I came across an interesting article last night written by a blogger I have never read before. Her name is Kelly Livesay and she made a very interesting call to action. In her post she declares that she is sick of all the different social networking sites out there; facebook, myspace, twitter, social networks for dogs, cats, you name it and there’s a network. The reason I found this intriguing is because I woke up this morning to find Renee’s post documenting even more social networking sites. Kelly suggests that we should just ditch all of them and keep only a blog and a twitter account. The blog will contain all your links, videos, etc and each time you post something you notify all your friends on twitter. I am not sure where I stand on this one and I want to open up the dialog to see what everyone else thinks. I personally think there are way too many social networks and I am sick of signing up for new services. However, I do not know if I would ditch everything for simply a blog and a twitter account (hell most my friends don’t even know what twitter is). An even simpler alternative would be to ditch everything for just Facebook and use it as a hub for all my information and sharing (which is what I already do, until recently). Facebook is essentially twitter built on top of a blog (at its most basic level). So what does everyone else think? Is this social networking craze getting too niche or do they actually add value? What do you think?
I am Officially a Googler 
Infographic: The Seven Deadly Sins of Mobile Marketing This infographic was made to represent poor SMS marketing campaigns, but is relevant for mobile marketing in general
Contextually Relevant Mobile Ads See Impressive Clickthrough Rates According to EMarkete, contextually relevant ads are seeing significantly higher clickthrough rates in mobile.
Facebook Has Surpassed 300M Monthly Mobile Users. What Does This Mean for You? A research study that is about to be published by Enders Analysis points out that Facebook is now seeing more than 300M Monthly Active Users (MAU) on their mobile applications.
Great Advice from Marc Hedlund
Get Rich Slowly, which was recently named the most inspiring money blog by Money magazine posted an article a few days ago guest-authored by Wesabe CEO Marc Hedlund. Wesabe is a web based personal finance community that believes, “we all can help each other make better financial decisions and ultimately take control of our money to reach financial goals.” It’s a hot new startup tearing through the financial sector right and their CEO Marc has had solid advice for anyone starting up a business. I wont go into too much detail as I think everyone should read this one, but his main points are:
- Starting a business with friends can be fantastic
- Write someone and ask them for help every day
- People matter more than anything
- Don’t worry about the idea
- Take money from other people as an absolute last resort
- Know your customers
- Have confidence in yourself
- Treat people well
Feel free to discuss these in the comments section and read the article found below
Entrepreneurship Advice from Marc Hedlund, CEO of Wesabe ∞ Get Rich Slowly
The E-Book Revolution
There has been a lot of speculation recently regarding the future of e-books and whether they are going to be the next big thing. What we do know at this point is that Amazon has sold 240, 000 Kindles. Given these numbers, Techcrunch’s Erick Schonfield suggested that Citi analyst Mark Mahaney update his most recent projections for the future of the Kindle (and to some extent e-books in general). Mahaney’s new numbers suggest that Kindle sales estimates should be around 378,000 for this year, 934,000 next year, and 4.4 million in 2010. These are not numbers to scoff at. If Mahaney’s projections are correct the Kindle will be a $1 billion for Amazon by 2010.
The big question for me is that even though these numbers are high, can e-books really win over the mass-audience. Two recent articles, one from Naomi Alderman and another from Peter Conrad of the UK’s Guardian give light to the different sides of this debate. Naomi on one hand advocates the move toward e-books. She is fed up with the piles of books overwhelming her apartment and finds the Kindle easy to use and convenient. Peter on the other hand stuggles to accept that e-books are the future. He argues that reading ebooks actually left him feeling alienated from books he used to love growing up. These two perspectives highlight the seperate camps very well and it is hard to say whether either one represents the mass public at this point.
I personally do not think that we are going to see a sudden move to e-books in the next couple of years. The cost of an e-book reader is still a large up front investment when compared to the one off price of a paperback. What I will say is that in certain segments, where people have to buy large amounts of books that they must use on a regular basis, the student market for example, we will see a fairly substantial adoption of e-book technology. Students can offset the cost of the reader by only purchasing individual chapters of textbooks as they need them, thus reducng their overall spending on textbooks for years to come. This makes perfect sense and I see the student (as they often do) leading the proliferation . The only hurdle I see holding students back is the inability to easily highlight text. Yes, you are able to click and drag, but nothing will ever replace the relaxing sensation of passing a hightlighter over a line of text.
This is going to be a very interesting industry to watch over the next 5-10 years and if the new projections are correct, Amazon is very well positioned to ride the wave (as they usually are). See Mark Mahaney’s numbers below:
Power Kiting is the New Renewable Alternative
My Conundrum; 12m Ocean Rodeo Rise Venturi Power Kite vs. FE 650 Husaberg Enduro… I love them both but one just strikes such a nice chord in my environmentally conscience brain. From the previous post on Big Oil, I can sympathise firsthand the love/hate relationship of the oil industry; the feeling of 650cc’s in your control as you fly through mountain roads is like non-other on this planet, however there is “a big hairy ‘but’ lurking around the corner” quoting Hank Moody from Californication (great show), when I have to purchase 97 octane liquid gold in Turkey which just makes me sick, Think Gas Prices are High? Try $11 in Turkey. For this reason and many others I have taken up kiteboarding to quite literally free me from the oil industry altogether and get my adrenaline fix by renewable Mother Nature herself. But the passion is not just the adrenaline, it is the incredible power of kiting that puts me in awe especially when I read about ideas like SkySails and Generating Power With Kites that make me realize the vast potential of power kites (see video below). I guess time will tell if power kites will be the new renewable alternative, in the mean time might as well make Life one hell of a ride!
One Life, Live It
The E-Book Revolution
There has been a lot of speculation recently regarding the future of e-books and whether they are going to be the next big thing. What we do know at this point is that Amazon has sold 240, 000 Kindles. Given these numbers, Techcrunch’s Erick Schonfield suggested that Citi analyst Mark Mahaney update his most recent projections for the future of the Kindle (and to some extent e-books in general). Mahaney’s new numbers suggest that Kindle sales estimates should be around 378,000 for this year, 934,000 next year, and 4.4 million in 2010. These are not numbers to scoff at. If Mahaney’s projections are correct the Kindle will be a $1 billion for Amazon by 2010.
The big question for me is that even though these numbers are high, can e-books really win over the mass-audience. Two recent articles, one from Naomi Alderman and another from Peter Conrad of the UK’s Guardian give light to the different sides of this debate. Naomi on one hand advocates the move toward e-books. She is fed up with the piles of books overwhelming her apartment and finds the Kindle easy to use and convenient. Peter on the other hand stuggles to accept that e-books are the future. He argues that reading ebooks actually left him feeling alienated from books he used to love growing up. These two perspectives highlight the seperate camps very well and it is hard to say whether either one represents the mass public at this point.
I personally think we are going to have to wait longer than just 2 years to see a large move to e-books. The cost of an e-book reader is still a large up front investment when compared to the one off price of a paperback. What I will say is that in certain segments, where people have to buy large amounts of books that they must use on a regular basis, the student market for example, we will see a fairly substantial adoption of e-book technology. Students can offset the cost of the reader by only purchasing individual chapters of textbooks as they need them, thus reducng their overall spending on textbooks for years to come. This makes perfect sense and I see the student (as they often do) leading the e-book revolution. The only hurdle I see holding students back is the inability to easily highlight text. Yes, you are able to click and drag a virtual highlighter, but nothing will ever replace the relaxing sensation of passing a hightlighter over a line of text or scribbling notes with a ballpoint pen outside of the columns.
This is going to be a very interesting industry to watch over the next 5-10 years and if the new projections are correct Amazon is very well positioned to ride the wave, as they usually are. See Mark Mahaney’s numbers below:
Uncertainty and the Powerlessness of Oil Consumption
It goes without question that with pump prices as high as they have been this past year, the mass public generally loathes the oil companies. A recent Harris Interactive study on 20 industries showed that consumer share a serious distain for the oil tycoons. Our own Renee Warren was recently quoted on BNet News with her own take on why this hate runs so deep in consumers hearts. Read more at the link below.
Loved or Loathed?: Chevron, Sunoco and Big Oil | BNET1 | BNET
Why Should We Listen to our Community?
I am a big proponent of community based development. I remember a meeting I had a short while ago with FreshBooks, CEO, Mike McDerment, who really made it clear to me the power of community. His advice at the time was to offer your service for free from the start and nurture/build your community. Once you have a solid community of active members you can gather valuable feedback to find out exactly what your customers want and need. If you really know what your customers want/need you can create value in your property that users will want to pay for.
Mark Dowds also used a similar methodology to create the preliminary concept for his creation, Brainpark. He brought a number of community members as well as a sketch artits into creative meetings to form the early direction of his application. The application has grown since those early sketches, however the core functionality is based on community feedback.
I think this methodology is valuable and there are many services out there that help harness the power of user generated feedback (such as uservoice). However, a recent article posted by Hanford Lemoore suggests that we should not be too impulsive when acting on community feedback. Yes, feedback is important. However, there are always underlying reasons for a feature request and before simply (or not so simply in most cases), making that change, it is useful to understand why the user NEEDS the feature. He suggests that in most cases there is a root cause to the users problem that has an underlying solution rather than a simple bandaid fix. Read more about Hanford’s experiences below:
blog.hanfordlemoore » Blog Archive » Don’t do what your users say …
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Community is big these days. You’ll hear lots of designers tell you that it’s important to build a strong community and listen to them, because they are your core users. And I agree with that.
But in UI design it’s important to understand that what a user says and what a user is telling you can be two different things.
The Beauty of the iPhone
Some of my close friends may know that I recently purchased an iPhone. Although I have been having some major issues with call quality and microphone consistency, I did get to really see the beauty of it today.
I am sitting in the doctors office right now (don’t worry nothing serious). Usually I sit here bored, twiddling my fingers and reading old magazine articles that mean nothing to me. However, in the past 45 minutes of waiting I have caught up on all my email, made a number of calls, read all my unread news articles, found an article I want to write about tomorrow, checked the baseball scores from the weekend and am writing this post to you all now.
This truly is productivity at it’s finest. The iPhone is an exceptionally verstile machine and for that reason, I call it a thing of beauty.
