Doing Words

HTC’s Android handset: the little droid that can’t

// November 10th, 2008 // 0 Comments // strategy

As fun to get to know as an early Linux install, for all the same reasons.

I’ve got no mobile clients at the moment but I’m a mobile geek so I’ve been watching with great interest to see what the market makes of the first handset to ship with Google’s Android mobile OS. I’m not surprised that it’s gotten a rave review by people who like to overclock their PC and a ho-hum review from people who just want something as easy to use as the iPhone but not from Apple. I’m surprised that Google and its partners really believe they can create an open architecture for mobile handsets that can compete with the seamless nature of the iPhone. I don’t think it can.

Everything that makes the iPhone such a revolutionary user experience depends on Apple’s ‘cathedral — its absolute control over hardware, operating system and applications. Even third-party applications are developed using Apple’s tools and marketed and delivered in a market tightly controlled by Apple.

Everything reviewers find disappointing about HTC’s first Android handset boils down to the difficulty in making a ‘bazaar’ product work – not controlling every aspect of the product and its software makes it harder design things that work smoothly.

Will the cathedral or the bazaar approach win out in the mobile handset market? Apple’s incredible success in the music player market suggests the cathedral is the model to adopt whenever you’re shipping high volumes of units to consumers who aren’t geeks – they just want something that works.

Google and its handset partners will probably garner a large and sustainable market of customers who like to take pride in their ability to configure, tweak and debug their Android handset, but that will always be a vastly smaller market than the number of people who just want to be delighted by how easy their phone is to use.

Android handsets will get better and better, but the capabilities will drift further apart over time, so that Android handsets will get better at specialist field applications – the sorts of things tablet PCs often do now — while the iPhone gets better at entertainment content and services.

People sometimes forget that Apple now owns a controlling stake in one of the biggest Hollywood studios, has very powerful relationships with what remains of the music industry, has a great set-top box (AppleTV), a robust delivery platform (iTunes) and is rapidly funding (presumably eventually to acquire) iPhone application developers.

Android may put price pressure on Apple, but we’ve seen with iPods how ready Apple is to crush competitors when it comes to price.

Could Google outmarket Apple? The word-of-mouth hype that created the Google behemoth was mostly an accident — byproduct of a bunch of people working really hard and keeping their heads down while the market watched with fascination. Google’s got no clue when it comes to marketing – how else to explain why they left their mobile platform with its original codename when they launched it? Is “Android” accessible? Cute? Sexy? Fun? Yeah, maybe if you like fiddling with code, but otherwise, probably not.

Spellrus.com redesign feedback

// November 8th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Reviews, Startup

Here’s a surprise: I hate spelling mistakes. But correct spelling is nothing without appropriate grammar, and good grammar won’t save you if you’re not writing or designing well. To see what I mean, let’s zoom in on some of the details of this redesign mockup for web spelling startup, Spellrus.com.

Kudos to the Spellrus team for putting an early stage redesign mockup up on their blog and asking for feedback from visitors. It takes courage and commitment to customer relationships and makes us users feel like part of the team.

Spell.rus redesign: could it be too free?

But it’s a shame that a spelling startup has itself a prominent grammar problem – the two different meanings of “free.” In this case I’d recommend removing both instances of “free” from the homepage because neither is as good as it could be.

Instead of “Free trial” consider something like, “Find the spelling errors on your site free!” (since that is the benefit of the offer). Don’t say “Free your site from spelling errors” because nobody’s looking for ‘freedom from spelling errors’ (or if they are, I haven’t seen the bumper sticker.)

Over-using “free” on a homepage makes you look a little desperate and cheap. Making it all upper case and adding exclamation marks everywhere heightens that impression.

Finally, consider moving the video tutorial to a ‘learn more’ section of the site. Casual visitors can skim and glean what they need from 4-5 bullet points and a few screendumps more quickly than they can from a 2-3min video.

Remember you have <10 secs to attract and retain a new visitor’s interest. The right time to use a video walk-thru is when the visitor is looking for more detail, especially for more detail on how the interface works. When they’re still making up their mind about committing 2-3mins to your product, hit them with punchy, brief bullets.

Giving, getting, and the Three Types of People

// November 3rd, 2008 // 0 Comments // Industry, Startup

Photo by Nite Scape

Whether it’s business or charity, the money almost never comes from where you expected — have you noticed?

Last weekend I took part in the Sydney to The Gong bike ride, a 90km social fund-raising event put on by the MS Society. Participating with 14,000 other cyclists, volunteers and support crews is inspirational. I try to raise some donations from friends and business contacts too.

I’ve been doing a lot of fund-raising lately; for Oxfam, another MS Society event, the Juvenile Diabetes Assocation, GetUp, the Smith Family, and for the Serkong School in the Himalayas. I’ve noticed that my ‘regular’ donors have started drying up as they received repeated requests for just a few dollars more. Fair enough, that’s expected.

But what’s unexpected is who donates. Every time, there have been high-net-worth friends who have the cash but don’t donate, and friends and colleagues of mine who I know are doing it tough, yet they donate generously and often. In between, there’s some noise in the data that ruffles the line on the graph — people I happen to catch on the right day, people who know someone affected by multiple sclerosis when I happen to be raising money for the MS Society. But it’s not hard to remove the noise and see that there’s only three types of people in this world:

1. People who give more than they take;
2. People who take more than they give; and
3. People who believe there are only n types of people in this world

Whether it’s raising funds for a charity, finding time to help refine the idea for a new business, or even the number of days outstanding on your accounts receivable, it’s always the same pattern.

Some believe the winner is the one who dies with the most toys, and every dollar you give away will take twice as much effort to earn back. Bills should never be paid until the last minute. Do unto others before they do unto you. (more…)

TechCrunch50 live on the web

// September 9th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Products, Startup

You could fly to San Francisco, be horrified at the cost of even a cheap hotel room, then spend USD500 just to be there, or you can watch the TechCrunch50 conference live on USTREAM and just pay the streaming bandwidth cost. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a USTREAM live video stream acceptably from Australia, so if that’s been the experience for you too, give this one a try – it seems to be working really well.

On the TechCrunch50 site you can skip directly to the video for each presenting startup immediately following their presentation.

iPhone App-onomics and prospecting for gold

// September 4th, 2008 // 0 Comments // software, Startup, strategy

Thirty minutes after installing 2.01 on my iPhone 2G I had purchased and downloaded 21 new iPhone apps. The whole experience – from finding to buying to downloading and installing – was so quick and easy that my credit card barely warmed up as the money drained away. I had to force myself to stop before I blew it. It was clear there was going to be quite a market for iPhone apps.

Later, I was talking to some friends who had a mind to start an iPhone App development business – would I like to be a part of it? Well, yes! Though the volatility of any new market can be a challenging place to start a business.

Weren’t they worried about planning for their business before the economics of iPhone apps was really clear? Beyond the obvious risk of not yet knowing how long it takes to build apps, how do you know what to charge and what your revenues are going to be? What the hot categories will be? How best to market your apps?

Their response was the right one: we don’t know, but the opportunities are as big as the risks – if we happen across a successful formula we could have a great business. I think that’s a great attitude and I hope to tell you more about this new Aussie iPhone App developer when the time is right.

Meantime, the volatility of a virgin App economy (“apponomy”?) trying to establish itself is becoming clear. Average prices for apps started way up, and now developers are concerned that prices for some apps have been cut in half, others have gone from paid to free. I think Marco Arment, the lead developer at Tumblr and developer of the iPhone App Instapaper, has it right when he predicts that app pricing should turn out to be fairly inelastic – that it shouldn’t matter whether you’re charging $2 or $10, the challenge is in getting someone to pay at all.

The problem with inelastic pricing is that it comes with significant momentum, both up and down. If consumers come to an Appstore and the average price for apps is $0.00, that makes it very difficult to charge even $2.00. If Apple had a problem with apponomics and decided to institute, say, a compulsory $2.00 charge for apps, that would set the expectation that apps are not free, and consumers would then be more likely to pay $5-$10 because of the perception that “apps are not free.”

The challenge for Marco and other developers trying to make a living doing this is: for most app developers, this is not a living, it is not even a main focus of work. Never mind the hobbyist developers doing it for fun, it’s the big businesses using Appstore as a marketing vehicle for their main desktop software that can really hurt your business. They don’t need iPhone customers, but they do need their desktop customers to have access to their software on their iPhone – those are two different things. A big software company that doesn’t really care about iPhone app revenues can really hurt your business if they’re in the same space.

Marco also talks about whether or not to make the iPhone version of Instapaper his main business and not developing any subsequent apps. His first app has been very successful: is he best to build on that success by developing more apps, or by improving the app he’s already built? Many would say to keep one foot in each camp, but Marco calls it right when he makes his decision: you double the complexity of your business and how it is affected by the volatility in the apponomy if you keep a foot in each camp.

The apponomy will settle down as it grows, though Apple may need to assist it in doing so – using the same email marketing it uses to promote music that will be popular on iTunes Store, featuring app developers on Apple.com and by supporting good developers with pricing breaks, free training and access to advice from the App platform development team. Whatever actions Apple takes, it needs to be fast, but subtle. Lots of small, incremental changes please – if they wear their hobnail boots as Apple sometimes does, it will only start the apponomy oscillating more wildly.

Meanwhile, this is a gold rush. Is there really gold in them thar hills, or is it just iron pyrite? There’s only so much you can learn from the greenhorns running out of the supply store with shovels and wheelbarrows. Sooner or later you have to buy your own shovel and go see for yourself… Marco, where’s the store?…

Mum’s the words

// May 22nd, 2008 // 0 Comments // Social Media, Startup, strategy, Writing

I’ve written before about the importance of developing great elevator pitches and business narratives, and about how often the best ones come from your customers, not your marketing team.

In the last week I was privileged to observe a group of passionate, involved customers do exactly this for Clay Cook, entrepreneur, angel investor and founder of Minti.com, an online support and advice community for new mums.

Clay had no budget to get some copy written in a hurry for a direct email shot out to a church email list. I heard about this when he Twittered, asking if anyone could help. I got in touch but I couldn’t really help.

It didn’t matter because in the meantime, Clay had a better idea: he already had an abundance of engaged, communicative, passionate Minti customers who would share a lot in common with the women on this group email list. Why not run a competition to see who could write the best email for Minti? (more…)

Let a thousand free web apps bloom!

// May 15th, 2008 // 0 Comments // platform, Startup

Tip of the hat to Jufemaiz for twittering Cycloloco.com’s cool web tool for making custom marker icons for Google Maps. Here’s a fun map using his icon in his honour.

This is exactly the kind of little friendly, free-or-nearly-free web tool that he and I are both rather excited about at the moment. Excited because (a) we think they’re The Future; and (b) because together we’re building one of our own.

More news as it comes to hand!

Getting right to the bones of a business story

// May 13th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Communication, Featured, Startup, Writing

Stephen Sammartino, founder of Rentoid.com, has a great article in Anthill magazine on the importance of good story-telling in business and the article is available online for free.

Blogs are about quick snippets, so here’s the upshot: practice, practice and more practice separates you and I from the great business story tellers of our age (Stephen uses Steve Jobs as a great example – have you ever watched Job’s address to Stanford University students? It’s incredible. I’ve added it at the end of this story.)

Sammartino makes a valuable point: don’t leave it until the moment it really counts to practice your business stories. When you meet that potential investor, you need your business stories polished to a high sheen. When you’re trying to engage a potential hire you really need, you want to set their imagination on fire. When you’re pitching to your first customers, you want them to be swept away. (more…)

Will you help Trippything?

// May 2nd, 2008 // 0 Comments // platform, Products, Startup

As some of you may know, Elliot and I are toiling away building TrippyThing, a website that turns unfriendly, jargon-heavy confirmation emails from travel booking services into understandable, friendly, shareable trip itineraries.

We hope to tell you more about our launch timeframe for TrippyThing soon.

Right now, we need your help to add to our collection of travel booking confirmation emails.

These are the emails you receive when you book a flight, room, car, etc. The more confirmation emails we receive, the more services TrippyThing will work with when we launch.

We need your help. We need you to send us as many booking emails as possible, from as many companies as possible. In return for your help, we promise to build a cracking-good web service that will save you heaps of time when you next book a trip. (more…)

Publishing your email address says, “please, spam me!”

// April 25th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Startup

A regular topic in my sermons to startup is the importance of disclosure, of opening the doors to your business to allow customers to learn about who works there, what they do, and how your culture differs from that of your competitors. In an age when so few companies ever meet a customer face-to-face, it’s vital to offer some online disclosure as a substitute.

But too much of any good thing can hurt you, including disclosure. Encourage your employees to blog about their work, write about your plans for your company as soon as the whiteboard notes have been copied onto your laptop, but please… don’t put your email address on a web page.

Despite evil bots hovering out there waiting to scrape up every email address that is published on the interweb and add it to a spam database, people still put their email address on web pages everywhere. The need to be contactable outweighs the pain of more spam. But it needn’t be that way.

There are a number of ways to hide or encrypt your email address when it is published on a web page, but many of these methods can be decrypted to allow a spambot to snag it. So why put the email address on the page at all? Why not use a form and a database?

I’ll tell you why not: forms and databases are dry, unleavened developerbread – I fall asleep every time somewhere between “records” and “fields.” Life’s too short.

Wufoo.com has many superpowers, not the least being some of the zushiest dynamic interface you’ll find on the interweb, making it easy-peasy to design a web form and the database that sits behind it.

You can build something as simple as an email feedback form (so that your email address remains unpublished) or something as schmancy as a 15 minute online survey form. Good CSS support means you can customise a form so that it looks like part of your website, but if that’s all a bit too hard, use Wufoo’s pre-designed templates and copy-and-paste the code into your web page. Job done.

Here’s one I built earlier for my About Page. When someone fills in the form, the details are taken down in a database I can access at the Wufoo site, and then the database emails me the contact request.

Believe me: absolutely no programming required. Sure, I still get spam, but mostly from my parents… another story…