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18 Innovation Lessons From Steve Jobs

Thomas Oppong — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 18:11:01 +0000

Apple, Inc. continues to set the standard for what a personal computer can be and do. There’s a lot you can learn from Steve Jobs and his innovative leadership style. Jobs’ history in business has contributed much to the symbolic image of the innovative Silicon Valley entrepreneur, emphasizing the importance of design and understanding the important role aesthetics play in public appeal. Steve Jobs has resigned as Apple’s CEO.

These are some of Steve Jobs‘ principles and quotes on business and leadership you can learn from:

There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will.
But good PR educates people. That’s all it is. You can’t con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.
We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off.
I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.
Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.
I thought deeply about this. I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and as we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide, I can’t do that. I’d rather quit.
Innovation requires a team and you cannot inspire evangelists unless you offer a compelling vision….
Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully
It comes down to the very real fact that most customers don’t know what they want in a new product.
We figure out what we want. You can’t go out and ask people ‘what’s the next big thing?
Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.
My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.
The secret to innovation comes from “Saying no to 1,000 things.”
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works.
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better.

Tango Secures $42M To Take On Skype

Thomas Oppong — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:50:17 +0000

Tango, has raised $42 million aimed at rapidly growing its workforce to compete with ooVoo and the industry leader,Skype. Tango has announced that it plans to bring its video calling service to PCs sometime later this summer. The desktop video chat service will be a Windows-only affair, and will remain free of charge and you won’t need to register to get your videophone on.

The Series B funding round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and includes existing investors. It includes $8.7 million raised in a convertible note that was revealed through an SEC filing earlier this year. With the latest round, Tango has raised a total of $47 million since being founded just 18 months ago.The round also gives it extra cash to extend its video chat app beyond just mobile devices, to reach some 1.5 billion potential desktop users.

“We have an incredible opportunity ahead of us and we are growing at an unprecedented rate,” said Uri Raz, cofounder and CEO of Tango. “There are 1.5 billion PCs in use worldwide and 95 percent of the world’s computers run Windows. With this launch, we are well positioned to reach our goal of 100 million customers by this time next year.”

Tango launched with a mobile focus but is gearing up to start working on PCs.It currently has about 18 million users on mobile devices. The new app will mirror its existing mobile apps both in form and function, allowing users to be simultaneously logged into their accounts through multiple devices.

NVIDIA 3D Vision Video Now Available On YouTube

Thomas Oppong — Fri, 27 May 2011 22:19:45 +0000

NVIDIA has announced that YouTube is for the first time giving users the ability to view thousands of 3D videos in rich, high-quality stereoscopic 3D on their NVIDIA® 3D Vision™ PCs and notebooks when using the latest version of the Mozilla Firefox Web browser.

“We’re excited to introduce HTML5 and WebM support to the thousands of 3D videos available on YouTube,” said Jonathan Huang, 3D Product Manager at YouTube. ”By embracing these open standards, NVIDIA 3D Vision users now have a great way of experiencing YouTube’s library of 3D content.”

“Firefox with 3D Vision creates a stunning and smooth 3D video experience using HTML5 video based on open standards,” said Jay Sullivan, VP of Products at Mozilla. “3D Vision from NVIDIA is a great example of the rich, innovative experiences that are being built on top of the speed and graphics power that Firefox delivers to the Web.”

To view YouTube stereoscopic 3D videos an NVIDIA 3D Vision-equipped PC or notebook and the latest NVIDIA GeForce® drivers (version 275 or above) are required, as well as Firefox (version 4 or above), which includes support for HTML5 video streaming. Users will also need to select the HTML5 viewing option when viewing a YouTube 3D video: http://www.youtube.com/select_3d_mode.

To further showcase the new YouTube stereoscopic 3D video streaming capabilities and some of the latest professional and user-generated 3D YouTube videos, NVIDIA is now hosting the top YouTube stereoscopic 3D videos on its 3D web community site at www.3DVisionLive.com/YT3D

Chatbox Brings Project Collaboration Features To Dropbox

Thomas Oppong — Wed, 18 May 2011 22:09:14 +0000

Chatbox makes it easy to discuss or comment on files shared over Dropbox. Install it, right click on any files / folders inside Dropbox, and start conversations with people you shared the Dropbox folder with.

Use it for commenting and annotating files OR for simple project collaboration in folders with relevant files inside!

It works offline and syncs whenever you’re next online.
Chatbox stores everything inside Dropbox. You don’t need to register another account.
It is FREE! It is simple and it just works!

Shared folders form the containers for projects and chats can then occur around the project itself or files within the folder, making it handy for discussing a project with many files — such as a development project.

ooVoo Launches Free 3-way Video Calling

Thomas Oppong — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:03:34 +0000

ooVoo one of the largest video calling service in the world with 24 million users, officially launched free 3-way video calling for users to connect with family, friends and colleagues from smartphones, PCs and Macs. This “always free” service for up to three users was announced following a successful promotion that expanded the service from free 2-way calling capability.

ooVoo provides a cloud-based communication service to more than 24 million users worldwide.

“We listened closely to ooVoo users who have been asking for free expanded multi-point capability,” said Philippe Schwartz, CEO of ooVoo. “ooVoo continues to raise the bar in the fast-growing video chat category as we create competitive advantages over Skype that will bring more satisfied users to video calling powered by ooVoo.”

In December, ooVoo launched the first 4G mobile video chat service that allows 6-way video chat without compromising call quality.

This service works over Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G to simultaneously connect smartphone, PC and Mac users.

Amazon Launches Amazon Cloud Drive And Amazon Cloud Player

Thomas Oppong — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 15:28:10 +0000

Amazon.com Inc. wants to be more than a destination for shopping online. The online retailer launched two offerings late Monday: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player.

Amazon Cloud Drive lets you upload and store files such as music, videos and photos on Amazon’s servers, which you can get to from a Web browser on a Mac or PC.

Amazon Cloud Player lets you play songs you’ve uploaded on your computer or on a smartphone that runs Google’s Android operating software.

While Amazon will charge for the Cloud Drive service, it’s offering anyone with an Amazon account 5 gigabytes of free storage. That’s less space than you’d get on the smallest iPod Touch, but it’s a move that’s likely to woo plenty of users who might later decide to pay for more storage space.

The company also wants to sell cloud storage. If your tunes and videos take up more space than the 5 GB Amazon is giving out, you can pay an annual storage fee to use Cloud Drive: The use of 20 GB of storage, for example, will cost $20 (and this includes the 5 free GB). For an undisclosed period of time, however, Amazon is offering 20 GB of free storage to those who buy a digital album from its Amazon MP3 store.

A New ‘Collaborative’ Angry Birds Is Coming To Facebook

Thomas Oppong — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 11:10:55 +0000

Angry Birds does not cease to amaze and expand, the game has already recorded 75m downloads and it is yet to hit the biggest platform for social games. Rovio and his team have grown the company to huge franchise. The game is set to fly to Facebook where you belong later this year.

The version for Facebook features “completely new aspects to it that just haven’t been experienced in any other platform,” according to Rovio head Mikael Hed. He also confirmed that due to the social site’s ‘collaborative nature’, “the pigs will have a more prominent role”.

The studio is launching Angry Birds Rio in a matter of days, which is a tie-in with a Fox movie and swaps the villainous pigs for monkeys seen in the film.

“We’re building an integrated entertainment franchise where merchandising, games, movies, TV, cartoons and comics all come together,” said Vesterbacka.

The firm also says it will probably launch its next game – it’s 53rd – next year. In the meantime “we are building our infrastructure with Angry Birds,” said Vesterbacka. “So we have the distribution, the marketing, everything in place, so that we can basically take any IP and drop it in. And we have the capability of producing the games on all the platforms – smartphone, consoles, PCs, Mac, online, Facebook – you name it. Then the TV, the movie side, it will happen when the time is right.”

Genieo: A Newspaper Styled Homepage Now Available For Mac Users

Thomas Oppong — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:44:12 +0000

Genieo today announced at the 27th annual Macworld 2011 its free personalized home page service is now available for Mac users. Genieo debuted last year at DEMO 2010, and has been widely adopted and enjoyed by PC users who sought to be more productive online.

Genieo learns your interests through online behavior and then combs social and news feeds for what’s relevant to you at any moment, such as blogs, videos, articles, Facebook status updates, tweets, Quora topics and breaking news.

Genieo keeps track of where you go and what you read on the Web, and then creates a newsy home page with stories you’ll actually want to see.

How does Genieo differ from other personalized homepages?

Genieo is self operating and does not require the user to specify any input as to his interests or requests. It automatically studies your interests, explores, filters and presents the information specifically relevant to you, on your Homepage. In addition, Genieo is a desktop application.

As such, its entire mapping and profiling process is performed solely on your computer – unlike other personalized homepages, which require interaction with web servers. This means your private data is always maintained on your own computer and is not registered or shared anywhere on the web

FSMS: Free SMS Messages To Any South African Network

Thomas Oppong — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:57:16 +0000

FSMS is beleived to be South Africa’s only free two-way SMS service. FSMS was launched in June 2010 and it already receives two million page views a month. FSMS boast of over 35 000 users who send and receive text messages at no cost from their PCs and cell phones. Over 1 million SMSs have been sent since inception with an average of 25 000 SMSs sent daily. The service is in the process of rolling out mobile applications, starting with the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry platforms.

How it works

Enter the required details in the registration form and send
You will receive a validation code via SMS on your cellphone.
Enter the code when asked and you’ll have access to 20 free SMSes per day to any network.
You can then either access the website on your PC or on your cellphone via WAP.

The service is sponsored by advertising, both on the website and short demographically targeted ads on the bottom of theSMS sent out. Technology investment company World of Avatar has bought a 50% stake in the company.

Soluto Wins TechCrunch Disrupt 2010

Thomas Oppong — Thu, 27 May 2010 16:31:45 +0000

Techrcunch Discrupt 2010 saw 20 startup presentations. The list was screened further to five finalists: Betterment, MOVIECLIPS, Publish2, Soluto And UJAM. . Competing startups had five minutes to explain their business and why it rocks to the audience and judges. And then they had to defend themselves on stage for ten more minutes each.

Soluto picked the $50,000 as the winner of techcrunch Disrupt 2010. Soluto monitors your PC to find the things that are likely most annoying to users. For example, it tracks down printing problems, crashy apps, resource hogs — all the good stuff. It also offers up solutions for how you can fix your computer issues. And the data they’re (anonymously) collecting about PC problems should be useful across a range of industries and services.