Tom Hume:

« September 2007 | Main | November 2007 »

October 30, 2007

I spotted this lovely analogy on the Agile Usability mailing list, from William Pietri, in a conversation about the value of colocating teams:

"Let's consider that archetypal human relationship, romance. We all agree that this works best when collocated. In that context people can establish it without formalism. People do maintain long-distance relationships, but these are usually started in person, they are known to be relatively unsatisfying, they are hard to keep up, and they are more likely to fail. You occasionally hear of people who create real romantic relationships without any collocation, through some interactive medium like letters or telephone calls or email or IM or video chat. With these newer media, I think this has become more common, albeit still rare. And many consider these relationships riskier. It's interesting to note that some people establish imaginary relationships through one-way media. Actors, for example, complain that people on the streets will often treat them as their characters, not as themselves. And the teen in love with a movie star is a classic stereotype."

Posted at 06:29 PM in Interfaces & Interaction, Software Development | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Transplant Log

My little auntie's newest endeavour

(tags: vic transplant blog)

Posted at 12:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 29, 2007

Kocca Korean Mobile Content Forum: Think Big - what works on mobile Mitch Lazar, VP biz dev, Yahoo Europe Shows a promotional video for Yahoo: lots of techno and phone screens (hmm: inverse relationship between BPM of soundtrack and superficial user experience of product?). "We are at an amazing inflection point": devices, pricing schemes and network speed. The online ad business took off in 88/89 - we're about 10 years behind the fixed internet and 2008/9 will be the big years for mobile ads. "Lots of eyeballs". People are online in different ways: rise of social networking. Online ad spend is growing in its own right to a small extent, but most growth is due to offline spending moving online. As agencies get comfortable spending money online, they'll get more comfortable spending on mobile. Why mobile advertising?

Reach (bit of a "because it's there" argument: there are lots of toothbrushes, but this doesn't make them a great ad medium);
Core audience of 16-24s being strong mobile users; as these guys age, we'll see their habits spread: multi-tasking through different media, increasing comfort with pull rather than push media, etc.

Communication is evolving, and mobile is at the heart of these changes. Older media businesses need to change: PC content doesn't always work well on mobile; mobile applications so far have just been extensions of PC experiences (e.g. Yahoo! oneSearch: millions of links aren't what you want on mobile). Interestingly, the top list of results in an example Mitch gives has web sites quite a way down the list: this isn't a search of online content as much as it is a directory search. Implication: web sites aren't what you want on the move (or at least, most of them aren't your top priority). Rule 2: keep it simple. Yahoo! Go "puts the internet in your pocket" (lots of people seem to be claiming this at the moment). In my experience, Go is really monolithic: when I tried it (yonks back, admittedly), I found it a little frightening to overlay a whole heap of Yahoo! services (most of which I didn't use) onto my handset. Rule 3: make money. Global figures from 2006: $871m mobile advertising, $24b internet advertising, $450b all advertising. Hmm, so mobile is currently <0.2% ad spend, internet 5.3%. "No media survives without advertising": except public broadcasting. Very ad-driven, understandably given that's how Yahoo! exist. "Mobile is differenet, keep it simple, make money": all true, all realistic, but none particularly insightful.

Posted at 10:19 AM in Business, Interfaces & Interaction, Mobile | Permalink | Comments (0)