Scan Introduces Scan Pages For Businesses
QR codes, the almost barcode like black and white squares, are one of those amazing things that you never have any idea what to actually do with. Companies have been playing around with the idea for some time and, guess what, I’m betting you’ve actually never scanned one.
Garrett Gee and his San francisco-based Scan is looking to change that. They have released today, what strikes me as, the first realistic, real-world, consuming-facing application of the QR code.
The release of this feature was accompanied by a video which rivals some of the best startup videos I’ve seen yet. It actually makes me want to open up a coffee shop just so I can be as hip as the guy in this video (well, almost).
Their app, which is available on Apple’s App Store under the name Scan, is the perfect fusion of fun, interactivity and functionality. I look forward to watching this company, I’ve got a feeling about it.
Faux-founder (in a good way)
A little while ago, we hired a CTO named Otavio. He joined us during a really interesting time in the business. In some ways much of the action had already been seen: I had been living in Brazil for over a year, we had launched the ecommerce store over 7 months previous, and we had over 80 employees.
Yet, in other ways, we couldn’t be a less mature technology startup. We hadn’t hired a single developer, written a single line of code, or even had a clear idea on how to go about building the product that would allow us to accomplish our longterm goals.
When we first found Otavio, we didn’t believe he was the real deal. It was one of those “he’d be perfect, if he was for real,” kind of moments, which led to an overly lengthy hiring process for him. We put him through the ringer to make sure he was the right guy for the job and in the end, he taught us a few things about recruiting.
First, he had this air of confidence that seemed to say, “You may not know it yet, but I am the man you’re looking for.” Even when our search took us in other directions, he didn’t seem deterred. Next, since we hired him, he has exuded a certain amount of control and wisdom that I don’t really find in people generally. Other than entrepreneurs, that is.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that this man who has only ever managed technology teams at larger companies, has the makings of a great founder. He sees solutions in places no one else would. He gets crazy when solving problems and, harkening back to his pre-hire swagger, has a confidence and a wisdom that says to me and our product team to be cool, be calm, think clearly, we will finish, we will succeed.
We were interviewing someone together on Friday when, in the middle of it all, I got hit with a term that I think captures his role really well. He’s a faux-founder. I mean in it the most endearing of ways. He’s part of our founding technology team, will play such an enormous role in our longterm success, and he has already shown this swagger that, to me, calls for something more clever, more cementing. Something fitting of such a great guy and technologist. I use the term not in a negative way, but in the most positive of ways. We went out to hire a CTO and got this guy that is that and even more. He’s here too late to really be a co-founder, but just in time to be a real faux-founder.
I can’t wait to show you, and the rest of Brazil, the future as teamed up with Otavio. We have some amazing things in store and trust me when I tell you that we, as a company and as a team, have only just begun.
I think everyone can relate with my current email plague. It doesn’t have to do with email in general or even it’s frequency, but its content. We recently launched a flash sales site for moms and in my desire to learn as much as possible from all who have charted the waters before me, I’m now neck-deep in to daily sales emails. And the ones pictured are merely the tip of the iceberg.
As much as I don’t LOVE getting them, I love what I get from them. I love seeing trends emerge and watching one innovate and the others follow. I love comparing the ones that are doing famously well against the ones that are famously not doing so well.
It’s important to immerse yourself into the world where you do business. Passionate people who love what they do always have facts and anecdotes on the tip of there tongue. I’m not there yet with flash sales, but I will be. And these daily emails will be a part of that.
Want To Know What’s Cool? Ron Johnson Knows
If you want to know why I’m writing about JCP it’s because one of the most brilliant retail executives in the world is it’s CEO and was the head of retail for Apple up until a year or so ago. I’ve been watching with eager eyes as they’ve began the transitioned from a bargain basement to a fashion retailer.
Well, the early results of their first big, new pricing campaign are in and revenues are down… way down. They famously did away with the constant mark-up only to mark-down strategy and have come up with something they call honest, clear prices. This move is being credited with a 20% decline in revenue. MSNBC has a report on this “huge blunder” and some of my favorite boggers are linking to it saying that it’s “sad.”
Everything is fine. Here’s why.
JCP has barely begun it’s transition. They are shifting their demographic and it is going to take a while for more fashion conscious shoppers to become aware that JCP is in the game again. JCP has been playing to the ultra-price sensitive shopper for so long that no one buys anything without saying, “It’s only $5…”
Their new demographic shops at Gap and maybe J Crew. They enjoy flipping through catalogs not just to shop, but for inspiration and even comfort and liesure. Their new demographic goes to the mall not for some cooked up sale, but for recreation and for lunch with the gals. Their new demographic has mocked people that shop at JCP and have since they were young. JCP is the place where substitute teachers shopped when I was a kid. Clothing that didn’t seem to belong in any age. Their new demographic is just now waking up to the fact that maybe that new top at JCP is cute, or maybe a friend of a friend stopped by in a JCP outfit and they couldn’t control their adoration for it.
It’ll be a slow process, but it is happening. Ron Johnson is hiring the best fashion designers in the country and is completely remaking the retail experience for the shopper that buys more frequently and spends more per purchase. This is the long term strategy, and in the short term the current JCP customer, the ultra-price-conscious-bargain-basement-thrift-shopper, will slowly stop showing up and revenues will decrease until the gals start showing up, catalog in hand, looking for that outfit that they couldn’t believe was being sold somewhere new, somewhere they may have judged pre-maturely… you know… JCPenny.
Zappos’s New Product Page Is All About the Photo
I was pleasantly greeted this morning by a new product page on Zappos.com. As someone neck deep in Scrum right now I immediately started to reverse engineer the story narratives behind this amazing development.
First I needed to figure out who Zappos considers to be their user (the primary actor within the narrative). We can rule out men or women, because clearly Zappos caters to both. We can rule out a specific demographic, just because it would be too complicated. My bet is that it revolves around a certain kind of mind set, something like “fresh” or more specifically “fresh shoppers.”
Next I needed to boil the new product page down in to different, smaller pieces of functionality. That sounds like too much work, so I’m instead opting to write a narrative for a larger piece of it, something like an epic.
The new Zappos product page brings the product front and center
Zooming in on a product is now an edge-to-edge experience
“As a fresh shopper, I need to be able research a product purely and without distraction, so that I can focus on my own needs and desires and make my purchase specifically to meet them.”
Like I said a moment ago, this is way to broad to act as an actual narrative, but it could certainly be broken down and as a result, this product page could be shipped.
The product page represents a philosophical departure from their last product page and from most ecommerce stores. One of the philosophies that guides most, and my, product pages is omni-presence. Omni-presence is a design tool that brings all important information on to a page without any additional clicks, and as little scrolling as possible. The philosophy guides much of the interaction of the web. This product page is a broad move away from this design tool or practice.
This is information navigator found to the right of the product image
Instead, Zappos is hiding key information within a navigator, an almost tab-like interface that reveals different sets of information at different times. There are benefits to this approach that, to me, seem self-evident. By hiding pieces of information, you allow other pieces of information to be highlighted. Yet, there are also many dangers to a move like this. In order to learn more about this product, it now requires clicking. And lots of it.
In the scenario I’ve posted screenshots about, I had to click one time to view the product information and then I had to click back to primary viewing screen. I do that, one, because it feels natural to me, and two because I know that most users do that same. I feels natural to set things “back to normal” before proceeding. That’s two clicks to view information. Then we have the other tabs sitting and waiting to be clicked. As shopping is all about the research, clicking on additional tabs is a natural part of that.
Now, all of a sudden, Zappos has users clicking around on things that aren’t the buy button.
The users, these fresh shoppers, are still on their site and are still researching a purchase, but as anyone in commerce will attest to, a shopper, fresh or otherwise, only has so much time and attention for their current task at hand. Omni-present content requires no clicking and very little scrolling. The only action required is the selection of options (and that’s if it is required) and clicking the actual by button.
As a designer who geeks-out over new interfaces and the progression of the web, I feel very excited about this new product page philosophy. I can’t wait to see how it goes and if it catches on. However, as a designer who feels that design needs to function, first and foremost, to help users accomplish their ultimate goal easiest and fastest, I can’t help but also feel that this move will likely not be a great fit for most ecommerce sites. There is simply too much hidden.
I’m also approaching this from mindset of Brazilian ecommerce. That’s where I live right now and that’s where my ecommerce startup (this one too) operates and ships to. The Brazilian online experience is still fighting against slow connection speeds, first-time web users, and low resolution screens. Maybe the US is ready for this leap. It is fun to use. I just wonder if it really gets users more quickly and easily to the buy button.
Time will tell. What an exciting morning.
Launching Dinda
Launch day. It’s a funny feeling and a funny experience. It’s basically a self-imposed date that you have to hold yourself to or otherwise no website would ever, really launch.
That’s because a website, at least all that I’ve been involved with, are never finished. Never done. Even getting to a point where you feel you’ve got an MVP (minimal viable product) is difficult. When considering users, it is hard to say that they’ll be able to live without, what some team members feel, is absolutely core functionality. But you do. You go live, launch, with something that you hope is enough to see some traction and buy enough time to fill out the experience a bit and get a sense for what users are ultimately interested in.
Dinda.com.br is a members only flash sales site for moms. Lots of qualifiers, I know, but if you don’t own a specific audience then you really don’t own anything. That seems like a common problem for startups I see around. They, the startups and really the entrepreneurs behind them, try to adapt their solution to an audience that is too broad. You need a specific, niche audience to launch to. You need a group of people to feel catered to and to build your product around. That’s how these things grow!
So, anyways, Dinda.com.br will invite its very first members in the next few minutes and the site is seriously being finished right now. We’re not launched yet because, for reals, we’re still finishing it. But that’s how you have to work it. The second we have all CORE features in place, we’re going to invite our oldest and most patient users to begin shopping the three brands that believed in us even before we had a site to really believe in (thanks again Siriri, Kids Company, and Boy Forever). And then we’ll keep busting our butts to make things better and better as we watch what our users really do when they use the site.
Launching, in many ways, requires the opposite of human instincts. We, as humans, want to wait and get things right before we show them to people or before we invite users to have at it. But we know better. Launching is the baptism by fire that will ultimately create a real business. Not an idea. Not a hope. Not a some-day. But a real business. And for us, that is more important than a perfect site and whatever would go along with that. Not only because of what we would learn and how we want to approach our relationship with users, but because launch day never comes naturally. It’ll never present itself. We would never launch and neither would any other site. We would have a world full of people building software that would never ship.
So, here we go. Launching in 3…2…1… Brazil, we hope you like it.
Defying Gravity
Every step forward, is a step the universe wasn’t anticipating. That’s what it feels like to make progress at a startup. At least the startups I’ve been involved with. Growth comes by fire, which brings scar tissue. That’s what entrepreneurs call the emotional and physical toll of learning painful lessons…scar tissue.
The universe has certain rules that make it continue to function in, somehow, perfect order. One of the strongest forces of the universe is gravity. So much of our human existence is controlled by the fact that we are glued to the earth’s surface. Like the elastic of glues, we’re able to briefly separate ourselves from our terrestrial grasp, but all flights at some point land, all space missions inevitably return. We are gravity’s captives.
I find a lot of parity between the laws of the universe and the laws of entrepreneurship. Particularly this law of gravity. It wasn’t until the 1700s that man was actually able to release himself from Earth’s umbilical hold with the advent of the hot air balloon. It must have seemed like a magic trick at the time. Entrepreneurship often requires similar feats.
Nothing happens at this startup I’m at without extreme effort and, often, some scar tissue. I see my fellow founders constantly trying to rally other team members to see a certain way or to get a certain thing done. I, personally, spend a lot of my time trying to move the product needle up and to the right, only to find that it doesn’t want to move. It takes every ounce of effort and time I have to keep that needle revving at a speed that feels barely tolerable. It’s like trying to defy gravity. The universe is against it.
I read a post by Chris Dixon this morning that surfaced a lot of my thoughts on this subject. The line he uses is particularly fitting given my feelings and experiences on the topic:
“The default state of the world is to stay the way it is, which means the default state of a startup is failure.”
I can easily and without equivocation second this sentiment. We’re at a stage in our little business that couldn’t be more crucial. We just closed a series B and now we’ve got, as everyone knows about venture capital, “12 to 18 months” to blow this thing up. We’ve been fortunate up until now to work with great investors and truly amazing people, but the obstacles ahead will require nothing less than defying gravity.
And I somehow know that we will. One, the rebel inside me hates to think otherwise, and two, we’ve done it before.
The Internet at the Dawn of Facebook (The Atlantic article)
Facebook launched in 2004. Today, it has more users than the entire Internet had in 2004. That line says it all.
(via parislemon)
Source: The Atlantic
I Only Know One Thing For Sure: Mashable Is Wrong
“The iPhone 5 is rumored to be coming later this year, with an official announcement expected in June around Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC).”
This from a Mashable article posted a couple hours ago. What self-respecting Apple enthusiest is expecting an iPhone hardware announcement in June? It has officially and permanently been moved to October. The WWDC this year will be about Mountain Lion (OS 10.8), new (possible retina display) macs, and iOS 6.
There is basically only one thing that we know will not be a part of WWDC this year, and that is new iPhone hardware. Funny how the whole world knows this and that Apple went through some pain delaying the iPhone 4S launch a full 16 months after the 4. Their sales were fine, even in the later months, but everyone agreed that in such a fast moving market like smartphone hardware, the iPhone 4 was beginning to gather dust.
They did this explicitly so that their annual music event, held in October, could have some more exciting hardware as part of it, as their world famous iPod slowly becomes less and less exciting as a standalone event.
Apple will have an amazing WWDC this year. The software and hardware will blow us all away as they always do. But a new iPhone? October holds that one indefinitely. You can bet on that. And Mashable… What the heck? Everyone knows this. Do you focus so much on social that no one has read any Apple news for the last several… ahem… years? Either get someone on the beat, or cease coverage. Oh wait, but then how could you bait people in to clicking on your articles? I’m sure the ad dollars are rolling in off this last one, “iPhone 5 Concept,” but stick to what you know.
The problem is that, more and more, I think all you know is how to draw readers and disappoint them.
People And Our Lives, As Observed At Starbucks
Office space is a tricky situation for startups in general, but I feel particularly here in São Paulo things are complicated. We have found ourselves in the very fortunate position of needing to hire a large team within 6 months of launching and as a result, we’ve needed to expand our space earlier than we anticipated.
We did a few things right from the beginning, which is making it easier. For one, the space we got has one other office next to it on the floor. We made arrangements to have right of first refusal on that space should the tenant actually move. Then when they moved rather suddenly, we decided to take the space even though we didn’t really need it yet.
Even before that, our primary space was larger than we needed and now with the additional space we had even more. Through out our 9 months or so in the office we’ve been able to lend office space to six different startups. I’ve enjoyed getting to know the different founders and talk big dreams with each of them.
Back to the trickiness, though. Office space for any startup is expensive. And if you’re founding in a downtown area, it’s likely to be even more expensive. You need to properly gauge how quickly you are going to grow because you can’t be caught without enough working stations for your team. We didn’t want that, hence all this forward planning. At the same time, your budget can only handle so much extra office space. So it’s a balancing act of where you’re going and where you are.
Last week we hit a threshold. We realized that with our employee count the way it is, we needed more desks than our current setup would allow. So, we bit the bullet, figured out a way to get everybody working somewhere for a couple weeks, and we are uniting our two office spaces in to one big open working area. No walls. No offices. No cubes. No individual desks. We’ll all be working together on one of five different group desks, each with ten working stations. That should be more than enough for the next several months.
All of this is a rather long intro in to exactly why I’m working out of Starbucks right now. Our office is being remodeled and outfitted for more team members.
I got here and began working well before the typical Starbucks worker shows up. From my years of Starbucks officing, the average hey-this-is-my-office-now person usually doesn’t really show up until 11:00 or so. And it was around this time that a man came and set up shop one table in front of me, facing me. As people watching comes as par for the course while working at Starbucks, I occasionally looked up and wondered exactly why he was here. Was this a pleasurable morning for him? Or does he not have an office? Does he want an office? I then noticed his notebook, a 15” MacBook Pro, same as mine. Does that mean he’s a creative? 10 years ago it 100% would mean so, but these days with the iPhone and halo effects owning a MacBook Pro doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
Speaking of iPhones, I noticed he had his out. A black one, iPhone 4, same as mine. Interesting. I began guessing at how old he might have been. Not 20s. Probably late 30s. Not 40. For sure not 40. I wonder if I’ll be working in a Starbucks when I’m 30-something. Probably. Did Steve Jobs ever work out of a Starbucks? Don’t know, but probably. For some reason I always jump to him as some kind of benchmark. Not that I intend to live a life anything similar to his, but nonetheless he has somehow stuck in my mind in this way.
The next thing I notice is slightly surprising. This 30-something, with flecks of grey hair on his temples, has a moleskin notebook elasticized shut with a Montblanc resting atop. Wow. Classy guy. Pens are common gifts, so it doesn’t have to be a self-indulgence, but I’m choosing to make it one. My mind shifts from if I’ll be like this man in my late 30-somethings to I hope I am. Not that I’m dying for a Montblanc, (I actually own one, but that’s another story) but I now realize what an amazing environment I am in. Maybe I’ve been working out of coffee shops for too long and a shop is a shop is a shop, but I all of a sudden notice the huge windows not 10 feet in front of me. I see the trees just outside waving in the wind. The smell of freshly ground coffee and sweet treats fills my nose and all around me I hear the lovely sound of laughter, and fingers tapping keys and screens. I notice how comfortable I am in this sofa chair and how generally confortable I am.
This in no way diminishes from the power and efficiency that comes from an office. I love having an office and I’m much more efficient working in it, but seeing this man and his familiar gadgets and his elegant moleskin and Montblanc opened my eyes to the staying power of the coffeeshop worker. Power to him. I don’t know his field, his interests, his level of success or even his name, but I know why he’s here with me. And it has nothing to do with office space or construction. It has to do with aroma and trees and sofas and addictive stimulants. It has to do with positive environments.
When my office is done being renovated, I’ll head back there. And I’ll enjoy it. The collaborative environment and the focus and productivity that will come will be empowering and wonderful. But the trees…and smells…and the relatable strangers will be missed.
Here's $10! Now Take The Ads Away Already
Facebook Made $9.51 in Ad Revenue Per User Last Year in the U.S. and Canada. I have wondered what that number was before. I knew it couldn’t be all that much because I have been buying performance ads for a while and know how hard it is to actually make a buck.
Now that we know this number we can ask ourselves, would you pay $10 a year for an ad-free version of Facebook? I would. 100%. And that would make me a more profitable user than the average user on Facebook.
I think I’m one of the free loaders right now that actually doesn’t generate much revenue. I don’t play games, I don’t really use many apps in any frequency, I rarely click on ads, and I am constantly telling Facebook’s little tool that the ads they are displaying are irrelevant.
Take my money, Facebook. Give me an ad free version and help me become more profitable for you.
Apple To Only Have 45% Tablet Market Share In 2085
I’m seeing this headline (or something like it) a lot lately. Is it really news? Is it really even analysis? I’m not a statistician, a market analyst, or surveyor, but I’ll tell you that it won’t surprise me if Apple loses it’s monopoly on the tablet market it created over the next 60 years. I’ll be dead, actually, and therefore not surprised.
Platforms change and technology advances and niche companies rise up and will gain prominence within a certain section of the tablet market. The Kindle Fire looks like it wasn’t as hot as it used to be, but even so, Amazon is selling tablets within a media niche. They are interested in selling tablets to those who want to read, rent and buy movies, and play the most popular iOS games. Excellent example of how over the next 60 years Apple will surrender a portion of its 800-pound gorilla status to competitors.
That isn’t even what interests me most. What interests me is that even in these long term projections, which never take in to account new products or companies, Apple still has the lion’s share. Are they trying to prove that Apple will be less of a powerhouse in a few decades? That isn’t how it reads to me. It reads like Apple, even after years and years of product development and industry maturation, will still completely dominate an entire category.
The most interesting part of these analyses is that they make huge assumptions about what is currently on the market. Namely that Android will be able to outpace their current growth trajectory and that Windows Rock Tit (isn’t that the proper name for RT?) will not only launch but steal share from both Android and Apple.
I think the real Apple competitor in the tablet market hasn’t launched yet. Android sucks. I’ve used Android tablets and I have come away knowing that normal people could never adopt one. Either an existing platform will re-write, or another company will step in to the ring with something truly innovative. Either way, no chart or graph or analysis could project that.
And either way, Apple will be holding on to their tablet market share for a long time to come. Maybe even 2085.
Thus: capitalism raises each generation alongside a revolution in “the instruments of production, and thereby the means of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”
Each generation comes of age with technologies, media, industries which radically alter the nature of social existence, the structure of cities, the dynamics of relationships, the meanings and values which ostensibly sustain and guide us but which now seem merely to tag along.
And quite understandably, each generation thinks that this new paradigm —their paradigm, after all, which they absorb easily and even think they shape— is the last paradigm, or at least that it is largely faultless even if it will be superseded.
iOS Development For The Programmer Inside You
I haven’t written that much about it, mostly cause its slow going and I feel I should be further along, but I’m making my way through the JavaScript lessons in CodeAcademy as part of Code Year.
As is true with most people learning to code, the light at the end of the tunnel is the hope of building something you actually use. And of all the things I use, my iPhone is at the very top of the list. TechCrunch has a post up about a State Trooper who turned in his right-to-ruin-your-day badge for a development position at his husband’s startup.
He didn’t know anything about iOS development before he began and using a series of online tools was able to single handedly develop an app. His story is inspiring. At the bottom of the article are the resources he used along the way. Well worth some clicking around, reading, and watching if iOS development interests you at all.
Are ‘Add To Cart’ Buttons Large and Colorful Intrinsically?
I hit a wall a few days ago on a section on Baby.com.br. The section presents a short, curated list of products that can be purchased together or individually. As I was organizing the page, I placed the site’s large, red “Add To Cart” button next to each product in the list and then I created a special extended red button that read “Add All Items To Cart” and placed it at both the top and bottom of the list.
As I looked at it, it became clear that there were too many large, red buttons on the page. But what could I do? “Add To Cart” buttons are large and colorful and I can’t change that just because of a new section on the website. Baby.com.br, as any website should, has a consistent and over-arching visual language. Changing something as basic as this would damage the overall shopping experience through inconsistency and confusion.
As I sat, staring at this webpage a question came to me. A philosophical one. “Are ‘Add to Cart’ buttons large and colorful intrinsically?” Are they? Or are calls to action large and colorful intrinsically and “Add to Cart” buttons just have always been the most important call to action up to this point?
The question hit me hard.
I probed longer and with additional questions. “What about “Add To Cart” buttons are large? What makes them colorful? Why are they typically, the web over, very similar in every case? The answer, I now know, is that in nearly every situation the “Add To Cart” button is the primary call to action. No button is large or colorful intrinsically.
Calls to action are what make sites easy to use. Hierarchy is what balances and guides users through websites of any kind, content or commerce. Through understanding the basic DNA of a button, designers can better guide users through a process and users can become more aware of their digital surroundings.
“Add To Cart” buttons are not large and red intrinsically. Wow.
