The Wooly Mammifesto

What is Woolly on the web? A woolly company isn't backwards or behind. It's a company that doesn't fall for the latest tech trend just because it's cool.

It's not a luddite. It's a person who isn't dazzled by the latest mobile trends deck just because it's designed nicely.

Take another look at that deck. Instead of oohing and ahhing over the spinning iPhones, ask: how many of those projects happened here in the U.S.? Sure, it's easy to sell branded phones to the nice people of Japan or the good customers of Audi. But how do you get common folk here in the USA to access your service via their Samsungs?

Woolly companies tend to take an incremental approach, but they embrace new trends readily. They simply always start with customer-focused use cases, not with technology.

Woolly strives to throw his DNA over the glacial wall to continue into the next generation. Some will make it, others will be overwhelmed by the unsustainably chic and their spinning iPhone decks. In other words, delusional and precious.

Woollies:

Clay Shirky


Zipcar

Books to Read

Books I want to read

 

The 10 Demandments and the Open Brand

 

Linda Resnick, Orchard of Rubies

 

Dan Aurelli, Predictably Irational

 

Ory Brafman, Sway

 

Cro-magnon CEO

 

Kelly Mooney, Resource International

 

iAP the news aggregator

The Associated Press would build a search engine that aggregates news like Google's. My first instinct is to say "No!" "Buy don't build" and "Push your content out to where your users are, don't try to pull them in."

But with Google sagging, and its algos not completely knocking off my socks anymore, particularly in the area of news, I say, why not?

Consider AP's plan a "disruptive innovation," on the low end. What if it aggregated valuable local and global content and found a way to analyze that news and make meaning out of it? Which local newspapers are most influential? Could AP create a proprietary "NewsRank" for international sources? How great would it be to find similarities between in coverage between Detroit's and Wolfburg's city papers?

For more on this story, see Businessweek. Unlike the NYT and WSJ, who treat this as a saga of the dying newspaper industry, Businessweek's coverage of the AP more accurately treats this as a David/Goliath story focusing on the AP's operations and management.

And if I may, as a former AP'er: Please guys, get out of the tower and re-integrate yourselves with your communities. It's about the people and having an identity in the place you cover. Go "Hyperlocal." See my next post, or simply this a.m.'s NYT business section.

Rupert Murdoch wants a 4-color e-reader

Rupert is on the search for a "4-color" e-reader that can save the traditional world of print news. While Plastic Logic certainly can reproduce about a 1/4 swath of the NYT print edition page layout, it is still very much a B&W affair.

The color request keeps the iPhone/iPod Touch device very much in the running, albeit one with a somewhat larger screen. 4x6? I'd carry that as a Touch - but no way I'd use that size as a phone. Give me a bluetooth and maybe then.

Check out this product demo from PL:

My Reading List for the Winter Break

The McKinsey Quarterly: “Getting more from prepaid mobile services” (February 2008) -> good for understanding innovation and adding services for lower end pre-paid customers.

Wellsprings of Knowledge, by Dorothy Leonard-Barton, Harvard Press book on market research method that's good for discovering non-consumption, as mentioned in Seeing What's Next by Clayton Christainsen.

The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

Infotopia, Cass Sunstein.

Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin.

Banktastic Blog.

Ethnio's Live Recruiter Goes Free

Ethnio, a bolt/peters co, now offers its live recruiting tool for free. See a demo on this site pop up (the study is running as of today for a few weeks). This means you can now recruit users live on your site for follow up focus groups, phone interviews, usability studies, etc.

You monitor your recruitment on a dashboard online. Then, go ahead and either do the follow up meetings yourself, or ask bolt/peters to run part or all of the show.

My agency, IconNicholson, used them to recruit and carry out a usability study for a major hospital site. The results were great and the method helped us win the job.

Clintons to Obama: Sorry, bud, no time

The Times is on to the Clintons and their lukewarm support of Obama overall. In the article today about Michelle Obama's role in the Obama campaign, they note Hillary's 2nd tier role:

Mrs. Clinton is campaigning only once or twice a week for Mr. Obama, as opposed to Ms. Palin’s appeals to women at events several times a day. That leaves Mrs. Obama as the Democratic campaign’s busiest and most high-profile female surrogate at a time when the fight for women is intensifying.

And today, AP found Bill telling us how great we all think Sarah Palin's life must be. But he'll be back on the trail after a four-day hiatus because of his Global Initiative.

Looks like Obama should be keeping friends closer ...