Views of a Modern World

Everything else Rick writes

When don’t you need an app?

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Confession: I bought an iPad, the smallest wifi-only version. I wanted something that was more functional than my Blackberry Pearl but with a more convenient form factor than my laptop for use during parts of my commute.

Here’s the question: I’ve been using Basecamp for internal (and now external) projects, and I had been of the impression that I would/should get an app to work with that site. I’d seen lists of iphone apps, including basecamp’s own list.

But I was trying to get a handle on which one to get; review seem scarce, and the app store model makes it impossible to try unless the maker has created a “lite” version (see Headquarters and their lite version: the app framework might be one where what used to be called “crippleware” doesn’t seem to be so bad.)

But last night, on a whim that seemed silly at the time, I just fired up the Basecamp website to see how broken it would be. Pleasant surprise: it worked pretty darn fine, just like on my laptop. Now, in fairness, I did identify one missing feature: the ability to rearrange tasks in a to-do list was missing (the little 4-way arrow was not there at all). Maybe that’s the dreaded no-flash problem. I can deal.

What this makes me think about, though, is a couple things: first, I just saved $10 or $12; second, those app companies are definitely confined to a niche; third, apps that access web services have their days numbered as mobile browsers improve (or, in the case of the iPad, screen sizes and keyboard functions).

Where these apps would create an immediate urge to buy would be if they mimicked “desktop” add-ons to Basecamp, such that they could operate offline and upload/sync my changes later. True, part of that feature needs to be implemented in the underlying web service, but wifi and 3G haven’t eliminated the need for the mobile professional to be functional when there’s no connection.

[Ed.: followup–  Outpost claims “full offline capabilities.” That’s the secret sauce; I think this app will make the cut for a full-fledged review/shootout.]

At ThoughtStorm [http://thoughtstorm.com/], we were fans of Groove (it still lives on my several machines, in fact) because of the online/offline capability. Until a client accepts my excuse of “I couldn’t work on it because I couldn’t get a connection in the subway or on the plane,” people like me will always have a need to maintain local/offline access to our materials, even if they are backed up to, or even exist primarily, in the cloud. (See more on this concern in my review of PlanPlus Online.

When do you decide that you want/need an app vs. just using the website? There are tools to “make an app” from your blog. Does this make sense? Do you use these apps yourself to read favorite blogs?

Fauxtivation

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What is Fauxtivation?

It’s hiding the ball from your customers to try to create a motivation to engage with your company that they wouldn’t naturally have, i.e., don’t need and don’t want.

Example: “emailing” travel reservation info that consists of a link to a website rather than, you know, the actual itinerary info. (Tip: that means you, Expedia.)

History: probably a holdover from the days of hits, page views, and monetizing eyeballs.

Also seen when “giving away” an eBook that actually requires you to confirm your email, ostensibly for the purpose of getting a link to the file but really for the purpose of adding you to the author’s email marketing list. (Tech tip: you need my email if you’re going to email me; if the PDF is hosted on your website, you could, you know, provide a link.)

BUT SEE Copyblogger/Chris Garrett’s Authority Rules ebook and Seth Godin’s recent What Matters Now.

If your business model or marketing plan hinges on getting people to give you an email address so you can send them things they haven’t actually asked for (and “opt-in” isn’t the same as asking for your marketing pitch), you might want to rethink that strategy or at least figure out how you’re going to move away from it. Remember, your customers are your friends. If you treat them that way, they might just become fans.

Snacks compete by selling less

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One day at the grocery store, I was thinking about competition and marketing while walking down the cookie aisle. I saw the 100-calorie snack packs (a section that is now surprisingly large for a segment that didn’t exist that long ago). I told my wife that someday we’d see a 99-calorie snack pack. In fact, not too long ago, we spotted something like this product.

This very funny tweet triggered my memory and got me to put this post together:

Idea of the day: 100-calorie workout packs to work off those 100-calorie snack packs.

Zero-based: use HARO efficiently with filters

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Peter Shankman‘s HARO (Help A Reporter Out) service is extremely valuable, but his opportunity-packed three emails a day can be hard to review in a timely fashion and risk getting bypassed if you have a big incoming stream of email. Because the content is time-sensitive, putting them off to read like a newsletter is self-defeating, like when I used to save daily WSJ issues I hadn’t read.

A few months ago, I signed up for HARO. You get three emails a day, each with 25-35 queries from reporters (loosely defined) looking for sources for various pieces. But since I’m primarily interested in a very discrete subset of those issues, namely “autism” or “special education,” reading through the emails was sometimes a hit-or-miss proposition.

Finally, I realized that I was shooting myself in the foot by letting all of the emails rise up to the level of my attention (cf. this video of Clay Shirky re: user filter failures via Lifehacker). Simply put, my new secret is to use an Outlook rule to delete the email from my inbox unless it has “autism” or “special education” in it. That way, if it’s in my inbox, I know it’s high priority and I can give it the appropriate amount of attention rather than subconsciously calculating the likelihood that there was something relevant and the time pressure of a response against my current and imminent workload. That one change, which only took a few minutes to implement was a big timesaver over trying to read three of those emails a day.

You can probably find a set of keywords that work for you, too. A colleague said that she has too many keywords to make this work well, but that’s no reason not to take a short step in the right direction. She could pick her top two or three keywords and let a similar rule or filter treat conforming emails differently, such as changing the subject text to “Urgent – HARO” or moving them to a specified high-priority folder. The key is differentiating more important emails from all the other emails, which she can then treat in her standard email workflow.

Time spent: <15 minutes, total

Time saved: <15 minutes per day

trendwatching.com: FOREVERISM

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trendwatching.com’s June 2009 Trend Briefing covering FOREVERISM.

I like the trendwatching briefings: they’re actually insightful rather than wishful thinking; they seek to recognize trends rather than create them. (I’ve always wondered about that particular issue in the fashion world — do designers discover hot colors or try to make a color hot?)

In this discussion of foreverism, which is a little broad, there is a subsection on Forever Beta. Maybe that’s the world’s new take on planned obsolescence. After all, if the software is regularly upgradeable on my phone, maybe you don’t have to make the phone break after all. This approach could clearly be more consistent with improving free cash flow, since software typically has a higher gross margin and, for a company in the marketplace today, they already have to expend the capital to create competitive software in the first place. Sales to people with older phones really exist on the margin, and they can therefore deliver even higher profitability. (Of course, this is one example; tell me how it would work for your field in the comments.)

Another way I think of this is in terms of companies using their brands to create value for customers rather than to take or destroy value for customers. I’ve long said that there are two types of companies: those that make money by giving more to customers and those that make money by giving less to customers. (Put your matched pairs in the comments!)

If you stop breaking your products but let customers use what they have, you’re at least not destroying value (Dell, you failed me when you changed the power connector on the same model number laptop AFTER I bought your extra charger!, and Fujitsu, when you changed the main battery design on your T4xxx series convertible tablets). Companies that use nonstandard power connectors, chargers, interface cables, and so on are showing us exactly what they think (revealed preferences: Economics-speak for “actions speak louder than words) about customer: suck them in with low price main object and charge more than value for accessories.

What companies don’t seem to grasp is that it’s this strategy that creates markets for competitive/knockoff/third-party accessories such as chargers, cellphone batteries, headsets, and so on. Who wants to pay $100 for a single-purpose Fujitsu laptop power cord when I can buy an iGo and extend it across all my devices? Heck, Fujitsu — if you made the universal charger, I would probably invest in your brand since I’m already springing $3-4k for the tablet!

In the olden days, i.e., when I was still in high school, information costs were far too high to undertake the sort of product searching that is now virtually automatic with, e.g., Amazon’s “people also bought…” section on product pages. Companies don’t seem to grasp that consumer behavior is changing rapidly because of the huge drop in costs.

The response from companies is that “our customers are searching on price, not value, and so we have to keep the price of X low like our competitors and make up the difference somewhere else.” Not only am I unsure of whether this is really true (as opposed to, for example, a rational response to high information costs of comparing products), but my sense is that it’s an effect, not a cause, of the fuzzy price-gouging that I’ve described. If customers aren’t seeing the value of your product, I have two questions: 1, do you know what the value of your product is TO YOUR CUSTOMERS, not to you, and 2, are you really communicating the value to them or hiding the ball with easy to sound important lists of specifications that don’t mean anything (like iLink (r) or FireWire (r) as branded names for a standard 1394 port)?

Apple has spawned a big ecosystem of people selling accessories for the iPod. But none of those people are really competing with Apple. I’d have to look for some numbers to justify my conclusion here, but I don’t think that Apple’s pricing policy is built around being able to sell Apple-branded chargers for iPods vs charging a healthy price for an iPod and looking elsewhere for something to sell that adds more value. Say what you will about iTunes, but it provides a lot of value to me, and the Amazon MP3 store doesn’t really match up quite as well, even at a (now-floating and fuzzy) 20% discount to a $0.99 song. In this respect, at least, I think the iPod and its relationship with accessories is a good example of how companies can compete where they want to compete and leave the extraneous stuff to others, deliberately.

Logo contest on crowdSPRING

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We’re running a logo contest on crowdSPRING for a social network-based site serving the ASD (autistic spectrum disorder) community.

Besides wanting to see a greater variety of designs from different people rather than a number of variations on a theme from one person, I wanted to see how the original “thoughtstorm.com” might have functioned. My friends know that the genesis of “thoughtstorm” for me was a play on “brainstorm” as part of my C2B business idea.

So, please feel free to spread notice of the contest to folks who should design an entry. Also, you can vote on the entries yourselves at the project page.

If there are designers who want to improve the project pro bono but don’t like crowdSPRING or others on principle, send me a design (I obviously won’t use unless we agree to a deal), post a link here as a comment (and then everyone else may get to coment), or enter and you can agree to donate the money to REED Academy, Alpine Learning Group‘s Outreach Program, or Autism Speaks. If you agree to that and do it, I’ll match the donation myself.