“Risk more than others think is safe.
Care more than others think is wise.
Dream more than others think is practical.
Expect more than others think is possible.”
I love this quote attributed to a West Point cadet. I think Steve Jobs would have agreed with every word, but I couldn’t be sure about the “care more” part until I read the obituary Eric Schmidt’s wrote, where he quotes Jobs as saying “It’s your heart running around outside your body” when referring to his children. I often feel the same as a parent, but he stated it so elegantly. This, in my view, completes him image as the ultimate embodiment of this quote, which everyone in the tech field and beyond should strive to fulfill.
How tough must it be for Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and the other design-focused people at Apple to engage with everyday technology. Filling up their gas tank, getting cash from an ATM, using their car radio - all these involve interaction with often terribly designed pieces of technology. How will a gas pump’s user interface look like if Apple designed it? simpler. An ATM? cleaner. A car radio? beautiful.
Apple’s influence on product design is already significant, yet it’s reach has been very limited so far. Apple itself is not going to redesign every piece of technology or make their services available to others. Instead, the “Apple style” - simple, clean, and easy to use is going to gradually take over the desgin world. The reason: this style is so overwhelmingly better that by sheer evolutionary pressure it will inevitably propagate and win. This is a bold prediction as it deals with user experience in addition to the underlying technology. Unlike existing designs, this user experience style requires a substantial investment in design and manufacturing. Still, I believe that it will gradually push the old out.
The reason a strong player like Apple leads the way is simple - traditional design consultancy or in-house designers typically do what the customer wants: the customer being cost-conscious consumers or design-agnostic businesses. Apple is led by a fanatic, detail oriented, micro managing design bigot who makes all product decisions. This is not the case with any other major player I’m aware of. Small companies do innovate in this area, but only a few make an impact. One such company is Arc90 that created Readability, a program that turns messy web pages into readable articles. Arc90 did such a great job that Apple integrated the open source version into Safari.
This better species had now reached a critical mass in the technology ecosystem and is rapidly eliminating inferior variants or transferring it’s genes to them. How long will it take for this superior species to kill off all the others? It might take a while, but the evolution is unstoppable.
In late December I was awarded US Patent 7,860,673 - Distance Measuring Device. I essentially patented the use of a parallax to measure distances from the user to a nearby object using a simple device that can be manufactured for a very low cost. First conceived when I was 17 years old, I kept toying with the idea and entertaining the thought of patenting it for years. A lawyer friend helped me write the patent application 5 years ago. It was a very interesting exercise in turning an abstract idea to a formal patent applications written in legalese, complete with claims, drawings, and calculations. Following a long review process and after hiring a professional patent attorney to fight a prior-art claim, the patent was finally approved.
What should I do with this patent now? not sure. Devices based on it can measure distances alright, but nowhere near the accuracy required for serious usage. I’m thinking about turning it into an educational toy and selling it online and at science museum stores. It can be a great tool for teaching the parallax effect and geometrical optics in general. Doing this will force me continue this multi-year exercise and complete the invention process by commercializing it. Should be an interesting ride.
I was “commissioned” by my wife and her business partner to design a new logo for their business. I’m a big fan of clean and clever logos, like the those of Fedex and Amazon. Not being trained as a designer never stopped me from playing around with visual concepts and creating new designs from scratch. Having some off-time a while back, I started sketching up raw ideas. The first letters of their names are C and D and their business revolves around relationship and intimacy coaching, so I thought about imagery that will somehow capture these elements. After about an hour of doodling, I came up with this concept:
Next, I spent another hour creating a Photoshop draft:
My “clients” liked it a lot, but I thought that creating the final vector-based version was beyond my abilities so I decided to outsource it through www.99designs.com. Turns out this wasn’t such a great idea; although I received around 70 designs, none of them was better than my own draft (according to my “clients”, at least). 99designs stresses quantity over quality, so you end up spending a lot of time coaching aspiring designers from all around the world, a time you could have spent crafting your own design. After getting my well deserved refund, I set out to create a final version myself. I don’t particularly like Adobe Illustrator, and was looking for a better alternative. Somebody recommended Inkscape, a free software that is as powerful as Illustrator, and, in my view, is much easier to use. Here’s the end result:
I’ve been reading a lot lately about the benefits of writing and blogging even in the absence of readers. These ideas resonate well, and I’d like describe the reasons that drives me to write¹:
I blog because it’s one of the best ways to crystallize ideas, short of brainstorming with other smart people.
I blog because it’s the best (and arguably the cheapest) way to gain practice in productizing nebulous concepts, turning them into products that people may actually want to consume.
I blog because it’s the best way to practice summarizing² long and winding thoughts into short, readable nuggets.
I blog because it forces me to capture the essence of an essay in a short and catchy title.
I blog because it gives me a chance to practice writing in a language other than my mother tongue.
¹ “Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few” (Demotivators)
² “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead” (Mark Twain)
Straight from the masters of NLP at Apple comes another amazing, extraordinary, incredible, awesome, and cool presentation. I posted one of these before, but this one is even better.
I happen to live about 2 miles away from the Apple headquarters. On my way to the gym I often see Apple employees walking through the campus, carrying a shiny Macbook Air or one of the other Macbook variants. Am I going to see them carrying an iPad on their way to the next meeting?
The device is undoubtedly way cool, and I definitely want one. It won’t fit in my pocket, so I’m going to have to lug it around in a bag. But I already carry a phone and a laptop, so why should I? to replace the Kindle I don’t have, I guess. Or maybe to replace all three of them?
The mass-market use case is not yet clear (to me at least), but the greatest achievement here is Apple’s new A4 chip, which reportedly is extremely fast. This finally lets Apple be totally self reliant, just the way they (rightfully) like it. In a year or so we’re going to see the A4 and its descendants replace the iPhone and Macbook CPUs, and maybe even penetrate non-Apple products.
Two companies entered the prestigious “I’m officially scared of Apple” club today - Intel and AMD. The banter in their executive boardrooms might be giddy and condescending, but they should be revising their 5-year plans instead.
Describing what your startup does in a video is a must. However, making a high quality video is harder and more expensive than it seems. Although video equipment is cheap, finding and filming a professional talking-head is challenging and achieving consistent quality through different scenes not trivial.
Luckily there’s a quick and easy way to ensure your video is excellent without sweating it: use stop motion. Just stitch together a bunch of pictures and add narration, and you have a great looking and sounding video that will get users engaged. Another option is to do a screen capture movie, but it’s easy to fall into the complexity and boredom traps with these. I’ll focus on animated stop motion videos in this post. Here’s what you need to do:
1) Write the story of a typical user and turn it into a storyboard. For each scene, write the narration and sketch the visuals. Tell a little bit about the user’s background and focus on the main steps they take while using your site and the key benefits they get out of it. Simplify the story as much as you can and use plain language. Revise several times.
2) Find a narrator with an “exotic” accent - Australian, South African (my favorite), Jamaican, etc. Spend $30 on good microphone. Use a wind breaker (like a piece of sponge). Record the narration in a small room with lots of furniture, pillows, carpets etc. to choke the echoes. Make sure the narrator holds the microphone at the same distance from his/her mouth throughout the recording. Record several takes so you have a lot of material to pick bits and pieces from and create one consistent sound track.
3) Draw some simple pictures (or have someone draw them for you) according to your storyboard. Use abstract objects - nothing too fancy or complicated. Make sure you have a few version of each drawing to choose from. Scan the pictures and clean them up in Photoshop. It’s best to remove the background altogether to get rid of small blemishes and tone variation.
You can also take pictures of simple objects; just make sure the lighting conditions are consistent. Take all pictures at the same place, one right after the other.
4) Use good video editing program like iMovie or Vegas Pro to stitch you images together. Use fancy transitions and effects sparingly. Render your video in HD - 1280×720, around 30fps, 44k sampling rate for the soundtrack. Post the video on YouTube and embed it in your site.
Common Craft has some good ideas on how to do these videos, although they are using a video camera, which makes producing a high-quality video harder with limited time and resources.
If you are on a tight budget you can definitely do this yourself. If you can afford to pay someone like Common Craft and focus on what you’re really good at - go ahead and do it; at the end of the day, however, it might be cheaper and take less time to do it yourself. It took me 3 days to do the video below with a little help from my friends:
Have you noticed how easy it is to buy applications on the iTunes App Store? Apple made it stupid-easy by skipping purchasing step typically found in most online and mobile stores. Simply find an app you’re interested in (Apple makes it increasingly easier to do so), click it’s price, click BUY NOW, and you’re done! no “Are you sure?” no shopping cart summary (in fact, no shopping cart at all), no tax, no suggestions for other apps you might be interested in, and no shipping options (duh). Click BUY NOW, and voilà. No questions asked. Apple emails you your receipt later on, and that’s the last you’ll hear from them.
Here’s the flow:
Stage 1: Click the app icon
Stage 2: Click BUY NOW
Stage 3: App is immediately installed
Stage 4: Ready to roll!
Isn’t it genius? it’s borderline ethical for sure, but fully legal according to the terms of service which everyone agrees to (do we have a choice?). Apple licensed Amazon’s 1-click patent which allows them to do this. I hope Amazon fails to defend this overused piece of pseudo IP, after profiting from it for so many years. It’s about time the playing field is leveled for the benefit of all players.
