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theoutcastrogue · 3 years

Note

I loved your post on burglars tools, very interesting and informative. Would you be able to help me understand the part about ladders? I don't know if it's the historical writing or my unfamiliarity with the subject, but I cant form a clear picture of what is being described.

Sure, let's see. First, here's the excerpt from that post:

Next comes another class of tools; rope-ladders, or wire rope with iron or wooden foot-rests, or pieces of wire bent into large rings at one end, and connected like a surveyor's chain, so as to offer support for the feet in climbing. They are always admirably made, fold up into a small compass, and can often be carried in the coat-pocket. The end intended to be attached to the window-sill is supplied with iron hooks. Some are capable of being thrown up by hand without making any unusual noise, while others are attached by hand from within a building when it is necessary to provide means of escape. In all cases a slight jerk from the ground releases the hooks, and the ladder falls. When the ladder can be attached from the ground, one operator mounts to the window while his “pall” stands below to guard against a surprise by the “cops,” as the police are called.

There are may types of rope ladders, they can have wooden rungs, or loops, or just big knots. They are usually made of hemp rope, but any strong rope will do, including the very strong wire rope (which is modern, it was developed in the 1830s). In the above picture, the wooden horizontal things are the rungs. These, or loops, are the "foot-rests". The fourth has knots, and if you imagine it made of wire rope instead of rope and with loops instead of knots, that's what the text describes.

rope ladder with hook, and assorted ways to scale a castle wall, Germany, late 15th century / a rope ladder on a modern ship (this is a pilot ladder)

Rope ladders been around since ancient times. They were used in construction (and siege warfare), and they were very common in ships. In these cases they're generally expected to be well-made and sturdy, but supporting the weight of a single person is not a tall order, and anyone can learn how to make one.

Latude escapes from the Bastille with a rope ladder. Latude (1725-1805) was a French swindler, celebrated for his many escapes from prison, as described in his own Memoirs (1787). He made a lot of things up though, so: grain of salt.

Rope ladders with big rungs may not be the ideal burglar's tool, since they're bulky when folded and noisy when used. But a simple rope ladder can folded neatly to a small package, imagine like a climber's kit:

As for the "pieces of wire bent into large rings at one end, and connected like a surveyor's chain", well here's what a surveyor's chain looks like:

Surveyor's chain, New York state, US, circa 1830

This is a device for measuring distances (in a complicated way which combines imperial and metric, and which we thankfully don't have to worry about here). If instead of small rings to connect all the pieces you have a few more larger loops, large enough to accommodate a foot, you can use it for climbing, and you can fold it to a small and portable package when not in use.

As for hooks, I think they're pretty straightforward:

Note: our source for all this is neither investigative journalism nor historical research, it's an article in a magazine for mechanics and builders, printed in New York in 1874. So I'm not sure how reliable it is. If I wanted historical accuracy, for writing or out of curiosity, I'd try to corroborate it with other sources. Newspaper archives that report on real burglaries would be a good start. (It's researching for periods before newspapers that make it real hard to find specifics, then you need to dig into court archives, and resort to super questionable descriptions in literature, and it's complicated.) But if we just want a broad idea, I think it's a great source. And honestly, when it comes to crime, I'm inclined to trust mechanics who actually know how stuff works more than I trust mainstream reporters, who are prone to creating moral panics because panic sells papers.

Hope that helped!

#correspondence #thieves' tools #burglar #trs #theory #escape artist

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ezzydean · 6 years

Text

fireflies in the square

yet another everyday/modern magic au that you didn’t ask for but I started writing anyway. because I do what I want.

no ships yet, just potential

Technically - technically - Kei really shouldn’t blame Kentarou for this. But Kentarou was the one who threw the dart at the map and therefore the one who chose where they would be going and therefore was the reason Kei’s favorite plant was nearly dead and therefore the reason Kei was standing in front of a shop called Garden Gnome that he hoped was a plant shop staring at the tallest mass of muscle he had seen in a very long time. Maybe ever. He hugged the pot for his plant a little tighter against his chest when the mass of muscle turned and spotted him standing outside.

He blinked and was looking at nothing but plants behind glass and then the door to his left opened.

“Hello.”

Kei’s fingers twitched against the pot. It had been awhile since he had gone out on his own and actually interacted with people. It was even more nerve wracking than he remembered.

“Hello,” he finally managed after what was probably far too long of a pause to be normal.

“Did you need help with something?” Kei took a step closer and spotted a name tag pinned to a pastel apron that should have seemed out of place on the slab of muscle. But it wasn’t. Somehow. Kei squinted at the tag: Ushijima. “Or perhaps you wanted to come look around,” Ushijima suggested. He stepped back against the door in an invitation for Kei to enter.

Kei glanced down the sidewalk back towards his and Kentarou’s apartment. Then he licked his lips, pulled the pot even tighter against his chest, and headed inside.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

The moment he stepped into Garden Gnome Kei felt like he had been transported to a new world. The air was fragrant and crisp, the light was somehow shimmering and warm in a way the sun outside hadn’t been, and plants covered every surface they could. Vining plants crawled up shelves and hung from the rafters. Succulents and cacti covered shelf upon shelf. Big, leafy tropical plants crowded the aisles. Feathery leaves whispered against each other across the room, moving from a breeze he couldn’t feel. He heard a quiet series of thumps, like books falling onto carpet, from above him and he followed the line of a spiraling metal staircase up to the second floor and spotted more flowering plants than he could ever remember seeing in one place.

Someone poked their head around a huge planter filled with dark teal flowers and peered down at them.

“What is it now, Ushiwaka?” They demanded.

Kei could feel the plant in his arms stirring back to life, just from being here.

“This customer was standing outside and I invited them in.”

Kei shifted under the pinpoint stare of light brown eyes.

“A paying customer or one who wants to gawk at the great Oikawa?”

Ushijima let out a quiet sigh. Kei got the feeling that this was a fairly regular occurrence here.

“Uh.” Kei cleared his throat. “We just moved into the area - my roommate and I - and, uh, my plant isn’t taking the move so well I guess. I’m not sure what exactly is wrong with it? I was hoping someone could help me?”

“Oooh,” Oikawa cooed from his perch above them. “A challenge!” He hopped over the edge of the railing and landed gracefully in front of Kei. Oikawa curled his fingers in delicate grabby motions and Kei let him peel the pot away reluctantly.

He never knew what to do with his hands when he wasn’t doing something with them, never had and probably never would. Kentarou found it hilarious and, much to Kei’s chagrin, kind of adorable. It wasn’t adorable. It was mortifying. Was he supposed to shove them in his jacket pockets? Did he hook his thumbs in his front pants pockets? Play with his scarf? Why were his fingers so long and gangly and awkward like the rest of him?

He settled for his default: pressing his thumbs together and letting his fingers tangle up while his arms hung awkwardly in front of him.

Oikawa cooed at his plant as he ran his fingers along the leaves and poked gently at the soil.

“He might be awhile,” Ushijima said from behind him, startling Kei. “Feel free to look around if you’d like.”

Kei didn’t really want to let his plant out of his sight but seeing as how Oikawa scurried away with it the moment Kei had glanced over his shoulder at Ushijima and was now nowhere to be seen he didn’t really have a choice. Ushijima wandered away carrying a watering can Kei didn’t remember seeing him pick up and left Kei to look around the shop warily.

He was a little wary because he had no idea what he’d find in the shop and Oikawa and Ushijima left him feeling skittish and restless and all sorts of things he couldn’t quite pin down. He was mostly wary because the last time he was in a building with this many plants in it Hinata had forgotten to tell him that he was living with a giant snake shifter and Kei had turned a corner and come face to face with a flickering tongue and what seemed to be a metric ton of slithering, coiling snake.

If he ran into a snake shifter he was calling Kentarou and dragging his ass right back on the road whether or not Kentarou wanted to come with.

Kei wandered through aisles of plants, brushing past leaves and flowers that seemed to shiver at his touch. He wasn’t all that good with plants. The one he brought in was actually one of the few he had managed to keep alive all these years. So of course now, when it and Kentarou are the only physical reminders of what he left behind, is when it starts dying. He grit his teeth and shoved the melancholy out of his mind - or at least to the back of it - and ducked under a frondy ferny branch of some kind that he had spotted out of the corner of his eye. He froze as the leaves whispered and fell back into place behind him. In front of him was a small pond surrounded by mossy rocks and trailing vines. That wasn’t what froze him in place. It was the fawn delicately lapping water out of the pond and nudging a pink water lily out of the way almost irritatedly.

Time seemed to slow to a stop as he stood there watching the fawn. Its light brown coat dappled with white made his fingers itch to touch and the way its ears kept flicking towards him let him know it knew he was there. It knew and it just kept lazily lapping up water. Kei looked around and saw nothing but plants. Nothing that indicated that this was even a shop anymore.

Oikawa’s voice snapped him out of his own swirling thoughts. He might have been standing there for five minutes or he might have been up there for five years he really wasn’t sure. The fawn finally looked over at him and for a moment he swore it looked irritated. Not at his presence, at least he didn’t think so.

“Kunimi,” Oikawa called out again, enunciating each syllable. The fawn let out a soft huff and the plants around the pond trembled. Then the branches behind Kei rustled and Oikawa poked his head into the little clearing. “There you are. Kunimi. Eat this.” He held out a small leaf and Kei had never seen a fawn look so unimpressed and exhausted as he did right then. It let out another huff but it licked the leaf out of Oikawa’s hand and chewed on it.

Before Kei could ask what exactly was going on the fawn shuddered and twisted its head at a strange angle and then, well, there weren’t really words to describe the way it started shifting and twitching and tearing itself apart until there was a guy who looked about Kei’s age standing there with a grimace on his face as he swallowed and then licked his lips like he was trying to get a bad taste off of them.

“He’s being cursed,” the guy, who he assumed was Kunimi, said. “Low level, maybe a two or three, intentionally weak.” He leaned in close to Kei and plucked lightly at the cuff of his jacket, squinting at him. “Non-family so far as I can tell.”

That… that explained a lot actually.

Oikawa gasped dramatically. “You poor thing,” he cooed at the same time Kei said, “Oh, just a curse?”

The other two stared at him in surprise.

“What do you mean ‘just’ a curse?” Oikawa gave him a once over, apparently seeing him in a new light or something.

“I bet that’s probably why so many of my plants have died over the years,” Kei muttered mostly to himself. “I just wish I had realized it before. Kyoutani could have taken care of it and then I would have a lot fewer dead plants on my conscience.”

Kei really should get back to the apartment and let Kentarou know. He slipped past Oikawa and headed back for the front door of the shop. He spotted his plant on the counter next to Ushijima who was watering it carefully and gently plucking dead leaves from it.

“Thanks for, you know, everything.” He grabbed his plant and held it to his chest again.

“Wait, wait, wait. You’re just gonna waltz out of here all casually after being told you’re being cursed?” Oikawa tilted his head in curiosity. Kei glanced up to the second floor where Kunimi was watching him warily. Ushijima made a unhappy noise at Oikawa’s words but before he could say anything Kei gave them all a polite bow and backed up to the door.

“I should go.”

He thought he heard Ushijima say something about coming back some time but he was out the door and heading down the block before any of them could stop him. He wasn’t running, but between his long strides and what was probably one of the most epic ‘bitch get out of my way’ faces he’d ever had on he made it back to the apartment in near record time.

“How was your day dearest?” Kentarou snorted before he even finished his sentence, ruining whatever dumb joke he had been trying to set up before he even got it started. Kei rolled his eyes and kicked his shoes against the wall. He was happy to note they fell exactly where they should and lined up perfectly with Kentarou’s own.

He shoved his plant into Kentarou’s lap and dropped down onto the floor next to him, arm balancing casually on one knee.

“You know I always thought a plant was kind of a weird gift to get. Especially from one seventeen year old to another.” Kentarou stiffened, eyes darting towards Kei and then down to the plant in his lap. “Couldn’t you have just given me like a talisman or something?”

Kentarou meet his gaze, searching for something. Probably gauging how irritated Kei was about it all. When he realized Kei was more irritated at the situation than at Kentarou himself he laughed and shook his head.

“A talisman? Jewelry? Dude that’s gay.”

“Um. You are gay,” Kei reminded him.

“Not for you.”

Kei shrugged. “Fair enough.” He was quiet until Kentarou bumped their shoulders together. “I’m pretty sure I found a plant shop that’s just a front for a fae portal of some kind. How about you?”

Kentarou grinned at him and pulled something out of his pocket, leaning most of his weight into Kei’s side in the process and nearly tipping them both over. He handed a small business card to Kei.

“‘The Polyarmory’?”

“One: four very attractive individuals and a whole shit ton of weapons.”

“Basically your wet dreams.”

“Basically,” Kentarou agreed. “Two: at least one of them has the kind of dark magic we need. Three: I got a personal number from one of them.” His grin grew even wider when Kei turned the card over and saw the name and number scrawled on the back.

“Well I hope you and,” Kei peered down at the card, “Kuroo will be very happy together. I’m going to go lay on the floor in the kitchen and see if I can figure out who, exactly, has been cursing me for the last five or so years.”

#haikyuu #tsukishima kei #kyoutani kentarou #fireflies in the square au #hq writing

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metamodel · 5 years

Text

Piss, Bread and Circuses

Hello again. I recently visited the Australian Film, Television and Radio School for their latest Re:Frame event, which was about audience engagement in the attention economy. After just ten minutes, I wanted to stab my eyes with a pencil.

Station ident: After returning to design after a year away, I find that Everything Now Looks Very Strange Indeed™. This is another one of my updates on restarting a creative practice (which I’m calling Studio Thing), plus a dose of cultural and design commentary.

Ah yes, the eye-stabbing. I can imagine many interesting conversations about attention in a post-broadcast media world, but when this event opened with a keynote from self-proclaimed “Data Whisperer” Elisa Choy, they were almost occluded in advance. Choy’s talk represented everything that might be dubious about the meeting of Big Data and creative strategy: figuring her audience as a bunch of panicked TV executives, she opined about the declining ratings of big tentpole shows like MasterChef. As a panacea for this non-problem, Choy offered her data-whispering “methodology”: ambulance-chasing the public’s roiling opinions on social media, which we can then mirror by creating the Right Content™. Pet-swapping is hot, so we should make shows about pet-swapping! I kid you fucking not.

[caption align="alignnone" width="980"]

The death spiral of bread and circuses[/caption]

Look, I know, feedback loops have the potential to enable many things, but they’re not necessarily positive, and here I have to take a stand: this particularly impoverished approach to data and culture represents the tightening of a noose around society’s neck. Rather than opening up possibilities in cultural production, the weaponisation of social media metrics to slavishly create What the Public Wants only serves to narrow our focus to that of a cybernetic Id: the collective embodiment of the prototypical addict, reduced to drinking their own toxic urine from a tube. (Having myself sought professional help over poisonous feedback loops involving substances that amongst other things included, uh, Netflix, I don’t use such metaphors lightly.)

Of course, I’d merely shrug if such an approach weren’t already so sadly emblematic of where we’re at as a society. The dream of a perfectly closed loop of reactive idiocy won’t ever fully “work”, of course, but in this era of insta-populism and habit-forming media apparatuses that feed on our own bile, we’re nonetheless currently living the damage wreaked by such attempts. As strategists, designers and producers of culture, we should be doing everything we can to avoid this spiral into doom.

Georgia Rowe, a service designer at the ABC, slyly mentioned at the same event that being sensitive to the breadth of people’s lived contexts would be, you know, essential to any kind of useful loop of engagement. Her respect for that universe of possibility within the pores of everyday life, rather than its reduction into more yet grist for the mill, has always been the progressive horizon of Human-Centred Design. But I’m not sure that this is enough to counterbalance the spectre before us: media landlords, populist strongmen and other disreputables, busily instrumentalising our data into some kind of zombie-reptilian autonomic nervous system of anti-culture. And it’s not Georgia’s individual responsibility to create a stronger antidote to such tendencies, either; shouldn’t we collectively be pushing harder in other directions?

In fact, I wonder these days if the “human context” we so often highlight has become a fig-leaf or alibi for our underlying zombie-reptile tendencies. Is the very popularisation of Human-Centred Design in the current juncture, which correlates so strongly with the rise of our current digital product overlords, itself a symptom of our predicament? As someone who cut their teeth as a Director of Design at Australia’s first social-purpose-focused Human-Centred Design studio, it’s not easy for me to say this, but our obsessive focus on fashioning usable, desirable products, and thus the methods we use to do this — including HCD — are imbricated in this short-circuit of desire, and exploited by the profiteers of our attention. Perhaps some spanners need to be thrown into the works, lest design is sucked into its own black hole.

Beneath the pavement: the rave

The second keynote at Re:Frame was from Seb Chan, the Chief Experience Officer at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Seb’s work is thankfully all about creating the conditions for reigniting curiosity and community, rather than death-spiralling. (He’s also an exemplary citizen of the Republic of Newsletters; Fresh and New is essential reading for anyone interested in culture and technology, as well as having an interesting “pay to access the archives” business model. Go and subscribe, immediately. Seb’s also responsible for giving me the kick in the pants to post a new issue: “I like your newsletter,” he told me after his talk as I blushed prettily, “… WHEN IT COMES OUT.” Ahem.)

Seb said a couple of slightly cryptic but suggestive things in his keynote that I think can help loosen design’s tendency to auto-asphyxiate under capitalism. Firstly, he noted that his design approach isn’t focused on reactively addressing “user needs”. (And he was also clear that neither is it about narrowly focusing on transactional interactions, as experience design so often is.) Secondly, he acknowledged that his current work in experience design inevitably draws from his background in organising electronic dance parties in the distant 20th Century — a different but related kind of “experience”. (No doubt some of you also remember going to Frigid in ‘90s Sydney. Good times!) Moreover, he provocatively described those events as “utopian, elite and exclusionary”.

It might be surprising to hear a senior figure of a public cultural institution use terms that could be interpreted as “anti-democratic”, but that’s not really the angle here. Seb’s approach certainly isn’t about disregarding the needs of ACMI’s visitors, or making it the sole preserve of over-educated latté-belters. Rather, going beyond “user needs” opens up possibilities that would be foreclosed by seeing visitors as simply customers who need to be mechanically serviced. And by being underground, 20th Century electronic dance culture created pockets of safety that enabled sexual minorities to have space to flourish, outside the panopticon of the dominant culture. Subcultures therefore serve as an alternative model for conceiving of how we might experience public institutions and infrastructures. The upshot is not how to make museums more obscure, but how we can use this insight to create spaces of conviviality across our social terrain.

In a recent newsletter, Seb put it this way:

When people in the cultural sector talk about museums or libraries as aiming to become ‘town squares’ or similar, I wonder if they are missing a trick. A town square is where only the loudest voices can be heard. Perhaps a town square is not what is needed, but an ecology of smaller niches where smaller voices thrive? And the institutional role lies in being a facilitator of the connections between niches?

Essentially, this is about a different way to be public.

Beneath the pavement: limestone caves

Thinking about this thought-bomb, I’m reminded of nothing less than W.H. Auden’s magnificent 1948 poem “In Praise of Limestone”, which contrasts the gentle affordances of limestone caves with other, less forgiving geological spaces:

“Come!" purred the clays and gravels,

“On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers

Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb

In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both

Need to be altered."

Against a totalising, scorched-earth concept of public space, Auden yearns for his sensual pockets of limestone. He’s not uncritical — like anybody who’s grappled with the limits of the identity politics that sometimes come with subcultural niches, the poem is ambivalent about the indulgence and narcissism that such spaces can engender, but it’s suggestive of something much more interesting to me than the flattened, data-whispered zombie dystopia of The Public (Opinion) that appears to be all the rage these days.

More on publics and counterpublics next week! I’m currently in Melbourne for the sometimes-provocative SDNOW conference, and there’s too much to write about…

A sustainable portion of all my love,

Ben

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theadmiringbog · 7 years

Photo

When most people hear the word “price,” they think of a number. That's a price point.

When we use the term price, we are trying to get at something more fundamental. We want to understand the perceived value that the innovation holds for the customer. How much is the customer willing to pay for that value? What would the demand be?

Seen in this light, price is both an indication of what customers value and a measure of how much they are willing to pay for that value.

Every company has a chance to create Cayennes and reduce the risk of Darts. The key is to rigorously determine the market for a new product long before the products are built, and making sure the market is willing to pay for that product before embarking on a long journey of productizing the innovation.

To boil it down, these companies conduct product development this way: They design, then build, then market, then price.

What we will teach you in this book is to flip that process on its head: Market and price, then design, then build.

In other words, design the product around the price.

Monetizing failures fall into only four categories:

Feature shock: cramming too many features into one product—sometimes even unwanted features—creates a product that does not fully resonate with customers and is often overpriced.

Minivation: an innovation that, despite being the right product for the right market, is priced too low to achieve its full revenue potential.

Hidden gem: a potential blockbuster product that is never properly brought to market, generally because it falls outside of the core business.

Undead: an innovation that customers don't want but has nevertheless been brought to market, either because it was the wrong answer to the right question, or an answer to a question no one was asking. The fact that new product monetization failures come in only four varieties should give you comfort. Imagine having to do postmortems that could point to dozens or hundreds of factors!

9 Rules for Innovation Success

We have boiled these secrets down into the following nine new rules for innovation success. The rules are contrary to what most executives have learned about product development:

Have the “willingness to pay” talk with customers early in the product development process.

Don't force a one-size-fits-all solution.

Product configuration and bundling is more science than art. You need to build them carefully and match them with your most meaningful segments.

Choose the right pricing and revenue models, because how you charge is often more important than how much you charge.

Develop your pricing strategy. Create a plan that looks a few steps ahead, allowing you to maximize gains in the short and long term.

Draft your business case using customer willingness-to-pay data, and establish links between price, value, volume, and cost.

Communicate the value of your offering clearly and compellingly; otherwise you will not get customers to pay full measure.

Understand your customers' irrational sides, because whether you sell to other businesses or to consumers, your customers are people.

Maintain your pricing integrity. Control discounting tightly.

Companies with strong product-driven or engineering cultures tend to be the ones that develop feature shocks. Firms with a culture of playing it safe and avoiding big risks typically suffer minivations. Hidden gems most often afflict companies that coddle the core business. And undeads are born in firms whose top-down cultures discourage feedback and criticism from below.

The component company failed to ask this question: “What value does this component bring to our customer and its customers, and what portion of that value can we capture?” Instead, it asked, “What does this component cost to make, and what minimum margin do I need to add on top of that?”

Have the “Willingness-to-Pay” Talk Early. You Can't Prioritize without It

Discussing pricing with customers before you have a product ... How does one do that? The simplest way is to ask direct questions about the value of your product and its features, for example:

“What do you think could be an acceptable price?”

“What do you think would be an expensive price?”

“What do you think would be a prohibitively expensive price?”

“Would you buy this product at $XYZ?”

Then follow each question with the most powerful question of all: “Why?”

Top Five Methods for Having the Willingness-to-Pay Conversation (from Easiest to Most Advanced)

In Figure 4.3, we detail the five methods we have found most useful that you should use when you have the conversations

Below are the 10 most important insights we have learned from them:

1. Don't forget to tap into pockets of internal excellence:

Before you have customer conversations, form a group of internal cross-functional experts (product, sales, marketing, finance, and engineering) and conduct an expert judgment workshop.

Ask the questions you would ask customers.

Send out the questions before the meeting and ask participants to show up with answers (to avoid behavior in the room that generates biased answers). Then conduct an objective discussion of why people answered the way they did. Position customer discussions as the “value talk:” Don't position the talk as “pricing” or “willingness to pay.”

2. Ask questions like “Do you value these products/features?” and then ask why.

Then switch gears to ask questions like “What would you consider an acceptable price?” Switching from value to price is an easier transition to make in determining customer WTP.

4. Make 25 percent of the questions “why” questions:

As simple as it sounds, the “why” question is the most powerful one. If someone says, “I would pay $20,” ask them, “Why do you say that?”

7. Avoid the “average trap:

When you analyze the answers to your WTP questions, look at the distribution, not just the average response. The average response can be misleading.

8. Be precise in your language:

The questions “Would you buy this?” and “Would you buy this for $20?” are totally different.

CEO Questions

Does our product development team have serious pricing discussions with customers in the early stages of the new product's development process?

If not, why not?

What data do we have to show there's a viable market that can and will pay for our new product?

Do we know our market's WTP range for our product concept? Do we know what price range the market considers acceptable?

What's considered expensive? How did we find out?

Do we know what features customers truly value and are willing to pay for, and which ones they don't and won't?

And have we killed or added to the features as a consequence of this data? If not, why not?

What are our product's differentiating features versus competitors' features?

How much do customers value our features over the competition's features?

There are many flavors of segmentation that may be good for customizing sales and marketing messages, such as persona, behavior, attitude, demographics, and more. But when it comes to innovation, there is only one right way to segment: by customers' needs, value, and their willingness to pay for a product or service that delivers that value.

A Paper Company's New Segmentation

A Segment-Based Product Offering in a Business-to-Business Market

When you configure and bundle your new product, you may get overwhelmed with deciding which features to include in each segment offer. In a different way, it is easy for customers to become overwhelmed trying to decide which offer is right for them. Designing your product with leader, filler, and killer features in mind will help you with that first challenge. Creating good, better, and best options will address the second.

The leader/filler/killer classification is the most important aspect of configuring your new product. We described methods for doing this in Figure 4.3.

The classic approach to product configuration and bundling is to create a three-tier model, sometimes referred to as good, better, best or G/B/B.

Typically, the good version has the most important core features, and the best has all the bells and whistles (the all-in product/bundle). You have probably come across this concept many times in everyday life: bronze, silver, and gold offerings. For example, the pro, business, and enterprise products offered by online file sharing website Dropbox are a G/B/B offering. Ideally, no more than a quarter of your customers should opt for the good option, while 70 percent should opt for the better or the best.

You can steer customers to a choice based on whether they are price conscious (good), quality conscious (best), or somewhere in between (better). The core philosophy behind a G/B/B is that a significant portion of people avoid extremes when they are presented a choice; they choose the compromise option. Playing on this psychology, G/B/B configuration/bundling maximizes revenue.

Don't make it too big. Once you go beyond nine benefits or four products, your product configurations and bundles run the risk of exceeding psychological thresholds. Your product will start making customers' heads spin, and you will be heading toward producing a feature shock product!

Hard bundling works when you have market power and are the dominant player. In almost all other cases, you should go with a mixed bundling approach (sell the products as a bundle and as standalone products).

Bundle with integration value so that 1 + 1 = 3. Bundling is not always about discounting. In certain industries, such as software, you can sometimes charge a premium for bundling products together because customers are willing to pay for integrated product experiences (such as common user interface and seamless interoperability between products). In these situations, if you offer a discount on the bundle, you will hurt your bottom line two times over!

4. Alternative Metric Pricing/Pay As You Go

Software companies have also successfully employed alternative pricing metrics. A software company that produces lab reports increased revenue by 20 percent just by changing its pricing metric from fixed perpetual license to charging per lab report.

5. Freemium pricing

The land-and-expand approach fails for 90 percent of companies. (For an exception to the rule, see the LinkedIn case study in Chapter 13.) In fact, the number of free customers who convert to premium is typically below 10 percent in software companies.

...

If you decide to offer a freemium service, you must double down on your efforts to convert customers to the premium version. It is extraordinarily difficult to get consumers to buy something they previously received for free. One need only to look at the scores of Web-based businesses that failed to monetize free online offerings in the last two decades. For example, most newspapers (apart from ones like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) have failed to convert free readers en masse to paid online subscribers.

What Are Your Competitors Doing?

The reason to ask this question is not to mimic your rivals' monetization approaches but to set yourself apart. Wherever possible, use your monetization model to create a competitive difference.

A solid pricing strategy document

Building Block #1: Set Clear Goals

Which goals are most important for your new products? Revenue? Market share? Total profit? Profit margin? Customer lifetime value? Average revenue per unit? Something else? Whichever goals you choose, you cannot maximize all of them at the same time. In setting goals, you must make trade-offs.

Forcing trade-offs in goals is crucial. A workshop task we call Goal Allocation Exercise helps companies do that. Every workshop participant is ideally from a company's C-suite. We ask them to allocate 100 points to a series of goals. That puts each executive in a trade-off mindset.

Examples of Principles for Promotion and Competitive Reactions

The most important input for optimizing your price is the price elasticity curve (also known as the demand curve and price–demand relationship). It shows how much the sales volume of your product decreases and increases if you move your price up or down: Price Elasticity = Change in Sales (%)/Change in Price (%) To calculate the price elasticity and profit curve for your new product, you need two sources of data: your analysis of what customers are willing to pay (discussed in Chapter 4) and your costs (both variable and fixed). Everything else is simple math. Here's an example. Figure 8.5 describes a product launch. At a price of $100, you would sell 1 million units per period. If you charge less, sales go up (1.35 million at a $70 price point). If you charge more, sales go down (to 600,000 at a price of $130). Figure 8.5 Price Scenarios for a New Product Launch With that information,

Every product—from a Rolls Royce to a pack of chewing gum—has a price elasticity curve. If you don't determine the elasticity curve for your product and use it to price that product, you will not get to your optimal price.

Your business case must model the linkages among the four elements of price, value, volume, and cost. When you do that, your monetary forecast will be far more precise.

Nine Steps to Build a Living Business Case

2. Assemble the basic ingredients. Incorporate market size, volume, customer segments, offer structure (configurations and bundles), value, WTP, a monetization model, costs, and competing products and their pricing.

3. Include price elasticity. Most companies avoid exploring price elasticity at this point, but we find it to be the critical element in business cases.

4. Apply data-verified facts. You need to use figures based on real facts. Without data, many are tempted to overstate the size of their target market, for example, or to create unrealistic adoption assumptions. Such guesses will come back to haunt you later, when you have to explain why sales are grossly under target. Topics that typically require data-validity checks include market size, ramp-up times, churn, and cannibalization assumptions.

5. Add risk assumptions. You need to attach risk assumptions to any input parameters that are inherently uncertain. For example, your manufacturing cost per unit will increase if a key supplier goes belly up and you must source from higher-priced suppliers.

SmugMug's Pricing Page with benefits > features

We have created an online diagnostic tool to help you diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of your overall innovation process (http://www.monetizinginnovation.com). Ask your innovation team to go through each task in the tool and report back with the results. The results should give you a high-level gauge for the status quo.

A key factor in the company's monetization success was appointing a monetization hero to the team and putting that person in charge. The monetization hero should have solid product experience and be familiar with your firm's existing innovation processes. This person should also have a broad perspective on the organization—especially the strengths, weaknesses, failures, and successes of the current innovation process. The monetization hero should listen for best practices that emerge in the cross-functional innovation meetings during the pilot phase.

#Monetizing Innovation #book review #business

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bennett-fan · 6 years

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9 Huge Advantages of Having a SmartWatch

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9 huge Advantages of Having a SmartWatch

I cant append how many grow old Ive heard people axiom smartwatches are a waste of money. Unfortunately, those who tell this usefully dont comprehend just what a smartwatch is clever of doing.

There are two types of people who will be reading this post. Those who think they are a waste of keep and those who want to know more very nearly the advantages and disadvantages of smartwatches back making occurring their mind not quite buying one.

So go ahead and check out our guide below. I am beautiful sure you will have a unassailable covenant of whether a smartwatch is right for your lifestyle by the stop of the article.

Advantages of intellectual Watch

The huge Smartwatch Benefits So, what can a smartwatch realize beyond tell a smartphone that makes it a worthwhile investment? We believe a look at some of the key smartwatch uses that might convince you to acknowledge the jump.

1. They dont just tell the time

Many people pick wearing a watch. The objective is either lively (simply telling the time) or its because its fashionable. A good watch looks good on someones wrist.

But watches are becoming less and less well-liked due to the advent of the smartphone. Who needs to buy a watch past their phone tells the time, has a calendar, and has an alarm? Its a valid reduction and one that explains decreasing watch sales in the last few years.

But, smart watches buck this trend as they meet the expense of something a little different. They provide every these basic watch features but they moreover accomplish things that smartphones cannot. Well run by exactly what these things are exceeding the course of this article.

2. A travel friend right on your wrist

James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research described a smartwatch as being:

Someone who knows more just about what you obsession than you do.

The Apple watch, for example, is skilled to refer swing vibrations to your wrist to say you if you should twist right or left bearing in mind subsequently directions. otherwise of for all time looking at a smartphone, for example, you are practiced to follow an invisible guide that informs you where to go. look going on and agree to in the scenery then again of staring at a map.

3. Finding a phone, key or device is even easier

As you competently know, losing a phone or keys is an unconditionally irritating experience. It always seems to happen before some important occasion that we just cant be late for!

Thankfully a smartwatch can render this inconvenience a issue of the past.

Most of them have a Find Phone feature. You can border your phone or any device following it and you will be adept to arena it through your watch whenever you wish.

Lost your phone? Just press a few buttons on your watch to find it in seconds.

4. They perform as a fine fitness tracker

Many smartwatches have fitness tracking as a core feature. It will assist you save happening like your fitness goals. as a result if you are ever thinking of taking a fitness tracker or a pedometer, you can replace it as soon as a good intellectual watch.

What exactly can a smart watch do? It can include steps, distance, calories, heart rate, pulse rate, snooze and some even go beyond this to calculate additional important metrics you might need. We recently reviewed the LQM EX1 Fitness Tracker and I am positive a fine smartwatch can give you the same.

Heart Rate Monitoring

5. reply to messages & get calls instantly

If you have a intellectual watch upon your wrist, you no longer obsession to bring your phone out of your pocket. You can get calls or respond to messages upon the go. This is especially useful if you are exercising or in a scenario where carrying a phone is just too awkward.

Some watches as well as have voice support. similar to something out of Star Trek, you can talk to your wrist and communicate similar to someone thousands of miles away!

6. see your social media notifications

Who doesnt desire to look Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, SnapChat or new social notifications upon his wrist? Well, me actually and this is always something I aim off, but for others, this is a must have function.

Some watches will helpfully discharge duty your messages and social media argument but others will permit you to interact similar to the application too. I dont suggest using this as your primary method of interacting subsequently people upon social media as it is a bit fiddly but on those occasions later than you are out supervision or something, its awesome!

7. You are even similar even though acquit yourself activities

When you are running, cycling, swimming or any additional form of exercise, you might want to peek into your messages, calls or notifications. Sometimes it is not realizable for you to keep a phone in the manner of you in those activities, and its just awkward and maddening similar to you accomplish anyway. Here is where a intellectual watch becomes essentially useful.

Are you below water? No trouble at all! The Apple Watch Series 2 has got a waterproof rating of 50 meters underwater.

It understands you augmented than any device. What more can you expect from it?

8. It keeps you associated longer than your phone

You might be thinking from the certainly first time, why would you infatuation a smart watch bearing in mind you already have a fine smartphone?

Shake it out of your mind because some smart watches have such powerful batteries that a phone just cant compare.

Going on a long trip? The Pebble time Steel smartwatch can keep you related throughout your trip for occurring to 10 days on a single full charge.

Pebble mature Steel

9. Your entertainment is on your wrist

Suppose you are walking and all on a rude you want to watch a YouTube video that your pal keeps talking about? You are just one or two clicks away from playing YouTube upon your watch.

You can watch videos and be in music on the go. Its never going to replace the big screen feel of your phone but for those quick moments, its unbeatable for convenience.

Are you sold past the advantages? If youve never used a intellectual watch before, I bet youre going on for convinced now! From my experience what I can say is, if you are a fan of mobility and ease of use, there is nothing improved to keep you connected.

If you are sold subsequent to the advantages, Id advise you to check which smart watch is right for you. The best is not always the absolute fit for everyone. Rather than that, identify your OS (operating system), check the specifications and pick your one.

#smartwatch #smartwatch advantages #benefits of smartwatch

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