maxmelchior.com/blog

2008-03-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

Whistler Opening Day

2007-11-20T12:01:00.000-08:00

Day 2 of ski season 2007/2008. And my first ski movie ever.

Skype outage

2007-08-16T08:15:00.000-07:00

After promoting the service to friends and colleagues it's a bit annoying when Skype no longer works.

Hey Skype, you're a telco now. Telcos focus on things like reliability and minimising risk, not adding new flaky features all the time.

The simple equation for basic communication service is:

"Happy Users => More Happy Users"

... not to be confused with:

"More New Features => More Users"

But if you have a company organised around creating more software/features, then that becomes a goal in itself, and very difficult to stop - and unhelpful if you're a telco and not a software development company.

Birds

2007-05-23T00:50:00.000-07:00

I keep bumping into nice birds:

2007-03-19T22:36:00.000-07:00

Around Revelstoke, BC

2007-03-17T15:24:00.000-07:00

How does it feel?

2006-09-06T22:46:00.000-07:00

Here's a thought about evaluating/designing interactive systems - what would it feel like to hold in your hand?

Does it feel like a squirming frog trying to escape, unpredictable and unpleasant. Or does it feel solid and well made like a high-quality padlock.

This goes far beyond the obvious physical/tactile aspects of interaction. It also captures something about what annoys me with a lot of advanced Flash sites or applications with "interesting" interaction techniques.

Life in the self-checkout lane ...

2006-09-06T22:31:00.000-07:00

Photo taken with my new SonyEricsson K790i - pretty good for a camera phone!

untitled

2006-07-19T22:51:00.000-07:00

Rebooting

2006-05-27T01:18:00.000-07:00

Heading for reboot 8.0. I'm excited, haven't been to a conference for a long time.

Heron

2006-04-03T22:52:00.000-07:00

Monochromes

2006-03-27T22:08:00.000-08:00

In the snow

2006-02-19T19:45:00.000-08:00

so this is what I do during my weekends... (I wish)... the cat takes us up the mountain, we ski down, through the trees...

Networks v Content Providers

2006-01-17T22:18:00.000-08:00

Lots of stories (like this) recently about network providers planning to charge content/service providers for delivering data over their networks. Pretty crazy, since the customers have already paid for their use of these networks.

The network providers must have calculated the cost of filling the expected bandwidth needs before deciding to go with a flat monthly fee, rather than a usage-based fee. Well, if their predictions were wrong, and users now need more bandwidth than expected, that was a risk they took.

The fact is that users are paying for broadband in order to access all the content and services available out there on the internet - in other words, the networks are making money because those services exist. Maybe it's the content/service providers that should be asking the networks for money - "if you don't pay us $X per month or visitor, we won't let your subscribers connect to our services".

Update (Feb 28): Deutsche Telecom wants to charge Google

Wireless devices for the home

2005-10-17T09:05:00.000-07:00

From akihabara news: Location Free TV on PSP.

Which reminded me of an idea that "mobile" (as in mobile device) can mean just "mobile inside the home" rather than mobile everywhere. A device designed according to this would have a much more focused purpose, and fewer technical constraints: it can be much larger, battery life is not such an issue, WiFi instead of cellular, etc. It can even serve decorative/ambient display purposes.

It would be especially suited for home entertainment systems where everything seems to be getting more virtual (see above PSP link). Leave storage to the Mac Mini in the corner, and output to your TV/stereo, but allow control and browsing from a device large enough to actually list tracks/playlists/etc. Sonos already has something like this.

And hey, if the screen is big enough, put a browser on it too. And email. And IM. But don't turn it into a tablet PC!!!

This is something that's missing from Apple's music universe. They should make on of these, and Om Malik hints that they will, but for some reason all the excitement is about using it to download tunes in Starbucks...

The Nokia 770 should be mentioned here too - if it's the same size as the 7710 it may be smaller than I had in mind. Check www.maemo.org for some interesting stuff happening for the 770, the maemo platform, and the Hildon UI.

Apple MVNO?

2005-09-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

Interesting speculations at mobileslate.com

Certainly the mythical iPhone makes sense in this context. It's a big thing to get involved with though...

8x optical zoom Nokia/Bushnell cameraphone!

2005-09-05T17:10:00.000-07:00

I enhanced my Nokia 6600 cameraphone with really cheap binoculars.

Before

After

Note: good technique is required to hold both camera and binoculars steady and perfectly aligned.

Presence

2005-09-02T20:08:00.000-07:00

These days I'm relying a lot on IM and other online communication and community services, while being involved in the design of some of these same services, so I stumbled across this with perfect timing:

Having ‘prescence’ in buddy lists means you are available for chat or queries to others. Do we now think that it is enough to be ‘present’ in reality - available, but not concentrating - awaiting a call to participate rather than participating by default? Would we be more productive or creative and less stressed if we opted out of one ‘buddy list’ of prescence - perhaps even sometimes the physical prescence.

From Blackbelt Jones — always interesting, always relevant — who also quotes Neal Stephenson quoting Donald Knuth:

"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

Presence (in the standard MSN Messenger, etc., form) works well enough in a casual setting, but I'm not so sure if it always fits in a business context, especially with project teams becoming more distributed across different organizations. While a free informal flow of communication is usually a good thing, sometimes a more formal customer/supplier relationship has to be maintained, with the other party being a "black box" — yes, we work together, but we're not a team, you're not my buddy, send me an email, and I'll get back to you in 12 hours. Forcing you to communicate at certain times is sometimes just a form of micro-management.

Pandora

2005-08-30T15:15:00.000-07:00

Check out www.pandora.com. Internet radio as it should be.

Now I just need it to play over my Airport Express...

Webcasts

2005-08-30T14:35:00.000-07:00

There is something great about webcasts of talks and presentations - they give someone like me the opportunity to see/hear people speak I otherwise wouldn't. For free! A few interesting examples:

Bruce Sterling

Bill Buxton

More Bill Buxton

Interview with Skype founder Niklas Zennström and VC Tim Draper (from AO2005 - requires registration): "always delight the user ... pop-ups don't make any sense to us" - nice

More webcasts from AO2005 if you've registered for the one above

I started watching Bruce Sterling's presentation last night, and although I really enjoy his books, the presentation didn't have quite the same flow. I broke off in the middle, and plan to watch the rest tonight. At the time of the talk he was about to start a new job teaching Industrial Design in California, and I want to hear more about that.

i-mode

2005-08-24T20:37:00.000-07:00

Came across this recently:

"Thirty percent (30%) of Japan’s population use mobile data and multi-media services at least 10 times a day."

It's funny how i-mode has been going for over five years, and no one seems to have figured out how to compete with them.

And I just have to rant:

How difficult can it be? Read "Birth of i-mode" by Mari Matsunaga about how the founding team created i-mode with a focus on user experience, as a consumer product, not a technology. The book is available in English, I bought my copy from Chuang Yi in Singapore.

It's not just about chosing the right technology ("i-mode is popular because they use cHTML rather than WAP", yeah, right!), but what kind of thinking that makes you select a certain technology, ie. you know you need to attract developers to create an ecosystem of content developers, and cHTML sounds more attractive than WAP. Not to the engineers, but to the people who want to create products, and hire engineers to make it happen. This thinking has to extend to every single part of the organisation that has anything to do with the product, because their actions and decisions will ultimately affect the product. That includes the pimply gel-haired kid in the mobile phone shop who gets a kick out of knowing more about phones than his customers, and sells what he likes. Well there are people like him at every level of the corporation.

It's ultimately a cultural thing, not a process, not a technology, not a metric, not anything that will get you status in a modern corporate environment. It doesn't matter if you spend money on some glamourous User Experience team, when you have other parts of the company run by marketing ARPU-monkeys and technology worshippers. Your User Experience people will just be a vanity department, a fashion statement. If you want status, buy a stable of Ferraris instead and spare us the trouble.

Taxonomy, hierarchy, folksonomy, whatever...

2005-08-16T11:02:00.000-07:00

Came across the following while doing some research for a project:

But classification is really about something much simpler and more practical: people finding shit.

In that context, it's hard to understand this religious fervour around tags. The litmus test for good classification is not "does it use tags?" but "does it help people find shit?" There's much more to it than that, but that's the simplest formulation.

From atomiq.org

UPDATE after thinking a bit about this: I totally agree on the focus on what people need, but is "finding" the only activity that classification should support? For example, in a collection of recipes, classifying a dish as Canadian only helps me find it if I already know it's Canadian, or if I'm looking for Canadian dishes in general (for whatever reason). But it also captures some knowledge about the recipe, or maybe even about the whole collection ("aha, 1% of these recipes are Canadian") which people can use to figure out what to do next. So a good classification not only helps people "find shit" but also "find out shit".

Is Amazon doing an alta vista?

2005-08-14T14:59:00.000-07:00

The US version of Amazon just gets more and more crowded. Here is a typical page for a music CD as rendered on a laptop screen (1024x768, with some indication of paging) - now, how do I find out whether I want to buy this album? Turns out I have to scroll down three or more pages to see anything resembling a description or review:

First page: album and artist, image, price, and "buy now" button (inside the ugly green line). The rest is other stuff Amazon suggests I should buy, things I've looked at in the past, lots of links to other stores, etc.
Second page: other stuff Amazon thinks I should buy.
Third page: rating (stars out of five), tracklist, editorial review.
Fourth page: user reviews.

The customer experience is about the whole customer journey from how users end up at the site, how they find and researching stuff of interest, to making a purchasing decision, etc. Success requires an "unbroken chain" of interactions. The current design has too many places where the user can fall off.

I personally buy more books from Indigo/Chapters these days, it's cheaper and I think it arrives faster - so (for me at least) Amazon are failing at the purchase decision point (do they even realize that checking prices on other sites has become part of my customer journey?). Now they are also starting to fail at the research stage (the "I want it" point) - there is too much stuff to distract me.

It reminds me of how alta vista, from being the most successful search engine, turned into a bloated advertisement/portal with a search box, followed by extinction once Google turned up. Altavista now looks like a google clone, or maybe the advertisers just left? (OK, they do still have advertising - sponsored links take up the first page of search results)

UPDATE: Oh damn, Jacob Nielsen said all of this already.

When your data outlives you

2005-08-12T23:14:00.000-07:00

File under (hmm.... how do I turn on categories in Blogger) Memory, The World is Flat, Tags

Back to thoughts about storage with a quote from The World is Flat:

On November 13, 2004, Lance Cpl. ___ was killed by a roadside bomb during a foot patrol in Iraq [...] his family was demanding that Yahoo! gave them the password for their deceased son's e-mail [...] Yahoo! denied the Ellsworth family their son's password, citing the fact that [...] all Yahoo! users agree at sign-up that rights to member's ID or account contents terminate upon death [...]

As we get rid of more and more paper and communicate through more and more digitized formats, you better sort out before you die, and include in your will, to whom, if anyone, you want to leave your bits [...] Somebody, please, sort all this out.

(Regarding "The World is Flat": it turns out that Bill Gates has read it too.)

Reading list update

2005-08-11T12:09:00.000-07:00

Finished Blink without much enthusiasm and was left with no clear message. There were a few good points about basing decisions on key factors rather than being overwhelmed/misled by less relevant factors, and avoiding panic since it makes you unable to think straight. There were also some interesting stories including one about consumer testing of softdrinks (evaluating the product in context can give entirely different results than your first impression - and both are overridden by brand impression anyway).

And I started reading The World is Flat, which is much more fun, and underlines again how easy it has become to start doing business online, but framed in a much broader context which will affect us all. ESSENTIAL READING!

Friedman may be underestimating the complexity of computerizing cooperative work flows (if it was easy, what are all those CSCW people researching?) - or maybe work flows will simply become standardized once the supporting software is in place?