They confirmed that a lot of the news and insights that you usually get and consume as an innovator or a consultant for technology, product, or service innovation becomes present in the realm of corporate product innovation about four months later. Things we read about is reported as “news” in mainstream magazines about six to ten months later. But what’s even more alarming is the increasing amount of non-journalistic views taken at face value: Blogs become fact publishers, a quick blog post becomes “reporting” instead of an (intentionally) opinionated “shout out”. Seth Godin puts it to the point (as always):

Blogs have eliminated the reason for most business books to exist. If you can say it in three blog posts and reach more people, then waiting a year and putting in all that effort seems sort of pointless.

[…]

The irony? The market demands that you summarize your book in a blog post.

We’re hesitant to buy a book (which is a far better value than just about any form of media) if we don’t think we’re going to like it. I guess that’s built in from childhood, cause you get in trouble if you don’t finish a book, and who wants to finish a book they don’t like?

At least once a week, someone emails me a lousy review someone did of a summary of one of my books. Not the book, but what they thought the book was about based on a blog post summary of the book.

I a recent project engagement with Products & Innovation at Deutsche Telekom I had the pleasure to work with a very diligent client counterpart on a qualitative assessment for various In-Car services. A shout-out to my industry contacts (hello twitter, linkedin, skype, gmail, gvoice, gtalk, etc.) immediately got me back some really thoughtful feedback, but with the missing data and facts. My client counterpart pushed me to align secondary research results with my “professional gut feeling” and “professional guesstimate”. Digging through available data for innovation projects is difficult – how do you get market information like costs and revenues for a non-existing market? – but the exercise quickly revealed (again) how professional opinions are often influence by secondary or tertiary agendas. And these were the most interesting findings for my client.

Bottom Line:

That said, you will see some “older” things popping up again, that are (hopefully) nevertheless important for the industry in months ahead.

I got some weird problems with a couple of plugins after the update last night. The new WordPress 2.7 Dashboard only displayed half the information, the cache is not refreshing, and image resize after upload – or the upload itself, I don’t know yet – stopped working. Especially the caching problem is annoying, I hardly ever get a refresh after blog post changes, especially with mashed-up content by Zemanta. Zemanta itself still seems to work fine, but another plugin that I already identified is my beloved “decoratr’ for blog posts :>(  I will be traveling over the next week, but maybe I can fix things while on the road, please bear with me…

Lesson learned: Don’t start working on your blog layout and/or software if you have to travel the next day.

Corporate innovation and product development are number driven. At the end, they need to create value. While it would be nice if their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) would be something lofty like social responsibilitiy, community value, or fun, most of the time these categories are measures with some sort of hard numbers, such as Return on Investment, Total Cost of Ownership, bottom or top line improvement, etc.

Of course, all innovations also need to fit into a portfolio of existing offerings and/or other development efforts. And the company must see a fit within its value network positioning. And …. well, here’s a list of excellent postings by Sequoia Capital, David Cowan, and Seth Levine what I constantly have to argue for/about with my clients (and that’s good!):

While these postings are from 2005 (yay, 4th year coming up) and mainly geared toward business plans and getting investments, these are still more or less the things my clients ask me for. Especially if you have a “freemium” business model, make sure you read the following two posts and comments (!):

Maybe next time you sent something to me you’ll keep that in mind so it’s easier for me to connect you to the right people within our clients’ organization – which I will happily do!

The original plugin had a few drawbacks:

I edited the ttftitles.php file to address 1. & 2. and created a quick and dirty plugin for 3.. You have to rename both files’ extensions to “.php” – ttftitles.php goes into the TTF Titles plugin subdirectory, thinkstorm-ttf.php goes into your plugin root directory. (You will have to activate the newly created “Generate Text To Font” Plugin). Now you can do two things:

“¦¦Hello, World¦heroin¦font_size=16&css_classes=right¦¦” produces the image shown on the right. There are a few issues with this quick and dirty hack:

Have fun!

Update from 2009-06-21

ichael had a question in comment number 7 regarding centering text in the TTF plugin instead of having it “left-aligned”. In my experience, the width of the TTF images is exactly the length of the text. If you want text to be centered, you would have to enclose it in a <div> or <p> or <h1> tag etc. and then center the enclosed TTF image via CSS. In case your image also has a background color, your enclosure tag needs to have that background color as well. So if you’re using my plugin, this helped:

<p style="text-align:center">¦¦Super Header¦¦¦¦</p>

which would then be rendered as:

Also: for compatibility reasons with non-image browsers as well as for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reasons, you should never render important text (like headings) into images and then not set the ALT tag accordingly. An even better solution is something called “StateScoping” of CSS, shown here:

http://alt.skybound.ca/statescope/

In the upper right corner of the main text content there is a link to switch “scopes”, and you can see the difference between the page rendered with images and without. The example is also somewhat SEO safe, even with images switched on, as the text will still be included in the page and just displaced by CSS.I say “somewhat”, because my latest experience is that Google does interpret the CSS placement for otherwise higher ranking sites to avoid tweaking of sites with SEO code that would never be displayed – such as putting “Nokia, N95, Gizmodo, Samsung, LG, G1, iPhone” within an <div> container that is placed off the screen just so to improve the hit rate on these keywords without actually displaying them :).

New blog layout, based on the "Trevilian Way" theme, by Artisan

After The last design kind of blew up with the new WordPress 2.6.7 release I spent the last two days adjusting a new theme to my needs. Let me know what you think…

So here is what I do:

A problem with tweader is that it will only search for conversations and tweets *before* the single tweet you were looking at, not at anything that will happen afterwards. So you will see the conversation up to the point where you clicked, but nothing afterwards: http://tweader.com/conversation.php?id=1014703963 will show you that jpitkin actually wrote a response, which the previous link above didn’t show. This is not really nice, and twitter should have conversations by default, but I understand that this is not an easy problem to solve, as all posts would schlepp along some additional conversation ID then, and posting from SMS would be hard… well, it’s free, and maybe someone comes up with a cool mashup – let me know!

"Promises, Promises." by Howdy, I'm H. Michael Karshis

I could say the same to social network invites.  Sure, I have the time to maintain eight or ten other websites and social networks… having too many social networks kind-of defeats the purpose of only having to go to one place to send updates or look for a contact. But wait, there are mashups, right, which update all of your websites at once… just make sure you have all the information ready and right, and hope noone changes the API.

The latest invite is coming from friends over at glassdoor.com,

a career and workplace community where anyone can find and anonymously share real-time reviews, ratings and salary details about specific jobs for specific employers — all for free.

No thanks, right now I’m pretty happy where I am. I am also running a bit short on time, as I need to maintain my profiles over at PayScroll, PayScale, JobGrades, PingMyCompany, Spoke, and BlueChip Expert… :)

CC License: ohhector@flickr

Hello All — As you might have noticed this blog was kind of lonely lately. The reasons were simple: 130% billability, travel to Europe for training, and my private activities kept me too busy to write something meaningful. Also, in the past I wrote rather long articles, and I simply didn’t have time to put that much thought into it.

Project-wise, I’m still pretty busy with Detecon on the P2P TV front, as well as creating some strategic mid- to long-term options for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) players.

I did find some time to Twitter now and then, so I hope in the future I will be able to give some more details again on this blog beyond the 140 character tweets.

So long, Thorsten