• It felt very transactional — it lacked soul and depth.
• It invaded my private space (my instant messenger sessions).
• It performed well at questions that classic search engines and/or discovery site like Yelp usually handle well e.g. what bike stores are in Palo Alto or where can I find a free SVN MacOS client. You can get answers to these questions without nagging somebody.

On the other hand, I have become a Quora addict for three reasons:

• Performs well at questions not well suited for a search engine: opinion, multiple constraints scenarios, hypothetical scenarios, etc.  For example startup founders and investors commonly ask “How did company X get traction.”  When somebody with knowledge of that company answers it provides insight that a search engine cannot find because that content previously did not exist.
• Provides depth and insight — by keeping questions alive, providing answer summaries, etc. the content can become richer.
• Feels like a natural conversation.  Quora is like a party where you can jump in and out of conversations of interest.  Whereas Aardvark which feels like a party where everybody is separated by a wall.

This blog post is adapted from my answer on Quora.  You should follow me on Quora here.

Mobile Design

• iPhone 3.0 GUI Photoshop Templates
• iPhone 4.0 GUI Photoshop Templates
• iPhone icons
• Android GUI Photoshop Templates
• Android Device Display/Screen Sizes
• Windows Phone 7 UI Design and Interaction Guide
• Windows Phone 7 GUI Photoshop Templates
• Windows Phone 7 Application Bar Icons
• Better Mobile Web Forms
• Mobile Touch Target Sizes
• Android Human Interface Guidelines

Mobile Development

• Android SDK from an iPhone Developer’s perspective
• Lessons Learned Developing Flickr Site for Mobile
• jQuery Plugin for Mobile Web Development
• HTML5 Web App Tutorial for iPhone Safari
• Sencha Touch Framework (HTML5 toolkit)

Mobile Technologies

• Location Technologies 101 (Wifi triangulation, GPS, Assisted GPS, etc.)
• How Accelerometers Work (opens pdf file)
• How Projected Capacitive Touch Technology Works (i.e. touch screen)

New Forms of Mobile Search & Discovery

• Gesture based Search (Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search)
• Image Recognition based Search (Google Goggles)
• Augmented Reality (Yelp: “Monocle”)
• Audio Search for Music (Shazam and SoundHound)

App Store and App Marketing

• App Store Metrics: Free vs. Paid, Growth, # of Apps, by App Store (Apple, Android, etc.)
• App Store Economy
• How to Launch an App on the App Store:  Charting the App Store
• The Two App Stores:  The Premium vs. Cheap App Store (deals with App Store pricing strategy)
• Building a Screencast for iPhone Apps

Mobile Monetization

• How Much Does Google Make on Each Android Device
• Performance of In-App Purchases
• Microsoft guarantees Verizon $400 for default search position

Web Businesses Adapting to the Mobile Era

• Kayak: 5% of Kayak’s Traffic Comes from Apps
• OpenTable: 3M Diners Sat Through OpenTable Mobile Apps (Worth $150M)
• Amazon: Mobile revenues 2009: $600M, 2010 on track to do $1.5B
• eBay: 11M downloads of eBay app, $1.5B in revenues from mobile channel

Mobile Strategy

• The Two Faces of Android: The Open vs. Commercial version
• Mobile Fragmentation is Forever
• Are People Willing to Pay for Digital Goods on Mobile Devices?
• What is Strategic for Google?
• The Very Personal Computer Era, Beyond PC
• Mobile Internet will Overtake PC (Mary Meeker presentation at Web 2.0 conference)

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.

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}

Lets have a quick look at the current lineup of major industries in the Valley and the top players in those industries:

Media companies

• Google
• Yahoo (ok, 9% growth is not exactly hitting it out of the park, but there is untapped potential here — full disclosure: i work at yahoo)

Computer/devices companies (both of these companies are on a tear)

• HP
• Apple

Micro-processor companies

• Intel
• AMD

Well — when times are good folks start to expand beyond their core and these companies are expanding — especially the folks at Google — into the following industries:

• Wireless & Telecom
  • iPhone
  • Gphone
  • Buying wireless spectrum: Apple & Google are each other
  • Undersea fiber: Google
• Entertainment
  • Apple TV & iTunes –> distribution hub for all entertainment
• Energy (alternative forms)
  • Silicon Valley in general is playing a major role in this space — however with the exception of Intel and AMD the companies above are more dabbling then anything else — but $20M here and $30M there and it becomes a bit more then dabbling.

For the past 4 years the pendulum has been swinging in favor of these Bay Area companies but when you expand beyond the core you inevitably start to piss off the legacy players… Once these legacy players start fighting back and the economic slowdown forces these companies to curtail their investments beyond the core will the pendulum reverse?

Given how much room for innovation is left combined with the fact that there is still billions of dollars of ad spend that will come online in the next few years these calls and rumors of consolidation of the major players e.g. Microsoft buying Yahoo!, Google buying Yahoo!, Microsoft buying Google, and every other combination you can possibly think of are somewhat silly.

1. Clever use of free data (costs a ton to process this much data, but the data itself is free)
2. Deliver the right information (will fare’s increase or decrease) at the right time (at the point of search or transaction)
3. Leverages consumers fear of overpaying. 

However, will your average consumer spend enough time to grok how this works — not sure about that one.  Some good marketing folks will be needed on this one. 

Energy Policy

How will we go beyond simply taking about the need for renewable energies and clean technologies to actually constructing meaningful policy that will incent business and consumers.  Here are a few suggestionsImmediately remove

• Rep. John Dingell as Chairman of the Energy and Commerce committee as he is single-handedly obstructing the long overdue increase in gas-mileage for cars.  Why does a Chevy Impala only get 21MPG – that is a rather sad statement on American manufacturing technology and government institutions inability to effectively regulate.
• Incentivize (tax breaks, etc.) employers to provide fuel efficient transportation for their employees such as:
• Free daily bus shuttles with free Wi-Fi Internet access – both Yahoo! and Google provide this service for their employees.
• $5,000K towards the purchase of a hybrid car that gets at least 45 mpg.
• Create a DARPA like program for Renewable Energies and Clean Technologies.  For example, the DARPA Grand Challenge was an amazing and successful event — can’t we compete to develop base technologies that will improve vehicle gas mileage by a factor of 10.  Let Toyota, Ford, and others focus on the 20-30% annual increases… while our major university institutions focus on the breakthrough technologies that will be a 10x force — I want my children’s car to be one that gets 500 mpg.
• Provide greater incentives for developers and consumers to build and buy housing within major metro areas.  If you only live 5 miles from your office and your city provides convenient and affordable mass transit there is little reason to drive to work.

Uncontrolled Spending & Looming Unfunded Mandatory Benefits (e.g. Social Security)

While many will not agree with President’s Bush decision or handling of the war his attempt to do something about the huge increases in our mandatory spending is a good thing — you many not agree with the how, but at the very least such as significant issue deserves a more thoughtful debate.  Germany, France, and others are good examples of what happens when you let the problem linger too long.  Here is chart (courtesy of IBM’s Many Eyes project) from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that provides a good illustration of the components of the Federal budget — here you can clearly see that items such as Social Security, Medicare, Interest on debt, etc. dominant our federal budget:While many will not agree with President’s Bush decision or handling of the war his decision his attempt about the huge increases in our mandatory spending is a good thing.  Germany, France, and others are good examples of what happens when you let the problem linger too long.  Here is chart from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that provides a good illustration of the components of the Federal budget — here you can clearly see that items such as Social Security, Medicare, Interest on debt, etc. dominant our federal budget:

(courtesy of  IBM’s Many Eyes project)

Why should you care?

All this mandatory spending leaves little room for investment in education, technology, and social services (all discretionary spending) that will impact the quality of life for future generations.

Is this more concerning news coming out of Boeing regarding the 787 program or standard hiccups in the development process of a complex and innovative product — only time will tell. While this issue is peanuts relative to analyst reports that some of the 787 suppliers are struggling to meet Boeing specs and timelines. While I am sure that a delay (even a relatively short one of a few months) will not bode well for the Boeing stock I can’t imagine that this will drastically change the Boeing vs. Airbus competitive dynamics as Airbus is a good 2-3 yrs. behind Airbus and has significant resources tied up in the A380 for the forseeable future.

In my humble opinion business schools should start preparing a case study on the turn-around of Boeing which is based on a few key elements—here are a few:

1. leapfrog technology aka the 787
2. insight that point to point is more important then network
3. new supplier model: extension of risk to large suppliers

What do you all think?