In 2007 3 students proposed a water carrier that would purify water using mechanical energy from the process of wheeling it along. The reaction on Dragons Den was unprecedented and each of them offered to fund the project splitting it equally between the others. It looks like the implementation has been a great success, including designing the product to be locally manufactured and maintained. I’m sure not the most profitable strategy but certainly the one necessary for such a basic need. You can find out more on their site here midomo.co.uk.
BrainPickings is a recent fascination. Each article is a wonderful curation of ideas and different points of view. I just enjoyed the article they posted on Fear and Creativity.
“The empty space is the great horror and stimulant of creation. But there is also something predictable in the way the fear and apathy encountered at the beginning are accountable for feelings of elation at the end. These intensities of the creative process can stimulate desires of consistency and control, but history affirms that few transformative experiences are generated by regularity.”
One of the things that helps that conceptual empty space is finding new and creative things, which is becoming harder and harder to do.
I loved finding this wonderful math and video savant Vihart. Here video on the math of sound is spectacular.
In Africa and other developing regions electricity is not always a guarantee so these bicycle mounted phone chargers from globalcyclesolutions.com are making a big difference. The dynamo isn’t new but this is a new application and it has spawned quite an enterprise. It’s interesting that their two products right now are a mobile phone charger and a Maise Sheller that “Can fill a 90-kg sack of maize in 40 minutes and 10-15 sacks per day”. Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens in context to the world around us, in other words innovation is often quite a local phenomena.
I do feel that local entrepreneurship and innovation are tremendously valuable in the developing world right now and can really help lift up communities.
There is a documentary called “Young World Inventors” on kickstarter right now that is worth supporting that covers inventions and inventors in the developing world.
Make Innovation Labs is a pragmatic pan-national movement to help communities capitalize on technical and social innovations by supporting local community spaces and tools for innovation, fabrication, co-working and project incubation.
There exist numerous locations around the world where people can come and make, learn, and create tools and technology to make their worlds better. Our purpose is to cultivate innovation, open source development, and open organizations and hope to provide some tools and information for connecting these communities and organizations.
We hope to involve hackerspaces, social innovation, and co-working spaces so we can bring together creative and technical talent to help seed these community workshops and support the emergence of each.
We can also bring tools, technology and knowhow together that can help any organization or group develop their practice of innovation and learn how to create a culture of innovation.
Its aims:
to increase local awareness of new and emerging spaces, business models, and local community and institution involvement
to help identify projects that have the potential to create positive social change, revenue or jobs and share them across communities
Please sign up on our google group to keep up with the developments of this idea. Especially those interested in finding locations and communities that are already interested in this concept.
I am currently planning a world tour to introduce this concept to some local communities. If you would like me to visit your town, sign up on the google group and post to it or leave a comment below.
UPDATE:
Since starting the google group we’ve already got some members working on amazing stuff in this co-making, co-innovation type space:
UPDATE:
I will be in Delhi in the next couple of weeks and plan on visiting http://moonlighting.in – and would love to hear from anyone who has worked there or heard of similar spaces.
I have never really been a user of Facebook or Linkedin, but more of a Hostage. I didn’t use them because they made me feel warm inside or helped me kick ass (as Kathy Sierra would say), I used them because everyone else was there. Hostages are a very important type of customer to consider because in many ways they are a hidden variable that can make or break a business. I say a hidden variable because most companies talk about active users as if it is one homogeneous group of active users. The problem with hostages is if they form a large part of your customer/userbase your business is at significant risk as soon as a viable competitor appears as there will be, as they say, a large sucking sound.
A level above hostage would be a User, I’m probably a user of gmail and twitter. These are tools that I continue to use even if viable competitors come out. Users are the bread and butter of most businesses, and would probably be even considered loyal.
Evangelists are the pinnacle of the userbase of any product, the ones that will actively persuade friends and family to use or buy something.
As I think about this there is maybe a fourth kind, someone who actively seeks to make other peoples experience better with product once they are their. It’s different from evangelist, probably less visable, but maybe more important. It’s the person that helps on the messageboards, that provides moral support or even just thoughtful commentary. You might refer to these people as Experts maybe.
Google has made some small announcements recently that I could be an indication of a significant long term shift in how they execute their strategy. Google’s stated mission “to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has been humming along for the last decade or so by organizing and rating content, hence the Page Rank. In other words the page was their basic unit of currency.
Google has been famous for its missteps in the social space and I wonder if that wasn’t because as an institution it valued content more than people. These small changes could signal a cultural change at Google which could be significant especially for many of the measurement companies in the social media space.
It will be very interesting to see if Google will enable people to monitize their equity or value in a similar fashion that it has enabled people to monitize their content.
Traackr has recently posted about the big moves by SalesForce and Google in this space which also provides a little extra colour in this emerging space, namely the acquisition of Radian6 by SalesForce and PostRank by google.
I’m in the process of designing a survey to get an understanding of what people value about certain behaviors on twitter and would love to get some ideas about questions to ask. I have some particular pet peaves and pet preferences that prompted me to think about this question but I’d love to get some input to broaden the conceptual frame I’m working from here.
Here are the behaviors or attributes I value on twitter:
efficiency and brevity: I appreciate both short and long tweets but I marvel at certain levels of information density. I also find inefficiency to be generally annoying, although sometimes amusing.
Clarity and completeness: I like it when a tweet can stand alone, I can read it, I understand the context and even if I missed previous tweets there is some way to track the thread. Good use of the /via and /re help with this. I find tweets that are meaningless and have no context to be a waste of space.
Humor: if a tweet makes me smile or laugh out loud it’s a rare treat
Originality: This is becoming a rare commodity in the social media echo chamber so it is especially important and valuable.
I’d love to hear your ideas of what you value or appreciate and will use it to add to the survey qestions, I will update the blog when I send it out and plan on publishing the results.
Outside innovation is a systematic process for sourcing, evaluating, and driving ideas through to funding and measuring success but it starts with understanding your internal innovation process.
In the State of the Union speech President Obama stressed numerous times that there is a tremendous need in the U.S. for innovation, not just in business but also education. The internet provides tremendous opportunities for all organizations to innovate especially in the ways they can involve customers in the process. This in many ways is a process pioneered by internet companies in various ways and if formalized is often called open, social, or outside innovation.
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The video game industry might have a market that spans the globe, but that’s not to say that the same game will sell in the same form in, say, Germany and Malaysia. There’s a lot that goes into localizing a game for foreign audiences – from translation and rewiring hotkeys, to cultural preferences and visual understanding.
Localization is increasingly becoming the norm as developers and publishers realise that foreign markets do not simply represent an ‘icing on the cake’ bonus to core revenues but can potentially yield major sources of income in their own right.
Broadly speaking, the electronic gaming industry was established in America and re- born in Japan in the ‘80s, and as far as cultural differences go, these two heavy-weights dominate the discussion (as well as the market). Although somewhat oversimplified, the cultural differences of the gaming industry therefore tend to be pitched on an East vs West basis.
Below are a few challenges worth considering when thinking about localization.
Cultural Preferences
Different cultures may have different preferences when it comes to aspects such as story, gameplay and graphics. American games, for instance, have a notoriously hard time attracting the Japanese gaming audience, and vice versa. In Japan gameplay is likely to be more linear, and there’s a tendency for characters to be stylised, cute and cartoon- ish, reflecting the manga and anime styles that are such a big part of Japanese popular culture. In the US and Europe, characters are more likely to be realistic in form and gameplay has tended over recent years toward the open-ended, go-anywhere, ‘sandbox’ style of play.
These are generalizations of course and not applicable in every case. It may also be more trouble than it’s worth to radically alter the structure of a game but visual and stylistic tweaks can sometimes make the game more cross-culturally attractive.
Grand Theft Auto III notably sold 400,000 copies in Japan, an unexpectedly high number, yet this pales in comparison to the 9 million sold in the US and Europe. It may nonetheless point to the fact that cultural differences are becoming more diffused, however Microsoft’s Mike Fischer still thinks “it becomes more and more important to have development that is local and unique to each culture.”
Thought should also be given to aspects such as sex, violence and the portrayal of drug use that may cause offence. The very presence of any such elements, the degrees to which they are present and the way in which they’re portrayed may also have a practical
bearing on legal requirements and age-restrictions that might apply within a certain territory.
Getting the translation right
Once you have the cultural tweaks down, there’s another aspect to consider: language.
Pretty much everything inside and outside the game, from dialogue to menus to the player manual and back-of-the-box blurb must be translated or, in some cases, partially rewritten. Menus and dialogue boxes have fixed dimensions but some scripts or written languages have a tendency to take up more or less space than others. German, for example, has a tendency to use longer words than English and so the same information may sometimes have to be expressed differently. If dialogue is dubbed, this will also have to match the timing of the graphics.
If subtitles are used instead of dubbing this is less of an issue. Subtitling cuts out the necessity for extra voice actors but can detract from the gameplay experience, the preservation of which is after all of paramount important to the localization process. Whichever method is used, quality translation and interpretation is essential and native language speaking professionals should always be used where possible.
There are many challenges involved in localizing video games but the potential benefits make the process more than worth all the effort. And if you’re a game designer, it’s worth taking into account these considerations before you get started with even the brainstorming stage of your game creation process. To ensure that your game has the potential for a global audience, it will help to build these cross-cultural internationalized elements into your game structure and design from the outset, to allow for easy localization further down the track.
About the author Christian Arno is the founder and Managing Director of global translations service Lingo24, specialists in website translation and creative localization. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees across three continents and clients in over sixty countries. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24
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