Idris Mootee

The US mobile industry has been in a clear state of duopoly with Verizon and AT&T occupying about 70-75% of both consumer and enterprise market. T-Mobile is attempting to disrupt the current status but the impact will not be sustainable, although its Uncarrier attack effort is causing a lot of noise. 

The CES is a good one this year. Everywhere is IoT. And honestly I am little tired of hearing IoT or “Internet of Things” which is estimated to become a $7 trillion industry where thermometers, clocks, garbage cans, toilets, washing machines, watches, smart phones, fridges, baby monitors, garage doors and coffee makers are all connected digitally, allowing seamless interactions and smart living for us. Sensors are cheap and can be deployed everywhere collecting data, unnoticed. 

This marks the end of another year. A very busy and fruitful year for us. Personally I was on the road for more than 200 days and I need to take a break - perhaps 3 days. What about my New Year's resolution? I need to cut down on drive and email. I need to cut down on attending unproductive meetings. I need to find three people to mentor that they can become the best. I need to revisit places from my childhood that were memorable. I need to back up my hard drive (I am 96 days behind). I need to produce a mini feature film and shot entirely with my HTC phone. I need to cut down on my public speaking. I need to have more discipline on getting enough sleep.

Everyone is looking for a breakthrough. The massive shift in generation differences in consumer behavior and rapid technological shift are causing many companies to fail.... and it will happen fast. Companies that are stuck in their old mental model cannot breakout for many reasons. It is usually a combination of all that causes them to be irrelevant. It includes leadership’s blind sight, organization legacies and lack of foresights and the list goes on and on...

As everything is moving faster and less predictable as it seems, organizations are struggling to understand what it means and what options to take and how to land on the right decisions at the right time. The results are often inactions or delayed responses that cost companies.

It is every designer’s dream to design a chair. I have yet to meet an industrial designer that doesn’t want to design a chair or a car. It is a designer’s dream for those who study transportation design to design a car and I get it. Chairs and tables?

We can see it’s coming. The future of work in the next five years will be so different from the last 50 years. There are more than a few driving forces behind this: demographic shift, lifestyles of millennials, technology, organization design, nature of competition, and human capital flow etc. Management of the workplace used to be quite simple. All one has to manage are:

There has been a lot of hype on 3D printers at last year CES and now this year I saw tons of competitors offering low-end models as well as high-end professional desktops. XYZprinting Inc. from Taiwan, a new entrant revealed their da Vinci 3D printer with a starting price of just $499, which costs as much as a color laser printer did a few years back. It is a simple plug-and-play design for small business and personal use.

The party at Idea Couture London office last week was a fantastic event. Get to meet many young talented people there and looking forward to work with them on projects. My work takes me around the world and it is hard to get to know everyone in different offices. I enjoy talking to creative people from creative engineers to designers. And I have a very different idea of what "creative" people means.