Wearables

Read an interesting article about the challenges associated with wearables. I strongly believe that wearables of different types (watches, glasses, bracelets etc) will be key towards the "data driven everything" world that we are marching towards. 

Several opportunities in this space that I can think of

• Help me with my social interactions. So can my google glass help me by recording names, important nouns in my conversation and provide me context for next time I meet the same person. Helps me get over my "small talk" challenges maybe.
• Make me more efficient. So can my "watch" or "bracelet" understand that my bp goes up when I talk to person X and try to manage that for me; maybe by making me call X before a party or going to sleep or whatever so that i can recover fast and not waste the entire day after a conversation with X trying to recover.
• Show the impact on my health. Wearables these days focus on "easy pickings" such as showing me how much i walked, ran etc. But can they then tie to how beneficial these activities are to the blood pressure, sugar levels etc for the person. And warn me when I do not exercise as to the expected impact on my health. I bet such information about positive and negative impact will get lot more people "keeping their promises with regards to exercising".

Here is another interesting article on wearables that I read this weekend.

User Experience on Apps

Have been playing around with various applications (apps) on phones. One big issue that I see is this. The app developer needs to ensure that the user can easily understand the model of the app.

For example; in some screens you have the back button and you go back to the previous screen you came from. in other screens there is no back button and the user needs to remember the circuitous route to follow to go back to the previous screen. This makes the user cringe at using the app and this is a debit for the app. To make up for this debit, the app needs to have other credits. Else the utility to the user is not high and the end result if not pretty for the usage of the app.

Of course, I guess one reason why you violate the above principle of "user should know the model" is when you are developing games.

Phone app review

In this article we will look at some iphone apps and provide comments about these. These comments will be in the light of the book "Design of Everyday Things" which I happened to read recently. Also did watch the related course on Udacity.

Plan to keep on adding to the list of apps reviewed. Note that these comments are my personal opinion only. And these comments will take a systems view of the phone apps where we consider not only the apps but also the experience associated with them.

• Highlight is an app to targeted to help you learn about the people around you. So you see all information that is publicly shared of a person close to you who is sharing highlight. The app is running in the background. I downloaded this app only on my Android phone.
• Comments: 
• The app is not very clear for a person who downloads it. You see a bunch of photos of people 
• On selecting a photo, I see the same photo again, a map probably with the location where the person was a while ago and a bunch more information.  What do I do with this information?
• There is a button that takes me to my profile but then how do I edit my information. Probably I cannot but I do not know the model in the mind of the creator of the app.
• There is also a camera (signifier in the language of "design of everyday things") on the main screen. I clicked on that, it took pictures and then I have no idea what happened to the photographs. Talk about "gulf of evaluation". 
• And of course "running in the background" all the time probably thereby sucking the battery of my phone. 
• Not to speak of notifications about strangers I do not care about on my home screen popping up. 
• Well I "deleted" the app. No sense wasting space on my cell phone, battery life as well as "wasted cycles" deleting notifications about strangers I don't care about. 
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Systems approach to business analysis

A systems approach to analyzing the business of a company is indeed very important. A good example of one such analysis is here for zulily. The author of this article does a good job of looking at all aspects of the system that is Zulily. I found it an interesting read.

daily task tracker

I like to track progress regularly (daily?). This to help figure out the cause of inefficiencies if any in order to address it. So obviously interested in a startup such as idonethis.

They send a daily reminder email. The replies from each person on the team is then summarized in a digest emailed to all the next morning. They do charge approx USD 5/person/month for this service. Might be okay for small teams but for larger teams it might be cheaper to build something in house.

Salary information

Here in the US we treat salaries as information that should be closely guarded. However, breaking this trend is a startup Buffer.

They have published the salaries of their employees on their blog. An interesting experiment no doubt. Still I am not bought into this given the issues we can run into when the team grows.  Issues such as the different constraints of different employees (some want more vacation over more salary or vice versa), different maturity levels of employees, impact on the social circle etc.

Containers in 5 min?

We hear a lot of buzz about containers these days. This article provides a very nice introduction to this concept. And not long to read too.

To quote

Containers virtualize an OS; the applications running in each container believe that they have full, unshared access to their very own copy of that OS. This is analogous to what VMs do when they virtualize at a lower level, the hardware. In the case of containers, it’s the OS that does the virtualization and maintains the illusion.

 Containers require low overhead to create and manage. These are more appropriate for the cloud workloads. PaaS being the main driver for containers these days although the concept itself has been around for a long time.