Author: mike

Categories
social shopping

Social Shopping links for 27 Dec 2010

LA Times article on” gameification,” the trend to add elements of gameplay to applications.

Carl’s Jr. has just released their own check-in program for their restaurants. Rather than partner with one of the big location-based providers, they decided to roll their own. Eschewing Gowalla, Foursquare, and Facebook Places, they opted to roll out a solution which involved installing special point-of-sales software.

The benefits? For one, they own the customer relationship (and whatever data they collect). Also, they were concerned about fraud protection and efficient administration of the program. Since they are offering free menu items and other merchandise, this makes sense, and no doubt a big part of any successful deployment of such a program is tailoring the tools so that harried fast-food employees can do what they need to do, even during lunch rush. Not like you can run off to log in to the Internet to see if someone wins fries when there’s a big line of hungry people in front of you.

The mobile app part of the program, Happy Star Rewards, is available on iPhone and Android. Too bad my local Carl’s just went belly-up, I would have owned Sherman Oaks.

Prominent in the LA Times article above, SCVNGR is also profiled at GigaOM.

Categories
Blog

Hey, You! Get offa that cloud!

For some reason, when it rains in Los Angeles, AT&T Internet services get wacky. Sometimes an old twisted pair gets saturated in someone’s building, sometimes a substation gets flooded, and sometimes the issue seems to originate well past the Central Office.

It’s almost as if a router or DNS server somewhere in AT&T’s Los Angeles center is sitting in a room with a leaky roof. Or maybe the deluge of rain causes so many people to stay home and cruise the net that the system can’t handle it.

Whatever the cause, any big rainstorm seems to disrupt the network at least temporarily. This weekend, my speed alternated between its normal 6MB and nothing. It wasn’t an issue with my line, I still had VOIP dial tone, which suggests that the connection to the Central Office down the road was good and that my local wiring station was also untouched by rain. It was maddening, not being able to use the Internet on the sort of rainy day best left to staying home.

And it underscored the down side of Google’s Chrome OS. If the Internet’s so-called cloud is taking a back seat to real rain-saturated clouds, where does that leave you? With no software stored locally on your machine, that’s where.

That slick little Chrome laptop that Google is sending out to journalists would be a sleek, minimalist black brick if not for the Verizon wireless service. Verizon’s coverage is very good in many parts of LA, but not everywhere.

As it was, some of the cloud-based services I’ve started to rely on, like Evernote, were not reachable. Fortunately, Evernote will sync when the connection is restored, which is quite a benefit. I couldn’t even go to the local coffee shop and use their wi-fi, it was down there as well. My local Starbucks probably would have had the same issue, being an AT&T hotspot. My only working internet device was my iPhone; AT&T’s 3G service was working well, ironically.

Generally these central office issues get straightened out, though not always automatically. AT&T routes around the failures, but the UVerse modems don’t always get the message. A manual reboot often will set them right, as it did this weekend. If it doesn’t, then you have a maddening wait for phone support, first level, then finally second level, where someone can do a trace and realize that a router still is trying to hit the wet machine (or whatever the problem is), and reset it.

If the problem is more local, things get amusing, and lengthy. A downed line between the local DSLAM and your building could take days to resolve, a ruined line in your house or condo wiring even longer. The folks at AT&T who sell Uverse and the folks at AT&T that repair lines are literally from different companies under the AT&T umbrella, and there can be a lot of finger-pointing on the road to repair.

So, all you companies that keep pressuring me to switch to paperless billing, and all you folks that have your head in the Cloud, keep in mind that when it rains, it pours. At least my mailman has an umbrella.

Categories
social shopping

Social Shopping links for 20 Dec 2010

Two articles about how consumers are using new tools to find bargains and improve their shopping experiences:

Wired article about the Groupon phenonomon, and how it’s transforming consumer behavior.

From the Wall Street Journal: “Phone-Wielding Shoppers Strike Fear into Retailers”

And NFC (Near-Field Communication) is just around the corner, with upcoming Android handset support, and rumors that the next iPhone will also include it. Mercatur Advisory Group thinks these services will provide carriers with more leverage, though the market won’t reach meaningful mass until 2012. NFC is similar to the keychains you tap on the gas pump to pay, this technology is making its way into new phone handsets, and provides carriers with a possible new source of income as they process payments made this way.

USA Today article about Ebay’s CEO, and his focus on mobile. Ebay has recently made quite a few strategic acquisitions in the mobile arena, including purchase of Red Laser and their recent takeover of Milo.com. They are moving fast to integrate these companies, too.

Categories
Blog iPhone Mobile News Web development

Blackberry enters the Tablet race

Blackberry announced their Tablet today:

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/09/27/research-in-motions-7-inch-playbook-tablet-to-target-business-users/

Of course, it connects seamlessly to all the BlackBerry web services, has a webkit browser, multitasking, etc. Not sure what the connectivity is, rumor had it as something that tethered to a Blackberry handset rather than having its own cell radio. Definitely aimed at Enterprise market. No pricing announced yet,

More info on Engadget.com, including some pics from the RIM conference.

The demo video is fairly interesting, they appear to have cribbed a lot of UI concepts from Palm’s WebOS. All in all, it looks like a good offering; if you look at it as sort of an accessory to one’s Blackberry, it could get a lot of traction amongst Enterprise customers, even if the Blackberry app store doesn’t expand dramatically.

As a comparison, here’s the 7 inch Galaxy Tab:

This Official Samsung Galaxy Tab Video Demo Is A Nine Minute, Must-Watch Snooze Fest

They have borrowed liberally from iOS user inferface concepts, and the device does appear to be very responsive. What they don’t talk about is the price. Of course, there are a lot of questions about app availability as well, most Android Market apps will need rewriting to use the unique screen size, and it’s not clear it will have Android Market.

This video of a prototype HP Windows 7 tablet does not bode well for Microsoft at all:

Hp Slate review

Based on how sluggish the UI is, how many buttons the device requires to support Windows (a Ctrl-Alt-Del key? Really?), and the obvious lack of touch integration in the OS ( you have to press a button to make the keyboard appear for text input) this device is too little, too late.

Personally, I don’t think the 7 inch devices will prove to be a big hit. You are talking about a device that’s bigger than a phone, but smaller than a paperback book. While it can support the split-view type interfaces we’re seeing on the iPad and in Sencha, they’re still kind of small for displaying a lot of information. The larger screen of the iPad is just a lot more real estate for displaying information, and given the limitations of the touchscreen input resolution, gives you a fairly precise pointing mechanism at a low price point.

I don’t buy the rumors that Apple is going to introduce a 7 inch iPad, their decisions for the size and form factor for the first-gen device were not arbitrary. At its current size, the iPad’s screen is small enough to be a portable device (think replacement for a clipboard), but large enough to display lots of information and allow for very immersive UI interactivity.

Prcing is going to be an issue for all of these. With the current benchmark being $499 for the entry level iPad, there just isn’t a lot of room for price competition, especially since analysts believe that Apple could drop the price by $100 or more and still turn a profit. Right now, the phone-call-enabled European version of the Galaxy Tab is said to be priced at 700 or 800 Euros, or 679 British pounds. With contract, this is going to be lower, but who wants to commit to a multiyear contract for a device that is more of an accessory than a primary device like a laptop?

Hope that HP unveils their WebOS tablet soon, I assume it will hit much closer to the mark than the Slate, which appears to have been cancelled for a very good reason.

Categories
Blog iPhone Mobile News

Android ‘openness’ more like ‘Open your wallet, please’

Insightful piece about Android’s “openness.” The promise of Android as an alternative to Apple’s approach is severely diluted by the same device manufacturers and carriers that were holding the smartphone market back in the first place.

It’s important to remember that Android was never conceived solely as a consumer phone OS, it’s an OS for mobile device OEMs to use in building their devices. As such, the device manufacturers have ample motivation to bolt custom user interfaces and features onto the core OS, since everyone starts with the same core Android OS. For their part, the carriers are back to their old tricks of disabling the features they’d prefer to monetize, and promoting their own app stores. Only Verizon allows Skype on Android, for example. AT&T only lets you use the Android Market for apps, no side-loading or alternate sources.

Mind you, in the days when the carriers had total control of the app market, fewer than 3 percent of phone users ever bought games, personalization content, or apps for their phones. In contrast, over 30% of iPhone users buy apps for their phones. By detaching app purchases from the phone bill and providing superior merchandising for apps, Apple was able to develop a real marketplace for mobile software. The old ‘carrier deck’ was a terrible place for discoverability, was tightly controlled by people who were very tone deaf to the brands offering apps and games, and the pricing model ensured that anyone purchasing apps would get a nasty surprise when their phone bill arrived.

App restrictions aren’t the only place where the carriers are flexing their newfound muscle in the Android world. You are also at the mercy of the carrier to see whether your Android 1.5 phone will be upgradable to 2.2; if the carrier decides they’d rather upsell you to their newer phones and a new contract (with stingier data allocations), you are out of luck.

The real revolution of the iPhone was to do an end run around the chokehold that carriers had on the functionality of a phone. It was unheard of to have a phone that was completely disconnected from the carrier deck for on-handset purchasing. Apps that used the Internet seemed expressly designed to ding you with additional data charges, and things like VOIP were strictly off limits. It was also nearly unheard-of to be able to easily update the phone firmware and receive new device functionality on an older phone. The latest crop of Android phones is selling ‘openness,’ but the real goal is to put the genie back into the bottle, and more of your money into the carriers’ pockets.

Categories
Blog iOS development iPhone Mobile News

Mystery “magic trackpad” could signal something big

Apple has gotten a Bluetooth trackpad approved by the FCC. So, what would you possibly do with this? You don’t need it for one of their laptops, they already have a trackpad. Potentially you could use it with an iMac or Mac Pro, but why bother with Bluetooth?

I’m picturing this as a remote for an iOS-based Apple TV, or an HD version of the iPod Touch that has a TV cable. Either combination would let you run iOS apps on a TV and control them from your couch.

All the rumors about a new AppleTV with limited storage based on iOS sound more and more like an iPod Touch with an AppleTV app. It actually makes some sense — you could buy or rent the movies you want, put them on this device, and actually take your movies over to a friend’s house to watch on their TV by plugging in an adapter cable. A 16GB iPod Touch could hold 4 or 5 feature films in about a third the space of a Blu-Ray movie box, and of course the chips are out there for higher capacity. Even better, the WiFi connection could let you serve streamed content as well, like the tons of podcasts and YouTube already available, or cloud-based iTunes video. It’s not a stretch to think of an iPod Touch HD that could play full 1080p over HDMI.

This Apple TV app could just run on an iPod, iPad, or iPhone, too. You just bring the remote and the adapter cable for your friend’s TV, and it’s Movie Night.

Now all Apple needs to do is get content owners to get real about TV and movie pricing on iTunes, and they could have a real business instead of a hobby. The technology for these and even cooler services is not the challenge, it’s getting content owners to agree to reasonable terms for the selling of content that is still often available for free on broadcast TV, or can be rented for $1 from RedBox.