Not quite what I was planning

Here's a great little book. It consists of 1,000 autobiographies - all in 6 words. It is the result of an article in the US Smith magazine where readers submitted their own 6 word biographies. Allegedly inspired by Ernest Hemingway who was once challenged to write a story in six words. He came up with "For sale: baby shoes, never worn".

My favourites?

• Occasionally wrong but never in doubt;


• Tried everything once, few things twice;
  
• Found true love, married someone else;


• Educated too much, lived too little;
  
• Lucky in everything else but love;


• Cursed with cancer. Blessed with friends;


• Never really finished anything, but cake.

It is possible to read it from cover to cover in an hour. It is inspiring and thought provoking. The thought that went through my mind is that many of these autobiographies would make great themes for photos.

I don't think it is out yet in the UK, but you can find imports on Amazon.

Ping Mag

OK, looks like this has been around for a while, but I have only just cottoned on to it.

It's a Japanese online mag that covers everything from design, fashion, architecture and design. It has an interesting cross section of items.

You will find it here: http://pingmag.jp/

Quirkology

Interesting name for a book, but it contains even more interesting content. As a psychologist, I can’t help but take the content seriously – surely, this is just social psychology. But some of the work covered in this book covers emphasises the bizarre nature of human behaviour, hence the name of the book. I love the way it is written - it makes the material easy to read and intensely compelling.

Some of the psychology studies covered appear in other works (including Blink and The myths of Innovation), so maybe the work isn't that quirky after all!

The work I am most intrigued by is that of Stanley Milgram. I am ignoring the work that he is famous for (around obedience and authority) and am just impressed with his innovative research methods. The one that sticks in my mind is the "envelope dropping" experiments where researchers would drop envelopes in the street that were already addressed and had a postage stamp. Half the envelopes would be addressed to one party and half to another. The researchers would then record how many of the envelopes were picked up by passers-by and posted. Invariably, the return rates were dependent on the addressee on the envelope. Using this method, Milgram could detect differences in political voting behaviour. The technique was later adapted to determine the friendliest towns by dropping envelopes in major cities across the US and measuring the return rates. So this is an ingenious way to infer what people are thinking by interpreting their behaviour rather than asking them the question outright.

This spurned a whole series of experiments including stalling cars at traffic lights and measuring how long it would be before someone hooted their horn. If you do this from country to country, you can identify the most impatient country in the world. Although bizarrely, the researchers found that the length of time was dependent on the nationality of the driver.

I wonder if it is possible to conduct this sort of social research online? A sort of "virtual envelope drop" experiment. It must be easier to do this stuff online. Anyone seen anything like this?

BTW, the quirkology website is well worth exploring. Do take a look at the videos.

Advertising on Social Networking Sites

I blogged on this previously. Purely because I was intrigued.

Today, I came across this quote from Martin Sorrell that goes part way to explaining what is going on here:

“Social networking is really recommendation between people about the things that they are interested in and they like… this has stimulated people’s attention in terms of the importance of PR. The people who are going on these sites didn’t want to be monetised, they didn’t want to be advertised to, so again editorial communication is so powerful, they would rather be communities that can exchange views that are untarnished.”

So what is being said here is that Social Networking sites are a mechanism for end users to provide each other with recommendations. We shouldn't underestimate this. There was a presentation at NRF (National Retail Federation) that reinforced this point. According to WSL Strategic Research, 74% of shoppers trusted the recommendations of friends or relatives. Furthermore, 40% of shoppers trusted reviews written by people who had used the product. This compares to 22% of shoppers who trusted the sales person in the store. But thank your lucky stars you are not a celebrity, only 10% of shoppers trusted their recommendations!

In similar research, Immediate Future found that 62% of shoppers trusted and used online reviews from fellow shoppers.

So, why does all this matter? Well, as social networking sites are increasing dramatically, it would appear that traditional online advertising does NOT work. If you don't believe me, take a look at these estimates from Technology Review.

Yet, ironically, 34% of bloggers admit to writing about products and brands in their blogs (according to the same report). And we know that shoppers behaviour is influenced by these views. Interesting.

The Immediate Future report on top brands in social media makes interesting reading.

Wordle

I saw this today on the FireWire blog today and thought it really interesting. The FireWire blog is well worth reading, by the way. Back to Wordle, it turns words into art - sort of! Well worth playing with. I would love to see a version

Here's one I created using the words from one of the page on my website....Have fun.

You will find it here: http://www.wordle.net/

Retail innovation

Here’s a business that it is intriguing. It sells T-shirts. Ok, so what’s so new about that I hear you ask! What makes it unique is that the T-shirts are designed by customers. The T-shirt designs are then voted on by customers and the winning designs are printed up. Customers then buy the T-shirts. They can even photograph themselves wearing the T-shirt and send it into the website for inclusion on their pages.

If you are really interested, you can even browse the designs by designer. The designer page contains a profile of the designer as well as links to his other designs. Thus, promoting browsing across the site and building an added dimension to the interaction. I think this appeals to the “story” aspect of the product.

And when you get your T-shirt, the label is printed onto the shirt itself with it’s title and the name of the designer. Again, promoting a depth to the product that would otherwise be missing. Does this count as user generated content? MMmmm

Here’s another cool idea that I liked. Little Miss Matched sells 3 single mismatched socks in a box. Yep, that’s right, 3 socks in a box. In fact, they have branched out and sell all sorts of mismatched stuff. Nothing for blokes though. They have franchises in the UK and have just won a big deal with Macy’s in the US as well as raising $17M in funding. I thought the mismatched tights were funny – although you could make up your own mismatched socks (just take one from two separate pairs), this was going to be hard to do with tights (unless they were made that way!).

And here’s another example... Nike has launched a service to enable consumers to design their own trainers based on pictures taken using a camera phone. The PhotoiD service encourages consumers to take a picture of any subject using their camera phone, which is then sent via MMS to a short code. A personalised picture of a trainer is sent back which features the predominant colours of the photo. The message comes with a unique code which can be entered into the Nike website to buy a...you guessed it – a pair of trainers.

Classic photos in Lego

Ever come across something and I think "I wish I thought of that!"?

Well, here is an example of a photographer taking classic photographs and re-staging them using Lego. Sounds a bit weird (which great ideas don't?), but it works extremely well. You can view the complete set on Flickr here: Lego

A wooden mirror

I saw this on a blog entry recently on FireWire and was intrigued my the idea. I still find it fascinating.

It works using a hidden camera and then moving motorised wooden tiles (sort of wooden "pixels") to reflect the light. What a really cool idea. The Utube video included on the blog above shows some close-ups towards the end of the clip where it becomes clear how it works.

What a really neat idea! A wooden mirror. Who'd have thought of that!

PC World: Have you ever heard of Multichannel Retailing?

I know they have, but I think they missed the point.

So what am I talking about? Well, love them or hate them, PC World is one of the most successful computer retailers in the UK. They even have a website.

Now one of the problems with selling on the web as a high street retailer, is how do you compete with the web pricing which is generally lower because of reduced overheads? PC World's solution is straightforward, offer web based prices online and allow customers to pick up the products in the store. Fantastic!

Now consider this, I needed to purchase an ADSL2+ router. By reserving it online and picking it up in the store I could save £30 on a £200 router. Not bad. Process works pretty well too and I reserved it and went into the store to pick it up. Well, while I was there I thought I would browse around and see what was new. Then, I realised that I could do with putting some extra RAM into one of my machines. They had it in stock and it was on the shelf. I was just about to pick it up and I thought "But I wonder how much cheaper this would be if I reserved it online and picked it up in the store?"

Mmm....using the browser on my mobile phone, I could see it was £5 cheaper (a 25% saving!). Quite a few keystrokes later, I managed to reserve it. Using such a small screen is a real challenge. As I stood in the store (still browsing memory), I was tapped on the shoulder and sales assistant said "Excuse me, can I just pick up one of these?". He reached over and picked up the memory card that I was interested in. Eh? What's going on here? I followed him back to his "Customer Service" counter. "Has a customer reserved that memory?" I asked. He nodded. "So, let me guess the customer's name!"

He was almost as impressed as me. And I saved £5 too!

Now, "Collect in Store" is a a great ideato drive customers from online world into the Store. It is great for transactional based sales, but absolutely hopeless for in-store browsing. In fact, the process which encourages customers into the Store, then actively disincentives them to browse when they are there!

Brits deserting IM?

I saw these figures today and I was intrigued (and not becuase it was the first time that I have seen UK figures rather than US ones!), but they show that Brits spent 1 billion less minutes on Instant Messenger last year than the year before. But the figures for Facebook are on the up. Instant Messenger and Facebook are now neck and neck in the UK both with around 2.4 billion minutes of usage each for the year (to the end of April 2008).

The figures show that the number of minutes that Brits spend online is up 4%, but the amount of time that we spend communicating is down 10%. And the biggest winners? User generated content (47%), Search (13%) and Entertainment (8%). The amount of time spent in eCommerce has remained level.

So things are looking good for two categories - user generated content and member communities (including wikis and blogs).

In total, Brits spent 33.3 billion minutes online last year (to the end of April 2008).

Advertising on social networks

Here's an interesting article that I came across today that has some important implications for advertising on social networking sites. The article reports on a conference for the Direct Marketing Association in the US this week.

Although there is a lot of interest in online advertising and social networking sites, in particular, it states that advertisers are still struggling to impact the bottom line. This was captured well earlier this year, when Google reported disappointing earnings and Chief Financial Officer, George Reyes, said "Social networking inventory is not monetizing as well as we had expected". Interestingly, in the same announcement, Google expressed excitement about the potential of advertising on the new generation of mobile devices.

It seems that people are more interested in interacting with each than they are in reading adverts. But the article goes onto provide more of a clue to the way forward - applications. I mean software that allows people ot interact in new ways - there are a number of examples around (anyone remember "fish slapping" on Instant Messenger).

Furthermore, FedEX's "Launch a Package" application became the number 1 visited page on Facebook last month - the first time this has ever happened for an application. The advertising agency commented that this was much more successful as a Facebook app than it ever would have been as a standalone application.

This reinforces something that I have believed for a long time - the enduring value in much of this new technology is in the interaction with other users. Anyone remember playing multi-user Duke Nukem in the 90's. The value in the games wasn't the fancy graphics or gameplay, but was the social interaction between the players as they worked together to capture the other team's flag.

Trivial, childish non-sense? Maybe, but in here somewhere is a clue to the future.

Realtek audio card on the Intel Atom motherboard

Well, again here's an example of another great piece of design that completely threw the end user, i.e. me!

When I built my Intel Atom based machine, I had some issues with the audio drivers. I was a bit surprised. I installed Vista Ultimate first and then used the CD that came with the motherboard. This even seemed to contain drivers intended specifically for Vista. The graphics drivers worked a treat and the overall performance of the machine improved as I commented on in a previous blog. However, the audio continued to prove a problem.

Every time I fired up the Media Center software, it would fail to display any live television. It would display an error message stating "No audio device found". Even the audio icon in the system tray seemed to display that it had a problem. I assumed that it was a problelm with the drivers and re-installed them from the CD. No luck. So I reverted to the Realtek site and downloaded a fresh set of drivers. But same problem.

I was stumped and decided to plug in a set of speakers just to check what was going on. Guess what? A dialog box appeared on the screen as soon as I plugged the speakers in! "New audio device" found! Well, I suppose that a set of speakers counts as an "audio device", but it wasn't obvious.

Again, I have to admire the engineer that designed this. It was a great idea. But it just didn't work - all it needed was a better error message and it would have counted as being real cool! As it is, it is just another one of those things that threw me.

HTC Touch Diamond - Great concept, almost a great product

But not quite. It has some great design features, but it has too many flaws for it to consider great.

First things first. If you are going to set high user expectations (and then you allow you Marketing department to overhype them), you had better deliver. Unfortunately, the HTC doesn't. The main problem is that the user interface (called TouchFlo 3D) does everything, but flow. The user interface stutters on occasion leading to a number of false selections and while it has some great ideas, it is just to fiddly in practice to be workable.

There are some really cool features:

• Putting the phone face down when ringing mutes the ringer. Nice design as it mimics exactly the action that I perform when my phone rings in meetings. Would I have guessed that it would work this way? Probably not. I guess that's what makes it a cool design that no one would ever guess.


• It s possible to reject a call and have the phone automatically text the caller that you will ring them back when free. Not sure if this is a new feature of Windows Mobile 6.1, but either way it is a cool feature.


• The phone going into vibrate mode when in a meeting according to your calendar. Nice.


• Rather than using strokes on the navigation tabs, press on the active tab and (while keeping the pressure on) move our finger to the left or right until the relevant icon is selected. Stroking the main screen, just selects the previous or next icon depending on the direction of the stroke. This makes the touchscreen interface much more usable.


• It is very easy to set up multiple email accounts – I have two setup – outlook for my corporate email, and POP3 access for my CompuServe account


• Threaded SMS messages really help keep track of conversations. Again not sure if this is specific to this phone or Windows Mobile 6.1, but either way still a neat feature.
  Envelope views for new emails. I find this surprisingly useful and quick to use. I frequently get a couple of hundred emails a day and this is a quick way to browse them.
  

But there are a number of negatives:

• The keypad disappears when you are in a call. This is NOT useful when you are trying to navigate your voicemail using touchtones – you make the call, then the keypad disappears. It can take a few seconds to get it back – press the button on the top of the phone followed by the keypad icon in the icon tray – by which time, your voicemail has timed out! I can’t find any settings to control this. Argh!


• The user interface is not smooth enough. For example, when trying to scroll down a long list of options, it is not unusual for the list to stop all of a sudden as it is presumably thinking about displaying the next part of the list. But what makes this even more frustrating is that the phone will often then select the option currently in viewing when the list halted. Argh! Pressing the back key sends you to the top of the list, where you start the whole process again! The Back key should send you back to where you were in the list before the option was selected, NOT the top of the list (which would be the equivalent of pressing the Back key twice!).


• Some of the icons and buttons are too smaller. Who is these designed for? Squirrels? For example, the OK button in the top right hand corner of many of the standard Windows Mobile dialogs is too small for most adult (human) fingers. Now, since these are standard WM dialogs, I am a little sympathetic. Where I have a bigger issue (and bone to pick!) is where these are custom UIs that have been developed. For example, if you set up more than one email account, you end up with buttons for the different accounts on the main Mail screen. You can only really access these using the stylus.


• Why didn’t they package the device with some GPS software? Even it is were only a trial version. It is like buying a car with world class speakers installed by default, but no radio! What good is half a solution? Installing demo GPS software would have demonstrated the capability of the device much better. I found myself checking the specs on the outside of the packaging to see if it really did GPS! After all, there was nothing on the device that would indicate it. And surely, a percentage of those folks who use the trial software would have purchased the full product?

In short, cool features are great, but you need to get the basics right. Maybe an update to the software will make all the difference, on the other hand, maybe the problems are down to a more fundamental limitation of the phone's hardware. Hopefully, HTC can work it out.

Adding ringtones to the HTC Touch Diamond

The HTC Touch Diamond is an interesting phone - I will write up some notes once I have had a little more experience with it (it takes some getting used to!), but in the meantime here's how to upload your own ringtone to the device.

While the device prides itself on usability, this was not obvious and I had to revert to reading the manual - something I don't expect to have to do with a phone. In fact, I have probably had 15+ different phones over the last 15 or so years. In the early years, I always had to read the manuals, then I discovered Nokia phones. Guess what, once I had learnt to use one, I seemed to be able to use any model Nokia. Needless to say, I became a loyal customer for many years, plus no more reading of manuals!

So having to revert to the manual for my latest phone was a real blast from the past! To save you the trouble of reading the manual (page 233, I think), here's how to add a ringtone.

1. First you will need to browse the file system on the phone. The easiest way to do this is to connect the phone to your laptop using a USB cable. If you are using Vista, it will install the necessary drivers and then display a dialog box asking you what you want to do. Select "open a folder"


2. Navigate to \My Documents on the phone and create a folder in called \My Ringtones in the \My Documents folder.


3. Drop your ringtone files into this directory.


4. Go to the Settings tab on the phone.


5. Select Sound. And then on this screen, scroll down until you get to Ringtones. This throw me for a while since I hadn’t realised that it was possible to scroll this page. The lack of scrollbars was the missing clue.


6. Once you open the Ringtones option, you can select your ringtone from the list. Easy, eh!

HTC could have done a couple of things to have made this process a little easier:

1. Create a \My Documents\My Ringtones directory on the phone by default. This would have been simple and require no changes to the software, just a minor change to the build. This would have been enough of a clue for me to work out what to do. If you want to provide more of a clue, why not put a sample ringtone in it which would have then appeared in the drop down list of ringtones?


2. Even better, when selecting a ringtone, why not allow the user to browse to a different file location on the device? This is the usual way of adding ringtones on other phones that I have had, but for some reason is missing on this phone. Shame.

Hauppauge WinTV USB Stick with Dual tuners

I have been using one of the Hauppauge Win-TV Nova-T USB sticks for a while with my Vista Media Center without any issues. However, there have been a number of occasions when it would have been useful to have had access to two tuners.

With this in mind, I decided to upgrade to the Dual tuner version of the USB stick. For around £50-60, this looks like a bargain. The USB stick is only slightly bigger than the single tuner version and I thought that it was going to be a dawdle to set up. After all, the single tuner version was a breeze - just plug it in and let Vista find the drivers for it automatically and it worked first time.

Well, this only half worked with the dual tuner version. In fact, it exactly half worked because, while it seemed to install correctly, I could only access one tuner and not two.

Here's how I did it:

1. Remove the old drivers if you have previously installed a Hauppauge USB stick. You can do this using the HCWclear application that you will find on the CD that shipped with the device. If you want the latest version of the software, you will find it here: http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/site/support/support_digital.html


2. You need to install the Diversity tool that is on the product CD. I have an aversion for bloatware and generally do not install software that comes with a product unless I really have to or it is a key part of the product. Again, this tool in contained on the product CD and it is possible just to install this tool (it is the checkbox at the bottom of the list). Once you have installed it, launched the application from the Start button and select dual tuner. For some reason, this seems to be set to single tuner mode by default. Strange. Can't imagine why someone would pay the extra money for the dual tuner version of the product and then use it in single tuner mode. You would be better off buying the single tuner version and saving the extra money.
3. Reboot. Media center finds this "new" dual tuner device and insists on going back through the setup process, but once done it works a treat.
   

Anyway, having been through these three simple steps, Vista Media Center can see both of the tuners. If you had previously installed it in single tuner mode, it will need to go through the re-scanning process again, but it will work afterwards.

Intel Atom DG945GCLF Motherboard

Just built a mini ITX PC using one of these motherboards. The motherboard has one of the Intel Atom processor onboard (230 clocked at 1.6Ghz). Probably the most remarkable thing about this processor is its power consumption of around 5W. The motherboard does have a fan, but it is on the graphics processor and not the CPU.

The motherboard was bought from Tranquil in the UK and set me back £42 (excluding VAT and delivery). I fitted it into a Noah 3988 case with a 500GB 7200rpm SATA drive, 1GB RAM and a slimline format CD/DVD drive. It is powered by an external power block and DC-DC board.

This combination is very quiet and produces so little heat that I could probably disconnect the fan in the case, leaving just the fan on the graphics processor.

I installed Vista Ultimate onto the machine. It installs without any issues and the CD that is supplied with the motherboard contains all the relevant drivers. The CD even recognise that it was installing on a Vista machine. The aero UI on Vista came up first time with the drivers on the CD. The network also installed without any issues. The audio took a little more fiddling with to get it to work.

The screen capture above shows the performance figures that I got out of the machine once I had installed the drivers from the CD enclosed with the motherboard. There is a definite improvement in video performance with these drivers - the graphics increased from 2.0 to 4.2 and the gaming graphics increased from 2.4 to 2.8.

When running Vista, this unit is pulling between 30-40W (most of the time it runs at about 33W). Exactly the same configuration with a D201GLY2A motherboard (Intel Celeron processor running at 1.2GHz) pulls about 40 - 50W (averaging around 45W). Because the Intel Atom is generating less heat, I unplugged the internal case fan. In hindsight, this was pretty pointless - it saves about 1.5-2W and makes very little audible difference to the running of the unit.

With this configuration, this unit is pretty quiet and would make an ideal candidate for a small format Vista Media Center. However, the motherboard's very limited video output capability (a single VGA connector) probably limits it's use in this department. Personally, I have been using the Linksys DMA-2200 Media Extender to connect to my TV via HDMI. So the lack of video connectivity is less of an issue.

I have a Hauppauge Dual Tuner TV USB stick that I will put into this machine and test out in the next few days.