LIVEdigitally

I was testing out a few new devices this weekend, and found myself just immensely frustrated with them. At first I chalked it off to the pitiful, yet unbelievably tolerated excuse of “that’s technology”. But that’s really a pathetic answer. Gadgets should not suck as much as they do. So here’s my little list of Why Gadgets Suck:

1. They are ill-conceived. I think the picture of the MP3 player slash breathalyzer I took at CES is the best example here. Too many people sitting in board rooms thinking up crazy ideas that apply to nobody. Also, convergence for the sake of convergence is a terrible idea. If you think consumers want keyboards in their living rooms, or more remote controls, or to carry around something that doesn’t fit in a pocket OR a backpack, you have the wrong consumer experts on your team.
2. Too much jargon. If the average Joe can’t figure out how to add contacts using a Moto RAZR, forget putting in a network setup screen that asks them which type of wireless network security their SSID uses. If you can’t figure out how to make a setup screen have regular old English, then you’ve made your product too hard to figure out by regular people.  Think of it this way: the average person out there is uncomfortable with the concepts of “inputs and outputs” on their stereos - so if you are even minorly more sophisticated than that, you are confusing people.
3. Unusable interfaces. A product should be usable without an instruction manual. Sending an SMS, synching MP3s or podcasts, and creating Season Passes should be as easy as making instant popcorn in the microwave. Granted there’s always room for “power user features” but the power users should be the 20%, not the 80%, of people who buy your product. If your “usability designer” (who probably has a Ph. D) shows you something and you don’t instantly understand it without explanation, it’s not good enough.
4. Usability designers. I’m sure there are plenty of these folks who have built great products in reality. Unfortunately it sure seems like most of them just do it on paper. My biggest tip here is that a really good usability person (a) doesn’t need a degree in it and (b) can point out not just flaws, but ways to improve most products they use, be it a coffee maker or a cell phone.
5. Lack of visionaries. Remember the old “a camel is a horse designed by a committee” phrase? In the devices world, this applies doubly. Visionaries keep products focused, whereas teams build according to “specs”. Three products built by visionaries: iPod, Slingbox, TiVo. Three products built by the rest: the Nomad Jukebox, Sony LocationFree TV, Comcast’s DVR. Need I say more?
6. Poor timing. With a domestic market of over 50% of Internet-connected households having broadband, today would be an acceptable time to attempt to ship “Internet devices”. But when 3Com tried to ship the Audrey in the late 90s, that was poor timing. I recently played with two different gadgets that both used dialup networking to get online. ONLY. Not even a broadband option. Really?
7. The buttons don’t match the screens. My Syntax Olevia 32″ LCD (which, by the way, is having issues and their tech support department has been excessively slow in responding to) has a very simple menuing system that’s extremely easy to navigate. However, the buttons on the remote were not laid out in a way to match the on-screen menus, and literally 1/2 the time I make a setting the button I push is the one that cancels the setting! You can certainly call this user error, but if someone as comfortable with devices as I am has a recurring issue like this, there’s probably a way the product could be made better.
8. Shoddy workmanship. I’m really talking about poor product testing here, but I just like that phrase so much. It amazes me when I try out a product with a basic feature set, such as a media extender or a digital picture frame, and run into an actual bug within minutes of use. One product I tried had the on-screen fonts render at double their normal size during video playback and when I asked their engineers about it, they hadn’t seen it before. I was using a standard file format and wasn’t even trying to trip it up. Always review your test cases to make sure they line up with real-world scenarios, not the ones in the labs.

I could probably double this list up with other common annoyances out there, but this seems like a good spot to take a pause.

In case you missed it, Apple announced they were discontinuing one iPhone and dropping the price on the second by 33%, all a mere 68 days after launch. Steve Jobs, the absolute master at generating hype, frenzy, and fandom in the consumer technology industry, dismissed this as “that’s technology.” Apparently a few people disagree (three highlights here here and here). I am one of these people.

In “the old days” all the way back in the 80s and even 90s, most consumer electronics products were cycled about once per year. Much like the auto industry, you knew full well if you bought a 100W Sony receiver with Dolby surround, the next year you’d see a 110W Sony receiver with Dolby Digital. That’s technology.

Jump ahead to today. Most consumer electronics devices still get cycled about once a year-ish, and the updates happen at different, but predictable times of the year. Flat panel displays tend to come out over the course of the Summer and early Fall, etc. Computers and mobile phones, on the other hand, are cycled fairly continuously, but again, predictable patterns exist, both in timing and pricing.

In the past two weeks, I now have two examples of companies (Apple now, Canon previously) ignoring any patterns, and simply “walk all over” their existing customers in the sake of bringing new things to market or dropping prices. These are the kinds of habits that create a chink in the armor of customer loyalty. And these chinks are exactly the moments that create opportunities for competitors.

So my advice to these manufacturers, and any others, is to think very carefully about your existing customers and how they will perceive your glorious news. If you bought an iPod nano last Xmas, you probably aren’t too upset about a new one - it’s been a while. If you bought one last month, my hunch is you are pissed. You might not do anything about it today, but the next time you are looking into buying a product, the competition might just have a chance to attract your attention.

I’m not advocating 3-month leaks on new products with pricing and tech specs revealed far too soon. I get that you have inventory that needs sell-off. But establish some patterns, we’ll learn and follow them. New iPod once a year? Great, no problem. iPhone discount just before the Holidays? Makes sense, we’re expecting it. Need to rush a new model to market to stay competitive? Excellent - set up an upgrade program for anyone who has made a purchase in the past 30 days.

The bottom line is easy: treat your existing customers with the respect and gratitude they deserve - they are the ones most responsible for delivering you your next batch of customers.

UPDATE: To the masses, Steve just did another wunderboy move with fresh kool-aid.  Still not drinkable where I come from, but something is better than nothing, right?

Bug Lab’s CEO Peter blogged yesterday about the “pizza tail“. No, it’s not an analysis of the long tail of pizza (featuring combos such as Peach+Anchovies+Potatoes or Corn+Pumpkin+Cinnamon), it’s an interpretation of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory applied to the consumer electronics/gadget industry.

I’ve spent the better part of 10 years designing gadgets for different companies, and there’s an unfortunately sad truth about the lack of successful innovation in the consumer electronics industry.  The key word there is “successful” as there are numerous entrants into the space, from Prismiq to Dash, from Presto to TiVo.  TiVo is a success in that it returned a lot of money to its investors and is still afloat numerous years later, albeit on questionable footing.  Prismiq won best in show at CES in 2003, then couldn’t sell enough units to keep the company alive. Dash is pre-launch, with an uphill battle ahead of them (though I *love* the concept), where they are taking on a rather entrenched industry.  Presto launched late last year, and again I feel it’s a good concept, with many barriers to “success”.

The common ground problem these companies all have to face?  Hardware.  It’s expensive with a capital every darn letter in the word!  Expensive to design, expensive to built, expensive to test, expensive to sell, expensive to support, you get the drift by now.

This leaves the field of innovation in hardware rather thin, thus creating Peter’s “pizza tail”.  In fact, the 4 companies I named above are truly variations on existing categories (TiVo=VCR, Prismiq=DVD player without the DVD, Dash=GPS, Presto=Printer).  When people ask me about the gadgets you can build with BUG, I actually prefer to leave the question unanswered.  I have a few ideas of my own, but I think the space between the categories will be defined by the first generation of Bug Labs’ customers.

I look forward to watching engineers, product designers, and entrepreneurs have the ability to innovate in hardware without facing the ridiculous cost and resource strains it takes to start a gadget company.  Until then, I’ll take a slice with Pepperoni+Mushrooms.  Okay, you can throw a little red onions on there too.

Saw Ryan’s two-part anti-IntelliTXT rant, and I have to say I’m in 100% agreement with him. Now I’m going to go one step further. I want a full-on end-user-configurable WidgetBlocker. Widgets are unquestionably slowing down page loading, so if how about putting the control in my hands? Here’s my note to my blogging friends:

I, for one, don’t much care who your recent readers were, or what you are listening to on Last.FM (don’t take it personally - it’s just not why I visit your blog). If I want to see your photos, I’ll go to Flickr. I don’t need to see the latest cartoon from GapingVoid (though they are hilarious - but I’ll go there when I want to see them). I don’t care how many feedburner subscribers you have. I don’t really mind your most recent microblog/tweet entry, but do you need it to be in a 250px tall box?

For those of you who need to make money of your blog, fine, show the ads, I understand. But if you are just doing it to get an extra $50 bucks a month, maybe you should think about decluttering a little. At the very least, how about just cleaning up the layout enough that you don’t show ads that look like regular content?

There is a reason for services like My.Yahoo, PageFlakes and NetVibes.  Maybe we can shift the widgetworld into letting people publish to each others’ pages, rather than slow down my ability to read your blog.  So, I’ve gone ahead and registered widgetblocker.com.  Anyone want to build the plugin with me?

On Engadget today. Just plain awesome.  Read it.

Let me preface by saying - I really love Canon’s ELPH digital cameras. I’ve used many competitors’ models, and have yet to find any reason to recommend any other brand higher. Yes, Fuji has some better low-light processing, and yes Pentax has Divx video built-in, but for the masses, Canon just seems to build winner after winner.

But now they are doing too much of it, and I think it’s to the point of potential backlash. My rationale here is that they are making enthusiasts and evangelists like myself frustrated by having continuously out-of-date products. I purchased the Canon SD850is the day it was released, 9 weeks ago. Today it became obsolete. It’s too much, and now when I recommend Canon’s cameras, I always add a little disclaimer pointing out their rapid release cycles.

As a secondary, but important, issue, Canon’s numbering schema became really bizarre this year. The SD line was progressing fairly “normally”, from 100 to 110, to 200, to 300, and so on. Then there was the 700is and 800is, followed by the 750, 850is, 900, and 1000. Today they introduced the 870is and 950is. Here’s the catch - the 1000 is a distinctly inferior model to the 950is, and that’s just my example inconsistency (note to consumers: only buy the “is” line, the rest aren’t worth it).

In my opinion, Canon needs to pull this process together a bit. Here are my specific recommendations:

• No more than 2 model cycles per year, preferably less. The more you cycle your models, the more you upset your “friendly customers” and the more FUD you create. By having too many opportunities to buy, you are also creating opportunities for competition. It’s not easy to remain top dog forever.
• Create some kind of upgrade program. I would probably shell out another $50 or so to get the 870is form my 850is. Further, while this might sound hard logistically, it really isn’t that much work, especially if you partner up with some online companies that have the infrastructure. Like, say, eBay or Amazon.
• Fix the ELPH numbering scheme.  Break up the is and non-is lines, start the numbers over, add a letter to the models, and be consistent.  Whether we all like it or not “higher” model numbers always imply newer/better products.

That’s it folks - again, I still like the products, but this process is at that precipitous edge of becoming frustrating and a bad experience.  Nobody likes to have a $400 item go from “newest” to “not so new” inside of the same season!  I hope my friends at Canon read this and take away something useful from it.

It’s the middle of the day here in NY, and I’m still riding that “good feeling” wave from last night’s Bug+(bar+NYC) meetup. Yesterday afternoon we had counted the comments on the blog and on Facebook and guessed that 20-40 people would show up. Instead, we had somewhere closer to 100 roll through the doors, which pretty much had me apologizing to the waitresses every 45 seconds as I was constantly in their way trying to do demos and meet everyone who showed up.

We’ve got a few pictures online here, and Peter’s written up a thank you note as well. Here are a few of my favorites:

Thanks again to everyone who made it there. As I mentioned at the event, we’ll be opening up a beta signup process in the coming week(ish - just gotta polish off the system), which we’ll announce on the blog. Also, I’ve tried to find all the links to any other writeups (some with pix) here:

• MAKE
• Gizmodo
• Silicon Alley Insider
• David Cohn (yup, the LD alum himself - this was the first time we’d met in person!!)
• Bijan
• Benjamin Stein
• SolidOffice
• Online Video Watch
• CEDX
• Zonageek

Oh yeah - I am working on some way to track incoming Bug+BLANK location requests, and will post something on the Bug blog once I have it figured out. Also should be within the next week or so!

I’ll be back in New York City next week (uh oh), going out for drinks with the rest of Team Bug Labs. If you are interested in hearing more about what the company is up to, or meeting some fine folks, please come on by. Details:

August 14th at Punch Restaurant (upstairs) in Manhattan for an open bar from 6-8pm.

As I alluded in my BugBlogger post, one of our goals is to have a very inclusive, open marketing approach. The more I look at the power of the community when it comes to the future of consumer electronics, the more I want us engaged with the community. Even if this is at the expense of “traditional” marketing activities (which are by and large out the window these days anyway).

I’m currently reading Mavericks at Work by William C Taylor and Polly LaBarre, and learning about TopCoder and other collaborative group efforts is truly inspiring. I highly recommend the book (amazon) or blog. When I think about Bug I think about the concept of “community electronics”. Then I start to think about blogging and RSS and other group efforts. They grew because of the community, and because anyone who wanted to participate was welcome to do so.

This is the same spiritual goal that we have at Bug Labs. Hope you can come join us next week in NY. We’ll be doing other inclusive activities and outreach across the country (and eventually beyond) in the coming weeks and months. If you’d like to see us somewhere “off the beaten path” please get in touch!

Oh, and yes, that did say open bar!

There are times in life where work feels closer to a hobby than “a job” - doubly so when a company you work with makes products that tie in to people’s hobbies. As (apparently) more than a few of my colleagues know, I’ve been working with “some cool gadgety startup” since the Winter, and now I can finally talk a little bit about them. The company is called Bug Labs, and it is producing an open-source hardware and software platform for building, well, gadgets. And not just gadgets like the conventional ones we think of and see every time we walk into a Best Buy, more like the gadgets that couldn’t possibly make it to a retail store shelf.

I’ve spent about 10 years designing, building, and marketing “convergence” devices. I’ve helped companies big and small attempt to bring them to market, and I’ve watched others try to do the same. With the exception of the Slingbox, all performed poorly on the market. But the reason for this is mostly due to the definition of market success. In 2000 or 2002 or even 2006, the “digital home” market was a small one (and in many ways still is today). So when I built a device with a Pioneer or an HP, and it sells by the thousands or tens of thousands, it’s a failure. These types of companies spend no less than six figures (and typically seven) on product development, and it’s typically much more than that (not even including marketing budgets).

Bug Labs’ platform, on the other hand, enables anyone to configure a device for a niche market, whether its 1, 1000, or 10,000, and be a market success. The company is effectively disintermediating the entire consumer electronics design, manufacturing, and retail process. By taking down these massive barriers to entry, an engineer (or entrepreneur) can purchase hardware from Bug Labs, build software for it, and create a new market for the configuration of their choosing.

Peter Semmelhack, the company’s founder and CEO, blogged today calling the product “Legos meets Web services & APIs”, a phrase I think is very appropriate. Most hardware kits contain pieces as low level as transistors, chips, and resistors (oh my!) which even with drivers and SDKs still require a lot of knowledge to work with. If you think about a Lego block, it’s a basic module that you inherently know how to use. This is the right analogy for Bug modules, they are pieces that make sense to any programmer. I’d say I’m a well-below average coder, but can still hack well enough to hook up Facebook and Wordpress for example. With the Bug platform, I probably couldn’t make the best gadget, but at least I’d be able to give it a shot. That’s the hobby I enjoy.

Last night’s dinner with Peter, Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Ryan Block, and Jerry Michalski was the first time we had the chance to talk openly about the company. It wasn’t “the launch” and there’s no “official press release” available. Instead, there’s a conversation, and a blog post with an early greeting (yes Zoli & Henry, we will have product info out soon). One of the key goals of the company is to embrace numerous communities, including open source, digital divide, and online technologists. While we’ll do some traditional marketing activities such as a press tour, you’ll also see us on college campuses, at XYZ-Camps, and doing other very “accessible” and inclusive activities.

I’ll be handling the outreach for the company, and while we still have a way to go until the Web site and products are available, I encourage anyone interested in being involved to get in touch, either here through a comment, by email, or even by IM. Looking forward to the next steps!

Update: wanted to share some of the thoughts from some of the individual VCs whose firms invested in Bug Labs (Brad Feld, Bijan Sabet, and Fred Wilson)

this is only a test. if this were a real post, i’d be blah-de-blahing about something else right here.

having problems with the wordpress theme - workin on it!

still not sure why links arent displaying… very weird.

So I went reading through a few stories of iPhone lines, ranging from Scoble to Engadget to Ars Technica and more (full list to follow). In these posts, stories are shared of lines ranging from 20 to 200 people in cities such as San Francisco, Palo Alto, Cincinnati, Tampa Bay, and New York, and they’ve been there for hours to days. Using just a little bit of math, the 11 cities I tracked represented 8790 person-hours of line-waiting. With 140 Apple stores nationwide (not even counting AT&T stores, by the way), this represents 7.8% of all stores. A tiny bit of extrapolation later and we have 111872 person-hours spent waiting in line (including Zooomr’s Kris Tate in live video, and the mayor of Philadelphia). The totals:
111872 person-hours.

4661 person-days.

12.77 person-years.

Thanks, Apple!
full list of sources:

• http://svextra.com/blogs/gmsv/2007/06/thank_god_its_iday.html
• http://www.techmeme.com/070629/p33#a070629p33
• http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_6261313?nclick_check=1
• http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/29/iphone-multi-city-lineblog/
• http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/06/29/ars-in-line-for-the-iphone-in-cincinnati
• http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/huge-gallery/iphone-lines-across-the-usa-a-pictorial-gallery-by-you-273527.php
• http://blogs.business2.com/apple/2007/06/iday-live-blogg.html
• http://laughingsquid.com/live-coverage-of-apple-store-iphone-lines/
• http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070629/apple_iphone.html?.v=31
• http://gridskipper.com/travel/iphone/nationwide-iphone-line-gallery-272739.php
• http://blog.mahalo.com/?p=21

Just finished replacing my stolen hardware with the brand-spankin new Canon SD850is.  I had actually purchased the SD800is last week, but just before breaking the 15-day-return seal from Best Buy, I did a little homework to discover the 850 was showing up “mid-June”.  And with my typical “must-have-it-now” obsessive nature, I started calling CompUSA, Best Buy, Circuit City, and the local Wolf Camera every day until last night.

It’s a 8-megapixel point-and-shoot camera with 4x optical zoom, facial recognition, and image stabilization technologies.  In other words, it’s pretty much the top point-and-shoot camera on the market right now, and while I’m rarely one to get “the best”, I love the Canon SD line (ever since the SD100 I had, which was, also, stolen), and I figured I might as well pick up the latest & greatest since insurance is covering it anyway.  Not to mention the fact that it is the technical replacement for the SD700is I used to have (the SD800is is technically a separate line, as it features a wideangle lens instead).

So far, the picture quality looks great, and like my old 700, it’s a very fast, very easy to use camera.  The speed in this case matters, as the total time from pushing power until taking a picture is under 2 seconds, and in continuous mode it seems to get up to about 4-5 shots per second.  Not like my first-gen Kodak digital camera, with 3+ seconds bootup plus a good second or two just to click and shoot. 

Eight megapixels is a grand amount for me, I can do all sorts of wonderful cropping and whatnot and still have printable photos.  Like the 700is, this unit also has 4x zoom, and again, I’m very impressed with the quality.  This is probably the point in the review where die-hard digital camera aficionados are rolling their eyes, so if that’s you, head on over to DPreview.com for a much more technical, in-depth overview.

Also new to the 850 is a lot more options in the menus.  First up, the vestigial “Send-to-printer” button is now programmable - I set it to go straight into movie mode.  Next, there’s a lot of categorization, basic editing, and red-eye features built-into the unit - I haven’t tried them all out yet, but it seems like it’s fairly powerful, yet in Canon-style, not too complicated to use.

Last but not least is the continued inclusion of a viewfinder, which is really handy on very bright days.  I don’t mind sacrificing a little screen real estate for it.  I do really like the facial recognition technology.  If you haven’t seen it in action, it puts little white boxes around every face it “sees” and uses them for autofocus.  Very cool.  More of my pix are on flickr. So, to summarize:

Pros

• Lots of features AND…
• Easy to use
• 8 megapixels
• 4x optical zoom
• Fast shutter speed

Cons

• Pricey
• One of the larger point-and-shoot cameras

If you have $399 to shell out, I definitely recommend the SD850is.  If you want to save a little, pick up a 700 or 800 (although I’d avoid the 750, 900 or 1000 - terrible naming system) - you can still find them in plenty of spots (all links are to Amazon product pages).