Web 2.0 Expo Highlights and Emerging Themes

Web 2.0 Expo Highlights and Emerging Themes
 
I attended Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this past week.  Brady Forrest (co-chair) invited us to have our H.E.Ai.D. installation (large scale, collaborative play space with lasers, generative sound, and a tinge of augmented reality) in the Expo.  Aside from the joy of watching Tim O’Reilly dance  in our installation, it was great to get up to date on all things Web 2.0.  Here’s my report:
 
 
Tim O’Reilly framed the event very well during his keynote speech, essentially giving a report card on the state of Web 2.0 – arguing that the web as [...]

Community Genius: Tips for Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers

I gave a talk at Seattle’s sixth Ignite: Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers. The text for the talk is below. A few folks were asking about the slides so I put them up on SlideShare here.
I read a book a while ago by Scott Berkun, Myths of Innovation, where he noted that inspiration is much more social than you might expect. “Group Genius” similarly reviewed recent research highlighting when groups can perform collaborative creative feats beyond the possibility of any individual.
That really got me thinking about how creativity plays [...]

CHI vs E-tech

I am at CHI this week, and last night I found myself in a conversation about the differences between CHI and e-tech (O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology). These two events have very different crowds, but they tend to focus on the same topics – innovative “human-computer-interaction” technologies. The comparison between CHI and E-tech has been very much on my mind, because I “grew up” so to speak in the research community represented by CHI, but have spent the last couple of years more immersed in the startup community represented by E-tech.
My first exposure to differences in attitudes was someone in the hallway [...]

Step by Step Instructions for Brainstorming your Innovation Team’s Next Project

Step by Step Instructions for Brainstorming your Innovation Team’s Next Project:  AKA S.L.A.P. Brainstorming (I just made that up.  SLAP.)

Background:
You have an innovation team that is 5-9 people, a mix of people with design, research, and development background, but all on the team because they are innovators.  You have just wrapped up on your last big project (s) or milestones, and now it’s time to brainstorm about what’s next — either some cool/exciting new feature on an existing product, or the Next Big Thing related to the team’s domain of expertise.
Who to include:

Innovators:  A mix of design, research, and development [...]