I think really great products come from melding two points of view—the technology point of view and the customer point of view. You need both. You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them…

…You have to merge these points of view, and you have to do it in an interactive way over a period of time—which doesn't mean a week. It takes a long time to pull out of customers what they really want, and it takes a long time to pull out of technology what it can really give.

Steve Jobs

CC: http://www.flickr.com/photos/williamhook/2830322349/

2009 “Mine’s quite bad actually … quite poor so I don’t really use it.”

2011 “Even my mum has got a smartphone”

The mobile web

The world's five billion smartphone users will become a larger user of the web than the two billion who currently access it through a computer.

MATT Brittin, Chief executive of Google in the UK and Ireland

The SCARLET Project

Arts & humanities researchers borrow books…

They’re centrifugal searchers and ‘berry-pickers’

They ask their tutors and each other where find info

They’re suspicious about ratings & reviews, but….

They can see the benefit of ‘tacit’ recommender functions

The SALT Project: Surfacing the Academic Long Tail

Hypothesis:

Library circulation activity data can be used to support humanities research by surfacing underused ‘long tail’ library materials through search

http://alpha.copac.ac.uk/

CC: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cstm-mstc/3082707918/

The LOCAH/Linking Lives project

New business modelsNew value propositionsNew purpose?

Becoming new links in the value chain