Email of the Future

If you are passionate about efficiency, as I am, then you will love this innovative new tool that Google's genius web team came up with. The brains behind the wildly successful "Google Maps" concept (that I live by now) brainstormed about what email would look like if they had to come up with something from scratch. Enter "Google Wave."

You can watch the demo here. Its a little long and bandwidth heavy, but if you can afford to watch it, its certainly worth it.

Innovating through negation

Part of good innovation is knowing when to say "no." That 's equally, if not more important than saying 'yes.' In a recent article, Google Senior VP Jeff Huber gave insight into their process for turning things down, and how they are still able to wow the world with their innovative products.

I suggest that you read the article, but here is my take on Google's process:

a. Diligent consumer testing: Know your audience and give them what they want. Any product that repeatedly fails consumer tests is immediately ditched.

b. Diligent listening: Google purposely puts out less than perfect products and then hones them around customer suggestions through their active product blogs.

b. Getting the fans and making the buck: If a new product won't generate ad revenue, the product is dropped. The bottom-line, particularly in this economy, is it should have a lot of fans. By Seth Godin's definition, a fan is someone (in this case a user) who will proselytize on your behalf. Getting more fans gets more ad revenue, which keeps the company growing.

Google's first-line of testing is their large and phenomenally brilliant employee base. If a product doesn't create a fan base among their employees, it probably won't make it in the "real world." Its what the googlers call "eating your own dog-food."

The food crisis, climate change and the role of technology to solve it

A woman walks through a paddy field in southern India (photo credit: Meena Kadri)

Sorry to digress a bit here. There is just SO much going on, and everything is related - poverty, food, energy, water, and climate change, and the growth of technology that could change things for the better. I will have my regular post about water in addition to this.

Today there were two well-written posts, that were separately contiguous.

The first was from the google.org people. Today is World Health Day (who knew!) and the WHO has released evidence stating that Climate Change has a significant impact on food and health. They even have a map showing areas with high death rates as a result of climate change. Not surprisingly, Africa is the worst hit, with a significant region attributing 80-100 million deaths to climate change. Read the whole post here. This was something covered by Al Gore as well in his blockbuster movie An Inconvenient Truth.

The second is from Paul Krugman of the New York Times, who wrote a brilliant summary of the causes of the impending food crisis, titled Grains Gone Wild. The World Food Program (WFP), Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) all UN agencies have stated that 854 million people are starving. Again, this starvation is primarily centered in Africa and parts of Asia, and slated to get worse with population growth. And its related to climate change.

So, the general consensus is that food and health are gravely affected by climate change. But can anything be done?? Well, obviously we (particularly those in the industrialized countries) need to be more aware of these issues and stop our own wasting. We need to stop hogging everyone else's food and messing with the rest of the world's agricultural policies. But that's an aside to my point (which has to do with this blog) about technology.

I think technology can offer a solution in the larger picture. (Please note that I believe in technology being used as an accelerator in solving a crisis; it is not the whole solution and can never be!)

Technology saved the day during the last major food crisis. Post World War II, countries all over the world were struggling with food rationing. There simply wasn't enough food produced (quite different from now, where famine is more a result of a combination of issues). Then advances in technology like pest-resistant cropping started a green revolution in many countries...the most famous of these scientists won a Nobel Prize for his work. Because climate change is such a large problem, advances in technology in every field (energy, food, road/transportation design, etc) are required to quell it. Suddenly the boundaries are blurred, and as a whole professionals and inventors in every field need to work together to solve this problem.

Technology is out there to provide a solution, but we all need to work together to make it happen. This isn't a single technological advancement needed...its a multiple technological advancement that's needed. The food crisis is just one example, one symptom in the larger issue of Climate Change.