Chapter 7
Exponential: Leveraging Ecosystems
Benjamin Pollock was a famous printer of toy theatres in London at the turn of the twentieth century. You can now buy “Pollock's Toy Theatre” as an application on various Apple platforms. It is developed by a company called Zuztertu. Not only is the genre very different from the countless games and other applications in the Apple App Store, but its founder, Gerlinde Gniewosz, has a very different background compared to the typical developer.
Gniewosz has experience at Yahoo! (the web company), Orange (the telecommunications company), and McKinsey & Co. (the strategy firm). She has an MBA from Harvard Business School. She was born and educated in Australia, went to business school in the United States, has worked in Germany and the United Kingdom, and has traveled the world. She's what you might call cerebral—like the portfolio of over 70 Zuztertu mobile apps, aimed at a wide set of markets from apps for small children to education for adults.
At the other end of the spectrum are the applications featured in the GEICO (the insurance company) commercial, which asks, “Do people use smartphones to do dumb things?” It features BroStache, musical instrument, and popping champagne bottle mobile apps as office colleagues at their juvenile best start planning for the weekend and turn their chairs and tables into a rock concert stage.
The BroStache app advertises, “You can choose a 'stache for any occasion—meeting, birthday party, or hot date. ...
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