from the editor of aseidman.com

Nike+ iPod: Starting the Self-Instrumentation Age

Posted by Ariel Seidman | December 16, 2007

@Work we instrument our products/services to ensure that we can track important metrics — as Peter Drucker said “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”  Yet, for metrics that impact our quality of life @Home we have yet to develop products that help people efficiently manage some of the more important aspect of their lives:

1. Health
   • How much exercise do you get per week?
   • How much crappy food do you eat per week?
2. Energy Consumption
   • How much money are are you spending on energy and do you know the cost of your energy choices?
   • How much damage (carbon emissions) are you doing to the earth?
3. TV consumption:-)
   • How much time are you wasting?

Because we all just have one shot at life, these are actually are a lot more important then the @work metrics.  Measurement and analytic products in the business domain are well-established and long-ago crossed the chasm.  However, on the consumer side while there are niche products such as Polar watches there are no self-measurement products (needs a catchier name, but for now this highly descriptive will work) that have successfully crossed the chasm. 

Nike+ iPod is poised to cross the chasm and is starting to uncover the opportunities of a self-measurement age. There are a couple of things that they nailed in this first version that will enable them to cross the chasm:

1. Plugs-Into Existing Products
   • We don’t need to create new products from the ground up to measure these everyday activities we simply need to plugin sensors and displays into existing products. Contrast this to a product like Polar that is attempting to build niche products from the ground up that help athletes measure their performance.
2. Low-Cost
   • Once you’ve spent $400+ on an iPod and Nike sneakers buying an Nike+ iPod Kit for $29 is not going to break your bank.
   • This point is driven by #1 above.
3. Simple Setup
   • Just put the sensor below the insole of your sneaker and a small receiver snaps into your iPod — that’s it your done. See here.
4. ‘Thermometer’ Interface
   • Explains to the user how they are progressing or regressing with their runs.
   • Lightweight analytics that allows you to slice/dice your runs — for those of you familiar with Business Objects or Siebel Analytics there are hints of those types of experience here.   Below are my runs for the past few months as seen on nikeplus.com

What still needs some work:

• Positive Peer Pressure
  • Enable users to encourage and compete with each other. This is incredibly imporant because it keeps people engaged and provides a viral way to introduce potential customers to the product.
  • They don’t need to create a new social-network to develop this community and positive peer pressure. Rather tap into an existing social network at the point of registration (more on this for another post).

Beyond the value that this creates for users, it also builds lock-in for Nike and Apple — when I get ready to buy a new set of sneakers in a few months guess what I will be buying.

Yahoo Shortcuts for Wordpress (Beta)

Posted by Ariel Seidman | December 14, 2007

Yesterday my team announced the launch of Yahoo! Shortcuts for Wordpress which we developed with Alex King and the CrowdFavorite team — CrowdFavorite team specializes in Wordress custom development and Alex was one of the early Wordpress developers.      First for some history…  We decided to take Shortcuts to Wordpress…Up until yesterday Shortcuts had found a home (a pretty nice one) in places like Yahoo! Mail, News, etc. but we decided a few months back that this technology needed to move beyond the walls of Yahoo!. Inspired by Luke Wroblewski’s early vision we decided to integrate Shortcuts directly into the authoring environment.   What it does…  As you type it find relevant terms such as locations/places (e.g. University of Texas), companies (Goldman Sachs), and brings you recommended content such as Maps, Flickr images (see the one in the upper left), Finance charts so that you can quickly add some spice to your blog post without the hassle of copy/pasting code.Both the Yahoo! Search Blog and the new Shortcuts home page do a far better job (or so I would like to think) of explaining what the product does far better then I will do here — so have a quick look.   What we learned from developing for Wordpress… 

1. Rich-Text Editor (RTE) Integration
   • Integrating  seamlessly into any RTE is hard.
   • Wordpress, while overall a great blogging platform, its RTE is still a bit flaky which made things that much tougher.
2. Security: 
   • Be very careful not to open any security holes.
3. Cross platform compatible plugin architecture: 
   • While we would get some scale when we do a similar plugin for MovableType — this needs to be a “build once deploy anywhere” where a developer can simply check the blogging platforms they want access to — Wordpress, MovableType, TypePad, Drupal.  
4. Stats
   • Standard way to instrument plugins to capture # of activations, de-activations, etc. — if anybody has found something that does a good job of this let me know.
   • We don’t want to force bloggers to sign-up with us as there is no need to, but it would be nice to see how many people activate the plugin and then whether or not they de-activate it.

Here is some of the coverage via Techmeme.   

My Rules of Tagging (with Del.icio.us)

Posted by Ariel Seidman | December 3, 2007

My Rules of Tagging (with Del.icio.us)Just finished cleaning up my del.icio.us tags as they looked like this screenshot to the left after 1+ yr. of using del.icio.us as my primary bookmarking tool. Over the year here are some simple rules I developed — hopefully these help:

1.) Generalized over specific

• you’ll never recall a specific term like “skyline” — rather use “bayarea

2.) Less is more

• no more then 2 tags per bookmark
• why? because this will help avoid violating rule #1 which leads to hundreds if not thousands of tags which leads to tag chaos

3.) Don’t bookmark blogs

• Use a good RSS reader instead that has a favorites feature — hmmm…perhaps these products should be integrated.
• Don’t import bookmarks from your desktop
• Applies to users of the del.icio.us browser extension

4.) The tags applied during the import process basically break all the rules above

• Plus if this is your work computer most of my bookmarks will contain private URLs that will either make no sense to the vast majority of users.

Looking forward to del.icio.us 2.0 and another good of year tasty del.icio.us bookmarking…

DARPA Challenge: Predictable Anthropomorphism

Posted by Ariel Seidman | November 11, 2007

This year’s Darpa challenge introduced the autonomous cars (yes— no drivers or human input to navigate the cars) into an urban environment — NY Times has some good coverage here.


Below is the strange yet predictable part of the article — the media always tries to anthropomorphize robots — uhh… last time I checked this is software that operates metal and plastic. Once we do get around to commercializing this stuff, these autonomous cars will have brands much the way an Apple computer has a different kind of brand vs. a Dell computer, but we won’t confuse them with people. Talking about the applications and commercialization of this technology seems like a far more useful conversation to be having.

“Donald A. Norman, a psychologist and an industrial designer, argues in “The Design of Future Things,” his recently published book, that a new organism is emerging that he calls a “person+machine.”

“Machines have neither motives nor emotions,” he wrote recently in an e-mail message. “Still, machines, appliances and even services have personality traits, if only because they were designed to be conscientious or not, friendly or curt, smooth or abrupt, condescending or understanding, recalcitrant or forgiving.”

Autonomous machines of the future, he said, will increasingly have emotions for the same reason that people have them: to protect themselves as well as to make choices among competing demands for their attention as well as a mechanism for social cooperation.

Though the Darpa autonomous vehicles were clearly not “thinking” machines, there was evidence that the line between human and machine consciousness might have just become a bit less clear.

{note to self: never use words with more then two syllable in a title}

Yet, Another Apple Launch (Process)

Posted by Ariel Seidman | September 6, 2007

No doubt Apple (AAPL) is on a tear: new iPhone refreshed iMac, refreshed iPods. One sees a similiar story on the software front: refreshed iLife, some new and refreshed iWork. Not only is the quantity pretty impressive, but so is the quality of these new products rolling out. But here is my issue — for such an innovative company with lots of cool and differentiating features their product roll-out process is growing stale. It basically boils down to this:

1. News starts to leak out a few months in advance (this is good to get bloggers all worked up)
2. Apple calls press conference a ~week in advance
3. Steve and team head north (for lesser launches stays on campus) to the Moscone center
4. Steve gets on stage and does a dance using terms like “revolutionary” “seven wonders of the world” “isn’t this cool”
5. Steve introduces a good friend like Jerry, Eric, or Howard
6. Steve introduces a musician like Nora or Tom.
7. Steve walks off.
8. Musician plays
9. Apple site refreshes with all the new cool toys.

Mix it up a bit… here are some ideas:


Venue: I love SF Moscone, but how about Big Sur (breath-taking) or Harlem to show another side of America?

Musician: how about some Outkast or Coldwar Kids.

Friends: how about real people who buy the products Apple is selling?

Pricing: Don’t announce the price at the press release tell people to go to apple.com to checkout the latest pricing so you drive traffic and deeper engagement with the apple site.

When does real work get done anymore?

Posted by Ariel Seidman | August 19, 2007

Bloggers Warning: by the end of this post you may be compelled to implant a device in yourself.

We live in a world of information overload and sometimes I wonder when do people actually do work (like write specs, write code, create designs, model revenue opportunities, etc.). Some of the major timesinks during the week:

information streams

*see techmeme, greader, facebook, MyY!, etc. people spend a lot more time then they willingly admit on this stuff — i estimate anywhere between 2-3 hrs./day (how ironic i don’t have the time to actually back into this number)

meetings

*depending on what you can do this easily 50% of your time at work (some work gets done here, but lets not overdue it)

water cooler chat

*shooting the shit with friends/colleagues at work

daily transportation

*1 to 2 hrs./day

social nourishment

*time with friends, family, etc.

eating

*at least 1 hr a day

sleeping

*5-7 hrs. a night

excercising or whatever it is you do to relax

*0-5 hrs./week

writing blog posts like this:-)

So — what is the solution? Simple –> self-instrumentation. Basically, if we had data that showed us how we spent our time over the course of a day, week, month I assure you we would quickly realize how much of our time is wasteful and would change our behaviors accordingly. The saying “you can’t fix what you don’t measure” is so very true and why not apply it to our most precious resource — time.

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