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WHY YOU SHOULD START A COMPANY IN…

New Ideas, New Markets, New Insights

It used to be, if you were serious about starting a tech company, you went to Silicon Valley. But emerging entrepreneurial hubs around the country are giving startups new options. In this series, we talk to leading figures in those communities about what makes them tick.

CLICK HERE for hotbeds of innovation in other U.S. cities.

To most people, Nashville is a one-note town: Music City, home of the American country scene. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, says Liza Massey, president and CEO of the Nashville Technology Council. “It’s great because it shows we have a creative, vibrant community.” But now another type of creative professional is stepping into the spotlight: the tech entrepreneur. Not only have the big technology leaders like Microsoft, Dell, and HP come to town, but frisky social media startups such as Emma, Moontoast, and Populr, are sprouting up here, too. Plus, there’s a burgeoning healthcare industry with high-tech needs. Which poses one of the best problems a city can have: Nashville now has 1,200 vacant tech jobs and not enough qualified workers to fill them.

So the city’s Technology Council has launched Nashville Is Hiring, a massive recruiting campaign that uses strategies both conventional (partnering with community colleges) and decidedly unconventional (going after middle school kids) in hopes of filling those jobs and starting a larger conversation around how to make Nashville a great place for tech workers. It is one of the Council’s several initiatives, which move beyond the “great quality of life” pitch and work toward making real grass-roots change with job candidates, educational institutions, and employers.

You might be wondering: Why so many jobs to fill? Well, for one, business is good. “The city has become so good at attracting and starting businesses that we’ve actually weathered the recession quite well,” Massey says. “I get pulled into meetings all the time with companies who are looking to expand and all they want to work on is tech workforce.”

The real problem is that while it’s easy to sell families on Nashville–the city has great schools, affordable housing, and no state income tax–it’s a lot harder to lure recent graduates. Employers aren’t always offering the hip, culture-driven workplace that young creatives seek.

The Technology Council wants to help employers understand that the young, recently graduated tech workforce is looking for a very different kind of work environment. “We have to tell students that you’re not going to be Dilbert in a cubicle, you’ll have flexible hours, and you’ll be able to work from home,” Massey says. Massey and her team encourage that structure by pointing companies to the postive aspects of ROWE, or results-only working environment, the kind of ethos pioneered by companies like Best Buy and Zappos, where employers focus less on face time, and more on work achieved.

Nicholas Holland, an entrepreneur and founder of Populr, a publishing platform that allows users to make good-looking single-page websites, and the digital agency Centresource, serves as a local expert on ROWE, advising companies large and small on its benefits. Holland challenges Nashville executives to think differently when it comes to structuring their office life, from initiating flexible hours to placing a focus on corporate culture. His argument is that companies can use ROWE to add a lot of value for potential employees without spending more on recruiting or facilities. “Right now, there’s a lack of resources so everyone is trying to entice and incentivize the same tech pool,” he says. “Larger firms, especially in Nashville, like healthcare firms have the ability to throw a lot of money at the problem, but many workers are looking for other things like a fuller career path, or an ecosystem that supports their personal lives.” (Holland sent me his answers using his company’s product, which includes many more ROWE resources.)

The Nashville Technology Council also works closely with local government leaders, many of whom are on a coordinating committee that meets once a month. One of those members is Matt Largen, director of the office of economic development in Williamson County, south of Nashville. He’s partnering with local community colleges to find funding sources for specific IT certification programs that meet the immediate needs of companies in the area. Across the region, says Massey, the Council works with the 14 universities, as well as community colleges, to tailor programs to employers’ needs, namely in healthcare, where technology changes rapidly.

But Nashville isn’t just focused on college outreach, they’re also targeting junior high school students. Largen says his team is laser-focused on increasing the number of eighth graders who enroll in a track they call Foundations of Information Technology. “We know there is a high retention rate of students who start in the foundation class and continue throughout the IT track so we decided to focus our energy and resources there,” he says. This includes sending a letter from the Nashville Technology Council to every eighth-grade parent and bringing in volunteers to answer questions about IT careers. “The bottom line is that we have to reach out to kids who show an interest and aptitude in technology and make them aware of the wide variety of career options.”

It seems like it might not be the best investment of energy–there’s no guarantee that those students will stay in Nashville when they enter the workforce–plus, could so much emphasis on tech that early be pushing kids away from other potential careers? Largen says that since technology is so pervasive in all jobs, a focus on IT in schools means building a stronger regional economy, period. “In today’s economy, talent drives economic development,” he says. “Plus, growing our own sector is going to be the direct result of efforts to push IT into early grades.”

Katherine McElroy, a partner at C3 Consulting, also works closely with Nashville’s public schools, where she says teachers, too, need to be aware of the widening tech field. She encourages local tech companies to host three-day “externships” during the summer for teachers. “It really helps for teachers to see how technology is used throughout companies in all types of industries,” she says. She also points to local efforts to engage young women, like an Art2Stem camp for girls in the summer, and the local Women in Technology-Tennessee chapter, that sponsors mentorships and scholarships for girls.

Although the Nashville Is Hiring campaign has only been recently announced, Massey says the effort will include an ad campaign as well as visits to tech conferences like SXSW. Earlier this year, the Technology Council sent a street team of young Nashville residents to the Tennessee music festivals CMA MusicFest and Bonaroo wearing bright yellow shirts that exclaimed “I’m a hotspot!” with QR codes that could be scanned for more information about the tech jobs available.

Massey hopes that the campaign will allow them to entice workers from nearby Atlanta, Indianapolis, and Raleigh, but their bigger range of initiatives will also allow them to lure tech workers away from larger cities like L.A., New York, and Chicago. She thinks their efforts show candidates that Nashville is dedicated to creating the best tech working environment in the country. “I challenge them to find another city on their short list that has such a coordinated effort and is taking such a holistic approach.”

Follow the conversation on Twitter using the tag #WhyHere.

Image: Cheryl Casey via Shutterstock

Photo: General Motors

As automakers continue to load vehicles with the features and functionality people expect from their portable devices, the in-dash user interface has become a branding battleground – and the Achilles’ heel of the increasingly connected car. While giving a smartphone or tablet undivided attention is common – if not considered rude, depending on your circle of friends – calling up a Pandora station on your iPhone while driving has the potential to put your life, and others on the road, at risk.

Automakers have to strike a balance between providing drivers the smartphone-enabled applications they desire, while making them safe to access on the fly. But that poses its own issues, including liability concerns and a fear that the feds – fired up about distracted driving – could mandate or outright ban these newest technologies in the car. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has personally called out automakers for putting tech prowess and profit before public safety, and has singled out Ford’s Sync system in particular.

But as automakers have pushed smartphone integration as a way to bring connectivity to the car – and attempted to emulate the slick touch screens of the devices – the most cutting-edge automotive UIs have largely been a series of failures. After soaring from the success of Sync, for example, the follow-up MyFord Touch system brought the Dearborn-based automaker down a few pegs. In a test of the Ford Edge last year, Consumer Reports called MyFord Touch “frustrating” and “a complicated distraction when driving.” A few months later, Ford dropped to 23rd from fifth place the previous year in J.D. Power & Associates’ 2011 Initial Quality Study, largely based on customer’s complaints with the largely capacitive touch-based system.

Ford declined to comment for this story, but claims an 80 percent “take rate” on MyFord Touch in the Edge and Explorer. The automaker also took the unprecedented step earlier this year of sending software upgrades to all owners of vehicles with the system. But one owner we spoke with doesn’t feel it saves the system.

Greg Gill of San Juan Capistrano, California, is a self-described “diehard Ford owner” who purchased his 2011 Edge about a year ago. “Before that, I owned two Expeditions and an Explorer,” said the VP of marketing for the National Auto Sport Association. Gill considers himself tech savvy and knew about the issues with MyFord Touch. “But I still bought it,” he said. “I thought, ‘That’s everybody else. I’m not going to have any problem with it.’ And what a nightmare it’s been.”

“The touchscreen is very clunky,” he told Wired. “I’m constantly tapping it multiple times and looking at it. There are so many things that have not been done well – even after the upgrade. And when I took it in for service, the dealer said, ‘Everybody’s coming in with these issues. Nobody’s happy with their MyFord Touch.’” Gill contends that he’s “still a satisfied Edge owner, but I could not recommend the vehicle overall because of MyFord Touch.”

Automakers are learning from the Blue Oval’s stumble

While Ford had a huge head start with the initial Sync system, other automakers are learning from the Blue Oval’s stumble with its latest high-tech release – and if not designing radically different systems, then at least pouring resources into consumer education. For the launch of Cadillac’s CUE system – which, from our early experiences with it, looks and functions similar to MyFord Touch – that will debut on the new XTS sedan, the GM luxury brand is taking a blitzkrieg approach to tech support, including giving everyone who purchases the XTS in its first year an iPad preloaded with an app that simulates the CUE user interface.

Cadillac is also dispatching 25 “connected consumer specialists” to dealerships to ensure that salespeople become familiar with CUE, and dealers are required to staff stores with two “certified technology experts” trained by the CUE specialists. Additionally, Cadillac is setting up a dedicated call center to handle questions on CUE, will have representatives scouring Internet forums and social media sites to spot concerns and is even prepared to send specialists to XTS owners’ homes who have still unresolved issues with the system.

“We’re trying to think of every way that a customer might ask for help,” said Scott Fosgard, a General Motors spokesperson. “If you’re a CUE owner and having problems, we’ll meet you at your place of work or home, whatever’s convenient.”

To coincide with the launch of the new 2013 GS, Lexus is creating two new tech positions at each of its dealerships: a vehicle delivery specialist to go over the features of a vehicle with new owners, and a vehicle technology specialist to serve as a contact for customers who have questions on how to use their vehicle’s electronics. “We need to provide a standardized method to get information to a wide variety of audiences, and owners’ manuals allow us to achieve that,” said Kevin Pratt, product education manager for Lexus. “However, we recognize that the best way for people to understand and get the full benefit of the features in their car is to be shown how to use them.”

Lexus is also employing an iPad app designed specifically for the GS to educate customers on the car’s features. Owners can even use the Facetime to contact a dealer and get remote personal tutorials on the tech in their vehicles.

But if the UI is properly designed in the first place, it should be intuitive enough that you don’t need a tech expert to make house calls or even an owner’s manual (see: Apple). “I think a lot of people have gotten used to Apple devices,” said Mark C. Boyadjis, an analyst who covers automotive electronics at IHS Global. “And when Apple owners have a question, there’s the Genius Bar.”

But Boyadjis points out that, unlike a smartphone, people typically own a car for years. And he notes that the recent rate of change in automotive infotainment may leave many new car buyers lagging in terms of tech. “I think people still to this day are familiar with the two-knob car radio,” he said. “That was the user interface for last 40 or 50 years. People who bought their last car in 2005 and upgrade to a 2012 model are going to see a completely different Human Machine Interface,” Boyadjis added. “They’re going to be introduced to touch screens. Many of them are going to be introduced to voice recognition for the first time. It’s not always something you can read in your user manual; you need to sit down and use it.”

As with any technology, pioneers are often punished for being first out the gate.

And while it’s economically feasible for a luxury brand to sink significant resources into owner education, consumers of lesser means could be left in the lurch as tech trickles down to more mass-market vehicles. “For the smaller automakers, there could be some issues,” Boyadjis tells Wired. “The GMs, Fords and Toyotas of the world have developed this because they’re the bigger players. But when it comes to Mazda or Mitsubishi or Subaru, they’re pushing to put some of this stuff in their cars. But even their newer systems are not super HMI focused, and they don’t have the R&D budget to spend.”

According to Cadillac CUE program manager Jeff Massimilla, while UI issues were addressed in the design phase, the lead up to the launch of the XTS is the first time GM has developed such as extensive tech support program. “The goal was to design a system that’s easy to use and that’s similar to Apple devices, Android devices or other device on the market that are intuitive.”

And then prepare for any potential tech-fail fallout by pumping money into training and support.

As with any technology, pioneers are often punished for being first out the gate. (We’re looking at you, Apple Newton.) Consider the clunky, pre-smartphone, first-generation BMW iDrive, which was pilloried by the automotive press when it debuted in 2001. Since its introduction, iDrive has become one of the more intuitive systems available as BMW refined and iterated on the original concept of a single knob and a handful of buttons to control a multitude of complex functions. Many luxury automakers later copied the concept, and it’s easy to envision similar evolutions with touch screens, capacitive buttons and haptic feedback. But the growing pains of new technology and unrefined UI paradigms are a tough sell for consumers holding onto vehicles for years or even decades, particularly when compared to the monthly and yearly upgrades of smartphones and tablets. It’s a brave new world for automakers, and it’s one that needs constant attention and an unwavering pursuit of usability before an iPhone-like revolution takes place inside the car.

Do you know what augmented reality apps are really good at? Directing you to new things they don’t directly point at. It’s a whole new world of discovery.

Nokia’s just unleashed its City Lens app for Lumia smartphones. And while the new augmented reality app could easily be mistaken for a bloatware version of the many AR apps we’ve seen before, it’s really Nokia’s attempt to associate its Windows smartphones with an alluring sense of discovery.

While the app actually points you conveniently to a restaurant, a bar, a store or a tourist attraction, it’s actually likely to lead you to discover whole new areas of the city to investigate once you’ve finished your business with the first place you visit.

Look at it like this: Once you’ve used City Lens to take you to a post office to send a postcard home, wouldn’t you perhaps consider visiting a nearby cafe to grab a drink and a bite to eat–one you’d never otherwise have found? Or how about if you follow the app’s advice when you’re visiting Paris and instead of eating in your usual touristy haunts in the Left Bank it takes you to a place to eat in the Marais … where you discover a whole new nightlife you didn’t know about before.

It’s the same sort of magic that made Groupon such a hot commodity. Ad partners often use Groupon just once and don’t return to use it again. That’s because Groupon isn’t really a coupon service, it’s actually a discovery service. If the coupon helps many new clients “discover” a new place to get their fingernails painted, and some of them choose to stay with that business instead of using their habitual one then the “discovered” merchant wins … it’s an indirect benefit, just like the surprise discovery of nearby places offered by City Lens.

For now the emphasis with City Lens and it’s ilk is on the tech rather than the discovery. But as AR takes off into the mainstream (which may happen only after wearable AR systems like Google Glass become popular) it’s not going to be enough to sell gizmos on the strenght of a tech that’s becoming uqiquitous. Rather, the value lies in the discovery it helps enable–and monetize. Paid-for ads like “have you considered this nearby French restaurant?” may pop up after you’ve AR-navigated to a particular patisserie recommended to you somehow. And that’s just the very tip of the location-based AR iceberg–most of the delightul, freaky, clever ways this system will be used probably can’t be imagined yet, just as noone could’ve imagined Instagram’s existence at the dawn of the Net.

Image: Flickr user data_op

The UAE has just launched an effort to embed its National ID card system into smartphones. Yup, that could mean you have to carry your phone at all times. Scary. Could it happen here?

We write a lot about NFC technology and its power to change pretty much everything from the way you shop, to the way you exchange information with other phone owners to advertising and so on. Many interesting innovations involve smartphone NFC tech, but it’s not all for good. The United Arab Emirates plans to incorporate NFC into its newish National ID card scheme.

The government has just begun work with local cell phone operator Etisalat to get the project off the ground. Etisalat, remember, was caught in 2010 trying to force a “network upgrade” code patch to its BlackBerry users that was instantly identified as plain old officially sanctioned spyware. So right from the start, this partnership isn’t sounding like the best friend of human rights.

But it gets worse. The National ID card scheme, created in 2004 in its modern smart-card guise, means every citizen has an official ID number which is associated with their chip-enabed card. On its tiny sliver of silicon it also carries personal identification information, a photo, and digitzed versions of the owner’s fingerprints. Carrying your ID card is mandatory, all the time. To be fair, the various parts of the UAE have been a bit lenient with imposing the scheme, but its all-encompassing power is still a bit threatening.

In some ways, popping this information into a smartphone seems like a great idea. The card is a legal requirement, and losing it must be a pain in the ass for citizens–and we all know how easy it is to misplace a tiny credit-card sized slip of plastic. Embedding the data into a phone means it may be harder to lose, as you’ve got more of an incentive to keep hold of your smartphone nowadays because of the way it keeps you digitally connected to the world, and because of all the really personal data you hold inside like credit card numbers and passwords.

But the weird thing is that if you embed your ID into your phone, then you’re probably legally mandated to carry your phone with you. Everywhere, assuming you’re not carrying your old-fashioned card, that is. And it doesn’t even matter if the phone’s battery is dead because, depending on what NFC implementation the UAE authorities ultimately plump for, the NFC ID information could be read anyway–the antenna in the NFC loop can actually power the NFC chip to radiate its information out (which is how your train ticket systems work). You’d basically have to haul your phone around at all times, even if it were out of juice.

And, again dependant on what NFC tech the UAE chooses, there’s the possibility of remote-readable NFC systems. The kind you’re probably familiar with from ticketing or secure door entry systems need very close proximity between reader and card–partly due to the laws of physics. That’s why sometimes you have to wiggle your wallet on the sensor pad to get the card to “ping.” But there’s no reason that an NFC card can’t be activated by a remote sensor system, if it’s carefully designed.

That’s a bit worrying. Of course the ID information inside will be encrypted, and probably only government-approved people will carry the technology that can remotely read and decrypt the information. But hackers do exist, and weak encryption was probably one of the reasons a digital ID card scheme that was once proposed for the U.K. was eventually tossed out. And quite apart from hacking, there’s the issue of “feature creep” on behalf of the authorities. Because once you’ve got remote-readable NFC cards, then how tempting would it be–for the purposes of anti-terrorism–to install public reader systems in train stations or public spaces? No one’s saying the UAE authorities are actually going to do this, but the idea should give you pause. Especially when you remember the bizarre Mexican iris-scanner public-tracking scheme.

Now, skip to 2015 when more of us are carrying NFC-enabled smartphones, and some of the stickier problems around agreed-upon information-storage standards have been worked out. At this point we may be comfortable having our credit card info and Starbucks loyalty card info inside our phone, and we’re probably highly adapted to the tech. Wouldn’t it be a natural step to put your driving license and passport information in there too–in a highly encrypted form, of course? The authorites would probably love it, as faking ID would be a whole bunch trickier.

Then in situations where you’re supposed to carry ID with you at all times, you’d effectively have to have your smartphone with you at all times, just as seems likely in the UAE.

Image: Khomulo Anna via Shutterstock

Via Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com

It’s been baffling and aggravating to watch the tech press gnash their teeth about Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, a service that lets you add old-timey filters to your camera phone pics, and share them with friends. This thick-headed post on CNET–titled “Facebook Buys Instagram…But For What?”–is a good example of the genre. In it, the author notices that other, even less savvy tech pundits seem to think that Facebook bought Instagram either for users, a better mobile presence, or to squash an upstart competitor. And then, she procedes to torch each one of these straw men. Instagram’s users and mobile mojo don’t mean anything, because they’re not monetized. As for competitors, the writer, in essence, says, ‘Who cares about filters? I bet most people don’t.” Case closed! This Instagram thing is the worst idea in the world, the symbol of a bubble in the making. As if there were no other reasons for Facebook’s move.

But they do exist, and they have everything to do with design and product development.

People take tons of pictures on their smartphones. Why do so few get shared?

In our recent coverage of Facebook, one thing is clear: The company views itself above all as a design-driven company. You can hate them for their actual designs–given all their talent, it really is surprising that Facebook isn’t better than it is. But they do think of themselves as user-minded and hyper-focused on product improvement. Therefore, you have to look at their purchase of Instagram through the lens of: How does Facebook think Instagram will improve their product. If you fancy yourself a great product company in the vein of Apple, that’s your lens, always.

Instant artiness, thanks to Instagram

From that viewpoint, Instagram’s accomplishments start looking pretty impressive. Consider these two competing facts about social-networking and picture-taking:

1. People take tons of pictures on their smartphones. But almost none of that content gets shared.
   
2. The thing we all love most on the Internet is seeing other people’s pictures.

Instagram stepped into the gap. They managed to get people to share more of exactly what their friends want. And they did it simply by providing filters that allow people to turn any crappy old camera-phone pic into something resembling a snapshot by William Eggelston. In other words, Instagram is tapping creative instincts while eliminating the effort required to create something good. They’re satisfying our social-curiosity with pictures, helping us grab hold of fleeting moments that we might never share otherwise. They’re tapping into user emotions.

Moreover, by allowing users to feel as if they’ve created something worth sharing, Instagram is helping users create an image of themselves as they’d like to be seen. They’ve turned the act of picture-taking into a performance, whose message is: Look how cool my life is. Wasn’t that what Facebook did at one point, with all those Like pages and interests? And when was the last time you looked at Facebook and said, ‘Wow, this person seems really cool?” Through dull designs and a straight-jacketed experience, the ability to convey who you are has leeched out of Facebook. Timeline was an attempt to solve that problem, but it’s not a magic bullet. Robert Fabricant, of Frog, just put that point to Inc. quite well:

I think Facebook is getting a little nervous about Pinterest, for instance. There is a new generation of meaningful social networks that are all about personal identity curation. Like Pinterest, Instagram understands that the future is photo-driven, and that those photos are about style and moments. Facebook is playing catch-up. It can either become this fundamental layer, the glue that holds this world together, or they can start creating better environments for users across the the board.

We’re now at a point where technology in and of itself isn’t all that interesting (even if the tech journalists only seem to write about them). When it comes time to buy an iPad 3, most people don’t care how fast it is; instead, they judge it by how fun it is to use. Features don’t matter nearly as much as user-experience. And here’s one stunning metric about how much users love Instagram: The app has a 5 star rating in the app store, on 70,000 votes. Have you ever seen a rating that high?

Tres, tres cool. Thanks to lots of filters.

That says great things about what Instagram has done so far. But the real question is how it will evolve, and how it could improve Facebook’s core product. Again, as Fabricant says, “There are so many possibilities for how Facebook could use Instagram. It’s not hard to imagine how good it could be. Then again, you never know.”

The app is great because it is in such a simple stage in its development. It’s still not clear to me that they can improve that experience while dealing with the inevitable complexity that comes with scale–and there are worrying signs that Instagram won’t be able to do it, including clunky sharing pages and fussy UI details that seem far more complicated than they should be. Moreover, Facebook doesn’t have any track record of being able to absorb other companies and use them to improve their core offering. (This has always been a guiding strength at Apple, from its purchase of Steve Job’s Next operating system to, more recently, Siri, which went from being a surprise acquisition to a main marketing point with blazing speed.)

I’m not saying that the $1 billion price tag was fair: I do agree that the Valley is capable of burning money in ways that defy all common sense. Cash flow is the ultimate judge of how good a company is. But I am saying that viewing the deal simply through the lens of monetization and competing features is a good example of how tech journalists, tech investors, and even tech companies simply have no idea how to absorb design and product development into their world view. Users don’t give a crap if a service is going to make decent margins in the future. But they do care about a product is fun to use. And that is what ultimately makes a company great: It has to make great things.

Facebook has made design a part of their DNA, if their recent hiring spree is any indication. But we don’t know if they’ll be able to draw the best out of their own talent. Can Instagram help inspire them to do better?

All photos by yours truly.

Last week BlackBerry makers Research In Motion imploded. In a decisive move the old guard was swept from senior management positions. Including, crucially, the oldest guard of all: cofounder Jim Balsillie. This week the new RIM’s revealed it’s tweaking its BlackBerry Enterprise Servers–the core engines that power much of the BlackBerry’s fast mail handling, and its secure messaging–to support iOS. That’s a concession it’s lost the lion’s share of the smartphone market to Apple. It’s also a sign that a lot of mistakes have happened, and RIM is pushing the reset button.

But RIM’s story is an amazing one–it single-handedly disrupted the very staid business of corporate communications. And it revolutionized corporate habits the world over: With a BlackBerry in your pocket you could for the first time safely confer with your office to get the very latest secret figures even as you walked to that big merger meeting. Your calendar could be adjusted by your team back in the office to alert you to a change of venue, even while you were en route. And you could tinker with the 5-year business model’s figures as you sat in the bath, or in bed at 5 a.m. (If you were so inclined. Reclined?)

And now, BlackBerrys–while still selling–are far from the cutting edge. If you were being cruel you’d say they’re more the blunt plastic scissors you give to kids. We now know it’s because RIM has made a sequence of mistakes. And where there are successes and mistakes, there are lessons for us all:

1. If you’ve got a great, innovative, disruptive, surprising new product commit to it 100%. This means you have to tout it as revolutionary, scale your production quickly and strengthen your own infrastructure to support the influx of demand. Pursue your customer base aggressively. Break rules. Make concessions, but only where they result in your product penetrating further into new markets or deeper into existing ones largely under your own terms. Iterate your offerings so clients keep wanting the next performance tweak. Be confident, be brash, be prepared to shatter long-held illusions.

2. If your product is a storming success, don’t get complacent. It’s dangerous to ever think you’ve “cracked it” and beaten your competition, or that you’ve assumed so much market dominance a left-field player can’t surprise you. This means you have to continually innovate–as well as cleverly iterating–lest you lose sight of the cutting edge. Listen to your customers. Watch your peers. Research into imaginative space far outside your current offerings…the dreamy, impossible tech will one day be real, and it had better be you who makes it if you want to keep the cash rolling in. If a peer outmaneuvers you, learn about their tech–don’t pooh-pooh it–embrace it, spot the errors or concessions the makers made, and better them with something that is even more revolutionary. Never imagine a clickwheel will outperform a multi-touchscreen.

3. Listen to your people when they tell you your tech needs to be pushed forward. This is related to the above–and at times is more important even than the urge to make money. Your researchers know how the tech can be innovated, and are aware of continual new developments in materials, engineering and electronics (or their equivalent ancillary businesses for your company) that are outside of your purview, but which will be core to your next-next-gen products. Their advice should be kept in mind, lest soon you won’t make money at all. Also you must encourage innovation, challenge, adventures, excitement, and really wild things among all your staff–if everyone’s too afraid to speak up and challenge you then nothing changes. Especially if those challenges, like “Hey, you know there’s a better way to do this than with a thumb clickwheel now?” are really, really important.

4. Dump awkward management. The writer Arthur C. Clarke once joked in a novel about the difficulties of the painless removal of distinguished elderly scientists, but the same holds true for powerful, bullish, over-confident CEOs…the problem just becomes trickier if they also happen to be founders and original innovators (but, frankly, if they’ve had no new ideas since that first one then maybe you have to face up to the notion it was a one-off). On the other hand, make sure you’re ditching them for the right reason: John Sculley famously fell out with a young Steve Jobs and eventually machinated to ditch him from his own firm, perhaps because Jobs didn’t match with Sculley’s (and Apple’s board’s) much more traditional, corporate viewpoints. Yet it was that very asymmetry that was responsible for Apple’s product differentiators.

5. One product and one idea is never, ever, enough. So surround yourself with people who’ll suggest to you the BlackBerry Pie tablet PC, the StrawBerry music player, the SnozBerry electric dog polisher (okay maybe not that, but you get the point)… people who are just as passionate about their product or business ideas as you are about your own. Spot the genius moves in the mix, co-opt them into your own strategy, sell them to the public. Reward the innovators appropriately, even if they’re cleverer than you. Make them millionaires with stock. Just keep moving forward.

Image: Flickr user Darwin Bell

Via Mashable: http://www.mashable.com

If you take a close look at Facebook’s S-1 registration statement, you’ll notice something striking: Designers are called out as key to the company’s longterm strategic success.

Tech company filings often call out certain job functions—like engineering—and the organization’s ability ability to fill those position as crucial to its success. But designers? That’s almost unheard of. And yet, there they are. In the section titled “Factors Affecting Our Performance,” Facebook’s filing reads: “We have also made and intend to make acquisitions with the primary objective of adding software engineers, product designers, and other personnel with certain technology expertise.” And in the section titled “Competition,” it says, “We compete to attract and retain highly talented individuals, especially software engineers, designers, and product managers.” (Emphasis added in both cases.)

Facebook says they’ve only scratched the surface of their roadmap.

The mentions underline the importance (little-noticed until now) that Facebook places on its design team. In a story on that team, which ran in the April issue of Fast Company, VP of product Chris Cox and others told the magazine how the company is looking to its right-brainers to help them do something that’s essentially never been done in software before: Design interfaces that catalyze emotions, rather than simply enable users to accomplish tasks.

Chris Cox

Designing for Facebook, Cox said, gets at “the science of things you can’t reason about, that you just feel.” He added: “That’s why, when we’re trying to accomplish something that’s pretty new, it’s important to be iterating in that design mindset.”

That mindset is only going to become increasingly important. Facebook executives say they’ve only scratched the surface of their roadmap. As a result, the company’s been on a hiring tear, tracking down and convincing some of the tech world’s brightest design talent to join the company, including, most recently, the team at Gowalla (brought in via an acquisition) and Elizabeth Windram, a former staff designer at Google who was snatched away from Quora just months after she joined that company.

CLICK ABOVE FOR OUR SLIDESHOW OF FACEBOOK’S NOTABLE DESIGN HIRES

Notably, tracking down the right people and persuading them to join the team is so important that Facebook doesn’t leave the job to HR alone. “We started keeping a dream team list about two-and-a-half years ago,” Director of Design Kate Aronowitz tells Co.Design. “We thought, ‘What if we could assemble all these people in one room?’”

Nicholas Felton and Kate Aronowitz, Facebook’s Director of Design.

The design team themselves maintain Facebook Group called Design Recruiting (yes, the company uses the site as one of its core productivity tools) that team members fill up with the names and portfolios of designers they admire. And Aronowitz says she herself regularly cuddles up with an iPhone or iPad before bed, surfing through a series of apps, looking for flashes of genius.

Members of the design team reach out to targets themselves, meeting up with them at conferences or inviting them out for dinner or drinks, both to test for fit (“see if our values line up and see if we get excited about the same things,” Aronowitz says) and to make the case for joining Facebook.

The design team reaches out to targets themselves. For some, Facebook brings out the big guns.

For some targets, Facebook even brings out the big guns. Both Nicholas Felton, the information designer behind the wildly popular Feltron Annual Reports, and Mike Matas, who worked on the original iPhone and then cofounded Push Pop Press, which created the Apple Award-winning tablet book version of Our Choice, Al Gore’s follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth, got personal invitations from the main man himself, CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (The email Felton saw in his inbox was so casual that at first, he tells Co.Design, he thought it was just a message from Zuckerberg to all Facebook users.)

That email led to a visit to Facebook headquarters for then-New York-based Felton and his partner Ryan Case. Zuckerberg took them on a a walk through the leafy Palo Alto neighborhood where the company was located at the time. He asked them what they were hoping to do with Daytum and talked about his own visions for Facebook. (Matas tells a similar story, of how an initial invitation from Zuckerberg to come talk about Push Pop Press led, several months later, to a formal offer to join the company.)

For all the outreach Facebook does, the bar to actually getting in the door remains high. “I only hire about one out of every hundred portfolios I look at,” Aronowitz told a group of designers at an event at Dave McClure’s 500 Startups last winter.

Facebook isn’t looking for your run-of-the-mill “pixel pusher.” When we meet at Facebook headquarters, Aronowitz ticks off three qualities she looks for: A personal vision (about what the world needs or where design is going), a sense of ownership over the projects they work on, and a “builder” mindset. “We’re looking for people who can say, ‘I have a product idea, I can think through a need, I can think through a customer base, build something, ship it, and then iterate based on how it’s being used.’”

I only hire about one out of every hundred portfolios I look at.

That’s because once they get to Facebook, designers don’t sit in a corner and wait for people to toss requirements at them. Rather, they enjoy an unusually high level of involvement in the product, starting at the very beginning as executives and product leads discuss what they should build. “Here, the designers will be in almost every conversation about their product,” Aronowitz says.

The designers’ involvement is so deep that they often partner with product managers to lead feature teams. Sometimes they even take the lead on their own.

Sofa, the firm that created ingenious apps like this one, was bought outright by Facebook. The team now works on polishing the site’s icons and visual elements.

Last year, for example, we wrote about how Rob Mason, a fresh-faced young graduate from England, with little more than a few Facebook apps under his belt, was handed responsibility for the Skype integration barely moments after he’d walked in the door. “Go figure out what the experience of doing video calls on Facebook should be,” he was told. He spent a few months tinkering around with it and eventually threw out the book on historical video chat conventions, coming up instead with something simple, straightforward, and so easy to use that, as one of the designers said at the time, even his mom could figure it out.

When the designers they hire are particularly good–when the company believes in their own unique genius–the company gives them free reign to come up with their own portfolio. When Matas joined Facebook last year with his Push Pop cofounder Kimon Tsinteris, for example, the two were given an office and told to think about what new features and products they thought Facebook should be doing next.

“If you can hire people that are good,” Cox explains, “you’re crazy to not give them the chance to set up the definition of what they’re doing.”

And not to keep them close. Both Zuckerberg and Cox spend the bulk their days in product meetings, working cheek-by-jowl with designers and product managers, hammering out the company’s next feature sets.

In the old Palo Alto campus, the company’s designers were parked in the same giant, open-plan room where Zuckerberg, Cox, and the company’s other top executives sat. The new Menlo Park campus has nine buildings and room for 3,200 people. And still, the designers were put not just in the same building, but on the same floor—just one open-plan space over—as Zuckerberg and Cox, all of which facilitates the impromptu executive-designer desk-side conversations and hallway conferences that employees say is one of the keys to the company moving fast and generating breakthrough ideas.

“Design is more strategic than ever,” Aronowitz says. “Designers who come to Facebook have a massive scale of audience and a pretty big impact.”

Portraits by Jake Stangel for Fast Company.

Robots in movies may be evil more often than good, but they’re becoming part of our lives. And their tech is evolving so that they “feel” more like we do.

This happened recently, and we had to show it to you. NASA’s sort of recreated the look of one of the famous parts of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco with an astronaut’s space suit and Robonaut. 

Bot Vid: Leap Tall Buildings In A Single Bound

Boston Dynamics has a bit of a rep for making scary military bots, but its latest Sand Flea robot is different. While still being designed for military or policing purposes, the tiny robot can leap over high obstructions in a single leap and could almost earn the epithet “cute.”

Bot Vid: Hand Shake Robot

Osaka University is demonstrating its robotic prowess by developing a robotic telepresence hand that can communicate the grip, force, and the body temperature of the remote operator. It’s all about adding a more tactile aspect to telepresence meetings.

Bot News

Robots at Foxconn. Foxconn’s again in the news because of its plans for revolutionizing its production lines in China, but in this case it’s because CEO Terry Gou has another way to stop employees working in illegal conditions: He wants to add thousands of robots to his factories.

Robot teachers. The idea of robot teachers has been around a while, but the technology is getting a new spin courtesy of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and a $100,000 prize competition to design a better automated “robotic” grading software. The idea is that teachers would assign more writing tasks if they didn’t have to grade them, and this would boost what’s seen as low writing skills in U.S. students.

RoboBonobo. A great ape sanctuary in Iowa has an unusual Kickstarter project underway: It wants to make a remote telepresence bonobo robot which the apes can control to interact with visitors. You may be skeptical, but bonobos are among the smartest great apes and have been taught to communicate using sign language–and the overall goal is to develop a super-clever touchscreen speech app so the apes can communicate with people better. As part of the Kickstarter project, if you fund it with over $500 you can get a Skype session with a bonobo.

Bot Futures: Tactile Robots

Giving robots human-like touch sensitivity is likely an important goal for the time when robots are more a part of our daily lives. Touch is incredibly important for things you may not imagine–such as detecting when you’re bumping into something gently, or for applying the right amount of force when, for example, helping someone out of bed.

Robot touch is actually something researchers at the University of Pittsburgh say is a “holy grail” of robotics, and they think they’ve got a technology that could enable it. It’s called Belousov-Zhabotinsky gel, and it’s pretty weird. That’s because if you don’t poke it or stimulate it in any way, it pulsates by itself.

The idea is that by engineering the BZ gel carefully it can be turned into a super-sensitive and soft sensor system for robots so that the machines could work out if their stiff, mechanical limbs are touching something that needs to be handled carefully–or, in the case of bumping into a human accidentally, to know it’s done so without necessarily having to “see” the situation happen and react accordingly.

It seems more and more likely that when robots do become a daily experience for us, they’ll be imbued with slightly human behaviors like touch sensitivity and, indeed, ethics.

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.