The news that Verizon is moving to a tiered data plan data plans that better suites individuals data needs is quiet unfortunate. I am thinking VERY hard about staying with Verizon (or keeping a smartphone) if the reported $20/2GB or $50/5GB is actually correct. It is yet to be seen how this will effect family share plans, but this is a big issue going forward with mobile data.
If these rumors are true, I have the next big Android/iOS app (that might actually pay for my data plan)! Here it is:
An app that runs in the background and monitors when data is sent and received. Only check email every 20 minutes, only upload photos on wifi, only stream music if you have > 2GB left on your monthly plan. Think of it as Locale or Tasker (Android apps that manage various phone states) but just for data management.
Boom!
Thoughts?
My head has been ALL over the place for the last three weeks.
Building a product I wish I had 10+ years ago. Designing a product I want now and is relevant in the for future me. Friends having babys… (Hey Liam!) ALL over the place!
One common theme is the idea of “investing in lines, not dots” or more relevant to me right now, take advice as data and be responsible for the best fit line. With advice and opinions coming from every direction (and that really just starting), the product doesn’t have to be set in stone, and it will drift (like the thesis of this post), but the vision has to be grounded in SOMETHING.
Almost NO idea is created independent of society. Rather, an idea is a culmination of those that have come before, GIANTS. Prime example: Einstein and relativity. HINT: It wasn’t JUST his idea! He just put the right pieces together at the right time (he didn’t even win the nobel prize for that… did you know that one?)
The key is how to take the vision while standing on the shoulders of giants and make it exponentially better??
Its late (for me). I am rambling. Nothing radical here, just trying to make sense of a long day, a long 2.14 weeks.
****Did I mention you can now visit henrysztul.tv for my personally curated video selections? You can!****
p.p.s: this post is a bit of a palindrome? can you tell how?
Quick take-away: I hope not!
I think that the iPad is a wonderful device. I do not own one but am just waiting for the second iteration to come out because a camera, better design, and a device with kinks worked out is what i REALLY want.
That being said, I have also been waiting to see if a quality, equally (or sub) priced tablet on the Android platform would emerge. Recently, on woot.com there was an Augen 7” Color Touchscreen device for ~113 incld shipping. I thought about it but in the end of the day its no iPad. And that is a dangerous place to be for Android Tablet’s.
“Not an iPad” is similar to the “Not an iPod” statement that has been said ad nausium for the past decade. All those companies making devices that play music that were well… lacking.
I like the Android platform (as a user) and think it has tremendous potential for growth and improvement. I think Android phones have avoided being classified as “Not an iPhone” BUT I definitly think the statement that a tablet is “Not an iPad” will be the theme for the next decade.
[an aside… this => I’m buying more $AAPL !]
(I wrote this after reading The Long Tail, wanted to see if I anyone out there had anythoughts on this stuff too…)
Not too long ago I logged onto Amazon.com and bought a used copy of “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson, oh the irony! I am just about done with it and ready to move on to my *free* Kindle version of his new book, “Free” but wanted to put some interesting thoughts I had out into “the wild” in the hopes of some feedback and perhaps some discussion. I think Chris has found one large arena where some of the philosophy of Quantum Mechanics is seeping into mainstream culture. First some background on where this is coming from…
As an undergraduate student I was privileged enough to take a Physics and Philosophy class with Professor Shimon Malin. In this class we discussed the differences between the philosophies of the science of determinism, classical mechanics, and the science of probabilities, quantum mechanics. These discussions have stayed with me through my PhD work at CUNY and have been in the back of my mind since.
It turns out that the 19th and 20th Centuries have been dominated by deterministic thought that leads to statements like: “If X happens then Y will happen” or “This OR that can occur.”
Malin, among others, argues that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift leading us to a new mainstream philosophical framework that leads to statements like “this AND that can occur” or “If X happens then there is some chance that Y happens.”
The classic example of this quantum philosophy is Schrodinger’s Cat in a box (will leave you to read about it, following those links if you are interested). What is important about this example is that the cat in the box is both alive AND dead.
As a society we do not think like this YET of course. If we flip a coin it is heads OR tails (classical), not heads AND tails (quantum). But through my reading of The Long Tail I think there are some aspects of society that are finally tipping to a more of a quantum nature than classical.
On page 68 Anderson says, “Wikipedia, like Google and the collective wisdom of millions of blogs, operates on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics– a matter of likelihood rather than certainty. But our brains aren’t wired to think in terms of statistics and probability.” In this passage Chris points out an interesting facet of the current and forthcoming paradigm shift to probabilistic thought. We as humans might not be truly capable of pure probabilistic thought but our inventions are and they provide us with a user experience that converts what is probabilistic in nature and hard to understand to something our minds can comprehend.
Anderson goes on later in his book on page 182 to say,
“[The] shift from the generic to the specific doesn’t mean the end of the existing power structure… [or] a shift to all amateur, laptop culture. Instead, it’s simply a rebalancing of the equation, an evolution from an ‘Or’ era of hits or niches… to an ‘And’ era… a mix of head and tail, hits and niches, institutions and individuals, professionals and amateurs.”
Chris, you hit it right on the head! People are starting to realize that not just hits are enjoyable entertainment and current web technology is finally allowing us to explore our niches.
Finally, on page 183 Anderson goes on to say, “[We] can now treat culture not as one big blanket, but as the superposition of many interwoven threads each of which is individually addressable and connects different groups of people simultaneously.” Hear that? Culture is a superposition! Not only is all of this language I have highlighted quantum mechanical in nature but I believe it hints at how our culture is starting to enter the age of probabilistic thought.
If I say I am going to meet you for dinner at 7 PM somewhere, I mean I will be there; not that there is a 70% chance I will be there.
Rather, how information is ingested and digested will take on a probabilistic nature, whether it is a conscious or unconscious move on the part of our society.
This is just my first go at linking these topics and am curious what I hear back from people.
Quantum 4ever!
Thoughts?
Thats right the SCHOOL99 promo code gets you a domain name (1-year) fro 99 cents.
Can you say: “domain ownership here I come?!”
(via gizmodo)
Jesse Schell: When games invade real life
Capitalism meets Socialism meets Communism meets the Internet… watch out!
Dr. Henry I Sztul
This is a GREAT product I just read about… basically pancake in a can. Think of it as point-and-shoot pancakes and waffles. #great !
I really love Jamie’s idea here about customer surveys and interactions. What he proposes is totally possible with current technology AND seems to have a very clear path to profitability…
siminoff:
I have written a few posts (here and here) in the last few months about my gripes with company surveys. Beyond just customers surveys I have started to broaden my thinking around overall customer interaction with a company.
Just the other day I got an email from Jetblue after my flight “from the CEO” but in reality it was at one of those no-reply emails asking me how my flight was. It had a link to a survey and another link to customer service if I had issues I wanted dealt with immediately.
I think it would be pretty simple to create a automated process that allows for free form emails to be written to the company. Instead of all of these links and complex survey questions just allow me to say, “it was great” or “it sucked because the staff was mean”.
For simple things the automated system could pick them up and place them in the correct buckets. For exceptions, they could be kicked out and shown to a human for determination of which queue to send them to or what rating they gave.
Doing free form would greatly increase the number of people that respond. Also by reducing friction I think it would also increase the relevance of the responses. Additionally there are other interactions that between customer and company would foster out of the use of free form responses, making interaction a lot more fulfilling.
Currently at PhoneTag we only talk to our customers in this way, the one thing we are missing is the automated part as all of the responses are looked at by our team. By handling the interaction this way see issues very fast and constantly have a real time temperature of customer satisfaction.
Just one more thing that if I had some more time I would build and launch…
Take a walk down the aisles of Target, Wal-Mart or any big box store, and you’ll see how many products that are out there that are not revolutionary, but evolutionary.
Want to improve your odds? Think hardware | VentureBeat
Many new consumer electronics ventures can flourish in a state of semi-success, selling product for profits and reaching a break-even point faster than software startups. This is because the economics of consumer hardware are not incredibly complicated. The return on investment is a much clearer process.
Roughly one-third of the suggested retail price of an item is direct cost (buying components, shipping, and inventory). Another one-third goes to the retailer. The rest is profit.
Want to improve your odds? Think hardware | VentureBeat
…the Internet allows an entrepreneur to enter a market with a free offering because the costs of doing so are not astronomical. And most entrpreneurs who take this approach will maintain an attractive free offering of their basic service forever. But that doesn’t mean that everything they offer will be free. That’s the whole point of freemium. Free gets you to a place where you can ask to get paid. But if you don’t start with free on the Internet, most companies will never get paid.
Freemium and Freeconomics
Very interesting topic and well said by Fred Wilson.
A TED talk given by David Rose of Rose Tech Ventures.
A good watch.
