Fast Company

Paula Wallace Is The Reason These Art Kids Today Mean Business

Adam Bluestein — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:50:04 EST

The former kindergarten teacher cofounded the Savannah College of Art & Design and serves as its president. She's preparing students for creative careers by teaching collaboration and the art of ambiguity.

Since becoming president of the Savannah College of Art and Design, Paula Wallace has doubled enrollment from less than 5,000 students to more than 10,000, established an online learning program, and built new campuses in Atlanta, Hong Kong, and Lacoste, France. Under her watch, SCAD has received numerous honors including being named by Kaplan as one of "25 cutting-edge schools with an eye toward the future.” Exactly what that future holds, no one knows for sure. But Wallace says that SCAD grads are better prepared than most to adapt and thrive.

FAST COMPANY: You cofounded SCAD in 1978. Before that you were a kindergarten teacher--has that been a useful background?

PAULA WALLACE: I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that every college president first teach kindergarten, but I did. I started teaching elementary school at the base of the pyramid, and that honed my ideas about caring for students and being accountable to parents. In higher education today, there is a lot of talk about assessment for student learning and teaching and measuring performance outcomes. That’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

You’ve also worked as an interior designer, written books on interior design, founded the Savannah Film Festival--how do those other activities inform your thinking about the curriculum at SCAD?

I think it’s important to learn respect for all the different disciplines. Writers don’t just work with writers. At SCAD, a graphic designer might work with an industrial designer or a sound designer on a project. Showing respect for different disciplines is something that makes our graduates very appealing to employers.

About Generation Flux Pioneers of the new (and chaotic) frontier of business Flagship Fluxers, Photo: Brooke Nipar

In our February 2012 issue Fast Company Editor Robert Safian identified a diverse set of innovators who embrace instability, tolerate--and even enjoy--recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions. People like author/Onion digital media maverick Baratunde Thurston, Greylock Data Scientist DJ Patil, Microsoft Senior Researcher danah boyd, and GE's Beth Comstock. This series continues to explore the new values of GenFlux. Find more Fluxers here. And tweet your contributions using #GenFlux.

What are the major career challenges facing art and design graduates getting out of school now?

There is a big need to tolerate ambiguity today, and that can be uncomfortable. If you’re not already good at it, you need to be. Often, the answers are not self-evident; one semi-question leads to another question.

How does SCAD equip students to deal with that ambiguity?

I believe in the classical ideals of a liberal arts education. Reading, speaking, writing--those are essential in any career. So is supporting the work of others. The classroom critique process, which is a tradition in art and design schools, encourages that. You have to stand up and present your work to your peers and they can question your assumptions and solutions, which may lead you to reconfigure your solutions. I think the critique model strengthens students’ ability to be successful in the professional arena.

Also, we have a huge art history faculty, and every student gets an abundant background in art history. Our students are links in a chain—they need to know what’s come before to be a strong link, to understand what’s stood the test of time. Art is not just about the wrist down—it’s having confidence in your conceptual ability, too. Engaging with the concepts is key.

Another key element of SCAD is our focus on technology. We got ahead of the curve on embracing technology and how it can help artists to fulfill their visions and do their work. Now it’s part of everything. We even have looms for weaving—a really ancient technology—that are connected to computers.

But you’re different from a liberal arts school because you’re also training students for very specific careers.

Right. We have the core learning, but you can specialize in one area, or combine specializations into your own course of study. We still have the same majors we had when we started, but we’ve added to them. We now have 104 different degree programs for undergrads and grad students, including tracks such as visual effects and sound design. It’s become more specialized, yet more collaborative over time, and that has strengthened overall preparation for our students.

Students at SCAD are also encouraged to think about the business of art and design while they’re in school, right?

We do a lot of collaborative work with businesses. This concept started with sponsored projects in the Gulfstream Center for Design, which houses our industrial design department. Now it’s more wide-ranging and spread across the entire university. Design thinking is critical to business success--businesses want students’ blue-skying, their new ideas. Students don’t know that something can’t happen.

Recently we established the Collaborative Learning Center, the whole point of which is to allow companies to come in and pose problems, and the CLC puts together teams of students and faculty to work on them. In the past, students have worked on projects sponsored by companies like Coca-Cola, Chick-fil-A, Dell, Disney, and American Greetings. We have about 41 sponsored projects this academic year. In the fashion department, we have the Style Lab mentorship program, where well-known, established designers will come and be mentors. Participating in these programs isn’t a requirement, but I look at this as part of fulfilling our mission to prepare talented students for careers, and helping them build networks and partnerships.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the last several years about the real value of expensive private universities—are SCAD graduates successful at actually finding work after school?

Well, we have a 3.4 percent default rate on student loans according to the federal government; the national average is about 8.8 percent for four-year colleges and universities in general.

Since you became president of SCAD, the school has opened two campuses abroad, in Hong Kong and France. Is it important for students to have a global perspective?

I do. I think it’s about respect. There’s an arrogance if one hasn’t considered different cultures. The opportunity for students from the U.S. to study at the other campuses—continuing on a career path with the challenge of every-changing environments—helps them become more versatile. And when they come back from a semester Lacoste or Hong Kong, you can see they’ve filled journals with idea they wouldn’t have had if they stayed in one place.

Do you think art and design students are more comfortable than other young people with the idea of a less straightforward career path?

Serial careers are something they expect. Here in the South, we just love storytelling, and this is all part of creating a story. It’s going to have a beginning, a middle, and end, and lots of things that happen, lots of plotlines. Students pick up on that naturally--they expect to tell a story in their lives. I counsel them not to be too rigid in their expectations.

Google Brings Transparency To Copyright Removal Requests

Noah Robischon — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:33:07 EST

Google has been asked to remove more than 1.2 million urls from its search index in the last month from more than a thousand copyright owners. Want to know who and why? You can find out using a newly announced copyright removal requests section of Google's Transparency Report. The requests are being updated in near real-time, and the Targeted Domains list could almost serve as a guide to the most popular Torrent sites for downloading illegal files. The organizations that have filed the most reports are also indexed, and most of them are not who you would expect (Dr. Najeeb Lectures, for example). The odd thing about Google's copyright removal reports? There is no obvious way to search the reports by keyword.

[Google Transparency Report Removal Requests]

The Discovery Economy: How Your Credit Card Is Becoming A Data, Discounts Doorway

Kit Eaton — Thu, 24 May 2012 15:33:34 EST

The fast rate of credit card innovation continues apace. Is this only about money? Or is it also about the discovery of new things and ideas?

Square and similar systems have changed the way we pay for things. But they are not alone. Powered by simple smartphone systems and near-field communication tech, your credit card will soon become a doorway to discovering new stores, bargains, and ideas.

Yesterday American Express and Zynga revealed what at first blush could've been an Onion story: A plastic card powered by AmEx's Serve system, enlivened with Zynga's cutesy graphics and directly linked to your Zynga-powered online casual gaming experience. By paying for things in real life, the card affords you rewards much as you'd collect air miles--but in this case you get in-game credits for FarmVille. That's pretty limited, although it may "introduce" you to new aspects of the game.

The Discovery Economy

Apps, gadgets, and ideas for turning exploration into business Previous story: When Digital App Play Leads To Real-Life Finds

But AmEx has bigger plans. FarmVille is just an early experiment, and the idea is eventually to let brands advertise in games and, as a reward for interacting with the brand in the game format, you'll get rewards added to your Serve card that you can spend in real life. AmEx makes money off the whole interaction, the brands get some very targeted advertising, and the consumers get a dash of fun--and may spend Serve rewards in a new place or on a new service they'd never before considered.

Meanwhile a new startup has plans to intimately link in-store loyalty deals with credit card information, turning the cards into much more than a payment tool. Mirth rewards you for being a regular at a merchant that's signed up to its service: All you have to do as a consumer is set up a Mirth account, tap in your credit card number, enable Mirth to share some basic personal information, and then pay for something in the Mirth-ed store using the same card. Through regular visits you earn rewards in the form of discounts, and the retailers gets to discover all sorts of useful analytics about how and where you use your card--potentially a data goldmine.

But the big trick with Mirth is that the discounts may be used in other Mirth stores, which means the consumer is incentivized to use a service that they may not have previously used.

These systems work through more or less conventional plastic credit card tech, but the mobile payment revolution is sweeping slowly around the world, and our smartphones are going to take over many of the roles of plastic cards. That's when services like Mirth and a similar new startup Cardify come into their own because they let merchants geofence their offers: Walk into or even near a store with your app enabled, and it'll ping you to offer you a deal that could get you inside to try or buy something you may not have beforehand, all based on what the merchant knows about your spending habits thanks to your credit card info.

Another taste of the future comes from VeriFone's latest news about its iPhone payment system. As well as the obligatory Square-like card reader and payment app, it also allows your emailed payment receipt to hook up to a social network like Twitter, and also for the acutal payment act to initiate a coupon-like special offer via tight integration with Facebook offers--which the merchant can design themselves.

None of this is really about simple in-store coupons brought up to date with smartphone tech. Rather, soon enough simply using your credit card may trigger a batch of carefully tailored offers and tempting discounts at other stores. That is, daily deals are about to become hourly retail come-ons.

[Image: Flickr user Artnow314]

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.

How Ecodev Persuades Companies To Bring Manufacturing Back To The U.S. (Hint: It's Cheaper)

Alissa Walker — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:46:45 EST

Ecodev, a Minnesota-based economic development consultancy, helps American businesses see that manufacturing products stateside isn't just a matter of national pride, it's good for their bottom line.

UNITED STATES OF INNOVATION New Ideas, New Markets, New Insights

All around the country, Americans are dreaming big. Their boldest ideas are changing their communities--and having a ripple effect throughout the world.

CLICK HERE to read about pockets of innovation in other U.S. cities.

In the last decade, Americans' perception of domestic manufacturing has done a 180. "10 years ago, customers were demanding that their companies operate overseas because they thought they'd get a cheaper rate," manufacturing consultant Dana Olson says. But a swell of national pride and increasing sensitivity to the health of the environment have conspired against foreign manufacturing. "Now companies would much rather manufacture in the U.S. for loyalty as well as cost savings."

A new factory opening in Devils Lake, North Dakota, will bring 500 jobs to the city over the next five years.

As president, CEO, and founder of Ecodev, Olson assists companies that want to expand, relocate, and consolidate their manufacturing within the United States. Lately, Ecodov has also helped American companies bring their manufacturing home. Last month, Olson's company announced that one of its clients, Minnesota-based Ultra Green, was moving production of its biodegradable paper products (including plates and serving utensils) from China to the United States. A new factory opening in Devils Lake, North Dakota, will bring 500 jobs to the city over the next five years.

Ultra Green CEO Mack Traynor says Ecodev helped his team envision how their products could be efficiently produced in the United States--something they'd thought was improbable. "We realized that if we could find the source of raw material in the U.S. that would be comparable and if we had the proper automation and good old fashioned American ingenuity, we could be competitive with a domestic plant in our own backyard," he says.

While companies like Ultra Green come to Ecodev listing various reasons for wanting to make changes, Olson says it comes down to three issues: cost, convenience, and trust. Ecodev creates a comparative financial model for relocation, factoring in various metrics like quality and production time, and often uncovering hidden costs from energy and transportation.

In the case of Ultra Green, Olson discovered at one point they were shipping wheat straw from the United States to China, processing it there, and shipping the final products back to the states. Ecodev issued a request-for-proposal to various wheat-producing communities in the United States, and North Dakota came up as one of the biggest suppliers. Devils Lake quickly stood out for its dedication to the company's values as well as a lucrative economic incentive package to bring business to the area. "They have been tremendous," says Traynor of Devils Lake. "The welcoming committee has been outstanding."

In most cases, it's not cheaper for American companies to operate overseas.

Ecodev is a small boutique business, only taking on 10 clients last year, but Olson says their work is also about correcting perceptions of manufacturing, namely, the myth that's been perpetuated throughout the industrial world that domestic production can't be cost-effective. "These companies are convinced that going overseas was going to save them money," he says. "In most cases, it's not cheaper for them to operate overseas." Although he works with mostly mid-sized companies, he thinks that larger corporations also should take a cue from the changing tide of consumer preference. "If a company is global like Apple, you should be producing in multiple countries, but the U.S. should be one of them," Olson says.

Beyond the pride of placing the "Made in the U.S.A." label on his product, Traynor thinks he'll be able to reach a broader audience when production returns home. Increasingly, governments and corporations mandate that certain supplies they purchase be produced in the United States--a trend that's expected to continue apace, Traynor says. "This opens up many new markets and new opportunities that we wouldn't have had," he says. "These are new customers for us." Manufacturing domestically also helps builds a stronger brand on the environmental front. "All the companies we work with believe that to be true," Olson says. "For Ultra Green in particular, they're now going to power their plant with a windmill and foster a green product that's made in America."

Now that there's an opportunity for decent manufacturing jobs, people want to move back.

Only a few of Ultra Green's top management and technical experts will move from Minnesota, so most of the 500 hires will be made locally in Devils Lake. But Traynor, a Fargo native, has noticed another interesting phenomenon that has made him even more proud of his decision. "We've got calls and resumes sent in from expats--folks who used to live in North Dakota who want to come home," he says. "Now that there's an opportunity for some decent manufacturing jobs, they want to move back."

Follow the conversation on Twitter using the tag #USInnovation.

[Image: Flickr user Kevin Lallier]

Otoy's Tech Streams Games, Apps, And More Across All Devices In A Browser Window

Gregory Ferenstein — Thu, 24 May 2012 14:52:52 EST

Otoy, the company behind the tech that made Benjamin Button age in reverse and the actors playing the Winklevii look identical in "The Social Network," is developing tech to flawlessly port any image, game, or app into any device.

Self-taught programmer and Otoy CEO Jules Urbach thinks you should be able to get a photorealistic image, a game, or an app on any decent computer screen, regardless of your operating system, device, or operating processor.

His solution is a tech that promises to shatter the walls between Apple, Google, Sony, Microsoft, and their associated apps and app stores--not to mention the makers of graphics processors and devices which seem to constantly need upgrades to keep up with the latest software.

Users "don't need computers," to use Otoy's tech, Urbach explains to Fast Company. "All you're going to need is a screen." He's designed a novel way to capture, render, and stream images and port everything from high-powered applications and processor-taxing games and video to a browser window on almost any device using a remote super-computer.

Urbach has already made a splash with Light Stage technology, a 360-degree image-capturing orb that looks like something out of Contact or Sphere. It helped power the age-defying magic in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and created digital doubles of the Winklevii in The Social Network (the Winklevoss twins were actually created from one actor's face, Armie Hammer). Hollywood has also used the technology to digitally duplicate actor's faces and allow them to play young roles for the rest of their lives. Tim Hawkins, the technologist who helped develop Light Stage, shared a technical Academy Award for his work.

Now extensions of the compression and transmission end of Urbach's technology are being used to free cinema-quality video games and apps from their proprietary devices, app stores, and operating systems, even for users who don't have tricked-out machines. Early demos of the gameplay tech were impressive.

But Otoy's plans are more ambitious than games. The company aims to eliminate the need for any content middleman, from the Xbox to Blu-ray. With streaming content, "There's no gatekeeper; there's not Apple, not Sony, not Microsoft," Urbach says. "I can run it in Safari."

Any App, Anywhere, No Upgrade Required

"The only limit of an application you have today is the device it's running in," Urbach says, adding that consumers shouldn't be constrained by computer power, mobility, or an operating system. Otoy's only limitations are a 4G connection, over which the broadcast can be streamed.

In a demo, I was able to use my smartphone and iPad to call up a windows emulation running in near-real time with some hefty applications (screen shot below)--apps that aren't supposed to run on Apple's proprietary devices. And at Otoy headquarters in Downtown Los Angeles, I saw the Otoy app rendering interactive Transformers-quality graphics designed to run on a full-blown PC in real time--on an iPad.

Otoy's initial plans are to roll out the service to digital artists for a $99 monthly fee [eds note: specific pricing has not yet been announced]. Game and movie creators, explains Otoy president, Alissa Grainger, are a perfect proving ground for the workability of Otoy's concept in a computation-intensive industry and also a strategic entry point to become the industry standard.

Becoming the standard tool for creators would give the company a leg up in the space where Otoy does have competition: on-demand gaming, which allows users to play video games without an expensive console, right in their web browser. The infant space is already crowded with eager startups like Gaikai and OnLive, which have begun offering mobile gamers access to the year's hot titles. Urbach insists that competitors can't match his new data-crunching super-algorithm, and early comparisons (video below) seem to confirm his confidence.

[youtube hvZKmSvOxMY]

Beautiful Light Makes The Virtual World Seem Realistic

"Your eyes only see light beams," explains Urbach, about the inexplicable reason we can sense when computer images don't seem real. "Your brain is wired to understand what humans look like, what a scene looks like, what light looks like. And, if you see something off, your brain knows that at some level."

Much of the effort that went into designing Otoy's patented video-rendering algorithm went toward capturing the peculiar qualities of light, especially for the hard-to-render transparent properties of water and glass, which not even the most expensive action films bother perfecting. Check out the ultra-realistic rendering of a glass of water (below) designed by one of the early adopters of Otoy's art tool, Octane.

Another Otoy user created an architecture video of office furniture (below) so realistic that he had wreck the scene with cartoon blocks just so that viewers could see that the room was a digital creation.

[vimeo 25686881]

Optical effects require enormous computational power to trace light through all of the layers of shadow that typically make up something as simple as light refracted through a glass of water (known as "caustics"). Urbach tells Fast Company that, unlike traditional ways of rendering light, Otoy has figured out a way to predict the path of light beams--a computational savings that adds up when rendering a virtual world of millions of objects (Otoy's process is secret, so we cannot verify exactly how it's done).

The second half of Otoy's magic was unloading computational tasks off of the CPU, which processes data serially like an "assembly line," and onto a relatively inexpensive piece of hardware capable of parallel processing, the graphics card.

While Urbach says we should expect photorealistic video games in the near future, Otoy is already creating digital replicas of A-list actors' faces, which allows them to play young roles for the rest of their lives. "They never get old," says talent agent Ari Emanuel, who is now encouraging his clients to get scanned with Otoy's Academy Awarding-winning technology, so that they can appear young on-screen for the rest of their careers.

A Bright Future

Some of Silicon Valley's most prominent investors are secretly betting that Urbach's technology could have a big return. Indeed, the potential user base of Otoy is--well--almost everyone with a cell phone or computer. Consumers with a reliable Internet connection could replace bi-annual upgrade trips to the Apple Store for Otoy's monthly cloud service. With Otoy's video compression technology, Telecom providers and video on-demand services could stream hi-def movies at a fraction of the bandwidth. Given that Netflix hogs 32% of all U.S. bandwidth during peak hours, the implications are being felt by even those who don't license Otoy tech.

Movie studios and age-conscious actors are already paying Otoy a hefty fee to create their digital doubles. E-commerce sites, which are getting into the virtual fitting room game, could be the next customer, as Urbach showed me a device he rigged up in his part time that digitally scans everyday objects with photorealistic accuracy.

Urbach's unusual creative obsession with light stems his boyhood science-fiction dreams of a virtual world. At a young age, Urbach was taken from his "blissful" home in the countryside of France; upon return, commercial development had ruined the once prestine landscapes. The promise of a Star Trek-like Holodeck, he explains, could grant everyone, rich or poor, their own personal sanctuary.

"Certainly people paint for that reason, they make movies for that reason, they create art for that reason. For me, a painting or one of these things wouldn't do it for me," Urbach concludes. "Some people say you can't go home again, but this would be my best shot at that."

Otoy still has to prove it can monetize this technology, after years as a public relations gopher, occasionally rearing its head to tease the press with impressive demonstrations. But, to the extent the future of the Internet is video, and the future of video is Otoy, Urbach is an innovator that could be one of the great disruptors in the making.

[Image: Flickr user Thomas Hawk]

How YouSendIt's New CEO Plans To Take On A Mob Of Flashy, Well-Funded Cloud Competitors

Lydia Dishman — Thu, 24 May 2012 12:48:34 EST

With Dropbox, Box, and now Google Drive hankering to usurp YouSendIt's market leadership, newly minted CEO Brad Garlinghouse is keeping a cool head--and an eye on customers.

He’s a week into his job at YouSendIt and CEO Brad Garlinghouse doesn’t have an office yet. But he’s in no rush to claim a corner spot or a coveted windowed view at the company’s Campbell, Calif. headquarters just yet. “We have offices on three floors,” Garlinghouse explains, “So each week I am going to spend time on a different floor, getting to know everyone.”

Garlinghouse is actually applying this laid back, wait-and-see approach to taking the reins in general. Citing YouSendIt’s current market leadership --its cloud-based filed sharing and collaboration platform has gathered over 30 million registered users and 585,000 paid subscribers since its launch in 2004--he tells Fast Company he’s not stressed.

“We have a very robust product suite,” he says noting the recently launched Workstream, the B2B content collaboration tool among others released over the past year. “The wind is at our back,” he adds, “Because among ‘pro-sumers’ [professional or enterprise customers] YouSendIt is known as a good brand.”

As a veteran of both Yahoo! and more recently AOL, where Garlinghouse served as president of consumer applications and head of AOL’s Silicon Valley operations, he’s taking a moment to exhale. “When you come into a declining organization like AOL that is in turnaround mode, your tolerance and speed at making decisions is different,” he says of leading the charge to expand flagging products such as AOL Mail and AIM globally.

The Challenge: Managing Growth

At YouSendIt, Garlinghouse says, there’s a different, but equally challenging, proposition. The startup "trainwreck" is barely visible in the rear view anymore, and the company's seen 60 and 61 percent revenue growth over the last two years. “If it’s not broken you have to be careful not to fix it,” he says. Some executives may be eager to put their fingerprints all over their new company, but not him. “You want to be careful because you may end up doing harm. YouSendIt is growing very quickly and managing growth is the hardest thing.”

Growth is the reason he took the job, Garlinghouse says, rather than pursue the investor route like some other successful Silicon Valley execs (hello Reid Hoffman). A consultation with good friend Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, sealed the deal. “She said she always went with fast growth companies. They have a tendency to help hide other sins,” he says.

The Current Manifesto: Compete on Customer Outcomes, Not Cost

Not that he’s suggesting there are lots of sins to hide. But how does YouSendIt stack up to Garlinghouse’s much-talked about “peanut butter manifesto” test? “Any organization can be more focused,” he admits, referring to his 2006 memo when as then-SVP Yahoo! he called out the company for its lack of cohesive vision. “I’d give YouSendIt a B,” he adds with a chuckle.

YouSendIt’s product suite “almost by definition gets a good grade,” he says, “But we could do better with clarity of purpose and messaging. There are aspects of our external communication that I’m not proud of.” But that’s a lot easier to fix than problems with the underlying business, he says, which is not an issue he sees at YouSendIt.

Garlinghouse says he’s also going to concentrate on customer outcomes rather than, say, changing YouSendIt’s pricing structure or seeking more funding (the company’s already raised nearly $50 million). Reiterating what he said at the TC Disrupt conference this week, Garlinghouse believes big funding doesn’t always equal success. He cited a TechCrunch article about Box.net having a billion dollar valuation. “One of the first [success] metrics was the money they raised,” he says. Living through the first dotcom crash taught Garlinghouse that it’s not healthy for a company to raise as much as it can at the highest possible price. “Success is measured by customer outcomes. If you have very happy customers, the business side will take care of itself.”

The Constant Refrain: A Well-Grounded Attitude

Another thing he’s learned over the course of his career and from his entrepreneur father (and not in the halls of Harvard, where he got his MBA) is that its important to stay grounded to be a good leader. Though he’s been entrenched in Silicon Valley for years, Garlinghouse credits his removed-from-the-hype Midwestern upbringing with his ability to filter the noise that permeates Silicon Valley's tech scene. He’d rather build slowly and organically to ensure sustainable success. Likewise he goes back to his father’s advice about choosing the professor rather than the class. “It applies in business, too,” he maintains, where its more important to follow a good leader rather than “work for a hot, sexy company run by a 26-year old who doesn’t know how to manage.”

Does slow and steady win the race? It remains to be seen. Right now, though, YouSendIt has its work cut out for it. The new Google Drive is lying in wait to make a big user grab, and Box is looking to own the enterprise space, counting 82% of Fortune 500 companies as customers. And while Dropbox doesn’t say how many paying subscribers it has, it’s currently boasting 50 million users and is a year ahead in translation in French, Spanish, German and Japanese. Garlinghouse concedes this is an area where YouSendIt needs to play catch up.

Still, he remains unflappable and offers a quote from author Charles Swindoll as the mantra he’s already shared with the entire YouSendIt staff. “It goes something like: life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. We are in charge of our attitudes.”

The "Hell Yes!" Approach To Better, Bolder Decision Making

Amber Rae — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:54:30 EST

Over the past few years, I've worked with and interviewed hundreds of CEOs, authors, entrepreneurs, and creatives. One key factor that separates inspiring and successful leaders from those who are trying to make it is decisiveness.

Last year, when I was working with Seth Godin to build The Domino Project, he constantly pushed our team to make more decisions. His theory was that it didn't always have to be the perfect or right decision so long as we took the risk and decided.

As part of Seth's publishing experiment, I began working with Derek Sivers to edit, publish, and market his book. Through this experience, I become intimately familiar with his "Hell Yeah" approach to decision making. It's stuck with me since and has proved to be a productive go-to framework for making things happen.

Here's how it works: For every opportunity that comes your way--be it a new business initiative, event, partnership deal, or hiring decision--ask yourself, "Do I want to ______?"

Most often, you'll intuitively respond in one of three ways:

1) "HELL YES!!!!! Abso-freaking-lutely! No question! YESSSSSS." When this happens, you should do it. Right now.

2) "Yeah... This makes sense. I can see this working. Yes." When this happens, you should table it for now and revisit it later. Or never.

3) "Maybe. That could be cool. That might work." When this happens, you should walk the fuck away. Mediocre is not good enough.

The difference between the aspiring entrepreneur and the one who's building a forward-thinking multi-million dollar business lies in the ability to say "HELL YES" or "HELL NO." Quickly. There is no yes. There is no maybe.

"Hell yes or NO." Those four words will change the trajectory of your work and life.

[Image: Flickr user Doug McNeall]

VeriFone And PayPal Partner To Change The Way You Shop At Big Retailers

Kit Eaton — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:01:53 EST

VeriFone and PayPal have just announced they're teaming up to bring PayPal's next-generation payment system to the country's large retailers.

PayPal can already be used in about 2,000 Home Depot stores. And you probably use a VeriFone machine at least once a day when you shop in stores and pay for your purchases by card--the company is one of the world's top payment technology makers, and says that its customer base includes 80% of the top 200 largest retailers in the U.S. The new partnership brings a simple software ugrade to Verifone terminals by the retailers in question--but it's a big leap for PayPal and potentially for the average consumer.

The Way We Shop Now

VeriFone and PayPal's new venture joins several other recent payment industry innovations Everyone from MasterCard to Amex, to startups like Square and Fab.com are angling for a piece of the action. Read more here.

At first PayPal's digital wallet tech will be selectively rolled out alongside existing card infrastructure with carefully chosen merchants. (PayPal has not yet revealed who these retailers will be.) Then VeriFone will build PayPal's system natively into its list of offers to merchants--soon enough you'll start to see PayPal's logo popping up on more and more window stickers just like Visa, MasterCard, AmEx, and so on.

The upshot is that you'll be able to use PayPal's novel in-store payment tricks like using its Access card and a PIN or simply tapping in your pre-arranged phone number and a PIN instead of waving your choice of credit card at the retailer and swiping it through their card-reader.

The move is significant because it's a signal that PayPal is more determined than ever to capture some of the burgeoning mobile payments market, and a long list of nationwide retailers is a great way to build marketshare as well as build customer awareness of these alternative payment systems. In making the announcement, the two firms note that adding support for NFC technology or other hardware solutions is easy. That means Verifone, which is already positioning itself to address markets similar to those Square does with its iPhone card reader system, is getting ready to embrace all sorts of different mobile-pay solutions, from PayPal to Google Wallet and even the fabled iWallet.

The end of the traditional credit card looms a little closer, ever day.

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.

Yahoo's Axis And The New Search Wars

E.B. Boyd — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:21:18 EST

Yahoo is reimagining the front end. Google is working on the back end. And Bing is tackling both. Who will win the new search wars?

On Wednesday, Yahoo released Axis, a new browser plug-in and iPhone and iPad app that purports to "reinvent" the search experience. It's not so much of a reinvention, however, than it is an upgrade of the old search experience, albeit a clever and potentially delightful one. (And, it should be noted, one that made a not-entirely-smooth debut.)

Axis comes on the heels of a new launch from Microsoft's Bing and rumblings from Google about its own plans to "make search smarter." All of which is to say: A new search war is on the horizon--and one that promises to turbocharge the experience for all of us.

The three leaders in this space have each realized that the conventional paradigms for search, architected over a decade ago when bandwidth was low, few people used the web for more than research, and almost all computing was done at desktops, no longer work in an age of mobile apps, multiple devices, big data, and ever greater expectation on the part of the consumer that working online is about getting things done, not just perusing documents.

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, therefore, are all competing to come up with the new killer search experience.

The primary feature of Yahoo's new Axis system is that it no longer returns "10 blue links," the paradigm established in the late '90s when search was first born. Instead Axis offers you visual previews of its results, whether in the plug-in for your desktop browser (as in the image below) or on the app on your iPhone or iPad.

Axis also abandons the vertical scroll paradigm, which made sense 13 years ago when everything on the web scrolled vertically. Instead, Axis allows you to scroll horizontally, both through a set of results, which appear at the top of the page, or through the actual pages themselves, down below, a la Fast Flip (Google's news reader, launched in 2009 and discontinued last fall). This makes sense given that Axis is based on a "mobile first" mindset; it's optimizing for the iPhone and iPad, where users have become used to using their touch screens to flip from screen to screen. (For more on the redesign, see our story on Co.Design.)

Ultimately, however, Axis is only an enhancement to the user interface. At its core, it still revolves around the idea of delivering users to documents. That might be fine for now, and even the next few years. But it might not be sufficient in the long run.

Bing and Google, on the other hand, have been fundamentally reimagining the purpose of search itself. Search was originally about helping users find web pages, because that's all there was on the web. But both Microsoft and Google realize that, from the user's perspective, "finding web pages" is ultimately just a proxy for "finding information in those pages that helps me get something done."

That's why they've been focusing on re-working search as an app that delivers utilities right in the results that help you get that "something" done, whether, for example, it's booking a table at a restaurant you were searching for or buying tickets for the movie whose show times you were looking up.

Microsoft has done the most front-end work in this direction, including a launch earlier this month of a new "social search" feature that integrates with social media to do a better job of helping you identify friends who might have the answers you're looking for.

Still, both companies are doing deep back-end work, developing semantic databases that, as Bing director Stefan Weitz told Fast Company earlier this month, "model every object on the planet." Building those databases (Google is calling its one a "Knowledge Graph") will enable both companies to leap to the next generation of search.

They might be onto something. According to Experian Hitwise, Bing's share of the U.S. market grew 16% over the last year (from April 2011 to April 2012). It now stands at 14%. That might seem like a small portion of the overall market, but consider that Bing hasn't even been around for three years yet.

Yahoo's share of U.S. search only grew 7% in that same time period. It's now at 16%, after having been around for over a decade. And Google share actually decreased 5%, to 64%. That can't necessarily be interpreted as a repudiation of its Knowledge Graph strategy, however, given that, so far, the work the company's been doing on the back end hasn't been served up to the user on the front end as extensively has Microsoft has been doing.

So who will win the search wars?

In the short run, Axis may enable Yahoo to grab yet more share of the search market. It's an attractive user experience, and Ethan Batraski, Yahoo director of product, tells Fast Company that the service tested well with 18-35-year-old males, the demographic Yahoo identifies as early adopters. Batraski says Axis produced more "click yield" and was able to deliver users to documents "significantly" faster, but he declined to provide specific numbers.

In the long run, though, while Yahoo's approach is fine for discovery--window shopping, if you will--it's not as effective at enabling users to accomplish discrete tasks quickly. For those searches, consumers may well increasingly turn to Bing, and stick with Google if it develops more front-end utilities. All of this is predicated, of course, on both companies' mastering the deep technical challenges of compiling their respective back ends, which is no easy feat and won't be completed anytime soon.

All three, however, will continue to fight hard. Search generates the lion's share of Google's revenues. And it's an important division within Yahoo as well. Says Batraski: "It's a billion-dollar business, so it's not something we're going to shy away from anytime soon."

Axis is available today in the United States and, according to Yahoo, will be rolled out to additional geographies, platforms, and devices in the months to come.

[Image: Flickr user x-ray delta one]

E.B. Boyd is FastCompany.com's Silicon Valley reporter. Twitter | Google+ | Email

Tech Giants And Public Schools Embrace Vo-Tech

Anya Kamenetz — Thu, 24 May 2012 07:51:00 EST

Tech giants are teaming up with public schools to give kids a path to science jobs.

Rethinking Vo-Tech: Each of the 19 teams sketched, assembled, and launched balloon-propelled rockets. Whenever a flight was successful, there was revelry. LAUNCH SLIDESHOW >Photographs by Rebecca Greenfield

Excited students bubble into the basement cafeteria of a Brooklyn, New York, high school, both sexes favoring thick-framed geek-chic glasses--fitting for a school in which geek is very chic. The kids have gathered this Friday morning for a competition: They must design drinking-straw "rockets" that can traverse a fishing line using only balloons for propulsion. But the jerry-rigged shuttles aren't the only models being evaluated. The school itself is an experiment, one intended to prepare average urban students for entry-level tech jobs. If the rockets work out, the winning team will get iTunes gift cards. If the school succeeds, it could help fill 14 million science, tech, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs over the next decade.

Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) opened in September 2011, the brainchild of Stan Litow, president of the IBM Foundation and former deputy chancellor of New York public schools. "The question was, what can schools do to connect more directly to jobs?" says Litow. The answer: Tap IBM and the New York City College of Technology to create a collaboration-oriented curriculum that enables students to graduate in six years with an associate degree in applied science and a spot "at the head of the line" for entry-level IBM tech jobs. To enroll, students need only attend an orientation session.

"The QUESTION WAS, WHAT CAN SCHOOLS DO TO CONNECT MORE DIRECTLY TO JOBS?"

The arrangement is shades of vo-tech, which is generally looked down on by Americans who resist the idea of "tracking" low-income students into sub-BA programs. But P-TECH's principal, Rashid Davis, argues that working toward a goal keeps students motivated and more likely to earn a four-year degree down the road. Research on so-called career academies by policy group MRDC bears this out.

"We push them hard," says Chris Leung, who teaches technology, one of five first-year classes (along with math, English, workplace skills, and phys ed). Fifteen-year-old Ibrahim Wright agrees. "I was a C student before. But here, you can't be lazy." Not that the students have to go it alone: Part of IBM's involvement is to provide mentors.

So far, early returns are promising. After only one term of ninth grade, 89% of P-TECHers meet N.Y.C. standards for promotion to 10th, compared with the citywide year-end average of about 70%. Down in P-TECH's caf, one team designs, redesigns, and tests its rocket three times in a matter of minutes en route to a close win and iTunes riches. The P-TECH model is iterating at similar speed. This year, three more schools will open in New York, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel has fast-tracked five in Chicago, with Cisco, Microsoft, Motorola, and Verizon joining IBM as partners. The rocket is on the fishing line; with balloons of that ilk behind it, there's no telling how high it can go.

A version of this article appears in the June 2012 issue of Fast Company.

Yahoo Accidentally Leaks Private Encryption Key For Axis, Its New Search System

Kit Eaton — Thu, 24 May 2012 07:37:10 EST

News updates all day from your Fast Company editors.

Last night Yahoo introduced Axis, a browser extension/ mobile app designed to turbo-boost Internet searching. It's a bold new front in the Search Wars. But it was accompanied by another, less savory release, discovered by Nik Cubrilovic, an Australian entrepreneur: Yahoo accidentally leaked its private encryption key for the Chrome version. This is part of the certificate that secure websites and browser extenstion bear to prove that they're legitimately software created by who you believe to be true. The exposure of the certificate could allow a malicious coder to release code masqueradeing as a legitimate Yahoo app but carry out whatever data-scraping or other intrustions the coder desired. Yahoo quickly apologized, and released a new version for Chrome that does not contain the offending certificate data, but the implications of the slip have yet to be concluded.

To keep up with news like this, follow our main Fast Feed page throughout the day.

Dan Beckmann And Tom Hallaran’s Plan To Bring Big Data To Big Government

David D. Burstein — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:19:05 EST

If your elected officials suddenly seem less clueless, you might thank Beckmann and Hallaran, creators of Congressional analytics dashboard, Correlate.

After the inauguration of President Barack Obama, Dan Beckmann, a former Obama digital team strategist, stayed in D.C. to meet with Congressional staffers on both sides of the aisle. Beckmann, 32, had previously worked on developing and implementing new media strategy for ABC News and Current TV. Now, with all that he had learned about using technology on a political campaign, he was eager to try and use similar digital tools to increase the effectiveness in the governing process. As he met with staffers, Beckmann listened to what was and wasn’t working on Capitol Hill. Before long, a solution came into focus. “I didn’t go to D.C. to pitch a company. I thought they needed better social networks,” Beckmann says. Staffers told him that their most pressing need was a system that would help analyze and organize their correspondence. “For the next month I went through the Senate and House, both sides of the aisle, and they all agreed, some embarrassingly, that they had a huge problem,” Beckmann says.

So after those conversations, he and Tom Hallaran developed a program called Correlate, which allows the constant stream of correspondence from constituents to their elected representatives to be more efficiently managed. The program processes a single member of Congress’s constituent email, faxes, physical mail (via scan), and social media to produce real-time analytics on the issues that constituents are most concerned about. Correlate searches the correspondence for keywords and connects those keywords to specific pieces of legislation that are active in Congress. Over time, a machine-learning process comes to understand how people write messages, and identifies and then searches for key patterns in the correspondence. Then, the tool uses public government database information about active bills in Congress to associate bills with correspondence. The Correlate team has found this process to have approximately 85% accuracy. The program also filters correspondence coming from inside and outside the members' districts.

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“It takes a long time for the offices to get any understanding of what’s in their correspondence,” Beckmann says, noting that in the best-case scenario correspondence is organized and delivered to the relevant staffers two weeks after it has initially been received, and it's not very analytical. As a result, one of the most important aspects of our democracy--the ability for any citizen to write their Congressperson with their concerns--has become a slow, cumbersome, and often disregarded process.

Correlate allows the feedback to be viewed through a real-time dashboard. At any moment, a member of Congress or someone on his or her staff can pull up the tool to see how a particular piece of legislation is moving by the hour, day, week, month, or year. The dashboard also allows each office to focus in on patterns in specific cities and areas in their district.

Beckmann is CEO and cofounder of IB5k, the company which built Correlate; Hallaran serves as cofounder and managing partner. In addition to building Correlate, IB5k has developed several other products, including a Facebook app called “Citizen Cosponsor” which allows average citizens to “like” a piece of legislations and interact with it throughout the process. They are also in the process of creating an updated system to manage all electronic communications within the House of Representatives.

Correlate’s government service costs under $500 a month per office. Beckman and Hallaran’s vision foresees a relatively low-priced product for government, supported by commercial applications of the same technology for private-sector companies. Correlate is already being used by some major consumer brands and their PR teams to follow consumer reactions to issues and campaigns.

Correlate doesn’t just process reactions to hot-button legislation, either. It also tracks everyday “casework” (i.e. immigration issues, military academy nominations, flag requests). Casework accounts for a significant portion of Congressional correspondence, and it is frequently time-sensitive, yet it is also a victim of backlogging.

Almost four years after those initial conversations, Correlate is active in 10 offices in the House including the leadership. Beckmann, Hallaran, and their team are pleased with this traction, and they anticipate greater adoption in the House and initial adoption in the Senate in the near future. Matt Lira, Director of New Media for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, was one of the first staffers on the Hill to embrace Correlate. “There is a sense that technology when applied to the problems of our democracy can have a beneficial impact. In the legislative process, this correspondence problem is one of the main drivers of the feeling of disconnect between the public and the legislative institutions,” says Lira, who also worked with the IB5k team on the Citizen Cosponsor Facebook app. “We don’t want to just process this information, we want to make it actionable and useful to the legislative process.” On the productivity side, IB5k estimates that Correlate can eliminate at least half of a full-time position in a Congressional office. Lira says Correlate has allowed his office to reassign several staffers to more substantive work.

With the challenges in communication, Beckmann feels that constituent voices are being drowned out by lobbyists who have much more direct access to members of Congress and their staffs, “We have a huge problem with the power of special interests in the political system. This is a way that we can make the communication between a candidate or an office holder and their constituents stronger. It cuts out the need for special interests. It puts the rest of us on a level playing field. Now an average citizen can have just as loud a voice as a lobbyist.”

Hallaran and Beckmann believe that this model can be extended to all the branches of federal, state, and local governments. The team has already had conversations with the White House and international governments about implementing Correlate or a system like it. For Beckmann, Correlate is a continuation of excitement that captured so many people during the 2008 campaign. “People might remember what the energy in the political system was like back in 2008. In our office it’s still like that. People wanted better government and they knew it was possible then. Part of why we’re doing this to deliver on the promise that politics was going to change,” he says.

If Your Employees Are Squabbling, Your Company's Probably Standing Still

Ken Blanchard and Scott Blanchard — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:42:50 EST

In today's changing work environment, it's important for leaders to provide clarity of direction. If they don’t, fear, frustration, and inefficiency start to creep in.

In the same way that a bicycle is wobbly when it's standing still and becomes more stable the faster you pedal, the same is true with personnel issues at work. It's when the organization is standing still that people start to squabble.

Three leadership strategies can help. The first is having a clear sense of where you're going. The second is having a plan for your people so they each know their role going forward. The third is having the tenacity and stick-to-itiveness to make that plan sustainable.

Fail in any of these three areas, and the result will be lackluster financial performance and the creation of an atmosphere where negative human dynamics will begin to grow. Humans cooperate best when they are all moving toward a common goal. When an organization is standing still, the pushing and shoving starts. Parents know this. When do the kids start fighting in the car? When they are sitting still with no place to go.

Clear direction is especially important when dealing with people who've been with the organization for an extended period of time. Leaders and organizations generally do a good job of clarifying goals as they are getting new people up to speed. With long-time employees, however, leaders often assume that the employee instinctively knows what's important. As a result, leaders generally don't spend the same amount of time and energy communicating clear objectives to seasoned employees that they do with new hires. When this happens, it's not unusual for veteran employees to lose the focus and discipline necessary to achieve their individual goals.

Three strategies for leaders

Good performance begins with clear goals. That's job one. If you don't know where you're going--as the Cheshire Cat said to Alice in Wonderland--any road will get you there. Leadership is about going somewhere, and clear agreements are the first step. It's a process of creating clarity about why we’re here, what we’re doing, and how we're going to work together.

We did a study a number of years ago with a large petroleum company in North America that shows how rarely this clarity occurs. We asked more than 2,000 employees and their managers to share their goal expectations with us. To begin, we asked the employees to rank the top five things they felt they were responsible for. Then we asked the managers to list and prioritize the five things they were actually holding each of their direct reports accountable for. We saw only a 19% agreement across the population of 2,000 people!

After clear goals are set, leaders must use strong communication skills to make sure everyone's eyes are on the ball. This includes regular one-on-one conversations with direct reports that include feedback and evaluation of how each person is doing against established targets. This helps employees understand how their role impacts the larger picture. It also allows people to have a say in the actions, decisions, priorities, and goals that are subsequently set. Leadership is done best when it is something you do with people instead of something you do to them.

The third step is for managers to help people notice and experience the incremental successes they are having. In the past, this was accomplished through extrinsic reward and recognition. Today we use a more intrinsic approach that focuses on discovering the incentives that are meaningful to individual employees to fuel their passion for the task or project they are working on. It’s about creating an environment that leads to sustainable performance.

A little structure goes a long way

On the surface, producing effective results can sound like it's about driving performance and cracking the whip--but, when it's done right, it's more about moving people in the right direction. You can begin by answering these questions: What are we trying to accomplish mutually? What is the organization trying to accomplish? What is our department’s role in accomplishing that? And what are individual contributors being held accountable for?

Your role as a leader is to use your management skills to place a certain rigor and clarity around goals. When performance is not what it should be, first ask yourself whether goals have been made clear. Goal clarity helps reduce issues regarding relationships and personnel that plague so many organizations. Set a clear vision and show people how they can contribute to it. When folks are moving in a common direction with clear goals, most workplace struggles will take care of themselves.

Scott Blanchard is the cofounder of Blanchard Certified, a new cloud-based leadership development resource and experience. Ken Blanchard is the best-selling co-author of The One Minute Manager® and 50 other books on leadership. You can follow Ken Blanchard on Twitter @KenBlanchard or @LeaderChat and also via the HowWeLead and LeaderChat blogs.

[Image: Flickr user Paul Joran]

Motorola's Police Car Of The Future Is An Unpaid-Ticket-Sniffing Scofflaw Slayer

Neal Ungerleider — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:29:08 EST

The 2012 Chevrolet Caprice PPV is a futuristic cop car with 4G communications and a Knight Rider-like voice interface. It also automatically scans every license plate in its line of vision for warrants and unpaid tickets.

Police cars have come a long way since Car 54. Motorola Solutions, one of the world's leading security communications technology firms, recently unveiled a blinged-out next-generation cop car. The heavily modified 2012 Chevrolet Caprice PPV and Detective vehicle retails for approximately $30,000 before bid and bulk discounts and functions like a mobile police station. Motorola's re-outfitted Caprices feature a full array of cameras and an immersive computer system that turns it into, as CTO Paul Steinberg tells Fast Company, a “virtual partner.” It's also the only way to purchase a Caprice here in the United States: General Motors discontinued the car in 1996 for civilian customers.

General Motors and Motorola collaborated closely on the vehicle. In a car fully equipped with Motorola's accessories, the siren and computer applications can be activated via voice commands (yes, Knight Rider-style) and an in-car video system is fully integrated. The video system can record, stream, and receive video from external cameras such as street cameras. In order to save space, the bulk of the car's computer hardware is stashed in the trunk. A push-to-talk button is integrated into the steering wheel for easy communications, and all of the car's functions can be controlled via voice. Multiple cameras (up to eight) constantly take footage of everything surrounding the vehicle and inside the vehicle; just for that special Big Brother touch, an automated license plate recognition system can automatically scan every license plate that the car is in visual distance of, and check it against a database. If a car is tied to an unpaid ticket, known felons, warrants, or any other risk factors, the Caprice will flag it automatically and alert the officer. Police departments will also have the option of keeping a permanent database with information on every car spotted on the road and its physical location, a move sure to raise justified concerns among civil liberties activists. The system is equipped to process between 8,000 and 10,000 license plates per shift, the typical number encountered by a busy highway cop.

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Law enforcement equipment, including vehicles, is a lucrative business. The multibillion dollar industry is subsidized by government grants and allows police departments in many municipalities to regularly buy new vehicles. Fast Company reported previously on the NYPD's hybrid patrol cars and Carbon Motors, an Indiana-based firm building a similar futuristic police car to Motorola's. However, Carbon Motors has been dealing with a bumpy political path that included a surprise loan refusal from the Energy Department.

The eight cameras on the Caprice can both cache video and stream footage back to a police station in real time, allowing multiple views of sensitive situations. In order to handle that sort of bandwidth, the vehicle is fully integrated with Motorola Solutions' Public Safety LTE networks, which gives individual police departments and law enforcement agencies access to high-speed 4G communications. Motorola markets a companion device, the LEX 700, to law enforcement agencies as well. The LEX 700 is a smartphone-like minicomputer that gives officers access to automated ticket writing, identity verification, evidence management, and suspect booking.

Motorola's cars are American adaptations of another General Motors vehicle, the Holden Caprice from Australia. Chevrolet is also making an unmarked version available for detectives and undercover officers. As always, it's important to note that Motorola Solutions is a separate company from Google's Motorola Mobility; the two companies parted ways in 2011.

For more stories like this, follow @fastcompany on Twitter. Email Neal Ungerleider, the author of this article, here or find him on Twitter and Google+.

[Photos/Video: Motorola Solutions]

Why Utah Matters To Virgin, Amazon, And LeBron James

Ryan White — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:45:40 EST

The Foundry, a Salt Lake City training ground for entrepreneurs, is challenging some long-held notions about how startup incubators should work--and captivating everyone from Armenian businessmen to Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.

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Two years ago Scott Paul was taking evening MBA classes at the University of Utah while holding a day job at a tourism site when he kept noticing lackluster racks of brochures (for deals on local ski tours and the like) in hotel lobbies. It was April of 2010 and the iPad had just arrived on the scene. Paul had an idea: “Why not slap these iPads into hotel lobbies and have them be digital concierges?”

Today, his company, Armor Active, makes iPad kiosks, point-of-sale systems, and kiosk-friendly apps for some of the biggest brands in the world. The company has sold more than 20,000 units and is on track to hit $3 million in revenues this year. The ballooning customer roster is a virtual who’s who of the corporate world: Estee Lauder, Virgin, ING, Amazon, and BMW, to name a few. Guests signing in at Macworld’s 2012 iWorld show in San Francisco did so on iPads sheathed in Armor Active’s enclosures, and LeBron James’s new high-design Unknwn sneaker store in Miami features 45 iPads, all housed in the company’s Evolve kiosks.

The Foundry is disproving assumptions that starting a business is inherently a fail-prone endeavor.

The company is one of a host of new ventures to emerge from the Foundry, a University of Utah-sponsored peer-based training ground for entrepreneurs that’s challenging some long-held notions about how business incubators should work. University of Utah post-doc Rob Wuebker and the program’s other founders believe they’ve hit upon a method of fostering entrepreneurs that is not only dirt cheap and easily replicable but--crazy as it sounds--also has the potential to catalyze urban redevelopment and foster the growth of the creative class in places with fledging hipness quotients, from Salt Lake City to Armenia. Recently, the Foundry even caught the eye of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who wants to build his own incubator in Las Vegas. “My MBA would’ve been a complete waste without meeting Rob and his team,” Paul says. The Foundry gave him “the tools to make the idea a reality.”

See more about why Salt Lake matters to Virgin, Amazon, and LeBron James here.

According to Bill Schulze, “The Foundry came together really as an experiment." Schulze is chair of the Department of Management at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business and part of the Foundry’s brain trust. “Our fundamental premise was that we wanted to create entrepreneurs," he says. "We weren’t interested in creating companies, we wanted to create entrepreneurs.”

Wuebker says the Foundry is disproving stale assumptions that starting a business is inherently a hard, risky, fail-prone endeavor. The free program is open to university students and community members alike (about a quarter of particpants come from outside the university). Since it was founded in May 2010, the Foundry has produced 64 revenue-generating companies and 75 jobs, generating about $12 million in revenues, Schulze says. And that’s without any seed money from the program: The Foundry provides a modestly furnished office space in a university-leased downtown building, whiteboards, Internet access, coffee, and pizza. The university has invested less than $100,000 in the entire program, Schulze says.

So what's the secret? The founders say it has a lot to do with social capital: Students form a tight-knit cooperative network, and as the number of viable business ideas dwindles over the course of a semester, they hire each other. This is in stark contrast to the typical incubator, where a competitive zero-sum-game vibe dominates. Participants remain accountable to the group by filing weekly reports, which they upload to Dropbox at least 24 hours before the peer-led weekly meeting at 7:30 a.m.--yes, 7:30 a.m.--Monday morning. In lieu of plodding lectures, students digest the basics of entrepreneurship via bite-sized YouTube videos, so they can spend their Monday meetings helping each other problem-solve. When it works the way it’s supposed to, the instructors are relegated to pouring coffee.

When it works the way it’s supposed to, the instructors are relegated to pouring coffee.

A relentless focus on testing, tweaking, and retesting business ideas maximizes a product’s likelihood of surviving in the economic wilds, and keeps risk low--spending money is considered a last-ditch step, when there’s no other way forward. “What’s different about the Foundry is they use a scientific method based on data,” says Ben Hadley, a Vail-based corporate development exec who mentors Foundry students. “I’ve never seen that methodology brought to the notion of business discovery.”

See more about why Salt Lake matters to Virgin, Amazon, and LeBron James here.

The ventures aren't limited to technology. Board-game enthusiast Phil Kilcrease launched his company 5th Street Games on his bike, pedaling his creations to game shops as far away as Provo and Ogden. He’s since successfully leveraged Kickstarter to raise nearly $37,000 and expand his lineup. Redflower Inc.’s Patrick Duke-Rosati launched a line of bottled aguas frescas drinks and has secured an agreement with Whole Foods. Erik Larsen’s cupcake-delivery business Heaven Cupcake made it onto Food Network’s “Cupcake Wars.” Power Practical founder David Toledo just raised over $126,000 on Kickstarter for his PowerPot, a cooking pot that turns cooking heat into an electrical charge.

Here's where the urban-redevelopment part comes into play: Such a diversity of business models bodes well for the Salt Lake economy and the city’s attempts to revivify gritty urban neighborhoods like the light-industrial Granary District (where the municipal redevelopment agency subsidizes the Foundry’s rent). “You could have a lawn-cutting business, a coffee cup business, a restaurant idea and the Foundry will help you,” says Hadley. “That is really key to urban renewal.”

Wuebker, a Santa Monica native, dreams of establishing in Salt Lake the kind of trendsetting “creative class” better associated with places like San Francisco, L.A., or Austin.

“My interest is in contributing to GDP, job growth, and making a difference inside the ecosystem,” Wuebker says. “What I think is happening is that we’re creating a significant creative core of entrepreneurs who are both vibrant and capable. They’re choosing to stay here, and build their businesses here.”

It doesn't hurt that Utah has one of the most business-friendly climates in the country. Relatively low operating costs, a low corporate tax rate, above-average employment, a growing population, and a burgeoning tech sector led Forbes to label Utah the “Best State for Business and Careers” in the magazine’s annual 2010 and 2011 surveys. In Salt Lake, the University of Utah was ranked no. 1 in creating startups based on university research in 2009 and 2010, topping powerhouses such as MIT and CalTech, according to the annual survey by the Association of University Technology Managers.

See more about why Salt Lake matters to Virgin, Amazon, and LeBron James here.

Wuebker sees the Foundry as “a regional development engine in a box,” though it’s worth pointing out that it is an engine still being unboxed. The city’s Granary District remains a far cry from San Francisco's Mission District or Brooklyn's Williamsburg, and Scott Paul says the crew at Google Ventures still laugh at him when he calls the area Silicon Slopes. “I’m always wondering, ‘Should I be leaving?’” he says. “There’s a huge pull now to go to San Francisco and start your team there.”

Perhaps the more immediate measure of the Foundry's method, however, is the extent to which it’s being imitated by similar programs at places such as George Mason University in Washington, D.C., and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. There’s a budding Foundry-style incubator in the Armenian capitol Yerevan of all places, launched with help from visiting Salt Lake students. Lately, the Foundry has captivated Zappos CEO-turned-urban renewal champion Tony Hsieh. Hsieh has a $350 million project aimed at building a vibrant urban core in downtown Las Vegas, where his online shoe company is headquartered. Wuebker says he is scheduled to meet with Hsieh and his team in a few weeks to share ideas--Hsieh’s Vegas Tech Fund plans to dole out seed money to community-minded tech startups and, à la the Foundry, spur the growth of a downtown creative class.

“Rob’s created a pirate ship,” says Ben Hadley, who introduced Wuebker to Hsieh. “I wanted the guys in Vegas to know about this pirate ship in Salt Lake City. You know you’re onto something when Tony opens an attachment and says, ‘This is very good.’”

Follow the conversation on Twitter using the tag #USInnovation.

4 Strategies To Turn "Big" Into A Disadvantage

Kaihan Krippendorff — Wed, 23 May 2012 15:49:07 EST

Whether you are writing your first business plan or have been in business for years struggling against a larger competitor, you can multiply your chances of success by stacking together strategies that turn your (small) size into a sizeable advantage. In the last several weeks, I covered four such strategies. If you combine them all, you could completely change the game.

This is what Ruckus Media is doing. Founded by Rick Richter, who until recently was the president and publisher of Simon & Schuster's children’s division, Ruckus Media is seeking to leapfrog its nearest competitor--LeapFrog--and transform how children consume media and learn.

But instead of trying the old “run fast and pray” strategy that so many technology firms resort to, Ruckus has carefully constructed a strategy that could make them immune to competition...at least for a while. Here is its playbook:

1. Move early to the next battleground: Great entrepreneurs spend more time thinking about the “next battleground” than their competitors. Just as Wayne Gretzky explained his success at hockey by saying “I skate to where the puck is going,” you want to be scanning the horizon thinking every day about what is there. The Ruckus team glimpsed the next battleground when they realized that "children with iPads and iPhones often have hand-me-downs from parents,” Richter says. Ruckus recognized traditional competitors, even technology-focused ones, were not yet prepared for this new future, so they crafted a vision to create a “LeapPad without the green plastic.” For those without young children, the LeapPad is a Kindle-sized device built for kids. I bought my son one for his 6th birthday. He loaded it up with educational games and now carries it everywhere. Ruckus aims to save me having to buy the same green plastic for my 4- and 2-year-olds.

2. Lead the sheep away: Great entrepreneurs see where their competitors’ commitments restrict their ability to defend themselves. The competition has invested time and money building a proprietary learning curriculum. Their curriculum is great. The Ruckus team aims to use that greatness against them, by adopting the Common Core Curriculum, a national standard adopted by school systems nationwide. That choice could give Ruckus an advantage as it moves into the classroom. More importantly, it is a choice that the competition will resist adopting, at least for a while, because they are too invested in what they have built themselves.

3. Coordinate the uncoordinated: One way to build a wall around your innovation is to use the power of coordination and pull together the pieces faster and earlier than your competitors can. Ruckus is doing this by signing up content deals with leading children’s brands from Crayola to Transformers, using the team’s network of relationships, to build new digital learning products.

4. Create something out of nothing: Finally, Ruckus is using a pattern that I believe rests at the core of much of Apple’s success over the last decade. Instead of playing within the categories the industry defines and your competitors follow, Ruckus is seeking to create a new category (Apple didn’t create an MP3 player or a tablet computer, it created the iPod and iPad!). “It’s not an e-book or a movie or game; it’s all of those,” the team explained to me. When the company gets the rights to a new character or children’s brand, it invests a lot of creativity into building a story line composed of text, activities, and video.

The verdict is still out whether Ruckus will transform the children’s media space--but it has the DNA to do so and early results look promising. Only days after its formal launch, four of its “Ruckus Reader” apps hit the iTunes Top 10 Chart. Within two weeks it clocked one million downloads.

During a sunny Sunday afternoon at home last week, I was busy building a treehouse. I was making great progress in part because my children got bored of “helping me.” I looked across the yard and saw my daughter in front of the pool, sitting cross-legged on a couch. She screamed, “Papi, necesito tu ayuda,” which means, “Daddy, I need your help!” I walked over and saw that she was trying to get the Ruckus Reader Little Pony through a maze. I explained that she should tilt the device. With that, she was off on her own. An hour later I was hammering down the last treehouse floorboard, and she was still captivated.

Turn your competitor’s size to their disadvantage. Stack up your advantages:

1. Find the next battleground

2. Identify the sheep your competitor will not protect

3. Coordinate faster

4. Create something out of nothing

Click here for this post in video format.

[Image: Flickr user John Carleton]

5 Ways To Prep For Your Next, Better Job

Alice Korngold — Thu, 24 May 2012 22:44:56 EST

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Baby Boomers held an average of 11 jobs from the ages of 18-44--and the trend continues with their children, members of Generation Flux. The BLS also estimates that Boomers experienced an average of over five periods of unemployment during those years. In today’s economy, for all generations, one can only imagine the likelihood of more job changes and perhaps even more frequent interregna.

As I work in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, people frequently ask me how to make career transitions from the business world to the nonprofit world and vice versa. For those of us who anticipate many years of working and actually relish opportunities for learning and variety, my advice is to always be preparing for your next job. Here are my recommendations.

Consider skills that will make you valuable in most jobs and careers: communications, leadership, crisis management, and accountability, just to name a few.Consider substantive issues that are most relevant in business, government, and the nonprofit sectors--globally, nationally, and regionally. These include the environment and conservation, energy and renewable resources, economic development, health care, education, poverty, and housing, among others.

Here are ways to continuously develop yourself in these areas:

Volunteer. Consider skills-based volunteering, and nonprofit board service. Just be certain to choose issues and organizations where you are eager to participate productively.Attend conferences. While there, be ambitious in learning and meeting people. Also, consider opportunities to speak on panels or lead breakout sessions, so that you are contributing your particular expertise, while you are learning from others in areas you wish to expand. Engage in social media. Blogging for the past four years, and tweeting for three has been an extraordinary learning experience for me. Blogging creates a new awareness, in addition to involving research and interviews. Tweeting can involve you in networks with people who share a variety of your interests; you’re among people who provide each other with curated reading lists. Additionally, many people whom I’ve met via blogging and Twitter have become professional colleagues and personal friends.Read. Several particularly relevant books connecting business and the nonprofit sectors include: Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World, by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green; Impact Investing: Transforming How We Make Money While Making a Difference, by Antony Bugg-Levine and Jed Emerson, reviewed here; Sustainable Excellence: The Future of Business in a Fast-Changing World, by Aron Cramer and Zachary Karabell, reviewed here; Mighty Be Our Powers, by Leymah Gbowee, discussed here; Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know, by David Bornstein and Susan Davis, written about here; and my book, Leveraging Good Will: Strengthening Nonprofits by Engaging Businesses.Enroll in courses and educational programs.

Commit yourself to lifelong learning and you’ll be prepared for that next job, as well as the decisions you’ll need to make about which job to take. It’s all about the adventure.

[Image: Flickr user Omair Haq]

How To Identify Your Customers, Make Them Love You, And Keep Them Hooked

Martin Lindstrom — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:21:50 EST

Every company is struggling to nail down their core target group. If only they could define it, life--or at least business--would be a whole lot easier. They could then channel resources and focus energy in the right direction. But a target group consists of many disparate elements. Take, for example, McDonald's. Who would they would call their primary target group? After all, they serve 47 million customers each and every day. And what about Apple? Their 362 stores had more traffic in three months than four Disney theme parks had in an entire year. Then there’s Nike, and Facebook, and… I think you get my point. You could be forgiven for thinking the target group is simply everyone. But that's not true.Clever brands know the truth. McDonald’s primary target group are families--not teenagers, and definitely not everyone. And Apple? Well, long before the brand was embraced by the mainstream, you could only expect to find their equipment on the desks of designers, generally those who valued better font and color support. Nike catered to athletes, both professional and semi-professional, and Facebook was begun by students, for students, in the halls of Harvard.A target group is as much about focus as it is about knowing what to rule out. Brands have a tendency to try to please everyone and their dog. Senior management is blinded by the lure of potential revenue that they believe will come from appealing to the masses. This is a mistake. In reality, the more narrow the focus, the more concisely the aspirational target group is defined, the broader it becomes. It’s one of branding’s strange paradoxes. Almost every successful brand that’s gained traction, has either consciously, or perhaps coincidentally, operated with two target groups in mind. The first, the primary target group, is the aspirational group, who I refer to as "magnets." They're the ones attracting others to wherever they are. The second group I call "takers," and they're the ones being attracted. The important revenue stream comes from the takers, but with no magnets, there will be no takers. Let's define the terms more vividly. Say you drive past the newest, most happening nightclub in town. On any given evening you will see a line of people outside, all patiently waiting to be let in. You would naturally assume from this that the venue is packed. Those you see in the line are the takers. Surprisingly, if you look more closely at the venue, you’ll see that it’s not that full. There are, however, a number of groups sitting around tables, talking, drinking, tapping their toes, and swaying to the beat. These are the magnets--or at least that’s what the nightclub would have us believe.

Brands have a tendency to try to please everyone and their dog. Senior management is blinded by the lure of potential revenue that they believe will come from appealing to the masses. This is a mistake.

Talking not long ago with a high-rolling nightclub operator in New York City provided me with a keener insight into this idea. He explained that it’s a fine balance between magnets and takers that creates the right kind of buzz. Celebrities aside, clubs have other criteria by which they measure social cachet. There’s gender, height, personal networks, fashion, hairstyle, and even followers. The people on the door carefully control the particular milieu that the club aspires to. They are well schooled in the art of knowing who to admit, or not admit. These gatekeepers are offered significant bonuses to get the mix right. Too many magnets with not enough takers means too many complimentary drinks and not enough purchases. Too many takers, and the nightclub loses its allure, and the stream of guests being drawn in will have moved on to the next hot venue. Obviously the ins and outs of this are more complex. Companies of the future will not only work with magnets and takers; they’ll also have to operate with two distinct deadlines: official and unofficial. The first time I became aware of the importance of operating with two different campaign release dates was when I was working with the Morgensons family as part of a $3 million research study for my latest book Brandwashed. The experiment was inspired by the Hollywood movie The Joneses, in which a fake family was tasked with promoting products to friends and neighbors. We decided to create an identical scenario, with one important difference--this time it was for real. One of the key learnings that emerged from this experiment was the notion that a product needs to be "seeded" into the market long before the official release date. This allows magnets to spread the word and generate the hype, before the takers, well, take over. The experiment taught us that such seeding seems to create the momentum needed before the official release. We learned that seeding should often take place several months--typically nine--before the official release. Since social media has become a key ingredient in every marketing campaign, the importance of including aspirational target groups in every new brand release is likely to become the norm. The fact is that in future, no brand will be able to successfully operate with only one target group. Instead, there must be a conscious division of target groups into magnets and takers, in order to be strategically viable. This will encourage a new discipline among senior management--they will be forced to learn patience. Every executive expects (or should I say, hopes) that on the day their new brand is released, there’ll be thousands of customers waiting outside the doors, desperate to buy their product. A bit like what goes on at the Apple stores. Behind the scenes, brands will be carefully crafting a two-tier release plan many months ahead of the official release. The question is just how willing you are to bring patience into your marketing plan. And will you be able to say "No"? Because rather than jumping into bed with the market on the very first day, the longevity of your relationship with consumers might very well depend on denying them at least for a while. If you don’t believe me, skip the long line of young funky fashionistas, and head to the easy-to-access club around the corner. The drinks will certainly be cheaper, but is that really what you want?

[Image: Flickr user Micah Sittig]

Read more by Lindstrom: The Psychology Behind The Sweet Spots Of Pricing

Martin Lindstrom is a 2009 recipient of TIME Magazine's "World's 100 Most Influential People" and author of Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy (Doubleday, New York), a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best–seller. His latest book, Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy, was published in September. A frequent advisor to heads of numerous Fortune 100 companies, Lindstrom has also authored 5 best-sellers translated into 30 languages. More at martinlindstrom.com.