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Written by Tom Powell: MBA student at Duke; Abnormal interest in innovative applications of technology, design, outside innovation, crowdsourcing, and social computing. tom@coinnovative.com
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Nov
23
How Mophie got help from users in designing new iPod accessories
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These guys have done some amazing iPod accessory design work. Mophie (now owned by mStation) also put into practice a concept I have been noodling over for a while now: involving end users in an interative design and voting process to produce innovative, niche products. They first rolled out an early form of what they call their Illuminator process at Macworld 2007. As they put it:
In less than four hours MacWorld attendees doodled over 100 concepts. Over the next three days the community and [chose] three that became actual prototypes at the show.
As I have said before involving users in the design process is not the answer to everything and when done incorrectly can have the potential to churn out total crap that no one wants. But when you take in all of the successful developments over the last year, the possibilities and power of something like this emerge:
- The maturation of online social tools
- Improving online collaboration technology
- Do it yourself product design, build, and/or sell companies such as Ponoko, Big Blue Saw, eMachineShop, Instructables, Crowdspirit, and Mophie.
- Successful crowdsourcing efforts such as A Swarm Of Angels, Crowdspirit, Dell IdeaStorm, Sell A Band, and Threadless.
My prediction: we will see more of this. And someone is going to figure out an awesome way to do it and bring all of these pieces together. .
Nov
12
A lot of activity lately around gadget and laptop personalization. Zune will be launching a service
tomorrow allowing customers to buy their Zune with a laser etched design on the back and a few lines of text. There are only a limited number of designs available from well known artists.
Not a laser, but related: You can buy iPhone skins of colorful designs from DecalGir.
Recently, Etchstar launched. This service has some similarity to the model I am working on with my little side project Etch Connection — which has stalled horribly since starting b-school. I had spoken to a guy over at Etchstar (previously iStyleCustom) about my providing consumer generated designs for use by his laser etching service, but they have gone off and created their own supply of designs. Their approach looks pretty slick: they are an authorized Apple seller and therefore, you can order your new Macbook or ipod from them and choose one of their designs to be etched. Or you can mail it in, which I would imagine is not a terribly popular choice. Or you can go to their LA location and get it done. Designers will soon be able to submit their own designs as well.
With Etch Connection, I am hoping to provide a centralized, service-provider-agnostic source of designs which have been submitted by anyone. At this point, if you live in New York or Boston, you don’t have much to work with in terms of designs unless you know some artist types or are one yourself. That’s where Etch Connection should come it.
If I ever launch it, that is.
