prodgeeks

In the late 1990s, the Japanese telecom giant NTT DoCoMo offered an early mobile service called i-mode that let users send small amounts of data over their pagers, including a heart icon at the end of messages. Users <3’d the <3. But for reasons that have been lost to history, DoCoMo pulled it from the service.
People were furious. They demanded DoCoMo bring it back. In 1999, the company released a new heart icon alongside 175 other icons that became the world’s first emoji.

Rise Science came to IDEO with a challenge. The young startup had built a robust data platform for college and professional athletes to track their sleep and adjust their behavior so that they played at peak performance. But for the players, the experience was challenging.

Market size is just a lazy proxy for the magnitude of market demand. But market demand is actually a function of:

• Number of people who have a problem or desire
• Intensity of that problem or desire
• How well existing products solve the problem or satisfy the desire

It’s not easy to hear that your product is ugly. Or that it’s confusing and out of date.

Google has gathered so much data, in so many areas, that it’s now crunching it together and creating features that Apple can’t make—surrounding Google Maps with a moat of time.
Amazing to see how Google is using its own byproducts (street view) to build bigger moat.