Categories: Articles

The Making Of Stuff

It’s time to push beyond digital.

Most of the stuff that I blog about (or create) is not physical. Digital marketing is very real, but it’s very digital. It’s the stuff a consumer sees on a screen. We tend to forget that you need the hardware to see all of that cool stuff. As I have blogged about before, one my favorite new video podcasts is Kevin Rose and his show, Foundation. In the latest episode, Rose sits down with Hosain Rahman, the founder and CEO of Jawbone. Most people know Jawbone for either their Bluetooth hands-free headsets or their Bluetooth-enabled speakers. For my dollar, I am most interested in their latest product, Up. It fits on your wrists like a Nike Fuelband, but it does more than monitor your movement and allocate you points. Up monitors your movement along with your sleep and more. It is tied into an app that helps you better understand how you are living (and how to live better). What makes the following conversation so fascinating is the progression of how Rahman and his team took some school research and delved deeper into solving the problem of audio, voice and more… and now into a substantial (and important) international business.

Here’s another fascinating conversation about the power of solving problems and turning it into business…

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.