Introducing Superventions

Over the past several years, I’ve been engaged with the startup community on a bunch of levels – mentor, interim C suite, sounding board, product/experience/design consultant. At the same time I’ve been honing and documenting the Superhuman toolkit, which contains frameworks for addressing a range of issues that most (if not all) businesses face at some point. And since I …

Inadvertent dinosaurs [post 49/100]

[NB: The blogging hiaitus is still on – due to a few personal matters, I’ve needed to reduce my areas of focus. I plan to pick it up after the summer holidays and finish these 100 posts I so recklessly allowed myself to get muscled into all those months ago. In the meantime, this post demanded to be written, so …

Little mysteries [post 47/100]

This morning I updated my iPhone to the latest version of iOS. About an hour later, I left for the airport. My phone was in my jacket pocket, as usual. My headphones were in and I was listening to music on Spotify, as usual. Only this time everything got a bit weird. First, the music started pausing, unpausing, jumping a …

The baby and the bathwater [post 46/100]

Another reader-suggested topic today… Here’s the question as it came in: “how is the art of ad making getting disrupted by the ‘skip this ad’ on YouTube – i.e. what message can you get across in 5 seconds to make people watch 30s?” I know I come down on advertising rather often and rather hard. But while it’s true that …

Conversing with ghosts [post 45/100]

Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned sometimes. A friend who’s got teenage daughters tells me that these days it’s considered ok (by some) to carry on a conversation while fiddling with one’s mobile. This still is definitely not ok in my circles, and no matter how much I apologise I always feel terrible when something comes up that I feel I …

Bring on the noise [post 44/100]

How many questions a day is the average human prepared to answer? When I was in school, days when we were asked loads of questions were scary – they were exam days, or worse, pop quiz days. Most questions were asked person to person, and were related to events that were shared between those people or the wider community. Maybe …

FOR SALE: Me. Good condition. Convenience ONO. [post 42/100]

[This article was written for Prophecy and is cross-posted here with permission.] We are addicted to technology. Literally. Cognitive scientists have found the same kind of dopamine response in smartphone users checking Facebook as in gamblers pulling the handle on a slot machine, or junkies getting high. And we know it. We now have resorts where you can pay to …

Statistics: the why behind the what [post 41/100]

It’s all about the numbers, right? This is how we are supposed to make decisions or justify them, how we evaluate our success, how we understand the world around us. Everywhere you look these days, there’s sexy new infographics showing, e.g., which percentage of us are jealous of our parents’ lifestyles, or prefer 70s retro to 80s retro, or open …

False adversaries and other obstacles [post 40/100]

“The problem is, everybody’s trying to be viewer-centric. And that’s just not going to work.” Last night at a MIPTV, someone said this to me. I managed (I think) to disguise my shock and hear him out. He’s not a bad guy, and he certainly doesn’t think that audiences are unimportant. But this statement comes from what I have discovered …