Products should be designed to get the job done

I read an article from Harvard Business Review about Marketing Malpractice. In article they say that thirty thousand new consumer products are launched each year. But over 90% of them fail. Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt used to tell his students, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!".

Thing is marketers often solve the wrong problems, improving their products in ways that are irrelevant to their customers' needs. In my Superior EPG for Connected TVs (I need some name for that...) idea I simply try to solve customers problem choosing what channel to watch when he/she turns on TV. And that's it. Nothing more. But do it in superior way that hasn't been possible before connected TVs. So probably my service won't include social media connectivity, deep search functions, mobile app integration etc. because those are irrelevant to job I'm trying to solve and just make service bloated and more difficult to use.

So I think it's very important to remember products should be designed to do some particular job. To make people's lives easier. And when adding new features you should ask are those features really helping to do this job or actually just making things more difficult.

Business Model Canvas for my idea

Based on the concepts found from Alexander Osterwalder's book Business Model Generation we were supposed to develop a business model canvas for our ideas. So here's business model canvas for my Superior EPG for Connected TVs idea.

(Click on picture to see it larger)

Some further things we were supposed to consider.

Is there growth potential in the field you are in?

• Whatever people are saying TV watching is all-time high. So TV is far from dead. Truth is it's much more fragmented nowadays because we have more channels.
• Connected TVs are now niche but 2015 most TVs sold will be connected.

Is there $$ involved? Are your future competitors making money?

• There's lots of money involved if it's possible become THE PLACE where people first go when they turn on their TVs.

What is the consumer need for the service and how big is your potential market?

• Consumer need is to have the best and easiest to use EPG on the planet. Potential market is all people who own connected TVs.

Another media service idea - EPG that doesn't suck for connected TVs.

Generally EPGs (Electronic Program Guides) suck in televisions. Those are landmark of bad engineer driven user interface design. Why we can't have have great looking visual EPG with information, pictures and videos about TV programs? One reason is that with current technology it's been impossible to transfer anything else than TV programs name, short information and schedule data to EPG. Bad UI design is to blame the TV manufacturers.

Now we're seeing first phase of connected TVs in market. Samsung, Sony, LG and Google all have TV-sets/set top boxes available with internet connection and app framework. So theoretically anyone can create apps for these televisions. By 2015 almost every television sold will be connected.

What if we build superior EPG app for connected televisions? It must be very simple and it's only purpose is to show quickly and visually what's coming at the moment/next from different TV channels. Of course you could also look forward and backward for a week but it'd be targeted especially to what's coming now (+-2 hours) so it could be made visually very attractive.

Even traditional television is nowadays more complex with new channels coming almost monthly. Often when I sit down and turn on TV I have no idea what I'll watch and try to look something interesting from EPG. So If we could make superior EPG that people prefer over television's own text based and boring one it could become huge advertising medium and so on business.

My media service idea - refined

As an pre-assigment for MediaBizLab we had to generate some media service ideas. Now after first lecture we were ordered to refine our ideas. I decided to continue with my advanced web grocery store idea. I call it now grocery shopping 2.0. Main motivator for me is that everyone has to eat (except zombies), I hate shopping and therefore I'm big fan of web shopping. So here's my refined idea as SlideShare slides.

Manual of Me

In first MediaBizLab lecture we had to analyze ourselves based on Foursight analysis technique. My result was that I'm driver. Means I'm high ideator & high developer. So here are some points you should know when working with me.

• I usually have lots of ideas and if I get excited about some idea I might feel little bit aggressive to other people because I put so much energy to implementing it quickly. Just remind me that maybe we should think little bit deeper and I'll calm down. And I really value all opinions :)
• If you're more clarifier or developer I really need you because you slow me down and focus better on right problems and select what ideas we should really push forward.
• Clarifiers! If you need some implementing horsepower maybe I'm the right guy for your group.

I promise to remember my strengths and weaknesses to make most out of group work. And yes all the skills are really needed to make breakthrough innovations. Point taken.

Experimenting with Adobe Muse

As a part of MediaBizLab studies I'm participating to Tools of Digital Media -course where we have to do some exercises with Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Final Cut Pro. Our first exercise was to build website where we can host all our other exercises. We were supposed to use Dreamweaver for that. I'm not a coder (although I've done some webpages by hand in the beginning of 2000) and maybe because of that Dreamweaver has always felt awfully complex piece of software for me.

I read from Adobe Muse and realized it's freely available for beta testing. So I grabbed my copy and started to experiment. I have to say I feel very positive about the software. I understand it's restricted at the moment for simple websites without content management systems and maybe the code it creates is little bit long and not so clear but it seems to be valid and working. There's definitely still need for real web developers with coding skill but for some small businesses, personal home pages, prototyping etc. Adobe Muse is awesome!

You can find the page (only in Finnish) I did as an course exercise with Adobe Muse here.

Pre-assignment for MediaBizLab

So like I posted earlier this academic year I'll be doing MediaBizLab minor studies program. It's about to begin next friday (23th of September) and we had to generate some media service ideas as an pre-assignment. So here's mine.

1) Advanced Web Grocery Store (with open API)

With some limitations it's been possible to order food from web and get it brought home. I'm super bad/lazy cook and even if I found recipe I like, I find it painful to find all the ingredients from market. I would any day pay for the service where I could choose food I'd like to cook this evening and with one click get all the ingredients brought to my home few hours later. I think Kesko or S-ketju should build database (I guess they already have some kind for inner use) for all the foods etc. they have in their each individual market and create open API that 3rd party developers can access and build services on top of that. Of course they should build their own web grocery store also but API would let many recipe sites, courier companies etc. build different services on top of that. Everyone benefits. I'm sure there's market for this. Everyone has to eat :)

2) Final Cut Pro X Freebies

Apple Final Cut Pro X is an video editing program that was launched this June. It should narrow the gap between professionals and amateurs because it's easy to use interface. Final Cut Pro X has never before seen possibilities for different kind of effect templates, graphic templates, storyline templates etc.. And people are creating lots of these templates at the moment because it's so easy and fun. Nowadays more and more companies & individuals are creating video for different kind of purposes and any help they can get from professional created templates is valued. At the moment free templates people have made are all over the internet and it's very hard to find the good ones. So I'd like to create ad-driven website called fcpxfreebies.com where I gather best of the best templates with clear descriptions, pictures and videos. Actually I've already registered fcpxfreebies.com domain but it might be I'll never have enough time to put it up. Previous version of Final Cut Pro has over two million users (probably more to come with Final Cut Pro X) so there should be some kind of market for this.

3) "I want to be in silence" -service

People want and need silence to be healthy physically and mentally. It might be difficult in todays technological landscape where you're interrupted constantly. I'd like to make service that integrates with phone, email, Facebook, Twitter etc. and informs people that I won't be available for next X hours/days and puts some nice quote there telling people how good it's for your health not to be always available. Someone said "killing your account in Facebook" is todays "I don't have television". I think not being available/being in silence can easily become trend. I think it's already for down shifters. Maybe the service itself is not bringing money but all the other things you can link to this thing (books, seminars, courses…) can easily be monetized.