I wrote in my end-of-year wrap-up about the Pentax K10D, a prosumer digital SLR, and Pentax has just announced its successor, the K20D. This has led to a storm of commentary in several Pentax discussion forums which are a microcosm of the extremism that the internet often generates. The level of emotion really gets out of hand quickly as people try to one-up each others’ arguments.

What are all the arguments about? In this case, in part whether Pentax dropped the ball by not improving the frames-per-second (fps) that the camera can shoot. Both the K10 and the K20 are 3fps, which is arguably slower than the competition. Some people, presumably who shoot fast moving sports, wildlife or kids, are vociferously complaining about “only” 3fps and are really dominating the conversation. However, a poll going on at The Online Photographer is (as of this writing) showing that 3fps is just fine for the vast majority of people.

This highlights two things:

1. Complainers tend to outweigh the silent majority of satisfied people and leads to a skewed perspective of the quality of a manufacturer’s products.
2. People’s perceptions of the importance of features can be very different at the point of purchase than in ongoing use.

In any case, the whole dialog reminds me of the famous Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch where each man tries to one-up the others on how horrible their childhood was.

I spoke on a panel at the Sustainable Business Summit at the McCombs Business School at UT Austin this weekend, and it was interesting to hear the perspectives of the other speakers and also have a chance to have some good debate about what sustainable business means and how we can accomplish it. Given that this was their first one and it was taking place on a Saturday, turn-out was impressive and energetic. Kudos to the student organizers for such a well-run conference with a nicely diverse and well-qualified range of speakers and panels.

There were two keynotes and they highlighted some of the themes that came up throughout the summit (more on this below).

The first was by Lee Matecko, Global VP of construction and store development for Whole Foods. Lee was received quite warmly (and was on home turf since Whole Foods was founded and is headquartered in Austin), and detailed at length the many activities that the grocery chain is doing in the name of sustainability. It was interesting to hear how each region works quite independently and can experiment with new approaches to sustainable practices, which if successful are then picked up and done more nationally.

The second keynote was by Jeff Renaud, Director of GE’s Ecomagination initiative. Jeff predictably got a cooler reception given GE’s spotty reputation to say the least (which Jeff acknowledged, such as the polluting of the Hudson River). But it was interesting to hear the extent of GE’s work, and how it sees significant opportunities in green energy in particular. However, as with any large company that is in the midst of a transition there is also much that did not get talked about that is not so much on the favorable side of the ledger, and questioners were quite pointed in bringing these up after Jeff finished his (nicely designed) Powerpoint.

Green branding discussion

I was on the panel entitled “Coloring your company green”, which unfortunately smacked of greenwashing. Fortunately neither myself nor the other panelists were interested in that approach, so the discussion was more substantive and I certainly found it interesting. The other panelists were from New Belgium Brewing (makers of Fat Tire Ale), Citi, and H-E-B (a grocery store chain in Texas and New Mexico), and we all talked about what our companies are doing in terms of communicating sustainable practices.

The questions from the audience were also very good and stimulated lively discussion. My main points were:

• Adding “green” to your brand is no different than adding any other new attribute to your brand. It has to be seen as a logical and credible shift, and you have to walk your talk or the credibility gap widens and breaks over time. You can’t take on any major new attribute overnight, so be prepared for the long haul.
• The approach to doing this is quite different if you are a company founded on sustainable practices (e.g. Whole Foods, Patagonia, Method), or if you are a company shifting to become more sustainable (e.g. GE). The former are given a lot of latitude, the latter very little.
• Adding green to your message is going to either reduce, grow or shift your customer base, so be ready for that

• Clarity: be clear about your mission, your approach and your goals.
• Humility: Don’t pretend you’ve got the problem licked - no-one does and you’re not fooling anyone. Be humble about what you’ve achieved and how far you have to go.
• Authenticity: Speak with an honest voice. Green has an ethical element to it that many other brand aspects do not, so tread lightly and engage in two-way dialog.
• Specificity: Don’t just provide a high-level gloss, but talk about specifics that substantiate your position. As noted below, sometimes this is difficult to do as they can be complex and dull, but it is vital.

Themes

Several themes emerged from the talks I was able to see, and from discussions with attendees. 

• Companies who are trying to become more sustainable are in a Catch-22. If they start talking about what they are doing, the bar instantly gets raised infinitely high and they get hammered for all the things they are not doing. So this creates a disincentive to talk publicly until major progress has been made. However, improved brand image is one reason for companies to initiate sustainable practices, and if they can’t talk about it then the value is reduced. This slows progress. The good/evil framework might have been useful in the past to spur action, but today it is outmoded and suboptimal. We need a more balanced dialog that acknowledges successes while also encouraging improvement without letting companies rest prematurely on their laurels.
• Sustainable business is very complicated, with many inter-related and often conflicting issues and stakeholder perspectives. Unifying these takes a lot of work and cross-departmental and cross-vendor coordination. A lot of it is pretty dull stuff, but necessary.
• Communicating the story to customers is very difficult. Again much of what is involved is pretty boring to end customers and are difficult stories to tell, so finding the right stores that are easy to communicate but substantive at the same time can be a challenge. For example in Lee’s talk there were some well known efforts that Whole Foods has, but there were many “invisible” activities in their supply chain, distribution fleet, and stores themselves which I was unaware of.
• Individual employees can have tremendous amounts to contribute to knew approaches, but two things are required to bring this to fruition: First the company has to show from the top-down that it is serious about sustainability, and put in place things that demonstrate this. (Lee talked about how all of Whole Foods full-time employees - 90% of their workforce - get fully paid health insurance, and 93% of stock options go to non-executives as opposed to 25% on average in the US. On my panel I talked about how frog offers incentives for employees to buy hybrid cars and use public transit, and switched to electronic paystubs instead of paper ones. These sometimes small things add up to show an overall commitment that frees employees to think sustainably.) Second, the company has to be open to suggestions from employees. Again, Lee gave examples of how the company absorbs employee ideas and disseminates them.

…finally, the 2008 line-up has been announced. Highlights include Kraftwerk, Roger Waters, Death Cab for Cutie, Jack Johnson, Hot Chip, Madness, and Love & Rockets. (Even more retro this year than usual). Plus the usual great mix of up-and-comers. Let the mad dash begin!

Anyone know of a place to stay? :)

Pretty amazing what you can do with some smart planning, a few props, a few days, a little bit of money (in film terms) and some computer enhancement:

A brief run through MacWorld gave two major impressions:

1. It was packed. Even more crowded than CES (though much smaller of course)
2. The signal-to-noise ratio of interesting products was way better than CES

Let’s take a look at some of the things that caught my interest from a design point of view, starting with Apple.

Apple

The MacBook Air really is quite breathtaking. It feels great in the hand, and the break from pure rectangular geometry makes it more interesting to tumble in your hands. It’s sort of a giant iPod, taking on the pillowed look. The corner radii are much larger than previous MacBooks, giving it a softer aesthetic. I had been wondering when Apple’s designers would get tired of the strict geometric style and start to branch out - this appears to be it.

For someone (not unlike myself) who spends quite a bit of time in transit and on planes, the light weight and small size (won’t get squished by the airplane seat in front of you crashing back) are perfect. While many have expressed their opinions about where Apple should have left in/cut features, my one quibble is with the exclusion of an ethernet port. Yes, there’s a dongle adapter (extra $), but it’s one more thing to remember and carry for those still common hotels that don’t have wireless. And since it only has one USB connector, it will tie that up, so you’ll have a choice of ethernet or, say, usb key. Also, it requires a video out adaptor, but I carry one of those anyway for VGA projectors.

The MBA is another example of Apple pushing the envelope on connectivity and data transfer methods. The original Mac adopted the nascent 3.5” floppy disk, Apple was one of the first to adopt 802.11, it switched to USB and dropped legacy proprietary connectors, and it created the Firewire standard (which made it slow to adopt USB 2…). Every time people have complained that the sky is falling, but each time Apple has judged the timing just right and has hit the adoption curve at the right point, and it all works out.

Belkin

Here’s something blasphemous: My favorite booth at MacWorld was not Apple’s, but Belkin’s. It knocked my socks off.

Think back a few years: Belkin was a ho-hum manufacturer of unsexy cables and nondescript PC accessories. Then came the iPod and they recognized a good thing when they saw it. They jumped on the iPod shooting star and produced a nice line of interesting, well thought out accessories. But essentially they outsourced their aesthetic to the iPod, piggybacking visually as well as functionally on that core device.

Now Belkin is turning into a design and innovation powerhouse in its own right.

In their attractive booth they were showing an amazingly wide array of products, from a hip messenger bag, an HD TV “beamer”, a Skype phone, and Podcast Studio. All were interesting, stylish, well-made with nice materials and fit and finish, and an emerging aesthetic that, while not totally unique, is starting to create a strong Belkin personality.

One that caught my eye because of its genuine innovation in a totally boring product was their Conserve Surge Protector. It is a thin 8 outlet surge protector (stifled yawn)…with a remote control. Huh? Actually it’s brilliant: You use the remote to turn off the powerstrip when you don’t want it sucking vampire energy. The remote can be used to control one or multiple strips (they have selectable RF channels), so conceivably you could turn off a whole bunch of them in one go in an office or house.

There are two non-switched outlets so you can turn off your energy sucking plasma and leave your TV on to record The Colbert Report. Ironically the power strip itself becomes a source of vampire energy, but it is far less than what is connected to it.

Lastly, the remote looks like a giant on-off switch, about the size of a playing card. It can be attached to a wall-mount, so you don’t have to worry about losing it:

Let’s hope Belkin can keep up this pace. My hat is off to them.

OmniGroup

OmniGroup is one of my favorite Mac application developers. They make slightly niche, slightly quirky, but always very well crafted and innovative applications that take full advantage of the technologies built into the OS. Omni were showing off their new OmniFocus application, for those who are fans of the GTD approach to task management.

They were also showing (in beta) version 5 of their oddly-named but wonderful application OmniGraffle. This is usually described as diagramming application similar to Visio, but this does its wide range of applications an injustice. I use OmniGraffle all the time for all manner of activities, from resource tracking to brainstorming to creating quick and dirty websites. At frog design it is used by many folks for more traditional information design and taskflow analysis.

Version 5 fixes some of the small niggles from the previous rev, like how the automatic hierarchical tree building works (think org charts). But it also introduces new features like true beziers, improved master pages, a dramatically improved stencil management palette, and an overall streamlined interface that should make working in it significantly faster, especially if on a laptop (goodbye floating palettes).

Crumpler

I stumbled onto this booth and was immediately enchanted by the Escher meets Bruegel imagery and cardboard castle look. What could it be? There was no name on the outside, so you had to go in to find out. Hmm, sneaky…

Ah, of course, it’s those whacky people from Crumpler, who make camera bags with names like Six Million Dollar Home. So the outside continues their irreverent and (apparently) random approach to branding themselves. But if you do random consistently and rigorously, it somehow comes together.

By the way, if you look closely at the outside you’ll see the Crumpler logo, as well as James Bond’s white Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me.