Posted: April 24th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Social Shopping |
As a technologist, I am excited With the announcement by Facebook on Wednesday April 21th 2010 of various changes and additions to their exposed Social Networking platform services. Time will tell which one of them will have the most benefit for my craft and for consumer utility. Initially, I may be somewhat anal in finding the use of Open Auth 2.0 to authenticate oneself via Facebook credentials the most enticing. Was not looking forward to having to deal with Facebook Connect while the other networks we are integrating with namely Twitter and Foursquare would be following the Open Auth 2.0 route.
Was perusing the Facebook Developers’ website just now and seems like they have the site well funded with “how-tos” and examples in various scripting languages as well as for WAP devices and their more sophisticated and powerful Smartphone siblings. 
Will comment on a separate post after I actually “do it’ for the Social Shopping application that Jittr is developing. One of our driving requirements is the absolute punting away of any need for our own social networking duplication that can be leveraged by way of Facebook, Twitter or the budding Foursquare in the location space. Why bother? It is not out of laziness but out of practicality as users are tapped out interest, time and mental bandwidth of all the different sites and credentials that mushroomed like weeds during the social networking startup craze. Facebook and the small bunch have the platform and as such will get their share of the rewards but it is time to exploit that power for features that fully exploit the power of the winning networks and implicit trust that revolves around them. In many cases, and I believe that is good ,the network you tap into will be a microcosm of the multitude of real friends and fake friends that a typical Facebook user has accumulated since it’s grand opening beyond the college ranks a scant 4 years ago. What I mean , in practical terms, if my daughter wants to craft a social shopping event with only a small subset of friends and none other, then there has to be a way to keep it that way. Well practically, as in any human interaction with groups of people, there is always the chance for someone to betray the circle of trust or secrecy. Applications must expand the capability at low interaction costs to craft a subset of a larger network for whatever their intent is , Social Shopping, Social Gaming , etc . The closer these platforms do so the closer they become to simulating the way most human interaction occurs. We are all part of a multitude of social networks but most sane rational folks parcel out what each one of them knows or is involved in at any point in time.
On a grander note, and this idea just came to me as I was wondering how to get the deal at the local supermarket without having that supermarket’s loyalty card , the ubiquity of Facebook and the pace they are moving to be the authoritative signin to the Web, why not just leverage that to be the identity I provide for the myriad discount and loyalty cards which I have and which I don’t have because I can’t stand to have another card in my wallet or ring on my keychain.
I mean, truly at some point all of this technology and capability we surround ourselves with have to make a major impact in simplifying our lives. One way to simplify would be to just not care and carry no cards at all BUT wouldn’t it be better to get the benefit, the merchant get’s the benefit and all at truly negligible thought and cost.
Posted: April 21st, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Product Stream, Social Shopping |
Was reading another post on TechCrunch concerning Social Shopping startup named Mertado that had just secured funding of about $1 million. All the right buzzwords are stuffed into the article including viral, personalization,recommendations which pop out from my initial read.
Site leverages Facebook Social Network and Facebook Connect as an integration point outside of the facebook site which makes as much sense as going to the bank to ask for a loan (well at least in the old days) as that is where the people are.
If I can distill the value to its barest form, the service provides “deals” that are targeted to me based on my Facebook profile as well as on my interaction with my Facebook network of friends sharing particular deals and the end result of whether or not there is a purchase transaction.
With the continued march forward of Smartphones with all their smart features and the purchase and adoption of these devices with their Global Positioning Systems ,digital cameras and mobile application frameworks , everyone with a spare neuron is jumping on the bandwagon of becoming the breakout product to tie the social , local , mobile mantras together for the common purpose of selling more things.
So what does Mertado actually offer me? At first glance, a chance to purchase at a deep discount from MSRP like anyone actually sells at MSRP. Going to their website brought to mind the websites that my former employer had for discounted wares for employees. Usually on closer inspection the deals were not that good and if Wal-Mart had it in stock it did cheaper. Logging into the site via my Facebook credentials did provide more interesting if slightly social twist as the right rail also depicted other users who were “viewing” a particular deal. The deals I saw though limited and easy to go from first to last in no time, did have a few things of interest to me , like a Deep Fryer for my frying needs and a few other odds and ends. That’s a Crockpot for as low as $16 dollars and change in the photo below. When I took the screenshot I still had 31 + hours to make up my mind if I wanted to take that deal. Given this was the first time I was on the site , no amount of personalization was possible or expected.
Crockpot
I would say though I was not overwhelmed and nothing but Wal-Mart and it’s falling prices and quick checkouts overwhelms me in the shopping arena, the site did not underwhelm me either and I did find it “neat” to view the apparently random Facebook users that were viewing the same offer. Why? I don’t know, perhaps the voyeuristic nature of these Web Social Networks. Though given the chance to broadcast and invite my selected friends to partake in the app, I passed on that honor and now ritual as I usually find it not worth the keystroke to delete the invites when I get similar invites from my large circle of Facebook friends.
I still have a nagging feeling or question surrounding the utility of recommendations surrounding deals like deep fryers and Men’s Cologne splash water and such. Yes there is a value to it , I grant you that but they are generally such inconsequential transactions that it’s almost not worth the bother. And will I buy a deep fryer because somehow based on my profile they know I like deep fried foods? The answer is maybe, I can be like most people convinced to buy things I don’t really need.
Frankly, in my crystal ball I feel all these initiatives will largely be a bust. I still believe that the person with the sandwich board handing out 2 for 1 near or in front of the store is a most effective manor of getting spontaneous like engagement to strike a deal. That is why I am more bullish on the Foursquare model centered around location services and where I am now married with the knowledge of what I have already frequented either in the same general location or in a similar category.
Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, New York City Startup |
Well, back from our sponsors -
What does Foursquare have going for it
- Engagement! The apparent leader in the Location based checkin realm. Being the leader here is still about relatively small numbers. I heard they may be around 1 million registered users but equally if not more important is how many of them are actually truly engaged on a regular basis checking in their whereabouts.
Notwithstanding the normal privacy concerns that surround things of this nature that are new, as the capabilities to do more accurate location targeting and the spreading of smartphones that can take advantage of that capability and the utility becomes real, people will adopt it. To stretch an analogy , using E-Z Pass for automated toll collection provides a government entity with your presumed location assuming you are driving your own car for the benefit of passing through a toll without the normal wait at the manned toll booths. Not quite apples to apples comparison but there was a hesitancy at it’s outset related to the Big Brother aspect.
- Tendency for more limited network. Though there is nothing that stops one from having a Foursquare network as vast as the typical Facebook Friends network, the tendency of users to limit the number of friends that know where they may be at a moment in time acts as a braking factor on the size of an individual network of friends. You can assume that could make a individual’s Foursquare social network a more valuable artifact.
- Budding commercial relationships With the likes of Starbucks, NYTimes and others. I can imagine the behavioral targeting if the location specific data could/would be merged with business establishments, Can imagine Gevalia increasing their upsell to me seeing I am the mayor of various Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. Of course I would not agree to a syndication of my distinct detailed personalized whereabouts but perhaps there is a way to make utility of the aggregated view including Badges and Mayorships.
- Simple Web Service APIs. A must for 3rd parties using the platform to integrate with Foursquare. The more 3rd parties integrate and provide twists and functionality to the inherent proposition of Foursquare, the greater the likelihood of Foursquare becoming the de-facto standard for a a location specific Social Network.
Of course we can see a replay of the situation with Twitter and 3rd parties where after 3rd party developers move the ubiquity along for Twitter as a platform, the business needs of Twitter itself force the cannibalization of much of what the 3rd parties developed.
What’s Going against Foursquare
- Low Barriers to entry. Location services are baked into the smartphone devices themselves with well defined interfaces. The Venue data can be and is licensed from aggregators. Search indexes that provide proximity searches are relatively simple to setup using Open Source packages like Local Solr based on Lucene.
- Utility for the user. Yes, the Gaming aspect is fun especially if your network of friends gets vicarious thrill of winning mayorships and badges. Medium-term for an individual the fun wears out without a commensurate return of some value. This is where the budding relationship with businesses may accrue benefits for the users as inducements and true rewards for loyalty to an establishment become the norm. Perhaps Foursquare can become the de-facto standard for loyalty programs especially for the large number of small and mid sized establishments that currently do not have the capability to have one of their own. Of course there is still a lot to do technically to prevent gaming of location and visits.
- Stability of the Application. By this I mean the predilection to crash especially on the iPhone where I most commonly use it. Typical of the fast moving Web space is that applications/sites are mutating so fast that a proper testing regime is not followed and buggy code is pushed out. So far it has been a minor inconvenience for me mostly because I am biased understanding the price you pay for rapid iterative development where your users are the ultimate testing ground. Most users outside of Technology won’t have such a forgiving nature.
What do I think of the valuations floating around upwards of $125 Million? I feel that at the moment, the scale of that number is obscene. Now if I knew the future with absolute clarity and could see that 1 or 2 years from now Foursquare would be the standard platform for location based services and have a user footprint in the space approaching Twitter’s 50 million users , the current floated valuation would pale in comparison. Michael Arrington has a good post in Techcrunch arguing against their selling out at the moment. Nevertheless having that sum of money dangled in front of you for what amounts to about 1 year’s worth of work of a small team with a relatively small investment of $1 .5 million, the discipline to stair it down and roll the dice on your own would be prodigious.
Posted: April 18th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Startup |
Of two minds when I read the press about the apparent bidding up of Foursquare , a barely 1 year old New York City startup in the Location based products arena. Of course, as a principal in my own mobile based startup Jittr , it gives me that added inducement to keep on plugging away long hours and potentially breakout in the same manor. I am a heavy user of Foursquare, being the proud mayor of 10 establishments and growing. On the other, incredulity sets in. Where is the inherent value that would drive such an inflated valuation? Given the names such as Yahoo or even Google that are apparently interested (and throw in AOL though restricted from acquisitions over $100 Million for the moment), big companies with to much money $$$ and time on their hands come to mind.
Here is the essense of Foursquare. It is a Location based gaming platform where one “checks in” to establishments one visits, say your regular early morning visit to Starbucks and score points for visits depending on varying factors such as how many in one day, how widely widely distributed over the course of the day. Enough visits to one establishment over time has the potential to reward you with the Mayorship of that establishment Badge. Of course it is not a solitary game as you are competing against all other active games who may be checking into the same places you are.
The well done integration with the large social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook provide the vehicle to be constantly broadcasting to a much wider audience your whereabouts and your game scores and achievements including Mayorships and “Badges” procured.
I personally use Foursquare primarily from my iPhone but from time to time from my Android powered Droid phone. It is meant to be a smartphone accessed application though it has a relatively austere Website.
From a technology point of view, it is quite simple, leveraging the GPS that all smartphones now provide to surface coordinates (latitude and Longitude) which drives a Web Service search to establishments/places nearby from which you can then choose the actual one you are visiting. If the list of nearby venues does not include the one you are at , you can add it via the application and then check it. All of the above usually can happen during the short time you are on line picking up a cup of coffee at your neighborhood Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts. I strongly suspect they have licensed a feed of venues from one of the few listings aggregators ie InfoUSA, Axion plus they provide the ability of adding your own venue. This broadens the venue pool to those non retail locations such as Parks, subway stations, your own home. For instance, I am the mayor of Jittr Headquarters and I have regularly checked in at the 68th street number 6 subway station in Manhattan which is next to Hunter College in New York City.
These large companies that are ostensibly interested in Foursquare would have the wherewithal to develop their own application with identical functionality in little time measured in 2 months at most. Since they already probably license the same data (save for those individually added places) the incremental costs of licensing content would be negligible at most and since they already possess Social networking products, you can assume the right integration would bring with it the necessary pool of potential users immediately. Though Foursquare is the leader in this location based gaming at the moment and I have heard of about 1 million registered users, that still pales in comparison to Twitter’s (50 million registered users) or Facebook’s (half a billion) making the space still open as no one has a significant user base that gives it the momentum of true breakout and uncatchable leader.
Then why the inflated values being talked up in the Trade Press? I will go into that after a word from our sponsors…
Posted: April 10th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Amazon Web Services, Cloud Computing |
Needing a search engine for a current under-development Mobile Application, I decided to follow the route of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) running SOLR which is a version of Lucene with a nice XML over HTTP interface. This is part 1 of a multi part post as I meander my way to a truly production ready , fully stacked Search engine capability including the persistent data stores that will feed the Search Engine indexing operations. A good reason for this blog is solely as documentation for what I have done to get there. There is plenty of documentation surrounding Amazon Web Services including Amazon’s official documentation but at least for me , it all appears disjointed at times, dated and not correct at least as the current apis and services work and getting something done for a “newbie” and I am stretching the definition of that term can often times be grueling or at least more time consuming then it has to or should be.
The first part of the series of posts will have as it’s conclusion an instance of SOLR powered by the version of Jetty that comes with the SOLR build. I will follow up with a Tomcat powered version of SOLR in part 2 or 3 of the post. For now, just wanted to make the exercise more about getting you own functional AMI instance configured, defined, registered and launchable.
So here goes nothing;
First, my JittrSolr (Jittr is my company) AMI instance I built was initially based on the Fedora Core 8 (AMI Id: ami-b232d0db)
Minimal Fedora Core 8, 32-bit architecture, Apache 2.0, and Amazon EC2 AMI Tools.
First I downloaded the two packages I will need to add to the base Fedora Machine Instance to my local machine. They are
jre-6u19-linux-i586-rpm.bin for java and apache-solr-1.3.0.tar for SOLR.
*NOTE – I could have saved the download and upload cycle by just using “wget” from the command line of the Fedora Machine but I did not have the exact url for the download package. That will be for a future exercise. It is a time saver of sorts because the upload to the Amazon Machine Instance was time-consuming. We are talking minutes not hours but during those minutes you are simply waiting and 12 cents an hour, though you are not going to break the bank , every minute does count.
Firing up a Machine Instance through the AWS console and then obtaining the secure shell commandline string to connect to the machine instance
ssh -i imac.pem root@ec2-174-129-66-51.compute-1.amazonaws.com
I am ready for the first part of uploading the two packages to the Machine Instance.
*NOTES – the ssh command string will change depending on the machine domain you have been allotted and the actual key pair you assigned to the instance when you were instantiating it. For convenience and since I don’t need anything else, I just use the native terminal program that comes with Mac Snow Leopard.
Also, make sure the security group you choose when configuring the Machine images has the port 8983 open for http. This is the port SOLR uses to listen for search requests.
I use secure copy (scp) from my local machine’s terminal session to upload the two aforementioned packages.
scp -i ~/Desktop/ec2/imac.pem ~/Desktop/ec2/packages/java/jre-6u19-linux-i586-rpm.bin root@ec2ec2-174-129-66-51.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/root
scp -i ~/Desktop/ec2/imac.pem ~/Desktop/ec2/packages/solr/apache-solr-1.3.0.tar root@ec2ec2-174-129-66-51.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/root
Both packages are uploaded to the /root directory of the Machine Instance. Connecting to the Machine Instance using the ssh string detailed above and performing a little housekeeping from the machine instance /root directory
To validate I have the stock , simple SOLR working
-
cd /usr/local/apache-solr-1.3.0/examples
- java -jar start.jar
to start up the SOLR instance
- Entering “http://ec2174-129-66-51.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8983/solr/”
within a browser should now give you the “Welcome to Solr” page with a link to the admin panel of Solr.
Note – as stated above you must have port 8993 for http open in your security group for this to work.
From the terminal session of the machine instance, now comes time to package your configuration and system software and then register it as a private machine instance.
-
ec2-bundle-vol -d /tmp -k /root/pk-???.pem -u [Your AWS AccountID] -s 2048 -c /root/cert-???.pem
Will bundle the machine image into the /tmp directory. I did have to upload both my private key and certificate. Various documentation stated I did not need the certificate but it would not work without it. Also, though I used the -s option for the image size, some documentation I reviewed stated it was best to leave it to ec2 to decide. There was a lot of trial and error. It worked with -s 2048. Also , the -u option is your AWS Account ID which you can view if you have not memorized it from you AWS Account Web page. I removed the “-”’s but I did see comments where people having problems getting the command to work fixed the problems by reintroducing the “-”’s. It worked for me with no dashes.
-
ec2-upload-bundle -b jittrsolr -m /tmp/image.manifest.xml -a YOUR_ACCESS_KEY -s YOUR_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
Will upload the machine image to Amazon’s S3 in the bucket defined by the -b argument. The bucket will be created if it doesn’t exist.
the -a and -s arguments are for your Access Key and Secret Access key respectively which are also available from your AWS Account web page in the Access Credentials section.
-
ec2-register jittrsolr/image.manifest.xml -n jittrsolr_small
Finally to register your new Machine Image executed from your local terminal session , not the Machine Instance terminal sessiopn
-
ec2-describe-images -o self
If all as gone as planned, you should see your new private instance listed.
It will also be listed on the AWS EC2 Console in the Private AMI tab
Posted: April 6th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Technology |
Maybe I am just getting older or maybe I am just a simpleton or maybe both are true but as I dive into the mobile space with concentration on the iphone and Android smartphones, I am liking the simplicity of the user interface. I have always liked it of course though before the iphone I would rarely and mostly by accident fire up a mobile browser. I was acclimated to basic uses such as using the phone of course, calendaring, sms , very simple email responses and not much else. Though those are still main uses for me as well as great majority of people, with the advent of cleaner interfaces either though native apps or mobile aware websites that adapt layout when consumed within a smartphone embedded browser, I now feel that in many instances I get the core proposition of the utility or value of the particular website without all the extraneous stuff that needs to fill the space on a normal Desktop browser environment. In fact, though at the outset I was ok with websites that didn’t adapt to the viewport of the device browser and was content to zoom and pan around to make the content accessible on the smaller screen, I know generally just bail from sites that through laziness or not “with it”, do not adapt to the device’s dimensions and thereby force me to “actively” work to consume their content on a phone’s browser.
Though I have spent most of my time with the Android Development Kit, both it and the iphone variant (no time yet for iPad) are well organized in terms of having common artifacts for most of the useful interactions one needs with a typical Smartphone application. Though there are other possibilities including just customizing the presentation for a normal Browser application for the smaller real estate on a phone using the “user_agent” string of the requesting device, the programming languages of choice for the native full featured phone processing Applications are java for Android and objective C for the iphone.
In the end, there is something attractive for me both as a developer and a user for the move back to a state of simplicity and austerity.
Of course, I mean solely for what the ultimate consumer of those applications sees. For those that must dive into the Android Development Kit to actually build those applications , it is eye-popping both the richness of what is available natively within the Java based APIs , the plugins for Integrated Development Environments like Eclipse but similarly eye-popping is the shear magnitude of the different code workflow/artifacts that are used to construct a fully functioning Android Application. Many developers and development groups have become proficient in putting it all together since the first release of the Android code base over 2 years ago as evidenced by the 10’s of thousands of Android applications in the Market. Nonetheless, even the best of development teams require a significant ramp up time to gain familiarity , for the platform to evolve into a more robust and reliable platform (Android 2.1 was just released in Late February early March 2010) and for a foundation of relevant code to serve both as tutorial material and base for further extension for new application features. Building Smartphone applications does not represent rebuilding all that has gone on the past decade in the Internet space. The richness of Web Services exposing the plethora of functionality is equally suitable in many cases unaltered to serve the data services needs of your typical Smartphone application.
One thing I hope to avoid at least for now are the sundry challenges making all of the markup and Frontend code like Javascript work across various browsers with their pesky quirks. Of course I will have to deal with perhaps more esoteric anomalies on different handsets implementation of the entire Android stack. Hopefully Google has learned something from the challenges that Microsoft has had over the decades customizing their Operating System to all the different Hardware manufacturers’ specifications. One advantage that Apple possesses in this battle is the absolute control of the both the software and hardware stacks. That makes the number of possible permutations that need testing and support appreciably more manageable.
Posted: March 22nd, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Startup, Technology |
Trying an experiment in Product development this coming week. I spoke to my daughter about some ideas surrounding “Social Shopping” over the week to gather what she thought of the idea. Of course, anything to do with shopping will immediately get her attention no matter how crazy the actual Product Idea may be. It is enlightened self interest on her part. With no money, no source of money and little chance of that changing anytime soon, if she needs to hear a pitch and go through the observations of the shopping habits of teenage girls, all she knows is she will be in a shopping environment with someone who has money (me) and who is a sucker for any whim she may have (once again me).
So what is Social Shopping one may ask? Well , I would suspect it is the antithesis of how I shop at least when it is of the bricks and mortar variety. Of course when shopping online like on Amazon I do make liberal use of the Reviews to guide my purchase (or non purchase depending on the gist of the reviews). In the bricks and mortar variety shopping experience which is still the predominant means of shopping, the only thing social about me is making sure no one gets in my way to obtain the article I have already decided to purchase and similarly on the mad dash to the checkout line. Thankfully I am the exception instead of the rule. With the ubiquity of online social networking, the exploding smartphone engagement with all sorts of services tied together including photos, video, search, location services and the penchant to shop of teenage girls regardless of all messaging that they should deal with more outer worldly things, we are poised for the killer app that will tap into all of these forces to magnify the shopping experience so that the romp to “the mall” can take on the force of the virtual romp to the Mall.
What are some of the characteristics of this presumed killer application.
- Doesn’t introduce yet another Social Network but leverages the existing winners in the space, Facebook, Twitter specifically and presumably FourSquare in the Location based services realm
- Doesn’t get in the way of the activity of social shopping so it has to be very easy to use and unobtrusive. Outside of quick checkin or setup.
- A tough one; has to aggressively protect privacy but still maintain flexibility allowing the user to easily define how restrictive or open to make the Social Shopping “event” . With the main demographic being teenage girls, adoption would be impaired if parents caught wind of gaps in privacy that could put their child at risk of the perverts in society.
- Is patterned after Web mashup but optimized for speed. Checkin or definition of shopping event, tying in messages/photos and all forms of communication revolving around that event. Syndication to only the chosen network of
users party to that event whether in person or virtually via the social network.
- Acts like a persistent store of the “event” after the fact. ie The pictures of posing with different outfits
Posted: March 16th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Technology |
Not like Mobile’s wave has just recently hit us. I have had a cell phone since early 1990’s , I believe 1993 to be exact, It was a monster by today’s standard with it’s own case and not a case that would fit in one’s pocket. I forget if it was Verizon Wireless or it’s predecessor that powered the network. The pricing plan was such that you would treat each minute or part thereof as precious.
If I look at the last 17 years of cell phone usage at least in my household, talking on the phone is still one of the main activities but with kids now on my plan, I would say that text messaging has definitely risen to the top as the predominant use. In fact, I had to get the unlimited text/sms plan as not even 1,500 monthly messages was enough to satisfy my oldest child. Though I am tolerant, Mom is not when during dinner night outs he is consistently looking down on his lap where he keeps the phone reviewing and responding to an endless stream of sms messages. AS for me coming from a generation with a different set of social norms I am even more discrete and generally only take the phone out while waiting on a line usually at a Starbucks line or some other pause/waiting moment including yes long Redlights.
Where is this all going and why is 2010 now the year of mobile at least if you read and listen to the intelligentsia from the likes of Techcrunch? Perhaps most notably it’s because according to certain reports the engagement of the web via mobile has or is soon poised to surpass the conventional desktop/laptop engagement via a laptop. The referenced TechCrunch post though positive from mobile’s increase in engagement doesn’t indicate anything like half of engagement coming from mobile but I also believe engagement defined as strictly the consumption of standard browser based web pages is leaving out plenty of the modes of engagement that are optimized for mobile such as email, photo taking and uploading, managing one’s assortment of different calendars, short busts of status information such as twitter, Location services of all sorts from the useful like driving directions to the trite like checking into a business establishment via FourSquare and perhaps becoming a mayor of some random Dunkin Donuts.
As major publishers adapt their websites to provide an experience conducive to viewing and consuming on the small real estate of the typical smartphone screen real estate , more and more of my web consumption will move to the phone. Though I still usually park myself on the desktop to read the nytimes.com site every morning, their iphone application is engineered to making the consumption of news via my phone easy on the eyes and overall quite pleasing.
I believe there is still a lot outside of the normal and some would say trite uses of the Mobile device that needs investigation and development. It is something we all carry with us all the time and for those like me that use it as an alarm clock as well, it is on my person or nearby 24 hours a day. It should or at least for some can become the remote of choice for all things that can be monitored or managed via software signals including the home of the future where all gadgets and appliances will be smart at least if smart means a computer chip and set of hardware and software interfaces used for communication and management.
In fact, here is a link to Silicon Alley Insider Post that was published as I was writing that speaks about the evolving trend of the iPhone to become that centralized remote control.
Any smartphone can eventually serve the same purpose I suppose and even less then smartphones. Back in the day it was common to setup AOL Instant Messenger BOTS that could take commands streamed as IMs and respond in kind whether for Movie listings, or anything for that matter. May seem like a low technology angle but you can envision BOTs waiting at our disposal for all sorts of activities. The imagination is the limit.
Posted: March 11th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Startup, Technology |
Foursquare Badges & Mayorship
EDITS on Thursday Evening March 11,2010
Is someone reading my blog?
Starbucks and Foursquare
Been giving serious thought to why I take the trouble to check-in my locations via Foursquare and less often via Gowalla. Well I do have an understanding why centered around the gaming aspect of winning badges, becoming mayor of my own Subway station or frequented Starbucks. But outside of this very basic gaming angle and the pride of being Mayor of an out of the way Dunkin Donuts in Whitestone, Queens , what utility is actually being driven for me?
Over time, and the time may be near, I can imagine the utility to the business establishments and franchises that I visit having access to the stream of information about who ,when and how often folks are frequenting their establishments.To what extent FourSquare aware and engaged folks are representative of the demographic of any particular establishment’s customer base is probably up in the air but at least at the current moment, I doubt they are very representative. Also part of the information is already gleaned from the cash register of course and I don’t know to what extent users of Foursquare or like minded products will allow anything “private” to be divulged to the venues they visit.
Representative or not, as the location service increases in breadth whether through the likes of Foursquare/Gowalla or by other Local sites ie Yelp comes to mind adopting this as a platform feature , over time the collected data will be more then about just the early adopter, wiz-bang type of person.
What will drive mass adoption? I don’t believe that mass adoption will occur until the act of checking in is instrumented to be so easy and automatic that one doesn’t even think about it. Often times I start checking in while waiting on line , say at a Starbucks which is notorious for long lines especially in New York City, and I have still not completed the checkin process by the time I have reached the barrister to place my order. It should be like E-Z Pass , the automated toll collection system spear-headed in New York City for the traffic choked toll lines across all the river crossings. You go through a special lane and the rest is done via transponder on the E-Z Pass side and conceptually the same for the “Checkin” side.
But now I am back to the crux of the question,
what is in it for me?
From a social networking perspective, I am more selective of the “friends” chosen. They represent people I have known personally for some time and in all likelihood interacted with them on a social basis including outside of work. That selectivity can be powerful especially compared to the “whoring” that goes on on Facebook where it appears the concept of Friends is severely deprecated. Foursquare doesn’t put any limitations on the extent of my social graph but the nature of the service makes one more hesitant to just accept anyone as a “friend”.
I imagine the selectivity in growing one’s Foursquare network is not just innate to myself but will be a generally accepted principle. If that turns out to be the case the usefulness of that network will be magnified. In it’s most simple venue based extension, I can learn about or take as recommendations establishments I should try based on my own network’s frequenting of those establishments.
Or better yet, as a business establishment looking to extend my reach I can tap into a customer’s Foursquare network (with their permission of course) to make offers available that would entice potential new customers.
Though I can see lots of potential in the limited network of my Foursquare friends. it is also possible to intersect with a feature that allows things/events to be “pushed” to me depending on what specific locale I happen to be at the moment. A totally made up and unfathomable example, a theater’s ticket sales are lagging as showtime nears at 8pm on Broadway. Why not blast out a last minute appeal to those that may be enticed and in the area with discounts or other inducement to fill the seats that may otherwise go wanting.
Posted: March 7th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Technology, Technology Outsourcing |
I was communicating with an ex Software Engineer report of mine the other day asking how things were going in my old company. Without going into much detail about extraneous things, he volunteered that “most of the work was moving to India” , that he and the rest of the team stateside didn’t have much individual responsibility or work to do but that they were spending most of the time hand-holding the people they were collaborating with in India. He used the ratio 60 to 1 (60 hours to do what he could do in one hour).
That ratio in my estimation is a wild exaggeration but it is not totally off in certain respects.
The biggest problem in my experience with productivity of software engineering outsourced to India is in the realm of managing towards overall effectiveness not solely the metric of cost. Of course, outsourcing a high wage activity such as software engineering to a much lower wage rate location will reduce gross engineering costs at least in the short-term. Accomplishing that is as deterministic as anything within the raft of different resourcing options any company has at it’s disposal.
If that metric is the sole determinant of success, the company following this approach will be measuring success or failure on a metric that anyone with a calculator or the most basic business sense can appear to succeed at.
The true measure should be similar to how employee investment Rate of Return is determined stateside or anywhere else in the world. What am I getting in terms of value for my investment? And since in this particular case I am talking about the Web business, how is the time to market impacted in outsourcing these critical activities to bring goods to market?
Software Development is an esoteric craft or at least treated that way by many folks who have decision making or sign off authority for outsourcing this important function. The cost in time and opportunity lost by the Stateside developers having to support in numerous ways
- providing business context
- providing elaboration usually nuanced on product requirements
- reviewing for standard implementations
the effort from India as well as trying to do their job is rarely a point of consideration.
From the aforemetioned one would assume I am against outsourcing to India. The fact is I am not, I have had success with it (and some quite bumpy rides as well) and if done for the right reasons
- abundant supply of of young Software Engineers
- a timezone that coupled with Timezones within the USA can result in a follow the sun iteration (this is not for the faint of heart. It is easier said then done)
- Better context of what works in the India or Asia Pacific Rim if the product is being tailored for that market
- And of course, a positive cost benefit for your efforts
A criterion for Success is to make the India team especially it’s India based management strictly accountable for the efforts of the India based Development staff. That may seem obvious and it is but usually for reasons of expediency a Program manager or a stateside liaison is the point of contact obscuring the true accountable parties for success of an India Development center.
To be continued….
Outsourcing Software Development Part One
