Mark Sigal

Mark Sigal is the Chief Product Officer at Unicorn Labs, a builder of iOS Games, eBooks and Educational Apps. He is an eight-time entrepreneur, whose ventures span mobile, digital media, social networking and platform development. Sigal maintains a personal blog called The Network Garden.

On co-creation, contests and crowdsourcing

A portrait of a design contest and what it says about the future of co-creation.

I had decided to update the branding at one of my companies, and that meant re-thinking my logo.

Here’s the old logo:

Original Middleband Group logo

The creative exercise started with a logo design contest posting at 99designs, an online marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design.

When it was all done, I had been enveloped by an epic wave of 200 designs from 38 different designers.

It was a flash mob, a virtual meetup constructed for the express purpose of creating a new logo. The system itself was relatively lean, providing just enough “framing” to facilitate rapid iteration, where lots of derivative ideas could be presented, shaped and then re-shaped again.

The bottom line is that based on the primary goal of designing a new logo, I can say without hesitation that the model works.

Not only did the end product manifest as I hoped it would (see below), but the goodness of real-time engagement was intensely stimulating and richly illuminating. At one point, I was maintaining 10 separate conversations with designers spread across the Americas, Asia and Europe. Talk about parallelizing the creative process.

In the end, the project yielded eight worthy logo designs and not one but two contest winners! It was the creative equivalent of a Chakra experience: cathartic, artistic and outcome-driven at the same time.

Read more…

Apple's iTV and the implications of what Steve said

Why the rumors about Apple building a television are wrong.

Mark Sigal challenges the conventional wisdom about the rumored "iTV" and offers a much different prediction about an Apple-television marriage.

The price of greatness: Three takeaways from the biography of Steve Jobs

Thoughts on the scarcity of great leaders.

From the moment he got sick in 2003 to when he died in October of this year, Steve Jobs was never fully healthy again. Yet, Jobs led his team to a series of triumphs that have no equal in the annals of business. Mark Sigal explores what this says about Jobs as a leader and the price that greatness demands.

You say you want a revolution? It's called post-PC computing

An examination of the post-PC wave and its major players.

Spurred on by a Googler's rant against his own company and Apple's release of a new phone, a new OS and a new cloud infrastructure, Mark Sigal wonders what the "post-pc" revolution really looks like.

Amazon's "Prime" challenger to the iPad

Why Amazon's Kindle tablet can succeed where others have failed.

While conventional wisdom says that to compete with the iPad you must emulate Apple's best practices, Mark Sigal argues that Amazon can do just fine by blazing its own trail.

Ruminations on the legacy of Steve Jobs

PC, mobile, music, film, post-pc: Steve Jobs played an important part in disrupting them all.

Apple, under Steve Jobs, has always had an unrelenting zeal to bring the consumer — and humanity — back to the center of the ring. Here, Mark Sigal argues that it’s this pursuit of humanity that may actually be Jobs’ greatest innovation.

Is the enterprise dead as a tablet strategy?

Conventional wisdom about the "consumerization of IT" is missing the big picture.

A confluence of factors, most notably the crash of the dotcom bubble and the rise of Apple, led to the consumerization of IT. But Mark Sigal says tablet makers are missing a golden opportunity by ignoring the enterprise.

The Great Reset: Why tomorrow may not be better than today

Hard truths about our values, the economy and the outlook for the future.

Mark Sigal says we're entering a period where the promise of a better tomorrow is no longer a generational expectation and our sense of a (mostly) fair and balanced system is being drowned by an elite class.

The iPhone, the Angry Bird and the Pink Elephant

Will Post-PC battles lead to a war of attrition for developers?

Lost amidst the tremendous success of mobile platforms is that they seem designed to create surplus. This makes it incredibly hard for developers to achieve the breakout success seen in past computing waves.

Four core takeaways from Apple’s WWDC keynote

The WWDC keynote clarified Apple's Post-PC vision and hinted at disruption and competition to come.

Mark Sigal says Apple's WWDC keynote was designed to deliver an awe-inspiring but chilling message: Whether you're a prospective customer, developer, channel partner, or competitor, "resistance to Apple is futile."