Tech Archives - Page 6 of 8 - Otis Regrets... or not

CES 2010: it has a pulse

Just finished my first day at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. The aisles are packed, at times so much so you can’t get through. But there are no exhibits in the huge Sands center this year, several of the areas in the back of the South Hall are blocked off, and one of the ballrooms usually used for the Hilton International pavilions is dark. In the main hall, OEM no-names share the prime spots with the likes of LG and Panasonic. My guess is that exhibitors panicked and stayed away while significantly more attendees are here than last year, signaling their intent to lift us out of our gloom.

According to show sponsor CEA, consumer electronics sales were off 7.8% in 2009 yet with higher volume led by bargain hunters. Sales for 2010 are projected to be up “slightly” from this terrible level. So it was interesting to see what attracted the most attention at the show.

Most popular trend that is going nowhere: 3D TV. Everybody is standing in lines to get into the theater rooms and see it but my prediction is, this is like the hot girl you’re never going to bring home to meet mom. Once the 3D glasses get stepped on or lost in the couch cushions, the party is over. (One vendor, TCL, shows a Fresnel lens type 3D where the picture is slightly different as you sift your vision, and doesn’t require glasses, but it doesn’t really have the drama of the polarized glasses kind.)

Bad news for the 3D TV folks: virtually no traffic in the zone promoting mobile TV, a technology that is designed to provide high quality reception in a moving vehicle. If you don’t want your kids to watch live TV in the car, my prediction is you won’t want to watch 3D at home either. There’s a limit to how much fun you can have.

Entourage Edge e-reader — Entourage Edge gives you the best of both worlds. It’s an e-reader AND a tablet computer.

Attracting a lot of crowds: e-readers. Diverse interpretations and executions of what Kindle left out, many with added value content such as newspaper subscriptions, complete with graphics, delivered along with your e-books. There was prediction Apple would show its new tablet at the show, but I haven’t seen it. (SF pundits mention Moscone Center is mysteriously unbooked for several days in late January, suggesting an Apple stealth event coming then.)

I saw several specific technologies of interest. Will report on some of these tomorrow.

On my way to CES 2009

This is my first year as an “official” blogger at CES (why the quotes, dude?). I’m already a day late because many of the press events are held on Thursday so they can get coverage before the throngs arrive. Definitely sorry to miss Lady Gaga at the Monster booth. Wonder if I’ll run into her later tonight when I arrive, maybe at the Showstoppers Expo?

The first time I attended this show was before many of my readers were born, probably, back in the 80s. I was an account exec at an agency representing The Federated Group, a home entertainment chain that has since gone to its reward. Accommodations were incredibly hard to find pre-internet efficiency. I was put up at the Showboat, somewhere downtown and far from the action. It was all demos of Betamax and Quadraphonic. I did not have fun.

Today the CES incorporates many of the vendors who used to be at COMDEX and they’re primarily my focus in attending. As a marketer, I like to hang back in demos and watch my audience to see what questions they have and what bullet points make their eyes light up (or become less glazed over). I also like to look for new or interesting technology which often comes not from startups (it’s very expensive to exhibit here) but from backwaters divisions of major companies—Panasonic’s heat pump washer/dryer, covered last year, being a good example.

And, as a marketer I like to look at the way all these companies are marketing themselves. If you’re into home entertainment, how do you establish through your booth display that your product is “entertaining”? If it’s a new technology, how do you show in a microsecond what it does? Now that I’m on the press list I get to see lots of flackery, good and bad, in the press releases and invites sent out. Most intriguing so far is Gracenote’s display at the Showstoppers tonight, which promises only “surprises”. Hope I am. More later.

New Media meets Old at AdTech NY

Yesterday at AdTech a panel moderator asked the question, “now that anybody can find whatever they want through search, is creative still relevant?” And a panelist, I think from MTV (I can’t read my notes because my hands were shaking with outrage) replied that sure, for example when people go searching for a band we’ll show them another band they’ve never heard of. She MIGHT have been talking about contextual targeting a la Pandora or iTunes Genius but I don’t think so; I think she was talking about selling product.

Later on I was checking TweetDeck before a session and the guy next to me muttered, “Twitter, what a waste of time.” And it occurred to me how different this conference was than the last few I’ve attended and posted about.

The “old media” here isn’t print; it’s MTV, AOL, Comcast and the other mass produced content that the advertisers who attend will put their marketing messages alongside. I saw some clever solutions for monetizing just about every square inch of the Internet, but the core content providers seem stuck in a 20^th century attitude of “we will build it, and they will come”.

Apropos which, equipment failure forced a switch from my beloved TiVo to a generic Direct TV DVR this week and I was amazed at the arrogance of the DTV user interface designers in assuming they could get away with the absolute minimum of features and intuitive usability. Good example: in TiVo there’s a “Season Pass” that lists all the recurring shows you plan to record including what is in the queue. On my new DTV box, I select the show and then it disappears. The “list” function only shows what is already recorded, no positive feedback to reassure me that yes indeed 30 Rock will be taped tonight.

The “new media” is of course the self-broadcasting that the audiences of all these old media companies have learned to do by TiVoing, Boxeeing, YouTubing and mashing it up with applications so you can see and share exactly what you want at any time. And getting back to that moderator’s question about whether creative is still relevant when people can find “whatever they want” by searching… where does he think that “whatever” is coming from?

Google, other marketers spend way out of recession

In an earlier post I talked about the argument for spending more to gain market share when others are cutting back, and cited Bed, Bath & Beyond and New York Life as success stories. Now comes news that Google, Juniper Networks, Cisco and Microsoft have launched major new campaigns into a still-roiling economy. “Everyone is trying to be the first mover,” commented Dean Crutchfield at one of the major tech agencies. “This is a market now where you’ll stand out or die.”

Coincidentally, Google’s Q3 revenue was up 7% year-to-year, in spite of tough economic times. Somebody is spending more on Adwords, that’s for sure. How about your company?

A three finger salute to bad product design

I have been getting cranky lately about products in my daily life that don’t work as well as they should. I’m cranky not just as a consumer, but as a marketer. Because if a product doesn’t work as it should, people are going to bring it back or not purchase again as surely as if you’d made false claims in your advertising. And since life isn’t fair, you may well end up with the blame.

So here are three ineptly designed mass produced products each of which richly deserves a middle finger salute—not just for their design flaws, but because those flaws are so obvious they would have been detected with the slightest hint of usability testing.

1. Glide dental floss tube. Glide is itself a success story of good design: Teflon coated dental floss, so it doesn’t get stuck and break off in your teeth. The idea worked so well that Oprah praised it on her show and stuck a package of Glide under every seat in her studio for the audience to take home.

Now we have an economy size in a tube, at about half the per-yard price and not much more bulk so it’s a no-brainer if you use Glide every day. But guess what: as soon as you start to pull out the floss, the top pulls off and the roll comes unraveled and it’s almost impossible to put back together. I guess they must have several billion of these tubes in stock because they’ve now come up with a Rube Goldberg fix: a disk of clear plastic over the top of the roll inside. The roll no longer comes out, but guess what: neither does the dental floss, making the whole delivery system inoperable. Middle finger salute.

2. Nathan’s mustard plastic bottle. This is my favorite mustard, and it used to come in a sturdy bottle with a tip, anchored with a plastic strap to the rim of the top, that you could use to seal it. Now they’ve got a new design which is designed to self destruct on first use and render the seal inoperable, which I guess means you will want to buy another right away. Not.

Look at the picture and you’ll see it is not at all intuitive how to get the top off. Click on the picture to enlarge it. Oh, there it is, that flat area in front. But it’s hard to get your finger or thumb in and unless you lift it off carefully and perfectly that entire sealing lid is going to break off leaving you with an extra piece covered with wet mustard that is guaranteed to get thrown away. Also, Nathan’s has taken to not putting a label on the bottle and instead just prints on the shrink wrap. Maybe it is rebranded for sale in other countries or maybe they are just hiding from their ancestors. A second middle finger salute.

Wireless switch on my Gateway laptop. — Wireless switch on my poorly designed Gateway laptop.

3. My Gateway laptop. I could go on for hours about all the things that are wrong with this budget machine that could have been avoid simply by copying a well designed laptop instead of randomly assembling parts. But here’s the thing that is most infuriating and ridiculous: a slider on/off switch on the side near the front which controls the wireless. You’re virtually guaranteed to slide the switch at some point if the laptop is on your lap, or if you simply brush it with your hand. It’s easy to do this without noticing and then you wonder why you can’t get your mail or why that Skype call was dropped. Why in the world do they even need a wireless on/off switch in the first place instead of controlling it from the control panel? Middle finger salute.

That adds up to a three finger salute: Control+Alt+Delete. These companies should get these products out of here along with the designers that created them.

How social media floats the Oracle juggernaut

One of my first freelance copywriting clients after I moved to San Francisco was a very smart guy who had been direct response ad manager at Oracle. He based his strategy at his new company on what he had learned and done there, so I learned as well.

Screenshot of Oracle OpenWorld Live feed during the show.

In a day when most tech marketing was fairly dweeby and feature-centric, Oracle took the advantage by brute force. Every day in the lower right corner of the local edition of the WSJ, there was an ad with a bar chart showing how much faster Oracle was than Sybase, then their major competitor because then Oracle was mainly a database company. And I myself considered applying for an ad manager position that was advertised in Adweek. Most classifieds described the job and the qualifications; Oracle simply ran a huge headline that said PREDATOR and follow-on text to indicate that’s how they wanted you to treat the competition.

During and just after the dotcom era, Oracle discovered an even more effective strategy to beat the competition: buy them. First there was Peoplesoft, then BEA, then Siebel (founded by an ex-Oracle marketing guy), now Sun. Today Oracle is a conglomerate and Sybase, its original competitor, has shrunk to 3% market share in its single market.

I was thinking about this history as I walked through Oracle OpenWorld, actually the first time I have attended in spite of my long Oracle history. It’s the only event I know of the many conventions held each year at Moscone that closes a major street so the party tent can be erected there. The result is gridlock throughout downtown San Francisco—classic smash-face marketing because everybody who is stuck in traffic is thinking about Oracle.

The typical OOW attendee is a database administrator (DBA) in a large organization. A key purpose of the conference is to make this typically mild-mannered individual feel like the most important person in the world by identifying with the Oracle juggernaut. I’m writing this post in an absolutely packed ballroom with thumping music and flashing visuals where the faithful are waiting, not for Roger Daltry or Aerosmith (they’ll be at the Customer Appreciation Event tonight) but for CEO Larry Ellison’s keynote.

With such a loyal fan base, using social media for marketing is an obvious choice and the Oracle folks are doing it well. The best example is OpenWorld Live, a website where you can watch a live feed (often with a couple of guys interviewing passers by about how happy they are to be at OOW) and simultaneously keep up with the tweets rolling by with #OOW09 as the hashtag. At the bottom of the page are buttons to take you to the Oracle conversations on Facebook and LinkedIn and even some code in case you want to embed the video on your own site. All Oracle, all the time, even when your laptop is propped up on your lap in the hotel room.

Commercially, Oracle is pushing a concept called Social CRM. I attended a briefing where Tony Lye, Oracle VP for CRM, talked about the concept of a “Listening Post” which will be incorporated in future releases. His prototype can gather and monitor conversations about Oracle anywhere in cyberspace (Lye though he was the first to do this, which isn’t true) and feed them into a sales and marketing interface such as Salesforce.com where they can be parsed by sales territory or other factor and the sales team can hunt down opportunities or put out fires. You’ll need a big database to do this effectively, and Oracle has one to sell you.

Oracle trade show gets suitcased

Fans of my suitcasing thread will be interested to know that I encountered a live example in the wild at the giant Oracle Open World show…. and even (unintentionally) participated in the hijinks.

I was collecting info for a post on Oracle’s use of social media when a gentleman handed me a flyer advertising a “social media meetup” which sounded like a great opportunity to get together with other social media gurus and talk about how Oracle does it. Little did I know he had a prison uniform under the poncho (it was raining hard) and was involved in an elaborate guerrilla marketing scheme for somebody called ActiveVOS.

Oracle, as mentioned in my other post (coming shortly), has a long reach and an iron grip when it comes to exacting loyalty from its users. ActiveVOS offers a BPM (Business Process Management) solution that can be used with Oracle… or, without! So rather than buying booth space they decided to position a bunch of people in prison uniforms outside the convention area, to make the point that you need to break free of Oracle’s chains by using products like theirs. It got good press, picked up by PC World and IDG.

SO, I asked marketing VP Alex Neihaus at the meetup, this really isn’t about social media at all, is it? Sure it is, he said. He used Twitter and Facebook to get the word out, and indeed I saw tweets advertising the meetup embedded in the stream of happy chirps from Oracle loyalists on the Open World Live site. Alex says this is “authentic” and it is a reality of social media marketing that, for better or for worse, once you buy into it you don’t have a lot of control over who says what.

The link to the ActiveVOS website was oddly missing from the invite to the meetup (maybe they were worried that Larry Ellison would mount a DoS attack?) so here it is.

Apple and the environment

This week Apple announced that it was resigning from the National Chamber of Commerce because of the CofC’s position on reducing carbon emissions, as PG&E had done earlier. (The Chamber has since said it supports the concept of reducing emissions–just not any current legislation.) Apple also has a website where you can review its measures to reduce environmental impact. This is a good thing if you want to leave your children a world to live in and believe for-profit corporations need to do some of the heavy lifting instead of leaving it to the government.

I gotta say, though, that the packaging of the MacBook I bought this summer (last of the old white edition, now replaced by aluminum) was among the difficult to dispose I have ever encountered. The box had tricky plastic inserts and a wad of foam padding glued to the lid which was impossible to remove in order to break down for the blue bin. This represents a step back from a recent period where all Apple goods came in plain brown boxes. Hopefully a temporary slip. I took a picture to document my frustration but seem to have recycled it. Easy to do on iPhone, not so much in real life.

Tethering and visual voicemail: iPhone 3.1 woes and fixes

Like a drug dealer passing out free candy at a schoolyard (my longtime friend Phil Henderson claims this is how they get you hooked), AT&T enabled a prototype of its tethering on the iPhone this past June. It wasn’t publicly released; you had to go to a special website to install it. But once you did the effect was amazing and liberating: you could now use your iPhone as a modem to connect your computer to the Internet, just by clicking “enable tethering” in your settings and connecting via Bluetooth or a USB cable.

AT&T undoubtedly plans to make this service official, and charge for it at some point. Assuming they don’t get too greedy, tethering trial users will gladly open their wallets. But the trial tethering went away with finality in iPhone 3.1, the latest software release.

If you religiously respond to Apple’s “an update for your iPhone is available” alerts you are already out of luck. Release 3.1 includes a firmware update that now verifies the iPhone each time you connect to the network (like Microsoft’s Genuine Windows “service”) so if you try to reinitiate tethering it will be immediately disabled. Since this is firmware, the “restore from backup” will not fix it.

If you want to try tethering and you haven’t updated, you might try Googling “enable tethering iPhone 3.0” or some such… just remember you are going to have to pay for it eventually. If you are already on 3.1 you are out of luck.

But if you had previously enabled tethering and now are at 3.1, you are feeling pretty unpopular right now! How do I know? Because you haven’t gotten any new voicemails in days! Well, actually you have but they are hidden. No alerts in the iPhone visual menu when they arrive, and no way to access them and listen to them.

If you have this problem, you might want to Google “restore visual voicemail iPhone 3.1” or some such. For me, what worked was going to Settings>General>Profile, clicking that, then clicking “remove” for the file that is there. (Some have reported the path as Settings>General>Network>Profile; I can’t go back and verify it because once you do this and sync your phone, the “Profile” choice disappears.)

Voila, all your voicemails are back instantly. Including, if you are like me, some action items that are seriously past due. Go ahead and take care of them, you can thank me later.

User Interface Design: Dual flush toilets look out for Number One

It’s not often you get to see a completely new user interface come on the scene, but that’s what we have today with dual flush toilets. This affords us a rare opportunity to look inside designers’ heads as they figure out the process of making consumers comfortable and confident as they use the product.

A dual flush toilet has two settings that use differing amounts of water depending on what is being flushed. The designer’s challenge is a/communicating this fact to the user, who possibly has never seen such a device before; and then b/letting them know which switch is for which function. Let’s look at a few examples of how this challenge has been met.

Dual Flush toilet instructions at UNC. — Dual Flush toilet instructions at University of N. Carolina.

The University of North Carolina installed a very institutional toilet with a handle that goes up or down depending. Since you don’t know which is which way does what they put up a sign to explain. I would say this is not very good user interface design: if you have to include instructions for a toilet handle, it’s non-intuitive and too complicated.

A couple of companies offer retrofit kits that add dual flush capability inside your existing tank. To make this work, they replace the operating handle on the outside of the tank. Dual Flush also has a handle that goes up or down, and they include a decal in the package that you can stick on the toilet next to the handle to educate users. Again, not ideal but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt since this device is a lot cheaper and more environmentally friendly than buying a new toilet.

Another retrofit kit comes from Flush Choice. This one has two handles, a little one for a little flush and a big one for a big. I think I would figure this out without a guidebook, but it would look a little circusy in a home bathroom and might not be sturdy enough for institutional settings.

Other designers have abandoned the handle and flush the toilet with an entirely different mechanism: buttons. Making such a radical change in the interface is pretty unusual, and it can only work because people really, really want to flush that toilet, and will take the initiative to figure out how. Buttons can be attractively designed, and they’re sturdy because they connect directly to a plunger in the tank. And in fact, all the dual flush toilets I’ve actually seen in the wild have buttons.

Dual buttons in a public restroom. (SEE UPDATE AT BOTTOM OF POST!)

Of the three photos here, the big wide buttons are from a toilet in a public restroom. The buttons are of equal size but they have images on them to tell you which is for which. The image of the solid circle implies “all the water” but it also reminds of solid waste. Maybe too graphic? And using same-size buttons for different-size flushes doesn’t seem like an elegant solution; the designer missed an opportunity to communicate by making the buttons also different sizes.

Kohler's new moon/outhouse button. — Kohler’s new moon/outhouse buttons.

That’s what was done with the new-moon shape, which is my favorite. It hearkens back to outhouse doors and once you study it, it’s clear that one button is larger than the other and I think most people would figure out that small means less. I kind of wish they would make the “less” button green but maybe that calls too much attention to itself to be a successful home décor product. (Interestingly, the plunger underneath this inside the tank IS green; also interesting, the home fixit guy who installed it got the parts reversed so the green low flush plunger ended up on the high flush side. In the end, some human errors can’t be solved with design.)

The much, much more subtle split circle is from the same manufacturer, Kohler. This toilet is much more expensive than the one above and works a lot better. And I can easily see what went through the product manager’s head when they saw the new-moon configuration: “I’m not putting a picture of an outhouse in MY customer’s bathroom.” But it would have been an improvement.

Gotta go.

Dual Flush 3 years later — Which button should I push?

UPDATE: 4 1/2 years after writing this post, I revisited one of these toilets, located in a public restroom at my local coffee hangout. Take a look: with regular use, the legends on the two buttons have worn off so you can no longer tell which is which. D’oh!