How the Aberdeen Group has proven that the Quality of the End-User Experience needs improvement
September 3rd, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiSometimes you turn your head around and ask yourself if you are on candid camera. Today this mail titled “Improve the Quality of the End-User Experience” from the Aberdeen Group created such a moment for us:
User experience is one of the core interests of the Line-Of-Reasoning team so we tried to access our “COMPLIMENTARY COPY”. What we got as result of clicking on the provided link was not what we expected:
aberdeen.com provided us with the bad quality end-user experience named “Active Server Pages error ‘ASP 0240′”:
We assume this is not what Aberdeen has to say about End-User experience. Or maybe this is a sophisticated indirect method of showing the need to improve the Quality of the End-User Experience. Whatever, thank you Aberdeen for making us smile.
PS: 5 hours later and the link to the report is fixed. If you are interested in the Aberdeen report try yourself here:
http://aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/4906-RA-application-performance-management.asp
The essence of information based human creativity (and how Robert Scoble´s Techmeme game is related to John Boyd´s military strategy)
August 31st, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiOur understanding of the core aspect of information based human creativity that can be for example sometimes (and not often enough) found in
- blogging,
- mails,
- reports/presentations and
- innovative software products and services
is expressed in this slightly modified quote of Colonel John Boyd:
Live the instinctive see-saw of analysis and synthesis across a variety of domains, or across competing/independent channels of information,
in order to spontaneously generate and share new mental images or impressions that match-up with an unfolding world of uncertainty and change.Source: “The Strategic Game of ? and ?”, Slide 58, (words in bold indicate our modifications )
Boyd defined Strategy in this way:
“The Strategic Game is one of Interaction and Isolation. A game in which we must be able to diminish adversary’s ability to communicate or interact with his environment while sustaining or improving ours.”
In this sense a specific type of Blogging can be easily understood as an instance of the war for attention. Herbert Simon identified already in 1971 attention as the scarce resource of the information age:
“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”
Source: Simon, H. A. (1971), “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” from here
One of the blogger’s who participated intensively and with success in this war for attention is Robert Scoble. He called this activity himself recently the “Techmeme Game”:
“See, if you want to earn links and attention in this world you’ve got to be first, or at least among the first articles to go out. I’ve seen this time and time again. I call it the Techmeme game.”
Source:http://scobleizer.com/2008/07/30/cuil-why-im-trying-to-get-off-of-the-pr-bandwagon/
In the picture Boyd`s well known OODA Loop is applied to Scoble´s Techmeme game:
Competitive advantage comes from quickness over the entire “loop,” not only the single direction O–>O–>D–>A sequence. Those who publish quicker and know how to get the attention of the Internet (via sites like Techmeme and other methods) can interrupt the OODA loop of their Blogging competitors and win the bigger share of attention.
It is your choice if you would like to be like the old Scoble or to focus less on competition and your ego and more on generating, contributing and sharing new mental images or impressions that match-up with an unfolding world of uncertainty and change. But whatever your choice is we would recommend strongly to study John Boyd’s work. It will enable you to make a more informed decision:
- Great collection of Colonel John Boyd’s work:
http://www.d-n-i.net/dni/strategy-and-force-employment/boyd-and-military-strategy/ - Access Frans P.B. Osingas thesis about the strategic theory of John Boyd as pdf: http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/5555.html
- Video (also) touching on Boyd´s ideas:
http://spookyaction.blogspot.com/2008/06/whats-going-on-in-there.html
Usability of free software tends to suck and how Mozilla Labs wants to address it
August 6th, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiMatthew Paul Thomas is listing In this follow up post to the 2002 article “Why Free Software usability tends to suck” lots of reasons “Why Free Software has poor usability”.
Item number three on his list is :
“Design suggestions often aren’t invited or welcomed.”
Exactly this point seems to be addressed in Mozilla Labs recent call (August 2008) for participation:
“Today we’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web.
You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.”
We really hope that Mozilla Labs call for participation will lead to great results (maybe we will even come up with our own idea and proposal).
But we find on Matthew Paul’s list of “Why Free Software has poor usability” also two items that highlight some of the challenges for Mozilla Labs “Call to participation”:
”
6) To many cooks
…
12) Design is high-bandwidth, the Net is low-bandwidth.
When developers are in the same room, they can discuss interaction design using whiteboards, paper prototypes, spoken words, and gestures. But on the Internet, these often aren’t available, making discussions much slower and prone to misunderstandings.”
Let us not worry too much. Mozilla Labs call for participation is also your chance to influence the future of the web.
That should be worth some free of charge creativity efforts, don´t you think so?
Enter text similar as you roll in Super Monkey Ball: How typing on iPhone 2.0 could be faster and much more fun!
July 26th, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiWhile the virtual keyboard on Apples iPhone gets the job done it is still not really fun.
Why not to be a little more creative and use iPhones special hardware to make typing faster and more fun? Movies and all details after the click.
TED 2008: A great source of inspiration and big ideas
June 30th, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiThinking about ideas and creating our line of reasoning is our passion. We recommended already earlier as a great source of inspiration the annual conference TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) and their videos of some of the most fascinating thinkers of the present.
To get a first idea of the ideas shown at the 2008 conference we recommend the 3 minutes long TED2008 BIGVIZ movie created by Autodesk (ideas span around questions like: “How Can we Create?”, “How Can We Change The World?”, “Is Beauty Truth?”).
We are pretty sure that after seeing the movie you will download the 200 page PDF featuring the idea-maps of the TED 2008 main-stage presenters.
Source of picture: the AutodeskBIGVIZ pdf
In the best case reading this will re-establish your motivation to develop your own ideas further, spread them and make a difference. Go for it!
Posted in Interesting Links | No Comments »Research proves that speed matters: The faster your service is the more it will be used
May 30th, 2008 Ralf Scharnetzki[Post edited last 5th of June 2008 to insert performance findings from Nigel Pendse's OLAP research study "The BI Survey 7"]
Let us give some pragmatic advice to all “Interactive-Product” Managers out there:
If you make the interaction with your device or service faster
you will increase its usage and value.
This is common sense and not worth to be discussed?
Or you don’t trust such simple rules?
Research results and examples of Business Intelligence (BI) solutions, Google, Twitter and a VCR deliver the facts you are looking for. Even milliseconds seem to make a difference. Find the details below.
Posted in Interesting Links | No Comments »Maybe Sony bought Gracenote so that Apples iPhone 2.0 will not be able to listen
April 30th, 2008 Ralf Scharnetzki[Post edited last 1st of May 2008 to insert comment below the article about Shazam as an alternative to Gracenote]
Our hypothesis:
Maybe Sony bought Gracenote at the 22nd of April 2008 for $260M so that Apples iPhone 2.0 announced for June 2008 will not be able to listen to music and identify what song is played.
Our line-of-reasoning behind that:
1) January 7th 2008:
Listen.app for hacked iPhones is released http://ericasadun.com/?p=126.
The developer Erica Sadun released beginning of January 2008 the Phone application “Listen” that makes use of the Gracenote sound recognition service to identify title, artist and album for any music that the application would “hear” (nice overview here). Users could click on a link to go to iTunes to buy the song directly online (not fully functional in the beta). User feedback to Listen.app is extremely positive:
“Listen. Motivated two of them to go buy iPhones, a smart move since 1.3 has hit. But the BEST sign that Listen is powerful came when I showed it t my wife. She could care less about gadgets and basically has pretended to be interested in whatever I show her on my iPhone. But when I showed her Listen, she suddenly became VERY interested. If it caught HER attention, that means there’s a huge market for Listen.”
Source: http://ericasadun.com/?p=143
The expected release of the iPhone 2.0 SDK in June 2008 would allow every iPhone owner to run Listen.app as an application on his phone.
2) January 14th 2008:
Listen.app has to be stopped because Gracenote wants to get it license fees for the usage of its service http://ericasadun.com/?p=143. A person that claims to be Stephen White, the VP of Product and Content Management at Gracenote, commented Erica’s post:
“Our Partner Sony Ericsson has been at the forefront of integrating this type of functionality and has integrated the results into their store, and into recommendations. Their implementation provides many of the functions you have asked for in your comments here and I urge you all to check out their handsets.
Apple is also a Gracenote partner and has the opportunity to integrate this feature into their iPhone platform. We cannot comment on their plans but we urge you to let them know that you would like this feature.”
3) April 22nd 2008:
Sony bought Gracenote for $260M: News on Forbes
Closing comments:
While there are alternatives to Gracenote services (example: http://musicbrainz.org/ ) there is the possibility that Gracenotes acoustic recognition service (originally invented by Philips: details here- http://ismir2002.ismir.net/proceedings/02-FP04-2.pdf ) especially in situations with background noise (the typical scenario for an application on a mobile device that is trying to identify a song that is played maybe in the radio of the taxi driver) is better than what Apple could get from another service.
It looks to us like Sony is with the acquisition of Gracenote in the position to either:
- prevent or delay a Listen.app like solution on the iPhone and get for Sony Ericsson mobile phones a competitive advantage or
- charge a premium for using Gracenote acoustic recognition on iPhone 2.0 or
- participate on every iTunes sale generated through a Listen.app like solution on the iPhone 2.0 platform
Disclaimer:
This is a theoretical line-of-reasoning, we put it together because all of us are enjoying good rumors around Apple. We have no further insights than the information provided here.
Update (edited last 1st May 2008):
Shazam has been mentioned as a viable alternative to Gracenote. There is from an Apple/iTunes perspective a potential issue with Shazam’s business model : Shazam is with its new music/video download service directly competing with Apple/iTunes. This is in our view likely to be a show-stopper for Apple to use Shazam’s meta data service for audio recognition. On the other side you can obviously argue that the competition between Apple and Gracenote/Sony is even hotter.
“Vodafone, Shazam launch mobile music video downloads
By Nick Wood , Total Telecom, in Barcelona 13 February 2008
Mobile music software company Shazam announced this week it has signed an agreement with Vodafone UK to allow consumers to download full-length music videos and songs to their handsets.… once customers have identified the song they’re hearing, they now have the option to download the full-length audio track for £1.50, or the music video for £1.99.”
Source: http://www.totaltele.com/View.aspx?ID=98390&t=2
The number of songs in the recognition database is one of the important factors that will drive the user experience of applications like Listen.app and the user experience is all what iPhone is about. Shazam is mentioning on its website “over 4 million tracks”, Gracenote claims to have “over 7 million audio waveform fingerprints” (all figures as of 1st of May, 2008).
Posted in Interesting Links | 14 Comments »IBM Global Innovation Outlook: If you want to see what business leadership may look like, look at what is happening in online games
April 3rd, 2008 Ralf Scharnetzki
"Online games put the future of business leadership on display.
Online gaming environments facilitate leadership through:
1. Project-oriented organization
2. Multiple real-time sources of information upon which to make decisions
3. Transparent skills and competencies among co-players
4. Transparent incentive systems
5. Multiple and purpose-specific communications mediums"
Source: http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/www_innovate.nsf/pages/world.gio.gaming.html
Posted in Interesting Links | No Comments »Where to buy and how to play also on Apple OSX the fantastic shoot them up Arcade game ROM "Rayforce"
March 30th, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiWe as the team behind our “line-of-reasoning” are passionate about highlighting challenges and opportunities in everybody’s life in the information age. Currently we are researching a specific sub-niche of the software market for games. We will share with you in the following article some interesting parallels of the digital marketplaces for Arcade / Retro games on the one hand side and the Music market on the other. We will express our hope that Apple will step into the Arcade / Retro market place and make it as easy for consumers to buy and enjoy these digital games as they have done with the itunes / ipod combo for digital music.
From your reactions, we know that you like our articles and you enjoy even more our concrete and practical tutorials (examples: Task management with Microsft´s Onenote; Practicing Google document security issues). In the article below we are going to explain how you can already today play Arcade / Retro games on your Apple Macintosh OSX right away, without having to wait for Apple to also solve the issues of the digital market for Arcade / Retro games.
Because the best is just good enough for our readers we picked the famous Arcade game “Rayforce” - one of the greatest shoot them ups of all times (read this review, or this to see what we mean) - as the example for our little “how to” Arcade / Retro gaming guide on Apples Macintosh OSX. But to be clear: there is no such thing as a free lunch here, we will show you where to buy Rayforce (so it will cost you some $) and how to make it run in Apple´s OSX (so it will cost in addition also your time).
More fun after the click!
Posted in Identified Issues, Recommended Products | 1 Comment »Touching on the central dualism of the information age: What information is available to you versus what information are you making available (or is available about you) to others?
February 29th, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiIn sometimes heated discussions around Facebook, Twitter, P2P, Social Networks, Meshups the Internet community has recently touched from different angles on the same underlying generic question:
What information is available to you versus what information are you making available (or is available about you) to others?
Lots of concepts that in the past have been considered only by theoretical philosophers/scientists as “information” are now experienced from everyone on a daily basis as exactly that: information that is immediately available (examples: music=mp3 files, with itunes being now the 2nd largest music retailer in the US ; movies=avi files; social networks: facebook).
The evolution of technology is responsible for bringing up questions like this:
- Is it already illegal to click on a link found by Google search (currently the legal situation in the UK for this is unclear, details here)?
- How much should information should I make publicly available about myself (interesting example: http://www.realtea.net/too_much_info )?
But because new technologies/services like Facebook, Twitter, P2P, Social Networks, Meshups are stimulating intensive discussions of Privacy, Copyright and Ownership of Data these services are also providing the opportunity for the society to make decisions (through parliament/congress or courts) about the rules that organizations and individuals will follow in the future. There is a relationship between the rules (that constraint what information you can legally access and distribute) and the economy, as Friedman’s remark regarding Copyright is showing:
Freedom of speech is the opposite of copyright, which means that you can’t get copyright right. And, intellectual property is different from physical property: in both cases, you have a monopoly but the monopoly on intellectual property is wholly different because duplicating the property comes generally at a very low or zero marginal cost. You are enforcing a monopoly pricing, as it were, that limits output to lower than the optimum social level. You cannot be in favor of infinite copyright.
http://www.cato.org/special/friedman/friedman/friedman4.html
In the context of globalization and global competition it remains to be seen what impact any country/region specific rules for information access and distribution will have.
For now just click below to read about some of the most recent decisions (at the beginning of 2008) and what arguments out of the ongoing discussions we found so far worth listing.
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