74 Make New Technology a Success

YES! AND… Creative Gorilla #74 If you want technology to be successful, you have to ensure it meets a few clear criteria…   “New technology turns adult and child roles on their head. If technology is easy to use now, we should say “it’s adult’s play” not “child’s play”. John Brooker ~ Adult player What makes a new technology product successful? I’m writing this in my hotel room in Morocco, having just finished my first ever video call to my family. This excited me so much that I was jumping up and down and clapping with excitement when we connected. We used Windows Live Messenger to make the call, which my daughter showed me how to use at the weekend. Once I had connected to the hotel’s internet (two minutes), it took me just a minute to set up the video call, with a bit of on line coaching from my children. This technology has given me the opportunity to see and talk to my family, easily, simply and for free (hotel internet prices aside!). They can show me their homework, we can play games and generally have fun, so much so that we spent forty minutes on the call. On the telephone, it is usually a couple of minutes’ chat and then they get bored. It also costs me £1.25 a minute. Some of you with a key driver (e.g. speaking to relatives overseas) may have been making video calls from your PC for quite a while, many more of you will use video conferencing at work so what is the big deal about my experience? Well, I think...

61 Random Connect to Create Ideas…

YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 61 There’s always a stimulus for creativity, random connection can help find it “For every living creature that succeeds in getting a footing in life there are thousands or millions that perish. There is an enormous random scattering for every seed that comes to life. This does not remind us of intelligent human design. “If a man in order to shoot a hare, were to discharge thousands of guns on a great moor in all possible directions; if in order to get into a locked room, he were to buy ten thousand casual keys, and try them all; if, in order to have a house, he were to build a town, and leave all the other houses to wind and weather – assuredly no one would call such proceedings purposeful and still less would anyone conjecture behind these proceedings a higher wisdom, unrevealed reasons, and superior prudence.” John W.N. Sullivan Science Writer (d 1937) “Just as well you won’t  read this article John.” John Brooker Are you stuck for an idea? I sat having a beer and a toasted cheese sandwich in the bar of my hotel in Luanda, Angola, earlier this month. It was a slightly surreal experience as I was eating in the dark, breached only by the dim glow of the myriad oil industry PC screens on battery power. Luanda had suffered another power cut and we waited for the emergency generator to kick in. The pianist played gamely on and I mused that sight reading of music is obviously not the principal qualification for a pianist in Angola. As he...