Innovation feeder

While you can’t judge a book by its cover, we often judge food by its packaging. One dollars worth of spaghetti sure looks a million dollars with a bit of fancy pants wrapping doesn’t it…Never underestimate the importance of appearance when it comes to food, or anything for that matter…

Why do pet care companies always put an animal on the front of their pet food? The dog can’t read but the owner can. Why are we packaging pet food for the pet? They know what dogs look like, talk to them in their own language.

I’d take a premium supermarket pet food brand & stick it in a stylish black tin with silver labeling & discrete branding with no visual reference to animals. Risky you say? I doubt it.

And another thing… why do washing detergents all use bright colours & show water or clean clothes? We make our decisions on what detergent to buy on the perceived quality of the brand. In the absence of any
laundry powders which don’t present pictures of clouds or water gushing through logos, let’s be honest, we pick the one we think looks more sophisticated or innovative or expensive than the rest.

Why not take washing powder & stick it in a metal canister that sits proudly on the laundry shelf instead of embarrassingly in the cupboard? Or better still, cook some good looking detergent granules &
put the stuff in a stylish transparent container.

For a fresh spin on packaging, make it design-orientated not product-orientated. Just because you’re selling pasta doesn’t mean you need a fat Italian & a bunch of tomatoes on the front. Lord, this is 2008.

Looking for a bit of Friday folly to procrastenate over while I garner the energy for another crack at work this afternoon, I stumbled across a new blog called ‘What If They Did’ - it’s basically a bunch of ‘what if’ ideas, a collection of random thoughts across all categories & platforms.

At first I thought might be an informal blog from someone at WhatIf The Innovation Company, after all, it would sit perfectly under their banner as a way of creating dialogue beyond the company lines. But no, it’s actually written by two creatives out of London who are using it as a playground to stash their collection of random ideas.

So whether you’re after a wacky idea for a particular category, or simply want think more laterally about how you go about generating ideas, this site is worth a look.

I love this idea for a lucky dip on the Skye Remote Control and when you think about it, it’s not so different from the concept behind iPod’s shuffle.

Check it out here

I met up with a mate of mine from the UK recently and we were talking sneakers. I myself am not a major sneakerhead but am quite a fan of Nike kicks. Having both designed our own shoes at NikeID, we were lamenting the first pair of shoes we’d each designed and how embarassed we were when they arrived in the post. After much laughter we agreed that designing your first pair of sneakers is not unlike your first kiss. . there is much anticipation and excitement in the lead up but the end result is . . disappointingly lame. Perhaps the excitement is overwhelming and delivers an expectation that the experience cannot possibly beat. Perhaps it’s lack of experience or confidence that ruins it, either way it was comforting to know that I was not the only one which had mourned that missed opportunity to create something spectacular.

And just like the first kiss, now that it’s over with I’m itching to get back into an ID lab and get my hands on another pair. Having spent considerable time thinking the experience over and looking at what makes a really good sneaker design, I’ m sure that the next time the opportunity presents itself, I shall refrain from jamming my name down the tongue of an unsuspecting sneaker and instead take my time and go slow.

Now if only Nike would bring their ID lab to Australia . . .

Korean handset manufacturers are losing overseas market share. “Ask Korean cell phone makers why they’re losing their market share overseas, and they will tell you it’s because of their focus on top-end products or the strong won”, JoongAngDaily reports. “Some industry analysts, however, take a different view. According to a report released by the research institute of LG, Korean firms are falling behind because they are oblivious to changing consumer demand and because excessive diversifying is eating into their cost competitiveness. The institute noted that today’s consumers are more interested in the “emotional” characteristics of cell phones such as the brand, design, and how the phone feels to the touch, whereas Korean firms are preoccupied with adding new functions. The think tank also criticized Korean firms for having too many models.

Above Story lifted from here

In 2003 Marc Newson designed The Talby for the Japanese market. A stunning handset that looked absolutely beautiful. I remember it because I wanted one so badly. Given the Japanese obsession wtih hyperfunctionality, it was no doubt, crammed with geek goodies. But gee it’s a good looking piece of equipment.

With mobile phones moving further and further down the functionality spectrum, bigger cameras, better screens, more WAP, IMS and other fancy acronyms… when will they stop? I’m looking for a new handset now to replace my Motorola Razr and can’t find any phones that don’t have the fancy bits. For every trend there’s a counter trend, LoFi mobile handset anyone?

Call me a nerd, call me a super geekazoid but I love the idea behind Startup Schwag™ . This little pint sized beauty is a web2.0 startup schwag tshirt of the month club. Bucking the trend of oh-so-cool fashion logos, most of us reach for the unbranded threads that fly under the radar of the try hard cool club. The Sabas or the Alannah Hills or the Edwins, where logos are vulgar but anyone worth their weight in coke can tell where it’s from just by the cut or the fabric or the way it hangs….

Well subtly is out and logos are back in nerdtown. Startup Schwag™  is based on a simple, wonderful idea recently abandoned by RubyRed Labs in San Francisco: Valley Schwag.

You pay a monthly fee and every month you get sent a logo t-shirt of one of the hottest web startups around. Whether it’s del.icio.us or Techcrunch or Digg, you get to be the first to wear a nerd brand splashed across your chest and who cares if no one knows what it means? That’s not the point is it? So go on…talk nerdy to me..

Check it out here :: Startupschwag 

For those of you Second Lifers who are waiting for the next big thing, the first 3D virtual platform from Chinese has just entered public beta testing.

HiPiHi works in a similar way to SL, users can create & customise avatars, own virtual land and share or build pre-fab objects in a similar way to the SL prim system.

If truth be told it looks very similar to SL but we’ll have to wait & see how far it takes the metaverse beyond what’s currently on offer.

The bad news is that whilst the the Beijing based company is looking to cooperate with “global leaders in the Internet and communication industry to establish a set of relevant hardware and software standards for the development of the 3D platform”, they still don’t yet support the mac platform.

Nevertheless this is a market where more than 20 million Chinese game regularly, spending almost US$500m. Although the government in Beijing was reported to be introducing controls to deter people from playing longer than three hours, the measures were designed to combat addiction to MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing games) such as World of Warcraft and Lineage II.

Given that metaverses are time intensive games and in fact, depend very much on the amount of time spent in-world (especially for those residents operating genuinely viable virtual businesses), it will be interesting to see how HiPiHi tackles the big men up top.

One to watch. Check it out :: HiPiHi

When your screen is white - an empty word page, or the Google page, your computer consumes 74 watts. Yet when it’s black it consumes only 59 watts.

Mark Ontkussh wrote an article about the energy saving that would be achieved if Google had a black screen, taking in account the huge number of page views, according to his calculations, 750 mega watts/hour per year would be saved.

In a response to this article Google created a black version of its search engine, called Blackle, with the exact same functions as the white version, but with lower energy consumption.

Check out the full article :: EcoIron

For those of you who don’t work for a big cheese corporate with fancy pants business cards, Moo is definitely worth a look. They’ve taken what is essentially a fairly boring & standard product, the old business card, and breathed into it, a new lease of life.

Enter the unbusiness card. These pint sized little beauties are about half the size of your normal business card so they already look different. Plus they link in with Flickr so you can use your Flickr photos on the back of each card (you can use as many images as you want to make a variety of cards) to personalise them.

They’re tiny, they look hot & they’re cheap. What more could a girl want? except maybe a proper job…

Check it out :: Moo

The latest addition to shopping & trading online is Swaptree, a site which lets users trade books, videos, music and games peer to peer.

You simply log on and create a list of things you’re looking to trade and a list of items you’d like to trade for. Swaptree reviews your lists and sets up the trades for you, the idea being that you’re willing to trade anything on your ‘trade’ list for anything on your ‘want’ list.

It doesn’t cost you anything to trade so it looks like their business model depends on advertiser revenue rather than any user generated revenue.

They’re in the midst of beta testing and are set to launch 4th July to the public.

Check it out :: swaptree

Gamers wanting a deeper narrative, story lovers wishing they could step inside the action, or simply anyone interested in the next wave of gaming will want to check out Storytron, software for interactive storytelling that is now available in pre-alpha.

Creative types can use Storytron’s Storyworld Authoring Tool (called Swat) to construct a “universe of dramatic possibilities” by establishing the personalities and agendas of a set of characters, along with other elements like locations, props and occurrences. Players within one of these created Storyworlds are story protagonists; their actions shape events.

Some in the gaming community are skeptical of Crawford’s efforts but if you’re an intrepid early adopter, you can download a version of Swat and start creating your dramas today.

by Jonathan Gottlieb
Check out the full story at Coolhunting.com