Stritar's chronolog

Force touch is the new multi-touch

Mon, 14 Sep 2015 22:12:37 GMT

When I first saw the video demonstrating Force Touch on one of Huawei’s new phones a few weeks ago, I found the feature pretty much useless. You have this amazing new sensor, and a scale application is the best you can do with it? Supposedly, the Chinese manufacturer has beaten Apple at introducing this new feature, but the fact is, Apple has done something completely different. The ~~Force Touch~~ 3D Touch - iOS integration has the potential to change the way we interact with our phones, in a similar way than multi-touch gestures did years ago.

Surely, there will be subtle modifications in next iterations, but the concept is there and it seems to work. And the results look like a crazy hybrid between a right click, the Spacebar Quick Look preview in Mac OS (which is one operating system's best features in general) and multi-touch gestures on steroids.

Demonstration of the 3D Touch technology with iPhone 6S and iOS 9.

Multi-touch revolutionised user interaction when the iPhone was introduced, but it hasn’t changed much in the past 8 years, even though newer and better gestures have been introduced. But now, a new layer has been added to the equation, and it seems that the flat, layered concept of the new iOS finally received its cherry. App developers, are you ready to play?

Apple's position of controlling both hardware and software has yet again proven itself solid, and Google will surely have quite a hard job to push this component across its platform to such extent.

Cool Slovenian brands, part 3: The rise of the Slovenian hardware startup

Tue, 07 Oct 2014 08:55:53 GMT

I've been writing about Slovenian startups for years now. In a post I published in the beginning of 2012, I've highlighted a few Slovenian companies there were able to gain global traction, and as you can see, all of them are focused on software. About a year later, I wrote on the topic again, and this time, the spotlight was on a new generation of companies, which were fueled by Kickstarter and the crowdfunding movement. These businesses were able to find their market with niche products that were interesting to the public mostly because of their innovative design. This year, I'll focus on the third generation of Slovenian technology startups, represented by companies that were able establish something that actually seems so logical today: the rise of the Slovenian hardware startup.

This is basic evolution. Slovenians know how to make great software. We were always known to have had exceptional designers. Besides, there are plenty of outstanding engineers from previous and current generations that were able to produce global success stories with high-tech products such as exhaust systems, ultra-light planes, solar panels and even sailing yachts. Put the three together, and what you get, is a modern hardware startup. Because most hardware startups that want to compete globally, require these three components:

awesome software (1st generation)
awesome design (2nd generation)
awesome hardware (3rd generation)

Currently, there are at least 16 hot Slovenian hardware startups, who managed to reach global audience, receive funding via Kickstarter or investors, or have great potential to disrupt specific industries. Most are focused on uprising technologies, such as the Internet of Things and Quantified Self. Others are simple gadgets that help fuel the mobile revolution. All of them are focused on niche markets that did not exist five years ago.

I'm really glad Slovenian entrepreneurs were able to focus on these new fields, because the modern hardware market is not something anyone can compete in. You need specific skills from many fields, especially software, design and engineering. And Slovenians are exceptional in all of them. This is why this third generation of Slovenian startups perhaps has the biggest potential of them all. The community is strong as ever, heck, some are already joining forces in making cool mashups. And they need your help as well: know them, like them, support them, buy them!

Here they are, the hottest Slovenian hardware startups, together with a few highligths of their stories so far:

Beezinga

Beezinga is an early warning analytical system about events in remote apiaries. Beezinga - Google analytics for beekeepers.
Highlights: Wins ImagineCup 2013 (Apr '13), gets covered by TechCrunch (Jul '13) and others (Jul '13).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~500
Links: beezinga.com, @beezingahive, FB: BeezingaHive

Bellabeat

Hear, visualize and share your unborn baby's heartbeat with our pocket size heart rate monitor and a mobile app.
Highlights: Joins Y Combinator (Feb '14), gets covered by ABC News (Mar '14), raises additional $4.5M (May '14), introduces 3 new products (Sep '14).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~9.700
Links: bellabeat.com, @GetBellaBeat, FB: bellabeat

CarLock

CarLock is an affordable and easy to use solution for monitoring your car's location.
Highlights: Joins StartLabs (Jan '14), gets featured in Auto Express Magazine (Apr '14) and Top Gear Magazine (Jun '14).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~6.150
Links: carlock.co, @Carlock6, FB: carlock

Chipolo

Chipolo™ is a Bluetooth item finder for iPhone & Android. And it comes in 9 gorgeous colors.
Highlights: Raises almost $300k on Kickstarter (Nov '13), appears on TechCrunch (Nov '13) and TheNextWeb (Dec '13), is available on Amazon UK (Jun '14).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~4.300
Links: chipolo.net, @Chipolo, FB: ChipoloTM

CubeSensors

CubeSensors are small, cordless and connected devices that help you maintain a healthy and productive indoor environment.
Highlights: Wins TechCrunch hardware battlefield (Jan '14), raises $700k (Jun '14), appears on HardWired (Jul '14), is shipping from stock (Sep '14).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~2.000
Links: cubesensors.com, @CubeSensors, FB: cubesensors

Daisy.si

Daisy.si is an amazing new independent portable all-in-one design smart plant watering device.
Highlights: Raises $26k on Indiegogo (Jun '14), gets covered by multiple sources (Apr '14).
Total fans (TW + FB): N/A
Links: daisy.si

enolyse

Platform for family winemakers to improve fermentation and save time.
Highlights: Wins start:Cloud 2013 (Oct '13), becomes Slovenian start-up 2014 finalist (May '14), Joins LAUNCHhub (May '14).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~650
Links: enolyse.com, @enolyse, FB: enolyse

FlyKly

FlyKly Street Smart. Smart tools for smarter urban transportation.
Highlights: Gets covered by Engadget (Oct '13), CNET (Oct '13) and others, Raises $700k on Kickstarter (Oct '13), appears on PopSci (Feb '14).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~23.500
Links: flykly.com, @flykly, FB: flyklybike

H2O-Pal

The Hydration Tracker That Works Perfectly With Your Smartphone.
Highlights: Gets covered by TechCrunch (Oct '13), appears on CES (Jan '14), becomes Slovenian start-up of 2014 (May '14).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~5.300
Links: h2opal.com, @H2OPal, FB: h2opal

Lumu

Lumu is a light meter for your smartphone. It helps you create powerful memories anytime, anywhere.
Highlights: Gets covered by The Verge (May '13) and TheNextWeb (Jun '14), Raises $244k on Kickstarter (Jul '13).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~6.250
Links: lu.mu, @Lumu, FB: lumu.meter

MESI (Qualcomm Tricoder XPRIZE)

Our solution is to bring the doctor into your home. It consists of a wristband, wearable shield, mobile app and 4 modules.
Highlights: Becomes finalist of XPRIZE (Aug '14), appears on TheNextWeb (Aug '14).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~800
Homepage: mesimedical.com, @MESImedical, FB: MESIdoo

Monolyth

Monolyth is internet connected device for your AC unit, optimizing air temperature & quality for your comfort and energy savings.
Highlights: Gets covered by Digital trends (Jul '14) and others (Jul '14), tries with Indiegogo (Aug '14).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~650
Homepage: monolyth.co, @MonolythCo, FB: monolyth.co

OIVO

Oivo is the smallest charger on the go for iPhone. No cables, no AC power, no fuss. Just add AA batteries.
Highlights: Gets covered by TheNextWeb (Sep '14), starts great on Kickstarter (Sep '14) but cancels campaign to reiterate (Sep '14).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~1.300
Links: oivo.pw, @OivoPW, FB: oivo.pw

Red Pitaya

Red Pitaya turns your smartphone, tablet or PC into many amazing instruments.
Highlights: Gets covered by TechCrunch (Jul '14), raises $256k on Kickstarter (Sep '13), appears elsewhere (Dec '13).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~1.900
Links: redpitaya.com, @red_pitaya_, FB: redpitayaspark

Swich

A unique Smartphone Wireless Charger. Sophisticated energy transmission and elegant design in sustainable materials.
Highlights: Raises $45k on Kickstarter (Jul '14), appears on GigaOm (Jul '14), FastCo (Jul '14) and ZDNet (Jul '14).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~1.600
Links: swichwicharger.com, @swichwicharger, FB: Swich.wireless

Visionect

We're deploying the next generation of digital signage by applying electronic paper where glaring, energy consuming and heavily wired LCDs can't do the job.
Highlights: Raises $1,5m (Sep '12), gets covered by TechCrunch (Feb '14), launches development kit (Feb '14).
Total fans (TW + FB): ~2.000
Links: visionect.com, @visionect, FB: visionect

Interested in more stories about Slovenian startups? Check out this magazine.

Trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners.

Check out the complete Cool Slovenian brands series.

Me vs. IT 2.0 vs. Enterprise 2.0

Wed, 30 Jul 2014 20:41:46 GMT

In 2009, I was very excited to present a few funky things we've been developing with Neolab, at the largest independent IT conference in Slovenia. The world was obsessed with "2.0" back then, and we were determined to join that hype. Facebook was already big at that point, and it was becoming clear they will make a huge impact on the future of technology. Tim O'Reilly wrote a seminal article on the topic, arguing how Web 2.0, the new generation of the internet (and software!), has changed everything.

I was amazed by the potential of Web 2.0 as well. Since my main focus is developing business oriented software solutions, I started fantasizing about the possibilities of integrating those concepts into our (serious) applications. If our clients are buying premium custom software from us, we should try to deliver more features with high added value for them. Stuff that enables co-creation and collaboration. Which we did. And called it IT 2.0.

We wanted IT 2.0 to be much more than Enterprise 2.0. At that time, Enterprise 2.0 meant using mostly third-party tools for social networking, wikis, blogs or tagging, assimilating them into enterprise environments. On the other hand, we wanted to take the coolest concepts invented by social networking, wikis, blogs or tagging, and integrate them into our solutions in new ways. You see, our software isn't social per se, our software's main goal is to solve complex and specific business problems. But we've managed to put a social layer on top of that software, making the term Enteprise 2.0 simply not awesome enough to describe it.

But Enteprise 2.0 is awesome. It's actually very awesome. If O'Reilly defined Web 2.0 in 2005, Andrew McAfee defined Enteprise 2.0 in 2006. He was one of the first who has studied the implementation of social software (such as social networking, wikis, blogs or tagging) into enterprise environments. In doing that, he developed the fundamentals of Enterprise 2.0, naming it SLATES (Search, Links, Authorship, Tags, Extensions, Signals). This concept was later on extended by Dion Hinchcliffe with FLATNESSES (adding Freeform, Network-oriented, Social, Emergence) and the 4Cs by Niall Cook (Communication, Collaboration, Connection, Cooperation).

But social software (like any other software) is usually just a means to achieve something greater. The truth is, implementing Enterprise 2.0 tools into the enterprise isn't enough to make collaboration and open innovation work, organizations need to fundamentally change as well. Enterprise 2.0 enables a completely new way of doing business, walking hand in hand with lean and agile approaches, seeking new opportunities in connecting employees, clients, partners, suppliers and even competition. It supports the new global and connected world. But it requires a new way of thinking and a deep corporate culture change.

Organizational culture (change) is very important for innovation and adaptability, but in the academic field, pieces of this equation are missing. Until now, there haven't been many studies about how organizational culture impacts the implementation of collaborative environment and vice versa. But I'm set to change that fact. And I will soon need your help!

I've finally started working on my master's thesis, which will try to find out if there is connection between organizational culture and Enterprise 2.0 adoption. I have already studied 6 books and 50+ articles on the subject, and will soon deploy the survey, which will combine the OCAI (Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument) and a general Enterprise 2.0 questionnaire. Those who will help me and participate in the study, will get the final report in return, besides a concise comment / advice about their specific organization's situation (the survey is not available yet, please ping me on if you're interested). I'm sure the results will be worth the effort.

If IT 2.0 is about new generations of software and user experience, Enterprise 2.0 is about new ways of managing companies. Those who are able to implement such approaches can win big, but then again, not all companies actually have the opportunity to absorb this transformation. There are many huge obstacles for businesses to go 2.0. Stay tuned because soon, we will better understand why.

Tablets were invented for recycling old PC games

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 21:15:33 GMT

Remember when we were playing really great games on our first home computers in the 80s and 90s? Good times. My gaming journey started with the Spectrum 48K (snowman FTW!), and slowly progressed to where we are now. Today's games truly are a piece of art, I have to give full credit to ventures such as Angry Birds and GTAs, but back then, everything was so much simpler, as if different rules applied. Games were there purely for the gameplay, and were awesome even if they came in 4-bit colors.

Luckily, these classic MS-DOS games received the opportunity to be revived. A few months ago, I played The Secret of Monkey Island on the iPad and it was fucking brilliant. Such a perfectly integrated experience, as if the game was originally designed for the tablet. Loved the humor, loved the clever tricks, loved the simplicity. It brought back so many memories... I want to play more games like that! More Lucas Arts and Sierra titles! Street Rod and Duke Nukem 2D! Dune, Syndicate and UFO! Railroad Tycoon!! Starcraft!!!

(Besides The Secret of Monkey Island, I noticed Civilization. Simcity and Prince of Persia are also available in the App Store, while The Incredible Machine seems to have been removed. Don't like the generic modern graphics though.)

These old games were great because they offered so little, but due to today's information pollution, insufficiency is bliss. Imagine a game where you don't need to be impressed with its amazing graphics or clever physics. Yes, we used to enjoy things like that, things that were pure and simple. Things like The Monkey Island, which managed to make me calm and relaxed with its plain ingenuity, besides reminding me of my childhood.

I'm not sure about the legal issues that come with it, but I am certain there's a huge opportunity in republishing classic games and abandonware on tablets and smartphones. The concepts and scenarios are there, they just need to be modified and rewritten for another device. So, if you have the opportunity to do so, please recycle one of those old PC titles, I would love to enjoy every bit of its vintageness on my mobile device before I go to bed. Because people are sentimental, and old times will always mean good times. And there are many of us who are prepared to pay money for that.

Solving global and local records in SaaS database design

Sat, 20 Jul 2013 23:50:56 GMT

Lately, we've been seriously considering developing a new version of our framework. This one is already a few years old, and besides other problems it's facing, it lacks one very important thing - it's not suited for SaaS (Software as a Service) applications. Often, we would like to host a few simple projects (like multiple web pages) in a single database, but we are also thinking about developing a product / service, which we could offer to multiple clients. Making a product for different clients that would live in the same database is not simple, and requires an architecture that is both rigid and flexible, micro-useful and scalable.

The database model we currently use is doing quite well. It's able to support complex business-oriented systems, social portals and web sites, the core tables being the same across all applications. Sure, there are many redundant things, but we are aware where we should scale-down. More importantly, we have to decide how to upgrade this database model which is used in different applications to be able to work in a single database. I'm not that fond of using multiple databases or schemas in SaaS architecture, since this is a similar situation to which we have now, and it doesn't work that well. I'm certain having the same database for different clients is most suited for our business.

This means we will be having a ClientID (ApplicationID) in all the tables that will be used by all clients / applications. But what is the best way to take care of global and local records - records that are used by everyone versus those in only a few applications?

Let's assume we are building a CMS system for many sites, for which we will be needing two global Roles (Administrator, Moderator), but one instance will have its own Role as well (News editor). There are many ways we can go.

1. Local roles

This architecture means each client having it's own Roles. It's a simple solution, very flexible, but has many flaws - the most obvious being the benefits of global functionalities. E.g. if you're and Administrator, you can restart the site. Since we now have multiple Administrators (ID = 1,3,…), features like these get a bit harder to implement, and you can end up developing a totally different application for each client.

ApplicationID	RoleID (PK)	Role
1	1	Administrator
1	2	Moderator
2	3	Administrator
2	4	Moderator
2	5	News editor

2. Global Roles with a M:N table

The other option is to have global Roles, which are attached to a single application using a M:N table. This is an elegant and very flexible solution, but from my experience, you should avoid using M:N tables if possible. Of course, there are logical cases in which you can't, but you should always consider other options. Adding another table to the equation complicates queries, makes direct data browsing less understandable, besides raising the possibilities of errors.

RoleID (PK)	Role
1	Administrator
2	Moderator
3	News editor

ApplicationID (PK)	RoleID (PK)
1	1
1	2
2	1
2	2
2	3

3. Composite key

Another possibility that comes to mind is to use a composite key, which in reality, makes a single table from the above two (Roles, ApplicationsRoles). This allows using the same IDs for the same Roles in different systems. But it also requires having a composite key, which makes other things more complicated. It prevents making simple joins (you need to make a join by both primary keys), which means all the tables joined to Roles would need the ApplicationID field as well, even if they wouldn't really require it. Not to mention this model simply calls for trouble.

ApplicationID (PK)	RoleID (PK)	Role
1	1	Administrator
1	2	Moderator
2	1	Administrator
2	2	Moderator
2	3	News editor

4. Fake composite key

Sometimes, it makes sense using an additional primary key in a M:N relationship, so you can easily join the table further. We could do this as well, making the previous case a bit more easy-going. But this situation makes all the magic that we could do across the system a bit harder - since all the joins would be made using new local IDs, we are getting too close to the first solution (you can't make joins with the RoleID field, since it's not unique).

ID (PK)	ApplicationID	RoleID	Role
1	1	1	Administrator
2	1	2	Moderator
3	2	1	Administrator
4	2	2	Moderator
5	2	3	News editor

5. NULL-able ApplicationID

A different architecture enables using global Roles that have no ApplicationID, and local Roles that have it. Each application is set to use both sets of Roles, allowing flexibility and understandability. But this model has a problem as well - we can't prevent an application from seeing a global Role - those are intended for everybody, which means that in the long run, the system would start gravitating towards not having any global roles at all, to assure flexibility. To simplify - this architecture is great, but needs something that takes care of Denying.

ApplicationID	RoleID (PK)	Role
NULL	1	Administrator
NULL	2	Moderator
2	3	News editor

5. a) Creating a table for Deny

Let's put another application (ApplicationID = 3) into the equation, which, for some reason, doesn't want to have the global Role named Moderator (RoleID = 2). Adding another table to care of Denied Roles would solve the problem perfectly, but do we really need another table? We want to keep our database with as little tables as possible, so it's easier to use. That's why we should consider extending the Roles table to handle denying as well.

ApplicationID	RoleID (PK)	Role
NULL	1	Administrator
NULL	2	Moderator
2	3	News editor

ApplicationID (PK)	DeniedRoleID (PK)
3	2

5. b) Adding two fields for Deny

In the most normalized way, we need two fields to take care of Deny - a boolean to mark we are working with a Deny record type, and an integer to tell which record we are denying. But what if we want to optimize even further?

ApplicationID	RoleID (PK)	Role	IsDenied	DeniedRoleID
NULL	1	Administrator	false	NULL
NULL	2	Moderator	false	NULL
2	3	News editor	false	NULL
3	4	NULL	true	2

5. c) Using an existing field for Deny

We could put information about which record we are denying into the existing Roles.Role field, since we don't really need it in these cases. But there's a major setback; if a non-numeric field would be accidentally stored in the denied Role, the SQL engine would throw an error.

ApplicationID	RoleID (PK)	Role	IsDenied
NULL	1	Administrator	false
NULL	2	Moderator	false
2	3	News editor	false
3	4	2	true

5. d) Using a single field for Deny

It's much easier to combine the first two fields into one, marking the record implicitly. If the DeniedID is NULL, it means we are working with a regular record, otherwise, we are dealing with a denying record. Information about which Role we are denying is stored in the same field, which works both as a boolean, as an integer.

ApplicationID	RoleID (PK)	Role	DeniedRoleID
NULL	1	Administrator	NULL
NULL	2	Moderator	NULL
2	3	News editor	NULL
3	4	NULL	2

The decision

The last architecture (5. d) is the one I think it's best. It's very transparent and flexible, and it has only one major problem I can currently think of; if only a few (of many) applications would require to share a Role, this wouldn't be possible to solve with this model, but I can live with that.

ApplicationID	RoleID (PK)	Role	DeniedRoleID
NULL	1	Administrator	NULL
NULL	2	Moderator	NULL
2	3	News editor	NULL
3	4	NULL	2

The SQL statement

I have played around a bit with the 5. d) and it works very well. Here's the SELECT statement that retrieves the records for each specific application, supporting the mentioned scenarios.

SELECT Roles.*
FROM Roles
WHERE
(Roles.ApplicationID = 3 OR Roles.ApplicationID IS NULL) --retrieve local and global roles
AND
Roles.DeniedRoleID IS NULL --use only regular records
AND
Roles.RoleID NOT IN --remove denied roles
(
SELECT DeniedRoles.DeniedRoleID FROM Roles AS DeniedRoles
WHERE DeniedRoles.ApplicationID = 3
AND DeniedRoles.DeniedRoleID IS NOT NULL
)

The same query, solved with a JOIN instead of WHERE IN, which is faster, but probably less understandable.

SELECT RealRoles.*
FROM Roles AS RealRoles --regular records
LEFT OUTER JOIN
Roles AS DeniedRoles --denying records
ON RealRoles.RoleID = DeniedRoles.DeniedRoleID --join by the ID of the role
AND RealRoles.DeniedRoleID IS NULL --but only those records that are real
AND DeniedRoles.DeniedRoleID IS NOT NULL --vs those that are denying
AND DeniedRoles.ApplicationID = 3
WHERE
(RealRoles.ApplicationID = 3 OR RealRoles.ApplicationID IS NULL) --retrieve my and global roles
AND
RealRoles.DeniedRoleID IS NULL -- take all regular roles
AND
DeniedRoles.RoleID IS NULL --that don't have a deny

Conclusion

There are many ways to solve a database model in a SaaS architecture, but because of many reasons, we've decided to use a single database with an additional foreign key that defines the client in all the required tables. One of the biggest concerns in this architecture is solving global and local records, but the model presented here takes care of most requirements a typical Saas system might stumble upon, by using a NULL-able ApplicationID, with another field to take care of exceptions that require denying.

This architecture solves most of the problems, and if you're leaning towards a single database architecture, it's probably the best way to go.

Apple is just messing with our minds

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 06:50:08 GMT

iOS 7 is all over the place. Some love the new look, others think it's childish and confusing. Some even say the flat look symbolizes Apple's capitulation, since they're abandoning the skeuomorphic paradigm they have been using for ages. The new icons are obviously the most controversial part of the released software, and they seem - yes - wrong and unfinished. But what if the unpolished icons are just a marketing trick, a temporary solution presented on purpose to annoy people, especially the designer community? Rumors have it, they were designed by their marketing team anyways.

The inconsistencies of the new icons. Categorized by GreenGelatin on reddit.

Personally, I like the new operating system. I think the whole 3D concept is great, a good reason why icons and other elements needed to go flat. I like the typical screens and forms, even if they resemble Windows. I didn't have the chance to try it out, but I believe the authors who did and claim it is a huge step forward.

Apple has sold iOS 7 to me, probably also because I can easily ignore the various types of icons, and the different directions of gradients. I admit they could be better, but I can imagine designers hating it. Which means that all that Apple needs to do, is to introduce a new set of icons before the launch, something super coherent and amazing, and it will blow everyone's mind. Bam!, and all the heretics run back to the mothership. If the final icons would manage to exceed expectations as some other things seen in iOS 7 did so far, Apple wouldn't have to worry about their mobile program for years to come.

One of the icon redesigns, published by agent00420 on reddit. If a single person can do this in one day, imagine what Apple can do.

Think about it. Would a company which has been associated with great design for decades present something so weak unintentionally?

It's funny how such a controversy, a potential game changer and perhaps another great manipulation, something that has the power to change one strong emotion into another, is encapsulated in the form of 20 small pictures. It seems Apple has done it again.

(Cover image via @likeluis)

Reinventing the blog, part 3: WTF did Pitchfork just do?

Thu, 30 May 2013 20:24:21 GMT

You know that feeling when you do a lot of research, and after you publish your results, you notice something else that should be included as well? Happens to me all the time. Immediately after creating the list of the most outstanding blogs, I noticed a few others that should be added to the directory. Shit happens. I also tried to identify the funky new UI elements these blogs use, which would help me understand the user experience requirements driving modern publishing trends. Felt pretty good about the conclusions, but only to find myself out of luck again. Turns out I missed something very important, something I noticed when I saw what Pitchfork does with their cover articles.

When I was doing some research on Daft Punk, I read an article on Pitchfork, and their use of parallax scrolling almost brought tears to my eyes. Not that parallax scrolling is anything new - there are many outstanding cases of using this technique in web design. But usually, this means the whole website is a single-page showcase that is using multiple layers that scroll with different velocity and in different directions to display information in an interesting way. One page.

Not on Pitchfork. They're using advanced layouts and super-fancy parallax scrolling on all of their cover articles. Custom fucking everything. Contrary to some other magazines, who are also using generic parallax scrolling in their feature articles (respect!), and some other blogs using custom layouts for cover stories (respect!), this is simply over the top. Check it out for yourself. I can't imagine how much time is put into a post like this, making it looks as good as it does.

One of the crazy transitions and animations inside the story.

But what does this mean? Simple. Do you remember The Daily, an iPad-only magazine that was already discontinued? Supposedly it offered revolutionary ways of consuming content. I didn't get the chance to try it out, but I did saw a few issues of Wired on the iPad, and I have to admit, it did feel like being in the future.

These paradigms are slowly being adopted on the Web as well, and some magazines and blogs are already polishing their most important content to impressive levels, combining in-depth stories and custom development into digital masterpieces. Like Pitchfork's cover story, or even a feature on Newsweek or a review on The Verge. This goes beyond putting some text into a WYSIWYG editor and uploading a few photos. Modern (digital) publishing is obviously pointing towards a collaborative effort of a broad team of journalists, designers and web developers, which will be the only way to deliver content that will retain audience. So much for a plain and simple blog redesign.

Check out the complete Reinventing the blog series.

How the #hashtag took over the world

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:57:39 GMT

Ever since the times of IRC, there has been a need to categorize specific messages on the internet. With the rise of the social web and increased amounts of information, this habit became even stronger. First popularized by Twitter, the hashtag was introduced in 2007, and since then, found its way into standard offering of the most popular social services (Instagram, Tumblr, Google+, etc.). It seems even Facebook will introduce its own version soon, though people already use them overthere anyways. The hashtag changed the way we create and consume content, and it became a symbol of collaborative publishing in the social era.

On the technical side, the hashtag is nothing more than a clickable search query, a simple keyword that is attached to the post to add a bit of context to the content. An emoticon with a few more options. But for something so fundamentally basic, the hashtag turned out to be so much more, something almost magical. Sociology, communicology, computer science and other fields would probably have a lot to say about this phenomenon.

Today, hashtags form the ultimate crowdsourced media channels, some even managed to construct themselves as brands. It's hard to imagine something happening without its hashtag, and most TV shows and commercials already include them. Actually, they remind me of the Web's beginning, when everything had the AOL keyword attached to it, except now, keyword creation and curation is decentralized and distributed.

A graffiti in Ljubljana, Slovenia, persuading people to join the protests against corrupt elites. Hashtag included.

But there's something that's much more important than commercial applications: the planned or ad-hoc hashtags that form themselves in case of disasters or other extreme events. Millions can tune-in to to these instant channels, and participate with their own information. Such streams can go beyond a single service, existing above specific social media. These hashtags have the power to help people in need, and assist activists in making the world a better place. They are the ones that made the hashtag the word of the year 2012, marking the transfer of power from publishers to ordinary people.

Reinventing the blog, part 2: The challenges, the opportunies

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:42:06 GMT

After the initial dissection of the most innovative and well designed blogs, it's time to go behind the scenes. We've seen how some of these blogs look like, but there's even more value in understanding why they look like they do. Every good user experience analysis needs to have a clear overview of the goals and good insight into the problems of the situation, and I will try to outline these by using my blog as an example. A lot can be deducted by monitoring the basic Google Analytics reports.

Even though generic blog challenges and opportunities may not exist, I think that most blogs probably share around 80% of these goals. And just to be clear, by blogs I don't mean corporate blogs with their specific requirements (sales, leads, conversions), but modern online magazines, originally (and still) called blogs, even though they are actually becoming mainstream media. Therefore, this analysis can work for most online publishers, but I'm doing it mostly to help me understand what I need to do to reinvent my blog again. It's pretty simple: getting and retaining traffic. All other requirement are derived from these two.

Main goal: getting traffic, increasing engagement

The main goal of every website is to get traffic. For traffic, you need great (or at least good) content, something with added value for the users. What you do with that traffic, is another story. Sell things, sell ads, sell yourself.

There are primarily three different sources of traffic you can receive: direct, referral and search. You want all of them, and each component is a result of different activities. Getting direct traffic means you have a strong brand. Getting referral traffic means you have great writers / influencers which help you get backlinks to your blog. Getting search traffic means you have a great technical team and SEO (CMO and SMO) optimized site.

You want a well-balanced stream of traffic to your blog.

The other important goal that websites have is keeping the traffic on the site, which can be done by stimulating user engagement. Helping things happen after you get people to your blog. You want users to spend as much time as possible with you, navigate through many pages, and hopefully give you some feedback - leaving comments and sharing your posts on social media. Some blogs want other actions as well, but these are probably the most obvious ones.

Increasing social media activity

Social media is emerging as one of the most important referral sources. But lately, it's becoming a noteworthy factor for search engine rankings as well. That's why blogs are trying hard to integrate social media widgets into their content, some even go beyond the standard tweet / like / + 1 buttons. Help people share, there are many benefits from it, both direct and indirect.

The social activity on my most visited post. These figures translate into more than 10k unique users.

Lowering bounce rates, increasing time on site

Most blogs have very high bounce rates - people tend to read a single post and leave the site. That is why designers and information architects are trying to do everything to keep readers on their site, hoping to persuade them to read another article. Some are trying too hard by adding too many related posts, others are playing with many interesting ways of driving readers to the next page.

My current bounce rate is more than 80%, with average visit duration just above 2 minutes. Something that needs to be improved urgently. I am sure this will be one of the most significant challenges I will face when developing the next generation of my blog.

Improving these bounce rates and time on site is one of my highest priorities.

Treating every page as a landing page

The time when people visited the homepage and navigated further from there are over. Today, specially because of social media, every page is a landing page and needs to be treated as such. We are consuming content in a different way, we don't browse for content anymore, the content finds us. That is why we need to design every single page as the starting point for our visitors.

At this point, less than 10% of traffic to my blog comes through the homepage. Which means designing great post pages is becoming more important than designing the homepage, since every page needs to become a hub for further navigation.

Building loyalty and credibility (branding)

Besides keeping users on site, it's also important you get users back to the site. As your brand and reputation evolve, it gets easier with all of the traffic components, but you can achieve that with only one thing - great content. Of course, nice design and user experience help, but you can't bypass this simple fact: you need something with added value to the readers. Only then you will get loyal users and only then your blog will thrive.

Even though most focus is done on gaining new readers, you mustn't forget about returning ones.

Allowing a mobile-friendly experience

We are living in a mobile world and more and more traffic is made by mobile devices. This number is closing in on 20% on my blog, which means optimization for mobile visitors is becoming something that you can't ignore.

Mobile operating systems are on the rise.

Combining it with the funky new UI elements

In my previous post, I outlined the interesting new user interface elements my favourite blogs use. Now we can map these elements with the above mentioned five challenges and opportunities, which will help us understand the requirements behind the innovations.

	Social media	Bounce / time	Landing pages	Branding	Mobile
Unconventional navigation		1	1	1
Fixed (floating) menu		1	1
Responsive design		1		1	1
Big key visual before text	1	1
Advanced key visual (gallery, video)	1	1		1
Abstract, teaser, subheading	1				1
Suggested content within limits		1	1		1
Custom social media integration	1			1
Polished content (wrapping, quotes)	1	1		1
Custom typography				1
Infinite scroll		1			1
Pinterest-style homepage		1		1
Integrated content and navigation		1	1	1
Total	5	10	4	8	4

It's pretty clear each of the elements has at least one specific goal that it's trying to solve. Some of them will surely become a standard in the future.

Conclusion

What a modern blog is trying to achieve in 2013 is pretty clear. Get more traffic, make users spend more time on the site. This hasn't changed in decades, but the behaviour of the users has. Only those that will be able to adapt to the newly-formed situation will survive.

The most important paradigms that have shaped the past years are the social and mobile era, which have revolutionized the ways we consume content. We are online all the time, with many devices, and there is so much content everywhere, it's overwhelming. Our attention span is becoming very limited, and all of above mentioned challenges are focused in trying to capture it.

I decided it's time to redesing my blog again, and by understanding what (and why) the market leaders do, my task will surely be easier. I hope you find my analysis useful, but please feel free to add anything I may have forgotten in the comments.

Check out the complete Reinventing the blog series.

Be an apprentice. Evolve as a manager.

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 08:22:18 GMT

Being a manager is not something that's in my DNA. I'm primarily an engineer, a scientist, a software developer. I find it hard to spend time on governing activities that have no direct output, and prefer doing things rather than guiding and supervising how things are done. Some people are natural organizers, others need to somehow learn and adopt that specific set of technical and social skills that help teams operate smoothly and efficiently. While I may have the technical skills of understanding how things should be done, my problems lie elsewhere.

The truth is, I don't feel that good when I'm telling people what to do, I don't see myself as a superior who sets the goals and awards or punishes people based on their results. At the same time I fully recognize this is something that needs to be done one way or another, otherwise, inefficiency. I must admit I did advance on the field in the past years, since I'm trying hard to learn how to do it. Slowly. And to my great surprise, it seems one of my latest ventures will unexpectedly help me evolve as a manager as well. As you will see, I happened to find myself on the other side of the story.

After many years, even decades, I'm finally an apprentice again! By dedicating multiple 10.000 hours to system architecture, database design, development, (digital) marketing, design and user experience, I've done or heard about pretty much everything that is associated with the fields of software development. That's what I do for living, and even if I embark on something new, I always have enough initial knowledge to prevent me from being an apprentice. Now I understand this fact made me miss out on a few very important realizations that come from being one.

My grandfather has left me this really cool car. A Yugoslavian Zastava 101, built in 1978. She hasn't been driven in about 20 years, but now, the time has come to bring it back to life. My girlfriend's uncle happened to be a car mechanic for 20 years, and he was specialized in repairing Zastavas. Lucky bastard me! He was very happy to help me out, and in the past weeks, we have spent a few session in his garage, coming close to making the beauty run.

I wanted to be there when repairs happen, to help and to learn. Which makes me an apprentice car mechanic. Swiping the floor, cleaning up spark plugs, screwing and unscrewing stuff, holding things aside, moving the flashlight, operating the car jack. I even managed to disassemble the wheels and brakes and felt amazing about it. My teacher is very patient and I don't feel bad at all for being ordered around and doing all the small things. I understand this is my role in this specific project, and I love playing it.

I did this. I will also have to put it back together.

I learned so much already, not only about cars and engines, but about management as well. The most important one being that people don't feel bad if they're ordered what to do, rather the opposite. They need to know why things are happening and how we will get there. It has nothing to do with someone being something more than the other, it's just a person's role in the specific situation. Perhaps those managed will be the ones who will give out orders in a few years, who knows. But today, I'm the one who is expected to do so, and it's becoming clearer, how. It's a bit ironic that I learned that by fixing up an old car that was waiting 20 years for me to take care of it.

Funny, how things are interconnected, how everything is everything. I probably wouldn't perceive the whole apprentice experience the way I do now if I wouldn't be where I am now, but what's even funnier, is that I can imagine having the same epiphany who knows where as well. I was ready for this, this needed to happen. We evolve every day, and sometimes, the next steps are achieved under very weird circumstances. That's why you and I need to do as many crazy things as possible. Being an apprentice somewhere to become a better manager somewhere else? Why not. Life is like a box of chocolates.

Reinventing the blog, part 1: Dissecting the most innovative and best-designed blogs

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:23:46 GMT

The blog is getting mature. Ever since Gawker did its eccentric redesign a few years ago, we've seen a lot of other blog (networks) doing similar things, trying to reinvent how the blog should look like in 2013. After the initial hiccup, Gawker managed to fortify its position and attract new users, showing others that people do like to see different things, things that are imitating the experience of reading electronic magazines on mobile devices. Today, there are many great cases of how a modern blog should feel, and since I'm thinking about doing something similar myself (it's been almost 4 years since I did this!), I decided to dissect a few of the most innovative ones, hoping to get a picture of what works and what not. Here are my picks of the most creative and best designed (mainstream) blogs on the Web, those that are standing out from the crowd and are unique in what they offer to their readers.

Fast Company

Fast Company is a great example that demonstrates the power of images - especially if you have access to professional photographic material. The home page is clean and the highlighted article is integrated into the main key visual, which works very well. The same logic of the huge picture is implemented to the inner pages as well, and this picture is transformed into a gallery if required. There isn't much of related content on a single article, and the social buttons are custom, which I think we will be seeing a lot of in the future.

Fast Company uses an effective combination of the key visual, article header, additional flavor text and custom social buttons.

Fast Company uses custom typography, infinite scroll to avoid paging, takes good advantage from the article abstract / subtitle to make you curious (it's displayed on the article as the introduction as well), and their website is responsive. It is also interesting that they keep a single article visible above the fold on their homepage to retain focus. From the design and user experience perspective, this solution is one of my favorites.

Gawker

Gawker's innovative approach was to use two columns for news on the home page - one for top stories and one for latest stories - and ditching the main menu. While this may have been one of the most important evolutions modern blogs have made, I don't think this feature works well on the homepage, since I don't really notice the right column when I browse the site. However, this feature becomes more useful on the inner pages, where this module is duplicated, and where most people land on the site.

Gawker and the omnipresent main menu that changed the game.

This realization, that single blog posts should be treated as primary landing pages, is very important, and Gawker was one of the first to fully integrate that concept into its user experience. People don't browse blogs anymore, they consume social media that brings them to blogs.

Gawker also uses a big picture (not in such a cool way as Fast Company) in the post, and it's very smart and concise that this picture can be replaced with a video. I like the way comments are solved, showing only the most popular threads, and not the complete conversation (with the amount of comments they have, it would be probably useless otherwise). I'm also keen on the internal hot meter they use, which they seem to use to distinguish the top and latest news. However, they should ditch the "like Gawker" block exposed on each article, it's very misleading. The mobile site should also be replaced with a responsive version.

Mashable

Mashable's redesign introduced quite a few interesting features I look forward to adopting. They have minimized the main menu, offering a drop down popup menu that allows further classification of news. This menu is well coded and does a pretty good job of taking care of incidental mouse moves (not as good as Amazon though). The homepage uses three columns to display articles, even though I'm not fully sure how that works ("The new stuff" is probably all articles, "The next big thing" are probably highlighted by the editor, and "What's hot" by the crowd), and this feature's column header is fixed upon (infinite) scrolling. The design is, driven by their specific social media ninja audience, of course, responsive.

Mashable has a clever integration of social media activity on the top of the article.

What I like about Mashable's new version the most, is the clever social media integration. They have the total number of shares displayed on the top of the article, as well as a little graph that displays the dynamics of social activity for a specific post. These social media statistics are probably also used to feed the columns on the homepage, even though most people probably don't understand what's happening. But perhaps that's for the best - if it works well in recommending the articles, thumbs up.

Again, we are seeing a picture above the article, which can be video as well. That's good. What I don't like about Mashable is the three-column footer of the article, it is the same as the homepage, displaying a single category. I can understand the need for such a thing, it could work, cloning the homepage on the landing article page, but for me, it's just too overwhelming.

The Next Web

The Next Web's new design is somewhere in between Mashable and Gawker. The homepage uses two columns, the Channels, which can be configured and switched from popular to latest, and the main window, which offers a pinterest-style display of articles, similar to the one Mashable uses. This left menu box is fixed and used both on the home and inner pages, and it works as the main menu to navigate the content of the portal. The main main menu is simple and works as a hub for other TNW stuff.

The Next Web's navigation and post header, together with instruction to use the keyboard.

The Next Web also has custom social media integration, and offers the users to navigate with the keyboard. This navigation works very well with the left box - meaning the users is navigating the current selection in the box, offering an experience similar to switching a remote on a digital TV, knowing what the next channel will be. I'm not sure how many users notice and use this feature, but this integrated content and navigation approach is very interesting.

The site is responsive, uses a big picture before the post, together with the detailed information about the article. Another interesting thing - the images break out of the paragraph form. Overall, a very solid performance with a minimalistic design.

Quartz

While Quartz may not be one of the most well-known blogs out there, it still very much deserves a mention for its creative implementation. The clever menu that collapses when you proceed to the article, the interesting fixed list on the left that can be configured and pivoted according to your wishes, making the navigation much easier and again, integrated with the content.

Quartz fully integrates the navigation and content.

There's another innovative feature on Quartz for which I haven't decided if I like it or not, but it is very interesting nevertheless. When you scroll to the end of the article, the next article is automatically displayed, together with a new URL. This is made as a redirect (the url changes), but it does not seem like one at all - when I get the time I will try to see how they technically achieve this. This article change is integrated with the left box, which makes the complete experience pretty interesting, similar to the one The Next Web has. What Quartz misses is better social media integration. They went a step back and decided to use links to share pages instead of widgets, which probably doesn't help their traffic that much, but it's aligned with the design. The site is responsive.

The Verge

The Verge's homepage is probably the most unique of them all. While I would make the main menu less confusing, I really like the tiles for the most interesting articles. This is followed by the video section, and by a ton of other articles - too many of them, to be honest. But things get more interesting once you get to a specific post. The menu gets smaller, there is a clear navigation to the next and previous articles at the top, and the breaking news floats.

The Verge's posts are close to perfection - full of images and quotes, together with embedded galleries.

The design of the inner page is very creative, there is a huge image (not on all articles, it seems only on the reviews) with social share widgets, a secondary title is also used. I really like the quotes inside the text, and the jump-to thingie is useful as well. You can see that someone took a lot of time to shape the content, the text is wrapped around images, the galleries are embedded within the text. This gives you an impression you are browsing a high-end iPad magazine rather than a web page. There aren't to many other elements on the page, so the overall result is very clean and easy to read. On the other hand, that polished content structure probably makes it quite hard for the site to be responsive, which The Verge is not.

Wired

The legendary Wired magazine has an online edition that would make a lot of people proud. They have been always known as innovators, and were one of the first to introduce the grid display of articles instead of a list. This means the emphasis is more on the images and headings than it is on the text. The popup menu is put somewhere inside this grid of posts, which is a daring, but effective solution. This menu neatly moves to the top on the inner pages.

Wired's article headings have big titles and teasing abstracts.

Again, we are seeing two different types of posts as on The Verge, the basic one, and the advanced one. The advanced one is a feast to the eyes, with a huge heading and abstract that get you interested, the pictures that break out of paragraphs. But there are a few things that are not suited for such an established magazine. In a gallery, each click reloads the complete page, which can be very very annoying. I don't think hunting for ad views makes it worth it. I would also make the right column a little less overwhelming with content (not only ads, but everything else as well). And the site is not responsive.

Breaking down the elements

Based on the analysis, we can conclude that new specific elements started to emerge with the next generation of blogs. These elements are the results of us consuming content in a different way that we were a few years ago - before social and mobile. Most of them are taking care of "the homepage is not the landing page" situation, while trying to persuade people to proceed with browsing the content, lowering bounce rates.

	Fastco	Gawker	Mashable	TNW	Quartz	Verge	Wired	Total
Unconventional navigation		1		1	1			3
Fixed (floating) menu			1	1	1			3
Responsive design	1		1	1	1			4
Big key visual before text	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	7
Advanced key visual (gallery, video)	1	1	1					3
Abstract, teaser, subheading	1	1				1	1	4
Suggested content within limits	1	1		1	1	1		5
Custom social media integration	1		1	1				3
Polished content (wrapping, quotes)			1			1	1	3
Custom typography	1		1	1	1	1	1	6
Infinite scroll	1		1		1			3
Pinterest-style homepage			1	1		1	1	4
Integrated content and navigation				1	1			2
Total	8	5	9	9	8	6	5

Conclusion

Typical design and user experience of mainstream blogs have evolved in the past few years, and we will be seeing similar concepts adopted by the mainstream media as well. The social and mobile era have changed the way we consume content, while heightening our expectations - most of us simply count on great experiences. Luckily, the world is full of great innovators who are not afraid to take risks and implement new creative features that will become a standard in the years to come. I'm already looking forward to how other major players will respond to the new situation.

Check out the complete Reinventing the blog series.

Dear Facebook, please stop trying to control my attention

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 07:06:30 GMT

Not that I'm threatening you or anything, I can assure you I won't be leaving you anytime soon. There is still too much inside you, for me to walk away. But the last few attention seeking features you've implemented are really pissing me off! I fully understand you are trying to get me to interact with others even more, but what you are doing will rather have the opposite affect. You have to find another way to get me involved, or the tab that you live in won't stay open for much longer.

The new red notifications next to the groups are very annoying (it seems I'm in a test group of some sort, since not everybody has them). Which UX mastermind sold you this great idea? It's becoming really hard for me to look at my Facebook homepage for the past few days, I've turned off all the notifications from groups and these things are still there, all red and intimidating. What are you trying to do, get me to click on each of them every day, or simply leave 'em all?

And the sound notifications you play each time I get a comment? I'm often listening to music or watching movies, and they're simply too much of an intrusion. Don't want that shit, I don't use chat because of these annoyances. You are making me wish not to receive any comments while I'm doing other things, which is absurd. The web was intended to be silent unless requested otherwise.

I try to keep positive with my blog, not complaining and bitching too much, but every now and then I just can't help myself. Things did change since you went public, the pressure from the investors must be enormous: more users, more friends, more members, more interactions, more everything. The graph is hungry. But you have to understand what's at stake: if we get too annoyed by what you're doing, we simply won't spend enough time with you to see all the banners you want us to see. Which can be a bigger problem than groups without active members or a few unnoticed comments. The service is the most important thing you have, and nothing good can come out of this new aggressiveness. Think about it.

I believe Firefox OS may be on to something

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 22:27:50 GMT

A few days ago, during the Mobile World Congress, Firefox announced its mobile OS, which will be available soon. Teaming up with 18 carriers and 4 announced manufacturers (plus Sony), the release was probably bigger than expected. A few high-profile web services, including AirBnb, Disney, Facebook, SoundCloud and Twitter, also joined the hype by including their apps to the new marketplace. Analysts quickly put down their bets, some supporting the effort, while others denying the possibility of its success. One of the most fascinating things about the new OS is that it's going to be entirely web based, the operating system itself, the apps, everything. Unlocking the power of the web, as they put it. And to be honest, I can buy that.

The situation

Currently, the mobile OS market is dominated by two players, Apple and Google. They both have their own strategies, Apple being the control-freak offering exclusivity, and Google being the easy-going dude appealing to the masses. Windows is trying to find its place somewhere in-between, but it's still struggling to gain its market share (currently at around few percent) - we will see how their partnership with Nokia turns out in the long run. We mustn't also forget about Blackberry and their potential comeback with their new operating system and the newly introduced Z10 smartphone. But that's about it.

Until Firefox OS was introduced.

The history

To begin with, we must take a look at the original Firefox browser, the first-choice browser of the developer a few years ago. That is before Chrome managed to offer a stabler and faster version of it. What made Firefox so useful, were the Javascript console and Firebug, an add-on that all web developers need once they try out. But Firebug supposedly makes Firefox work much slower. Chrome built such a tool for client-side debugging inside its browsers and boom - millions of developers switched to Chrome. I don't know why Firefox hasn't offered a similar tool, they should, especially now, when they have a chance not only to gain mobile OS market share, but also to regain their position in the browser wars. They should fully unlock the power of the web, with their potential mobile OS and browser marketing synergies. Firefox = the internet.

The web is wonderful, and Firefox has always been one of its strongest advocates. And now they are doing it again, by offering an operating system that is fully based on the web. Besides, for many reasons, they are probably in a much better position to do it then WebOS was. Or as they put it:

With Firefox OS, you can simply enter any search term and instantly create a one-time use or downloadable app.

The community

Developers are an important part of every mobile ecosystem, and developing for different platforms is a big pain in the ass. Of course, everybody has the possibility to decide for HTML app instead of a native app, but if the platform prefers native apps, it's a no brainer that those will have more capabilities and better performance. But it's hard to make native apps. I am a web developer, been doing it for years, tried to develop something for iOS one day. I lost interest in a few days, because you need to get used to a totally new environment, and the thought of going through the same with Android and Windows just made me depressed. But here's what Firefox says:

Every Web developer can easily create and distribute HTML5 apps so you can find an app for whatever you want.

Holy crap, the web as the platform! Which means I will be able to make Firefox OS apps already from the start. And when I have that HTML5 app, will I perhaps be willing to easily turn it into a hybrid native / HTML5 app for all other platforms? The thought is appealing. And since HTML5 is powerful enough to access the phone's hardware (camera, GPS, etc.), this makes it much more interesting. Not to mention I would be improving my basic web developer skills if I would start developing for Firefox OS.

The recipe

Firefox OS has the carriers, manufacturers and supporters aboard, and if developing and deploying apps will be as easy peasy as they brag about it, it will all come down to a single thing: the interface and user experience that the rendering engine will be able to provide. Firefox has its own rendering engine Gecko, contrary to WebKit, which powers Chrome, Safari and Opera. Based on the first videos of the Firefox OS, it seems the interface isn't as smooth as the one you can get from the iPhone, Android or Windows Phone, and not as innovative as Ubuntu Touch. Which can be a big, big problem. Manufacturers may need and support alternatives, but it's the users who will decide, and their expectations are very high.

If Firefox can take care of this, and (stronger) devices are fully adjusted to run it, while developers are able to upgrade the user experience, I don't see a reason why Firefox OS shouldn't gain traction. All the components are there, the brand is strong and the race is long. Go Firefox!

5 reasons why I won't steal your idea

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 09:22:39 GMT

Since I'm a software architect and a web developer, I get often approached by people with their new ideas. In most cases, for some quality feedback, and on lucky days, for a rough quote about the costs of such a project. These people are usually very secretive about what they have, making me explain to them that it's far from my interest to steal that idea. One time, a guy even made me sign a Non-disclosure agreement before I could make him an offer for a service he was thinking about. After bargaining with me, he chose a different contractor, but ended up doing nothing, at least to my knowledge. He was obviously focused on the wrong things, instead of getting feedback from as many sources as possible, he was investing energy into bureaucracy and protection of his idea. Let me tell something to him and all others out there: Focus on your product, and don't worry about me stealing your idea. I won't. I have at least five reasons not to.

1. Your idea probably isn't as great as you think

I've seen a lot of different people who had "game-changing" ideas, at least so they though. A few of them actually managed to convince me and my partners that their idea is so amazing that it'll kick everyone's ass. Even though proper market research wasn't done, charisma is sometimes hard to resist, and if you are working with someone you've known for a long time, you are prepared to accept crazy terms, such as a delay of payment until this idea will start to generate revenue. After these specific ideas were put into the real world, it turned out there is a huge discrepancy between ideals and reality, and we ended up with unpaid invoices and ignored phone calls.

Ideas are something, execution is everything else. There is a long way inbetween, a way paved with upgrades, downgrades, changes, pivots, time and hard work. Millions have ideas, only a few can make them work. I've seen Seedcamp companies change their core concepts and business models completely, and these startups are already the best, selected from hundreds, if not thousands. When you start working on something and proceed ahead, the initial idea will often evolve beyond recognition. Not to mention there is a very strong possibility that someone else was already thinking about the same thing, except better, years earlier. Your idea isn't amazing, but it may be good enough to achieve something with proper execution. That's why you need feedback and partners.

2. I have plenty of ideas of my own

You know what's better than your idea? My idea!

Mostly because I kick ass, but also because people get emotionally attached to the thoughts they generate by themselves. I have so many ideas I don't know what to do with them. They are probably not really great (see reason 1), but they are mine, and I try hard to make a few of them come alive every now and then, when I have the time. During the day, I work on real-life projects, during the night, I play around.

When I decide on what to work on next, I usually look for the best ratio between actuality, complexity, required energy and potential. This means I've already made my own priority list of the services I will be rolling out in the future, and I must say, it would really be hard to put one of yours inside this packed list. I'm sure most developers think in a similar fashion, lacking resources to make everything they imagine a reality. Face it, there are hundred times as many people who have unrealized ideas, than people who don't know what to work on. Do the math.

3. Your idea probably requires specific passion and know-how

The idea lives strongest in the person who thought of it. It is a result of that person's experience from many fields, so it's hard to replicate in its full form without that experience. The ideas I've stumbled upon usually solve very specific and niche problems you can't solve without digging yourself into that field. Which most of us don't have time or the resources to do. The core of the idea represents the person who thought of it, it may be taken to another level by a different person, but in most cases, it requires the original author's knowledge, involvement and passion to work as it's supposed to.

I can't execute an idea which will revolutionize kindergarten children education, I don't know shit about the problem, I don't have any connections in the industry, and I'm simply not that passionate about that field.

4. Your idea requires your involvement as a product manager

In the past few years, we've implemented quite a few prototypes and services together with Neolab, and even though a few of them got some praise, they didn't make it to the mainstream. Take this blog for example, I developed it in early 2009, aggregating posts from different social services, presenting them (also) in a magazine form. What did I do with it? Nothing. Years later, a service called RebelMouse did something similar and raised millions in funding. Same goes for Twenity, a spin-off from Twitfluence, gamifying social authority measuring. Or Ljubljana Realtime, a social event discovery tool. All out there, but that's it.

I simply don't have enough energy to push a service beyond a point, or don't want to. Perhaps this fact will change someday, but at this point, you will need to be the product manager of your idea, and I can be its architect. Since I have a real company to run besides all of this, I can't afford to be one.

(Btw, if you think you could do anything with the above mentioned things, don't hesitate to give me a shout).

5. Karma and stuff

I believe in karma. Don't do evil and all of that. I would really feel uncomfortable if I would take someone else's baby and make it my own. So I won't, because this simply wouldn't be a fair thing to do. I value proper sleep above success.

But what if

Of course, there are always exceptions, and I can imagine I could encounter something that would go beyond all of my points above. Perhaps there is one idea that I've heard about years ago that would suit this description. If I ever decide to proceed with this project, I will let that person know what I'm doing and invite him to join the project. Even if I'm thinking about a thing that only faintly resembles the original concept, I can't deny it's that person's idea. And since this guy was able to think of such a marvelous thing so much time ago, he would surely make a great addition to the team (also see reason 3).

That's it. I won't steal your idea, so feel free to talk about your revolutionary innovation with me anytime. All I will do is to try to tear it apart and put it back together, and after we're done with that, if I get the chance, I will try to bring it to life.

Using JSON (with asp.net) is like wiping your ass with silk

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 18:45:44 GMT

I love mashups. Actually, I love everything about them, I love using them, I love making them, I love those who do everything they can to empower them. In my opinion, mashups are one of the most significant concepts the Web has invented, since they represent unlimited possibilities of integrating and reshaping things that are already done. The platforms out there are stable, so it's the creativity that sets the limits. These days, you can easily take data from anyone and do something else with it. Just don't forget to use JSON.

I'm an old school guy who has been working mostly in enterprise software environments, which means using XML for data integrations, besides, RSS used to be the man. The first generation of Twenity (Twitfluence) was using XML feeds, and this blog is using mostly RSS for fetching entries from other sources. XML was the standard we all spoke, very cute and readable, but on the other hand, not so easy to parse. At that time, this fact didn't represent such a major problem, since a few more lines of code took care of everything. But today is a different situation.

It was Twitter who first started dropping support for XML, which annoyed the hell out of me. I had to start rewriting things for JSON. This turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened, since JSON seems to be loved by everyone. It's super easy to use with jQuery, but since I'm a server-side type of a guy, it's even more important that it's cleverly integrated into asp.net. Fetch the data, store it, do crazy shit with it.

JSON is serializable into a .net object with a single line of code. Create the class with parameters compliant with the the specific JSON structure, serialize the response string into that class, and everything automagically works. Piece of cake, unlimited opportunities. Take Twitter for example:

Make the basic Tweet class:

public class Tweet
{
public string id_str;
public string text;
}

Create the request to access a tweet (funny, the hardest thing to do):

string url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show/274508827146215424.json";
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(url);
request.Method = "GET";
WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
string jsonResponse = reader.ReadToEnd();
reader.Close();

Which will return something like this (play here):

{
"created_at": "Fri Nov 30 13:42:59 +0000 2012",
"id_str": "274508827146215424",
"text": ""Facebook knows what we say, Google knows what we think",
"source": "web",
...
}

Serialize the response string into an object:

JavaScriptSerializer js = new JavaScriptSerializer();
Tweet tweet = new Tweet();
tweet = js.Deserialize<Tweet>(jsonResponse);
Response.Write(tweet.text);

Pretty neat. Since I've started using JSON, mashups have become easier than ever to make. With one of our latest projects, we've integrated our application with Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and Flickr. For breakfast! XML may have its advantages, but for such things, JSON is simply the greatest. All hail the new lord!

Hey developer, here's something that will make you sound smart

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 08:21:02 GMT

I've met many developers in my life, and quite a few of them share a similar problem. Being mathematical geniuses and all, but not being able to put into words what the hell they are doing. At least so it would sound marketable and awesome. After all, it's not their job to sound smart, the developer's role in the Hipster - Hustler - Hacker dream team is a bit different. But talking like an MBA can have it's advantages, specially when it comes to individuals communicating with their clients.

Launch

Take my example, half of the time my customers don't fully understand what I'm saying even though I'm trying really hard. But I've noticed some phrases have a better effect than others, some simply sound like special awesome things are happening (which they are) and that everything is under control. The funny thing is that the recipe to speak like that is very simple: say hi to the MBA developer talk.

[MBA verb] + [technical noun] = [#mbadev]

The equation for the #mbadev talk is elementary. Take a power verb that has a really active meaning. Like "structuring", "evaluating" or "utilizing". These are often used to make an activity sound way cooler than it actually is. Then, take a noun that is very hacker-specific, something that non-technical people don't fully understand. Like "metadata", "framework" or "encapsulation". Put them together, and you have a winner. Developers, face it, no one really understands what you're saying, so you might as well make it sound cool.

"Dear client, I'm very busy structuring metadata, thank you for your understanding".

The MBA developer talk seems such a great concept that we've even made a generator for it. Feel free to take it for a spin, you'll be amazed by how such a basic combination can yield such interesting results. Now all developers can sound really smart.

http://mbadev.neolab.si

A case study in agile development: the algorithm for Ljubljana Realtime's event discovery

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 20:01:16 GMT

When we started working on Ljubljana Realtime, we decided to approach it in an agile way. Amongst others, we wanted to use a few interesting lean concepts such as rapid development, Minimum Viable Product and the Build - Measure - Learn iterations. Less than two months later, the results are in, and they are very pleasing. The MVP in the shape of an activity map was developed in a few weeks, only to show there is a lot of social noise which will somehow need to be taken under control. But that's currently low priority, since the first pivot is already taking place, slowly shifting the focus from the rich map application towards an event discovery algorithm and stream. That's where I see the most potential of Ljubljana Realtime, and in the last weeks, that's where the most work was done.

Launch

Ljubljana Realtime event discovery engine uses Foursquare trending venues and geo-tagged posts from Twitter, Instagram and Flickr to discover what's happening in real life. At least 6 people checked-in on Foursquare or two different people tweeting or posting photos in a single hour could mean something is going on. These events are posted to Twitter and Facebook, with links to the posts. A few versions of this algorithm were already deployed, each one solving new problems, resulting in a few micro Build - Measure - Learn cycles in a single month.

Iteration 1: Foursquare, no duplicates

The first version of the stream (bot) was a simple one, at that point it was meant to work as promotion for the map. The only thing it knew how to do was to wait a few hours until it posted the same thing again. I think Foursquare checkins are alive for three hours, so if a trending venue was still trending after that time, new people had to checkin and the venue was still buzzing.

Problem: Plain, no real added value.

Iteration 2: Adding activity from other sources

When we were trying to make some space on the crowded map, we started grouping posts from Twitter and Instagram by the nearest Foursquare venue, which meant having less boxes on the screen. This turned out to be quite a complex thing to do properly, but it was worth the effort. On only a few occasions, one venue would have multiple posts in a single hour, and in most cases, that meant something was happening there. This provided another very interesting potential for the activity stream. Actually, it made the stream bigger than the map could ever be.

(I love it when such things happen, when you are trying to solve a problem, and it turns out there is much more hidden behind the resolution.)

Groupping posts by a venue. Did Ljubljana Realtime just discover an athletic meeting taking place?

The next problem: Activity in some venues, specially generic ones such as "Ljubljana" would trigger the stream almost every day. Similarly, some large venues, such as supermarkets, would be trending too many times on Foursquare.

Iteration 3: Balancing the posts

The algorithm needed an update, which would lower the amount of times when a venue would be recognized as an event, either on Foursquare or on other channels. At first I though about an upgrade which would set the amount of people or tweets needed to trigger the "event discovered" action for a specific venue. This would enable us to reduce the importance of some venues, but it would also require manual work. Luckily, we came up with another brilliant idea: the more times a venue is trending, the harder it is for it to be trending again, at least for the next few days. Automatic balancing.

Venues with the most discovered events. Generic ones, besides massive places, such as train stations, cinemas, squares and shopping centers are too dominating.

The next problem: At this point, we have launched other test instances of Ljubljana Realtime (Maribor, Zagreb and Zurich), to see how the system behaves in other environments. Some cities are bigger, some are smaller, which means they produce different amount of activity. Besides, different services are used differently in different cultures.

Iteration 4: Supporting local instances

Foursquare is big in Croatia (Zagreb), but not so much in Switzerland (Zurich), which means Zagreb Realtime's stream had a lot of Foursquare trending posts, while Zurich's had a lot of "Increased activity on Twitter and Instagram" posts. It was obvious that local instances needed different algorithms. While having an option to set the amounts which would trigger the post on a specific venue would be too much to moderate, having the same logic on a specific region could work. And it does. Zagreb now needs more people checked-in on Foursquare, while Zurich needs more unique people tweeting or sharing photos.

Number of discovered events by type (Foursquare vs. Twitter + Instagram) on each day. Foursquare trending venues are dominating Zagreb, while social streams are dominating Zurich Realtime.

The next problem: The basic algorithm requires two different people to tweet/post from the same location in one hour. In case of Zurich, this amount was set to three, but it turns out this situation happens rarely, around 10 times fewer than with two people, or only two to three times a day. Obviously not enough.

Iteration 5: Improving the "increased activity" weight

You can only have a whole amount of people tweeting in the past hour. Two or three. In our case, we needed something in the range of 2 1/2. The modified solution adds the number of posts divided by ten to the number of users, which means that currently, at least two people making at least three posts in an hour will determine a trending event in Zurich. This is not a perfect solution from the event discovery view, but it does what urgently needed to be done: prevent having too many tweets in the stream.

The next problem: we currently have four Twitter accounts that tweet events for these four cities. Our target was for each of them to make around 10 - 15 tweets a day, which seems like a number that is not spam. But how can a person see which of these events is THE event?

Iteration 6: Going super venue level 2

The latest version of the algorithm now recognizes two levels of events. An event (mostly 6 people on Foursquare, mostly 2 different people tweeting), and an outstanding event (around 12 people on Foursquare, around 4 people tweeting). Our goal was to make this super event happen only once a few days, on rare occasions two times per day, and it has already happened a few times.

Sometimes super events happen, with tens of posts in a single hour, such as the one for Philips Fashion week. These events definitely require more exposure.

The next iterations

At this point, I'm very satisfied with how the algorithm works, even though a few other modifications need to be done (specially to support different days of week specifics and behavior). By measuring what is happening, learning from that information and building the next releases based on that knowledge, the activity stream logic has come a long way from the initial version. Measuring is crucial, and rarely we have went to such extent to enable this in the widest way possible (e.g. the update to balancing the posts based on the previous events would be trivial by itself, but we wanted to log things that would happen but didn't happen, besides things that actually happened).

These cycles of Build - Measure - Learn can be a lot hard work, but they provide great results, which are also very fun and rewarding. Some people simply need to see how deep the rabbit hole is. Do you have any other interesting cases or experience with this approach?

Discover what's happening in Ljubljana in real-time

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 13:37:29 GMT

I've always been a big fan of the power of the crowds. When a mass of people can achieve much more than a few skilled individuals can. And ever since we've started playing with Twitter's API, I've been think about the possibilities of this magnificent data source. Besides Twenity, we've done a few other Twitter mashups like Twitter walls, but this wasn't enough. We wanted something more - geolocation. Displaying information on a map in real-time. But since there aren't that many tweets equipped with GPS coordinates, we needed to include other services for more diversity as well. Which we did, and Ljubljana Realtime, a social event discovery application, was born.

Launch

Data and services

Ljubljana Realtime currently feeds on four different services: Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and Flickr. It would be great if we could add other services as well, but Facebook doesn't allow public geo search, Google+ doesn't support geo search at all, and other services either aren't appropriate or don't offer an API which would allow us to get their data.

These four services are visited once a minute, and all posts in a radius of around 5km from Ljubljana city center are found: tweets, Foursquare trending venues, pictures from Instagram and Flickr. A variety of information created with different purposes on different occasions.

The area covered by Ljubljana Realtime. Different services require different searches, based on maximum allowed radius.

The application

These posts are displayed on a map, which was the original idea for the prototype. The last hours of posts on Google Maps, which can be zoomed and filtered at will. But the whole display felt a bit chaotic (still does), since there are many posts in vicinity of one another. That's why we knew we need to group similar posts, and we did this by the post's nearest Foursquare venue. Then a funny thing happened: this simple solution enabled something magnificent, something that could be much bigger than the whole posts-on-a-map application.

Anyways, since geo location is heavily connected with mobile devices, the application is responsive and fully compatible with most smartphones. Perhaps there will be native apps as well at one point.

The stream

Back to the magnificent. Originally, a Twitter bot was intended to come with the application (I love making those), which would tweet all trending foursquare venues to promote the application. But this seemed a bit lame, we needed to add something cooler. Something that would add more value and detect an event before a 4sq trending venue would happen. This is where the mentioned grouping of posts by venue came in handy, and the logic is as follows: if two or more people publish form the same venue in a single hour, this could very well mean something's happening there. And in most occasions, this turned out to be true. Read further for more details.

Discovering an event before a trending venue on Foursquare.

The event discovery stream is available on Twitter and Facebook.

The problems

Besides unstable APIs, the biggest problem we are currently facing is the geolocation itself. GPS chips in mobile phones are often not accurate enough, so people are located tens or hundreds of meters from their actual location. Combine that with the amount of Foursquare venues out there (imagine tall buildings), and you can understand Ljubljana Realtime sometimes has problems with connecting a post to a venue. Not to mention duplicated venues. We've eliminated some of this effect by only using venues with a certain amount of checkins and different users, but this will surely be the greatest challenge the project is facing in the future.

An event which is not.

The results

Problems aside, in most cases, Ljubljana Realtime event discovery works great. In a week or so since it's online, it discovered many events that were happening in Ljubljana (night run to the Castle, an athletic meeting, one of the first iPhones 5 in Slovenia, a public garage sale in park Tabor, etc.), and on many occasions, it discovered these events before a trending venue happened on Foursquare. Which is great. The potential is obviously there, and newer, improved versions and algorithms will surely behave even better.

A few of the great discoveries Ljubljana Realtime made.

The plans

This project is being developed in an agile way, where the application's behavior is constantly being monitored and changes deployed rapidly according to discovered strengths and weaknesses. The MVP (minimum viable product) is there, and with a few minor modifications, Ljubljana Realtime will soon be ready to expand to other cities and regions. Now it's up to you to help us, and it's pretty simple. When something magical is happening on and you are tweeting about it anyways, be a sport and click the arrow to include your geolocation in the tweet. By doing this, you will help others to discover what's going on in our beautiful city.

That's it for now, party on.

p.s. for all the Slovenians out there: the coordinates embedded in a tweet are pretty accurate even though Twitter will say you are in Italy. If you look at the picture of the map below the tweet, there's a polygon around Italy which sadly contains Slovenia as well. Hopefully, Twitter will remove bug someday.

Did Apple and Samsung just pull the greatest trick in the mobile universe?

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 08:09:54 GMT

The verdict is finally in. Samsung has lost the lawsuit against Apple, which means the court decided they were copying iPhone's design and user experience. The decisions seems legit, specially if you saw the internal document from Samsung, a case study comparing and improving the Galaxy's user interface based on iOS's. On the other hand, it's hard to say if the decision is morally right and what it means for the mobile industry. Software patents are a problem and some companies like Google have already made a stance agains them (even though they've supposedly acquired Motorola because of them). But could all of this be just a marketing trick? Where Apple and Samsung set out to dominate the mobile industry?

Collectively, these two companies hold 50% of the smartphone market share, and take 90% of the global industry margins. Samsung is the only Android manufacturer that is really profitable. Around 25% of the iPhone is made by Samsung. The corporations publicly don't like each other, and don't have any problems suing each other while making business. A weird situation indeed.

Apple's biggest quarter brought in $13 billion dollars of profit on $46 billion dollars of revenue, most of it from iOS devices. Samsung's revenue is around the same, with lower margin ($5 billion). Yet the whole legal fiasco ended up in Samsung having to pay around $1 billion to Apple. Peanuts, if you ask me. We have been listening to this bullshit for years now, yet the decision doesn't make any significant different to any of the giants. Except the fact that people are taking side with one or the other. Not Nokia, HTC, Motorola, Sony or anyone else. Other manufacturers don't seem to exist anymore. Just Apple and Samsung, abusing the legal system to own the mobile world. Which could easily be one of the most brilliant marketing stunts ever. Two rings to rule them all.

Dear Twitter, please reconsider this madness

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:01:53 GMT

Dear Twitter. You were always one of my favorites. I love it how you managed to create a subculture, something that Facebook will never be able to do. You've allowed people to collectively create information that travels the world in seconds. Your role in many global activist projects is invaluable, and your stance on privacy issues something that inspires the world. You help us find out about things before they actually happen. When the Icelandic volcano was erupting in 2010, I was watching the #ashtag word clouds being broadcasted live on CNN. It was then that it struck me that the media will never be the same again, the power of thousands reporters wins every time. You made it to the mainstream, shaped transmedia into Twitter + television. You were becoming the ultimate foundation for real-time information. You made me realize so many things by being one of the most prominent platforms of the social era. You were the man.

And now you are starting to kill the platform.

Anyone who's read What Would Google Do? would know this is a huge mistake. This book (from 2009!) has a chapter about the value of platforms and distributed systems, and I've been obsessing myself with this revelation ever since. Wrote a blog post about it, which was retweeted by the book's author Jeff Jarvis himself, and it made me even more in love with the idea. Now I'm sure platforms are the future, because they have the ability to outlast services.

The most important things about platforms are the ecosystems around them. Yours was always more appealing to me than Facebook's. Because of the information Twitter has (almost all of it public), because of the culture that's emerged around this information. Twitterers, Developers, even Lurkers and Ninjas, the amount of innovative things that people have managed to build around your core is amazing. Not just silly games and marketing schemes, actually valuable and inspiring things (we've tried it too!). I always believed you were cooler than Facebook, that you have a brighter future, since you weren't trying to keep people inside your services. You seemed to know what made you in the first place.

I understand it's the high level mashups you are interested in, but still, the platform is the most important thing you have. Why not let other people reinvent your user experience, like others are trying to reinvent email? You want that, you want people to make Twitter whatever they want, while creating, consuming and curating the data that's inside you. You need thousand of different clients that feed your infinite hunger, enabling you to build your business model around the tweets that are generated. You want developers to use, abuse and reshape your essence. Because platforms are like networks, there value grows exponentially with the number of nodes they have, and these nodes help platforms evolve even further, in unimaginable ways.

And now you are trying to kill bits of this platform, those bits that help create the most valuable thing you have - hundreds of millions of Tweets every day. They may be just Twitter clients, but they might as well be the most important thing you've ever had. Your fans, your supporters, your ambassadors, your army, your ecosystem. Your future is more important than your monetization, not just to me and to them, to everybody who loves what you are, and to those who don't get you. Your future is important to mankind. That's why you should stay what you were meant to be. You should stay the open platform.

On iPhone, toys, the enterprise and of course, Windows 8

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:34:06 GMT

Flashback 5 years ago. In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone, the original model, which had no 3G support and cost more than any other mobile phone. At that time, Nokia dominated the market, with almost 40% market share, and Samsung was gaining ground on Motorola, both owning around 15% of the industry sales. Funny, how things change in so little time, but what's even funnier, is how the competition reacted to the iPhone. Some of you may remember how Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, laughed at the iPhone, saying that it's pretty much an expensive toy that would never penetrate the enterprise. History proved him wrong, and we can only guess if this was one of the most bitter predictions he ever made.

Apple proved that with proper marketing, a toy can find its place in the enterprise, a place traditionally owned by Microsoft. We must understand that even if a lot of Microsoft's revenue does come from the Windows division, most of it still comes from their enterprise business (Business Division + Server and Tools). But is the enterprise ready for a radical user interface such as Windows 8's Metro? I hope Microsoft isn't overcompensating for the totally wrong estimate about the success of the iPhone, because it's hard to believe they will be able to pull something similar off. Sell another toy to the enterprise.

I love Windows Phone 7. The user interface is great, the user experience is intuitive and fun. I like what I've seen about Windows 8. I think it's fresh and modern, something that even Apple could be proud of. But what worries me is its adoption in business environments, which is Microsoft's core business. The phone and a tablet are primarily casual gadgets, the personal computer is not. And there is already quite a bit of bad press around about the upcoming new version of Windows. Some have already said the next Vista situation might happen, and that most people will stay on Windows 7, like they did on XP before.

I think the average user in the enterprise in not that tech-savvy. Imagine a 50 year old secretary, struggling with the new fundamentally different environment of Windows 8. Businesses have already had problems with implementing the new Office 2007, at it was only slightly different than the previous version (compared to the differences between Windows 8 and Windows 7). Who will pay for the massive training required by users to adapt to the new Windows? Which company will risk it?

Of course, I might be wrong and Microsoft isn't primarily interested in the enterprise with this release. Maybe they are just trying to own a bigger share of the consumer markets, and targeting mostly smartphones and tablets, hardware included. This might be an interesting strategy, since adoption of Macs has also grown with the success of the iPhone and iPad. I hope they have a solid plan behind it, because I would like to see Windows 8 succeed. Because Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 actually did higher my perception of Microsoft, they made me believe Windows can be awesome. But to succeed, Windows 8 will have to be more than awesome, the way it's done, it will have to be so amazing my mother will be able to use it on her first try. Otherwise she won't.

The final destination, part 1: technologies and concepts enterprise IT will have to adopt

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 18:38:09 GMT

In the past years, we've witnessed a very important transformation: the consumerization of information technologies. Billions of connected users living their life online, overwhelmed by millions of information systems that have been tailored to suit their every need and desire. Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon came a long way with their products and infrastructure, but the enterprise isn't losing any time. Learning from the new paradigms and adopting new funky technologies, that have traditionally been developed in corporate laboratories. Can the Fab 4 also predict where enterprise IT is headed? And what will it become?

A few weeks ago I participated in a panel for PI-PL on Ljubljana's Faculty of Economics, where I was asked this exact question: where do I see corporate IT in 10 years. A very hard question indeed, but the more I thought about the it, the clearer it became. Enterprise data, software and technology will sooner or later integrate everything. Simple as that. But to fully understand how this will happen, we must first try to identify the most important trends that have shaped information technologies as we know them today. Yes, most of them don't have that much to do with the enterprise. But things are changing.

Cloud technologies

While cloud computing may have been present in the enterprise for quite some time, it's still pretty much dominated by web players like Google (mail, docs, etc.) and Amazon (hardware), who are also flirting with the enterprise. Who wouldn't? There are massive benefits for businesses to move their stuff to the cloud, from scalable physical Infrastructure to higher level Platform or Software as a service information systems.

Perhaps the most important thing the Cloud achieved was to render technology infrastructure irrelevant. It doesn't matter any more, what kind of environment you use. What type of security, infrastructure, servers and network you have installed. You can outsource these things to others, and it will be much easier and cheaper, while all your migrating-to-a-bigger-thing problems will be solved with a swipe of a credit card. I was fascinated that Microsoft now offers Linux based servers on their Azure cloud services, which can be changed to Windows with a click of a button. Architecture doesn't matter anymore, and this fact helps IT departments to focus on more important things than system administration.

APIs, mashups, platforms and ecosystems

Heavily connected with the whole Cloud concept, data and information never had it easier to travel from one place to another. System migrations (moving data from one information system to another) and system integrations (connecting multiple information systems into one) have always been one of the biggest challenges of IT. But the web didn't have as much resources as the enterprise, so it had to simplify things. By offering APIs (Application Programming Interface), web applications allowed others applications to work with their data in an easy way. Mashups, hybrid information systems built on top of others, were born.

Pretty much every noteworthy web service has its own API. This helped a lot of them to become a platform. You know, like Facebook and Twitter, who have created an ecosystem, where thousands of other applications live around them? Soon, similar concepts will dominate the enterprise too. There are already players like Salesforce, who not only offer business-oriented Software as a service solutions, but the also a Platform for other developers to build services on top of their services. And since everything is so open, all this data can easily be integrated with other information systems or transferred to a different environment. Modern information systems don't have problems with understanding each other, but IT departments have problems with understanding information systems, since different, more business oriented skills are needed to support these integrations.

Mobile devices and new distribution channels

More than ten years ago, when I was an Information Sciences student, there was still a debate going on about the benefits of web based enterprise information systems over traditional Client - Server architecture. In the end, the Web won, mostly because distribution was so easy, you make the update on the server, and every user gets it instantly. Employees need nothing but a browser. They are acquainted with the environment ever since they started using Hotmail, and took it for their own ever since they started using Facebook.

But today, it seems the Web is losing its ground as the leading infrastructure, since a new technology came into town. Capable mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, now enable access to information systems from anywhere, anytime in real-time. Besides, they arrived with their own app markets, which enabled a whole potential for software distribution, and perhaps more importantly, for software billing. You give a fair share to the store owner, who also promotes your solution, and you can freely focus on developing and marketing the product. It's true that mobile apps may not be as flexible as web applications, since the users need to install the updates (even though this can also be achieved by combining native mobile and hosted HTML 5), but the trend is clear. Apple already has its Mac store, Microsoft Windows will follow soon. Distribution of mobile and Software as a service information systems is becoming trivial.

Big data and The internet of things

Traditionally, banks, retailers and financial institutions have been the organizations that operated with the most data in the world. Well, things are changing, and we can only wonder who owns the most bytes today: is it Google, Facebook or someone else? Since there are less transactions than there are interactions, we can estimate consumer oriented information systems with billions of users are the biggest in existence. While this data is accessible to the enterprise to some extent, there are also hundreds of other systems the enterprise or its employees use, and they all create massive amounts of data and information, which needs to be integrated into a wider picture.

Not only that. Today, there are already are more connected devices that we have initially anticipated. These devices (cameras, sensors, tools, etc.) create even more data, which the enterprise needs to process. This trend of wired gadgets is called The internet of things, and together with the large amount of interconnectable information systems businesses use, points to one important trend: the typical enterprise was never faced with so much data and information, which somehow needs to be integrated and understood in an interdisciplinary way.

New ways of doing things, on a higher level

In the mean time, these consumer oriented (B2C) web corporation not only became a few of the biggest technology companies in existence, they've also invented new ways of how to get things done. From Google's 20%, to flat organizations without management, more and more companies (not only startups) set out to revolutionize how business is done. In the service oriented society, creativity is important, but so is productivity and the ability to ship fast. Done is better than perfect.

With new types of management concepts, such as lean and agile, modern organizations are becoming more and more flexible. Not only in doing things, but also in switching from one technology to another. These companies have developed their own way of thinking about which software to use. And it probably has a lot to do its price, how fast can you start using it, how scalable and connectable it is, and how fast can you dump if for another. IT requirements are moving to a higher level, and information systems have become just pieces of a puzzle that needs to be completed.

Design and user experience

Design and user experience probably still don't have that much to do with enterprise IT, but they are very much worth mentioning nevertheless. Face it, users are becoming more and more demanding, and software developers need to make better and better software. Even though the above mentioned facts are probably the dominating factor for the choice of which information systems the enterprise will use, design and user experience matter more and more.

Businesses have always had problems with implementing new software, educating the users, going through the whole status quo change. But beautiful and useful software penetrates faster. People perceive beautiful things to be more useful, and it's the whole intuitiveness and usability of software that helps them adopt something without too much resistance and problems. Some software vendors already found out user experience is the new competitive advantage, and in the end it may be the thing that tips the scale. But the whole point behind it is that I can see better, more clever and detailed, information systems force out older ones on an even faster pace. The whole world of information systems need reinvention, and user experience design will be the science behind these upgrades. Benefits are becoming more important than features.

Social, crowdsourcing and gamification

More than 3 years ago, I was very excited to present a concept we have been developing in Neolab on Days of Slovenian IT. I called it IT 2.0, since it meant integrating social services into enterprise software (at that time, Enterprise 2.0 was more widely used for stand-alone social software such as wikis or corporate blogs). The truth is, I didn't get the chance to sell it well, and in the mean time, disruptive social services managed to fully find their way into the enterprise. But business won't stop here; there are many other fascinating things the internet has invented that can fully be applied to corporate environments.

Gamification, the art of using gaming mechanics in non gaming environments, is getting more and more claim beyond the web. Both for motivating employees, as for motivating clients. We all like to play, so why should work be any different? And we all like to participate in something bigger, that is why crowdsourcing, where people coproduce something, can bring such exciting results. Can you see where I'm headed?

We are all human, and in the end, behaving on a very basic level. Sometimes we perform better, sometimes worse, and we all hold hidden potential even ourselves aren't aware of. That is what software in the workplace can sometimes help us discover, and it's something more and more businesses are aware of. Social, gamification and crowdsourcing are only a few approaches that can make us feel better and more motivated, and they are all concepts that enterprise IT will adopt sooner or later. Behind every company, there are only people.

The final destination of enterprise IT

These are the concepts and technologies that will shape enterprise IT of tomorrow. And with it, new challenges will emerge, together with new profiles of people, who will understand and use all of the above. These profiles, such as data scientists and business analysts, will help enterprise IT do what it was destined to do: Integrate life, the universe and everything.

But that's another story. Coming up soon.

Check out the complete The final destination series.

What Apple's headphones can teach us about user experience design

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 12:25:17 GMT

I've always been fascinated by things that simply work. By the details that convince, by the experience that fulfills expectations. Enter the case of Apple's headphones. They may be just an accessory that supports something else, but this little gadget is a brilliant example of how ux design should be approached. I'm not saying other vendors don't make equivalent or even better headphones (don't know, so please comment!), but Apple has proved many times that they really know what they are doing, reinventing stuff as they go along. Bottom line: as weird as it may seem, when your are designing user experience, you should think about Apple's headphones. They are one of the most perfect examples of how to do it right.

Form follows function

As most great designers will tell you, the design is only as good as its ability to solve a problem. The focus is not so much on aesthetics, as it is on function. If you manage to persuade someone to do what you wanted, design did its job well. Otherwise, it failed, even if it looks great.

Apple's headphones come with a controller for the iPod and other phone functions. This controller is ergonomically shaped in such a way, that you can use it with your eyes closed, or while running. Your finger will always find its orientation. The volume up button is physically on the top. The form follows function, being beautiful comes secondary.

The controller is designed in such a way it does exactly what you expect it to do, without guessing.

There are infinite ways you can implement this philosophy into software, but you have to know what you are trying to do. That's the main objective of user experience in general, understanding your goals, and adapting everything to help users reach them.

"Less is more" generates intuitiveness

The controller comes with only three buttons, but these buttons can do more that it seems. The age when a single control could perform only one function is over, and this fact can easily be applied to the new generation of software, supporting advanced (native and HTML 5) interactions (swipes, multi-finger gestures, etc.) on devices such as smartphones and tablets. Here's what these three buttons can do:

volume up and down are dedicated
the main button can play and pause with a single press. The same goes for answering and hanging up the phone.
pressing the main button twice goes to the next song, three times for the previous song
holding the main button activates Siri / Voice control

Less is more is a very important approach, and it's one of the reasons why the iPhone did what it did, having a single button instead of many. Users shouldn't be faced with too many options and choices, it's better to design these choices in such a way they offer advanced behavior. Only then, users will find something intuitive and easy to use.

Think adaptation and multi-functionality

As mentioned before, the headphones controller can adapt its behavior to the state the system is currently in. When you are listening to music, it controls music, when you're on a call, it controls the call, when you are using Siri, you're the weirdo who's talking to your phone. Software can do the same; when I launched this blog, I played around with the idea of the home link adapting to the fact where the visitor currently is.

Software users come in various shapes and find themselves in various situations. First time user vs. second time user, potential client vs. client etc. Advanced systems can adapt to this fact and offer a different kind of experience to each of them, acting multifunctional. You want to present yourself to the first time user, and inform the second time user. You want to close the potential client, and do everything to retain the current client. Software is not static anymore, it adapts to different personas and scenarios.

Consistency FTW

Great user experience is consistent inside a product and across multiple channels. Even if something is not solved perfectly, analog functions must be solved in the same way all across the same and other systems, to avoid confusion. Apple's headphones also work with a Mac computer. With the controller, microphone and everything. The little cherry that makes Apple's complete listening and controlling ecosystem a platform.

The headphones are fully compatible with a Mac.

This is very important fact, making user experience a holistic strategy, that goes beyond the single product / implementation. A part of mentality that CEO is not about Executive anymore, it's about Experience.

Summary

Great user experience is becoming a competitive advantage, but at the same time something that's really hard to master. Knowing what problems and goals you are trying to solve is crucial, everything else must adapt. Thinking outside a single product and implementing the same philosophy across multiple systems and channels is slowly shaping (user) experience design into a strategic business function.

Apple's headphones with their controller are a great example of how to do user experience right. Something so basic, but at the same time so advanced. Solving so many problems with so little, by fully understanding what you are trying to do in different situations, and leaving you only with the choices you need to make in the specific moment. It simply doesn't get much better than that.

Putting 'people who look at you' to your Facebook profile would be the smartest thing to do

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 10:50:34 GMT

Are you one of those people who are wondering how Facebook decides which friends they put on your profile? I admit I am, both out of programmer's curiosity and of course, there have been rumors that those individuals are the ones who look at your profile. While LinkedIn offers this "who looks at your profile" insight to its (premium) users, Facebook is still very mysterious about it, denying this is how this particular algorithm works. But there is a simple reason I don't believe them: if I would be Facebook, I would design it exactly like this.

EdgeRank

Facebook uses EdgeRank to calculate the connection between two people, determined by the amount of mutual friends, interactions, tagged photos, attended events and other parameters in a time period. Besides other things, the EdgeRank influences which posts get displayed in your news feed. It seems Facebook is saying that a similar algorithm is used for the friends on your profile, but is it really?

The exploit

Some time ago, someone managed to find a way inside the EdgeRank results. This guy noticed that Facebook caches the list of your friends, together with the level of proximity you have with each one. This stored part of the social graph helps search and other lists on Facebook to work faster and be sorted better. He was nice enough to write a script and made it public, so everybody can see who their Facebook BFFs are. The results looks like the real deal, and it's actually quite fascinating that Facebook hasn't patched this potential abuse yet, it's been available for almost a year.

Bottom line: the list of friends in your EdgeRank and the list of friends on your profile are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike each other.

Comparing my closest friends to those that are showing up on my Facebook profile

Why bother?

Facebook needs to constantly drive your engagement, and they have infinite data about you. They are trying to seamlessly integrate their experience into every pore of your life and make you even more connected. They are saying they can predict when hookups and breakups will happen. Who do you think they would put on your profile?

It would work

Adding "people who look at you" to your Facebook profile would act as the poke that never got clicked. The most basic (inter)action, something that wants to lead to something bigger. The invisible act of someone longing for engagement. Potential connection, potential partnership, potential relationship. The beyond EdgeRank scary social experiment, which holds infinite possibilities, positive and negative. An almost godly algorithm. Why would anyone even think of doing it differently? It simply doesn't get much better than this.

I would do it, I believe Facebook would do it as well, but even if they did, it's pretty clear why they can't tell us. This feature would work only as long as we wouldn't really believe it's being used. That's why you need to forget about all of this and simply enjoy your virtual life.

Trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners.

Security questions are the dumbest thing the internet has ever invented

Wed, 02 May 2012 20:05:54 GMT

At one point of the evolution of the World Wide Web, somebody came up with this fantastic idea. This person must have thought that the problem of securing your online identity was just solved in a very elegant form: security questions, which only the person who owns the account is able to answer. But there's a problem. Even if security questions worked at one point in time (which I also doubt), they simply don't work anymore, so you might as well lose them. Luckily, most services already did that, and Facebook tried to innovate this feature with "recognizing friends" alternative, but I somehow still manage to find them. And fail using them.

True story

A few years ago I had to set up the security questions with my online broker because of their new online privacy policy. Since financial services are a bit delicate, they are trying to provide as much security as possible. One of the questions I had to answer was "What is the last name of your favorite athlete". Since I wouldn't take risks, I did something silly with the answer, but forgot what that silly was. I tried to remember on few occasions, but failed miserably every time. In the end, because of the recent Apple and Facebook stock exchange frenzy, I had to make a phone call to the States and reset my security questions. A waste of time and money.

Why u no work?

But why don't security questions work? Firstly, nobody's sure how they work with the specific service. Will somebody be able to reset my password by answering them right? Or will I be required to answer them after I login to the system with my username and password? Or will they be used just in case I need to prove my identity on the telephone? Who knows… (and don't bother explaining)

Than the next problem happens. When I'm asked to answer the security questions such as "Your first girlfriend's name", "Mother's maiden name", "Favorite holiday spot" or "Your pet's name", I can think of plenty of people who might know such things, and don't know what these monsters could do with the answers (see above). Sure, these are mostly people I trust, but lately, quite a few answers to questions like this can be found elsewhere, e.g. on Facebook. How can I be sure my mother has the correct privacy settings? Or that my pet won't appear tagged on someone else's picture? Is that a risk I'm willing to take?

Time to drop

Bottom line: I tend to be creative or lie when I'm answering security questions, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who does it. Lies and creativity are easily forgotten, so I end up not knowing the right answer when the time comes. Face it, you can not make a generic query that only I will be able to answer, and that's where the story ends. So please, stop using security questions, they don't work! Think of something else.

DISCLAIMER: Please note I'm not trying to persuade anybody to lower their security standards, but the fact is, people are emailing passwords to each other.

The Silicon Valley tour, part 8: Lessons learned, time to reevaluate

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 18:01:36 GMT

It's been about month since I've returned from Silicon Valley, so I've had plenty of time to think about what happened there. This time I went out of curiosity, hoping to get the idea of how things work in the global center of technology. The next time I will be there for real business, approaching the situation more systematically. San Francisco and Silicon Valley are a great place to visit for profiles such as myself, so there surely will be a next time, when a wiser version of me will be able to do some serious shit. And I'll be wiser also because I've learned my lessons this time.

Ideas are worthless, but execution also isn't all it takes

When I started being an entrepreneur, I thought The idea was everything. While innovation may be important, it's mostly worthless by itself. No matter how good or revolutionary your idea is, hundreds of people probably have a similar idea at the same time. As Oren Michels puts it: "Stealth mode is stupid, execution is what matters.". Ideas are worth nothing if they're not executed properly. But wait, we've done a pretty good job with Twenity, but that still wasn't enough to make it abroad. It seems execution isn't enough as well.

At this point I think the hardest thing to do is the next step, putting the product on the market, making it recognized. At least that's where we are now, that's the obstacle we are currently facing. But I can already predict that the next hardest thing would be to find the investors, and the next to scale the business. Idea > Execution > Marketing > Financing > Scaling is a complex lifecycle, and you have to control every element before you can say you've made it. That's why you should try (and fail) as many times as possible. With every new project you do, it will be easier to dominate the prior steps, allowing you to focus more energy on the next ones.

Competition is fierce, but the market is big

The (Seedcamp) startups I've met on my trip really do some seriously crazy shit. Some of the things were so awesome I've almost lost faith in being able to do something similar. But I managed to somehow get back in the game. Neolab may not be cutting edge (yet) on the emerging fields such as mobile, HTML 5 or responsive design, but that's really not that big of an issue, since we make things that do what they're supposed to. That's the Execution phase, but luckily, the Market has the capacity to absorb many things, if approached properly. Face it - there will always be companies who do a better job than you, but it's the Market who'll decide who makes it or not.

I attended a Salesforce conference for a few hours (thanks Davorin!), which attracted thousands of visitors. In case you don't know them, they are the leading provider of Software as a Service CRM solutions, offering a service and a platform for other developers. Their product is really awesome, but that doesn't mean similar products can't find their own market. Researching on this issue, I found a review of the 10 best known SaaS CRM solutions, all of them obviously able to survive, even though Salesforce dominates this segment. And I'm sure there are hundreds, if not thousands more that are able to coexist at the same time on the huge global markets. Which brings me to my next point:

Highlights from a massive Salesforce conference

User experience is the new competitive advantage

You need to find your Unique selling proposition and competitive advantage. Most of the above mentioned Seedcamp startups found it in superior user experience. Take something that works, and make it work even better. Today's users are quite willing to migrate to a new product / service if it turns out to be better than the current one. A great example of this philosophy is vox.io, which offers a similar service than Skype (online calls and chat), but simply does it better. And by better I mean using new innovative approaches to make something more simple and intuitive to use. The user experience segment will only become more important and challenging in the future, since new ways of interactions with software are emerging (touch, voice, thought?).

vox.io's chat with embeddable content proves chat can be reinvented

Selling and pitching is ok

When you mention Sales, many people get the impression of a door-to-door salesperson trying to sell you books. Or company phones ringing with people who make it hard to say no to. These things give sales a negative connotation. But it seems that's a cultural thing. In San Francisco, everybody is trying to sell you stuff, everybody's pitching all the time. When you ask somebody "What do you do?", the person is already showing you their product on his/her iPhone. Maybe not for the actual sell, but just to get some decent feedback. You shouldn't feel bad about trying to sell something, that how the system works. Just make sure that something is worth selling.

One of the parties at vox.io's. Everybody was pitching.

You're nothing without the contacts

I admit I was a bit naive this time. I hoped the fact me being a blogger and a representative of two startups would open a few doors, but this turned out to be wishful thinking. It's true I did manage to find a few contacts on the spot, which enabled me to do great things (such as visiting the technology bluechips and the Internet archive), but my way to the influential blogs was closed. I heard that they receive a few hundred submissions a day, so you need to make sure your pitch is awesome and you have backdoors to deploy it. Do your homework, the next time I take on a similar adventure, I'll try to schedule as many meeting as possible in advance. I've finally found a reason to pimp up my LinkedIn profile, and I was lucky enough that:

The Slovenian (startup) scene is alive and kicking

One of the most fascinating things that happened to me was the chance to meet the Slovenian diaspora in Bay Area, and the startup scene around it. Thanks to a few individuals, such as Jure, Tomaž and Andraž, a lot of things are happening around Stanford University and vox.io's San Francisco headquarters, and everybody is very welcoming to the new generation of Slovenian immigrants and other startups, trying to make it abroad. Thank you for your kindness, I feel Slovenia!

The Slovenian diaspora meeting at the Stanford University

Foursquare is the ultimate travel guide, so get a local data plan

Forget maps, Foursquare has become the ultimate travel guide if you're looking for companies, tourist attractions or happening. That's why you'll need a local data plan, which costs a few bucks a day. Pretty much everything is on Foursquare (besides, physical addresses are often very hard to find online), and trending venues can point you to the events worth visiting. I've never used Foursquare in such a way, and the critical mass of users reached around here surely provides massive value beyond the game.

What now?

That pretty much sums it up. This trip was a great experience, but it's time to get back to the drawing board. Rethink my strategies. Redesign Twenity's user experience. Reinvent Neolab's business model. Stay in touch with the people I've met. Find new contacts for the next visit. Adopt new technologies. Research new markets. Think global.

Well, at least I won't get bored.

Check out the complete The Silicon Valley tour series.

The future (of software) is in platforms

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 16:26:11 GMT

I don't know if you've had the chance to read What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. You should, it's a very powerful book, even though it's been written a few years ago. Things have changed a bit since then, when Google was on top of it's game, but that doesn't mean the ideas presented in the book aren't more actual than ever. One of the chapters that made the biggest impact on me was the one about platforms and distributed systems. Google managed to conquer the world of Web 1.0 by being decentralized, allowing others to embed YouTube videos, Google Maps and Ads anywhere on the Web. This orientation provided the fuel for Google's further development and growth. Today, this way of thinking is not a competitive advantage anymore, it's becoming a necessity. As you will see, current online market leaders of various industries are not those who provide the service, they're the ones who provide the platform.

Platforms rule because mashups rule

Platforms, as opposed to products and services, allow others to build on top of them. Not thinking about control and centralization, they provide the basic building blocks other can use to develop even more products and services. In the world of Web 1.0, this meant using an embedded YouTube video instead of having your own video player, but Web 2.0 has been heavily defined by ecosystems of services built around other services. With APIs these platforms provide, developing high-level mashups has never been easier from the technical point of view, and this type of architecture benefits everybody. The platform vendor gets additional developers that extend and market it's service, while the satellite mashup gets the distribution channels, users and data they need to get somewhere faster. A modern synergy packed symbiosis.

Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery, which provides API as a service, talking for Silicon Gardens in Kiberpipa

The technology platforms

Today, pretty much all of the technology market leaders are platforms. Google allows various levels of use of it's services, from embedding things to using different APIs. Facebook's games and other apps ecosystem is huge, with providers such as Zynga already gone public. Twitter and it's massive amounts of tweets generated in real-time produced the Twitterverse - an array of fascinating high-level services. Foursquare, a geo-location network allowed other interesting concepts, such as augmented reality and games, on top of its service. Amazon offers you to build your own store, and Apple's and Android's mobile app stores are hosting hundreds of thousands of apps developers can build, deploy and distribute in short amounts of time. Salesforce offers a platform for enterprise IT, WordPress for writing and blogging tools. I could go on, but you get the picture. Platforms are the future, because they evolve collaboratively, with thousands, if not millions of people co-creating them.

A massive Salesforce conference in San Francisco, which I've visited on my Silicon Valley trip (thanks Davorin!)

The real-life platforms

Not only in software and technology, platforms in real-life are also becoming more widespread. The whole Apple iPad/iPhone gadgets ecosystem is one of the most obvious cases, where various providers offer sound systems, dongles, add-ons and other accessories that upgrade and make the original item even more appealing. Nespresso and Dolce Gusto are another interesting products. Nestlé provides the platform - the small coffee pads, which they are pushing to the market, while different manufacturers make coffee machines and other complementary products. The platform becomes more useful because of its satellites, which make the platform even more successful, turning this relationship into a virtuous circle.

Coffee machines by various vendors for Nestlé Dolce Gusto

So what should I do?

Firstly, you should embrace this way of thinking and understand what's happening. Platforms have been around since the beginning of software, even though you maybe haven't thought about them in such a way. Computer architectures, Operating systems, Programming languages and Development environments are all platforms, on a more basic level - but they provide the foundation which others can build on top of. Other platforms are build atop of these and others atop of those. Platforms are everywhere, and with every new level, they are less technically, and more conceptually oriented. Think about where you fit in.

Next, find a platform that suits what you are trying to do. Personally, against many odds, I believe more in Twitter than I do in Facebook, since Facebook is trying to keep as much as possible inside its service, while Twitter acts distributed. One of our projects is Twenity, a game we've developed around Twitter influence measuring.

If you're feeling lucky, you might want to become a platform on your own. While this may be almost impossible to do, it's something I wish I will have the chance to do someday. Neolab already has its own development framework, and if we do manage to make enough surplus or find an investor that will take us down this road, I'll be the first one in line. That is, if we don't decide to join an established platform and rather build on top of that.

Things have changed. The future (of software) is in platforms. Are you already a part of the show?

The Silicon Valley tour, part 7: A few exciting new business models that actually work

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 17:28:22 GMT

Visiting Silicon Valley enabled me too peek into the future a bit. Finding out about new technology trends, meeting disruptive new software startups and seeing fascinating new business models that are proven to work. There are even more futuristic products / services than the ones mentioned in this post, but these are the ones that made the biggest impression on me. And they all share similar competitive advantages: using smartphones and other mobile devices, canceling middlemen and supporting cashless commerce.

Mobile payments and Square

While Square may already be mainstream in the States, something like it is far away from being used in Europe, not to mention Slovenia. Square is focused on mobile payments, and is currently offering three different services:

a credit card reader that you can plug into your mobile device
an iPad register app for merchants, supporting invoices, payments and inventory
an app for paying with your smartphone

Square is on fire, and there are tons of places in San Francisco where you can use it. Electronic payment industry leaders such as PayPal are already looking for ways to conquer the same market.

A place that accepts all major credit cards and Square

Personal chauffeur and Uber

Uber can only be described as taxi on steroids, bypassing the dispatcher. Ok, it's actually a chauffeur. Using a mobile app, you make a request, and one of the drivers answers it. After that, you can see where the driver is, when he will pick you up, how your driver looks like, and get a direct link to call them. A guy in a suit driving a Lincoln picks you up, takes you wherever you want, and after it, you just exit, without paying. You get an invoice on your email, together with the map of the route, and the fare gets deducted from your credit card. It's a bit more expensive than a cab, but still, a pretty awesome service, that will be expanding to other countries soon.

With Uber, you get picked up by a Lincoln like this

Carsharing and Zipcar

The next generation of rent-a-car is called carsharing, and it's offered by Zipcar. No agents, just your card that you use to unlock the car you've rented. Everything happens online, where you make a request for a car, get directed to a designated pick-up area, and the car is already waiting for you there. Petrol is included in the price, and if the fuel tank drops below 1/4, you just use their credit card to top it up. Results: rent-a-car has never been easier, cheaper and less stressful.

One of the Zipcar pick-up places. They are everywhere.

bonus: Co-working and NextSpace

Co-working represents shared offices that people from different startups and companies can use. Besides being cheaper than renting your own office, you also get a chance to spend time with other people, share knowledge and ideas, which is something I found out to be invaluable. NextSpace is an established co-working space in San Francisco, with more than 175 members and packages ranging from a few hundred dollars monthly for a desk to around a thousand for a complete office. Something similar is already happening in Slovenia, so if you are interested, please visit coworking.si.

Tables, offices, conference rooms. All available with NextSpace.

Conclusion

Some of these business models might not work as well outside the curious and tech-savvy culture of Silicon Valley, but they can still help as a demonstrator of things that can be done and an announcer of things to come. Let's face it, in technology, Silicon Valley is still miles ahead, so if you're looking for trends, the smartest thing to do is just to go along with it.

Trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners.

Check out the complete The Silicon Valley tour series.

The Silicon Valley tour, part 6: A trip to the Internet Archive

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 18:28:09 GMT

Those that have read my previous post about visiting the technology giants of Silicon Valley, might have gotten the idea that organizations around here aren't that welcoming to strangers. Well, that might not be entirely true. One of my stops in San Francisco also included a visit to the Internet Archive, a foundation that is trying to preserve all the information our civilization possesses. And they were more than welcoming. Besides giving Andraz and me a full tour of their headquarters, they've also invited us to one of their staff meetings, where the Archive's members and volunteers present their activities and results from their specific fields.

The Internet Archive is located in a former church in San Francisco, so there's more than enough room for all the people and hardware. Two main projects are currently taking place; one is the Wayback Machine, which makes snapshots of websites throughout history, and the other is the Archive, which represents systematic digitalization of movies, music and books, manually done by its members. A never-ending task that can only be done by activists who genuinely want to protect the knowledge of mankind, and you can contribute to the effort as well.

During our tour, 2.5 petabytes (that's 2.5 million gigabytes!) of data was mentioned, but I'm not sure if that's just one of the projects or both. This data is well protected, with mirrors all over the world. Impressive stuff, good enough to currently make archive.org the 223rd most visited site in the world (according to Alexa), get to the front page of The New York Times, and receive various prestigious awards.

One of the most fascinating stops of my Silicon Valley trip was indeed educational and inspiring, and it got me thinking: If there's a modern Library of Alexandria in the making, this would be it. Thumbs up.

Internet Archive's Headquarters in San Franscisco. It goes well with the logo, even though they came here only a few years ago.

The staff meeting, where members from various fields presented their achievements

Everyone that is an employee for more than 3 years, gets its own figure inside the church

Brewster Kahle, the chairman, passionately presenting the Archive's servers. There is no air condition, since heat is used for building heating.

The irony: since consumer hard disks are cheaper, they buy those and get rid of the casings.

This is how scanning of videos, microfilms and books looks like

Are we there yet?

Trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners.

Check out the complete The Silicon Valley tour series.

The Silicon Valley tour, part 1: Seedcamp America Trip visiting the Googleplex

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 02:05:21 GMT

When I decided to travel to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, I didn't expect things will be happening so fast. But thanks to Andraž from Zemanta, I managed to do two awesome things already on the first day after I've arrived - visit Google's headquarters in Mountain View and talk with the Seedcamp teams, currently on their tour of the United States. They came here to present their projects to potential investors, and Google was nice enough to accommodate one of the mentoring sessions in the Googleplex.

The Googleplex experience

Googleplex is huge, it seems that there's a whole town that exists only because of Google. When you get here, you really get the idea about the size of the corporation - it's a corporation by all of its meaning. Infinite buildings and office for various Google products, hundreds of people going back and forth.

What was said about Google is still true. You do want to work there. The place looks great and there's a feeling of extreme brain power everywhere you look. We got fed for free and even met Žiga, who is one of the few Slovenians working for Google. He's been doing it for a few years now, working on Google search, and he says he loves it. Who wouldn't?

Google's park and restaurant, located in the 1950 Mountain View building

Cafeteria and chill-out zone inside

The slide in the main lobby - sadly out of order. The screen displays Google search queries.

The Seedcamp experience

The mentoring sessions for Seedcamp teams took place in the afternoon in one of the buildings (Mountain View 1950 to be exact), where the companies currently in the Seedcamp program presented their solutions. I was honored to be one of the mentors, trying to help the projects with my experience in enterprise IT, business intelligence and Twitter integrations. Hopefully I was able to give the teams I was associated with some decent feedback. Here is the list of all 19 Seedcamp teams on the tour (including Oust.me from Slovenia), and these are the six I managed to get to know a bit more:

Zingl, a dating service that uses the social, interest and location graphs to match people
24symbols, a solution for e-books based on a subscription model
AppExtras, a plugin for mobile apps that allows publishers to promote other apps
archivme, a service for managing invoices and other business documents in the cloud
Bilbus, which works as a broker between businesses and lenders
blossom, a project management tool for lean companies

Pretty much all of these 19 companies managed to create some very impressive business models and innovative new services.

Alex presenting Oust.me, a location-based conquering game

Mentoring sessions happened in various rooms

A bit of food and drinks after an exhausting day

What now?

So far, so good. The Seedcamp experience in the Googleplex was amazing, and I learned more in one day than I did before in months. I truly hope these teams will be able to get what they came looking for, and I hope I will too. I just need to find out what that is, because I'm not even sure anymore.

Check out the complete The Silicon Valley tour series.

Apple should offer the opportunity to merge two iPads (with mockups)

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 18:14:42 GMT

The iPad 3 is coming out in March, and like its predecessors, it will surely be a huge success. But every time a new generation of an Apple gadget comes out, the previous ones flood the secondary markets, usually followed by massive price drops. Like iPads 1 today, iPads 2 will probably be quite inexpensive in the following weeks, when we'll have a new item on our with list. This may not be a really a big problem for Apple, since their business model of ultra-fast product cycles obviously works, but still, the idea of being able to sell more than one product of the same line to a single person could hold quite a few benefits. Let's take a look.

Why bother

I remember a really cool anecdote about an intern, who was bragging to the management of a pharmaceutical corporation he would be able to double the sales of their shampoo without any costs. Of course, no one believed him (or her), but the idea was very simple and effective. He said the company should simply put a "Wash twice" instruction to the back of the bottle, making people consume twice as much of it. The sales probably didn't double, but it's still a brilliant idea.

What about Apple? It's obvious that the low priced iPads 2 will be eating into the sales of the new iPad 3, since a lot of people will go for a second hand, cheaper version of the still capable-enough iPad 2. But by offering the possibility to merge two iPads into a single unit, Apple could prevent some of that effect, lowering the supply of the old iPads. Not only that, they could identify a totally new group of potential consumers who would buy the new iPad 3:

current: the people who don't own a tablet
current: the people who already own an iPad or a different tablet and will switch because of the iPad 3
new: people who already own an iPad, but don't feel the need to update to iPad 3 (like me)

This third group of people is who we are after, by offering them another added value to buy the new iPad without making them sell the old one. Owning two iPads at once? Why not.

Benefits: real multitasking

While the iPad and most other mobile devices support software multitasking, having more applications opened and one on the screen isn't real multitasking for the user. Split screen apps could solve this issue, but the screen size isn't that big. What would be better than having two apps on two iPads, with copy-paste and other cross-functional support? Like combining books and notes?

Real multitasking on two integrated iPads, using the iBooks and Notes.

Benefits: the book mode

We've already seen quite a few promising prototypes of book-shaped tablets, but I'm not sure if any of them made it to production. As shown on the second mockup, which displays different mailboxes in a TweetDeck type-of form on the first, and the emails on the second screen, this kind of use could prove itself very much useful.

Mailing like a pro: mailboxes on one screen, emails on the other.

Benefits: the laptop mode

At this point, the iPad is still not a full replacement for a personal computer, because of its hardware and software limitations. But it does support remote desktop connections to a computer, behaving as a terminal. Very cool, but not that useful, since it's hard to control a computer using a touch screen. By integrating two iPads into a laptop, we suddenly receive a keyboard and a trackpad, making such tasks much easier. Add a few more features to the iOS, and you could have a full replacement for a laptop. Something similar to the Asus Eee Pad Transformer or the Acer Iconia laptop concept?

Combining two iPads into a fully working laptop.

Requirements

Hardware: Easy. Something similar to the current magnetic sleeve which would hold the two iPads together. A cable wouldn't be needed, since connectivity could be done by wifi or bluetooth.

Software: Hard. Enabling one iPad to become a server and another one to become a client, being able to access and control the apps of the other.

Conclusion

Merging two iPads wouldn't be easy and probably not as useful as imagined in the mockups, since the user experience and controlling would have to be completely reinvented to support dual screen mode. Besides, if you would combine the iPad 1 (around 700 grams) and the iPad 2 (around 600 grams), you would get a 1,3 kg beast. Not very promising, but still not perfectly useless (the current 13' MacBook Air weighs 1,35 kg).

But the idea surely does hold potential. There could be even more interesting uses of such an installation, I've only outlined a few of them. So ~~Steve~~ Tim, if you like the idea, feel free to make it work. I would be more than happy to test out the MacBook Pad concept with the complementary iPad 4.

Special thanks to betmenka for lending me her iPad 2 despite being in a real hurry.

Zakaj blogam v angleščini [In Slovene]

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 08:14:26 GMT

Dragi prijatelj, znanec, bralec, naj se ti najprej opravičim. Pred leti, ko sem se loteval tega projekta, sem se soočil z eno izmed težjih odločitev v svoji spletni karieri: ali naj svoj spletni dnevnik pišem v slovenščini ali v angleščni.

Takrat sem se odločil za slednje, kljub temu da sem vedel, da bo na ta način težje začeti. Podobno, kot na Twitterju, se mi zdi, da je na kratek rok v materinem jeziku lažje dobiti tisto osnovno občinstvo, vprašanje pa je, kaj je bolj učinkovito na dolgi rok. Z angleščino je enostavneje doseči več ljudi, kar sem tudi pričakoval, da se bo enkrat zgodilo. Danes, skoraj tri leta kasneje, lahko rečem, da mi je kar uspelo.

Čeprav imam zelo rad Slovenijo, se ne čutim dolžan delovati v smeri ohranjanja materinega jezika - za to obstajajo drugi profili ljudi. Morda se sliši ignorantsko, vendar ni. Svojo misijo vidim drugje.

Glede na trenutno gospodarsko situacijo je zame bistveno, da skušam v tujini predstavljati lastne projekte, kot sta Neolab in Twenity, ter zagotoviti zaposlitev čim večjemu številu ljudi. To ni edini razlog za angleščino, veliko delujem tudi v smeri splošne promocije Slovenije, njenih dosežkov, uspešnih podjetij in ljudi ter kulturnih posebnosti. Nekdo mora povedati svetu, da obstajamo. Tako imajo tudi drugi nekaj od mojih naprezanj. In morda je takšen pristop celo bolj učinkovit za ohranjanje naše kulture kot uporaba slovenskega jezika.

Eden izmed večjih problemov Slovenije je, da so država in njeni sateliti pogosto edine stranke, ki si sploh lahko privoščijo projekte večjega obsega. Delati za državo pa ni ravno najbolj spodbudno. Zasebna podjetja imajo jasen cilj, ko kupujejo programsko opremo: racionalizirati poslovanje, zniževati stroške in/ali povečati prihodke. V državnih ustanovah pa se rado zgodi, da so vpleteni še drugi interesi, kar ne vodi v najbolj optimalno izvedbo posla. Zaradi tega je še toliko bolj bistveno, da se mala podjetja usmerjajo navzven. Ob tem lahko ponosno povem, da je Neolab v svoji zgodovini uspel izvoziti storitve v več "zahodnih" držav: Nizozemsko, Veliko Britanijo in Južnoafriško republiko.

Ne skušam trditi, da je mednarodno profiliranje našega podjetja posledica mojega pisanja. Morda ne povsem, je pa pisanje verjetno pripomoglo v določeni meri. Ko smo že pri pisanju - to je moj stoti zapis, zato sem si tudi privoščil tale jezikovni preobrat.

Dalje pa spet naprej po starem. Razglabljanja o tehnologiji na vse možne načine. Nekoč bo že nekdo prisluhnil mojim razmišljanjem in me potegnil s seboj, jaz pa bom s seboj potegnil ostale. In takrat bo v Silicijevi dolini še več ljudi govorilo slovensko, pisatelji in novinarji pa bodo skrbeli, da ne bomo pozabili na slovenščino. Mar ni to super plan?

Upam, da sedaj razumeš, zakaj blogam v angleščini.

Cool Slovenian brands, part 1: Technology startups making it big

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:23:10 GMT

Slovenia has a surprisingly high level of technology companies that made a global impact. These startups are an inspiration to everybody, and we hope more of us will be joining them soon. Some made it with the support of different incubators, such as Seedcamp or Y Combinator, others made it on their own. They all share an innovative and outstanding product or service, proving that Slovenia is a place of very talented and ambitious people. While there are probably even more successful startups I haven't heard of or mentioned, I think these eight Slovenian technology organizations created the most hype in the recent few years.

Celtra

With the recent domination of smartphones and tablets, mobile advertising is sky-rocketing. And we are not talking only about ads inside apps, we are talking about multi-platform mobile rich-media ads. These ads go beyond the direct effect of clicking, they enable mobile branding, attracting top-level multinational companies. Celtra has developed a platform for publishing and tracking such ads, and it is so hot they've received 5 millions in investor funding.
http://celtra.com

DoubleRecall

DoubleRecall is a company that might as well save the printing industry. The internet made information more accessible, and people are willing to pay less and less for it. Banner ads don't generate enough revenue for online editions, so newspapers are trying other options, specially content paywalls and tablet editions. In the mean time, DoubleRecall "invented" a new type of ad, where you have to type-in in a few words to access the article. High recollection of something you read and type make this type of ad very effective, and advertisers are willing to pay a lot for it. DoubleRecall got picked by YCombinator.
http://doublerecall.com

Flowr

Even though Enterprise 2.0 has been around for a while, we haven't seen it penetrating business on a large scale. Flowr addresses this issue, offering a simple and effective service for online collaboration between coworkers and teams. Call it Facebook for the enterprise if you like, these types of applications surely are the future of work. The Flowr managed to become a finalist in the Enterprise 2.0 conference.
http://theflowr.com

Oust.me

The latest Slovenian Seedcamp winner, Oust.me, combines two fascinating and trendy technologies: location based networking and gamification. The game supports Foursquare and other geo platforms, and its main objective is to conquer as much territory as possible by checking-in to places, becoming an ouster. Recently, they've also introduced a risk-type game that you play in teams. Your life should be a game? Can't agree more.
http://oust.me

Outfit7

Thanks to a series of talking friends available on most smartphone platforms, Outfit7 has become one of the most successful mobile development companies, and its founder one of the wealthiest Slovenians. At this point, more than 200 million downloads of Talking Tom, Talking Santa and other characters have been made. One of the most fascinating facts about Outfit 7 is that they have identified a totally new target group - children on (parents') smartphones and tablets, which is shown by their vision: we compete against Mattel and Disney. Ingenious.
http://outfit7.com

Toshl

Toshl is a fun app that helps you track expenses on your smartphone. With more than $250.000.000 expenses tracked on different mobile platforms, Toshl managed to became a finalist on SeedCamp New York in 2011. The competition there was fierce, so they didn't receive any funding, but that didn't stop them from moving to Silicon Valley, where the real magic happens. We are standing by to hear about the results.
http://toshl.com

Vox.io

Vox.io is one of the hottest Slovenian startups at this point. After winning Seedcamp London in 2011, this company is on it's way up, being covered by influential magazines / blogs Wired and TechCrunch in the past weeks. What is it about? It's VoIP (Skype) in your browser, without installation. Besides being cool, Vox.io also introduced a few interesting new concepts, such as using an URL instead of a phone number.
http://vox.io

Zemanta

Zemanta is the original Slovenian startup success story, the winner of Seedcamp in 2007. It offers a service that allows bloggers to enrich their writing by adding pictures, links and related content to their posts. Zemanta is very important because it showed other companies they can think big, and since then, they have been paving the way for other Slovenian and East European startups. A few days ago they've announced a strategic partnership with Federated Media Publishing.
http://www.zemanta.com

The impact

These companies are not only successful, they are also very important for other Slovenian startups trying to make a difference. They've become the foundation and mentors of a new mentality that's coming to this part of Europe, and they deserve all the respect. We are trying too, with Neolab and Twenity, and hopefully someday we will become members of similar lists. Until then, it's only fair we support them, by using their services, helping them, or just spreading the word about their awesomeness. We should be proud some of us have actually made it this far.

Trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners. Martin Strel image courtesy of Martin Strel Swimming Adventure.

Check out the complete Cool Slovenian brands series.

I feel sLOVEnia. I really do.

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:25:27 GMT

Not that it's the best slogan ever. I always preferred "Slovenia, on the sunny side of the Alps", which was somehow forgotten / lost / stolen in the mean time, but "I feel" it's still much better than the previous "Slovenia invigorates" we've been seeing. Each slogan tells a story, but together they tell another, wider story, a story of a nation looking for its identity in these confusing times of globalization and recession. But we may not be as confused as it seems, these past weeks have shown there is much determination around. Much love, displayed in the huge amount of support and sincere wishes I received after we've launched Twenity. I felt sLOVEnia, finally!

Even in the making of Twenity, people were helping us, commenting, blogging about it and lending us their Twitter accounts for testing. The launch went great, the whole wwwh community and others took Twenity for its own. We've made contact with successful Slovenian startups (more on them some other time) and exceptional individuals, all prepared to help and support us in any way they can. Everybody's curious about what's happening and where we are going. And quite a few think Twenity could be it.

But why the surprise? Well, even though Slovenians are very capable, they are traditionally also a bit protective and envious, not really wishing their neighbor would succeed with something or have a bigger car. We often lack the ability to find unity (as displayed by the current political crisis in the worst time possible), but at the same time wish we could stand united the way some other cultures can. But it seems new values have finally come around, backed up by ideas that Slovenia could truly be the next Silicon Valley. Ideas brought by a new generation of technology entrepreneurs, experiencing them on their own skin in San Francisco.

Tomaž Štolfa from vox.io said that the entire IT sector in Slovenia couldn't form a corporation as big as Apple or Google, and he is more than right. We shouldn't compete between ourselves, 5 mobile operators are more than enough for 2 million people. We should think big, and technology is where I FEEL we can make it, it's where i recognized LOVE and wider thoughts. I see capable people everywhere, and it's overwhelming. Together, we could do something special, bypassing the current political and economical fuckup. And I know you feel it to. Thank you for that.

Trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners.

Twitfluence is dead, long live Twenity! Launching December 21st 2011.

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 17:41:51 GMT

In three days, a new type of online influence measuring service will be launched, an exciting new version of Twitfluence on steroids. Unlike Klout or PeerIndex, Twenity won't try to set a new standard for calculating social authority, it will rather behave as a game on top of your social activity, which will allow players to go through quests, unlock levels, badges, compare themselves and compete with each other. A project made by Neolab and IlovarStritar that will try to combine the elements of gamification and social authority measuring. Who's hot and who's not, the game.

Launch

The algorithm we'll use is the v0.60 of Twitfluence, but on an improved engine, and that's pretty much everything that will stay the same as the prototype. Twitter is the original source for data, but if there is enough interest, new quests based on Facebook, Foursquare and other platforms will be designed and developed.

On Wednesday, December 21st, at 7 PM CET, Twenity will be presented and officially launched as part of the last wwwh of this year. We will stay in beta at this point, since there will surely be problems with some (influential) users and further patches will be done in the next few weeks. But after that, the sky is the limit. You're very welcome to join us in Kiberpipa, or you can watch the live stream online. Here are a few resources:

the official Twenity page
the v0.60 of the Twitfluence calculation
the event invitation (in Slovene)
the live stream where the presentation will be broadcast on Wednesday
the event on Facebook
our Twitter profile and Facebook page
more info about the Twitfluence calculation

"Twenity is an interesting new game that helps you discover your social capital while competing with your friends. This real-live RPG enables you to play without the need to actually do anything."

That's right: Vanity is the spice of life.

Did Google just admit Apple's Siri is the future of search?

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 15:21:19 GMT

I don't know if you saw The evolution of Google search video, which they've published a few days ago. You should, it's a cool movie, portraying the history of search and Google's vision of its future. But something went wrong. One of the punchlines of the video was a story from one of the engineers, who said that next-generation search engines will be able to answer complex questions such as the following:

"Hey, what is the best time for me to sow seeds in India given that monsoon was early this year?’"

A very legitimate question.

I don't know if you've tried out iPhone's new personal assistant, Siri. It's awesome in every bit. Not only does it have a state-of-the-art voice recognition, it's also packed with super smart artificial intelligence that supposedly allows you to ask crazy things things such as:

"Can you remind me to call my wife when I leave the office?"

Another very legitimate question.

And there's a strong resemblance there. Both requests are really abstract and probably require quite a bit of computational power to be understood by a program. They have nothing to do with mathematical or social ranking currently used by Google (search), they are all about Artificial Intelligence and semantic interpretation. And while Google currently doesn't provide (or at least market) services that would be able to understand such sentences, Apple does.

I've noticed quite a few articles saying concepts such as Siri are the future of search. It's obvious artificial intelligence will play a big role in this segment. Apple's already in. Even if their technology is not superior to Google's, who is also working on embedding AI into search, it's fully available today, and everybody knows it. Google should really be careful with such statements concerning their core business, Web search. Specially if they are competing against the marketing wizards of Apple, who know how to sell things even if they don't fully work.

Promoting a technology you don't have and your competition does? Stupid consumers such as myself might do something stupid.

UPDATE (5.12.2011): You can join the discussion on HackerNews.

The great technology wars and the transition of software from B2B to B2C

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:25:14 GMT

The epic article by Fast Company about the technology wars of 2012 provides great insight into what's happening in Silicon Valley and software in general these days. Four players, or the Fabulous Four, are mentioned to be the real market and innovation leaders: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google. Each of these companies found its place where it dominates and invents new business models, and each one is a role model for new generations of technology startups and leaders. And if you didn't notice, all of them sell software to consumers, not other companies (in case of Google and Facebook, you are the real customer, but advertisers pay for it). Software is becoming more and more consumer-oriented, and the clash of these titans will determine the outcome, the software of the future.

The Fab Four

Who are these fantastic companies? Amazon is the leader in e-commerce. Apple reinvented mobile devices and content distribution. Facebook is the largest social network in the world, a big brother in the making. Google is the biggest web and search company.

I almost won't argue with the choice of the Fab Four. To me, these are truly the technology companies that are moving things forward. To be honest, the list is bit of an understatement for Microsoft, even though that doesn't change the fact I'm trying to put out here. These four corporations (their software at least) are more B2C (Business To Consumer) than B2B (Business To Business) oriented. Even Microsoft, with its XBox, Bing, Windows (Phone and Tablet) programs is shifting focus to consumer markets.

The stock market comparison

The B2B software market is still huge, but electronic commerce, online advertising and the economy of scale of billions of users spending a few dollars is slowly outperforming more expensive business solutions sold fewer times, even if they are deployed millions of times as operating systems, products or services. If you check out the following charts, you can see information about market capitalization, revenue and historical price change of these companies (Facebook is not public yet, but it's IPO could be around $100 billion) compared to traditional technology companies such as Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. The numbers are pretty interesting (source: ycharts).

Market capitalization of Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in the last 10 years (as available)

Change in market capitalization of Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in the last 7 years (as available)

Revenue of Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in the last 10 years (as available)

Change in revenue of Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in the last 8 years (as available)

Change in stock price of Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in the last 7 years (as available)

Why does it matter

As a software architect, I see major shifts in user-centered software compared to business-oriented software. Even if you check Gartner's strategic technologies of 2012, it becomes more and more obvious what's happening:

software is made for and "sold" to users, not management anymore
product cycles and new releases are reaching Warp Speed
the focus is shifting from features to benefits
user experience is becoming more and more important
technology used is getting less and less important
system and data integration is becoming trivial with web services and APIs
there's a new generation of devices that run software (smartphones and tablets, the internet of things)
scaling and performance is not measured in Whateverbytes, but in number of users
new distribution channels (marketplaces) are going beyond the Web
platforms and mashups have emerged, where ecosystems of software are being build around the core service
online software is more disruptive and innovative, business software follows (from Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0, adoption of gamification in the enterprise, etc.)

Adaptation

Some business software companies, such as Salesforce.com have managed to adapt to this situation, offering a platform others can upgrade and develop on. We're adapting too, on a smaller scale. Neolab is still mostly focused on B2B software, since that's where we've built our market. Sure, we did a few web portals and are working on deploying our own user-targeted service Twitfluence, but it's business-oriented software that we generally work on. But that doesn't change the fact we are fully aware that the concept of software is changing, and we are on top of it, trying to embrace these trends and include new paradigms in corporate infromation systems. Social, user-oriented, user-friendly. Knowing that people are behind every company.

Software is maturing; consumers are getting more and more demanding, brands behind the software are getting more and more important. And as the Web expands even further, this fact will become yet more obvious. It's you and me who are the ones who are "buying" software. Which is great, since in the end the ordinary people, not corporations, will be those who will decide how software and technology of the future will look like. Interactive, useful and fun. Here we are now, entertain us.

Is Dexter and its social game Slice of Life the future of TV shows (but no one noticed)?

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:46:35 GMT

I don't know if you've noticed, but a few months ago the hit television show Dexter got it's own social game you can play on Facebook, named Slice of Life. Similar kinds of branded social games have been done before, but it's something else that's interesting this time. This game changes according to the plot of the television series each week. That's right, the show and the game are coexisting and evolving together to bring users a totally new type of experience. And while most technology blogs, obsessed with social, said Slice of Life is a revolutionary new type of a social game, I asked myself: is it rather a new revolutionary type of consuming television?

Television is static - not interactive the way the Web is. You can't do much. More or less, liking and commenting shows, besides tele voting, are the most interactive things you can do. But Slice of Life changes everything. A television show that you can watch, consume and play on multiple mediums, multiple channels, multiple platforms, online and offline. You're actually playing a game inside the show. Or watching a show inside the game. Pretty awesome stuff that didn't get as nearly much attention as it should, attention for bringing a new type of interactivity to television shows.

If the future of television as a medium will be defined by new types of business models (Netflix), physical architecture (Google?) and user experience (Apple?), the future of television content will definitely be defined by the level of interactivity it offers, imitating the Web. And until now, interactivity hasn't been solved in such a smart way than our favorite serial killer's social game. You must watch, you must play, you must do everything to be the biggest of the 10 million+ fans Dexter has on Facebook.

It looks like television is becoming more than just a medium. It's rather evolving into a cross-platform interactive content serving entertainment system. Some have already managed to successfully understand that fact, more will follow soon. I don't know about you, but I can't wait to see more.

The great aquarium cleaning dilemma: should you be removing or replacing water?

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 18:44:18 GMT

Everybody that owns an aquarium probably came across this decision at one point. The water is filthy and needs to be replaced. All you have is a jar. And you ask yourself: should you be emptying the aquarium first, adding new water later on, or should you be replacing filthy water with clean water? The first choice seems more rational, but sometimes you can't fully empty the aquarium (e.g. you have fish), and you need to do more runs since you're not taking water both ways. The other option seems interesting since you're efficient both ways, but at the same time you're taking back fresh water mixed in the aquarium. So, what should you do?

The situation

In reality, you do have other options. A water pump, a larger intermediate basin or other things that can make this task easier. But believe me, sometimes you don't have the time to do it properly and you just want to clean the water a bit. And that's when you'll wonder what to do. It happened to me, and that's why I've made myself a model that would answer this question, a model that would determine the breaking point (where both options are equally effective) between the two techniques.

The model described contains the following parameters:

the aquarium volume (V - volume)
the jar volume (d - change)
number of two-way runs (x)

And it looks something like this:

The aquarium cleaning situation

The initial model

The original view I made in Excel is based on simple mathematics, where each one-way run is represented by one line in the table. Adding and removing water both-ways constantly reduces filthiness, but makes each additional run less effective. On the other hand, removing water first and adding fresh water later takes more runs (since your jar is empty in one direction, you require four one-way runs to replace an additional unit), but you're not removing clean water. Here's a preview of how this looks:

The basic calculation

The advanced model

The basic model is more understandable, but not appropriate to make a full mathematical equation. That's why I made a second model, which is based on two-way runs and exponential functions. Here's what I got:

The advanced calculation

The results

The results show that if you don't have much time, it's better if you're replacing water, taking it both ways. This accounts for faster cleaning, which is slowing down in the long run. But the point is that no matter what the parameters are (aquarium and jar size), the breaking point happens more to the end of the cleaning. So, if you're not prepared to fully empty the aquarium, it's generally better if you use the the first option, removing and adding water at the same time.

The graphical results displaying water filthiness based on number of two-way runs for different jar and aquarium sizes

The breaking point equation

The results are there, and I managed to make the following equation which would calculate where both ways are the equally effective:

This makes calculating the number of runs so complex it can't be calculated in basic Excel (because of the Lambert W or product log function).

But luckily, you can use Wolfram Alpha to calculate the breaking point of two-way runs by entering the aquarium and jar size in the boxes below. If you're prepared to make less two-way runs than the result, take water both-ways, otherwise, one-way.

Aquarium: Jar:

If you want to play around a bit, you can even download the complete model in Excel format.

Conclusion

Perhaps there's an easier way to calculate the great aquarium cleaning dilemma, which speaks in favor of water replacement (taking water both ways). There's also a chance I've made an error somewhere (please let me know!). But the results seem correct, and I hope you find all of this amusing and / or helpful when you need to update your water. Aquarium cleaning will never be the same again.

Update (26.11.2011): While this may have been a fun experiment, I've just read it's not that smart to fully remove water in the aquarium, since it disrupts the balance of bacteria.

Facebook vs. Twitter, Part 3: The phase of unification

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 08:22:32 GMT

I started writing about Facebook and Twitter because I saw these two services as the most impressive players of the social age. I received a lot of comments about the two of them not being comparable, which I disagree. They are the biggest global Web 2.0 platforms (LinkedIn successfully went public and has a lot of users, but it's hardly a platform) and two of the ten most visited websites in the world. They are social trend-setters, both super advanced on technical and conceptual levels. They are a lot, but with the latest sets of patches, they are also becoming a lot alike.

Originally, Facebook wanted to be a social network. On the other hand, Twitter wanted to be a news network. But seeing what's happening these days, we can ask ourselves: is it rather the other way around? Indeed, Facebook and Twitter are finally entering the phase of unification. Let's begin.

Two way integration

Twitter now officially supports posting to Facebook, while Facebook now officially supports posting to Twitter (for now, Pages only). Until recently, you had to use other services or install apps to fully connect both accounts, but these days, direct integration it's pretty much trivial. The wall between the two giants is obviously coming down. And they both noticed the need to recognize each other to proceed.

Facebook adds following

The symmetric relationships (friends) on Facebook made it what it is - a social network for keeping in touch with the people you know. The same goes for Twitter, the asymmetric relationships (followers) made it what it is - a news network where you can follow people you are interested in. This fact was one of the biggest differentiator between the two social services.

Facebook soon noticed they will have to somehow go beyond that, for the sake of enabling more accessible information to the masses and enabling unprotected, crawlable real-time data without privacy. They've started with Pages, intended for brands, which users can like and follow. But recently, like I predicted more than a year ago, Facebook introduced subscriptions for personal profiles, where you can follow people without the need for them to confirm you back, and they can post public updates. What an interesting turn of events.

Facebook adds a real-time stream

Facebook put a lot of effort into developing the EdgeRank, which recognizes the level of connection between two people. The previous version of Facebook had Hot and Fresh streams, the first one being based on the amount of activity and EdgeRank vicinity, and the other one on recent activity. Today, the main stream is a mixture of both, while a new feature was introduced. The so-called Ticker in the right sidebar, showing real-time activity from all your friends. Your own little Twitter inside Facebook, which they plan to evolve even further, adding automatic updates.

Twitter starts to close, adds multimedia

Traditionally, the Twitter app ecosystem was built around (outside) Twitter, while Facebook's app ecosystem was built inside Facebook. But Twitter's policy is changing. They've already acquired one of the biggest Twitter clients TweetDeck, and said they will prevent new Twitter clients from being developed. They've also added a multimedia library to each profile (feeding also from external services) and enabled an internal service for sharing photos. Bad news and a stab in the back for Twitpics, Yfrogs and such. Smells like Facebook.

Twitter adds activity streams

Social networks are all about profiles, streams and interaction. Twitter used to be plain, providing only simple profiles, basic tweets stream, replies and retweets. But the newest addition also includes real-time activity streams, where all retweets, replies and favorites are gathered in one place. I haven't gotten it yet, but people are saying Favorites are the new (Facebook) likes. Twitter is becoming very much a social network, trying to boost up it's social graph.

Conclusion

There are even more cases like this, but these are the most significant. I hope this trend won't continue much further. It was the differences between Facebook and Twitter made each one interesting and useful in it's own way, but I guess things like this are inevitable. Like operating systems or browsers, competitors are constantly copying each other's features and solutions, which actually proves mutual recognition. Why would social services be any different? It seems Twitter and Facebook are finally mature enough to enter the phase of unification.

Check out the complete Facebook vs. Twitter series.

Optimizing computer input performance: learning to use the trackpad with both hands

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:20:05 GMT

I'm left-handed. Which is not that optimal for general use of computers, since they are designed for right-handed people. You use the external mouse with your stronger right hand, which means your weaker left hand stays on the left side of the keyboard, where most of the function keys are. I managed to adopt that. But now a much greater challenge awaits: learning to do the same with the trackpad.

When I bought my first Mac, I also went for the Mighty mouse, which more or less sucked. After some time I abandoned it and started using the trackpad, which is really cool since it also supports multi-touch gestures. The new Macs and their trackpads are a lot bigger, and their multi-touch even more capable, so I'm not even thinking about getting an external mouse. Besides, I think having your hands near the keyboard by using a trackpad makes your inputting (navigating and typing) a bit faster and more optimal, since you don't have to move that much. And of course, it's better if you use the trackpad with your right hand because of the keybeard function keys.

When Apple introduced the first iPhone, people were laughing at its underperforming capabilities. But the iPhone had something significant that made it the success as it is today. The outstanding capacitative display and amazing user experience, which set new standards for mobile industry. I'm not sure if the same capacitative technology is used in Mac trackpads, but the fact is they simply work.

Looking at modern tablets and smartphones, it's pretty obvious that the future lies in devices with touch capabilities. Why should computers be any different? Besides, we will probably be using both hands sometime soon. So this mission of mine may have multiple benefits. Be better today (ok, tomorrow, since adoption will take some time), and be prepared for the super high-tech virtual touch future by having two touch-adopted hands. And when I actually manage to make it work, I already have an idea for the next, even more optimal inputting method: Using the trackpad with my right thumb, so both my hands can stay on the keyboard. Wish me luck.

Please help me upgrade my Twitter bot

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:33:12 GMT

Half a year ago I decided to make something out of my Delicious bookmarks. The magazine-style display inspired by Flipboard wasn't enough, I wanted to publish these links somewhere outside my chronolog, somewhere on Twitter. So I made a bot. It's doing quite well, posting like mad, but it's really not where I want it to be. Until now, it made about 3.000 tweets (around 500 per month), but has only 67 followers. I know my taste in content is a bit obscure, but still, only 67 followers?

This calls for an upgrade. And since I won't change my interests and bookmarking habits, something else needs to be done. That's where I need your advice. Crowdsourcing the concept and stuff.

The brand

This is probably one of the greatest fails of the project. At first, I thought of it as an extension of my blog. Hence the account @stritar_net, the name Stritar's chronolog, together with the description it has. Should I rename it and try to make it a standalone "brand"? Should I openly say it's a bot (Stritar's bot or something)?

The selection

The bot currently posts ALL my bookmarks to Twitter (as mentioned, around 15 per day or 500 per month) without any selection. But it could be done. Since my bookmarks are originally tagged, it could leave out those with too few tags (since I use the same method of counting tags to determine the initial weight of content for the magazine). Or specialize in specific segments according to tags. There could even be more of them bots. What do you think?

The frequency

Currently, the bookmarks I make go into a queue. I hate those Twitter accounts that post 10 tweets in 5 minutes and go silent for a day. I wanted to make it more smooth. So the queue always knows how many items it holds and adapts the frequency of posting according to it (less bookmarks in queue mean less frequent tweets). But that produces the situation where most of them are already a few hours or days out of date when they are published. A higher publishing frequency would solve some of it, but it opens a great dilemma: what's the lesser evil, over-spamming or being out of date?

The order

The order of bookmarks posted on Twitter is determined by two factors. The number of tags and the date they were published. More tags equals more importance. Older bookmarks get published sooner, otherwise they would get even more out of date. Should I do it the other way around and post more recent links sooner? This would make some of them more interesting and up-to-date, but other worse. Breaking content or consolidated content?

So many decisions… In this case, the best way probably doesn't exists, but trade-offs can always be decided for the better. Please let me know what you think, your help would be more than appreciated. I could help back if I can.

Determining if an element is in the last row of a table

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 11:57:52 GMT

Once upon a time I stumbled upon a problem, where I needed to calculate if an element is in the last row of a table. Here's the scenario: you have a number of items, which are put in a table from left to right. When the row is full, the items continue in the next row. Imagine an airplane or a theater where people start sitting front-left and continue to the right until they run out of space, then going to the next row and so on. Now we want to know which people are sitting in the last of the populated rows.

A weird problem, but hopefully I will be able to show you some cool results produced by this algorithm someday (yes, it's usable).

The equation has 2 parameters: the total number of elements and the number of columns in a single row. There are a few ways to do it, using division with remainders (the modulo operation). The simple way would be comparing the total number of rows with the element's current row. Another one would be to calculate the number of elements in the last row and see if our element is in those last few. While both seem logically easy, they actually suck, because they contain exceptions (some states need to be handled specifically - if the last row is full or not).

That's why I went for the ultimate way, using abstract mathematics which requires real magic, and since it would be too boring to explain it, just take it if you need it and don't try to understand - to be honest, even I'm not perfectly sure how I did it.

The number of rows way:

lastRow = ((Math.DivRem(currentElementIndex + 1, numberOfColumns, out remainder1) + Convert.ToInt16(remainder1 > 0)) >= Math.DivRem(totalElements, numberOfColumns, out remainder2) + Convert.ToInt16(remainder2 > 0))
* Math.DivRem returns the division result and the remainder, since both are required for the calculation

The number of items in the last row way:

lastRow = (totalElements - (totalElements % numberOfColumns) - (numberOfColumns * Convert.ToInt16((totalElements % numberOfColumns) == 0)) < currentElementIndex + 1)
* % is the modulo - remainder from dividing

The ultimate way:

lastRow = totalElements < ((numberOfColumns + currentElementIndex) - (currentElementIndex % numberOfColumns) + 1)
* % is the modulo - remainder from dividing

Mathematics is awesome.

UPDATE (27.7.2011): Silly me. Overwhelmed by "The ultimate way", I missed the opportunity to simplify "The number of rows way". I guess this is one of the cases which explain why counting starts with 0 instead of 1 in programming.

The improved number of rows way:

lastRow = Math.DivRem(currentElementIndex, numberOfColumns, out result1) >= Math.DivRem(totalElements - 1, numberOfColumns, out result2))
* Math.DivRem returns the division result and the remainder, since we need the number rounded down.

You know what Google should include in Google+? A social Gmail client.

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 08:05:05 GMT

Social is a funny thing. Some get it, some don't, it's been around since ever (remember forums?) and it keeps evolving with a maddening pace. While there used to be a giant barrier between social and not social, this barrier is slowly disappearing, and the last of the old boys finally admitted it's competing against Facebook and not Microsoft. Google has had problems with providing a social service. But wasn't social potential always there to conquer, only not really noticed? Not inside their failed social projects like Buzz and Wave (and Google Me?), but there, in the core of their services?

Social?

What's "social"? In my opinion, it's not really a thing, it's more of a something that you put on top of things. Facebook put social on top of photos and education. Twitter did it on publishing. Foursquare on moving, Groupon on buying. Can you see where I'm headed? It's hard to make social out of nothing, you have to have something, and then you can make that something (even more) social. And Google will have to do the same thing (and Neolab too). Don't make social, make things social instead.

Introducing Google+

Since Larry Page became CEO of Google, things have been moving ahead. The +1 button is one thing. Showing activity of your social vicinity inside Google search is another. Both upgrading Google's core service with social. It's also smart they've (finally) made a Google "dashboard", the social Google+, where you can socialize with your Google account. It looks promising, even though it resembles Facebook. But it's the services that count.

Circles (grouping people) seem cool, since Facebook's relationship model is flat and they will have problems to persuade people to make groups / lists. I would arrange my Gmail contacts and put them into groups in needed, since I would be doing it as I go along, and it's easy to do. Sparks seem nice, providing content based on your preferences. Again, (probably) powered by search and complex mathematical algorithms, where Google dominates. I won't comment on photos and chat for now, but this time, Google's social attempt went from improvisation to consolidation of their existing services (search and accounts). Use what you got, especially if that works.

What about email?

I said I would consider arranging my contacts. Yes, we finally come to Gmail. Once I was writing about how I would love a "social" smartphone, since smartphone is a social device in its essence. But isn't email also social in its essence? The first online social service to be exact? Forgotten somewhere, forever not classified as social?

It is very much social, and it might as well be what Google's desperately looking for. I would love to have a social inbox. Not by including profile pictures from Facebook, but really social, in a new innovative way. Grouping emails by Circles, reading email correspondence on someone's profile, suggesting Circles on email recipients. Commenting, liking emails. Not having separate email contacts and social friends, but just people. Enterprise 2.0 shit included even. (And fully integrated with Android, of course.)

A mobile social inbox

That would really be neat. Google, you obviously understand that future lies in platforms, and you should stop trying to put useless things like Buzz and business cards inside Gmail. Gmail is fine. Now it's time you use it somewhere else, use it as a platform. With all your Gmail users, they just might provide the critical mass you need to pull this off, while differentiating yourself from Facebook at the same time. That's it. Search and Mail. Make that fully social inside Google+, these are the segments you're a market leader in! And mobile! And you'll win the next round. But you probably already know that?

A few thoughts on content categorization. No surprises there, less is more.

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 12:26:00 GMT

Since I've started collecting bookmarks using Delicious, I've put a lot of effort into their categorization, organizing them in such a way their browsing would be as simple as possible. The service supports two level categorization (tag – bundle) which helps to control massive amounts of links people have gathered. But it's the experimentation with different structures that gives real insight into content categorization, and because this topic was already mentioned and discussed a few times on this blog, it deserves a special mention. Let's begin.

Categories vs. Tags

Observing other blogs, I've noticed a lot of them use both Categories and Tags. While I can understand the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefit in having as many different entry points (landing pages) as possible, I don't see any other added value in using both. From the logical point of view, they do the same (categorize content), but on a different level. Here's where tag bundles come handy. With my bookmarks, I use tag bundles such as Wibe, Science, Brands, Work, etc., to combine different tags into groups according to their qualities. And aren't Categories and Tags just another form of the same thing, just two different tag bundles? Perhaps not, but that doesn't change the fact one is probably redundant.

I still see cases when Categories are used as single items (one post is filed under one category), while Tags are always used as multiple items (one post can have many tags). This corresponds with the technical 1:N and M:N database relationship, and even though the second is a bit more complex to create and maintain, it provides much more flexibility. Hierarchy vs. matrix.

Less is more, and intersections rock

Another thing I've noticed is that people use a lot of different tags. Too many to handle. I try to keep the number of tags as low as possible, working rather with intersections of tags (e.g. marketing + twitter) than looking for specific tags, used only a few times. I made a quick calculation on how this works, estimating a model with 10.000 contents and 200 tags, which corresponds with my situation on Delicious:

10.000 contents, 200 unique tags, average 5 tags per content
10.000 contents * 5 tags = 50.000 total tags
50.000 total tags / 200 unique tags = 250 occurrences of each tag (contents per tag)
5/200 probability of first tag * 4/199 probability of second tag = 1/1.990 (0,0005) probability of two specific tags on a single content
or (200! / (2!*(200-2)!) = 19.900 unique combinations of two tags; one bookmark with 5 tags allows 10 pairs of bookmarks, making a combination's probability 1/1.990
1/1.990 * 3/198 = 1/131.340 (0,0000076) probability of three specific tags on a content
Result: on average, 5 contents out of 10.000 will contain two desired tags and 0,07 three tags

The model is built on the assumption that all tags are spread evenly, which is far from reality, but you get the picture, the number of contents with multiple tags is pretty low. But if you lower the number of unique tags (e.g. 150 tags instead of 200 would raise the number of contents with a pair of tags from 5 to 8,9) or use the same tags more often (e.g. 6 instead of 5 tags per content would raise the number from 5 to 7,5), the results get even better. Basic mathematics is a powerful tool, and intersections with two, three or more tags are definitely the way to go.

Applications

I've made a few applications using the techniques mentioned. For general Categories of this blog, I used a combination both, having Categories behave like Tags, using a few of them as possible (but attaching many on a single post), displaying them as a tag cloud (bottom of the page). I used a similar approach on my iTunes library, abusing song Comments to act as Tags for advanced smart playlists. And some time ago, I developed a simple engine for related content, based on occurences of different Categories / Tags on my blog posts, acting both as an additional feature for readers, as a tool for internal hyperlinking, used for SEO.

These are a few cases which display the power of simplicity, using as little data as possible to create a lot of information. And while I know this is hard to do, I must continue to pursue this philosophy, may it be in software development or blogging (I ironically failed with this one). Things that are similar on an abstract, logical level, should be the same on the technical level. Try it, you'll be amazed by the results which will present themselves.

Can you believe Watson got the question about Slovenia wrong on Jeopardy?

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 07:33:12 GMT

Slovenia made it to the spotlight again, for the first time after the soccer world cup (when Slovenia was trending topic on Twitter and top search on Google). This time, it happened because IBM's supercomputer Watson competed against human champions in the famous TV show Jeopardy. IBM's computers are known to destroy people in various challenges, Deep Blue beat the world champion Garry Kasparov in a chess tournament in 1997. But chess is simple for computers to play, because it is pure logic and mathematics – the capability of a player is determined by the number of operations and actions it can calculate in advance. But a quiz is a totally different story, where the biggest challenge is semantics – understanding the meaning of words.

In 1950, Alan Turing, one of the greatest pioneers of computing introduced the Turing test, a methodology that could separate humans from computers using a set of questions, some of them formed in such a way computer wouldn't be able to understand and answer them. There are many questions which can't be answered with pure logic, the one I remember from high school goes something like this:

"Jack attended Sally's party, bring a doll. What was the present?"

The catch is in the connection between party – (birthday) – present – doll, which can't be noticed without abstract thinking humans are capable of. And today's computers still face the same problem - even though Watson dominated Jeopardy, it failed miserably on the following question about Slovenia:

"As of 2010, Croatia & Macedonia are candidates but this is the only former Yugoslav republic in the EU"

Watson's computing capabilities and knowledge banks are huge, but a question and an answer so obvious to humans presented a huge problem. Watson surely knows which countries are EU members, but it obviously didn't understand the question, thinking it was asked about which country would be next to start negotiating for EU membership, answering Serbia. The right answer was, of course, Slovenia.

The video is also fascinating from the cultural point of view – and extremely creepy. Those who have watched (or read) "2001: A Space Odyssey" may have experienced a slight shiver and carefully waited if Watson would say it: "Hello Dave". Others might have enjoyed this science fiction presentation, but besides Watson's obvious advantage in being the fastest to answer the question, it's clear that computers are still far away from being intelligent. And hopefully they will stay that way.

I've developed a magazine based on my Delicious bookmarks. And a Twitter bot.

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 07:34:38 GMT

Last week was marked a great social achievement of mine – I managed to bookmark my 10.000th bookmark on Delicious. A lot of people have 10.000 tweets, but not many own 10.000 bookmarks, fully tagged and classified. I've been collecting these since December 2006 (probably one od my first 2.0 addictions), and they are becoming one of my greatest possessions – knowledge is the ultimate collection. Hopefully Delicious won't get shut down or left behind, so I will be able to continue with this obsession.

I've made a few interesting mashups with them already; as my most frequent actions online, my bookmarks represent the core of the chronolog. But things are changing fast and the desire for presenting information is moving into a new dimension. In case you didn't notice, tablets are mainstream, and the media industry already hopes they are the solution they've been waiting for. The Daily, which was released a few weeks ago, is the first no-print, tablet only magazine available (for iPad, Android version is coming), and other applications, based on social curation, such as Flipboard (which is amazing and inspired all of this) and OnSwipe are revolutionizing the way we (create and) consume content.

I find this evolution of displaying information fascinating and a bit ironic - going from newspaper form to blog form and back - but I've decided to play along, developing a magazine based on my bookmarks. Using the Html Agility Pack library for asp.net I managed to extract an image and a few paragraphs from each URL I bookmarked, using them to form a magazine. The number of tags I put on each link determines the initial weight, which is additionally modified with your views and likes, allowing it to constantly adapt its shape. Those links which are stronger, are displayed higher, have a bigger picture and more text which makes them more visible.

While contemplating about the potential of different APIs and all the pages I bookmarked these years, it occurred to me I could also make a Twitter bot. All the bookmarks I save are now getting automatically shortened with bit.ly and posted to Twitter, with a bit of artificial intelligence. The speed of posting is determined by the number of items waiting in the queue, adjusting to the frequency of my actions. It still has a few problems, but they are only appropriate for a prototype, whose posting algorithm still needs to be technically and mathematically improved.

The life cycle of my links I like has become quite a ride, as you can see in the diagram below, similar as the evolution of the Web, transformed by social, mobile and the upcoming domination of the tablets. And while the major players are able to spend millions on the development of new and creative solutions, small players such as myself can only play along. Luckily, I like to play.

The path each one of my bookmarks makes in its lifetime.

Why an actual Facebook phone could kick ass (with mockups)

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 19:28:34 GMT

The question if Facebook will start producing it's own mobile OS on top of Android made a huge buzz a few months ago. Technology authorities such as TechCrunch and Mashable gave us diametrical coverage about it, the first claiming the rumor is true, and the second denying it. Needless to say the mobile market is one of the fastest evolving. Since 2007, when Apple supposedly revolutionized the mobile telephone by introducing the first popular tablet smartphone without a keyboard with an app market, things didn't change much, but in 2011, Facebook has a great chance to reinvent the phone again.

Today, the world is "going social". The transition to 2.0 has touched most aspects of our lives and heavily influenced software development, some companies are introducing social browsers, and others such as Neolab are trying to put social into enterprise IT. But the most social device of them all, the mobile telephone, despite high competition and increasing hardware and software capabilities, was left behind. Sure, the social potential in mobile contacts was noticed, but we haven't seen it happen yet. So, if Facebook actually gives this thing a try, could we finally see a real social phone?

One of the biggest problems with today's mobile operating systems and their user experience is that they are still built around services rather than around people (contacts). You have your app for calling, your app for messages, your app for mails, apps for different social networks. Different channels with enclosed streams rather than one giant stream that would display all the communication and interactions with a specific person. Android and Windows 7 Phone did enable Facebook contacts syncing with direct links to profiles and some integration, and there are third-party apps that are trying to achieve this (SocialPhone, Phonebook 2.0). Nevertheless, I still made some mockups of my own about how I envision the social phone OS of the future (since I'm more aquainted with the iOS, I worked on that), something that is destined to happen one way or another.

User stream

The most important feature I miss about the current generation of smartphone operating systems is the complete stream of activity and interactions from a single person. All classic mobile services (call, message, mail, calendar, ...), combined with social services (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, ...) in a single feed. Here's a mockup of how this could look, the icon represents the service, the arrow represents the direction (in case of public posts, which are not between two people, there is no arrow, since it's an action without target instead of a reaction). All services are intended for communication, so why are they kept separated and treated differently?

Single user stream, displaying information from different sources and services. Similar features already exist in some apps.

The contacts

Now that we have an integrated repository of all our social interactions with a single user, we could reinvent the address book. Each action could have it's weight (e.g. a Call would be much stronger than a Twitter reply), and the occurrence of social interactions with a user in recent time period could determine the probability of needing that specific contact (an upgrade to "recently contacted", available today). To make things even more useful, users could set the preferred time period using a slider. Those who have seen how sexy iPhone icons behave while being rearranged, can probably imagine the fancy shuffle of profile pictures upon this activity.

Contact grid, where people are recommended based on the number of social interactions in a specific time period.

The activity log

To top it off, I've made a mockup of the complete activity log, which could combine all owner's social activities together with the interactions on a mobile device and other services. Again, the icons represent the public actions (shown with a service logo) and the interactions (shown with a profile picture), together with the direction of the reaction. This blog does something similar, combining different social activities into an unified stream, but it's still mostly one way - my posts on different social services. But combining one way posts with two way actions/reactions/interactions could provide the component that could actually make the phone capable of portraying the most perfect social stream of its owner. Specially since regular phone activities, such as calls and messages are as social as you can go, but they exists only on the device and the carrier.

Log of all user's activities on the phone and on different Web 2.0 networks.

These are just a few ideas, I've been thinking about trying to pack them in an app, but I really don't have the time to go for it, and similar ones are already available. I also think that this concept of a social phone should be built into the core of the OS, because the phone would need to be completely integrated with and authenticated into different Web 2.0 services (not only single apps). This would make these features available inside other apps, and setup and synchronization would require less hassle.

Facebook, the king of social, is currently the most perfect candidate (and perhaps the only one capable) to make something like this work, so I would really love to see it come alive. It's questionable if they would allow competition like Twitter or Foursquare inside it, but other software giants would surely need to follow the concept and in the end, make it right. I want a social phone!

Web 2.5: Looking for the missing link between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 17:39:56 GMT

The great revolution of Web 2.0 is still here and well – it looks like it's not going anywhere. Actually, its name did change, making "social media" more widely used today, but I'm still sticking to the original Tim O'Reilly's term. It's been more than five years since that happened, and a few years ago Web 3.0 was also starting to get mentioned. Web 3.0 mainly stands for the semantic web, using mathematical algorithms and meta data for trying to understand the meaning of content. But the whole thing is getting kinda old, because we still didn't see any real great results or services online – or perhaps they just did not make it to the mainstream. So while we wait for that to unveil, we could discuss something in between.

Client: Smartphone

In my opinion, there are a few quite significant changes in the Web we're used to using today, compared to the widely spread classic social Web 2.0 that already became fully mainstream. And the thing that's mostly responsible for this transition, surely has to be the smartphone. The wide spread of smartphones brought us new kinds of services, solutions, interactions and user experience, all powered by a powerful hand-held device supporting web connectivity. And as I will try to explain below, these services go way beyond Web 2.0, which is traditionally still powered by a personal computer. If you ask me, the mobile web is not just a new way to access the World Wide Web, it might as well be the new generation of it.

New capabilities

Modern smartphones come equipped with a wide arrange of additional hardware capabilities, such as high-resolution cameras, various sensors, compasses, gyroscopes and probably the most important – GPS. This fact created an array of new online services, where the ones worth mentioning would definitely be location (geo) based networking and augmented reality. Most of us can probably still remember when first phones with their 300x200 pixel cameras came out, and look at what happened now. Not to mention the giant tablet army that's heading our way.

Real-time web

Real-time web is the driving force behind Twitter, a thing so cool Google adopted it too, while Facebook is having problems to get its information out of privacy. It represents giving information when it happens, not hours (days) later, like the traditional (online) media does. While real-time web might be one of the biggest favorites for the next generation of Web beyond Web 2.0, it's still pretty useless if real time is only on the publisher's side. Mobile devices bring real-time to consumer's side too, enabling real time interactions between millions of users, which creates even more publishers and information – more than a group of professional journalists is ever capable of creating, making this world truly global.

Location-based networking

Location-based networking enables socializing based on where you and your friends physically are. Original players, such as Gowalla and Foursquare (who aleady has more than 3 million users) are already being copied by the mainstream, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google (all three naming them Places). While these services are rapidly spreading, they also introduced another interesting thing into networking, the gaming component, which uses badges and achievements to create real-life role playing games.

Augmented reality

Combining a compass and a GPS allowed another new type of software, called augmented reality, mostly in the form of solutions that use the camera image and draw things on top of it. There are already a few interesting applications of it available, and the marketing potential of this concept is probably huge. Augmented reality also managed to turn the smartphone into a deadly gadget, and where governments probably spent billions researching similar weapons, a soldier equipped with a €500 smartphone and a proper piece of software could lead a team of warriors who can see each other through walls.

Mobile apps

The previous shift in IT was for corporate software solutions to go from desktop to the web (and beyond to the cloud). Funny the trend, as today software is going back from web to mobile "desktop" applications, called apps. This happened because mobile apps enable a much better user experience (they can access the above mentioned capabilities) and at the same time provide less data consumption (making them cheaper and faster). Besides being a billion dollar industry, apps might also create the next step in the evolution of (business oriented) software and IT.

Is the mobile web actually Web 2.5?

These are a few examples of features we haven't seen before, and I think they should be considered when thinking about significant generations of the World Wide Web. The transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 was from static to dynamic, from publishing to sharing and interaction, and the next big step worth mentioning could really be the one presented.

I admit the title of this post is a bit misleading, since this new concept has almost nothing to do with semantic Web 3.0. But I hope my thoughts are not that way off, since I haven't noticed any real authority write about the mobile web as a next big step in the Web's evolution. Right or wrong, from my point of view as a software architect and developer, the mobile era brought us much more than just online access everywhere, it brought a new generation of software and the Web. Besides, we have to be aware that this trend of mobile domination will surely evolve even further and continue to grow in the future. And since the name Web 3.0 is already taken, it might as well be called Web 2.5. What do you think?

The chronolog now understands connections between content

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 21:20:56 GMT

I once made a promise that I will try to incorporate as many interesting features as possible into my blog. My previous development sessions were based mostly on interactions of readers with the posts, the peak of it being the Hot on the chronolog algorithm. But now, as the chronolog finally reached critical mass in the amount of content it operates with, the time has come to do something new. The next step is focused on a different functionality, and a few days ago, the chronolog received an algorithm for recognizing relationships between different blog posts.

The connections

The whole concept is based on the occurrences of categories (which are actually tags) on different blog posts, the most obvious being the number of the same tags two different posts share. We did something similar on a web portal we launched a few months ago, and it works pretty well. Sure, the proper way to do it would be using real text mining, where the strength of the relationships would be based on meaning and occurrences of words and external hyperlinks in a specific post. But in this stage, I'm keeping it simple: if two posts share a lot of tags, they appear more related.

The weight

Since some categories (tags) are used more often, they appear in many posts, making these posts too heavily related with each other. The number of categories attached to a single post also varies, giving a post with many tags a much stronger chance to appear as related to another. Therefore the general equation contains two modifiers, which are giving weight to each shared tag between two posts.

Categories that appear only a few times globally, have more weight, because they represent a more scarce and therefore a more interesting and stronger connection. This takes care of the tags which are used very often, making them not too dominant. On the other hand, the weight of each tag on a post drops with the total number of tags the post has, so those posts, which have a lot of tags, don't become every other's related post. It may sound confusing, but it's probably a bit simpler to develop than to explain.

The results

I was actually quite surprised about the result the algorithm makes (which you can now see on the bottom of every post). As I was playing around a bit, observing how the calculation behaves and playing with constants, I actually found some interesting connections between posts which I didn't notice before. The engine finds quite a strong relationship between the post about using Web 2.0 logos in TV commercials and the one about Round browser icons, both of them being design clichés. The case of Microsoft and Google going social also made it strong, as the two posts are describing the struggle of two technology giants trying to adapt to the new situation. I could go on and on, but than you would probably just say I was doing SEO too hard.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is actually another hidden benefit of the feature, something that occurred to me after I've already finished working on it. Google likes it if you have your content internally cross linked, so what better way to do it than to have automation take care of it. So until SEO dies, this new functionality is actually a double win, because the chronolog became more optimized for crawlers and hopefully more useful for the readers. Even though most of you probably won't even notice.