this is a nice view…
Blogged with the Flock Browser
This is the Bee version of the post
18 May
Hey there we are coming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guWHD4a1wOM&feature=channel
How to make your Marketing dollar work more – The Art of Conversations
8 Oct
When I think of marketing, I see at least three areas where marketing needs to impact to be effective.
Make Effective Online Marketing Contents, Collaterals, and Web sites
What if I make a beautiful mousetrap and they never show up? But what if they show up and find that your mousetrap is not what they wanted. Or if they find that people who sell these mousetraps are not-friendly.
Everyone is working in Marketing
What if I make a beautiful mousetrap and they never show up? But what if they show up and find that your mousetrap is not what they wanted. Or if they find that people who sell these mousetraps are not-friendly.
Some good conversation starters
Conversations about the company in the customer and prospect’s world. What are they talking about? Why are they talking about it? How am I affected by it?
Good if you are part of conversations. Excellent if these conversations are favorable towards you. Worst if you are not part of any of these fierce conversations.
Think about possibilities that a positive product review can release on your market.
What if you could influence these conversations. Shape the discussion in the conversation-space.
using marketing – strategy
Good news is that a lot of people have been thinking about these issues and we are not alone.
Here is a list of a few resources that can get you started- Marketing’s Role: Dispatches from the field.
[still refining it. Stay tuned......]
Sustainable Product Design
5 Aug
How to design sustainable Products?
I am interested in sustainable product design. I encountered a good resources on designing sustainable products, well here it is for your green pleasure. It is from Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and design and innovation firm IDEO, Aligned for Sustainable Design: An A-B-C-D Approach to Making Better Products. The objective of this report is to educate companies about how to create internal and external alignments that will allow them to achieve their sustainable design goals. But first….
Why design sustainable products?
At least one of the reasons is cost. Companies are already made to pay for recycling these products. Soon consumers will also pay for their waste. For example, recently in Toronto the city has started charging the building owners for the waste they produce. City is encouraging the building managers to do more recycling.
In the past one really do not have to care about which box you through your coffee cup in, waste or recycling. But now you must care.
Product Life-Cycle and Product Re-Cycle
A good product designer must think about all aspects of a product life cycle. May be we have think of products not in terms of cradle to grave, but rather from Cradle to Cradle.
Talking about what matters to you.
7 May
Its been a little while since my last post. I have been up to quite a lot. Here are some of these:
- Comedy Improv
- Product Management
- Contact Improv
- Capoeira
- Usability of things
- Walks around the High Park
- Influence Strategies
Be visible or invisible, that is the question
13 Jan
The other day when I was going to work in the morning, I noticed a very interesting thing. A girl was crossing the road. Right before her a man crossed the road and went on the other side. The walk sign was blinking and counting numbers in backward order to let the pedestrians know how much time to cross the street.
I noticed that the girl took slightly longer to cross the road than the man, though she appeared to be younger than him.
It appeared that she wanted this time, where all the people stopped on the red signal to see her. She wanted to be visible. while the man before her just wanted to cross the road and get out of the way of people. It appears that he wanted to invisible, offering least difference to the routines of other people.
I began wondering. so how much of our desire to visible or not can affect our behavior. How much of that reward or deny us the bounties of life?
More I thought about it more it became obvious that the desire to be invisible is as much in existence as much is the desire to be visible. Rather it appears that desire to be invisible is more prevalent. Or should I dare say that some groups appear to be more wanting the visibility and hence their behaviors adjust accordingly.
If I can blanket apply my observations then here are few generalized statements:
- Some cultures appear to desire invisibility
- Some cultures don’t mind either
- some cultures will risk everything to be visible
This desire of visibility or lack of it can then show itself in various places.
Tradition maintainers, accountants, marketing folks, sales, programmers, dreamers, coffee-club members, water cooler philosophers, idea-managers, action-man, or why don’t you sms me types.
The fountains of money
14 Sep
What would you say if I tell you that the water fountains in this picture below are running on money?
You might think that I am being philosophical about life and things like that. You might even accuse of me being a fan of Eckhart Tolle and Oprah Winfrey. But it isn’t the case.
These fountains are working from a live data feed of currency rates. Its refreshed every five seconds, so you can see the fluctuation in the market. (At the moment dollar is not doing well against Yen and Euro.)
What a great way to visually present information. I have talked about Visual Thinking in my last post, but this is taking things a little real-life. Its almost like information becoming alive. Now that’s a wonderful way to present information.
Behind the scene, these fountains are getting data from Internet, that data is fed into processors in embedded devices controlling these fountains. So a machine is talking to another machine and it then interfaces with our world through expressions of water.
Ah! poetry of M2M, mashups, interface design, user experience, embedded devices and beauty.
Now that’s what I call visual Thinking.
Tags: VizThink Visual Thinking Evolutionary Design Poetry M2M Product Management Mashups Fountains DataFountain.com Interface Design
Visual Thinkers ! this is for you.
9 Sep
Are you like me?
Do you describe ideas more visually using back of napkins and small sticky figures, boxes and arrows. There is no idea big enough or complex enough that can not get some help from few lines, words, and pictures. I love to draw concepts.
As part of Product Management responsibilities sometimes this communication skill becomes handy. Development teams, marketing, sales, quality control, and executives they all need to be involved in various elements of my work. I have saved hundreds of hours of useless frustrations by walking up to a whiteboard and drawing few lines and sketches. Goodness, people love when you just get their idea and rest of the energy is focused on more productive aspects of discussions.
I came across this wonderful technique – sketchcasting by Richard Ziade of Basement.org. Its just amazing and extremely simple. I have already started using it as part of my work and personal life.
Here is the technique in action, where he talks about Product Management trap (double treat for you product management fans out there.”
I am currently doing my sketching using mouse and pocket PC, I know its not a convenient way, but till I get my tablet PC its serving my needs.
I will post few of my sketchcasts soon.
Tags: Product Management sketchcasting sketch.basement.org Dilawar.com Communication Visual Thinking VizThink
Evolutionary Design, or design using evolution – a work in progress
10 Aug
Lets say we met in 1995, and you just got your first email address. What would have been your response if I asked you, “so what do you think this Internet thing will be like in next ten years?” I am sure you could have predicted the whole www web and its changes, and web 2.0, and Google, and YouTube, and Facebook,……. Right!
May be you would have, but I could not? Future is pretty unpredictable.
Now, lets imagine we had a product called Evoneng, the worlds first evolution engine. To use Evoneng, you just put a product, an idea, or a phenomenon in front of it ask it to tell you, what it sees in say 5 years, 10 years or longer. Instead of just crystal balling, it uses the well tested process of nature’s evolution.
EvonEng might have come up with various combinations and we could have predicted trends like global village, social networks, return of craftsmanship etc.
Good idea for some science fantasy, right!
Not really. Its already happening.
Something on these lines is already being developed. I was researching more information on this idea to see what is out there. Here are my references (finds) so far:
Evolution and product design:
http://www.icosystem.com/articles/business/Bonabeau…
Evolution used in game design: Spores
Its a very good example of how evolution is used in game design. Its a bit techy and full of game design jargon but you can appreciate the basic theory and how its implemented in actual design.
Evolution in game design at gamedev.net
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1…
Hunch: Eric Bonabeau’s Hunch: is using evolution as part of discovering things.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/17397/
and here is Eric’s company that uses evolution, exploration to find drugs for the pharmaceutical industry
http://www.icosystem.com/apps_marketplace.htm
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Next steps
Seeing the interest of so many of you in this subject I have decided to put a detailed post or an article very soon. Check back soon or bookmark this page. For those a bit more technical souls you may click here to subscribe to my RSS Feed.
Keep creating.
Tags: Evolutionary Design Evolution Eric Bonabeau EvonEngine New Product Idea Product Management New to Market
