Molecularist

Another day. Another discovered note.

I heard Nick Jones from Gartner give a talk a while back. One thing he said regarding emerging markets that stuck with me was that (I don’t remember the exact quote) ‘Folks with no emotional connection to technology just use it. Emerging market players can experiment. There is no emotional connection to existing biz models’ to hinder product use or uptake.

He also made a characterization that I constantly use when looking at products, which he called ‘catalyst apps’. Catalyst apps are the apps that convert the non-user to a user.

I guess this is for the folks who do have an emotional attachment to some tech or biz model.

I kinda view it as the cross-over metaphor, one that folks understand and can transfer to, say, a mobile device.

For example, email and browser use are metaphors folks understand from the fixed desktop Internet world. But the potential of Internet connectivity from mobile devices goes way beyond that. Therefore, we need to use email and browser use as the metaphors to hook folks on mobile Internet use and only then offer them apps that go way beyond that.

Make sense?