Napkin Labs visits Boulder Digital Works

During last Wednesday's Idea Studio at Boulder Digital Works, Napkin Labs co-founders Warren Ng and Riley Gibson stopped by to talk about starting up their company and how its model is changing the way companies handle product design.

What does Napkin Labs do?

Napkin Labs is a collaborative community based new product development consultancy. We are blending the creative energy of the 'crowd' with disciplined design processes to rapidly generate consumer-centric new product concepts rooted in the strengths of our clients' brands.

In other words, they curate a community of some the best young minds (from places like Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and CU) and then set them loose on your project. They provide the structure throughout so everyone stays on track and incentivize participation by using an algorithm to measure how much each member contributed to the final output and paying out a reward accordingly.

Their approach goes beyond simple crowd-sourcing by: one, curating the people in their crowd and two, rewarding everyone based on participation rather than a winner-takes-all approach.

And then I was re-listening to this 2005 TED talk from Clay Shirky about institutions vs collaboration and I realized that Napkin Labs is essentially breaking down the institutional barriers he talks about here:


Shirky mentions how that as barriers to collaboration decrease (the web and web apps like Napkin Labs) people become more and more able to organize and collaborate in increasingly complex ways without the help traditionally needed from institutions. Shirky's vision is brought to life in exactly how Napkin Labs operates.

By connecting big organizations directly to crowds and managing the crowds in a hands-off way, Napkin Labs brings the best of both the institutional and the unruly masses worlds together. As institutions become more comfortable with this approach I think this will mean a sea-change will take place in the R&D world. Certainly, highly trained scientists and researches will never be replaced but think about the example Shirky uses above where a single Linux engineer contributes a single important patch and nothing else. He's probably not worth having on the payroll, but aren't you glad he contributed that one really important piece?

I believe the same sort of scenario will begin to play out across R&D and product design. While dedicated teams in institutions won't be replaced anytime soon, a lot of their work will begin to be offered out to Napkin Labs-esque organizations with excellent results.

It's exciting to see this glimpse into the future happen so close to home. Keep your eyes peeled for how Napkin Labs will help shape the future with your help.

The Ungrateful Bastards Indeed

Look, I'm not into tearing people down. If you want to hear negativity you can surely find some on this great big series of tubes. I'm all about going for it and kicking ass and optimism and teddy bears and bubbles. But everyone has to make exceptions.

A little backstory: I've somehow made it onto the PR list for DiGennaro Communications in NY. I guess it's because I run this here blog and they've decided the best way to reach out to bloggers is to crawl their emails rather than say hello. But at least it's usually relevant and cool work I get. I don't post it because that's probably not why you read this blog and besides, you can view it all on other blogs like Agency Spy or Ads of the World etc that post the work all the time.

So they send me this email:

Today, Y&R NY and VML launched a new website called “The Ungrateful Bastards.”

If you received a gift during the holidays that you don’t want (and who didn’t?), you can visit this site and trade for someone else’s unwanted gift.

Check out the site here: http://www.theungratefulbastards.com

“Because one man’s stupid, unwanted holiday gift is another man’s treasure.”

CREDITS:

Agency: Y&R NY and VML

Chief Creative Officers: Scott Vitrone, Ian Reichenthal

Creative Directors: Guillermo Vega, Icaro Doria

Managing Creative Director, VML: Jim Radosevic

Creative Director, VML: Mike Wente

Art Directors: Menno Kluin, Alex Nowak, Sandra Nicholas

Copywriters: Tiffani Lundeen

Illustrator: Peter Frendrik

Producer: Jo Kelly

Lead Developer: Frank Cefalu

Flash Developer: Marc Brown

Director of Technology: Martin Coady

And I follow the link to Ungrateful Bastards because it sounds like a fun, if unoriginal, idea.

And then I immediately regret doing so.

The site is, to put it mildly, underwhelming. And I'm not talking about the fact that there's about a dozen items on the site (including a hat listed under gadgets, which actually made me chuckle a bit.) I'm talking about the fact that this is a site from a global ad agency (Young & Rubicam) and a full-service digital agency (VML) and, even though it's obviously a fun side project, it looks like it was thrown together last night by the interns in a red-bull-induced-rave-state.

I'll just be frank: the site is bad. Really, just poorly done. Honestly, how many of those 15 (Fifteen!!!) actually worked on the project? Would they all still want their names attached to it if they saw the final result?

The people involved are no doubt talented (several were involved in the amazing Skittles work of several years ago) but the end result is woefully uninspired.

So is it any wonder that people have been less than eager to get involved with the site? It amazes me that an agency so big (Y&R claims 186 offices and 7,000 employees) and a self-proclaimed full service digital shop would ever let something like this out into the wild.

There are a few possibilities:

1. They actually think this is good
2. The interns did it and everyone else wanted credit (why?)
3. They don't care
4. They tried to be bad on purpose (but weren't bad enough to be funny-bad)

So how does it get better?
Let's break it down:

The Idea
It's been done, but hasn't everything at this point? The key is to do it better than anyone else has before or add a unique twist. Neither were done here, so that'd be where I'd start.

The Execution
The end result is not the effort of the 15 people credited. It's barely the effort of one skilled developer. People have a low tolerance for subpar design / usability these days when there is so much good design / usability being done. People also make judgments within seconds of visiting your site. Guess what people are thinking at first glance of the Ungrateful Bastards site. I think it's also worth considering who the work is coming from. If there was a college freshman behind this site I'd hold it to a bit different standard than a global ad empire.

The Usability
Finally, users have to be able to use the site they're at. Besides the aforementioned categorization confusion (which could have been intentional) I found frustration in clicking the button like objects on the site that were not in fact clickable buttons but rather fancy containers for the text which was the actual link. I'd also question the use of flash on the site in a seemingly uneccesary way. I know agencies love flash, but many users do not. Could another technology have accomplished the same thing (a countdown and a animated fireplace?) Also, I'm assuming the crackling sound emitted from the fireplace is for the kitsch effect but it's seriously annoying and cannot be disabled. If you're going to go kitsch go 100% or don't go at all.

The Bottom Line
I'm probably taking this whole thing too seriously but this is a symptom of a larger issue: how traditional agencies (and even digital ones) adjust to the new environment they operate in. If Y&R / VML had thought about their users a little more would this whole thing have been a lot better? It's hard to say what happened behind closed doors. If you're listening out there Y&R / VML, I think you know what I want to find in my inbox stocking next year.

Why Lala took over iTunes

You may have read that Apple bought cloud music streaming service Lala. Well, in my little Justinverse the opposite happened, Lala took over iTunes.

I've been using Lala for a couple years now. Originally I just wanted an easy way to stream my iTunes library at work. Now I simply want a piece of music management software that works.

I have a lot of music. Just over 15,000 songs clocking in at around 80 GBs to be exact. Moving that kind of library around from old computer to new computer or even just to a new hard drive on the same computer is a serious pain in the ass through iTunes. I've tried using their preferred way of doing it and I've tried moving everything through Windows and then pointing iTunes back to the library and I've even tried storing it on an external drive to keep my laptop's hard drive freed up. Every time iTunes can't find songs or can't find my library at all in the case of my laptop (despite my mapping of the drive to always show up as the same "letter.")

While I can't give up on iTunes for syncing my iPhone / iPod, I have given up on it for doing what it was originally supposed to do: play my goddamn music.

I've found a better solution through Lala. I've synced up all my purchases and uploaded any songs they didn't have so now my whole collection resides in the cloud (a long process, but once it's done, it's done.) I can play it from any computer with an internet connection (if I could stream it from my phone it'd be perfect!)

So now that Apple has bought Lala I'm left wondering what the future of Lala's service looks like. Reports seem to indicate that Apple wants access to Lala's brilliant engineers more than their service. Here's to hoping that the core service sticks around for a while, at least until Apple can play catch up in the very category it created.