Google Now and the Mobile Information User

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Fred Wilson wrote about Google Now yesterday. If you are not familiar Google Now has an interesting promise: that it knows stuff about you and can help you even without asking. To me, Google Now is the closest thing we have to fulfilling a need for what is very close to an ignored user group in the mobile market place, information users.

Michael Mace wrote in an incredible article a number of years ago on the various use cases for mobile computing. He simplified it down to three core user groups: communications, entertainment, and information. I believe very strongly that the first two are being covered well but the third is basically ignored (from the OS/hardware companies).

Google Now is interesting to me because it starts to get at a core need of information users. I have an appointment each month and invariably I forget the meeting once every couple of months. So I start setting an alarm, which sets off 10 devices around my house and means another thing I have to set. But Google Now has the potential to be smart enough to know where I am, the direction I am heading, what’s on my calendar, and which devices I have with me. If it knows all that, it can be smart enough to tell me if I’m not headed to my appointment, reminding me it’s time to go but also smart enough to not tell me if it sees I am on my way.

Once my devices are smart enough to look at my calendar, contacts and current position — with all kinds of other information — it can be smart enough to help me in all kinds of ways. I’m driving and traffic is backed up beyond my vision, it can tell me to take an alternative route. It knows where my meeting is and which parking meters are open near by, directing me to the one closest to my meeting. It knows where I am headed is for work and track the mileage for my expense report automatically.

As an information user myself feeling a bit underserved by current apps and OS implementations, I can’t wait for this future.

Hello Kitty To The Stars

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If this doesn’t inspire everyone, especially teenaged girls, to explore science I don’t know what will.

Besides the feeling of awe when watching this video, the other thing that jumped out at me was that she could do this at all. When I was in third grade we tied notes to balloons and let them go, seeing if anyone found them and would call to tell us about it. (We got at least one call.) But Lauren, the girl who conducted this experiment, got to watch the entire thing via mounted cameras at multiple angles. Ten years ago the cameras would have been too heavy to send into space. Five years ago, too expensive. Now? If their destroyed, oh well!

The joys of potentially disposable technology: great for our minds, bad for our landfills.

Opera Goes WebKit

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Interesting news yesterday that Opera is dropping their custom backend for WebKit. WebKit is the HTML rendering engine used by Safari, iPhone, iPad, Android, Chrome, and BlackBerry with its latest OS. From the press release:

When we first began, back in 1995, we had to roll our own rendering engine in order to compete against the Netscape and Internet Explorer to drive web standards, and thus the web forward. When we started the spec that is now called “HTML5”, our goal was a specification that would greatly enhance interoperability across the web.

The WebKit project now has the kind of standards support that we could only dream of when our work began. Instead of tying up resources duplicating what’s already implemented in WebKit, we can focus on innovation to make a better browser. Opera innovations such as tabbed browsing, Speed Dial and data-saving compression that speeds up page-load, have been widely copied and improved the web for all.

Some developers will be concerned that innovation will stop now, with all but two major browsers using the same engine. I’m not concerned about that. In fact I think quite the opposite will occur. We will see increased innovation on top of the consistent WebKit base as each Google, Apple, Opera and BlackBerry attempt to innovate on top of what is there already while maintaining compatibility for what came before.

As for developers, more consistency is a very good thing. For anyone who has tried to make their web sites compatible with Internet Explorer 6 knows… yeah, consistency is a very good thing!

Not Crushing It

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Great post by Elizabeth Yin:

I’ll be one of the first entrepreneurs to admit we’re not crushing it.  Building a business is hard.  Crushing it would mean that you are always on the up and up.  Crushing it would mean that you are always hitting all your goals.  But you know what, that never happens — whether it’s in business or in life.  I am never crushing it. We are never crushing it.

Oh, man, can I relate. January started my 16th year running Infinity Softworks. Year after year I hear about the hot new company. A few years go by and that company is gone. I don’t wish the end for these companies and believe at some point we will be a hot company again, but meanwhile it is one foot in front of the other.

How do I do it, you ask? Easy. I believe in what I’m trying to accomplish and don’t believe it will happen over night.

(By the way, what a stupid phrase, “crushing it.” It’s like we are all pro ball players hitting home runs or surf boarders or pop drinkers or something. This is business, not entertainment.)

Adventures In App Marketing

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My friend Patrick Thompson pulled off a great presentation last month at Mobile Portland. Patrick’s built an excellent indie company, accomplishing the goals he set out to accomplish, doing it his way. In this presentation he walks through how he built his company from scratch, describing in detail the things he learned along the way, including mistakes he made. He shared tons of data! Enjoy!