Silberbauer Says:

Uffe Elbæk from the Chaos Pilots opened with the first workshop.

When listening to Uffe Elbæk one question comes into mind: Why do ‘revolutionaries’ always talk as if the world is standing on a tipping point and that we’re living in the most important generation of all time”? Haven’t the world always been on a tipping point? When were the safe days?

Anyway,

Uffe’s presentation consisted of three parts:

1. A critique of the present Danish political environment with the statement: “Creativity yes! But in what kind of political context?”

2. 25 pieces of advice:

1. Embrace Chaos
2. Be lustful
3. Sit less
4. Wipe out habits
5. Give the best away
6. Drop plans
7. Be good to others
8. Beware of those who are perfect
9. Be greedy
10. Be playful
11. Be disciplined
12. Ask anyone
13. Flip graphs
14. Look up from your computer
15. Exploit each other
16. Ask questions
17. Ask stupid questions
18. Drop weaknesses
19. Take more risks
20. Beware of political correctness
21. Defer critique
22. Don’t be sure you can figure it all out
23. Slow down
24. Think in fairytales
25. Believe in happy emotions

We would like to add: “26. Save the whales” and “27. Don’t go nuts if you’re a squirrel“.
Or in other word, a list of the obvious doesn’t make it enlightening!

The third part of Uffe’s presentation was a 10 minute music video. It was a kind of Late-nineties-Sting-meets-Bono-in-Africa-thing. This being the 25 years anniversary of MTV it was rather difficult to get excited by it and a great illustration of how creative “methods” can grow old.

Then: Playtime. We joined the RobotLabs workshop run by LEGO Mindstorms [Update: the event was hosted by RobotLabs itself, not LEGO]. Now – this was fun. The assignment was to program a pre-built robot to solve as many tasks as possible in a small model world. The theme was Energy, so “coal”-bricks were to be moved to a certain position, windmills must be pushed across the landscape and a petrol car should be moved to make room for a hydrogen car.

It was a classic team work experience, but the pressure was on as we had very little time to program the robot. Also, to win, the group had to prioritize the assignments: Some assignments were worth a lot of points – others almost no points. so this was about creativeness, yes: But also it was about business objectives. The groups that did not go for the easiest way to solve the problems that paid the most points lost. Even if their solutions were creative.

Needless to say: Our group (Silberbauer Bros. and Christian from FLSMidth) won the contest that day. Always nice to have en engineer close at hand when it comes to robots.

The Mindstorm products are truly innovative and the LEGO [Update: Robotlabs] workshop succeeded in showing what innovation is all about: Creativeness and teamwork – but also a clear goal and clear business objectives.

Great to see that a product we’ve played with from the age of 2 still re-invents itself without loosing the “thing” that made it fly then. It still flies. Must… must… must have Mindstorm for Christmas.

Tuesday’s first keynote was served by Ernst Gundling. He talked about the importance of differentiating between kinds of innovation, but also stressed that we must be careful not to believe that radical innovation (disruptive innovation) is entirely different from line extension (incremental innovation improving on an existing product or service). Often, radical ideas surface from incremental improvement of existing products. The iPod cannot be considered a disruptive invention – the iPod only succeeded because of an excellent infrastructure, a broad product line, continuous development and gradual innovation.

It’s a great point, we think. Everyone talks about disruptive innovation and often focuses of the genius factor that creates that one, revolutionary design. But innovation is just as much about line extension. As Jørgen Knudstorp said yesterday: Innovation is also about continuity.

A brilliant case from Guntling is the 3M product line. For decades 3M has built upon the concept from the original Post It sticker and through line extension / evolutionary innovation created tape that is strong enough to glue together jet engines, photo printer Post Its, etc. Line extension, sure – but also brilliant and disruptive ideas.

One of the best presentations so far.

Just to get this off our chests: ECCIX really needs to get its priorities right. The double 3rd keynote (with Niels Due Jensen, CEO, Grundfoss and Jørgen Knudstorp, CEO LEGO Group) didn’t start as scheduled. Instead came a little surprise: This being a conference on creativeness and innovation, we were all going to dance to an to the rhythm from an African drummer. That stole 20 minutes from the schedule – the exact same 20 minutes that we were lacking in the end of Knudstorp’s talk. Therefore the ECCIX host had to cancel all questions from the audience. Being late, however, didn’t prevent the same host to rambling on for another 10 minutes. What were they thinking?

Anyway: It was a pleasure listening to Niels Due Jensen’s presentation on innovation at the Danish pump-manufacturer Grundfos. He is a charming guy and that he turns up at events like this shows that Grundfos is walking the talk – as Knudstorp would later state as an absolute necessity for surviving as a company in a globalised market. Grundfos has built innovation into the structure of the company. For instance an innovation team trained in innovative and creative methods is stand by for all development teams to call upon. Also, more than 10 % of the revenue is channelled back into R&D (according to Jensen this is a serious figure for a company like Grundfos). Not the least, Grundfos top brass is all for innovation and creative thinking. Chairman Jensen being present at ECCIX shows that – without a completely dedicated top management innovation just won’t happen, he says. And his closing remark: “Don’t imitate – innovate… For heaven’s sake” summed up the presentation very well.

Jørgen Knudstorp was clear cut and to the point – no manuscript or slides. He talked about LEGO Group’s four main frontiers toward 2020: 1) To constantly adapt to a changing world without loosing the continuity; 2) to innovate a new platform business model; 3) To enter and thrive in the digital realm and 4) To continue executing rapidly.

Knudstorp has transformed LEGO from a very large enterprise (10.000+ employees) to a smaller, more agile company (the goal is 3.000 employees). It’s now a platform company more like IKEA with the LEGO Group at the center.

Knudstorp stressed repeatedly that innovation is not about being funky, trendy, fun or anything like that. It’s about corporate survival in a rapidly changing world. It maybe all we have left as all our production is getting outsourced to Asia.

We’re hoping that the people behind the ECCIX conference have heard Knudstorp’s message and that they in the next couple of days will pay more attention to the valuable knowledge that the Keynote speakers are sharing with us, instead of focusing on African dancing. It’s not that we don’t enjoy a creative atmosphere for learning. But the attempt to create an atmosphere should not be more important than the essential content. That’s a misconception of both creativity and learning.

Scott Isaksen and Dan Phillips described a very interesting case on innovation with the enticing title “Reducing Time To Revenue”, who can say no??

Dan Phillips works for Alcatel-Lucent who’s clients – like all others in the telco industry – are desperate about finding that new product that can win back the customers from the competitors and the software based services.

Phillips made clear that his industry is conservative by nature and that most innovation has been done inside-out without any end-user influence.

He hired Dr. Scott Isaksen and Creative Problem Solving Group to facilitate the innovation proces. CPSG uses their proprietary GEMagination-proces to bring out user needs, transform these into ideas and finally concepts ready for prototyping.

Phillips laid down the background for the project and Isaksen took us through the steps (needs, ideas, concepts, prioritizing concepts and corp. read out) that has given Alcatel-Lucent six revolutionary (so they say) concepts in six months.

The purpose of the method is to address un-met and unarticulated end-user needs and to focus on immediate monetization of the innovation. The presentation was very convincing and Isaksen/Phillips’ approach to creativity and innovation seems to be very professional and operational. A shortfall of the method might be it’s focus on product innovation, it could be interesting to know if the method was applicable to other kinds of innovation like organization, marketing or value chain innovations.

All in all an inspiring breath of professionalism…. keep it coming!

Peter Hessedahl from Danfoss Universe took us through the megatrends of the new millenium: Connectivity, Individuality, Participation, Acceleration, Demographic and Resource depletion. We flew through slides on Web 2.0, new media, the democratization of the digital production tools etc.

For someone absolutely new to the user revolution, web 2.0, long tail and the rest of the popular buzz, this might have been an eye-opener of some sort. But to the rest of us this is extremely basic knowledge. Unfortunately Hesseldahl tried to cover too much ground for his 40 minutes time slot and we sadly never got to Demographic and Resource depletion. Hesseldahl had gotten about halfway through his slides when the chairman shut him down. Better planning should be expected from a speaker at a high profiled conference.

The second talk on this track was about what the Danish newspaper Børsen does to get a part of the digital market. A debate arose on whether free newspapers are “good” or “bad ” for people compared to “real” newspapers. It turned into a very old discussion on how to force “the people” to read the good stuff instead of the bad stuff. Especially to someone from the media business this discussion seemed very trivial.

Looking forward to hearing Dan Phillips and Scott Isaksen next.

Rob Austin, Prof at Harvard Business School is a seasoned presenter. By describing the business case of the VIPP trash bin (a trash bin that sells for $500) he pointed out that the design and quality factors are more important than ever. Rob’s part of the keynote was pretty basic but well-delivered and with a few strong points on what happens when business meet great design.

Danish designer Marianne Stokholm introduced to the design case of the Delta PLUS telephone (launched in Denmark 1987). She made the argument that products need to be more than just functionality and features. That’s so right, but it shouldn’t be new to anyone remotely into design or branding. We think that hearing more about Stokholms hands on approach to the design process would be quite interesting, but as many designers she felt compelled too take a too philosophical approach to the subject.

Where Rob Austin excelled in showing – though briefly – how design and creativity and business are linked, Stokholm’s talk became pseudo-metaphysical: Words as holistic and yin-yang came up more than once. To us, her view on design seemed a bit old-fashioned as she describes aesthetics as something in which only a superfluous society will indulge …as if designer products are only for us rich westerners. Luckily a member of the audience could inform her that people in the third world are also fascinated by aesthetics and do buy nice designer products besides commodities – and sometimes instead of commodities. A very good point!

The keynote started to sidetrack when members of the audience brought up their own agendas. A very entertaining gentleman spoke on microloans. A great little talk but a bit off topic here. Another member off the audience stated that emotions has a great influence on consumers and their choice of product. Well… we weren’t flabbergasted by this insight. We think Nike and Apple are both aware of that fact. And we just realized that we do in fact love our iPods.

To try to their quite different talks meet, Austin and Stokholm had drawn a chalk line around themselves on the floor. Austin had “the business island” and Stokholm took the designer’s and artist’s point of view. Why does this conference continuously stress the differences between the money men in dark suites and the real creative people? The story of creativeness and innovation is not bipolar.

I wish that Rob Austin had been given the entire 1½ hours to himself. Then none of this holistic gluing-together would have been nessecary and we could have gotten a better insight into his excellent ideas instead of a glimpse into a 20 years old design case.

So, we joined a session called “Paperjam: Art, creativity and Innovation”. This session was chaired by Robert Austin (plain overkill, by the way).

The format was a bit confusing: 3 researchers took turns presenting each others thesis. The quality of the research done varied to some degree. It was our impression that while Ms. McCleod and Ms. Buffa had done some really interesting anthropological studies, Titiana Chemi had some challenges separating her role as a consultant from her role a researcher. It appeared to us, as if the enthusiasm towards the job as a facilitator for creative processes had taken over the academic reasoning.

But of course, we haven’t read her thesis – so who are we to judge, we just attended the paper jam.

All three speakers displayed an innant fascination by the arts and by artists as a group. An almost romantic notion of the bohêmian artist, not motivated by material incentives. Especially Ms. Chemi seemed to regard the arts as an almost magical catalyst for innovative and creative thinking. We fear that this kind of unreflected view upon creativity may further part the fields of management and creativity instead of closing the gap.

Charlotte McLeod opened the session by presenting the thesis of Patricia Buffa on Experimentation and Innovation in the Visual Arts. Buffa has studied different subcultures in Milan – for instance street artists, trying to find out how these urban ‘incubators’ keep developing and spawning trends and artists. Also, she studied how the members of these cultures interact with each other and with commercial art galleries. The question is: How can businesses tap into these creative hot houses without destroying the unique and dynamic environment of them?

Next: Tatiana Chemi presented the work of Charlotte McLeod. She had studied the background of a large group of advertising creatives: What were their childhood like? From which demographic segment did they come? And what do they have in common? One of the thing they all had in common is that they all have felt marginalized in some way or the other. Money is not the driving factor for them – intrinsic motivation such as peer recognition is. We wonder, though: Are these qualities associated with advertising creatives only? Or are they simply common motivating factors for most professionals – including scholars and managers for that matter – we all want our job to be more than just a paycheck. Interesting presentation none the less.

Finally Patricia Buffa presented Titiana Chemi’s thesis (confused now? We were!). Chemi is doing what she calls action research being both a consultant and a researcher. Her idea is that applying artistic methods – and introducing real life artists as catalysts – she can improve a client’s innovative process. By setting up workshops where employees and managers meet artists she suggests that the creativity potential of the company will increase. One question that comes into mind is: How will Ms. Chemi prove that the “artistic” practice is what does the trick? Maybe it’s just that bringing together people tend to make them laugh and get creative together. Is this just a way of proving that your average team building sessions actually work?

Our conclusion on this session is that we should be very careful to canonize art as an catalyst that will magically enhance a business’ innovative powers. Creative methods, out-of-the-box-thinking and an open discourse should not be confined to extraordinary workshops facilitated by external consultants and Real Life Artists but must be integrated into the way we innovate on a daily basis. We must not to alienate ourselves from these basic principles of creation by labelling it as ‘artistic’.

It’s improving greatly. Joe Tidd and Scott Isaksen (authors of Meeting The Innovation Challenge) has just given the first keynote about the dualism of creativity and innovation.

A general discussion followed. Is creativity enough to be innovative? Probably not. Proper innovation won’t happen without a business approach to creativity.

As a member of the audience said: A conference on creativity will be populated with clown, actors and a few public relations people trying to get an idea for their next campaign. A conference on innovation will comprise a lot of black suits. Wonder what kind of conference this will turn out to be? How many clowns and how many suits?

To really appreciate this talk we guess you must have read Tidd and Isaksen’s book.

We’ll both spend the next four days attending ECCIX - a conference for creativity and innovation, and right now we’re trying to get through the ‘Grand Opening’ of it.

It too soon to say anything about the event as a whole, but the beginning seems most like a parody on the opening of the Copenhagen European Song Contest. Faulty Powerpoint presentations and business men in old jeans thinking that creativity is all about funny hats. And very nervous presenters to say at least. Oh well. Let’s see, it can only get better – Maybe they’ll even manage to get the mics working during the day.

More to come from ECCI X 2007 in Copenhagen.

Just another post on the use of digital billboards in NYC.
On his website, Jason Eppink is showing how to create street-art out of the commercial content on the digital displays in the NYC subway entrances.
There is a lot of money involved in marketing on the digital displays in the New York Metro:
(estimated $274,000 for a ten-second spots every minute on each of the city’s 80 digital displays for a month). That’s a lot of money! But you’re not getting you’re moneys worth if you are broadcasting the same standard made-for-tv commercials as always.
The content should be made especially to the digital displays and be somehow adjusted and relevant to the specific physical surroundings.
Or why not hire Jason Eppink… it looks great!

Check out the interactive installation at Union Square in New York. It’s really amazing and hasm a lot of ‘wow-effect’. But I would love to play with the equipment for a couple of days and try to combine the astonishing visuals with for instance live video/data or live data from a RFID chip

Logging into Wordpress I discovered two almost finished drafts that I never got around to publish. One was about the launch of Axure v. 4.6 (old news now), and the other was about the European Galileo project that sadly may never fly, mostly because of some left wing politicians who can’t see the need for a civilian, European satellite navigation system (and for some reason thinks it’s better to trust that the US Military kindly keeps the GPS running for the benefit of all mankind).

Anyway, that debate is also over, so that draft went in the bin too.

I guess that what happens to a private blog when work takes up too much of your time. A few months ago I was offered a position as Head of User Experience as a part of our new matrix-organisation. Of course I couldn’t say no, although I had very little idea of exactly what a Head of User Experience does. No regrets, though.

The last month I have been working on a new (and hopefully improved) process for our interaction design and visual design phases. It will be quite simple as we do a lot of different projects and it has to fit them all in some way, but of course such a process cannot exist on its own. It needs to be tied into sales, project management and development – and anchoring just takes time and a lot of talking to different people.

My team (and all of my colleagues at Creuna) has been extremely busy too. Creuna Denmark has grown tremendously and while taking in a lot of new people we have also won lots of new clients and exciting, challenging, and sometimes difficult, projects.

While I have been fiddling with process diagrams in Visio my fellow UX-consultants (IA and AD alike) have been working like madmen (and madwomen) to meet the deadlines. Shoutouts to an extraordinarily dedicated team -  I’m seriously looking forward to having some well-earned crabfish and schnaps with you on Friday! Cheers guys.

Be afraid, be very afraid. If this was footage from a Soviet young pioneer organisation camp in the 1980′ies, just imagine what Reagan would have said – something about an evil empire, I guess.

But no: It’s a trailer for the documentary Jesus Camp showing American children being brain washed by raving maniacs to be true soldiers of god.

Notice the camouflage paint and the pledge to lay down your life for Jesus. This is beyond sick…

Just another proof that religion of any kind can and will be exploited by fanatics. Kids: Stay clear of it. Source: www.kirstensanford.com

Thanks to This Week in Science, the radio show that fights for reason and science, the Unicorn Museum is now online at www.unicornmuseum.org. The goal of the Unicorn Museum is to raise the money for a big billboard across the street from the home of absolute ignorance: The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. The billboard is to feature an ad for the (non-existing, really) Unicorn Museum. The hope is to make visitors to the Creation Museum think twice… I wonder if that’s gonna happen, but still: A worthy cause!

Now that I got your attention: Go grab the This Week In Science podcast at Apple Music Store, it’s free. It’s hosted by Justin Jackson and Ph.d. Kirsten Sanford. Besides being smart Kirsten is one of the absolute lookers of the science community. As the podcast is still audio only, I here bring you a photo of Kirsten Sanford for you to look at when listening and getting smarter. Consider it a multimedia experience. Oh, read her blog too.

Shout outs to This Week In Science for fighting for a little less dumb world.

In today’s alert box Jakob Nielsen gets angry on Adobe for forgetting the OK button on a preference dialog.

And yes, of course Adobe should have added an OK button to the Windows version of the dialog, but for Mac folks, this is how dialogs have been for ages – that is without an OK button when it wasn’t needed.

So – in this case Nielsen is right (it’s always easy to be right about obvious stuff). But with his “33 years of experience using computers” Nielsen could have at least mentioned that to exclude the OK button used to be a very common design standard for Mac applications.

Also, it seems to me that with users getting used to Ajax-style “on the fly saving” of data, the missing OK button is getting more and more normal.

Speaking of benchmarking…

Have a nice weekend.

Really good slideshow about the economics of micromedia, connected consumption and the snowball effect.
Nice to see a web 2.0 slide show that’s not focused on technology but on the development of the New Media Economics.
Although 107 slides is a lot, I liked the intelligent analysis of broadcast/blockbuster media and micromedia. Enjoy

Behold, behold! The New 7 Wonders of the world have been announced. And behold again: 6 of them are extremely old buildings, and the seventh is the horrible over-sized Jesus thing in Rio de Janeiro. That for sure is no wonder: It’s just a big ass chunk of concrete erected to intimidate people not to regress into their native believes.

The 7 wonders of the ancient world really were wonders at the time. But I think we’ve come a long way since it was wondrous to build a large statue or do a nice temple. We can do that any time we want to. But building a long suspension bridge, inventing a CAT scanner or a tunnel scanning microscope certainly takes a lot more effort and does quite a lot more good. And what about nifty stuff like the GPS system, the Arecibo telescope, the International Space Station, the Saturn V – or the internet? Nah – that’s just modern crap.

So we opt for some ruins, because that’s what they did 3.000 years ago (except that the ruins weren’t ruins then). Very imaginative, people.

And now for something completely different:
A couple of snap shots from my holiday in Italy.

Gasexplosions

Gasexplosions from the volcano on the small Island of Stromboli. According to Wikipedia and my experience from two days on the island, it’s one of the most active volcanos in Italy. Stromboli is definetly a ‘must see’ if your on Sicily or in Naples. It’s a bit difficult to access, but definitely worth the trouble. Spend a night or two, it’s amazing!

Mount Etna:
The highest volcano in Europe. The pictures was taken near the summit, at aprox. 3000 meters above sea level. It’s a picture of the main crater, which is always smoking. The major erruptions takes place once or twice in 10 years period.

One of the larger craters, where you can see the sendiments from previous erruptions. Notice the person in the middle of the picture and the cones in the background, it’s a very large volcano!!!

IE Tab. Brilliant! It runs IE inside a tab in Firefox. Excellent if your internet bank (and too much other stuff) only works for real in IE. Simply compile a list over alle the sites that you want to run in an IE context, and you never have to start IE again – manually that is. IE Tab will embed IE into Firefox when needed.

One of those tools that just makes your life that little bit easier.

At e-consultancy’s What’s New In Online Marketing, London June 27, Flemming Madsen presented Onalytica. It’s a tool for measuring your brand’s online impact. Like Google, Onalytica counts links, but unlike the big G, Onalytica weighs each link according to the credibility of the source. Also, Onalytica (partly) understands the context of the link and thus it can judge (with a precision about 93 %) wether the brand (or product, or subject) is referred to in a negative or positive manner.

This opens for pretty nice analysis of brand impact and for targeting those sources that are especially influential. Of course your brand have to be large enough to be discussed substantially online – in reviews, in blogosphere etc.

More from WNIOM to come…

I attended this seminar in London yesterday and it rocked. The term Web 2.0 wasn’t used at all but the whole thing was about how to link your website into the web itself and how to think outside your own site. I’ll be back with a more thorough description as soon as possible.

Must be hard work to be a pope. Imagine how much work the poor fellow must have put into his 10 Commandments For Motorists. Especially the second one must have taken some serious thinking for someone who’s work it is to bring the world back into the dark ages: The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm. No shit Padre?
I don’t know about you, but I’m not taking driving lessons from an old German guy who insists on crusing in a white cabriolet while standing up.

Like this Christopher Locke’s review of The Cult of The Amateure: How internet is killing our culture.
Quote: cult of the snotnose dumbfuck

I haven’t read, I don’t think I will.

The new French president Sarkozy shows up drunk to the press conference at the G8 summit.
Why do you hire communication professionals if they’re not stepping up to the occasion and preventing the president from going on stage drunk??…
Thank God it was just a microphone at a press conference and not the launch control to the nuclear missiles.

In the late nineties the University of Copenhagen shut down the department of Humanistic Computation. Scholars and IT didn’t mix, the vice deane apparently thought. IT was about programming, scholars were all about poetry and fluffy stuff. Stupid thinking – bad, bad move. Luckily in 1999 the IT University of Copenhagen stepped in and took over the market for well trained usability specialists and designers.

The idea that IT was all about numbers and algorithms also reflected onto the IT industry. Usability, interaction design and visual design were something fluffy that you applied to the web site like icing to a cake. Systems were programmed without knowledge of the user or of the user’s context and needs, and they more often than not suffered from so many conceptual mistakes that a simple revamp of the user interface just wouldn’t do the trick. To stick with the cake metaphor: It may look nice, but if the cake is genuinely bad, the icing won’t help much. The trouble was twofold: The programmers and the management didn’t understand what design was all about and we, the designers, were really bad explaining it to them. We appeared like grumpy geeks that always talked about the users and seldom about the business. No wonder: Designers were not considered a part of the business – just a part of the cost. We didn’t earn any money from the hours we spent consulting on design and concept. The projects didn’t really start, budget-wise, until the programming began.

This was of course bad for business for the web bureaus: All of the earnings had to come from a very short visual design phase and from a large, high risk, programming phase. That the conceptual design was almost non existing made the programming even more risky, as conceptual mistakes or interaction flaws would be discovered much too late in the process. This meant that quite often interaction errors were considered bugs and that we were taking immense losses trying to fix stupid design flaws that should never have been made. Just because we didn’t design before we built.

Nowadays demands are high for well educated scholars with communication skills, technical understanding, design skills, and a ’soft’ approach to IT. Too many large scale IT projects have suffered badly from the lack of design to ignore the need for these kinds of experts. We know that the business wil suffer from bad design and profit from great design. The clients (the smart ones) are willing to pay for great design (both interaction design and visual design) and thus to bring down the risk of the programming phases.

Although a few (often large) companies still haven’t got it (they will get it, eventually, or they will suffer a slow death), most have realized that design and design consultancy are valuable business areas of their own. Furthermore, they have found out that strengthening the quality of the design and thereby the quality of the product itself may (surprise, surprise) eventually lead to bigger market shares and that branding is also a about usability, web design and the right feature set. Who would’ve known, huh?

Now we need to take the next step: We need to realize that analysis, concept and strategy must be discussed before design starts. That great design comes from a well defined strategy and clear goals.

Both the consultants and the clients must realize that it’s impossible to design – and build – anything if the strategy and business models are not there. …and that “just make it user friendly” is not a strategic goal in itself.

Too much money is still being put into platforms and websites without a well thought through branding and communication strategy. So to further bring down risk and to make each € spent on web count: Think strategic. Define your digital strategy and make sure that every website, subsite, microsite, e-mail marketing system etc. fit neatly into it. Spend the time and money needed to make sure that your consultants and designers understand what your strategy is about – or get them to help you define your digital strategy if you haven’t got one.

A small YouTube clip from a Tom Peters presentation. Play the clip for your boss, the next time he wants to benchmark you against the current Market Leader
Enjoy !

Just a recommendation to check out the Sultan of Slide Shows – Management Guru Tom Peter’s slides. You could argue about the design of the slides, but the message is clear and important for everyone engage in innovative and creative work. In the slide you get fx punchlines like this:

Enjoy!

Microsoft has launched their Project ‘Milan’, which is basically a large touchscreen with a new multitouch manipulation software.

I tried a similar product in New York last year (based a projector instead of a touch screen) and based om my experience it makes a big difference when you’re using a multitouch display instead of a keyboard.

If you’re using a multitouch display on a horizontal surface it’s often becomming a social experience in contrast to using a keyboard where you’re mostly interacting in a individual manipulation and interaction mode. So give me a couple of those, thanks … but could someone at Microsoft please make sure that the blue screen of death is not all over my coffee table?
It would ruin my creative mood, I’m sure.

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Accidentally moving my mouse cursor over the bottom of the MSN Messenger Window I triggered a hidden, brain dead happy-go-lucky video ad from McDonald’s. Suddenly the loud and annoying sound of the ad was screaming out of my earphones making my ears ring.

Do not auto start sound in any way. Not in banners, on web pages or any where else. Let the user choose when to use sound or not. You do not know how the volume levels of the user’s computer has been set, and no ad – no matter how cleverly produced – will work when blown into your head at 120dB.

Also, while the customer might be able to handle ads when surfing the web, it is very intimidating to be confronted with popup video ads and sounds in what you regard as a desktop application.

If this is the new way of presenting ads in MSN Messenger (or Live! Messenger or what ever the name is this week) I’m shifting to another IM that will leave me alone.

[UPDATE: Jacob Hage has the solution! - in Danish. It's all about getting this patch]

A McDonald’s video ad just waiting, ready to jump up and scare the minced beef out me.

Whammo – I’m not loving it.

Heads up: Geeky stuff below.

Wordpress is very easy to install on your own server if you have even the slightest knowledge of how a web server is put together. But getting those old Blogger-URLs to translate to the new URL scheme was hard work for a non-techy like me.

Here is how I did it – in case others have the same problem (actually, some do):

Redirecting the RSS feed

First of all I wanted the old URL to our RSS feed to work so loyal subscribers won’t have to re-subscribe to the feed. The old feed was published to silberbauer.dk/rss.xml but the new feed is to be found at silberbauer.dk/feed/.

I tried numerous ways of rewriting the URL with mod_rewrite – nothing worked. Somehow my rewrite-rules conflicted with the rewriting that Wordpress does on it’s own to make pretty URLs.

Finally I asked my very (very) smart Creuna co-worker Guan, and he told me simply to use RedirectPermanent instead. It works like a charm:

RedirectPermanent /rss.xml http://silberbauer.dk/feed/ Even FeedDemon/Newsgator accepted the “301″ and continued looking for the feed at the new URL.

Making old Blogger URLs point to new Wordpress posts.

Then, I decided to make old blogger-URLs redirect to the Wordpress version of the posts. First, I sat up Wordpress to generate pretty permalinks that look as much like the old blogger links as possible, e.g.:

Old Blogger generated permalink: http://www.silberbauer.dk/2007/04/that-warm-fuzzy-feeling-of-web-20.html
New permalink: http://silberbauer.dk/wp/2007/04/that-warm-fuzzy-feeling-of-web-20

As you’ll notice: Only the “/wp/” and the missing “.html” differentiates the new URL from the old one. So with RedirectMatch we can redirect the URL using regular expressions:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/200([0-9])/(.*).html$ http://silberbauer.dk/wp/200$1/$2

Archive URLs

In exactly the same way the old archive URLs are redirected to the new archives:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/200([0-9])\_([0-9][0-9])\_([0-9][0-9])_archive.html$ http://silberbauer.dk/wp/200$1/$2/

My .htaccess file now looks like this:

RedirectPermanent /rss.xml http://silberbauer.dk/feed/
RedirectPermanent /index.html http://silberbauer.dk/
RedirectPermanent /index.htm http://silberbauer.dk/

RedirectMatch permanent ^/200([0-9])/(.*).html$ http://silberbauer.dk/wp/200$1/$2
RedirectMatch permanent ^/200([0-9])\_([0-9][0-9])\_([0-9][0-9])_archive.html$ http://silberbauer.dk/wp/200$1/$2/

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress


I got this message from the CEO at eLounge - the e-book store entirely made in Flash that I posted about some time ago.

Now the site has been rewritten in good old html. I’m sure that eLounge will experience an increase in revenue almost immediately as the search engines are now able to see the site.

I still feel that the visual design is a bit confusing with too many details, but that’s beside the point. Now eLounge is a real website that may be accessed from search engines, bookmarked and deeplinked into, and we like that! Welcome to the web, eLounge.

Hello Wordpress! Why? Because it’s niftier. The admin-interface is so Web 2.0 that we almost wet ourselves. Forgive us the default template.

And oh yeah: The Blogger RSS Import plugin by Ady Romantika really rules.

- and a brand is not a style guide.

To most professionals these are obvious statements. But definitely not for a lot of website owners who still think that online branding is all about Flash and nice graphics, and forget that branding is in every aspect of the site: The choice of features, the tone of voice, the response time, the ease of navigation (or lack thereof), the feeling of real value. And, of course, the looks.

I’ve even heard the top 120 pixels of a web page declared as “the branding area”. BS! Online branding is about using the web medium the right way – it’s not just about putting the right logo and the right colors on some out-of-the-box web solution.

You can’t limit your branding effort to a isolated part of the page – it’s an ongoing process. Your website oozes branding from every pixel, so you better in control of what kind of branding it’s oozing…

Your brand strategy must govern your web strategy and affect all important decisions in the design process – but on all levels, not just on the visual one: A website which doesn’t provide the user with any real value but only wastes the user’s time (or downright annoys the user by being stupidly designed or coded) is bad branding – no matter how beautiful and by-the-styleguide it is.

Now grab 10 minutes of nice, visual branding fundamentals and remember that they all apply to the web too.

Source: http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap

Göran Karlsson On Search And Web 2.0

moblogging from Børsen: Göran Karlsson from Fast is so right: Search and web the 2.0-paradigm is closely connected. Specialized search technologies are the backbone that creates value from the user generated content.

Web 2.0 Seminar At FDIH

moblogging from Børsen: Thomas Madsen-Mygdal talks about the real values behind the web 2.0 hype. It’s about real change, not technology.

For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals
Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination
We learned to talk

Pink Floyd: Keep Talking (The Division Bell)

Speaking about social networking and e-commerce at the Danish E-business Prize 2007 someone in the audience expressed his feelings about social networks and communities as nothing more than a hype. ‘Who’, he noted, ‘will spend time discussing and reviewing products on the web – I know for sure I wouldn’t’.

I guess people who haven’t participated in the buzz themselves don’t understand why someone feels the urge to talk online.

Neither did I until a couple of years ago. Being a true child of the generation of one way communication this social networking thing seemed foolish to me. Of course, as a web professional I quickly learned to appreciate community features and social navigation as nice tools for enriching the user experience. Later on my brother and I launched this blog to be a part of it all and felt the blog-urge.

But maybe I didn’t really grasp the emotional power of web 2.0 for real until very recently when my wife started blogging about what she loves the second-most: Gourmet food.

Left: Trine in our weekend cottage – outside the April sun is shining bright, but… must blog… must blog…

She’s not watching TV anymore, she’s not reading magazines – she’s always in front of her laptop working on the next post. That is, when she’s not out photographing restaurants and chefs for the blog or busy reviewing cafés or gourmet restaurants on the (excellent) community site www.mitkbh.dk

It has been quite an experience for me to see her suddenly realize to the full extent what web 2.0 is all about. It made me realize how simple it is: It’s not about AJAX, round corners or bubble design. It’s not really about the web or the internet at all. It’s just about communicating. It’s about telling other people what you like or don’t like and about experiencing the sheer thrill of meeting new friends that share your likes and dislikes. I spend more than a day creating the template of this blog and, from vanity reasons, getting Blogger.com to ftp the pages to my own domain. Not giving a rat’s ass about the technology Trine spent exactly 10 minutes picking a Wordpress template and she was on her way.

Neither TV, newspapers, nor web 1.0-sites will give you that nice feeling of contributing and being a part of it all as do blogs or community sites. That’s why old school corporate websites or web-shops that don’t hook into the buzz in any way soon will be things of the past.

For designers (and our clients) it’s important to understand that the true web 2.0 aficionados out there do not care about the fancy tech-stuff of it, or the term web 2.0 for that matter. Screw the hype and the bleeding edge technology – keep it simple. They just want to keep talking.

As the last person in the western hemisphere: I’m now able to photomoblog.

Well… I guess it is easy if you’re either living in the US, having AT&T as your carrier or being the proud owner of a blogger-ready Nokia N-series or a fancy Sony-Ericsson. But living in Denmark (not supported by Blogger’s mobile service “Blogger Go”), having Sofonon as carrier and having a Nokia 6230i (which is a lousy phone for anything else than talking) – photomoblogging is up hill.

I’ve spent a lot of time testing different approaches:

• Blogger GO (not supported in Denmark)
• Shozu (Great Java app that connects to a web based distribution service that will push your images here and there. Doesn’t work well with my Nokia and Sonofon, though, and can’t connect to the new Blogger service which I’m using)
• The Flicker->Blogger interface (works great, but I can’t MMS from my phone directly to Flickr)
• Sending images directly to Blogger’s e-mail-interface (it doesn’t accept attachments)
• Using Gmail for mobile phones (to circumvent the Nokia 6230i e-mail- and MMS-features (but alas: Gmail Mobile doesn’t do attachments at all upstream)

I finally came up with this detour that in fact makes me photomoblog by MMS’ing an image to an e-mail-adress:

How to photomoblog directly to your Blogger blog (new version):

1) Set up an Gmail-address, if you don’t have one already (Gmail accepts MMS)
2) Set up a Flickr account, if you don’t have one already (To use as a gateway between Gmail and Blogger)
3) Let Flickr make you a special “mail-to-blog”-email-address
4) Grant Flickr access to your Blogger account
5) Set up a filter on your Gmail account forwarding all mail sent to a special pseudo address (e.g. yourname+foo@gmail.com) to your Flickr e-mail-to-blog e-mail-address

Now: Put your special Gmail blog-entry in your phone’s contact list – you may name it “blog”. Now, snap a picture and send an MMS to your contact “blog”. Gmail will accept the MMS and due to the filter this e-mail will be forwarded immediately to your Flickr account’s special directly-to-blog-e-mail-address as an e-mail prober. Flickr will convert this to an image with a description and push it through its Blogger-interface, and voila: Your image has been blogged!

So it is: Nokia > [MMS] > Gmail (sub address) > [e-mail] > Flickr >[Blogger gateway] > Blogger

Easy as pie…

The Danish E-business Prizes 2007 has been awarded – eight of them in all.

The show itself was OK. The Børssalen (the main hall at the 1624 Copenhagen Exchange) is a beautiful place and the food provided by “Gammel Mønt” was tasty indeed. Katrine Ring and Annette Falberg hosted the show. Neither is quite the Danish female equivalent to Billy Crystal, though.

Jesper Kunde from Kunde&Co. talked about branding and e-commerce. I think he came trough as an angry old man who really don’t get it. I bet that some of the audience – representatives from large corporations doing quite OK online, felt a bit puzzled when Jesper Kunde told them that they really aren’t. Martin Thorborg from SpamBut hey – he’s a branding guru, I’m just a consultant, so he may be right, and I may be wrong. Who knows. In fact: Kunde is right in many ways – it’s just that what he’s saying, we’ve been saying for years: Danish corporations need to understand that a corporate website isn’t enough and that the top brass has to focus on internet strategy as well as on off line branding. And that also on the net corporation need to differentiate between brands and corporation. Aaargh – it’s so obvious that it hurts. But I guess some people need to hear from a guru.

Martin Thorborg from Spamfighter (former Jubii and Yahoo) was great fun, telling us how he helped Pernille Aalund raise her revenue 400 % on dildos. He has a very straight forward way of saying things, but I like it. It’s refreshing.

As before mentioned I did a “lounge” with Andreas Johannsen (great guy, looking forward to working with him again) on e-business and social networking. It went well, I think, we got a lot of positive feed back. About 80 people showed up and we got quite a discussion going. The 90 minutes went too quickly.

As Creuna co-sponsored the event I also got to say “And the nominees are…” and to shake hands with the Minister of Science. Wauw – my own private mini Oscars-experience. (The image to the left is of me and the Minister. The Minister is the pleasant looking fellow to the right – I’m the short haired moody guy to the left.)

The logistics were very professional. The presenters were briefed, informed, and supported in every way by the nice staff. The timing was very precise and I felt it was all very professional staged. All in all FDIH did a great job this year.

But… and being a designer I have to mention this… (and I’m sorry that I’m always so negative): The big screen graphics sucked magnificently! Unreadable (and I was placed at the table closest to the stage), stamp-sized, screenshots of the nominated web sites flickered across the screen looking like something I made on my Amiga 500 15 years ago. No wait: The Amiga would have done better. Why not hire the fabulous Bottega Areté VJ-crew or someone else in that league to kick some visual ass instead? Maybe next year the 9th show will be really cool.

Are you a skilled information architect / interaction designer? Do you know how to communicate with the client and how to make people realize how important it is to design stuff before coding it?

Then Creuna needs you for our Copenhagen office.

It’s common knowledge: If you want to get your message out there your site must be accessible to search engines, especially Google. That’s why I normally tell my clients not to use Flash for the entire site. Yes, Flash can access databases and XML, Flash makes all that nifty effects possible and Flash will show in the same way in all browsers (if it shows at all, of course).

But in the end: Content inside the Flash file will not be indexed by Google. Unless you spend a lot of time and money on shadowing your pages in html and in other ways tricking Google to index your site, your content is nonexistent as far Google is concerned as long as it’s wrapped in Flash.

So, in my – and most other web professionals’ – opinion, Flash is great for doing the icing, not for making the cake itself.

That’s why I’m so happy to find out that the NRA (National Rifle Association) website is almost pure Flash. If you google NRA member and gun rights wacko Wayne LaPierre, or the title of some of his articles on nra.org, you won’t find the NRA website at all. Fantastic. In that way children won’t accidentally stumble upon NRA’s unhealthy message: That guns are great toys and that we are safe as long as we have the option to gun down each other.

Now, if only the large tobacco companies, arms manufacturers and religious fundamentalist organisations would be so kind as to hide their content behind a Flash plugin too, the web would be a much healthier place to be.

Wikipedia shows us that the combined knowledge of man is incredible and that Web 2.0 technologies can be used for something truly great.

But don’t forget that Wikis aren’t inherently good in any way – the very same technologies may be used for spreading stupidity and idiocy. Although it seems that to use Web 2.0 technology for that kind of misinformation you’ll have to control who’s contributing – to keep all us liberals out, you know. So, where Wikipedia is for all of us to edit, the fundamentalist Christian alternatives are not. And it makes sense: If they opened the door, saneness would be pouring in from all over the web.

On Conservapedia (a right-wing christian answer to the “liberal biased” Wikipedia) I stumpled upon a very short article on Thomas Edison which I’d found could benefit from some improvements. Among other things, I’d liked to add that Edison was a an atheist. But, as I’d expected, I am was not allowed to create an account on Conservapedia – I guess it’s only for American folks of the faith and keepers of the truth.

Wikipedia is biased, Conservapedia says. How about this description of “Atheism” in Conservapedia:

“Atheism is closely tied with Secular Humanism. Popularly-known Atheists and Secular Humanists include Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Other famous atheists include Pol Pot and Stalin.” [...] “No atheist has ever been elected leader of a democracy. The only political systems under the control of atheists are totalitarian and/or communist“

Biased? Naah.

Other scary reads are:

Conservapedia on “Dinosaurs“, Conservapedia on “God”, Conservapedia on “Liberal”

Also, don’t miss out on CreationWiki on Dinosaurs which answers that old question of how Noah did manage to make room for those bulky dinos inside the ark? Well:

It should be noted that although the Biblical description of Noah’s ark states it as large enough to host even the largest known specimens of dinosaurs, it is logical that younger / smaller varieties were taken aboard. Reptiles are the only terrestrial vertebrate that continuously grows as long as they live. Mammals on the other hand, have an adolescent period following which there is no further growth. Therefore, it is arguable that many of these “terrible lizards” were simply much older than modern varieties.

Mind boggling.

If you want to attend FDIH’s “E-handelsprisen” (The Danish e-commerce prize 2007), get your ticket now. There’s only a few left.

I’m going to second Andreas Johannsen (his blog – in Danish) on his panel on social networking and e-commerce. If you’re into B2C e-commerce, you should join us. We’ll be talking about the value of letting your customers network on your own site, and why it is important that you also join the buzz outside your own shop.

Two days ago I made Axure aware of a bug in Axure RP Pro 4.4.0.471 that made special characters, like the Danish æ, ø and å, render badly in Firefox.

Today the new release 4.4.1.745 is ready

Check out MoMA’s site about Doug Aitken’s ‘Sleepwalkers’. I wish I’ve seen it live in NY, but the site gives you a good impression of the video-installation.

By the way, one of the ultimate highlights of the excellent ‘Sip My Ocean’ videoexhibition at Louisiana (in Denmark) was definitely ‘Can’t Stop’ by Aitken. It’s a definitely ‘must see’ piece of videoart!

Enjoy!
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2007/aitken/

Axure RP Pro 4.4 is out and features a few long awaited improvements: Now you can

• use “onchange” in dropdowns
• communicate with dynamic layers across masters
• use a placeholder widget instead of the ugly image widget

And is it me – or has the app become a bit faster?

Anyway: Axure stays in the lead as the best tool for rapid web prototyping.

Silberbauer Says: is sorry to announce that the iPhone concept is no more than a simple rip off.

70 years ago the very first iPhone was made (in beautiful sturdy bakelite) by Bell Labs which is now planning to re-market is as the iPhone Retro Classic.

First the mouse – now the iphone. Shame on you Steve, shame on you…

Designing rich newsletters for Notes has always been a pain. The Notes html rendering engine pretty much sucks. But as not many consumers use Notes it didn’t really matter. Also, webmail services like Hotmail and Gmail has been difficult to negotiate CSS wise. But you could always trust the good old Outlook to render your html e-mail in the right way.

Until now, that is.

February Microsoft launches Outlook 2007 featuring that old buggy Word rendering engine with extremely limited support for CSS. Yes: The one you know from MS Word that has the same html rendering power as did Netscape 2 – that is: Very limited indeed.

It’s nothing short of a disaster. Html formatted e-mail newsletters drive a lot of our clients’ online business, and we know for a fact that rich formatted newsletters work well: Nice design makes people buy stuff. Now some of our clients must either redesign their newsletters or fall back to text e-mail to be sure their customers can read their messages in Outlook (which most people use).

Why Microsoft has chosen to use the crippled Word rendering engine for displaying the html formatting of the brand new Outlook 2007 is a mystery.

My best guess, though, is that some fool in Microsoft has decided that to “integrate” e-mail more into the Office suite the stupid Word engine must be used all over the place. And it’s probably the same lame guy that years ago decided that Word should be the default e-mail editor for Outlook.

Source: Campaign Monitor

This week we’re testing large videoprojections in our new HQ in Ørestaden (Copenhagen).
The headline of the project is: “From a Place to Work to a Place to Create” and we’re trying to create an ambience of innovation, creativity and communication.

If you’re in the neighborhood drop by this week an enjoy the impressive prototype, else check out the videoclip.

What do you think?