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October 24, 2006
Small Stuff
Spent the afternoon trying to figure out Google Sketchup- a 3 dimensional modeling tool that came out a while back. It's always best to do this stuff on a deadline and so I constructed some concept sketches for a medcial kiosk service, to be sent to a design team in India.
Posted by jb at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2006
Question
Is it bad form to get the words "wrong leg" tattooed on your leg? Will ink parlors do this? It is a bit of a high risk tattoo. You may need surgery on that leg some day.
Posted by jb at 05:58 AM | Comments (0)
October 15, 2006
A work related aside
Olivier Blanchard has an editorial post at Corante, quoting Mary Schmidt’s review of the new Kraft Cheese grating concept—a bag containing a wedge of parmesan cheese and a miniature grater. He notes that Kraft can spend bundles on market research but still end up throwing darts in a dark room when it comes to innovation and wonders whether there is a target market that really needs this sort of thing.
I suspect that there isn’t, and I suspect that this was obvious to many of the people that worked on the project. Projects like these occur when (1) companies define themselves as innovative (2) a language of innovation is established and (3) department leaders are able to use this language to gain political capital within the company.
I don’t have any knowledge of Kraft’s innovation process, but the product is perfect for gaining internal alignment within a consumer packaged goods company struggling against a market that seems to demand an endless stream of new products. The product is easy to visualize and understand. The product is low cost, save for R&D involved in the cheese grater. The product saves Kraft several processing steps in powdering the cheese and making sure that the cheese powder does not stick together. Importantly, this is the sort of product that can attract participation across the company. While seeming simple, it is new enough that someone in R&D can become a team player and leap onboard, it is a sure win for someone who might otherwise be struggling in marketing. It supports a series of timelines that can be met and is situated in a familiar market where forecasts are easy to make with numbers that are large enough to attract c-level support.
All that this innovation requires now is leadership, a sponsor, someone who believes in the concept. If the concept is generated at an innovation workshop, the innovator may be placed high enough in the company hierarchy that the benefits of forming a special team become obvious. If the innovation occurs in the context of a divisional or company wide ‘incubator’ program then all the better. If innovation occurs in the context of an initiative that requires “y new product launches” by 2007 then the inventor is making a valuable contribution to an internal metric.
Once the concept has surfaced and a team has formed, there is no backing down short of a market launch. If the product fails in the market, then the team has attempted innovation and failed, learning a great deal in the process. This the product fails internally prior to launch then the team leadership has probably spent a great deal of political capital to no avail. That’s the curious thing about innovation processes: in-market failure can be acceptable, particularly if those failures generate new consumer insight, but internal failure prior to launch is often taken to demonstrate a lack of leadership.
Photo from the Accidental Hedonist website:
Posted by jb at 10:08 PM | Comments (3)
East Coast Beach
I walked and then took a taxi to the East Coast beach today. It is the first time I’ve taken a taxi to get somewhere when I am rambling about. It felt like cheating.
A 200 meter concrete pier juts out from a point along the beach near the food court. If you walk to the end, you can see line after line of cargo ships, tankers and supertankers sitting in their lanes, rolling imperceptibly out to sea and back, not one person visible onboard. The trick to spending months at sea probably lies in keeping busy so I can understand why nobody was seen lounging at the rail. If you are lounging onboard in tight lanes with other ships bustling starboard and aft you are probably expendable.
And lots of people have become expendable. The crew size for a tanker today ranges from 22 to 27 people. Car carrier ships, bulk container ships and others use 20 to 23 people per ship depending on the age of the ship. The newer ships need fewer people. It is something to keep in mind the next time you see a massive cargo ship pulling into port. I’d have thought that the ship would require hundreds of people but instead you could fit the crew into an average public high school classroom with a few seats to spare.
Like every other public facility, the pier looks as if it has been washed daily. Thirty or maybe 40 fishermen stood along the railing and most of them were using old surf fishing rods. I found a barnacle encrusted rod poking out of a trash can along the pier. Some fisherman probably snagged it with his line and wrestled it up. He may have thought that it was a big fish but instead it was a fishing rod. Had he set down his own rod and used the sea damaged one, he would have caught a third rod. Repeating the process, he could have caught a fourth. At first this would see crazy, and he would catch and exchange a few rods just because it seemed so improbable. After his tenth rod, this activity would take on new meaning—as if he were pulling a great zipper out the ocean. Maybe a crowd would collect around him to watch and disperse. He would spend the night there alone, pulling rod after rod out of the iron water. At three am he would feel a great jerk on the line that would rip him from the pier, the pile of rods clattering off the cement behind him. There would be no sign of the fisherman or the rods in the morning. Hundreds of miles away, a mammoth saltwater trout would spit out his shoes and then add his rod to the undersea hundred mile dragline.
Posted by jb at 06:16 AM | Comments (1)
October 09, 2006
Improvements All Around
I'm not a fan of Nietzsche, and I dislike Family Circus, but I find Nietzsche Family Circus strangely appealing and scattershot.
Along these lines, I've also identified an entire species of spam that pulls filler text from project Gutenberg. I have no idea what to call it. Spam Classic is too long but Splassic sounds entirely wrong.
Also, before I forget, I was having lunch a few days back in a Chinese Bodega near the Sunshine complex off of Middle Road. There was a television on in the room and instead of playing sports or an Indian movie, it was broadcasting the Hawke/ Delpy Before (Sunrise/Sunset) scene from "Waking Life." The sound was off and this improved the movie somewhat.
2:29 PM
I Got Spam noticed the Project Gutenberg spam back in late August. I feel like a slacker because I noticed it only two weeks ago.
Also, another NFC:
Posted by jb at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)
October 07, 2006
Haze
It’s been a weird week in Singapore. Smoke from the brush fires in Indonesia has drifted this way, rolling over Malaysia and swamping Kuala Lumpur on its way south to my apartment. Two nights ago, you'd not be able to see more than 700 meters in any direction. Large buildings were obscured in the haze. I’ve read that daytime visibility shrank from ten kilometers to somewhere below three. The windows, in the daytime, are covered with grit from the smoke.
Which makes me think that there is potential for a great zombie narrative. Selected, highly psychotropic plants are burned in the brush fires. Their constituents are released in the air during the burn but are unaltered by the heat. Indonesia succumbs first. Television shots show people wandering around in a daze, drifting through the streets. The great wave of zombie violence starts in Jakarta and then drifts west and south. I’d film the move from the perspective of Singapore residents who can see the haze approach but who are unable to do anything about it. People are fleeing but it is clear that the population cannot be cleared fast enough. Wait, that might be boring. I need car chases. It would be cool if the entire cast of the Miami Vice movie became zombies. Zombies with guns, and really fast cars and no acting ability. That would be cool. That would be…wait a second….
Posted by jb at 08:32 PM | Comments (1)
October 04, 2006
Boosted Wasabi
Wasabi peas disappoint me. They are weaker than they should be; tingly when they should induce an involuntary valsalva maneuver. I'm trying to solve this by rebaking the peas with more wasabi. So far, the storebought fresh wasabi does not cut it. It might be that I baked it at too high a temperature, reducing the impact.
Mix wasabi with peas and then bake
I'll try some powdered stuff next...that should work. I'm also curious about breaking the peas into fragments and reassembling the fragments around balls of wasabi (perhaps crushing dried peas into a flour and then rolling the balls of wasabi in the flour). I'll call them peas wasabi. I'm only thinking about this because it reminds me a now pretty much defunct class of European dishes called subtleties, which centered on making one food (typically game) appear as either a different food or a non-food item entirely. The wikipedia entry is here.
These days we have the chocolate oranges, I guess. I’ve also heard of concept restaurants where the plates and forks are edible. Someday I hope to have a food of plate served on a placemat made out of beef jerky.
Posted by jb at 09:40 PM | Comments (2)