Facebook Gets More Simpler, More Complicated

Facebook Gets More Simpler, More Complicated

By Rubel - No Comments

Here’s the first thing you may notice about the new Facebook — the word “Facebook” doesn’t appear anywhere on it. Just one blue-on-white, lowercase “f.”

It’s indicative of a couple of things — first of all, Facebook is so famous it doesn’t need to use its full name any more. Secondly, the company has a new religion: make the design as clean as possible. Remove all unnecessary pixels (and yes, the company talks about it in pixel-level terms). Get Facebook out of the way of your Facebook experience.

“We wanted to remove all the chrome from Facebook,” software engineer Chris Struhar told Mashable after the event. And he wasn’t talking about the Google browser. (Indeed, folks at Facebook were strenuously avoiding any usage of the G-word Thursday, possibly because of the design’s similarity to Google+.)

Struhar was using a web nerd term to describe the chrome fins on the Facebook car: the details, the frames, anything that wasn’t Facebook stories and pure, gorgeous white space.
Of course, if you were paying attention to the details of the News Feed event, you’ll notice the paradox here: at the same time Facebook got simpler, it also got more complicated.

Instead of two options for how to sort your News Feed — “Top Stories” and “Most Recent” — Facebook now offers a dizzying seven options.

You get regular old News Feed (the equivalent of Top Stories, sorted by the Facebook algorithm), “All Friends” (headed up by a photo with a selection of friends in it), “Following” for the Pages and public figures you follow; “Photos,” “Groups,” “Games,” “Music” and your old friend “Most Recent.”

In fact, you get even more options than that. Click on “see all” and you’ll be able to view your News Feed by your location, or only people you follow at your work place, or only people in your high school, and so on.

All in all, I counted 20 ways to view my News Feed. Your mileage may vary.
How much of this will you use? It’s a fair question. In talking to Facebook employees who’ve been playing around with the new design internally for months, I’ve heard much the same thing: their browsing habits didn’t change.

If they preferred the passive browsing of the “Top Stories” algorithm before, they’re not really drilling down into the multiplicity of News Feed options. If they were the kinds of Facebook users who set up dozens of Lists before, then those kinds of options are closer to their fingertips.

Internet, Keep Your Damn Hands Off My Rom Coms

Internet, Keep Your Damn Hands Off My Rom Coms

By Rubel - No Comments

The tech world is often misunderstood as hard and cold. Movies about the internet have commonly fallen into the sci-fi and dramatic genres. Romantic comedies just don’t work for us web-dwellers because we’re all robots and we have no feelings, right?

Nope. There’s nothing Meg Ryan and a little soft focus can’t warm up. Take these tech-inspired romantic comedies (rom coms) and warm up your cold, bionic heart.

10 Actionable Trends For Mobile Marketers In 2013

10 Actionable Trends For Mobile Marketers In 2013

By Rubel - No Comments

It is almost silly to think that in 2013, many enterprises are still struggling with mobile strategies. The fact of the matter is that enterprises can sometimes be just as big, slow and bureaucratic as the Federal government. That can also be true for the enterprise marketing departments that are, ostensibly, supposed to be ahead of the curve of the rest of the organization.

Research firm Forrester has identified the top 10 trends that enterprise marketers need to know in 2013, and the actionable responses they should take to prepare a multi-year mobile strategy to push their companies into the future. The key takeaway? It’s time to invest resources in mobile – including time, money and people.

Among its points Forrester says that “the role of mobile marketing manager will emerge.” We are beginning see these types of roles crop up in companies across the world. Whether it is the “VP of Mobile” or the mobile-only IT guy, enterprises are starting to fraction certain parts of the workforce to specifically deal with mobile issues. Cost conscious enterprises may not like to see their workforces become even more fragmented and specialized, but the fact of the matter is that mobile is like a weevil, ingraining itself into the infrastructure of enterprise protocols. Ignore it at your peril.

“Mobile on the cheap is over. Implementing the complex technology to make the most of mobile opportunities requires a new vision of how to interact with customers, significant changes in culture and competencies across business and IT, and more investment,” wrote Forrester analyst Thomas Husson. 

What it comes down to is this: enterprises and marketers need to address multi-year use cases for smartphones and tablets, hire and organize their workforce to take advantage of the opportunities and restructure the corporate organization chart to give those people the power to make actionable decisions. Ideally, these types of changes would have started two or three years ago or before. If your enterprise is just starting to figure out how mobile is changing your processes in 2013, you are well behind the ball.

See the chart from Forrester below. What is your enterprise doing to take advantage of the Mobile Era? Let us know in the comments.

BlackBerry Z10 review: a new life, or life support?

BlackBerry Z10 review: a new life, or life support?

By Rubel - No Comments

BlackBerry is about to enter the battle of its life, and as you’ll see in my review of its new flagship phone, the Z10, it’s using everything in its arsenal to win. Maybe win is the wrong word; perhaps victory for BlackBerry right now is something more like not losing everything. Because if you’ve been following this story, you know that everything is what’s at stake.

The company is coming back into the game with force, that much is clear. Its new touchscreen smartphone is the serious contender BlackBerry has been claiming it would be, packing in the specs, software prowess, and services to take on even the most entrenched players in the game. This isn’t a feint or a half-step, it’s a long bomb with all the blood, sweat, and tears behind it you would expect from a company that’s lost a significant piece of its value (to say nothing of its market power) over the last handful of years. But there are those entrenched players, and consumers as well as enterprise customers have proved fickle in the face of changing technology. The fans have gone or are going — can the Z10 win them back?

This isn’t just about a single phone or a single OS, it’s about BlackBerry’s fight to stay afloat. Can the new phone along with BlackBerry 10 put the company back in play, or is this too little, too late? Read on for my full review and find out.

Makerbot Digitizer Will Let Anyone Scan and Print

Makerbot Digitizer Will Let Anyone Scan and Print

By Rubel - No Comments

Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis excitedly announced a new Makerbot Digitizer Desktop 3D scanner on stage Friday at SXSW in Austin. Currently a prototype, the next-generation scanner will allow anyone to scan a physical item, digitize it, and then print it in 3D, regardless of whether or not they have any design experience.

Sort of like a copy/paste for real-world objects, the Digitizer works using two lasers and a webcam. The webcam sees where the lasers are shining off of an item, and wraps all those points up into a plan for a 3D model that can then be printed.

To make the magic happen the lasers spin around the object, a process Pettis describes as “like Tron.”

“This is something you would envision being a piece of fiction, but in fact, it is real — and it is so cool,” says Pettis.

Able to scan items in as little as three minutes, the Digitizer can create small to medium sized objects, 2” to 8” cylinders. The Digitizer works in indoor light, and prints watertight models that can be used for prototyping, or to replace broken items in your home.

“The MakerBot Digitizer is a great tool for archiving, prototyping, replicating, and digitizing prototypes, models, parts, artifacts, artwork, sculptures, clay figures, jewelry, etc. If something gets broken, you can print it again.”

Makerbot is currently testing the scanner, with plans to release it to the general public in the fall. You can sign up to receive updates on the Digitizer on Makerbot’s website.

Make Better Presentations With the Instagram for Pitch Decks

Make Better Presentations With the Instagram for Pitch Decks

By Rubel - No Comments

“Hey, I really enjoyed making this PowerPoint,” is one of those things nobody says. Haiku Deck aims to change that with its iPad app for making and viewing presentations.

Before addressing the pain point of bad PowerPoints, the founders of Haiku Deck were part of TechStars’ inaugural class of entrepreneurs in Seattle. Their initial idea didn’t fly but it was their experience on the ground, pitching to various investors or partners, that led them to the idea for Haiku Deck.

“We were almost never finding ourselves [pitching] in a conference room,” says Haiku Deck co-founder Adam Tratt. The app now has been downloaded 250,000 times, with more than 100,000 decks made by users.

Despite the introduction of tools including SlideRocket and Prezi, the process around creating and presenting slides hasn’t changed much in 20 years. It involves a lot of Google searching for images, resizing text and on occasion, adding animations that will make your audience chuckle, at least the first time. What you end up making is often nothing to boast about — it gets the point across, but can look jumbled or be hard to read for your audience.

Tratt looked to his past product experience at Microsoft (working on Office) where he became familiar with an important statistic about feature usage: 80% of people use 5% of product features. Often, full-featured software gives people “too much rope with which to hang themselves,” he explains.

That’s why Haiku Deck, much like the poetry format haiku, has a strict framework.
“99% of the world is not a designer.” Tratt notes most people know something looks good when they see it, but cannot pick out a color palette.

The app comes with five “themes,” or templates (with 11 more for purchase). Finding images is a no-brainer — the app actually allows you to input relevant Creative Commons images, with attribution included, as soon as you type in a slide title or body text (you can also upload your own images).

The charts included in Haiku Deck are also unique. In a time when data turns heads, bring it into pitches is crucial, but the numbers themselves don’t always tell the story. Haiku Deck offers three types of charts: bar chart, pie chart and statistic chart. For example, in the bar chart, you would drag the bar to the correct number, say, 80 — and then add a label for each bar. It’s the kind of gesture action you expect when using a touchscreen.

Does Apple Ever Regret Making The iPad Mini?

Does Apple Ever Regret Making The iPad Mini?

By Rubel - No Comments

There are so many reasons to love this photo of Apple marketing boss Phil Schiller holding up an iPad Mini. For one thing, it captures the kind of hushed sanctimony and reverence with which Apple introduces things that are, essentially, little plastic gizmos. But mostly I love Phil’s weird off-camera gaze, which reminds me of this photo from Stepbrothers. What is he looking at? What’s he thinking? Is he fearful, even then, on the day of the introduction, that this cool new device is going to kill sales of the bigger iPads and thus drag down Apple’s profit margins?

If so, then Phil was right, because apparently that’s what’s happening, according to a report from Digitimes, which claims Apple is cutting back orders for components used in the big iPad and now expects to sell fewer of them than originally expected. Mostly because it’s selling so many of these goddamn iPad Minis.

Digitimes says Apple originally planned to sell 60 million big iPads and 40 million Minis, but that now Apple expects to sell 33 million big ones and 55 million little guys.

That’s great news if you’re the product manager in charge of the iPad Mini – you’re having a blowout year! But you’ll notice that the new sum total of all iPad sales for the year stands at 88 million, which is less than the previously expected 100 million. This is not good.

My Entire Premise Could Be False, In Which Case, Sorry

Then again this entire report could be bullshit, since it comes from Digitimes, and Digitimes is perhaps not the most reliable publication in the world, as reflected in the headline the story to which I linked, which mentions issues with Apple’s “supplpy” (sic) chains.

But if the report is true, this means Apple will sell fewer overall iPads (of all kinds) than originally expected. And more of what it does sell will be the less-expensive Mini model.
That in turn means Apple is likely to make less profit margin, as the financial wizards at Business Insider point out.

Does Phil Schiller sometimes lie awake at night wishing Apple had never made that damn Mini? Does he lurk outside Apple stores and curse the cheap bastards who keep buying Minis just because they’re $170 cheaper than the big one?

Maybe not. Maybe Phil and his team figure they pulled off a pretty amazing coup. They milked ridiculous margins out of the original iPad for a long, long time. And now that big iPad serves a purpose – it makes the iPad Mini look cheap. Which it’s not, considering that you can get roughly comparable Android tablets for a lot less.