From TED Profile of Paul Bennett :
design need not invoke grand gestures or sweeping statements to be successful, but instead can focus on the little things in life, the obvious, the overlooked
“Small is the new big,”Bennett says. And his design approach reflects this philosophy. For often, it’s not the biggest ideas that have the most impact, but the small, the personal, and the intimate.
Paul shares several such innovations in this video, a talk given at TED
From Jonathan Schwartz’s blog:
The saying goes, “a brand is a promise.” On a personal level, I’ve always felt that statement was incomplete. A promise is the lowest common denominator of a brand - it’s what people expect. Think of your favorite brand, whether search engine or sneaker or coffee shop or free software, and you’ll know what I mean - a brand is an expectation. If you experience anything less, you’re disappointed.
But a brand must go beyond a promise. To me, a brand is a cause - a guiding light. For fulfilling expectations, certainly, as well as dealing with the ill-defined and unexpected. It’s what tells your employees how to act when circumstances (and customers) go awry, or well beyond a training course. My first real experience with that was a personal one.
It’s a cause. One your employees - and more critically, your customers - willingly join.
via Jeff’s Links
Clean Technology Bigger Than Internet? At least Bill Joy, thinks so.
A global response to climate change will spur a business revolution bigger than the internet, said co-founder of Sun Microsystems Bill Joy.
“Solar cells are semiconductors, heat to electricity is semiconductors, software to manage systems comes out of Silicon Valley,” said Joy, who is now a partner at venture capital investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB).
A global race is on to be first to commercialize breakthrough technologies which could make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
You can already see some activity in this space like California Clean Tech Open.
The California Clean Tech Open is an independent effort by entrepreneurs, researchers, environmentalists, investors and others to create economic growth and environmental sustainability by sparking a clean technology cluster in California.
A friend of ours sent a link to our alumni forum. It was a simple link about A page depicting the Time Line of India. I got curious and started poking around. I have already spent more than an hour and half on it and I thought I should bring this story to the world. What impressed me most was this chronology page. It describes how, a dedicated family slowly built up a web site from a few pages over a decade to 4.5 million page views a month.
Chronology of Development of Kamat’s Potpourri
In our little database tools company, we did not do much PR. I used to go out and meet a few columnists, make some passionate presentations and hope that they believe in what we were doing and spread the word. We were not just looking for writeups. As a young company we were also looking for validation of our ideas.
One of them was Jon Udell, who used to work for Byte Magazine. I still remember our first meeting at the Byte office. Since then I met Jon several times and always enjoyed the conversations. He recently moved to Microsoft recently.
The other was Peter Coffee. I always enjoyed his columns in PC Week and later in eWeek. I met Peter in San Francisco airport (in some lounge) for an hour in mid 90s. I still remember how pleasantly surprised I was about the depth of his technical knowledge. When you deal with people like Jon and Peter, you develop a lot of respect for tech journalists. Today I read in Larry’s blog (I just rediscovered Larry after a long gap) that Peter moved to Salesforce.com as Director of Platform research.
What makes these people move to vendors? I hope I can meet them some day and ask them in person.
Good luck to both - some of the best minds in the tech industry.
I just came back to Mountain View, CA yesterday (after a 40 day trip). I met Jon at the Chennai conference and hope to meet him again here.
In his SD Best Practices India 2007: It’s a Wrap, Jon shares his impression of the first set of conferences they held in India. I have been to one of those and blogged my impressions here. It is a nice read if you are from the tech industry from one of the most prolific writers of technology magazine.
Jon, if you are reading this, when are you planning to come back? Spiced buttermilk is my favorite too.
This is probably one of the best blogs/columns I read this year. After reading it, I sat thinking about how true it all is. The New Web is just the beginning. Just like the Web before, this will change almost everything we do from getting news to buying stuff to entertaining. For once, it is the participants who decide what the game is. Here are my favorite fragments from this Time’s Person of The Year.
The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.
Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana?
It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person.
The New Web is taking shape. It will go by different names and evolove into something none of us foresee. You can call it Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 or Semantic Web. But it is not the technology (though that may help). It is the people. Augmented by technology. As Doug Engelbart would say, it is the co-evolution of people and technology. They aument each other.
Wishing you all a very Happy and Prosperous 2007.
It is The Global You. You are a mini-cosmos and embody everything great about humanity. It is You that Time magazine has chosen as the person of the year for 2006. It is so fitting. Just for being there and doing what you do. For just being You.
Happy 2007.
How come there is so little news about Seymour Papert, Doug Engelbart and others great people? After hearing about Seymour Papert’s accident, I felt sad. I hope he recovers fast. News about him is not that easy to find.
I am trying to track information about Papert’s recovery and even went and created a Google alert. I got just one alert with some old news in the past three days.
There is something funny about news in this world. We get so much more of what we don’t want. When you really need information we like, things that we care about, we really have to dig for it.
Update:
Patti Foley of MIT News Office was kind enough to send me this link to track Seymour Papert’s health updates.
Wow. This is significant. Jon is one of my favorites in the tech industry. I always cherish our first meeting (when he was at BYTE) and enjoy my conversations with him. His great insights into the technology are always valuable. I hope to see him more since I visit Seattle/Redmond often.
Why Microsoft? Jon says in his blog:
I’m often described as a leading-edge alpha geek, and that’s fair. I am, and probably always will be, a member of that club. But I’m also increasingly interested in reaching out to the mainstream of society.
For those of us in the club, it’s a golden age. With computers and networks and information systems we can invent new things almost as fast as we can think them up. But we’re leaving a lot of folks behind. And I’m not just talking about the digital divide that separates the Internet haves from the have-nots. Even among the haves, the ideas and tools and methods that some of us take for granted haven’t really put down roots in the mainstream.
Over the years I’ve evangelized a bunch of things to the alpha-geek crowd: Internet groupware, blogging, syndication, tagging, web architecture, lightweight integration, microformats, structured search, screencasting, dynamic languages, geographic mapping, random-access audio, and more. There’s a purpose behind all this, and Doug Engelbart saw it very clearly a long time ago. The augmentation of human capability in these sorts of ways isn’t just some kind of geek chic. It’s nothing less than a survival issue for our species. We face some really serious challenges. The only way we’re going to be able to tackle them is to figure out how to work together in shared information spaces. I’ve chosen to align myself with Microsoft because I think it has the scale, the resources, and the business incentive to help me empower a lot of people to learn how to do that.
Jon is one of the most creative people I know. His “light-weight and agile R&D” in technology is what makes him unique. And has the power to really explain complex technology in the simplest possible way. He combines the best of a techie with the best qualities of a good teacher. He will make a great evangelist.
Microsoft is really, really lucky to have him.
