thinkshiv

App Store for Windows Mobile?

admin — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:49:00 +0000

As reported on alleyinsider, Microsoft is planning an iPhone-like App Store for their Windows Mobile phones dubbed “Skymarket”. It was only a matter of time before they announced this but yet again, MS is playing catch-up. Microsoft has been at the mobile OS for a while but hasn’t done much to innovate in that space. I mean this is good news for Windows Mobile users but I see a few challenges for them:

-Building something easy and simple to use interface

-A platform / framework that will work with the complex Windows Mobile industry and allow for synchronicity - in other words they don’t have an iTunes like synch software buddy sitting on the OS. ActiveSync is not the answer!

-Carried policies - around data plans and revenue sharing

-Other 3rd party app creators - i.e. Handango who have built a business around this

-Building a UI that will work across different WM configurations by screen size, keyboards - virtual vs. QWERTY, GPS, Wi-Fi, different data plans etc.

I don’t think it’s going to be easy for them to solve for all of the above but if they fail to do so then their app store is also going to fail.

MySearchoff.com

admin — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:07 +0000

So I ran into this webste today - www.mysearchoff.com. I like it so far and I am curious to know who created this. Not tough to create this but I like the idea and also the idea of voting on the searches by users. Try it out and let me know your thoughts.

jetblue.com seat selector

admin — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:52:23 +0000

So I wanted to check-in and select my seats on my early a.m. flight to San Jose and after logging into the site I could not select the seats on the website. This has happened to my about 3 times and this time I had to call their customer servcie number. After waiting for about 12 minutes the rep said that I could not select a seat because I booked through Corporate Expedia (mind you other airlines allow for seat selection via Expedia and I don’t know why Jet Blue doesn’t). After explaining to her that I am trying to do this on their website she spent a few minutes doing the same on her end and found that she couldn’t do it either. Finally she said that the flight was near capacity so that is why it would not allow me to select a seat. From a user experience perspective this should not be a limitation at all. She said that they did have seats on the plane - so why didn’t the website show them to me? Is there something else here? Is it because they want more people to purchase extra legroom? I don’t know - all I know is that this could be better and would have saved me 20 minutes.

Twitter Needs A Platform

admin — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:34:02 +0000

Twitter has a decent API and so many applications have been built using the API but all of them are outside of the Twitter website. I think Twitter needs to launch a platform just like Facebook so that developers can build interesting applications onto Twitter - example includes photo-sharing, groups, events, classified / marketplace etc. This will definitely increase engagement for Twitter users on their website and they can potentially use this platform to start monetizing their service. They need to launch this soon, otherwise other websites (Pownce, Plurk) will do so and beat them to their game.

Collaborative Web Search

admin — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:37:36 +0000

Microsoft Research recently launched Search together and I was really excited to read what they had to say on their research page. However, as i scrolled further I was shocked to see that they require users who download the beta to use a Windlows Live ID and IE. I mean come on, haven’t they learnt from the past! Anyways, I can go on and on about why that is bad but that is a topic for another day.

This is a pretty cool idea to search with the help and collaboration of a group of people. I can the value for students, colleagues working on the same project or even a group of industry professionals discussing and comming on a topic. From their site:

How does SearchTogether facilitate collaboration?

SearchTogether’s collaboration features include group query histories, split searching, page-level rating and commenting, automatically-generated shared summaries, peek-and-follow browsing, and integrated chat. For a more complete discussion of SearchTogether’s features, check out the tutorial.

More to follow on this once I play around with it. I first need to get my friends and colleagues to get a Windows Live ID first:)

Interesting from Indexed

admin — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:33:47 +0000

I love reading the Indexed blog every morning - interesting to see how these simple charts and graphs start deep thoughts and conversations. This one is on inspection and innovation. Very cool blog - you should check it out.

What else would you add to this? Invention, Value?…..

GTA IV - A Blockbuster

admin — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:25:04 +0000

So it’s been a week since GTA IV has been released and here is a first look at some of the numbers:

Buzz:

Here is a BlogPulse chart on the buzz for the last 2 months (this chart also includes EA games and Take Two Interactive as line charts which has announced a hostile take-over):

Sales:

According to a report on The NY Times site, Take Two Interactive is expected to report 6 million copies sold and first week sales of up to $500 million. This is pretty amazing given Iron Man which raked in $100 million, see chart below (latest numbers from Nielsen):

Top 10 Movies - Theatrical Release
May 2-4 , 2008

rank	title	Distributor	Weekend	Cumulative 2007 (millions)
1	Iron Man	PARAMOUNT	$102,118,668	$102.1
2	Made of Honor	SONY PICTURES	$14,756,850	$14.8
3	Baby Mama	UNIVERSAL	$10,065,010	$32.1
4	Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay	WARNER BROS.	$6,114,373	$25.4
5	Forgetting Sarah Marshall	UNIVERSAL	$6,059,920	$44.7
6	Forbidden Kingdom	LIONSGATE	$4,187,897	$45.1
7	Nim’s Island	TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX	$2,677,543	$42.5
8	Prom Night	SONY PICTURES	$2,403,313	$41.4
9	21	SONY PICTURES	$2,002,471	$79
10	88 Minutes	SONY PICTURES	$1,545,084	$15.4

Source: The Hollywood Reporter / Nielsen EDI

Marketing Spend (online):

Most recent data from AdRelevance from Jan ‘08 to most recent month of data avilable (March)

Impressions and Estimated Spending by Company for Rockstar Games During January 2008 through Most recent month
Company	Impressions	Estimated Spending
Rockstar Games	14,129,000	117,200

Total	14,129,000	117,200

Source: AdRelevance/ Nielsen Online

Will EA buy Take Two in the $27-$28 range?

Love the new Apple iPod + iTunes Ad

admin — Wed, 07 May 2008 03:52:51 +0000

Apple always does a great job with their creatives…really like this one - catchy and perfect for the summer:

The quest for a delightful User Interface

admin — Wed, 07 May 2008 01:33:39 +0000

As a product manager, I am often challenged with the notion of what is a good user experience. Of-course when you think about user experience - or specifically sleek user experiences - a few brands or products come to mind. Google, Apple - the usual suspects. So to build-out a sleek and useful user interface I started searching around the Google Corporate website and their blogs to see if they use some guidelines or have some methodology in place. According to their corporate page on the Google User Experience:

The Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable. Achieving a harmonious balance of these ten principles is a constant challenge. A product that gets the balance right is “Googley” – and will satisfy and delight people all over the world.

They outline 10 principles:

1. Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.

Does your corporate site or product page follow any of the above guidelines? Is your page fast and simple? Does your site / product require a manual to use? Is your site / product trustworthy and does it have a human touch? This is very timely for me as I will be applying these principles in my product development.

Design and Presentations

admin — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 13:32:26 +0000

So I have been working on this powerpoint presentation this week at work and really reflecting on how corporate citizens abuse powerpoint. Sometimes I wonder when did powerpoint become a tool for taking notes or writing memos. Even worse, when did we start writing business plans and proposals in ppt. Ridiculous! At my workplace, powerpoint usage is very high and I would say 80-90% of the attachments distributed via our exchange servers must be ppt (ok, maybe its an exxageration but you get the point). I always wonder when the job descriptions companies are hiring for have the “must have good communication skills” - I wonder if that is where we test how people would use visual presentation tools like ppt. Don’t get me wrong, I like ppt for what it is and what you use it for - but please use it wisely. I have been to so many industry conferences and internal presentations where people have so many bullets on the slide and pages and pages of text. What’s worse is that I have seen so many of them read right of the screen. Now I believe that you have to a very good understanding of your material or content and that you shouldn’t have to read off of the screen. Anyways, back to my real issue - how do you change a corporate culture that is so ppt-reliant? I know my boss stays away from using or doing ppt presentations - actually he hates it and these days so do I. I mean I do work in a research company and that we are so data oriented but come on! - who needs more data on the screen. The real value in us as researchers is taking complex research information and turning into nuggets of insight and presented in a very simple way. And, they dont have to be 200 pages long either. Too often we get caught up on having everything spelled out on the ppt slides and forget that people come to presentations to listen to you and not just look at you read from the slides or fill them with all the facts and text. I get a lot of tips and insights from Garr Reynolds’ blog - PresentationZen. Infact, I just got his latest book titles PresentationZen and I highly recommend anyone creating presentations to read it. One of my favorite posts from him is Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic where he illustrates the differences in the styles of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Look at the image below (I got this from his blog):

This is how I feel so many ppt are today and not to mention that all of them will have the corporate branding on them too. Look at this compared to Steve Jobs slides:

Look at the difference in visual complexity of both presentations. Granted, Steve Jobs is a master presenter but I think every CEO or execuive should have that regardless of their background or experience/expertise. Ok, back to my ppt presentation and I hope to make it clean and simple as Mr. Jobs!