Category Archives: service

What Makes A Tech Success?



It seems in the world of computers and the Internet there is always a steady stream of new things on the horizon, as well as a steady stream of new products and services. It’s been this way for many years at this point.

There are always winners and losers. Winners can win big, and losers at worst fail to make any marketplace splash or even a ripple and end up in the tech dustbin of obscurity with few people ever knowing that the product or service ever existed.

What is it that makes for a successful product? Why is it that some products and services that seem very similar to other products and services end up becoming household names, while others end up being cancelled domain name landing pages?

It’s obvious there are a variety of factors that come into play. If it were easy to predict these things, we would have a lot fewer losers. Why did Twitter become a household name, whereas similar services such as Plurk and Jaiku languish in the shadows? What enabled Facebook to steal most of the MySpace thunder?

New products and services that end up being successful frequently incorporate elements and principles of previously-existing successes, but package them in more compact and useful forms.

Initially when Twitter came along a couple of years ago, I heard people talking about it, but I was a bit resistant to sign up. I felt like I had plenty of ways to communicate with people, so why did I need to add yet another account to a service that would steal away time I already had filled, only to ultimately let yet another account go dormant? I finally signed up for Twitter, and after I began using it I began to understand the value of it. With a service like Twitter, the more people that are using it, the more valuable it becomes.

About the same time I signed up for a Twitter account, I also signed up for a Plurk account. After a few visits to the Plurk website over a period of a month or two, I haven’t been back to the site since.

I believe what is valuable about Twitter is that 140 character limit per Tweet, forcing people to be succinct with their wording. Twitter and Tweet are cute names. The site design is simple, the blue bird logo pleasing to the eye, and the developers kept the API and name open to other developers, allowing an entire ecosystem of ancillary products and services to develop around it at the same time it was rapidly increasing in popularity. Twitter is very much like chat, which was already well established, but it had the added value that it either could be in real time, or not, able to be accessed from a vast array of devices beyond the Twitter website. Twitter also allows you to subscribe to just the people you want, and ignore or even completely block the rest. Twitter also allows you to reach out and touch people, and it allows you to monitor what others are up to whose lives are at once very similar to your own, yet often radically different. You can spend as much or as little time as you wish interacting with the service. Another thing that turned out to be incredibly useful with twitter is the vast 24/7 real-time data stream that it generates. Real-time Twitter data mining has proved to be quite valuable to many people.

To be honest I have always thought that many MySpace pages were often monstrous, unbelievably cluttered messes that often took a long time to load. Nonetheless, MySpace became popular because it obviously served a need with a younger demographic.

I’ve always thought Facebook’s interface is somewhat confusing, though allowing for far less cluttered and confusing-looking profile pages. I still don’t quite understand what got Facebook to the level of critical popularity – perhaps the less-cluttered, faster-loading profile pages gave it the critical edge over MySpace.

It should also be noted that Facebook allowed for an open API, allowing a myriad of interesting and often useful applications to be plugged in to its interface.

However it did it, Facebook managed to get to a critical mass of users where it became THE thing to sign up for and THE place to be to stay connected with family, friends and business associates. Something interesting has happened with Facebook that has never happened before – everyday, non-geek people who had never built website profiles in all the years they had been doing email and web browsing were suddenly signing up for Facebook in unbelievable numbers. Mothers, dads, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, etc. were suddenly showing up on the same service with their kids, nieces, nephews and grandkids. Once the ball rolled, Facebook became an incredible success.

I started noticing a while back that many people were starting to use Twitter and Facebook to communicate with each other in lieu of email. At this point I find myself getting pulled into that trend myself. These services don’t offer the relative privacy of direct email, but they allow for easy, frequent public conversations and easy sharing of personal media such as photos between friends and family on a global scale.

What I take away from the success stories versus the less-successful competitors is that oftentimes the differences in design and implementation can be slight, but those slight differences can offer real, tangible advantages to the end user. If those often-slight advantages can somehow help get the product or service to a critical mass threshold, they can find themselves catapulted to the point of planetary awareness.


Should You Pay For Content?



I was listening to a podcast where the hosts were chatting back and forth about the newly offered Hulu Plus, where for $10 dollars a month, you can get Hulu on a wide variety of devices including smart phones and over-the-top Internet TV boxes. Hulu is also offering a somewhat wider, but still incomplete back catalog archive of shows. One of the hosts was saying he wouldn’t pay for content, he wanted it “for free.”

Whether we realize it or not, we are all paying for content, either directly or indirectly. Even if we have only a TV antenna and watch only the local TV channels, we are still paying for content indirectly via advertising. When we buy consumer products of virtually any kind, part of what we pay goes for advertising, which pays for content creation.

If we are paying indirectly only, someone else is deciding for us as to the quality of the programming content. We can either consume that content or not, but we still pay as consumers buying products. We have very little indirect control over what gets put on the air. On the other hand, if we pay for content directly, then we have far greater control over the quality of the media we are consuming.

If Hulu can offer value for the money, then it will succeed What they have to do is figure out what people are willing to pay for. Perhaps that value revolves around putting highly-sought-after content on as many devices as possible. Perhaps it revolves around coming up with the absolute best back catalog of old TV shows. Imagine having instant streaming access to every TV show ever produced in every country in any language, and every movie ever produced anywhere in any language. Something like that would be well worth paying for. Imagine a site such as IMDB.Com that lists every movie and TV show ever made, except as a subscriber you could instantly stream it – now you’re talking. Hulu, anyone else out there – are you listening?

I personally would be willing to pay for a service such as Hulu, except for one small glitch. There are no back catalog shows on the site at the moment that really excite me. Network drama shows can sometimes be quite good, but my tastes are somewhat different.

When I had Dish Network, I was watching a few selected shows on only 3 channels – Discovery, TLC and History. I can get most of these shows if I really want them at some point via Netflix. To my way of thinking, Netflix is a much better value. Netflix has a far wider variety of content, plus they also offer the handy rental service of DVD’s and Blu-ray discs.

The verdict is currently out whether Hulu will be able to figure out what value it needs to best serve its customers. If people are paying Hulu money directly, then Hulu had better quickly figure out exactly what those customers want and do its best to deliver it to them.

Hey Hulu, here’s an idea to try. Offer first-run streaming movies, but do it the Hulu way. I would be willing to pay for a first run movie streaming for a nominal pay-per-view fee, say $5.99. Vudu is offering streaming first run movies, but you have to have a big fat Internet connection to be able to use Vudu. The Vudu service demands way more bandwidth than my Internet service can currently deliver.

Here’s yet another idea for Hulu – offer exclusive, Hulu-only content consisting of well-produced material revolving around the “Entertainment Tonight” type of concept. Do exclusive interviews of movie and TV stars. Do exclusive interviews of directors. Give people real value for their money. Make your customers want to not only see you succeed, but motivate them to help you succeed.


Have You Tried Google Labs



I have to admit I like to try new things and am willing to take the risk that it entails. Which is why I love Google Labs. The lab contains experiments that Google believe have potential, but are not ready to release to the general public yet. If you decide to use a lab product, you need to be aware that it is just that an experiment. It may not work perfectly and it can be pulled at anytime, without notification. How long somethings stays in the lab, varies by product, some products spend years in the lab, while others either die or are released quickly. Google Reader and iGoogle are just two of many graduates of Google Labs. There are some Google products that have their own labs, such as Google mail and Google calendar. There are a couple of ways to get to Google Lab, the first is if you are in a Google product, you will find it under the more label, when you click on even more. The direct url for Google labs is www.googlelabs.com.

One of the lab products that I have been using lately is called Google Squared, this is a great tool if you want to organize a category. For example I love to try different cheeses, from around the world. Right now I am trying various blue cheeses, too keep track of what I have and have not tried I used Google Squared to create this chart. Obviously this is just an example, you can create a chart about any category. This one of dozen of lab products you can try from the Google Lab. With the advent of the Google android platform there are some lab products that are specific to that platform. Also there are a few lab products that are OS specific, so before you try to use a lab product make sure its available for the browser and os you use.

The one complaint I have about Google labs is that sometimes the products stay in the lab so long, you forget that they can be pulled at anytime. The product become a part of people’s work flow and when they do get pulled, it can cause quite an uproar. It is important to remember that a lab product can be pulled at anytime, never make a lab product a critical part of your work flow. If it is part of your work flow, have something to replace it or be able to do the work flow without it. Do you use Google Labs, if so what your favorite product?


EduFire says it can help students learn and teachers make extra money



edufireA couple years ago, I talked with a friend who was a teacher. We put together an idea for a website to help teach. It never made it off the planning stages, but I knew something would eventually come along.

It’s hailed as the “eBay for teachers”.  EduFire is a site that has been around for a year and has over five thousand teachers creating hundreds of classes with over 30 thousand students. For $30 a month, you get a Superpass to all courses.

Teachers get a cut of all students that take their lessons. EduFire gets 85% commission. It’s not unlike a musician renting a practice room for lessons or a personal trainer for a Pilate session. A good teacher that gets hundreds of students per course could easily make some good extra cash.

But is it a quality education system?

With five thousand teachers and growing, you would have to keep up with the content being published. There seems to be no accreditation needed to teach or tutor. Sign up for an account and go.

There is a “Tutor score” to weed out the bad ones. 1-4 = minus 1 point, 5-6 = 0 points and 7-10 – 1 point.

Still, it might be a great place for your kid to get the extra help needed to pass the ACT, or improve an individual academic. It even looks like a place to help those kids who have English as a second language. The flash card section is also pretty interesting.

Bottom line – if your child is partaking in the course, keep an eye on it. Make sure they are not giving misinformation. If you are a teacher, it could be some good extra money, but make sure it’s not going to cause any problems with your regular job.

As for my friend, I am going to point her in this direction. It looks like everything we discussed a couple years ago. I think this will be right up her alley.


My first Librivox audiobook chapter recording



Electronic readers have been a hotbed as of late. Audio books are other ways to get the content on the go. Last week Google posted a bunch of open domain books, but did you know that there is also a service that lets you download open domain audio books?

audiobooks
Audiobooks iPhone Application

A couple weeks ago I found out about Librivox.org – a place to go to get audio books in the open domain. For the last few years, volunteers have been reading chapters to these books. I was so impressed with the service, I decided to contribute to the service.

I went to the site, signed up for a chapter, read and submitted it. I chose a book on musical notation by Karl Gehrkins. The chapter was short, but challenging enough – I had to remember how to pronounce those latin words you see all the time in music. After all, Molto Dolce is not just a coffee.

If you have an iPhone, check out the application “Audiobooks”. You will find that there is a book for whatever you want to read. I just got done listening to “How to write and speak correctly”. Hopefully it shows in this article, but I think I will be going back over that book for items I may have missed.


Defining “Broadband” and “Underserved”



$7.2 billion in stimulus money has been earmarked by Congress for spending on broadband service and underserved areas. Thus is born a conundrum that is becoming virtually unsolvable.

What exactly does “broadband” mean? According to ATT, it’s anything not dialup. To others, like the Communications Workers of America, it is anything over 3 mb. And since our median “broadband” speed in this country is about 2.3 mb, while Japan boasts an median of 63 mb and Canada about 7.6, what are we truly talking about when we talk about broadband?

And what is meant by “underserved” areas? Is it rural areas with no access to broadband? Or is it broader than that, applying to any area that can’t get 3 mb or more, which includes both urban and suburban areas?

This is what the FCC is trying to figure out, and is open to comments through April 13th. The acting chairman of the FCC, Michael Copps, believes his agency is up to the challenge of defining these terms for the purposes of deploying the stimulus funding. But he notes that President Obama’s long-term goal is to get broadband deployed deep into the country, which could place rural deployment of broadband at the top of the list.

I’m all for that, since I’ve been craving a move to the country for some time. But I also want to see fatter pipes, to the tune of at least 10 mb, if not more. I realize I’m very blessed at this moment to have a realistic 8 mps down and 3 mb up on a regular basis, but I’m living in an area where the majority of people are using dialup, and if I were to move even one more mile further away from the main metro area, I would lose any type of broadband altogether. I’m also one of those that believes true broadband (I subscribe to the better-than-3mb club) should be a basic utility, just like gas, electric, and phone service. To me, it is no different.

You can submit your own comments to the FCC, through April 13th, on this important determination. Visit www.fcc.gov for more information, or take this link to go directly to the comment instructions (PDF file).


Personal Cellular Sites Possible Soon!



Last night I outlined my issue with changing desk and loosing the ability to use my Cellular service and EV-DO card because of no signal, and now comes word that Mobile Operators are thinking about allowing there customers help solve these very issue for them.

Not  many people know it, but you can buy equipment today off the shelf that will boost the mobile signal in your workplace. They start at about a $1000.00 for basic amplifiers and can get very expensive for solutions designed for moderate to big buildings.

I know that folks in my office bitch about this issue every day, and if the carriers would come in and boost the signal we would all be happy. Most people put up with no signal and few are willing to go to the extreme of buying an amplifier like I did. I was not happy to have to spend $250.00 to make my EV-DO work but it was a priority for me.

I actually went and purchased a long distance phone card for the first time in 10 years because making personal Long Distance would not make my boss happy.

GigaOm has some details on how mobile operators are thinking about dealing with these issues by apparently allowing customers to deploy mini cellular sites called femto cellular.

My mom lives in Michigan the service out their really sucks and this idea would go well their. I had put out a offer that if Sprint would like to put a tower up on our property we had plenty of acreage to support it, and I would give them a long lease and rent for free in exchange for free service. I realize towers are multi-million installations but you can’t blame a guy for trying to hook his mom up.

I am going to spin that a little bit in that I will extend the offer in a new way if a mobile company buys me one of these femto cellular units I will be happy to install and plug the thing in at work so that our mobile phones will work.

Do you have the same problem with no signal in the office? I am sure there are millions of us with these issues. [GigaOM]