Floozy Speak!

Apple's ruffling my feathers lately. 

After a frustrating moment in word yesterday trying to make some basic index cards for a focus group study I figured "the heck with it" let's do this in iWork.  But course my 30 day trial had experied.  But I figured I should be able to buy from the apple store online and get a serial number.  The 30 day expire notice tells me, explicitly that if I bought it at the store online they'd email me a serial number.  I figure ok, I can do this. 

No you cannot.  I ordered the software.  And no serial number.  After 20mins of searching their website for a contact email, which i couldnt find, I said FINE i'll be a big AHOLE and call them.  To me calling someone on their website is a phase i just didnt want to get into, so i feel ticked off in doing just that cause i'm gonna have to deal with the phone menu.  Press 3 for Sales, Press 5 for Info on our yadda da, and Press 9 for what you've forgotten already, or Press 2 for something that sounds like what you want but of course its not...  BAH  Now the CSR tells me, technically they send me the serial number when an item is shipped.  Well it didn't mention that bit detail on the 30 day notice thing.  Way to go to set expectations there buddy.  So now I have to wait for shipped item notice.. the serial number comes with that email. 

I figure that email will come 6-8hrs later.  Any hopes that iwork would infuse me with fixing my index card issue quickly fade.  The CSR guy even tells me, sir technically you could of bought the product online, download wise.. WELL jimmy boy, I never saw that in the apple store, its some elusive page that ya ok, its ok the 30 day notice thing, but its not the first thing you see.   If you read top to bottom, you see the "buy it on the online store" thing first before the download purchase.  I was scatter brained at the time so I did what came first cause it still promised a serial number.. BUT of course thats not the real case.

So now 6hrs goes by.. meanwhile I've delegated my index card task to a designer, go do this, make it look good, but I'm still curious about that famed serial number that should come with "now shipping email"... and well?  NOPE its not in there.  Classic FU on the experience meter.  I'd said I'd give you cake with purchase, oh you bought it, sorry no cake till it ships, oh it shipped, sorry no cake, technically we cant give you cake until 8 days after you phyiscally have it.  SO FU on the cake. 

Next time just say it Apple, say it up front, in advance, no CAKE until you actually hold it in your hand.  

Tags: experience FU apple cake iwork

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Posted by dan at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hey kids what is up?  Man on man, lots happening today.  I'm on the hunt for the cool flash website that presented "focred decsion modeling" or "implicit bias projection" or something like that.  I haven't found it yet, its out there, I've seen it. 

Meanwhile in Drive Thru Veggies news...

Look at them chops eh?  79%!!  Yeah baby.. folks love veggies..  This is my idea I put up on the website IdeaBlob.  There's lots of these random idea gathering sites out there. 

What else is going on?  I'm reading two new books. 

Mind your Xs & Ys is really good and really well written.  Just picking up the book you see lots of easily digestible content, bullet lists, small paragraphs, good breaks.. I dunno how to describe it other than it looks like a fun easy, non-taxing type read. 

Ok back to the ballon works...

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Posted by dan at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The stuff you can do on the web gets easier and easier and easier every frickin day.  During my ongoing research efforts today I some how stumbled into another ideation session with Wyatt a fellow design researcher here at lextant.

I rambled on and on about an idea i've been tooling with lately, doing pager research studies with SMS + chatscreen like interfaces.  Whaaat?! 

A long time ago I used to hear researchers talk about pager studies.  They'd give people pagers and then page them at certain times and ask them "whats happening now in X Y or Z experience you're having".  The idea was to remotely collect data on the now.  Get into people's NOW space and collect data at the moment.  Fast forward 6 years or so and I began following trends online with people leveraging SMS chat messaging systems in different ways.  And I started seeing all these bit ideas unfolding. 

People using chat screens in bars and lounges giving people ways to anonyomously interact with an audience.  You could screen the content of course, no F words please.  Still it was interesting.  What else could do with this tech?  I saw some posts online the other day about bands playing on stage having a huge SMS text chat screen setup so that participants in the audience could text what song they wanted to hear next or even ask the band a question.  Thats frickin cool.

So I started thinking, what about pager studies reborn al la SMS?  I've also been looking for a way to display live data in the office, as a way to showing people that collecting live data is very real and very possible.  So I imagine this display at work with SMS chat text coming thru to it, I envision texting participants questions, they reply and the data unfolds live in person in front of the whole office.  It goes, every day new messages occur. 

At first I thought investing in this tech would be expensive, and the coding, and all the back end stuff to do it, very costly and way over my head.. boy was I wrong about that! 

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Posted by dan at 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lunch time.  Today we're having herb cruster tofu, grilled veggies, green tea and granola.  Yes.. back on the plan to try and eat better, and 5 times a day.  I struggle with the 5 times a day part.

I read online that Led Zepplin is ditching record labels and selling its future tunes on the web.  Let's see now, we got RadioHead, Led Zep, Madonna, and I heard Oasis and Primus are going this way too.. not alot but the speed of change is afoot, you can feel the change happening, the slow wave of "later record labels..."is moving.  Course the real $$$$$$ behind the change isn't really totally clear, but it's moving ya know, speed of change is happening. 

It seems like one more nail in the coffin of the music industry really.  Who buys albums any more, does anyone?  I can't remember the last time I did that.  Step up 3 more years in time and it'll be hard pressed to find cds in stores I bet. 

The thing with the speed of change isn't so much the now, and where its at, its tomorrow that really should bother ya.  If the now is present and happening, tomorrow will be 10x that.  Sure, it will morph and who knows maybe cds will make a big come back with a new real tangible anti-tech/net thread, but until then, the speed of change is gonna kick the industrys ass all over the field. 

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Posted by dan at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Its lunch time here at lextant and I'm multi-tasking away. 

I'm blogging this entry, while munching on some tuna and editing a power point file.  I also happen to be listening to Henry Jenkins closing key note talk at the Forrester Consumer 2007 Forum via the Critical Mass live video streaming of the event.  Because of that, I'm also looking at Henry's book on amazon while reading his blog up on yet another web page. 

Not a bad lunch really.  Very tasty and informative.  Streaming these key notes is a brilliant idea really, good job david! 

Tags: fcf07, criticalmass, henryjenkins, amazon, lextant

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Posted by dan at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I spent some time on the AlwaysInBeta Critical Mass site covering the Forrester Consumer Forum 2007 conference. 

Its an interesting interaction experience.  You get live uStream video from their booth at the convention and you can see and hear whatever is being broadcasted.  You can also chat along side other folks watching the stream. 

I think half of the people on the chat were from CM, but still its a good little site to go to and watch this ongoing experience unfolding at the conference.  I engaged in many hilarious conversations as JO on the site.  I was able to interact with booth-zen's (booth citizens), and even get them to do things for me.. waving, pointing the camera around and answer questions.

From a strictly voyouristic point of view its also kind of neat to see how people at the booth do their sales pitches to people when they stopped by the booth.  As a bonus treat for folks, they gave away swedish fish and I think free copies of a book they wrote called the Age of Conversation which is available on LuLu.com. 

Page wise looking at the source, it was pretty simple to setup and seems like an obvious bet for anyone down the line to make a site like this and promote your presence at a convention. 

Now, how I got there, and why, that's due to the Logic + Emotion blog I read via my bloglines roll.  I checked it the other day and consumed what seemed to be line 50 different blogs of information.  I came across the CM always in beta video reel and site post and thought it would be interesting to check out.  Glad I did, it was alot of fun.

Tags: criticalmass, alwaysinbeta, logicemotion, ustream, forrester, consumer, marketing, emarketing, conference

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Posted by dan at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

If you haven't seen it already, now is a good time to go rent and watch the anime series called Serial Experiments Lain.  From wikipedia...

Lain is influenced by philosophical subjects such as reality, identity, and communication. The series focuses on Lain Iwakura, an adolescent girl living in suburban Japan, and her introduction to the Wired, a global communications network similar to the Internet.

The Wired is a complex and enormous computer network that dwarfs the modern day internet in size, dimension, and complexity. It is said that with the very first telegraph transmission a whole new layer of reality, an informational layer so to speak, was created and with its growth it has come to be known as the Wired. A special chip was released for NAVIs called the Psyche that would allow one to use his own mind as a co-processor, thus boosting the speed of the processor and the Navi itself. The Wired has advanced so much by this time that the speed of access as well as the amount of data able to be accessed in the Wired is actually limited only by the speed and ability of the NAVI being used to connect.

Lain lives with her middle class family, which consists of her inexpressive older sister Mika, her cold mother, and her computer-obsessed father. The first ripple on the pond of Lain's lonely life appears when she learns that girls from her school have received an e-mail from Chisa Yomoda, a schoolmate who committed suicide. When Lain receives the message at home, Chisa tells her (in real time) that she is not dead, but has just "abandoned the flesh", and has found God in the Wired. From then on, Lain is bound to a quest which will take her ever deeper into both the network and her own thoughts.

We're at point on the web, where Lain's Wired is not that far way.  I keep sensing a kind of union occuring on the web.  This union or convergence is fluxuating all the time as players on the scene battle it out for presence on the never ending radar of the consumer in this new digital wired world.

Lately the emergence of signs that a kind of Wired like reality have been occuring more so than usual.  Google is by far one of the bigger players on the scene. A few months ago the net got the rumor of their own mobile phone experience that is soon to debut.  Then we began hearing about their intention of getting into the virtual world scene, aka vs Second Life and we know they have a hold on us when it comes to maps and experiences like google maps/earth.  Today they bought Jaiku and thrusted themselves into the small but highly visible scene of microblogging, leaving Twitter and Pownce to wonder what will happen next.

Could Google's deal with Multiverse Network be the the beginnings of the Wired? 

"The goal is to grab things from the 3D Warehouse when looking at things in Google Earth and then make an instant multiverse world," - Cnet Article

Alot of this hodge podge theater of course, realization and finalization is a long ways out, but its in these bit moves do we see technology niches unfold into real movements of change.  If they can Wire up, my hometown, Columbus, Ohio with 3d models, adding avatars as people hang out, then hit me up with location based awareness that is accurate to the real places i'm virtually hanging out at, we have a kind of mirror world unfolding here, all powered and fueled by Google.  That could be a very cool experience. 

Tags: google, multiverse, cnet, wired, serialexperiments, lain, jaiku, secondlife

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Posted by dan at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm a fuel infested mumbo jumbo tech tronik cluster wagon of mystical widgets and wonder science.  I live on the far edges of reality dancing with blue avatars habbo hotel groupies and disco kats that can't speak straight... or at least that's what people tell me.

Currently I'm waging a mental war over visual and experience confirmation in a study.  Half of the team wants to not reveal any magic unless its the real deal magic, which will take too long and will never be fully ready for the interview sessions.  On my side of the room I want to reveal what the magic could be like to get folks into a better place to talk about the what ifs of its potential experience.  And potentially isn't even accurate since the magic I present is tangible, doable and down right spiffy.. but its like not the legit real, actualy, official, thus approved magic that the said client would present.  But without presenting the magic, I feel as if we'll get skewed data cause the folks won't be able to accurately fix in their minds just what is the so called magic that is planned for them in a future experience. 

If you go too fast for people you're critized and often hunted down, boxed up and crippled by lack of vision, fear of change and social "wait a sec why didnt i think of that" culture.  What's worse is that accepting that defeat on my own part is like hacking off my legs and restraining my very leap like movements. 

Though they do say its important to fail in business ya know.  Maybe its the way of communication that sucks.  Or the audience isn't receptive to your techno babble.. its probably that really.  It's too far ahead, it doesn't compute.  Tone down, repackage it. 

Well regardless.. let's move on since forward is far more attractive a place to be than backward. 

Yesterday I was talking to my brother about getting and donating to charity the XO laptop that comes out in november. If you haven't heard about this project, the XO laptop is the result of the "one laptop per child" project started at MIT about 2 years ago. Its the result of challenge to produce an inexpensive laptop ($100, though it ended up costing $200) for third world countires, mainly targeted at kids.

Design wise this is product is packed with inspiration. It's waterpoof, dustproof, rugged, has built in wifi, webcam, microphone, mesh network (it can create its own network if it senses other XO's near it), can run on normal power - hand crank or solar power, battery
life is 6hrs normal 24hrs in ereader mode. Now it doesn't have a hard drive or disk drive, and the software is mostly leveraged web apps written in Python but its still pretty darn impressive.

Starting in november they have a program that will allow consumers in the industrialized world to buy one computer and have a second donated to a student in a developing country. It is "Give 1, Get 1", for $400.  Bonus tax write off as well.

http://www.xogiving.org/

NTY david pogue video

Tags: olpc, research, drama, video, nyt, davidpogue

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Posted by dan at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Posted by dan at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I must be from Mars. 

I can't understand how folks cannot see the utter simplicity behind social networking tools.  I simply utterly confused.  I don't see massive headaches anywhere in the process. 

Sure, you have to communicate, and you lack communication then everything falls apart, but you need that by default.  Sometimes I think I work in a technophobic environment.  Too many old skool kittens latching on to as many old skool "they define me" methods as possible. 

If the research enterprise lacks the forsight of innovation within, then how do you expect your projected methods, analysis and eventual outcomes to be innovative? 

I am wrong place.  Right time.

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Posted by dan at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is one of the best anime music videos i've seen in awhile. 

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Posted by dan at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A few years ago when tagging kicked off with a boom via sites like flickr and delicious I started thinking about personas.  Is there such a thing as a tagsona?  With the masses going to the web to tag their photos and sites that they wish to keep, is there a way to reverse that and learn about the people tagging that content? 

I started thinking about delicious.  Staring at it blankly one day I wondered, what do these tags tell me about this person.  What about the rate at which they create new entries or their network or the weight at which thier bookmarks are liked by others as well or not.  What can all these various bits of information tell me about that person.  Can a tag cloud help create a picture of who that person is, what interests them and more? 

I started analyzing random delicious users noting whatever patterns I could find.  Tags were not absolute descriptors of the mark, they were often like themes or sub catagories of the mark.  Something tagged "design, cool, motion, video, play" told me the mark was design related, fun to do, involved video, and most likley a quicktime or motion type file, and was for play.   Other marks often had tags like "work, business, research, keep, marketing, web2.0" which told me this mark was for work, relating to business, saved for future research or research related, it had to kept for future review or essential, and it involved marketing, of a 2.0 technology like nature.

These kinds of random user analysis adventures amazed me.  Still do.  I see the themes inside the tags, work vs play, and how users use core words like forme or keep or essential.  These are like emphasis words, telling me that these marks are more valuable than ones without it. 

Then I started thinking about the weight of mark.  This mark is shared/saved by 286 people.  Thats 286 people that also thought this mark needed to be saved.  What can that tell me about the person?  Maybe that the mark is fad like?  Popular?  That doesn't draw me a great picture other than to fuel some kind of whats hot at that moment buzz metric.  In fact I love marks that have little to no one else marking them.  Then I feel as if that mark is much more targeted to that user.  With only that person in all of delicious marking that link.. that link could potentially tell me something very interesting about that person, something unique. 

I also like to think about the rate of marks occuring.  Looking at my delicious, I've had 19 newly marked items in the past 24 hours.  What can the rate of marks tell me about someone?  What if I combined rate of marks with related tags?  Maybe i'm exploring more than the potential persona I'm trying to reach, maybe I'm looking at usage patterns or surfing habbits.  Even still that information alone helps me craft what I call the tagsona of someone. 

Does your tag cloud represent you?  Could it?  This is a hard concept for old school researchers to follow.  Many of them don't see what we're talking about here.  Yet I see tags in mediums like social networks like delicious very telling about the person behind the virtual wall of anonymity. 

There are notable downsides to the tagsona concept, we don't know why per say, we never ask the user why.  Sometimes I debate on whether or not we need to.  If all I had to go on was delicious tags and marking history, and a potential facebook or myspace page, and hell lets toss in some flickr action in there as well.  I bet I could peel the whys back from the canvas solely by exploring the digital habits of that person online.  Its like reading their email.  Yet we read everything but their email which we know is often the last thing they really want to spend any time in the first place. 

While personas in traditional research are more stately or old schoolish cause they capture a moment in the users life and draw a picture around it, digital personas, or tagsonas expose you to the history of the user, its captured on the web, it leaves a trail, and thats all up for analysis.  I would wager that a tagsona can tell you more about the potential progressions of that user than a traditional one moment in time instance could provide. 

This is why many emarketers are in hog heaven right now.  Its a marketing wet dream unfolding on the web.  Consumers are embracing social networks in various forms.  They are blogging and pouring their passions into digital trackable assets online, most unknowingly doing so.  Social networking is finding its way into everything from gaming, investing, banking, schools, education, fun, frills, everyday picture taking and more.  The idea of sharing is out.  Share, expose, keep, save and remember, these novel ideas are all over the web as are users using them.  All of this data, most of it anyways is open for analysis, and so I wager to you, the tagsona will continue to develop and in time, become a better gage at understanding users than the old school moment in time capture method. 

Tags: tagsona, persona, research, marketing, online, trends

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Posted by dan at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My Skitch beta came through last night, and I was pretty excited about that.  This is a perfect example of an micro app done right.  I say micro app because of the way its positioned to the user.  The app was never marketed to me as a big deal, no massive install, no major dealio, it looked simple.  Its like an extra, a cool widget for your desktop, yet its really a very powerful, web connected application. 

Skitch promises simple drawing, snapshotting, fun and wee bit image editing and web like posting and embedding.. and it delivers on all of that.  It looks, feels and acts pretty damn good.  I wish I could rotate text on the fly easier, maybe i'm missing the secret keyboard shortcut.  Now I've only used it a wee bit mind you but I like what I see.  There's a skitch page for me to visit on the web or share with friends.  I can embedd my skitches on sites or blogs and I can save as jpgs, pngs, svg's for editing in other vector apps, pdfs, and apparently I can pass my skitches to other users. 

One thing I like about the app is how it feels alive.  Hard to explain but the UI controls are all around the canvas editing portion of the app.  Its really different and fresh thinking.  Its not a cookie cutter clone of a photoshop mini app.  Its a new take on how the experience could play out and its built for optimal speed.  Skitch is fast.  I get bit details all around the UI, I don't have to fuss with any menu drop downs, its all here. 

Skitch has a history function that I wish most design tools had.  I can easily see everything I've ever worked on, posted to the web, dragged, snapped and so forth.   I can even search the listing by file names.   Skitch plugs right into iphoto and lets you start messing with images you already got.  I've had some trouble connecting it to flickr, and my blog, I'll sort that out later.

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Posted by dan at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yahoo released a new search engine perk yesterday that had much of the tech web on pause to review not only the improved search functionality but whether or not yoodling nut job yahoo was on the path back to greatness.  My position on yahoo has changed a bit.  While I still see attempting to buy themselves every possible niche web2.0 innovation they can find, they appear to be actually making a few as well.  At one time I wrote them off completely, now, maybe I see a smidge of hope in them. 

Boingboing.tv popped up yesterday as well.  Though it doesn't feel like a concentrated effort.  In fact I would of rather liked to have seen boingboing do something more along the lines of a justin.tv, ustream, operator11 or mogulus... well maybe not mogulus, because it always appears dead to me.  Their production efforts need to be more punchy and BAM baby.

If you've been reading techmeme lately you'll notice something.  There is nada, es, nothing, no talk about Apple on there lately.  Especially no talk about the iphone.  While there's hacks to get people to downgrade their ultra-secure-no-apps-for-you 1.1.1 phones to 1.0.2, there's a distinct lack of fuss or buzz about the iphone lately.  I think Apple shot itself in the foot.  Sure they will continue to sell the phone, but the dev community and nearly everyone out there wanting to really have fun with the phone is on notice to wait.  Engadget the other day revised its BUY stance to the device to NOT BUY because of the issue.  Nokia has launched a whole ad campaign, and I've seen the latest ad banners on sites, its pretty hilarious how fast they got them up that take direct pot shots at Apple with their "open" phone stance from Nokia. 

Also in the news, Adobe's Thermo hit yesterday.  Its a new tool that allows users to create web apps faster and easier.  It sorta feels like the debut of reborn tools like Golive or something.  From read/write web blog...

"Thermo was quickly the most buzzed about thing at the conference, and it was easy to see why. Anders and Heintz turned a static image of a web app interface into a working mockup -- complete with dummy lorem ipsum data created by Thermo -- in about 15 minutes without touching any code. Thermo allows designers to create interactive Flex-based applications without coding, then hand those apps off to programmers who can complete the development process by adding business logic."

Tags: thermo, adobe, apple, mogulus, operator11, ustream, justintv, yahoo, readwrite, boingboing

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Posted by dan at 09:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The tech scene and the web is a vast space age wonderland.  Sometimes filled with promise and opportunity, other times filled with grace and humility, but mostly its filled with twisted landscapes and whacked out kids tripping on wonderland enabled exstacy. 

Lately we've been dining on the twisted tales of the rotten Apple.  Why oh why do they abuse their core base of frenzied followers?  This puzzles me. 

The web is great though, being an archived source of all that you ever did or tried to do, and this link SLAPS Apple hard in the face of its own projected promise marketing scheme.  Shame on you Apple.  For all those folks struggling with bricked phones due to 1.1.1 update, by now, approx 6 days later, hackers have figured out a way to fix it all.  Still no word from Apple.  They better wake up and realize they don't own our future experiences with their products.

In other news, Ars Technica has a nice review of Microsoft's Surface table computer that if you like interactive  Minority Report like gadgets, you should check it out. 

Since Apple is giving all of us the FU on the iphone, I can't believe it, but I'm turning my sights on the GPhone now with dreams of the promise.  But who will make this would be phone for google experimentation?  HTC?  Nah.. I say Samsung! Its a perfect power play for Samsung to get in with Google and do some serious head turning.  They are massive and have the horsepower to make something really zangtastic.  I say Samsung. 

On the never ending subject of phones, Nokia is raking it in on serious chops to Apple's brand image with their recent NYC campaign telling the public, an open phone is a good phone, pouring salt into the 1.1.1 update pr fisaco that Apple walked into last week.  I say go Nokia, pour that salt until it burns them deep, I need Apple to wake the frak upTags: nokia, apple, samsung, microsoft, surface, iphone, gphone, nseries and smell the coffee of open phone design. 

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Posted by dan at 01:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)