Making better products

It’s now almost an year since I started blogging seriously - blogging about work, about trends in technology, product management, user experience and usability.

It’s one year down and this is my 50th post on this blog. Not bad after all, an verage of four posts a month, a post a week!

The other I was just going through my blog stats and wanted to check out the most popular posts etc.

Here’s an excerpt

Top 5 posts and pages of all time along with the number of views

Here’s the traffic snapshot over the last year. I think that this is fairly consistent, but would like to hear from experienced bloggers about this trend line.

Any finally search engine terms which brought me in traffic, here are the top terms along with the number of clicks

Thanks for all your support, keep the comments and feedback flowing!

I was at the Bangalore startup lunch last Saturday at the NSCREL, IIM Bangalore. It was a good event overall, with participation from about 8 startups. The agenda of startup lunch was to provide a platform for Startups and Job seekers, so that they can get know startups better, their work culture and the works. Went to the event with no specific goal as a job seeker, but ended up having interesting conversations with many founders. The organizing team has a nice scoop of the event here.

Kudos to the organizing team for putting up a great show!Great job guys - Sridhar, Ashish and Pradeep !

If you are interested in working for a startup - here’s a list of startups in Bangalore along with positions that they are looking for.

If you were at the event, these are pics from Pradeep.

Scoble claims to have been moved to tears after seeing a demo by the Microsoft Research team.

Something like this coming from Scoble is quite rare and this of course led to an avalanche of blog posts and predictions as to what this ground breaking thing could be. Popular predictions included Photosynth , Seadragon etc.

Scoble then came back with ‘Misreading Scoble on Microsoft cry’

One particular line caught my attention

The thing I’m talking about is NOT anything you’ve seen Microsoft do before.

And this

 That said, I think it will stand up to the kind of hype I unleashed yesterday. It is still inspiring me and I still want to get my hands on it as soon as possible.

Wonder what this could be ? Any predictions ? Btw, as per Scoble’s claims we would be getting to know about this by Feb 27.

Trying to decide on a nice restaurant for a date in Koramangala and can’t decide where to go or what to do ? AskLaila, from Four Interactive comes to your rescue. Asklaila aims to answer common questions of Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? within your city.

Currently they have local information services for Bangalore and Mumbai (which was launched a couple of weeks ago).  I had a chat with their team and they were telling me that you can soon expect to see asklaila in all metros and other major cities in India in next few months.

I think this product has some great potiential (especially going  by the vision of their passionate team !) in the Indian consumer market  and the next couple of years will determine how consumers actually percieve the real value from local products.

Below is a SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats ) analysis I did on their product.

Note : The opinions expressed here are totally from my perception of the product

This video is incredible. Don’t know if you have seen this before - but watch the lyrics - they are way too cool. A spoof of Billy Joel’s “We didn’t start this fire” (can we get more apt!)

So here’s to another bubble - Cheers!

Isn’t this game incredibly cool, check the video below. Looks like you really need to know your physics well to play this one This one is from Kloonigames and runs on the tablet PC. A PC version of crayon physics is coming soon.

The user experience on this is incredible, watch how the game reacts as the user draws different figures and tries to achieve their objective. With the Wii and PS3 giving PC games a run for their money, I think innovative concepts like this one are a really good answer.

This makes me wonder about the process of gathering requirements for this game. I’m thinking, there are so many scenarios that need to be captured and then taking a call on which ones the game needs to support and deciding others to be left out. Phew ! It’s actually my dream to do requirements, scenarios and functional specifications for a gaming product. Wouldn’t that be cool

Stuck in Seattle with the rain and a marathon requirements gathering session :). So no barcamp for me this time. Damn! the collectives were really good this time and some very interesting topics.

Anyways if you are at barcamp and are blogging/liveblogging or microblogging, leave me your link as a comment, I’m going to be following this from here And of course kudos to the organizers, impressive list of sponsors!

And yo! found some really nice badges on the BCB5 site, so if you are blogging make sure that you use them.

 Update : Participant registrations  for Barcamp Bangalore 5 arenow open. Please go ahead and register at http://barcampbangalore.org/wiki/BCB5_Registrations.

It’s time to Bar camp again, this time around, the winter edition is happening on the 17 & 18th November, 2007 at IIM Bangalore.

Registerations are not yet open, but watch out this space for more. As with every bar camp, it’s by the people and for the people, so YOU can play a very important role in shaping how BarCamp turns out. You can contribute in many ways - ideas being one which everyone really appreciates. For instance you could participate in the logo contest which is currently going on.

If you company would like to sponsor BarCamp Bangalore 5, leave me a comment or check this page for some of this event’s sponsors. If you are going to be at BCB5, drop me a message and we can catch up at the event.

For over quite some time now, there has been a great interest in using Web 2.0 concepts withing the enterprise. The whole concept of Web 2.0 has been evolving and has gained iconic status in business and technical worlds alike.

Web 2.0 has many concepts associated with it - blogs, wikis, mashups, social networking, RSS, content tagging and many more. Most of these concepts are based on an user centric approach where the user is the focal point of action/attention. Enterprises are hence realizing that it makes a lot of sense to replicate these concepts within their organization to improve collaboration and communication and hence improve productivity.

However using Web 2.0 concepts within an enterprise requires a drastic mind shift within people. Information is now openly available, and people can easily express their views on the same. This will need to go hand in hand with a good change management and user education process.

Below is a diagram that I find very intuitive about Enterprise 2.0, courtesy Dion Hinchcliffe from ZDNET

The idea here is look at enterprise 2.0 from two prespectives - Internal facing and extrernal facing. Here’s my take on the most important faces of Enterprise 2.0

1. Collaboration 2.0 - An unoffical term for the collaboration strategies within the enterpise, this seems to be gaining a lot of traction within enterprises. The ability for multiple people to work on a document and then have preset workflows which get kicked in, are very useful and can play a key role in improving efficiency and productivity. SharePoint (or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) is a product which I think holds a lot of promise in this space and clearly there is a lot of traction around using MOSS 2007 within large enterprises and ISVs.
   Other collaboration tools which are popularly used within enterprises include Wikis, which hold a lot of promise for easy information sharing and editing.
2. Syndication/RSS feeds - This would enable everyone to keep in touch with items most important to them through notifications, feeds etc
3. Informal modes of communication  - This has led to the use og instant messaging services, SMS, etc for communication with the enterprise.
4. Rich User Experience (UX) - This is becoming ever so important in the Enterprise 2.0 era. The ability to engage users and have them get their work done easily is of primary importance. Some examples include Rich Internet applications built on AJAX, Flex, Flash, and Silverlight. Other concepts such as Office Business Applications (OBA) enable pulling in data from Line of business systems and surface them up in portals with a rich user experience.
5. Employee blogs - Blogs are an ideal channel for employees to showcase their ideas and also put up their questions, opinions etc. Blogs are also being used as marketing tools where companies primarily use their blogs/ employee blogs as showcase pieces or even to break some important news about product releases etc to the world.
6. Software as a Service (SaaS) - Desktop software is becoming passe` in the web 2.0 world and running softwares on the network (or cloud) is potentially one of the best software models which has a lot of potential.

The undo problem is one key aspect I am hoping future web apps will support. I just deleted all my mails in my hotmail inbox and I need to ‘Undo’ but I can’t do it. If this was a desktop application I could have done this in a jiffy.

This is a huge problem in web apps, though they are not covered too much and not many people talk about them, as we are now pretty much used to this kind of behavior. Web apps work excellent, they store all our data, enable us to access them from anywhere and give us no worry about licenses etc.

But as we move towards looking at a cloud or what some people call as a ‘cloud OS’ it becomes increasingly important to have all the desktop paradigms on the web. This problem was probably not thought about by people because when the web started it was more a data storage medium where documents, files etc were stored and people would read from it, so probably there was never a need for offlines access or storing states. But as we move towards having a cloud OS, and making the web a operation system, it becomes very very important to look at such issues.

John Dowdell from macromedia has some interesting thoughts on storing states where he basically argues as to whether the Back button on the browser needs to smart to capture these changes and also talks about capturing states in web apps.

Having an undo functionality brings about a sense of simplicity in the user’s mind - “What the heck, I can always undo it” and hence brings more confidence. This will play a vital role as people from different age groups, degrees of tech saviness etc start using the web to perform very important and secure activities like paying bills, making purchases online etc.

What’s your solution to this problem ? The best answer gets a special feature on this blog.