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.

Posted in lessons learned in the trenches, product development | Tagged , | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in lessons learned in the trenches, product development | Tagged , , | Leave a 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.

Posted in about us, lessons learned in the trenches, product development | Leave a comment

Why Quora Boards?

Kelly Abbott | January 4, 2012 - 4:34 am
Product Development Board - on Quora

My Product Development Board - on Quora

For those of you wondering why I chose to create a Product Development board, read this first.

I find the name “Boards” misleading because it connotes bulletin board. Really, it’s just a broadcast where the board owner can post a message that gets broadcast to the followers s/he chooses. So, when I created the Product Development Board it’s because I enjoy posting about the Product Development topic. I blog about Product Development quite a lot in this very blog. And I’m likely to start sharing my blog posts there as well as snippets from around Quora and around the Web on that board. Sharing to our Facebook page, LinkedIn, Google Plus and now Quora? Seems like a lot of work. I’ll have to measure how much response I get from each source to figure out whether it’s worth the additional effort to broadcast over on Quora.

Posted in product development, the internet as we see it | Tagged | Leave a comment

Quora: Product Development Board

Kelly Abbott | January 3, 2012 - 4:36 pm
Quora

Quora

I spend a great deal of time perusing Quora for knowledge. I find it to be both personally and professionally rewarding. I’ve asked and answered questions on a number of topics ranging from cooking to entrepreneurship to technology. Before the holiday break Quora released a new Boards featureset which allows users to do what people do on boards: create topics for discussion based and build a community within that topic. Quora did this before boards by helping people find or ask questions and then contribute, curate and follow the answers other provide. In addition to that, users can vote up or down answers and comment on each. You can even sign up to be a moderator for any topic if you feel so inclined. I find my best contributions are in working behind the scenes to help answers find their way to questions be it through clarification of a particular post or encouraging others to join in.

Today I created a Product Development board on Quora so that I can curate the topic more closely. I invited a couple dozen of my followers to follow the board and encourage anyone who does follow it to post links, ideas, and questions freely. Part of my rationale for doing so is tied to this feeling I have as a product guy in the organizations I’ve joined: isolation. The Product Person’s Dilemma is one I plan on writing more about but it boils down to this: Product Development requires that the product person be multi-disciplinary and weave themselves easily into technology, marketing and design groups within their companies. By doing so, Product people generally stand alone in their company with few others they can talk with to learn from and grow. On the one hand we are social working with many people from many backgrounds. On the other, we generally do not work with other Product people. Unlike CEO’s, CTO’s and CFO’s which have their own groups for managing companies, Product Managers (who are essentially the CEO’s of their products) find few dedicated resources online to compare notes and share best practices with other Product Managers. What resources do exist are often dedicated to Product Managers whose products exist offline. Where does that leave us who develop products for the Web? I have an answer for that….

Posted in product development, product reviews | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Google Indexing Ajax?

Kelly Abbott | November 8, 2011 - 4:35 pm

A certain rumor started circulating a week ago about how Google is now capable of indexing rendered Javascript. I received a notification from a customer of ours. My immediate reaction was skepticism and then optimism. If any company could pull that trick off it’d be Google. However, our own @jonnyjon did some research on this and it turns out that the claims, while accurate, are not precise. Here’s what Jon found.

  • Google is not currently indexing Echo stream client content (which is how we built all of our products at realtidbits)
  • Google is indexing Facebook comments when the comment widget is embedded via <iframe> or XFBML (which creates a dynamic iframe)
  • When you embed the Facebook comments widget via iframe or XFBML setting the content is rendered within an iframe as HTML not dynamic javascript AJAX
  • I don’t see any evidence that Google is in fact indexing Facebook comments served up via AJAX only static html that is rendered from an iframe
  • Google’s recent statement that they “can now index some dynamic comments” is true but very misleading they can only crawl javascript that creates a dynamic iframe
  • Displaying echo in an iframe was debated a while back but eventually rejected in light of backplane and having multiple widgets on a page all work together.
This last point is a good one and points to our philosophy on how and why we built our realtidbits products the way we did. By tapping into backplane, we may lose SEO bump but gain an engagement bump. Backplane-enabled apps allows us to break down the barriers between content silos from a widget-level to site-level and indeed to web-level. I’ve written more about realtidbits’ reason for being here where you can see how the products are envisioned.
One last note, we realize that SEO is important. We’re prototyping search engine indexible components for all Echo stream content. It’s a simple process, really. And one we have in beta with a few customers already. When we’re confident it does as it should, we’ll release it for all Echo ecosystem partners to license. Stay tuned.
Posted in lessons learned in the trenches, our products, product development | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

It’s all about the Committed Monthly Recurring Revenues

Kelly Abbott | February 19, 2011 - 7:08 am

Cloudonomics 101 – Creating a Financial Plan for your SaaS or Cloud Computing Business

Posted in lessons learned in the trenches, product development | 1 Comment

Membership Has its Priveledges

Kelly Abbott | February 16, 2011 - 3:09 pm
Kelly Abbott's Stream | Namesake

Namesake.com

I’ve been a member of Namesake for a while now. I met the co-founders Brian and Dan a while back when I was working in LA. We kept contact and over the years have even had occasion to party together. So when they invited me to join their new site Namesake, I joined and much to my joy, I found myself quickly enjoying what they had built. Even now, many months later, I find myself returning every day to find out everything I need to know to make myself look smarter in front of people for whom that’s important. In my business, that’s you, dear reader.

One of the things I find myself continually doing is clicking on the links members of Namesake post every day. Namesake is my de facto news source. Given that Brian and Dan co-founded and sold Newroo to News Corp a few years back, this should hardly be a surprise to me. But it is. Namesake is not packaged like a news site. But so often I get what I need to know about the world from it. News by any other name would smell as sweet.

Today I posted my first of many link rolls from what I’m learning there. I hope you get as much from it as I do.

Posted in product development, product reviews, the internet as we see it | Leave a comment

Product Reinforcement

Kelly Abbott | August 19, 2010 - 7:30 am

It’s a pleasure to work with dedicated people. It’s also a pleasure to work with smart people. But often, smarts and dedication are not enough. No matter what our goal, a sense of purpose is necessary. It’s not our love for the game that makes us win, it’s our desire to win. Winning is the defining moment.

In product development, winning is hard to define. We have a desire to sell products, so in a sense outselling your competitors could be the defining moment. Or exceeding our sales expectations. Maybe being profitable is your goal. Great. Goals are not always financial. I’ve helped friends get into the game, develop and launch their own products, and for them that was enough.

Products should be used to reinforce, not define who a company is.

I have Simon Sinek to thank for that. Simon writes for AskMen.com and keeps a company blog about inspired action here. I first heard about him when Aaron Fulkerson asked me to watch his TedX video where he presents the central tenet of his book, Start With The Why.

Of course, it’s become cliché to cite Apple as an example of greatness in business, which he does in this video. But if we’re going to take his message to heart, we have to get past the clichés and understand the true meaning of Product Reinforcement. It had never occurred to me to ask clients “why” before. On the surface, I have always asked “why” but only to understand the why they reasoned the way that they do. In other words, to help me understand their rational for developing a product the way they do, but not to understand “why” they exist in the first place.

If you ask why, the fundamental why, then you start to understand more clearly what the goals are. The answer becomes your defining moment. The bigger, the hairier and the more audacious your “Why,” the harder to define. But you’ll know it when you see it.

Have a look a the video. Buy the book. And someday, we’ll have a talk about our Why’s.

Aaron's Leg - A Tattoo of His Company's Logo with Pirate Theme

Simon's Book - Start With Why

Posted in lessons learned in the trenches, product development | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Amazon Data Transfer Rates Lowered

Kelly Abbott | February 2, 2010 - 2:03 pm

Amazon sent us an early valentine’s day letter this morning:

Dear AWS Customer,
As you know, we are constantly working to drive our costs down and become more operationally efficient. We then pass on those cost savings to our customers in the form of lower prices. Today, we are pleased to announce that we are lowering AWS pricing for outbound data transfer by $0.02 across all of our services, in all usage tiers, and in all Regions. These changes are effective February 1, 2010.
The new outbound data transfer pricing will be:
First 10 TB per Month: $0.15 per GB
Next 40 TB per Month: $0.11 per GB
Next 100 TB per Month: $0.09 per GB
Over 150 TB per Month: $0.08 per GB
Amazon CloudFront, the easy-to-use content delivery service, continues to have its own outbound data transfer pricing schedule in order to offer the lowest possible rates for each edge location. Effective February 1, Amazon CloudFront will also reduce its outbound data transfer prices by $0.02 per GB across all edge locations and for each usage tier.
Please see the pricing section for any of the AWS infrastructure services on the AWS website for more information. Thank you, as always, for your support.
Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team

Dear AWS Customer,

As you know, we are constantly working to drive our costs down and become more operationally efficient. We then pass on those cost savings to our customers in the form of lower prices. Today, we are pleased to announce that we are lowering AWS pricing for outbound data transfer by $0.02 across all of our services, in all usage tiers, and in all Regions. These changes are effective February 1, 2010.

The new outbound data transfer pricing will be:

  • First 10 TB per Month: $0.15 per GB
  • Next 40 TB per Month: $0.11 per GB
  • Next 100 TB per Month: $0.09 per GB
  • Over 150 TB per Month: $0.08 per GB

Amazon CloudFront, the easy-to-use content delivery service, continues to have its own outbound data transfer pricing schedule in order to offer the lowest possible rates for each edge location. Effective February 1, Amazon CloudFront will also reduce its outbound data transfer prices by $0.02 per GB across all edge locations and for each usage tier.

…yadda, yadda, yadda….

Sincerely,

The Amazon Web Services Team

Further proof that you can count on the cloud to keep getting cheaper.

Posted in product development | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment