3 Ways Apple Actually Innovates – OnlineMBA.com.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2013. | Permalink | One comment
Post tags: apple, innovation, market

Frugal Dad.

Source: http://frugaldad.com

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2012. | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: infographic, innovation, patents, software patents

This morning I played around with The Email Game, a web app that expands Google’s Gmail client with a couple of interesting features. I like the concept of ‘Boomerang‘ and the countdown for each email-related action. If you have a Gmail account I suggest you to give it a try. I won’t be using it (my gmail account is for spam only and a few mailing list) but I hope that some of these ideas end up in one of the email clients I use on my GNU/Linux desktop.

The Email Game – Conquer your Email from Baydin Inc. on Vimeo.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2011. | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: client, email, inbox, innovation, usability

James Bessen on the Great Stagnation | Bottom-up.

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Post tags: bessen, education, innovation, patents

With Google the case seems very different: advertisers are free to stop advertising on Google any time they want. Contrary to Microsoft, Google cannot leverage any network effect to keep Internet users (the ‘consumers’) to stop using Google for search. I can go and use Bing any time I want: Google search uses an open standard, it’s a freakin web site. The simplest thing Microsoft has to do in order to take 40% of Internet users’ search is to pay a sufficient amount of money to Mozilla, and voilà: all Firefox users will have Bing as default search engine.

Same thing with many other Googl services. If you don’t like Gmail anymore you can take all of its archive, contacts, and everything else and move it somewhere else: open standards (IMAP) at work again.

And, should Microsoft not want to pay Mozilla, Google’s search engine can start to suck  any time or more privacy issues may arise, and users will move to the next best one (didn’t we all move to Google from Altavista already?)

What am I failing to see in these new wave of antitrust complaints against Google?

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Post tags: antitrust, bing, business, competition, freedom, google, innovation, microsoft, open standard

Finally, commentators admit that Chinese patents will serve as land mines for foreign businesses. Doh! Great comment from @vwadhwa on TechCrunch:

This is a battle we can’t win. The Chinese economy will be littered with millions of stumbling blocks for foreign business. These companies will have to offer up their intellectual property in exchange for Chinese intellectual property—in the same way that IBM and Microsoft trade patents. Or they will have to pay license fees to enter the Chinese market. And China may challenge the U.S. globally with its new patents as it plans to do with 4G.

This was mainly the argument we used at FSFE to push the European Union to the reject the US-sponsored directive that would have legalized software patents in EU. European citizens won that battle and I’m so glad I had the possibility to help win it.  The suggestion from the author is:

It’s best to disarm before it is too late.That means reforming the patent system. We really don’t need software patents, and we really don’t need patents in other technologies that evolve rapidly.

Read the rest: Let’s Compete on Innovation Rather Than Patents.

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Post tags: china, innovation, patents, software patents

It’s good to notice the quantity of efforts from the free software community revolving around your social capital. After my disappointment with the pretty lame addressbook in Thunderbird 3, I was amazed to learn about MozillaLabs Contacts. It’s a Firefox extension that makes the browser aware of your online contacts and friend lists. Why should you care? Because your addressbook is yours and you shouldn’t be sharing it with everybody only to invite them to join yet-another-social-networking-site. As Michael Hanson puts it in his blog post

This information is also special, because it represents the boundary between “my data” and “your privacy”. When you disclose your friends’ email addresses on a website (maybe you want to invite them to a cool new site you just joined), you are trusting the website to keep that address private. [...] The disclosure of your friends’ contact information is an important step: we think you should be in control of it.

Contacts also uses the Portable Contacts definition internally. I aggregate and keep all my contacts in sync with Funambol, so I’m thinking that the best way for me to use Contacts would be if I could have it grab the addressbook from Funambol server. How hard would it be to add a Portable Contacts representation of the contacts stored in Funambol? If anybody is interested, I can sponsor the investigation of the issue and the development with Code Sniper grants.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments
Post tags: addressbook, funambol, innovation, mozilla, social network, sync

If you, like me, are fascinated by innovation and by the physicality of objects I suggest you to read Apple iPad’s Product Development Approach . It’s a brilliant lesson to learn for all companies out there building devices

Beyond the half-pound device’s elegant silhouette, interface, and operating system, the gadget is worth paying attention to for innovation lessons from Apple.

Many comments have given me the impression that the iPad is not clearly positioned. It’s clearly not a phone nor it’s a notebook/netbook. Strategically, the iPad opens a new market for Apple, one that may cannibalize its own products: if you already have an iMac/MacBook and an iPhone, would you buy also an iPad or sell the iPhone and get an iPod nano instead? As Scott Anthony says in Does the Apple iPad Make Strategic Sense?

The two things I admire most about the company are its ability to think holistically about business models (iPod + iTues, iPhone + the App store, iPad + iBookstore) and its willingness to keep innovating. Imagine how different it would have been if Apple stopped at the first generation iPod, or just rode the iPod for as long as it could. Its willingness to step out and enter into new categories is an important lesson for all companies.

The blurred positioning of iPad make it harder to identify a clear competitor. TechCrunch clearly identifies Kindle in Top 10 Reasons The Apple iPad Will Put Amazon’s Kindle Out of Business.

Apple has upped the game for Amazon. Jeff Bezos and his team better start a clean sheet of design if they want Kindle to catch up again and play as a leader with consumers.

For HBR the ultimate competitor is only maybe Kindle, but in The iPad Showdown: Apple Versus Comcast argues that Comcast may get some headache.

At twice the price, maybe the iPad is a Kindle Killer — maybe. But Kindle is a single-purpose device for reading, while iPad is a multi-purpose device for entertainment.[...]  The real face-off  [...] is Apple versus Comcast — the largest cable provider in the United States, serving 24 million homes [...] [T]he new device creates “anywhere, anytime” access to the broadband Web, including broadband video streams.

A colleague argued that tablet pc have existed for over 10 years, with many more features than the iPad. Looking at the facts, though, tablets never took off: too expensive and with poor user experience due to bad software and hardware. Another lesson about product development and radical innovation is in Apple’s Secret? It Tells Us What We Should Love:

This was validation of Apple’s peculiar innovation process: Insights do not move from users to Apple but the other way around. More than Apple listening to us, it’s us who listen to Apple. This contradicts the conventional management wisdom about innovation.

I learned about the iPad name from twitter while I was at the gym and I didn’t understand the jokes about the name until my american wife explained it to me. The comment The Day Apple Turned the Web into Junior High from HBR about naming is interesting.

Perhaps Apple underestimated the power of a viral joke, but it seems more likely that the company, thinking long-term, has so much well-founded faith in its products and its brand that it has no doubt the real iPad will eclipse the joke iPad in the minds of consumers as soon as it’s released.

I would add that the name has other meanings only for native English speakers, not for the rest of world.

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Post tags: apple, disruption, hbr, innovation, ipad, kindle

se ho ben capito le idee non sono brevettabili e quindi [...] chiunque può rivedere la mia idea e ricopiarla con un altro marchio?

Mi colpisce sempre come qualcuno possa pensare di basare il vantaggio competitivo di un’azienda solo su un brevetto. Evidentemente la propaganda pro-brevetti fa breccia nelle menti di alcuni e certamente il mito del povero inventore che di colpo diventa ricco senza faticare è dura a morire. La dura realtà è che un brevetto da solo quasi non basta nemmeno alle aziende farmaceutiche per ottenere un vantaggio competitivo sostenibile. La recente battaglia tra Nokia e Apple dimostra che i brevetti oggi non servono affatto a stimolare l’innovazione, ma piuttosto a limitarla. Nokia ha smesso di innovare, Apple la sta superando ma la prima si è lanciata alla rincorsa con gli uffici legali.

Le ho consigliato di leggere il post di Seth Godin su come proteggere le ideee (non si può) e il libro The art of the start di Guy Kawasaki. A tutti consiglio anche di firmare la petizione di FFII per sensibilizzare i politici europei sui danni che il brevetto comunitario può fare alle imprese nazionali.

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Post tags: brevetti, innovation, innovazione, patents, petition, software patents, swpat

If your non-profit isn’t acting with as much energy and guts as it takes to get funded in Silicon Valley or featured on Digg, then you’re failing in your duty to make change.

via Seth’s Blog: The problem with non.

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Post tags: innovation, marketing, non-profit