Author Archives: Kelly Abbott

Join Us for a Realtime Super Bowl Party

Kelly Abbott | February 4, 2012 - 11:18 pm
Super Bowl Image Gallery

Realtime Super Bowl Image Gallery

We’re hosting a super bowl party of sorts. One of our products from Realtidbits is on display during the Super Bowl. It’s a live streaming photo gallery of photos from Indianapolis. We’ve been running the stream since Wednesday and have captured 972 images so far. We predict another 2,000 images might come in on Sunday as festivities ramp up.

We welcome you to visit the demo on Sunday during the game to see the Super Bowl’s realtime photo gallery in action. Below I’ve posted a little screencast I did to show how to interact with it. But the real fun is going to be in visiting the gallery on Sunday during the game.

In addition to our demo, you might also visit the Realtime Forums over at ESPN.com also powered by Realtidbits. The NFL forum is the most popular forum on the site (with over half a million posts). It’s often a vibrant forum with lots of off-topic conversation, but it’s a great example how a realtime experience can inject life into a static paradigm.

NFL Forum on ESPN.com

NFL Forum on ESPN.com

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It just works (and it’s better).

Kelly Abbott | January 30, 2012 - 9:41 pm

Apple's Retina Display

One of the lessons I’ve learned from Apple is that being better is just better. In every day parlance, Apple’s promotions are little more than getting their customers to say to friends and family “the proof is in the pudding.” The ways that Apple proves itself apart from its mainstream advertising efforts are too numerous to state in a single post. Each of their products and even their retail locations are studies in a better product experience. However, Apple knows the value of images more than any other company. That’s why you pay more for their photo books and why the retina displays are necessary for a company like them to keep their edge. I’m constantly impressed with how high the quality of photos are from my iPhone. And I just love showing off our family albums we have printed by Apple. Whenever someone looks at the quality of images in both, they assume I’m a good photographer. Not at all. I’m just letting Apple make me and my images look good.

If you’re trying to compete with Apple, you could might try aiming at the retina display. Giving consumers pretty pictures – in all their manifestations – is a high-value touchpoint. Literally.

This New OLED Display Blows the Retina Away.

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Making a Case For Change

Kelly Abbott | January 27, 2012 - 8:35 pm

Where do I start?

You could say one of our super powers @3ones is in dot-com turnarounds. When you revamp a dot-com, you end up touching so many parts of a product that the new version is almost a completely different product. We’ve done this in the dating space and we’ve done it in B2B software space. But regardless of the market for these products, the methodology for measuring success is the same. First you must state a case for change. The opinions of the exec team don’t matter. Your case for change will come from the voice of customer or the data you cull from actual usage and subscriptions. Once you set out to change, it’s important to save your study and then measure the results of your changes using the same criteria you used for assessing that need. I wrote in detail about the need to have empirical data guide your decision-making process over on Quora. But here’s a quick cheat sheet:

  1. Come up with a hypothesis.
  2. Test the hypothesis.
  3. Make a change to your product.
  4. Re-test.
  5. Did you move the needle in the right direction? If so, keep the change and go back to step 1. If not, revert and go back to step 3.

For obvious reasons, it’s best if you do this frequently and not save up a whole bunch of changes and release at once. That’s not always the possible in a pivot though. That’s why they pay us the big bucks. We specialize is big turnarounds.

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Extremely Fun and Incredibly Cheap

Kelly Abbott | January 25, 2012 - 5:42 pm

One of the great things about working in product development is that you get to dink around with other products all the time. On a whim, I bought “The Numberlys” which is an animated book recently on various top lists over in the Apple App Store. It’s a book, a video game and a movie all wrapped into an app. It’s luminous, happy, educational (if you’re my 4 year old) and inspirational. It has all the great qualities of a work of art: it’s literary, magical, and inspirational. It makes you smile and it makes you think. I gave it to D, my aforementioned 4-year-old, and he has read it once through each of the last 4 days. Getting him to sit still for 30 minutes is feat enough worthy of praise. We both have had fun playing the app together.

If you should need such a thing, the synopsis is as follows: the Numberlys are a society of beings where the conventions of the day are ruled by numbers. The society is monochromatic, dull and filled with the dust, smoke and debris of industry gone amok. A small band of Numberlys, not fit to be satisfied with status quo, start inventing letters. With the user as helper, those numbers get “built” and named. And with their arrival, a new world comes to be.

The app is not expensive. $5.99. It’s iPhone and iPad compatible. You may only play it once end to end, but I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did. If you linger long enough on each screen, some of the details are thoroughly remarkable. It’s worth cycling through more times to pick up on those nuances. Don’t let the simplicity of the game deceive you. The music, copywriting and art direction are all worth the price of admission.

When you’re done, cruise on over to the Numberlies Web site and have a look at some of the making of videos. Here’s a trailer in tell-tale portrait format.

The Numberlys App Teaser from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

Or follow Moonbot studios on Twitter. I await their next app with glee.

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Digital Literacy

Kelly Abbott | January 16, 2012 - 10:28 pm
Code Year_ Week 1 | Codecademy

Screenshot from Code Year - Week 1 from Codecademy

I get questions periodically from friends who want to know how to do stuff. Since I’m an entrepreneur, I guess they think I know how to get shit done. True enough; my job is to figure stuff out and make it happen. The kinds of questions I get asked are usually business related. How do I set up a corporation. Can I recommend good lawyers and accountants? How do I build a web page or app? Do I know any good programmers? For many entrepreneurs these questions can seem annoying, but I try as hard as I can to be a “Mensch” which means I often respond with some quick tips and a sincere wish of good luck.

Everyone once in a while I’m tempted to give people more advice, not satisfied to addressing the specific question at hand. In general, I have learned some things that I think all people should know these days. This is my short list (in no particular order):

  • Learn how to understand and create media of all types.
  • Learn how to be a better citizen; i.e. know the legal system work; know your rights and know how to navigate the system to get what you and the world need.
  • Learn finance.
  • Learn how to be emotionally intelligent; i.e. how to interpret people’s feelings from the things they communicate to you and to be a better communicator of your own feelings.
  • Learn yourself; i.e. what you are good at; what you like to do; and what you can get paid for doing.
  • Learn how to code.

It’s this last item that I’ve been revisiting since Codeacademy opened up a free year-long course in programming with one lesson a week (screenshot above). I started my career 10 years ago as a software engineer by hacking at HTML and doing graphics in Photoshop. Through years of journeyman work in the field of Product Development, people get more value out of me as a leader, organizer and idea guy, than as a programmer. But I couldn’t have gotten to that level if I didn’t also know the fundamentals of how our product work.

I’m hoping to remind myself about the fundamentals by taking these courses. You won’t catch me writing code for our products; no would I write our own contracts or do our taxes. I trust the people I work with to do that for me. But still, it’s nice to know that if I do have questions, I can rely on some experience, do research on my own first, and thus make my own quest to be a better leader more poignant. If you want to be self-actualized, knowing how to code (any amount) is one really great way today to get there.

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One Last Thought for the Week

Kelly Abbott | January 14, 2012 - 3:36 am

This week has been fun. Thanks for listening. Here’s my favorite hugging ghost salt shaker.

Free hugs!

Free hugs!

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Best (and Worst) Practices for Email Unsubscribing

Kelly Abbott | January 14, 2012 - 3:31 am
No Spam

No Spam

Here are a few screenshots I took at the end of 2011. I was cleaning house and just trying to cut down on the amount of noise I have in my inbox. It lead to more than a few examples I want to praise. And a few more examples that made me red in the face. If you get anything from this post, please comment on it or share it. I have a feeling it will be helpful to a lot of talented product developers out there. Enjoy!

[...]

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Is Quora Still Being Used?

Kelly Abbott | January 12, 2012 - 3:58 am

Yes.

Is it growing? Also, yes.

According to Compete.com and Quantcast.com Quora is seeing a stead growth in both of the audience reach metrics of monthly uniques and pageviews (100% growth year over year and 15% growth month-over-month).

What kinds of traffic are we seeing at Quora? What’s the community like? I don’t have that data. Not objective data anyway. I like it over there. I’ve made some new friends and found it easy to connect with other product people. But that’s just me. I find it more rewarding to contribute and moderate my topics of interest there than on Wikipedia. Where else can you ask the question, “What’s the secret, Max?” and get a clever answer within 24 hours?

A year ago, KISS published this blog post about Quora’s growth at that time. I’d like to see it updated. It does a good job of explaining why one would use Quora and, as it their want, some more key metrics outlining Quora’s successful growth.

World of Quora

World of Quora

Source: KISSmetrics

Posted in the internet as we see it | Tagged | 1 Comment

What Does 3ones Mean?

Kelly Abbott | January 11, 2012 - 6:08 am

The simplest, stable structure is a set of three sticks bound at one end. It’s the model for this camping chair I’d never seen until now. It’s how tee-pees are built (more or less). It’s also the basic design of this beautiful stool:

Three-legged stool

Three-legged Stool

3ones the name is based on three principles of design:

  1. Simplicity
  2. Scalability
  3. Stability

When we build stuff, we try to keep in mind how we can make it more simple, more scalable and more stable all the time. It’s our guiding principle. There you have them, our 3ones.

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What’s Live Got to Do With It?

Kelly Abbott | January 10, 2012 - 2:56 am

I’m watching the BCS Championship game live on ESPN3 right now. At the same time, I’m also watching their forums update in realtime.

ESPN3 Live

ESPN3 BCS Championship Game Live

This is what our forums product looks like during a live event.

ESPN Forums Live During the BCS Championship Game

ESPN Forums Live During the BCS Championship Game

And this is how it’s better than a typical forum (watch the video).

ESPN Live Forums Example from Kelly Abbott on Vimeo.

A pass is made and seconds later users are posting comments about it in our forums. You don’t even have to refresh the page. Talk about a true second-screen experience. It’s hard to know which game to watch: ESPN3 football or the ESPN forums verbal gymnastics on their forums.

Walk on over to the forums now and join me, yeah? (BTW, if you’re reading this after January 9, 2012 at about 8PM PST, you’re probably too late. But I’ll post some more videos later.)

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