Big Thinker talk in Bangalore

I was very happy to be invited to Bangalore in India to give a Big Thinker talk about Grounded Innovation, sponsored by Yahoo! I spent a week at Yahoo! R&D in Bangalore and also went to the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai. The main talk was very well attended and I got a lot of questions and had very good discussions afterwards! Overall I was very impressed with what I saw in India and the technical competence of the local Yahoo! staff as well as the many people other companies and institutions I interacted with.

The slides for the talk are here:

• Full resolution PDF (24,5 MB)
• Reduced size PDF (3,5 MB)

Grounded Innovation tutorial at Mobile HCI 2012

Want to know more about how to create the next groundbreaking digital product? Come to the Mobile HCI 2012 conference in San Francisco, where Lars Erik Holmquist will be presenting a tutorial on grounded innovation! The tutorial is intended to provide the attendees with the following:

• General understanding of innovation processes and the role of research in creating new products
• Overview of the unique properties of digital products, and how they can be leveraged to generate new concepts
• Practical tools to perform grounded innovation, including user studies and idea generation
• Detailed insight in how research can feed into innovation, based on case studies of successful as well as not so successful projects and products

Read more at the conference homepage. We hope to see you there!

Book launch in Austin!

Grounded Innovation was officially launched on May 8 during the CHI 2012 conference in Austin, Texas! The event was hosted at the Museum of the Weird, a landmark Austin attraction which displays oddities from all over the world - freaks, monsters, mermaids, and much more! The author is pictured with King Kong, above (photo by Albrecht Schmidt). As added attractions we had the Pain-proof Man, who demonstrated how he could drive a nail into his own skull (and let a member of the audience pull it out!), and a fortuneteller to give essential advice about the future, digital or otherwise! The place was packed by an enthusiastic audience of CHI visitors and the book was also very well received at the Morgan Kaufmann booth at the conference.

You can also read more about it in the User Interface Engineering blog by Albrecht Schmidt, who was an important collaborator in several projects and features in the book!

Book launch activities!

With the book officially out and in stock, it is time to go on the road! The main event is the official release party at the rather splendid Museum of the Weird in Austin, Texas on May 8 during the CHI 2012 conference - see invitation above!

Additionally, I am speaking at two university events in the upcoming weeks:

• Friday, April 27: Berkeley Center for New Media, at the symposium Digital Inquiry: Forms of Knowledge in the Age of New Media. Download slides here
• Wednesday, May 2: Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon university, at the HCII Seminar Series Download slides here

I hope to see you there! And if you want to book me for speaking engagements, feel free to contact me at larserik@yahoo-inc.com!

Grounded Innovation is now published!

Ahead of schedule, the paperback edition of Grounded Innovation: Strategies for Creating Digital Products is now in stock at Amazon! Order it today! The Kindle edition will appear on May 15.

Share your latest innovations at SIGGRAPH Mobile!

This year, I am chairing SIGGRAPH Mobile, a new program at SIGGRAPH 2012, the world's premier conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques. Mobile graphics is growing at an incredible speed, and we want you to share the latest exciting technologies in mobile graphics and apps! There are many different presentation formats to cater for all kinds of content, from industry, art, academia and beyond.

Read more about it in the SIGGRAPHITTI newsletter, or go straight to the Call for Participation to submit your work!

Tim O'Reilly on the future of mobile sensors

I highly recommend this conversation with Tim O'Reilly, originally published by Forbes! O'Reilly always has great insights, and his views on things like location (dis-)sevices, big data and the future of serendipity are well worth hearing.