Links

Skype mobile – requires Wifi or 3G connection
http://www.skype.com/download/skype/mobile/

Twango has used nice ajax (button focus on select)

TaraHunt Pinko Marketing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VxmSEJQK7c

Mobile Cams
http://www.shortcourses.com/bookstore/cameraphone/cameraphone.htm

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Product Scenario

What is the most important task on the site ?

Subscriptions page
My Page
Answering Machine – How to use the preview mode and the full screen mode
My Friends

What kind of actions can the subject perform with only screens?

Photo Organizer
Registering process

Home page – we want the user to stay on the page till the time they either go to some other people’s pages or clicks on one of the “register” links. Using ajax to switch between the “take a tour” images will be good Address Book Integration process
———————–

New features
Suggest a title
Ratings
Subscriptions
Blog scraps

For a new person, seeing all the populated fields would be confusing. Better to start with showing her someone else’s blog / posts.

Situation/ Scenario

What a bash ! You have just come home from your best friend’s bday party. You clicked lots of photos from your mobile phone and now want to share it with common buddies. One of the friends at the party was talking about 1ClickBlog.com and how its easy to upload photos from a mobile. You dont have an account at this site.

Your friend mails you his blog link thru email. You go and check his blog and get interested. You want to open an account. How will you go about performing this task ? You have stumbled upon the site via a friend. You want to know more about how the site works. How would you do it ?

Cant download the client without registering ?  Well u can but for uploading you need an ID to connect the client to the server.

MESSAGING
INSTANT MESSAGING
IMpressive

whenever someone is on your page. they can chat with you through the meebo widget If we talk about integrated messaging, why do we have tabbed

We can have a feedback button near the bring yahoo address book button saying “respect my privacy” or “leave me alone”

—————–
Spokn ID : 1010853
PIN : 1010853

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Aug17

http://www.mobifilms.net/
http://www.blackboxtv.cn/

First camera phone in 2000
First video camera phone in 2003
(Presentation of the blueflavor.com)
the data prices are going to be low for mobile in the coming years so everyone would be jumping in to make apps for mobiles.

What aids UGC ?
> Experts / editors
reviews
blog posts
critically acclaimed posts

Social News
http://gabbr.com/
digg.com

Keywords of a picture can be used to make a short note about the pic, which in turn can be used as a voiceover for a presentation

If majority of people are immatures / curious onlookers / newbies, then how will the site grow ?

What shows well on a mobile?
News, text only, search, chat,

Web 2.0 : Industry Life Cycle
http://smallpanda.wordpress.com/2006/08/13/web-20-industry-life-cycle/

http://telephonyonline.com/mag/telecom_improving_mobile_video/

NMS Communications has built a 3G-324M circuit-switched video solution to provide a real-time two-way communications medium.
The Vision Video VoiceXML solution is designed to accelerate the development and deployment of revenue-generating voice and video applications, including video mail and voice/video messaging in 2.5G and 3G networks.
The VoiceXML server reduces the effort to build, modify and maintain emerging interactive video applications such as on-demand video media distribution, video sharing or video messaging. The server also allows developers to get applications such as speech-enabled interactive voice response, voice and video messaging and conferencing to market quickly. Hughes said that an integrated approach is essential in the mobile video arena.

like cds were expensive when they first came, like mobile phones were expensive when they first arrived, similarly flash player will be freely available and apps made and downloaded freely OTT

Mobile Virtual Network Operators -  A Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) is a mobile operator that does not own its own spectrum and usually does not have its own network infrastructure. Instead, MVNO’s have business arrangements with traditional mobile operators to buy minutes of use (MOU) for sale to their own customers.

Microsoft now allowing “user generated games” on xbox 360

- Start with the user experience
- Tune the hardware to the software
- Have unparralleled industrial design
- Market a tech product as a fashion statement
- Look at the complete system and building the ecosystems around it (as Apple did with desktop publishing and the iPod)
- Clarify and simplify complex business models
- Attract outstanding people

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Of Startups & Upstarts..

A good service can easily be lost in the cloud of startups. But really good ones stands through the test of time. The traffic on those sites grow slowly but surely. Some get acquired by Big companies and the rest don’t sell. If a site is really user-friendly, then it Will have a large user base- now or later.

Try telling that to a business/ product manager.. didn’t work for me.

Making money from something popular (MS?) is easier than making something popular (Google?). Everyone wants their product to be unique and popular and lucrative. Personally I think it needs a lot of user feedback and care for the product to grow.

But who has time for these?

Lessons from Kiko Demise
Key points-
* Stay focused
* Release early, but not too early
* Too many features killed the cat
* You must have a plan for escaping the Technosphere
http://height1percent.com/articles/category/kiko

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Testing Times

A lot of great startups did not do user testing while making product. They give more thought to having the basic focus right- the one thing that the product does- it should do that well. BUT after they launched it, they started taking user feedback and organized informal testing sessions. Here are a few case studies for the same.

Meebo
Blog of meebo (relevant to “posting it to a forum” reply by Tara)

excerpt
“Seeing something in person is always different from hearing about it. When users write in with feedback, it’s really useful, but sometimes we wish we could be there in person to see a bug or witness the smaller inconveniences that people tend to gloss over.

So last Thursday, we hosted our first Usability study and invited nine volunteers to use meebo while we took notes and gazed anxiously over their shoulders.We had a great mix of volunteers: a 14-year old, an avid MSN user from Holland, and even a husband and wife duo. We asked them to perform tasks like removing buddies, joining a group chat, adjusting sound preferences, and just demonstrating their typical meebo routine. We’re still compiling notes (pages and pages of them!) and consolidating findings but there were a few things that immediately stood out.”
http://blog.meebo.com/?p=163

del.icio.us
http://www.creativegood.com/casestudies/delicious.html

Google
“Gmail was used internally for nearly 2years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.”

They use the 20% / 5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the ‘Advanced Preferences’.

http://alan.blog-city.com/an_evening_with_googles_marissa_mayer.htm

Amazon(2004)
http://ai.stanford.edu/~ronnyk/

So, for me this means that there are multiple ways of improving a product while taking user’s feedback. Expensive user testing is not required. Thats what I am doing for this product. 5 users for each profile are  great for initial feeback.. lets see how that goes.

Filed under: Copy+Paste

2.0 Zillion Links

www.current.tv (Social media and UGC)
www.smithmag.us (Storytelling)
www.sensesofcinema.com (serious and eclectic discussion of cinema)
www.heroesmini.com (Ajax game by Ubisoft)

removing obstacles and barriers to entry that preclude participation
implicit creation
“big agency” social media

Great Article on UGC
http://onotech.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_onotech_archive.html#113020735146277189

Tagging Game to Label Images
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143

Failure is not just acceptable, it should be encouraged

create | act | grow | party-cipate | consensus | contribute

“Instant messaging is one of the three most popular Internet activities in the United States — after email and search — and is a key driver of user engagement. “
http://news.userplane.com/

UGC for a Specialist Community
http://www.drawn.ca/

An unconference is a great example of a real-world UGC for specific communities.

Make your own movies with the materials given by the site
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/offthemap/
http://wip.warnerbros.com/scienceofsleep/

Why cant we have annotations on a video ?

Cell phone journalists provide raw footage of Israeli Lebanon conflict

pickle.com (update- they’ve now merged with a big tech firm as a provider of a photo-sharing platform- so the site does not exist now)
minimum or no ajax used
javascript rollovers for help
unique site building approach

pickle doesnt encourage you to see other “picklers” (for now – dont know about later)

“We definitely plan to incrementally add more community capabilities – so they willbe coming soon. First, we wanted to make sure we built a *great* user experiencefor managing and sharing your personal media. We hope we are getting there.

Thank you for your feedback, and please let us know if you have any other thoughts. Enjoy!

All best,
Julia Goldstein
Pickle Support Team Member
“”

umundo.com - by Hexlet LLC, a web 2.0 technology company based in Fremont California, and founded by experts of both web and mobile technologies. Umundo aims at providing consumers a unique service, subscription-free with their cell phones: send instantly video clip direct from the phone to popular sites such as MySpace, my Yahoo, Google, iTunes for easy viewing and sharing by family members and friends of the sender.

What it does:: The application lets you send video you capture on your mobile phone to video@umundo.com and then, simply by entering your phone number on the site you can view the video online or cooler, grab the code that will allow you to embed your video in other pages, like your MySpace profile.

Notables::
No account creation needed

Similar to:: Abazab.com, which is a more thorough implementation of the concept. under closed group beta

1. Capture clip or picture with your cell phone
2. Send it to video@umundo.com via MMS or email 3. Publish on My Yahoo!, iTunes, Google, MySpace to share on the web with family and friends

If one uploads through an email, a support mail arrives with the url to ur personalumundo page.
Confusion:: If the links to the clips show only on my personalized page (which I see only if I log in), then how do I share it with everyone ?

photojojo.com – Amit Gupta and Kara Canal
example: http://www.photojojo.com/content/websites/photo-sudoku/

tabblo.com

www.mobileinnovation.co.uk
Mobile Innovation is a leading user interface designer, product integrator and software developer for smartphones and communicators.

www.ourstory.com
A different look to the same concept of photo sharing

Filed under: Copy+Paste

UGC

User generated Content
Graffiti, collage (borrowed media) How Original

Reviews used by companies to promote product (authenticity)
speeches
tributes

Present
Viral Videos (users promote themselves)
current tv (mixed media, incentive to the user)
user created ads

http://www.yelp.com/about
…a fun and engaging place for passionate and opinionated influencers to share the experiences they’ve had with local businesses and services.

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Stickiness of Content

WebDesk- Your Desktop on the Web

GoogleCheckout
Benjamin Ling, Product Lead, and Louis Perrochon, Engineering Director

We’ve heard time and again from users: “I find great stores through Google search, but every time I try to buy from an online store, I have to re-enter the same billing, shipping, and credit card information. There are too many steps. Why can’t it be as fast as a Google search?” This motivated us to improve the online purchase process.

Opponents worry that Google may now be able to access too much information and envision a value-based keyword pricing architecture tied to purchase data.

What Negroponte says in “Being Digital” generation which has a sweet tooth for bluetooth. If two friends are in the vicinity, they’ll know about each other. Concept of time, space and form take on a new meaning. Connected and Not Connected are the two new states of people.

recent – showing recent activity means
popular – which everyone talks about, knows about

Stickiness of Content (what you like stays, and what you dont, fades away)
Hostel room / rented appt / college notice boards
nature of stay for is not permanent/ is temporary

stapling the pics on the board for permanent things
clipping those which are temporary

office cubicles (example- google)
nature of stay for some objects is permanent and some others is temporary
pictures of loved ones / kid art

friends’ avatars as dolls and stacked on the board / masks

what about old posts – thrown away / stored

Interesting Things to Post on Your Mood Board (like a a multi page scrapbook, scrapboard)
> mobile videos (greetings, comments), mobile pics, mobile audio
> subscribed photos, blogs (dilbert), kites
> widgets
> bumper stickers
> background of the board could be a theme (picasso, newspaper, single color)
> magazine covers (right click and send to your board)
> god photos
> pics from fwds
> maps
> top 10 lists

Decorate someone else’s board (add sticker, note)
Latest Personal Possessions (gadgets, dolls, decorative piece, bonsai, books) pics
Documentation (notes, reminders, to do, birthdays, messages)
name plate

A “Spotlight” to direct the visitors to a particular place.

OFFICE CUBICLE PICS from Flickr Groups
Inspiration Boards
Annotated Workspaces
Whats in your [office/cubicle]?
Desks (preferably messy)

Filed under: Copy+Paste

Identity of Web2.0

Identity for web2.0 upstarts/startups.. watever
the guys dont spend much time on thinking about their logos.. check this out

http://www.fontshop.com/fontfeed/archives/web-20-logos.cfm
and this
http://flickr.com/photos/stabilo-boss/101793494/

Even I came up with a color chart for web 2.0

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