The technology sphere has been trying desperately for years to make the barcode a consumer necessity. Only problem it, nobody’s fully thought this through…

A notable attempt to put barcode technologies into the hands of consumers was the ill-fated CueCat, which assumed that people would find an advertisement so compelling that they would take their magazine or newspaper to their computer, initiate the dialing sequence of the modem, scan a barcode, and then watch as some type of advertising loaded over their 56K.

Eh, maybe not CueCat, a decade ahead of schedule.

More recently, every year is “the year”, when barcode scanners will be universal on mobile phones and everything will be tagged, marked, and hyperlinked to some overlay on the physical world.

Imagine it, Paris tourist destinations hyperlinked to their Wikipedia entries, street signs linked to traffic reports, and Christmas cards linked to your Facebook accounts. The technology exists to make pretty much any camera-phone do this without all the painful waiting of yesteryear, so let’s jump on it!

There’s only one problem folks, and it’s not about adoption or competing standards or any argument commonly put forth. The problem is the barcode itself.

Barcodes are designed to encapsulate information in the smallest amount of space possible, while still being usable. All barcodes work off some type of mapping of image (pixel) content through an algorithm, which then decodes it to relevant information. If you’re curious, here’s an awesome overview of the competing barcode standards, which I recommend you visit!

Barcodes are built to minimize the space they take up, and be machine readable. Let’s remember our history here: barcodes are designed to be machine readable, first and foremost. This is great, for machines.

What’s not so great is when a human tries to read a barcode. They are pretty much universally indecipherable and give no clue as to what content they contain. They could contain a link to http://pbskids.org, or http://somethingawful.com . You’d never know by looking at it.

So why not just print the URL next to the barcode? That would work in theory, except that you’d have no proof that the printed barcode and printed URL had anything to do with each other. You could still have a clean printed URL and a naughty destination.

As we are increasingly absorbing information from the ambient environment, we are beginning to place a pretty high level of “trust” in what’s there.

With no way to know where a barcode would be “headed” or what type of content your reading device would be receiving, you could do a pretty good job of culture jamming, spoofing, phishing, or otherwise generally raising mayhem by simply using a sticker to cover the intended barcode. Clever hackers could potentially “fill in” existing barcodes with a sharpie, then buy the new nonsense URL, and carry on their merry way. How is the unsuspecting Paris tourist to know that QRCode on the Eiffel Tower shouldn’t  lead to an ad for a Paris strip-club?

Because there’s no human-readable aspect of the barcode, they can’t really be trusted.

In order to remedy the problem, a human-readable text would need to be included in the barcode. This text could be quickly verified by the human, then incorporated as part of the validation code within the machine logic. If the printed URL doesn’t match the destination, don’t decrypt. Then the problem becomes that you’ve made a barcode… not really a barcode.

Are you going to eat the apple, even if you don’t know what it does?

With the speaking panels officially released for SXSW 2010, I can finally tell everyone the news about my invitation to speak at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas!

Though I probably won’t draw the crowd that Nina Hartley ("Porn Star, Sex Educator, Social Networker") will draw with her talk, or match the new hotness of Avner Roven’s talk about Boxee, I know an interested group will want come to my talk and learn about Dangerous Curves: Hockey Sticks, Swine Flu And More.

And what are these dangerous curves? Well perhaps I’ll just quote Josh Shepherd, who’s quoting me talking about my talk:

Public Enemy first instructed us all….”Don’t believe the hype!”  That’s a hard thing to do in these times.  When everything around us is about hype, how does one distinguish between the trends?   There are subtle signs of growth and decline in anything.  Learning how to catch all those signs may determine the future of your business be it iPhone App. designer, kindergarten teacher, entrepreneur, or lawyer.  That’s where Rolf Skyberg’s SXSW 2010 presentation, Dangerous Curves: Hockey Sticks, Swine Flu and More, comes in.

“There are lies, damn lies, and statistics,” Skyberg said. “Correlation does not imply causation. Hopefully people will walk out of my talk thinking differently about some of the patterns they see. Is it really exponential growth? Where is this trend in its hype cycle? Should I walk away, or should I run? Are we “storming”, “norming” or “performing”? I hope to give people new tools with which to interpret what they see happening around them.”

This SXSW presentation is [part of] Skyberg’s continuing look at trends in the marketplace and learning how to correctly identify the trends.  Once those trends are figured out, it’s time to use that as an advantage.

That’s right kids, my talk will be filled with stuff that makes you go, “huh, I could use that”, and walk away thinking.

So come join me at SXSW for learning and lounging, and maybe you’ll learn to walk away, and when to run.

 

See you there,
-Rolfsky

As a presenter in the area of innovation, I often get asked about the “secret” of innovation, commonly phrased as requests for “tips or strategy”. Sadly, there are no silver bullets.

Instead, I usually deflect this comment by helping the audience understand innovators and innovation:

• an innovator is an advocate for the possible
• innovation is seeing the possible, and doing something about it

Scott Berkun has posted a well-thought (if a bit Santa-destroying-emperor-has-no-clothes style) article regarding the “secret of innovation secrets”. Similar to my belief, Scott mentions that it’s not simply enough to see possibility where connections haven’t been recognized before, you also need to be successful in DOING something about the new connections.

A section from his post: (edited, with emphasis added)

… the most misleading thing in much research on “how to innovate”, … is the focus on creativity as the bottleneck. Inquisitiveness, sparks of insight, and creative talent is the focus of much writing on innovation, [but] it’s far from the whole story. … ideas are cheap. … finding successful people who … are willing to do the legwork to convince others of the merits of something that doesn’t exist yet… , that’s the challenge.

If there’s any secret to be derived from Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, … [it] is the diversity of talents they had to posses, or acquire, to overcome the wide range of challenges in converting their ideas into successful businesses.

In this sense, an innovator is part scientist, technologist, part project manager, and part salesperson. If we were setting up a role-playing character, the best innovator would of course have +10 to intelligence and +10 dexterity, but also +10 to charisma and +10 to stamina.

Successful innovators successfully challenge the norm, and innovative companies repeatedly define new business opportunities by making happen what other companies don’t believe is possible. The work is what you have to do in-between your idea and reality. The real secret of innovation is how to find/attract/mold/educate individuals capable of that work. Is it possible? That remains to be seen.

What we do know to be possible is that companies can be taught (with the right executive support) to understand and support innovation so that it is successful. How do you do that? Well… that’s a secret.

Every unpleasant activity is an opportunity for you to make money, build a name for yourself, and get ahead. How? Become a professional toilet scrubber.

Admit it, you hate scrubbing toilets. No, seriously you do. Why? Because it’s icky, because it’s time consuming, because it never really works right, and because you could pay someone else to do it for you.

The opportunity here lies in doing things for other people that they don’t want to to themselves. Does that mean you’ll have to do icky things? Well… scrubbing toilets isn’t as bad as you think.

There are a few reasons why any task is “icky”, which all really boil down to a few elements:

1. uncertainty
2. repeatability
3. return on investment

You can apply this pattern to any other undesirable task you like, say, painting your house. It’s easier to pay someone else to paint your house, because you don’t have to be uncertain about the outcome, it gets done every time you spend the money, and you haven’t spent a bunch of unnecessary time and money learning a bunch of skills and buying specialized tools, for something you’ll only do once every 10 years.

The professional house-painter and toilet-scrubber have a few things working towards their advantage:

1. they know how long this takes
   Humans hate not knowing, it screws up their whole day, week, year. Professionals have done this many times, and can finish the job while still making it to yoga class without breaking a sweat.
2. they’ve got the skills to pay the bills
   They’ve done this before, many times and they know how to get the best result. Practice does make perfect and they’ve had a lot of practice. No wasted effort or doing it twice here. Their minds are also filled with esoteric knowledge you only get with experience.
3. they’ve got state of the art tools
   You don’t even know what the art is, let alone the best tools for it. Professionals do, because they rely on their tools and skills everyday. They are optimized for this task at hand and it makes sense to buy that $100 paintbrush if you’re going to be using it every day.

So how to you get rich scrubbing toilets? Pick a task, and get really good at it. The more loathsome, boring, tedious, heinous, disgusting or foul the task, the better. The more equipment, time, or experience required to complete the task well, the better. The fewer people already providing this task, the better. The more people who have this problem daily, the better. The more emotionally sensitive the task, the more irrationally people look at the task, the better.

So find your toilet, love your toilet, own it, dominate it, master the skills, buy the tools. Then when someone groans about that nasty thing, leap to the cause and say, “I’ll scrub your toilet… for $10.”

One of the design practices I employ is to assume I am working for evil rather than good.

I sit down and I ask myself, “what if I really wanted this to fail, how would I sabotage it?”

There’s many ways you can intentionally wreak havoc on a project:

• pollute data sources with useless keywords
• bury the search results
• deliberately create poor documentation for your successor
• make help text nearly invisible
• create inconsistent, unfathomable options
• do nothing while I see problems arise
• make it impossible for users to give you feedback

Thinking like this gives me the vision of an outsider, a skeptic even perhaps. It works because the skeptic’s viewpoint isn’t clouded by all the justifications you’ve made for inconsistencies that leaked into the final product.

Design is a conscious action, where these pieces have been designed via inaction.

Individually, these unintentional results aren’t exactly evil, but merely middle-of-the-road annoying or too-hard-to-fix-right-now. The big problem here is when a choice made by inaction or inattention results in the same decision as if the choice were made to maximize maliciousness.

If “doing nothing” results in the same as “being evil”, you’d better do something.

You can apply this to anything in your life – from your next PowerPoint, to your current relationship:

• “if I were stupid/ignorant/unprofessional, how would I design this slide?” <—OK, don’t do any of those things.
• “if I wanted her to think I was ignoring her, how I would achieve that?” <—OK, you’d better say something to her or buy some flowers.
• “if I wanted it to look like I didn’t care about this job, what would I do?” <—probably time to break out the razor, put on a belt, and polish the shoes.

In all the cases above, there’s nothing wrong with the way that you were doing it before, but you may be giving the inadvertent impression that you are lazy, stupid, or even actively sabotaging the success of your project.

A proactive way to look at this is to ask yourself, “if I were a saboteur, where would I attack this for the greatest impact?” Whatever you come up with are the top things you should be making sure don’t happen.