The Innovation Forum is a monthly discussion I lead talking about “new stuff that is made useful”. This forum was on RSS and how to managing the deluge of information that we get today, and how to surf smarter and faster.
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Last year we installed a water filter due to some perfluorochemicals that were leaching into the groundwater by a nearby manufacturer. It’s a nice reverse-osmosis, 4-stage filtering system that fits under our sink and is suppose to remove all sorts of volatile organic compounds.
I thought I’d share what the 1st filter pulled out of the water in the last 6 months.
The filter on the left is after 6 months of use. The filter on the right is what it looked like new.
Zaky’s 2010: The Year Apple Enters a New Golden Age:
“To get an idea of how deeply Apple continues to penetrate the market, last year the company produced 50% less in sales and over 71% less in earnings than it will this year. That means the 2010 Apple is nearly 50% larger than the Apple of 2009 – almost an entirely different company. If this growth continues into 2011, Apple will surpass Exxon (XOM) to become the largest corporation in America.”
There are a lot of numbers in the article. Pretty interesting though. Especially when you consider “Microsoft spent seven times as much as Apple on R&D over the past four years” (via Daring Fireball). One has to wonder how Apple does so much with so little.
Merholz writes a good reminder in Experience IS the Product… and the only thing users care about.
Building a product or a feature that works is only half the problem, and probably a lot less of the problem at that. How do people find get it? How do they learn how to use it? When do they use it? How do they fix it if it breaks? How do they pay for it? What happens if they don’t use it?
Do they even *like* using it?
Metacool says the first principle of innovation is:
“constantly seek to experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world”
Certainly learn from others, but it reminds me of #9 in Bre Pettis’s Done Manifesto:
“People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.”
To make real advances, to innovate and to learn, will require that you try, fail, and try again. It’s called experimentation. And as they said at Grumman Aerospace in the 60′s, “1 good test is worth a 1000 expert opinions”.
Amen.
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