The more, the better. That is the fashionable recipe for nurturing new ideas these days. It emphasizes a kind of Internet-era egalitarianism that celebrates the “wisdom of the crowd” and “open innovation.” Assemble all the contributions in the digital suggestion box, we’re told in books and academic research, and the result will be collective intelligence.

Yet Apple, a creativity factory meticulously built by Steven P. Jobs since he returned to the company in 1997, suggests another innovation formula - one more elitist and individual.

This approach is reflected in the company’s latest potentially game-changing gadget, the iPad tablet, unveiled last week. It may succeed or stumble but it clearly carries the taste and perspective of Mr. Jobs and seems stamped by the company’s earlier marketing motto: Think Different.

Apple represents the “auteur model of innovation,” observes John Kao, a consultant to corporations and governments on innovation. In the auteur model, he said, there is a tight connection between the personality of the project leader and what is created. Movies created by powerful directors, he says, are clear examples, from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” to James Cameron’s “Avatar.”

At Apple, there is a similar link between the ultimate design-team leader, Mr. Jobs, and the products. From computers to smartphones, Apple products are known for being stylish, powerful and pleasing to use. They are edited products that cut through complexity, by consciously leaving things out - not cramming every feature that came into an engineer’s head, an affliction known as “featuritis” that burdens so many technology products.

“A defining quality of Apple has been design restraint,” says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and consultant in Silicon Valley.

That restraint is evident in Mr. Jobs’s personal taste. His black turtleneck, beltless blue jeans and running shoes are a signature look. In his Palo Alto home years ago, he said that he preferred uncluttered, spare interiors and then explained the elegant craftsmanship of the simple wooden chairs in his living room, made by George Nakashima, the 20th-century furniture designer and father of the American craft movement.

Great products, according to Mr. Jobs, are triumphs of “taste.” And taste, he explains, is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and present, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.”

His is not a product-design philosophy steered by committee or determined by market research. The Jobs formula, say colleagues, relies heavily on tenacity, patience, belief and instinct. He gets deeply involved in hardware and software design choices, which await his personal nod or veto. Mr. Jobs, of course, is one member of a large team at Apple, even if he is the leader. Indeed, he has often described his role as a team leader. In choosing key members of his team, he looks for the multiplier factor of excellence. Truly outstanding designers, engineers and managers, he says, are not just 10 percent, 20 percent or 30 percent better than merely very good ones, but 10 times better. Their contributions, he adds, are the raw material of “aha” products, which make users rethink their notions of, say, a music player or cellphone.

“Real innovation in technology involves a leap ahead, anticipating needs that no one really knew they had and then delivering capabilities that redefine product categories,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “That’s what Steve Jobs has done.”

Timing is essential to make such big steps ahead. Carver Mead, a leading computer scientist at the California Institute of Technology, once said, “Listen to the technology; find out what it’s telling you.”

Mr. Jobs is undeniably a gifted marketer and showman, but he is also a skilled listener to the technology. He calls this “tracking vectors in technology over time,” to judge when an intriguing innovation is ready for the marketplace. Technical progress, affordable pricing and consumer demand all must jell to produce a blockbuster product.

Indeed, Apple designers and engineers have been working on the iPad for years, presenting Mr. Jobs with prototypes periodically. None passed muster, until recently.

The iPad bet could prove a loser for Apple. Some skeptics see it occupying an uncertain ground between an iPod and a notebook computer, and a pricey gadget as well, at $499 to $829. Do recall, though, that when the iPod was introduced in 2001, critics joked that the name was an acronym for “idiots price our devices.” And we know who had the last laugh that time.

Blogging is almost the grandfather of social media. There are millions of blogs and bloggers worldwide, some read by millions, others by only a few.But, done properly, blogs can be a very important part of social media marketing for small businesses. Here’s why:

Convey your brand personality - even the best websites can be a bit dull. The best way to spice up your site is to include a blog. Here you can be more informal and get across your personality and the personality of your brand.

Demonstrate your knowledge, experience or expertise - blogging is a great way to demonstrate that you know what you are talking about. By going into greater depth on a subject you will engage with your visitors and demonstrate your knowledge

Make your website feel alive and up to date - static business websites can often feel as though they are ignored and are rarely updated. A blog will give regular, dynamic content that is changing on a frequent basis.

Give your customers added value - by blogging regularly, you can give visitors yet another reason to come back and visit your site, especially if you are using RSS or Twitter to send out updates about your recent posts
Help with search engine optimisation - a blog is a great way to build extra visibility with the search engines. Make sure your content is relevant and includes plenty of your popular search keywords.

Give visitors a reason to buy - whilst your website will give visitors lots of information about your products or services, your blog will offer a way for you to demonstrate why they are important or valuable. This could be through tips, guidance or possibly even case studies.

Become a thought leader - by blogging on a regular basis, you will build up a following in your industry and this will improve your recognition and publicity far and beyond your traditional customer base.

Valuable content for other social media channels - with so many social media networks out there, the challenge is often knowing exactly what content to share. Having regular blog posts provides a vast array of new, fresh content that you can tweet or share to your heart’s content!

Show you care - the time and effort that you dedicate to blogging will show to your website visitors that you really care about this business and are happy to go that extra mile

Embrace the blogosphere - blogging isn’t the end of the matter. If you are really going to make a blogging strategy successful, you need to be out there in the blogosphere commenting on other blogs and joining in the conversation. If you do this, your blog will be better known and your traffic will really start to grow.
By Social Small Biz on November 29, 2009

Apple’s new iPad at first might look like a bigger version of the iPhone although it has the capabilities to change the way publishers sell content and help package goods. As a multimedia tablet it supports not only textbooks but also video, audio and whole heap of applications, 140,000 o of which are out already. Best of all you can pick one up for as little as $499. So how will this effect the media market?

1. Paid content gets more attractive. Suddenly major publishers will have the opportunity to sell their content on a subscription basis, bundled into your monthly iPad contract. A bit like Spotifyselling music on their platform. You have the option to buy advertisement funded content or if you want it uninterrupted just subscribe.

2. Social Media subscription. Suddenly we will have social networking application which be designed for Apple iPad only. What are the advantages? Firstly you have a big enough screen to navigagte easily. It will help form a niche social network which will work like real social networking events. It will work online when you are away (via video chat perhaps?) and will require you to hold up the iPad in your hand when you are physically networking to identify the members. Great example of online meets offline.

3. News readers. Apple iPad will become the preferred gadget for news readers on your television. They will ditch their bulky laptops and embrace the iPad. This will happen sooner than you think!

4. Video game market. More video games will be released on a 12/18 months contract basis. Games as a Service (GaaS). This will bring the prices down and distribute the cost to a affordable monthly payment. Making game publishers a recurring revenue and boosting sales by making it affordable.

5. iTunes will be your digital subscription Walmart. If you haven’t still realised iTunes now sells anything from video, music, applications, e-Books and games. More so it will become the one stop shop to buy anything digital, whether it’s news, jokes, video games, social networking etc. In essence like your local Walmart store.

6. Movie premier on iPad. As iPad becomes popular there will be movies which will be released on it before they hit DVDs. It’s already happening to an extent on iTunes but now the tablet has given us a reason, especially for people who spend a awful amount of time commuting everyday.

7. iPad ready websites. Soon we will have wesbites compatible with the ipad i.e. they will render the experience to fit your iPad. A bit like iPhone/iTouch websites (example Facebook iPhone). These will provide new opportunities for web developers and publishers, providing a new range of rich media pages and e-commerce transactions. iPad-commerce?

In conclusion, these 7 changes are only the tip of the iceberg. We will see a wide variety of innovative products and services on the iPad. The mobility, screen size and mainly the prize have really made this an exciting opportunity for publishers and consumers.

Let’s now fast forward to those students who are part way through their degree and will be looking to start work in a year or two years time……

Do you have 1 or 2 years left on your degree? Now is the time to be thinking of your career!

Key is the consideration is that the jobs market is highly competitive, so you need to be able to stand out. How do you stand out as a graduate? Yes of course, the institution you study at and the grade you attain help recruiters assess your ability but there is a lot more you can do.

First up, have you considered internship? During those long summer vacations, why not work for a games company for 3 months and gain a real insight into working life. EA Internships place you on a live game team and hence give you really meaningful work on a game that will ship to millions of people…plus you get paid and most importantly you get you name into the game credits. You will also gain some vital contacts and build your network. If you are good you may even get a job offer for when you graduate.

Now imagine if you are the recruiter and you get a selection of cv’s. All are similar ie they come from great Universities and have strong grades but one cv has the added value of an internship. Which would you prioritise for interview?

Two young brothers turn their school math lessons into an iPhone app

One of the positive sides of a weak economy and the resultant lack of jobs is the huge increase in people starting their own businesses and following their dreams. One of the interesting ways to do this, can be in the form of your very own Apple App development. We’ve always thought that you need to be a real techy to understand how to build an app and thought that it was beyond our horizon as a result. We were very pleased to read the article below, written by Alexandra Cheney for inc.com. Looks like it’s not just tech guys who get to do this…

Owen Voorhees may seem to be an unlikely tech entrepreneur, because he’s just 11. But for the past nine months, he climbed a mountain of self and parental doubt, overcame unfamiliar programming languages, and pored over college-level computer science textbooks…all to develop his own iPhone application. Last month, his app, MathTime, debuted in the App Store and quickly rose to No. 13 in the paid, educational apps section.

The premise of MathTime is simple: It takes the old-fashioned flash-card “mad minute” drill idea and adds a new-media twist. Players can practice addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division on the phone by quickly solving problems with two taps of the phone: one to show the problem, one to display the answer.

“I thought it would be cool,” says the Hinsdale, Illinois, native. “It’s really cool to make something work, to make a little money, to do something like this and see it up” on the App Store.

After Owen established the basic premise of the game, his 9-year-old brother, Finn, designed the mathematical symbols in Photoshop. Once the design was done, the boys pitched the program to Apple.

“Nothing’s impossible if you don’t know it’s impossible,” says John Voorhees, Owen and Finn’s father, who created an app account and provided a bank account for the boys. “He dug into it all by himself. I didn’t touch a line of code.”

The App Store has more than 35,000 iPhone applications and games available for downloading. “These two kids are unusually young to have done that, but the development environment is so easy, novice programmers with good ideas can now develop something compelling,” says Matt Murphy, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Murphy also manages the iFund, a $100 million fund devoted to investing in start-ups that create apps for the iPhone.

Murphy believes the billion-dollar iPhone industry will keep growing. MathTime, a 99-cent application, was downloaded 141 times in a day. “It started booming,” says Owen, “I woke up, and I was like, ‘I’m an entrepreneur now.’”

NEW YORK (Reuters)

Job-seekers are using unusual gimmicks to grab the attention of potential employers, such as in one case sending a shoe along with a resume to get a “foot in the door,” said a survey released on Wednesday.

Almost a fifth of hiring managers report seeing more unconventional tactics this year, compared with 12 percent who said so last year, according to the study by CareerBuilder.com, an online jobs site.

Faced with the highest unemployment in 25 years, candidates are trying a variety of tricks, including:

* handing out resumes at stoplights

* washing cars in a company parking lot

* staging a sit-in in a company lobby to demand a meeting with a director

* sending a cake designed as a business card with the candidate’s picture

* handing out personalized coffee cups

* going to the same barber as the company chairman to have the barber speak on his behalf

One job-seeker attached a shoe to a resume as “a way to get my foot in the door,” a respondent told the survey.

“The search for employment is taking longer and is more competitive than it has been in past years,” said Jason Ferrara, senior career adviser at CareerBuilder, in a statement. “To compensate, some candidates have turned to extreme tactics.”

But he cautioned: “While unusual job search antics may attract the attention of hiring managers, they need to be done with care and professionalism so that candidates are remembered for the right reasons.”

The online survey was conducted for CareerBuilder by Harris Interactive among 2,543 full-time hiring managers and human resource professionals between February 20 and March 11, 2009. The overall results have a margin of error of plus or minus 1.94 percentage points.

Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a woman approached him. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art. When asked how much he was owed, Picasso asked for five thousand dollars. The woman questioned why did the portrait cost so much given it took him less than one minute to draw it. To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

The legend of Picasso is at the heart of a contemporary challenge in the advertising industry - the value and cost of ideas. There lies the problem. As an industry we are obsessed with ideas. We complain when these ideas are not accepted. We feel cheated by having to put a price tag on the enterprise of our ideas - how can I be asked to price passion and the selfless pursuit of an idea?

When we recognize we are in the business of “value creation” can we begin to shift our thinking from “‘What does it cost us to generate work and ideas a client wants?” to “What is the value of the services and materials we are creating for the client?”

Value creation forces us to decentralize the idea creation process. Instead, everyone’s job must become value creation. Value creation forces us to establish a strong personal and commercial relationship with our clients; truly understand their business as opposed to their latest brief. Value creation demands we measure and place more value on the outcome of our work.

Our latest idea is more than a campaign concept; it is value creation. Was the agency responsible for creating the Staples’ plastic Easy Button, a $4.99 gadget (that’s sold more than 1 million units since its launch in 2005) aware of that? Apparently not because they received no financial reward beyond their original fees.

Financial advisors are paid on the basis of value creation. This is accepted given their decisions have a direct and measurable impact on wealth. Digital marketing, like no other channel allows us to directly measure the value created for a brand, be it revenue or perception. This is part of the problem with digital marketing, value creation has been completely tied to quantitative metrics - sales, revenue, ROI.

If value creation is proven and measured every day, the degree of compensation then becomes a question of positioning. If clients regard an agency as just another operator on their marketing conveyor belt, value creation is not possible. Value creation requires partnership. Unfortunately most clients regard their agencies as just operators in a large conveyor belt. In response, and to extend their control and influence, agencies try to be the “jack of all trades”, operators in all realms of digital marketing. The focus is then on depth of offering as opposed to value creation. These new services are generally sold to clients at a discount - lowering overall compensation levels.

Client and agency must be willing to invest in value creation. When this occurs, the conversion of two intangibles - time and ideas - translates into a tangible and sustainable compensation model.

Tom Fishbourne, UK Managing Director of Method Products is also the cartoonist behind Brand Camp - a collection of very clever management cartoons. Tom is an inspirational business man, hugely innovative and enterprising and a great guy to work with. For more of his cartoons please go to www.tomfishburne.com.

“I’ve been thinking about how the recession is sinking into the collective business psyche. It feels like we’re all going through some form of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief. I’ve been struck by the resurgance of WWII-era propaganda, like the vintage “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster that suddenly appeared everywhere…….” (more at tomfishburne.com)