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Alex Goldfayn's new book is called Evangelist Marketing: What Apple Amazon and Netflix Understand About Their Customers (That Your Company Probably Doesn't). He is CEO of the Evangelist Marketing Institute, a marketing consultancy with clients that include T-Mobile, TiVo and Logitech. You remember, don't you? The emails magically appeared while you weren't looking.

What is the perfect "personal device"? In the quest for a dominant design, now Motoral is looking for a TV tablet. Will it find acceptance in the market? This is probably a matter of market segmentation: "older" TV addicts having more money to spend will probably find it interesting. But younger people, raised on youtube and facebook might find it useless...

Short article commenting on the role of markets in allowing experimentation, chaos and ultimately innovation... sometimes that planning and government intervention cannot properly achieve. Nice reading.

The article does not directly have to do with innovation, but provides an interesting perspective on the strategic challenges that luxury carmakers have when dealing with macro-trends such as an ageing customer base, emerging markets, downsizing (and low margins), etc.

Now that battery-powered vehicles seem to be the solution of choice for the next generation of cars, companies are looking for attractive markets. Will fleets be the right place to go? Maybe yes, if such fleets require short-range urban mission profiles. Maybe not, if all the attractiveness simply is adding a "green touch" to the company. 

Yesterday in Cupertino, CA, the Apple's CEO unveiled at the developers the new iPhone OS 4.0. The new OS is available to iPhone developers today, while the general public will get the update sometime this summer. Apple uses innovators and then early adopters to improve the product, leveraging on their enthusiasm. "We are not the first to offer this service, but we are the best" : Steve Jobs doesn't know moderation and understatement. Some of the OS 4.0 features, as the multitasking, doesn't represents that kind of radical innovation, just because Google did it first. But Apple is aware about giving those features to its product in the right time, according to Jobs. By the way, multitasking is only 1 of the 100 new user features announced and thanks to the early market the OS 4.0 could potentially represent the birth of new paradigms in the operating software market.

Advertising agencies and software developers also welcomed Apple's new iAd network as a potential breakthrough that could give an important boost to the small but fast-growing mobile advertising market. iAd is an OS 4.0 built-in app, which could be the starting point of a new generation of mobile adverts that would be far more engaging than current formats, which Jobs said "suck". Thanks to his company's control Apple's network would be able to serve up more creative forms of advertising to run inside the "apps" users download on to these devices. Advertising inside apps, although still small, has become the hottest corner of the mobile advertising business, prompting a race between Google and Apple. In fact, earlier this year Apple bought Quattro Wireless for $270 million signaling its intention to enter the advertising network space. Quattro is an ad network that spans both mobile websites and smartphone applications. It seems to develop a new strategy and paradigm for the advertisement and a new battle field for the two giants Apple and Google. Which will emerge?

An interesting interview with Dr Robert Cooper, senior consultant to Fortune 500 firms and top scholar in the field of innovation management. Today markets in many countries and industries are flat and increasingly commoditized, gains in market shares are expensive and acquisitions often don't work. In addiction, even traditional product development (for most companies, this means line extensions, improvements and product modifications) seems depleted, and only serves to maintain market share. For R. Cooper, the answer is "true innovation - breakthrough products, services and solutions - that create growth engines for the future and some examples, such as Apple's IPod, are often cited."

HP and Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ: PALM) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which HP will purchase Palm, a provider of smartphones powered by the Palm webOS mobile operating system, at a price of $5.70 per share of Palm common stock in cash or an enterprise value of approximately $1.2 billion. The transaction has been approved by the HP and Palm boards of directors. The combination of HP's global scale and financial strength with Palm's unparalleled webOS platform will enhance HP's ability to participate more aggressively in the fast-growing, highly profitable smartphone and connected mobile device markets. Palm's unique webOS will allow HP to take advantage of features such as true multitasking and always up-to-date information sharing across applications. "Palm's innovative operating system provides an ideal platform to expand HP's mobility strategy and create a unique HP experience spanning multiple mobile connected devices," said Todd Bradley, executive vice president, Personal Systems Group, HP. "And, Palm possesses significant IP assets and has a highly skilled team. The smartphone market is large, profitable and rapidly growing, and companies that can provide an integrated device and experience command a higher share. Advances in mobility are offering significant opportunities, and HP intends to be a leader in this market."

Google has announced that it will soon bring an end to its online sales of its Nexus One handset. The company will still show off Android phones on its site, but purchases will be done the old-fashioned way: through mobile service providers. Google's direct sales model was an attempt to radically alter the business model for mobile handsets. Instead of buying a phone from a carrier, with a contract and a subsidized up-front cost, the company was hoping to cut out the network. Customers would buy the phone directly from Google, paying the full fee up-front, and then putting in a SIM of their choice. This, however, ignored the realities of the phone market, as the company soon discovered. Its approach to tech support-send an e-mail and maybe get an answer eventually-was always doomed to failure. Given how important phones are to our lives and our lifestyles, that was never going to be acceptable. Customers might not like calling call centers, but if there's one thing worse than being stuck on hold waiting for the muzak to end, it's not being stuck on hold at all, because there isn't even anyone to call. A month after launching the phone the company relented, giving its customers the ability to talk to someone. But this was not the only problem with its sales model. As it wrote in the announcement, "it's clear that many customers like a hands-on experience before buying a phone." A phone is something that people want to touch, to see how heavy it is, what it looks like in person, how good the screen is, if it fits nicely in their pocket-for many of us, the phone is an extension of ourselves, which is why we see so many different shapes and styles of handset on the market. So expecting people to be happy buying a handset that they cannot even touch, much less play around with, was a bridge too far.

Moore's law (the prediction that the number of transistors that can be placed in a given area in an integrated circuit doubles every two years) is an interesting case when you study s-curves. It basically implies that  - 40 years after it was formulated - the s-curve still hasn't reached its inflection point. Now that Intel has announced the commercialization of chips based on 3d (i.e. nonplanar) transistors, some observers view this as a confirmation that Moore's law is still  going to be valid for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, others might wonder whether 3D chips represent a new paradigm and s-curve. In the end, you easily realize that s-curves are not a simple concept and that - in practice - you find many "nested" s-curves.

Almost every year we see that Intel is releasing New processor is it because 1. their older chips have reached market maturity or 2. they are innovative to keep increasing their market share or 3. is because The market is asking for more ? eventhough Intel is in top company, in making chips why are they always investing in designing new products ?

Mr. Joshi (the head of Hewlett-Packard's $24 billion printing empire) has spent years disputing the notion that people will print less as they do more on their hand-held devices. This week, he will see his ideas put into action as H.P. introduces a fleet of printers with Web access, their own e-mail addresses and touch screens. These products should open up new ways for people to print from Web services like Google Docs, and from smartphones and devices like the iPad from Apple. Mr. Joshi is going back to his roots as an engineer - as a young H.P. researcher, he figured out a way to make ink cartridges fire 45 million drops - and relying on new technologies, not slick marketing. But still, he will have to prove that customers will change their behavior and print more if given the right tools. That, Mr. Reitzes said, is crucial to how investors will evaluate the long-term prospects of H.P. "Investors are worried about printing," he said. "It's really important that they get this right." As the world's largest technology company, H.P. sells a wide variety of products but got much of its profit from printers and their pricey ink. More recently, H.P. has built up a large technology services arm as well, which has helped round out its business. But the printing division accounts for about a fifth of its revenue and a third of its profits. The new printers - which build on a limited experiment last year - will range in price from $99 to about $400. Every one will come with what H.P. executives billed as a breakthrough feature - its very own e-mail address. H.P.'s engineers hit on the e-mail address as an easy, familiar way for people to send print jobs to the Web-ready printers. You can, for example, take a photo with a phone, e-mail it to your printer's address and have the printout waiting for you at home. Or, you can share the printer's e-mail address with family and friends. This means that someone can buy Grandma a Web-ready printe

An article on competition in the smartphone industry. Nokia is the market leader thanks to its brand and grip on the Symbian OS, but competitors like Apple and RIM are growing quickly thanks to superior product concepts. It is interesting that Nokia is teaming up with Microsoft in the area of Office applications, in order to increase the appeal of its products.

Nokia is suffering from the emergence of smartphones, with the market share growth of RIM and Apple, and a constant decline in unit margins. Therefore, it is now trying to move into online services with its Ovi portal.

Nokia and Microsoft, who have always been at odds in the battle for smartphone operating systems, have now formed an alliance for mobile applications. The idea is to bring personal productivity (Office) tools on Nokia (Symbian) phones and fight against growing market share by RIM (Blackberry phones).

The diffusion of netbooks exhibits many interesting traits of radical and disruptive innovation: the change in technical tradeoffs and product architecture (though not of core technology), the downsizing in performance (good enough for a new market), the inertia shown by incumbents.

The cloud computing paradigm is getting closer. Now Google is launching Chrome as an OS. While there appears to be widespread acceptance of the paradigm, we should not forget that Microsoft is strongly entrenched as a standard. The Chrome browser still has 2% market share!

A nice overview on how cloud computing works, and on how this could become the next paradigm for information technology. Don't read the main article only, but also the ones that are linked at the bottom. The review leans a lot on technology. I think it should be read by thinking about which market demands might favour or hinder the emergence of cloud computing.

Part of Google's success is due to its secret algorithm, capable of delivering search results that are relevant to users, but also marketable to firms. The problem is that Google has the power to grow or kill any business by simply moving it up or down the hierarchy in search results. Some firms are starting to complain about fairness of this (especially the ones that partially compete with Google). However, it is up to antitrust authorities and end users to decide on the right tradeoff between convenience and neutrality of results.

Analysts are starting to recognize that - maybe - operating systems for smartphones will follow a different story than in the past. Instead of a winner-take-all market based on standardization, diversity is likely to prevail. This because handset makers and telcos will try to push in that direction  - as long as this will not reduce customer utility - and because the real source of value (and potential locus of standardization) now sits in the web and in social networks. In this case, which device and which OS is going to be used is going to be irrelevant.

One of the recent topics (or fads?) in innovation management is associated to "indovation", i.e. the search for low-cost products targeted to emerging markets, and the transfer of these solutions to industrialized countries. Is it an episode? Is is a trend? Is there something deeper that is worth researching and understanding?