Henrik Werdelin

My friend Noah just posted about a new project he is starting called The Gallery Interweb. Its basically a bunch of links to people/sites who have tried to visualize the internet. It got me thinking of this old art piece that I saw and download many years ago. The quality of the video is pretty poor (as I downloaded back when 6MB was a big file :-). While I cant remember where I got it from, I still find it thought-provoking:

First check out venturehacks.com’s fine list on how to pitch your start up to angels or vcs: http://bit.ly/YGqoY . Then jump over to this blog post about how to use social proof to pick up women: http://bit.ly/cFltBc

As you can see, there is a fascinating rhetoric overlap between start-up pitching and pickup social science. Maybe its just because I did my degree in social science – but I feel when speaking about product marketing, we should focus less about technology and specific tricks for e.g twitter and facebook. While we are dealing with new communication technologies – its seems the core principles of human interaction and social needs is more or less the same as it has always been. Concepts like ‘social proof’, the need for ‘social acceptance’ and the ‘strength of the weak ties’ have been around for a while. It’s those core human needs and a deep understanding of that psychology we need to understand and discuss to make better products, marketing-tools and designs.

Or at least it’s a good excuse to read ‘The Game’ and expense the book as ‘social media research’ :)

Have a great weekend.

A national study out of SDSU shows that 57% of young people believe their generation uses social networking sites for self-promotion, narcissism and attention seeking. This is important for you as a product developer/designer because this emotional-need forms the basis for creating virality in your products. People don’t just share messages to be nice to their friends. Take a look at Facebook or Twitter, for instance – often status messages are equally about saying something about the sender, so the important question you should ask yourself is: “How will the message I want spread make my audience look cool or clever to their friends, colleagues or customers?”

A few examples:

1. Make them show they are early adopters. Make users feel important by giving them something to say about themselves, e.g. I am a user of this new cool software – it’s still in closed beta – but I can try to get you an invite.
2. Make them seem funny or interesting. When adding a  ‘tell/invite a friend’ into your sign-up flow be sure to spend extra time making your invite email interesting. You are essentially the ghost-writer for your users. Make them sound funny or interesting – they will want to share your story with more people.
3. Allow people to add their personal touch to your story. Users are more likely to spread stories that have their own personal touch. So leave room for them to add their fingerprint to your narrative easily. I guess my best example is to always allow for a bit of space when you do tweets – so people can add their own comment to your narrative. By doing that, you allow your audience to become co-senders. If that fails, then piggyback your message on to something entertaining, as a last resort, in case there is no other way to make the message itself cool to communicate. Just think of how OfficeMax have made you Elfyourself.com
4. Make people better storytellers by giving them templates or ‘guide them’. Facebook’s initial status update did this delicately by adding the ‘Henrik is…’ to each update. This forced users to write a certain type of update and allowed them to be more creative by working within the template of the ‘Henrik is…’ template. A new trend is to give people personal information about themselves to share via Behaviour Generated Content generation.

Any other examples?

@werdelin

Having been involved in the venture world for a few years now, I have noticed that boring startups can suddenly become wild success stories, not through any fault of their own, but because there is a major external change in the marketplace. Sometimes, a company that didn’t seem likely to be a homerun becomes one overnight because a new technology or product is being launched by a major player. A good example is Admob which was really a small player until the iPhone came out – and everyone needed a way to monetize their apps. A similar thing could occur with the launch of the iPad. Here are a few quick ideas on what changes the iPad might lead to:

• HTML5. Since there is no flash on the device I think many will use HTML5 to make app-like sites and use the HTML5-based video streaming format to get video on it. Currently HTML5 is supported on Safari (both computer and iPhone) and Firefox. The ‘non IE support’ of HTML5 has slowed the usage of that format, but what you can do is quite impressive. So expect to see much more advanced sites built with HTML5 – aimed at the tablet.

• Touch. I think a major trend will be ‘non keyboard ways of interacting with the net’. We have already seen eyescanners in airports, Wii-controllers and early voice to text (actually working: e.g. it works really well on the Google phone). When people try navigating the web with their fingers, I think it will be a ‘magical’ moment for them. This will lead to the user demand for (and acceptance of) more touch devices. From laptops over mobiles to kiosks. I think you will even start to see websites who will think of designing for hand navigation.

• User centric design product development. This is maybe not a crystal behavior change – but still a trend I think is very important (and will write about this later). If you watch the Apple video about the iPad you will notice how often they use touchy-feely words “it just feels right”, “the device changes to your needs” and so on. I think this is leading to a new direction in product development, where user centric design, user flow and visual feel will be considered much more important that it has been before (where design was a distant third consideration after tech and the business model).

• E-books.  I guess I think that the Kindle will still be my preferred choice for e-reading for now. There are really three reasons: 1. I am already set up with Amazon and many of the books I read are industry-specific so won’t be available on the iPad.  2. Battery time is really important for me, so the Kindle’s two weeks of battery is key. I really like that I don’t have to remember to charge the Kindle and don’t have to bring a power supply for it (think it might be a nicer way to read long texts too). 3. Kind of an odd one, but the reason I use the Kindle is because it’s not a computer. When I am on my laptop there are so many things that want to grab my attention that I very seldom get to read stuff. The Kindle allows me to focus on reading – without getting distracted by instant messengers, emails, links I want to check and so on. So while it might not be a Kindle Killer,  I think that the launch of the iPad will focus more attention on e-books and the digital distribution of books and mags in general. Thus, it will likely change the industry by educating the publishers, pushing the features and usability of other e-book readers and making books and mags a must-have-feature for other tablets..

Any other areas it might affect?

The attached graph from Alexa is really interesting on many levels. It shows twitter.com traffic for the past few years. Twitter started in March 2006 and although the graph only starts in 2008, it’s fair to assume that the traffic was flat from 2006-2008. So what can we learn from this?

1. There are two ways to get market-fit – both require lean companies.

a) you can either keep on innovating your product until you nail a set of features that users like today, or

b) you can keep your product alive for long enough for the market to change û making your product relevant.

Lesson learned: Keep it lean.

If you look at the graph it’s clear that that from 2006 to 2009 Twitter was a pretty crappy company by all traditional measurements. The service had very little market traction/traffic and people didn’t really seem understand what to use the platform for. They could have led the company along either of two paths. Had Jack Dorsey read Steven Gary Blank’s book he might have attempted to change the product into something that had more ‘market-fit’ by using customer development . This is the idea that you keep your company lean and continuously iterating your product until you find something that your users really like and this results in great market traction. Jack didn’t do that. He kept the product pretty much as is. So if the product didn’t change it seems the market changed around it  – resulting in dramatic growth in the start of 2009. The secret to this change is probably found in various places: from Facebook teaching the mainstream audience about the power of status updates, via Twitter’s role on CNN during the Iran election conflict, to increasingly developers understanding the use of apps making Twitter available on mobiles, desktops and websites. What’s key however, is that Jack and his team kept the service alive long enough for the market to adapt to their vision. This could only be achieved with endurance and some kind of secondary revenue stream for the team who worked on Twitter.  So if you are doing your own new innovative start up, make sure you keep the cost LOW û it’s the only way for you to have time to change your product if it doesn’t work right away,  or for you to keep working on it for the market to change so your vision is aligned with the users.

2. “Invest (your time/money) in products that you enjoy , and with people you like to hang with”. (quote Martin Varsavsky at SeedSummit)

Lesson learned: Build cool stuff with awesome people (both staff and investors) because you are likely to be stuck with them for a while.

It’s very seldom that projects are successful from the start. If you look at most companies that today are considered hits, they all had long initial periods where people didn’t ’get’ what they were trying to do and more often than not ran for years with little traction. It’s stressful and emotional building a company, especially in those period, where your company narrative and product is not locked down. As an entrepreneur, you often fear that you will run out of money and lose respect from your peers/friends if you can’t make your start up successful. The truth is that your start up is more likely to fail than it is to succeed. So make sure you enjoy the journey. This is very much easier if you are around nice, funny, intelligent people with passion and empathy. Find those and the journey, no matter if it leads you to success or not, is better. Think of that, when you’re hiring/partnering, or choosing people to finance you. I don’t know the Twitter team and have only met Jack once. However, from what I read and hear from friends who know them, they seem to have gathered a fine selection of staff and investors that are likely to build a solid company as well as being nice to hang with. This is most likely part of the story that kept them going during the 3 years where few thought highly of Twitter.

3. Your timing is as important as your product - and people really dont know what will work a few years in the future.

Lesson learned: Don’t worry that much about what the blogs say about your newly launched product - they are probably wrong and things online can change very rapidly.

The web is really a great place on many levels. Small things change and suddenly a bad idea/company becomes a great idea/company. Admob.com was not really that big a hit – until the iPhone came around; many felt that Playfish could never build a real business as a ‘plugin’ to a site like Facebook – until they did; and Twitter was widely considered a silly idea when it came out – until 2009 when it really kicked off. Changes in the internet ecosphere create disruptions all the time – and companies become big on the back of those. So when people doom your product/business to success or failure, take it with a grain of salt. The web changes all the time and what was a silly idea one day can very easily be a great idea the next.

Any other lessons ?

@werdelin

1. install ‘read later’ (instapaper.com) in your browser. Its great for catching up on stuff you want later. Even better. Connect your profile on instapaper to your kindle – and get the stuff you wanna read packaged and send to you for days on the road when you are bored. (note that the new kindle works in most countries. sweeet)

2. buy this new device called WakeMate and start twittering or blogging about/in your sleep :) Yes I have already pre-ordered.  http://www.wakemate.com/. Curious to see if it works and how  my sleep pattens are. Its your first step towards making your own Felton report .

3. connect to your slingbox via their iPhone app. I know its expensive but watching  sling tv in your bathtub is so worth it. The app on iPhone works like a charm.

4. Read cartoons. My favorite these days are Danish friends of mine: wulffmorgenthaler. – they are kind of like Family Guy meets The Far Side.

5. Consider buying someone you know a SmartPen – and while you at it – come up with something to launch on their livescribe app platform.  http://www.livescribe.com/

Where is the innovation in online visual languages?

Was sitting playing around with Google’s new flip the other day when it struck me how little innovation we see in visual languages online. While the tech community have made great new tools and frameworks (Ruby, Django, AJax), we really have done very little when it comes to new ways to display text, images and video together in a compelling way online (this blog being a great example). It seems that in our move towards extreme syndication we have reduced content consumption to RSS feeds and a few embeds. This is really ashamed. Take a look at Google’s Flip and notice how all these intereting articles are displayed with out any soul or passion. Especially if you compare it to all the magazines on e.g. issuu.com. It seems clear that while we now have effective distribution of stories via rss, blogs and websites, we still lack lots on the design/creative side. Better visual formats. Web-designers and product managers still have lots to learn from quality magasin art direction. A few examples:

• Creating increased emotional impact with clever layouts. Take a magazine like Wired and compare it to wired.com. The magazine manage to create an experience where each article becomes more than just the text. The awesome design and illustrations- write blog post (Where is the innovation in online visual languages?
• Easy content discovery. Magazines managed to create a notion of flow much better than most sites/blogs. Allowing users to enjoy content that the DIDNT know they wanted.
• Make content consumption easier. Reading endless list of text is hard for the eyes and the brain. Magazine design breaks up the design and clever editing allow the user to consume tons of content with out getting tired.

Google Flip = Webdesign vs. Issuu = Magazine design

So here is a new years resolution for product developers and web designers. lets man up, learn/steal/inspire from the magazine guys and create some more compelling and entertaining online experiences and formats.

I think that building a new web based product is very much like making a nightclub. Its no longer enough (if it ever was) just to have a great sound system or a cool bar concept. Its about having the right name, at the right place, with the right doorman, serving the right drinks, with the right promotor and DJs. You need the right people to stay for the right time – and you need the right things to go wrong. In short you have 100s of small things that make up an awesome experience / night out. Building a web product is the same. Its not the name, nor the concept or the design. Its the 100s of things that combined make up an awesome web product. The concept, making the right flow, understanding how to attract the users and keeping them, making the site spin fast and in tune with the user ect.. For both product and brands the devil is in the details – and success is formed out of 1000s small great ideas.

As wikipedia was being build, ‘crowd sourcing’ became a buzz word and the worlds entrepreneurs started to dream up ideas where the work of a thousand small participations could out-compete major companies.  While this method for sure has been helpful for some projects (e.g. wiki, digg, openstreetmap) other projects like ‘user reviews sites’ (yelp, amazon reviews) are now getting to a point where obvious disadvantages are becoming clear. This is especially the case when used for review of restaurants, gadgets, hotels and so on. My three main concerns with user submitted content are:

1. One mans cool is another mans stuffy. Reviews work when there are clear and shared criteria for what ‘quality’ is – but that is often not the case. More often that not, I’ll check out a place online which will have e.g. 25 ‘5-stars’ and then 10 ‘1-star’.  So what does that mean? That the place is an medium place? Probably not. Its most likely the case that people like different things. e.g. some like posh up-market places where others find them stuffy.

2. Secondly I’ll find that peoples willingness to express themselves when they have experienced something negative far outweighs people with good things to say. So I tend more for ‘neutral data’ rather than getting concerned if a place have a few ‘bad experiences’. For example, a good indications of a good youtube clip is often more ‘most viewed’ than ‘most popular’. (especially if most viewed include a qualifier like ‘most viewed with more than 75% of the show completed’)

3. Cheating. Multiple examples have been publicized where a company hire a group of freelancers to trawl around the web and writing positive reviews of their products or places. Making, at least I, pretty skeptical about the validity of user reviews.

For these three reasons, which in my view will only become worse, I think that user reviews needs new development. This can either be with the introduction of the social graph (e.g. only read reviews from people you know), using more passive data collection with qualifies (see post about behavior generated content) to make the data more objective or we invent new methods to highly reviews form people who are more like yourselves.

I was in a meeting the other day where we spoke about brand loyalty. It got my thinking of which brands I really like and why. I thought it would be an interesting analysis of which core components was making me become a fan rather than a user of a company/brand/product. How do you build a company that people really care about. Here are the companies that came to mind, some that is fading and some that I use but don’t care about: (in no specific order)

Companies I love and why

- Amazon
because it works like clockwork
because they take difficult fresh concepts and make them happen (mechanical turks, ebook wireless devices and delivery, cloud computing)
because they are the real backbone of all the wonderful new 2.0 services
because they just keep growing and seems very focused on building a company that will be around for a long time
because they have so far never let me down

- Virgin America
for their amazing safety video with attitude
for their internet and awesome in-flight entertainment system
because their pilots often welcomes you outside the departure gate
because their staff actually seem to enjoy themselves

- Virgin Atlantic
because lets face it, Branson is just amazing (and from the looks of the documentary about him on the virgin altantic inflight system – his wife and two kids seems pretty cool too)
because the staff smile to you – even in economy (BA and AA take notes please)
because the virgin atlantic lounge in Heathrow is worth the hassle of getting a gold card (or getting someone to fly you on upper class)
because they have allowed me into the closed stewardess facebook group :)

- HSBC premiere
because their premiere service really works. I walked into a US branch and they hooked me up with a US account right away as they had all my data from the UK
because their private bankers respond quickly and seem they care
because their advertising in airports is clever and entertaining

- Zipcar
because they managed to make an complex sign up process and booking system very easy
because they noticed a twitter I wrote about them and reached out for a dialog
because the concept is good for the environment
because their iPhone app (while still not out) looks cool
because their attitude is cool. (their naming of their cars, the copy on the website)

- Vodafone
because you quickly get to a person on the phone when you need help
because their free summer roaming is actually super useful and not just a gimmick
because their logo and visual identity is amazing

Balsamiq Mockups
I love the home grown style of the company and its communication
I like the analog nature of their branding – it feels very honest to me

Now there are loads of other brands and products that I use every day but I don’t have the same emotional connection to. Lets take Facebook as an example. I really like using it, but I dont feel that loyal to the brand. If my friends moved to another network, I would probably not argue too much before following them. Same thing is happening with my iPhone, love it – but all the restrictions and stories about apple not approving stuff is making me less loyal – and thus considering trying out e.g. the HTC Hero android phone.

So what is it that creates this extra emotional connection? Think that the above highlights some of these shared components:
- Their products just works! (dont think you can brand yourself out of a shitty product)
- The companies seem to care about ME – as in Henrik not a user
- I get emotional connection to the look and the feel (or ‘attitude’) either in their product or their marketing material. (maybe brand marketing is not so dead…)
- I have a direct and instant dialog with them and they seem to listen
- They offer me an experience besides a service

Many years ago when I was doing product development at MTV, I got obsessed with the idea of allowing users to create their own interactive tv applications in flash and get them on our channels. The idea was to allow the best apps to be overlayed on top of the MTV channel and in a sense make MTVs graphical layer open source (with added SMS functionality). I think Nick Rockwell, being the upper smart tech dude he is, actually managed to get MTVs broadcast system to accept flash files – but at that time I had left.

Its therefore great to witness an slightly different execution of that project. This time, its the Allan and the player boys at Joost who have made it happen. The concept basically the same,  to allow any users to create any cool interactive active tv application on top of any of the shows on Joost via flash and an API.*

While the current twitter test app is pretty basic, its really only developers fantasy that is the limit of what can be done. I have worked on all sorts of interactive tv platforms from open tv, over liberate to MPH and it has always been the technology that was the limitation of that could be done. Now is our creativity.

Have a look at Joost Labs.

* Clarification: Interactive tv applications are in their core form all created with a mixture of a number of tech features; text/graphic overlays and animations, the ability to stop, start, forward, jump to, pause, change audio/volume track and the option for integration/mash up with other services.  On traditional TV, MTV and BBC seems to have been the ones who have managed to create to most advanced and innovative applications on e.g. Sky’s digital platform in the UK. However, no one has until now been able to create a smash hit interactive format – so its intriguing to see if making these interactive tv formats easier to do (by allowing developers to do them in flash) will spark some new thinking is this area. That said, maybe TV is just a passive storytelling method by nature – and all the interactivity and innovation will be around making communication and social interaction around the video more seamless.

I was reading Fred Wilsons blog the other day where he argued that twitter and facebook traffic would surpass google referral traffic in the future. The interesting part of that discussion is for me less about which of these companies that will win or loose out. The core question is really about how people will discover stuff in the future. How will people find stuff online.
The very first method of discovery was editorial. The web only had a few websites where people went to find ‘good stuff’. The web have since been very much centered about using search as its primary discovery methods. The web has essentially been spinning around Mother Google making business that was well disposed for this kind of discovery the first to prosper. We are now moving towards a time where new social discovery tools are being created. The initial wave of these tools were around one to one sharing, (e.g. send this to a friend) but are now becoming more sophisticated (e.g behavior generated content). Together the three ways of discovery matches the ones we have offline:

- editorial. you are browsing around in a magazine or a site and someone suggest you to read/try/do something
- search. you are looking for something in a shop or you ask google to find it for you
- social. you get a ping from a friend, a social trigger, that prompts you to do something.

These three categories can be divided into sub categories. For example, editorial can be either be done by a blogger or by a computer (like amazon) – but at the end of the day its a form of expert who recommend something. So while social discovery online is growing, its hardly a new concept and we can probably expect the split between them to follow the offline world – which is probably editorial 30%, search 35%, social 35%.

The new questions then become – how will the online tools look like that make people explore ’stuff they didnt know they were looking for’ and what new formats will be effective in influencing those three discovery methods. In a video world, social discovery mean new content discovery methods like; personalized subscriptions, facebook connected notifications, auto twitter viewing reports, co-watching in realtime (join what your friends are watching), content exploration via friends viewing data visulazations – but all that is probably a worth a post of its own :)

A friend of mine just converted from PC to a Mac and asked me what  smart programs he should install. As I was writing the list, I thought, I might as well share it here on the blog. So here goes in no specific order:

• Numbu – for a simple twitter client
• Evernote – for taking notes and have a backup of them online and on my iphone
• Cocktail – for cleaning of the mac on a weekly basis
• FormulatePro – to sign pdf files with my scanned signature
• Freemind – for making quick mindmaps
• Skitch – for taking screen shots and sharing them quickly
• Firefox – for browsing
• Firefox plugins:
  • - Drop.io – for quick big file sharing
  • - GreaseMonkey – for installing all sort of geeky scripts
  • - FireBug – for doing quick changes to websites to explain changes or see how cool stuff is done
  • - Delicious – for quick bookmapping
  • - FireFtp – for easy and quick ftp tasks inside firefox
  • - Google Redesigned – for a nicer design of gmail and google apps
• Skype – for video and video calls
• Adium – for being online with msn/aim/jabber/gchat
• Google Quick Search Box – for general quick search across my computers and the web
• Dropbox – for quick/easy file sharing with girlfriend and freelancers
• Logmein – for quick remote controlling my mac when I am away from it
• TimeMachine – for doing local backups of my pc
• JungleDisk for remote backup of my archive and my weekly backup
• MobileMe – for sync of my settings across multiple macs and calendar sync to Iphone
• CardScan – for keeping digital copies of all the business cards I get and having an online backup of them
• 1Password – for keeping track of all my passwords (and sync’ing it with my Iphone)
• Iphoto – for general handling of my pictures
• Imovie – for editing of my videos
• ITunes – to listen to call podcasts and buy tvshows for long haul travel (as well as music of cause)
• Smultron – for the few times where I wanna read code – or hack up some html/css
• Balsamiq Mockups – for doing quick prototypes and mockups
• FacebookSync – for getting my friends pictures into “Address Book”
• GrandPerspective – for cleaning up my harddrive and figure out where all the harddisk went
• Opera 10 - for when I am on a super flacky wifi or gprs connection and still want to browse
• Seashore – for free very basic picture editing
• VLC – for when people send me a odd video format that nothing else will play
• ScreenFlow – for when I need to do screencapture to explain something. (think there is a cheaper version out there)
• Ical connected to Google Calendar – for getting a calendar for work, private and a shared one with my GF

Online services (I use many online services almost like apps, so they are included here)

• Gmail – for all my emails
• MotionBox – for cloud storage of all my videos
• Picassa – for cloud storage of all my pictures
• Facebook – for getting in touch with friends
• Twitter – for getting in touch with friends I dont know yet
• Delicious – for getting track of all the websites I find and like
• Wordpress – for writing random thoughts and keeping some info about myself online
• Google reader - for reading RSS feeds and subscribing to blogs
• Last.fm - for listening to music I didnt know I would like
• Jigsaw – for when I want an 1-click music video channel
• Joost – for when I watch great TV

Think thats about it.

First and foremost congratulation to Dave Morin from Facebook. His place on Fast Company’ss Top 100 Most Creative list is totally desevered. Creativity is in my world way more than just design – and I salute Fast Company for celebrating that. Also a big thanks to the mag for including me on the list. While I am not so sure I deserve being listed most so many of the people I idolize – I am non the less incredible proud and thankful for being on it too.

Top 100 most creative in business: http://origin-www.fastcompany.com/100/

The last year or so, I have been obsessing over what I call ‘flow over feature’. Its is the maybe somewhat obvious idea, that you can not think of individual features or products in isolation, you have to think about how you solve problems in the context of the users ‘flow’. Now while that thinking is somewhat already embedded into the notion of user cases, I find that use cases themselves are often too specific and overlook emotional flow-based-insights that are important. We focus too much about solving the specific problem, rather than understand the mental space the user is in – and thus we might solve the problem but the experience is not fluid. Let me give you an example. The other day, I stayed at the W hotel in San Francisco. As I was stepping into the shower I noticed that the bath mat towel used when stepping out on the floor after showing was rolled instead of folded. This meant that I could tap it with my foot just before stepping into the shower instead of bending down and un-folding it. I then turned on the shower and noticed that the shower head had been pointed towards the wall, making the first bit of cold water that is always in the pipes go onto the wall instead of me. Finally, as I went out of the shower, I found the bathrobe next to the shower with the string tied in a way so I could just pull the string and the bathrobe would open instead of having to untie the knot. Future more the string was secured to the side of the bathrobe so it didnt fall down on the floor. Overall the W hotel had managed to identify my user flow and optimize each elements of the features instead of just seeing them as independent ones. The W have realized that a user is in a flow when using the bathroom features – making my experience much better as the features was adaptive to the flow.

I think when we develop sites and products, we often forget to fully understand the physical or mental flow properly of a user, e.g. where was the mouse pointed at last, what are a user  thinking about as they use a feature  or do they hit a page from the side door (e.g. google) or our frontdoor of our site. In order to make successful products, we need to increase this understanding – so we can wrap our technology more invisible around human behavior.

Made this twitter the other day in celebration of an excellent experience with ZipCar.  “Really impressed by zipcar. Their signup process is really slick – and its perfect for ‘living in a big city like london’ usage.” Now today, I recieved the email below thanking for that twit. Now, in a world where there are many options for consumers, I really love the way that ZipCar make me feel special.

I relelize that there are compeditors out there (even some that are cheaper I think), but its really consumer dialog like the email below that creates loyalty and, not to forget, vocal viral promoters. Even renting a car, is for me not only about getting some wheels in a given time period – its about the totally end to end experience; From booking easy online, to getting a nice working car, to feeling some what part of a cool brand. So again and for the last time (otherwise people will think I work for them ;-). Well done ZipCar.

————-

Hi Henrik,

Laura from Zipcar UK here. I noticed your enthusiastic post on Twitter/May 3^rd about your Zipcar drive in Mini Minaret. Hope it did the biz for you!  As a little gesture of thanks I am adding £15 in free driving credit to your account today, lasting for 30 days (we love our happy Zipsters!)  Hope you enjoy it however you choose to use it.

And yes, to your post point, we think we are helping people to overcome traditional private car usage and reduce car usage making London a better place to live and travel in.

Just to add: if you’re in Hammersmith, Southwark or in Tower Hamlets watch out for a slew of new Zipcars coming your way this spring/summer, making Zipcar an even more simple personal and business lifestyle choice.

Thanks again, and happy Zipping.

Kind regards,

Laura

Communications manager

Its really fascinating how the ‘real’ world and the virtual world is mashing more and more. Wrote earlier this year about how we are interfacing increasing with non keyboard interfaces and how I see that as a step towards the singularity. However, when I saw this trick the other day I realized that its the second cool augmented reality project I have seen recently and properly a sign of more to come. Marco is for sure always a step a head of everyone (and for that I salute you) but check his latest magic trick out in the video below, and I am sure you will agree that its really fascinating.

The second project I saw recently was from GE. You can find the project here and a nice video demonstration below:

There are two online movements that are really get me excited these days (especially when they are used together). The first thing is ‘behavior generated content’ – the art of making personalized content based not on a users active creativity  but on logging a users behavior and create a structured format.  Wrote a blog post about it some time ago – check it here (personal note: it needs updating…).  The second thing is data visualization. The art of taking data and structuring it in a way that makes the data entertaining or informational. There are an increasing amount of sites, shows and companies that make excellent use of this.  Here are a few:

• Mint.com (amazing company that slurps the data from your bank transactions and make interesting and informative graphs for you to enjoy – or improve your financial decision making with.
• CNN (cant help put think they made great use of their electoral board. They managed to take boring election data interesting and informative – see picture here:
• 
• Jonathan Harris. (Visualization artist. Amazing guy who did some really cool data visuals for the Moma Exhibition Creativity and the elastic mind. His talks on Ted are also really cool. Watch them here.
• Mashable’s cool collection of datavisual projects: http://mashable.com/2008/11/24/data-visualizations/
• Doplr did an super cool behavior generated content meets data visuals project at the end of the year. They are slupring my travel data from my google calender and send me this rapport. Note that I had not done anything else than giving them access to my travels. A great example of things to go. Click here for full image
• My two favorite blogs about the subject is infosthetics.com and visualcomplexity.com
• And…. since everyone seems to be heading to South by SouthWest.. Here is a cool twitter data visualization project – much respect to slash7.com who did this:  http://pepsicozeitgeist.com/

Expect to see great things in this field – I for one is looking forward.

I read the Singularity is near a few years ago and thought it was really mind provoking. In this book Kurzweil argues two main things (or at least mine major takeways):

a) development of tech is exponential and thus we cant really imagine what is just around the corner

b) the natural next step of human development is the convergence between man and machine.

Now, most people I speak to about this subject are pretty skeptical. Either they dont believe that the technology will develop that quickly – or they dont believe that people will adapt and feel confetable with such a close relationship with non organic enhancements to the body. What I dont think they notice is how quickly this new form of interaction between man and computer is happing. Just over the last two years a few core product developments has made me think that Kurzweil vision will happen.

It started with the fingerprint scanner on laptops. Little notice did it get, but it was really the first step in reinventing interfacing with computers for the mass market. Via the fingerprint, a user could  communicate their identity quicker than via keyboard and mouse. It was easy and convenient and most users found it quite intuitive. Since then several of the airports I fly to now offers eye scans as a quick way to make sure that you are allowed in the country. It makes my life easier and so I and many others do it. Next step in the consumer segment was the iPhone, that educated the mass market that touching your phone, tapping pictures and turning it around to see a picture differnetly format was really much more intuative. What is really happening is that the computer is adapting to humas. Its the art of warpping technology around human behavior and interaction.

In the meantime the military is already flying planes and doing operations with robotic arms 1000s of miles away from where the human are controlling these. Security companies are operating ‘biochips‘ into the body of their employees and the always clever people at MIT are taking mobile computing and user interfaces to the next level. (this video of what MIT is up to is a must see: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/481 )

So, for me at least, its clear that the path to a much closer relationship between technology and users have already begun. While I understand that people get concerned about the concept, I think steps mentioned above shows that its actually not that scary and makes our life easier, safer and more enjoyable.

1. Virgin America is an amazing company. Not only is flying with them a pretty unique experience – but one cant help loving the way they use technology to create a dialog with their (potential) users. Just noticed that they have a dedicated Twitter team. Impressive.

http://twitter.com/virginamerica

2. Balsamiq is another cool company. Besides being a really nice small software company and I love how a 2 man company mashed with all the latest web 2.0 support services can run a healthy business.  On their blog Peldi explains how he cleverly uses Twitter search as a lead generation tool. In short, he monitors any reference to what his product does – and then sends a twitter with an introduction to his product. Clever – and a sign of things to come.

Link to blog post

Been helping a few friends on a small little pet project the last few month called MobileMagic. The idea was to create a social app on the iPhone, but where the social interaction was ‘around’ the phone not ‘on’ the phone. The result is an cute magic trick that you can show you friends/date/kids. You dont need any special skills but it will for sure amaze whoever you try it on. So please try it out and let me know what you think.

For the the link to the app in Itunes – press here.

I am getting increasingly convinced that will see a lot of smart people starting companies that are build to be small. The ‘build to be bought’ mentality by some start ups of past years seems to have been exchanged with a ‘build to be lived’ mentality. More and more of the people I met who have interesting business concepts are looking to build business that can be maintained virtually (sitting on the beach) with a small amount of staff. This can now be done because of the new amazing amount of services that allow you to build a proper business using web 2.0 services to do what normally required a lot of staff and thus investment.  A few worth mentioning are:

• Amazon S3  for hosting your servers. Allowing you to scale your expenses with your revenue
• Get Satisfaction for doing clever product/service support
• Google Apps for email, document sharing and creation
• ScreenFlow for easy making support and introduction videos
• Balsamiq MockUps for easy making wireframes and proto types
• Jungledisk for backup of all your stuff on a secure cloud server
• Basecamp for product management and communication with external partners/staff
• Odesk/Rentacoder for staff and ad hoc resource needs
• Tumblr for having a blog what is easy to use
• Issuu for good looking manuals and brochures

… and the list goes on.

With the virtulization of the different areas needed to run a business – I look forward to many more small clever start ups that make a good living powered by the power of the web. H

Random personal tip: Did a small change to my work routine this week. Instead of keeping my email software open at all time, I have started to only open it every 2-3 hours. It might be obvious to most people but I am amazed on how much more work I get done. I also find the day much less stressful – so if you are not doing it – try it out.

“Design is rapidly moving from posters and toasters to include processes, systems, and organizations. Design is the accelerator for the company car, the power train for sustainable profits. Design drives innovation, innovation powers brand, brand builds loyalty, and loyalty sustains profits. If you want long-term profits, don’t start with technology—start with design.”
~Marty Neumeier
(found it on: http://darmano.typepad.com)

One of the interesting dilemmas you have on a website; is the balance between making stuff very simple and easy to use versus having a lot of new features. Its often hard to make those calls, espcially for more advance feaures that the ’standard’ user might not care that much about. Many sites, start out really strong but end in an interesting struggle between making their exsisting userbase happy by giving them more stuff to do on the site (and then reduce chun and increase time on site) and by keeping the site nice and easy to use for new users. (increase month uniques). At Joost we have the same challange. We want to allow users to find content really easy. However, we also want to introduce users to new features that add value to their video viewing or allow them to find content they didnt know they wanted to watch. So one way we will be trying to solve that problem is by introducing new features in our advertising space. Not only can we make feaures easy to understand – we can also messure and improve our advertising units. (the video below is displayed with an campanion ad on Joost – allowing users to connect with facebook via one click…)

TV is one of the most universal social machines. Not only is it great center when hanging at home watching TV with friends or family – its also one of those things that you can always start a conversation
around. In fact almost as important as the shows themselves is talking about what might happen in next weeks episode, interacting with a show while its going on (e.g. via shouting or texting) or debating previous
episodes with friends the next day. Previously all these social aspects of video viewing has been going on in the offline world.

However, at Joost we want to give users the tools to do all the social things they do in the offline world, namely tools for finding shows your friends a watching, expressing your point of view while watching
and discussing the shows afterward. We have some of these tools already. While watching a show on Joost
you can ’shout’ and all your friends will be notified what you view was on that certain video, you send new shows you never heard about by watching what your friends are watching and you can both comment or
create groups to host the discussion afterward.

Today is a really good day for online social tv viewing. From now on users can sign in to Joost via their Facebook account (Facebook connect). This amazing new initiative from Facebook allow users to use
all the social tv tools on Joost together with all their friends on Facebook. Think of this, like having a room packed with your best friends and a wide screen plasma TV with access to 46.000 cool music videos, great movies and entertaining films. Now just add popcorn and let the social tv experience begin.

In our first release here are some of our top level features:
- Login to Joost via you Facebook ID
- Post your comments and favorites to your friends facebook feeds
(including an embedded version of the video you were referring to.
This allow you friends to watch that video without leaving their
facebook page)
- Receive notifications and updates via Facebook.

But this is of cause just the beginning, but for now, we are proud to be part of this serious step towards adding social to every day online video viewing. Thanks to Dave Morin and his team over at Facebook for
good ideas and being so easy to work with.

http://www.joost.com/users/henrik

Henrik

For those of you who are in New York you should really go and see Design and the elastic mind at Moma. Its a pretty mindblowing tech art exhibition. For the ones who do not have time and are not around NYC – check out the book that explains all the interesting projects that are on show:

Link to Amazon

“Do you have” vs. “Do you want”

John Moore talks about Borders Reducing its Borders.

It turns out that cutting inventory by 10% and facing books out (instead of just showing spines) increased their sales by 9%. This is counter to Long Tail thinking, which says that more choices and more inventory tend to increase sales.

The distinction is worth noting, because there are two valid strategies.

You can stock everything, so that the answer to the question, “do you have” is yes.

Or, you can market and sell, not just take orders, so instead of answering that question, you’re asking, “do you want?”

Do you want this cool new cookbook about Spain? It’s right next to that amazing new novel about food in Spain…

Bookstores that follow this strategy need to be pickier about what they carry, organized differently (alphabetical order again!) and staffed differently as well. Don’t put all the cookbooks in a little corner. Instead, put books for me (whether they are cookbooks or computer books) together and make me delighted I found you.

This kind of bookstore needs to sell and merchandise and promote and tickle and promise and tantalize and thrill.

Hey, that might work for your business, too.

From the always fascinating Seth: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/03/do-you-have-vs.html

My good friend Cristian Jofre just sent me this link. Its a TV ident that reacts to the voice over of the announcer. Pretty cool with this new trend of mashing up stuff.

http://idents.tv/blog/2007/12/11/the-new-s4c-idents-that-react-to-voice/

Fan posting:

:)

A bit old interview / apple commercial with Jofre. See it here and His blog