Feb 27
lindsayrgwattBusiness packaging, Tropicana
When you work at a medium- or large-sized company, you have an inherent advantage over small companies/start-ups: somebody else got you there. The law of averages means that it’s pretty unlikely that you’re the person who started the company from scratch and built into the Goliath that it is today.
When you work at a large company, you’ve got a lot of security as, even if you don’t show up to work for a month, someone’s still going to sell something and the company won’t die, and the shareholders will get their dividends, etc. This is a Faustian pact: in return for security, you’ve got to promise not to rock the boat and take the whole thing down (some bankers right now are learning about this). In practical terms, this means that most large companies are risk averse and bureaucratic.
But every now and then someone takes a risk. It can succeed spectacularly, or – as Tropicana is now learning – fail miserably. Tropicana recently decided to change their packaging. It used to feature a beautiful orange on the cover. An orange that looked so ripe and juicy that you had to buy the package because it was making your mouth water.
Now, they’ve replaced it with anonymous packaging with colours so muted that you can’t tell which package is which. For an 8-step takedown of this packaging failure, check out the Astuteo blog; this event is going to be an MBA case study in what not to do one day, and this blog entry will save you your admissions fee. There’s more coverage at The Times.
So how bad is it? Well, I went to my local Gristedes and snapped a photo of the juice section (I have to use that cameraphone for something). Guess how many different types of Tropicana there are?
There are at least 7. And that’s why they’re switching back to their original packaging.
Feb 21
lindsayrgwattUncategorized m4change, mobile technology
I’m at the Mobile Tech 4 Social Change barcamp. Here are some notes on what’s going on:
The keynote is by Harvard’s Ethan Zuckerman. Via Skype. We won-the mobile phone is the most powerful tool for democracy in the developing world.
Driven by U.S. phones and tariffs catching up to Japan and also Kenya-where you do your banking and possibly job.
Opportunities for activists: mobile phones make it easy to mobilize. Three years ago 5,000 people wore black and stood outside the U.S. embassy-and no one knows who organized it. Now seeing government shut down SMS part of network: Cambodia before elections, for three years in Ethiopia. Chinese government is now sending out SMS to tell people not to go to protests.
These protests work because they manifest our social networks. People protest as their friend invited them, not because organizer invited 20k people.
Not the only tool: in Africa the best tool is FM radio. Real power is combining mobile with it. In Ghana, people who see electoral fraud and call talk radio via mobile-data is then public and electoral commission must investigate. In Congo, people can submit questions to government officials on radio show via SMS. For instance, women text in and ask if soldiers are allowed to command their houses-and Defence Minister can say ‘no’ and whole country here’s answer.
Frequently found that users don’t have same behaviour as designers. Nokia has wasted a lot of time giving N95s to create citiZen journalists-who them don’t use the phone or can’t get interviews using a phone.
Interesting project: Ushahidi. Crowdsource crisis info. Worked really well in Kenya, but struggling in Congo as people don’t have similar technological sophistication. Also did not have anyone actually run the project in the DMC-were using server from South Africa.
I led a session on Mobile 4 Health. I didn’t get to write down too much, but here are some thoughts:
For health: need to check out what google is doing via SMS in Kenya. Free calls amongst doctors in Ethiopia.
Need to look at Rwanda for innovative health care. MTN for phone coverage-3G. Fiber across Kigali! University of Washington for weight loss flower (PDF).
UPDATE: Here are links to a bunch of related medical studies:
Feb 19
lindsayrgwattNYC, Random architecture
Last night Rich and I went to see Daniel Libeskind get interviewed at The Strand bookstore. Here are a couple of interesting anecdotes:
- Amongst his commissions, he designs private residences, but he’s never lived in a house – only apartments
- It took him 12 years to get his Jewish Museum Berlin built. It opened at 10:30 am on September 11, 2001. He said that he was so happy as it was the first time in 12 years he hadn’t had to worry about history. And four hours later he saw the attacks and decided to move back to New York
- When he grew up in New York in the ’60s he used to hang out near the WTC as it was being built – his dad was a printer in the area and was an architecture student at Cooper Union. Now he’s the master planner for the site. (Side note: he also used to hang out in The Strand)
- Some interesting thoughts from him:
- Thinks life is a compromise between birth and death
- 95% of all his buildings “have been done before” but the other 5% is truly new
- Killer quote on why he builds: If you could put it in words, you wouldn’t have to build a building.
Feb 18
lindsayrgwattBusiness google, Kaizen, Toyota
I started my career as a management consultant and one of the concepts that was drilled into our heads was the “experience curve“. It’s the notion that organizations learn over time and this enables them to produce goods at a lower cost per unit – and therefore makes it harder for competitors to underprice them to steal market share.
The other thing notion that was drilled into our heads was the notion of “kaizen” – best exemplified by how Toyota makes continuous small changes to its production lines and therefore is constantly lowering its costs (and subsequently becoming the best auto manufacturer in the world).
I couldn’t help but think of these two concepts today when I read about how Google performs searches on Greg Linden’s blog. The following is total geek-speak, but has stunning ramifications:
The attention to detail at Google is remarkable. Jeff gleefully described the various index compression techniques they created and used over the years. He talked about how they finally settling on a format that grouped four delta of positions together in order to minimize the number of shift operations needed during decompression. Jeff said they paid attention to where their data was laid out on disk, keeping the data they needed to stream over quickly always on the faster outer edge of the disk, leaving the inside for cold data or short reads. They wrote their own recovery for errors with non-parity memory. They wrote their own disk scheduler. They repeatedly modified the Linux kernel to meet their needs. They designed their own servers with no cases, then switched to more standard off-the-rack servers, and now are back to custom servers with no cases again.
Google’s agility is impressive. Jeff said they rolled out seven major rearchitecture efforts in ten years. These changes often would involve completely different index formats or totally new storage systems such as GFS and BigTable. In all of these rollouts, Google always could and sometimes did immediately rollback if something went wrong. In some of these rollouts, they went as far as to have a new datacenter running the new code, an old datacenter running the old, and switch traffic between datacenters. Day to day, searchers constantly were experiencing much smaller changes in experiments and testing of new code. Google does all of this quickly and quietly, without searchers noticing anything has changed.
What this means is Google has and is doing everything they can to wrench the tiniest performance and accuracy gains out of their search. Nothing is too small to change. Toyota’s famous for rejigging it’s production lines to save 5 seconds on a procedure (do this a few hundred times and suddenly your productivity goes way up). When Google engineers make sure that files are stored closer to one another on disk so that they can be accessed faster, they’re doing the same thing, but with bits instead of rivets.
What’s truly phenomenal is that they’re able to maintain this culture despite having a 60+% in search. Toyota is battling GM for the title of world’s biggest automaker, but it’s still a hugely fragmented industry and there’s no global winner. Search, on the other hand, is consolidated amongst Google/Yahoo/Microsoft in most countries.
Feb 16
lindsayrgwattBusiness google, social media, twitter
There are lots of articles out there about how what you say and do online can impact your job/job search, particularly given that once Google indexes something, it doesn’t want to give it up. It’s one thing for the 18-22 year-old set to figure this out; it’s a whole other ball of wax when it’s tech savvy professionals.
Yet, in the past few weeks there have been two massive screw-ups where someone posted something online they shouldn’t have. First, advertising exec James Andrews went to Memphis to see Fedex – one of his company’s larget clients and twittered the following at the airport:
True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, ‘I would die if I had to live here.’
One of Fedex’s employees found out and it almost/may cost Ketchum their business.
Similarly, the Chairman of the Virginian Repbulicans recently twittered that they’d seized control of the house by convincing a Democrat to switch. Except that they hadn’t, and the Democrats figured out who it was and convinced him to stay.
What’s fascinating about these blunders is that they’ve been indexed and are therefore never going to go away. In the past you could just let your errors fade with time, but now they’re sucked in by Google and the blogosphere and will follow you around, possible forever.
Feb 15
lindsayrgwattFood, NYC recipe
Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, and in addition to these flowers:
Wendy was also the recipient of a set of Petit Fours and truffles from Three Tarts (they get bonus points for lavender- and chili-flavoured truffles):
I also made her a dinner of tequila lime chicken with cilantro dressing. There’s a secretly nerdy reason why I made it – I was at a vendor conference on Thursday and they showed that page as an example of their technology; I thought the recipe looked great and so we made it. It’s a great dish and very light – just be aware that the prep time is massive (you’ve got to make the oil and plucking leaves off of cilantro ain’t the easiest thing…).
Valentine’s Day was almost perfect – the only snag was that we went out to Bushwick for a party, only to get there and find out that it had been shut down by the police. On the plus side, we taught our cab driver how to navigate the backwoods of Brooklyn…
Feb 14
lindsayrgwattNYC, Random
Perhaps this is a sign of just how desperate the Great Recession of 2007 – 20?? is making us become:
That’s right – tomorrow night one lucky lady will going win $5,000 is plastic surgery if they party at a certain NYC nightclub. I wonder what the AMA thinks of Dr A. Abraham Levin’s promotion?
Feb 13
lindsayrgwattNYC, Random photography
Today was one of those magical days in New York where the light colours the city in unexpected ways. First, check out this dumpster that was transformed from banal into a battered modernist gem:
Later today I noticed the wind ripping through a nearby construction site, turing the steel skeleton into a giant lung:
Undoubtedly I’m being a little romantic, but this city never ceases to surprise…
Feb 10
lindsayrgwattRandom siberia, weather
A few weeks back it was abnormally cold here in NYC (global warming has made us wimps) and my friend Richard and I were speculating where the coldest livable place was. Richard, being from South Africa, thought that perhaps Duluth, MN was the coldest place on Earth. I countered with Iqualuit, Nunavut. Much colder.
However, Richard, not to be outdone, diligently went away and spent a few days trying to see if he could find anywhere to trump it…and he did. Yakutsk, Siberia. Words cannot describe how cold this place is, but a photo can. Here’s the weather forecast from a few days back:
Richard – you win.
Feb 08
lindsayrgwattNYC, Random comics, culture
Today Mike, Sarah, Wen and I went to ComicCon 2009.
Why, you ask are four people with an average age north of 30 going to a comic book convention? Easy – this is one of the greatest subcultures out there and it’s incredible to experience. Where else can you get arrested by storm troopers…
…show that you have the power…
…or pose for a picture with Darth Vader and his henchmen?
There are only two large comic conventions in America (the other’s in San Diego) so it’s a huge draw. Despite the size, it’s democratic – the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers had to stand in line to check their coats just like everyone else:
Similarly, despite his nefarious criminal history, Cobra Commander was not pestered as he went about:
Far and away the most popular costumes were the Star Wars characters. The security guards were dressed as storm troopers (this one’s making a new friend):
And we also saw a wookie or two…
There was also the more traditional cosplay. These New York-based ninjas screamed “This is cosplay! This is otaku!” as they bravely took the escalator to the main floor:
I’m sure we’ll see them at this year’s Anime Festival.
The fans are the best reason to attend the conference, but in addition, there are a lot of other things to see. There are more collectibles than you ever thought imagined. This includes loads of figurines you’ve never seen before:
Plus some familiar ones like these Emperor’s Guards. If you look closely at the photo below you’ll see that the guard’s pike is worth exactly $6. This subculture is nothing if not meticulous:
There are thousands of old classic comics to be bought:
The other well-represented category are video games. I was almost reduced to tears by how amazing graphics have gotten. The only thing that stopped me from running out and buying a television/game system/few games was the sight of GTA Chinatown Wars for the Nintendo DS. Wendy’s got one and I think she might be getting a gift soon…
And then there are those collectibles that you never knew you needed but are there anyways:
The conference also has workshops and previews for upcoming movies and TV shows. Sarah is a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer so we went to watch the teaser for Joss Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse (For those who aren’t in the know [I wasn't], he created Buffy). The place was packed:
I don’t watch TV, so I don’t think I could truly appreciate the immensity of the occasion, but the people next to us sure did. They repeatedly asked us how excited we were and whether this was the best thing ever. Then, when one of the actors on stage forgot what he’d been talking about (he’s famous for his chest), they started screaming “Your character” as loud as they could. They were definitely true fans and got their money’s worth.
Besides the people, the product and the promos, the other big reason to go to the show is the sheer creativity of some of the folks there. People have created whole worlds that revolve around the tongue-in-cheek:
If you’ve every been to New Jersey you’ll know how improbable a New Jersey-based superhero truly is – and perhaps that’s why the series’ slogan is “finally South Jersey has a hero it can depend on…some of the time“.
Similarly, The Misadventures of Electrolyte and the Justice Purveyors celebrates a suite of ambivalent superheroes.
Where else will you find such characters as The Capitalist and The Sentence Finisher? Electrolyte himself has the power to sober up drunks. It sounds like a fake public service announcement, but it’s not:
Similarly, I doubt you’ve imagined Space Vixen (who is keeping Britain safe as we speak)…
…Teddy Scares…
…and the guy you love to hate, Tofu: the Vegan Zombie:
There are also a few things that are less comic-y and more graphic arts-based. KidRobot had a booth:
And the guys from Dumbrella had some interesting stuff (alas, I only bought a few pins):
There are only two downsides to ComicCon. The first is that some of the attendees have made some interesting, uh, life choices, that must make it quite hard to be anything but a misfit. For instance, there was one guy (I don’t have a photo) who had shaved his head and tattooed his entire head so that it looked like a viking helmet.
The other drawback was the awkward sexuality that hung over the convention. Some guys tried to convince us to check out these movies/comics (Ko-Kane: Bounty Huntress [that's not a typo]) because they featured “Women with swords in their hands. What more could you want?”:
Somebody else was giving away these lovely book liners. Yes, that is a woman in a bikini sucking on an ice creamsicle as she enjoys her book:
And when we walked out of the Joss Whedon screening we saw this girl playing with her gun and having her friends take photos. I literally felt like I’d walked onto a movie set in the San Fernando Valley:
Despite that, it’s well worth attending. If you can make it next year, be sure to go. This year I only made it to the Sunday of the convention; next year I’ll be going to the big dance on Saturday (and I’ll blog about it again).
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