Tag Archive for 'Innovation'

The new way of Getting Things Done

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 20-August-2008
in Business Excellence and New
.

Gudjon Mar Gudjonsson, has written an interesting post on his blog about networked productivity.

There are many great resources out there on the holy grail of productivity and time management. One popular method is the Getting Things Done (GTD) method from David Allen.

GTD is a work-life management system and book by David Allen that attempts to free us from a vast workload and instead operate an integrated system of stress-free productivity.

I like GTD but it can be improved. In this post I talk about a new layer to the GTD framework that I believe adds the strength of network collaboration as well; a kind of socialising layer.

I will call this the Open layer thus the methodology is Getting Things Done Open (GTDO).

Here is the post:  The new way of Getting Things Done

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Gin, Television and Social Surplus

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 29-April-2008
in Innovation and Media
.

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has posted on what he calls the “social surplus” or the time we gain by participating in the culture versus just sitting back and watching it pass by pursuing activities like watching TV.

Clay specifically cites TV, and singles outs sitcoms, as a sort of glue holding society together as we transitioned from the Industrial Revolution to post WWII society with higher GDP per capita, better life expectancy and more free time. Now imagine if all that time spent watching TV could be put to use and benefit of society–the social surplus.

Shirkey’s back of the napkin stats are compelling

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.

That is huge. Think of it another way,

this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

Time to turn off the TV and start participating…

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Hello, gorgeous! Meet the laptop you’ll use in 2015

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 26-March-2008
in Apple, Computers, Innovation and Microsoft
.

I found a very interesting Computerworld article:

A lot has changed in the 20 years since the first laptop computers appeared, including gigahertz processors, color screens, optical drives and wireless data. However, one thing that has stubbornly stayed the same is the conventional clamshell format with its hinged display lid that opens to reveal a mechanical keyboard.

That’s about to change. The rules of notebook design and the components that go inside are being rewritten to make the road a better place to work and play.

The CPU’s front-side bus will likely disappear by 2015. The bus acts like a traffic cop, sending data to the different parts of the system at a slower speed than the computational core. In its place will be an integrated controller that makes this distribution of data much more efficient by operating faster.

Currently, adding 64GB of solid state capacity to a notebook’s hard drive runs an extra $1,000. By 2015, the typical mainstream notebook could be outfitted with a 2TB hard disk drive, which should be plenty of room for even the biggest data hog, the experts speculated. For smaller and lighter machines, look to having something like 250GB of flash memory at your disposal, but it will likely come at a small premium.

read more | digg story

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DRM, Digital Content, and the Consumer Experience: Lessons Learned From The Music Industry

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 26-March-2008
in Apple, Content, DRM and Innovation
.

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The trouble with Steve Jobs

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 5-March-2008
in Business Excellence and Innovation
.

A friend of mine pointed me to an interesting article about the personality traits/flaws of Steve Jobs and the impact, both real and imagined on the stockholders of Apple (for purposes of disclosure, I am a stockholder). The article is worth reading and raises several issues germane to the issue of disclosure to shareholders. The core issue is summarized in the prologue:

Jobs likes to make his own rules, whether the topic is computers, stock options, or even pancreatic cancer. The same traits that make him a great CEO drive him to put his company, and his investors, at risk.

My reaction is typical of these pieces. The author, Peter Elkind, is a typical investigative journalist who has never sat behind a desk as an executive of a publicly traded company and endured the kind scrutiny he forces on others. He of course, has the advantage of hindsight to assist him as he passes judgment on decisions made by executives with less than perfect information.

It will be interesting to see if Jobs in another case of a celebrity (in this case a celebrity executive) built up by the media only to be torn down. I guess this would be the second time for Jobs.

read more | digg story

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Don’t put a stake in the ground

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 22-February-2008
in Innovation
.

My friend Kelly Smith over at Curious Office has blogged about a Financial Times article about the need for flexibility in any endeavor, but certainly any Internet related business.  It really is a great article and the FT has some great content, so head on over (free subscription required).

From the FT article:

The quest to develop the internet’s next big thing can be full of unexpected twists and turns. PayPal, the online payments service, started as a way of transmitting payments securely between Palm Pilots. Its founders realised that there was an even bigger opportunity in online payments - and went on to sell the company to Ebay for $1.5bn (£767m).

Flickr, the photo website, grew out of a multiplayer online game being developed by its founders. Game Neverending never saw the light of day, but Flickr went on to be acquired by Yahoo, sparking a wave of interest in “Web 2.0″ sites.

“None of the big internet successes were like that,” he says. “If you want to build a great consumer internet company you have to be willing to try as much as you can, as fast as you can.”

We learned this at Myrio where our business plan changed several times during our early days.  The core idea was video delivery using IP and we knew we had to be disruptive.

We originally wanted to deliver video to enterprise customers, but that appeared to be a crowded market and getting more so each day.  Companies such as Cisco, RealNetworks, Microsoft, Apple and others were all vying to deliver CEO speeches and enterprise training videos over corporate networks.  Dead end for us.  So our model changed.

So we endeavored to stream real-time broadcast TV and VOD over IP (IPTV), and we made it work.  Much to the surprise of some very big companies (we even used their gear which they believed wouldn’t work).

Once we had it working, we knew we couldn’t waltz into a cable company and say, “Hey, we have a better way to do what you are already doing.”  A cable company wouldn’t simply switch to IPTV.   We needed to disrupt what cable companies were doing and we needed allies with networks and subscribers.  So we took our idea to PacBell.   Nada.  Sure they had networks and subscribers, but they lacked a key element.

So our business model changed again, and we found allies with subscribers, capital, and an entrepreneurial spirit in the independent telecommunications companies in rural America.

During all of this, our core remained, but our business plan was flexible and we hired excellent people (see earlier post: When Good Isn’t Good Enough) that could execute against a new idea.  We also utilized small teams of developers which allowed us to pivot quickly to meet the requirements of each market segment.  Again from the article:

[sic] Ooga Labs, a self-funded start-up whose 15 designers and engineers work in two-man teams to develop ideas in parallel. The goal is to churn out as many promising ideas in as short a time as possible.

[sic] “You can shrink the teams down to two people - a designer and an engineer. The smaller you go, the faster it goes.”

Please share your thoughts and ideas.

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The Most Anti-Tech Organizations in America

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 3-December-2007
in Communications, Content, DRM, Innovation and Media
.

Excellent article @ PCWorld written by Mark Sullivan on the 5 most anti-tech organizations in America. History is replete with examples of products, companies, and industries that fail to adapt and adopt to new technology. These 5 will be next.

From PCWorld by Mark Sullivan

Their names keep coming up over and over again in courtrooms and corridors of power across the country–those groups whose interests always seem to run counter to those of technology companies and consumers. They come in many forms: associations, think tanks, money-raising organizations, PACs, and even other tech-oriented industries like telecommunications.

The tech issues that they’re concerned with are what you might expect: digital rights management and fair use, patent law, broadband speed and reach, wireless spectrum and network neutrality. I talked to a good number of tech and media policy insiders in Washington, D.C.–mostly off the record–to find out who these groups are, how they operate, and who pays their bills. We’ll start with the biggest offenders first and work our way down.

1. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)

Issue: Copyright and Fair Use

The Internet economy should be a boon for digital media companies and for those of us that like to buy our music and video online. It’s also a very powerful way to connect with people of like mind with a view toward learning about new things to watch and listen to. Unfortunately, the content owners in the record and movie industries have mainly seen the Web as a platform for piracy, and have mainly failed to adapt their businesses to the realities of online, as one lonely industry executive recently admitted. Continue reading ‘The Most Anti-Tech Organizations in America’

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