Hutch Carpenter › Comments

"Jeremiah - remember when you got temporarily more active on FriendFeed? I seem to recall tweeting you that one of your tweets was getting a lot of discussion there. FriendFeed was uber-cool for a while. Then, engagement slowly diminished. I recall comments about Twitter and Facebook being the place where people either had stayed, or were returning to. It's as if FB and Twitter have essentially created a huge barrier to entry for others via network effects. If you're going to tear people away from those, you need something that's "9x" better (http://andrewmcafee.org/2006/0.... Or perhaps 9x different. Twitter is fundamentally different from Facebook (one-way follow vs. two-way connect; forced brevity; publicly searchable). That's allowed it to grow rapidly even as Facebook grows. As a basic posting and commenting platform, Google+ isn't 9x better. I've atttached a graphic that outlines the overlaps. It needs to be based on something different. Otherwise, why switch? Hutch" - Hutch Carpenter

Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions. - Hutch Carpenter

Viralheat offers two free services. One is Social Trends, which allows non-paying customers to access thousands of Viralheat profiles and statistics. The second is our Sentiment engine which allows users to send a chunk of text and get the sentiment rating in return. - Hutch Carpenter

Nice first person account of a guy working to build an iPhone app - Hutch Carpenter

What’s worse, this craving for similarity – for interacting only with people who think and act in familiar ways – doesn’t merely influence our behavior during cocktail mixers. Instead, it shapes our social world, constraining the reach of our personal network. This was elegantly demonstrated in a new paper by Angela Bahns, Kate Pickett and Christian Crandall at Wellesley College and the University of Kansas. - Hutch Carpenter

Background on building an app - Hutch Carpenter

Industries ranked where companies use at least 1 social tool. - Hutch Carpenter

Shared by Ev - Hutch Carpenter

The creation of the innovation consultant marks a sea change. Through the industrialized age, innovation was tied to entrepreneurs - Hutch Carpenter

The general way around this problem seems simple enough — have a process by which you evaluate ideas in different ways at different stages of development (most call this a "stage-gate process."). You might have a "front end" process where you rapidly iterate and evaluate lots of ideas and a more detailed "launch" process to optimize the few that make it through the early rounds. This kind of process can help successfully move an idea from a Post-It note to the market. - Hutch Carpenter

How is it possible for a company to have seen a technological discontinuity yet still end up on the brink of bankruptcy? To understand what at first appears to be a paradox, think back to Kodak's famous slogan "You press the button, we do the rest." Kodak always sold cameras, but its real business was "doing the rest" – supplying and processing film. During Kodak's decades of dominance, the company built a vast and specialized infrastructure of machines, equipment, and skills in manufacturing, R - Hutch Carpenter

By Tom Eisenmann. Professor at Harvard Business School who studies lean startups, entrepreneurship, platforms, and network effects (Twitter: @teisenmann) - Hutch Carpenter

:( - Anne Bouey

I know. Really only hurt the 99%. - Hutch Carpenter

If you're like most people, you feel like a baby when it comes to visual design. You sometimes have a vague sense of what you want, but can't articulate it or make it come about. All you can do is point and cry. This guide will help you communicate with conscious skill. It will show you how to create designs that are easy to understand and attractive. - Hutch Carpenter

More than 300 teams from across the world submitted proposals for the prize. Last summer, the 10 finalists in the Oil Cleanup X Challenge traveled to Leonardo, N.J., home of the National Oil Spill Response Research - Hutch Carpenter

"Would love to hear more about the SuperValu story. Sounds really cool." - Hutch Carpenter

Writer Anne Lamott talks about the “Shitty First Draft,” the first piece of writing “where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place.” Like the prudent half of the pottery class in our parable, Anne lets herself put down as many ideas as possible without the burden of perfection. She makes mistakes, but it’s okay, because they are later evaluated and refined. - Hutch Carpenter

And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished. - Hutch Carpenter

In testing and observing 3,000 creative executives over a six-year period, Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen noted five important discovery skills common to innovators: Associating, questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking. Of these, the most powerful was associating: asking people to make connections across "seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas." || Imposing constraints to spark creativity may seem counter-intuitive. Isn't the idea to explore "white spaces" and "blue oceans?" Our experience, however, is that necessity is the mother of invention. Imposing artificial constraints injects some much-needed stark necessity into an otherwise low-risk exercise. - Hutch Carpenter

While most economists measure human capital by levels of educational attainment, my colleagues and I utilize a different measure: the share of a country’s workforce in high-skill, high wage Creative Class jobs spanning the fields of science, technology, and engineering - Hutch Carpenter

Entire front page of Hacker News was about Steve Jobs. This page has links that work. - Hutch Carpenter

Customer support, incidentally, is the overlooked knowledge gold mine in most companies. They know why customers are unhappy, cancelling, or singing your praises, but they rarely get to share that info with other teams. - Hutch Carpenter

A picture is worth a thousand words and this is no exception. Well "said" Rah. - Nicholas Kreidberg

yep. :) - Abhishek

Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh computer, and the people who created it. - Hutch Carpenter

There’s been a lot of talk about designing for delight. Delight is nice, but it’s easy for users to get used to. Habituation becomes a problem. Tasty, shiny, or cute only get you so far. Certainly, there’s a place for, and many advantages to, creating designs that are pleasurable to use. They’re perceived as easier, more trustworthy, and more personal. But sometimes embedding visual treats and trying to be considerate of users aren’t enough to create the engaging, immersive experience of being in flow. Pleasurable interfaces can provide nice surface attributes in the visual design or interesting interactions that are mostly just transient. Your design may need something more—something to keep people interested after the novelty wears off, something to assist productivity. In flow, the experience is rich and deep. - Hutch Carpenter

Previous research has shown that certain patterns of social interaction make radical innovation more likely. Bold ideas are typically incompletely formed when first conceived and easily shot down by criticism. Hence, they emerge more readily in communities in which individuals work mostly in small and relatively isolated groups, giving their ideas time and space to mature. - Hutch Carpenter

I think great brands create the "end state" first. When launching a new product, marketers are not very specific about how a product actually works. They express more about the result. They talk about what you will feel or what you will be like if you choose to engage with that brand or that product. The Apple commercial in 1984 was a great example of this. There was very little about the product in the spot. It was all about the aftereffect of the product. - Hutch Carpenter

The importance of creative thinking today needs no emphasis. In your profession or in your work, you will have a competitive advantage if you develop your ability to come up with new ideas. In your personal life, too, creative thinking can lead you into new paths of creative activity. It can enrich your life – though not always in the way you expect. Practising the “art” of creative thinking will help you to: Develop your understanding of the creative process - Hutch Carpenter

All large companies (and I do mean all - this is not a post about Microsoft) tend to be in love with finding the right ‘strategy’ in place before doing anything. There are reams and reams of text written on what exactly strategy is and how to go about having a good one. Some of them are actually quite good (for example, Porter’s work on the five forces). You could often get rapped on the knuckles (or worse) for being ‘off-strategy’. - Hutch Carpenter

We interviewed people like Brent Gow, payroll chief at Starbucks, whose department discovered ways to reduce the cost of paying employees by 50 percent. We interviewed Tom Dolan, and unconventional manager at Xerox Global Services who stared down a major disruption threatening the very life of his company, and he didn’t flinch. He saw how Xerox had gotten out of step with customer needs, and he accepted the will of the market. We interviewed Jennifer Rock at Best Buy, who with her team took on the problem of employee turnover and helped reduce it from over 80 percent to under 40 percent by using social media and the company intranet to foster dialogue between employees in the various stores. The result was that they transformed employee engagement levels. - Hutch Carpenter