An archive of my writings from 2007 till 2011. If you're interested in the recent stuff, visit my Tumblr at dvirreznik.com.
Season 8 of Israel’s leading comedy/late-night show, Eretz Nehederet (A Wonderful Country), starts shooting soon, and in the meantime they started publishing short clips online.
The latest one is a parody on the world’s famous mobile game – Angry Birds, with a Middle-eastern twist 🙂 The English version was published 4 days after the Hebrew one and already surpassed it by # of views. Even received a share from Jeremiah Owyang on facebook.
Enjoy!
Back in July I wrote here about the 1st foursquare campaign in Israel, Club Seat, a bold activity at the time, and even now. 4 months later, and thanks to Lindsay for reminding me, here is best practices for launching a foursquare campaign post. The post is based on data I collected on facebook and foursquare, along with personal insights, from my experience and my understanding of the digital marketing space in Israel. The charts comparing the ‘official’ venue vs. Club Seat venue are a visual aid, based on actual foursquare data collected October 26th.
1. Confusing rules
I’ll start at the end of the contest, a status update (see screenshot below) from a participant wondering why he hasn’t won 1st prize. Before you say anything (sour looser, etc) – the dude has a valid point: the winner should be the Mayor of the venue (Galina) that received the most check-ins during the contest. The response from Club Seat, although agreeing with the participant, doesn’t help clear the air (4th comment in the screenshot below): “The club that had the most check-ins by August 31st was Gazoz, 2nd was Galina, 3rd was Sublet. OK, say we believe it (stats anyone?). But wait, it gets better: The Mayor at both Gazoz and Galina, as of August 31st was Michal Y., who declined accepting the prize. Hence, the Mayor of the 3rd venue, Sublet, is the winner”. WTF?!?! How did they deduce that?? Who is Michal Y. and why did she decline a flight+vacation to Ibiza? Where are the check-in stats for August 31st to support the decision? But the most awkward thing is the logic they used for picking an alternate winner. Just so we’re clear, Runner-up refers to an actual human. Not venue. Confusing, but even more, something’s fishy. And that’s not a term one wants associated with one’s brand.
Club Seat post-contest discussion
2. Duplicate venues
Google’s mission is to ‘Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful‘. Foursquare, as any other User-Generated-Content service (youtube, twitter, go-walla, facebook places, etc) are working hard on eliminating duplicate and triple content, in order to minimize storage space – and make it easier for us, consumers, to find what we need. I understand it was important ‘branding’ the club with ‘Club Seat‘, making it unique to the contest – but I think that’s wrong. There are plenty of methods to measure traffic and check-ins to existing venues, no need to create duplicates. Plus, by using the existing venue already on foursquare (Gazoz, Galina and Sublet) you give incentive to the current Mayor to ‘keep his chair’, by increasing his/her visits – basically ‘using’ the Mayor’s own need to remain, well, the Mayor.
Foursquare stats: Galina vs. Galina Club Seat
3. Leverage evangelists
As I wrote back in July, this campaign will be interesting to watch, as foursquare is considered early-early stage in Israel, around 1,000 active users (who checked-in in the past 30 days) in my opinion. Any digital marketing campaign must include early adopters of the technology in question and community hubs – people that have 1000+ facebook friends, 2000+ twitter followers, 300+ foursquare friends – that will act as a powerful magnet, bringing more traffic, making some noise. Maybe Grey Interactive had such evangelists, but even if they had, I haven’t heard about it – and I’m pretty out there, socially speaking.
4. People, not venue, oriented
CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CIOs – it’s all about the consumer. When doing a location based contest, people count, because tracking their movement and analyzing the data will bring you added value. Premiere value. To strengthen my first point (confusing rules), when the winner (Mayor) of a venue declines a free vacation to Ibiza, give it to the person Runner-up, not the venue. Now, the charts – although Gazoz and Galina (Club Seat) have more check-ins than the official venue, people-wise – they loose. Twice. Because those 114 and 203 people (respectively) could have joined the contest, boosting all metrics, simply by seeing all those other Seat clubbers checking-in.
Foursquare stats: Gazoz vs. Gazoz Club Seat
5. Bring the business on-board
In my opinion, the #1 reason this campaign didn’t go as planned – minimal business involvement. There are hundreds of clubs/bars in Tel Aviv, all striving to survive, 60% will close within 24 months (actual stat). If Club Seat would have worked with Galina, Gazoz and Sublet, offering an incentive to those checking-in (free keg to parties of 4+, 1st beer on the house, etc), this contest could have taken another route altogether, increasing awareness, boosting sales and helping both Seat and the clubs win the crowd.
Foursquare stats: Sublet vs. Sublet Club Seat
Nokia’s newly appointed CEO, Stephen Elop, made a surprising guest appearance at Nokia World yesterday (Wednesday), to wrap up the event and present the winner of Nokia’s Calling All Innovators contest.
In a short speech, Elop emphasis the importance of Nokia’s developers community, saying ‘Nokia can build and market great devices, and offer added services with the cellular operators, but we need you [developers] to create the vibrancy and the eco-system we need to be successful in order to compete around the world’.
Watch Stephen’s full appearance in the video below [RSS readers: click here].
The Nokia Booklet 3G isn’t something’s you’d expect to see from the world’s largest cellular manufacturer, but times have changed.
Nokia is still #1 in terms of market-share, but its dominance isn’t as strong as it used to be, with Apple, Google, and Microsoft making industry-changing initiatives – and basically saying ‘we can play in multiple fields, not just our own’. Those initiative brought Google to the hardware market with the Nexus One, Microsoft to strengthen her investments in search and mobile and Apple with iPhone/iPad. The three screens (also as PDF) model also helped the cellular industry push forward, diminishing the boundary between software/IT/technology companies – everyone is doing everything now.
Nokia Booklet 3G
The Nokia Booklet 3G is Nokia’s first attempt to enter the PC ‘war-zone’, and the particularly hot netbook scene. Nokia is hoping its close ties with mobile operators will help push the Booklet 3G, making it an alternative to all the Asus/Lenovo/HP/Samsung/Dell netbooks out there. And after spending 2 weeks with it – Nokia has a winner in its hands.
The Booklet is beautiful, especially in the light blue I received (Black and White also available), and draw quite the attention. The clean design is also surprising, with neat, rounded lines, very Apple-like of Nokia. All ports are located on the right and left sides, leaving the front and back areas clear. The bottom keeps this theme, with just 2 clips to eject the battery – which means there’s no way to increase RAM.
Nokia Booklet 3G alongside Logitech Harmony One
Nokia booklet 3G comes with the usual specifications of the niche market, although I expected more power in the RAM and HD portions (1GB and 120GB, respectively). Even so, the Intel Atom Z530 running at 1.6GHz is doing a solid work with Windows 7 Starter, fast response, navigating multiple applications, wake-up from sleep and all. One of the best features in netbooks (and a major reason for buying mine) is the battery time. A year ago, 7-8 hours were considered amazing, now the numbers are reaching 10 and even 12 hours. Nokia Booklet 3G did a fine job in that area as well, giving solid 9 hours of intense work.
Lots of ports - USB 2.0 and HDMI
In terms of connectivity, the Booklet comes fully stocked, as expected from a world leader: 802.11 b/g/n wifi, BT 2.1 with EDR, built-in 3G modem (sim-card slot) for data only, and on-board GPS chip for use with OVi Maps service. The official specs also mentions motion sensor, but I couldn’t find how to enable/use it.
There’s plenty of data transfer options too: 3 USB 2.0, HDMI slot, SD Card reader, sim-card slot (data only), and a combined headphones+microphone socket, for Skype calls (integrated 1.3 Mega-pixel).
Eventually, it all boils down to pricing and plans. In Israel, netbooks are very popular, and in 2009 increased their market share over traditional laptops. Top 3 cellular providers all have plans that offer you a netbook+data package for 36 months at $10/month, a lucrative proposition, especially for students or for families with kids, as a 2nd or 3rd laptop.
Nokia did a fine work on its first non-cellphone device. With Nokia World 2010 just around the corner, I’m looking forward to see how Nokia is planning on building-up the lineup, with various OS options (MeeGo perhaps), and respond to the touch phenomena that’s overwhelming the western world.
Over the past 2 months at Inkod-Hypera I learned a lot about the importance of user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) in the process of making web (or mobile) products. First off, those 2 expressions are not the same, in fact, UX govern UI (in web-lingo: UX is the parent, UI is the child). Secondly, user experience (UX) is based on social and cultural trends whereas user interface (UI) is more based on technology – multi-touch, touch, mouse, command-line, speech, etc. The direct result of the latter is that user experience is both subjective in nature and dynamic, because it relates to an individual’s performance, feelings and thoughts about the system – that can change, over a period of time.
Google.com in 1999
Over at Inkod-Hypera we developed a proven methodology that puts great emphasis on UX, before Photoshop is even launched. We do product concept, benchmarking, usability testing, user interface planning (mockups/wireframes), functional specification and only then – guiding our in-house studio for the design aspect. During my time here, I’ve met with dozens of customers, 3rd party vendors, entrepreneurs, ad agencies, and more to get a feeling of how they perceive the field of UX and design. Unfortunately, especially with start-ups and 1st time entrepreneurs – the focus is still on the what, instead of the why/who/how.
Met this week a good friend, developer since the age of 12, ex-CTO, co-founder of 2 start-ups and CEO of a 3rd one, that told me ‘UX is the new semi-God‘. Not CTO, not the code, not the product (what) – but the business (why/who/how). And he said it took him 2 years to realize that, and outsource the work to an expert. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing the code in PHP, Java, .Net, or Rubi – the software will work. But if you haven’t figured out the user (who), the problem that needs solving (why), and the right way to solve it (how) – that’s not good.
I’m not saying ‘Hire us’, this is not a sales pitch (ok, ok – half sales-pitch). I do say ‘work with experts‘ – you have developers, right? Hire UX experts, or outsource the work.
Google.com in 2010
As the internet evolves, and mobile becomes a larger aspect of our lives, I hope people will pay more attention to user experience, and understand its importance from day 1, not launch + day 1.
