Innovative Irish company gets the red out

Traditionally, photography has been an edit-after-the-fact art form. In the film era, this meant taking lots and lots of pictures and discarding the ones that didn't come out right. Early digital photography has used editing programs like Photoshop to eliminate red-eye or improve lighting after photos have been downloaded to a PC.

An innovative Irish company, FotoNation, has developed technology that allows photo improvement to occur before the picture is actually taken. As profiled in today's Wall Street Journal, the company has developed a compact software program that eliminates red-eye in flash photographs before images are written to disk, among other innovations. Nikon and Kodak are building FotoNation's technology into their digital cameras.

Another interesting point about FotoNation: despite being founded in Galway, Ireland, the founder is Israeli and the chief engineer is Romanian--another example of the growing heterogenizing of Ireland's technology sector.

technology, innovation, software, photography, Wall Street Journal

Hats off to those who made free software into a successful business

I have been stuck in Chicago for three hours--snow in Chicago, snow in Harrisburg--and it looks to be at least another two hours before I get out. So, I've gotten a glass of wine here in the United Red Carpet Room and am prepared to stay here a while longer.

This is a roundabout way of saying that what I planned to write about, how CEOs cannot delegate strategy, will have to wait for another day.

Instead, let's talk about open-source software. ("What?" say the readers. "We were expecting something interesting!") For the uninitiated, open-source software's programming instructions (source code) are freely available and modifiable.

It sounds like a joke. Imagine coming into a venture capitalist's conference room, firing up the laptop, and announcing, "Our business sells free software...we're looking for a first round of $5 million."

"Get out of my office!" says the venture capitalist.

But today comes news that Sun Microsystems will pay $1B for MySQL, distributor of the free relational database software of the same name. And Bob Young, the founder of another open source company, Red Hat Software (most recent quarterly net income: $20 million) was profiled in "The Opposable Mind" (reviewed earlier this week).

Call it Open Source Week.

So how do open-source companies make money? By packaging that free software into standard releases, providing maintenance and help-desk services, to businesses that want to use open-source products.

The businesses' IT staffs could download the source code over the internet, compile it themselves, then distribute it to their own servers for installation--all free. But the volume of open source modules and the frequency with which the modules change add up to a major headache to companies who want a stable, predictable environment for their web sites or other applications.

The genius of the successful open-source companies, therefore, was to recognize a value niche between the chaos of truly free software and the large license fees of proprietary software like Windows. They sell open-source subscriptions at a fraction of proprietary license fees--that offer a stable, supported product to risk-averse corporate customers.

Add it up, and it's worth a pretty penny--or a billion dollars to Sun.

technology, software, open source

Mistake Bank #12 - Don't forget about support!

What follows is a sample of a project I've been working on called the Mistake Bank. It combines narrative, learning from mistakes, video and web2.0 in an environment that companies can use to train new employees, create a corporate history, connect workers and mentors, and bring more humanity to the workplace. Email me at inquiry@caddellinsightgroup.com if you would like to know more about the Mistake Bank.



When John Caddell began his first job as a product manager, he inherited a new product that was being sold by a large partner. And once the first sale happened, he learned that having a support strategy is not optional.

mistakes, international, information technology, Mistake Bank, narrative, learning, marketing, distribution, software, web 2.0, product management, technical support

On designing

Lots of talk this week about design, including Business Week writer Bruce Nussbaum's broadside on arrogant designers, and reaction here, here and here.

I am a rank amateur when it comes to the aesthetics of design. For example, my wife created the vision and look for our house's new addition, specifying materials, sizes, configurations; my biggest contribution was to appreciate the result.

With regards to technology products, I perhaps have more to offer. Aesthetics are a small (though significant) part of what constitutes design for tech products. A much larger component is answering this question:

What will the product do, and what will it not do?

The functions of traditional products (buildings, furniture, housewares) are typically constrained by tradition, physics and the properties of the materials used. Designers of high-tech products, especially those that are software-driven, face innumerable choices about what to include (a term has emerged describing a typical result: "software bloat"). The first personal computers sidestepped these decisions by providing platforms with little built into them (except a compiler--the message to users was, "use it for whatever you can build!"). Word processing programs, spreadsheets, Powerpoint, games, web browsers, anti-virus programs, e-mail programs, etc., followed.

Formerly lower-tech products like automobiles and airplanes now confront this scoping problem. BMW replaced radio knobs with iDrive, a function-stuffed, nearly unusable system. Delays in Airbus's A380 project stemmed not from issues with airworthiness, but from problems with the 300+ miles of electrical wiring.

iDrive and PCs demonstrate the biggest negative side effect of the urge to function-stuff. The more things a product can do, the harder it is for mere mortals to use. Consider the following question: if you have one PC in the house, in which room do you place it?

Apple's genius with the iPod, iMovie and other products was to design them to do less, to make them supremely usable (and good-looking) and of limited functionality. For them, the iPhone will pose a challenge: how to create something with as many uses as a Swiss Army knife but which doesn't baffle its buyers.

(Picture by Annette via stock.xchng)

design, innovation, software, technology

Computing pioneer dies at age 82

The man who led the creation of Fortran, the first successful high-level computing language, John W. Backus, died Saturday at age 82. According to this obituary in the New York Times, Mr. Backus grew tired of "hand-to-hand combat with the machine" via assembly language, and convinced his superiors at IBM to let his team create a new language that communicated with the computer at a higher level of abstraction; i.e. closer to the process of human thinking. The first Fortran compiler was completed in 1957, a year before the word "software" had even been coined.

The Times added:

Fortran was also extremely efficient, running as fast as programs painstakingly hand-coded by the programming elite, who worked in arcane machine languages. This was a feat considered impossible before Fortran. It was achieved by the masterful design of the Fortran compiler, a program that captures the human intent of a program and recasts it in a way that a computer can process.

People who once programmed in Fortran are getting older, and many have moved onto other professions, like marketing.

Rest in peace, Mr. Backus.

innovation, software, programming languages, obituaries, New York Times