For Start-ups

Information from various sources regarding the start-up eco system

Apple 1st Innovates (iPhone 1 and iOS 1), Than The Perfection Begins (iOS 2 etc)

by Brad McCarty

There’s no doubt in my mind (and really shouldn’t be in anyone else’s either) that the iPhone was the single biggest innovation in mobile phones. It completely changed the way that the market was heading and there have been copycats ever since. But if you look beyond the device itself and the first OS version, the innovation stops and the perfecting begins.

This is Apple’s forte. The company typically re-asks old questions and comes up with better answers than we’ve seen in the past. It holds true for nearly everything that the company does…outAside of the iPhone. The iPhone was a complete re-thinking of how mobile devices should operate, rather than perfecting an existing recipe.

via The Next Web

How To Innovate In The Real World: 21 Principles From IDEO's Diego Rodriguez

Author: Diego Rodriguez

1. Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world.

It’s true! And sad how often we don’t open ourselves up to inspiration in our busy lives. You cannot create without inspiration. And you can’t get inspiration from sitting in your office cube all day long staring at a computer screen. Take your dog to the park. Meet for coffee instead of scheduling a phone call. Take your employees out for dinner. Design an iPhone app. Pitch your greatest idea to your 2-year-old. Read a book that has nothing to do with your line of work. Travel, and then use Loosecubes to book office space abroad.

 

2. See and hear with the mind of a child.

 Have humility. Have wonder. Be willing to play. He asked, “How can you use play to get to a productive end? How can you integrate play into your normal flow?” It’s these questions that great managers ask themselves. Read about why: The future of work is play.

 

3. Always ask: How do we want people to feel after they use it? 

“It’s the difference between thinking about beer and the experience of drinking beer,” says Rodriguez. Emphasizing the importance of the experience, he draws a corollary between Hamburger Helper and Dream Dinners, an organization that brings together working moms, providing them with a place to cook together and all the necessary ingredients. They leave with plenty of meals to freeze and thaw when the time calls. So while it’s essentially the same idea as Hamburger Helper (microwavable meals) Dream Dinners is selling a totally different experience.

“The very best stuff is designed around the experience,” he said. “Think of Disneyland, it’s highly successful because it’s a seamless experience.”

Read the rest of this post »

Need A Technical Co-founder? Look For A Design And Product Lead First

Author: Charlie O'Donnell

Every business person with a dollar and a dream these days thinks they’re a technical co-founder away from interweb stardom.  It’s great if you can find one—but even if you can, I’m not sure it’s always the best move.  That’s counter to what I used to think before, but I’ve done some more thinking about it.

The reality is, a lot of the stuff being built now isn’t rocket science.  If you read Marco from Instapaper, you see that what makes Instapaper great isn’t the technology and his ability to write code, but his thoughtfulness around design.  He has spent a lot of time thinking about what users really want to do to solve information overload problems.  He thinks about how he can offer solutions, not create more problems like RSS readers did.  Good design is winning all over the web--at sites like Mint, Twitter,and Quora.   User centric design is creating a real sustainable advantage in the same way technology used to.

On top of that, if you have an application whose initial build isn't that much of a technical challenge, you may find yourself unable to attract a top tier technical lead.  In my experience, top technical talents want to work on interesting technical challenges—and for a lot of apps, scaling and advanced functionality is interesting, but early, putting together simple prototypes may not be.

Read the rest of this post »

Tracking The Signal Of Emerging Technologies

Last week the words of science fiction writer William Gibson ran rampant over the Twitter back channel at the inaugural NASA IT Summit when a speaker quoted his observation that "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." That's a familiar idea to readers of the O'Reilly Radar, given its focus on picking up the weak signals that provide insight into what's coming next. So what does the future of technology hold for humanity and space flight? I've been reading the fiction of Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, David Brin, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling and many other great authors since I was a boy, and thinking and dreaming of what's to come. I'm not alone in that; Tim O'Reilly is also dreaming of augmented reality fiction these days.

Last week I interviewed NASA's CIO and CTO at the NASA IT Summit about some of that fiction made real. We discussed open source, cloud computing, virtualization, and Climate@Home, a distributed supercomputer for climate modeling. Those all represent substantive, current implementations of enterprise IT that enable the agency to support mission-critical systems. (If you haven't read about the state of space IT, it's worth circling back.)

Three speakers at the Summit offered perspectives on emerging technologies that were compelling enough to report on:

  • Former senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency Lewis Shepherd
  • Gartner VP David Cearley
  • Father of the Internet Vint Cerf
You can watch Cerf speak in the embedded video below. (As a bonus, Jack Blitch's presentation on Disney's "Imagineers" follows.) For more on the technologies they discuss, and Shepherd's insight into a "revolution in scientific computing," read on.

Read the rest of this post »

7 Tactics & Incentives For Open Innovation

Author: Roland Harwood

The last decade has seen the rise of collaboration as a by-word for innovation success. This is now often referred to as ‘open innovation’ which we define as sharing the risks and rewards of innovation with others. This may sound simple enough and yet in our experience many large organisations struggle with implementing it as open innovation is it can be highly counter-cultural and disruptive. In this short article we present seven tactics and incentives that can really help to spark open innovation success.

1. Share both Risks and Rewards

Most people feel pretty comfortable with the idea of spreading the risks of innovation with others, however more interesting and difficult is how we collectively share the rewards. It is essential to recognise that open innovation inevitably means sacrificing some short term benefits in return for valuable longer terms relationships. You can no longer run away from your reputation as you once could and so all organisations, both large and small, ought to strive to be the partner of choice in your field, through being open, honest and approachable. A company who understands this really well is Procter and Gamble who seek to be the first port of call for any innovator with a product or service that fits one of their brands. This market positioning has significant commercial benefit and their primary competitors lose out by often only ever seeing opportunities that P&G have rejected.

Read the rest of this post »

Why Net Neutrality Is Critical To Startups And Innovation

Author: Chris Cameron
"A regulated Internet is a comforting thought to the access providers and a frightening thought to entrepreneurs and the ecosystem around them."
- Fred Wilson
One thing to note about net neutrality is that it is not something that proponents are looking to change about the net. As it is now, the Internet is a level playing field, and service providers cannot discriminate between their customers. Net neutrality is instead something its supporters are looking to uphold - a fundamental cornerstone of the net whose loss would be detrimental to most.

The level playing field of the net today allows small companies to grow very quickly and to challenge larger players. With everyone operating on the same bandwidth (for example), a startup can theoretically compete with large established companies. Without net neutrality, the larger companies with bigger budgets could position themselves to wedge out any smaller competition, stifling innovation.

Read the rest of this post »

7 Hints For Selling Ideas

Author: Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Regardless of how good it is, no idea sells itself. Before getting commitment to proceed with an idea for a new product, process, venture, technology, service, policy, or organizational change, innovators must sell the idea to potential backers and supporters, and neutralize the critics. They must find resources, expertise, and support. They must convince colleagues to advance the idea in meetings they don't attend.

People whose ideas get traction — that manage get out of the starting gate — take advantage of this practical advice for selling ideas.

1. Seek many inputs. Listen actively to many points of view. Then incorporate aspects of each of them into the project plan, so that you can show people exactly where their perspectives or suggestions appear.

Read the rest of this post »

Is Groupon’s CityDeal Acquisition A Disaster For German Innovators?

Author: Mike Butcher

The Groupon acquisition of CityDeal is being hailed by many across Europe as a good exit for the German-based clone (yes, there is no point in saying it is anything else but a Groupon clone). But luckily there are more than just clones in Germany. The burgeoning cluster in Mitte, central Berlin, is producing startups such as Soundcloud, hiogi, Babbel, Twinity, SongBeat and aka-aki. Nokia bought Dopplr and with it set up an innovation lab amongst the beating heart of Berlin’s startups. Hamburg has spawned many others include Qype, Europe’s Yelp, and more recently the interesting Apprupt. VCs in Hamburg and Munich vie over raw engineering talent out of German universities, and our TechCrunch Europe Munich and Berlin events last year were buzzing. As US-born Germany-based VC Paul Josefak recently guest posted for us, he’s coming across “multiple companies who recently closed either initial or follow-on rounds.”

Read the rest of this post »