Author: rakesh

Like others who are current users of the web-based Gmail Mobile, the net-net experience with the new Java-based Gmail client isn’t great. It looks nice and it does a number of things that I’ve always wanted to be able to do with the web-based version (easier lookup of email addresses, mark messages as spam), but this is a case of two steps forward, five steps back. Some of the issues that I’m having are issues with my Windows Mobile 5.0 JVM (I have a Cingular 2125):

* My Java Midlet Manager constantly asks me / prompts me if it’s OK to the access the Internet. How do I get rid of these prompts and just tell it to log me in when it needs to log me in?

* How do I get text entry to default to T9? Right now, I have to change the setting everytime I enter a textarea / textbox to enter an e-mail address or a message. On a related note, getting into a text box requires too many clicks! Click in the Gmail Java Client and then click again in Windows Mobile to edit the textarea. And then two ‘accepts’ when I want to get back to the Gmail Java Client.

* How do I link directly to Gmail from my main menu rather than having to go through the midlet manager?

* And, like Paul mentions in his post (linked to above) the context switch from my mobile web browser is a pain.

* Related to the context switch, the back button on my phone doesn’t behave the way I expect it to. When I hit back, rather than taking me to the previous screen in the Gmail Java client (which is how the web-based version works), it takes me out of the midlet manager. Ack!

I’m looking forward to iterative upgrades to this client. The client gives a glimpse at a superior class of mobile web experiences, but it also reveals the (fixable) shortcomings of today’s mobile phone platforms.

It’s not often that I watch an in-flight movie, but my flight this morning was playing “Little Miss Sunshine” and Apu had recommended this movie to me so I decided to check it out. The movie was great. The characters, the acting, the story — all great. But the cinematography was especially spectacular and it’s what made me love this movie so much. It felt like every shot in the movie was an carefully composed photograph, whether it was a shot of the angst-ridden teenager character reflected in a mirror during the intro or their van (the “bus”) set against a midwestern sky at dusk. Who deserves the credit for this stuff? How much of it is the work of the cameraman? How much the work of the director? I’m curious to know, but ultimately it doesn’t matter because I loved the final product.

(On a side note, Apu, if you are reading this, you’re partially redeemed by this movie recommendation but your last one (Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna) was a real dud so you still have a ways to go)

I’m a fan of mass customization so when I was at FAO Schwartz on 5th Avenue earlier this week, I snapped this photo with my phone (posted to my blog courtesy of Shozu). I grew up with Hot Wheels so it’s neat to see a build to order option from them.

If you’re one of my blog readers in Houston, you might be interested in checking out this talk at Rice early next week. From the sounds of it, the talk will cover a lot of topics (including peanut aerodynamics and urine leak engineering!).

Dean of Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series
Co-host: Computer and Information Technology Institute

title: Will Pringles Fly?

by Tom Lange, Director, Corporate R&D, Procter and Gamble
when Monday, October 30, 2006
time: 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM
where: McMurtry Auditorium Duncan Hall

Duncan Hall is building # 20 (located in the upper right quadrant) on
the campus interactive map at http://www.rice.edu/mapos. Move your mouse
over the buildings to see the building number.

Visitor parking is shown in yellow on the interactive map. The visitor
parking west of Rice Stadium is free. Shuttle busses pick up and drop
off at bus shelters every 10 minutes. Paid visitor parking (by credit
card only) is available near entrances # 2, 8 and 13.

abstract
How can modeling and simulation greatly accelerate the pace of
innovation, and not just for airplanes and cars but for everyday
products? With Procter and Gamble making and selling billions of
products every day, we will explore some of the ?surprising? technical
challenges this presents e.g., a case study on the aerodynamics of
Pringles?. Other multi-scale, multi-physics examples will be shown that
span the scale from molecules to the enterprise: from computational
chemistry models of soap suds, to the reliability and availability of
high-speed production systems. Multi-physics simulation challenges from
diapers to laundry liquids, from human/product interaction to machine
dynamics will also be explored.

speaker bio
Tom Lange (BSChE from the University of Missouri ?78) joined Procter and
Gamble in May 1978, as a product technical engineer. Tom has spent his
27-year P&G career modeling and simulating product and production
systems, from how the aerodynamics of a peanut affect roasting, to how
baby sizes affect the probability of a urine leak in a diaper.

He was recognized in 1994 with a PRISM award, P&G?s highest technical
recognition for engineering. Tom was appointed associate director in
1998, becoming the first department head of the modeling, simulation and
analysis department for corporate engineering. In August 2001 he was
appointed head of P&G?s CAE (computer-aided engineering) organization.
In September 2004, he was appointed director of modeling and simulation
for P&G in Corporate R&D, including CAE and computational chemistry
efforts.Dean of Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series
Co-host: Computer and Information Technology Institute

title: Will Pringles Fly?

by Tom Lange, Director, Corporate R&D, Procter and Gamble
when Monday, October 30, 2006
time: 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM
where: McMurtry Auditorium Duncan Hall

Duncan Hall is building # 20 (located in the upper right quadrant) on
the campus interactive map at http://www.rice.edu/mapos. Move your mouse
over the buildings to see the building number.

Visitor parking is shown in yellow on the interactive map. The visitor
parking west of Rice Stadium is free. Shuttle busses pick up and drop
off at bus shelters every 10 minutes. Paid visitor parking (by credit
card only) is available near entrances # 2, 8 and 13.

abstract
How can modeling and simulation greatly accelerate the pace of
innovation, and not just for airplanes and cars but for everyday
products? With Procter and Gamble making and selling billions of
products every day, we will explore some of the ?surprising? technical
challenges this presents e.g., a case study on the aerodynamics of
Pringles?. Other multi-scale, multi-physics examples will be shown that
span the scale from molecules to the enterprise: from computational
chemistry models of soap suds, to the reliability and availability of
high-speed production systems. Multi-physics simulation challenges from
diapers to laundry liquids, from human/product interaction to machine
dynamics will also be explored.

speaker bio
Tom Lange (BSChE from the University of Missouri ?78) joined Procter and
Gamble in May 1978, as a product technical engineer. Tom has spent his
27-year P&G career modeling and simulating product and production
systems, from how the aerodynamics of a peanut affect roasting, to how
baby sizes affect the probability of a urine leak in a diaper.

He was recognized in 1994 with a PRISM award, P&G?s highest technical
recognition for engineering. Tom was appointed associate director in
1998, becoming the first department head of the modeling, simulation and
analysis department for corporate engineering. In August 2001 he was
appointed head of P&G?s CAE (computer-aided engineering) organization.
In September 2004, he was appointed director of modeling and simulation
for P&G in Corporate R&D, including CAE and computational chemistry
efforts.

I recently switched from a Dell laptop to a Toshiba M400 Tablet PC and I’ve also been spending some time using Shonali’s new MacBook and I’m discovering something interesting. Keyboard layouts vary pretty significantly and I think if I were an “average” user (as opposed to someone who is an early adopter, a techie), this would be one of the biggest barriers to switching from one PC to another.

Shonali’s MacBook doesn’t have a PgUp or PgDn button (though I eventually figured out that Fn + Up or Fn + Down accomplish the same thing. My new Toshiba doesn’t have a Windows button in the same row as the keyboard (I’m used to there being at least two of these buttons — one to the left of the spacebar, one to the right of the spacebar). My new Toshiba also has a ` button in the same place that my old keyboard and every other keyboard I’ve ever used has it’s control button — this particular difference is a major annoyance!

Anyways, the point here is that when I’ve bought new computers, I’ve never paid attention to the keyboard layout. In fact, until now, I can’t say that I ever gave keyboard layout any consideration at all while purchasing a laptop. You certainly don’t hear reviewers talking about keyboard layout as they whiz through the latest speeds and feeds.

Sometimes non-obvious things (at least, non-obvious to early adopters) are what lock people into one product vs. another.

Marc Canter says of Michael Arrington’s Google-SpaceShipOne replica blog postings: “Who the fuck cares about that bullshit!” I had a similar, albeit much tamer, question when I read these postings on TechCrunch over the weekend but the answer seems pretty obvious to me. First of all, based on Michael’s history of posting, I can tell that he’s no Google fanboy so I’m pretty sure Michael didn’t post this because he wanted publicly adore Google (if anything, he might have been trying to do the opposite in an unspoken manner). So the reason he’d post something like this is simple — it was a Google-scoop in a world where everyone loves the latest kooky Google story and a scoop like this, if successful, promises to bring with it lots of great link juice, potential mentions in offline publications and, ultimately, lots of readers. And, again I don’t know Michael personally, but from the few times I’ve talked to him and heard him speak, if there’s one thing Michael does care about (and is good at), it’s increasing his readership.

I was reading Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch this morning and as I did, I saw the text ads in every TechCrunch post advertising Michael’s “CrunchGear” site, a relatively new addition to his network of sites and a competitor to sites like Gizmodo and Engadget. All the ads were, in my opinion, pretty generic: “CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware”.

Now Gizmodo and Engadget were pretty well-established and successful in this category when CrunchGear was launched. So, if I’m looking for a gadget fix, I’m going to head over to Engadget or Gizmodo — it’s simply what I’m trained to do at this point, they’ve already proven themselves to me.

CrunchGear has a couple of ways to edge into my mindshare when it comes gadget sites — they can scoop their competitors on hot, new gadgets and/or they can be different, addressing the problems/complaints of Engadget/Gizmodo readers or simply innovating in the category.

For the first method (scooping their competitors), there’s no promotion to be done — if they scoop someone else on something hot, they’ll get linked to and mentioned for it.

For the second method, TechCrunch could definitely be doing a better job of promoting how CrunchGear is different… and here I’m assuming that CrunchGear is actually different. But maybe that’s not a safe assumption considering that one of the few things I know about CrunchGear is that they hired the former editor of Gizmodo to run the site. An apple doesn’t fall far from the tree? What CrunchGear should be doing is burning Gizmodo and Engadget in effigy every day and working to redefine the category. I consider myself a gadget guy, but I’m not a regular Engadget or Gizmodo reader. Why? Because their post volume is too high! I’ve always been interested in fewer posts from a gadget site. And I’ve also wanted more vision and more analysis of trends, something I remember Engadget used to provide in a weekly column by some third party person, but I always wanted like 10 of these a week and I wanted them to be accompanied by lots of photographs of cool shiny gadgets.

And once CrunchGear has their differentiation (and like I said, maybe they already have that differentiation and edge — I wouldn’t know), they need to trumpet that difference in their ads, in their posts and everywhere else they have an audience willing to listen. In my mind, their “CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware” ad translates to “CrunchGear just another gadget site like the rest” and that’s lethal when their trying to edge into a space that already has some big winners.

Today was Choti Diwali (small Diwali) and tomorrow is Diwali so a lot of the family is in town — my eldest sister and brother-in-law from Louisiana and my niece and nephew and my youngest sister and her fiancee. For those of you who don’t know what Diwali is, for many North Indians it’s the most important religious holiday of the year, the beginning of our new year.

A small puja (religious ceremony) was followed by our placing diyas (usually oil lamps, but in our case tealight candles), 51 of them, all inside and outside our house. That was followed by a elaborate meal and then everyone split as dishes were cleaned, children were put to bed and some of us sat around talking and drinking tea. Once the kids were down, we moved the coffee table out of the living room, threw down a bunch of comforters and settled in to play a game of Scrabble. As a side note, I haven’t played Scrabble in several years mostly because my eldest sister and brother-in-law are really, really good and it’s no fun playing against them because they’re in a league of their own, often drawing scores in the 300+ range (if I remember correctly). They get into obscure debates about whether letter combinations like ‘ti’ or ‘fa’ are “words” in the Scrabble dictionary… it’s just ridiculous.

So anyways, we played and it wasn’t so bad… I actually found that Scrabble is a lot of fun, a mixture of strategy and vocabulary. But the interesting part was that we played with a new Scrabble set that someone had picked up from Target — designed by Michael Graves.

Before we had played, when we saw the packaging, it looked really cool and new age — our old favorite spinning board with grooved slots and wooden lettered tiles reinvented with cool high-quality opaque plastic and shiny brushed metal.

After we spent some time playing on the Michael Graves designed Scrabble board, it became clear that either Michael Graves is a terrible designer or he was out to lunch when his people put this Scrabble thing together and slapped his name on it. The details:

* The board is a fold-out board, a diptych, and rather than the tiles being continuous at the seam where it folds, there’s this 1/2″ black band that separates the two halves, a disconnect in the otherwise uniform grid. This makes for annoying game play because letters that are adjacent to one another on opposite sides of the seam don’t actually appear to adjacent.

* One thing Michael Graves confirms here: a Scrabble board should spin so every player can easily see the letter layout on their turn, and the board should have grooves in it for the tiles, so when it’s turned, the letters don’t run the risk of getting scattered. The Michael Graves board doesn’t spin and it doesn’t have grooves.

* The board surface itself is made of a metallic material and the text printed on the board is also shiny — net result is that everything on the board is hard to read, including the otherwise useful legend of how many tiles of each letter are in circulation in the game.

* And probably the most inane part of the design is the score keeping mechanism: each player has a rack thingy to store his letters and in the Michael Graves Edition, the rack thingy is made of this sleek brushed metal… with a bunch of holes in it. So rather than just writing down how many points each person scores in each round and keeping a running total or a running difference for each player, you’re supposed to use these bunch of holes to keep track of your score. There are 20 holes in the first row, labeled at intervals of 5 (ie 5, 10, 15, 20) and 20 holes in the second row, labeled at intervals of 100 (ie 100, 200, 300, 400). So it’s basically some wacko, not-friendly base-20 counting system that is, IMO, almost completely unusable, or at best very, very unintuitive.

I’ve been generally impressed with what Michael Graves has done for Target in the past 5-10 years, making it a premium but value shopping destination. And while I haven’t bought or carefully studied any of his designed-just-for-Target products that always catch my eye when I’m at Target, I’ve heard a lot about how through his partnership with Target, he’s brought high-end design to the masses, like the American IKEA or something. This experience definitely changes my view of Michael Graves as a designer — maybe he’s just a great branding and marketing guy and not a very good designer or maybe this one product just slipped through the cracks.

In any case, I CAN tell you that if you’re looking to buy a Scrabble board and actually use it (as opposed to, say, showing it off as something that looks cool), don’t buy the Michael Graves edition from Target.

Paul Kedrosky’s post about how little Google spends on advertising and promotion reminded of something I heard Google’s Marissa Mayer say in her talk at the WebGuild 2006 conference this morning. Marissa said that when they evaluate the success of a new product, the first thing they do is ignore the first month’s worth of data. Because of the mad stampede (those are my words, not Marissa’s) to new Google products, the first month’s worth of data is almost always outlier data.

The other part of what she said was also interesting — that they look for month over month growth of 20-30% as an indicator of strong success and that when m-o-m growth is in the 5-10% range, they take that as an indication that they aren’t doing enough with the new product, that there’s not enough consumer affinity to the product.