Innovation Tyrant: Denver Innovation and Growth Consultants

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Kickstarter of the Week: Instaprint Your Instagrams | Design

A pair of Instaprint printers. Photo courtesy of BREAKFAST

Everyone loves Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg loved it so much that he spent a billion dollars on it, which led other people who loved Instagram to write hilarious posts about the future of the service.

In the midst of all of this is Breakfast, a company that loved Instagram so much that it built a locative printer on top of its APIs.

Now it’s trying to take its prototype to market. We love the metaness of a printer that pulls faux-retro photos from the internet. We love it so much, we’re anointing it as our first “Kickstarter of the Week.”

Here’s how it works: You configure the printer with a hashtag or a location and connect it to the internet. It links itself up with instagram, looking for photos tagged with that hashtag or the location. When it finds one, it automatically prints it out.

Ever been to a wedding with disposable cameras on every table? Instaprint is kind of like that.

This makes it perfect for parties and special events. Ever been to a wedding with disposable cameras on every table? Instaprint is kind of like that, and also kind of like a photobooth, but for the 21st century.

“We all still love holding a photo in our hand from a fun night or special moment, but we don’t want shoeboxes of them laying around,” says Andrew Zolty, Instaprint’s creative director, “Being able to take a modern-day platform and give back a small piece of this retro love is just the right amount to fill that small space in our hearts.”

Say what you will, this is still the best interface for browsing photos. Image courtesy of Breakfast.

Breakfast first developed a prototype of Instaprint in 2011. It came out of a water-cooler conversation about what could be done with Instagram’s newly released APIs.

“With Instagram being clearly inspired by the old Polaroid instants, we started chatting about how it would be cool to be able to turn Instagrams into those old prints,” says Zolty. They gave themselves two weeks to bring a prototype to SxSW.

The company chose Kickstarter as the path to market because it enables it to maintain complete control over every aspect of its work. Breakfast was built to embrace “the roller coaster of emotions that goes with growing a company that way,” he says.

The other big benefit to Kickstarter, Zolty says, is that it allows Breakfast to test the waters and ensure there is a demand before throwing its full weight into converting Instaprint from a prototype to a consumer product. At the moment, that test looks daunting, as Breakfast is still under half of its $500,000 funding goal with less than 10 days to go.

Whatever happens, Breakfast has already started renting out the prototypes. Instaprint has made an appearance at the Grammys and concerts at Madison Square Garden.

As for Instagram’s new owner, Zolty strikes a cautiously optimistic note. The prospect of access to Facebook’s 845 million users is “amazing,” but not if it changes the product. “Like most dedicated Instagram users out there, we hope the product retains its simplicity and is transitioned in the smoothest way possible.”

You can support the project and pre-order your own Instaprinter on their Kickstarter Page. If you just want to rent the printer, you can find out more at Instaprint.me. via wired.com

Want to increase growth and avoid more losses? Want to out compete your competitors? Want to bring new products and services to market faster? Want to be more agile? Contact Innovation and Growth Speaker Jim Woods. Jim works confidentially with start ups, governments as well as profit and for profit enterprises.

Visit our website:www.innothinkgroup.com Executive and Business Coaching: http://ow.ly/anBpK

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective growth strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability.james@innothinkgroup.com

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Thursday, April 19, 2012

Jocelyn K. Glei: Milton Glaser - We're Always Looking, But We Never Really See - The 99 Percent

Did you know that Milton Glaser designed the I ♥ NY logo on a scrap of paper while stuck in the back of a taxi cab? I've been tearing through Jonah Lehrer's excellent new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, over the past week, and Glaser's "a-ha!" moment is just one of the many insightful stories contained therein.We'll admit to being avid RTers of most anything Lehrer writes over @the99percent, and our enthusiasm for the new book is no exception. In a very digestible 253 pages, Lehrer digs into the stories (and the brain chemistry) behind incredible creative achievements.

He explains how Dan Wieden came up with Nike's "just do it" slogan, why Bob Dylan had to give up on music to write "Rolling Stone," and how a uniquely critical culture has made Pixar one of the most successful film production houses of all-time.

With Glaser, Lehrer captures a wonderful moment on the importance of paying attention. Not just looking at the world around us, but seeing it.

Here's Lehrer:

When Milton Glaser was sixteen, he decided to draw a portrait of his mother. "I was just sitting in front of her one night and I thought it would be fun to sketch her face," he says. "So I got out a piece of paper and charcoal pencil. And you know what I realized? I realized I hadn't the faintest idea what she looked like. Her image had become fixed in my mind at the age of one or two, and it really hadn't changed since. I was drawing a picture of a woman who no longer existed."

But as Glaser stared at her face and then compared what he saw to the black marks on the paper, her appearance slowly came into view. He was able to draw her as she was, and not as he expected her to be. "That sketch taught me something interesting about the mind," he says. "We're always looking, but we never really see." Although Glaser had looked at his mother every single day of his life, he didn't see her until he tried to draw her. "When you draw an object, the mind becomes deeply, intensely attentive," Glaser says. "And it's that act of attention that allows you to really grasp something, to become fully conscious of it. That's what I learned from my mother's face, that drawing is really a kind of thinking."...

Glaser is eighty years old, but he still works in a small studio on East Thirty-second Street in Manhattan. It's a cluttered space, the white walls hidden by old art books stacked ten high. Above the front door, chiseled into the glass, is the slogan of the studio: ART IS WORK.

For Glaser, the quote summarizes his creative philosophy. "There's no such thing as a creative type," he says. "As if creativity is a verb, a very time-consuming verb. It's about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real. And that's always going to be a long and difficult process. If you're doing it right, it's going to feel like work." --
For those of you attending the 99% Conference on May 3-4, 2012, you can look forward to seeing Jonah Lehrer speak in person. Afterwards, we'll share the video right here at The99percent.com. In the meantime, check out "Imagine: How Creativity Works." via the99percent.com

Want to increase growth and avoid losses? Want to out compete your competitors? Want to bring new products and services to market faster? Want to be more agile? Contact Innovation and Growth Speaker Jim Woods. Jim works confidentially with start ups, governments as well as profit and for profit enterprises.

Visit our website:www.innothinkgroup.com Executive and Business Coaching: http://ow.ly/anBpK

Fan us on Facebook: http://ow.ly/anyQ7