In design though New York has yet to elevate itself into the same realm as Milan. Nothing unsusual in that. Paris and London are both trying to define their contribution to international design. But this is New York, and a group of young designers and gallerists has decided it’s time the city began expressing its design position more effusively.

“The last ten years have been very hard for design in New York,” says Odile Hainaut who co-organises Wanted Design, a growing sub-plot in the design week narrative. “Perhaps going back to 9/11 and the trauma of that, but also stores have opened and then closed because of the financial difficulties. So it has not been easy. But over the last two years something has changed. A group of 30 something designers has come together, designers who are also entrepreneurs, and who are excited about going out and creating a movement.” That movement is Wanted Design.

Design Week in New York has been synonymous, until recently, with the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, which, while dynamic in its own right, is hardly inclusive of the New York design community. Wanted Design has grown a more eclectic design community around its base at Terminal Stores.

One of the highlights of the week will be a three day competition between design schools from France and the USA to create prototype lighting designs, using 3D printing as an in situ maker technology. It’s meant to explore the possibilities of technology and design,  interactive design and new forms of manufacturing.

What makes Wanted Design distinctly a New York experience? “Something was needed here,” says Odile, who also reflects that representation of the design community to the world at large is still poor, “that did not replicate what happens in Paris or Milan and what it is we try to reflect is the tremendous sense of possibility that greets the visitor to New York. Out on the street is a sense of possibility, this idea that when you come here you are welcomed and you are given opportunity.”

Co-Organisers of Wanted Design, New York, Odile Hainault and Claire Pijoulat

You can find Wanted Design at Terminal Stores, 269 11th Avenue, between 27th and 28th Street. Design Week opens 19th May.

After Tech Boost, Design Begins to Pique Interest in New York was posted on Moxie Insight -

Seems like there are least four ways to look at it. One says you can’t mix engagement with aggressive ads anyway, especially on a social network; a second says creating contextual ads relies on knowing what people are doing on Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube too, so the social graph is not Facebook’s to own and Facebook needs to buck up its sales’ effort rather than rely on sounding gnomic about the graph.

And then there’s an argument that says, GM has the wrong strategy or an incomplete strategy – this is not Facebook’s issue. But there’s a fourth view, which is General Motors will have to advertise on Facebook anyway. Facebook will have to innovate to make its social networking environment a more interesting place for brands to be. But even without that, GM will keep spending those dollars on Facebook ads.

Navigate these issues and brands can do very well with Facebook. The first realization has to be that ads are not the dominant way of communicating in social. According to Dennis O’Malley, whose start-up Ready Pulse extracts conversation and engagement for brands across different social platforms, Facebook’s advantage lies in the vast numbers of people who have given brands “permission to communicate“.  It’s obvious really. The big advantage in social marketing, as distinct from search, does not lie in display or text ads.

“Use the analogy of organic versus paid search,” advises O’Malley. “We’re still finding, certainly in the B2B space, that organic beats paid every time. Similarly people go to Facebook and opt into communication with a brand. They don’t opt in to being marketed at.” That’s why, for example, Dell‘s customer service strategy on Facebook works well. It is rooted in engagement.

Combining organic, conversational behavior with any kind of advertising could be a cardinal error. It’s like trying to cultivate grass with a plough. The two are connected but not necessarily sequential. “If you are getting deep engagement, it is already providing the display ad value for you,” O’Malley adds.

However, Michael Scissons at Syncapse, simply doesn’t believe Facebook will or can give up on Facebook ads. “Does the market really believe this headline? For me, unquestionably, they will spend on Facebook ads.” More on that below.

What’s also apparent in the social arena is that the “context”, the holy grail for advertisers, has to be built up across a number of sites. Yes, Facebook does track where people are going to around the web, but sites like Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter elicit different behaviors and conversations. New advocates emerge in these destinations.

Good “context” becomes a complex beast. The social web is precisely what it says, a web, and not just a social networking site, however hard Facebook has worked to trap all the relevant data. Context is not Facebook’s alone. But nor is it necessarily a straightforward asset either.

People who have taken up advocacy positions provide a great real-time “legacy” that brands might want to use. Comments, compliments, buzz, rave reviews.

But is it appropriate or effective to see this in the context of ads? Say for example you have a whole tranche of young people liking, tweeting and pinning a new board design or uploading a video to YouTube of that board on the waves. The value of their advocacy is worth more than any display ad or text ad. La Jolla, in retail, is doing some great work in building its own data on advocates, not relying on Facebook’s graph but collating data from across different platforms and building strong relationships with superfans in the social space, not just on Facebook.

Ads  are meant to trigger an action, like a sale.  Particularly in the context of a high value object like a car people simply won’t be going to Facebook for a purchase. Ads, you might say, become irrelevant except as a way of getting people to your brand page. And that’s why Scissions believes GM will keep spending.

Facebook Ads, Do They Work or Is GM Being Rash? Wrong Questions. was posted on Moxie Insight -

The Glassdoor rankings are based on feedback from employees, say Glassdoor, “who were asked one simple survey question: Do you approve of the way your CEO is leading the company? In the last year alone, more than 280,000 employees rated their CEO on Glassdoor.”

The top rated tech CEOs behind Tim Cook are Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm and Larry Page of Google, followed by Paul Ottelini of Intel and Paul Maritz, VMWare. Whitman is in 9th.

The top social CEOs in the tech business behind Whitman are Larry Ellison, Larry Page, TIm Cook and Jeff Bezos. So here are the top ten social CEOs among those most highly rated by their employees.

And here are the top ten Tech CEOs as listed by employees in the Glassdoor survey.

Who Are The Most Social CEOs in Tech ? was posted on Moxie Insight -

It happens all the time yet it also means changing our minds about something and that we find very difficult.  Here’s an example of easy change. Five years ago people did not talk about owned, bought and earned media. Now it is so commonplace that owned, bought and earned are thought of as “traditional” marketing terms. And what about Forbes? From exclusive platform to open platform. Big change in mindset.

So how do people think differently and, in the process, permit themselves to behave differently? How come we sometimes find it so easy to think differently and yet at other times struggle? Dyer and Gregersen point out that a lot of innovation comes back to associative thinking – which is, or can be, a learned skill. That is to say, it happens when we mash up a lot of ideas or sources of information.

I don’t find that so compelling.  Seems to me thinking differently has a much wider role than innovation and the skill is more than just popping a new idea, after a lot of hard work. Y Combinator recently announced they would take on businesses that didn’t even have an idea – a sign that we are now looking for a type of person not just the result of a process, which is why thinking differently becomes so important.

In his recent book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman points out that we have two thought process on the go. One is slow burn, expertise-building that allows us to organise and access a body of evidence about our lives and reality. It could be the expertise of a bus driver who takes the same three routes daily and knows, instinctively, every traffic light from A – Z. Or it can be a chess grand master who has burned thousands of move options into his or her memory.

The other style of thinking is the rapid decision making that we might have to do when we’re forced to recognise new patterns or respond to the emotional urges that govern how we treat people around us.

We oscillate between these two modes of course, but in a rapidly changing world, it’s the thinking-fast bit that tends to dominate. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in Outliers, most people with genius at their fingertips have been working at it for at least 10,000 hours. But who has time for that?

In this fast changing world we need to balance how to think differently with how to grow expertise. The reality is to think differently we need to be good at thinking. To think differently you need to be conscious of where your intellectual and emotional energies are invested and when to switch.  But to think differently you have to think well. Being smart becomes your platform, your expertise. To do that though we need to change something that is fundamental to how we function. Can we rebalance between thinking fast and slow?

1. Knowing your habits of mind

Fifty years ago we tended to have very explicit worldviews. That might mean being a socialist and believing that the future lies with collective ownership, or of course a capitalist with a belief that free markets are the best way to allocate resources, and rewards. Most people have a worldview. They might not be fully conscious of it but it is there. Very few people are comfortable with making their worldview explicit and vulnerable. Let me give you an example.

Like a lot of people I tend to take the side of the underdog. Over the past year I’ve realized it’s been a significant limit on my ability to think clearly. Being part of the Forbes platform I’ve had to think instead about how to celebrate success. I’m not great at it but at least now I can see my old habit of mind for what it was – neither fast nor slow it was an addiction to a singular viewpoint.

#Rule 1. You need to put yourself into situations that expose the singular elements of your thinking, so you can grow multiple perspectives.

2. Knowing and breaking your category preferences

A while back I worked with a mathematician, a PhD from Cambridge. The guy was impossible to debate with because he believed his opinions were proofs. A point of view is what I had. Proofs is what he did  You might be a history major at University or you might have an MBA or, like him, two degrees in maths.  The chances are your academic background will similarly condition how you think about a problem. We also know all is not well in the academy – change is happening too fast, so the chances are, also, that how and what you were taught to think, carry liabilities.

One of the most famous mind-changing events was when one set of medics discovered a bacterium that they thought caused stomach ulcers. It’s a famous case. Gastroenterologists resisted the finding for a decade.  What people don’t often point out though is that the doctors with the bacterium were bacteriologists with no category conflict when they found…. a bacterium. Gastroenterologists believed bacteria cannot survive in the gut and so had no history of studying them.

Clearly we need to improve our ability to deal with category conflicts. Before we do that though we need to be more conscious of our category preferences – you have to ask how do I see the world, what is different about how I arrive at explanations from the way my friends do, whose eyes am I looking through?  The doctors with the bacterium had to be very astute at how they constructed their concepts and category of explanation (it gained acceptance when they branded it a new class of disease, rather than a mistaken explanation on the part of other doctors). So thinking differently is also about working the permissions, letting people give you some scope to think differently.

How To Think Differently (And Why!) was posted on Moxie Insight -

On Designer Daily I discovered the picture you see right of frame  from a book on Chinese graphic design. What a set of images! The book illustrates at length how European design trends were mirrored in Chinese graphic design in the 1920s and 30s. Designer Daily is in fact a blog written by Mirko Humbert, a Swiss graphic designer. I was also taken by the Swiss handicraft design branding below.

Top Design Mag was founded by Alexandru and Bogdan, two Romanian designers. Like Designer Daily it is a blog, sometimes with external contributions, but mainly driven by the observational passions of its founders. And that’s what I like about each site, that they are not compiled by editorial teams. They are “individual” pursuits.  Both are really worth your time, on those occasions when you really need time, and an opportunity, to think differently.

Two Sources of Inspiration for When You Need To Think Differently was posted on Moxie Insight -

Books of ideas go back some years. The first, in the modern age in the English language, dates back to the 1540s. The ideas sent to the court of Henry 8^th were used by historian Joan Thirsk in a book with the uninspiring title of Economic Policy and Projects. “Projects” was essentially a book about the entrepreneurial ideas that people sent into the Court to seek funding or special permissions to execute.

The modern equivalent is the “call for ideas”. They are remarkably common – used here byBlog Her for example, and here in a“call for ideas” for new products for healthy older people, courtesy of design magazine Domus, and here in a call for ideas to re-imagine the 57 acres on which the Pruitt-Igoe housing project stood in St Louis…. in fact calls for ideas are becoming a common place. Just look at the Economist Ideas site and Gary Hamel’s Mix-Fix. And of course TED, PICNIC, DLD etc. Opportunities to vent ideas are voluminous.

There is also an annual Festival of Ideas in the UK, which awards a prize to the best idea book. There is a book on The Art of the Idea by John Hunt, and a book if ideas produced by the UK newspaper society. Right now there is a Book of Ideas open at Future Mobility Now, a project of the European car industry to define mobility in the near future by connecting with young people.

The sliding house looks to me to be the most impractical idea imaginable. What do you do with the furniture when it is time to take the house in for the night? But that’s part of the beauty of ideas. They’re not necessarily meant to be practical, though I’m sure dRMM would argue their design is perfectly practical. Ideas, though, are intended first and foremost to exercise our imaginations. I chose the sliding house as my favorite from The Book Of Idea because it is crazy, radical and real, qualities we need a lot more of.

Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701

The Sliding House and The Book of Ideas was posted on Moxie Insight -

In terms of what Facebook “gets” about mobile there’s no question it lags the market, and the company admitted as much this week. It isn’t able to sell enough inventory for the number of people accessing the site via mobile.

But that might also reflect something else – mobile as an ad medium is being oversold. The ability to deliver contextual ads to people on the move, just ain’t easy. Getting the right context in the time available? I suspect it’s not happening. But let’s focus on the bigger issue.

The next big thing argument has focused on access modes – will the mobile generation spawn post-Facebook businesses that will overwhelm Facebook and even Google because users increasingly will access the web from anywhere on any device, one with a highly limited form factor?

To that the answer has to be, yes eventually, though it pays not to underestimate what Facebook and Google are capable of in local commerce, the next big frontier for their social network and search capabilities. But the disruption argument needs fleshing out a little.

To date the current generation of web businesses has been replicating offline business models.  I mean replicates in the sense that companies still see the customer as somehow an object or opponent. Companies target customers; they win when they do battle for customers; customers are out there, a different species from companies, opponents in an ongoing way for market share. See here for P.J. O’Rourke’s plea for a ceasefire in this war.

The web, as The Cluetrain Manifesto pointed out over a decade ago, is not fundamentally designed as a marketing medium, yet brands astutely continue to appropriate parts of the web for marketing purposes, and Facebook is an excellent example of a company that has cornered off a different type of web and shaped it entirely to marketers needs. The big question over the past five years is whether that mindset, and all that goes with it online, can and will be disrupted. The answer is surely it will, and sooner than Facebook’s investors think.

Meanwhile in the enterprise space companies are becoming increasingly social – or at least they are headed that way. There is a big, big difference in how companies think of employees and how they think of consumers, even though we are the same person. In employee-world, people are talked about as assets and talent as companies face a generation of change that their leaders do not understand.

That doesn’t stop employers off-shoring work to reduce costs but it does speak to a different perspective on people. The relationship between employer and employee is changing much faster than the relationship between company and customer. In the workpace we are more aware if an impending crisis whereas in the consumer space we are targeted with this year’s refresh of the same value-added products – but via Facebook rather than the TV. In the workplace we have to be persuaded to work harder and more imaginatively, and with more commitment, even as job security declines. As consumers we face having our social network behavior appropriated so that brands can sell to us at prices we are less able to afford.

This is what is unsustainable – this dual treatment of us as valued assets and manipulable objects. It is unsustainble because disruption in the global economy will lead to more pressure on companies and us as employees to develop a new way of working together. To avoid getting too deep into the complexity of these developements here are four things to think about:

1. Much of what gets people excited about companies like Facebook is the ability to market to customers in better ways. This form of marketing appears new but is really outdated, because of its us-and-them nature. Facebook’s vulnerability lies in disruptors who overturn the us-and-them marketing paradigm and who begin working for customers, collating, analyzing and selling data on behalf of customers, helping customer navigate a more affordable economy – that in turn will pressure companies to revamp the value chain.

The development of a customer-centric data world is already happening small scale. Here’s a big question. Google‘s social network Google + is an identity network full of people using their real names. Will Google disrupt Facebook by working for those users, making them the focal point of its business, rather than selling those identities to marketers? If so it will be the first time for a long time that Google has acted radically.

The Post Facebook, Post Mobile Disruption Already Arrived was posted on Moxie Insight -

Read the full article in Reuters.

Should We Ditch the Idea of Privacy? was posted on Moxie Insight -

Here’s how Marcus Fairs, editor of design-site Dezeen, based in East London where the Olympics take place,  sums up the current design outlook.

The London 2012 is definitely not a vintage Olympics for architecture and design. The organisers have managed to commission the worst logo, the worst font, the worst mascots and the worst architectural landmark (the horrific ArcelorMittal Orbit viewing tower/sculpture) in modern Olympic history. However London has never been very good at grand gestures; it is much better at street culture, subversion and spontaneous wit. The series of unofficial 2012 souvenirs created by East London designers is s good taste of what to expect. “

East London designers are planning and producing their own design alternatives, though I’m not massively convinced by the Create commissioned pieces Marcus is referring too. London needs a shake up. Sarah Hyndman released a series of alternative Olympic posters (see below) designed from local artifacts at the back end of 2011. Below you can also see one of Donna Wilson’s designs for a series of exercise books (British people use the term for their school writing books).

As Marcus says it’s really about what is happening at the street level and that might not quite accord with the vision of the Olympic organizing committee. Love the red beard.

Rescuing the 2012 Olympics – From a Creative Fiasco was posted on Moxie Insight -

Over the decade or so that Google has been around, the management of large enterprises has changed significantly. This is the age of flat. This is the moment when companies purge hierarchies. This is when it all democratized. Well not really.  In many ways Google is a product of that era. and it still practices tight reputation management through PR, social media has barely touched it’s mode of operations, and its senior management are distant folks, who of course post pictures to Google + but otherwise appear strangely conventional and aloof.

For a long time what made Google different was its 20% rule, the day a week it gave staff to innovate but that led to such a desperate lack of focus that a year ago Schmidt had to give the reins to Page. Still Google insists on running a driverless car even as its vastly more important social networking model comes under fire for appearing lacklustre in the run up to the Facebook IPO. And then it redesigns its governance model to reduce the impact of potential criticism.

All frustrating. But something else is going on. Google is also the first modern platform and ecosystem model of business operations- a form of business organization, or operating system, that allows companies to scale rapidly at low relative cost. The platform and ecosystem model is the breakthrough post-industrial form of wealth creation and Google is sitting on five of them: Search, Android, YouTube, Maps and Apps.

The frustration I feel as an observer of Google is probably different from the frustration an analysts feels. Analyst don’t like Google circling the wagons or being distracted by irrelevant innovations. They feel frustration too at what they perceive to be a lack of innovation in the core search business (though Google is making amends here). In terms of emerging business practices though the frustrations are different.

Google has many options but it doesn’t seem to generate strategic options the way Apple does. Take any one year in the past five and Apple had a ton of options for what it could put into the market and when (iOS updates, form factor changes, Siri, iPad upgrades, retail innovations etc). By contrast you get the feeling Google is going through some very important motions, fulfilling the grand plan.

On the other hand it has multiple ecosystems working with the Google brand and this might be part of the problem, as well as a part of their long term solution.

1. Search, AdWords, AdSense is a beautiful enterprise operating system. From the inception of Page Rank, Google began generating an ecosystem of SEO and SEM experts that spread far and wide. For almost a decade, being visible on the Web meant being visible within Google search returns and a huge industry of advisers and agencies grew up to serve client visibility needs. So long before Apple and its developer ecosystem Google had an SEO/SEM ecosystem the advocated, promoted and sold Google‘s vision and services.

2. Androidhas been a tougher journey for Google and I have to be honest I still don’t totally get what Android does for the search giant. Yes, it’s allowed Google to be a default search option on smartphones but I presume Google could have negotiated, or bought, that status anyway.

Begun as an alliance of handset makers, it now provides a competitive, royalty free OS for mobile devices and embeddable,s. The investment has accelerated competition in smartphones, and thus helped Google to learn the mobile trade from the front. But what is the value of this ecosystem – all the developers and advocates that build for and love Android? What is the core relationship between Google and these 500,000 developers? Compare it to Apple and its developer community and it seems under-used by Google.

I do get how location tracking can interact with Maps’ applications and retail offers – and various kinds of payment options. I know that Google makes over $2.5 billion annually from mobile search. My point is not that Android is useless but that it is difficult to answer the question: does Google use this resource in an optimal way? In old industry, that type of question was not difficult to answer. The relationship between investment and outcome was clear and it was mediated by established management practices. In post-industrial business it is a puzzle.

3. Apps. Google‘s Play, the App Store that used to be Android Market and Google Music is now a fully fledged content and apps center. However, according to Wikipedia, Google does not take a cut from sales via the market. Simultaneously Google has developed its productivity apps and these Google does earn from. However, here again you wonder is the ecosystem strategy optimal, or powerful even, compared to the SEO/SEM experience of early Google.

What Makes Google Different (And Unsettling) And Still A Model For Others? was posted on Moxie Insight -

Look at Microsoft diving into eBooks, taking Nook to Windows 8 and possibly to a tablet form, leveraging Bing within Facebook some time soon, migrating to Cloud services; Facebook and its app store, marketplace, contextual ads, and upcoming no doubt local transaction offers,  and then look across at Google with its productivity apps, social search, Google +, local transactions, local offers via its Maps ecosystem, content via YouTube, and Amazon’s capacity to do all these things too including launching a smartphone – and Apple‘s leadership in devices, Apps, and content, and its entry into productivity.

Meanwhile Facebook’s App Center will be a mega-shop for Apps from all operating systems, with a rating system based around engagement. Facebook will not take a cut if it directs people to iOS or Android but will be encouraging developers to do more for Facebook, where it will take 30%.

The most remarkable thing to note is the large areas of convergence. Underlying all these developments is, in fact, a converged business model: platform and ecosystems. Skimming this morning’s news reports nobody is questioning Facebook’s ability to sell apps or to replicate Apple‘s success as a platform and ecosystem business. Platform and ecosystem businesses see uniquely able to launch major new initiatives, with ease.

Right now the top 5 or six American companies in these respective domains are working their way towards a new corporate form, a new way of organising resources and creating wealth. It pays to take note of it. Platforms and ecosystems will rule.

Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701

Facebook’s App Store Heats Up Convergence of Big 5 was posted on Moxie Insight -

Microsoft [MSFT], partner of handset device giant Nokia, last week eased itself into the ebooks market with its $300 million investment in Barnes and Noble. Seems the software giant wants a slice of the e-reader market, where Amazon is king.  Microsoft’s purchase, though, is part of a very interesting puzzle, when set alongside, for example, rumors of a Facebook smart phone device or what Google is doing in social.

Google [GOOG] also bought into devices nearly a year ago with the purchase of Motorola Mobility. Amazon [AMZN], the retailer and maker of ebook market leader Kindle, competes with Microsoft in Cloud services, has a great content stream to rival Netflix or anyone (Microsoft included), and is also rumoured to have a smart phone in development. Google is thought to have a tablet project underway bringing it into competition with Amazon in devices. And all four compete with Apple [AAPL] in each of these areas.

Five of the biggest and most innovative players in American software and devices are all headed to the same place. What gives?

There are all kinds of fascinating permutations in there but what ties these developments together? What makes what Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple do coherent rather than neurotic?

One answer could be the customer – but I don’t think that is it. Having control of customer details (address, credit card, demographics) could be the guiding strategy. And of course data is gold. But only Facebook and Google have access to truly awesome data at this stage, through their social networks. Apple’s 200 million + credit card accounts is not to be sniffed at but earlier today I watched a presentation from Facebook app MyPersonality.

5 years old the app now has records of 6.5 million people taking personality tests online at Facebook connected of course to their like behaviour, friending and content consumption. Awesome, and that is just a Facebook app.

Data alone does not explain why Facebook would want a smartphone. If Facebook wanted more data, then it should begin buying carriers rather than get into phones. Rather it seems that the phone is a way to experiment more with the social network experience, to deepen and simplify social networking on the move. The ultimate prize will be local transactions and maybe even a version of Facebook’s marketplace that is more app-based, a hybrid of Apple’s model.

So there are a lot of fascinating permutations but what ties these initiatives together is something different. It is not data. It is the emerging platform and ecosystem business model. I wrote about the platform and ecosystem business model here (in response to the claim that Facebook and Google might disappear). I’ve reproduced some of that below. Platforms and ecosystems are the core of a new enterprise operating system.

The key issue, I think, is this:

The platform and ecosystem model allows companies to manouvre into new markets with exceptional ease, drawing on the relationships within the ecosystem to address new and often hidden needs of micro-niches in the market. They enable, at one and the same time, highly-scaled interaction across the ecosystem and highly granular niche market discovery and delivery, both on an unprecedented scale.

With a platform and ecosystem model companies can manage their adjacency moves a lot more easily. They can move into new markets with new products because they have a core set of partners who have strong market exposure across niches, they have the platform to add more partners at will, and they can quickly penetrate to micro-segments of a market – a new development Nick Vitalari and I called mass-differentiation. In other words they are able to do what management theorists used to say was impossible – move beyond their old competencies at will.

To date the most complete example of the platform and ecosystem model is Apple. None of these competitors will replicate Apple’s aesthetic appeal or ease of use. But Apple will never capture a social networking community the like of Facebook or Google. So the short story is that platforms and ecosystems are moving on from the device and app, owned by Apple, to a new era where device, content and social relationships are intertwined.  But that to one side for now the answer is these companies are competing to create the 21st century enterprise operating system. It matters.

Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701

A business platform is both a software environment and a set of rules for business activities within an ecosystem. The platform typically organises highly scaled interactions among partners according to terms and conditions rather than negotiated contracts. It is an ultra-low friction way of doing business.

Facebook’s Smart Phone, Microsoft and Books, Google and Social, Amazon and Cloud: What Gives? was posted on Moxie Insight -

“Over the past two years, we have made very important progress in building a true economic union. I would even say that more has been achieved in the last two years than the previous ten. We are delivering a robust response to the crisis by repairing our banking system; strengthening our economic governance; setting up credible financial firewalls and providing unprecedented solidarity to Member States in difficulty.”

Yes, you might want to read that twice. He will also say, unless his PR people catch him quickly:

“I am extremely pleased to see the new momentum that is clearly building in our Member States to kick-start the stalled engine of European growth.

The Commission’s message for Europe Day is that we need to seize upon this new momentum to deliver on the many proposals for stability and growth that we have tabled.”

Like you I had to read these words several times before believing they are for real. And what exactly is that new momentum….is that the democratic process, public outrage or a new policy we haven’t heard about?

Barosso also highlights the need for structural reform in Europe: “At the European level, for example, we need to finally …. clear the way for the launch of the EU patent, which we estimate will save businesses €250 million per year.” That’s, like, Euro 0.50 per person.

What?

And he wants to progress an initiative called “project bonds” for new infrastructure: “a contribution of €230 million from the current EU budget…”

Euro 230 million?!?

He also wants to increase “the lending capacity of the European Investment Bank. Boosting its paid-in capital by at least €10 billion.” Okay so now we’re getting into continental scale. There is a rule in the European Commission, which is “never to talk the Union down”.  It’s hard to see where Barsoso’s credibility is going to come from in future. And maybe, depressingly, that’s where the EU is at right now. In a rapidly changing economy that carries extreme risk for people’s livelihoods across Europe, still patting themselves on the back.

Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701

Europe’s Supreme Delusion: We’re Doing Better Than Ever was posted on Moxie Insight -

How do they get the “we” back?

Good question. We all remember how Obama broke new ground in the 2008 campaign by using social media as a powerful political tool. Obama’s campaign created an expansive Internet platform, MyBarackObama.com, that gave supporters tools to organize themselves, create communities, raise money and induce people not only to vote but to actively support the Obama campaign. What emerged was an unprecedented force, 13 million supporters connected to one another over the Internet, all driving toward one goal, the election of Obama.

When they chanted “Yes we can,” it wasn’t just a message of hope for the future – it was a confirmation statement of collective power. They weren’t waiting to be told what to do; they were actively engaged, calling friends to come to events, learn what was at stake, contribute ideas, and help out in some way. The power of “we” was awesome to behold. The “we” not only raised hope for people but also unprecedented sums of money for the old-fashioned campaign on the ground.

But this time, “Yes we can” has been replaced by a new modus operandi for the Obama campaign. It’s “We know you.”

Read the full post in Reuters.

What Happened to ‘Yes we can’? was posted on Moxie Insight -

Image from Wikispaces.com

Eric Jackson, last week, drew attention to a truism of modern business – most companies still don’t get mobile or how it affects the way we work.  And he stirred the pot with the claim that Google and Facebook will disappear in five years time, a theme he returns to today, because they lack new generation know-how.  So, link bait aside, how do we sort out truth from imagination in this debate? Will they, won’t they, might they?

It’s no surprise that Google and Facebook give an analyst cause for concern – they seem to make money so effortlessly and yet their businesses are not easy to understand against traditional models. In fact they seem to specialize in being misunderstood, especially Google.

The reality though is that both Google and Facebook are different types of businesses from the norm. They are platform and ecosystem businesses and their longevity and growth has to be judged against what we know of the platform and ecosystem wealth model.

It’s difficult for analysts to see this in part because platform and business companies have a tendency to adopt a value system that’s different from the one analysts apply to investments today. It’s one that does not cow-tow to the existing norms of the stock market. Platform and ecosystem businesses fight for the space to be different and to forge a new wealth paradigm.

Amazon, another platform and ecosystem company, is a great example of an enterprise that has acquired a lot of leeway to define a new business paradigm.

The platform and business model is the subject of The Elastic Enterprise, a book I co-wrote with Nick Vitalari. The paper edition is out at the end of May but you can see the e-edition on Amazon now. One handicap in self-publishing is not having the publicity machine to get the ideas out quickly. Still the book is finding an audience, including a great review on Amazon recently from Keri Pearlson of the IT Leaders Forum:

“In the right hands, this book provides really value. It gives CEOs and general managers a clear vision of what could be. At the same time, it gives CIOs and insightful IT leaders a manifesto to follow to provide strategic ideas for their organizations.”

What we’re drawing attention to in The Elastic Enterprise is critical also to Jackson’s thinking. He makes the distinction between his old self, who believed that great executives could shape and drive their external environment at will, and his emerging self who sees more value in the emerging field of business ecologies.

The conclusion to draw from that transition is not that Facebook and Google will fail. It is, rather, to understand how platform and ecosystems function. Great analysts need to adapt their expectations. Here’s a different way to look at Google and Facebook. But first a quick summary of the platform and ecosystem model.

The platform and ecosystem model

A business platform is both a software environment and a set of rules for business activities within an ecosystem. The platform typically organises highly scaled interactions among partners according to terms and conditions rather than negotiated contracts. It is an ultra-low friction way of doing business. Generally the platform enables highly scaled third party business activity.

A modern business ecosystem is a collection of companies and individuals who are signed up to the set of rules on a platform and who become a productive resource both for the platform owner and for each other.

Platforms and ecosystems that succeed typically have strong information markets around them, made up of ecosystem members who advocate the platform, and writers, bloggers and news organizations who are essentially fans of the ecosystem’s mission.

Good ecosystems tend to be organized around some form of altruistic goal that also has serious economic benefits. It might be, for example, to reduce the cost of mobile communications, to organise the world’s information, or to create products and services that are a step-change in ease of use.

They also need a style of leadership that excels at attracting resources such as developers or content providers.

Here’s Why Google and Facebook Will Not Disappear in Five Years Time was posted on Moxie Insight -

Some of the comments on the post cited national preferences – Germans know to buy German cars, higher levels of efficiency, union practices and so on. Der Spiegel, the leading German magazine, provides a  different set of insights this weekend in its international edition. The short answer is Germany doesn’t pay twice the wages. Under the headline: The High Cost of Germany’s Success, Der Spiegel picks apart the argument that German auto workers are uniformly well paid or that success rests on a fundamentally different economic model.

The article suggests that Germany is grappling with how to grow and manage an elastic labor force typified by a lack of traditional employment (a topic I covered here), one that does not have much glamor attached to it, and one where wages are unevenly, perhaps even unfairly, distributed.

The article makes three telling points:

1. Pay is favouring top talent

Der Spiegel points out that the record salary paid this year to Audi CEO, Euro 7.3 million (about $10 million) runs against the grain of a country that still would like to boast a strong social infrastructure.

At a time when the economic elites in the United States and Great Britain are turning to Germany’s recipes for industrial success as role models, the social structure in Germany is increasingly moving in the direction of a three-class society. This is a fundamental shift for a social market economy whose policies have long been aimed at ensuring that the country’s prosperity is fairly distributed to all echelons of society. That system now appears to be eroding fast.

These days, it is executives, with their compensation skyrocketing into the millions, who are at the top. The second tier consists of the well-trained and reasonably well-paid legions of white-collar and skilled workers in modern information and industrial societies. Bringing up the rear are professional groups that were once considered part of the core of the traditional working world: salespeople, cooks, waiters and teachers, for example, who often earn less now than they did a decade ago.

2. The auto sector reflects a deep division within German society

Der Spiegel points to the largely sub-contracted nature of work in autos as a source of deep wage disparities even for people in identical jobs. “Nadja Klöden isn’t even at the very bottom of the hierarchy at Audi…. She’s on the sidelines, yet also in the thick of things. The 28-year-old, who studied business management, works as a project assistant in administration. But her employer is BFFT, a service provider that organizes parts distribution among the Volkswagen Group‘s subsidiaries, which include Audi. That’s why Klöden earns €800 ($1050) less than comparable Audi employees for the same 40-hour work week.”

The company also employs contract labor alongside staffers on the assembly lines doing identical work. Contract workers, who might be long term inside Audi, actually earn less because they are not entitled to bonuses, which can amount to as much as Euro 10,000 a year.

3. Temporary full time work is growing as a resource but is both lower paid and less secure

Der Spiegel, among other points, also draws attention to the increasing practice of using people on lengthy temporary contracts. “….there are about 1 million temporary workers in Germany, and they often do the same work as their full-time counterparts for significantly less pay. In many cases, they don’t know where they’ll be working in a week or whether they’ll be able to keep their jobs if their employer doesn’t have enough work for them.”  The move to impermanent and insecure work seems inevitable. Time to start talking about it.

Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701.

You might also be interested in this post on the future of the American middle class. It looks at some of the global constraints on the influence and prosperity of middle earning Americans.

Revisiting: How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much was posted on Moxie Insight -

WikiHouse is an open source construction set . Its aim is to allow anyone to design, download and ‘print’  CNC milled houses and components, which can be assembled with minimal formal skill or training.

There is a video of the WikiHouse going up at HackedLab, Milan Design Week. Although the project is open source, the video would not embed here on Forbes, so sorry but you’ll have to lick the link . I came across WikiHouse on Dezeen.

The video doesn’t take you all the way to house completion – and I suspect that’s because the components were swelling in the humid atmosphere of the HackedLab. Anyway – there’s enough here to show the way. Open source design and maker projects are gaining real traction in Europe as the scale of the economic crisis makes itself ever more obvious.

As I said in an earlier piece, this is about transforming economies not about choosing between different styles of intervention.

The House You Download To Your Desktop was posted on Moxie Insight -

If you prefer to learn through social networks there is a compilation of design/creative social networks at this blog. And a great article here on Forbes about Fab.com, the designer goods retailer. I generally don’t have time to browse catalogues but do have time for sites that gently remind me of their work, through the email.

1. Dexigner

Dexigner is the daddy and mommy of creative curators.  In the ten or so years since it began, the site has had almost 70 million page views. I’ve been following Dexigner for about six years, though I have to say the new home page design leaves me a little frustrated. Go to the directory to start browsing for design ideas and trends.

2. Design Taxi

Design Taxi is newer than Dexigner and a little more in touch with the electronic world. Go here for quirky stories like the Berkeley Ridiculously Autoamted Dorm project, updates on apps and technologies related to design, as well as aesthetics. I was drawn back to Design Taxi this week by Lomography’s La Sardina beach camera. Take a look.

3. Brainpickings

One of the new generation of curated generic creativity sites Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings appears in my inbox once a week – just about the frequency that let’s me take a quick look without flooding me with information. I go here when I’m tempted by ideas about creativity as a process. This week for example she has unearthed a copy of a 1939 book on how to create ideas, written by one James Webb Young. I won’t read it but I will file it in my mental filing cabiner under: democratization of genius. Popova puts 450 hours a month into the site (not all her own hours I hope). I use it like I might have done, say, Wallpaper a few years back but without all the heavy lifting.

4. Dezeen

Dezeen is based in London’s east end and on its very doorstep can witness the resurgence of one of the world’s great capitals, motored by designers with a kind of democratising attitude. I once bought two watches in a Dezeen pop-up shop in Covent Garden and I only regret one of them. Dezeen is good competition for Dexigner without being as issue-driven as Design Taxi. Dezeen has a fair chunk of home produced video from important events – check out this conversation on open source design and production from design week Milan. Message: designers are looking more at designing process and platforms.

 5. Wallpaper

Wallpaper has probably the best resources of all the design sites I dip into. Funny, then that it’s the one I use least and that’s maybe a sign of my information budget being too stretched by Wallpaper’s voluminous information. It is more magazine that curation and the output shows just that. Wallpaper have launched a dailydesign news app for the iPhone.  Being a non-smartphone user I won’t be downloading it but it might be a useful shortcut for managers, executives, writers, who want a shortcut to understanding what’s happening in design. A daily anything though is out of my time budget, right now.

I also try to keep up with the emerging field of hybrid spaces, that is design for physical spaces that have many emerging uses, for example merging augmented and physical realities. And here is one that I have just found but which aficionados will know well.

DOMUS: Domus Web is strong on the future of design and the interaction of design and manufacturing and the future of product and process.

Regular readers will know my philosophy is to stay broad rather than go deep, so to accusations of dilettante in art and design, I have to say yes, but somebody who cares about the changing nature of work has to care also about design and about macroeconomics.  I’d be really delighted to hear what sites you use – please engage in the comment box. I sense I’m lacking a guide to really radical design. What else?

Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701

The Top Five Sites for Keeping Up With Creativity and Design was posted on Moxie Insight -

Within 7 years more Americans will be in the freelance, free agent market than in a full time job. And global consumption patterns (and hence growth and production) will increasingly be defined by the needs and wants of a new global middle class. In the past, global consumption (and hence production) was defined by America’s middle earners. We face a complex series of changes.

My own view is the disintegration of secure employment will be good for America, even though the knee-jerk reaction is to bemoan the passing of security. We are already creating alternatives. An area that I’m particularly interested in, social business, is one such. Social business is in fact a way of organising complex flows of labor in and out of temporary opportunities. That’s why we need to treat social business extremely seriously. Let me explain.

#1. Those global consumption habits

Two years ago GE backed a Stanford start-up Embrace. Embrace makes infant incubators that sell for $200.00 (earlier versions sold for $25.00). American hospitals pay $20,000 for a high tech incubator, according to Embrace. Traditional warmers cost $5,000. Whichever way you look at it Embrace is a big cost reduction innovation. GE now distributes Embrace globally.

Initiatives like this help people in emerged economies to begin aspiring to a middle class lifestyle where there is greater security and opportunity. They might grow into a world where they can own a Tata Nano car, priced under $3,000.

Of course they might also aspire to own an iPhone or a Mac Air – American-style aspirations are not going away. However there are new patterns of consumption, creating new patterns of production, along with different competitive pressures. Ultimately these will impact on the American domestic market (cheap warmers, cheap cars) as well as on jobs and how we work – the last will be defined by new standards of productivity throughout the value chain.

#2. Capturing the benefit of new consumption patterns

Sure, American health care companies would love to be selling $20,000 incubators into India and Africa but instead GE is selling $200 warmers. What’s more important is that GE has partnered with a start-up in order to do that. They partnered with a series of start-ups for their recent healthymagination program too. Big global corporations are suddenly very keen to do business with smaller companies that have agility and ingenuity. That’s the new freelance economy at work. At present GE has 5 healthymagination seed partners. In future it will have 50,000, just as Google has 50,000 partners in its Android ecosystem.

That’s assuming GE can capture enough of the growth in the world. A big question mark hangs over the extent to which countries like China will allow American and European companies to benefit from their growth.

China’s strategic objective is to stimulate indigenous innovation. China is becoming what professor Seamus Grimes, of New University of Ireland, Galway, calls the “new battle ground for the future dominance of global markets.” Grimes points out that the Chinese perspective on current economic development is that much of its own domestic market is owned by non-Chinese multinational companies and, at the other end of the scale, their own attempts to enter new markets are being frustrated by “blockades and technology controls.”

They are determined to lower their dependency on foreign technology. At the same time, the Chinese are highly adept at creating very low cost products for the “good-enough” market, precisely the market that American and European multinationals must pursue. We are going to see extreme price pressure well into the future.

The Future of the American Middle Class: As Defined by China was posted on Moxie Insight -

NEW YORK, NY – MAY 02: Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ is auctioned at Sotheby’s May 2012 (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

When Edvard Munch’s The Scream sold at auction for $120 million the Twitterverse spiked with commentary and insight….well not exactly. Reading people’s tweets over the past few hours, it is clear that many people feel moved to pass on the news about the $120 million sale but what do their viewpoints actually consist of,  in this “broadcast yourself” moment? 

Robin Bew, Chief Economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit says of the $120 million: “That’s what massive global liquidity injections do to asset prices!” But it’s not just asset prices. The forward value of businesses are also being overestimated. Rakesh Agrawal ‏ of Venture Beat nailed that: “The Scream sells for 0.119 Instagrams. Pricey on a per-image basis. Few simultaneous uniques.” I’m not sure about the maths there.

The Co-op Banking Group is part of the 170 year old mutual society based in the UK. “Would you pay £120 million for The Scream? We find it a bit scary!” I find it troubling that they don’t distinguish between $ and £s. But to the point these  are professional commentators.

Once you got outside that group (which was small in the time I spent reading tweets)  there were very few that expressed a real point of view on The Scream or its price. Not on the nature of the art work or its valuation. Twitter was used, for the most part, just to pass on the news. But that too is not the whole truth.

In fact by mid-day European time tweets on The Scream were heavily affected by spam, redirects to porn pages or acne treatments and scams that I didn’t want to delve into. Lucky I had my malware working.  Of 20 tweets that passed my screen at around 12.35 London time, 16 were spam (I counted again at 13.00 and the count was 17:3), which also begs the question: what does it really mean to trend on Twitter if as much as three quarters of the stream is hijcaking it?

Here’s Twitter on how it deals with spam, and GigaOm on how twitter spam is propagated by leading influencers.

The simple truth about The Scream, auctioned yesterday at Sotheby’s New York for a record $120 million for those of you who missed it, is that it illustates just how much surplus capital there is in the system, capital that doesn’t want to do into productive use. But more alarmingly we see the effects of surplus capital with corporate valuations – see this critique of Facebook’s IPO valuation and some extraordinary investment decisions. So my point of view? It’s a wake up call for how we make certain types of productive investments attractive or not. It’s also time we found new ways to identify and isolate truly valuable conversations in all the noise.

Finally, here is The Scream, the animated version, which has seen visitor numbers rise dramatically in the past few days. Well worth a look:

Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701

The Scream: Reaction to a $120 Million Artwork was posted on Moxie Insight -