Author Archives: Elia Freedman

The First Shot

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Shipping software is an art form. Trying to balance the right feature set within a reasonable time frame is a challenging exercise. Being able to see through the haze of feature requests — an important thing to have, by the way — to see the bigger picture issues. Sometimes, Infinity Softworks has been good at this and sometimes it has not. The wrong mix is poison.

If there are too many features and not enough vision then the product is satisfying to those who wanted those features but not endearing to anyone. It does the job, they will say, which frankly is the kiss of death. After all when something cooler comes along, your product will be dropped like a lead balloon. As unit volumes come in, it’s increasingly clear that Nokia has fallen into this trap. It does the job. But BlackBerry and iPhone are cooler and are now stealing sales. (See data here.)

If there is too much vision and not enough features then there’s no product. People can’t relate to it and thus they don’t buy it. An example doesn’t come to mind off the top of my head (these products usually die quickly) but one company who has figured out a strategy for dealing with this problem is Microsoft. They like to use an “Embrace and Extend” strategy. For instance, they embraced email and extended it to integrate personal information management in Outlook, at the time a visionary perspective.

The trick is that this combination has to be managed with EVERY PRODUCT RELEASE. So we recently shipped FastFigures Mobile for iPhone and iPod Touch. (Direct link to AppStore here.) The features are 30 (mostly) finance- and business-oriented calculator templates, an algebraic and RPN calculator that doubles as a number entry keypad, and the template format — a cross between a calculator and spreadsheet — for doing fast analysis. What’s the vision for release 1? Easily do quick calculations on the go.

Is it feature and vision complete? No, not by a long shot. But it’s a solid start with what I think is the right mix of features and vision for the first release.

Today I Am A Marketer

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To paraphrase President Kennedy: Ich bin ein Marketer. It’s not that I don’t care greatly about the product and features and it’s not that I’m not heavily investing my time in developing product. It’s that, in the past few months, I have come to understand my customers better than I ever have before. For the first time I understand WHY they use our powerOne and FastFigures products, not just WHAT they use them for. And this, my friends, makes me a marketer.

Figuring this out is really hard. I know. I spent years struggling with it.

If you follow Infinity Softworks then you know we have distributed some 15 million units, through bundling and sales, in our 12 year history. We gave away a low functioning product to sell a high functioning product. powerOne Finance, RRE and CRE, our three for-sale products focused on financial and real estate markets, were used to run calculation in the field. This is WHAT it did. But it took me a decade to figure out WHY these finance, real estate, investing and business customers used the products. The WHY is because it gave them credibility with their clients and co-workers. They are paid to have answers, to lend their expertise to a situation, and powerOne gave that to them, very quickly, everywhere and at their fingertips.

If I would have understood this, I could have developed the capabilities around the product to do even a better job of solving this product. Understanding WHY would drive every decision we would have made. And seeing opportunities in that light would have been a litmus test to decide whether we should pursue them or not. We could have also utilized this to develop other products that solved the same core problem.

I obviously didn’t understand this as our next move was to develop powerOne Graph. powerOne Graph was primarily focused on the scientific community, whose main constituents are in education. powerOne Graph answers the WHAT question perfectly: run calculations in the field. But the WHY for education is completely different then the WHY for business and finance. Education WHY was to develop a deeper knowledge and understanding of the subject matter. Completely different then the WHY for our financial products.

It’s that un-ending focus on solving the customers WHY that builds world-class products and companies. I hope to stay true to the WHY this time around.

Having Business Problems? Keep Going.

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The economy stinks everywhere (unless you sell Big Mac’s). The U.S.’ GDP shrank by over 6% last quarter, getting worse. Unemployment is spiking, 10% here in Oregon. Pretty much every state government is looking to make massive services cuts and our federal government is spending money like it grows on trees, almost $2 trillion dollars in debt this year alone, which just makes me quizzy.

So… ya…. this is a pep talk.

We need to see the forest through the trees. We will see the other end of this mess.

When things are at their worst, that’s the easiest time to be down. It’s the easiest time to give up.

And I want to remind you (and me) that ALL businesses fail  — that’s 100%, folks — because the founders/owners/managers stopped.

Keep fighting. Keep moving forward, even when you get knocked back. Keep experimenting. And keep coming back to work the next day.

Introducing FastFigures Mobile for iPhone and iPod Touch

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I’m very proud to announce the release of FastFigures Mobile, our first iPhone/iPod Touch application and the first release of our companion to FastFigures Online. FastFigures Mobile runs on iPhone and iPod Touch devices without requiring an Internet connection. FastFigures modernizes the calculator.

In my time running Infinity Softworks, there have been three defining products. The first was FCPlus Professional version 2, which came out in 1999. This product really introduced the template format to mainstream financial calculator users, making it possible for them to drop their HP-12c and HP-17b and carry a Palm handheld instead. This product was also a great marketing success for us as its younger sibling, FCPlus, was the first of our products bundled with Palm handhelds. We had product bundled on pretty much every Palm OS handheld from that point on, including Sony and other Palm OS manufacturers. During this time, bundling became our main marketing strategy.

The next defining product was powerOne Graph version 4, a full-fledged software graphing calculator for Palm OS devices. This was our key product to go after the education market. Educators loved it because their students weren’t spending their entire class time trying to remember which buttons to press and students loved it because they got to carry around a computer. Our education efforts, unfortunately, didn’t work out so well for us. Our three years of effort were killed off when Palm decided to exit handheld computers.

FastFigures is our third defining product. It revives the vision I had for the company’s products in 1999. Calculation is an integral part of many of our lives. We use it to calculate mortgages and investments and concrete slab materials and IV drips and pressure conversions and … well, you get the idea. And we all have our own specialities and needs, independent from everyone around us. But we don’t just run calculations. We need to retain results and share them with co-workers and clients. And we need to be able to run these numbers everywhere and recall these results everywhere, whether in the field or at our desk.

The Online version of FastFigures is already in beta and works with an Internet connection on Windows, Macintosh, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Palm computers. And now, with the release of FastFigures Mobile, we release our first version of FastFigures that runs without an Internet connection on iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

I hope you will give it a try (you can buy it here) and tell me what you think.

To Flash or Not To Flash? That’s The Question

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I’ve been following the news out of the Mobile World Congress (MWC). There are probably two items that struck my fancy: the first is the debate raging in the mobile world regarding Adobe Flash on smartphones and the second is the lack of Android/plethora of Windows Mobile announcements. I’ll address the first this week and talk about the second later on.

Ah… Flash. To some it is the holy grail. To others it’s bloated c***-ware that’s run its course. Flash, if you are unaware, is a programming language that runs in the browser. It was invented by Adobe to provide browser functionality that wasn’t native to the web languages of CSS and HTML. Probably its most popular use in the early 2000s was as a way to deliver interactive advertising on sites like Yahoo!, but over the years it has been used to develop web-based applications as well, such as Quicken Online.

Here’s the problem: Flash is an intensive memory hog designed for desktop use and that makes it difficult to use on mobile devices. After all, who wants half the battery time.

The news: at MWC Adobe announced a consortium of mobile platforms — including Nokia and Palm — who will support the development of a full version of Flash that runs on their devices. Why is this creating a stir in the mobile world? Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, announced vehemently that Flash would never run on an iPhone. Now the world is a-twitter with “has Apple missed the boat” conversation.

The reality, however, is that Flash on a mobile device doesn’t really matter. It’s a dying platform on the web anyway, being replaced by a JavaScript protocol called AJAX that’s far less memory intensive, supported by all the browsers, and not controlled by any single entity, a holy grail for the open-standards web.

Who does Flash on mobile help? The market followers. Those crying for Flash on mobile point to Twitter clients and Facebook clients and the like. But those applications are already available at Apple’s AppStore, the market leader for third-party software. It’s everyone else that benefits from it as they get Twitter clients and Facebook clients without having to worry about significant additional development, hypothetically. Significant is the key word, of course, because some changes have to take place to work on the small, smartphone screen.

So what do I think? I think the entire conversation is a distraction. The reality is this: if Palm sells 25 million units in its first two years and sets up an effective software sales and distribution model then developers will flock to the platform, writing applications using its native development tools. And if Palm doesn’t sell millions then it doesn’t matter if Flash runs on the Pre or not as no developer will spend time optimizing their code for a couple thousand users.