Product Strategy and UX: Admiration: the Bump iPhone App

In a recent FastCompany's Article, we read this:

Consider Bump, an app that lets users swap data between phones simply by bumping them together. Its cofounder, Dave Lieb, notes that in the first dotcom rush, online enterprises had to build their infrastructures from scratch, so engineers were paramount. In our app economy, everything has changed. Bump had 1 million users before it spent $1,000. It didn’t need infrastructure, thanks to Amazon’s server-hosting service; it didn’t need advertising because of social media; and the App Store solved any distribution problem. Development was a breeze, too, because of Apple’s software developer kit. "These are all things that used to cost millions," Lieb says.

That is profound. It should open our eyes as well as our minds.

Yes, there are caveats:

1. We are not headquartered in America.
2. We have missed that wave.

Then, there are counter arguments:

1. There are customers outside America, too.
2. Missing one wave is no big deal. There are new waves almost every month or year.

Can we build an app like that outside America too? In places near where I'm living?
And I also read that mix/matching API's can be easy too:

For our geo-search API, we used PostgreSQL for many months, but once our Media entries were sharded, moved over to using Apache Solr. It has a simple JSON interface, so as far as our application is concerned, it’s just another API to consume.

HopeHero's Offer

If you want some "bump ideas", we can help.
If you have ideas already, but you want help with UX/UI/content/copy writing,  then we can help too.

Whatever role, level, pecking order --- we are willing to play, to help.

All we ask is: don't pay us in cash or salary.

Am I asking too much?

Calculus Advantage

Even if you got 100% for Maths in the nation-wide high-school-leaving examination, you may not be allowed to study any Maths at the Burmese universities in my days. Strange, awkward, but true and sad.

So when I read in Singapore in the early 2000's that if you knew Calculus

1. You can calculate how much paint you would need to paint an awkwardly-shaped floor.
2. You can calculate how far you can raise your price until some customers start leaving.
3. You can calculate many other real-life meaningful stuffs.
4. etc, etc,

I became excited.

So I started asking around among my colleagues: "Hey, are you okay with Calculus?"

Everyone answered "Yes, we are fine with Calculus," as I expected since I knew all of them are Engineering or Computer Science grads.

As I half-expected, none of them was using Calculus in their daily lives.

I also started asking young kids when I visited my Myanmar friends' families living in Singapore.  They also told me, "Uncle, Calculus is very easy. We never have any problem with that."

As I half-expected, none of them was using Calculus in their daily lives.

I studied Shakespeare, anthropology and many other such weird stuffs. I admit those stuffs are weird. I don't think anyone can sincerely say that Calculus is weird.

Why did ONLY Steve Jobs use Shakespearean scholars in designing Apple products?

Why did ONLY Xerox, IDEO etc use anthropologists in designing and trouble-shooting their products?

Why did Sprint's CEO say that Softbank brings to them expertise in "how to utilize (some) technologies"?

I cannot teach Calculus. But I know how to use it in certain places. I can teach Shakespeare and I do know how to use it in certain places. I can teach Poetry and I do know how to use it in certain places.

Why not teach that to your kids?

Oh, by the way, I can teach them excitement, too!

Psychology of Mis-Judgement

Charlie Munger,Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Corporation, has discussed how our mind plays tricks on our decision-making in his book "Poor Charlie's Almanac." That chapter is also available on line at Psychology of Mis-Judgement.

Uncertainty, Chaos, Complex confusing circumstances, Friction and fog of war, turbulence, unpredictability, and similar topics kept me spell-bound during past few months. And thus, when I have time, I would like to share my understandings of famous books like Judgement Under Uncertainty by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and many such books.

Munger turned out to be sort of a kindred spirit to me. Even before I read his "Almanac," I read such books in minutes, zeroing in on what Munger calls "really big ideas." You must have noticed that here in my posts, I share such juicy, hand-picked "really big ideas."

Munger lists 25 factors that can skew our judgement and then urges the readers or future scholars to tidy up his list. Here is my attempt to do so:

1. Greed, Liking, Envy/jealousy, Social Proof, Over-Respect, Over Optimism, Curiosity(Seeking Fun, Variety, Adventure, Thrill etc)
   
2. Fear, Dislike, 
     Avoiding pain, doubt, inconsistency, discomfort etc
     Seeking confirmation, seeking meaning
     Loss aversion
     Over-reaction to deprival
   
3. Association, Pavlovian conditioned reflexes
     Anchoring
     Oversight of convergence of many factors 
     Availability-Misweighing
     Pride, arrogance, over-confidence
     Excessive self-regard 
   
4. Stress
   
5. ?
   

People familiar with Buddhist literature will notice that these are what Buddha calls defilements or hindrances as explained by Venerable Nyanaponika, and by Wiki teams.

Kamachanda(Sensual desire, lust, craving, grasping)

Here, you want something very badly. This is what can happen:

1. You lose sight of other relevant factors. e.g. In a Taoist tale, a thief grabbed and ran away with a gold piece in a crowded marketplace because he "saw only the gold", not other humans who would catch him.
2. Numerous Chines kings and princes who believed that soldiers from the enemy army were deserting in droves simply because they desired such an outcome whereas in truth, those soldiers just went into hiding to lay ambush.

Vyapada (Ill-will, hatred, anger, fear)

Here, you hate someting so much that you refuse to believe it.
e.g. Hitler would not accept that Soviet factories were producing more tanks etc than his own factories.

Thina-middha (Sloth and torpor)

Here. you are not awake.

Uddhacca-kukkucca (Restlessness,worry, agitation)

This is what we today call stress and anxiety.

Vicikiccha (Doubts or hesitation)

This is plain confusion, contradiction, paradoxes, and lack of faith.

Vision for Our Business

In the middle of the 1990s, I started my IT career with the following visions. At that time, I was a greenhorn, a noobi, a rookie in IT matters.

1. Extract information and create knowledge from unstructured data.
2. Represent human beings in computer/virtual worlds, all in terms of BDI (beliefs, desires, intentions), model/world-views, and approaches."

Now they look too academic, too broad, too ambitious, too out of touch with real lives, real users, real problems, and real money.

It's as if I am setting up myself and my team for failure, by over-extending too far.

Can We Set Up Ourselves For Success?

1. We can divide each vision to dozens of small products, services or applications. Such a web application does not need many man-months, and such resources are not beyond our means.
2. Each such application must solve some real problems for some real users. For instance, blogging, tweeting, searching etc have proved useful to real lives. We are not doing such services here, I show them as examples only.
3. If we can go viral, we may not need a large budget for marketing and promoting our apps.
4. How many applications do we need to sacrifice, let others copy, before we make money, get big enough to fight back?

We are getting there.

Internet Etiquette : Spare Our Time

The Stackoverflow site has been introduced to avoid the Google Loop, regarding programmers' queries.

There are many more such loops and a majority of them are caused by human beings themselves.

If you try searching "how to measure web marketing," "how to measure online marketing," "how to measure Internet marketing," for instance, you will find that the materials online didn't give you any specific answers.

What is worse is that you discover that only after some hours.

If we impose Twitter-like restrictions on Internet/web content, that will save us a lot of time. I suggest a "500 words or less" restriction.

We, here at ethicminds are polite. We won't waste your time.

For the above the query, all you need is just these 2 books :

Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics and
Yahoo! Web Analytics Book

Invitation to Programmers

on November 21, 2010

We are going to develop an application for primary and secondary students all the world over. It's a free app with premium services for paying users.

We will do it in Python(Django or Google App Engine.) If your team have experience in the language(Python), please contact us. Platform/framework experience is not that really necessary since the learning curve there is not that steep. However, if you lack the relevant platform/framework experience, you must be prepared to learn fast.

We have the following features in mind, are your team comfortable implementing them?

1. Read uploaded excel/CSV files, and store data in database.
2. WYSIWYG editor with image uploads e.g tinymce, fckeditor
3. draw graphs and charts
4. send SMS to users' phones
5. accept user's payment thru Paypal's IPN
6. categorization and search by tags
7. site search
8. quiz(multiple choice)
9. tracking user's usage, achievement, and thus progress

And the typical features
1. signup, login, logout
2. role assignment and differentiation: guest, free registered user, paying premium user
3. email
4. file upload and download

Are your team comfortable implementing them?
1. How long will you take to do it?
2. How much would you like to charge us for the app?
3. Will you be also available for enhancement and maintainence?

Invitation to Web Marketers and Promoters

on November 21, 2010

We are developing an application for primary and secondary students all the world over. It's a free app with premium services for paying users.

We want as many students themselves and their parents as possible to become aware of it and to try it out.

1. Can you help us locate where they are?
2. Can you spread our message among them: email, direct mail, flyer, social media groupings, Youtube, slide share, ezine publishing, mobile messages, PR, ANY OTHER WAY?
3. Can you drive traffic to our app/site?
4. Once they are at the site, can you help us encourage /cajole/ entice/ seduce them try out our service?

Beyond that point, we take over. We take it upon ourselves to ensure that our app is intuitive and easy to use, that its benefits are obvious to the users, that the fees are reasonable and affordable and easy to pay, and so on. Here also, we are open to your contributions e.g. What features will increase our value to the users? What benefits will they like to get? What concerns would we address? Reduce or increase price? and so on.

Are your team comfortable doing these activities?
1. How long can you stay with us?
2. How much would you like to charge us for the service?


PS. True, we will stop funding any product that fails to meet our milestone/target. But, before we do that, we will try to morph it into a far better product. Even if we kill a product, we stay in the same line of business and still go after the same types of customers. So, please also think about long-term benefits that you can get from starting a long-term relationship with us. When Product AZ 1.0 of ours goes, AZ 2.1 will come, and when AZ line goes, there will be BQ, CW, DY lines and so on. And you should still be promoting them for us to our mutual prosperity.