But I agree with you, it's a ux dealbreaker for most situations. Solution: control the hardware. :)
246 karma · joined April 21, 2007
https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-Brow...
Take mobile music for example. There is no respect for wifi or CRUD. If you want internet variety you're stuck with either an iPod or a CD player. Wouldn't we all like access to last.fm, pandora or a simplified version of itunes in our cars? Wouldn't it be nice if, whenever your car was in an open wifi area, it synced account preferences and pulled appropriate new content? You should be able to blacklist tracks and podcasts on the fly. Instead you have to remember preferences in your head so that the next time you sit down at your computer you can edit your playlist.
I think Detroit should open up standard panels in the dashboard so commuters can snap out last year's modules and plug in this year's technology. Nobody wants to perform majory surgery on their car, they just want to pop in whatever 3rd party vendors are selling this year. Break the rules, Detroit, and open up an API so 3rd party developers can access a few standard buttons.
How disciplined are you? Everyone values genius, welcome to the crowd. It is a convenient excuse to obsess on others' talent as if genes and childhood were all that separated you from them. You appear to be focusing too much on outcome rather than on the hard work necessary to achieve it. Skills always look natural from the outside! But ask the honest, reflective people you admire and they'll tell you: they worked their butts off on fundamentals. Psst: fundamentals are open to you too.
Don't obsess over shortcuts. I would love to see you explain to a person with no arms how you'd gladly cut yours off for slightly better gray matter.
Practice with intense effort. If forum composition and wordsmithing is a challenge, discipline your technique by journaling stream-of-consciousness. To improve your memory treat it like a muscle: high reps, low weight at first.
How is your health? Do you exercise, eat right, avoid alcohol, have a positive attitude and sleep well? These are simple but powerful levers.
Talent is overrated. Upgrade your attitude not your physical brain, silly. :)
Maybe the solution is phone based. What if you could call a phone number and hear the news read to you by a good narrator? By pressing keys you could drill down into Tech, World, blogs etc. It would be an opinionated filter of news, essays, wikipedia. Like this http://audiothink.com/concept1.png. With twilio you could <play> .mp3s. First time callers could maybe get x minutes free after which point they'd pay for their callerID to continue working. Not sure how to handle payments - sending phone visitors to a web page might kill conversion. I think bored commuters with hands-free devices and cell minutes to burn might use such a service.
I built a little sales analysis tool for Accenture that they have since sold to several consumer goods clients. It pulls in raw marketing data--pricing, promotion types, locations, revenues--then calculates a few dozen metrics related to ROI, cannibalism etc. Client managers then drill into their marketing data from a couple layers of abstraction and from there they can see fairly clearly how their choices are affecting P&L.
We built that because the leading consumer goods companies were essentially guessing at the repercussions a given sales promotion would have on the bottom line. Today the leaders are more sophisticated but the little guys continue to revere intuition and gut instincts over statistics.
Our pilot client was Procter & Gamble. I pulled in their POS sales and marketing data e.g. endcap on Tide detergent at [x% discount] in [region y] during [phenomenon z]. I mashed that with private and public data sources, laying out the results for trending and drilldown. P&G bought as did L'Oreal and some others. I'm curious how things are going so if anyone reading has worked with these or similar tools, I would love to know how they've evolved.
It's amazing how many expensive marketing decisions are done without regard for scientific analysis. A lot is decided on the basis of how the marketing director/committee feels. In the 90s that was acceptable technology but today it is called Not Learning From Your Mistakes. Compare Google's A/B testing with "throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks" and you begin to see the problem. Trust me, there are big P&L opportunities in this stuff.
According to one entry in that thread it is possible to expose anonymous callerIDs by forwarding to an 800# and then gathering the number from there.
"First I am interested in why people tend to have overly favorable and objectively indefensible views of their own abilities, talents, and moral character. For example, a full 94% of college professors state that they do "above average" work, although it is statistically impossible for virtually everybody to be above average."