Check out Microsoft’s vision of how computing will evolve to. It’s rather utopian in look and feel.
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Making Music Mobile
Sep 15, ’11
12:02 AM
One of the smartest things about web services are the APIs, which let you take data or content from one service and wrap it up in experience from another service. Mashing services together often results in the whole being significantly greater than the sum of the parts. Take for instance, Instagr.am, which combines cool photo filtering along with an instant network to share your photos. Then, make all of these photos accessible by exporting them to them available through popular social networks that everyone uses like Facebook and Twitter and you have the ability to expose your photos to a much wider audience. You can embed your Instagr.am photos nearly anywhere making it effortless to amplify the reach of your photos.
I believe the next big API target is music. With services like Pandora, Last.fm, Rdio and Spotify, there are no shortages of companies who see the potential in social music. The beauty is that sharing music is something people have been doing for decades, through mix tapes, going to concerts and loaning CDs to each other. The behavior doesn’t need to change in order for it to work; rather, the technology needs to catch up with how consumers expect to discover new tracks.
Digital Life: Today & Tomorrow
Jun 3, ’11
12:15 AM
Presenting facts and figures at conferences is often dull and dry and wrapped in a manually driven, narrated presentation. Here’s a lovely animated infographic charting how our digital lives have expanded across the globe. Neo Labels does a fantastic job humanizing and contextualizing rapid growth of the connected home, mobile and social in this short video. Some key projections for 2015 (hint: think mobile)
- Mobile web users will overtake desktop web users
- Traffic generated from 20 homes in 2015 = Total traffic of the entire internet in 1995
- There will be 788M internet users who access it via mobile only
- Mobile payments will account for over a quarter of online payments
Feature Quality vs. Feature Quantity
Apr 3, ’11
9:37 AM
It used to be that a product’s success depended upon how well it differentiated itself on the basis of what it was able to do. In the world of software, that generally meant the more features something had, the better off it was deemed. For the hundreds of features Microsoft Office has, it turns out that the vast majority of customers only used 10% of the total features, leaving 90% to a very small, very long tail of users.
Reductionism took hold in recent years, with Apple’s approach to music players. While competitors took the tack of adding FM tuners, video codec support and other ancillary features, Apple focused on simplicity of operation and music acquisition. The rest is history.
As the software market evolves and integrates social media and mobile expectations, we’re seeing a similar phenomenon where the best apps are those that focus on feature quality rather than feature quantity. One of the hot new apps is Instagr.am, the mobile photo sharing network. Combining funky photo filters (like Hipstamatic) and enabling sharing and discovery, the developers have created an overnight sensation with now over 3 million users in just 6 months. The experience couldn’t be simpler. The bare-bones functionality forces users to get creative in its application, just as Twitter’s 140-character limit encouraged brevity and efficiency. Just as Twitter is known for microblogging current trends, Instagr.am has now become known for photo storytelling. Whereas most photo apps focused on the image transformation aspect, Instagr.am made images look great, made them instantly shareable and made it fast. They never set out to do so, but by focusing on doing a handful of key elements well, founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have managed to create not just an app, but an personal experience that defines their brand.
Mobile Payday
Mar 26, ’11
11:37 PM
Photo credit: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
It’s pretty clear that mobile devices have become the de facto platform for digital innovation. The sheer number of mobile-centric startups that are quickly gaining traction is astounding. From Path to Instagram, from IntoNow to Color, entrepreneurs are tapping into possibilities that didn’t seem likely even a year ago.
One area that I expected to explode is the field of mobile payments. Unlike many new mobile trends, like location-services, the payment field is very mature with serious competitors who have been at it for decades. In order to successfully disrupt the market, contenders will need to overcome the following issues/barriers, all of which are critical to commercial success.
