Wak Oentoenk

Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, gave a talk this morning. Afterward I asked him if we'll see next year the secret project that Jeff Hawkins has been working on. "Yes," he said, and moved immediately to another question.Very little information has been released publicly about the Hawkins project. I know a number of very bright people at Palm moved to work on it, more than a year ago. Hawkins himself has dropped cryptic hints about something that would start a new category of devices, alongside handhelds...

In April of 1999, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger posted to the Web one of the most iconic artifacts of the Internet Bubble. It's called the Cluetrain Manifesto, and parts of it are so pompous that they read like a cross between the socialist Internationale and an L. Ron Hubbard novel. Here's the document's preamble:"The sky is open to the stars. Clouds roll over us night and day. Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may have heard, this is our world, our place to...

As you've probably heard, SonyEricsson bought the UIQ user interface from Symbian this week. The only surprise in the deal was that it didn't happen a long time ago -- Symbian had been trying to unload UIQ for at least four years (they tried to sell it to Palm at least two times that I was aware of). I haven't seen any online information about the terms of the deal, but at some point I hope it'll come out in a public filing. I'll be shocked if it turns out that SonyEricsson paid a lot of money....

If you're interested in new product design and/or market research techniques, the latest chapter in Stop Flying Blind talks about how to define the market for a new type of product. It's not as easy as you might think, because traditional market research is focused mostly on understanding existing markets, not on defining new markets that don't yet exist.Clayton Christensen would probably tell you that it can't be done at all. I think it can, but it's not easy, and it's definitely not research...