One of the most notable take-aways for me was the over arching focus on the speed of innovation – and more specifically that innovation is moving so rapidly that a digital still camera released today has a product life of 3 to 6 months. iPhones have had their current 3G version publicly available for less than a year, and many are calling for a product update as soon as this week.

One of the most notable moments for me came when this card was flashed on the screen:

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. – Bill Gates.

Looking at this another way, a lot of times adoption is more critical than innovation, and an innovator often has to be prepared to go slower in order to move faster. This can mean letting competitors achieve what is often referred to as the First Mover “Advantage,” although it’s so rarely advantageous to move first that this catch phrase becomes somewhat of an oxymoron. The (unlevel) playing field is littered with first movers who had a great technology or the next best thing but who were quashed (or bought for pennies on the dollar) by larger organizations with better lawyers.

For me, the matter of patents and intellectual property is becoming more and more distressing. Canadian innovation giant RIM had its stock – the capitalization it needed for growth – battered for years because a company called NTP claimed RIM was using concepts, specifically sending emails to wireless devices, and that this constituted infringement. They settled out of court for more than $600 Million.

Now, it’s important to note something here: NTP doesn’t actually make any technology that sends or receives wireless email. Nor have they actually developed a working prototype of such a device. In fact, they didn’t actually come up with the idea, they bought it off someone else. Moreover, and this is what gets me… NTP doesn’t actually make or do anything – their whole business is licensing patents they’ve acquired from other sources.

What does this mean for innovation? Well, for one thing, it means that businesses can be stifled even before they’re initiated! This could mean that if I have a general idea for a business, I may very well have to license the idea from someone else (if they’re willing to license it to me), despite the fact that I may have a working prototype, business model and even several million customers. Consider: What if Alexander Graham Bell had built the telephone, only to discover that someone else had patented “two-way voice communication over electric wires”? What if Thomas Edison had lit that bulb but then found out that Tesla owned the rights to “Electric Illumination Devices”. If you think that these seem far-fetched and frivolous, I would encourage you to look into Amazon’s One Click Purchasing Patent.

There’s some good news, though:

1. Patent law is under review and we should see patent tort reform and hopefully some relief soon.
2. Patents are jurisdictional, meaning that what’s patented in the US may be clear in places like the EU and China;
3. Creative commons licensing and the open source communities are gaining steam and visibility (not to mention credibility);
4. And finally, the speed of products is rendering the protection of unimplemented intellectual property relatively moot.

Marshal McLuhan said “Invention is the mother of necessities,” and as product life-cycles move faster and faster and increasingly require global adoption in order to stay competitive, the need to protect ideas becomes less important. The ephemeral nature of our consumption demands new features and new extensions with alarming frequency. This means that building the better mousetrap, and not just dreaming one up, is indeed becoming the way to get the world to keep walking that well-worn path to your door.

The future home will probably be equipped with a number of control centers, from any one of which the homemaker can give her commands to appliances at work in the kitchen and laundry. Electric ranges already are equipped with automatic controls for temperature and cooking time, but there is no practical reason why these operations together with the other appliances cannot be controlled remotely from any room the house.”

- Popular Mechanics “The Electrice Home of the Future,” Aug, 1939

The folks at the Industry Standard have offered up a new predictive look at the home of future, this time projecting ahead to 2013. The “Home Of The Future” is a common thought experiment that allows futurists, engineers, artists and business people to trace a path to the present by looking backwards from the future (hey, that sounds familiar), and the Industry Standard offers an interesting guide.

t’s 2013, and you’ve just come home from work. As you pull into the driveway, you reach into your pocket and swipe the screen of your smartphone with your thumb. Your garage door opens and the lights in your house turn on. The TV queues up the shows you missed while you were working late. Your favorite songs are following you from the living room to the kitchen. Then you stop. The phone blinks and warbles at you. The fridge says you forgot the milk.

Welcome home.

In the following pages, you’ll be treated to a glimpse of the toys and technologies that will grace your home in the not-so-distant future. If you are like most people, you probably have already sampled some of them, but others — such as automated home control and personal applications of cloud computing — haven’t made it into people’s homes … yet.

Check out the full article here

Apparently, there’re plans afoot to blend a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) with a weekly TV show on the Sci-Fi Network in the US. Most of the reaction in the blogosphere have pointed towards this being ill-advised. I agree, but perhaps for different reasons than “It’s gonna suck.”

The thinking behind the plan is fairly obvious: Create so-called appointment viewing, or getting fans to watch a show as it’s being broadcast, rather than on a DVR such as TiVo or from a Bittorrent, so that viewers must watch the advertisements. The MMORPG has the added benefit of providing engagement and continuity so that the show remains top of mind for the viewer base, and they feel particularly involved in the story.

Dave Howe, CEO of the Sci-Fi Channel commented:

“A television show that is on once a week isn’t enough. The fans today want the experience to go beyond that. For example, we can tell them that there will be an alien invasion at a certain place in the game, at a certain time, and to be there with all their friends and be ready. The outcome depends on them. And then that battle will be part of the universe in the show.”

Here’s why it won’t work… Simply put, viewers make bad writers. Part of the great experience of watching TV is to be led through a narrative, being surprised, horrified, and even disappointed. We WANT to talk about it at the watercooler, we WANT to blog about what a great (or crap) choice the writers and producers of the show have made.

The best shows on TV are those that don’t have to listen to their fanbase, and that keep them guessing. It’s also the reason that every choose your own adventure interactive TV show has failed.

For the foreseeable future, narrative TV will remain a lean-back experience, and as such, will require writers and producers to continue to take risks and deliver that ultimately elusive experience: innovation.

Links:
Slashdot | Sci-Fi Channel Merging TV Show with MMO
The original blog posting

“In many ways, the iPhone saga merely confirmed what many Canadian consumers and businesses have known for some time. Mobile data pricing in Canada is among the highest in the world, creating a significant barrier to the introduction of new mobile services and causing many consumers to carefully ration their mobile use for fear of being hit with a hefty bill at the end of the month.”

I was VERY surprised (and disappointed) to learn the following:

“The impact of uncompetitive pricing is felt beyond the consumer market. Last month, the World Economic Forum pointed to problems in the wireless market as a key reason for Canada’s slipping global ranking for “network readiness” (Canada has moved from 6th worldwide in 2005 to 13th today). Canada ranked 75th in the number of mobile subscribers, trailing countries such as El Salvador, Kazahkstan, and Libya. It also lagged behind countries such as the United Kingdom, Singapore, Italy, Sweden, and Norway on mobile pricing.”

Link

“Cognitive surplus” [is] the idea that automation gave us an enormous amount of free time to think and cogitate, and that sitcoms and other light entertainment from the past century were a way of absorbing that surplus”

Link: Death of the sitcom frees up 2,000 Wikipedias worth of cognitive capacity – Boing Boing

“It has been widely speculated that the stumbling block was Rogers’ wireless data plans, which typically cost more than those offered by carriers in Europe and the United States – a disparity that critics blame on a lack of Canadian wireless competition.

As well, most of Rogers’ wireless data plans have usage caps, with users charged by the megabyte if they go over their allotment.

“We’re not fans of unlimited plans,” Rob Bruce, president of Rogers’ wireless division, told analysts during a February conference call.”

I’m not one to tell a business that they shouldn’t take whatever they can get. If they’re in a position to charge that, and get it, then they should: It’s what the market will bear. If I don’t like it, my choice as a consumer should be to go elsewhere.

My lack of consumer choice in this matter, and this is the big one, these sky-high prices are actually hurting the wireless telcos! Why, do you ask? Well, first, they’re not going to own this game forever, and people in Canada have long memories. Second, and more importantly, wireless data represents some of the biggest opportunities for innovation since Web 1.0, and these guys are the gate-keepers. I think that rather than squeezing the network for cash, they need to get as many people ON the network. It’s only through tremendous girth that they will have value to big-boy wireless app (and I don’t mean game) developers.

This means that it’s also hurting Canada. Why? Not because we’re funneling huge sums of cash to Rogers, rather, because a cottage industry of innovation around wireless application development SHOULD be happening here, in the great white northern home of RIM. Such an industry could pay off BIG for wireless providers – Consider, they control the network, they could demand a cut of all mobile commerce transactions for eBay sales – Snipe from your Samsung!

Instead, we’re stuck with companies that would rather gouge us than encourage a fledgling industry that could help them make a lot of money in the future.

Link to Toronto Star Article