Idea Number 3 in the new iPhones

The third of four ideas 'seen' in the new iPhone announcements, as reported  by Kyle Vanhemert at Wired:

A True Digital Self

Tim Cook called the iPhone 5S the company’s “most forward-thinking phone yet.” What else is he going to say? But moreso than the new 64-bit processor, the improved camera, or even iOS 7 itself, there’s one iPhone 5S feature that truly is forward-looking, in a potentially game-changing way. It’s the fingerprint sensor.

On the surface, it does seem a bit gimmicky. Just like those Android phones that unlocked themselves by scanning your face, there’s an element of a cheesy sci-fi that tags along with the idea of fingerprint scanning. But as Ive reminds us, “it’s not just rampant technology for technology’s sake.” Apple has a plan for Touch ID, and the fact that the idea of the fingerprint scan is such a familiar one gives it a head start.

The thumbprint is a psychologically powerful mode of authentication.

Your average person doesn’t know anything about RFID or PGP or how secure any of it all really is (perhaps as they’ve gleaned from the news lately, not very). But they do know that scanning into a building with a fingerprint is good enough for bank vaults and high-level government clearance, at least from what they’ve seen in the movies. Apple knows that in a world consumed with privacy concerns, the fingerprint has a decent chance of being accepted as the password of the future. In a clip dedicated to the feature, Apple’s Senior VP of Hardware Engineering, Dan Riccio, comes right out and says it: “The fingerprint is one of the best passwords in the world. It’s always with you, and there’s no two alike.”

The immediate plans for the technology are clear. The thumbprint will be your pass code into your phone. It will let you buy things from iTunes with the single mash of a thumb, no fingertip pecking required. In combination with iBeacon, the Bluetooth Low Energy protocol baked in to iOS 7, the tiny new finger-sensing home button could be the biggest, smallest step we’ve seen towards a future where we’re buying stuff with our phones, not our wallets.

But Touch ID has farther reaching implications than simply letting you walk out of Walgreens without stopping at the register. Right now, we’re at a delicate locus where privacy is a greater concern than ever and where our digital selves are fragmented across countless platforms, apps and services. The catch, though, is that the next generation of interactive, digital experiences could well depend on some sort of unified personal profile–a more portable digital identity, including your preferences, your apps, your content, your settings and the rest, that could be brought from device to device. The fingerprint could be the key to all that.

It doesn’t solve issues of privacy and security out of the gate–not by a long shot. Armchair critics responded to the news of the iPhone 5S sensor with a common refrain: one more thing for the NSA to collect. Still, though, the fingerprint is a psychologically powerful mode of authentication. As we’ve seen, our usernames and passwords are simple puzzles to be cracked; the rise of sophisticated phishing makes them as insecure as ever. Two-step authentication remains a slightly mystifying pain in the ass. A thumbprint is essential, and elemental. It’s convenient and, at least in theory, uncrackable. These are all things Apple’s evoking when they write, on the website for the new iPhone, that the Touch ID system is “inspired by a perfect design: your fingerprint.”

Those unique qualities give the fingerprint the power to usher in a totally new paradigm for mobile computing–one where your “digital” identity isn’t just a bunch of different sets of usernames and passwords and a scattered assortment of data profiles, but something that is actually, fundamentally, you–a digital version of your real, flesh-and-blood identity, as linked by your thumb.

As designers look to the future–one where real world experiences that seamlessly blend devices and services are privileged over discrete use cases and sandboxed apps–this type of centralized digital identity will be paramount. Services like IFTTT have showed us the power of linking up isolated services and features; how jerry rigging Twitter to talk to Dropbox to talk to your Photo Roll can come up with some novel workflows. In much the same way, the thumbprint is poised to be the connective tissue for the cross-platform experiences of tomorrow, where data profiles can be shared in vastly more flexible ways. Walk into a room, and all the devices inside it–not just the computers and TV screens but the lightbulbs and thermostat, too, potentially–will know it’s you. Apple wants to be at the center of all that. When Jonny Ive says “Touch ID defines the next step of how you use your iPhone,” he’s not just talking about how you unlock the thing. What he’s hinting at is use cases we’re just now starting to dream up.

IDEA Number 2

The second of four ideas 'seen' in the new iPhone announcements, as reported by Kyle Vanhemert at Wired:

A More Harmonious Gadget

The iPhone 5C is noteworthy for another reason: reconnecting the design language of Apple’s mobile hardware and software. The disconnect between the soul and body of the iPhone, up until this new, cheaper one, has been profound. Game Center’s ham-handed skeuomorphism was silly enough on its own, but viewed in the context of its space-age aluminum container, it was positively jarring. The iPhone 5C and iOS 7, on the other hand, are a perfect match. As Ive says in the product video, the new iPhone “dramatically blurs the boundary” between the hardware and the software. The phones even come pre-loaded with wallpaper matching the color of the device itself.

What it amounts to is the most harmonious marriage between Apple software and Apple hardware since the Bondi Blue iMac and the lickable baubles of OS X. And that’s totally by design–though it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Whereas before we had Jony Ive taking us to the moon and Scott Forstall taking us to the craps table, now Ive’s responsible for the user experience through and through. Apple’s always had a leg up on competitors thanks to the fact that they’ve made their hardware and software. The iPhone 5C is the first time in a while it’s actually looked like it.

This is the hallmark of the original MacIntosh.  Built famously around XeroxPARC's GUI (graphical User Interface) with the novel WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get), it combined 'intutive' icons and their invoked actions, along with the 'amazing' ability to print just what you saw on screen.

It took Microsoft -- the leading SW company of its day, a mere six years to copy this, poorly.  And in the process, eventually we've all come to expect such behavior from our machines.

As Vanhemert points out, until Jove 'got control' of the SW and HW 'integration' this was not happening in the iPhone world.  Pity.  Thank goodness it is now addressed

GREAT EXAMPLE of TRUE INTRAPRENEURING INNOVATION

The hype, ballyhoo and disappointment with Apple's new phones yesterday was both predictable and in many ways discouraging to those of us who follow (and believe in) large company innovation.

First, check out this Wired columnist assessment -- which to my mind GETS IT RIGHT (because of the length, and the disparate ideas, I will break this into four posts

4 Big Ideas in the New iPhones That No One’s Talking About

• BY KYLE VANHEMERT
• 09.11.13
• 6:30 AM

Yesterday, Apple had its annual iPhone bonanza. On one hand, it was the biggest announcement since the original iPhone. Today, for the first time ever, there are two iPhones. At the same time, though, the event held few surprises. The colorful iPhone 5C had been unveiled prematurely by a flurry of leaks, and the iPhone 5S, with its gold flavor and fingerprint sensor, had been similarly sniffed out. Still, in the finer points and features of these new products, Apple is laying the groundwork for its future as a company–and, potentially, the future of mobile computing. Here’s what we’re reading in the tea leaves.

The Power to Personalize

The iPhone 5C, a phone which Jony Ive called “beautifully, unapologetically plastic,” was assumed to be a foray into cheaper territory–a defensive move against the lower priced Android handsets that have been gaining ground worldwide. But to understand the iPhone 5C purely as an cheap play, or one for the international market, is all wrong. What the device is, really, is a bold step by Apple into the world of fashion, customizability, and personal preference. For years, your decision when you picked an iPhone had been limited to black and white. Now, you’ve got five options to pick from.

But that’s just the start. The iPhone 5C’s weird swiss cheese case, with a grid of circles carved out on the back so you can see the candy-coated hardware underneath, is an even more unambiguous sign of how important Apple thinks personalization is at this point. Accounting for the five colors of the phones and the six cases, there are 30 color combinations you can pick for the 5C. Maybe not enough to guarantee your team’s colors, but certainly enough to go a few weeks without seeing anyone else on the subway with the exact same phone you have.

One of Android’s big draws, especially in the first few years of the smartphone era, was the customizability of its software. But kids don’t care about ROMs and launchers. They care about colors and expression. With the iPhone 5C, Apple’s tapping into the allure of outward, broadcasted preference–something that the Android ecosystem, though diverse in its SKUs, still doesn’t really offer. This time next year, the iPhone 5c is going to be the phone coveted by everyone age 13 to 23.

To see what a departure the case really is, it’s worth looking at it in the context of Apple’s past storage endeavors. The iPhone 4′s bumper was colorful, sure, but its design was informed purely by functionality–the insulating rubber ring was a direct response to concerns about signal loss when gripping the iPhone 4′s antenna band. The iPad’s ingenious magnetic cover added a dose of color and preference too–but more than spunk, the draw was again functionality: it kept your screen a little bit cleaner and safer and let you stand the iPad up in bed while you were watching Netflix.

The holes on the iPhone 5C’s case, on the other hand, have zero functional purpose. They’re purely aesthetic. And in that light, you can see them as a sort of admission on the part of Apple. Jony Ive’s fanatical attention to detail, in a way, painted the iPhone into a monochrome corner. Maybe the iPhone 5 did really represent some sort of end of the road for smartphone design–at least in the current understanding of those devices. Maybe it had reached an iterative dead end, leaving no outward surface left for Ive to work his magic. Maybe they’d chamfered all they could chamfer. There’s a chance that they’ll start over with the iPhone 6, chucking everything out the window and coming back with some wild curvaceous glass shoehorn, but in the meantime, the iPhone 5C is a clear signpost to the places where Apple thinks smartphones are still worth getting excited about: personality, color, and customization. In other words: fun.

TEDx and resilience

I gave a talk last spring at TEDx Livermore (CA) that has been posted to YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2oeSFkV7eE&feature=youtu.be

It was great fun, but it also has some pieces worth talking about in some depth.  Maybe we'll undertake that task soon.

Hong Kong Institute talk

Media X hosted two multi-day workshops this month, one with the Hong Kong Institute of Science and Tech, and the other with an industry group touring re Innovation and Entrepreneurism in Silicon Valley.

I got a chance to give a morning workshop for each, which in turn gave me a chance to practice my "new view" about the missing links in larger corporations.

I have been positively impressed by both Geoffrey Moore's "Dealing with Darwin" and Kevin Kennedy's "Going the Distance" -- especially by the process flow diagram that Kennedy uses to distinguish Entrepreneurs from Product Managers from Process Managers.   This chart does a great job of defining the jobs inside a company that pertain to Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm" from a customer standpoint, as well as the company-inside dynamics around Everett Rogers' S-curve of adoption (The Diffusion of Innovation).

The first Missing Link is at the bottom of the chart, when resources are freed up by selling off "old successes".  How do they get re-applied to the right "new ideas"?   Steve Jobs could do this; Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard could do this; most CEOs are by contrast apparently incapable of this.  And it takes a C-level decision maker to connect the two -- the resource "seller" is a financial type, but not a product strategist or researcher; the latter has NO connection to the resource pool without a C-level sponsor.

The second Missing Link is between the Entrepreneurs who invent something new, and their colleagues who are busy with the Mission Critical products and services of the current company.  The new stuff is disruptive of their busy daily routine.  Thus the company is able to rebuff the new ideas long before the erstwhile customer gets a chance to vote.  This stops innovation in larger corporations much more than anything else.

The third Missing Link is for the Entrepreneurs themselves -- how do you decide to "think outside the box" when you are really good at what you do, but what you do (and know) is not the set of rules for the 'new world'.

I had two sets of examples, one around Apple's transformation from a computer vendor to the iPod music, then the iPhone communications company, and then the iPad tablet vendor, as compared to Motorola, Nokia, and RIM on the one hand, and HP and Dell on the other.    The second was re HP in the days of being a voltmeter company and 'going into computing' in a way that defied logic (if you were a proper computer company, or for that matter, a proper voltmeter company).

These are topics worth outlining in more detail.

Stay tuned

A NEW Engineering Management Curriculum?

Gosh, if I got excited about the last post (about a new model of engineering school) actually having possibility, I could get rhapsodic about the idea of teaching company managers about Intrapreneurs and the seven rules for managing them.   Why, one might even imagine that we could teach managers how to encourage innovation and innovators within companies rather than how to kill it.

Phil McKinney's powerful anecdote when he was HP's Chief Innovation Officer still rings in my ears:  "Take any group of kindergarten kids, and they're all creative.  It takes the public schools three or four years to beat it out of them.  Only a few survive that process.  They become scientists and engineers, and then industry hires them.  It takes us three or four more years to beat it out of those kids."

Sad, and too true.

It'd be fun to imagine having a core curriculum devoted to stimulating innovation support by top managers, but it'd be hard to imagine many top managers finding their way to such a program.  They'll be too busy with quarterly results, unhappy shareholders, and wet-between-the-ears analysts from HBS

The NEW Engineering Curriculum

Much discussion in recent weeks about how to take advantage of the MOOC opportunity for STEM.  For those of you not currently following the new buzzy acronyms, MOOC stands for Massive Open OnLine Courses (the craze sweeping the world and striking terror in the hearts of most college admins) and STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.   Some few places urge STEAM, adding Arts to the mix.

At the ACM Annual Awards Banquet last Saturday night (see my posts in innovascapes.blogspot.com) a major award was granted to Zvi Kedem of the Courant Institute for his efforts to rebuild the taxonomy for computer science, as "a modern cognitive map of the computing field" with thirteen subject domains, and 134 experts building core curriculum.  This supplants a fifty-year old scaffold that has been seriously out of date for some time.

In engineering circles, the Stanford D'School, the Institute of Design, has broadened to twelve sharing institutions.  The Point of View" pages on their website are poignant -- (1) the job is to build innovators, not to do innovation; (2) their way of working is to combine Technology, Business, and Human Values (now there's a radical concept!); (3) work on Real-World Projects (this is experience based learning, not book learning); and (4) RADICAL collaboration, across multiple disciplines, not just token collaboration.

Hasso Plattner, founder of SAP in Germany, has underwritten the d'school at Stanford, along with a sister group at Potsdam Univ.

But I would submit that there is more to it than these attempts.  Curriculum-wise, there is the question about Big Data and Visual Displays, about Mathematics as seen and used at Google for example, about interactive collaboration at a distance ala the H.264 video technologies, about Social metrics and media, and about meaningful design, support, and use of Digital Media.  And virtually no one teaches exponential growth except Singularity Univesity, even though Einstein described its as "the eighth wonder of the world."

The other question that goes begging is how to couple curricula with jobs, as the For-Profit colleges are discovering (thanks to what they call 'onerous government intrusion' with Gainful Employment goals).  And in engineering, it would seem practical -- to me, at least -- that a consortium of companies could get together with some engineering colleges to certify what's needed, how to tell if it's mastered, etc.

For example, Cisco and its licensees have trained several million students in the past fifteen years to operate a communications network IST shop -- no university developed this, it was an industry need and initiative that drove it.  Likewise, Qualcomm has trained a half million on IT needs for wireless.

Companies like HP, Intel, and IBM have for years had "corporate universities" for 'on-the-job' skills enhancement, usually done as updates for fast-moving fields or 'rehab' for older employees.  My wife hired into HP to help develop a Computer Science curriculum for HP engineers in the mid-eighties; I am glad she came to HP to do so, for it gave me a chance to meet her and 'the rest is history'.

Odd as it may sound, corporate training groups spend way more on education than the universities.  Why?  What on? And how happy are they with the results?

The answers, when you seek them somewhat systematically, are troubling.  Costs of traditional education are increasingly prohibitive, and the courses are increasingly seen as mere prelude, not helpful in the employer context (some say this has ever been thus).  Newer fields are not handled well by most schools; corporate needs are different than research needs (which is what most faculty try to convey to their best students....).  The list becomes daunting.

The prospective students, on the other hand, are a bit dispirited as well.  Where are the jobs for what they're being taught?  And how much in debt will they be?  And why can't they apply the robotics MOOC course they just finished as partial credit toward their degree?

There has got to be room for, in fact a crying need for, a different approach.  Stay tuned?   Or, better yet, send your thoughts along.