McKinsey acquires design firm Lunar for digital transformation
Consulting strategy firm, McKinsey, just announced its acquisition of San Francisco-based design company Lunar. The move brings Lunar close to McKinsey Digital, which helps clients “separate digital opportunity from hype.” In plain English, this group within McKinsey focuses on digital transformation. The acquisition is interesting for several reasons, but is neither groundbreaking, as one insider […]
It’s time to reconsider, Google
Almost a year ago, Google made an apparently small change to Google Calendar. They started automatically adding Google Hangout video links to every new appointment. And it was bad. I’m sure you’ve all seen appointments like this pop up in your calendar. How do you join the meeting? Do you dial the phone number, or […]
The 787 Dreamliner (Parts 1-2)
Part1: I travel to Asia a lot. The journey takes about 12 hours and can take 16 hours depending upon where I am headed. It is arduous. I often think I would rather drink rat poison than sit in a horrid seat for one more trip. But I do it; that is my job. I […]
VisualBee –Trying to Automate Creativity
Like many people in the technology industry, I’m regularly tasked with creating and delivering presentations – it’s something I really enjoy – spreading the message of cloud to the world. One of the things I don’t especially enjoy however is the design process around presentations – luckily I have a
Plane Simple
It’s amazing, though not in the least bit surprising, that the recent AWS outage has generated such widespread attention, with a plethora of blog posts from customers to industry experts taking up pixel space across all corners of the globe. I think it’s fairly obvious to all that since the event, everything that needs to […]
Product Design for Iterative Processes
Everybody has some portion of their life that is repetitive. For these cases we want software that is optimized for massive iteration.I recently wrote a post about design simplicity where I encouraged technology design teams to think about “designing for the novice, configuring for the pro” users. I wrote this post because I feel that too […]
Design for the Novice, Configure for the Pro
I recently wrote about my philosophy of minimalism that “less is more” with the mantra “when in doubt, leave it out.” I’ve had a long-standing rule of thumb in product design, which I call “design for the novice, configure for the pro.” I started saying this back in 2001/02, long before the era of Web […]
Crowdsourcing Our New Logo Design. Time to Vote.
We’re putting our money where our (digital) mouth is: having talked so much about crowdsourcing, we took 99designs for a test drive, hoping to see a new CloudAve logo emerge. I was not too impressed with the initial submissions, but just as I sus…
Crowsdourcing Our New Logo Design. Will it Work?
We’ve written so much about crowdsourcing, I figured it was time to put our money where our mouth pen keyboard-tapping fingers are. CloudAve will soon get a new layout, and we thought we should refresh the logo, too. Next step: LazyTweet – and within minutes a trusted friend recommended 99designs. I read a few positive […]
AbleAdvisory: Finally, A Tech Mashup With Transportation Policy That Doesn't Suck!
Stewart Mader blogs about 4-id creative network, a Barcelona-based transportation design firm. They’ve created a system that helps you figure out where the best place to board a subway is in order to find a seat. He picked it up from 2nd Avenue Sagas a blog devoted to, yes you guessed it, the NYC Subway […]
Courier & Foldable Tablets are Neither Innovative Nor “Different”
This is a sad “I’ve told you” moment, as I predicted the death of dual-screen tablets, be it the one by MSI or Microsoft’s Courier, which has just been canceled. Says Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s VP of corporate communications: At any given time, across any of our business groups, there are new ideas being investigated, tested, […]
Is Crowdsourcing Disrupting the Design Industry?
This is an issue that I simply cannot wrap my head around. Spec work appears in the design field infinitely more times than any other industry. It absolutely floors me that people think that it is even remotely ethical to build their businesses by tearing down ours. Mark Hemmis’s comment on AIGA policy statement on […]
Do we need openness for our toaster?
There has been some interesting discussion about Apple and iPad being closed. In many cases for Apple, I’d buy this argument, but regarding iPad being closed, I have to disagree. As I talked earlier, iPad is a gadget for non-techies. People who have been scared about the complexity of computers will be able to use […]
In Search of the Obvious – cutting through the marketing mess
When I first tweeted that Jack Trout‘s new book “In Search of the Obvious” had arrived from Amazon, my mate @euan suggested his (excellent) blog is actually easy to find. He called it “The Obvious” because when he started writing about the application of new technology and social media in organizations, he felt that, actually, […]
Lessons Learned from Cloud Camp Seattle 2010
Last night I got to attend cloud camp, which is an “unevent” that people can attend to meet up with people who are looking into a particular technology for business. Cloud Camp Seattle was held at the Grand Hyatt Seattle, which provided an awesome environment to discuss cloud computing with 200 of like-minded people. For […]
