Yesterday, after returning from my trip to the Bay Area this weekend, I qualified for a free Rapid Rewards trip on Southwest airlines and received a confirmation email with the award codes. Yet the email did not include a link to post an announcement to Facebook or any other element of social interaction or social gaming–for example, to see which of my Facebook friends had qualified for trips or who had earned the most credits in the past year.
In many ways, frequent flyer programs are the original social games. Users receive points for activity, they can level up based on combined actions over time, many consider achieving high mileage levels a status symbol, and some go to great lengths to get there. Yet, for some reason, while Zynga, Foursquare, and others have demonstrated the power of enabling users to compete with their friends for points-based activity, for some reason, Southwest and the other airlines seem to have missed this wave.
As far as I know, I have never seen an update on Facebook when a friend has received a new travel award or reached a new level of frequent traveler status. For that matter, I have never been asked to post to Facebook when I booked a new flight or completed a trip, nor have I been asked if I would like to share my point status with friends as a game or competition (I probably would have no privacy issue with this).
Frequent flyer programs are already hugely successful points-based activity systems. The problem is, right now they seem to be games of solitaire. Hopefully, the airlines and other travel companies soon will take them to the next level.
It has been over 40 days since the BP oil rig explosion and blow-out that has been spewing 15K-20K barrels per day into the Gulf and there is still no end in sight. Aside from the media coverage of the potential devastating impact on the environment and way of life of the people in the affected areas, there is now a lot of discussion about the events that led up to the explosion and how the government and the energy industry can prevent similar events in the future.
All that is good and necessary. There are certainly steps the government should take to ensure better enforcement of regulations in the future, such as separating revenue-collection from policing to reduce conflicts of interest. However, these discussions and the coverage of the attempt to cap the well are missing the larger point–why is it that neither BP nor the government had taken any steps to develop the expertise necessary to fix catastrophic problems with deep-water wells before allowing drilling to take place?
BP is now on its fourth and apparently final attempt to minimize oil flow from the damaged well before the relief wells they claim will permanently fix the problem in August. As with the other three attempts, BP has warned the odds of this fix working are low due to the difficulty of the fix and the fact “it has never been attempted before at this depth.”
This is the problem. Analysts now estimate the spill will cost BP $40 billion, which is roughly 25% of the value of the company. Some investors believe BP will be placed into receivership or could be broken up and sold as a result of the crisis. (Never mind that current legislation limits BP’s civil liability to $75 million or the government is discussing raising this limit to $10 billion–Congress can and probably will retroactively remove any limit on the liability.)
Accidents happen. Always. Corruption happens. Bending the rules happens. Given the massive cost for BP, the environment, and the local population, it should have been a no-brainer for BP and regulators to spend whatever budget was necessary to be able to confidently manage this type of situation and dozens of other possible scenarios. I do not claim to know any details of oil drilling, however, I have to believe with a budget of $1-$2 billion, BP and the government could have developed–and fully tested at similar depth–the types of techniques they are attempting to use now. They could have and should have staffed a team of scientists and engineers full-time to do nothing but simulate catastrophic failures and practice containing them.
Yesterday it was reported that for the full size of the spill since the start of the crisis, the U.S. as a nation burns through this amount of oil every 5 minutes. With that type of massive energy need, it is inevitable we will have accidents that, while they are small relative to our energy need, are huge in terms of real environment and economic impact for millions of Americans. Preventing accidents is important. Developing the ability to successfully contain them is critical and this should be part of the plan for the future.
Full disclosure: I have been a BP shareholder for several months as a hedge against a major global political crisis. I am certainly paying the price now.
This week we are starting the KlickFu private beta. For those who don’t deal with the details of making software every day, a private beta means we are starting to distribute KlickFu to a small group of users to have them try it out and give us feedback, such as: do you like it, did it install correctly, did you have any issues downloading it, does it crash or conflict with any other programs on your machine, what do you like or not like about it, and how would you change it if you could?
As you can tell, these early users are quite helpful for us, giving us key feedback on how to make sure the product works correctly and does cool stuff that people like.
We are starting to accept requests for the KlickFu private beta now. Participation is totally free–all we ask is that you install KlickFu on your machine, start to play around with it, and give us feedback. To request an invite, go to KlickFu.com and enter your email address. We will notify you when we are ready for you to start using the system.
Note: To participate in this round of the beta, you must be running Windows Vista or 7.
Thanks, we are looking forward to you using KlickFu!
For a lot of the time my co-founder Rod and I have been working on KlickFu, we have often had the feeling the area of the business we have been focusing on–enhancing the experience working with the Windows desktop–is maybe not the coolest part of the industry. Yes, Windows 7 is an excellent product and has been quite successful for Microsoft, however, for the past year, many of my fellow startup founders have been focused mainly on building new apps for Facebook or iPhone/iPad or Android. Of course, this makes total sense, since these areas are evolving rapidly and many successful new businesses have been launched in the past few years.
Candidly, it has been fun working in an area that is a bit off the beaten path. (One of these days, I will write a post about the pros and cons of zigging while most others are zagging.) And while someday, we will look seriously at how KlickFu can be adapted and evolved for mobile and tablets (and have built in some hooks for doing so), for now, we are totally focused on building and perfecting the core KlickFu experience, which is aimed directly at users clicking and dragging on the OS desktop, while sitting at a desk using a mouse or a trackpad… i.e., old school.
So it was a nice surprise this week when Google confirmed they are acquiring BumpTop, which makes a nice 3D environment for managing and working with desktop content. (You can download their free version for a more days,here.) While it is true Google is discontinuing BumpTop’s main product, it is probably a fairly safe bet they will be incorporating some of the gestures or concepts into Chrome OS or Android, or both. Also, while some of the implementations may be for mobile, some of them may also be for tablets or even laptop/desktop computers.
As you will start to see (soon!), KlickFu is quite different from BumpTop–for the most part, we are not looking to replace the functionality of Windows Explorer or other systems for managing desktop content, rather we want to create new experiences to complement and enhance these features in ways that are fun and useful for users. However, it is great to see others working in the space, and also to see the validation from a leader like Google that concepts from the traditional desktop can be extended and merged to mobile and tablets and maybe other new platforms. Of course, we hope to make a contribution in this area as well.
Congrats to BumpTop and best of luck at Google. We look forward to joining you and hopefully others, working to make what was once almost old, new again.
The drug company, Bayer, recently introduced a glucose meter that attaches to the Nintendo DS called the Didget, “to help kids manage their diabetes by positively reinforcing consistent blood glucose testing habits and awarding points that kids can use to unlock new game levels and customize their gaming experience.”
On the one hand, it is great Bayer is applying gaming methods to helping kids manage type 1 (early onset) diabetes, which requires education and constant monitoring. On the other, it is quite worrisome the need for products to manage type 2 (adult onset) diabetes, which is often associated with obesity, is predicted to explode in the coming decades. The Center for Disease Control estimates 1 in 3 children born in the U.S. after 2000 will develop diabetes during their lifetimes, with some minorities as high as 1 in 2. The consequences are well-documented: blindness, amputations, kidney dialysis, heart disease and early death.
Those numbers are shocking. You could make the case that, after education, helping Americans eat better and maintain healthy lifestyles is the most important issue facing the country.
Given the importance of the issue and the proven power of social games to educate and incentivize behavior, it would be great to see developers create games with the appeal of FarmVille that incorporate some real education and awareness about the contents of food, if not outright encouraging users to participate in real exercise. True, there are sites like Skimble.com, a fellow Founder Institute graduate which was featured recently in the NY Times and does a great job of building community around physical activity. However, these sites are mainly for folks who are already active and looking to connect. What I am referring to would be games that capture the imagination of people of all ages, many of whom currently do not regularly exercise or eat healthy, and inspire them to learn about food and diet, and at least exercise virtually–maybe with a halo effect that leads to real life changes.
Certainly, KlickFu will support some simple instant games and apps that could play a role in this type of market. However it happens, it would be great to see a continued trend of gaming used to help kids and adults become healthier and more engaged in the real world, not just the virtual one.
Erick Schonfeld wrote an article in TechCrunch today called Google’s Need For Speed, in which he argues Google is obsessed with speed because it leads users to do more searches, which results in more ad clicks. He notes Google research that shows delays of a few hundred milliseconds returning results translated to 0.6% fewer searches by users, which could add up to tens of millions of dollars per quarter in lost revenue.
It is true Google is obsessed with speed. Recent examples include TechCrunch’s confirmation that Google’s URL shortener is the fastest on the Internet as well as the statement by Gmail product manager, Todd Jackson, at SXSW that no new features will be added to Gmail that increase latency, period.
However, to say Google is passionate about speed because it leads to more searches and more ad revenue misses the larger point. Instead, Google’s speed obsession comes from the recognition by the founders and other Googlers that faster speed makes most products better, and better products lead to broader adoption, greater usage, a higher quality of life for everyone, and yes, more revenue and profits for Google.
Latency is a tax. The longer it takes to do something, the less likely we are to do it, or to do it often, or to enjoy doing it. For example, take going to the DMV or the post office. These errands are dreaded mainly because they take a long time and involve waiting for a random and unpredictable amount of time. If you knew going to the DMV would take 5 minutes or the post office was a simple in-and-out trip, you might not love it, but you would not dread it.
The same goes for tech products. Google search by voice on the iPhone is a great feature–the voice recognition is truly remarkable. However, because the feature takes *a few more seconds* to load and return results, I usually type the query instead. If the experience were instant, I would use it more often, which might lead to me using other Google services or iPhone apps more, which when added together may make me less likely to switch phones and even carriers–big differences from latencies of a few seconds.
However, more than increasing revenue, Google’s founders are simply passionate about making better products and faster experiences. I recall Larry Page in a company-wide meeting bemoaning the fact that it takes longer to boot up a machine and write a simple Word document today than it did 20 years ago–i.e., the industry as a whole had failed to improve one of the most basic computing tasks in two decades. He was personally bummed by this lack of performance. And all Googlers are well aware of Larry’s and Sergey’s practice of expressing latency in terms of the human lifetimes lost, e.g. “If this feature takes 2 seconds longer than it should and it is used 200 million times per day by users, that means we are wasting 146 billion seconds of users’ time per year, which equates to 61 human lifetimes–in other words, this feature is killing 61 people per year.”
In other words, Google cares about speed because Google cares about users. That increases revenue for Google and it will for the rest of us too.
It has been almost a year since I left Google, yet I am struck how often I refer to lessons I learned there as I make daily decisions for KlickFu. I thought it might be helpful to summarize some of the most important things I learned at Google, some of which may be fairly obvious, and some may be less so.
1. Speed is the most important feature of any product. This is true for any tech product, and especially true for web services. You may believe users are going to love the new bells and whistles you are designing for your product. However, if they are going to slow it down, even as little as a few milliseconds (!)–or make the product feel slower in actual use even if it is not slower–you probably should not add the feature. In fact, if there are 2 or 3 (or 6 or 8 ) features you can remove from your product today to make it significantly faster (again, removing tenths of seconds), you should probably remove them or redesign them. It is well-known at Google when the founders are looking at a new product, they will sometimes count as a page loads, “One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand…” If they get to 3, you’ve probably got a problem. Also, to this day, Google posts the search time next to the number of results (upper right corner of the page) for every query.
2. If you can’t measure it and scale it, don’t launch it. If you are building a product for a large number of users, you have to design the product from the beginning to work–and work fast!–for a large number of users. This does not necessarily mean on day 1 you have to handle terabytes of data, however, as the product is being designed, you must anticipate, how does this product work when we have 1 million users, 50 million users, 500 million users–if you design it well, you might! The same goes for measurability, if you cannot measure the usage of your product or feature, you will have no way of knowing whether users like it, or if they do, how to improve it. Build the measurement–and the dashboard!–into the product from launch.
3. Innovate in every aspect of your company. Many companies believe innovation is something that happens with engineers, UI, and product people and the rest of the company exists to support and/or sell their creations. Google realizes every aspect of the company can and should be constantly considered for ways to improve or do things differently to benefit users, employees, partners, the environment, the world, and investors. Not only does this continuously improve the company, it creates an atmosphere of innovation in which employees in every area are constantly coming up with new ideas for their departments as well as the products. A few examples of Google innovations outside product teams include the company’s recent use of eco-friendly Bloom Energy generators; the Google stock option after-market, where employees can sell un-exercised options as options (rather than having to exercise the option), realizing far greater gain; and simple things like placing publicly available umbrellas next to doors of most buildings.
4. The right answer is the right answer, regardless of whether anyone else has done it that way before. Often there is pressure, overt or unconscious, to do something a certain way simply because that is the way it has always been done. Google places a high-value on truly considering all options, and taking the course of action that is most beneficial for users and the company even if it might seem strange at first. A great example of this is the Google IPO, in which the company chose to use a Dutch auction format for selling its shares over the strenuous objections of investment bankers involved with the deal. Although this format was highly unconventional, it ended up netting several hundred million dollars more capital for the company. Google makes these types of decisions every day in smaller ways throughout the company. How can you outperform your competitors if you do everything the same way they do?
5. Google cares deeply about user privacy. Google’s approach to privacy is often the subject of discussion and debate, especially recently with the launch of Google Buzz. From experience, I can say Google the company as well as employees care deeply about protecting user privacy. Googlers know their business is based entirely on user trust and they themselves are strongly driven to make the web a useful, safe place for users. No company is perfect, however, if you had to choose a large company to possess as well as safeguard a lot of valuable user data, in my opinion, you could not ask for a better company than Google.
6 Even smart people make mistakes. Google has a lot of really smart people… and some that are really, really smart. Overwhelmingly, these people work hard to create products that make the world a better, easier, faster, more economically-efficient place. However, even smart people screw up sometimes–make products people don’t want or that are confusing, annoying, or sometimes even a bit scary (e.g., Buzz, Street View). No worries, when this happens, the main thing is to acknowledge the issue, apologize, and most importantly, fix it asap. Whatever you thought about the recent Buzz launch, the speed with which Google acknowledged and fixed the issues was excellent and impressive. If you have good intentions and fix issues quickly, users can be quite forgiving.
7. Increase resources on new projects based on user response. Through 20% time and other methods, Google encourages employees to constantly create new features and products they believe users want. They do this with essentially zero approval required other than simple sign-off from a manager. By minimizing the initial investment, the company can enable developers to pursue new products quickly, identify the ones users respond to, and increase investment in those.
8. You can maximize internal transparency without leaking secrets publicly. For a large company at the forefront of its industry, Google is remarkably transparent internally, yet quite good at not sharing secrets publicly. For example, each quarter, after Eric Schmidt gives his presentation to the company’s board of directors, he gives the same presentation to all the full-time employees. This is something I have never seen in a company of 30 people, let alone 20,000. Yet, the employees understand that in order to receive this level of transparency, they have to be especially good about not sharing secrets. For example, as far as I saw, there were zero leaks about the launches of Google Wave as well as Buzz, even though thousands of Googlers were using these systems internally for months before they went public.
9. Doing what’s best for users is always the right answer. Always. Of all the nice things about working at Google as a product manager, the best–by far–in my opinion is that the main driver of every decision about the product and the business is, “What is the best thing for users?” Google realizes that with their core search business, they are always one click away from losing their entire user base. Yet, their response is not to try to lock in users by holding data hostage or creating proprietary partnerships with other powerful players–instead they focus on creating the fastest, most useful services so users will want to stay. In my opinion, Google’s approach in this way has been a main factor in influencing the entire culture of the Web to put users first.
10. Even large companies can be well-managed. Managing a large organization (i.e., over 1,000 people) has many inherent challenges. With all the stereotypes of corporate life, it is easy to believe that once a company reaches a certain size, it simply cannot be managed in a way that is efficient and flexible for employees. Through innovation and scalable processes, Google shows it is possible to run a large organization and still produce outstanding results in an environment that is responsive to employees as well as customers. I believe this model can be quite useful for government as well, and I am optimistic that the Obama administration is looking to apply many of the techniques from Google and similarly well-run companies to the U.S. government.
Last week, we filed the provisional patent for the technology in KlickFu, so now we can gradually start coming out of stealth mode (finally!). One of the ways we are doing that is by running a KlickFu development contest with the UCLA ACM computer science student group. Last night was the kick-off meeting for the contest, in which UCLA CS students will create apps for KlickFu, then next month, we will bundle all the approved apps together in a special KlickFu UCLA version the developers can send to their friends at school. There was a great turn-out at the event last night and we are looking forward to seeing what types of apps the students come up with! (Btw, we have already gotten requests to do a similar contest at USC, which we may do as soon as this one is fully launched.)
We are very excited to be working with students as some of the early developers for KlickFu. Because it enables developers to make small, instant games and apps (as well as more complex ones), we believe KlickFu is an excellent platform for students to build their skills in window management, graphics, and user experience. For the participants, we hope this will be a fun opportunity to build legit shrink-wrapped software they can share with their friends. For KlickFu, we are going to get some excellent feedback on the new (and improved) SDK, as well as some interesting apps to distribute with the free version of the program.
Special thanks to our friends at Microsoft for contributing some great prizes for the developers–an XBox 360 and a Zune HD–we appreciate it! Stay tuned in about 5 weeks to see the Bruin apps.
Last Thursday night I went to the info meeting for the upcoming Founder Institute session in Los Angeles. Founder Institute (FII) is the entrepreneur training and mentoring program started and run by Adeo Ressi, in which I participated last fall. After the initial session in Silicon Valley, FII started additional sessions in NYC, Seattle, Washington D.C., and San Diego. Now they are expanding to Denver, Singapore, Paris, and L.A.
I am particularly excited about FII starting a session in L.A. because: 1) FII is an excellent program and can be a great help to new founders; and 2) through its expanded sessions, FII is creating an amazing network of mentors and alumni–the L.A. session mentors include Michael Robertson (MP3.com), Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese), and Peter Guber (producer of Rain Man, Batman and other blockbusters), among many others–I am looking forward to getting to know the mentors and founders in my local area!
The L.A. session is being run by Ken Rutkowski, founder of KenRadio.com and one of the most engaged and connected folks in the L.A. technology and media scene. The event on Thursday was hosted at Clearstone Venture Partners and there were about 50 founders present. Adeo made the trip from Silicon Valley to present about FII and answer questions and there was a lot of excitement among founders for the program.
I am looking forward to helping out and participating in the FII program in L.A. in any way I can. If you are interested, you can apply here. The early admission deadline is Feb 15–good luck to all the new FII L.A. founders!
Blippy.com is the new social media site where users can automatically publish feeds of everything they buy. Unlike Beacon, the unsuccessful shopping news feed launched by Facebook and then scuttled due to negative user feedback, Blippy is entirely opt-in, and purchase notifications can be limited to specific vendors (Amazon, iTunes) or credit cards.
After using the site a bit, I am not sure if I want to publish my purchases in this way, or view all the purchases of my friends. However, given the early traction the site is getting, along with the A-list investors such as Ron Conway, it seems clear Blippy has an excellent chance of succeeding.
The contrast between Blippy and Beacon, in terms of their approach to privacy as well as user reaction, is striking, especially given Facebook’s recent decision to change the defaults for Facebook to make more content fully public and searchable. Of course, it is in both sites’ interest to maximize the amount of content that is made public by users. The more public content available, the more that content can be used to generate user activity and engagement as well as to target ads.
Throughout its history, Facebook has taken an aggressive stance toward making different types of content public on an opt-out basis (i.e., without getting user permission first). The strategy worked well with publishing the initial News Feed, not so well with Beacon, and the jury is still out on the latest shift in publishing defaults.
As an aside, by adopting a brand identity with users as a company that will periodically “lead the way” to broader public publishing of previously semi-private information, I believe Facebook has a strategic advantage over larger companies, such as Google, who simply cannot take this aggressive an approach due to not wanting to damage the user trust that drives their $185 billion core search business.
Meanwhile, Blippy has established an effective middle ground–publishing data publicly that was previously thought to be highly private, credit card purchases, however doing it in a way where users feel in control. By adding extra value such as filtering for the most important/interesting purchases and linking to vendors for follow-on sales, this will be a highly valuable business if users adopt it.
As the pendulum shifts toward users becoming increasingly comfortable publishing what until recently has been considered private data, it makes me wonder if we will begin to see other startups publishing data considered now to be even more private, such as:
- medical records, results of doctor visits
- body metric data, including sleep/wake cycles, exercise, and sex
- pay stubs, charitable donations, tax returns, bank balances
- TV watching, including pauses and rewinds
- school grades, attendance, homework, and test scores
- voting for public elections
- DNA and genetic conditions
In other words, is there any type of data so private, users will not eventually be willing to share it in an automated way, with their friends and/or the world? Americans of a certain age (say, born before 1990) have been raised to believe that privacy is a fundamental right, necessary for maintaining a healthy psychology, and a source of national pride. However, if there are enough safeguards in place against discrimination, minimal social backlash against individual habits, and greater value derived from sharing information with friends, we may see users choosing to make more data public than we think.
