Liz Rice

Are you sitting comfortably?

2012-01-04T15:04:00.000Z

I've become slightly obsessed about the way development teams' seating arrangements are laid out. In particular, I've developed a horror of a particular kind of cubicle layout where a team sits together, but with their backs to each other. What are we trying to do - encircle something that needs defending from an enemy?

As a wild (but recognisable) generalisation, most engineers could do with talking together more rather than less, and a little more eye contact would often be a good thing. Putting a barrier between people sends a signal that you don't want them to talk. The simple change of having desks face each other means it's a lot easier for people to talk to each other - a 180 degree manoeuvre to join in a chat might not be exactly onerous, but it's a little bit of unnecessary friction.

And developers can't concentrate in a room full of sales guys making load phone calls. Just sayin'.

Memory leak

2011-10-26T22:55:00.001+01:00

(if you don't write code, look away now...)

I reviewed the car park pretty carefully and I'm pretty sure this doesn't get freed anywhere.

Cutting the cord

2011-10-22T03:19:00.000+01:00

When we came to the US, we thought we were here for just four months, so one of the things it didn't really make sense to do was to get a TV contract. In fact we didn't even get a TV. And it has been like that for well over a year.

We mostly watch on Hulu or BBC iPlayer. We sometimes buy a series from iTunes. We get out the odd DVD from a RedBox just around the corner, and we go to the cinema more often than we used to - having three of them within walking distance does help with that.

The only thing we can't easily view is sports, though it's not the worst thing in the world to have to go to a bar to watch a big game. I did miss the high-quality coverage of the Tour de France on ITV4, but we got reasonable online viewing (albeit a bit unreliable) from an All-Access Pass from MSNBC, and I missed Ned Boulting et al enough that I got quite into their daily podcast during the Tour. And in any case, an 9-hour time difference was never going to make it easy to watch.

Cutting the cord would be a lot easier with a decent internet connection. I had entertained fantasies that Silicon Valley would be a land of boundless bandwidth, but sadly it's a bit like rewinding 5 years or so, with added DNS failures, compared to London. (That's the benefit of local loop unbundling then.) But even still, it works just about well enough.

We watch on an iPad if we're feeling lazy, and we bought a pico-projector for when we want the full-screen experience at home (it involves a little effort to plug it in and focus it, but we do get a 50" picture).

And the best thing? It's a lot harder to just leave the TV on for "background noise" - an effect I'm definitely not missing at all!

Scrum for Pirates

2011-09-19T23:08:00.001+01:00

Ahoy! Since it's International Talk Like A Pirate Day it seems appropriate to mention an idea that I've been kicking around for a while: Scrum For Pirates.

I'm a big fan of Scrum (and if you want to read a book about it, I'd definitely recommend Ken Schwaber's Agile Project Management With Scrum) but over time I have come to prefer some differences from the "standard" Agile methodology that it describes. These differences are particularly applicable if you're working with a really strong group of engineers. For some reason, talking about all this with @philpearl, we started referring to this as "Scrum For Pirates".

More on what it means, later, when I'm not so busy raiding ships and drinking rum. Arrrr.

Changing the conversation - Thrutu

2011-03-14T17:38:00.000Z

I'm excited to - at last - be able to write about Thrutu, the project @philpearl and I both have been working on here in Palo Alto. The Android version is now available!

When you're in a phone call with someone else who also has Thrutu, it makes it much easier to send your location, photos and other content while you're talking. But this video (excellently produced by our friends at LaunchSquad) explains it much better:

We've had an amazing few days of obsessively checking the user count graphs, and twitter feeds of all the press coverage. So far, so good! But a product is never "finished" and if anything, being public adds more urgency, as real users give us feedback and tell us what they want to see next. Best get on with it then!

Thrutu for Android on AppBrain

A brief thought about Scrum

2011-02-04T06:11:00.001Z

If you're doing a scrum process, what are you using to track your sprint backlog?

If it's not something physical, tactile, and open to the whole team - a whiteboard, stickies or (at a push) a flipchart - then, in my humble opinion, you really don't understand what makes scrum work.

Hiring at Metaswitch

2010-11-17T18:38:00.003Z

We're just finalising some job specs for senior developers to join the team at Metaswitch in Palo Alto. The project is still in stealth but trust me, it's awesome. If you're an experienced engineer specialising in either mobile client development or scalable server deployments, hit me up for more details!

Palo Alto

2010-10-31T16:20:00.002Z

If you're in the Bay Area in the next few months, dear reader, why not come see me in Palo Alto? I'm currently working on a super-secret but rather fetching mobile product with Metaswitch, as part of a sort of R&D / innovation team we have established out here.

For the time being we're working out of Sequoia's offices, so we get to see the VC world of Sand Hill Road from a different perspective.

The work's great, and the cycling's brilliant too - some proper climbs just a few km from our apartment. Loving it!

Give it away now

2010-09-21T20:34:00.001+01:00

At Mobile Monday SV last night, a show of hands from developers showed the vast majority are working on Android or iPhone, and only a handful have any interest in developing on other platforms (most of those were from companies responsible for those platforms!)

Nokia have just announced their N8, and I've heard a few folks saying that it's a really slick device. They also have operator billing integration with some 90-odd operators. But they're lacking developer mindshare, and without a steady stream of sexy apps, they're not getting consumer mindshare either.

Manufacturers like Nokia, Sony Ericsson etc really need to get developers on board. Start giving away devices, people! Take a leaf out of Google's book by seeding devices with the people you want to influence.

Giving out half a dozen at MoMo last night is a start, but it's not really enough to generate a buzz.

At Mobile 2.0 today, Nokia advised developers to consider giving apps away and making money from in-app sales, as this is more lucrative (see Farmville etc). It would be good if they took some of their own advice as inspiration.

Operator billing needs its own VISA

2010-09-13T22:22:00.001+01:00

Operators don't have a lot of advantages in today's landscape, but one thing they should be taking advantage of is a billing relationship with each of their customers. They should be able, in just the same way that Apple and iTunes manage, to make it almost frictionless to buy music, apps etc from your phone.

To be fair, the operators all seem to understand this, and from what I can tell are trying hard to implement operator billing. But why are they all trying to roll their own versions? Wouldn't it be a more compelling payment platform (especially for developers, but also for users) if the same system worked for everyone, whichever phone service they use? Speaking with Pascal Finette recently, he put it very clearly like this: operators should get together in a consortium, like the banks did with Visa many years ago. I couldn't agree more.

Two iPhone apps I just can't live without

2010-08-29T16:03:00.000+01:00

I'm parsimonious when it comes to paying for apps, but there are a couple I'm using at the moment that I didn't buy a moment too soon.

The first is Tune-In Radio. Find whatever you're into on Internet Radio and stream it to your iPhone. It finds listen-again services as well as live streams, and the search function makes it easy to locate the specific show or station you're after. You can record shows for listening later, and there's an alarm function for waking yourself up.

This app lets 6 Music fans like me access this digital-only station on the road (though I have to admit, 3G coverage on the M1 is patchy so I'd recommend recording the show you want and then listening to it later). And now I'm in the US, I'm getting my Radio 4 fix with Tune-In too. For £0.59 / $0.99 this is a complete bargain.

The second is Pocket Informant. This is a task list and calendar, but what I love about it is that it syncs really well to my Google calendar (far better than anything else I've tried on the iPhone). Judging by other people's comments it's not what you want for syncing to an Outlook calendar, but I'm a Mac girl and stay as far away from Outlook / Exchange as I can.

One nice feature is that a recurring task can be set to happen at a fixed interval (like a normal recurring appointment), or you can set it to happen a fixed interval after you complete the task. I might intend to write a blog post every couple of weeks, but the reality is that other stuff often takes priority. With a task reminder for blogging set up this way I'll never have more than one overdue blogging task, and once I publish this entry it will leave me alone for a full week before bugging me again.

The Pocket Informant task list is now how I manage my life. It's not cheap, at £7.49 / $12.99, but I think it's worth the price. And there's a decent Lite version if you want to test it out first, which only lets you track a limited number of tasks.

If you try them out, let me know what you think!

Seamless social media interaction

2010-07-08T10:08:00.000+01:00

Lots of apps make it fairly straightforward to post updates to your social networks, but it's never totally seamless - for example if you take a photo and then want to upload it to a social network you typically have to go to an app, and select the photo to post, involving at least a few clicks.

Mashmobile have an interesting solution where essentially they run a small web server on the phone, which amongst other things can offer RSS feeds from your phone direct to other services. So your social network could be pulling photos straight off your phone without you having to do anything at all. Likewise videos, location - whatever data your phone can generate.

I'm sure most people want the ability to filter / edit before publishing, but it's definitely an interesting way of easing friction out of the publication process.

The other huge advantage of running a web server on the phone is that you can offer a way to manage the phone from a PC. This could have endless uses, from making it easier for you and me to set up the phone the way we want it, through to operator and enterprise management facilities. It also helps with inclusiveness (as discussed at Senior Market Mobile this week), because you'd be able to set up accessibility options on your phone from an already accessible PC.

The phone charger mountain

2010-07-06T16:47:00.000+01:00

According to Ian Hay from Orange (talking at the Senior Mobile Conference), we've made 11-12 billion mobile phone chargers. Wow.

Thank goodness for a universal solution. Which is agreed for 'the majority' of handset sales by 2012.

Now when's the universal laptop charger coming?

New release of Qlockwork Pro

2010-06-30T14:39:00.000+01:00

If you're an Outlook user, and you wonder where your day goes, then Qlockwork from WorkingProgram is for you. One of the projects I've been working on recently is this week's launch of the new Pro version which adds several new features. There's a free trial available, so why not give it a spin and find out where you're spending your time?

A mysterious superfluity of captcha's

2010-06-25T19:32:00.000+01:00

Regular readers might notice a new look to my site - courtesy of Blogger's template design service. Now that you can host extra pages as well as your main blog, Blogger is a decent solution for a basic website. I've been migrating my static pages from a paid service so that they're now hosted for free, courtesy of Blogger / Google. Nice.

But why, oh why, do we have to enter a Captcha every single time you want to make a change to your blog's hosting settings? You can't hit the Save Settings without entering yet another captcha. Can't it remember I'm a human, even just for 5 minutes, while I sort everything out?

ProductCamp London

2010-06-24T10:50:00.000+01:00

We held the first ProductCamp London on Saturday - and what a great event!

I'm one of the organisers, so that might sound like blowing my own trumpet, but really what made it special was the participation by lots of smart product management types from across the range of businesses here in London. No dry, dull presentations; lots of interactive discussions.

As an "unconference" the content depends on the topics and activities that participants are prepared to present / lead / facilitate on the day. Our session board quickly had lots of interesting-sounding suggestions, and in some slots it was genuinely a struggle to choose. It's hard to pick highlights but here are a few of the sessions I enjoyed:

Innovation culture within big businesses
Avoiding meaningless marketing jargon
A couple of discussions about the (varying) role of PM in relation to P&L and in relation to UX
ABC's Deep Dive video on IDEO from 1999 showing something of how their innovation process works (sadly, not available on YouTube apparently)

And I wish I'd attended Martin Eriksson's session on virality, as it was eventually voted to win our best session prize.

Product Managers - I seriously recommend signing up to hear about the next edition. And in the mean time, the monthly ProductTank sessions are also not to be missed!

Check out more photos from ProductCamp.

Beastway

2010-06-08T10:24:00.003+01:00

John from LondonCycleSport took this pic of me and team-mate Iz at last week's Beastway (my first mountain bike race in ages - in fact the first time I've ridden this bike in ages).

SEO's not so hard

2010-06-01T15:53:00.001+01:00

Before I started working with Plug in SEO, I thought there was a whole level of depth and complexity to SEO that I'd need to get to grips with. As it turns out, the theory is actually not that difficult - it's really just about creating good content and persuading other, relevant sites to link to yours. (For more on the basics, check out our Paint-by-numbers guides to search engine optimisation.)

If you think I'm over-simplifying, is it because your (in-house or outsourced) SEO expert talks in jargon? If so, check out my list of old-skool SEO techniques that are pretty much a waste of time.

LWCR - experiments in web marketing for road cycling

2010-04-27T16:48:00.045+01:00

In the past I've participated in many women's road races with a meagre turnout of, say, 6 to 8 riders, so it's thrilling that we've seen turnouts as high as 40 in London Women's Cycle League races! It makes for a much better atmosphere and vastly more fun racing.

There are lots of reasons why we're seeing high turnouts, some of which we can't claim credit for. There's a wave of enthusiasm for women's competitive cycling in Britain since Victoria Pendleton, Rebecca Romero, Emma Pooley and Nicole Cooke did so brilliantly in Beijing. Initiatives like the Cycle to Work scheme mean more people in general - and therefore women - are riding bikes more. And more directly we've had great support from sponsors look mum no hands! (who open this week), lots of cycle clubs in London and the South East, and cycling press including LondonCycleSport and BikeRadar.

But being a geek, I'm interested in how we're using the internet to generate interest in the league, and maintain contact with our riders.

Before we started the league, Maria David (who's the driving force behind the whole thing) had already set up a Facebook group called London Women's Cycle Racing, so we already had a core community we could build on.

The skeleton website took no time to build, based on Blogger so that it's easy for anyone on the team to update it. (Fortunately, Blogger added support for Pages just in time for our needs.) Between us we're posting on average two or three times a week, with news like race reports, results and advice about upcoming events, so it always has fresh content. We get around 40% of traffic to the site by natural search.

We send out newsletters in advance of each event, using MailChimp, giving all the practical information about how to enter the race, maps showing where it is, what time to get there and so on. We also post the newsletter link to Facebook. We've got a rather stunning average email open rate of 55% - folks out there really are interested in getting involved.

Road racing is pretty complicated, what with a variety of licenses, rankings, categories and points, and a race classification system of which I have only the vaguest grasp even after several years of participating. There is some info on British Cycling's website but it's a pretty tough user journey to find it (give it a try!) We couldn't tackle the labyrinth of how racing is set up, but we could tell potential new racers what they need to do to join one of our races. This included an FAQ, and newsletter guidance on the license you need, how to enter races etc.

We use Twitter (@lwcr) and again several team members can post from it, keeping it active. We only get a small percentage of our traffic from Twitter, though, so arguably it's only of marginal value with our particular audience.

None of this is rocket science, but it's relatively rare in the road cycling world, where race pre-entries are still more often than not done with a cheque through the mail (though online payment systems like Rider HQ are gradually being used more frequently).

I don't want to give the impression that it's all about the web - the league wouldn't be what it is without face-to-face contact, phone calls, friendly support and encouragement within cycling clubs and the cycling industry, and a lot of generous people who give their time to organise races. But I'd like to think we've demonstrated that a layer of web goodness makes it a lot easier for people to participate. In real life, as on the internet, it's all about removing as much friction as possible from the user journey.

Qlockwork time-tracker saves businesses time & money

2010-03-24T12:32:00.001Z

I've been working recently with my good friend Anne Currie on her very neat time-tracking plug in for Outlook, Qlockwork. We've put together a new-look web site, and today we're announcing the release of Qlockwork v2, which makes it easier to assign tasks to different projects, and produces really neat reports showing where your time has been spent.

Download a free trial today!

Verizon sees the light

2010-02-17T12:35:00.002Z

Like 3 in Europe, Verizon has embraced Skype on mobile. Interesting that they say that now is the time because it can deliver a good user experience. The user experience lesson seems to be one that Microsoft is also wising up to, given their Phone 7 developments and the fact they are no longer going to let manufacturers reskin uncontrollably.

The Verizon-Skype tie-up is further evidence that operators have to learn to become a good data pipe - they're still going through the lessons that ISPs went through more than a decade ago. When we see the end of operator portals, we'll know they have caught up with the 21st century!

London Women's Cycle Racing

2010-02-09T12:30:00.000Z

Over the last few weeks I've been busy helping set up London Women's Cycle Racing, a new league for women in London and the South East designed to encourage more women to get into racing, and to give experienced racers a friendly but competitive way to test their performance in a range of different road racing events. We've secured sponsorship from look mum no hands! and already have support from 10 cycle clubs (including, of course, London Phoenix who I ride with).

If you're a female road rider, check it out - and if you know any women who ride bikes please pass the message on!

Voice commenting in social media

2010-01-29T14:40:00.006Z

Image via CrunchBase

I've been working with PhoneFromHere.com on this little demo showing a voice call being broken into snippets, or utterances.

Rather than having to wait till the end of a piece of audio, you can insert comments at the relevant point within a conversation.
This demo uses Google Wave, but you could imagine leaving voice comments - and comments on comments - just like you currently do with text in applications like Facebook. Or, come to think of it, on blogs like this one.

Big screens

2010-01-28T12:28:00.000Z

When I was working a lot on DECT phones, manufacturers kept coming up with ideas to squeeze more stuff into that tiny phone screen. I never really saw the point - just because people like photos on their mobile, doesn't equate to wanting photos scaled down to about 200px on a tiny screen in their living room, where there are so many better capable formats for showing pictures. And if you want a weather report, my mobile phone, my TV, my radio and my PC are all more convenient than twiddling about with a phone handset.

Much more sensible to take features to big screens - take, for example, Skype on your TV. Get that enormous screen real estate into use for more than just watching telly.

And now the iPad - which appears to be a very big iPod Touch. I love my Touch, so I'm feeling pretty warm towards the idea of an iPad too. Sure, it's not going to be as easy to type on as a Proper Keyboard - but I don't imagine it's the primary tool to use for programming or writing an essay. As a browser & media player, it looks great.

It'll either be a horrible compromise between big screen and portability, or a brilliant marriage. Can't wait to find out.

Using Wifi in Starbucks on a Mac?

2010-01-13T18:19:00.000Z

This isn't the most scintillating post I've ever written, but I hope it helps someone else one day, as it took me a while to figure it out.

I'm running Snow Leopard on my lovely MacBook Air, and up-to-date with all the latest system updates. And I've been treating Starbucks pretty much as my office whenever I'm in town, ever since they introduced free wifi for Starbucks card holders. But today I couldn't get on the network.

Turned out I had a couple of DNS entries, and deleting them solved the problem. (To get rid of them, go to Network in System Preferences, hit Advanced, then delete them from the left-hand side of the DNS tab.)

I can't say with absolute certainty that I didn't add those DNS entries myself, though I have no recollection of ever doing so. My suspicion is that something "helpfully" created them for me - possibly something I've added (or upgraded) in the last few weeks since I was last connected in Starbucks?

Anyway, problem fixed (until I find there's some network I use where those DNS entries were important...)

Windows 7 and network-connected TVs

2009-12-21T10:03:00.006Z

Last weekend @philpearl and I helped my mum set up her new Windows 7 laptop. Now that I have mentally blocked out the trauma of using the, presumably ironically named, "Easy Transfer" application to get the data she wants to keep from her old computer onto a new one, I'm left with the impression that the OS is definitely an improvement from our friends at M$, but I'm relieved to have migrated to Mac a couple of years ago.

My mum has been on something of an electronics spending spree, having also bought a nice new Sony Bravia TV. One of the features it advertised was Home Networking, and I don't think it's unreasonable that she interpreted this to mean she'd be able to use the TV to watch programmes she downloaded to her computer from BBC iPlayer. Sadly of course, the feature is a lot more limited than that. What you can do is play music and videos, and show photos, in a limited set of formats that doesn't include protected BBC downloads.

To their credit, both the TV and Windows 7 meant that it was straightforward to get the devices talking to each other over the LAN, and the Sony menu system had us locating photos on the PC in no time.

But there is no point having a feature unless it's fast enough to use. Even if your friends will tolerate being forced to sit through your holiday snaps, waiting for several seconds for each one to load makes it unusable.

How do product teams get away with building these features that basically have no use in the real world? Did some exec say "we need network-connected TVs" and no-one ever thought to ask a user what they'd do with it, or have a spec for how fast pictures need to load?

A couple of years ago at CES, DivX were showing something similar with a set-top box, but at least their compression algorithms meant it showed photos (and other media) from your PC very fast. Even still, I don't know anyone who bought one.

Am I way off in my assertion that on-demand internet TV is the use case? Apparently Sony are making internet TV happen, presumably with some sort of co-operation with Project Canvas? But it's a bit late for my mum.

Plug in SEO's pay-if-it's useful pricing

2009-12-10T11:40:00.004Z

I'm very excited about this - we've just announced product pricing at Plug in SEO. It's pretty much exactly a year since I first met Dan, and he showed me an early draft of a business plan. From there he and Andy have built a product to be proud of, and it's great to be in a position to launch a paid-for product.

We spent a fair bit of time thinking about how best to structure our pricing. What we've come up with is a tiered plan where you pay according to the traffic you receive - and you only pay if your traffic increases month-on-month. So, we're only going to make any money if the product's genuinely useful!

Wish us luck!

Intriguing startups

2009-11-30T11:17:00.007Z

I've been away (on a lovely holiday in Malaysia) over the last couple of weeks. On coming back I've just heard that Patients Know Best - one of this year's Seedcamp winners, and a company I've been very happy to mentor - were named in Business Week's inaugural list of Most Intriguing Startups.

It's a wide-ranging list with companies in software, biotech and alternative energy, and companies funded from PKB's modest Seedcamp levels up $160M for a solar energy project, via Spotify, whose investment so far they put as $82M.

All but 5 of the companies on the list are in the US, which makes it all the sweeter that PKB are included. Nice work guys!

The penny drops, in the key of E major

2009-10-19T17:01:00.003+01:00

A music post, for a change - 'cos this made something really obvious for me. It's only a small thing, but I'm pleased for the clarity.

A while back, someone (probably @christianward) pointed out this amazing analysis of Beyonce's Single Ladies - not a song that would make it into my all-time top 10, but very interesting and quite complex.

E major, huh. OK, I believe you, Keith.

But check out this Andy Griffin-ised version - it's E major-tastic! It's so obvious when you hear it like that!

And a droll take on the video as well.

Launch48

2009-10-16T16:49:00.003+01:00

Posting from here at Launch48. Some really smart people here - really looking forward to seeing what comes out of the weekend.

If you saw my presentation on Planning your Web Application, you can find some resources (including the pictures that didn't show up - damn you Windows!) over here.

The nicest sign-up process

2009-10-14T09:27:00.010+01:00

I've been trying out DailyPerfect - some of my ex-Skype colleagues are involved in this personalized news site - and they have a really lovely sign-up process.

To get personalized news stories, all you do is enter your name.
And that's it.

Worked great for me. Later on, you can create a "proper" sign-in (or use Facebook Connect) to store your preferences, but it's great that you can try out the service without going through the usual username-and-password-twice malarkey.

There are a handful of other people with the same name as me (one of them beat me to the Liz.Rice googlemail address - how annoying is that!) but I must blab enough of my consciousness into the webosphere for Daily Perfect to be able to pick up on what I like. It made a pretty good job of selecting some topics for me, and it's easy to get rid of the few irrelevant ones with a simple thumbs-up / thumbs-down.

Wonder if John Smith would have the same positive experience?

Launch48

2009-10-08T13:54:00.004+01:00

Starting to think about my speaking slot at Launch48 next week. It'll be a lot better if I'm talking about something you want to hear about! So if you've got any burning questions or thoughts on the topic of How to plan your web application, now is a good time to let me know.

Seedcamp ... and, remind me, what is it that I do again?

2009-09-25T14:59:00.005+01:00

Another successful Seedcamp week, and I think it's fair to say that the participating teams and the mentors all got a lot out of it. As well as mentoring, I've been feeling some of the nerves from the other side as one of the companies I'm involved with, Plug in SEO, was a finalist. Although we didn't win, the team is very much buoyed up by the experience and advice, not to mention the brilliant contacts made during the week. And congratulations to the winners!

One thing I've come to realise recently is that my fingers have been in a few different pies since leaving Last.fm, sometimes in a fairly off-piste way, and "brand Liz" is confusing. A good friend told me I need to work on my elevator pitch, and she's right. And it's also clear that Product Management is not well understood - some folks think it's a posh term for project management, and in the last week I was surprised to hear someone (not at Seedcamp I hasten to add!) talking about needing a Sales team because he wants to learn more about what his users want. So my next mission - some rebranding and information about the value that Product Management can supply to a team, and the kind of PM tasks that can successfully be outsourced on a project or contract basis.

There, I've written it down in public - now I'll have to do it!

Meanwhile if anyone (especially freelance PM folks) have advice on meaningfully encapsulating what you do, do let me know.

Bookmarkers - a comparison of the sign-up process

2009-09-10T10:20:00.014+01:00

Every site and it's dog now has some sort of "share this" link (AddThis is one easy solution) where you can use a variety of tools to bookmark and share with your friends and the rest of the world.

But if you're not already a member, signing up for those bookmark managing services can vary from the straightforward to the painful. Here's a quick comparison of Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon, but the same kind of comments could apply to any website where users create accounts, not just bookmarkers. (Have you thought about your sign-up process recently?)

Digg
We get off to a pretty good start with Digg.

The option to use existing Facebook account details means you can avoid creating yet another log in. Lovely - one fewer password to remember. This is becoming easier and easier to do (I'm adding it to the to-do list for Tank Top) - for example here's what UserVoice have done with a solution from RPX.

The Digg sign-up form is pretty nice. A few words of help appear by each field as you focus into them - it's obvious they are there, without being distracting. If you enter something that's incorrect, it's checked dynamically and you get a pink error box straight away. No need to hit that "I agree" button until you've got everything right.

There's not a lot of reason to get something wrong in this form when you submit it, but suppose you do? Even if you got the Captcha right, you'll have to enter a new one this time. Captchas are a necessary evil for checking we're real people not spambots, but they're annoying - if I filled in a Captcha correctly on a form a few seconds ago, there's no need to make me do it again, is there?

Interesting that the birthdate is required "for legal reasons". StumbleUpon also insist on it, but not Delicious. My guess is that this is something to do with not showing (user-generated) adult content to minors, but you'd think the same rules would apply to all three, no?

Delicious
Straightforward enough sign-up form but it's not a delighter.

There's a nice button you can use to check if the user name you want is available before you press the register button. Would be even better to automatically check it dynamically.

Most people start at the top and work down the page, so the rules for password length are easy to miss until after you've already filled in both password fields. Again a dynamic check would be nice here, especially as it could stop you entering something invalid for a second time.

Like Digg, if I get the Captcha right, but something else is wrong, couldn't it remember that I was human a moment ago and probably still am now?

The next step offers me some slightly mysterious options to import bookmarks - but doesn't tell me where they're coming from or why I might want to do it.

I skip that step and get a much friendlier looking screen. Who wants to bet this was done by a different designer?
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon lets you write a review of what you're bookmarking as the first step before you create an account. Once you've invested in the review, you're probably more likely to bother with the sign-up process, though it does leave a little bit of a sour taste in the mouth that it's not quite as straightforward to submit your review as you initially believed.

Once there, the sign-up form's nice. Best bit - fill in the Captcha once and it disappears!

The only thing that's a bit confusing here is "You wrote the review below". Filling in any text for the review is optional on the previous page - the bit that's compulsory is the URL to which you're giving the thumbs-up. If I hadn't written any text you'd see a pair of empty double quotes instead of "Here's a little review I wrote". Where's the URL or some other information about the site I'm submitting?

_________________________________

Removing friction from every step of the sign-up process can make a massive difference to user conversions. Just writing about these three sites has given me food for thought for some of the products I'm involved with.

If you'd like to talk to me about independent analysis / heuristic evaluation of the user journey on one of your products, please feel free to get in touch.

Not thinking like an engineer

2009-08-13T12:40:00.005+01:00

When you're an engineer (I know, I used to be one) you're paid to solve problems. As soon as a problem is articulated, you're trying to build an elegant solution in your mind. If you're a product manager, this is a dangerous tendency.

The trouble comes when you leap from a half-arsed understanding of a requirement straight to the bit where your mind is solving the problem. Before you know it, you've expressed your market requirement as a piece of functionality, maybe throwing in a few implementation guidelines for good measure. To start with it feels as though you've made progress and you're helping the engineering team along - in fact, you've not spent the time to understand the problem, you've not articulated the requirement effectively, and you've stepped over the line into engineering responsibility and generally got their backs up.

The trouble is, a piece of functionality is rarely what the market requirement really is. The market needs a way to solve a problem, and the product manager needs to fully understand the problem and the user it affects. The cliché example is NASA investing $$$ to develop a pen that would write in space - the Russian's understood the problem and just took pencils. Sadly, I belive that story's an urban myth, NASA had plenty of manned missions armed with pencils before the pen-for-space was designed...but it's still a good illustration of jumping into the implementation of a product before fully understanding what is (and isn't) needed.

Creative folks get trained to explore lots of different options before they settle on one design; iteration goes across a variety of possibilities until the optimium solution gets picked (or identifies itself due to its sheer brilliance and beauty). Engineers are taught to figure out at a high level what the "best" solution as soon as possible, and then consideration of alternatives is put to one side; iteration is about fleshing out the details of the implementation.

Don't get me wrong, I think engineering's a great background for a product manager, and when you sit down to discuss the requirement with engineering it's no bad thing if you're able to bounce implementation ideas around as well. But to be effective, product managers need to train themselves to think a bit more like creatives, a bit less like engineers, and avoid jumping to the 'how' of implementation before they really understand the 'why'.

Evils of social networking? C'mon, really.

2009-08-03T15:20:00.003+01:00

We laughed at this morning's Today programme worrying about whether the Internet / Facebook / MSN / Other Evil Product That You Don't Understand would stop kids today from forming proper relationships because they're too busy IMing and communicating online to bother with old-fashioned face-to-face contact.

Was the same said when pen was invented, or when literacy became commonplace? When I passed notes in class or got myself a penpal, was I undermining my social skills? Did we all lose the ability to interpret facial expressions properly once we started chatting on the phone?

Contact list integrated

2009-08-03T14:59:00.003+01:00

Browsing my Google Analytics for this blog today, I happened to notice that someone came across my site after searching for the phrase "are skype contacts integrated with normal contacts skype phone". And that reminded me of something I was very passionate about as we built the first embedded hardware phones that integrated Skype and conventional (PSTN) phones - when you want to look up a contact, you shouldn't have to think about the method you're going to use to use to contact them first. You shouldn't have to remember whether your friend has a Skype account or not. We chose to combine the contact lists rather than keep them separate for Skype and conventional phone calls (which was the prevailing method used by non-embedded Skype phones at the time).

The same issue is appearing on handsets now that IM apps are increasingly often embedded on the phone. For a fully integrated experience the contact list should be combined for all the different methods you might use to communicate, and this is one opportunity that handset manufacturers have for improving on the user experience of running communications apps on an iPhone. I wonder how many will take advantage?

Business models for music

2009-07-20T12:25:00.015+01:00

I went to another of Simon and Richard's mobile networking dinners earlier this month (and very enjoyable they are too). Our table got very excited and passionate about business models for music. It seems to me that the realistically monetisable aspects are becoming: live events / personal experience, merchandise, and discovery.

What you can't monetize
Let's start with the basics. This really shouldn't be news to anyone by now, but it still has to be said: there is an entire generation for whom paying money for a digital copy of a piece of music simply makes no sense. You already can get anything you want for free, and everyone knows the marginal cost of their copy is virtually zero so they don't feel particularly bad about it.

The counter-argument is "but what about the poor musician, they need a way to make a living". Yes, they do, but the old model of being paid for a copy of a piece of music is not going to last. Fighting that is fighting the tide. Get over it. (And read Laurence Lessig's Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity while you're working on it.)

Twenty years ago, if an amateur band wanted to cut a record or a CD, or even duplicate tapes at decent quality, we had to pay money to do so. Unsigned bands didn't make money out of music sales then, and they don't now - but digital enables them to reach an audience and distribute their music much, much more easily and at much lower cost. So if you're any good, the tools to find a fan base are much more readily at your disposal than they ever used to be.

Ticket sales and merchandise
If you've managed to build up a following then it's pretty well recognised that there is money in tickets sales and merchandise. (Let's set aside for now the split of ticket sales revenue amongst all the different players - the point it that users will pay good money to buy the ticket.)

Personal experience
People will also pay for experience, and getting that experience earlier is more valuable. For example, hearing a new track as soon as possible is important to a hardcore fan. Why not charge a little bit of money to people who want to hear a track before it's released? They're not paying for the ownership of the track (that's free, right?) but they're paying to satisfy their curiosity and/or the cool value of having heard it first. Paying to add a track to Guitar Here / Rock Band is another great example of monetizing experience. It's not the same as buying the track, you're buying the ability for you and your friends to play along to the track.

Discovery
Richard Wray reports that the industry is coming round to the idea of some royalties from streaming services like Spotify being preferable to no royalties from illegal downloads.

These streaming services are capable of more than just a more personalized alternative to conventional radio. Music discovery and the related cool is of huge value to a smaller group of music fans - let's call them mavens. They are the ones who actively try to find new bands, new sounds, new ideas. Back in the day, we did it by spending hours in record shops, and by reading the Melody Maker and NME cover to cover. We still do it by checking out support bands at gigs and festivals. In the digital age, services like Spotify, Last.fm and also iTunes Genius make the discovery process a whole lot easier (and in many cases free) and in my view there are still opportunities for monetisation here. Rory Cellan-Jones suggests that Spotify is doomed because no-one's paying for their premium service - but maybe they don't pay simply because there's a free alternative. And even if the mainstream user who doesn't care about the ads on commercial radio won't cough up for a streaming subscription, a maven addicted to discovering new music finds it more valuable.

Niche labels have always played a part in music discovery - you know what you'll be getting from a band on certain labels - and if I were a music label I'd be focussing my efforts on how I could leverage this.

One last thing that people do pay for when it comes to music: the equipment that actually plays it. It's interesting that Nokia are already blurring the boundaries between equipment and music costs with Comes With Music. The trouble with that model, for me, is the idea that you own a piece of music but you can't choose what you're playing it on. I suppose, if we all get ourselves totally comfortable with the idea that a copy of a piece of music is free, then we won't have to think in terms of ownership at all.

Track my progress London to Paris

2009-06-19T14:56:00.006+01:00

One of the companies I've been working with recently is Palringo. Their mobile IM client includes an optional location feature, so you let your contacts see where you are.

Battery permitting I'll keep Palringo running on my trusty Sony Ericsson w880i, so my contacts will be able to check up on my progress on next week's London to Paris bike ride. If you'd like to see how we're progressing along the route, download Palringo to your mobile or desktop and send me a connection request on liz [at] palringo.com.

It's not too late to sponsor me for the ride and help raise some money for some great charities!

L2P sponsorship

2009-06-02T14:53:00.003+01:00

Kids at Christel House

Later this month @philpearl and I are riding London to Paris in three days, alongside (or more likely well behind) some big names from cycling and other sports. It's 520km altogether, and will involve about 6-7 hours riding each day.

The event raises money for a selection of charities including the Geoff Thomas Foundation, and Christel House - I was lucky enough to visit a Christel House school in Cape Town earlier in the year, and was really impressed.

If you'd like to sponsor us please visit our Justgiving page.

Tank Top TV

2009-05-29T20:17:00.005+01:00

@philpearl and I have been working on a little project called Tank Top TV. It helps you keep track of new programmes on BBC iPlayer (and soon, other online on-demand TV sources), filtering out the ones you're not interested in.

Give it a whirl and let us know what you think!

Plug in SEO survey results

2009-05-21T17:26:00.004+01:00

Blogged about survey results for Plug in SEO.

08-how much?

2009-05-05T09:57:00.004+01:00

Back in the old days, when phones were fixed and locations were static, someone invented the 08-number system. 0800 were free, 0845 were "local rate" and 0870 were "national rate". Everyone knew that local calls were cheap and national calls were...not cheap. There were other numbers for "premium rate" calls that we all knew were expensive.

I accept that "Local" calling can be a more complex concept from a mobile phone (unless perhaps you are in a system like the US where mobile phone numbers are tied to an area code). But is this an excuse for UK mobile operators to charge arbitrary amounts (up to £2.50 per minute, according to a quick flick through the latest Carphone Warehouse price guide) for what was supposed to be an easily understood numbering plan?

Why don't these local and national rate calls count as part of the inclusive minutes in nearly all the standard mobile calling tariffs? Is there any better answer than "because it's a way to leech more money out of unsuspecting customers?"

Mini Seedcamp London

2009-04-21T12:41:00.004+01:00

Image via CrunchBase

Any commentators from the US who still think entrepreneurship in Europe is feeble should frankly think again. Yesterday was Mini Seedcamp in London, and I was privileged to be one of the mentors. The teams were full of passionate, driven founders looking for ways to maximise their potential, and aside from meeting talented folks, it was a real bonus to feed off the energy in the room. Amongst the teams, I had a few favourites, and there are others I suspect will struggle to really prove a business model, but there are some exciting ideas out there.

As a first-time mentor it's easy to feel a bit of a fraud, and wonder what you're going to be able to bring to the table (I know several of us felt the same way). It turns out that all those years of experience do count for something. Maybe it's just knowing some of the questions to ask - a common theme seemed to be that some of the teams hadn't quite figured out who their users are. Knowing who your target market is, and what problem you're solving for them, is the foundation of product management. Everything else - the features, the design, the business model, the marketing - should be informed by who you're building for and why.

Knowing your users was also a theme in the panel discussion about product. Talking with them, getting metrics on how they use your product - you have to know what your users think in order to iterate your design / features / priorities / payment plan. These successful entrepreneurs tell us that you learn from your users in order to build a better product. I couldn't agree more (and on a side note, I'm increasingly intolerant of developers who talk of users' stupidity - who do they think benefits from insulting the users? I didn't come across this attitude at all yesterday, which bodes well.)

As well as meeting with some talented teams, I really enjoyed talking with some of my follow mentors - a great mix of folks from all across the London startup / technology scene, with backgrounds in every discipline from the most technical to the most commercial. Several times we figured out with a team that they'd really benefit from a meeting with Company X, Journalist Y or Guru Z, and then someone would whip out their iPhone and fire off an introduction. This is networking at its most productive - not just a talking shop but Making It Happen.

A vote from the mentors resulted in these finalists being chosen to present in more detail today. I can't wait to hear how they get on!

Killer interface demo

2009-04-14T11:19:00.004+01:00

This demo is one of the most exciting tech things I've seen in ages. Particularly the bit where he dials a phone number on his hand.

Condense the projector, camera and phone into one device, and ideally find a way not to need the coloured fingertips (easier said than done, I'm sure) and this is a killer product.

Ada Lovelace day - women in technology

2009-03-24T07:42:00.003Z

In case you haven't heard, today is Ada Lovelace day when lots of people, myself included, have pledged to blog about women in technology they consider to be role models. I thought it would be nice to acknowledge some of the women that I've worked alongside - perhaps not superstars (yet?) but proof that alongside the guys we are out there, playing our parts in driving technology forward.

To cut down the list, I'm concentrating on people who are involved in development or the more technical end of product management - these are people who know how things work. So, in no particular order, and with apologies to many other talented people I've left out...

Aside from her day job as software development manager at Figleaves, Anne Currie is a tech entrepreneur responsible for workingProgram.
At Skype, the devices product management team was remarkably well-balanced along gender lines. Helen Blackburn, Debby Shepard and Sue Powell all play(ed) important roles in shaping the options for Skype users to communicate away from their PCs.
Gemma Harrison is a development manager at MetaSwitch, where they deal with some seriously difficult network protocol technology.
Sophie Major runs the international part of the Yahoo! Developer Network - and as an ex-developer knows what it's like on the other side of the fence. Seems I'm not the only one to think of Sophie today.

Let me get one thing straight: I can't stand self-congratulatory women-in-engineering get-togethers where everyone pats themselves on the back for making it past the oh-so-many-incredibly-difficult barriers to making a success of themselves in the industry. Wittering on about how hard it is doesn't encourage more women to get involved. What does work is highlighting positive role models like any of the women listed here.

Who else should be on this list? Sign the Ada Lovelace pledge and let the world know in your own blog post!

Free - you get what you pay for

2009-03-19T11:45:00.003Z

Things like this worry me, but not because of anything Google's doing - I'm more concerned about some busy-body group like the Electronic Privacy Information Center adding friction that makes it harder for companies to offer services for free.

OK, Google run a business and derive some benefits from (a) showing me ads (b) knowing more about me, but this is a trade-off I'm more than happy to make in return for some amazing, free services. I'm sure Google care about security issues, because they have a reputation to uphold, but their Ts & Cs make it clear that they aren't going to be held responsible if something goes wrong.

So if I have something super-sensitive then I won't upload it to the Google cloud - simple. Want guaranteed security? Then pay for it.

Cape Argus Cycle Tour

2009-03-05T21:03:00.000Z

Just a quick post in case anyone who reads this hasn't heard - I'm in South Africa for a week riding with a team of pro & ex-pro women in a team called Hot Chillee. We're all riding the Cape Argus Pick'n'Pay Cycle Tour on Sunday. I'm Twittering about it as @LizChillee, and wrote this blog post for Bike Radar.

Music theft and the new models

2009-02-20T11:40:00.008Z

A tweet from @nicolariordan pointed me to this interesting post, predominantly about Spotify, by Bob Lefsetz. I don't wholeheartedly agree with absolutely everything he said but he makes some interesting points.

I was particularly drawn to this paragraph:

I thought I didn’t need Spotify, I believed I had enough access to music. But the interface was so good, the availability so perfect, that it’s all I use to listen to music on my computer. I haven’t stolen a single track since I’ve installed Spotify. It’s just not worth it!

This triggered lots of thoughts for me, but the main one is the value inherent in good interaction design. Last.fm has way more functionality, not to mention a massive head start, but judging anecdotally by blogs like this, it's losing users to Spotify because it's so easy and attractive to use.

Most people feel some level of discomfort in getting hold of content illegally. There is a threshold of cost for each individual where it's worth paying to avoid the illegal route, though the cost is pretty close to zero for many people nowadays simply because there's so much free music out there. Using Spotify, Bob can only stream the track rather than "own" it (for example he can't transfer it to another device) but he's happy with that compromise - Bob values the ease of use plus the guilt-free sensation of using a legal service more highly than the ownership and portability.

I think Bob's right that Spotify looks like real competition to iTunes. Even though they aren't competing head-to-head in functionality terms, they've both got their eye on the mass market and have a user experience to match.

Another interesting article came up today about naming your own price when selling CDs. Not only will people pay money for convenience and ease-of-use, they'll pay for the warm glow of supporting an artist they love. I love this model, but I'd bet it would work a whole lot worse for any act signed to a major label.

Nokia, Skype, INQ and contact list integration

2009-02-18T10:57:00.007Z

Nokia's announcement that the N97 will have Skype pre-installed is great news, and an indication that the mobile industry is step-by-step wising up to how cool Skype (and VoIP in general) are and how they can either embrace it and benefit (like 3 are doing - apparently getting 20% revenue hike from Skypephone users) or try to pretend it doesn't exist and lose out.

That article also reminded me about contact list integration. Traditionally handset manufacturers have held the address book very close to their chests, and installed apps have struggled to get any sort of integration at all. This is changing - to my knowledge at least 3 big players are building some form of properly integrated contact list, and not before time.

While I was at Skype we scraped the surface of this when integrating with home phones - devices that plug into your phone socket for normal PSTN calls, and connect to the internet for Skype calling.

It was important to me that we didn't just bolt the two types of address book together. When you make a call, you think of the person first, and you don't want to have to remember which phone book they might be in according to the technology you use to speak with them. Much better to find the person, and then use presence information to decide whether it's a good time to call, and if so, what kind of call to make (with the device helping you by defaulting to a sensible type of call according to context).

Fortunately we already had the UI concepts for this in place - Skype already supported SkypeOut contacts for whom you only have a phone number, not a Skype ID. We simply extended this concept on home phones to allow you to make conventional phone calls as well as SkypeOut calls to this kind of contact. Mapping presence states so they make sense was also reasonably straightforward. A pleasant side effect was that if all your contacts are stored in Skype, even if they are phone numbers only, they can move with you to any device where you choose to sign in.

But that's more than two years ago now, and contact lists on mobile phones are just starting to catch up. The INQ team get this, and the contact list integrates things like Facebook and MSN properly. Hopefully they will take this further, for example showing Last.fm status in future iterations (so you can see what someone's listening to when you call them). iPhone allows some integration already, and the Android framework allows endless possibilities. And I can't wait to see what Nokia do on the N97.

By the way, congrats to INQ Mobile on their success at the Global Mobile Awards!

The mobile web, standardised frameworks and thin clients

2009-02-13T11:27:00.004Z

Mobile Monday London this week was all about standard frameworks for developing mobile widgets, apps and websites. Great stuff, and good to hear that lots of network operators and handset manufacturers are co-operating to provide some standard APIs for network & handset functions in the GSMA One API and the OMTP BONDI initiative. Sounds like we're edging towards the utopia of one environment across, well, several phones and networks. But....

What about J2ME phones? Y'know, the ones that are used by the vast majority of users, and probably still will be for some time to come.

I know things take time, and it's no doubt being sped along by the use of open source reference implementations (great idea by the way) but still, I can't imagine we're going to see any compliant devices released to the real world any time soon.

In the mean time, those wishing to provide a mobile app for mass usage have a pretty tough time of it - fragmentation in handsets and networks being a well-known problem. The fastest way to get to market is probably to use a thin client solution, with the bulk of the app running server-side, and the results are remarkably effective. Examples of this are Moblica's Snaptu, or the on-phone client environments created by mobile developers like weComm and HandsOn that speed their developments of different apps & games.

The downside is limited (or no) functionality when there's no network connection, and, depending on the client implementation, limited integration with other phone functionality.

The good news is that standard API initiatives and thin clients are not orthogonal solutions. When the standardised APIs become available, it should make it easy for thin clients to be upgraded to access additional phone and network features and offer them up to the server-bound app. Even though there will still be a proliferation of different phone OSs, only the thin client needs to be maintained on these different OSs.

The cost of DRM

2009-02-10T11:33:00.006Z

Steve Litchfield's post about DRM-related bugs using Nokia's Comes With Music got me thinking about how the economics of this work out.

Question - is [cost of implementing & supporting DRM technology + cost of lost business due to having DRM] > [cost of lost sales due to people pirating music] ?

There is little evidence that people pirate music that they would actually have paid for, had it not been available for free. At Last.fm (who, incidentally, have at last released metadata artist / track spelling corrections - woohoo!) we saw that introducing free on-demand streaming significantly increased sales - it makes sense, because people want to try before they buy. And competition has reduced music prices to a sufficiently low level that many people consider to be worthwhile paying compared to the risk of illegal downloads.

DRM is inherently complex - it has to be otherwise it would be easy for people to get around it - so it makes common sense that it would be expensive to implement. My gut feel is that the industry will have spent far, far more on this than was worthwhile.

Someone with more time on their hands to research the numbers want to work this equation out properly?

Sanity prevails - Skype recognised as Not Evil

2009-02-03T15:00:00.002Z

In this transcript of a conversation including my ex-colleague (and wearer of loud shirts) Jonathan Christensen, and Lee Dryburgh from eCommConf, it's something of a relief to hear that Gartner are telling businesses that it's safe to use Skype after all. Hurrah. Did it really take a recession for people to wise up to the fact it can save a whole lot of money, far outweighing the potential cost of the vanishingly unlikely virus infection through Skype?

Compared with, say, users clicking on links in spam email, I never really figured why a professional would have considered this a serious risk in the first place. Well. I think the reasoning went something like this: Skype is not open source - we can't reverse engineer it - we don't understand it and yet we're supposed to be the experts - surely they can't make it this secure and make us feel foolish without somehow harnessing the forces of evil?

Tags on Amazon

2009-02-02T16:51:00.004Z

I only just noticed that Amazon now have user-generated tags for items on their store - a super-efficient way of crowd-sourcing meaningful 'genre' terms down to a suprisingly fine level, as I learnt at Last.fm. That should help them tune recommendations too. I wonder when iTunes will join the party?

Location paranoia

2009-02-02T12:09:00.003Z

I've been away for a week, having a marvellous time snowboarding and cross-country skiing in Sweden. Much though I'd have liked to Twitter and maybe photo-blog the experience, I didn't - I've convinced myself that advertising the fact we're away from the house is an invitation to burglars.

I imagine a wave of enterprising criminals who, having identified a likely looking target house, rifle through the recycling to find out the names of the occupants. A quick Google and they have a real-time feed of where the hapless victims-to-be are - and from that, a good idea of how long they will be away.

Am I alone in this paranoia?

Racing at Hog Hill

2009-01-20T10:46:00.004Z

BC have me down as coming 4th in Saturday's women's race (thought I was fifth, so not sure what went on there!)

As well as this shot of me apparently time-trialling my way round, Ken Iino from our club London Phoenix took some good pics.

Sharp edges

2009-01-19T09:44:00.003Z

The MacBook Air is a beautiful thing, but in a form-over-function fail, the sharp edge at the front wears away at your hands. The geek-chic equivalent of high heels.

Yahoo sign-in overkill

2009-01-14T12:26:00.003Z

I'm about to post a message to MomoLondon, which maintains its mailing list on Yahoo. So I sign in to Yahoo, and notice that one of my email addresses isn't verified. OK, let's fix that.

I have to sign in again? OK, I can live with that, I'm changing something about my identity.

Yes, that is one of my email addresses, I click to confirm I want to verify it. Oh, I have to sign in again?

Err, yes, Yahoo, that is indeed the address I want to verify, in a list of all the other ones you have for me. You want me to click the Verify link? OK. I thought I just told you that's what I want to do?

And now you want me to sign in AGAIN?

Great, you've sent an email to my address with a link to click on. Oh look, yet another sign in page!

I may have missed a step or two here, all those sign in pages have become a bit of a blur... but the one thing I'm certain of is I shouldn't have to enter my password five times for something that simple.

Advertising as a product

2009-01-08T12:36:00.004Z

Call me naive, but I'm continually amazed by the amount of design and engineering effort that goes into advertising in the digital world. Creative agencies dream up cool functionality that aligns well with a brand, and gets built as some funky ad, viral, microsite etc. At the end of the campaign, maybe just a few weeks, it becomes redundant. Lots of $$ have been spent, presumably more products were sold and the brand was enhanced in the public (sub)consciousness. But the user doesn't get very much out of it.

Here's an example: the Sony Walkman Project from last year. Really, really cool TV ad (at least, it appealed to the musician in me). But the interactive bit where you record your track, upload it and mix it was pretty lame and, well, pointless.

Wouldn't it be cool if the talent and effort that went into creating that site went into the actual products, rather than just the marketing of those products?

I can only guess that marketers like these microsites because they give a count-the-clicks way to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. But still, it looks like a lot of effort down the drain to me.

Timeframes are often the disconnect between the advertising creative process and product development, especially if there's hardware involved. Marketing look one or maybe two quarters ahead, to promote products that are finished or close to it. The product team are working to define functionality for a product three or four quarters before delivery. So when the marketing team take a funky integration idea from the creative agency back to the product team, it's way too late. And the product manager rarely if ever gets involved with the advertising creative process - it's considered well within the domain of marcomms.

I'd challenge marketers to take a longer-term view - get your product teams involved in these creative sessions with agencies. The benefit might not show up on this quarter's marketing results, but you might end up with some better products to market a year from now.

Do you have time for video?

2009-01-06T17:40:00.003Z

I know YouTube is the biggest phenomenon since, oh, the ballpoint pen, but I can't believe we have enough time to deal with video for everything. Every time I click on a video, I end up trying to multi-task - like right now, I have demoted a video of Steve Jobs to another browser tab while I'm writing this post. It's like listening to voicemails - you want to be able to speed them up to get to the useful bits.

Unless we're trying to spend time of course - that's called entertainment.

Biking on snow!

2009-01-05T14:49:00.002Z

Not the arctic north, just merry old London. Proper winter weather, and I like it!

2009 - year of the eBook

2009-01-05T11:12:00.003Z

Last year the world and his dog got satnav, and the same could happen in 2009 for eBook readers. With several models on the market, at not-too-outrageous price points, no heavier than a print book, decent battery life and reasonable user experience, they seem ready to take on the mass market.

You'll be needing some eBooks then. Just like digital downloads for the music industry, this is a game-changer for publishing, and a lot of parallel lessons could be applied early on.

ID tags - get the title, author, date etc consistently applied by all providers so that wherever you buy an eBook, it's listed within your collection correctly.

New business models - for example book rental, or serialization like in Dickens' time.

All the same arguments for and against DRM - there's a whole separate post topic right there.

Recommendations - use both purchase and actual read-time data to build better collaborative filtering (scrobbling for your books)

Anyone can become a writer - so as part of the recommendation and navigation process, new and exciting material needs to filter through without forcing us all to trawl through piles of dross. This editorial and marketing role is where the publishing companies need to focus their efforts, as there will be less and less money to be made in physical book manufacture and distribution.

It's not eactly like music though. Most people read most books only once, or maybe up to a handful of times, even if it's a real favourite. And people often read a book - especially factual / education titles - because it's a set text or the authoritative source, not entirely out of personal choice according to taste.

Amazon and others have been applying collaborative filtering with some success for years, based on purchase data plus user ratings, which are quite likely inaccurate - do you really keep your Amazon ratings fully up-to-date every time you read a book? There must be better ways, and eBooks open up some new possibilities such as tracking the time you spend reading a book. Or download sites asking you what you thought of a previous work that it knows you recently finished.

If eBook readers really do take off this year, expect some hot recommendation sites to follow very swiftly behind.

Rumours of the death of the music industry appear to be exaggerated

2009-01-04T19:30:00.003Z

Still life in the old dogs yet, according to Nielsen. And a billion digital tracks sold in the US alone last year.

Last.fm keep up the good work

2009-01-03T15:58:00.004Z

In a recent interview with Daily Tech, RJ from Last.fm lists more consumer electronics support first when talking about the next steps for the company:

What does last.fm have planned for the future?

Ooh, well, some more of the same. We’re expanding onto a lot of different devices now; that’s been a bit of theme recently. We’re on the iPhone, we’re looking very seriously at an Android app, we’re on the Sonos, we’re on the Logitech squeezebox, and we’re on more devices than we can keep track of. We’re trying to make sure that wherever you listen to music, Last.fm is there, and you’ll be able to scrobble the songs that you listen to.

I'm stoked by this - devices and mobile are what I looked after while I worked there, and it'll be awesome if they can keep up the momentum.

While family were over for the holidays we had loads of Christmas music and easy-on-the-old-folks'-ears Last.fm tag radio playing through Squeezeboxes round the house. For free. Logitech still have a bit of work in my opinion to make this absolutely the seamless user experience that, say, my mum would need to be able to operate it, but it's a great piece of functionality. Can't wait for more, friends from Last.fm!!

Don't regulate my internets, Andy!

2008-12-29T10:04:00.005Z

I hope someone has explained to Andy Burnham that asking ISPs to police internet content is the equivalent of making paper manufacturers responsible for what gets published in the newspapers.

He's pressing Team Obama to help regulate content "in the English speaking world". Aside from the small matter of a handful of folks outside the US and UK who can get by in the language, not to mention tools like Google Translate, isn't the main problem in, erm, pictures and video content?!

To be fair, most large user-generated content sites have a take-down policy, e.g. to remove Nazi-related content which is illegal in Germany. This poses some interesting ethics vs pragmatism questions if you're a content site: if something is illegal in country X, do you go to the trouble of hiding it in X but allowing it to be viewed elsewhere? Otherwise, X's government are effectively censoring for the rest of the world as well. Maybe you don't really mind if X are a liberal, democratic nation who have decided that it's best if we can't see kiddie porn / happy slapping videos, but you'll feel differently if X are a dictatorship banning anti-government sentiment.

I don't believe censorship for kids works properly anyway - it just becomes a forbidden-fruit challenge to access the material. Who didn't get to see an 18-rated movie when they were younger? And just look at under-age drinking, or prohibition in the US, to see how people, adult or child, will always find a way around the rules.

The "bad guys" making money from distributing "unsuitable material" (whatever that means) will find loopholes too. So let's not make UK businesses and tech innovators jump through regulatory hoops.

Vodafone - Last.fm announced

2008-12-18T11:51:00.005Z

Another of the mobile projects I worked on at Last.fm is now announced - Vodafone's scrobbling app. Here's a video of Damien from Vodafone demo-ing the app.

I wonder if they are redirecting mobile browsers to m.last.fm yet?

The recession - contributory factors

2008-12-18T11:00:00.004Z

OK, this economic downturn is real, and it's primarily driven by lending spiralling out of control. What else?

Have retailers forgotten how price elasticity works? I wish I had taken a picture of the racks of empty shelves where the Christmas lights once lived at my local Homebase earlier this week. They had been discounted so heavily (by a presumably panicking management) there was nothing left, a good ten days before the holiday - all that empty space must be costing them. Conversely, why didn't Woolworths management start holding sales sooner, seeing as they were overwhelmed with demand last week?

How much time has been lost to the lurgy this last few months ? Anecdotally, everyone seems to be more sick this year than usual, and if that's true it must make some difference to total output.

About 18 months ago, @philpearl predicted a recession was on its way after he noticed the unflattering, lycra-based and luridly coloured "fashions" - surely no-one spends a lot on clothes that make them look like a bright green sack of potatos. The last time shops sold such hideous stock it was the 1980's, and you know what happened to the economy after that.

And let's not dwell on the self-fulfilling prophetical nature of the media coverage...

And in more Last.fm news...

2008-12-12T14:35:00.003Z

Sad days back in the office, I hear. But rather than dwell on that, let's mention this announcement about T-Mobile using Last.fm webservices which is much more positive.

Last.fm on INQ ad

2008-12-09T10:08:00.005Z

I'm like a kid in a toy shop every time I see an ad showing Last.fm on the INQ phone!

Mobile Social Media

2008-12-09T09:03:00.003Z

At last night's MoMoLondon discussion about Mobile Social Media, everyone was coming at this from an application developer perspective. It occurs to me that operators already have a social network in place, of sorts - they know who a lot of people are, their phone number and their location. Faced with the prospect of becoming nothing more than a data pipe, in their position I'd be looking for innovative ways to leverage that built-in social network.

For example, what's the point of getting free calls to other people on the same operator network as you unless you know which of your friends is on it?

Dual-SIM phone number, please

2008-12-08T10:44:00.003Z

Leaving Last.fm meant I had to hand in my Blackberry, and it's a little bit frightening how quickly you can get addicted to anytime access to the internet - primarily for me, the connectedness of email and the safety net of maps. So I'm considering what device I need to replace it.

I love my iPod Touch for ease of access to my music, and for all the apps, so the obvious phone choice would be an iPhone. But it's too big! In my jeans pocket, the iPod Touch makes sitting down a careful operation, and that's smaller than its iPhone cousin. There's no way I'd want to risk an iPhone in my jersey pocket on the bike - too much likelihood of damaging that huge, shiny screen, and enough weight to persuade me psychologically (even if not realistically) that it would affect my performance.

I adore my Sony Ericsson W880i because it's so tiny. Perfect for when I just need phone & text, and maybe the odd photo, for social occasions or out on a ride, but it's not the all-singing all-dancing device that I've got used to with the Blackberry.

In the high street I can find any number of cool devices - maybe a Nokia N95 / N96? Too big again. The newer Sony Ericssons? Nothing is as small and cute as the W880i. Maybe another Blackberry Pearl? Hmmm, maybe, but it's just not as cool, and the app selection is nowhere (yet) compared with Apple's App Store.

What I really want is the ability to put two SIMs in two different phones but associated with the same phone number. For daytime and travelling I'd have an iPhone (or maybe an Android-based phone when someone makes a sexy one), and for riding, gigs and parties, the Sony Ericsson. No need to update my friends or contacts with a new number, and the flexibility to have the level of connectivity I want when I need it. I'll need unlimited data access of course, and a decently cheap monthly plan (or PAYG, I'm not fussy). Any UK operators got what I need?

Better networking

2008-11-28T19:47:00.004Z

I've been to a couple of networking events recently, one by The Up Group, the other Simon Rockman and Richard Evans' mobile dinners, that have consolidated a view in my mind that these things are better when they're by invitation. Maybe I'm a snob but I've had better conversations with more interesting people.

At Wednesday's mobile dinner there was a nice chap from Laird Technologies getting me excited about near-field communications technologies - apparently there's a low-energy Bluetooth standard coming together. It will be cheap and easy to embed these chips into, well, pretty much anything - and then with your mobile nearby, or a suitably-enabled wifi router, it can connect to the internet, using your existing data plan or broadband. Suddenly your central heating system / musical instrument / bike computer / insert-your-own-idea-here really can be connected.

The challenge is going to be making it easy to set up. Bluetooth and wifi connectivity are hampered by having the whole experience dreamt up by engineers, not usability experts. If you're an engineer working on anything like this, and considering a solution that involves entering hex digits, walk away now - you are not the right person for the job.

What I want to see is this:

buy connectivity-enabled thing
take it home
wave it near your router / mobile phone
press a button
you're done.

We also had a good chat about prosopagnosia - I have always been "bad at recognising people" and it was quite revealing to take some online tests a few months back, prompted by an article in Wired. I'm not awful at it, but certainly below average, it turned out. Nick was the first other person I've met who knows he has this, so it was fascinating to compare coping strategies - like scanning the attendee list beforehand looking for names you know, so you're less likely to be caught staring at someone trying to figure out if you've met before.

And that's another advantage of invitation-only networking events.

Imeem show us how to do an album exclusive

2008-11-27T08:50:00.004Z

I won't be posting about Britney often, I promise, but Imeem's treatment of their exclusive preview of her latest album could teach some other music sites a thing or two.

Prominent placement on their logged-out home page / spotlight (pictured here)
Copy highlights that it's an exclusive
Nice skinning on the playlist page itself

Better than an occasional house footer ad placement, below the fold, eh?

Let's start here.

2008-11-21T15:07:00.002Z

Yep, everyone's gotta have a go at one of these. I'll write something here, eventually, when I've finished all the fun bit where you add widgets and tart up the way it all looks.