thinkfuture » ideas

Unprocessed Ideas Can Be Tastier

Chris Kalaboukis — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:00:39 +0000

Following up on my post yesterday on the processing of internal ideas, like organic food, which has has as little processing as possible, organic ideas, coming directly from the inventors, with as little added flavoring as possible, usually make the best ideas. Now it is possible that the initial idea was missing a business model or some other factor which you could conceivably add to make the idea more palatable to the organization, sometimes even unpalatable ideas need to be nurtured and launched out into the world, just to see if someone finds them tasty. Sometimes you never know if something is good until you try it. With some ideas, a good example is Twitter, there was no real thought to the business model, but one arose once it got into the marketplace and started to be used. The best ideas are like that, and I’d be willing to bet had the concept of Twitter arose within a corporate innovation program, it’s doubtful that it woudl have flown. What does this tell us? Maybe, sometimes, its good to just wing it, and let the market determine the business model

3D bio-printers to print skin and body parts

Chris Kalaboukis — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 06:12:47 +0000

This is cool. I wonder if it can be used not just for replacement parts but for extra parts? Imagine a fashion where people can grow additional skin and body parts in various forms as a fashion statement.

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Scientists are developing 3D “bioprinters” that will be able to print out skin, cartilage, bone, and other body parts.

Professor James Yoo, from the Institute of Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University is developing a system that will allow them to print skin directly onto burn wounds. The bioprinter has a built-in laser scanner that scans the wound and determines its depth and area. The scan is converted into three-dimensional digital images that enable the device to calculate how many layers of skin cells need to be printed on the wound to restore it to its original configuration.

via 3D bio-printers to print skin and body parts | KurzweilAI.

$1 Pre-Order: Poke the Box eBook: Seth Godin

Chris Kalaboukis — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 17:59:47 +0000

Big Seth Godin Fan here: and this is a deal that you can’t beat. $1 for a pre-order of Seth’s new book: Poke The Box. By the description, its been an idea thats been swimming in my head for a while lately: TOO OFTEN we wait for permission instead of just going for it, too often we site back and let others do the work, too often we don’t just take the rick and initiative and just jump. In my experience, if you just take the reins and DO IT, people afterwards will applaud you and say “Good job for taking that and running with it!” It’s more likely you will get cheers rather than jeers, so run with it!

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If you’re stuck at the starting line, you don’t need more time or permission. You don’t need to wait for a boss’s okay or to be told to push the button; you just need to poke.

Poke the Box is a manifesto by bestselling author Seth Godin that just might make you uncomfortable. It’s a call to action about the initiative you’re taking-– in your job or in your life. Godin knows that one of our scarcest resources is the spark of initiative in most organizations (and most careers)-– the person with the guts to say, “I want to start stuff.”

Poke the Box just may be the kick in the pants you need to shake up your life.

via Amazon.com: Poke the Box eBook: Seth Godin: Kindle Store.

Video Gamers Aren’t Lazy

Chris Kalaboukis — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 22:45:01 +0000

Completely agree with this article: in fact I’ve dedicated a chapter of my book to the topic “Video Games Teach Problem Solving Skills” – where else can we learn these skills, arguable the most important skills that you can have, in a fun, engaging way?

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Gamers aren’t lazy—they’re incredibly industrious and productive. They invest hundreds of hours in learning to play intricate, often extremely challenging games not because they’re apathetic and unmotivated, but because they want more engagement in their lives, more heroic purpose, more chances to collaborate with others in the pursuit of truly meaningful accomplishments. Compared to games, the real world comes up short. It lacks the clearly articulated goals that help motivate people. Its feedback systems aren’t as deftly calibrated to help us improve ourselves. And thus it doesn’t make us happy as readily as, say, the quest for armor with magic powers. “The truth is this,” McGonigal writes. “In today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy.”

via Reality Bites – Reason Magazine.

HOW TO: Develop Ideas That Will Disrupt Your Industry

Chris Kalaboukis — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:36:28 +0000

n 2003, Jonah Staw was having dinner with some friends in a trendy restaurant in San Francisco when the discussion turned to what he calls “disruptive business ideas.” Suggestions were flying left and right, and at one point, someone asked, “How crazy would it be if some company started selling socks that didn’t match?”

Everyone thought it was a terrible idea — not particularly practical, certainly not useful, and difficult to own — and they moved on. Everyone, that is, except Jonah, who couldn’t get the idea of mismatched socks out of his head. In his view, the sock category was lazy and boring; we’re still buying and wearing socks the same way we have for decades. And, how many times have you lost one sock and had to toss the matching one?

via HOW TO: Develop Ideas That Will Disrupt Your Industry.

Italian Scientists Demonstrate Cold Fusion?

Chris Kalaboukis — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 17:46:34 +0000

If this is true: its a very big deal. Maybe this is exactly what we finally need in order to truly kickstart the future: nearly limitless energy.

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“Italian scientists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna announced that they developed a cold fusion device capable of producing 12,400 W of heat power with an input of just 400 W….when the atomic nuclei of nickel and hydrogen are fused in their reactor, the reaction produces copper and a large amount of energy. The reactor uses less than 1 gram of hydrogen and starts with about 1,000 W of electricity, which is reduced to 400 W after a few minutes. Every minute, the reaction can convert 292 grams of 20C water into dry steam at about 101C. Since raising the temperature of water by 80C and converting it to steam requires about 12,400 W of power, the experiment provides a power gain of 12,400/400 = 31.”

via Italian Scientists Demonstrate Cold Fusion? – Slashdot.

Is The Crowd Always Right?

Chris Kalaboukis — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 06:18:20 +0000

So, I was at a meeting the other day where we were presenting various crowdsourced applications for getting product ideas from customers. We presented some companies and case studies where the companies leveraged the crowd, usually their customers, in order to come up with new product ideas. For example, Quirky lets you design a product, submit everything from the initial idea to packaging, the winning products get created, and then everyone shares in the proceeds.

Another example we presented was Mountain Dew, who, in a campaign called the Dew-mocracy, came up with 3 new flavors, and let the crowd decide which one of the flavors should be put into production. Interestingly the crowd at the presentation was not too keen about that. One person even heckled “Are they still selling it?”

I sensed the old attitude of “the customer is usually wrong” – while the customer is great, since he pays us, he/she doesn’t really know what they want, so we have to figure that out for them and give it to them. Well, that attitude may have been able to play in the past, but with the internet, and its ability to give EVERYONE a voice, that voice should be listened to.

Is the crowd always right? No, but the crowd represents what the majority of people want. For the first time in history, most people have a larger voice than ever. Think about it: in the old world, before Twitter or Facebook, could a regular person, not a celebrity, have 40,000 people who hang on their every word. And that doesn’t even count the viral nature of retweets or shares. No they couldn’t.

Your customer has a voice. It is now loud and strong. We HAVE to take heed – have to adjust ourselves. Think of it as free market research, and act accordingly.

CES 2011: Year Of The Tablet

Chris Kalaboukis — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 23:31:24 +0000

Seems like the big thing as CES was the tablet: tons of iPad clones being revealed. Some other gagdetmeisters talk about how maybe there were too many tablets. Can never have too many tablets if you ask me.

I’ve used an iPad and I find it sluggish, heavy, slow, and don’t like the box Steve forces me to play in. I don’t like authority figures telling me what I can and cannot do with my devices. Many do, or either just live with it in order to partake of the “specialness” which is Apple and Jobs. If you ask me, its simply current tech that’s wrapped in a pretty package. In fact it’s not even current tech. Apple assumes that you will love the design so much that you will not care that the device is technically deficient.

Despite that, it has done one good thing: iPad has spawned a ton of competitors and upped Google’s game to provide a true alternative. The Motorola Xoom, which was announced at CES, looks like it will match or best the iPad2. Android is taking off everywhere.

Apple steps up its game and Google does the same. In the end, the consumers win, we get choice, and better devices at better prices. Free market capitalism in action! Seems like I can’t even stop talking about politics here

Anyways: CES seemed cool: tons of tablets, a new version of Microsoft Surface, which in some magical way, is able to scan and record documents without cameras, lots of 3D TV and internet connected TVs.

Personally, I’m not sure if 3D TV will take off, at least not for a long time. Connected TV for sure, but 3D TV is a way off for one reason: content. Content is king, and if there is no 3D content, why buy a 3D TV? I lay my bets on a more immersive 2D experience coming before 3D. If there was some way to turn our walls, ceilings and floors into displays, now that would be cool. The closer we get to a holodeck, now we’re talking.

What Are You Waiting For?

Chris Kalaboukis — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:48:19 +0000

There are no more excuses, if you ask me.

I remember the days when it took literally a full time systems administrator, engineering personnel, and hundreds or thousands to millions of dollars in order to build and deploy a static web site, let alone the incredibly complex applications that we are seeing today. I personally remember the days of buying hardware, finding a place for the actual servers to sit, T1 lines, locked cages, hosting services, the differences between shared and dedicated hosting etc etc etc.

It took forever, a specialized set of skills, and a ton of money in order to setup and run an internet business.

Not any more.

Today, almost anyone with a basic set of skills can fire up an internet application in no time. Leveraging cloud services for the hosting, which provide you with a complete, scalable infrastructure (Heroku, Engine Yard), application frameworks which allow you to rapidly build applications (Ruby on Rails), cloud based services which support those applications (ZenDesk, Get Satisfaction), and APIs which allow you to build applications on top of applications which already provide a lot of the base functionality that any application requires (such as user logins via Twitter or Facebook), it takes very little effort to light up an idea.

All of the above services are free, or have free packages and trials that you can offer. And if you light up your app and there is traction, they can all scale up.

So what are you waiting for? Now is the time to take that idea and turn it into reality and see if it flies. It has never been easier to build and launch products as it is today.

Living example: we lit up http://tweeb.us in less than 6 weeks.

What ideas do you have in your head right now that you can spin up?

Applied vs Theoretical Innovation

Chris Kalaboukis — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 02:16:24 +0000

Recently, I got to thinking that there are really are two kinds of innovation, and these two types of innovation were very apparent in the kind of programs I would run for companies. Borrowing a term from physics, I like to call these two types of innovation “theoretical” and “applied” just like theoretical and applied physics.

Theoretical innovation is something you simply just cannot do today. There are factors which keep you from actually implementing the envisioned product or service right now. These can be something as simple as the right kind of technology, say size of storage space or wireless bandwidth or as complex as the right geo-political infrastructures. A good example of this is streaming HD virtual reality to wireless phones. Sure, it can be done: but the network is simply not up to the task of allowing it to happen.

Tech factors, strangely enough, are not usually the ones holding back the innovation: it’s more likely the human factor, factions within companies taking credit or laying blame, cultural and political reasons etc. However, the biggest indicator of something being “theoretical innovation” in my view is ability to monetize. If there is no way to make any money off it, even if all barriers were lowered, then it remains in that realm since most no one, save some independently wealthy, or governments, will step up to take it on. It’s this type of innovation which is ideally suited to go into a patent application process.

Applied Innovation, on the other hand, is leading edge work that not only pushes the envelope, it also has a clear path to monetization. If you ask me, this is pretty easy to come up with: is it a product or service that I would use and pay for? Applied innovation takes what is out there today, and rebuilds or mashes it up to create something new, useful and valuable. Applied innovation is the kind of thing that can be taken from idea to launch in days or weeks with a few guys in a garage. And its applied innovation which is probably what most people think about, at least in the business world, as innovation.

Thats not to say that theoretical innovation doesn’t have its place, and many ideas began in the theoretical innovation space, but as these ideas have much longer paths, or in some cases no path to monetization at all, now may not be the best time to pursue theoretical innovation. In boom times, with the wind at our backs, of course, but today, in this climate, a focus on applied innovation is essential.