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Impressive project, and some great footage. My favorite part of the video is the countdown, though — the boys’ excitement is palpable.
Nice update to one of my favorite iPhone and iPad apps. For me, it’s essential.
Our Internal Reality
We all want to change our internal reality on some level. The way we think, interpret, react, cope, expect, process, interact and communicate. The way we create our own experiences: good and bad. The way we manage our fears. Or, perhaps, don’t manage them. The way we avoid the big decisions. The way we wait. And wait. And wait. That is, procrastinate.
The way we see ourselves. Talk to ourselves. The way we feel. Our emotions. The way we deal with stressful situations. Or, perhaps, the way we create stress in our world. The way we see the world and us in it. The labels we give things. The meaning we give certain experiences. The way we give away our power. And take it back. The way we look for approval. And acceptance.
The way we beat ourselves up. And make ourselves unhappy. The way we pretend. And act. And deny. The way we continue on with the same unproductive and destructive patterns, habits and behaviours. The way we have the same pointless conversations about the same issues with the same people. And produce the same less-than-desirable results. Forever. The way we do the same things over and over and then curiously wonder why nothing changes. The way we start things we never finish.
Yes, we all want to change on some level. We all want to become a better version of us. To learn, grow, evolve and adapt. That’s why we explore personal development stuff.
So, what is the single quickest way to create internal shift? To change the way we think, feel, interpret, react, cope, expect, process, interact and communicate? Three simple words:
Experience new things.
Do Different to Be Different
When we do things we’ve never done before, there’s an instant and automatic internal shift. Expectations, emotions, attitudes and beliefs (about what’s possible for us) change. The internal shift is simply a byproduct of a new experience. Of doing something we’ve never done before.
Change comes from doing. For the most part, we don’t ‘think’ ourselves different; we ‘do’ ourselves different. So to speak. We need to ‘action’ our way to internal transformation. Which is why the theory of personal development is worthless until it becomes a practical reality. Until the concepts and ideas are turned into behaviours. Some people are theoretical geniuses but practical idiots. They talk a lot but do very little.
Change comes from doing. Which is why an article like this can be transformational or worthless – it all depends on you.
The Runner
For the forty-five year-old woman who runs a half-marathon for the first time in her life, the transformation will be more emotional and psychological (internal), than it will be physical (external). She finishes her event and without focusing on anything other than the physical process, she has gained more confidence, her standards and expectations have changed, she’s less fearful and she’s more excited about her future possibilities. Her new experience has created internal shift.
The Ex-Scaredy Cat
Then there’s the insecure, fearful guy who runs into a burning house and saves a child. In an instant, his default setting is changed forever. He does something that he never thought was possible (for him) and with one brave, selfless action, many of his self-limiting beliefs are smashed. He is empowered. The world is the same but he is different. Therefore, his world is different.
The Graduate
There’s the self-proclaimed dummy who enrolls in university, does the work, develops the study-skills, learns the academic language, passes the exams and gains the degree. She is forever changed. The ability was always there but the confidence wasn’t. Her self-limiting thinking and self-sabotaging behaviours become a thing of the past – as a byproduct of doing something she had never done.
The Traveller
There’s the woe-is-me guy who visits a third world country. He instantly realises that his horrible life in the USA is actually fantastic. And that his lifestyle is actually one of privilege, not disadvantage. He identifies that his self-pitying, negative attitude has always been his problem. Without even looking for it, his experience in another part of the world teaches him to acknowledge, value and appreciate what he has (which is plenty). Nothing changes but everything changes.
The Business Woman
There’s the girl who sets up her own business. She doesn’t think about it, plan for it or talk about it (any more). No, she actually does it. In the first twelve months of owning her own business, she learns and grows more than she has in the last twelve years. The experience changes her.
And Me…
While I am constantly reading and studying, the place I’ve always learned the most, had my biggest breakthroughs and experienced my biggest (internal) shifts was when I stepped out of my over-thinking mind and experienced new things.
If you’re like me (an experiential learner), then perhaps it’s time for you to experience something new? To do something you’ve never done. And no, it doesn’t need to be a major event so don’t talk yourself out of it before you even start. It might be something relatively minor like trying yoga, talking to a stranger, going for a jog, learning an instrument, doing some volunteer work, asking someone out for coffee or even leaving a comment on this site.
Or, maybe you should think about it for a while longer?
Share an experience with us that created a significant internal shift for you.
Craig Harper (B.Ex.Sci.) is a qualified exercise scientist, author, columnist, radio presenter, television host, motivational speaker and university lecturer. For the past 25 years he has been a leading presenter, educator, motivator and commentator in the areas of personal and professional development. You can visit Craig's blog at Motivational Speaker.FREE eBook – So… You’ve Decided to Get in Shape (Again) Craig's FREE eBook takes 20 – 30 minutes to read, and addresses the REAL getting-in-shape issues based on his 25 years of experience. To get Craig’s FREE eBook click here, weight loss books.
Apple has released a Bluetooth peripheral that completely replaces the computer mouse as we know it. It’s not like we didn’t see this coming. Apple’s hatred of buttons and love of touch that began as early as 2003 with the 3rd generation iPod and continued with iPhone, iPad and multitouch trackpads should have clued us in that the mouse wouldn’t be here forever.
Apple’s not going to just release a $10,000 touchscreen table computer (ie. Microsoft Surface) and hope people will line up to buy it. Instead, Apple will slowly shift our computer mannerisms $199 at a time (iPhone) until we’re completely touch. Buttons will be a distant memory like typewriters and Windows Me. This dream of using computers, Minority Report style, starts with the death of the computer mouse.
A simple truth is that my 10-year-old sister has grown up never using a computer mouse. She’s used notebook trackpads with her index finger and the touch-sensitive glass on my iPhone and iPad. The Magic Trackpad will be her input device of choice no matter what device she uses and the mouse is simply foreign in the way that the keys of a typewriter never felt right to me. Apple’s taken the steps necessary to remove the mouse forever, including making the Magic Trackpad compatible with Mac OS and Windows Vista & 7.
The Magic Mouse comes with the iMac and Mac Pro which are two out of six computers that Apple sells. One out of three Macs comes with a Magic Mouse, and for $69 more, you can swap that out for a Magic Trackpad and never have to use the mouse at all. The Magic Trackpad is the same height, depth and length as the Apple Keyboard and fits snugly right next to the keyboard or a foot away, depending on your preference. The trackpad is the button and the box has a list of gestures to get started.
Of course, this isn’t a review of the Magic Trackpad since I haven’t used one yet, but I’m trying to weigh in on the future of how we interact with our Apple computers, or at least how Apple wants us to interact with them. The keyboard still reigns supreme and I prefer a physical keyboard to the one on my iPad or iPhone, but there are small changes I see that are making it obvious that change is coming faster than we think. Keyboards of today require very little pressure compared to keyboards of the 80′s and typewriters in the 40′s and 50′s. Pushing today’s keyboard keys are so easy that a child can type without issue. This decrease in pressure requirements is preparing us for touch keyboards that require no pressure, just as improvements to Apple’s trackpad have eventually turned into a dedicated peripheral that we will happily buy because we love the trackpad on our MacBooks.
I have to think big picture, though, and make that claim that iOS will soon make its way to our laptops and desktops, and soon the keyboard will be obsolete. Then, Apple will announce the last iteration of the Mac OS as iOS becomes a unified standard for how we get work done. The App Store will be the only way to get apps on your devices, software pirating drops, we touch instead of click and our fingers become the only input device you need.
Wow, that was quite a glimpse into the future in the length of two posts to Twitter, but that’s where I see it going.
This future is both far off and not so far when you look at where we’ve been in the past four years. In 2006, the Mighty Mouse had more than a few buttons and our keyboards had many keys and our phones were all keyboard from Windows Mobile to Palm OS to Blackberry and touch was something we did on notebook trackpads. This was before the glass trackpad and our trackpads had physical & clickable buttons. Today, Apple’s product line is 50 percent mobile and we do the majority of our “mobile input” with our fingers on iPods, iPhones, iPads and MacBook Trackpads and soon (let’s say a year from now) Apple will say that it has sold millions of Magic Trackpads and we’ll learn that a majority of desktop users use their finger as the primary input device. This shift is happening fast.
The computer interfaces depicted in Minority Report are still a decade away, but we’re prepared now and our fingers are moving more than ever, controlling objects on retina displays and interacting with 30″ displays via trackpads. We’re doing it all right now and, once again, Apple is ahead of the curve, but still tip-toeing. Apple isn’t ditching the mouse completely but it’s testing the water to see how we react. Judging by yesterday’s buzz around the Magic Trackpad, I’m confident we’ve sent a message to Apple that iOS is ready for the mainstream and we’re ready to make touch the default input for tomorrow’s computers.
You’ve seen Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic, but you’ve never seen one like this.
You’ve seen news readers like NewsGator, Google Reader, or, even, newer ones for iPad like Pulse, but you’ve never seen one like this.
You’ve seen news aggregators like Techmeme, Google News, Skygrid, Yahoo News, Hacker News, or Huffington Post, but you’ve never seen one like this.
What is “this?” It’s Flipboard.
It’s from a new company you’ve never heard from before. Embedded here is an exclusive interview with CEO Mike McCue. You might have heard of Mike before. He sold a company, TellMe, to Microsoft for about $800 million dollars. Flipboard, the company, has already had one round of funding from Kleiner Perkins and today is announcing a new round of funding along with an acquisition of the Ellerdale Project (http://www.ellerdale.com/).
What is Flipboard? It turns your Facebook and Twitter account into something that looks like a magazine. It also lets you build a custom magazine, either by choosing from Flipboard’s pre-built curated “boards” or by importing Twitter lists. This is a very powerful and engaging way to read Twitter. You can also turn a single person’s Twitter account, or a single brand’s Twitter account, into a Flipboard. For instance, you can follow Techcrunch on Twitter with it and it will turn Techcrunch into a beautiful magazine-like interface that’s easier to read than any other reader.
The differentiator for Flipboard is the design. Lots of touches that make it engaging:
1. Touch an article and it “zooms” to reveal more.
2. Touch a video and it plays inline.
3. Turn your iPad and everything reconfigures, even photos switch from vertical to horizontal formats.
4. Touch “read more on Web” on longer articles and instantly be transported to the original website that was the originator of the information discussed in the tweet.
5. When you bring in your Facebook friends your friends’ photos, status messages, will all be laid out in attractive pages.
6. You can touch to share, favorite, like, or retweet, depending on what you are reading.
To get a sense of how dramatically different Flipboard is from any other Facebook or Twitter client, you should watch the video we filmed with McCue where he demoed the app for our cameras. In the interview he covered the philosophy of this interesting new company, demoed the product for us, and talked about where the company is going.
So, why is this disruptive, or even, revolutionary? Revolutionary isn’t our word, either, but is what actor/entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher said when we showed him the app to get a feeling for how it would affect the content businesses he’s involved in. He’s not the only one, either. We showed it to Wolfram Alpha’s CEO, Barak Berkowitz and he said “it’s one of the most awesome iPad apps I’ve ever seen.”
Techcrunch has covered that in a second post about why Flipboard is a killer app that — on first look — appears very disruptive to Twitter client producers, news readers, and news aggregator/publishing companies. In that second article we’ve also laid out why Twitter and the iPad have set in place the ingredients for a real media revolution — one that goes way beyond other publishing systems and one that further moves our reading behavior away from RSS aggregators.
But here let’s discuss how it works.
You add in your Twitter and Facebook accounts. It builds tiles, or “sections” out of your accounts. If you are an advanced user you can add in other people’s Twitter accounts, Twitter lists, or choose from a pre-done set of custom boards to choose from. More on those in a minute.
You then click on the section it builds after you flip past a “cover” that is made from photos that it finds from your friends and people you’re following on Twitter. The cover itself is pretty interesting, but the meat is inside, so we’ll focus on that.
Click on “Facebook,” for instance, and you’ll see your friends’ photos, tweets, status messages, articles, and videos. Just drag your finger through page after page, er, board after board, of these things. This is your Facebook news feed, but in a way you’ve never seen it before — all laid out like a newspaper. Click on any item and you can see the originating status message and all comments. You can “like” the item, or comment on it too.
How did Flipboard find these things? After all, I have 1,800 friends on Facebook and am following 19,000 people on Twitter and it filters out most of the noise I see on other Twitter and Facebook readers. Well, it has a set of algorithms that are looking for highly engaged items. You know, items that have lots of comments, likes, or retweets. It also has an algorithm that senses photography that’s been linked to from Facebook status messages and it lays those photos out.
When you reopen Flipboard it re-paginates the whole set of boards (you can only display nine sections at a time, which is a major limitation of the first version, but more on limitations in a second.
Along the bottom is a timeline that you can run your finger across to see a menu of all items. If you get to the end of the timeline and want to see more, just flip the last board over and it will go and get more pages for you to view.
LIMITATIONS
This is quite remarkable, and addictive to play with, but there are lots of things we’d like to see Flipboard add. More section tiles, for instance, is desperately needed. I have 25 different Twitter lists of just my own, for instance, and if you go to Listorious you can find thousands of lists on all sorts of different topics, all of which make good Flipboard sections.
Some might wonder why RSS isn’t used. That will be a limitation for some people, especially if you are trying to follow a blogger who doesn’t yet put their stuff into Twitter (naughty!) In reality, though, there is so much that IS on Twitter or Facebook that this limitation isn’t that big a deal. If you find some cool blog you can Tweet it and then it’ll show up in Flipboard anyway.
After playing with this I wanted to have Flipboard on my Android and iPhones. Unfortunately the team has chosen to focus solely on iPads for right now but are considering other devices for the future.
There’s no advertising, which leaves us guessing as to what the business model will be in the future. Mike McCue told me they are looking at new, design-centric, advertising that could possibly fill a page or a portion of a page.
A major limitation is that this is a reading and commenting app, not one where you can build your own tweets or Facebook status messages. I found myself often wanting to tweet from inside the app as I was reading.
It also doesn’t use LinkedIn or Google Buzz, both social networks I’d like to turn into Flipboards.
WHAT IT GOT RIGHT
Flipboard got a LOT right. It shows how you can enter a crowded space of Twitter clients with something that’s beautiful. The interaction design is beyond anything I’ve seen from a startup since Siri came on the scene earlier this year (and was almost instantly purchased by Apple).
They are totally right to bet on Facebook and Twitter. These are the default information sharing systems for most people now and are both mature enough to serve as news sources. I have a Twitter list of world news brands, for instance, that is awesome in Twitter. http://twitter.com/scoblemedia/world-news-brands Lots of people haven’t seen the power of lists like these, but now they will, and they’ll also understand that Twitter isn’t just about telling people what you’re doing.
WHAT IT DID NOT GET RIGHT
There is a lot missing from Flipboard. First, the #1 thing we need is more tiles, or what they call “sections.” Nine is simply not enough.
Second, we need a far better “store” from which to find new sections, er, Twitter lists. Yes, you can eventually figure out that you can search for people, lists, etc, but we need a better way to do that. I wish there were a stronger tie between Listorious, which I find has a very nice way to find lists, and Flipboard, which makes it somewhat difficult to find new lists to make into Flipboard sections.
Third, as a content producer, I’m very worried that this takes too much of the brand and advertising dollars away from the content producers. If I share a Techcrunch article, for instance, I get more credit than Techcrunch does inside Flipboard. That’s not good. Also, they need a better way for content producers to tell Flipboard just how much of the text they are using. Right now Flipboard looks for an RSS feed from a content producer to see if they’ve set full text, or partial text, or headline only, to figure out the syndication rules but there needs to be a way inside Flipboard for publishers to communicate their wishes since I’m sure lots of publishers won’t like what they see inside Flipboard. From a user standpoint, though, I find this reading experience to be unparalleled, so media producers should work with Flipboard instead of flipping out, as I expect some of them like Rupert Murdoch to do.
There are still some bugs. I often see duplication of articles, especially in my lists that follow larger numbers of people (Flipboard’s own curated lists have small numbers of sources to keep them cleaner). I also occasionally see bad text or bad headlines that were pulled in. But those are minor problems for a 1.0 beta and will be fixed, the team says.
THE FUTURE OF FLIPBOARD
The acquisition of the Ellerdale Project, this morning, gives Flipboard lots of new “trending” features to build as well as some strong algorithms to further reduce the noise and pull out great items for us to read, no matter what the list is we’re aiming Flipboard at.
Overall this is an extraordinary iPad app and one that will shake the media world for quite some time.
ANALYSIS OF WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT:
Every once in a while I get an early look at a “killer app.” I still remember the day I first saw Pagemaker (back then from a company named Aldus, which later sold to Adobe). That app, along with a $5,000 laser printer from Apple, was a “killer app” for the Macintosh. Why? Because if you wanted to do a new form of publishing you needed to buy a Macintosh, a laser printer (back then $5,000) and Aldus’ Pagemaker.
I’ve been using my iPad since the very first day and have been looking for that “killer app” that would give me a reason to tell you why you must get an iPad. In other words, an app that would justify buying an iPad for a large number of people.
We’ve seen other companies get close. Last month Techcrunch wrote about Pulse, a news reader for the iPad. I downloaded it, but it wasn’t revolutionary, just a nicer done RSS news reader. Earlier this week another nice news app, Apollo, was announced in Techcrunch, but I quickly answered back on Twitter that I had already been beta testing something that went far beyond what they were offering.
“So, Scoble, spill the beans already!”
The app I’ve been using? Flipboard. See the news article elsewhere on Techcrunch for more details, since Flipboard also announced new funding and an acquisition too.
It does something very simple: it turns your Twitter and Facebook into something that looks like a magazine.
But, don’t miss what’s happening here, because there’s a news revolution that has been born due to Twitter. First, you must see that Twitter has moved from being just for a way to follow your friends to a way you can follow news brands. Techcrunch, for instance, has a Twitter feed that I follow in Flipboard and other Twitter readers like Seesmic, Tweetdeck, and Twitterrific. But go further, I have a list of 216 news brands like the BBC, CNN, New York Times, etc at http://twitter.com/scoblemedia/world-news-brands. You add that into Flipboard and you have the most complete newspaper-style media you’ve ever seen. You can follow just the BBC, or just the New York Times, or just your local newspaper on Twitter.
The problem is that when you see the New York Times on Twitter.com it looks boring. You don’t see the great photography that the New York Times provides. You don’t have an easy-to-read layout. And if you try to read the New York Times along with my list of news journalists or if you want to follow Techcrunch’s staff writers on Twitter you’ll see them all mixed together with all the noise that comes with that. If MG Siegler posts what he’s drinking on Friday night, as he did last week, it is weighted the same as a New York Times article of international importance.
This makes reading Twitter far less useful than it could be and it lays out why Flipboard is a publishing revolution. Oh, don’t take my word for it. I showed actor/entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher Flipboard and he turned to me and said “this is revolutionary.” Then he asked me for an introduction to Flipboard so he could invest in the company (which he did). Nearly every person I gave a sneak peak to Flipboard said the same thing after playing with it.
It’s disruptive to several groups: those who publish media, especially news organizations; those who produce Twitter clients; and those who produce news aggregators.
“One of the most awesome iPad apps I’ve ever seen,” is what Barak Berkowitz, CEO of Wolfram Alpha, told me after he saw it. “It brings to life the real capabilities of social media.”
“It takes a lot of the stuff from nerddom to mainstream,” Gary Lauder, VC at Lauder Partners, and TED speaker. “My mother is not going to read tweets, but she will read Flipboard.”
But it isn’t just the app that makes this a significant new company.
It also is backed by an interesting team, starting with co-founder Mike McCue who started TellMe, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2007 for $800 million. < << http://www.crunchbase.com/company/tellme >>>
It also has already made an interesting acquisition, of Ellerdale < << http://www.crunchbase.com/company/ellerdale >>> which has been building algorithms using semantic technology that filters the real-time stream by topics, instead of keyword strings. Basically, this means that Flipboard has some cool trending topics features and noise control that will come in future versions.
It also has a list of impressive venture capitalists, including Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Google investor Ron Conway, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, The Chernin Group founded by Peter Chernin, Alfred Lin, Peter Currie, Quincy Smith, actor/entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher, and major investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Index Ventures.
But that’s not why I view this as disruptive. It just is plain fun to use. I’ve spent more than 50 hours on it so far and love that it removes most noise from my Twitter feed, makes me much more productive in finding interesting items, and is plain addictive to use. It also makes me feel like I’m reading an old-time newspaper with beautiful design that helps me find important items to my life. Not every Twitter item is interesting and Flipboard focuses on that.
What do you think? If you have an iPad already do you agree that this is a “killer app?” If you don’t have an iPad does this push you over the purchasing decision line?
On a recent airplane flight, I happened to catch the movie Groundhog Day. Again.
If you aren't familiar with this classic film, the premise is simple: Bill Murray, somehow, gets stuck reliving the same day over and over.
It's been at least 5 years since I've seen Groundhog Day. I don't know if it's my advanced age, or what, but it really struck me on this particular viewing: this is no comedy. There's a veneer of broad comedy, yes, but lurking just under that veneer is a deep, dark existential conundrum.
It might be amusing to relive the same day a few times, maybe even a few dozen times. But an entire year of the same day -- an entire decade of the same day -- everything happening in precisely, exactly the same way? My back of the envelope calculation easily ran to a decade. But I was wrong. The director, Harold Ramis thinks it was actually 30 or 40 years.
I think the 10-year estimate is too short. It takes at least 10 years to get good at anything, and alloting for the down time and misguided years [Phil] spent, it had to be more like 30 or 40 years [spent reliving the same day].
We only see bits and pieces of the full experience in the movie, but this time my mind began filling in the gaps. Repeating the same day for decades plays to our secret collective fear that our lives are irrelevant and ultimately pointless. None of our actions -- even suicide, in endless grisly permutations -- ever change anything. What's the point? Why bother? How many of us are trapped in here, and how can we escape?
This is some dark, scary stuff when you really think about it.
You want a prediction about the weather, you're asking the wrong Phil.I'll give you a winter prediction.
It's gonna be cold,
it's gonna be gray,
and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.
Comedy, my ass. I wanted to cry.
But there is a way out: redemption through repetition. If you have to watch Groundhog Day a few times to appreciate it, you're not alone. Indeed, that seems to be the whole point. Just ask Roger Ebert:
"Groundhog Day" is a film that finds its note and purpose so precisely that its genius may not be immediately noticeable. It unfolds so inevitably, is so entertaining, so apparently effortless, that you have to stand back and slap yourself before you see how good it really is.Certainly I underrated it in my original review; I enjoyed it so easily that I was seduced into cheerful moderation. But there are a few films, and this is one of them, that burrow into our memories and become reference points. When you find yourself needing the phrase This is like "Groundhog Day" to explain how you feel, a movie has accomplished something.
There's something delightfully Ouroboros about the epiphanies and layered revelations in repeated viewings of a movie that is itself about (nearly) endless repetition.
Which, naturally, brings me to A/B testing. That's what Phil spends most of those thirty years doing. He spends it pursuing a woman, technically, but it's how he does it that is interesting:
Rita: This whole day has just been one long setup.Phil: It hasn't.
Rita: And I hate fudge!
Phil: [making a mental list] No white chocolate. No fudge.
Rita: What are you doing? Are you making some kind of list? Did you call my friends and ask what I like and what I don't like? Is this what love is for you?
Phil: This is real. This is love.
Rita: Stop saying that! You must be crazy.
Phil doesn't just go on one date with Rita, he goes on thousands of dates. During each date, he makes note of what she likes and responds to, and drops everything she doesn't. At the end he arrives at -- quite literally -- the perfect date. Everything that happens is the most ideal, most desirable version of all possible outcomes on that date on that particular day. Such are the luxuries afforded to a man repeating the same day forever.
This is the purest form of A/B testing imaginable. Given two choices, pick the one that "wins", and keep repeating this ad infinitum until you arrive at the ultimate, most scientifically desirable choice. Your marketing weasels would probably collapse in an ecstatic, religious fervor if they could achieve anything even remotely close to the level of perfect A/B testing depicted in Groundhog Day.
But at the end of this perfect date, something impossible happens: Rita rejects Phil.
Phil wasn't making these choices because he honestly believed in them. He was making these choices because he wanted a specific outcome -- winning over Rita -- and the experimental data told him which path he should take. Although the date was technically perfect, it didn't ring true to Rita, and that made all the difference.
That's the problem with A/B testing. It's empty. It has no feeling, no empathy, and at worst, it's dishonest. As my friend Nathan Bowers said:
A/B testing is like sandpaper. You can use it to smooth out details, but you can't actually create anything with it.
The next time you reach for A/B testing tools, remember what happened to Phil. You can achieve a shallow local maximum with A/B testing -- but you'll never win hearts and minds. If you, or anyone on your team, is still having trouble figuring that out, well, the solution is simple.
Just watch Groundhog Day again.
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Fascinating piece by Fred Vogelstein for Wired magazine on the Apple-AT&T relationship:
In a bid to avert the looming problem, a team headed by senior vice president Kris Rinne met with Apple to ask for help. Of course AT&T was planning to upgrade its network to handle the increased demand, Rinne’s team told Apple executives, but that was going to take years. In the meantime, would Apple take measures to help throttle back the traffic? Perhaps Apple could restrict its YouTube app to run only over Wi-Fi. Maybe the iPhone could feature a smaller, lower-resolution videostream or cut off YouTube videos after one minute. Rinne, who had already met with Apple’s iPhone team at least half a dozen times, fully expected the company to play along. After all, manufacturers agreed to such restrictions all the time. It didn’t make sense to build phones and offer features that carriers couldn’t support.
But in meetings with Apple engineers and marketers over the subsequent year, Rinne and other AT&T executives discovered that Apple wasn’t playing by traditional wireless rules. It wasn’t interested in cooperating, especially if it meant hobbling what had quickly become its marquee product. For Apple, the idea of restricting the iPhone was akin to asking Steve Jobs to ditch the black turtleneck. “They tried to have that conversation with us a number of times,” says someone from Apple who was in the meetings. “We consistently said ‘No, we are not going to mess up the consumer experience on the iPhone to make your network tenable.’ They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.”
And:
They have even fought about wardrobe: When an AT&T representative suggested to one of Jobs’ deputies that the Apple CEO wear a suit to meet with AT&T’s board of directors, he was told, “We’re Apple. We don’t wear suits. We don’t even own suits.”
Super Mario Bros. is one of those classic video games that stands the test of time. But I bet no matter how many times you have seen a plumber run through the Mushroom Kingdom to save the Princess, you have never seen Mario like this. In a video project created for his college thesis, Andreas Heikaus, who [...]
Shared by RussellThe Real Story on iPhone 4's Antenna
A very thorough review of the iPhone 4 by AnandTech.
Gorgeous video by Craig Shimala. (Via Jack Shedd.)