Back of the Envelope | Jonathan Wegener's Technology/Marketing Blog » products

Do You Speak the Language of Visual Design?

Jonathan — Tue, 18 May 2010 18:19:15 +0000

…or “Why You Need a Graphic Designer”

The book’s title caught my eye instantly. ”Visual Literacy” Intriguing. I took it home, and over the next few days, I learned just how blind I was to the art of visual communication. Completely illiterate.

The book begins with exercises: “By using four black squares of the same dimension, create a graphic image that best expresses the meanings of each of the following words:

order

increase

bold

congested

tension

playful

I gave it my best shot and then flipped the page, revealing sample answers from students at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Suddenly I realized just how illiterate I was.

I’ve since appreciated design more. To further explore the importance of graphic design and visual communications, I dug up a few Exit Strategy NYC graphics. I show our initial design attempts (done by yours truly). At heart I’m a science/tech geek, so I’ll explain my inherently scientific thought process. And then I show how a professional designer approached the same problem.

Exit Strategy Fans: enjoy this behind the scenes look!

Train Illustration. How I approached the problem: Exit Strategy NYC shows subway riders which train door to use. So each door needs an ‘on’ or ‘off’ state. The MTA’s trains can be 10 cars, with 4 doors in each car. That means 40 doors in a train. We want the train to run vertically on the iPhone screen which is 460px high (it’s 480px minus 20px used by the time/battery/service strip at the top). So dividing 460px by 40 doors means each door gets about 11px of space to indicate on or off. With padding, there’s probably 5px of height for each door and 5px in between the doors.

Where I got stuck: 5px for a door isn’t large enough to stand out, even if it’s red and a few extra pixels wide.

How a graphic designer solved it: By making the train have a ‘slant’ to the side which increased the swatch of the door, allowing the red color to ‘pop’. Also she made it 3D and beautiful.

Splash screen. How I approached the problem: We wanted to communicate subway transit combined with the notion of exiting quickly. Inspired by an ‘exit’ sign, I attempted to overlay a transit like system on top of it. It’s hideous.

Where I got stuck: Everywhere! How could we possibly communicate something as intangible as “Which is the correct train door?” while keeping a transit theme. Time to call in an expert.

How a graphic designer solved it: Sheer brilliance. The zig-zag of the colored lines communicates subway lines. These lines dump out at a subway door. The ‘correct’ door is open with a silhouette of a running guy. An arrow helps indicate that this is the right door. The entire image is done with bright and bold colors.

So if you’re wondering whether you really *need* that graphic designer — always lean towards ‘yes.’ They’ll bring a perspective to the product and the messaging that will pay for itself many times over.

Readers — have any embarrassing early design of your products you wish to share?

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Golden Skyscrapers and Minimal Viable Products

Jonathan — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:42:02 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of meeting two MBA students with big ambitions: they want to redefine online shopping. I sat back in my chair and listened closely as they pitched their ideas for an entirely new online shopping experience. 3D this, interactive that, Web 2.0 the other thing.

As they laid out the extensive feature set they envisioned and the millions of dollars in venture capital they were hoping to raise to build this product, I was struck by an interesting realization: the concept of a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is actually quite counterintuitive. Don’t you want your product to be as awesome as possible? Features are good, so how could fewer be better?

Manhattan is full of gorgeous skyscrapers. No self-respecting person walks around thinking to themselves “Gosh, if I were going to build a skyscraper, I’d want mine to look like shit.” That just doesn’t happen! Instead, we have a natural tendency to want to ‘one up’ the status quo: “I’m going to build a skyscraper out of gold!”

But in software, version 1.0 of your product should look like shit! Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn famously said: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

The heart of the issue is that very few of these minimal viable products exist in the real world. Why? They rarely stick around! Customer feedback quickly drives additional improvements and features. Soon, memories of the mediocre original product completely fade away! How many of us realize that the original iPhone didn’t have apps?! It wasn’t until July 2008, an entire year after the iPhone debuted, that the app store launched. But today we only see the final product.

In a world of beautiful skyscrapers and impressive technologies, thinking small seems futile. But in this economic environment, a minimal viable product is more than just a nice concept. It’s a requirement.

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Economy of Taps and Smart iPhone App Design

Jonathan — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:05:26 +0000

Good interfaces should be designed around an economy of clicks. Or in the case of the iPhone, an economy of taps. Put simply: apps should allow users to achieve key goals with as few finger taps as possible.

Exit Strategy NYC’s extremely simple interface asks only three key pieces of information:
1) What subway line are you riding? (tap the line’s icon)
2) What subway station are you going to? (tap the station)
3) What is your direction of travel? (tap ‘uptown’ or ‘downtown’)

The app then shows the platform diagram for this station. Three taps — that’s it! In and out in fewer than ten seconds. Compare this to the Tube Exits interface design (Tube Exits is the London equivalent of Exit Strategy NYC.) The user has to tap over a dozen times just to get the same information!

One of my favorite apps, Foursquare, took a step backwards in their latest update. Previously you could check in with two taps: once on the venue, and once on the ‘check-in’ button. Easy Peasy. But the latest update added an additional step after the ‘check in’ button. This change added no functionality, only friction.

If you’ve ever played the Settlers of Catan iPhone app, you’ve seen another worst case scenario. Users must tap a tiny “Continue” button every time the next player’s turn comes up. It’s unnecessary and it’s frustrating.

Using an app with poor tap economy is like trying to run a marathon in the ocean. You exert much more effort and get nowhere fast. There’s too much friction. Tapping is mentally taxing, especially when it lands users on an entirely new screen. The user must review this new screen, then figure out which elements are interactive, then decide which one will help achieve their goal, and then tap again! Each additional screen/tap shoves one more roadblock between the user and their end goal.

The best services let users do more by doing less. This makes users feel powerful. Have you ever used Amazon’s one-click checkout to place an order? If not, please try it. It’s thrilling to use! Similarly, Griffin’s iTalk app features a giant ‘record’ button that feels magical. With a single tap, the user can start recording because the app picks smart defaults and stays out of the way.

The only time having an extra tap makes sense is when the alternative is worse: a cluttered user interface. Good UIs balance which elements are shown and which are hidden. Consider Facebook’s decision to add the grid button in the upper left corner:

Economy [of taps] is always a motivating factor, but the grid adds an extra tap [because you need to press the grid button] versus the full-time tab bar. This was a compromise I felt was necessary. There’s always that balance between screen clutter–adding tabs–and the number of taps.

-Joe Hewitt Quoted in Chris Dannen’s iPhone Design – Award Winning Projects

At the heart of many apps is a single core goal that your users hope to achieve — repeatedly. For Exit Strategy NYC it’s retrieving information. For iTalk it’s recording audio. For Foursquare it’s checking in. For Amazon it’s purchasing items. Don’t make your users run in the ocean. Remove as much friction as possible. Let them fly in the sky! The quicker the user can perform their goal, the better they feel about themselves. And the better your product makes them feel, the more they’ll fall in love.

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Framework For Thought: Aggregators

Jonathan — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:18:36 +0000

This post about competitive dynamics has been stewing in my mind for months now and it’s still a work in progress. At its heart is a framework for thinking about a common type of tech company: the aggregator. The aggregator takes disparate items, gathers them, and presents them as a unified front.

Aggregators can exist for both content and also products/services and there’s thousands of examples of them across every category: Google News (news content), OpenTable (restaurants), Expedia (airlines and hotels), Lendingtree (loans), SeamlessWeb (restaurant delivery), Digg (web content), Servicemagic (service contractors), Zocdoc (doctors), Admob (mobile ad units), AdWhirl (mobile ad networks), Pontiflex (marketing leads), GymTicket (gyms).

Convenience is often the key value these aggregators offer: a one-stop stop for customers to find what they’re looking for without going to ten different places. The ability to compare items is also important.

In almost every case there’s a interesting tension between these ‘aggregators’ and their ‘constituents.’ Let’s consider Google News. Google news is increasingly the starting point for people looking for news on the internet. Newspapers hate that Google News is scraping their content and eroding their brand value — but at the same time, Google News drives a significant proportion of their web traffic. They’d be stupid not to want that. As a member of an aggregator, they’re ensuring they get web traffic. Unfortunately they’re helping build the Google News brand rather than their own.

Are they shooting themselves in the foot?

This issue arose in my post about Opentable. One commenter wrote restaurants participating in OT, build the OpenTable brand rather than the restaurant’s own brand. It’s true! But what can done?

Once established, the aggregator has the upper hand. All the individual entities/constituents act in their own self-interest and therefore will remain part of the network. No single constituent can defect without suffering harm. And widespread rebellion / mutiny is unlikely — it’s unlikely that all the restaurants are going to band together and start their own version of OpenTable. It’s a tragedy of the commons, and the aggregators benefit handsomely from the resulting lock-in network effect.

As an established aggregator, risk can come from only a few places:

1) Competition in the form of another aggregator

2) One or more constituents decide to sidestep you.

#1 is hard to avoid. #2 is rare, but extremely interesting when it does happen. One example of this is Southwest Airlines, which isn’t listed on any of the travel booking sites. Similarly, Admob refused to serve ads through AdWhirl, an ad network aggregator (and when that didn’t work they bought ‘em!)

Occasionally the constituents themselves will ally: One example is Hulu, a joint venture between NBC, FOX and ABC, which aggregates all their content into a single place.

And once in a blue moon a constituent will creatively embrace aggregation in their attempt to fight the aggregators. For example, Progressive Auto Insurance proudly shows you the prices of their competitors alongside their own prices. Fascinating strategy.

The more fractured and crowded the marketplace, the less likely a mutiny or rebellion. Are the thousands of restaurants on Seamlessweb suddenly going to unite to form their own online ordering system and destroy Seamlessweb? Not likely. Are the dozen or so large newspapers going to unite to rally against google news and demand to be de-listed or compensated better? Absolutely.

As the number of constituents increases, the dependency on any one constituent decreases. And as an aggregator grows its brand, it becomes extremely difficult for a constituent to break away. Doing so requires an extremely strong brand and unique offering (like Southwest Airlines) and an alternative sales/delivery channel.

This is most important in the context of a offline company: Consider that Brick and Mortar stores like Walmart are essentially product aggregators. Shoppers go to Walmart because they know it has a wide selection at great prices. Suppliers don’t want to miss out on the huge volume that the Walmart sales channel delivers. The more Walmart grows, the more crucial they become to their suppliers’ businesses. And the more suppliers they gain, the more crucial they become to consumers. At the end of the day, Walmart has incredible pricing leverage over its constituent suppliers. There simply aren’t many alternative channels. Suppliers are trapped.

I’m going to end the post here because it’s already way too long. But please leave your thoughts and help me push this topic further. Thank you!

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The Launch of Exit Strategy NYC

Jonathan — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 03:18:55 +0000

Benny and Ashley and I officially launched Exit Strategy NYC last night at the NY Tech Meetup!

Exit Strategy NYC is an iPhone, Blackberry, and Android app that answers the quintessential New Yorker’s question: “Where should I stand on the subway platform?” After months of full-time subway riding, we’ve created detailed diagrams for hundreds of NYC stations, eliminating the guesswork and frustration from subway riding.

The project launched with an article from the New York Times and quickly got covered by Wired Magazine, NY Post, NY Mag etc (full list of press here).

The locations of the subway exits and transfer points have never before been collected on a large scale in NYC. Similar projects have been done in Toronto and Tokyo. We’re extremely excited to introduce this to New York City.

Soon i’ll be writing more about the thinking behind this app and the experience developing across three different mobile platforms. But for now, buy it and let us know what you think…we hope you love it!

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Part one: Startup Spotlight: Mobile Spinach

Jonathan — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:59:24 +0000

(This is the first in a two part post. Part one contains a profile of a startup. Part two contains numbers and analysis related to that startup.)

Mobile Spinach is a small and ambitious Bay Area startup focused on the mobile coupon space. The company is still at a very early stage — seed funded and looking for funding. Earlier this month I had the pleasure of talking with co-founder Anthony Vitti. We had a great discussion about the difficulties of effective marketing for local businesses, and Anthony laid out his vision for Mobile Spinach and the opportunity he sees.

Mobile Spinach’s offering for consumers is a compelling one: “Get exclusive deals and mobile phone alerts from our Tastemakers who hit the streets to find you the best deals when, where, and how you want them.” Think local trend-blog meets social-shopping meets mobile-couponing: Thrillist meets ThisNext meets Cellfire. Whereas existing coupon services like Cellfire and 8Coupons focus on product discounts (Save 25c on toilet paper!!), Mobile Spinach focuses on deals from local lifestyle businesses: Shopping, Night life, Events, Travel, Dining and Food, Arts and Music, Gyms and Spas. One of their co-founders runs a contemporary San Francisco lifestyle brand called Artificial Flavor, so they’ve got experience with fashion trends.

With Mobile Spinach, you receive deals only from the Tastemakers you’ve chosen to follow. These folks are the site’s power users — aggressive well-connected individuals who introduce their favorite local businesses to Mobile Spinach’s service and get special deals for their followers.

Mobile SMS couponing requires a light touch. Consumers don’t want to be interrupted with advertising that’s not relevant to them. Mobile Spinach understands this very well: “Less is more” says Anthony. Relevancy and customization are crucial to Mobile Spinach’s vision of an empowered consumer who is able to “dial down” the service as needed. Besides using Tastemakers as filters (so consumers only receive deals that match their taste), Anthony suggested that consumers will be able to make further customizations like electing to receive coupons ‘only on Tuesday nights’ and ‘only from nearby restaurants.’

For these local businesses, Mobile Spinach helps them engage local consumers and market themselves effectively. According to Mobile Spinach, there are very few ways for small to medium business owners to get noticed — traditional media, SEO, and SEM all have high costs and questionable efficacy. With Mobile Spinach, 500-1000 SMS messages are typically sent for a campaign and the company reports double-digit response rates. The company also reports getting double digit CPM rates for their mobile advertisements.

For Mobile Spinach, tastemakers act as sort of a crowdsourced marketing effort as they spread the word about the service to their friends. More importantly, they bring local businesses onboard to advertise with Mobile Spinach — and receive a 20-30% commission. These tastemakers, combined with a traditional in house salesforce, are designed to make the service scalable. Anthony envisions having 20 tastemakers in each of 30 cities across the country once the service expands to full size.

Mobile Spinach has a nice vision for a social-recommendation local couponing business. Furthermore, Mobile Spinach shows sensitivity and insight into the typical issues plaguing SMS advertising. But can they make the numbers work?

Well, let’s do some back of the envelope calculations…

(continue to part two)

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Startup Spotlight: Aardvark’s Expert Network

Jonathan — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:55:17 +0000

I’m in love with an animal!

No, this isn’t some kind of bestiality confession. I’m talking about Aardvark — a 15-person San Francisco startup made up largely of ex-Googlers and backed by $6 million from top investors. Like many relationships, this one started with a friend’s introduction. In February, Omar Christidis had been waxing poetic about Aardvark — ‘vark for short — and soon I was begging to be set up. A friend of Aardvark’s founder Max Ventilla, Omar was an early member of the service and gladly passed on an invite.

Unlike most online services, Aardvark’s focus isn’t on their website. Instead, Aardvark lives on your buddy list. Like a good friend desperately in need of a social life, its green ‘available’ dot glows brightly 24/7. When you IM a question to Aardvark, it goes digging for the answer. First the service analyzes and categorizes the question, then — and this is the real magic — it routes the question to an ‘expert’ who responds, usually in a matter of minutes.

Does it work? Hell yeah. My first challenge posed to the service was to ask it something local. After all, how many early aardvark users could possible live in my neighborhood?
me:
What’s the best bar in boerum hill, brooklyn?

aardvark:
Got it. I’m sending your question to someone who knows about *going out*
[6 minutes later]

aardvark:
(From Naomi/F/Brooklyn,NY, Re: *going out* )
I like the Brooklyn Inn on Bergen and Hoyt maybe. no food. just booze. local.

Wow, I was impressed. Not only was there another Aardvark user in my neighborhood, but she was online at that moment. And helpful! A day or two later, Aardvark posed its first question to me from a user in State College, PA asking “How much is your iPhone monthly bill?” Aardvark sent me the perfect question and I was able to give an answer accurate to the penny…being helpful felt really good!

I continued to use aardvark over the next few weeks, asking progressively harder questions. And each time, it stepped up its game. One time I sent Aardvark a chunk of Objective C programming code — a bug had stumped my friend and I and also stumped the readers of a popular programming site. Sending it to Aardvark was a last resort and pretty much a joke. But less than five minutes later, Aardvark sent back a one-line response that solved the bug. My question had been routed to Colin Barrett, creator of Adium (a popular aim/icq/msn messaging client) and master of all things Mac programming related. We had a back-and-forth conversation through aardvark, and exchanged contact information which came in handy later.

At precisely this moment I realized Aardvark was much more than a simple ‘question answering service’. It was an expert network.

Have you ever heard of the Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG)? I hadn’t either until a friend started working there. Essentially GLG connects corporations/investors to experts on very specific subject matters.

Perhaps a corporation is considering launching a new product that’s outside their core expertise. They have questions and concerns about the launch which require an expert opinion. They pay GLG gobs of money to play matchmaker. GLG sorts through its database of 200,000 experts and sets up an interview/consultation between the the expert and the corporation. It’s big business. GLG’s 2008 revenues were $284 million.

Essentially, Aardvark is GLG for the little guy. Or it’s GLG for the ‘long tail’ of questions. Over the past few months, I’ve used Aardvark to consult with experts on all sorts of topics, not just to ask simple questions but to have entire discussions! In addition to getting coding help, I’ve had hour long conversations about mobile micropayments with the Senior Mobile Product Manager at a major social networking site. I also found a very helpful PR expert who discussed in detail with me how best to do press outreach for an upcoming project. I’ve even used aardvark to have questions answered by lawyers and doctors.

Categories of Questions Asked (source: vark.com blog)

The key to Aardvark’s success is threefold:
1) Intelligent routing. When aardvark asks me to answer a question, I’m happy to help. I know aardvark isn’t wasting my time with irrelevant queries.

2) A great network of ‘experts.’ The quality of Aardvark’s answers is only as good as the quality of its users. Aardvark was started by a group of ex-googlers and as an invite-only service it has spread through real-world networks attracting a very impressively credentialed userbase. Aardvark’s ‘refer’ feature is also brilliant. I don’t know the answer to every question Aardvark poses to me. But I probably know someone who knows the answer. Using the referral feature, I can pass the question to the right person.

3) A gift economy and a feedback system. Like Wikipedia or Yelp, users contribute to Aardvark because they have benefited from the service and want to give back. Also, Aardvark encourages it’s users to type “thanks” in response to a useful answer and being helpful and getting thanked feels good. (“thanks” also works as a feedback mechanism to help Aardvark identify its most helpful users and route questions better.)

As a former sociology major interested in social networks and information flow, I find Aardvark absolutely fascinating. As an enterpreneurial person working on several projects and needing answers to dozens of questions, I’ve found the service to be priceless. To monetize the service, Aardvark plans to fold in targeted advertising. Should that not pan out, I have a feeling they could do just fine by creating a premium paid expert advice service.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts about Aardvark and the emerging social search space. And if you want to sign up or add me as a ‘friend,’ do so here.

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Company Spotlight: Bug Labs versus… Apple? Part Two.

Jonathan — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:47:16 +0000

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

(This is the second of a two part post. The first part can be found here)

The ubiquitous iPhone/iPod Touch devices are stealing Bug Labs’s thunder. To understand why, realize that the iPod/iPhone are no longer mere personal music devices carried around in a pocket. Instead, they’re increasingly purchased as stand-alone devices that serve a specific purpose. For example, my brother in law’s restaurant (No 7 in Brooklyn) uses a dedicated iPod Touch with the Pandora app to play streaming music all night long. Previously they would have needed XM Radio or a full computer to serve this same purpose. Was the iPod Touch intended to be mounted on the wall of a restaurant (like a thermostat) and stream music for eternity? Certainly not. But at $200, it’s a great investment for this purpose.

Back to Bug Labs for a moment. A classic product example the company has used: you want to build an alarm clock with GPS that wakes you up as you reach your destination on the train. Great idea. So you start with the base module (Bugbase, $249). Then you add a GPS module (BUGlocate, $99). And a speaker (BUGsound, $99). Cost: about $450. Can you do this with an Apple device? Yes. How? Well folks, you probably guessed it — “There’s An App For That!” iNap costs 99c.

And if iNap didn’t exist, you could easily create it. Most people associate Apple’s App Store with cheap games, free communication apps, and simple utilities. But there’s an entire half of the App Store that the mainstream media has overlooked: high end apps. There are dozens of $200+ medical apps (Lexi-Comp), $450 salesforce software apps (MyAccountsToGo), and $900 camera surveillance apps (iRa Pro).

But wait, there’s more! In addition to high end apps, there’s a whole other section of apps that will never see the light of day on the app store: enterprise apps. These Apps aren’t designed to be sold publicly — they’re proprietary in-house applications designed by companies and deployed for internal use under Apple’s enterprise distribution program. The point is that the Apple devices are powerful and versatile enough to fit almost any need.

Consider the minimalist design of the iPod Touch and the iPhone and you start to realize they’re the ultimate hardware devices. A single large touchscreen. The screen is the primary input and output method. It can be used to display a single large button. Or a thousand small buttons. Or just enough buttons to represent an on-screen keyboard. Or to represent an on-screen piano keyboard. The user interface is infinitely configurable.

Additionally, these devices have accelerometers, location awareness, audio inputs and outputs, memory storage, internet access. To top it all off, there is a well documented and robust SDK (software development kit) and a very active community of developers. And the devices are cheap. An iPod touch retails for around $200.

Bug Labs’ saving grace right now is that their hardware itself is open-source, modular, and infinitely configurable. Can you add a temperature sensor to an iPod touch? No. But it’s coming. When Apple announced their iPhone/iPod 3.0 OS due out this summer, the addition of ‘Copy/Paste’ stole the headlines. But tucked quietly into the announcement was the fact that these devices will soon be able to interact freely with the outside world through bluetooth and via the devices’ 30 pin dock connector. That opens an entirely new marketplace: companies creating custom accessories or interfaces for talking to existing devices. This is a game changer.

Previously, the iPod Touch and the iPhone devices could only interact with external speaker docks. But now, the consumer, business, and scientific applications are endless. Expect the generic devices to come first: input devices (external keyboards, game controllers), output devices (monitors, LCD display boards), readers (bar codes, RFID, infrared), sensors (temperature, water, heat, weight, chemical). Soon, more specialized accessories serving different market verticals will follow: medical equipment, sound mixing boards, lighting control, video production equipment etc.

Are you starting to see why I’m worried for Bug Labs? There are 37 million iPod Touch and iPhones in the wild and most people are very comfortable using the devices. They’re extremely powerful hardware devices. They’re cheap and readily available. The user interface is infinitely configurable. They support powerful custom software development and in house application deployment. There’s already a thriving high end market for software on apple devices. With the advent of custom hardware accessories and interfaces, Apple devices will become the dominant platform for interacting and controlling all sorts of equipment across many verticals. Bug Labs’ is going to have to change strategy quickly. They’ll need to shift their goal from creating the dominant open source hardware platform and start focusing on building around the Apple devices. A recent article suggests that this is already happening.

Still need convincing about Apple’s upcoming dominance? Check the latest edition of Newsweek: The Military is using the iPod Touch as a handheld field device. Amazing.

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Company Spotlight: Bug Labs versus… Apple? Part One.

Jonathan — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:28:35 +0000

(This is the first in a two part blog post. The second part can be found here)

Bug Labs is a fascinating NYC startup that builds a “modular, open source system for building devices.” Basically, they have a collection of programmable hardware modules that snap together to make custom devices.

I have to admit: the idea baffled me at first. It seemed like Bug Labs makes a really cool device for technology hobbyists and students — similar to the Arduino or my friend Michael’s company Nerdkits. Bug Labs also focuses heavily on developing a passionate community of users. But isn’t the product basically a toy aimed at a very narrow niche?! Why was the company worthy of investment from one of New York’s top VC firms, Union Square Ventures?

Things became clearer when I had a chance to sit down with Matt Cholerton at the Bug Labs offices this past winter. He demoed the device for me and explained the real uses for the company’s product: rapid prototyping, market testing, and serving the long tail of manufacturing.

BUG is intended less for individual hobbyists and more for companies that can use BUG to rapidly make prototypes of new electronic devices (think handheld electronics: digital cameras, alarm clocks, location based devices). BUG allows companies to market-test new device concepts before beginning a expensive round of mass production.

Additionally, BUG is perfect when there simply isn’t a big enough market to mass produce a device — this is what Bug Labs calls the “long tail of gadgets.” For example, perhaps some utility company needs twenty very specific custom device for their field technicians? Enter Bug Labs.

Bug Labs has a really cool thing going and I love the idea of capturing the long tail of device manufacturing. It’s an incredibly non-traditional idea for a startup and innovative hardware companies are rare these days.

Bug Labs is certainly our most “out there” investment.
-Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures

BUG’s configurability is based on its modular design. Modules are added to the base unit ($249) and each adds specific device functionality: a motion detector/accelerometer ($59), a GPS receiver ($99), a full-color, hi-res, touch-sensitive LCD screen ($119), an audio module with a speaker/microphone/mini-stereo jacks ($99), and a 2gb extendable memory chip ($10).

And here’s where I start to worry. Can you think of any other devices that have ALL of these features and more? Oh right, the iPhone/iPod Touch. These two ubiquitous little devices might just pull out the rug from under Bug Labs…

(Continue reading part two of this blog post)

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Store Shopping Is Dead.

Jonathan — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:22:44 +0000

Offline shopping is dead. Amazon.com killed it.

I’m a diehard Amazon fan, as friends can attest. The lovefest started in late 2005 with a free trial of the (then) brand new Amazon Prime service (tip via slickdeals.net). Whereas previously only orders exceeding $25 received free UPS Ground shipping, becoming an Amazon Prime costumer gave free two day shipping with no minimum order. I was impressed. But Amazon was primarily a bookstore..and I didn’t really order books that often.

When my toothpaste started running low, I turned to Amazon and was pleasantly surprised to find that had it! Two days later, 7.8 ounces of Colgate Total 12 Hour Multi-Protection Toothpaste, Plus Whitening Gel arrived at my door.

Total cost? $3.59.

Amazon had me hooked. In the months that followed, Amazon became my go-to-source for everything: books, electronics, medicines, soaps, shaving cartridges, shirts, pants, and even Muffin Makers (or rather a singular Muffin Maker. Or maybe Muffins Maker?).

One of my stranger Amazon.com purchases

Amazon’s prices are competitive. The huge selection which can be promptly delivered to my door with one-click of a mouse makes the Amazon.com user experience an unbeatable one. And their $4 next-day shipping option has also come in handy (keep in mind that $4 is the cost of a shopping expedition via a round trip NYC subway ride).

When I needed a new shower lining last month, I knew I had two choices:

1) Make a trip to Target: Walk 20 minutes to the store, wade through heavy crowds, navigate a cryptic and unfamiliar store layout, pray that they even have shower linings in stock, and then wait in a long checkout line, walk home.

2) Go to Amazon.com, search, quickly scan user-reviews, and then place an order with a single click.

I’ll stick with Amazon.

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