January 2010
You are browsing the archive for January 2010.
In my last post, I laid out three steps for gathering market data: Go get it. Share it. Live it. The idea, of course, is to collect information that helps you make a great product that the market wants. Nothing irks me more than when a “cool” feature finds its way into the products that [...]
Robert Capp’s article from Wired magazine last August, The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine, offers a fantastic synthesis of what many product and services companies have been finding over the last decade: Less is more, especially when it comes to whistles and bells. The Flip’s success stunned the industry, but [...]
If you’re like me, this holiday season you spent a lot of time at parties answering the inevitable “so what do you do?” question. Here at Arena we make a software tool for collaboratively managing BOMs and changes and sharing product information with the supply chain. While that’s simple to understand for someone who knows [...]
Every product company has a story–one that makes you cringe just thinking about it–where something went wrong…really, really wrong. A situation that could have been avoided if only…. At Arena we hear these stories all the time. They wrench our gut and remind us of the days when we worked in manufacturing. We’ve taken these [...]
In the fall of 2009, my good friend Tim Taylor and a squad of like-minded insane people decided to build a race car. This race car, to be precise: The car was built to compete in the 24 hours of LeMons race, an endurance circuit race for cars costing less than $500. The full story [...]
I just received this email from APICS and thought it might be interesting to those of you who have operations or supply chain expertise and are wondering if there’s a way to use your skills to help deal with the devastation in Haiti. [January 14 email from APICS] Haitian Earthquake: Can You Help? In the [...]
I recently stole a cheese grater from Craig Livingston, our CEO at Arena. Since the incident occurred during a yankee swap gift exchange at the Arena holiday party, I’m hoping this will not turn out to be a career limiting move. The gift I stole was no ordinary cheese grater however — it was a [...]
iRobot, makers of robots with such varied talents as vacuuming floors and defusing roadside bombs, has released a video of its latest R&D effort: the Blob ’Bot. The Blob ’Bot is a soft shape-shifting robot that rolls around by changing shape and will even be able to fit through small cracks. The video does an [...]
The latest Institute of Supply Management (ISM) report on manufacturing, issued last week, finds that the PMI rose for the 5th consecutive month in December 2009 to 55.9%. New orders, production and employment were up, while inventories contracted and supplier deliveries slowed. The full report can be found on the ISM website. Long considered one [...]
During my recent holiday travels I was lucky enough to see the Konstantin Grcic: Decisive Design exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibit begins with a ring of products, photos and text stretching around the perimeter of the gallery, showing viewers example after example of how well industrial designer Grcic marries form with [...]
