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I was looking at the sorry spectacle of my son’s seed project from school this morning. He took it home over summer recess; the young plant was doing fine but it has obviously outgrown its little plastic pot. The fact that his Dad had bought a sack of earth doesn’t help, his Dad has ignorantly not helped him get a bigger pot and replant it to take it to the next level. Hmm, bad.

Ideation could be compared to the business of seeds. The worth of seeds can’t be realized until they are planted – unless you eat them as muesli, I guess. Sowing some seed can be a rather wasteful exercise if you look at the percentage of seeds that never make it. If you look at the seeds that actually make it to high yield crops, then you should  have no problem with arguing the value of the whole thing, and the seed wastage is not an issue.

I love ideation as a part of innovation. Ideation is great for freeing the mind to both find and analyze new potential value, and it’s a good start to any innovation initiative. Having said that – the big question for anyone with the bag of seeds

Know your soil – ie, your innovation budget. That defines what you can get to a certain level of ‘proof of value’ whether that’s a prototype or market validation. It defines how many pots you can have at the same time. Beyond those pots, the rest of your seed is irrelevant until you find a new pot and new soil to fill it. If you cannot identify a sack of earth, don’t waste too much time playing with seeds until you find one and get one.

There is another important aspect that comes from ideation. The process draws the people with “green fingers”, those passionate for an idea and who can drive it to commercialization. They are the first people to grab a pot given the chance and do something intelligent with their favorite seed. I have the sometimes irritating habit of saying ‘yes I’ve seen idea X, company Y are executing this’ which can be dangerous because you can dismiss stuff for the wrong reasons. I have also had the privilege of meeting leading entrepreneurs behind company Y – and the real value was understanding WHY they have succeeded with their pots, taking them through drought and storm.

The value of seeds comes with the sower, the soil, and the social interaction around the whole sowing process which helps you find the best sowers/gardeners, and helps you to decide who should get the soil (not just what). The flip side is to have a pile of seed with people saying ‘someone should come and plant this, it’s great seed’.  Have a look at the article from Brad Field (http://blogs.reuters.com/small-business/2011/06/14/note-to-entrepreneurs-your-idea-is-not-special/)

Now I still have to replant and save Exhibit A …

But why the smaller form factor? Does an iPad or iPhone need a smaller SIM? Hardly.

I could see situations where a smaller SIM would be a real pain. I remember standing in the aisle of a plane waiting to disembark at Johannesburg, when I heard a rustling behind me. I turned around and saw a guy sorting through a pile of SIMs in the palm of his hand, as if he was sorting out red M&Ms or Smarties.
that’s not a nice scenario for micro-micro SIMs – then one sneeze and you would have SIM confetti everywhere .
Nope, these SIMs are OTA-configurable, so in theory you would never have to take them out of your iThing …. whatever an iThing is.

What connected things would benefit from a very small SIM? Billions.

“Today’s SIM/UICCs are truly IP-connected cryptographic devices. They communicate over HTTPS, authenticate us mutually to multiple types of networks, secure mobile TV systems, support payment, transit and other NFC applications, and are available in ever greater memory sizes and new and innovative form factors“. (Jean-Louis Carrara, Gemalto). 

Small keys, big doors.

I have followed Gerhard Fasol of Eurotechnology KK for a while now, with his valuable and fascinating insights into the Japanese market. He writes:

“Japanese operators are learning from the experience and are hardening communications and broadcasting systems. Understanding communications during disasters is essential for business continuity.
It has been reported that mobile communications peak demand during the March 11 disaster increased to about 50-60 times normal volume, leading to a break-down or switch-off of mobile voice communications, and to an extended near-break down of mobile email.
Twitter and social networks showed strength and resilience, as did internet based communications”. 

I heard much the same scenario from Ericsson’s Martin Körling when he presented to SICS (Swedish Institute of Computer Science) at their Open Day, he was in Tokyo when the Tsunami struck and Facebook via mobile became for a while his communications lifeline.

I have roots in the aerospace industry, where critical functions are replicated with heterogeneous systems (no single point of failure, multiple solutions to scenarios) so am very positive to a future with ‘Hetnets’.

Connectivity has moved from the ‘nice to have’ to ‘must have’ and in situations like March 11, a lifeline. There are great opportunities to make it one of the most resilient parts of a society’s infrastructure.

You can find Gerhard’s full presentation, which he made at the 7th Korea Communications Conference in Seoul on May 12, 2011,  here:

Do cities figure out how to manage everything optimally with a sweeping master plan, or do they let others do that where the use cases rise to meet the problems in Darwinian fashion? I believe the latter is key … new use cases grow new behaviour, a city can help promote and orchestrate the best services further down the road, but open ecosystems will prove to be valuable in getting there.

Roadify seems to be doing a great job of helping people share parking spaces, and thanks to open data they can bundle that with  timely public transport info. A lot more wholistic than if Roadify was just a very good parking app.

The human cloud is “shorthand for how the web has disrupted the way we work” (GigaOm). Mobile, high-speed networks have played no small part in enabling that way of work. The very fact that we are talking of  ’disruption’ means that the changes are often being driven bottom-up by empowered workers, and organizational and government policies catch up sooner or later. It’s in many cases no longer meaningful to talk of a regular 9-5 job if you interact live with two other continents. Or ‘regular commute’ for that matter.

Ericsson made a cool pitch at the ITS World Congress on ‘Carbon Smart Commute‘. If I were to take the pitch and try to paraphrase in a question it would be ‘If we are carbon smart, how much should we commute – when and to where?’ A lot of the answers I believe will be found in the disruption of the Human Cloud. It’s happening, I believe smart policy (employee/govt) will accommodate and augment the change.

If 100o workers (hypotetically) decide to work from home on Monday and they travel to the same trade fair on Tuesday you could argue it’s because they are climate-compensating. It’s quite likely that it’s  just more effective for them to prepare for the trade fair at home. Either way – if the public transport company was ‘smart’ they might run a bus less on Route A on Monday and an extra bus on route B on Tuesday if they knew what the 1000 people were planning. I don’t know of a public transport company ready for that – but I’d like to see one. If the employer had some ‘smart’ deal with the public transport company then we could talk of some win-win deal, with a sizeable Co2 reduction as bonus.

The key word for Human Cloud is ‘rethink’ – here’s a link to last year’s Net:Work 2010 video recap.

At about 27 minutes into the discussion, things start to get to another level of intensity and interest regarding the whole aspect of innovation.

Fred claims “Google hasn’t had any major innovations since Gmail, which rolled out six years ago. “They haven’t home built from the ground up anything interesting in a half decade,” and John counters with pretty much ‘so what – they acquire innovative companies’

What both seem to agree on is the sentiment I like to re-echo – innovation comes back to execution. the alternative, as John mentions is ‘worshipping at the Temple of Ideas’ – ideas are really important, implementation is key.

Quoting Mark Rosoff at Business Insider:

“I’ve argued for years that Microsoft’s biggest problem isn’t lack of innovation. The company has tons of interesting innovations kicking around in its research labs. Its problem has been turning those ideas into well-executed products that are released and updated on a timely schedule. Microsoft has also had a horrific record trying to integrate acquisitions, like the $6 billion purchase of online ad platform aQuantive, which went absolutely nowhere, or the $2 billion it spent on accounting software companies Great Plains and Navision, which have shown little growth since then“

I would conclude that the deepest issue is not where we get our innovation from (home-grown or bought in the market), but what we do in the kitchen afterwards. Whatever your take on that, I recommend listening to the interview (beginning of this post), from 27 minutes if you’re in a rush.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-lack-of-innovation-not-the-problem-2010-11#ixzz161B6U7lY

AJ is the result of a partnership between the University of Michigan and Ford.

Ford believes that people will start ‘tinkering’ or personalising with their cars again. This diesn’t happen so much nowadays for new cars on the hardware side … but now that software becomes a significant part of cars there is lots of room for personalisation there. Ford are hoping to make the car more personal towards its owner.

AJ features a version of Ford’s SYNC infotainment system powered by a Dell PC, Sprint wireless internet (2 antennas), and Windows 7.  AJ can handle Skype calls, Facebook, navigation, etc…. eventually the plan is that SYNC could ‘talk’ with Android apps on a mobile terminal, so everything wouldn’t need to be ‘baked in’ to the car.

Future apps for Ford could include a crowd-sourcing one to detect accidents and slowdowns; a fuel-economy promoting app that shows your economy on a particular road versus drivers of comparable vehicles; and an app that allows you to record voice reviews of restaurants you stopped at.

Now that’s not so futuristic … look at http://www.ahamobile.com (I listen to my Facebook friends today hands-free via mobile).

I think the thing that caught my attention for this post was the ‘social’ touch … the Ford Fiesta is called AJ…

http://www.dailytech.com/Ford+Takes+American+Journey+to+Promote+2011+Fiesta+Windows+Apps/article18410c.htm

http://www.americanjourney2.com/fordindex.php

I was heading to the office for a meeting after a stressy start to the day and counting on grabbing a breakfast from the in-house cafeteria just before entering the meeting. I waved to a colleague seven places ahead in the queue who was looking extremely happy for her double latte as an incoming phone call interrupted my plans: “No, the youngest isn’t at daycare, he’s just got sick …. your turn to take care of him”. I forgot the breakfast and headed for the train, with reason one step ahead of my stomach. At the train station I saw a vending machine … with a smoothie!  The chocolate did not make sense, but the smoothie did. I had no coins… but I did have a spare phone with prepaid, and this machine received SMS payments.

That was when I had my ‘aha’ moment. I had to address the SMS to 2elof with the amount …. the machine has a name.

I credited the machine with the SMS, grabbed the smoothie as the commuter train home pulled in. I resolved to do track down some more vending machines during the week.

The result you can see in the picture collage … all the machines have a name which resembles a Swedish name. 2isak is back-to-back with 2isac (twins?), 2maj is close to the city centre … and 2elof has a special place in my heart because it was the only one of these that had a smoothie and just when I needed it.

Names imply relations. Giving names to machines is nothing new; I was familiar with the habit from my aerospace days. The first autopilot for aeroplanes was invented by Sperry back in 1912, but by the 1940′s the box that could fly the plane for the pilot had gotten a name …. ‘George’, and you will find ‘George’ is a name still being used on the most modern of airliners. George can speak today, but the need to christen him arose when he was still a fairly dumb box seventy years ago.
Outside of aviation, the most famous autopilot is probably R2D2 of George Lukas’ ‘Star Wars’ – notice how the dustbin-shaped droid quickly becomes ‘Artoo’ – who can relate to serial numbers?

Now – back to our SMS-connected vending machines or should I say 2elof, 2maj and 2isac.
Fifty billion connections now gets a row of questions ….

2elof, 2maj and 2isac are connected but are they connected to each other?
If I have bought things from each … will they confer to make sure that 2maj and 2isac stock those smoothies too?
I might decide that I ‘like’ 2elof because of its location … but do I really want that ‘like’ to be communicated on Facebook? Do I want a ‘like’ posted within the vending machine group?
The questions arise easily, because there is a name to relate them to.

I have been playing with Siri, the intelligent ‘do engine’ over the last few days.  Here one engages in a chat with something that interfaces some forty-odd services with potentially thousands of end points, or connections. All of that is embodied in a four-letter name.

Tens of billions of connections  need be no harder to relate to than billions of people in the world – we build a little subset of relations as we move through life, we  have our info channels and in our small, personal ways we relate to life. Now I’m not saying that won’t be problem-free or uncomplicated – pilots should never trust their ‘Georges’ 100% and I’m not ready to give my bank account details to 2elof.
But a name or two makes  everything a little easier, I think.

http://www.bmw.com/com/en/insights/technology/connecteddrive/overview.html 

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/34677/BMW-unveils-in-car-app-store