Here are a few examples that point toward a world after candybar multitouch. Exactly how they can be used and integrated in the UI/UX remains to be seen.

Demo of Microsoft Surface with PixelSense from Samsung

I have written about Microsoft Surface before, which is large horizontal multitouch screen built as a table. In the new slimmer version of Surface, Microsoft together with Samsung have developed PixelSense touch sensing technology. In PixelSense every pixel in the screen is also an infrared sensor that detects warm fingers on the surface. Just imagine what a future development of this technology could do if Samsung manages to fit the three RBG color sensors in every pixel. The surface could double as a copying machine. You put a paper, coupon or picture facing down on the surface, and when you lift it up, the copied object is displayed on the screen.

A technology for high performance multitouch screens has been developed by the Swedish startup Flatfrog. Their multitouch is based on an optical in-glass solution (Planar Scatter Detection) that also can be used to create multitouch on curved glass surfaces.

Another Swedish startup is Tobii, which has developed a technology for tracking eye movements. Using cameras that track the position of the pupil it is possible to calculate exactly what the user is focusing on. The company’s initial markets have been expensive high end systems for paralyzed people, market researchers, and academic researchers in cognitive psychology. Tobii has now begun to target the mainstream market together with Lenovo which are integrating eye tracking in a prototype laptop.

Kinect is a technology that Microsoft developed for their gaming console Xbox. It is an add-on gadget for your gaming console or flatscreen with facial recognition, voice recogniton and the ability to track gestures such as arm and hand movements. With Kinect you can control a game or PC by talking and waving your arms. It can be used for controlling an action figure or for moving between windows such as browsing your music collection, zooming in and out of a photo, etc. Up to six users can be tracked at the same time.

Even more futuristic UI/UX modalities are BCI technologies (Brain Computer Interface) where brain waves directly control an UI or some machinery. BCI has been used in research labs for a long time with electrodes implanted in the skull. Newer products based on less invasive methods with the electrodes attached to the scalp are now hitting the market, often in the form of a headset. The precision and bandwidth of these methods are still very primitive. One of the few things that can be reliably measured with BCI are emotive states such as relaxation vs. concentration.

Most of these new innovations are early in their life cycle and it is still too early to tell if anyone of them has a strong disruptive potential. New technologies drive development of new form factors. It remains to be seen if and how this will create future killer hardware. There is also a shortage of apps that can take advantage of the new features and turn them into compelling user experiences.

There are several hurdles to overcome. Products such as Kinect, Tobii and Surface put significant demands on processor capacity and there is a learning curve for any new UI technology. Prices have to come down for the large mainstream market to accept them.

I am slightly skeptical about a technology that requires you to wave your arms. What’s fine when gaming in your own living room, lifting and waving your arms for an extended period of time is tiresome. This has already been shown by users’ resistance to large vertical PC touchscreens.

It is possible that these new technologies will find their way into the candybar smartphone/tablet. But I think it is more likely that the future smartphone will integrate these new UI technologies without residing in the handset. If most tables, office desks, and bars are made of hard glass with MS Surface technology perhaps the user could just place their smartphone on the glass and have all their apps, contacts and pictures displayed. The surface might even have built in eye tracking. Or maybe Corning’s vision of a world of glass will come true and the nearest wall will be able to display your smartphone home screen with built in eye tracking for navigation in the wall. Just make sure to control your eyeballs – you never know who might be looking over your shoulder.

I think that the general level of the business plans was quite high. Some were built around potential breakthrough technologies, straight out of the research labs. A jury of investment managers from Industrifonden and Almi Invest named Johan Strömqvist och Evangelos Sisamakis, with a background from the research group in Experimental Biomolecular Physics at KTH as the winner and a 10,000 SEK cheque (€1,100). Congratulations! They have developed a method for screening pharma drug candidates that makes it possible to predict the likelihood that a drug candidate will be successful before clinical trials start.

The program started in October. We got excellent feedback from the participants; one business school student wrote that he learned more about running a business from the ten workshops at Startup than he did during his three years in business school. Thanks.

The next round of Startup is planned to start in April. You can apply here.

The problem is that the way to reach the blue ocean is generic. There is no new theory or model derived from empirical research similar to Disruptive Innovation (Christensen), Crossing The Chasm (Moore), or Competitive Strategy (Porter). The book’s main assertion is far from groundbreaking. Find an untapped market. Understand customer needs. Redefine industry boundaries. Pretty simple.

However, their advice is sensible. For example, look for what they call Value Innovations, which is another way of saying that your innovation has to be relevant and valuable for your customers. It should not be technological brilliance for its own sake.

They also present a model for how to rethink your current business. The first step is to identify relevant performance factors that define the competitive landscape. These factors are used to draw up a strategic canvas, in which your own offer (“value curve”) is plotted together with your competitors. The next step is to look for ways to change the offer to the customers by applying what they call the Four Actions.

For each factor consider if it is possible to either 1) eliminate a factor that is taken for granted in the industry, 2) reduce a factor well below industry standards, 3) raise a factor above industry standards or 4) create a new factor that has never been offered in the industry. Summaries of the rest of book can be found at Slideshare, here, here, here, and here.

An example is the way NetJets redefined the market for corporate jets. Before NetJets entered the market, business travelers only had the choice between owning a corporate jet or buying first/business class tickets. When NetJets introduced fractional aircraft ownership, client companies could reserve a corporate jet from the NetJets pool at short notice just like a car pool. NetJets would offer: the convenience of owning a private aircraft at the cost of commercial airline tickets. The figure below illustrates the strategic canvas for NetJets compared to commercial airlines or owning a corporate jet.

As usual in popular management literature, the authors collect examples of success cases and use them as examples of blue ocean strategies. That is, after a new strategy has proven to be a success, the authors squeeze it into their model and claim that it is a Blue Ocean Strategy. This sometimes borders on the ridiculous, for example when they use the case of the successful turnaround of the NYPD in 1994 by the new police commissioner Bill Bratton as an example of a Blue Ocean Strategy. The case description of how NYPD managed to radically improve performance with the same budget is inspiring but the lessons are related to leadership and overcoming resistance to change. Not a Blue Ocean Strategy. I take issue with the way the authors expand the term to label everything successful as a Blue Ocean strategy. It is sloppy thinking.

Sweden: leading in EU Innovation Performance (ref: EIS 2008)

I believe that one of the major obstacles for entrepreneurship in Sweden has been the absence of role models in Swedes’ social networks. People who have succeeded as entrepreneurs can inspire others, disseminate their experiences, and provide mentoring and coaching for their community.

However, if one wants to start a company in Sweden, more and more organizations and support structures are being put in place to pave the way for you. Science based startups have the best support structures but startups in the rest of the economy are also getting more support. Venture Capital is usually the first that comes to mind but VC is only relevant for some types of startups. The importance of VC is often exaggerated. Most startups generate their own capital internally and manage to launch without formal VC funding.

Here is a quick overview of some actors in the Swedish Innovation System for startups, mostly based in the Stockholm region.

• Venture Cup, founded in 1998 is a competition to develop the best business plan. Participants get coaching and support from experienced entrepreneurs in four regional chapters and the twelve best teams get selected for the national final.

• Connect Sweden, founded in 1998 with support from IVA (Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences). Connect is a matchmaking and networking organization. They have networks of angel investors, of mentors, and of potential board members. They offer business plan coaching and put entrepreneurs in contact with members of their network. Partners are Tillväxtverket, EU, Industrifonden, and Vinnova. Not just for startups and not just for high-tech firms. Connect is part of the global Connect network that initially was founded in 1985 at The University of California, San Diego.

• STING (Stockholm Innovation & Growth), founded in 2002 and based in Kista is an incubator for hi-tech startups. The main partners are Innovationsbron and KTH.

• Startup, a hands-on course in entrepreneurship that offers coaching and support. Managed by KTH Innovation and STING and aimed at technology based startups.

• SSES (Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship) founded in 1999 by the five major universities in Stockholm. Offers university courses in entrepreneurship from undergraduate to doctoral level.

• KTH Innovation (one of the eight Innovation Offices). KTH Innovation is the first single point of contact for KTH faculty and students and offers advice about patenting and business coaching.

• “The eight Innovation Offices”. Starting in 2010 the Swedish government will spend around 5 million Euros/year on eight innovation offices located at the major Swedish university campuses. The aim of the offices is to facilitate commercialization of scientific discoveries by offering support with patenting and hands-on entrepreneurship coaching.

• Innovationsbron, a government agency founded in 2005 for the commercialization of hi-tech innovations. They co-finance 21 regional incubators connected to universities and provide loans and angel financing.

• IQube, founded in 2004 is a private incubator.

• Verification, a program for verification of science based innovations run by Innovationsbron and Vinnova (see my previous blog post).

• Vinnova (The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems), the giant, though not much funding is directly targeted for startups (see my previous blog post). One of their reports provides an overview of all available government funding for SMEs, mostly R&D and funding for corporate growth.

• Almi företagspartner, the only government agency that directly offers loans for startups outside the hi-tech sector.

• Tillväxtverket, (Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth). Offers free one day seminars about starting your own company, they also offer free phone support at 020-351010.

• Verksamt, is a new web service managed by Tillväxtverket in cooperation with Bolagsverket (Swedish Companies Registration Office) and Skatteverket (Swedish Tax Agency). It contains general information about starting, running, and closing down a business firm.

• YEOS (Young Entrepreneurs of Sweden), founded in 2008 is a support and networking organization for young entrepreneurs in all sectors of the economy.

• Swedish Startups is an internet based forum and community for networking.

• Drivhuset, founded in 1993 is a support organization for university students that want to become entrepreneurs with ten regional chapters.

• SVCA (Swedish Private Equity & Venture Capital Association), the industry organization for the VC industry. They have a catalogue of all their members on their website.

• SiSP (Swedish Incubators and Science Parks), the industry organization for Swedish incubators. They have a catalogue of all their members on their website.

It remains to be seen if these support programs are enough to overcome the historical disadvantages of low entrepreneurial activity.

This article has previously been published on my Swedish blog.

Google Voice’s core offer is ”one phone number for life”. New customers get a phone number which is connected to their server and from a web interface the user can forward the call to one or several of his/her fixed or mobile phones. Via the web it is possible to manage all your incoming voicemails, SMS, missed calls, etc. with an interface that resembles Gmail (Google states that a future full integration with Gmail is planned).

Voicemails in English are translated to text and the user can choose to receive them as SMS, email or read them on the web. Incoming calls can be managed by a menu: “press 1 to respond, press 2 to send to voicemail, press 3 to listen to incoming message, press 4 to respond and record the call”. Different outgoing voicemail messages can be used depending on if the call is from your boss or your parents. It is also possible to block certain numbers late at night. Outgoing domestic calls (including conference calls) are free and the international tariffs are much lower than SkypeOut.

Both the technology and the ideas for this have been around for a long time. Call forwarding with *21* has been available since the 80s (if I recall correctly). The Unified Mailbox was a compelling vision in the late 90s, and number portability has also existed for over a decade.

If the telco operators hadn’t been so slow to innovate they could have been able to do this themselves, or bought GrandCentral two years ago. Google and all the other Telco2 startups are now running rings around the telcos because IP and the web make it much easier to quickly deploy new services. As long as the telcos stay stuck in a worldview w here every new services have to be built on an industrial scale and integrated in the network before they can be launched it is inevitable that they will continue to lose out to more agile players.

And on the few occasions when the telcos develop innovative services they shoot themselves in the foot by developing proprietary systems, locking in the users, and overcharging. One example is iobi from Verizon that was launched in 2004 – one year before GrandCentral. The service is similar to GrandCentral/GoogleVoice but is only available to Verizon customers. Their high monthly fees ($7.95 for consumers and $11.95 for businesses) prevent iobi from becoming a mass market leader and they have not licensed the software platform to any other players. The fact that customers will lose all their personal data if they cancel the service makes it even more unattractive to sign up with iobi.

This article has previously been published on my Swedish blog.

The projects conducted by Mobile Life were somewhat disparate, however, they have worked quite a lot with expressions for emotions and the integration of sensors that can measure things such as body temperature and heart rate in new applications (e.g. the project Affective Health). The prototype FriendSense (see picture) is similar to a Twitter that uses images and colors to capture how the members of a group feel and whether they have cold or warm feelings for other people in the group. In ActDresses you can control the behavior of a robot (a doll) by dressing it in different clothing. The project Mobile 2.0 covers a number of more mainstream mobile applications with integration of maps, geo-tagged pictures, friends’ pictures, geo-tagged chat rooms, friend finders on the subway, etc.

FriendSense

SwarmCam is an application where users can upload streamed video from their mobiles to a mixer with editing capabilities. Envisioned applications are a DJ that can show videos from the dance floor on a large screen and real time citizen journalism from, for example, an accident site.

The project e-Adept which is a co-operation with the City of Stockholm develops services which enable handicapped pedestrians to get exact walking instructions. Geographical micro-data have been coded for objects such as park benches, crosswalks, stairs and lampposts. With the aid of a PDA with GPS and voice output, blind people can navigate in the city streets. Other projects focused on different aspects of Pervasive Games where the players move around in an urban environment aided by GPS and their mobile phones.

In her speech, the center director professor Kristina Höök addressed how mobile data facilitates a breakdown of the old closed telecom paradigm and that the mobile Glasnost is now entering a phase of mobile service revolution.

The keynote address was given by design professor William Gaver from Interaction Research Studio at the well-known Goldsmiths, University of London. I like the policy at Goldsmiths (Damien Hirst is a former student) which demands the highest academic standards from their creative departments. The projects Gaver’s research team have worked on display an impressive creative madness. How about the idea of placing a piece of furniture as the Double Deck Desk (see picture) in an office to study how people interact with it? It is a good sign that Mobile Life has succeeded in building networks with other leading institutions in the field such as Goldsmiths.

Double Deck Desk

As it is hard to objectively determine the difference between genial creativity and things that are just odd and pointless there is always the risk that resources are wasted on bad projects. The fact that design and creativity are subjective can unfortunately be an excuse for not setting the standards as high as they are in areas that can be quantified and measured. The way leading arts schools (such as the Royal Institute of Art in London or the Art Institute of Chicago) have solved this problem is to ensure that the creative leadership is in the hands of extremely talented people. These creative leaders are confident in their assessment abilities and use brutal honesty to uphold high quality standards by rejecting subpar project proposals. I assume that Goldsmiths has a similar system.

The reason for my elaborate digression is the failure of a similar Swedish strategic research project, The Interactive Institute. The story of its failure is a textbook example of how not to manage national strategic research.

The background can be traced to the former Persson government which became aware of the Internet around 1997. At that time, the MIT Media Lab was the center of media attention and the Swedish government asked the MIT Media Lab if it wanted to open a research center in Sweden. The MIT Media Lab knew the value of their brand and asked for $100 million (if I remember the figure correctly) just to begin working with the Swedish government. After that slap in face, the Swedish government decided to start on their own. The outcome was the Interactive Institute, with an annual budget of 100 million Swedish kronor, which made it one of the largest budgets in the world after the MIT Media Lab. The idea was that interaction designers, scientists and artists would work together and develop new creative concepts.

For politicians the populistic elements must have been irresistible: an aggressive investment in the future, flashing lights, bright colors and animation, kids skateboarding in the corridors doing cool things. What a joy to be connected to all this youthful vibrancy. Tony Blair had paved the way a few years earlier by introducing “Cool Britannia”. In addition, government ministers could bring foreign guests to the expensive office floors at Östermalm in central Stockholm and show something that was visually appealing and easy to understand.

The invested resources did not produce any lasting results. I believe the failure was due to the lack of professionalism and quality in recruitments and execution. Collaboration and developing networks with leading institutions were neglected. Direct political interference and decisions governed by regional policy is not the right way to build a world class research environment. When I visited their open house demos around 2000 I hardly found any interesting projects. In an international academic review in 2003 they received damning criticism.

The situation for Mobile Life is much better. They managed to secure funding in a highly competitive academic environment. The problem for Mobile Life is rather how they will manage to differentiate themselves from commercial product development.

Comparing with the MIT Media Lab in the 1990s might be unfair because they were in a much better position to make themselves interesting at that time. MIT had the resources to implement and test new interactive services before the technological infrastructure was deployed in the rest of society. They became a demonstrator for all the new cool applications that everybody could envision in theory but were unable to implement in 1996.

Today there is a huge industry with tons of start-ups, entrepreneurs, and major corporations that develop these services for the marketplace. This makes it much harder for the academic world to advance and produce innovative products.
In a world where iPhone, Twitter and Facebook already exist, academics will have to choose peripheral and sometimes unintuitive projects to avoid replicating commercial product development.

As usual, one gets updated through the grapevine at these events. The most interesting fact that I can write about is that the head of Ericsson Consumer & Enterprise lab, Henrik Pålsson is now stationed in India. He said that the reason for his move is that the Indian market is developing very quickly right now. It is notable that Ericsson has relocated its most senior user market expert from Lund, Sweden to India.