Today is the last day for Icelanders to eat at their local McDonalds. It’s a direct consequence of the crisis, Iceland’s isolation combined with fairly dire financial situation means that it’s no longer possible for McDonalds to import their supplies and sell burgers profitably. Apparently burgers at the Iceland McDonalds were above 5USD, almost the most expensive in Europe.
The venues will be taken over by a local business, they’ll be rebranded as “Metro” and offer a more local menu.
But today I suspect Icelanders will be lining up for their last fix of fries and flurries.
“We want to be smart innovators – not cutting edge” said my colleague. I still not exactly sure what distinction he was trying to make, since avoiding cutting edge sounds like a need to avoid risk – but innovation requires that you take a risk.
Cutting Edge
But what does “cutting edge” come from? And what does it refer to?
Now days it means something new, so new that it might not be fully tested or fully know.It’s often used to apply to technology.
In terms of origin I only find information that it come from the idea of a knife’s blade – the cutting edge – leading the cut.
To take the expression to extremes someone has come up with the phrase “bleeding edge“, maybe that’s what my colleague meant.
I was about to close twitter for the night when I saw a banner ad from Twitter inviting me to check out the lists function that’s currently in beta.
It’s a proud moment for me – I don’t usually see any of these beta toys until after the rest of the planet has got personalised invitations.
So I’ve been playing, setting up a list called design with people in it who tweet about design.
So far it seems a little clunky to set up, but once you’ve established a list you’ll be able to be a bit selective about which content you follow directly on the twitter interface.
I’m wondering if it will also be a whole new level of competitiveness on the site – not only can you now look at the number of followers to gauge a person’s popularity but also estimate their expertise by the lists they’re included on.
There is a new museum coming to the Netherlands, a “National History Museum”. There has been a lot of debate about it centering on location, (the eventual winner was Arnhem) and form.
The museum’s goal is to educate people, particularly young people, about Dutch history.
But they have no collection.
Normally people come to visit a museum because of the collection, or occasionally because of the building. So if the building is new and there is no collection then what would people come for?
Here’s where the vision comes in.
William of Orange presents the day's schedule - he was one of the prototype exhibits.
Erik Schilp, the CEO of the museum, wants to build media based content that will engage and educate visitors to the museum. As part of this he organised a “New Technology Conference” hosted at ING House yesterday. The participants were from museums around the Netherlands and the speakers came from worlds of design, technology and academia. In the foyer there were several stands of prototype content developed by the technical universities around the Netherlands. Wow, inspiration overload.
For now there’s only a simple blog about the project – available only in Dutch. But a new “really impressive 3.0 website” will be launched early April according to the museum’s CTO Jasper Visser.
It might seem a strange proposition, to start a museum without a collection, but as Seb Chan one of the other speakers pointed out the hardest things to change in a museum are the collection and the staff. By starting new this museum has a chance to do something tremendous; original, innovative and very very human. It can use this seeming disadvantage and treat it as an advantage.
It is, in fact, another lesson from business. Disruptive innovation almost always comes from outside the mainstream of any industry; it wasn’t banks that came up with paypal, it wasn’t newspapers that came up with craigslist and it wasn’t retails that came up with ebay.
The challenge in starting this museum is that it must negotiate exisiting systems – since it is government funded, while building a new concept of a museum.
You can see a visualisation of the museum online already,
(There was too much to think about from the speakers – I suspect there will be more posts to explore the ideas discussed)
How do you know if you’re engaging and inspiring your team? According to Benjamin Zander you know when their eyes are shining.
I reviewed “The Art of Possibility” written by Benjamin Zander and his wife Rosamund Stone Zander earlier this year, since then I’ve given copies to colleagues and friends. I mentioned it to a friend who lives in the US, she replied that her husband and seen him speak and recommended this talk from TED. It’s funny and inspiring – not just my word it’s according to almost 5000 ratings.
Being a Geek makes you more productive, according to Chris Garrett, whose own geek credentials are impeccable. He points out that thinking about systems applies to problems outside computer systems, and that outsourcing to give yourself more think time is a great approach and not lazy at all.
Extreme Geek
My first study was in science (Biochemistry if you must know) and I have long held that the analysis skills and process thinking from this study have helped me since then in unrelated fields. I work with geeks and given that a lot of my job is about designing and managing websites I’m sure I have a small and happy inner geek.
So I’m really happy to see a positive take on what Geeks may bring to work.
And if you’re not sure whether you qualify as geek try this online test to check (hint being female automatically scores you extra points).
Two weeks ago we launched a new corporate site. It’s been a challenging and time-consuming project and the reason I’ve been less active with posting. Our goal was to take a step closer to the customer, which we think we’ve done by providing better services and content;
Better access to ING products and services
We wanted people to get an overview of what our company offers in their country, we’ll improve this in the coming weeks by adding IP sniffing so that you will see the information that matches the country you’re in.
Enterprise-wide search
We knew that people searched for login and account information on ING.com, and got empty search results. So an enterprise-wide search engine allows a visitor to search across all ING domain names in any language. We asked colleagues around the world to test this in their own languages and it seems to be working.
Stories about ING around the world
It’s hard to understand the size and diversity of ING, so we wanted to showcase different aspects of the company – not just corporate stories but also some of the good things the company does around the world.
Data from an eZonomics poll, click to read the analysis
Which aims to make economics easier for our customers. We’re using a simple poll and analysis to see what visitors think, our next steps are to add some geographic breakdown behind the numbers to make it a little more interesting. We’re also including a range of content relating to making better financial decisions in the section. (By the way; the content in the eZonomics section is free for re-use where ING is the copyright holder)
It’s a big change in how we looked at content and how we thought about our audience. Whereas we had thought of ourselves as providing information on company performance to a specialist audience we’re now know more about who our audience are (70% clients or potential clients) and we’ve taken some big steps to try to meet their needs for services and for specific content. We’ve also tried to open some social media functions on the site – not easy as we’re working in a secure environment, and of course the design had to become less corporate and more customer-centric.
There’s more to come – and I know lots of sites do more and have more social media – but we’ve made a start. It’s a big step for us!
I’m probably breaking some unspoken social media rule here but twitter annoys me. Or more specifically the link-goose-chase that some posters send me on annoys me. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about from Guy Kawasaki. He’s by no means the only one who does this but he posts a lot so it was easy to pick up one of his posts.
Step one: The Tweet
Original Tweet, with a link
Step two: The Holy Kaw
Guy Kawaski's Alltop site with another link
Step Three: The real meat of the content
The real content
I have a problem with the interim page, in this case the Alltop Holy Kaw page. I can see that it generates more traffic and higher awareness of Alltop, but I fail to see the value to me of that extra click. Why couldn’t the link to the real content be included in the original tweet?
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