Mobile Media

Media companies are now focusing heavily on mobile content distribution and looking for new revenue models on mobile devices. Understanding the unique opportunities and constraints of this medium isn’t exactly intuitive. The device landscape and trends seem to change bimonthly  and there isn’t a ‘no-brainer’ template for companies to adopt and invest in. Everyone just has to jump in the water and start swimming or be left behind. New business models, design patterns and user interactions are all still being sorted out in this evolutionary process.

What makes mobile application usability different from the traditional website equivalent? In short: small screen, limited input devices, and infinite variability of social and environmental contexts encountered by mobile users. You can’t regurgitate your website onto a small screen and call it a day, you have to give some thought to the wants and needs of a user are as they pull their mobile device out of their pocket and open your app to interact with your brand. You have to evaluate what makes your brand special in the mobile context and play to those strengths with a polished and easy-to-use application. “Usability” has lately catapulted into a long-deserved limelight role in product creation. The promotion of usability has created a new vocabulary for customers to differentiate “good” software and it can no longer be a secondary consideration.

So what attributes make a news media company’s application truly excellent and usable?

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This was a paper for Randolph Bias’ usability class at University of Texas School of information.
It’s a very light look at mobile usability considerations in mobile contexts.

Recently, revolutionary devices such as Apple’s iPhone and the Palm Pre have illustrated how important usability is in creating distinction in an otherwise commoditized marketplace of mobile devices. Studies have shown that in terms of barriers to users’ acceptance of mobile computing applications, usability is second only to security (Casper & Gonsalves, 2005). The emerging consideration of mobile usability is a topic deserving focused attention.

Mobile usability diverges from other usability interaction research in a couple of important areas. In this whitepaper I will address the interactive limitations of small-form factor devices as well as the challenges posed in creating viable research methods for devices used in many different environmental and social contexts. Read the rest of this entry »

Check out the custom blog site for our run at the 2009 La Carrera Panamericana – a hardcore rally race spanning all of Mexico. The site is mod_perl/mason powered by the Flicker API, this helps me by abstracting away photo resizing, video and CMS functions.

Enjoy the site and be sure to follow our updates beginning October 21st.

http://www.applefarmerracing.com/

Just finished a summary of some work I did for John Parker at Vintage Performance Developments as a project for my grad studies. Take a read.

Third motor mount

I’ve been using some stock Volvo 544 mounts to keep my engine in place in my 71 volvo 1800. I’ve been using these particular mounts because they have an approximate 1″ thickness vs. the stock mounts 1 3/8″ thickness and give me hood clearance needed by the supercharger. Over time, the amount of torque and traction produced by the car is a bit much for this design. Autocross starts are 4500 rpm clutch drops on race tires and a sloppy downshift on a road course can transmit a lot of energy to these mounts. Recently one of the mounts let go and sent the forward edge of my compressor into the sheet metal of the hood. This sucked, time to fix it.

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Sorry for the sensational title – I had an IA class assignment to critique the homepage of a website I find useful and this title looked great on my opening powerpoint slide. After receiving the assignment I decided I would search for a site to critique while doing my daily laps of the internet. I found a lot of junk but most of it was too boring to criticize. Coincidentally a recent violent hailstorm in Austin piqued me to go look in classifieds for deals on nice cars with hail damage. I pulled up Craiglist and my UX disaster klaxon went off! Paydirt

We all know that Craigslist is one of the great class acts on the internet. They helped me sell my dusty treadmill for 40% of retail and scored me a dedicated beer fridge for $40, delivered. Very efficient. Besides that they’ve also stuck to their original plan and avoided the temptation of overt or even reasonable monetization. They’ve kept their old-school internet design intact, wrangled 2.6% of the traffic on the internet and helped millions of people and things find each other –  all while slowly destroying the newspaper industry’s classified revenue models.

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“So far information technology has had a fairly small impact on the energy infrastructure,” says Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scientist Rob Pratt. “That’s about to change.“  (P Mazza – Climate Solutions, 2002 – gridwise.pnl.gov)

This is a presentation I made for a competitive intelligence course at the UT School of Information based on research into the smart grid industry. This was a great project and If I had spent another 30 or 40 hours this information would be excellent but for now it is at least worth a read. The bulk of the data gathered for this project is contained in this spreadsheet. Some of the information is very much an estimation either because Hoover’s data can be sketchy or the larger institutions are opaque concerning revenue or the employee count for particular divisions. Where available the data was pulled from CapIQ’s excellent business data service, the Book of Lists data products or from the websites of the companies themselves. I tried to make notes where applicable regarding the info in the spreadsheet. Enjoy and feel free to reuse any of this data for your own purposes. ~sb

Smart Grid Market in early 2009

Our existing legacy power grids are straightforward power creation and distribution systems composed of electricity generators and electricity consumers connected by technology fundamentally unchanged since the early 20th century. As a consumer draws electricity from the grid the generators must respond to meet the load in real time. The generators send power to substations and route it to homes and businesses. There is a startling lack of information, control or buffering available in this process. Grid operators have no information beyond the substations and power company employees still physically travel to consumer endpoints and record energy consumption from meters. The only usage information made available to consumers is in their bill each month. The power grid as it exists is inefficient and it is not ready to integrate the wealth of renewable energy resources and distributed generation patterns that will define the energy landscape in coming years.

The term “Smart Grid“ has become a catchall term used to describe a confluence of products and services designed to add intelligence to the legacy grid described above. It is all about adding sensing, communication, analysis, feedback and control to our existing systems to improve efficiencies and environmental impacts.

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Emilo Chapela Perez does BMW

Emilio Chapela Perez takes the colors and distribution of those colors from corporate logos and makes some awesome graphic pieces from them. This guy is very thoughtful. Hard for an artist to convince me to click on every single link of their site but this one is the goods.

I also enjoyed his Traces work, crumple up paper and then trace the creases. Really simple but I’ve never seen it before.

Traces by Emilio Chapela Perez

The group I work with is a technology incubator group within a larger company. We are tasked with making new products with revenue roadmaps but we  also consider ourselves as a testbed for new technology that can be spun off and used by other divisions.

When it came time to decide our hosting model for our shiny new business information platform EC2 was just really hitting a tipping point in terms of reliability. In this case tipping point means there was about a year of data showing the service works as advertised and there was a shortage of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt hanging over the thing. Our project was complicated but finite with a modern API design so it was a good demo for this. I did some testing and talked with smarter-than-me peers and decided it was stable enough to run with. We examined it from a business perspective and came up with hedge logic that “if for some reason we don’t think it will work then we just move it on to local unix boxes – nothing lost”.

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The inclusion of 15,5 gallon beer kegs into our brewing setup has jacked up through-put but made managing 80lbs of boiling liquid into an obvious problem, even for a flame-resistant ubermensch such as myself. Here’s a map I made to figure out how much silicone hose and how many valves and quick release fittings I’ve got to get from McMaster Carr.  After talking it over with The Collective and making very sophisticated cost/benefit analysis we’ve determined that we will rely on siphons and back muscles to move product.

Click to see the apparatus