Rocket Bomber - linking to other people's stuff

“Yet, the truth is that innovation is a messy business. It’s full of blind alleys and half-baked ideas, random collisions and abrupt changes in direction. Ideas mix and recombine, fail, reemerge and, in the end, a precious few become wildly successful.

“Innovation, most of all, is driven by collaboration. So it takes more than just smart people, but diversity as well. Different people, working on different things, colliding together in unexpected ways is what brings about important new ideas. That’s why, more than anything else, vibrant cities are crucial to our continued ability to innovate and compete.”

Why Cities Are Our Most Important Innovation Platform : Greg Satell, 9 November 2013, Forbes

Money quote:

“As Steve Jobs noted, creativity is about connecting things. The more random collisions you have with people who have different ideas, the more creative you’ll be. That’s why he designed Apple’s new headquarters to facilitate interactions, with lots of open spaces and common areas. It’s also why cities need more than office buildings and research parks. They need cafes, music festivals, art shows and other places where creative people meet and exchange ideas.“

emphasis mine.

“During the trip we saw several planned pilot breweries at these farms, and the farmers had as many questions about the brewing process as we did the hop growing process. One of these very generous and inquisitive farmers led us through a 16 acre breeding field with 8,500 plants of different, personally cross-pollinated varieties, most of them doomed to extinction by selection, but one or two maybe destined to be the nest [sic] Cascade or Simcoe. This symbiotic understanding of each others’ profession can only spark collaboration, innovation, and generation spanning relationships that will be the legendary brand building blocks of the future. It will be key for brewers and farmers to work together to ensure that the future of American brewing can realize its full potential. There will only be so much land, time, and resources to harvest the right amount of varieties and overall yield, and the hop farmers are ready to jump into the awesome challenges ahead of us.”

Weird Things Can Happen in a Hop Field at One in the Morning

[blockquote]
“This is when Amazon drastically expanded the number of warehouses to more than 10 around year 2000 and started stocking most products that it sold. The focus shifted to a business model built around excellent delivery performance and efficient logistics. Customers were amazed at how quickly their orders arrived on the doorstep.

“Amazon did not stop reinventing its business model here. In 2006 it went further and unveiled a program called Fulfillment by Amazon, whereby independent sellers could use Amazon’s warehouse network to fill orders and delegate to Amazon their logistics-related decisions.

“Under this new model, Amazon essentially became a wholesaler of goods sold by many much smaller virtual storefronts. What the distributors and publishers, in the aggregate, were to Amazon in its early days, now Amazon was to the participants in its fulfillment-for-hire program. What used to be outsourced became the core proposition and strength.

“Amazon’s recent decision to further develop its fulfillment capabilities (by spending close to $14 billion to build about 50 new warehousing facilities) to bring a large fraction of the US population in the same day delivery catchment area reflects that, for Amazon, the Internet retail model has now come full circle.” [/blockquote]

Amazon Constantly Audits its Business Model : Karan Girotra and Serguei Netessine, 15 November 2013, Harvard Business Review Blog Network

Burn. I feel chastened. I feel schooled.

Why the “Next Silicon Valley” Doesn’t Really Exist: Lots of people want to create another innovation hub like Silicon Valley. Here’s why they’ll all fail. : Mark Zawacki, 7 November 2013, MIT Technology Review

“It’s understandable that so many places around the world want to re-create the economic engine of Silicon Valley, as MIT Technology Review wrote about in its recent business report (‘The Next Silicon Valley’). But creating another Silicon Valley will be far harder than anyone imagines. That’s because the Silicon Valley ecosystem is now far more sophisticated than just startups.”

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My argument was a bit more focused (not recreating the Valley but instead trying for relatively small local solutions) but this is still a burn.

“This is Silicon Valley’s superiority complex, and it sure is an ugly thing to behold. As the tech industry has shaken off the memories of the last dot-com bust, its luminaries have become increasingly confident about their capacity to shape the future. And now they seem to have lost all humility about their place in the world.

“Sure, they’re correct that whether you measure success financially or culturally, Silicon Valley now seems to be doing better than just about anywhere else. But there is a suggestion bubbling beneath the surface of every San Francisco networking salon that the industry is unstoppable, and that its very success renders it immune to legitimate criticism.

“This is a dangerous idea. For Silicon Valley’s own sake, the triumphalist tone needs to be kept in check. Everyone knows that Silicon Valley aims to take over the world. But if they want to succeed, the Valley’s inhabitants would be wise to at least pretend to be more humble in their approach.”

Silicon Valley Has an Arrogance Problem: It’s Too Proud, Too Self-Centered, and That’s Not Good For Anyone : Farhad Manjoo, 3 November 2013, The Wall Street Journal

So let’s start with the links, shall we?

Hana Doki Kira, a shojo comic and illustration anthology Kickstarter project
http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/1191994790/hana-doki-kira/

From their pitch:
“An original art anthology in homage to Shōjo, showcasing a diverse group of over twenty artists!

“Hana Doki Kira is a collection of comics and drawings from a fantastic group of artists all inspired by Shōjo – a sub-genre of comics that for many of us were among the first illustrated stories we fell in love with. We asked over twenty artists with diverse skills and styles to consider what Shōjo personally means to them, and to create art based on their interpretations.”

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Hana Doki Kira will be a 120 page ‘limited edition’ book (another way to say, ‘small print run’), “filled to the brim with lovely illustrations and comics from our participating artists. Our goal is to print the book and compensate our contributing artists for their hard work!”

also: “107 pages of illustrations and comics!”
with 23 artists, that’s 4 pages each?

Obviously some submissions might be longer, and of course advertising “illustrations” as part of the work means we’ll be getting some splash-page-type single page contributions, leaving more room for the rest. And of course a decent little story could be packed into just 8 or 12 pages, but I still feel that this is going to be much more of a sampler: Heavy on the Art Book, rather light on “shojo” comics.

I’m being prejudicial, and also being unfair. But I am still skeptical.

I personally am not backing the project.

With all that said,

I don’t think my bias should stop you (or anyone else) from backing this particular project:

• if you feel like any effort along these lines should be supported, just to help these particular artists a bit and perhaps encourage others to experiment with print projects.
• if you think $5 isn’t that bad price a for a PDF copy of a book like this.
• if you are much more optimistic about the contents than I am.
• if you are interested in seeing this American/Tumblr take on Shōjo (of course there is a tumblr).
• if you just want to pile on:

The project is 90% funded with 3 weeks to go, so it looks like it should fund anyway.

I’m just being old and crotchety — but don’t let me and my grumpy-blogger act get in the way: Please visit the links, judge for yourself, and see if this is a project you’d like to get behind. I certainly support the idea of “roll your own”, minis, zines, and “authors doing it for themselves” comics in theory, but this project didn’t grab me. Your mileage may vary.

[blockquote]
“While you’re enjoying your convention activities, how easily can you move around? Is there space for everyone in your event? How chaotic was the line situation? At Otakon, the convention center is actually three buildings over three blocks, with three or four more hotels on the adjacent blocks offering up their first and second floors. All are connected by straight-shot skywalks wide enough for six people, if not eight. Via the skywalk, the convention’s various buildings are all connected within a one-minute walk of the one next to it, and even take you over to the Harbor District — this is in contrast to some conventions, where the skywalk system takes you everywhere but where you need to go, and takes you fifteen minutes to do it.

…

“Otakon also has a multi-tiered convention center that offers lots of space for attendees to sit and chat in bright, wide-open spaces that lift the spirits and increase the positive convention experience. Three separate, outdoor terraces in the main convention center building alone are complete with chairs, fountains, and trees; side-hallways and annexes feature window seats as well as places to tuck lines; corridors set off from the rest act as small lounges with couches and end tables; hotel lobbies with programming rooms above don’t mind visitors talking or taking pictures for a hour; and nooks around video rooms all offer good space to combat that ever-lasting problem of attendees sitting on floors and breaking fire code.” [/blockquote]

What Otakon and the Baltimore Convention Center Do Right and Why Cons and Con-goers Should Listen Up : Thalia Sutton, 7 November 2013, Suvudu.com

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Can you see now that my position as an anime, manga, and sci-fi fanboy and my passion for livable, walkable urban spaces actually have a fair amount of overlap?

Please go read the other 12 paragraphs, and leave a comment for Thalia and Suvudu — this seems like an excellent opportunity (and forum) for this kind of discussion.

This is about more than just me throwing a bone to the ‘old’ readership and making my case for the new blog topics, though. Making spaces inviting, accommodating most if not all use cases and special needs of your customers, and anticipating bottlenecks are all considerations of retail space as well. The larger your space, the more you have to consider.

If you’d like some expanded thoughts along these lines, I’d recommend my blog post from 25 August 2012.

“Why do some stores succeed while others fail? Retailers constantly struggle with this question, battling one another in ways that change with each generation. In the late 1800s, architects ruled. Successful merchants like Marshall Field created palaces of commerce that were so gorgeous shoppers rushed to come inside. In the early 1900s, mail order became the ‘killer app,’ with Sears Roebuck leading the way. Toward the end of the 20th century, ultra-efficient suburban discounters like Target and Walmart conquered all.

“Now the tussles are fiercest in online retailing, where it’s hard to tell if anyone is winning. Retailers as big as Walmart and as small as Tweezerman.com all maintain their own websites, catering to an explosion of customer demand. Retail e-commerce sales expanded 15 percent in the U.S in 2012—seven times as fast as traditional retail. But price competition is relentless, and profit margins are thin to nonexistent. It’s easy to regard this $186 billion market as a poisoned prize: too big to ignore, too treacherous to pursue.”

emphasis mine.

No Stores? No Salesmen? No Profit? No Problem for Amazon. : By George Anders, 7 November 2013, MIT Technology Review

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I like this article a lot — not just for the two paragraphs quoted above (which hit on several points I’ve also made)

“The change in customer demand does not begin and end with a web site and is not limited to online sales. When someone wants a book, they will seek it out from any retailer, and their buying decision is affected not by the discovery process but rather the same mix of price and convenience that backs all of their sales decisions.”
Bookselling: Not Dead Yet. : RocketBomber, 12 July 2013

“The company lacks three of conventional retailing’s most basic elements: a showroom where customers can touch the wares; on-the-spot salespeople who can woo shoppers; and the means for customers to take possession of their goods the instant a sale is complete. In one sense, everything that Amazon’s engineers create is meant to make these fundamental deficits vanish from sight.”
Anders, MIT Technology Review, op cit.

“To Amazon, retailing looks like a giant engineering problem. Algorithms define everything from the best way to arrange a digital storefront to the optimal way of shipping a package. Other big retailers spend heavily on advertising and hire a few hundred engineers to keep systems running. Amazon prefers a puny ad budget and a payroll packed with thousands of engineering graduates from the likes of MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Caltech.”
Anders, MIT Technology Review, op cit.

Right now, Amazon is winning the fight because they actively seek out ways to minimize their weaknesses. When a customer considers the ‘mix of price and convenience’ many, many times Amazon wins there, too. The question for competitors is how to find a chink in Amazon’s apparently fool-proof business model and attack-proof walled garden.

Walmart is trying to think laterally — leveraging what they have that Amazon doesn’t: Thousands of physical stores already in close proximity to their customers. Walmart suffers from two serious handicaps, though. First, Amazon has a 15 year head start, and second, Walmart has a serious image problem. For many consumers, Walmart = cheap — and not in a good way.

How to compete?

Read this: Taking down Facebook, piece by piece : Rian Van Der Merwe, 24 October 2013, Elezea.com

conclusion of the article: “Facebook is in a classic position where, as a dominant provider of horizontal social services, it is in danger of being taken down piece by piece by several vertical players who provide specific, narrow experiences very well. Facebook has become a social media firehose. It won’t be replaced by another firehose, but by a bunch of different cocktails that users can customize as they please.”

Is Amazon also a “dominant provider” with a horizontally-expanded business? One can also easily make the argument (in books, especially) that Amazon is also simultaneously trying to be a vertically-integrated near-monopoly — and I don’t mean “monopoly” in anti-trust terms, per se, but rather that Amazon is seeking to develop a self-sustaining, wholly-owned ecosystem of books that operates independently of the ‘old’ book market, to the point that the competition becomes irrelevant.

Ignoring books for a moment, though: Amazon is vulnerable on other verticals. Zappos and Diapers.com were bought up by Amazon before they could really become a headache — and perhaps also to keep them from becoming business-magazine-cover ‘success stories’ that might inspire others.

Where would I attack Amazon? I think DVDs might be an option, though it would be hard to recreate imdb.com from scratch. (Amazon bought imdb, too, btw). A ‘Goodreads’ for movies might be successful, though — maybe Rotten Tomatoes should try their hand at online retail.

Music is always an opportunity — iTunes seems like a winner here (Amazon is in 2nd place) but many smaller players are working the fringes. Music has always seemed like an indy, garage type endeavor (at least in myth) and I could see a mix of Pitchfork-like-reviews combined with Soundcloud-like-easy-streaming-and-sharing working exceptionally well — you know, except for the selling things and making money part. (if you figure that out, let me know)

Newegg and Tiger Direct already compete with Amazon in the computers, peripherals, parts, and small electronics space — and I think manufacturers are doing themselves a disservice by not doing more to explore and exploit direct sales to their customers.

(The same goes for publishers, especially the genre publishers in Mystery, Romance, and Sci-fi.)

This is all just food for thought: if I had a killer solution, I’d be writing a business plan and shopping for VC funding.

The point I’d like to make (yes, I’m finally getting back around to it) is that the e-commerce revolution is a change in customer demand. The better one enables customers — with good information, guidance in the form of curated collections and impartial reviews, ease of ordering, and sufficient choices — the better one will do. Indeed, price is the only consideration for some customers — but not all. A good experience, a no-bullshit approach, and intuitive seach tools (combined with expertise and selection) might go even farther than ‘lowest price’ with most customers. We all know: you get what you pay for.

“Chicago mayor and former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel announced a new initiative today aimed at doubling the size of his city’s tech sector by adding 40,000 new jobs over the next ten years. The plan was announced at 1871, a co-working space that houses a number of the areas’ young startup companies. Under Emanuel’s tenure, the tech sector in the Windy City has reportedly grown 30 percent.

“The mayor’s plan has three core pieces: Chicago will host a venture capital summit in conjunction with Lollapalooza, Purdue University will launch a Chicago-based weekend MBA program to help engineers and computer scientists turn ideas into businesses; and the Mayor will join tech leaders from around the city to visit the top 5 business schools in the country and recruit students.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel vows to double Chicago’s tech sector over next decade : http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5070494/rham-emanuel-vows-to-double-chicagos-tech-sector

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Fine. Press releases, “initiatives”, summits, meetings. Let’s talk… and talk and talk… about how nice it would be to maybe have some tech.

Chicago is certainly a draw, America’s Second City, right? If there is already a start-up ecosystem in place in Chicago it would likely double on its own anyway. The city government’s ‘helping hand’ won’t hurt that, but likely won’t ‘help’ much either.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned that I personally think that a vibrant Tech community starts more with the community part, and not so much with initiatives coming out of the mayor’s office. But best of luck to you anyway, Chicago. If nothing else you can claim credit for the natural growth already occuring.