iPlot

The Social Phone / Conversational Devices

The future of business is social. Stuart Henshall on "The Mobile Social World of Presence:"

"I’ve been thinking recently about my connectivity and mobility and one of the reasons I keep coming back to it is the dissonance I have when looking at the two mobiles I use most often. There’s now been many comparisons made between the Nokia N95 and the iPhone. Both best in class so to speak. However, I’ve struggled to completely understand why the iPhone beats the N95 (for me and I’m also really betting for many others). The N95 ostensible has it all. Better camera, streaming bluetooth, video, decent headphone jack, better speakers and general sound etc. It has messaging and mail etc. I could go on and the comparisons which have been made before.

However, the real reason in my mind that the iPhone wins is it’s ability to “stay in social touch”. The email, the SMS, the browsing experience has enabled much of the behavior that social networkers have mastered already on the laptop or desktop. It’s not about the technology, it is about how the device helps you socialize.

(...) Devices that keep us more connected and “loosely connected” without pressuring us to wear a heads up display are going to win over those that just add a better camera. In the end it is about the conversations, the chatter, and the ability to engage wherever you are. I even find the iPhone works well as sort of a second screen… for glances at email updates, entering Twitter updates etc. In that way it is supplementing my desktop."

SMS on the Rise in the US…But Mobile IM is Expected to Be the Next Killer App

A recent Garner study estimates 189 billion mobile messages will be sent by US mobile phone subscribers in 2007 and forecasts 301 billion in 2008, both of which is still only a small fraction of the 2.3 trillion messages to be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (a 19.6 percent increase from the 2007 total of 1.9 trillion messages). Asia is the biggest mobile messaging market worldwide. China is well ahead in the lead with approximately 560 billion SMS, followed by the Philippines’ 430 billion, and Japan’s 190 billion.

The vast majority of the 189 billion messages in the US are expected to be SMS text messages, with an average use of about two SMS per US subscriber per day. That is similar to the level of SMS activity in the UK in 2005 and still only at the global average of 2.1 SMS per day. The average number in the UK today is six SMS per day, Singapore is at 12, and the Philippines even at 15.

While the US is still lagging behind Asia and Europe, its adoption of SMS is obviously accelerating. Gartner predicts that this will further propel mobile payment solutions as SMS will continue to be the dominant channel for mobile payments. The analyst house believes that the number of consumers making payments using their mobile phones is set to soar from 32.9 million in 2008 to 103.9 million in 2011.

Despite the continued growth of SMS usage, however, Gartner expects growth rates to slow as direct mobile connections are becoming increasingly cannibalized by mobile IM communities and social network portals. As I wrote before, there is huge potential for an elegant, seamless, cross-platform, and cross-media IM solution that enables the ideal of the “never-ending conversation.” It looks like Apple might again be the first mover here. The company is apparently developing a chat application for the iPhone, as revealed recently through a patent that describes "A portable electronic device with a touch screen display, comprising [a] means for displaying a set of messages exchanged between a user of the device and another person in a chronological order." That’s basically the description of an UI for an iPhone IM application.

NBC analyst Jim Cramer thinks that an iPhone IM application is going to be to instant messaging what the iPod was to the Walkman. And Ars Technica is not alone when it suspects that most of the iPhone users will probably value “a way to use instant messaging without using up their SMS message quota.” While the iPhone currently relies on SMS, Apple could add AIM, Jabber, or Twitter to the interface and thus become the de facto universal conversation enabler. However, a native IM application (and adding third-party chat applications) could create conflicts with the iPhone operators who might be concerned about losing potential SMS revenue if users sidestep SMS by using IM programs.

We will soon find out. The momentum is building up towards a possible unveiling of the next-generation iPhone at Apple’s Worldwide Developer's Conference on June 9th.

...Just Making Something Look Nicer?

Just a mirage? Rick Poynor, in a beautifully honest article for ID Magazine ("Down with Innovation"), takes the "design thinkers," the "innovators through design," or the "design-ovators," as he calls them, head on:

"Design thinkers set great store by business targets, by driving the enterprise forward, because it is exactly what their clients want to hear and it gets them work. Seen from outside the cozy bond of service provider and client, this is a severely limited way of viewing design, and the total domination of current design discussion by this kind of commercial rhetoric is a worrying trend."

And furthermore:

"It is hardly surprising that designers try to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the accusation that they are hung up on making things look pretty. Belittling language of this kind suggests that the visual is inherently trivial, easy to do, and beneath consideration, that form is not a powerful medium of expression and carries no meaning for the viewer. Design thinkers like to talk as though we have somehow passed beyond the stage where the way things look needs to be a primary concern, and designers, browbeaten and demoralized, half seem to believe them. They have been too ready to accept the caricature of themselves as airheaded stylists who care about insignificant niceties of no concern to anyone else."

"Yet the rhetorical reduction of design to frivolous prettification reveals a willful blindness to the power of expressive form-making, if not a deep, philistine ignorance of the history of design and visual culture. The scale of the oversight is so colossal, and frankly baffling, one hardly knows where to start. Are the great cathedrals of Europe—Rheims, Lincoln, Chartres—merely pretty? Are the gardens of Kyoto? Is Alvar Alto’s Paimio armchair? Was Alexey Brodovitch’s Portfolio magazine? How about Leica cameras? The patterns on Moorish ceramic tiles? Or the PowerBook and the iPod? There is surely no need to go on."

In the same article, Michael Bierut of Pentagram supports him: "The business use—the specific goal that motivated the client or sponsor to initially fund the work—often fades away, sometimes quickly," he says. "In some ways, you might argue that aesthetic value—for an enduring design, at least—is the only lasting value, since over time functional needs can change and business moves on to the next goal." Bierut goes so far as to modestly propose that "just making something look nicer" or "replacing something ugly with something not so ugly" is an admirable goal for designers.

That's quite a statement in a climate where proving the business value of design is the profession's Holy Grail (and complex), and "design thinkers" keep demanding designers should become CEOs. Can they? Yes, perhaps, but only if they can get over themselves. Leadership in business is about empowering others. Designers and particularly "design thinkers," however, are still busy yielding power for themselves.

At this point, it may be more aspirational to be humble. Rather than touting design as the ultimate problem solver in all aspects of social, professional, and political life, the (relative) power of design may lie in balancing the possibilities of convergence (media; devices; platforms; disciplines; processes) with the unleashed forces of divergence in a web 2.0 world -- design as the facilitator between software and hardware; mobile, web, and desktop; analysis and creativity; virtual and real; professional and consumer; individual and crowd; business and art; function and beauty.

Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of frog design, teaches design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. The mission statement he has crafted for his students may provide some much needed clarity and guidance in this debate for practitioners:

"The holistic challenge for Design is to create physical and virtual objects which are useful art, and inspire spiritual values by as few atoms and bits as possible. Design is our modern-day continuation of 'technical' functionality converted into human-historic and metaphysical symbolism. When designers create a new and better object, a mechanism, a software application or a more inspiring, human-centric experience, this will become a 'branding symbol' in itself by meaningful innovation, good quality and ethical behaviors. People will recognize the resulting visual symbols as a cultural expression of humanized technology and subconsciously connect it with historically learned visual shapes and patterns that connect. Design cannot be just a fashionable statement, but must advance our industrial culture by providing sustainable innovation, cultural identity and consistency so it can create emotional and social belonging. Designers have a humanistic responsibility that connects and coordinates human needs and dreams with new opportunities and inspirations in science, technology and business in order to make the results and their usage culturally relevant, economically productive, politically beneficial and ecologically sustainable.

The accelerated globalization is posing both huge challenges and offering new opportunities which require designers that are both talented and competent to influence and define new trends in regards to mastering outsourcing to 'lower cost' economies and reversing the current excesses of overproducing generic and hard-to-use products. Designers also need to invent new concepts for “homesourcing” by converting local and tribal cultures into beneficial concepts.

To succeed as competent and respected 'executive partners' in the rational world of business, designers must become creative entrepreneurs or creative executives themselves. However, ultimately, design must rise above all commercial-functional benchmarks and aspire to near-eternal cultural relevance and spirituality."

Disconnected Connected: Laptops Banned from Meetings

Via PSFK

Several companies in Silicon Valley are banning laptops, Blackberries, iPhones, and other gadgets from meetings. The initiative has been spurred by complaints that people connect more with their devices than each other. Gadget-less "old fashioned" meetings are reported to go faster and to have increased communication between attendees.

Apple and the Rest of Us

Is Apple's PR wearing thin?

Sure, there was the MacBook Air and the buzz around "thinnovation." But wasn't that -- pun intended -- too "thin" for a big media splash, especially compared to past years? Now that MacWorld is over, pundits are reviewing Apple's PR efforts, and when the expectations are so high (and a company is so good at it), it is not too surprising that some are disappointed with what they've seen this year. Frank Shaw, a PR professional at Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft's lead PR agency, is one of them, and you have to give him credit for being so vocal in public despite his affiliation with the Apple rival (it would be easy to dismiss his criticism as just a Microsoft cabal). Shaw is wondering whether Apple's shock and awe, event-focused product launch PR philosophy has lost its relevance in a time of always-on communications:

"The concept of holding news, building expectations and then unveiling a massive surprise has been super effective, and no more so than last year with the iPhone. It was a tour de force from a communications standpoint. This recent Macworld? Not so much."

He refers to the Feiler Faster Thesis, which states that people's ability to retain and process information has accelerated, resulting in significantly faster news cycles:

"So in this world, is a twice a year news bang sufficient? The answer could be yes -- but there is little room for events like today in that world. Apple stepped to the plate today, IMHO, and hit....a single. The company won't be up to bat again for a while....if you are only up a few times a year, you better hit some home runs."

He admits that he's a proponent of "small ball" rather than "home run ball," and it's hard to judge whether that makes him old-school or PR avant-garde:

"I've never been a big fan of 'giving up control of the message' or 'information wants to be free' or 'user generated content will rule the world' or 'it's all about the conversation.' But I'm a huge believer in the value of ongoing communication, to the right audiences, about the topics they care most about, in a regular, sustained way."

iPhone guilt

But Apple products raise more than just PR questions. On the O’Reilly blog, Dale Dougherty takes Apple's 1984 slogan "The computer for the rest of us" as a starting point to meditate on the "rest of the rest of us," those excluded from our high-tech frenzy and without the means to participate in the Apple universe of godly gadgets. He does so because he feels "iPhone guilt":

"Taking the iPhone out of my pocket in a public place makes me uncomfortable. Some people ask nicely about it: 'How do you like it?' But I'm keenly aware that others don't have what I have and they notice it. The iPhone is a great phone but I'm conscious that it's helping to define 'the rest of us versus them.'"

Dougherty's moral treatise poses some uncomfortable questions:

"Is the high-tech world indifferent to the problems of the poor? Do we have any competence that matters in helping them find a better life? Or are we just making 'the happy few' that much happier? What is a social network if the people facing the toughest problems are not part of it? They don't need more signs that tell them that they are on their own. The have-nots don't do networking. It doesn't get them anywhere."

"Whether it's the latest from Web 2.0 or Apple Computer, do we need to ask what it means for those who aren't able to take part? Does it help them catch up or put them further behind? That calculation is part of the social cost of any new technology. We might think of it like we're starting to think about our oversized carbon footprint and its impact on the physical world. Is there any way to offset the negative social impact of the technology that we're so busily developing?"

"It's a challenge for the 'best of us' to address."

In Between Years: Innovation Trends and Snippets

Soccer and innovation: I blogged about "what Ronaldinho and FC Barcelona can teach you about innovation" before "el clásico" on Sunday, and, well, there was a certain risk that my bold claim would backfire. Madrid slammed Barca in its own backyard 1-0, and while I'm flattered that my favorite Fox soccer analyst Bobby McMahon is linking to my post, his comment still stings a little....

Monarchy 2.0: Queen Elizabeth has launched a new channel on YouTube -- the Royal Channel -- which will broadcast her traditional Christmas address, at 3 p.m. (7 a.m. PST, 10 a.m. EST) on Tuesday. According to a YouTube spokesperson (via the New York Times), the channel has been a huge success so far, drawing hundreds of thousands of viewers. The most popular clip is the 1957 broadcast of the Queen's Christmas address, with more than 400,000 viewers.

Trends of the trends: That time of the year again. Media out-forecast each other with predictions of trends for 2008. Here's a compilation: consumer trends, advertising and marketing trends, fashion trends, IT trends, security trends, marketing trends for small and medium-sized businesses, media trends, air travel trends, and there are much more....

Mobile: Speaking of trends, David Armano argues that 2007 was the year of social media and 2008 will be the year of mobile media. I've heard that one before, you may think, but perhaps he's right, and fueled by the "iPhone effect" this time companies will live up to the hype. There are indeed signs of real break-through innovation on the horizon: "Silicon Valley's first phone company," Ribbit, is all the talk right now in Silicon Valley; "viral" WiFi models like that of Fon will continue to thrive; more local businesses and chains will offer free Wi-Fi; and Google's Android platform will drive tons of new business for user interface designers and developers. And then there is the new Skypephone with its iSkoot software. And the Google phone...?

Conversation analytics: New metrics for new social media are in high demand. How, for example, do you track and analyze conversations on Twitter? Tweeterboard is an attempt to provide "conversation analytics," and one of the parameters it uses to gauge someone's influence on Twitter is the level of "giving and receiving love..."

Happy holidays!

Slow Innovation- Long Wow?

(Credit: Yodel Anecdotal)

The Putting People First blog by Experientia has pointed me towards the excellent essay "The Long Wow" by Adaptive Path's Brandon Schauer. Schauer outlines a vision of creating lasting customer loyalty and brand value that runs counter to the fixation on quick wins and instant gratification, which many companies, under the pressure of shorter product life-cycles and CMO tenures, seem to pursue these days. He defines "The Long Wow" as "a means to achieving long-term customer loyalty through systematically impressing your customers again and again."

This goes far beyond adding new features for features' sake, implementing loyalty programs such as membership awards, or simply measuring loyalty in economic terms: "Like Christmas, customer loyalty can't be bought or bottled. It's not something you can capture in an ID card. Loyalty is a sense that grows within people based on the series of notable interactions they have with products, services, and companies." As he describes them, "Notably great experiences are punctuated by a moment of 'wow,' when the product or service delights, anticipates the needs of, or pleasantly surprises a customer. For Schauer, "OXO's Good Grips Angled Measuring Cup triggers such a moment of wow. A set of angled markings on the OXO cup lets you quickly measure liquids for recipes without having to stop cooking and bend over. Suddenly a little part of your life is easier, because OXO thought carefully about the way you cook. This delightful surprise resonates because it feels tailored to your needs."

It is interesting to assume a causal relationship between this kind of lasting value and the time it takes to create it. What if the immense pressure to innovate quickly or to rush to market comes at the expense of quality and sustainability? What if the "Long Wow" presupposes a long time-to-market or, in other words, "slow innovation?" Innovation and creativity expert Derek Cheshire has answers to these questions and -- obviously inspired by the Slow Food movement -- suggests a slow approach to innovation. In a recent manifesto for Change This, he heralds the goal of creating "an innovative company whose structure and culture are conducive to long-term growth and sustainability." His argument is convincing: "In the world of slow, there will be less waste as there's time to be more resourceful and to use the materials already available."

Essentially, this is a question of how companies manage their time. Both the concepts of "Long Wow" and "Slow Innovation" ask for more time: more time to listen to customers, more time to build a meaningful relationship with them, and more time for the innovator to develop products and services that are built to last. But what about the customers? Will they have the time to wait for this kind of high-quality, sustainable innovation?

Change as a Feature: Designing for Consumers in a State of Permanent Crisis

Can you call a concept a cultural phenomenon if different people conceive of it at the same time? Within the past few months, three publications have come to similar conclusions. The digital media agency Avenue A | Razorfish released a study called "Fast Forward: Designing for Constant Change." It consists of thirteen essays as well as research exploring how consumers' digital media habits are changing, and how this affects the design of user experiences and brands. The key take-away is: Today's online users are forced to adjust to constant change in increasingly volatile rich media environments, and they are increasingly good at it.

Around the same time, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced an exhibit called "Design and the Elastic Mind," which will open in February, 2008. While the Avenue A | Razorfish study provides actionable advice for marketers, the MOMA exhibit examines the philosophical implications for designers:

"In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change."

And lastly, in a similar vein, Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management and father of the concept of "integrative thinking," elaborates on "The Opposable Mind" in a book published earlier this year. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that one sign of a "first-rate intelligence" is the ability "to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Accordingly, Martin argues, a sure sign of first-rate business intelligence is the ability to recognize two diametrically opposing ideas and meld them into a new model that is superior to either. Martin says that designers often engage in abductive reasoning: they imagine what might be and act on that insight -- even though they can't prove it.

The "adaptive," the "elastic mind," or the "opposable mind" -- business or consumer, and whatever the name, the concept is the same: the rise of new digital technologies has turned us into skilled micro-managers of constant change, in all aspects of our lives. Uncertainty has become our routine as we live in a state of permanent crisis, in a multi-task, muti-tab, multi-media, multi-window world where each new online event requires a new and different reaction. Sometimes we flee but mostly we adapt, bridge, and synthesize. We have become adept at adapting. We switch back and forth from from macro to micro, zoom in and zoom out, face-to-face and space-to-space, at the same time but at different paces, shifting time and shifting places. We possess what drummers show when they perform two distinct rhythms in their hands and feet -- excellent coordination. Seamless is our modus operandi.

As micro-managers of constant change, we stretch our minds' boundaries and sometimes over-reach; we combine the long and the short form, the philosophical and the mundane, the narrative and the 140-word Tweet. We understand that the "map is outgrowing the territory," as Bruce Sterling puts it. We can think meta while in beta, and we understand that every idea immediately transcends itself into something bigger, something universal that it is meta-tagged before it is even final.

What does all that mean for product designers, not only in the digital realm? Acknowledge that consumers are smarter than you. Hence, design for input, and do not just satisfy the user preferences. Understand change as a feature. Design a highly modifiable and personalizable experience that is adaptive to change, but build in enough flexibility for the users to adapt the experience itself to changing conditions. Make your products adapt, bridge, and synthesize, as your users do. Give them features that literally scale. Equip them with "peripheral vision" -- the ability to see things outside of the usual spectrum, not front and center but right, left, and in the back. And if all that isn't enough: Allow the user to customize, mash up, and ultimately re-design the product or service beyond its original purpose.

Examples? Netscape, Flash, JavaScript, TCP/IP, IM, and a host of other products in the digital realm have all moved far beyond what they started out as. The iPod enabled podcasts, Google Earth triggered hundreds of mash-ups, Google's Open Social and Open Mobile inititiaves will further spur third-party innovation resulting in myriad new applications that will change the orignal services. And then there is of course Facebook, which from a social network evolved into an operating sytem, a content distribution platform, a whole new micro-economy -- or all of that together. The product is the system and the system is change.

The Economist's (Not So Disruptive) Take on Innovation

The Economist has a special report on innovation in this week's issue, and it's good to see the magazine recognizing "open innovation" as the perhaps most important current trend in this space:

"Rapid and disruptive change is now happening across new and old businesses. Innovation (…) is becoming both more accessible and more global. This is good news because its democratization releases the untapped ingenuity of people everywhere and that could help solve some of the world's weightiest problems."

The report is an expansive tour de force through the entire innovation landscape, covering a lot of ground (open innovation, mass- or user-driven innovation, product vs. process innovation, creativity vs. operational excellence, innovation policy, innovation in Asia, innovation in developing countries, Six Sigma, innovation measurement, the "Innovators Dilemma," the importance of "Fast Failing," etc.) and quoting the usual suspects (GE, P&G, Eric Von Hippel, Toyota, Doblin, Nokia, etc.).

For my taste, the articles would have benefited from the very "open innovation" spirit they describe, for example by adding some guest authors from different disciplines to the mix. Ironically, the debate about innovation appears to sometimes suffer from the same "Not Invented Here" syndrome that hampers innovation itself and prevents disruptive ideas from getting to market.

The Economist concludes with a seemingly trivial recommendation for putting "the debate over creativity versus execution" to rest: "For a start: firms need to do both. But that does not mean they have to do it all themselves. On the contrary, the double act is best managed with a loose and open approach during the wild and woolly idea-generation phase, and a tighter, more concentrated one to turn ideas into products or services." John Kao, author of "Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity," likens the process to playing jazz: "There is no fixed score in any given improvisation, but that does not mean there are no underlying principles either."

So, open, yes, but also rigorous and tightly managed. But is that really news? And what about Apple, arguably the most innovative company in the world and yet the most un-open you can imagine?

At the end, innovation remains a fuzzy concept, or as one of the quoted senior executives puts it in the famous words of Potter Stewart: "Like pornography, I know it when I see it." And in contrast to the Economist's claim, I don't think there is much evidence that the innovation process will be "steadily becoming a practical science to be measured, taught, and managed" any time soon.

Micro-Productivity: Man vs. Machine, Divergence vs. Convergence in the Interaction Economy

Credit: Urban Junkie

According to a McKinsey & Company study of US economic activity, "Raising the productivity of employees whose jobs can’t be automated is the next big performance challenge." The study argues that "as more companies come to specialize in core activities and outsource the rest, they have greater need for workers who can interact with co-workers, partners, and vendors," supported by highly personalized organizing and communication tools. 40 percent of labor activity, says McKinsey, comes not from making things or from traditional transactions but from what the consultancy calls the "Interaction Economy," which it defines as the "searching, coordinating, and monitoring required to exchange good or services."

This interaction economy emphasizes collaboration, social intelligence, tacit knowledge, and ambiguity, as much as it values workers' ability to make individual decisions quickly and organize tasks and time efficiently – in a nutshell: it puts a much stronger focus on the non-formalized, individual productivity or "micro-productivity" of employees. McKinsey says that this area of productivity involves the highest-priced labor of the most valued knowledge workers and yet remains the hardest to measure and manage.

It is also the least commoditized part of the economy, for a good reason: it would be counter-productive to decrease the level of entrepreneurial freedom at the micro-level by trying to implement streamlined de rigueur organizing tools. More companies are starting to realize that it might be a better alternative to provide a vast array of tools and leave it up to the workers to tailor them creatively to their specific needs - the human being and not the application as the meta-organizer. "You’re not trying to automate the task a human does; you’re trying to complement what the human is doing,” says James M. Manyika, a senior partner at McKinsey, who co-authored the study, in a recent New York Times article about personal organizing tools and company mash-ups. Micro-productivity applications such as Scrybe or 37 Signals may indeed lead to more productivity gains than big companywide applications such as enterprise resource planning or arcane knowledge management portals, which because of their rigidity too often limit innovation and creativity. And BusinessWeek reports that E*Trade, Siemens, JDS Uniphase, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Coldwell Banker Commercial are all using enterprise mashups in some capacity. Just as personal computers released the gridlock of corporate information to employees, personal organizers and mash-ups are empowering the individual worker to effectively engage in the “soft” yet critical tasks of collaboration, organizing, communications, and interaction – and let them choose themselves how to best accomplish that.

This is an interesting premise as this new "tacit technology" combines seemingly antagonistic convergent and divergent elements (as so many innovations do these days). The demand for a meta-organizer which combines myriad schedules and calendar applications is contrasted by the demand for personalized and individualistic organizing options that are divergent because they consider the differences in the user's preferences.” David Weinberger, author of the book "Everything is Miscellaneous," argues: "What we need is the ability to associate the people and the times and the places of our lives with the broad messy context of our lives." He adds that these new productivity tools are "an early but important step toward giving individuals at companies a better way to manage their increasingly complicated existence."

The recognition of micro-productivity is part of a broader trend – the renaissance of a human-centered economy that introduces new organizational and business models to re-cast the old Man vs. Machine story. Consumers want it real and human - post-industrial, excellent, unique, provocative, sentimental, opinionated, boutique, artisan, (eco-) epicurean, handcrafted, hand-wrought, warm, attentive, devoted. And companies are getting it. From user-centered design (Apple, Cisco, HP, etc.), user-generated content (Blogs, Wikis, Slideshare, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) to human-powered search (ChaCha, Mahalo), crowdsourcing, GeekSquad (call 1-800-GEEK-SQUAD - of all places, a technology company - and hear how the use of a real human voice and humorous options helps render the company real), to the new social and green responsibilities of the "high-purpose company," the rise of a more powerful human resources function, and a new quest for "authenticity" – the human is, once again, back at the center of attention and the economic value chain.