Okay, I just wanted to let you know a buddy new application that I'm using on the iPhone. It's called Dragon dictation. I think it's pretty cool.
This entire post that I am typing is actually done via voice only. If you go download the application now it's free in the app store. It's pretty amazing that the iPhone can actually do this sort of thing just like a computer. I'd suggest that Apple actually try to figure out how to integrate this into the rest of their applications. It's amazing that you can do this and then send to text you can send to e-mail or you can send to other applications. If you haven't got it yet you should be using us. That is the end of my post from dragon dictation. If you think you need this, go get it from the app store.What will the the answer be from content creators? This is the way I see it. Boxee is amazingly cool. It brings a social aspect to something we typically only share with others in the same room. Now, if you can share and interact with a "social network" around the tv shows you are watching, how interactive can it get? Can you start chatting with people live over the show? interact with others in the area or limit yourself to a personal group? So many people have the "survivor parties" (and I use that term loosly) how about doing it while 2000 miles away?
What do you think the answer from the networks will be, you know.. the ones who create content? Hulu has already shown it's true colors. While starting out with the concept of sharing and embedding, they have clearly started to block access where it isn't comfortable for them. The first place they did that? Oh yeah.. Boxee.
Here is the problem. Boxee is going to bring eyeballs. Advertisers want eyeballs. Hulu (unless they launch their own box) is only on computers. Families are not coming in droves to watch Hulu. It is a niche market. Boxee has the potential to hit mainstream with a good distribution channel and a wide variety of content. If I was a cable provider these days, I'd be figuring out how to address the Boxee market. Cutting content deals, bringing social to my own DVRs.. something.. anything .. Boxee could crush your revenues.
So.. will Boxee's success also be it's demise? Will people continue to block content as a potential threat to other revenue streams? Or will people wake up and cut the right content deals and realize that eyeballs bring advertisers. Advertisers within a social network can provide and receive more value than a Nielson box could EVER do. Heck, sign in to Boxee with Facebook connect..see what data you can derive.
I read a quote somewhere once.. (Thomas Baekdal?)..
"If you are using technology to protect old revenue streams, you are doing it wrong."
This is exactly the trap Hulu fell in to. Hopefully others wake up and see the potential.. it is coming, and Boxee is ahead of others in this game, Let's see what the next year brings. I bet massive content deals for video, great streaming audio deals and a large 1st year penetration of Boxee. (at least in my house)
This is going to be a fairly short little post, but after a couple discussions recently with some other people, it is still amazing to me how many managers don't know how to manage a team properly. The experiences I have been hearing about all resonated with me based on my own past.
First off, let me say that as professionals in our fields, we all recognize the times where it is crunch time.. go time.. the time to put your head down, focus on your work to completion.. no matter what it takes. Those are the make or break opportunities in our own fields, the ones that get us the big deals.. the ones that impress big clients.. the ones that meet a critical deadline. As a manager, you hope to have team members who recognize these times and do the right thing without you having to ask. That is what helps create a great team.. and one that truly will gel over time with these experiences. Now.. as a manager, don't confuse this with always expecting your team to work long hours, weekends and holidays.. on a regular basis. If your team is ALWAYS overworked, working long hours, weekends or constantly taking on random tasks…there is a systemic problem in your organization. You will succeed in the short term with some wins.. but fail in the long-term. You will fail to deliver long-term sustainable results. You will fail to retain quality employees. You will fail to recruit new good candidates as word spreads. You, as a manager.. will have failed. You failed yourself, your team and your company.
As a manager you also need to manage the tasks coming in to your team appropriately. Being the manager that never says no to upper management does not make you successful. If it is putting your teams ability to succeed at risk, you are failing. There are two areas I see this happen. The first is in sheer volume. (see first rant above) If you are taking on more work than your team can handle, and expecting them to "suck it up", you will fail. The second way this occurs is with managers who don't know what the capabilities of their team really are. Some managers take on ANY task and expect good people to just make it work.
If you truly give someone a task that is out of their skill set, hoping they will grow with the task, you may have just set them up to fail. If you can provide proper education, training or assistance, it could be for the better. If you don't enable their success, you just asked them to fail. The problem is, many managers will have good people who they just expect to succeed. Nobody can do EVERYTHING well. There are limits. Take a solid project manager and try to make them do customer account management across multiple large customers with big projects. While at surface level.. it is someone tracking and delivering goods on a timeline.. they are two different disciplines.
Lastly, if you are hiring a manager for a group from outside the company into an organization, have a transition plan for the newly hired manager. Please take the time to think about how this person will succeed or fail. What is your plan to ramp up this individual on your products? Do they come in as an individual contributor before taking on a management role? How do you expect this to impact the team? Was there someone on the team that may have felt they should have received a promotion and that management slot? If so, have you talked to the team to let them know why you went the path you did? Have you clearly laid out a career path for your employees that will help them meet their goals and not feel slighted by this new hire? How do you plan on educating the rest of the organization on the new hire's role in the organization. Educate the current team on the reasons you hired the new person.. what is their background, skill set, etc. By all means, if you can make them part of the interview loop.. do so.
Anyway.. just a quick little rant. I've had too many discussion with people lately who are bringing up similar stories. Lucky for me these are really not part of my current organization.. but clearly I have had these things happen to me in the past through direct contact or close ties and the great stories that inevitably follow.
Work should and can be fun, you just need to be set up to succeed. If your manager is not helping to enable your success, you should be concerned.
One final tip for managers: You will go MUCH farther and do MUCH better by setting your team up to succeed with flying colors time and time again… vs. the manager that is trying to make him/her self look good to upper management. Do the right thing for YOUR employees; Their success will drive long-term sustainable wins for your customers, your company and your employees. Your management team will surely recognize the solid team you have built and maintained. That is what will drive YOUR success.
OK. So Today Flickr rolled out their Face tagging option. They are really excited about it and trying to make the social waves to get something to talk about. I seem to be one of the few people who are not only not impressed, but think they got it all wrong.
First, tagging is up to me. If I want to tag someone in a photo, sure.. it MAY be a Flickr member, but most likely they are not. Another scenario which happens all to often, families have a Flickr account. Not one person, but an entire group . The way photo tagging is set up, I can not tag photos of these people without Flickr wanting to spam them to join Flickr. HEY.. they are already on Flickr, just a shared account! Now let me tag a name! Seriously!
I also have to question their lack of ability to license any facial recognition software to this point. It is 2009. I expect more. Maybe you are worried about scale..can you have that many users? Make sense, sure.. but make it an opt in option maybe. Hell, sell it as a premium service. Upsell me Flickr . Get more than the $24 a year from me by providing more value! I’d buy in for a good product. I am already a pro member. Let’s grow this service. Add in a backup service maybe? Allowing downloads, archives, etc. I’d pay. I already do! I pay $5 a month to ensure my photos are protected. I only pay you $24 a year to show a small selection.
OK.. I am ranting here.
I do have to say I think they thought well about the permissions issue. But at this point, it is like having a fantastic alarm and security system on a car that I am not driving? How will this help me? eh.. not sure. I have been waiting for a LONG time to be able to tag people in photos on Flickr. I had really had my fingers crossed for facial recognition. At this point, I will just ignore this feature. It is not helping me at all.
Flickr.. you disappointed me. You took WAY too long to add a sub-par service that really doesn’t meet the needs of your customer base at large. It does serve somewhat of a purpose. Maybe this is a .73 BETA version. Not sure. Not happy. Not using the new feature . SIGH
As an industry, we have debated about SmartPhones for quite some time. What really constitutes a SmartPhone. What makes it a dumb phone? If you go way back to basic devices and just started getting into Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Palm.. those made sense. They were head and shoulders above the majority of the basic class of devices. It was easier to define SmartPhone back around 2001/2002. RIM had released their second big version of the Blackberry, taking it beyond a pager style device.. and Windows Mobile was getting out of it’s first rev of the OS to release Windows Mobile 2002. Seems like forever ago.
If you look at what devices are out on the market today, compare them to the differences in the past. Things are starting to blend. Before you could say a device with a keyboard and PIM (Personal Information Manger) applications was smart. Then it started to move into the OS discussion, could you run additional applications on them? What about the device power? Did it have a Strongarm processor that could be used in more powerful office type applications and extend desktop capabilities beyond the desktop? It started to get muddy real quick.
If you look now at the devices in the market, MOST devices are considered SMART in their own right. They are far more capable as a whole than we’d ever thought possible back 10 years ago. Heck, even on Google trends the idea of SmartPhone is not that exciting. It has been trending downward since Christmas 2004. At that point, devices could support portrait and landscape modes, higher resolutions, they had keyboards and even WiFi.
While search volumes have consistently risen, the general interest compared to other searching activities is weakening. The public is immune to the marketing hype of the “SmartPhone”. It is not selling devices. It is not understood. It is not a relevant term.
If you look even at major media companies (I’ll make the leap that CNET is still regarded as knowledgeable here). If you look at what CNET calls SmartPhones, the list is varied beyond comprehension. There appears to be no standard they are applying at all.
The Blackberry Bold is a Smartphone in their list. Sure, I get that. Makes sense. The Garmin NuviPhone is in the list despite the fact that it lacks ANY real Email or Calendaring functionality. It is VERY smart with regards to GPS applications though. Maybe that made it smart. It also has a touch screen.. but no real keyboard. How about the Nokia 5130? Standard looking “dumb phone” style, but very good with music. It is more of a hybrid portable music device and phone secondary. It does not do well with email, no calendaring functionality to speak of, no keyboard, low-res screen and small screen compared to others. Hmm.. how does this make sense?
I am trying to work through in my head what I think the right terminology is. I know some co-workers and I have had this debate many times. Nobody has a clear answer, yet we all agree that SmartPhone is wrong. So.. I am just going to lay it out there while we think about it.
What is the new mobile device segmentation we care about?
Phone vs. Netbook?
Proprietary OS vs. Open Development Platforms? (i.e. LG vs. RIM, Apple and Android)
Device Capabilities such as Screen Size, touch screen, keyboard (physical or virtual)
Memory/Storage?
Extensibility?
App Stores Availability?
Browser Capabilities?
Cost?
How about the network? 3G vs. 4G? as Wi-Max and LTE come on board more mainstream, what does this do for us? Bring mobile computing into the realm of REAL possibility for rapid growth?
I will continue to ponder this.. but would love to hear input on what your thoughts are.
In my daily blog reading I noticed today the post on Mashable about MySpace traffic falling off a cliff. While I was not shocked, I was interested to see the details. Mashable sites Compete.com’s numbers around unique visitors going down around 5 Million uniques over the past month. (and nearly 20% of it’s traffic since June) While this is accurate, I am not sure Mashable spent the time to really paint how bleak the picture looks for MySpace in terms of trends.
As a Product Manager myself, I am well aware of how hard it can be to move the needle in the right direction on an up-swing. It can also be even more challenging when a competitor is pulling away your traffic, and not only pulling it away, but ripping it from your very claws.. no matter how hard you hold on. Sometimes your product just isn’t good enough. Just because you start out as something… say, a site focused on helping musicians, doesn’t mean you should latch on to that same trend on your way down. What gets you noticed is almost definitely NOT the thing that will get you across the chasm and into the hearts of the mainstream users. (Crossing the Chasm)
Check out the Google Trends chart over time for Facebook and MySpace. Long about the time Microsoft threw some money at Facebook (The A in the chart), they started climbing like a skyrocket.
There is no comparison, While facebook was gaining momentum initially, the trends of what people were searching for and caring about was clearly NOT going to be MySpace. If you compare this chart against traffic trends on the sites, you can see about the same time MySpace really started to trend downward on Google, Facebook started to take it over in terms of overall traffic.
Now check out the GLOBAL PAGEVIEW PERCENTAGE on Alexa for these two.. this shows an amazing tale for Facebook. They have over doubled the penetration of total internet pageview penetration in under a year. WOW.
MySpace never had the main stream appeal to fully take off in my view. What MySpace did was sit on their laurels and very lightly extend the cheesy templating functionality, allow more crap on pages and let people plug in embedded audio in the webpages. Started to remind me of the Hamster Dance crap (http://www.webhamster.com/) back in the day! As you can see, with this strategy they were never able to cross the 10% reach mark according to Alexa.
Overall Time on site for Facebook is starting to trend upwards. This is a leading indicator that possibly it is becoming more of an entrenched portion of people’s daily lives as we continue to use Facebook. MySpace on the other hand is losing more and more daily page views since the beginning of the year and less and less time on site for it’s users. No longer is it critical for as many users. Only the few entrenched users (likely with ties to music) are driving up the daily time. It’d be interesting to see how much an average user with BOTH accounts spends on each one daily.
I also think this particular stat is partially driven by the very nature of the sites. MySpace is focused on single sites per person and not the constant stream of information about your friends, family and coworkers. The nature of the Facebook news feed is a fantastic discovery mechanism and forcing function to drive my daily usage rates through the roof. (and amazing for their ad inventory as well)
Going back to the first set of data that Mashable used has some pretty scary stats if I were a MySpace Product Manager. Overall MySpace visits for the past month are down 15.51% and annually they are down 28.33%. If you take their revenues in 2008 of around $800 Million dollars, drop that by 28% for this year.. they have lost about $224 Million in Revenue assuming the same monitization rates. This does not account for the possibility they are getting less for ad rates due to any skittishness from advertisers. That amounts for about $896 Million lost in valuation based on that same 2008 number. (was $3.2B)
A side note of interest is that initially Facebook was considered more closed than MySpace. If you look at the API and development focus now for Facebook, nobody could argue that between them and Amazon, you have two of the most solid development communities for web 2.0/application services out there. I believe this is a key to Facebook’s success. No longer were they the bottleneck in innovation, they allowed their community to lead them past MySpace for compelling offerings and crushed the competition with authority.
While Mashable had some data that was interesting to me, digging in a little more at the numbers makes me want to short their stock.. well, if I could. :) Things are NOT going well for them, they are not getting better. MySpace will be hard pressed to reverse this trend in the coming months. You can bet that within 6-9 months, MySpace will be so low on the radar that existing profiles will be dormant, there will be MySpace themes dedicated to routing people to their “new” Facebook profile and MySpace will be suffering to keep ANY key developers on board. Heck, Execs, Sr. Leadership, Innovators… they will all jump ship. Only the weak and wary will stay on board until they feel the proverbial water surrounding their neck and slowly taking away that last breath of Social Media love-fest air.. then.. gone. Check back in mid to late 2011 to see what MySpace looked like on http://archive.org in it’s old state. When it was a company.
OK.. I have not really gone out of my way to recommend many pieces of software for the iPhone.. but I can gladly say that Navigon is one of those.
First off.. why GPS on my Phone? Especially when I have it built in to my vehicle.. my wife’s vehicle..and a stand alone GPS unit for my Motorhome?
While I love the GPS application in my truck, it makes things extra handy.. the Navigon software is just so much better than my Pioneer deck . Sorry.. it just is. I do use my truck Navigation when in my truck.. but so many times I have found myself in need of navigation and I am not in my vehicle. So many times I have been on a vacation or a business trip that GPS comes in handy. Normally (if I forget to bring mine).. GPS rental is $10 a day for a rental car. That quickly lets this thing pay for itself in a matter of a couple trips.
I do have to say the POI search flow on Navigon leaves a bit to be desired.. but it does work. As I read before.. someone suggested to spend some time with it. Other than that, routes seem great, arrival times are almost always dead on.. and the guidance is amazingly accurate for a phone. Check that.. just fantastic.. who cares if it is a phone. It just works.
I had the AT&T navigator prior to this.. and at $10 a month, it was really a good service. The problem I had was access when you don’t have signal. That was bothersome for me. I find Navigon and it’s 1.4GB download solves this. :)
Anyway.. I’d just say get this app. It is fantastic. worth the money when you are in a pinch. (but you will want to have it already to go since it won’t download OTA like the AT&T one will)
10
Sep
Sep
I have finally decided to shut down my family sites. Not because I don’t want to talk to family, or see what they have to say.. it has just been over the past year that Facebook has really taken hold for most of our active family participants. I guess having the site over the years has been both fun and challenging at times. You always want to provide the best service you can to your family.. but you also want to balance it with the right level of effort.
Coming from a development background, I was always trying to write the next best platform for my sites. Usually some sort of content management system back before CMS was cool ! I moved from a fairly static site in early 2000 to a variety of CMS solutions I wrote through the years.. and then in to some PHPBB forums.. those ran for some time, then eventually I moved into blogging. Wordpress became the basis for the sites for quite some time.
Anyway.. Thanks to Archive.org, we can all relive the horror that was me maintaing my family site. Now that it’s 2009.. Facebook is filling this hole for our families. Thanks Facebook!
So i have gone back and forth on jailbreaking the iPhone from the first version until now.. today is my first time jailbreaking the iPhone 3GS.
First, Why did I do it? AT&T and Apple are irritating the hell out of me with the network limitations on two things. Streaming video from programs like Qik (see above at the LIVE STREAM link) and this week was the Google Voice blockade, that pushed me over.
How did I do it? There were a couple of options out there. Purplera1n was the first one on the market, yet I was unsure of how safe this version was. I decided to wait for the iPhone Dev team to bring out Redsn0w. It worked like a champ. For those who have jailbroken before, this is an even better process. I didn’t have to restore! All of my apps, etc were intact! Nice work to the team!
Anyway..back to having fun with Jailbroken apps, streaming video and possible tethering! 
9
Jul
Jul
OK, so after some dinking around with the new iPhone, I am going to take a stab at advancing my photography skills by doing a series of iPhone only shots. My rules are I can only take and edit the pics on the iPhone, nothing else can touch the photo. I was insipred by a couple others doing this already.. (will dig up those links).. but it really is an interesting challenge. The iPhone 3GS camera sure makes it easier.
As I get the list gathered of all the various software I am finding useful, I will update this post. As it stands right now I have about 12 different programs I am trying to the tune of around $25 maybe. Not bad at all considering the quality of stuff I think is coming out of them. It’s a phone for god sakes!
For now, here is a sample slideshow of the photos.
about the author
I consider myself a mobile geek, gadget junky, coffee slave and all around fan boy.
Always looking for the next cool gadget, use my iPhone for hours a day for data. (I even hear it does voice calls). I am posting on here to force myself to look at my industry in various ways.. and to think about things. It is for me to learn from myself and others.
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