da Mentors! Our time for your startup.

A few weeks ago I was attend­ing just another event where the main topic was “Star­tups”. Same old faces, same old words, same old chit-​chat.

I fired up my iPad browser and searched for the terms “startup event” and this was what I got:

startup event google search
Google search for “startup event”

Have a look at the num­ber of results: 136 mil­lions!!! Yes, that’s right. 1.3.6. millions.

I am sure that there are valu­able events for star­tups in that list, and I am not try­ing to make an argu­ment about you attend­ing those events. What I would like to under­stand is what is the aver­age value that the star­tup­per brings home after attend­ing those events.

Are they of any value to him or it’s just dream­ing a dream?

Sure enough I don’t have the answer. Maybe you find the VC will­ing to invest in your startup, or the best tech part­ner on earth, or a good idea for your next startup. Maybe not.

Then, the same night, I looked at this video from TED:


And that was, some­how, illu­mi­nat­ing. You should have a look at it, but if you don’t have time just jump to 9.30 and lean back for a cou­ple of minutes.

“Bring your shovel!”

I picked up the phone imme­di­ately and called Max, my part­ner at MU Invest­ments, and said straight away: “Look, we have to do some­thing for star­tups. I mean, some­thing valu­able for star­tups far away from what we do with MU Invest­ments. Some­thing free!”. He’s crazy enough not even to ask what. The reply was “Let’s do it!”. A few days later Marco also jumped on board and here we are with da Men­tors!.

da Mentors!

What’s da Mentors!?

It’s quite sim­ple. Each of us will give away four hours of his time to star­tups who need pro­fes­sional help.

If you need a review of your pitch, a mas­sage to your busi­ness plan, sug­ges­tion on your web site or appli­ca­tion usabil­ity or any­thing else that you think we may help with, just call us and we will try to help you to our best.

Best thing? It’s free. We are doing this on a pro bono basis.

The for­mat is quite simple:

  • You have five min­utes to deliver your pitch and explain on what you need help.
  • You will get two hours of our time to actively work together on your issue.
  • You will spend one week doing your homeworks.
  • You will get an extra two hours of our time to fin­ish your work.

This is it. Plain, sim­ple and free.

We also would like this to spread. If you want to dupli­cate the for­mat, please do it. If you want to be a men­tor with us, drop us a line and we will be happy to have you. If you want to extend it, you are free to do it.

You will be able to find da Men­tors! pretty much everywhere:

Have a look and let me know what you think about it!

Killed By Bad Presentations? React!

Powerpoint

Raise you hand if you have ever been almost killed by a bor­ing presentation.

Yes, I think that almost every­body out there has had some expe­ri­ence with this.

Truth is that bor­ing and bad archi­tected pre­sen­ta­tions are just part of the prob­lem, at least accord­ing to my per­sonal point of view. I have done a lot of pub­lic speak­ing recently and, you know what, it’s get­ting bor­ing at least.

I def­i­nitely hate the sce­nario where I am con­fined behind a podium and I am sup­posed to be the sub­ject mat­ter expert about some­thing while the peo­ple is sit­ting in the room lis­ten­ing to me. Worse is that their only option to inter­act with me is the usual ‘Do you have any ques­tions?’ at the end of the speech. There is no inter­ac­tion, no real time feed­back, and no option to adapt the con­tent of your speech to the audi­ence reactions.

Yes, that may be really scar­ing for most speaker. Most of them feel really com­fort­able being con­fined in the bor­ders of their slides. Think for a sec­ond at the poten­tial­ity of a sce­nario where you can dis­trib­ute in real-​time addi­tional con­tent to you audi­ence, make the envi­ron­ment react to what you are pre­sent­ing while not being con­fined behind a podium but being part of the audi­ence itself.

If we go for­ward we could even image to trans­form a speech in a par­tic­i­pated event where every­body gives his con­tri­bu­tion to the con­tent, maybe with just a ‘like’.

At the very same time while you speak you see a lot of peo­ple using their note­books, tablets, phone and you are sure that there may be a con­tinue flow of twit­ter, or Face­book sta­tuses being posted.

I think there is a lot of unex­pressed poten­tial in deliv­er­ing con­tent and sto­ries to peo­ple. It’s time to take action and build some­thing exciting!

Over the course of time I have dis­cov­ered that it’s much more excit­ing to work on some­thing new with other peo­ple, and that’s why I am call­ing for help and contributions.

I would like to form a group of peo­ple work­ing on new and cre­ative ways to deliver con­tent and sto­ries. Give a new set of tools to dig­i­tal sto­ry­telling. All what will be pro­duced will be licensed with a Cre­ative Com­mons License and made pub­licly avail­able. At the very same time soft­ware will be dis­trib­uted with a good Open Source license.

I already have a few ideas to build upon and a few bricks to use:

  • Use Microsoft Kinect Sen­sor or you web­cam to con­trol your presentation.
  • Arduino to con­trol lights, sounds and other phys­i­cal ele­ments in the room.
  • node.js to make the pre­sen­ta­tion inter­act with peo­ple in the audi­ence, col­lect rel time feed­back, and dis­trib­ute extra content.
  • Col­lect­ing social net­works feed­back in real-​time and dis­play it in a way that is mean­ing­ful to the speech.
  • a lot more…

So, if you are inter­ested in this drop me a line at js email
and let’s see how we can move on to build some­thing exciting.

I am look­ing for­ward to hear­ing from you!

P.S. No, you don’t really need to be a magi­cian to do this.

Have a look at this: Marco Tem­pest — The elec­tric rise and fall of Nicola Tesla

Photo Credit: Mike Licht, Notion​sCap​i​tal​.com

Nokia Lumia 800. First impressions.

Nokia Lumia 800

I have been look­ing at the Nokia Lumia 800 for a while and, finally, I decided to give it a try.

Here my list of likes and dis­likes after two weeks of inten­sive use.

Likes

I like the fact that the imple­men­ta­tion of the Metro UI has been really designed and extended deep into the UX design. To me it really looks clean and light. The side effect is that you may have more strict guide­lines when devel­op­ing appli­ca­tions. Basi­cally all the appli­ca­tions looks and behave the same in terms of User Inter­face and User Expe­ri­ence. Non bad in prin­ci­ple, but maybe annoy­ing for those devel­op­ers who want to bring in some­thing different.

I love the typog­ra­phy of the User Inter­face. Per­sonal thing, but I do really love it.

The phone is really respon­sive, and fast. From this point of view I am not miss­ing the iPhone at all.

The dis­play is really, really good, and mate­ri­als and fin­ish­ing are fan­tas­tic. I got the blue one but I think I would pre­fer a black one. Rea­son is the bezel would look part of the body of the phone and that should look great.

Con­tact merge from Out­look, Gmail, Twit­ter, Face­book, and other social net­works is great, even if it can get messy in the long run. I am just dis­play­ing my con­tacts from Out­look after hav­ing had all for a cou­ple of days.

The cam­era is fan­tas­tic for pic­tures and not as great for videos.

From an appli­ca­tion stand­point the mar­ket is very well pop­u­lated, at least for my needs. I have found all the core appli­ca­tions I use on my iPhone.

And now the dis­likes. As always they will be much more than the likes since I tend to focus more on what I don’t like.

Dis­likes

I feel that the screen is some­times over pop­u­lated. Com­par­ing the mes­sag­ing appli­ca­tion on the Lumia and on the iPhone you will have much more con­trols and but­tons on the Lumia. All the but­tons on the last raw share the same size and there is no empha­sis on the send button

Upgrad­ing the phone to the lat­est soft­ware ver­sion has been a pain. I work on a Mac and I had to run the upgrade process through the Zune soft­ware on a Win­dows vir­tual machine. Long and very annoy­ing process.

Bat­tery life is a seri­ous issue, at least for my uti­liza­tion pro­file. With WiFi, push e-​mail, and back­ground appli­ca­tion I can hardly make one day with the device. Dis­abling every­thing and acti­vat­ing the bat­tery saver options in the set­tings menu will let me go home at night with 40% bat­tery life on the phone.

Audio qual­ity in voice call is not as good as in the iPhone. The max­i­mum vol­ume is very low and i found that the sounds was brighter on an iPhone.

Some appli­ca­tions have their own search but­ton, and I always con­fuse that with the search but­ton on the bezel, Yes, maybe it’s just me get­ting old.

It seems that I can­not trim the vol­ume of the sound in the alarm appli­ca­tion. I hate this, and I hate how ven­dors put so lit­tle atten­tion to the most used appli­ca­tion in every phone.

I think that the iPhone vir­tual key­board is still bet­ter on the iPhone. I am not as fast as I am on the iPhone on the Lumia. Maybe I will need some more time to get used to the differences.

I also had some issues with cer­tifi­cates from my Exchange server when run­ning the con­nec­tion over WiFi at the office. This is a weird issue, but I had not seen this on my iPhone.

Some of the appli­ca­tions I installed (Foursquare, Twit­ter, Face­book) are not as respon­sive as their equiv­a­lent on the iPhone. Yes, I know about Twit­ter and Face­book inte­gra­tion, but I just wanted to make a com­par­i­son between the two dif­fer­ent implementations.

Con­clu­sion

I would say that the Nokia Lumia 800 is a very good phone, and it may play as a sub­sti­tute of my iPhone. I am com­pletely sat­is­fied with the oper­at­ing sys­tem and I like many of the fea­tures of the new UI/​UX. From that point of view noth­ing will make me want­ing to switch back to the iPhone.

Bat­tery life and audio qual­ity are a no go for me. Audio qual­ity may be a pure Nokia issue not depend­ing on the OS itself. Bat­tery life may be more OS related.

These two things are crit­i­cal to me and for this rea­son I will go back to the iPhone for the time being.

My e-​mail Management Policy

e-mailI notice that peo­ple is always sur­prised when I tell them about the way I man­age my e-​mail messages.

These are the rules I fol­low for my work related e-​mail:

  • I don’t use any kind of tax­on­omy to archive my mes­sages. I have just one folder called “Archive” where I move all the mes­sages that I may con­sider use­ful in the future. I trust search enough to be sure to find every­thing I want in a timely man­ner. Truth is that you will never be able to find what you want when you need it even with the most detailed tax­on­omy you can imag­ine. It’s also true that man­ag­ing a com­plex tax­on­omy is really time consuming.
  • Impor­tant to notice that there are very few mes­sages that I keep in there. I tend to delete every­thing that is not mean­ing­ful to me for some reason.
  • I am the Gen­eral Man­ager in the Milan stu­dio in frog design and I ask all the peo­ple in here not to copy me on every e-​mail they send. I trust every­body is a pro­fes­sional and that they can do their work. If there is an issue on some­thing, pick up the phone or just reach my desk.
  • I have just another impor­tant folder called “ACP” that is an acronym for “Ad Culum Parandi” (Thanks to @agaved for the name he sug­gested dur­ing the old times in 3). In that folder I archive stuff that may be crit­i­cal to save one of the most impor­tant things in my body. I’ll let you guess what it is.
  • I check my mes­sage one every two hours and I have dis­able noti­fi­ca­tions. If there is some­thing really urgent it should come through my phone or via a visit to my desk. Every­thing else can def­i­nitely wait for two hours.
  • I am a big fan of Three Sen­tences and I use that rule every time I can.

These are my basic rules. More could be writ­ten on how I man­age the con­tent. Maybe another post in the future will be worth writing.

Do you have other rules? What are they?

Leave your com­ments. I will be happy to read.

Your Mobile Phone Is A Chameleon

chameleonIn recent times I have been fas­ci­nated by the amount of new appli­ca­tions, and hard­ware, that allows your mobile phone to become aug­mented in its functionalities.

Music has been one of the first areas where this become a reality.

With iRig you may turn you iPhone or iPad in a music stu­dio. Just select the soft­ware mod­eled amp and effects and you are ready.

You can turn your iPhone in a POS accept­ing credit card with Square.

You can have a Geiger counter using a probe con­nected to your iPhone (here), or just sim­ply use your phone cam­era to do it. (here)

You can mea­sure dis­tances using echoes (here).

There are dozens of appli­ca­tion to check your heart rate using the mobile phone cam­era and flash, and one of your fingers.

Your phone can be used as a baby mon­i­tor, or a spy device if you like.

And these are just the appli­ca­tions I can remem­ber right now. There are hundreds!

As I was writ­ing in my pre­vi­ous post I think this is def­i­nitely a new area we should look at for inno­va­tion in mobile.

It shows how the envi­ron­ment around you can be con­nected to your mobile phones in ways that we could not imag­ine a few years ago. Cur­rent smart­phones have so many sen­sors that we have just started to scratched the surface.

The inter­est­ing point is around tech­nol­ogy. I am sure that engi­neers were not think­ing about a dis­tance mea­sure­ment device when they place a mike and a speaker in your mobile phone. There will always be some­one who will try to push the hard­ware and soft­ware to new lim­its. This already hap­pened in the past with SMS, and the new hard­ware and soft­ware now avail­able have just made that world closer to peo­ple will­ing to explore and innovate.

For sure you will not just place phone calls with your mobile. Not anymore.

Why Mobile Is So Important

Last week I had the chance to attend a big con­fer­ence, and i was sit­ting in front of hun­dreds of peo­ple look­ing at them while they were lis­ten­ing at the speakers.

I always use these events as oppor­tu­ni­ties to observe peo­ple, and what they do. I am not work­ing for a mobile telco oper­a­tor any­more but my pas­sion and love for mobile has not (yet) left me.

Every­body was sit­ting there in front of device screen. Lot of mobile phones, lot of tablets, few PCs.

And I was think­ing: wow, mobile is there, really!

Some of them were tak­ing pic­tures, oth­ers were record­ing the dif­fer­ent speak­ers, some were send­ing sta­tus updates to Twit­ter or Face­book, or just read­ing e-​mails dur­ing bor­ing talks.

I knew I had to make a very short com­ment on a keynote and I just decided to tell this peo­ple why I think mobile is so important.

Your mobile is always with you

Can you think of any other con­sumer elec­tron­ics device which spends more time with you? My mobile phone actu­ally is spend­ing with me much more time than my wife. Think about that, and real­ize that your user is there .

The user has time while in mobil­ity

Time is a scarce resource. Just think about the time you spend on your phone to kill time while wait­ing for something.

The mobile phone deliv­ers emo­tions

Isn’t that true? Think about it. Did you ever receive a mes­sage like this “Beat­rice is here! Both mom and baby are doing fine”, “I think we need a break. I’ll call you”, “We won the deal! great job”. Pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive, they are emotions.

Objects can now talk to your mobile phone

Today, more than ever in the past, object are able to talk with your mobile. Bar­codes, QR Code, NFC, pic­tures are just a few of the meth­ods the real world can use to con­nect with your phone. This is a new dimen­sion, and an impor­tant one.

You are always con­nected to the net

Well, ok, most of the times.

You mobile phone has many sen­sors

GPS, gyro­scope, cam­era, and micro­phone are just some of the many ways your phone can col­lect data from you and the envi­ron­ment around you.

Would you add some­thing to this list? Please, feel free to leave a com­ment if so.

Innovation In Cooking Pans

Just think about innovation.

Thermometer Pan

If we look at the def­i­n­i­tion of inno­va­tion on Merriam-​Webster online dic­tio­nary, here is what we get:

  1. : the intro­duc­tion of some­thing new.
  2. : a new idea, method, or device.

It’s quite sim­ple, isn’t it.

Some­how when we think about inno­va­tion we always think to some sci­en­tist work­ing in his lab full of expen­sive equip­ment. We feel like inno­va­tion is not sim­ple at all.

Yes­ter­day night I was cook­ing some past. I do like cook­ing and I have a few cook­ing pans on fire. One to boil water for pasta, another with some eggs in it, and the last one fry­ing some bacon for Car­bonara pasta.

I was cook­ing on autopi­lot and when bacon was ready I did not notice the han­dle was too close to the other pan and got very, very hot.

I hurt myself, noth­ing serious.

The main pur­pose of the han­dle on the cook­ing pan is to avoid these kind of prob­lems, but it did not work since the han­dle was too close to another source of heat, the other cook­ing pan.

The orig­i­nal han­dle con­cept works for the major­ity of uses, but it could not avoid me to get hurt by heat. Since its orig­i­nal design, it did not change much. There are some fancy cook­ing pans with ther­mome­ter on the han­dle to check food tem­per­a­ture, but that’s more related to the food than to the safety of the user.

Yes, you know that han­dles can get hot and you should always use some­thing to han­dle those pans. This is a ratio­nal thought. You have to think about it and not always you think, spe­cially when you have three pans run­ning at the same time.

There can be inno­va­tion in cook­ing pans? Obvi­ously, yes.

We can think of:

  • Hav­ing pans made of effi­cient mate­r­ial that will opti­mize energy spending.
  • Dif­fer­ent shape of pans for dif­fer­ent food type.
  • New non­stick material.
  • Method to make cook­ing faster and better.

As you see, there is lot of room for inno­va­tion in pans. Most of the things I have writ­ten will take a lot of effort into development.

I was just think­ing about an easy one.

I was just won­der­ing why nobody has ever thought of hav­ing han­dles that can change color if they heat.

The usual nice look­ing black if every­thing is fine. Yel­low if it’s hot, but still man­age­able, and red if it’s really hot.

Any­way, Car­bonara pasta was great.

The Future Of Product Design In A Connected World

Salone del Mobile

We will hold a spe­cial event at our Milan stu­dio dur­ing the Salone del Mobile week.

Hol­ger Hampf and Max Bur­ton, both Exec­u­tive Cre­ative Direc­tors at frog design, will give a speach on the future of prod­uct design in a con­nected world.

If you have some spare time, want to meet illu­mi­nated peo­ple and enjoy great food then join us on Fri­day April 15th.

Satellite display devices

When I joined H3G, known with the com­mer­cial name of 3, back in 2001 I remem­ber that UMTS mobile phone did not even exist.

We started look­ing at mobile device trends and one thing was quite evi­dent: devices were get­ting smaller and smaller.

Here’s and exam­ple of what I was using at the time.
Motorola V60, great J2ME imple­men­ta­tion for that time though.

Motorola v60

Other sim­i­lar hand­sets I was play with were the Eric­s­son T28 and the Nokia 8310. Small size and light weight was the main dri­ver in GSM devices evolution.

Then we started to think what a UMTS mobile phone had to look alike and which ser­vices we were going to deliver to our clients. It was pretty much clear that the trend was going to be very different.

Mul­ti­me­dia was going to drive devices to big­ger screen sizes and, pos­si­ble, touch displays.

Year after year we saw screen size increase reach­ing what we see to day.

You range from basic candy bar mobile phone with a 2.2″ inches dis­play up to the 3.5″ iPhone dis­play and to the new Acer Stream 3.7″ display.

Touch and dis­play size are play­ing a big role in the game today.

A new trend is emerg­ing: satel­lite dis­play devices.

The first exam­ple of this is the Sony Eric­s­son Live­View.

Sony Ericsson LiveView

It’s a very nice device. 1.3″ dis­play size, Android based. The Sony Eric­s­son Live­View will con­nect to your mobile phone and will dis­play caller ID, incom­ing SMS, face­book noti­fi­ca­tions, twit­ter update and so on. It’s def­i­nitely a satel­lite of your mobile dis­play small chunks of rel­e­vant informations.

What I like the most if that the device is pro­gram­ma­ble and you can install already baked appli­ca­tions from the Android mar­ket. Even­tu­ally Sony Eric­s­son will release an SDK to allow third par­ties to develop applications.

Actu­ally Sony Eric­s­son already did this kind of stuff in the past with a blue­tooth wrist watch that was able to dis­play phone noti­fi­ca­tions. It was not pro­gram­ma­ble at but it was the first step toward LiveView.

Some other quite nice devices, not really con­verg­ing to the mobile phone world are devices like the Texas Instru­ment eZ430 Chronos. It’s a pro­gram­ma­ble wrist­watch that is equipped with short range com­mu­ni­ca­tion fea­tures that will allow you con­nect the wrist­watch with your per­sonal computer.

Another inter­est­ing device, fully pro­gram­ma­ble via an SDK, is the inPulse wrist watch. It first appeared cou­ple with a Black­Berry device allow­ing the client to see noti­fi­ca­tions with­out pick­ing up his phone. In this case con­nec­tiv­ity is pro­vided by BlueTooth.

I def­i­nitely think these are inter­est­ing devices that may open up oppor­tu­ni­ties for new applications.

Noti­fi­ca­tions, quick inter­ac­tion with a back­ground appli­ca­tion run­ning on the phone are just the beginning.

There is a lot of space to build new stuff with these devices. Some­how I think this can be part of the future of mobile.

Which one would you get and what for?

Hon­estly I think that for the time being I would go with the Sony Eric­s­son Live­View, even if the inPulse is quite tempting.

3 Web Cube

The 3 Web Cube was the last prod­uct devel­oped by my team before I left H3G to join frog design.

I think it is one of the best prod­uct we ever designed, even if it had a trou­bled birth, somehow.

3WebCube

From a tech­ni­cal point of view it is noth­ing else that a MiFi device; a WiFi/​UMTS router for domes­tic use.

The orig­i­nal idea was very sim­ple. Let’s take an exist­ing MiFi archi­tec­ture, redesign it for domes­tic use, and sim­plify the end user User Experience.

Sounds easy, isn’t it. Well, it wasn’t.

Design wise it’s made of two dif­fer­ent pieces. The first piece is the device itself. It can be plugged in a wall out­let and it will starts its oper­a­tions automatically.

The sec­ond piece is a cra­dle where you can plug in the main device in order to place it on a desk or on any flat surface.

Design was an inter­est­ing exer­cise. We ana­lyzed all of the MiFi devices and UMTS/​WiFi routers out there and we dis­sected them from an hard­ware point of view. What are the func­tions of all the LEDs? How do you power the device? What visual indi­ca­tions are given to the user? How does the device com­mu­ni­cates its sta­tus to the client?

The same process hap­pened on the soft­ware side. How do you con­fig­ure the device? How do you con­nect to the 3G net­work? How is the con­nec­tion man­aged? How do you con­fig­ure your WiFi connection?

We found that most prod­ucts were com­plex, unfriendly and ugly. Well, most of them.

Our goal was to have a sim­ple, sim­ple, sim­ple device.

The next step was to strip out everything.

What is impor­tant for the cus­tomer? The answer was an easy one:

  1. He wants to know how strong the 3G sig­nal is.
  2. He wants to know the sta­tus of the device.

That’s it. Noth­ing else.

This is why the device has just one visual sig­nal indi­ca­tor in the front show­ing the strength of the 3G sig­nal and a set of blues LEDs in the back to visu­ally rep­re­sent the sta­tus of the device.

We wanted our client not to be scared about the device and the configuration.

If you look at the main device it’s a very sim­ple one. It has a plug on the back, one but­ton in the front and that’s it. When the client will take it out of the box the very first thing that he will see is the wall plug. The only thing he can do is to plug the device. Noth­ing else.

Then some magic hap­pens. The device turns on auto­mat­i­cally, con­nect to the 3G net­work and pow­ers up the WiFi inter­face. In less than fif­teen sec­onds the device is up and running.

Now you are ready to con­nect to the Internet.

Just look at the quick user guide and type the WiFi pass­word on your per­sonal com­puter and your connected.

Three sim­ple steps com­pared to a much dif­fi­cult path with other devices.

We have seen other prod­ucts with huge user man­u­als and CDs in the pack­ag­ing. We did not want this.

The pack­ag­ing is very sim­ple. You have the main device, the cra­dle and just one leaflet with the quick user guide. That’s it.

The quick user guide has been designed to be visual in order to show to client what he has to do to con­nect to the Inter­net in three sin­gle steps.

My team has worked really hard on this prod­uct, and it is not per­fect. What’s the reason?

Any prod­uct, or ser­vice, you design has to cope with exist­ing processes in your com­pany and we had to go through so many hur­dles with this. We come down to com­pro­mises that some­how made the prod­uct less friendly com­pared to what we orig­i­nally designed. Well, you know. That’s how it works.

Nev­er­the­less it is some­thing I am really proud of.

Thank you to all of my ex-​team who has worked on this and to all of the col­leagues that made this hap­pen: Adam, Ser­gio, Lavinia, Mauro, Marco, Oronzo, Francesco, Marco, Mar­lene and so many others.

We wanted to cre­ate magic, and now I still do!