Samsung ruined this consultant’s designs. So he did his own thing instead.

Huge multinational corporations like Samsung might have an enormous amount of resources, but that might just be one of their greatest disadvantages. Bob Olodort, who formerly worked as a consulting designer for the smartphone giant, would no doubt concur wholeheartedly.

According to Venturebeat, Olodort would visit Samsung’s headquarters in South Korea four times a year to present a slew of phone designs that he had created, each with an emphasis on “simplicity and elegance.” Each time, though, Samsung’s engineering managers would jump right in and mess it all up.

“They would louse it up by putting in everything – that’s their style at Samsung [...] You’d get exactly the opposite of what you’d get at Apple where you had Steve Jobs saying ‘No, no, no.’” Olodort tells Venturebeat. Each manager would add their own set of desired features, the carriers Samsung sold to would add another set, and the result would be phones with a serious case of feature bloat.

Not surprisingly, he abandoned ship not long after, opting to start his own company – the aptly named Simple Matters. True to its name, it has released its first product today that Olodort describes as “so simple, so cheap, and so useful that it becomes a ‘no-brainer’” – a tiny notification device called the Ditto.

Here’s what the US$29 device does: it vibrates to notify you when important events occur – receiving a call from your boss, or an email from a particular associate, for example – which you can customize via a companion app on your smartphone. And that’s it.

“I’m not wearing Google Glass. I’m not looking at my wrist every five minutes. I’m a professional. But I want to know when something important happens,” he says.

While Simple Matters is now running a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the Ditto, Olodort reveals to Venturebeat that it is more for the publicity, and hitting the goal of US$100,000 isn’t so important – he’s going to produce and ship it early next year, regardless.

See: In Facebook’s early days, new developers got a congratulatory email for crashing the site

This post Samsung ruined this consultant’s designs. So he did his own thing instead. appeared first on Tech in Asia.

Samsung ruined this consultant’s designs. So he did his own thing instead.