Skype frequently fails for those of us who use it on shoddy internet connections like the neighbors wifi or free public access. it’s promise is that it happily connects loved ones from miles away, and when it works it is magical.
@spamandynyc recently discovered it’s joys with here best friend in New Orleans, and for her first experience i told her to establish the callback protocol – who is calling who back if the connection drops. Of course she thought this was geeky and weird, shusshing me as she started her first call – but quickly soon after discovered taht it is in fact very useful.

In reading a book on game theory this morning – I read this very conundrum, only with wire phones and not Skype and that’s when it hit me:
Skype should implement a callback setting for every session – asking the initiating user if they would like to be in charge of callbacks if and when the call drops.
this sets the immediate standard and lets everyone know what is going on from the get-go. In the case of ‘I am calling you and you are not answering and i don’t know what is wrong’ – cause the other user is calling you at the same time and they are being cancelled out – skype will win out in customer understanding.

I know this because on the first drop, I saw @spamandynyc dialing back frantically, and skype responding with an ‘unknown error’ of some sort.

if the girls had known what to expect and what was going on from the beginning – then the whole experience would have been better. @spamandy’s friend would have been notified that her friend was going to be calling back in a matter of seconds – and @spamandynyc would have been told that the call had dropped and asked if she wanted to retry or send a message (something like: I would be calling back, but the dog really needs to go out – i’ll call you later).

I know that for many of the companies that I work for, the fear of a bad user experience leads us to pretend the experience does not exist at all or over complicate. I think that if [realistic] expectations are set in the beginning, and all parties know what could happen, how to identify what did happen, and how to best deal with what happened; the experience as a whole is much better. Even if there was (gasp) a failure.

instead – so many of our applications give us errors like: ‘unknown error #21′ and the average user then blames the tech that they are currently using, and promptly facebooks ’stupid technology x, never again’.

How to Research Your Business Idea – Entrepreneur.com.

taking some notes from this article – here are my thoughts

lots of ideas are cool, but only a few of them will actually fly. By conducting some very simple research it will be easy to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Gather:

marketing research is about determining who will use the product or service that you are building, determining how many of those people are out there, and figuring out a way to get in front of them. Ultimately, what we are trying to do is determine if there are enough people in the world that you can reach who will pay you for your product or service. To find that number we need to define them very carefully and cross section all of that data to put together an estimate for a potential market.
right here the article goes a bit blurry, and says that your should research based on what your product or service is. For my type of work I want to form some general assumptions about my customer and then find the number of people who fit that assumption. For instance, the last business idea i wrote out was for the digital business card link (Jiminie, i need a new name for that). After familiarizing yourself with the idea we can come to some general conclusions about the people who might use that. I would assume that they use business cards to make contacts (owners, marketers, salespeople, freelancers to start), want to be reached in multiple ways (digital – chat, url, email, blog  and IRL- phone, fax, mail), have additional information to share (links of interest, resume’s, business reviews, portfolios/samples),  and are too pressed for time,  not technically competent enough or do not have the authority to set up some form of this on their own (brand blog, company blog, whatever). so i need to find out the number of salesmen and women, business owners, marketers, and freelancers who do not have an easy to find public page on a public facing website or who want to present some additional information that is important for a new contact. Now i need to determine how many of those people are early adopters and would be willing to use the service – and how many of those are willing to add something onto their cards instead of the information they currently present. As you can see while i think the idea is cool, it’s going to be a few special people that would use it. Is that set of people large enough for me to make a profit? if the answer is yes, move on to:

Analyze:

There are 4 major vantage points that you should see your product from:

1. company: think of how the product/service will be presented to the end user. this includes features/promises, the ‘personality’ of your brand, and the promises that you intend to fulfill.
2. customer: there are three different customers that you will have to think about, if they are all the same person – you are really lucky OR you’re not doing it right.
   • purchaser – the one writing the check for your product/service
   • influencer – the one who will influence the decision to purchase
   • end user – the actual person who will be using the product or service.
3. competition: again, three types.
   • direct- these people are doing the same thing that you are doing, sign up for their service and see what they do. particularly what they are doing better, write that down and top it. as for what they are doing worse, improve on that immediately. For their marketing, look at any public data they have provided: public talks the ceo has given, associations they belong to, data about their intended customer base that they list on their site, and public postings (blog or whatever) that could lead you to understand who they think their market is – and therefore help you understand who your market is.
   • secondary – these people are doing something similar or could take customers away, take notes as to what they would have to do to compete directly with you and reevaluate that every week/month/quarter, whatever. also watch your customers and see if they are using the product or service as well as yours. if so, ask why and consider incorporating that into your offering.
   • tertiary – they slightly resemble your offering – just keep an eye on them and move them into a secondary position if you start seeing a trend in marketing or customer base that resembles yours
4. collaborators: associations, media and other organizations that do not compete with you or make a profit when you do, but are going after the same customers. Watch what they do and how they market and take cues from the more successful ones. Often you may be able to purchase lists of data about their customers. In the least – look at who they are marketing to and how to determine whether or not there are techniques that seem more successful or data that can help you better estimate your market.

in my life i have to keep up with lots of small tasks – and i don’t necessarily need help remembering to do them, just need a running track record of if they happened or how many times it happened during the day. did my lawyer call or respond to my email, did i email my lawyer, how many cigarettes did i smoke, was i able to speak to my son this morning, did i go to bed before 12, etc…

all of these things together define my daily routine and then turn into: why is this situation happening?

now if i had a small app that asked me these questions every day, and i could respond with a yes/no, or a number indicate if the response applied to today or yesterday – i start to gain some quantitative data about how my life is going. why was i having a bad week? well, i had 5 cups of coffee every day and went to sleep after 12 most days. at the end of the week I can assume that I have to cut back on coffee and go to bed earlier – or my week will be bad.

I could keep a diary – but that is another thing to do.

if there was an app that allowed me to set some basic questions – and the app asked me daily, then i am keeping a diary of statistical data without the hassle.

the interface would be simple – question and answer, day that it pertains to (today or yesterday), room for a small note to explain further if needed, and a way to dismiss the question all together: something like ‘i am done tracking this’ which would remove the question from the que.
A review, which should be sent weekly, should look at all of the data i am tracking in a calendar and quantitative view. with that data i could hopefully gain some insight into my habits and make some changes for the positive.

so this would be sort of a daily diary twitter style – not a bunch of thoughts written out that i have to go back an re- read, but conscise data in a graph that shows instances per day and their outcome. simple really – a quantitative overview of my habits and their results.

I want to get to the end of the week/month/year whatever and say (with coffee for instance) – i had an average of 3 cups per day, and i was OK – but in sept i moved to 5 per day and started having bad weeks. the 3rd week of sept i started smoking 6 cigarettes per day, probably because i was having bad weeks due to the extra coffee.

if twitter is a concise insight into my thoughts, then this would be a concise insight into my habits.

The Deets:

the app should naturally start on the web, with an xml output that could be used for mobile and desktop versions.

users could sign up – set their initial questions (public/private) and possible responses, and set their question delivery method and time. (cakePHP)
links to livst.at/nathan would see my public questions and graphs
desktop app in air gathers questions from web api and has ability to display at a set time
mobile versions (android,iphone) should be quickly following
widget to embed on my blog/facebook for a particular question or set of questions
api ()
all answer methods should be aware if the daily set has been answered – i.e. my android phone would not ask me if it checked the db and saw that i already answered (by desktop or email). so i don’t get a bajillion popups all asking me the same thing.
public questions and responses could be autoposted to twitter

how will it make money: ads, silly. then sell to yahoo. Profit!

I have started working with Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework. To get started I hunted down some examples to see how others dove into it – and found a few great ones, but most that relied on previous sprints. As you may or may not know, OSMF is still in prerelease which means that anything could change, and for traits that is exactly what happened between sprint 7 and sprint 8.

This change (along with some others) made many of the examples that i found not work – including a good one from @lisamarienyc on the adobe forums that I thought was best.

So I rewrote some portions and the resulting code is below:
questions, corrections, comments, and suggestions welcome.

package {

import flash.display.Sprite;
import org.osmf.events.LoadEvent;
import org.osmf.events.MediaError;
import org.osmf.events.MediaErrorEvent;
import org.osmf.events.MediaErrorCodes;
import org.osmf.events.MediaPlayerCapabilityChangeEvent;
import org.osmf.media.MediaPlayer;
import org.osmf.media.URLResource;
import org.osmf.net.NetLoader;
import org.osmf.traits.LoadState;
import org.osmf.traits.MediaTraitType;
import org.osmf.video.VideoElement;
import org.osmf.utils.URL;

public class OSMFExampleTwo extends Sprite {

	//our local flv to be played
    private const PROGRESSIVE:String = "trailer.flv";  //path to your progressive flv here

    private var _player:MediaPlayer;
	private var _video:VideoElement;

    public function OSMFExampleTwo() {
        trace("initialized");

		//create a new media player
		_player = new MediaPlayer();
        _video = new VideoElement(new NetLoader(), new URLResource(new URL(PROGRESSIVE)));

		//add an event listener to the video element to catch netstream failed errors
		_video.addEventListener(MediaErrorEvent.MEDIA_ERROR, onLoadEvent);

		//add an event listener so that when the player is capable of being viewed we can add it to the display list and watch
		_player.addEventListener( MediaPlayerCapabilityChangeEvent.VIEWABLE_CHANGE, onViewable );

		//add a new video element to the player
	   	_player.element = _video;

        }

	   //if the event fails - what comes through:

        private function onLoadEvent( e:MediaErrorEvent) :void {
           trace('ERROR (onLoadEvent): recieved a media error event');

		   var errorCode = e.error.errorCode;
		   	switch (errorCode) {
				case MediaErrorCodes.STREAM_NOT_FOUND:
					trace('ERROR (onLoadEvent): there was an error finding the file that was specified');
					break;
				case MediaErrorCodes.PLAY_FAILED:
					trace('ERROR (onLoadEvent): playback has failed');
					break;
				case MediaErrorCodes.NO_SUPPORTED_TRACK_FOUND:
					trace('ERROR (onLoadEvent): there was no supported track found');
					break;
				case MediaErrorCodes.FILE_STRUCTURE_INVALID:
					trace('ERROR (onLoadEvent): the file structure is invalid');
					break;
			}
        }

        private function onViewable( e:MediaPlayerCapabilityChangeEvent ) :void {
            if( e.enabled ) {
                addChild( _player.view );
                trace('player view');
            }
        }
    }
}

betaPoint is a collection of my ideas for the past year of working in the midst of the social and video technology in the new york tech scene.
Now that i have a year’s worth of ideas – i would like to take all of them and allow you to vote on the best. I will take the top 3 and make 3 month sprints on each of them to get 3 proof of concepts in 2010. I will be asking for feedback, and some help on each of the works but first we have to decide the winners!

working with ad operations with a small to medium publisher has allowed me to see an opportunity in the way of providing ad statistics in a way that is easy for the operations person to gather and the advertiser to consume. We are receiving 3-4 requests for statistics a day for basic things such as the number of impressions and clickthroughs – but we also provide a detailed set of reports for amount of video viewed (in quarters), sections that the user clicked to go to the site, which video was playing when the click happened, etc…

all of these events are sent back to our servers to be aggregated and when an advertiser calls to check on them  – we create the reports and send them on which can take a few hours and some custom made scripts to gather.

What if there was a third party to do this for us though – an independant company that would offer ping, clickthrough, and quartile creation, spitting out a short url tied to each event. The advertiser could enter the details: event title, location in the creative, and other metadata – and once the ping was saved the system would return a shorturl to record the event.

Once all of the events for a campaign were created and saved, the system should provide a comprehensive pdf or spreadsheet with the ad events that may be emailed to the publisher or the creative team to place into the creative.

to solve the need for up to date statistics on a particular campaign the system should, on an hourly or bi hourly interval, gather all of the pings that had been sent back to the system and generate an xml document based on the returned data that all parties can see.

the final leg of this is a desktop air application that would fetch the latest event info and present it in raw and graph format, allowing the advertiser the ability to keep up with how their ad is doing on any given network in almost real time. This application could be custom branded to prvide the publisher with additional marketing in the form of desktop real estate.

the business difficulty here is defining the end consumer: is that the publisher – a service that they would buy to provide their advertisers with greater insight into advertising performance on the publisher’s network and a little marketing? perhaps the advertiser: so they can keep up with the statistics across multiple platforms, or even the creative agency – so that they can provide their advertising customers with the data?

in the end, this seems like a relevant and necessary application, no matter who is charged for it…

is omniture an innovator in this space?
(http://www.omniture.com/en/)

while perusing the design bombs (http://www.designbombs.com) i found this nifty little library. i am quickly starting to understand why most developers use only a text editor. seems like more and more libraries are handling the stuff we used to actually code in the old days. god, remember the javascript it used to take to just create a rollover. the best thing in the world was flash, and when i went to interview at eastman chemical the web guys were all to hell cause there was a flash site in front of them and they thought it was all javascript. i had to explain what flash was!

jQuery TOOLS – The missing UI library for the Web.

While living in tennesee – I spent a good portion of my teenage years working on a computer into the wee hours of the morning, and during my breaks to either rest my brain or think more I had the privledge of listening to my next door neighbor wail on the drums. He was and still is one of the most amazing drummers I have ever heard. Richard and I would often not talk for weeks even though he was next door – but when we did, I would hear stories about ‘getting gigs’ and shows they had played.

One thing he talked with me about was similar bands in differing areas helping one another get a show at a venue that was ***understanding*** of their music. There were lots of venues to be played everywhere for an up and coming band, but getting on the roster was difficult, and it was hard to know whether all your time was going to pay off. Would the right crowd be there for your style, was there a good turnout on the night you got booked for, how are proceeds from the door split, and what was the sound system like (should you bring your own?).

In one method of finding a place to play – bands or their reps would search for ‘tba’ and a location, producing results for venues that had booked the headliner but had not yet found the opening act or the sideshow.

If there were a central location for band members to rate and review gig spaces they had played as well as a method of swapping these locations out for one another, there would be a app opportunity here.

Imagine a site that allowed band members to essesntially become remote managers for one another. Where bands from one area could help bands from another area get gigs at cool places with responsive crowds and on good nights.
Now I am thinking about the systrm here and I am not sure that enforcing a trade system would be best, mainly because I just read an article about craig from craigslist and how he sees things. His philosophy: provide the means of communication and the people who meet there will work out the details amongst themselves.

I am not even sure of the medium of exchange – some may help others for the clout (or the dap as I referred to it in school), others may do it for the return favor and yet others may do it for money. Whatever the chosen medium of exchange I sure as hell don’t want the site to be a hindrance to the ends of helping local bands go on national tours. This brings new talent to a new area and exposes local bands to new fans. This removes the need for high priced managers and representatives – which in my mind is the only reason left for the huge record labels.

In this ecosystem, bands would need profiles and pics and samples (import or link to myspace?), a rating system to rate the remote reps (linked in style of network with recommendations written – had to asked for by the user, should be suggested after a gig date by the system to the band that was booked), and the service/introduction, and a rating system of the venue that also takes genre into account (47 punk bands said boo, 35 pop rock bands gave a standing ovation)

All thoughts appreciated – especially if you rock. Currie, I am lookin at you.