Has Apple Defined a New Medium, Again?

January 20, 2012

Apple announced new tools to cre­ate and view iBooks on the iPad, and a new dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nel for dig­i­tal text­books. In doing so Apple ignited a firestorm of debate on the sub­ject of dig­i­tal books, and the future of the pub­lish­ing indus­try, book dis­tri­b­u­tion, and likely con­sumer con­sump­tion pat­terns. More impor­tantly, they set the stage for what we will some­day rec­og­nize as a new medium, a new form of con­tent in its own right.

And mean­while Apple is doing so at a time when the pub­lish­ing indus­try is at risk, with out­moded busi­ness mod­els, under attack on mul­ti­ple fronts.

More Than Just Textbooks

Apple posi­tioned their Jan­u­ary 19 announce­ment as an edu­ca­tion event, with the aim of rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing the text­book pub­lish­ing indus­try. Accord­ing to the Wall Street Jour­nal, only 6% of text­books are deliv­ered today in dig­i­tal form, fore­casted to reach 50% by 2020. That’s a big tar­get in its own right, but I’d guess Apple’s unspo­ken aspi­ra­tions are even broader…

Well beyond what we think of as “books”

Years from now, we’ll look back at this moment and real­ize that Apple lit a fire, fuel­ing a new medium, one still to be named.

What Apple has in mind is not just a book or a text­book ren­dered dig­i­tally on an iPad. Their vision for this new type of con­tent goes well beyond dig­i­tal books, enhanced ebooks, or what­ever labels we use today.

Their vision mashes up ele­ments of movies, games, ani­ma­tions and dynamic mod­els, inter­ac­tiv­ity,  hyper­link­ing and non­lin­ear nav­i­ga­tion — key enhance­ments to the core ele­ments of sto­ry­telling, nar­ra­tive flow, design, lay­out, etc. Here are some of the core ele­ments that will drive our under­stand­ing of this new medium, as I see it.

Beyond the Book

— Source, Chris­tine Thomp­son, Inform­ing Arts ©2012

Text­books First, But Not Last

I sus­pect Apple chose the text­book as the ini­tial tar­get for rein­ven­tion because the lim­i­ta­tions of a print-based medium for multi-dimensional, com­plex or time-sensitive sub­jects are so well under­stood. Apple’s long expe­ri­ence at sell­ing to and sup­port­ing edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions affords the com­pany unique insights into what works, and what’s bro­ken, when it comes to 21st cen­tury education.

The text­book pub­lish­ing indus­try is huge, and can help finance the tri­als that will even­tu­ally shape the win­ning char­ac­ter­is­tics of this new emerg­ing medium. In North Amer­ica alone the tra­di­tional text­book pub­lish­ing indus­try gen­er­ates $12–14 bil­lion annu­ally, accord­ing to one expert (for a more con­ser­v­a­tive assump­tion: > $4 bil­lion in 2011 text­book sales, accord­ing to the WSJ today; $8 bil­lion in 2010 accord­ing to For­rester. Clearly no one agrees on the def­i­n­i­tion of the indus­try, but it’s huge.)

From Apple’s per­spec­tive (as a mas­ter of dis­rup­tive inno­va­tions), the edu­ca­tional pub­lish­ing indus­try must be a sit­ting duck, ripe for transformation.

““We are edu­cat­ing peo­ple today in the same way as we did when there was 1% as much knowledge.”

– Danny Hillis, The Econ­o­mist, March 22, 2001

That said Apple is will­ing to be a part­ner, not just a dis­rupter. Apple announced that it plans to part­ner with edu­ca­tors and pub­lish­ers (reported by the Wall Street Jour­nal today). When this part­ner­ship is pro­duc­tive, those who embrace change and can envi­sion a new medium should profit enormously.

This New Medium Requires New Tal­ents & Specialties

What will emerge is a new form of multi-faceted con­tent. This new medium will require con­tri­bu­tions from many spe­cial­ties, such as:

  • Pho­tog­ra­phers, video­g­ra­phers, musi­cians, producers
  • Design­ers, illus­tra­tors, animators
  • Art/creative direc­tors for the ensem­ble as a whole
  • Game devel­op­ers — peo­ple who know how to incor­po­rate game mechan­ics (“gam­i­fi­ca­tion”) within designed experiences
  • User expe­ri­ence and inter­ac­tion designers
  • Usabil­ity testers
  • Web devel­op­ers and pro­duc­ers (HTML5 and CSS3 experts), scripters and coders
  • Infor­ma­tion archi­tects, tax­on­omy and tag­ging specialists

And of course, the usual:

  • Writ­ers and copy­writ­ers (as well as trans­la­tors for books with global appeal)
  • Edi­tors
  • Fact check­ers
  • Tal­ent spot­ters (acqui­si­tion experts)

On the strate­gic level this new medium will require vision­ar­ies, risk tak­ing pio­neers, game chang­ers and oth­ers whose per­son­al­i­ties are prob­a­bly abhor­rent to the tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing world.

Not to men­tion new mod­els for brand build­ing, social media inter­ac­tions with con­sumers, and new forms of mar­ket­ing. But that’s a whole dif­fer­ent sub­ject in its own right.

[Dis­clo­sure: I played a key role in Apple’s early days of dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing, but have had no involve­ment in their cur­rent activ­i­ties. The opin­ions described here are my own, based on inter­pre­ta­tions of what I’ve read and heard over the Web.]

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Tagged as: content strategy, digital publishing, digital textbooks, enhanced ebooks

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Bloggers, Get Ready for “Responsive Web Designs”

January 16, 2012

With more peo­ple access­ing blogs and web­sites from smart­phones, con­tent own­ers need to check out their exist­ing page designs to ensure they are “smart­phone friendly” — opti­mized for mobile usage. By that I mean: usable on a smart­phone with­out requir­ing a mag­ni­fy­ing glass to read or nav­i­gate them. Blogs and web­sites that aren’t just a “min­i­mized ver­sion” of the orig­i­nal content.

mobile-contentYes, peo­ple can use pinch­ing or other fin­ger­tip ges­tures to con­trol scrolling or mag­ni­fi­ca­tion on their phones, but this is less than ideal. Prob­lems abound.

Some nav­i­ga­tion schemes work poorly or not at all for peo­ple with fat fin­gers. Peo­ple with bifo­cals or those over 40 may have trou­ble read­ing tiny type…

Pho­tos or videos intended for view­ing on a lap­top or desk­top PC may down­load slowly, or be dif­fi­cult to see if not opti­mized for mobile viewing.

How Best to Opti­mize Mobile Content?

If you’re a busi­ness or con­tent owner like me, you will need a way to adapt to a grow­ing array of devices with diver­gent require­ments — with­out increas­ing the time you must devote to your blog or web­site. This may not be a press­ing prob­lem today, but when mobile access starts to exceed 50% of your audi­ence, the prob­lem will become urgent.

(If you earn your liv­ing design­ing and devel­op­ing blogs or web­sites for oth­ers, Hal­leluja! You’ve just stum­bled on a new rev­enue stream.)

It’s imprac­ti­cal tackle these mobile opti­miza­tion require­ments on a post-by-post or page-by-page basis. Instead con­tent own­ers need a smarter, more mod­ern tech­ni­cal plat­form to han­dle this for the blog or web­site as a whole. The smart way to tackle web + mobile opti­miza­tion is by using a design strat­egy called “respon­sive web designs.”

Assum­ing you’re not a web devel­oper by trade, you also want a plat­form that han­dles the heavy-lifting for you, with­out requir­ing you to make exten­sive use of hand-coded scripts…

Word­Press Users, Rejoice

If you use Word­Press to man­age your blog or web­site, there’s a new tool in the off­ing that can sim­plify your adop­tion of a respon­sive web design strat­egy. Check out Head­way Themes. (Pric­ing ranges from $68 to $378, depend­ing on the options.)

Their upcom­ing release, Head­way 3.0.5, aims to tackle some of the core lay­out chal­lenges: enabling the designer or tech­ni­cally savvy blog­ger to turn fixed-layout designs into flex­i­ble or “respon­sive web lay­outs.” (Read the book Respon­sive Web Design if you want a deeper under­stand­ing of this topic as a whole.)

Head­way experts dis­cuss the new func­tions in a screen­cast here; note that the respon­sive web demo takes place at about the 8-minute mark… (Cau­tion: this video and dis­cus­sion are intended for peo­ple already famil­iar with Headway.)

How Head­way (or Word­Press, for that mat­ter) will sim­plify the task of serv­ing up the opti­mal media for each device is still unclear to me at this point, beyond the fact that it will involve the use of “media queries.”

A Good First Step

Whether or not Head­way has the per­fect solu­tion in Q1 2012, I’m relieved that the Word­Press devel­oper com­mu­nity has begun to tackle some of the chal­lenges pre­sented by rapid adop­tion of mobile web access. Their efforts should even­tu­ally make it eas­ier for con­tent own­ers to adapt con­tent for opti­mal view­ing across a broad gamut of devices.

At present <5% of my blog vis­i­tors arrive here via a smart­phone. This gives me time to exper­i­ment with Word­Press and Head­way (or oth­ers), try dif­fer­ent approaches using an exper­i­men­tal site, and be ready with a solid solu­tion once mobile traf­fic becomes significant.

In the mean­time I look for­ward to some hands-on test­ing to see what’s involved in opti­miz­ing for mobile web visitors.

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Tagged as: content optimized for mobile, content strategy, Headway, responsive web design, WordPress

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How to Drive Innovation via Customer-Value Creation

January 12, 2012

I’ve been a fan of the Busi­ness Model Can­vas as a strate­gic enabler for orga­ni­za­tions that seek busi­ness model inno­va­tion, or for entre­pre­neurs who want a sim­ple but pow­er­ful way to describe a new busi­ness con­cept. But as I note below, this approach has not got­ten the atten­tion it deserves within the North­west tech com­mu­nity. Thanks to a forth­com­ing enhance­ment, the Busi­ness Model Can­vas is now poised to become a for­mi­da­ble tool for busi­ness innovators.

Crit­ics point to the Busi­ness Model Can­vas’ light­weight treat­ment of the cen­tral value propo­si­tion — the under­ly­ing ratio­nale that fuels future rev­enues — how and why spe­cific offers will sat­isfy the needs of defined cus­tomer seg­ments. Iron­i­cally, where the can­vas is most weak lies at the epi­cen­ter of what dri­ves entre­pre­neurs to go with­out pay or sleep, mort­gage their homes, and risk their most impor­tant rela­tion­ships in order to build a business.

Enter the Customer-Value Can­vas to address that chal­lenge, as a con­cep­tual “plug-in” for the Busi­ness Model Canvas.

The Busi­ness Model Can­vas itself is based on ground­break­ing work by Alex Oster­walder and Yves Pigneur, with crowd-sourced con­tri­bu­tions from hun­dreds of busi­ness lead­ers. Their approach is described in a delight­fully illus­trated book, Busi­ness Model Gen­er­a­tion, which I highly rec­om­mend. (I also rec­om­mend Osterwalder’s blog.)

Out­side the time– and money-starved tech com­mu­nity, the Busi­ness Model Can­vas has been acclaimed by many forward-thinking busi­nesses. Here’s why.

Busi­ness Model Can­vas Overview

Thumbnail of the Business Model CanvasThe Busi­ness Model Can­vas enables entre­pre­neur­ial teams to col­lab­o­rate on a new busi­ness con­cept that can then be pre­sented on a sin­gle page. The can­vas itself is a 9-box frame­work, encap­su­lat­ing the key dimen­sions of a holis­tic busi­ness model.

Struc­tured Brainstorming

The can­vas pro­vides an effec­tive means to struc­ture col­lab­o­ra­tive think­ing, dis­cus­sion and brain­storm­ing about the most impor­tant aspects of a pro­posed busi­ness model. Via a brain­storm­ing process (online or in-person work­shops), peo­ple cap­ture their ideas using sticky notes that they place within the appro­pri­ate box. Con­strain­ing ideas to sticky notes enforces high-level think­ing… Con­strain­ing those notes to fit within the boxes requires the team to set priorities.

Each box rep­re­sents 1 of the 9 most impor­tant com­po­nents of a holis­tic busi­ness model (e.g., cus­tomer seg­ments). Each note out­lines a sin­gle idea, an aspect of their pro­posed busi­ness con­cept. The team must ensure there’s an inter­nal logic to the model — each sticky note (or idea) must be con­cep­tu­ally linked to other core dri­vers of the busi­ness model.

The 9 Com­po­nents of a Busi­ness Model

Oster­walder and Pigneur, the pro­po­nents of this frame­work, define the 9 most impor­tant aspects of a busi­ness model as:

  • its value proposition
  • cus­tomer seg­ments to be served
  • cus­tomer rela­tion­ships (how the orga­ni­za­tion will inter­act or deal with its customers)
  • the chan­nels to be used
  • the organization’s key activ­i­ties to be performed
  • the key resources to be utilized
  • the part­ners needed to fill in key gaps (e.g., gaps in chan­nels, crit­i­cal activ­i­ties or resources)
  • the cost structure
  • the rev­enue streams to be generated

See Busi­ness Model Gen­er­a­tion for more infor­ma­tion on how “vision­ar­ies, game chang­ers” and entre­pre­neurs are using this approach to envi­sion inno­va­tions that can be designed and then devel­oped into action plans.

“Yes, But…” Say Tech Firms

This approach has been proven as an effec­tive inno­va­tion resource, when adopted via facil­i­tated work­shops that bring out the best think­ing of the inno­va­tion team. In fact a world­wide con­sult­ing indus­try has emerged to deliver work­shops and follow-on ser­vices lever­ag­ing the Busi­ness Model Can­vas. (Just search on #bmgen to see the many tweets from prac­ti­tion­ers.) The Euro­pean busi­ness com­mu­nity has been espe­cially enthu­si­as­tic about this approach.

But when propos­ing this frame­work to tech clients here in the Pacific North­west, I often encounter resis­tance due to its light­weight treat­ment of the value propo­si­tion and cus­tomer needs. Clients crit­i­cize its lack of focus on the value prop’s impli­ca­tions for segment-specific product/service offers, or the ratio­nale for those offers.

When this model fails to res­onate with what tech entre­pre­neurs care about most, they often over­look the value of the BM Can­vas as a means to struc­ture or draw out their think­ing in more pro­duc­tive and holis­tic ways.

As a stop­gap I’ve devel­oped some approaches to bridge this con­cep­tual gap; how­ever, that has entailed rough links to cus­tomer devel­op­ment, lean startup and other frame­works for entre­pre­neur­ship and inno­va­tion. Clients find this obvi­ous mash-up of mod­els to be too confusing…

For­tu­nately, the cre­ators of the Busi­ness Model Can­vas have now begun work on a sup­ple­men­tary can­vas that focuses squarely on the customer-value propo­si­tion link­age — the sine qua non of a busi­ness model that can actu­ally cre­ate value for all stakeholders.

Link­ing Customer-Value to the Busi­ness Model Canvas

Alex Oster­walder, one of the core archi­tects of the Busi­ness Model Can­vas, is now pro­to­typ­ing what he calls the “Customer-Value Can­vas.” Call­ing it a “plug-in” to the Busi­ness Model Can­vas, he is test­ing and refin­ing it via client engagements.

This new Customer-Value Can­vas should help inno­va­tors focus atten­tion on what mat­ters most when craft­ing a value propo­si­tion — the key dri­vers that respond directly to the pains and desired gains that sur­round a customer’s unmet needs.

Oster­walder rec­om­mends fram­ing those needs in terms of the jobs-to-be-done, a proven model for less risky inno­va­tion that’s based on research and prac­tice by Harvard’s Clay­ton Chris­tensen, Mark John­son of Innosight and oth­ers. He also rein­forces Steve Blank’s call for real-world, “out of the build­ing” obser­va­tion of cus­tomer needs, rather than bas­ing a busi­ness on what the founders assume to be true.

Here’s the customer-centered com­po­nent of Osterwalder’s Customer-Value Can­vas; this dri­ves focused think­ing on the most impor­tant aspects of the customer’s job-to-be-done, and the pains and gains asso­ci­ated with that cus­tomer “job.”

The Customer-Value Can­vas | Observ­ing the Customer’s Needs

Job-to-be-done mapped to customer segment

Source: The Customer-Value Can­vas cre­ated by Alex Osterwalder

The right-hand side of this can­vas should reflect real-world assump­tions about cus­tomer needs, based on “out-of-the-building” obser­va­tions of what cus­tomers really care about: the jobs they need to per­form in their per­sonal or work life, and the obsta­cles to get­ting those jobs done today. (Read Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Blank for more insights into this process.)

It’s dan­ger­ous to base these assump­tions solely on what the founders say is so, no mat­ter how impas­sioned their argument…

Design­ing the Offer to Sat­isfy Those Needs

The left-hand side of the can­vas shows the value propo­si­tion that will be designed in response to the customer’s job-to-be-done. This value prop com­prises the core aspects of a com­pelling offer that will sat­isfy the customer’s needs — the things that will deliver on the customer’s desired gains, and elim­i­nate or neu­tral­ize the pains they con­front today. This is where the entre­pre­neur­ial team should focus its think­ing on the bun­dle of prod­ucts and ser­vices to be delivered.

customer-value-canvas

Source: The Customer-Value Can­vas cre­ated by Alex Osterwalder

The Busi­ness Model Can­vas describes how the com­pany will orga­nize itself to deliver that value propo­si­tion to those cus­tomers, and how it will gen­er­ate prof­its while doing so.

Based on the Best Think­ing about Entrepreneurship

What makes Osterwalder’s pro­posed customer-value model even more pow­er­ful is the way it builds upon some of the best think­ing for 21st cen­tury entrepreneurship:

Adop­tion of the Customer-Value Can­vas should help forward-thinking tech founders and inno­va­tors clar­ify their think­ing about the crit­i­cal ingre­di­ents that power their rev­enue engine. If so, they will be bet­ter equipped to build smarter busi­nesses that are less likely to fail.

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Tagged as: business model innovation, entrepreneurship, jobs-to-be-done, Value proposition

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Android: Tough Love for Small Businesses

January 5, 2012

An Android smart­phone entered my life this hol­i­day sea­son, to solve net­work access issues in places where my beloved iPhone can’t con­nect via the AT&T net­work. Like San Fran­cisco and the Sil­i­con Valley…

While the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of Android smart­phones has improved dra­mat­i­cally, the over­all user expe­ri­ence is sur­pris­ingly uneven — bet­ter suited for con­sumer use cases than the needs of a small busi­ness owner. Here’s my take so far. [click to continue…]

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Tagged as: Android smartphone, Motorola Droid Razr, Verizon

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Revised on January 17, 2012

OMG, It’s a “Transmedia” Problem

December 2, 2011

Yes­ter­day I blogged about an emerg­ing chal­lenge fac­ing small busi­nesses — adapt­ing their web con­tent so it’s more usable and acces­si­ble for peo­ple who use smart­phones or tablets to go online. It’s amaz­ing what you can learn in a day by sim­ply focus­ing your atten­tion on a busi­ness issue.

From Jakob Nielsen, the usabil­ity guru, I’ve dis­cov­ered that experts refer to this kind of con­tent chal­lenge as the need for a trans­me­dia design strat­egy. At min­i­mum this is a “two screen chal­lenge” — desk­top + smart­phone — but some busi­nesses may need to con­sider other screen types as well, such as kiosks or dig­i­tal signage.

From Kristina Halvor­son, con­tent strat­egy guru, I’ve learned that this is a “respon­sive web design chal­lenge,” and will be explor­ing what that means. [Editor’s note: web design­ers and devel­op­ers are more likely to refer to this as “respon­sive web design.” That said, this is the Wild West — this whole area is new to everyone.]

Why You Need a Trans­me­dia | Respon­sive Web Strategy

If you man­age con­tent for a B2B firm, or a B2C brand that serves afflu­ent or well-educated con­sumers, many of your cus­tomers already use some com­bi­na­tion of:

  • a desktop/notebook PC or Mac
  • a smart­phone (about 40% of all Amer­i­cans now own smart­phones, and the ratio goes up every month)
  • increas­ingly, a tablet device, such as an iPad, for media con­sump­tion or online shop­ping from the com­fort of the couch

Under dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions or at dif­fer­ent times of day, the same per­son could be access­ing your online con­tent from any one of those devices.

And as every mar­keter or con­tent strate­gist knows, the holy grail is to deliver a coher­ent expe­ri­ence across all device classes, espe­cially when tar­get­ing your most val­ued cus­tomer or audi­ence seg­ments. You want your brand to be con­sis­tent across touchpoints.

This prob­lem won’t go way; it will just increase in urgency as more and more peo­ple shift the fre­quency or dura­tion of their online inter­ac­tions to the mobile web.

As Jakob Nielsen writes:

“Use of mobile devices will dra­mat­i­cally increase, but much high-value use will remain on desk­top PCs. Most com­pa­nies must sup­port both device classes [PC + mobile], and our usabil­ity research shows that this must be done with sep­a­rate UI designs that tar­get the dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­is­tics of the two types of user expe­ri­ence. One size UI does not fit all screen sizes.

— Jakob Nielsen, “Trans­me­dia Design for the 3 Screens”

The speed of mobile web adop­tion on the part of your cus­tomers, part­ners or employ­ees is what will deter­mine how quickly your orga­ni­za­tion must respond to the trans­me­dia design chal­lenge. (Hint: pay atten­tion to your Google Ana­lyt­ics stats, so you can antic­i­pate when you’ll need to take action.)

“Dif­fer­ent But Similar”

Although Jakob Nielsen rec­om­mends sep­a­rate UI strate­gies for dif­fer­ent classes of devices, he also points to the need for con­sis­tency across key dimen­sions of user experience:

  • Visual con­ti­nu­ity (rec­og­niz­able coher­ence in color schemes, lay­outs, fonts — even when tar­get­ing dif­fer­ent screen sizes — so users rec­og­nize these ele­ments as com­ing from the same company)
  • Fea­ture con­ti­nu­ity (such as user reviews, if yours is an ecom­merce site)
  • Data con­ti­nu­ity
  • Con­tent con­ti­nu­ity (such as tone of voice in the edi­to­r­ial style, or rec­og­niz­able char­ac­ters, brand marks, etc.)

And then there’s the issue of down­load speed… Remem­ber the early days of the Web?Broadband isn’t the same when it comes to mobile web users. 3G is slow, and 4G is still more myth than reality.

Because wire­less spec­trum is likely to remain con­gested for years to come, con­tent design­ers and pro­duc­ers need to min­i­mize page down­load times and band­width require­ments when serv­ing online con­tent to smart­phones or tablets.

As Jakob Nielsen reminds us:

“Mobile users suf­fer as if it were 1998, and fre­quently com­plain about slow downloads…

— Jakob Nielsen, “Trans­me­dia Design for the 3 Screens”

So unless you’ve got a magic solu­tion for dynam­i­cally resiz­ing or rejig­ger­ing con­tent assets on the fly, now you’re fac­ing a dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment chal­lenge as well… Just for grins, do a Google search on “Word­Press dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment” — and see how few choices there are…

We Need Intel­li­gent Tech­nol­ogy Solutions

The con­tent man­age­ment impli­ca­tions of “dif­fer­ent but sim­i­lar” are what dri­ves the need for a scal­able tech­nol­ogy approach, because siloed or one-off solu­tions aren’t sus­tain­able over time.

And while I approach this sub­ject from the POV of a small busi­ness owner, the impli­ca­tions are sim­i­lar for busi­nesses of all sizes. Larger orga­ni­za­tions sim­ply have the lux­ury of more money, and more tech­ni­cally savvy tal­ent to throw at the prob­lem today.

Today’s sit­u­a­tion is par­tic­u­larly painful for smaller orga­ni­za­tions, due to the com­plex­ity and high costs that result from today’s incom­plete solu­tions (many of which are cob­bled together from dif­fer­ent ven­dors, and are poorly archi­tected or integrated).

The cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of SMB-class tools was designed with “desktop/laptop” view­ing or inter­ac­tion as the pri­mary use case. As soon as you decide to add mobile, the com­plex­ity fac­tor goes way up. The work-arounds require expen­sive, cus­tom devel­op­ment invest­ments — beyond the reach of many smaller busi­nesses, I would imagine.

As a starry-eyed opti­mist, I wish there were SMB-appropriate alter­na­tives in mar­ket to con­sider. Instead I’ll wait, some­what patiently, for the soft­ware com­mu­nity to rec­og­nize this prob­lem, and then aim to “engi­neer out” the com­plex­ity via intel­li­gently designed solutions.

This is a clas­sic oppor­tu­nity for dis­rup­tive inno­va­tion, as the cur­rent tools are over-priced and over-featured when it comes to the needs of smaller organizations.

I wish Steve Jobs were still here, to push the tech­nol­ogy indus­try toward a dra­mat­i­cally sim­pler solution.

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Tagged as: Brand Strategy, content strategy, transmedia design, user experience

Revised on January 16, 2012

Are You Ready for Web + Mobile Content Strategies?

December 1, 2011

If you blog reg­u­larly, how pre­pared are you to respond to the impact of device pro­lif­er­a­tion or the increas­ing num­ber of peo­ple who access your con­tent using mobile devices? I don’t know about you, but I’m start­ing to worry about con­tent com­plex­ity, and the lack of “right sized” tech­nol­ogy solu­tions that are usable and affordable […]

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Holiday Gifts in the Post-Steve Era

November 28, 2011

Peo­ple buy­ing hol­i­day gifts from the Apple Store can be con­fi­dent those gifts will reflect Steve Jobs’ unique approach. But what about next year? What impact will Steve’s legacy have on future prod­ucts and services?

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iPhone 4S: Buying It for Steve?

October 10, 2011

Pre­orders for Apple’s new iPhone 4S sur­passed a mil­lion units in the first 24 hours, more than 40% higher than Apple’s pre­vi­ous single-day record. This early buy­ing frenzy stands in stark con­trast to ana­lysts’ luke­warm response to the intro­duc­tion of Apple’s lat­est iPhone model. Mean­while online Apple fan clubs and LinkedIn net­works of for­mer Apple employees […]

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Remembering Steve

October 6, 2011

Like most for­mer Apple employ­ees I’ve been mourn­ing the pass­ing of Steve Jobs, and reflect­ing on his last­ing impact. The many and pro­found ways in which he shaped employ­ees’ val­ues, behav­iors, crit­i­cal think­ing skills, and approach to inno­va­tion. His impact on the world, inspir­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices that would be embraced (and widely imi­tated) for […]

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Success Factors for Marketing Automation

April 28, 2011

For­rester has iden­ti­fied the key fac­tors that are most likely to spell suc­cess or fail­ure when it comes to imple­ment­ing B2B mar­ket­ing automa­tion plat­forms (report pub­lished April 2011). Com­pa­nies that rush to imple­ment with­out the right con­tent or agreed-upon processes are unlikely to achieve sat­is­fac­tory pay­back from their invest­ment in mar­ket­ing automa­tion. For­rester cau­tions that […]

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