Innovation « Psychobserver

Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category

21st
Aug
2007

Crocs, Birkenstock and … rubber boots

It all started when Crocs became more and more common in Hong Kong. The first Crocs that I spotted few years back really changed my vision of the “shoe world”. I started looking at people’s feet all the time in the street, waiting for the bus, at the office, etc.

In regards to Crocs, it was really interesting to see its development. The first people wearing those were:

Kids at the beach or during hikes (and sometimes their parents)
Single women making a statement (I guess rejecting the image of fashionable and femininity found in the media)
People standing all day long for their work and where comfort was more important than aesthetics (in bars for example because who looks at the barman’s feet)

I really realized Crocs were getting big when I asked 3 ladies in a shop about the brand. They replied that they were buying all the colors available. The first one had 6 pairs, the second one 4 pairs and the last one said, a bit embarrassed, that she only had 1 pair but that she would catch up. And now Crocs are everywhere and more and more people with different profiles wear them.

Still, there are not as common in Hong Kong as Birkenstock shoes. Now, this is an amazing phenomenon. Birkenstock has exploded in the past few months in Hong Kong and their shops recently opened in Times Square (Causeway Bay) never gets empty. To me Birkenstock is very different from Crocs, but the company itself seems to disagree as they propose what I would simply call “fake” Crocs in their impressive product line-up. I find this pretty disappointing on the part of Birkenstock.

But all this is history already. The next big thing is arriving in Hong Kong (arrived already, but we only start now to see the impact on the streets). And this big thing is “Rubber Boots”! It took me a while to take rubber boots seriously, but now they are getting big, and I think companies should make sure they ride that wave. You think rubber boots all look the same? Take a look at this Web site with recommendations on designs…

[digg=http://digg.com/business_finance/Crocs_Birkenstock_and_Rubber_Boots]For now of course rubber boots are only for ladies, and guys don’t jump on the boat, but that could change soon enough. I am waiting for the first shop to open (maybe it already did) that sells only rubber boots.

13th
Aug
2007

Customizing a bag

I always carry my MP3 player with me and have been struggling with my earphone cable tangling around… so I thought about this simple design.

… I may start customizing all my clothes and accessories…

23rd
Dec
2006

"Better Living – Product Design Contributes" Expo

The Hong Kong heritage museum has organized a 6 months or so product design exhibition as part of the government initiative to promote Hong Kong as a design platform for Asia. All the exhibitors are Hong Kong designers or companies (See Pictures on Flickr).

It is interesting to see that most well-known Hong Kong designers have set up their own consultancy or design their own products on a small scale and in relatively low risk categories. Indeed the exhibition has a lot of “gift & Premium” types of products.

Still, the TTI Group area is very interesting, with a wide range of products displayed and much efforts spent on highlighting the design process behind each of these. To me, that should be the spirit of the whole exhibition and is the best way to promote design and push people to get more involved.

I was very disappointed at the Philips Design booth. Nothing much to see there. It seems they tried to build an “experience” booth with too much atmosphere and very little content.

22nd
Dec
2006

Interactive Floors

There are more and more interactive floors appearing all over town in Hong Kong. These things even though they do not work perfectly are a great way to entertain people and make them interact with their surroundings. And kids especially love it…

22nd
Dec
2006

Few Links – 22 Dec. 2006

The usual three links on three topics that have nothing to do with one another:

From BusinessWeek is an article about “China’s Innovation Barriers“. My thought on this: Looking at China’s rapid evolution in the past decades, why would being innovative be much of a problem? China has overcome much larger problems already.
From BusinessWeek again is an article about “Matsushita’s Green Strategy“. A lot of interesting figures about Japanese companies in this article. The biggest take-away is that being greener is really a huge commitment and investment that does not bring return right away, so companies had better start quick.
Posted on Experientia Blog “Putting People First” is an article about Usability called “Introducing Usability 2.0“. I really hate that 2.0 craze, but having done Usability Testing and writing reports sometimes even after a Web site had been launched, I totally identify with the writer. Great read.

16th
Nov
2006

Few links – 16 Nov. 2006

The onliness of Strong Brands is a BusinessWeek article about ZAG, a new book from Marty Neumeier. The book talks about the “onliness” of brands, meaning their uniqueness. It emphasize the need to create unique experiences as opposed to best experiences, arguing that best experiences leads to following common practices and fail to differentiate the brand. The article also emphasizes the need to link brands with long-term trends to create a bridge with customers, as well as be critical towards results from market research that sometimes fail to identify a killer product.
(Links in French) WAT.TV is an online platform launch by French TF1 (The channel number 1 in France). In LeMonde, leading French newspaper, the article entitled “TF1 fait de la television avec du Web” (TF1 does TV using the Internet) discusses the new strategy employed by the channel to bridge traditional TV programming with the Web. The online platform allows the community to share pictures, videos, text and so on. On a weekly basis, the channel will choose a selection of short videos that they will broadcast late at night on their main channel. The authors of the videos receive Euro 100 for that. I find the approach pretty nice, but I wonder if a significant community can really emerge around a TV channel… it seems too restrictive to me.
The last link is to the SonyEricsson ad that is showing right now on Hong Kong TV. The ad is very neat and nicely done… but at the end the phone rings and a guy says: “Hello…”. Am I the only one who wants to complete the sentence with “Moto”? Every time I see the ad I think about Motorola more than SonyEricsson…

11th
Nov
2006

RSS for Everyone?

RSS feeds changed my life. They are the best way to retrieve information on a daily basis from multiple sources of information. Everybody knows that I guess… or do they?

Even though RSS feeds have been around for a long time, their potential has not been fully utilized today. One of the reason for this is that whatever easy we believe, as heavy Internet users, it is to use RSS or to understand the logic behind, well it is not. I was transferring all my feeds this afternoon from MyYahoo to NetVibes, as I think NetVibes offers more flexibility for me to build my own “stay-in-touch-with-the-World” page. It took me hell of a lot of time… adding all the feeds and very often having to copy/paste RSS feeds URLs. And I am not even talking about finding new feeds here.

Talking about my dad again…
I am sorry that I will mention my dad again. Not that I have a fixation on him, but while he was visiting Hong Kong I gave him am Internet crash course! I decided to show him the power of the Internet and how it could change his way of working. Some stuff freaked him out, like being able to find pictures of the house he just bought in a tiny village in the South-East of France on Flickr. Others amazed him like the amount of information that can be found on Wikipedia. But above all, he felt most enthusiastic about RSS feeds and how it could help him save so much time… save time, that is once you have everything set up.

All this takes so much time
And that’s where for me the major problem is. To be able to make an efficient use of RSS feeds, well on top of being very comfortable with all that Internet stuff, you have to have so much time. There is so much information out there that finding really interesting content is really a challenge, especially for the generation of people who did not grow up browsing the Web before they could speak. And this segment of the population is in dire need for information, as they hold position of major responsibility in multinationals for example.

Bloomberg for everybody
So, if we look at how things work in the Financial world, where Bloomberg and others feed real-time information to traders around the World. Wouldn’t a concept like that nowadays work with general information where users could choose to be informed about special topics of interest? As many Web sites do it, it is great to leave it to the community to decide what is interesting, but for people with little Internet experience and little time, the task of choosing the type of content that is interesting to them could be left to one or several experts.

Following Pandora concept
A Web site that has nothing to do with information but that I find so great is Pandora, where the system builds a radio suited to your own taste, just based on the name of a band or a song that you provide. When a song comes up, you can just say that you like it or not and the system will tailor further the radio. It is that kind of simplicity that could make to my mind RSS feeds and information providers reach their full potential. Of course Pandora is a huge initiative that necessitates to review and categorize every piece of music that can be found. Could that be done with information? My feeling is that leaving an algorithm and the whole community do it may not be enough… and may leave out a part of the population who would be avid users is they were given the opportunity to try.

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