“Innovation” has been thrown around so often in technology circles that to some, it’s a four-letter word.
At one tech company, innovation can mean bringing a dazzling new product to store shelves. At another, it can translate to a tiny new button on a Web site. That’s why, executives say, the word itself has been overused and devalued.
Still, new cutting-edge products mean everything to a successful tech company.
Executives from eBay, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and others were here at SDForum’s first Corporate Innovation and Research Fair on Friday to talk about their techniques for staying creative. Each company has its own style, with some strategies that overlap. But they all acknowledged it’s not easy to innovate, especially considering that large corporate cultures can be a curse to fresh ideas.
Max Mancini, eBay’s senior director of Platform and Disruptive Innovation, went so far as to say that Silicon Valley venture capitalists wouldn’t make so much money on start-up investments if tech companies were better at developing new products.
“Venture capital firms thrive on inefficiencies in large organizations,” said Mancini, who spoke at the gathering held at the Computer History Museum.
His counterpart at HP added to the idea by saying that demands from Wall Street and senior management can stifle innovation. “If you’re a larger company, there’s high probability you have creative people (in your organization). But creative people get impatient,” said Rich Friedrich, director of HP’s Enterprise Systems and Software Lab.
That means that these companies either must invest billions in research and development units, or bake in policies to ensure that people dream up new products. Google, of course, asks engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on pet projects. Microsoft, in contrast, employs more than 800 researchers in labs around the world.
A bottom-up style
Roy Levin, Microsoft’s director of research in Silicon Valley, said that one reason the labs have proven helpful to Microsoft, including bringing products like Windows Media to consumers, is their bottom-up style. The labs’ researchers pick projects themselves and collaborate with each other. They’re also not beholden to profit-and-loss goals or managers, he said.
“Every time you introduce (managerial) hierarchy, you introduce barriers to collaboration; and collaboration is key,” Levin said.
But once a technology is ready, transferring it to a product group or bringing it to market can be highly difficult, he said. That’s why so-called technology transfers are “a contact sport,” he said. Researchers must travel a lot to get new ideas and prototypes in front of the right people, Levin said.
eBay’s Mancini said that the auction company does two big things to promote creativity. The first is operating a technology platform that mirrors the eBay framework so that its engineers can experiment with new tools. That way, developers can test products outside of the company’s rigid software development process, he said.
The other method is to invite third-party developers into the fold through application programming interfaces. He said that in the last year developers have created an estimated 12,000 applications for eBay, producing as many as 60 percent of the listings on the site. “That’s innovation we probably couldn’t afford,” he said.
“Innovation is about the ecosystem, either removing barriers internally or allowing third parties to help meet the needs of your customers in ways you can’t afford to do (or have the time to do),” Mancini said.
Similarly, HP’s Friedrich said that one of his company’s strategies is to partner with outsiders on projects. “All of the innovative people don’t work for your company,” he said.
HP, for example, teamed up with DreamWorks years ago to work on technology for life-like animation and “cloud” services that were used to produce the movie Shrek. Last week, HP also teamed up with Intel and Yahoo to create six large-scale computing centers that would allow outsiders to test technology.
Cloud services are one of several areas of research for HP, which invests about $3.6 billion annually in R&D, Friedrich said. It’s also looking at projects in sustainability and managing data. On a broader level, HP is trying to shift the company from a hardware maker to a software company; and it’s doing that largely through acquisitions.
Oracle’s Marie-Anne Neimat, vice president of development for embedded databases, also pointed to acquisitions as a way to evolve, beyond Oracle’s multibillion dollar annual investment in R&D.
“It’s new blood,” she said.
Finally, some technology companies have turned into venture capitalists, too.
Ike Nassi, SAP’s executive vice president of research for the Americas and China, said it recently started a venture capital incubator. It solicits ideas from internal employees and external start-ups; and if it’s a good idea, SAP will help form a new business unit, fold the start-up into an existing product line, or spin it out as a new company, he said.
“If you have an interesting idea and don’t want to go the VC route, we provide seed funding,” Nassi said.
That’s similar to other technology companies. Intel, Google, Motorola, Amazon, and Comcast run venture capital units either formally or informally.
What about the word innovation?
“It’s completely devalued,” Nassi said. “The thing we need to look at is managing risk–whether placing an investment on this versus that, and what’s the payoff of that investment.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General, Ideas, Internet | No Comments »
Steve Jobs’ new iPhone, expected to be unveiled Monday, is headed to Japan by the end of the year. But the device’s famed ease of use may actually be a put off in Japan, where consumers want features, not simplicity.?? Indeed, Japanese handsets have become prime examples of feature creep gone mad. In many cases, phones in Japan are far too complex for users to master.
“There are tons of buttons, and different combinations or lengths of time yield different results,’” says Koh Aoki, an engineer who lives in Tokyo.
Experimenting with different key combinations in search of new features is “good for killing time during a long commute,” Aoki says, “but it’s definitely not elegant.”
Japan has long been famous for its advanced cellphones with sci-fi features like location tracking, mobile credit card payment and live TV. These handsets have been the envy of consumers in the United States, where cell technology has trailed an estimated five years or more. But while many phones would do Captain Kirk proud, most of the features are hard to use or not used at all.
“Some people care about quality, but first and foremost it’s about the features,” says Nobi Hayashi, a journalist and author of Steve Jobs: The Greatest Creative Director. He estimates that the average person only uses 5 to 10 percent of the functions available on their handsets.
Japan is a culture of spec sheets. When consumers go to electronics stores to buy a cellphone, they frequently line up the specifications side by side to compare them before deciding which one to buy.
Hayashi owns a Panasonic P905i, a fancy cellphone that doubles as a miniature but crisp 3-inch TV. In addition to 3G and GPS, the device has a 5.1-megapixel camera and motion sensors that enable Wii-style games to be played sitting on the train.
“When I show this to visitors from the U.S, they’re amazed,” Hayashi says. “They think there’s no way anybody would want an iPhone in Japan. But that’s only because I’m setting it up for them so that they can see the cool features.”
In actuality, Hayashi says, the P905i is fatally flawed. The motion sensors are painfully slow, and the novelty of using them is quickly replaced with frustration. And while being able to watch TV anywhere is a spectacular idea, there’s no signal in the subways, and even above ground, the sound cuts out every few seconds.
“There’s nothing more annoying than choppy TV noises,” Hayashi says.
Aoki, who carries two phones, a Sony W44S and an iPhone for accessing the web, has only a vague idea of all the things the Sony cellphone is capable of doing. “Every once in a while, you find an incredible function via the complicated menu,” he says.
The manufacturers, who realize the absurdity of piling on features that don’t work well, are caught in a vicious cycle of materialistic consumers who always want the newest high-tech handsets, and carriers that have complete control over what products and services are provided to their customers.
“The most important thing for us is to provide our end users with a unique user experience through our products,” says Toshi Kawamura, a spokesman for Sony Ericsson Japan.
They’re also at the mercy of the all-powerful carriers, like NTT DoCoMo — the company that created the localized 3G network that makes Japanese handsets virtually obsolete in the rest of the world — who get to decide what applications and functions are compatible with their networks.
“The flashy little functions are cool, but they’re carrier-specific,” Hayashi says. “Once you take this out of Japan, it’s just a piece of metal.” Japanese companies only make 5 percent of global mobile phone sales, and all of those sales are domestic.
Neat-looking gadgets are also a core aspect of one’s identity. Daiji Hirata, chief financial officer of News2u Corporation and creator of Japan’s first wireless LAN, admits to changing handsets more often than is probably necessary.
“Cellphones are always part of any conversation,” he says. “People are always using them and holding them, even in the middle of a meal, so they might not think you’re hip if you’re carrying an old one.”
However, it’s unclear whether Japanese consumers will ditch their complicated cellphones for Apple’s easy-to-use iPhone, which will be sold in Japan by SoftBank by the end of the year.
A survey conducted by Japan Railways showed that just more than half of those polled were interested in buying the iPhone, but that less than one-fifth really knew what the iPhone was.
“It doesn’t have 3G, the camera is only 2 megapixels, and it lacks fun little features like mobile wallet functions and an LED flashlight,” Hayashi says. “It may sell modestly as a smart phone or as an upgraded iPod, but it’s not quite cutting it as a competitor in our mobile-based culture.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General, Hardware | No Comments »
The US space agency is exploring the possibility of developing a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game.
The virtual world would be aimed at students and would “simulate real Nasa engineering and science missions”.
The agency has published a “request for information” (RFI) from organisations interested in developing the platform.
Nasa believe the game would help find the next generation of scientists and engineers needed to fulfil its “vision for space exploration”.
“A high quality synthetic gaming environment is a vital element of Nasa’s educational cyberstructure,” the RFI reads.
“The MMO will foster career exploration opportunities in a much deeper way than reading alone would permit and at a fraction of the time and cost of an internship program.”
Space mission
Nasa already has a presence in the 3D virtual universe.
The agency owns an island in Second Life where individuals and groups with an interest in the space programme can meet, share ideas and conduct experiments.
CoLab, as it is called, is the brainchild of scientists at the Nasa Ames Research Center in San Francisco.
The agency hopes that the environment could one day be used to allow the public to take part in virtual missions.
“We at Nasa are working hard to create opportunities for what I might call participatory exploration,” the director of the project, Simon Worden, has said.
“We are looking at how this island can be a portal for all to fly along on space missions,” he told delegates at the National Space Society’s (NSS) conference last year.
“When the next people step onto the surface of the Moon in a little over a decade, your avatar could be with them,” he said.
The latest proposal was published by Nasa’s Learning Technologies Project Office which supports and develops education projects to promote science and technology.
Job seeker
The document says that games are becoming increasingly important in education and could be useful for teaching a range of skills.
“Virtual worlds with scientifically accurate simulations could permit learners to tinker with chemical reactions in living cells, practice operating and repairing expensive equipment, and experience microgravity,” it says.
The document calls for a game engine that includes “powerful physics capabilities” that can “support accurate in-game experimentation and research”.
“A Nasa-based MMO could provide opportunities for students to investigate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics career paths while participating in engaging game-play.”
Other organisations such as the US armed forces already use online gaming as a recruitment tool.
America’s Army for example introduces players to the “seven Army Core Values” and now claims to be one of “the most popular computer games in the world”.
Nasa has asked for interested organisations to respond to the request by the 15 February.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Gaming, General | No Comments »
