The DMN's Cheryl Hall (last cited in this post) profiles yet another fascinating niche business--this one the video division of a local architecture firm.
Bob Morris, managing principal of Corgan Associates Inc., will tell you that business opportunities crop up in unexpected places.
Two years ago, he gave a small band of architects free rein to expand the firm's computerized media capabilities and drum up outside work.
They'd become proficient at animated 3-D videos of buildings "blossoming" from the ground up and virtual walking tours of interior spaces. And they could create digitized images of cars, gardens, furniture and buildings that were indistinguishable from actual photographs.
Mr. Morris figured other architectural firms might want to outsource their video production.
He was right.
But he had no idea that there was a lucrative market beyond that. He proudly admits his staff had more vision than he did.
This year, Corgan Media Lab, as the 12-person unit is called, will bring in just under $1 million in outside revenue. The bulk of that will be generated by game, feature film and in-store broadcast work.
"These young mavericks had the desire and passion to push an emerging technology into tools that we and other businesses can use," says the 52-year-old Mr. Morris. "They've turned a marketing and R&D cost into a profit center."
His team re-created European historic landmarks as backgrounds for a recently released video game and is offering its digital lighting expertise in an upcoming animated movie.
Images of Old English cottages and homey fireplace-lit interiors fill a corkboard wall of a workroom. These "oil paintings" are for an undisclosed software product being released for Christmas.
The division, reports Hall, not only adds to the firm's profits but helps attract and retain talent. It's a great example of leveraging existing capabilities to expand business potential.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 02, 2006 • Comments
Inspired by the research for my next Atlantic column, I became fascinated by the many neon signs in and around Florence, most of them for small shops. I've created a Flikr album of some of my favorites.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 02, 2006 • Comments
Plenty of museum shops will sell you a photo of Donatello's David, but none of those pictures will give you a good look at his prehensile toes.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 02, 2006 • Comments
Reader Julian Becker calls my attention to this article by Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamen. McDonald's, it seems, has discovered, in Kamin's words, that "There is substance in style and if you want to sell a hamburger and fries, you had better take note." The new McDonald's design isn't just prettier and more up-to-date. It also encompasses more variety.
What they've done inside the new and refurbished buildings is better, recognizing, as the year-old flagship McDonald's along Ontario Street in Chicago does, that people come to McDonald's in different-size groups and with different expectations for their experience. So there are three kinds of seating areas: a "fast" zone, with a large communal table or smaller adjoining tables with stool seats; a "social" zone, where families and others can park in banquettes around big tables; and a more secluded "linger" zone with comfy, upholstered chairs.
This is real customization and it comes with real comfort (the banquettes are outfitted with imitation leather seats and backs versus the "measured comfort" of the double-mansard era, with its cushioned backs and plastic seats). There's also real choice (you actually can move some of the chairs around, unlike the old fixed ones that made you feel like you were eating in the high school gym).
For all the talk about "de-plasticizing" McDonald's, there is still plenty of plastic present in the faux wood tabletops, floors and walls, all of which can be easily cleaned. But the design cleverly de-emphasizes plastic, drawing the eye instead to warm brick walls, soft pendant lights (which replace the harsh lights inserted in acoustical tile) or the plasma TVs that indulge the modern habit of multitasked eating.
With this and other smart touches -- like the red Eames chair and a modern fireplace that adorn the linger zone in the new McDonald's in Westerville -- the result is attractive without being snooty, more a restaurant and less of a pit stop, responding to the rising expectations that people today bring to shopping and eating.
Alas, the Tribune site includes no photos of the new McDonald's.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 02, 2006 • Comments
To read some contemporary commentators (Sally Satel reviews one here), you'd think nobody ever considered depression a disease before evil pharmaceutical companies invented Prozac. To the contrary, here's Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments on the subject:
Nature, in her sound and healthful state, seems never to prompt us to suicide. There is, indeed, a species of melancholy (a disease to which human nature, among its other calamities, is unhappily subject) which seems to be accompanied with, what one may call, an irresistible appetite for self-destruction. In circumstances often of the highest external prosperity, and sometimes too, in spite even of the most serious and deeply impressed sentiments of religion, this disease has frequently been known to drive its wretched victims to this fatal extremity. The unfortunate persons who perish in this miserable manner, are the proper objects, not of censure, but of commiseration. To attempt to punish them, when they are beyond the reach of all human punishment, is not more absurd than it is unjust.
I'm reading most of Smith's collected works in preparation for a week-long Liberty Fund seminar, affectionately known as Adam Smith Camp. For searchable, nicely formatted, full-text versions of works by Smith and other classic writers, see Liberty Fund's terrific Library of Economics and Liberty. The Econlib site also features Arnold Kling and Bryan Caplan's blog and other contemporary writings.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 02, 2006 • Comments
Where does the Today Show get its story ideas? The Atlantic. Here's the replay of my massages article.
And in the "you just can't please some people" department, the head of the American Masage Therapy Association has written the magazine to complain about the article.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 30, 2006 • Comments
USA Today has endorsed (very) limited financial incentives for organ donation. The editorial concludes, "More than 6,000 patients die each year while on waiting lists. Demanding patience, when the price of delay is death, is no answer. It's time to try new ideas."
The National Kidney Foundation, represented by its chairman, Charles B. Fruit, takes the "just let them die" view. Fruit's article includes this misleading little math exercise:
Payment stands as an affront to those families that have already donated organs of loved ones out of charity. There is evidence to suggest it might prove similarly offensive to future donors. In 2005, the National Survey of Organ Donation found that 10.8% of those polled would be less likely to grant consent for the organs of a deceased family member to be used for transplant if they were offered payment; 68% said they would be neither more nor less likely to grant consent. Thus, there is little data to show that financial incentives would increase donation rates.
So, to round the figures a bit, 70 percent would be unaffected, and 11 percent would be less likely to grant consent. What happened to the other 19 percent? They were, ahem, conveniently left out--because they would be more likely to grant consent. That's what's called a net increase.
The argument that paying organ donors is "an affront" to unpaid donors is disgusting. Are unpaid donors giving organs to save lives or just to make themselves feel morally superior? Even in the latter case, they shouldn't care if other people get paid. They can still hold their noses in the air. Underlying this argument, which the NKF loves, seems to be a nagging sense of guilt: The current system takes something valuable without offering anything in return. It is, in other words, highly exploitative. If that exploitation suddenly goes away, the people who've been exploited in the past will realize they've been used and be mad. Personally, I don't think that's terribly likely, because most of today's donors are, in fact, motivated by sympathy for recipients. But the fact that defenders of the system keep making the argument suggests they know they're doing something a little shady.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 27, 2006 • Comments
I'm in Florence, home of great art, great food, and poor Internet service. They're still in the Internet cafe stage, with little wi-fi to be found.
Here is Steve in front of a re-creation of Galileo's inclined plane in the science museum. There are bells along the top, spaced at proportional intervals. As the ball rolls down the incline, it rings the bells, making it possible to time the descent.
We were going to take a photo of me in front of Galileo's actual telescopes, but it turns out you aren't supposed to take pictures, and we were busted--very politetly and apologetically--as I was posing.
The anti-photo policies of museums don't necessarily make sense, except as some kind of revenue enhancer. Prohibiting flash is one thing. And I don't blame the Louvre for blocking photos in the often-crowded Italian painting gallery. But prohibiting all photos in an uncrowded museum filled with works in the public domain is unnecessary--unless you think it will generate sales in the museum store. But the very cool, and virtually empty, science museum, which hardly even has a bookstore, would get more visitors if it let them pose for photos.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 27, 2006 • Comments
In chapter 5 of The Future and Its Enemies (excerpted here), I talk about the insights into governance gained from the early online game Habitat:
Back in 1985, when personal computers were strange and wondrous inventions just filtering into American homes, Chip Morningstar and his colleagues created an online world in which Commodore 64 owners could meet, play, and communicate with each other. The computers were simple, the modems slow, but the world--called Habitat--quickly became complex. Habitat provided its users with an animated landscape, props, activities, and cartoon personas called avatars. Users could send each other e-mail or converse through text in word balloons. Working from this underlying structure, Habitat's virtual citizens developed a wide variety of social activities and institutions. They invented games and dance routines, went on treasure hunts and quests, published a newspaper, threw parties, got "married" and divorced, founded religions and businesses, wrote and sold poems and stories, and debated weighty issues.
Watching Habitat develop made Morningstar think seriously about how rules shape societies, and what the limits of rule making are. "It was a small but more or less complete world, with hundreds and later thousands of inhabitants," he recalls. "And I, along with my coworkers, was God." In theory, the programmers made the rules, knew them thoroughly, and could change them at a stroke. But their godlike powers weren't as limitless as they seemed. Says Morningstar: "Again and again we found that activities that we had planned based on often unconscious assumptions about user behavior had completely unexpected outcomes....We could provide opportunities for things to happen, but we could not predict or dictate the outcome."
If there were chinks in the rules, the players found them. A few enterprising souls spent hours shuffling between a "Vendroid" machine selling dolls for 75 tokens and a pawn machine in another region buying them for 100 tokens. When the arbitrageurs had enough profit to buy crystal balls for 18,000 tokens, they repeated the same procedure with a pawn machine paying 30,000 tokens, until the Habitat money supply had quintupled overnight. When questioned about the source of their newfound wealth, they replied, "We got it fair and square!"
"Unintended consequences really have to do with naive people believing that there are no holes [in the rules]. It's very easy to seduce yourself into thinking that you've got everything under control," says Morningstar. "And the reality is, it's almost never true." Clever people will always come up with ideas no central rule maker has conceived.
Over and over again, Habitat's designers ran into the limits of their own knowledge. The range of tastes and knowledge its many users brought to Habitat quickly overwhelmed the ability of designers to foresee how users would react. A treasure hunt that took weeks to build lasted less than a day, after a single Habitat resident quickly discovered a critical clue; the winner had a great time, but most of the other players barely got started. The system's operators soon realized the value of letting users create their own games. "It's not that they could necessarily do things that were as good as some of the things that we had the facilities to do," says Morningstar. "But the things which they did were much more directly in tune with what people immediately wanted--because they were much more directly in contact with themselves."
I was pleased to discover that Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer now have a blog extending their insights to the present day. It's full of good stuff.
And, in the "I am so old" department, my "7-year-old niece" mentioned in the chapter's lead is now a 16-year-old rising senior at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts & Humanities, specializing in visual arts. She'll doing some college shopping while visiting us later this summer.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 19, 2006 • Comments
Here's a fun site for those too old for teddy bears. Startup Freddy & Ma is an experiment in mass customization and web-based marketing, including blog that tracks the company's progress and also comments on fashion. At the website, customers design their own handbags online, combining a huge selection of fabrics (many specially designed for the company) and trims.
I met Anthony Pigliacampo, who founded the company with his sister, when he came to a talk I gave at IDEO. A few months ago, he kindly lent me a couple of prototype bags to test. They're pretty and well-made--but the company's real appeal is the design-your-own angle. It's good for entertainment, even if you don't buy anything. But if you do, use the code DYNAMIST and get 20% off.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 19, 2006 • Comments