Nokia N81 8GB Review
July 5, 2008
Filed Under Nokia | 1 Comment
A few weeks ago I was sent a Nokia N81 8GB mobile phone. This post will contrast it with Nokia N73 it replaced.
Image by tnkgrl via FlickrPositives of the Nokia N81 8GB:
- The first thing you notice is new radically different navigation on N-series phones. The green and red call and hang up buttons are on the edges of larger buttons - it takes a few phone calls to get used to the new placement!
- I love the one click swipe to lock or unlock on the top of the phone!
- Now 1 click to writing a text message
- Battery life is really long, especially considering the extremely well lit back keys
- WIFI connection works well, I’ve been able to surf and test mobile web sites much more clearly.
Areas to improve on the next version:
- The Nokia N81 8GB is black background with white text - this can be hard to read in bright sunlight situations.
This phone should definitely serve me quite well until US version of 3G comes out.
I’d also like to give Andy Abramson special props for getting me in touch with someone at Tmobile regarding a coverage problem I’ve been having. Much appreciated.
The Future Yahoo! CEO Nominee Discussion…
June 17, 2008
Filed Under Customer Experience, Yahoo! (YHOO) | 1 Comment
OK, Kara Swisher started this discussion, but I question her fundamental assertion that Jerry Yang is the person calling the shots. The memo regarding Jeff Weiner’s departure came from Sue as does most of the primary communication messaging. Many think Sue is the one that is in charge for this reason.
I’d acknowledge the relevancy of Sara’s nomination of Dan Rosenweig but will dismiss Marc Cuban as he’s more focused on acquiring the Chicago Cubs at present.
I’d like to nominate my own slate of nominees all would bring dramatic culture change and growth rather than an expense cutting mantra and I’d enjoy being a part of their team if asked:
Dick Costolo - Yahoo! arguably has the world’s largest mountain of content. Dick is one of the world’s thought leaders on distributing and monetizing content. He is also well qualified to build a culture of customer responsiveness. He also might have played a lead role in the recent Yahoo!/Google monetization deal.
Rich Skrenta - His knowledge of search is highly regarded. His new startup could also be lifted out to build a new company to replace many parts of the old one.
Brad Garlinghouse - Many would argue he understands and communicated the challenges to execution that Yahoo! faces better than anyone and is willing to make his case about it as he did in the peanut butter memo.
Jim Lanzone - If given the chance, it would be fascinating to see him have the resources to execute some of the lofty things he tried at Ask on a shoestring budget.
Those come to mind first, am I missing anyone? I’m certain I’ve missed some people out west that should be considered.
I’ll Tag:
Michael Arrington (via Crunchnotes)
Carl Icahn (please give me a shout if you read this)
UPDATE: Michael correctly points out that he’s already written this post…my bad…
ebaydevcon08 Chicago: Skype Developer Roadmap
June 16, 2008
Filed Under Mobile / Cell / LBS / SMS | Leave a Comment
The following is my live and raw blogging of Peeter Motskula’s from Skype’s session:
Skype: Enabling Conversations
If you put all of the time spent talking on Skype put end to end you would end up going back to the start of human species.
Skype is a thriving ecosystem 190+ hardware devices, 10,000 developers, partnership with world class companies.
Skype Developer Program (SDP) Vision:
More delighted users doing more with Skype
A vibrant ecosystem of external innovators
Supporting the long tail or outside innovation on the Skype platform
Growing selection of SDKs
Clear route to market
Where We Are Today:
Public Client API
Skype Extras Framework
Support Resources
Software Certification
Next Step: Software Certification Update
Focusing on a few really important issues
Much easier to understand and follow
Shorter test rounds
Coming Up: Next Version of Skype for Windows
Redesigned user interface
User and partner feedback is important
Extended beta program
API overhaul will follow
Later On: API & Extras Program
- Multi-Layer API
Core Functionality (cross-platform)
UI integration (platform-specific)
- Distribution and Management:
Extras Gallery
Extras Manager
Blacklist and Whitelist
- Backward and forward compatibility
ebaydevcon08 - eBay Future Product Roadmap Session
June 16, 2008
Filed Under Customer Experience | Leave a Comment
The following is my live and raw blogging of Adam Trachtenberg’s session:
New Ebay API Calls released today
- most watched items
- deals
- related category items
- top-selling products
This uses eBay’s New Services Framework! This is an API upgrade…
Cross Merchandising
- sell products using the brand
- promote contextually relevant market
Merchandising in Action at Ebay.com - Buyer behavior, interests are now creating personalization based on past purchase behavior
Visit developer.ebay.com for access to tools…
SDK upgrades and SDK/JDK for Java…
Many Large Seller Improvements
- Batch upgrades
- Easier variant listing
- Feedback automation
- ASQ: Redirection to CS email
- Invoices: Invoices to A/P email
Making eBay Better
- Create a first-class buyer experience
- Create a trusted marketplace
Improving Buyer Experience:
- Number of recent policy changes improve buyer experience
- Mandating “critical item information”
- Previously optional items, will be mandatory
Shipping
- All items must specify at least one domestic shipping service
- Suggest passing, weight info to auction, suggest passing tracking info back for my eBay…
Return Policy Needs to be Transparent
Paymentsb - Paypal required in most countries…Paypal only in limited markets
Anonymous Member Email Address:
- Anonymous until sale is complete
- Protect buyers from fraud during eBay purchase
New Links Policy:
- Generally speaking, no link off eBay, whether or not an item is being for sale on that site
- Not a comprehensive list, more specifics to come…
Verification of new sellers is occurring
Trusted Selling With Identity Confirmation
Twitter Question
June 1, 2008
Filed Under Customer Experience, Social Media | Leave a Comment
A question to add to all of these posts asking Twitter questions:
Will the AIM interface ever be fixed? I found posting from IM to be the easiest and fastest method, it’s been broken (or blocked by AIM?) for months dating back to 2007.
What is the status of the Twitter AIM interface? Anybody?
TECH cocktail CONFERENCE Chicago - Creating Change For The Future
May 31, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Branding/Buzz/Viral, Change Management, Chicago, Customer Experience, Entrepreneurship, Interactive Ads, Social Media, Venture Capital | 3 Comments
Wow! That was tiring, I stepped on the L at 7:30AM and didn’t get home until 1:30AM the next morning! 18 hours of pure madness! Most people noticed the great speeches by Gary Vee from Wine Library TV and Dick Costolo (aka ask the wizard) and others. But what I really appreciated was the other things that the day brought to me. When Frank and Eric started TECH cocktail, one of the goals was to enable the interaction of people and removing barriers between entrepreneurs, funding sources and removing the boundaries between Chicago and the rest of the world.
When I sit at the first TECH cocktail CONFERENCE Chicago watching great speeches and meeting people from startups from both the east and west coasts while talking, playfully joking about Internet concepts and trading ideas with a local Chicago angel investor in the back of the room for hours on end - it’s at that moment one can clearly perceive a vision is starting to become reality…
For a first conference, it was very well run. There were those little things with a venue that didn’t go quite right with the elevators and not having enough power outlets (but you could say that about any conference) but those were out of their direct control. You could see that Eric and Frank went out of their way to challenge the audience about topics that too often go ignored at startups, like how to set up a corporate entity properly, partnerships and most of these challenges and experiments went well.
So what’s next? I’d like to challenge each and every person in TECH cocktail community to take things to the next level by taking the following actions:
1. Follow Up - People need to work to get to know each other better and learn to leverage each person’s special gifts and talents and realize that 1 + 1 > 2 when we behave in this manner. For me, I know that creating new business partners while listening to help iterate the product, data model or service is my area of strength.
2. Change TECH cocktail from an event to an everyday process on your own - a three month cycle time is not sufficient to build relationships to the next level - it’s everyone’s responsibility to make an hour here and there to sit down with someone, learn about what they are doing, give them a fresh perspective and potential assistance. Don’t wait for the next TECH cocktail event. If this means you need to organize your contact info, make that important time investment.
3. Listen to what Dick Costolo had to say about Internet company NDAs and then change your behavior accordingly (where is the video of that speech anyway?) - Stop sending people NDAs that serve no purpose other than to destroy your access to people who are the most qualified to help you. Ideas are a dime a dozen, assembling the right people with the current knowledge and future potential to create that reality is what matters.
4. Go beyond lurking, participate!!! During the conference, I had at least 10 people talk to me about a blog post of mine in detail, yet they’ve never left a comment on my blog. That’s sad. Leaving a comment leaves you a hyperlink back to your business or blog and allows distribution of one’s business network organically removing them as the bottleneck, please use this viral tool.
5. Learn to hire people for their current knowledge, network, blogs and future potential - not legacy job titles and brands - this takes work, research and being involved in the community, but it is how you’ll find the breakthrough thought leaders and future superstars.
6. Become an ambassador to expanding the understanding of the tools we all use and expand our base of understanding to new people outside our core - If you have a client or operate a service do they understand what Internet advertising, blogs, rss, social media, twitter, etc do? If they do is their organizational culture and structure set up to handle it to serve a customer’s needs? Many people know there is a problem but do not know where to start to fix it - I want to help those people as it will ease the adoption and enhance demand for disruptive new Internet services. I’m planning a series of future posts on this important, yet highly untouched topic. If you have examples of success stories or learnings in this area, I’d love to hear from you.
What else would you add to this list? I look forward to your contributions.
TC08 Chicago - Ask The Wizard Live - Dick Costolo Talks Entrepreneurship
May 29, 2008
Filed Under Chicago, Customer Experience, Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital | 1 Comment
Dick Costolo gave a really raw, heartfelt talk about Feedburner, venture capital fund raising and venture capital. I won’t dwell on it here, but even though I’ve never worked directly on anything with Dick, we’ve had an amazing exchange of ideas and conversation over the years. Someday I hope I can take that relationship to an even higher level - mostly for the personal growth that I know it would cause rather than the monetization events it would likely bring. He gets it. Dick never stops learning and interacting every day. That restlessness is critical to his perpetual personal growth. Sorry, I think I did dwell on it a bit….anyway, here are my raw notes or his passionate speech that bordered on a rant at times…in the most positive way:
4 startups including Feedburner
Feedburner all founders had same equity percentage – very important to teamwork dynamic and success
Entrepreneurs worry too much about valuation
Market Opportunity – sizing, does the market need it, team, product, market
Location – No Black Swans
Funding
Cash – Don’t kid yourself
CCs, your misunderstood friends – finding the right one
Options/Equity - options, pool, common stock, dilution
Board Meetings – Should be strategic discussions, not operations, board package, timing and who should attend…
Hiring – Best Available Athlete, Roles and Flat Organizations, Hierarchy begets bureaucracy, replace with tools (eg SFA)…Don’t hire for position…hire people that can do almost anything…a jack of all trades…this reminds me of a lot of what BlackRock was like…I sat at 23 desks in 4 years, I don’t know how many projects I worked on during my time there, I understood every process in the company.
No offices. Open culture and communication are critical…
Experience or Enthusiasm?
Performance – performance reviews and subjectivity
KPIs
Growing the team
- Sales and Marketing – don’t hire until you are ready to sell
- Interview process - long
Product Development and Business Strategy
Serendipity and Adjustment – visit to the eye doctor
Launch Late to Launch Often – data models and programs architected for extensibility can beat point solutions every time (I agree this is critical)
Focus and Speed of Execution are a competitive advantage
- Internationalization
- Early biz dev can hurt you, so can any biz dev
Competitive advantage
- Be first to market, not most sophisticated, not the best product, be itirative and fast
Let people you don’t know help you win (open/api) and provide your products/service with the best opportunity to evolve in the market
Startups who ask people to sign NDAs are stupid! Gave a great (and way too fast!) discussion on this…I wish he’d write a detailed blog post of his rant. ?
Quantum barriers to entry and market share - Get market share, market share is the only thing you should focus on.
Revenue plan: Don’t kid yourself. Revenue ALWAYS ramps slower than you think it will.
Don’t do unnecessary things because you think you’re supposed to
Try to let the business model come to you
- Easy to say, not easy to do
- It’s easier to lower the price than to raise the price?
- Look for always on opportunities
Don’t worry about an exit strategy, worry about everything else
Be a big small company
- Public face of the company
- Have a specific voice, have a culture
Be competitive on your merits
TC08 Chicago - Designing With Users In Mind
May 29, 2008
Filed Under Chicago, Customer Experience, Entrepreneurship | 1 Comment
The following is a brief summary of the session that Former Feedburner folks Matt Shobe and John Zeratsky (I need to spend some time with that guy sometime) put on at TECH cocktail Conference 08.
Without further delay, here’s their tips on designing with users in mind!
Be Yourself – informal, fun
Be Fast – the perceived time when people see speed, they perceive the experience and organization as reliable. Image sprites can help this. Steve Souders is a good source on this topic.
Be Willing to Give Up Control – Give yourself permission to outsource certain tasks.
Be Engaged – have a blog, more importantly, be engaged in other blogs. It’s important to get the early adopters and beta testers to help you. It allows you to iterate.
Be Polite – Try to be considerate…from the users perspective.
Be Surprising – Do things outside the norm. Hackathon. Had new feature coding retreat days. Engage random users.
TC08 Chicago - Looking at Technology For Your Business In New Ways
May 29, 2008
Filed Under Chicago, Customer Experience, Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment
TECH cocktail CONFERENCE 08 in Chicago got started with Mike Domek, after which the guys from Threadless gave a simple and fun session with some practical insight…
Problems
Scaling…printers, vendors, etc
Inventory is hard….
The Internet is Serious Business
Dealing with problems that we are not prepared to deal with… (can be an advantage too)
Advantages
Our Users - Do they care? Do they help?
Technology Agnosticism
Awesome Staff – “Innovation comes from the bottom up” - Golden advice on how to build a culture…
Harper then ended with an interesting comment about Bin Laden….implied that he saw some false flag elements…
Why You Should Make Your Photos Public Use - Example 1
May 29, 2008
Filed Under Social Media, Wordpress | Leave a Comment
Robert Scoble is always advocating this practice…
The effectiveness hits home when you see it happen to someone you know who is less famous (but no less remarkable)…
Congrats, Dan! See you soon.
Dell Deleting Message Board Entries About Dell Inspirons
May 27, 2008
Filed Under Customer Experience | 2 Comments
During my recent Dell communications, I performed a Google blog search on - Dell Inspiron 1505 hinges
Please focus on the second item:
At the time that entry was still in Google blog search, it reached to a dead link. Why is Dell censoring and deleting information about these Inspiron line issues? Do they have something to hide?
White Paper…Query Suggestions for Mobile Search: Understanding Usage Patterns
May 25, 2008
Filed Under Mobile / Cell / LBS / SMS, Mobile Search Marketing | Leave a Comment
Bill Slawski wrote up a nice review of the Google paper on mobile search…definitely good analysis to a nice research piece on the most perplexing bottleneck - mobile data input.
It’s my expectation that interest in innovation in the text input, voice input or even new forms of shortcuts will accelerate in the near future as it’s a critical area to create an optimal user experience while increasing frequency of usage and monetization potential.
Are you aware of companies doing interesting work in this arena?
Dell Hires New CFO Brian T. Gladden
May 19, 2008
Filed Under Customer Experience | Leave a Comment
Good luck to him, I’d like to think that this might change the current dynamics I’ve recently laid out, but based on his background, I won’t get my hopes up…but oh my this AP story certainly raises questions about why Dell is nickel and diming customers if they can allocate this signing bonus and stock allocation…imagine if they spent $2 million and this stock on fixing Dell Inspiron laptop hinges instead?
Dell will pay Gladden a $700,000 annual base salary and a minimum target bonus of the same amount next March, plus a $2 million signing bonus, 223,000 restricted shares of stock and options on 922,000 shares, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Happy 2nd Blog Birthday
May 16, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Change Management, Customer Experience | 5 Comments
I’ll keep this short. It’s not about me, it’s about *you*, my friends around the world who create a business network that empower me to reach people and accomplish things that I could never do all on my own. To all of you who practice the words below, I love you and thank you for your continued help and encouragement in my life adventures and for pushing me forward towards my goals of creating highly monetizable ventures:
“Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.”
- Peter Drucker
“An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.”
-