JustinIdea - Justin Ricaurte's Personal Blog

It's a Marketing Problem

This past Sunday I went to Mind Camp 4.0 at the Tukwila Community Center, and I had an absolute blast at it.  The day was set-up as an open conference, where people post what they would like to teach others and each individual chooses what they would like to listen to for each one-hour segment.  There were some really great discussions there.  Some of the ones I went to involved where can you take web 2.0 next, what you need to take into account when starting a company, advertising rates for websites, and education in the State of Washington. 

At the event, there was no loss of good ideas.  One of the cool one's that I saw was NoonHat, where you post the place you're at and the radius within which you would like to catch lunch.  The site then pairs you with others that want to catch lunch in the same vicinity and time.  Another was Uncluttr, which makes finding books on Amazon a lot more intuitive and simple.  If you want inspiration for some new ideas, something like Mind Camp is a great event to attend.  I think the discussions helped to spark about a dozen ideas in my head during the 12 hours I was there.

The one thing I saw missing from a lot of the discussions was the business side.  It's great to have cool little technologies and demo them for others, but it's another discussion to find ways to make money off of them, and sadly a lot of the ideas didn't have a concrete monetization model.  Another area was business risk, which is something that came up in talking about where to take web 2.0 next.  With ~90% of the people being more tech-oriented, ways to lower business risk that have been used in other areas of the economy weren't brought up until I started to chime in.  Then how do you gain your users?  Working off your initial network will only take you so far, so quickly.  To gain a large user base quickly, you'll need to find other ways to market it to increase user adoption and understand what type of scaling problem you have with respect to your users. 

Without a strong business model, most of these cool ideas will flounder or allow their creators to make a few dollars a month off of Google Adwords, and they won't become widely adopted.  The plummeting costs to develop web applications has thrown out the technical problem when developing 98% of web applications, a site like Farecast being in the 2%.  It's easy to copy and paste someone else's code or make a social networking site with one new "killer" feature.  Even when the technical problem is eclipsed for those 2%, what you're left with is a marketing problem, and solving that problem requires a different mind set than developing the cool feature did.

The Ultimate Convergence in Computing

I won't deny that I became extremely excited when I saw Microsoft announce the Surface computer.  But my mind couldn't help but wander and see if there was a way to improve upon the concept and the entire idea of how humans should be able to interact with computers.  Is playing around on walls, floors, and tables the best way to interact with computers, or is there an even better way?  I personally don't think it will be the end all, even with an OLED covered house with walls that are as dynamic as those in Disney's Smart House movie.

Why limit yourself to a surface to do computing at all?  Even better, why make the internet a separate space where things are done?  The internet in the end, as my friend Anders says, is merely another way for humans to communicate.  So what could the ultimate convergence become?  In science fiction movies like The Matrix, humans have to plug into a machine to be able to connect to a "virtual reality".  Why should virtual reality be any different from reality?

Device convergence is great and everything, but I believe the ultimate convergence in computing will be when virtual reality and the internet are completely integrated into reality.  When you are walking down the street, you won't pull out your cell phone to find a place to go.  You will see the possibilities appear before you.  You won't even need a cell phone to carry on a conversation.  Instead of having a character in SecondLife as an avatar to interact with others, you will see other people, who are not physically there, walking around and will be able to interact with them.  You might not even be "there".  (Of course, teleportation would make getting there a lot easier. :-) ) 

With virtual reality and the internet completely integrated into reality, the possibilities are truly infinite.

Democratized Design

David Armano found an awesome article by Bruce Nussbaum of BusinessWeek asking the question - Are Designers The Enemy Of Design?  It looks long, but is a very fast read and has a lot of great content.

I think Bruce nailed it on the head when he talked about how design is being and will continue to be democratized. I believe everything will eventually go this way, and the profits will then being to help other people with what they need done, through continued conversations as both David and Bruce mentioned.  To get an even closer look at the democratization in business movement, check out this article from The Economist a year ago titled "The New Organization" [*note* it now requires a subscription], and also this article on self-replicating 3D printers for the future of democratized manufacturing.

For example even though its easy to argue that the vast majority of Myspace pages and websites are ugly, more people can put information online in a easier-to-read format, because they have been given simple design tools.  Would as many websites have sprung up if it required a Bachelors in Fine Arts to design a webpage?  Probably not.  The tools that grease the democratization process will further continue to upend the design industry.  And it would be even better if those tools helped the average person create good (if not great) design!  This is a great tool I have been using at Adobe Labs when trying to come up with color schemes for websites or other materials.

Another piece I really enjoyed Bruce touching on was the sustainable industry movement.  There is so much money to be saved (and made!) from cutting pollution and waste from the manufacturing process and in turn making all of our products more environmentally friendly, it's almost mind boggling.

As a last note, I thought one of the lines David bolded from the essay "We live a life in beta" is something people (who haven't) should take to heart.  You shouldn't be done learning or improving yourself after some set milestone, such as graduating from high school, technical school, or college.  You should strive for continuous improvement in what you do and who you are.  Constantly work on improving your relationships, business, health, and life.  Often improving one will help to improve all.