Looks great!
-Didn't immediately know that top left logo switched feeds until I clicked tour.
122 karma · joined September 27, 2011
-Didn't immediately know that top left logo switched feeds until I clicked tour.
(Disclaimer: Friend of one of the guy's behind this.)
i) Person who just wants to be a dick. ii) Person with personal vendetta against the project creator iii) Company looking to fend off competitors much the way of clicking lots of links to burn through a competitors ppc on adword.
“you’d have to be out of your mind to live in Palo Alto.”
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/david-karp-is-...
Taking inspiration from Urban Design where a path runs along the outside of a park expecting everyone to take the architected route. However people cut through the middle when they don't like the given route, following their desire path. Over time, the grass wastes away from the thousands of footsteps and bicycles that take their preferred route. The park owners have a choice to put up a sign saying "Do not walk on the grass" or altenatively pave the new path.
In business, when consumers take a new path, there is an option to pave their path as a new product line. Watch Tom's talk above to see how Facebook didn't pave their users desire path giving space for snapchat to grow. An example where a business put up the "do not walk on the grass" sign is Kickstarter who blogged, "Kickstarter is not a store," moving away from the desire path.
In this case, the CEO of T-mobile has helped a user cross the middle of the park, the question remains whether he should pave it.
Power of New Entrants: Xiaomi
Power of Substitutes: Google Glass
Power of Customers: demand for low cost iphone
Power of Suppliers: Moving back to US manufacturing?
Power of Competitors: All the big tech companies.
Also a fantastic article on Disruption from The Kernal. Key insight is that companies are very aware of disruption considering it irresponsible for any board of a large technology incumbent not to have read 'Innovator's Dilemna.'
THE STORY WE ALL KNOW "Kodak built film cameras, and made money on the film, the classic “Gillette” business model, and was so obsessed with this profit stream that it completely missed the tidal wave of digital photography and the internet"
INTERESTING ADDITION "The next step for digital photography wasn’t the internet. It was point-and-shoots. Canon and Fujitsu. Kodak was so focused on disrupting itself and not falling into the trap of the innovator’s dilemma that it lost a grip on its core business. It turned out that in order to remain relevant in the internet age, it just had to make good cameras."
http://www.kernelmag.com/comment/analysis/4696/the-man-who-g...
"We no longer want a faster computer, but one we like more."
Had a really interesting conversation the other night about sites that offer consumers an honest ranking of things such as a place to eat. When they monetise through businesses that care little for the honest rankings and only desire strength for their own personal ranking, there is a conflict of interest. When power is placed completely in hands of consumer, power corrupts them too as they demand a free meal otherwise leaving a bad comment despite recieving good service. I have talked to hotel managers who have been threatened with bad comments despite no problem in service and had no choice but to not charge for the room due to the dishonesty.
The big question here is how do sites generate a site that is honest providing a good service that can be monetised successfully and cannot be gamed by either business or consumer. Any good examples?
My favourites are by Tom Hulme, Rob Fitzpatrick, Mikko Jarvenpaa, Paulina Bozek, Mike Butcher and Florian Heinemann.
They thought they could do the same in Europe, immediately running into problems as they quickly found they would need a distributor in each country which would take a rather large chunk out of their margin. They still proceeded and found that everyone had different tastes, the Italian's liked something flamboyant, the French preferred something classy, the English wanted something Iconic and the German's wanted something Minimalist. In the US, everyone wanted the same thing. In short, the company went bankrupt in both regions due to the errors made in Europe.
There are language differences, cultural differences, tax and regulation differences, additional costs of multiple companies to be setup during expansion and the list keeps going on. Startups stuggle to scale in Europe for very clear reasons, it's much harder to do so. With a small team and little resources, a company can address the entire United States, in Europe they simply can't (of course there are a few lucky exceptions).
So as a European, what has Europe needed for the last two decades to be competitive? Quite obviously, it is to level the playing field and remove those barriers to zero. Until that happens, European Startups will never be able to scale to the size or with the speed of their US competitors. While I think European founders are as smart as American founders, by the points above, does that even matter?
Easier translation such as http://www.reverbeo.com (Friends of mine) will take care of the language barriers on web businesses. Higher levels of customisation on both software and hardware will take care of the stylisic differences. But the regulation challenges require EU intervention and we've been waiting a long time for them to do anything.
Prof. Kay uses ICI which was a leading pharma company in the UK to explain obliquity in business. In 1987 ICI's mission statement read 'we make awesome products and innovate new drugs where possible to do good.' (wasn't in those words, but that was the message.) In 1994, they changed their mission statement to 'we exist to increase shareholder value,' and dropped the rest. The company went bankrupt not long after. The oblique route resulted in one of the largest companies in their field with the highest shareholder value, the direct route resulted in bankruptcy, i.e. the absolute lowest shareholder value.
Increasing shareholder value is only a motivation of the shareholders not surprisingly. Employees and customers have little interest in increasing shareholder value directly (unless they are significant shareholders) yet it is through motivating customers and employees that a company will grow and increase shareholder value the most. When longtime ICI employee Sir James Black (Nobel Prize Winner) was asked to change from making awesome drugs to pushing existing drugs on a roadshow to increase shareholder value, he left the company. He later created more blockbuster drugs in his new role, but not at ICI. Thus in VC funded and non-VC funded companies, I believe the goal should include to produce a great lifestyle for the team.
I have a mild knowledge of open source, but never felt Opendesk nor Wikhouse ever truly embraced open source despite using the name for kudos, nor do I feel the team operate with a true open source mentality. The Creative commons site is explicit that the CC BY SA license is their license that is closest to open source and do not say that all CC licenses are open source. For me, the precense of the NC tag has always torn me in different directions wondering do I understand this stuff well enough as my understanding is that Opendesk is not actually open, (nor is wikihouse).
With my own separate endevour, I have thought alot about this and wonder what parts of our furniture and the furniture of our community should we open source and what parts should we be opposed to. Opensourcing the design project is fundamentally destructive to the current model of design of which they are pro's and con's to that project, the main pro being that you potentially enlarge the size of the design field which would have be proven, the con being that you discount the value of the design where designers are potentially unable to pay their cost of living which is not a glorious project.
Opensouring CNC joints in a beautiful collection is much closer to what I intend to mean by open source, i.e that the components are open sourced so that community and other communities can create great designs. I believe that primitives should also be opensourced that are not attributed to any designer such as square table with no design thought, much of what may be perceived as classical woodworking designs that have been around for decades if not centuries. But as for opensourcing the final design of the desk you guys have designed, I am fundamentlly against, nevertheless you haven't open-sourced it yet, merely used open source in name for now.
A platform that allows ideas to rise to the top of the pile without any hustle is indeed interesting. In the past you could hand an idea over to someone to do it for you, but they would take the majority of equity and it wasn't a great deal for creators. The opportunity now is that you can use Kickstarter (and other platforms for other things) that take a much smaller cut, but they leave that hustle to you. I hope my blogpost can aid other creators in learning how to run their campaigns, but there is always the old option in handing your idea over to someone to do the execution/hustle, thereby leaving very little ownership for you, (around 5%).