World Usability Day | Making it Easy!

World Usability Day | Making it Easy! - I am so amused by this, it's left me speechless! hehehehehe

TechWeb | News | Consumers Poised To Dump Wired Phones For Wireless

From the CTIA NewsWire: "The percentage of consumers who make a mobile phone their only phone will increase from 9.4% today to 37% in 2009, predicts a report by In-Stat. The report says lifestyle changes are driving the shift, and that people who currently are heavy wireless users are more likely to consider cutting the cord. TechWeb Network (10/25)"

I am not sure about "cutting chord" in a society where your phone # is related to so many services and a cell number doesn't agree with those. In some places you can't get food delivered if there is no "landline" on the premises, in others, it is difficult to open a bank account or a credit card without a landline. However, the most useful aspect of having a landline is actually in using it in a way similar to a junk email address - this is where all the "semi-insolicited" phone calls from your phone company and credit card companies go - the ones where they try to sell you all those services you really don't need. Its nice to know that I can give out my phone number without a fear that I will have to listen to stupid offers and hang up on weird marketing calls time after time. It only costs me about $13 a month and I can have a DSL on the same line. In my mind, its worth it. Would $13/mo cover Verizon's wire maintenance and service? probably. Will it make them profit? unlikely, but my subscription is worth it to me for this much. So maybe not so much dumping wired phones, as making them into junk-phone numbers.

Apple unveils video iPod and iTunes finally figures out to sell Music Videos

from the CTIA NewsWire:
Apple Computer unveiled a new iPod model that can play videos as well as music. The company's online iTunes store will sell video content at $1.99 a piece and signed a deal with Walt Disney Co. to offer five ABC programs -- including "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" -- on the new device. The New York Times (free registration) (10/13), New York Post (free registration) (10/13), Los Angeles Times (free registration) (10/13), BusinessWeek (10/13), CNET (10/13).

Ok.. so Apple decides to make a fairly ambitious step and get into a not-so-hot-up-to-now market of video on demand to be played on little screens like the ipod. I've heard several people wonder whether this is smart and I, personally, think its taken them too damn long to realize they could be making a whole lot more money on video content. Very specific video content, though. Nobody wants to see movies on the iPod, at least not at the moment - the screen is too small, fidelity is too low, why? Music videos on the other hand? of course! bring it on! Besides, Apple has a brilliant business model where they add functionality to a piece of hardware, simultaneously providing the content for that functionality, thus driving buying for early adopters for both hardware heads and music heads. Except, of course, Apple is not above being evil. They are still doing this whole - "renting rather than actually selling digital content". The music videos that one can buy from ITunes are "unburnable", meaning that they can not be burned on a CD and can not be transported and shared and can not be actually played anywhere outside the itunes environment. As usual, that eeks me out. In fact, I suspect this in particular may actually affect Apple's viability in the long run, when others start selling the same content but with few restrictions.

Selling digital content is tricky though. It seems that the way big companies have tried to "solve" their problems is buy changing the meaning of "sale" for this type of content. Unlike physical things that contain digital content, when you buy online and download, in many cases you aren't actually buying the content itself. You are buing the rights to use the content you want, in a way that is defined by the limitations the company puts on that content and everything else you try to do with what you "thought" you bought is actually illegal. Its like saying that you can only use your books or any other things, for just the purpose they have been prescribed for, not for anything else (in case of books, for example, you couldn't use them to hit your little brother over the head, stack them as paperweights or use them as bricks for imaginary architectural structures). Most importantly, you can't use digital content as gifts. Oh, you certainly can gift a "gift certificate" but we all know how impersonal those are. I suspect, in part, this particular limitation will create a problem for digital content sellers in the future (or at least i certainly hope so). Any good product designer will tell you unabashedly that whatever you "think" your product will be used for, its only one of a zillion of its uses. People are creative, you can't predict their behavior, but that's what makes life fun! Digital content providers seem to fully think that they can predict what people whant to do with their product, and produce resrictions heavily based on these predictions. They get a bit of clammoring about it, but their customer base is still small enough and there are enough alternatives that this hasn't backfired yet. I wonder when it will. Maybe the day E-bay allows people to auction off digital content... that day, things will get very interesting

In any case, going back to the iPod and Apple's plans for world domination through the device, there are some interesting side-effects both of Apple's recent Nano offering and this one. Harddrive companies where having major terror moments when Nano came out - the reason? there is no harddrive in the Nano. In general, the Nano removes the reason for a regular iPod and a Shuffle combination for people who like to be active (can't run with an iPod, the harddrive doesn't like that activity) and who want more than a few songs on the device. The hard-drive industry has largely been dependent on the iPod for its livelihood, so the idea of a larger hard-drive for a new ipod with new capability of video which suggests more and more hard-drives is good. Besides, it ensures that a move to solid-state memory will not be happening any time soon. There were a lot of people who heaved a sigh of relief at the news.

Find-A-Human Service

Find-A-Human -- IVR Phone S... - Approved* In a world of increasing mechanisation of labor, computer-phone systems (especially the ones that function on voice recognition alone) are extraordinarily annoying. More often than not, frustrated customers end up yelling "get me a human, you stupid thing!" only to get "i did not understand your request, did you mean .... ". Maybe there is a reason for stalling customers, by making them go through automated menus to get to speak to a human representative, but our voice recognition software is just not good enough to do things without causing frustration quite yet. Imagine a friend of mine who happens to be an Australian living in London. Her accent, understandibly, is rather far from "American". None of the voice recognition systems were able to understand a word she said, much to her frustration. Menu systems that require navigation via numbers are also not much simpler, requireing constant attention while the system slowly reads off menu items. If you didn't pay attention - you are lost. You may, however, get utterly lost even if you did.

So... this website, forwarded by a friend, does something ingenious - provides a set of shortcuts for getting "to a human" in many customer service IVR phone systems. Yay!