what you’re talking about, that you know the market, that you have spent time – could be years, thinking about the fundamental gut validation for the idea.

2.  You have to have a good team

This is harder than it sounds.  Good, here means others that share your passion – are willing to give up whatever they are doing for this idea, simply because they get it.

3.  You have to have good timing

Your idea for a 140 character message program may be good, and you may have a good team, but try to launch it in 2000 and you’d have failed.

4.  You have to have a way of spreading the word.

Over used saying about the best songs go unheard if no one can hear them is true.  If you don’t have a way of getting your idea out there, you’re lost, good idea or not.

So, what it comes down to is that you have all the pieces, and they all have to work well together.  This might sound over simplified, but if you realize that it’s said in the ecological sense you realize why it takes years to get things right.  Just like successful animal species that have taken years to adapt to their environments – over night business successes have taken years to adapt and take advantage of their niches.

Why buildings don’t fall down…(usually)

I just read a good post by IDO’s CEO Tim Brown (here) called Checks and Balances – his question was why don’t buildings (and other physical stuff) fail as often as non physical things like financial schemes – read that as credit default swaps.

He makes good points, but one which I think he might have underplayed is the quick feedback time for physical goods, especially buildings.  Being a past architect we were always taught about how the Babylonian’s  felt about their architects – if the building fell down and anyone was hurt then the Architect suffered the same fate – an idea which tends to make you think really, really hard about your designs.  It also tended to get rid of bad Architects.

It was actually a bit more direct – it the building fell and killed the son of the owner, then the builder’s son was put to death, if it fell and killed a slave then you had to buy another slave, if it ruined the owner’s goods, you had to replace them.

I think this established a sort of cautious history for building design.  It may have stifled innovation a bit, but it tended to give long lasting buildings.

And, I think in a slightly less gruesome way it’s true of ‘stuff’.   If I buy the latest Star Wars motion activated TV remote control, and I can’t get to work, I usually swear, and then complain to everyone who will listen.  And these days, what with the web and all, this information goes spinning around the ‘internets’ ,as my son would say, very quickly – and the result can be rather harsh for manufacturers.  I don’t believe designers are put to death (the designer of the CD cellophane wrap comes close to deserving it), but his future does become more uncertain.

So, next time you buy something that simply doesn’t work as it’s intended, I suggest you include in your email rant, a mention of the architects of old, couldn’t hurt.

Looking Away

Talking with a friend can be very taxing on your brain.  Turns out that face to face conversations are one of the most brain intensive things that we can do – literally sucking up about all the bandwidth the brain can manage.  This, all thanks to Darwin.

Your survival as a prehistoric African hunter depended on fast and accurate communications.  As a breathless companion runs into the camp, wildly gesturing off into the distance, you really need to be clear on whether he’s talking about a mammoth on the rampage or just the location of a good patch of berries.  To do this we developed an expressive face with 98 muscles and a very complicated vocalization mechanism.  Using both of these at the same time we can pass a fair amount of information back and forth very quickly.

The downside to this is that the brain actually has to work very hard to interpret what’s going on.  It’s processing the other person’s facial expressions, as well as all the subtle inferences of our voice.

All of this effects behavior.  Have you ever found yourself looking away when someone asked you a difficult question?  Turns out this is a built-in trick the brain uses – it needs all the processing power it can get so it shuts down the heavy processing task of looking at the other person’s face, by making you turn your head away.  Clever huh?

There have been a lot of studies on children – asking them all sorts of questions and watching what they do – same result.  Easy question?  Keep looking at the questioner.  Difficult question? Look away.

The fact that the brain has limited processing power doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has had the pleasure of following a car in which the driver is busy chatting on their cellphone.  You’ve just got to hope that the person on the other end doesn’t ask them a difficult question.

Where did Buck Rogers go wrong?

1964 AT&T Picturphone

Video phones have been around since Buck Roger days and they remain about as good now as they were then.

The problem isn’t entirely technology, the problem is in the design.  Well, technology does play a hand in it, but it’s more about knowing how people really connect and building something to get out of the way.

There’s lots of info, and common sense, about how we keep connected with one another – next time you’re sitting chatting with a friend, try closing your eyes and carrying on the conversation – a whole lot of information will get lost.  In fact, those in white lab coats, will tell you that nearly 80% of the information passed back an forth during a face to face conversation is visual.  And this is important stuff – ‘eyes as a window to the soul’ sort of thing isn’t that far off.  And that’s not all.

What’s the difference between being in the same room with someone and carrying on a casual conversation, and calling that same person on the telephone?  The answer is that not only have you lost 80% of the information, you’ve lost all of the casual moments.   The visual stuff, like smiles and frowns and grimaces, are important, but it’s the stuff that’s said casually, things that you don’t bother saying on hurried telephone calls that makes the difference.  This little stuff is important – it’s in fact, what builds relationships, and in the end, what gives us each a sense of security about ourselves, and each other.

Try this sometime.  Set up a ‘virtual’ window between  your house and a relatives.  A relative that has an 8 year-old kid that you know is perfect.  Get them to set up Skype on a computer and put it on a kitchen counter, or play table.  Then you set up your end.  Make both full screen and start them up.  Last thing you ask your sister to do is tell their kids that you’re in the window and they can stop by and chat any old time.

What happens, outside of the frustrating technology, is something magic.  You’ll share all the same casual moments that you get, and take for granted, when you visit – silly knock knock jokes, faces made into the camera, looks at crayon drawings, and endless questions.  All the important stuff.

It’s realizing that this is the important stuff that will separate hardware companies from those that go on the Buck Roger’s route from those that actually make devices that enable conversations and get out of the way.