As luck would have it, a Carthaginian quinquireme ran aground as it tried to blockade the Romans who were trying to ferry across to Sicily in borrowed boats. Once caught, this enemy ship is supposed to have provided the Romans with the prototype they needed. In fact the build of the ship was so structured (numbered pieces)  - for the Romans it was almost like putting together a piece of flatpack furniture. As a result the Romans were easily able to copy and reproduce the warship and set their sights on the seas.

But war at sea requires far more than simply the tools, the method for defeating the enemy involved ramming the enemy ship which in itself required a great deal of skill and experience from the crew.

The Romans didn’t have these skills but instead modified the design to allow for the battering element to become a bridge – to allow their troops to quickly gain access to the enemy ship and effectively take part in a land based style battle (something they were much better at). The rest as they say is history.

So let’s remember not to re-invent the wheel, but instead build on others success, but at the same time if we want to be truly successful we must add to the solution with something that’s new – something which might just change the entire game.

So I will be asking on my next project – what am I doing that is new and innovative to build on those great foundations provided by others. If I’m not – I’m probably likely to lose the larger battle.

Before you watch these videos its probably worth spelling out exactly what they are, and what they are trying to do. Aurora has been produced for the Mozilla Labs Concept series. The Concept Series aims to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.

Aurora (Part 4) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo. (Oh, and if you haven’t pressed play already, your internet connection isn’t going down. It was produced that way!)

I have to say when I first saw it I thought it seemed incredibly complex, and seemed to be trying introduce too many concepts to comprehend in just a few minutes. Particularly the first scenario seemed a little odd – it didn’t seem like a task that needed to be solved. It also left me a little bewildered and confused. There is just sooo much “technology” to take in.  And it seemed so complex. So many icons, options, and ways of using them.

Many of the comments on the Vimeo website reflect this with comments such as “most people want usability rather than bling.” But as I watched the third and fourth video I could start to envisage where I see this type of concept working really well. I suppose the question a lot of people would have is whether a browser could truly do all of this, or whether it is really a new operating system.

Either way I find it fascinating, and will keep an eye on the Labs concept series with great interest. I’m sure that a lot of the concepts are so new, we will all need to be introduced to them very slowly.