Next generation Computer Interaction - Kinect Hacks

Microsoft Kinect is an extra bit of gadgetry that you attach to one's Xbox that does some cool things: it recognises your voice and it recognises that your movements. For non-gamers (eg me!), then this is a step-up from Wii - you have to hold a Wii to do the same thing. Have a look at MS's
Kinect trailer).

Well, clever geeks have taken this on board and created some pretty cool computer interactions.



My favourite is the Swim Browser  (see the video), which describes itself as hands-free browser. (Translation: a browser that allows you to surf the web by waving your hands around). It was the winner of 2011 PrimeSense/OpenNI developer challenge, so err..., other people think it's good too.

I sense that we are only at the beginning of this....

Nokia lashes itself to Microsoft for its smartphones

Last week, Nokia, that doyen of phone manufacturing companies, lashed itself to Microsoft's Windows 7 phone operating system for its future smartphones. Nokia is in the midst of turbulent times. Stephen Elop, its new boss of 5 months, sent his staff an memo on 11th February warning them that they were standing on a burning oil platform and risked being consumed by the flames. The firm will also get a new operational structure and leadership team, more of whom will come from outside Finland, aka ‘de-finnistration’.

In 2G and 2.5G phone era, Nokia were all conquering: they perfected the 'candy bar' phone and made an elegant user experience, built on sound technology. As users ventured beyond calling and texting to surfing and dedicated applications, this design started to creak. The advent of touch technology really demonstrated that Nokia had lost its golden touch.

Further details of the partnership: Microsoft's Bing will power Nokia's search services, while Nokia Maps would be a core part of Microsoft's mapping services.

On reflection, this announcement isn't too surprising. Stephen Elop formerly head of Office Products at MS was recruited as Nokia's CEO 5 months ago. He will have the historical and cultural capabilities to make this marriage work.

The tech press have been making a big deal of this announcement. But let's not forget that Nokia still makes about one third of the world's phones and remains extremely powerful in the developing markets of the world. Any phone manufacturer would be delighted to swap places with Nokia.

This isn't a company in crisis, but it does need a kick up the pants. Phone manufacturing today is much more about providing the building blocks for an ecosystem and less about filling the end-to-end solution with single solution technology.

In this respect, I think that, of the two front runners in the smartphone battle, iPhone and Google's Android, Android is better positioned, as Apple remains draconianly closed. However, I do believe that Apple will open its iOS to a greater degree within 18 months' time. RIM's Blackberry remains in trailer in the race and will most probably remain niched in the enterprise market.

Microsoft are likely to be VERY pleased with this new relationship. Historically, it has spent colossal amounts of money on mobile development, with little real traction. Access to this mobile giant (I refuse to call it a dinosaur yet) will bolster its credibility.

However as Rory Cellan-Jones writes in the BBC news story:

The cruel verdict from some is that two turkeys don't make an eagle .... This is a huge moment which could shape the future of an industry.

However what did make me sit up and think was the Economist's analysis (Nokia falls into the arms of Microsoft) and the analysis below of market share vs profits (source is credited to Asymco)



Incumbents are receiving a battering from Apple (particularly Nokia), which is fleecing the profits in the industry. We're likely to see an increasing number of partnerships and acquisitions to counter the Android + iPhone duopoly. I believe it also augers the end of European telcos doing handset manufacture.

One nagging thought: what are the implications for Japanese highly advanced mobile technology, now that the ecosystem battle has superseded the device wars??

Product Management in small technology companies

CPMN
Last month's Cambridge Product Management Network monthly meeting was a gem. Rob Davis gave an excellent presentation on Product Management in small technology companies (click this link to see slide deck).

What made it really interesting was that Rob distilled 10/15+ years experience in embedded software, hardware + software and purely software.

Key lessons learnt:

• Be brave
• There's more than one way to skin a cat
• Just do it

Key Influences:

• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
• To / Who / We Provide / That / Unlike / Our Solution Question & Answer methodology
• Getting Things Done
• PresentationZen by Garr Reynolds

An excellent 'So what' Question and Answer methodology for Product Managers to keep in their heads at all times:

• To: Description of market segment
• Who: Have a particular set of characteristics
• We Provide: Name / Description of Product
• That: Yields specific user benefit / user function
• By: My customer implementing what steps or processes and paying what money
• Unlike: Competitors' offering

Next month's presentation on Pricing should be excellent - see you there!

iPhones are for dirty sluts

The Register, as well as being an excellent source of tech news, occasionally has amusing, well-written articles.

So this article, NY hookers cross street from Craigslist to Facebook, talks about a study by sociology professor (!!) that undercovered that Facebook has become the primary social software service now that Craigslist has shut down it Adult Services section last year.

However, the gem in the story is the reference to the value of the Blackberry brand.

This symbol of professional life [ie owning a Blackberry] suggests the worker is drug- and disease-free," Venkatesh [aforementioned Prof] explains. 

The article notes that:

Of prostitutes that own a smartphone, 70 per cent have BlackBerries while just 11 per cent own iPhones.

El Reg readers display their sense of humour in the comments on this story.

Contactless payments coming to the UK in the summer 2011

Near Field Communication is the swipe 'n' go technology that enables the ticket payment at the London Underground's barriers via the Oyster card.

Everything Everywhere is launching contactless payments in the UK this summer in collaboration with Barclaycard - see press release. The Register has some of the details of the technology - UK proximity payments by phone this summer.

Retailers that have signed up are: Pret a Manger, Little Chef and the Co-op amongst others. Obviously, this requires special terminals in store to make happen. AND this will require special chips in credit cards (and phones - more on this later on in this article) to work.

In short, in order to make all this work, lots of players have to have signed up to the concept and make a lot of investment.

• Firstly, the credit card providers have been shipping replacement cards to their customers with an embedded contactless chip. There are now 11.6 such cards according to this article from the BBC - Orange customers of Everything Everywhere get mobile payments.
• Secondly, credit cards with a pre-pay facility have helped. I find it amazing that pre-pay credit cards have take so long to come onto the market. Not sure why it has take so long - any comments anyone??
• Thirdly, retailers need to make the investment in the terminals in-store.

So quite an ecosystem..... coming up next, embedding the contactless chips into mobile phones - the long awaited m-payment revolution. But wait, contactless payments via mobile phone is a commonplace transaction in Japan.

The last time I visited Japan (5 years ago), a friend lent me an Suica-enabled phone, which allowed me to swipe through Tokyo's subway - fantastic. I'm told that if you wish to pay for something in a newsagent's in Japan, then Johnny Foreigner will be one of the few people that pays for sweets, cigarettes, etc with coins and notes, whereas the natives will be using their phones.

The mobile environment in Japan is very different to GSM world: the operators are tightly integrated with the handset manufacturers. Financial Regulations permit operators to run pre-pay services for services other than calling, texting and accessing content on their mobile phones.

Back to Europe...
Pan-european mobile payment system, Simpay, failed in June 2005 (see Simpay halts mobile commerce project). There are a number of reasons for this, but mainly it was the inability for the ecosystem to coalesce around the concept.

This time around, competitive pressures are MUCH stronger. Apple, with its App Store, has shown the consumers will buy goods via their handsets and have done VERY well to cream off lots of profit from these transactions. The operators are very unwilling to surrender this potential revenue stream to a handset manufacturer - particularly Apple - that really turned the screws on UK Operators when it launched in this country - see O2 wins Apple iPhone deal - at a hefty price (from September 2007).

Also, Kenya's MPESA, a mobile wallet, has been an outstanding success - see this nice story from BBC.

My unbreakable rule of software releases

A company that I follow (unnamed, to protect the hard working!) posted this tweet on Friday lunchtime:

v3 is very close to being released, before the end of today, just not sure which time zone ;)

This reminded me of my own unbreakable rule of software releases, which those that I have worked with will tell you, I have broken on occassions:

Never after 3pm and never on a Friday and never, ever after 3pm on Friday.

Towards the end of any work day, then emotionally, there's a huge push to get this d*mn release out the door. This is the time when you slack off: you turn a blind eye to some bug-ette which (you know in your heart of hearts) could be a show-stopper; or you skip over a technical check during the launch process - the type of check that has never previously been a concern, but today, because someone else took a little shortcut elsewhere, this issue just catches you.

Friday is even worse, because you just don't want the prospect of release hell hanging over the weekend and to really drain morale on Monday morning.

My advice: JUST DON'T DO IT - it can most probably wait until the morning / Monday, when:

• everyone is refreshed
• everyone has had some time to mentally run through some scenarios that may have gotchas in them and to validate one last time.

My own scars
Yep, I have the scars of Friday release at 4pm. It was a stressful release that got pushed from the previous day. We were hard at it and finally released the shiny new version in the late afternoon. We hung around and checked and validated until 6.30pm. Then we went home. I checked on it again at 8pm that evening. Checked on it on Saturday late afternoon - all appeared fine, but the stats looked a little out of whack. Hmm, I thought, well, perhaps the boys changed something - I'll ask 'em on Monday.

Monday morning rolls around. The CTO has noticed the stats immediately, digs around and discovers the registration server had run out of disk space and had fallen over: no user could register for our service over the weekend. UGH!!!

Footnote
Another big disadvantage of doing a release out of office hours is that within your partners and hosting providers etc, etc, you run into the 'second line' problem. The weekend / overnight staff aren't generally as skilled or as quick (nice, big, sweeping statement here!) when you really need their 'first line' players (an ice hockey term) to sort out the problem quickly for you.

My number one software mantra

If you want it real bad, you'll get it real bad.

This was told to me by the Manager of Documentation (hmm, you can tell how long ago that was, by the title), when I was a young tester in Dallas, Texas.

(It sticks in the mind better, if you imagine it said with a Texan drawl!)

There are only 12 Kinds of Television Ads in the World

In 1978, Donald Gunn, the creative director for the Leo Burnett, the advertising agency took a year's sabbatical and studied the best television ads he could find.

He determined that all ads fall into the following categories:

Demo ad:	Visual demonstration of a product's capabilities
Show the need or problem:	Demonstrate the problem and then show the remedy (eg a dropped mobile phone call)
Symbol, analogy, or exaggerated graphic:	Same as (2), but the problem is a feeling, so the problem of pounding headache is symbolically represented as a drummer pounding a bass drum.
Comparison Ad:	Compares product with competitors
Exemplary story:	A short narrative is played out, which illustrates the product's benefits (Jenny's school play is tonight, but there's a stain on her costume. What will mum do?)
Benefit causes story:	Shows a series of scenarios all because the central character adopts the product
Testimonial:	'I had that problem until I used brand X'
Ongoing characters and celebrities:	the use of a recurring character, or celebrity, can help cement a brand's identity into the viewer's brain. eg the Energizer Bunny
Symbol, analogy, or exaggerated graphic:	Same as (3) but it demonstrates the benefits of the product (rather than the problem)
Associated user imagery:	People achieving brilliant things all because they use this product
Unique personality property:	A pitch from the founder or endorser (eg James Dyson for vacuum cleaners, Remmington for electric shavers)
Parody or borrowed format:	The use of the product is parodied, so that the product is tied to parody. The ad relies on the user understanding the parody

Original article by Seth Stevenson at Slate.com. Go to the site for examples of each ad.

Sports stars twittering – common sense anyone

The BBC last weekend discussed Twitter in the context of sports stars and footballing brands. Twitter ye not?

As with any new technology, it has a cycle of early adoption by individuals who understand on how to capitalise on it, some initial success stories. Then others adopt the technology and after some time, use it inappropriately (more likely naively). There’s a fall out which attracts the attention of the authorities – in this case the Football Association who manage football in the UK. 

Ignorance of the technology terrifies authorities and they try and shut it down. Attitudes like this below (from BBC's website) aren't helpful: 

QPR manager Neil Warnock has subsequently banned his players from using Twitter to talk about club matters.

"I've had a word with the lads about this: they can use Twitter all they want as long as it has nothing to do with the club," Warnock told the Fulham Chronicle.

The ability for individuals to openly publish has been around for a long time, twitter is an easier way to do this from a mobile device.

Fortunately, the FA would appear to have a mature view on the subject: 

It is understood the FA sees social media no differently to other public forums and has strict rules on alleging bias or questioning the impartiality of officials. 

I hope (and assume) that all new players receive induction about publicity, speaking to the public and the press and have clauses in their contract which talk about bringing their club and game into disrepute. Clearly, players want to establish their personal brand, but they play for a team and represent the sport. 

The FA’s policy towards twitter is (and should be) exactly the same – nothing wrong with a refresher on policy and also nothing wrong with having a PR refresher with the players, encouraging them to adopt the technology and how to use it to their advantage.

App Store - a concept not a brand

According to the The Reg, Microsoft disputes Apple's 'App Store' trademark.

I have gotta agree with MS here.

Without doubt, Apple own the most famous 'App Store'.

Others exist of course: handset manufacturers building ecosystems around their devices. Indeed, I recall some ecosystems trying to collaborate together to make their apps deployed on one ecosystem simple to deploy on others. 'Write once, run anywhere' mantra. (Can't find the link at the moment.)

The elephant in the room is Microsoft. They have Microsoft Marketplace which seems to have gone through an evolution or two, according to Wikipedia.

In 90s, surely this could have been the mother of all App Stores, as Microsoft could have leveraged its incredibly powerful developer network to promote developers' software to each other and the world.

Heck, the thing could have had virtual currency with:

• e-commerce store for all apps that ran on MS platforms
• developers purchasing software components from Microsoft and each other (Indeed it could be possible that MS could defer licence fees for developers purchasing its software until the software made money on the e-commerce store)
• advertising
• reviews + forums
• ....

Perhaps this existed and I missed it or perhaps MS missed the elegance of the concept completely, but I bet Microsoft are kicking themselves for not building a really solid wall to nurture their developer community.

Facebook's valuation and what do Harvard student use now?

A Daily Telegraph article, Will Facebook conquer the world?, uses the Goldman Sachs investment to discuss the future of Facebook.

Side note for history: Goldman Sachs invested $450 million (£288 million) in Facebook over the New Year period, taking the valuation of the site to $50 billion (£32 billion). The site has nearly 600 million users (rising at 700,000 people a day), putting the valuation of each user at the amazing amount of $100.

According to the article's author Will Haven, then, "No – the tide is turning, with fears about privacy on the rise."

I spoke to a former classmate of Zuckerberg’s and asked whether Harvard students use the site as much as they used to. “No, definitely not,” he said. “When I signed up, Facebook was a closed and exclusive community. It was exciting to be a part of it. Now that era’s over, Harvard students are much more worried about protecting, not sharing, their own data.”

So what do social media DO Harvard students use?? Anyone?

Email is for old people

The NY Times published an article before Christmas about the drop in usage of email amongst teens.

The problem with e-mail, young people say, is that it involves a boringly long process of signing into an account, typing out a subject line and then sending a message that might not be received or answered for hours.

NYT quotes these stats:

The number of total unique visitors in the United States to major e-mail sites like Yahoo and Hotmail is now in steady decline, according to the research company comScore. Such visits peaked in November 2009 and have since slid 6 percent; visits among 12- to 17-year-olds fell around 18 percent.

One interviewee said:

E-mail has its place — namely work and other serious business, like online shopping. She and others say they still regularly check e-mail, in part because parents, teachers and bosses use it.

The substitution is text, IM and Facebook of course.

I pondered this over Christmas and did some further research. The argument is 5-8 years old: exactly the same stuff around the rise of instant messenger. See Interesting article: E-Mail is for Old People from 2006

I recall (with the horror, due to the trust / privacy violation) witnessing teens accepting a friend of a friend into their contact list, merely so that one person didn't have to have two chats going simultaneously. (With horror, because in instant messengers, the connection is ongoing and provides online presence too, whereas email is merely a single transaction.)

In a more recent article from February last year, Email is for Old People, the substitutes are text, twitter, or Facebook.

Here are the use cases:
"How do you communicate anything substantial, with only 160 characters?"

• "U only need 160 chars 2 say what U need 2 say. FYI."
• "Facebook is for bigger stuff - and pictures."
• "If you really need to write something big you just post it to your blog. I have an RSS feed of all my friends blogs."

Email has its place and won't be degraded to worthless. Teens lives are generally one dimensional: work, home, friends are all the same crowd, so one integrated tool will work for them. As they grow up, then the asynchronous advantages of email will be come useful to them.

NTT DoCoMo launches LTE mobile service

Hot on the heels of my previous post about Japan having 600 LTE base stations, then, on Christmas Eve (2011), NTTDoCoMo in Japan launched its LTE mobile services (ie USB sticks at this stage) under the brand name Xi.

According to the press release, then the speed looks pretty crispy for those of us in the UK.

In most outdoor areas, transmission speeds are up to 37.5 Mbps for the downlink and 12.5 Mbps for the uplink, but in heavily used indoor areas, such as the terminals at Tokyo International Airport, customers can enjoy up to 75 Mbps for the downlink, approximately 10 times faster than DOCOMO’s current 3G service with HSPA.

LTE also averages about three times more data in the downlink and two to three times more in the uplink, and transmission latency is just one-fourth that of HSPA.

According to the article on Gigom, then will fall back to the carrier’s 3G network in areas that lack 4G coverage (currently, Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka).

(Thanks to Eurotechnology for the original news alert.)

Skype's recent outage

Skype suffered a massive outage just before Christmas, crippling the service for 24 hours. Fortunately for me, I don't use Skype as my primary telephone and when I do use Skype, it is 'bursty'.

The detailed explanation given by Skype made me wonder about Skype's competitive advantage:

• VoIP (shipping voice packets over the internet) is as old as the (internet) hills. 
• Skype's incredible growth / user base is down to two aspects:
• Product launch happened to be around the moment in internet history when people were (a) purchasing machines for their own use at home (b) broadband penetration was just taking off
• Service does a slightly better job of routing VoIP packets over the internet using Skype supernodes.

Allow me to explain the last point (technicians might want to refer to Skype's explanation of its technology):

• Skype uses P2P concept, meaning that the VoIP packets aren't sucked into a central server (from the 'sender' of the voice packet) and then squirted out to the client (ie the recipient / listener of the call). 
• Instead, the speaker's machine sends the voice traffic directly to the listener's machine.
• Previous VoIP service just lumped the VoIP out onto the internet and allowed the internet to determine the best method of getting the packets from speaker to listener. (Note that the internet is magnificently self-tuning to route packets in the most efficient manner from sender to receiver).
• Skype differentiating factor is that, within its network, it defined some of its users' machines as 'supernodes'. (Skype's CEO indicates that there are tens of thousands of these supernodes.)
• These supernodes take on additional responsibilities - see the detailed explanation. (I must admit that I thought that these machines took on a disproportional amount of traffic, but no mention of this is made in the explanation.)

The outage occurred when a bug in a particular version of Skype caused some of these supernodes to crash. (Technically, there was a precipitating factor before the crash, but I'll gloss over that.) This then overburdened the remaining supernodes causing a cascading effect, bringing down the whole Skype network.

Conclusions:

• In a networked-based or distributed-communication system, defining super nodes will create a vulnerability. (In a true P2P, each node is genuinely a peer of every other, so this isn't a concern.)
• If you have a vulnerability, then for God's sake make sure you have control of the weak points. (If you read the detailed explanation of the failure, then you notice that Skype is reviewing its auto update policy of its software, so that Skype can autonomously self update these supernodes without users restarting their machine / Skype. You'll notice that Skype had already deployed a fix for the original bug, but not every machine had updated to the latest version. I assume that the update occurs when Skype restarts or when the machine restarts.)
• It would appear that Skype didn't have an automatic way to promote node to becoming supernodes when a systemic failure started to occur to compensate for the diminishing network. (The detailed explanation of the failure indicates that Skype engineers had to put manually inject several thousands of "mega-supernodes" to compensate until the network of supernodes could recover.)

So, quite a mess, indicating that the disaster recovery plan needs some additional scenarios added!

Full credit to Skype for the level of information that they provided their users - see the Skype blog for December. Also, they offered paying users some credit to compensate for the lack of service - my voucher arrived today.

Global Preference for Social Networking Service

Here's an interesting map from Vincenzo Cosenza which mashes up Alexa data with Google Trends to produce a map displaying the primary preference for a particular social networking preference by country.

Also, this table (from the same site) displays the top three social networking services by various countries:



Facebook is all conquering, apart from Google's Orkut in Brazil which remains an large exception, even if Portugal has already been steam rollered by the Zuckerberg machine (stolen from Hi5 actually).

What is interesting is how recently, eg June 2009 (visit Vincenzo's site and scroll down), the picture was much more fragmented, with the odd domestic provider holding out against FB. These would appear to be second choice networks now. MySpace appears to be a US oddity too.

Japan has 600 LTE base stations

News of this capability comes from Gerhard Fasol at Eurotechnology - see this recent newsletter.

This sounds impressive but Mike Bryant, an analyst with market research company Future Horizons points out in this article from EE Times that LTE cells can support MUCH fewer users than 3G cells.

Whereas a 3G basestation cell could support 4,000 users, an LTE cell is smaller and can only support 600 users, so seven times as many basestations are needed to support the same number of users, Bryant said. That means additional sites have to be found and, in addition, placing LTE equipment on the roofs of tall buildings doesn't always provide street-level coverage as it normally did for 3G basestations.

Bryant further concludes that:

The result is likely to be an inability to service the demand created by sales of smartphones. Already monthly flat rate data usage plans are being dropped by many operators in favor of per-Gbyte charging schemes to increase profits and throttle demand.

I have been a firm believer in the view that all-you-can-eat data schemes are disastrous for operators and that per-Gbyte must surely make better sense, even if it is a marketing proposition.

Also, this interesting article (from July 2010) also declares that WiMax is dead as operators are deploying the spectrum to other technologies

Viber VOIP For iPhone - 1m downloads in 3 days

Viber is VoIP client for iPhone which has racked up one million downloads in the 3 days after launch (according to 3G.co.uk).

It allows you to make free calls to other Viber users. Is how is it different?

• Well your ID is your mobile number - which eliminates registration / authentication, making adoption easier. (This is the most novel part I think)
• Once installed, Viber automatically scans contact list in your mobile phone and highlight the users that have Viber, so you know who can you call for free. (Truphone does this too, I believe)
• Viber runs automatically whenever your mobile is turned on. 

It remains unclear how Viber will make money in the future, of course.

Effectively, it is an easy way to substitute your voice minutes by using data package. Given that adoption and substitution is so easy, I would anticipate a reaction from mobile operators.

The 5 Myths Of Building A Great Mobile Team

Techcrunch has an article from guest author Elad Gil who kickstarted Google’s mobile efforts back in 2004: The 5 Myths Of Building A Great Mobile Team.

As someone who recruited a team for an application that spans PC, mobile and web I have some scars in this subject area!

Myth 1: You need to hire mobile experts.
Reality: Hire great athletes; mobile “experts” will be useless in 6 months

So true. Yes, you do need some specialist mobile knowledge, as the idiosyncrasies are many, but just because they have expertise in mobile doesn't mean that they should lead the team, but rather they should be used as a mobile SME for the rest of the team.

Myth 2: Your mobile codebase is different from regular code.
Reality: It's just code. You should treat it as such.

True, but I don't think this is a myth, so a red herring really.


Myth 3: You need carrier or handset deals to distribute a mobile product.
Reality: Focus on standard consumer distribution first, not carriers or handset manufacturers.

Hmm, moot point, as this definitely not true any more, but once upon a time, getting your apps on mobile operators' deck (ie their home page which listed 'recommended' apps) was key.

Myth 4. You must build for all platforms from Day One.
Reality: Start with iPhone or Android only first.

Myth 5. (Once the app launches) We are mobile geniuses!
Reality: Stay hungry and keep questioning your mobile direction


Both are true, but so obvious, this isn't a myth.

Some of my own observations:

1. Version Control and Release Management is more important
With multiple platforms with interdependencies between web code set and mobile code set and PC code set, then release management and planning must be taken to a whole new level.

Agile programming and development approach (which work really well on for internet deployment) slowly crumble in the face of multiple environments. Development can be done in short 'agile' styled bursts, but only really work for interim releases (ie NOT vX.0 releases).

Significant functionality enhancements (ie X.0 releases) require mega planning so that the new functionality works at every tier. As a result, some platforms 'get ahead' of others. eg the mobile platform is dragging its heels, so the web dev team start working on the next release (or even the release after that). As you can imagine, Code Management has to be very robust! (And DO avoid the temptation to crash a release out on one platform, even if it isn't ready on other platforms - the user experience / PR fall out is significant!)

Do check out my Feature Prioritization & Product Road Mapping Whitepaper which covers these issues in detail. 

 2. Architecture is very important to get right first time
For the reasons in (1), getting the architecture is very, VERY important, as modifying this is SOOO painful. Again, an Agile approach of 'hmm, let's build something simple to start with and see what happens' is full of fallabilities - I'm not saying it is wrong, but will generate problems in the future. (I have LOTS of scars here from this decision - porting data from database structure to another seemlessly so users aren't impacted took months and months. (I am very, very pleased to start that the project was a fantastic success, but it required a lot of time and some very high calibre people to see it through.)

Waitrose using QR Codes on television to connect to consumers' phones

Waitrose, the UK grocery retailer, has announced its intention to start a series of television commercials for Christmas using QR codes to engage with customers (and their phones) - news via ZDNet.co.uk.



Unusually, the snapping the QR code with your phone will take users to an App (for iPhone and Android) that provides recipes from celebrity chefs Delia Smith and Heston Blumenthal. The more usual destination is to an informational website.

Also, the QR code is displayed for 2 seconds at the end of the commercial, so viewers had better be lightning quick or have the ability (and inclination) to record and replay the advertisement. (ZDNet reports problems with snapping the QR Code with Android 2.2 devices.)

Methinks someone had some marketing budget to blow up the chimney before year end and an ad agency dude managed to persuade someone that this would be claim some thought leadership, irrespective of actual bottom line impact. I assume a couple of people (and their iPhones) will be looking for a new position in the New Year!

Update: The TV Ad is back up with some point of sale advertising too. There's a good rant on the poor quality of execution of the campaign here.

Linux Mint - Desktop OS that should have Microsoft a little worried

In June this year, I acquired (courtesy of my sister-in-law winning an iPad in a golf competition) a Acer Aspire One netbook (awful flash website). As shipped from Acer, it used a Linpus operating system - and Acer have goofed with it somewhat. The end result is absolutely desperate - clumsy and inoperable.

In searching for alternatives, I have installed various versions of Linux Mint on my Acer. I'm delighted to say that Mint 10 (released in November this year) is a significant step up from Mint 9 (released in August this year) and Mint 8.

LinuxMint is developed on top of Ubuntu which itself is developed on top of Debian. Its selling point over the hundreds of other Linux distributions is:

• friendly desktop 
• wide range of useful applications pre-installed with the OS (Open Office, Firefox, PDF viewer, Pidgin (instant messenger client), Thunderbird (Mozilla's email client), etc, etc, etc. Once installed, the result is a fully operational device.
• friendly and easy-to-use software manager which very simply allows you to install additional software

Being Linux, it's all for free. Linux Mint claims to be the fourth most popularly installed OS in the world (see footnote on Wikipedia's entry on Linux Mint). For the enquiring mind, the top three are: Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS and Ubuntu.

In using the previous versions of Linux Mint (and of course Linpus), it makes me credit and applaud Microsoft for its Windows OS on account of its ease of use and for creating a flexible platform on which a vast diversity of applications can run on.

Linux Mint can not be in the considered to be in the same division as Windows (yet), but it is rapidly becoming a low-end challenger. As a keen student of  Clayton Christensen's theories of disruptive innovation, Microsoft needn't be overly worried at the moment, BUT it should definitely be on the radar as having the very real prospect of stealing its WIn7 revenues on low end devices, depressing Microsoft's share price.