August 29, 2012 · 9:53 am

You Carry A Tamagotchi, Honestly.

Anyone remember the Tamagotchi?  They were a late 1990’s phenomenon – digital handheld pets.  The owner had to care for them on a daily – maybe even hourly – basis or they’d die.  Not a fun experience for either the owner (generally a child) or the parent.

I was reminded of the constant care and feeding required by those things this morning as I booted up my phone and found nearly a dozen app updates that needed to be installed.  That, of course, was after I updated a half-dozen yesterday.  Don’t get me wrong – some of the updates contained wonderful enhancements to the app and were very welcome but way too many were either bug or security fixes.  In fact, if you own a smartphone, notice how often you get an update followed within a day or two by another.

Having worked on a few mobile apps, I know how hard it can be to catch everything in QC.  We’re not going to have the Android vs. iOS chat now but even in a closed system like iOS there are multiple versions in multiple devices and the updates come fast and furious.  Using the mobile web and web apps is better although various browser/hardware/OS issues still make testing hard.  At least the user doesn’t have to do any updating though.

The real issue for me is that I’m not sure there’s enough thought or care given to the constant update issue.  Some apps will do a partial release – they think if a button was bigger it would get better results so they push an update to some of their users to test it.  Other apps decide to change the permissions (to get more of them and more data) on their installed base knowing that most people don’t look at that when they install the update.  Still others move features behind a pay wall.  Obviously security issues need to be fixed immediately, but a logo change can certainly wait until a big release, right?

Way back when in the early web days the dream was for a universal browser looking a web sites – no client side activity at all.  Now in mobile it’s gone back the other way – dedicated client-side apps have replaced the server activity.  Maybe it’s that apps are a closed world – I’m not shopping Barnes & Noble while I’m in Amazon’s app.  But there’s got to be something other than grown-up Tamagotchi worlds living on our smartphones.

Thoughts?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under digital media, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , , , ,

August 28, 2012 · 9:47 am

Twitter And The API Decision

You might have read or heard about the Twitter brouhaha last week.

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

No, not another politician sending pictures of his undies.  Twitter announced that they are going to restrict the use of their API and due to that a bunch of companies are going to have big problems.  While I realize that this entire discussion might be a bit of inside baseball for you non-tech business folks, I think the decision Twitter made is instructive no matter what business you’re in.

Basically, Twitter announced a bunch of restrictions on the number of times an application can access the Twitter stream.  You can read the details on Twitters developer blog but suffice it to say that anyone who makes a traditional Twitter client – Storify, Echofone, TweetBot, etc. – is going to have some issues.  These folks compete with Twitter’s own app (both the regular Twitter client and TweetDeck, which they own) for ad dollars and part of what Twitter announced was the division of the Twitter world into four quadrants.  One of those is “consumer engagement” and while Twitter is trying to encourage competition and business building for analytics and B2B, it wants to ” limit certain use cases that occupy the upper-right quadrant.”  In other words, restrict anything that interferes with their ad-supported business model.

I understand why Twitter is doing this.  After all, it’s their data (even if the users are creating the content).  However, I think they’ve got it backwards.  Rather than protecting themselves in a very difficult, competitive area (ad sales), maybe they should have focused their revenue efforts on the folks who are making money themselves (the analytics and other B2B guys).  They’re saying they welcome development on their platform as long as it avoids their core revenue model, which is consumer experience enhanced with advertisements.  In my mind, setting up a bigger toll booth in front of the folks who remarket the data for large fees makes more sense.  It’s the Willie Sutton rule – go where the money is.  Twitter has no competition when it comes to the folks using their data to drive their product while there is plenty of competition in the ad world – Twitter isn’t yet a “must” buy.

That sort of decision-making comes up in many businesses from time to time and I think a long look at what Twitter chose is instructive. What do you think?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under digital media

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

August 27, 2012 · 9:22 am

Being Fearless

A 15 year old young woman won the CN Canadian Women’s Open over the weekend.

English: Thirteen year old New Zealander Lydia...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Lydia Ko can’t drive cars but she certainly showed she could drive into the middle of fairways as she beat the best women professionals on the planet.  She’s not yet one of them – she has retained her amateur status because she thinks she might want to play collegiate golf.  That’s a $300,000 decision but one would think she’ll have many years in which to earn that back and a lot more.  This isn’t a total shock – she is the current U.S. Women’s Amateur Champion but she did beat a strong professional field so it’s very unexpected.

What impressed me most about her post-tournament interviews wasn’t her achievement.  In fact, she sounded pretty much like most almost 16 year olds do – lots of use of the word “awesome” in between the giggles.  But she did say something that really impressed me and it’s a great business lesson for the rest of us.  This is from her post-tournament news conference:

Q. Lydia, you’re 15 years old. You’ve just beaten the best players in the world. Has it sunk in what you’ve just accomplished, and was there ever a point on the Back 9 where you’re looking around going what the hell is going on here?
LYDIA KO: (Laughs). I don’t know. Like the first time I looked at the leaderboard was on I think 17 or something. Maybe I had a peek or anything. But I kind of looked at it because I wanted to become more relaxed, and today I said I’ve got nothing to lose. I already got the leading amateur in my bag.
And yeah, all I need to do is play my game, and my goal was 4 under, so I shot 5 under, even better.

In other words, she was fearless.  Her attitude was “I’m a kid, I’m not supposed to win, I’ve already accomplished a lot by winning the Amateur, I’m learning a lot just by participating so why worry.”  How would each of us perform at our jobs if we kept that perspective rather than getting so caught up in the moment or current crisis?  That’s my thought to start the week – you with me?

Enhanced by Zemanta

1 Comment

Filed under Helpful Hints

Tagged as , , ,