Making Sense of Disjointed Discussions
Google made the announcement of their well kept secret, Google Wave, at the I/O conference this week. Wave is Google’s attempt at evolving Internet communication and collaboration into real-time contextual discussions.

If you think about how e-mail has changed over the past 10 years, then you probably come to same conclusion as most people: It hasn’t changed much. The user interface may have been updated but you are still sending, replying and forwarding messages back and forth. The change on the communication front has come mostly from the introduction of Instant Messenger, micro-blogging apps and social networking sites. And if you consider blogs and wikis as additional methods of communication, then there are a lot of discussions going on outside of e-mail.

The drawback to all of these rich discussions is that they can become disjointed fairly quickly and keeping everything within context for yourself, let alone other participants can be complicated.

Take the situation when someone sends you and a colleague of yours an e-mail and you both reply with comments to that original e-mail. There are now exists two versions of that thread. Take it one step further and you IM the sender with a question about the first part of the e-mail. Well now that IM converstaion is completely missing from the thread of the e-mail and only two of you in the discussion know about it. The situation gets even more complex if someone starts referencing comments from a blog, flickr or youtube. See how the conversation is now taking places in multple places without any ability to being them together under the same conversation? 

Now I’m not sure you can solve the problem of managing all of these communications by building super apps that integrate e-mail, twitter, friendfeed, facebook, etc… into a single UI. There are apps today that present your twitter and facebook streams in a single interface but there are limitations in how you search, edit and share the data with other users. Additionally, there is a lack of awareness of the same conversation taking place in the various conmmunications forms that contributes to the problem I describe above. Then of course is the e-mail threading confusion of having multiple concurrent threads taking place which gets even worse when you look at conversations withing twitter and blog comments.

Re-imaging Communication
E-mail has only incrementally changed and not really adapted to the new way communication over the Web is taking place. Gmail’s threading view of e-mail conversations is useful but is more of a hack of e-mail. During the presentation announcing Wave, one line really stood out to me.  ”Wave is what e-mail would look like if it was invented today.” 

Google Wave Interface

Think of taking all of the communication sources (twitter, facebook, linkedin, instant messengers, blogs, e-mail) plus the rich media available in photo, graphic and videos sharing sites and simply dumping them into a vat. Then go through all of the data organize it into logical contextual discussions taking place between users. Finally mix  in the capability to search anything, edit anywhere and have the changes reflected real-time so everyone in the conversation is looking at the same information irregardless of where the communication is taking place. That is a lot to take in which is why the video below does a good job of demonstrating the potential.

There is a fear that changing all of the above will make the user experience much more complicated. If you once again go back to the original scenario I speak about, it becomes clear that the mishmash of today’s communication streams has already made the experience complictated. Users and vendors have just adopted this as the everyday way of doing business. 

Opening things Up

In addition to all of the features around communication and discussion, Google Wave is also being rolled out as an open source platform with the ability to create extensions. The is one of the areas in which Wave sets itself apart and maybe how it eventually wins as a communication/collaboration platform. The developer community is an extremly important aspect to succeed in today’s enterprise software space. Salesforce.com has done an amazing job creating a developer community. Apple and Google have similarly built a development community for their mobile platforms.

Google’s expertise is dealing with data and that is exactly where Wave shines. There was much to ooh and ahh about during the 1 hour presentation which you can catch below. There are a few very good examples of how communication can change into a real-time discussion and how that discussion benefits. I have picked out a few highlights and listed the timestamp in case you just want to see the cool stuff right away, but I recommend watching the entire presentation.

Video Highlights

• Integration of e-mail with in-line comments a la instant messenging at 8:45 in the video. 
• Have richer discussions in blogs by embedding Waves at 20:40 in the video.
• Collaboratively author documents at 27:50 the video.
• Wave collaboration showing inline editing and real-time conversation at 31:30 in the video. Also take note of the ‘Playback’ capability.
• Wave and Twitter integration example at 57:30 in the video.
• Wave and issue tracker integration (i.e. bugzilla) at  1:01:50 in the video.
• Real-time tranlsation of conversation to French and English at 1:12:00 in the video.

Much has been said about the announcement, the technology and it’s application in the real world. I’ll cover more about Wave and my impressions in a future post. In the meantime you can take a look at what others are saying. 

Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web

Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?

Google Wave To Bring Web 2.0 Lifestyle to Work

Amazon.com chose the later when faced with objections from the Authors’ Guild about text-to-speech capabilities in the Kindle 2. Seth Godin writes about other recent missteps by similarly short-sighted groups.

Ultimately the Kindle 2’s fate will be determined by the market. Hopefully a challenger to the Kindle 2 will appear with full text-to-speech capabilities so that those with impaired vision will be able to enjoy literary works like the rest of us.

Unlocking Business Opportunities

What Amazon may not have fully thought through are the businss opportunities in a market enhanced with text-to-speech. For example, they could offer a selection of voice over actors for any book on the Amazon store. This could range from Paris Hilton reading The Little Engine that Could all the way to Patrick Stewart reading Moby Dick. How about having a selection of actors reading Moby Dick and let the customer choose which one to hear? What if Amazon offered it up in a marketplace like iTunes at a price of 99 cents where voice actors can upload their versions of stories that can be imported into the ebook on the Kindle 2?

And what real leverage does the Authors Guild have over Amazon? Can’t Amazon simply choose to not distribute books that disagree with their text-to-speech implementation on the Kindle 2? But the Authors Guild does not have to be locked out of this potential revenue stream and, in fact, the more voice-enabled books there are, the more books they will sell. Maybe I am just naive to think everyone would benefit or maybe the Authors’ Guild are short-sighted?

Amazon may have such a plan in place and they are simply working through logistics. I hope that is the case. There are other platforms, besides the Kindle, that can also take advantage of integrating text-to-speech into ebooks. Android already has a few text-to-speech and ebook apps on the marketplace. The next step would be to combine the two and allow users to upload their audio readings of the books. Eventually more well known voice actors i.e. LeVar Burton may join in and offer their interpretations at a slightly higher premium price.

There will continue to be ’short-sighted ones’ that prefer the status quo in the face of change. In those cases, just look at how these organizations fared:

1. The RIAA and MPAA are losing the battle to justify lost revenues in light of the trend towards file sharing networks

2. Microsoft’s anti-trust activities failed to maintain browser marketshare against alternatives offering innovation

3. The Republican party completed an epic fail in losing the presidency and any influence in the house and senate in election cycle 2008

I have faith that Amazon.com with see the Kindle 2 for its tremendous possibilities and unleash it in the not too distant  future.

Photo Credit: dekuwa , rajeshvj

This past weekend I found a new app called SMSpeaker, made by the same people that brought you Speaking Pad. It costs $.99 from the Android Marketplace which made it a difficult decision to test, but for the good of all G1 users I decided to give it a go.

Once installed, the app does exactly what it says. When a new SMS message comes in, it is read aloud. Pretty straight forward. You can also have it repeat the message if you missed by simply tapping the screen. This will come in handy with the newest California law banning texting and driving. Here is a video of the SMSpeaker app in use.

While testing, I found the app very handy if your phone is sitting across the room because you can now hear the SMS message and who sent it. This also brings up a word of caution because the SMS message may not necessarily be something you want other people to hear. Take for example, you may be planning a surprise party for your girlfriend or making arrangements for a boys night out which you really do not want read out loud.  On the otherhand, it could be an interesting intercom-like system to send audio messages to your wife or kids. As with any app that comes out, you can adapt it how you see fit.

There are other Android apps that could benefit from TTS integration. Take for example Twidroid or any Twitter app for Android. Short 140 character tweets are ideal for TTS, but there would need to be some filter on which tweets are spoken so you hear the ones that are from those twits you would want to literally hear from.  If the implementation is right, this is an app I could imagine paying for.

Taking the Next Step

As with Augmented Reality, we are only scratching the surface of the benefits TTS will bring especially for those with imparied or degraded vision. My father, for example, wears glasses for reading and has a lot of trouble reading his Blackberry because his glasses are not always around. I saw this first hand a few months back as he was struggling to read the small screen and text. Imagine being able to simply click on a message and have it read out to you.

So while all of these touch screen phones have brought a great user interface , where does that leave those that are unable to see the screen? The developers of SMSpeaker are already pushing ahead with more apps that will bring benefits to an audience larger than the everyday mobile phone user. 

Photo Credit: Tim Caynes

DISCLAIMER: To be honest, I’ve had a very limited exposure to all the SMS apps in the Marketplace. I usually try to test a few and then once I find one that works well, I stick with it. If the developer of that app continues to add interesting features and fix issues then the barrier for me to switch apps gets to be higher. Trying new apps that do the same thing as the one I have become accustomed to is really not my thing. So if you are looking for a review of all the SMS apps on the Marketplace, try AndroidGuys, AndroidApps or just Google sms+android+app+review.

SMS Messaging

I am probably what would be classified as a low volume SMS user. Most of my contact with friends and colleagues is, in order of use, via e-mail, IM and Twitter. SMS comes up fourth because I mainly use it to very quickly communicate with friends when I am not at the computer or they are not at the computer. So the apps I selected and now use daily are based on my own selection criteria. Yours may be different and thus these apps may not suffice. To each their own.

First off, the built in SMS app is OK but definitely not great. There were a number of bells and whistles missing and it takes two Marketplace apps to compensate for these shortcomings.

Chomp SMS adds a very cool interface that allows you to see your SMS conversations as word bubbles. It also adds an on-screen keyboard,  a highly sought after feature for sending off quick messages without needing to open the keyboard. Finally, you can text multiple recipients from a single message. For those of you that don’t have root access to the G1, thus no auto-rotate, Chomp SMS also has a auto-rotate option. There is a video review of the Chomp SMS app on Youtube for anyone interested.

SMS Alerting

To make SMS on the G1 even more convient, wouldn’t it be great if the messages popped up on the screen as they came in making it easy to read them? It would be even better if the messages displyed even when the screen was locked so that you didn’t have to unlock the phone just to read SMS messages. Add to that being able to set a different LED color for SMS messages and you have almost a complete SMS alerting app.

That is where SMS Popup comes in. In addition to all of these features mentioned above you can also set the notification to vibrate and set reminders of unread messages. There is a video review of this app for those interested.

I’ve run with both of these apps for a few weeks and not had any issues with crashes or usability. You’ll notice that in order to get the close to perfect SMS experience you need both apps, but that is a small price to pay primarily because they are both FREE. 

That rounds up my SMS review for the G1 and Android Marketplace. There are a lot of other SMS apps on the market and I am sure they all have their benefits. If any of the apps mentioned above start to falter, I’ll be shopping for something new so let me know which ones are comparable or better in your opinion.

How much simpler can managing releases via an excel spreadsheet be? Take a look below.

How It Works

• Each release bucket is represented as a column and features are represented as rows. 
• Columns are designated with a release date and an overall status at the top: Planning, Development, Released, etc… If a feature does not look like it will make the release, it moves to the right into the next column i.e. next  release. 
• Based on the readiness of the feature it moves up or down the colum. To get above the bold black line the feature has to be defined somehow in the form of a PRD, spec, wiki page to the point where engineering knows what is being built. To move above the thick gray bar, QA must sign off on having tested the feature.

The magic of this method: everything that goes on the spreasheet must fit on an 8.5 x 11 in. piece of paper. It doesn’t matter how small the font is and you can’t roll over to a second page. What does this accomplish? It forces the organization to make tradeoffs with features/resources/time and it gives a very simple format for marketing, engineering and QA on which to base that discussion. It is very easy to over-commit on features and delay releases, especially in start-up world.

Updating the Calendar

Every week we would have a Product Calendar meeting with the product managers and engineering and QA managers. Everyone is expected to come prepared on the status of how the features are doing, if the feature is ready for QA, completed testing, etc… The features would move up/down or right/left In reality not everyone came on time, but that changed over time as peer pressure kicked in.

In Summary

Here are a few reasons on why I found this to be such a helpful tool. 

1. It is basically a very well organized excel sheet. Most people are allergic to overly complex project management tools but everyone knows how to use excel.

2. Everything fits on one page making it easy to get a complete picture of the product details going out 6-9 months.

3. It forces great discussions on resources, priorities and product strategies.

Finally, I was introduced to the Product Calendar and this process by Dr. Russell while we worked together at GigaFin. It takes a little time to get everyone use to the process, but then it becomes second nature.

2009 is the year of Android and G1, at least that is my hope. There is a lot of potential in this product, but potential doesn’t get you success or superbowl rings, just ask Tony Romo, T.O. and the Dallas Cowboys. I found a post talking about a Top 10 G1 wishlist which covered the most important feature missing in the G1, the on-screen keyboard. With the upcoming ‘cupcake’ release that will hopefully be remedied. Unfortunately as of Jan.1 in CA, there is no more texting and driving so my #1 reason for wanting the on-screen keyboard is no longer valid. Not to worry there are a few other reasons for wanting the on-screen kb which I will not bore everyone with unless you really want to hear it.

Continuing on with the G1 Android wishlist, here are a few that I think can take this product from just a smartphone to my most favorite gadget EVER!! At this moment, that spot is being held by the Flip Mino HD, which I got a few weeks ago and absolutely cannot live without.

SIDEBAR When I was growing up one of my responsibilities was family video recorder. I had to lug around these giant video cameras to record family vacations and social events on VHS tapes. The weight of this on my shoulder alone cost me any shot at a professional sports career. The fact that I had no hops, just average speed and was 5′6″ didn’t help either. Fast forward 15 years and the video recorder is the size of a cell phone, records in HD and is as easy as pushing a little red button. If I had this when I was growing up, then my mom or dad could have been the one recording and I would have been able to protect my shoulder for football, basketball or baseball. I guess these things happen for a reason. 

Back to the G1 Android list, here are a few things that I think will continue to fully exploit the G1’s potential. (In no particular order)

1. Better integration with the accelerometer and screen rotation in all apps. It is already integrated into the video player and Steel showed that you can do this with the web browser, what about other apps like fBook, WikiNotes, photos?

2. More battery life. I am tempted to buy the higher capacity battery. Power Meter is a very cool utility that takes on managing the battery for me, but I need to be able to go longer between charges.

3. More apps that integrate camera with context like shopsavy and wikitude. Augmented Reality is not a future innovation, it is here and getting integrated in many places. There are a ton of opportunities to blend context into the camera that will make people happier, more aware of their surroundings, save them money and connect them to the world among other things. We are just scratching the surface of what is possible and I would love to see the G1 be the device to bring AR into the hands of consumers. Read my earlier post about AR for other uses.

4. Mario Kart + accelerometer integrated would be killer. This is a personal wish based on the cravings of my innerchild. But it would be cool, no?

Hope you enjoyed my take on the G1’s potential.

Photo Credits: Cheryl Syverson

After reading it, I can think of other ways to employ it for everyday use. Here is an interesting idea.

 G1 + AR = Astronomy 101 for Everone

Ever find yourself lying down on a field of grass or hood of your car, looking up at the stars in the clear sky and wishing you learned how to identify the Big Dipper, Polaris or Orion? Never? Ok, but what if you did? What if you can take your G1, point it to the sky and have it identify constellations for you as you look through the camera lens? Think of all those millions of children that never had the opportunity to learn about the stars or astronomy, now having all this information in their hands. In addition to identifying the stars, there can be more context of each star given on the screen, like origin of the name, when it was discovered and other interesting stats. Make astronomy fun again. (was it fun to begin with?)

Take it step farther and incorporate interactive learning so that the patterns are not just being identified for you, but the G1 is teaching you how to identify them yourself like in this tutorial.

With this kind of app, an interesting case can be made for the G1 to be subsidized by schools for students. Isn’t learning supposed to be fun and interactive?

Interested in Augmented Reality? Read this wrap up of milestones in 2008 for AR.

Row 1 (from left to right)

Facebook : I spend a good a mount of time either on facebook or at least keeping the window open to check out what people are up to. Lately I have been connecting with a lot of old college buddies which has made me spend additional time catching up with what they have been doing for the past decade. I only play one or two games and visist a few of the groups that I am a member of.

Wordpress – Wordpress is my blog platform and I am on this site a lot, especially when I get writer’s block and just sit there looking at a blank new blog post screen. I also enjoy looking through the blog stats and where people are doming from.

CNN.com – CNN.com actually grew into my top 9 during the election. It was a tight race between CNN.com and Foxnews.com over the past few months and during the elction they were neck and neck, vying for my attention. After the election though, CNN.com won out because I felt they delivered more varied viewpoints on news stories while FoxNews.com was tilted toward the conservative viewpoint. I still visit FoxNews.com from time to time to get another angle on stories and they do a better job at highlighting local news around the nation. Oh and their Strategy Room during the election was the best web programming around.

Row 2

iGoogle – This is my home page. You can’t see too clearly what widgets i have but they are Hulu.com, Google Reader, Google Docs and weather. I recently added fora.com to my home page based on a recommendation, but haven’t really been using it, so it will probably get removed soon. 

I used to go to myyahoo.com as my home page, but slowly moved away from that. It wasn’t a one day switch. I can remember having a myyahoo.com and igoogle page running in parrallel. I would use myyahoo mostly for news and stocks. Once I started using CNN more for news and was less interested in stocks, I stopped going to myyahoo.com. I still visit myyahoo.com to check on how my fantasy football team is doing, but that is pretty much it. I never really thought about how much less I use yahoo now than say a year ago, but it is pretty remarkable. MyYahoo.com was my default page for almost 3 years.

I would say that the first four on this list are high traffic sites for me and the next two are medium trafficked sites.

Twitter –  I just started using Twitter and while I go to the website to look at profiles of people following me or for searching through tweets, I primarily use tweetdeck to monitor tweets of those that I follow. TweetDeck is a very cool application that allows you to organize groups of people you follow and filter out the rest. This is extremely useful  as your twitter network grows and you get inundated with tweets. 

LinkedIn – I am trying to figure out the best use of LinkedIn. It is great as a contact database for my professional network, but as I wrote earlier, I don’t make status updates in LinkedIn because I don’t think it is appropriate for the audience. I turned on the Wordpress application today and linked my blog so we will see how that goes.

Row 3

CraigsList – This is on the top 9 primarily because I have been looking around for furniture for the kids’ rooms. I was able to get a great deal on a couple of beds, dressers and a desk and only had to drive 5 minutes to pick it up. Amazing. Craigslist will probably stay on the top for the time being as I try to sell the kids’ old beds and their car seats. Gotta love growing children.

BacknGear.com google home page – This is my e-mail, docs, etc… all powered by Google for backngear.com.

Meebo – I have written about Meebo in a previous post. I am still a big fan.

Finishing up

So there you have a day in my web browsing shoes. There are a ton of other things I do online that aren’t in the top 9 but are just as important. For example, I follow up on a lot of links through my Twitter network. 

It may be interesting to have your top 9 sites updated on your facebook or google profile so your contacts can see as well. Since Chrome is an open platform, maybe someone can write that app?

Productivity driving growth

Productivity is an important driver behind innovation. For example, look at the Blackerry smartphone. There is not doubt that the success of the Blackberry in the business world is due to the integration of e-mail for the mobile worker. It freed executives from having to constantly sit at their desks to check mail and  enabled sales reps to communicate with customers, forward support issues and take sales orders without needing a laptop. In the later case, you can quantify the increased revenue as a result of better productivity. Eventually the adoption of Blackberries by sales teams and executives drove these devices to become supported by the IT departments becuase the productivity could be tied to revenue. Once in the hands of IT, action items like Exchange integration and server backup became a priority.

The success of Blackberry in gaining wide adoption within the business community started a wave that Palm, Nokia and Microsoft were never able to achieve previously. It also showed that if you can bring tangible productivity benefits, consumers will follow. If you can show revenue impact then IT will adopt. 

My belief is that productivity applications are an indicator to growth of general IT spending in networking and security. Going back to the Blackberry secnario above, there were many new requirements on the cellular networks to support the Blackberry service. To gain the bandwidth and GPRS coveragefor mobile e-mail, telecos and service providers needed to upgrade infrastructure. While this alone was not the main driving factor for infrastructure upgrades, it is a much easier business case to make when you have customers needing bandwidth for real application versus potential future business opportunities that need greater bandwidth.

Another example is the adoption of wireless LANs within businesses. I can remember when employees would sneak rogue Linksys and Netgear access points into the corporate network so they can move around the building with their laptops. Pretty soon a strong business case for wireless LANs could be made showing the increased productivity from being able to connect from conference rooms, during meetings and presentations. Once that tipping point from ‘nice to have’ to ‘must have’ occurred, the IT department was tasked with supporting wireless LANs and building a scalable, reliable and secure solution. All of these are factors driving the growth of wireless LAN products from companies like Aruba Networks and Cisco.

You can make a similar case for  businesses Internet access driving infrastructure upgrades as well as security purchases. Is there a responsible business out there that does not have a firewall hanging off of their Internet connection?

Telepresence, the next productivity driver?

Telepresence is a new technology area being pushed because of significant productivity benefits and cost savings. Video conferencing is one application of telepresence that has been around. New applications leverage HD technology and have virtual attendees beamed into meetings as 3D images. Whether or not this takes off in the way that mobile e-mail has will depend less on cost savings and more on the productivity benefits it can provide. How many more sales opportunities can close using video conferencing or other telepresence technology? At what point will the sales team demand it because they have shown significant growth and shorter sales cycles? Those are questions that will get telepresence technology more widely adopted and supported by IT.

What it means for IT spending

Cisco learned a valuable lesson after the dotcom bubble that unless there are real applications driving the need for more bandwidth, they will not be selling many network infrastructure products. As a result, their message has evolved to one of productivity benefits of adopting new technologies like Web 2.0 tools and other collaboration media like telepresence that coincidentally also require faster, more reliable networks with larger storage capabilities. Cisco went a step further by acquiring companies like WebEx that deliver productivity increasing applications. Now Cisco is driving the adoption of these applications thus setting themselves up for growth in infrastructure sales and controlling their own destiny. Pretty smart.

With a looming collapse of IT spending on the horizon, will telepresence be an area upon which IT spending will increase? What other producivity applications will drive IT spending in the coming years? Start asking the sales team what will help grow more revenue and shorten the sales cycle ain order identify the next growth areas.

I wrote a post earlier about the Google App Market on the G1 being one of it’s greatest features. It got even better this past week with the addition of the meebo application for G1. For those of you unfamilar with meebo, it is a web site that keeps you connected to all of your IM networks from a single browser page. I have been a big fan of meebo for a awhile because it allows me to see all of of my Google, MSN and Yahoo IM contacts in a single list, from any computer and I don’t need to install any software. This works great because sometimes I don’t have my computer with me. What more can you ask for?

When it showed up in the Google App Market, I was ecstatic!! Prior to the meebo app, the G1 had separate apps for each IM account which was not very practical. With meebo for the G1, I am now have the ability to easily IM my friends from anywhere, with or without a pc.

IM from Anywhere with any Buddy

The biggest drawback with IM for me was the fact that even though it had been a very good tool for instant communication with a colleague or group of people, the lack of interoperability between different IM systems was a drag on the technology. I mean can MSN, Google, Yahoo or AIM realistically believe that their customer’s friends will all be on the same IM network? Or that they could force their customers to change to their network? Of course not.

Taking a page from the e-mail playbook, IM is becoming more of a standard and the IM vendors are starting to understand that it is in their best interest to open the path for interoperability with different systems. This network agnostic approach has worked beautifully in e-mail to spur innovation to the benefit of the consumer. There are applications that have taken advantage of multi-IM integration…see Trillian. Meebo has taken this to another level with ‘access anywhere’ from a Web browser and exceptional ease of use. Simply get onto a computer, now mobile device, and connect to all your buddies.

Like I said I have been using meebo for months, have been extremely happy and would recommend to anyone with multiple IM accounts or if you just need to contact you friends while you without your pc.

Disclaimer: I don’t work for meebo, but it sounds like a nice place to work and they are really pushing the envelope.