Two of my coworkers and I went to see the UIE Roadshow yesterday — it was a great day out of the ffice, a glorious day in DC, and a fabulous chance to get re-escited by what we do. Jared’s a one-man show, lot’s of one-liners, diversions, and now magic tricks in his show, but it all built up to a great demonstration that excitement, delight, and kindness are the magic ingredients to good e-commerce. There’s all sorts of  information in his day-long event, and some of it seems/feels disjointed (and personally, I’m done with the Chicken-Sexer routine), but all in all, lots of good nuggets in there.

1. Apple, in all their magic/mystery, are very planned, and thoughtful. He showed their 1987 Knowledge Navigator video — which was an attempt to imagine how computers would interact with people ca. 2010. We may not be there, but the point was creating a long-term vision, and then working towards it. What company couldn’t do with that amount of foresight?

2. He introduced a concept about how products evolve. I’m not sure whose research he was drawing upon, but the cycle is something like — New (innovative, unique) product –> Feature-competitive –> Experience Competitive –> “Commodity” (in his case, more of product that is driven through API to be a feature in other products). So imagine the flow for web mapping. 1. Mapquest creates the original mapping site. People are in awe. 2. Maps.com,. yahoo maps, and mapquest start to compete on features. 3. Google blows them out of the water with a map that does all the basics, but with a much faster, richer experience. 4. Mashups turn maps into commodity tools, that create entire new products using maps as an element of their features.

So yeah, I learned some really cool things, and now they boil around in my head, as I think of how to apply them to work problems. I really want to put a vision video together though, that’s for sure.