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NPR and frog design Host Digital Think-In to Explore Future of Public Radio

"NPR is a brand to die for," as a colleague of mine said. Enjoying the authority of a well-established public media vanguard with a broad and extremely loyal listenership, it has also managed to become an agile innovator that is embracing (and even pioneering) the new rules of the digital era of broadcasting. NPR's social media footprint is constantly widening, its API much acclaimed, and its recent iPhone app has already surpassed that of the New York Times and other news outlets in terms of popularity.

It is thus not surprising (but still absolutely commendable) that NPR is experimenting with further opening its brand and in fact holding a full-blown digital strategy session in the public limelight, as it did this Friday with the NPR Digital Think In in San Francisco. I was priviliged to be involved in the planning and organization of the event, on behalf of my employer, frog design, which co-hosted the event. We facilitated the workshop sessions, provided our studio facilities, and also helped NPR connect with key thought leaders from the Bay Area tech and design communities.

The Digital Think In brought together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations. Hosted by NPR CEO and President Vivian Schiller and Digital Media SVP and General Manager Kinsey Wilson, the Think In harnessed the collective expertise and creativity of an exceptional group of entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators. Participants included leaders at the leading edge of technology and media innovation from academia, venture capital, internet design, public media, social media, and research. Notable participants contributing to the day-long brainstorm included: Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist; Reid Hoffman, Chairman and co-Founder of LinkedIn; Roger McNamee, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners; Chris Beard, Chief Innovation Officer of Mozilla; Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist and creator of Google News; and Sue Gardner, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation, among many others.

Here's how NPR's Kinsey Wilson framed their mission:

"Historic changes in technology and the rapid growth in digital media have had a profoundly disruptive effect on journalism, calling into question the news media's ability to fulfill its time-honored function as civic watchdog. Hardly a week goes by that we don’t hear of yet another major news organization cutting staff, curtailing coverage or closing its doors. As traditional news organizations struggle to adapt, new, non-traditional outlets are beginning to take their place. As a not-for-profit with a distinct business model, National Public Radio has benefited from the disruption and seen its audience grow. Americans now spend more time with NPR than any other news source. But it's hardly immune from the technological challenges of the era. And it's clear that the rise of digital media will ultimately disrupt NPR's business model as well. NPR has responded by recruiting digital leaders to serve the top of the organization, embarking on an unprecedented staff training program and overhauling its digital media strategy. It is poised to take further steps to ensure it remains a vital source of news on every platform."

The Digital Think In explored five main topics that are significant to NPR's ecosystem and its future: social media and connection to the audience, the organization's national network of more than 800 stations, the potential of its open API, expansion of platforms, and its diversified revenue model. After an NPR overview and an opening session, participants broke out into small groups to develop concepts that NPR can incorporate into its organizational road map.

Closing out the day, NPR's Vivian Schiller suggested to call the next gathering "Open-mic Night," given the stand-up performances of the presenters. She said she was overwhelmed by the ideas that came out of the event and that some of them could be implemented soon. Kinsey Wilson assured everyone that their efforts will not end up tossed in a dusty drawer and forgotten. So be it!

The event was live-blogged on the Think In micro-site which also featured live video streams of the opening and closing sessions. In addition, attendees were tweeting the event throughout the day using the hashtag #nprthinkin (and there was a lively conversation going on between on-site and remote participants; also check out the NPR Facebook page for comments).

You can view pictures of the event on Flickr.

New design mind issue Launches with TED Salon in London

TED Curator Chris Anderson – who had 844,821…wait 844,833 followers the last time we looked – tweeted about it yesterday, and we’re thrilled that the word is now out about the new special TEDGlobal edition of our design mind magazine, “The Substance of Things Not Seen."

We officially unveiled the new issue on Monday with an intimate TED Salon ("More Substance of Things Not Seen") with 120 TEDsters and friends at the Unicorn Theater in London. Hosted by Bruno Giussani, TED’s European director, and Sam Martin, editor-in-chief of design mind, the evening featured three TED Talks.

Fabio Sergio, creative director at frog design, explored the possibilities of using data produced by the human body to educate the human mind: "How to design (for) awareness and self-reflection? How to design platforms that people can use to encourage and challenge each other to follow what they believe are virtuous behaviors?"

His main proposition goes like this: We live in a world of data. From keeping track of our household expenses to sharing our running data with the community at Nike+: What happens if we go on with this idea and gain the ability to keep track of even more areas?

Sergio's vision can be neatly summarized as: track, share, and change. He sees four intersecting opportunities: Access to our own data streams and services to accrue and store our bit crumbs forever; individual and collective aggregations to reveal hidden patterns; well-designed interactive tools of self-reflection to visualize, manipulate, and shape raw data into meaningful information; and social networks that encourage and sustain virtuous behavior by treating it as social currency.

In his prediction, it is essential that we track more data of our lives, our behavior, and the things we use. To make this data more accessible, visualization is key. Secondly, the data that we collect should be made usable for our social lives. Thirdly, data analysis and sharing it with our environment to trigger social pressure could trigger change. An example: Imagine you could keep track of your Toyota Prius CO2 emission and share that data with other drivers on the road in front of you. A display in your car would show you that the Prius next to you has ejected fewer emissions than you. Wouldn’t this be the perfect challenge? Now imagine you could see your friends’, your family’s, your neighbor’s emissions. Instead of just saving the environment as a single player, it would transfer it into a collective challenge – a playful way to save our planet and a great way to show off in front of your friends at the next dinner party! "It's all about love and passion again," Sergio said, and "empathy."

Fields Wicker-Miurin, co-founder of Leaders' Quest, presented her vision of new leadership based on field-based insights from around the world. Wicker-Miurin trains business leaders by connecting them to other leaders. This sounds rather common - however, her leaders live in the Amazon forest or are advocates of HIV education in India or collect and display artifacts related to uneasy periods in Chinese history: they are leaders that face the real challenges of our time.

Wicker-Miurin spoke forcefully about Benki, a young tribesman from deep in the Amazon, facing the threat of deforestation, which not only has an impact on climate change, but also, much more immediately, on the existence of his people. Becoming a leader very early in life, he recognized that the environment, the animals, the rivers, the air he breathes and his tribe's existence were in danger. That's when he took a step out of the Amazon and traveled 3000 km to the Earth Summit in Rio -- to tell the world outside about the world inside the forest, and connect the two worlds. He spoke, but he also learned a lot, and brought those learnings home. Almost 20 years have past and the Ashaninkas (Benki's tribe) have reforested 25% of their territory, created schools, brought satellite Internet to the village, and more. After describing other profiles from around the world, Wicker-Miurin summarized the seven characteristics of the "new leaders": they go away from what they know; build bridges and walk across them; have a sense of the great arc of time; know that they depend on others; remember that “it's not about them, but it starts with them”; and have humility.

 

Misha Glenny, underworld investigator and author of the book McMafia-Seriously Organized Crime, is interested in different kinds of leaders: key figures in the "shadow economy" of organzied crime. In conversation with TED's Bruno Giussani, Glenny discussed very openly, and with genuine humour, his research methods, the encounters with his sources, and some behind-the-scenes episodes. Among many other things, we learned that the FARC had no interest in kidnapping him, that fake names are often references to characters in gangster movies, and that human traffickers and drug dealers were especially hit hard by the financial crisis. Glenny was also interviewed for the new design mind issue ("Hiding in Plain Sight").

Andreas Raptopoulos, founder of FutureAcoustic, gave an exclusive technology demo of reactive soundscapes. And singer/songwriter Lou Rhodes concluded the program with a stunning "unplugged" live performance.

The advance copies of design mind were in high demand.

The moderators, Bruno Giussani and Sam Martin, awaiting the "Substance of Things Not Seen"...

On the other side of the pond, simultaneously, the launch was more grassroots-style. Promoted via twitter, an ad-hoc group of 50 strangers (a Twitter Flashmob, if you will) convened at the café in our back alley at noon sharp, uttered the password “Oxford,” and picked up their free copy.

There’s already a lot of buzz about the magazine on Twitter (search for “designmind” and “frogdesign”) and on blogs. BusinessWeek just re-published Beth Comstock’s (CMO and SVP of GE) article from the new issue, in full content, online. Core77 has a nice write-up featuring frog designer’s Laura Richardson’s article, and so does Nathaniel Whittemore on Change.org. TED.com has highlighted the issue on its blog.

All photos by Robert Leslie (except for the one at the bottom, which is by Jacob Zukerman). You can find more on Flickr.

London Design Festival Celebrates the Art and Business of Design

Several of my colleagues are in London this week to unveil the special TEDGlobal issue of our design mind magazine in a very special TED Salon on Monday, with the title "More Substance of Things Not Seen." The event will be co-hosted by frog design and TED, and moderated by Sam Martin, editor-in-chief of design mind, and Bruno Giussani, European director of TED. More about that soon.

It comes in handy for the frog delegation that this is also the first week of the magnanimous London Design Festival, an eclectic assembly of design-related programs, exhibitions, and parties all over town.

You can watch an introduction by Festival Director Ben Evans here.

Yesterday Jaime Hayón unveiled The Tournament, his chess board installation that will be used to play chess today for the first time by the lucky applicants who signed up to pit their wits against English Chess Federation guests and world champion players.

Possibly the world’s tallest paper tower, Paper Monument, by Shigeru Ban has been completed alongside Marc Newson’s Supercell structure.

Much of the Festival program starts this weekend, including the opening of exhibitions at the festival hub, the V&A. There is a flurry of activity around the Oxo Tower Wharf, which opens its doors to coincide with the Festival, London Fashion Week, and London Open House. Brunswick House on Wandsworth Road in Vauxhall is the setting for Super-Squat - a design invasion. RE-made (in Britain) at A-Z studios on Hardwidge Street in London Bridge is also open.

A 6 minute train ride from London Bridge is South London's creative hotspot, Deptford, which witnesses the re-launch of Committee's Gallop Complex, accommodating Committee’s design studio, a coffee bar and a one-seat cinema. Across the river at Somerset House, The Sorrell Foundation's exhibition What’s Next for Schools? is open. Just round the corner the London Transport Museum hosts The Outer Limits – Beyond Zone One poster exhibition depicting the glories of suburbia.

In the West End, Ligne Roset opens a show called Urban Nature and Armani / Cassa launch their new collection of furniture, accessories, limited editions and exclusive textiles by Rubelli in New Bond Street. Not far from there La Maison de la Région Languedoc–Roussillon host their first exhibition of contemporary regional French design entitled Sud de France Design 2009 in Cavendish Square.

In the West, Young Creative Poland showcases emerging Polish talent in the Brompton Design District whilst SCP West in Westbourne Grove launches a new range of decorative bone china by Donna Wilson. On the Kings Road Designers Guild store hosts an exhibition called The Chair.

In the East, there is even more than usual to see, including, for fans of graphic design, Made in YCN on Rivington Street in Shoreditch. Emerge open their first graduate showcase at Rich Mix, and Magma in Clerkenwell open their exhibition called Russian Doll. If you're in the area you can go on a stroll with Studio PH on a guided walk of the area entitled MetaboliCity.

Back to frog design: On Monday morning, frog president Doreen Lorenzo will be one of the panelists in the Financial Times’ "Business of Design" Talks at the V&A’s Sackler Center. The "Responses to the Recession" panel will explore how design-led companies are coping with the current economic crisis. Are tight-spending consumers now in charge or can big brands still drive buying behavior? Will the market polarize into a world of ultra-luxury products for the “haves” and super-inexpensive ones for the “have-nots”? What strategies – back to basics, diffusion lines, etc. – work best in a downturn? Doreen will be joined by Miguel Fluxà Ortí, the Vice President of Camper; Rolf Sachs, Designer; and Geoffroy de La Bourdonnaye, Chief Executive Officer of Liberty.

Remarketables 09.04

This week's collection of remarkable marketing links, curated by the frog marketing team.

A Megaphone for Generation M (“Meaning”): HP's “Declare Yourself” campaign

A History of Innovation: The Henry Ford Museum is launching a new series on the history of innovation. It says that it wants to connect all these innovation gurus with YOU to show that we all can be inspired, innovate, create, etc. However, there isn't a platform for anyone to submit their own stories or prove that the “common American citizen” can be the next creator of change…

Where Are My Leads? A new perspective on the old sales-marketing conundrum.

Big Brother.com: Learn how the Internet sees you.

Mission Impossible?: Understanding the Creative Director

The Brand is You: 25% of search results for the world's top 20 brands link to user generated content.

Tweet Yourself To Hawaii: Marriott’s smart sweepstakes campaign on Twitter.

12 Rules for Bringing 'Social' to Your Business: Go share!

Power to Prezi!

Is it a presentation tool? Or a visual storytelling tool? Visualization software? Or a zooming editor? Budapest-based Adam Somlei-Fischer, founder and lead designer of Prezi, and Peter Halacsy, founder and CTO of Prezi, were interested in soliciting feedback on their product’s category when they visited frog design’s San Francisco studio last week and demoed their tool. Having marketed mind-mapping software previously in my career, I felt sympathetic: At the time, we went through a similar exercise, and after endless discussions and focus groups we ended up with a label only a committee could come up with: “enterprise productivity software.” Yawn. One must not be concerned that the Prezi guys will get trapped by the lowest common denominator – they’re too smart, too opinionated, and too small (ten people).

Suppose, though, Prezi is a presentation tool – as the name (and Techcrunch’s praise: “the coolest online presentation tool”) may well imply – then of course it faces a mighty contender: PowerPoint is the dinosaur in the room. Microsoft's program has been around for 25 years, and by some estimates 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created every day. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any major company that completely foregoes using it, despite its disputed benefits and “Death by PowerPoint” claims that accuse the software of being an all-too-convenient prop for poor speakers. Edward Tufte, one of the most vocal PowerPoint critics, in a famously agitated essay (“The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”) even drew a causal relationship between NASA’s PowerPoint slides and the Challenger crash in 1986.

For PowerPoint haters, Prezi surely offers hope. Unlike Keynote, which is highly popular among designers because it offers higher visual fidelity and a better user experience, Prezi differs radically from PowerPoint in that it requires an alternative mental model: Information is displayed in a non-linear fashion. That’s also true for mind-mapping, but Prezi offers additional linear paths, knowing that “time is linear” when you present, as Adam Somlai-Fischer put it. Users can jump in and out of these paths and are thus given enormous flexibility in storing and presenting information.

This very flexibility, however, presents a serious adoption barrier: Many first-time users, as the two Prezi founders would readily admit, struggle with the challenge of filling a “blank canvas,” as they can become overwhelmed by the freedom (and pressure) created by a level of user empowerment they’re not used to within the strict confines of PowerPoint templates. Prezi is asking you to literally think outside the box, but there is a real danger that the brilliance of the tool can get in the way of your content. I saw several conference speakers rely on Prezi this year, and while some of them used it so masterfully that I didn’t even notice the software, some were deliriously inundated by Prezi’s rich possibilities and went gaga with dizzying “jump cuts” from topic to topic, disrupting their presentation and confusing the audience. At the end of the day, you still have a story to tell, and Prezi’s simple way of putting information anywhere you like can ironically lead to the very information overload it aims to avoid – it is just too tempting to create mega-maps and add more and more data to them. But that’s just a minor concern, and some training and (self-imposed content discipline) will make you easily forget about PowerPoint.

Prezi has a lot going for it. Backed by TED and solid VC-funding, with a soon-to-open new office in San Francisco, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey as advisor, and a ton of media buzz, the company is poised to aggressively grow adoption in the mainstream corporate world. Power to Prezi!

http://www.prezi.com

Learn Prezi in five minutes

Vote for the INDEX: 2009 People's Choice Award

To help expand the global conversation about design to improve life, INDEX:, a global non-profit network organization based in Copenhagen, is partnering with Facebook to promote the online voting for the INDEX: 2009 People's Choice Award and enable an online discussion during the live stream of the awards show on 28 August.

Worldwide voting began online on 20 August through www.designtoimprovelife.dk, and on-site in the Danish capital on 21 August. During the People's Choice competition, everyone can vote for their own personal INDEX: favorite to win the People’s Choice Award. On 28 August at 18:00 GMT, INDEX: will be using Facebook technologies to let visitors watch the awards show on a live stream from the Danish National Broadcasting Center. Remote viewers will also be able to chat with their friends on Facebook while watching the award ceremony.

The winner of the People's Choice Award will be announced at the INDEX: Award Ceremony on 28 August, along with the juried winners of the INDEX:Award 2009. The winner of the People's Choice Award 2009 will receive "The Egg," a chair designed by famous Danish designer Arne Jacobsen in 1958 for the Radisson SAS hotel in Copenhagen. All 69 design finalists will be on public view at the INDEX: Award Exhibition, as well as on the INDEX: website.

Among the INDEX: finalists and candidates for the People’s Choice Award is frog design’s Project Masiluleke – a HIV Self-Test Kit that combines existing, low-cost diagnostic technologies with mobile support services.

To make your vote, visit: www.designtoimprovelife.dk

A Movement for Meaning-Driven Business?

frog design's promised series on “Meaning-Driven Business” is taking shape. After introducing the concept of “Chief Meaning Officer” in the “Power” issue of design mind, we are going to formally launch this new forum in our upcoming special TEDGlobal issue (to be released on September 21) as well as on a special micro-site to be launched in a couple of weeks.

For the first round of essays, we are delighted to have received contributions from three industry and thought leaders: Beth Comstock, chief marketing officer of GE and one of the world's most influential Fortune 50 marketing executives, will take the economic crisis as an opportunity to make the case for marketing-driven innovation. Werner Bauer, Nestle's chief technology officer and head of innovation, will describe his company’s concept of “Shared Value” and how it enables a more socially responsible business. And Dev Patnaik, founder and chief executive of innovation consultancy Jump Associates and author of the book Wired to Care, will illustrate how “high-empathy organizations” of all kinds prosper when they tap into a power each of us already has: the ability to reach outside of ourselves and connect with other people. Stay tuned!

The conversation is continuing in other outlets, too, and some pundits want “meaning” to not only be an abstract concept, but a movement. Economist Umair Haque is one of them. His "Generation M (as in “meaning”) Manifesto" stirred some controversial reactions (just read the comments on his blog) – from unconditional endorsement to accusations of arrogance and naiveté. It is one out of many manifestos that have recently been published on the new “new economy” – this, too, is a sign of the times. Manifestos indicate an increased need for ideological alternatives – and meaning.

Inspired by Haque’s Manifesto, Landor’s Scott Osman writes that “Smarter brands are already aligning themselves with better activities, making better actions a brand attribute. Perhaps this is an honest shift by management, perhaps it is recognition that the game has already changed and they need to start turning their ships around before they find themselves going in the wrong direction. IBM, GE, Coke, Pepsi, and Starbucks (to name a few) have already begun their commitment. Many others will surely follow. It is certain that the rules between the customer and the company are going to be rewritten and this time—caveat venditor.”

For all those companies wanting to follow, Sohrab Vossoughi, the founder and president of design consultancy Ziba, has developed a “Survival Guide for the Age of Meaning” that is worth reading. He observes, “Gone are the days when the master brand was king and companies were customer-focused only to the extent that customers generated sales. More than ever before, today’s savvy, choice-fatigued and cash-strapped consumers crave meaningful connections with brands that allow them to be more authentically themselves.” To respond to this trend, he recommends companies apply four key principles: 1. Create meaning; 2. Less is more, 3. Take a platform-based approach, and 4. Consistency is key.

Roberto Verganti takes this one step further and in his new book provides a comprehensive framework for Design-Driven Innovation. He believes that there is a "Third Way of Innovation," beyond radical innovation pushed by new technologies and incremental innovation pulled by market forces. This Third Way is, he asserts, is driven by meaning, or to be more precise, by those cultural “interpreters” who have the ability to “make sense of things” and give existing things new meaning – and thus create new markets. They don’t have to be designers, but it turns out they often are – at least by a broader definition. How can companies apply this concept? By investigating the evolution of culture, society, and technologies, says Verganti, and by putting forward visions about possible new product meanings that people have not solicited but that they were eventually just waiting for.

Reading all these recent blog posts, articles and books, it appears that the term “meaning” – obviously highly elusive anyway – is consistently used in two different meanings: one is focusing on sensemaking, the social and emotional relevance of products and services (that’s the designer’s perspective represented by Verganti, Vossoughi, and others), the other one is more concerned about meaningful actions, the social impact of brands and their contract with society at large (Haque). It is important to establish a clear nomenclature and distinguish these two dimensions of “meaning” in the current debate. Neither dimension is particularly new: The idea of design-driven innovation has been around for a while, and so has the idea of corporate social responsibility. What’s new and interesting, however, is that these two dimensions increasingly converge (see David Armano’s writing). You can see more “Design for Impact”-type initiatives emerge and more design-driven innovation that takes social responsibility very seriously. The social media-social marketing-social impact cascade is gaining traction, and product-innovation concepts striving for customer-focused meaning are moving to the macro-economic level, perhaps providing a template for, that’s right, a new meaning of business.

To be continued...

The New Digital Divide

After participating in frog's first Digital Brand Think Tank in Munich a couple of weeks ago (a lively discussion with 20 marketing executives from Audi, BMW, Google, Continental, and other top-tier brands), I must admit that I’m a bit tired of having to evangelize (or even justify) the value of brands using social media. It is astonishing to me that companies still ask for evidence when the tweet is on the wall. The event showed that there is a new Digital Divide that cuts straight through the ranks of the marketing industry – some executives get the Social Web, some don’t. No one has figured it out yet. Most would admit that they need to catch up and keep learning.

Marc Mielau, head of digital media at the BMW Group, certainly belongs to the former cohort, and at the event in Munich he shared some interesting insights into his company’s much acclaimed online strategy. BMW has long been on the leading edge of marketing innovation and has embraced social media formats early on (remember the hugely successful branded entertainment “The Hire” film series, featuring renowned directors like Wong-Kar Wai?). To me, more than the actual programs, the most remarkable thing about BMW is how the company has managed to establish a culture of marketing innovation. It is much easier to pull off a sporadic viral hit than to build and sustain a proactive and trendsetting digital marketing engine.

Management guru Peter Drucker once wrote, “The business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results: All the rest are ‘costs.’” BMW took this axiom literally and created a “Marketing Innovation” group. Mielau described how the Bavarian carmaker concluded that an innovative brand needed truly innovative marketing and consequently put its money where its mouth is. With the Marketing Innovation department, it installed a function that was freed of any P&L pressure, given a considerable budget, and the mandate and support to experiment with various types of emerging marketing technologies and techniques – occasional failures included. Serving as a sort of marketing R&D, sounding board, incubator, and innovation catalyst, the Marketing Innovation group explores new user behavior trends on the web and on mobile devices, while at the same time rapidly prototyping tools and campaigns to address them. While not every program has been an immediate or massive success – BMW’s engagement in Second Life, for example, was terminated, albeit in an elegant way – all activities undertaken by the group helped BMW learn by doing and enabled it to be the first mover when new formats eventually became mainstream. This has led to the high ‘social media readiness’ needed to instigate, enhance, or rebut conversations occurring in the echo chamber of BMW’s expansive and influential social graph. The key is that BMW’s short-term social media agility is based on a strong commitment to a long-term vision for its brand.

This very vision would help Vodafone these days, whose “Generation Upload” campaign in Germany has been the subject of much ridicule and scorn from the very Digital Natives it so eagerly (and maybe a little too eagerly) aimed to embrace. The company had obviously studied the social web playbook and thought it was doing all the right things: It created cross-platform social media channels for live-feedback to the campaign’s launch press conference; it put user-generated content at the center of the campaign; and it featured a prominent German blogger as the campaign’s ‘hero.’ However, it made one big mistake: It launched the campaign without backing it up with an actual product offer for the targeted “Generation Upload.” The “medium is the message” approach was simply not enough in this case. Sure, the Gen Y’ers love to converse – but they also appreciate products and rates that meet their needs. Besides that, “Generation Upload” is an unfortunate term that describes user behavior as purely mechanistic when in fact it is not so much characterized by the function of uploading but the desire to share.

And yet: “If you can’t get fired for your marketing campaign, it is not innovative,” marketing author Seth Godin once pointedly said. I’m not sure if any heads were rolling at Vodafone, hopefully not. The company deserves credit for taking a risk and jumping right into the social web without a safety net. Ultimately, I believe, this strategy will be rewarded by the marketplace. Already, the campaign – notwithstanding all the negative comments – created a lot of buzz. And as they say, there is only one thing worse than negative PR – and that is not being talked about at all. This truism is magnified on the social web. With a long-term commitment and flawless follow-through similar to BMW’s, Vodafone might indeed have made a first step towards transforming its brand.

Marketers, beware! The New Digital Divide is very real – but you may not always know exactly which side you are on.

[Image: Neil McLeod - "Chasm"]

Frog Design, the Book: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business

Frog Design founder and former CEO Hartmut Esslinger has written his first book, and it is available in stores now: A Fine Line – How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business. Part autobiography, part how-to innovation guide, part outlook to the future of design, A Fine Line is "a must-read for designers and business people alike" (Satjiv Chahil, senior vice president, Hewlett-Packard).

A Fine Line offers a step-by-step overview of the innovation process — from targeting goals to shepherding new products and services to the marketplace — in order to reveal how to arrive at an authentic human design that connects strongly with consumers. With a unique perspective, rich stories, and a global mindset, Esslinger explores business solutions that are environmentally sustainable and contribute to an enduring global economy.

Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital, in his foreword, said it all: "Hartmut's book contains the ruminations of a man who has devoted his life to the challenge of marrying the aesthetic with the functional while standing firm against the deadening forces of mediocrity. His work shows that taste can triumph, design and production can be soul-mates, and the eye of an individual can shape a product and a company. The idea that finely designed products can change the fate of companies while also becoming our indispensable companions is a message that millions of us owe to Hartmut."

You can find the table of contents, sample chapters, testimonials, and videos on http://www.afinelinebook.com

And here are some excerpts from a video interview with Esslinger: