Quirky Recap – S01 E06 – “Very Messy, Very Fast (Season Finale)”

It’s the end of Quirky’s debut season on Sundance and so here is the final Quirky recap…possibly forever, who knows?  To close out the season, Ben reminds us all just how cool the Quirky concept is, with its democratization of innovation.  The piece de resistance of course being that they make some of the world’s best products that solve real world problems. Gosh they’re like superheroes!

We’re on to the 111^th Eval meeting.  111?  What was 100 like?  I hope they at least had cake.  So that’s 111 brand new products in less than 2 years.  That’s really impressive.  We learn that 111 is focused on barbecue accessories, so here’s the first inventor, Chad from Houston.  Chad’s “Skew-tisserie” gets your kabobs off the sticky grill and rotates them for even cooking.  Gaz likes the concept but thinks the spinning motor is overkill. He just hates the idea of barbecue meats having any kind of fun at all.

Quirky Recap S01 E05 – “Hell Yes”

The show has apparently moved to Friday nights, but that doesn’t work with my schedule, so here I am still publishing the recap on Wed, I hope you don’t mind, all two of you reading this….me and my mom.  Ok that’s a lie, my mom’s not great with a web browser.  When a show gets moved to Friday nights, that’s typically not a good sign in TV land.  So fingers crossed that Ben and Gaz get to continue their hissy quarrels and not be banished to the dungeons in the basement of the Nielsen offices.  Next week is the season finale, do you want more Quirky?  Well make sure you tell Sundance.

Time to see who will be this week’s Quirky inventor and have their dreams realized.  It has better odds than the lottery, so get over to quirky.com and start inventing, you people inspired by the tuna and peanut butter in your garage.  At this week’s Eval, they have changed it up a little and are entirely focused on gadgets for coffee pod machines like the Keurig.  The whole single cup brew category has exploded in recent years, partly due their ability to economically customize beverages for individuals, so everyone in the office can have something different rather than all drink out of the same pot.  I’m sure men buy this at home too so their wives can have vanilla latte while they drink roasted mud.

App-athy and the Value of Information

In the early to mid-nineties, I became enamored with the idea of lean information systems.  This was back when software applications were getting bloated and trying to be all things to all people but were unsatisfying to just about everyone. At the same time, enterprise applications were being set up to try to control all kinds of business processes in the name of cost control and efficiency. Multimillion dollar installations of enterprise systems employed countless consultants setting up, implementing and maintaining these applications that cast a generic set of industry specific best practices in the silicon equivalent of wet cement.

Lean manufacturing pundits mocked the wave of MRP/ERP implementations as a poor substitute for actually improving the flow and productivity of the manufacturing facility, while technology enthusiasts envisioned seamless integration across all business functions.

Is Facebook the new Windows?

Is Facebook trying to become an operating system like Windows or just look and act like one?  Something happens to companies that start off small and then become successful giants.  Often, they lose their ‘mojo’ and eventually become something that barely resembles the original.  When you move from the garage to the office campus, your spirit often doesn’t make the move with you.   Just ask the scores of Dot-com companies that crashed and burned, Icarus-style, at the turn of the century.

In the beginning, Facebook started off very simply, you put in your data, you accepted or declined friend connections and then you maybe updated your status.  That was about it and it was elegant and simple.  Fast forward to today and Facebook holds large scale developer conferences like the big boys at Apple and Microsoft, and rolls out features at a maddening pace.  They have also tried and failed several times with things like adding their own email and Groupon type discounting.

Quirky Recap – S01 E04 – “I Crush It”

It’s another week and a chance to crown another Quirky inventor.  We’re at Eval again and the Quirky employees get their chance to chime in on the top ideas chosen by the online community.

First up is Joe from Portland with his idea for a piece of plastic that piggy backs on your roll of toilet paper giving you, Voila! – TWO rolls of toilet paper, so you don’t run out as often.  “Wiping your a** like no other,” jokes Ben.  One designer points out that it lacks the “wow factor” (ok, name a toilet product with wow factor, what, you can’t either?).  Ben asks who likes it and hears crickets (insert standard Ferris Buehler/Ben Stein attendance joke here).

Now we go to Marnie in Seattle with her “Ziploc Rolodex,” which seems like a very OCD product for OCD people who have just simply lost control of their storage bag inventory.  One Quirky staffer comments that he doesn’t believe in the problem this idea solves despite the fact that it got a lot of interest from the online community.  Popular doesn’t necessarily mean good, so there’s a good lesson for you kids out there.

Quirky Recap – S01 E03 “Sacrifice for Sex Appeal”

We’re back this week to see how the Quirky team turns some lucky inventor’s idea into an object of consumer lust.  It’s the third episode, so no more need for background setup scenes and we jump right into Eval.

First up is Copenhagen’s Heini  (really, that’s his name) with his super loud bike horn which I presume is for those type of bikers who think they are cars and ride in the car lanes when they turn at lights, probably to make sure all the drivers get a gander at their fabulous spandex outfits.  Why else risk your life foolishly like that?  At least one Quirkyite thinks there’s a market for it.

Next is Tanya from the Bronx with her “Clubbing Clip”, which condenses all of a lady’s essential purse items into a bracelet , so your hands can be free to dance, hold adult beverages and still look cute for the guys.  I’m sure in a dramatic moment later in the show, Tanya will find out that Wayne Industries already owns the patent on that item, if she becomes the chosen one, that is.  Ben says that Tanya quit her job as a school principal to become an entrepreneur and that makes her worthy of extra consideration.  That’s the Quirky spirit!  Always willing to aid others in chasing the dream.  But what about the kids?  Won’t somebody please think of the children?  Regarding the product, the team has some pretty big concerns, such as what do you do with your cell phone and your keys?  What indeed.

Quirky Recap – S01 E02 – “Show Premier”

Andy Warhol may be the pop culture Nostradamus if he is right with his prediction that everyone will experience 15 minutes of fame.  Forget the Internet, reality TV has pipelined fame to the unknown masses faster than a political candidate can jump on a photo op.  The good news is that for product development geeks, we now have our own show…Quirky.

You may know Quirky as that ultimate symbol of open innovation and crowdsourcing, a small company that employs social media to take anyone’s BIG IDEA and turn it into a real, commercial product.  Quirky is maybe best known for Pivot Power, a college student’s idea for an outlet strip with multiple hinges so that the unit can bend around like a snake and allow those large block-like power sources to fit into the strip and not block access to the other holes.

In the great and Internet-time-honored tradition, I will be occasionally writing recaps of the weekly show.   Now you don’t have to watch it yourself!  Most people do this for shows like American Idol, Mad Men or True Blood, but this is much more in our “wheelhouse”.  I don’t know if this show is getting good ratings or if it will even stay on the air, but there are about 8 million shows like this on everything from antique hunting to hoarding, and they seem to have found audiences, so who knows?

Percentage of all tweets that are worth your time: 6%

Don Reinertsen is the only person I know whose numbers always add up.  It’s not that his math is higher quality than yours, but he is the only one I know that is disciplined enough to employ math consistently.  In his work with us training people on Lean Product Development, participants (mostly engineers) often comment on the soundness of his material from a mathematical and statistical standpoint.

Don is well known for debunking myths from Six Sigma, Toyota Production System and other management schools of thought, simply by “doing the math.”   Chances are if Don is involved in something, it’s because it has calculable value associated with it.  He has applied this successfully and turned around many people’s opinions on what is a valuable activity and what is wasteful.

With that lens, I found it at least mildly surprising that Don is an active Tweeter.  I’ll be honest, I don’t find much twitter activity worth the time.  To fully understand tweets, you have to follow someone for some time and really pay attention to understand the necessary context.  There is just so much noise about what was for lunch and how that movie made you remember the butterfly that got stuck in your peanut butter and jelly sandwich when you were 8 that I lose interest quickly.

But Don is someone I may choose to follow, if for nothing but the quick insights he occasionally posts like the one above from his feed.

Don’s MRT Workshop: Second Generation Lean Product Development: Applying the Principles of Flow

Social Media makes babies cry…

Some people say email is obsolete because today’s younger generation uses text, tweets and other tools to communicate, but I don’t buy it, it’s still here, hasn’t changed much, and forms you fill out still ask for it, but not your twitter ID.  The same does not go for social media, which is much more of a fad and prone to eventual extinction.

Here’s some more evidence that supports the idea…

If Pavlov built Facebook

I am going to start a Facebook “deathwatch” or maybe a Facebook “Doomsday Clock”.  Whenever I sense a trend or occurrence that I think adds to FB’s eventual obsolescence or “myspace-ification”, I will update the clock to be closer to the death hour of midnight.  Forget about Google+, with the addition of the new social media site, GetGlue, the clock now sits at 5 minutes to.