Via Foursquare TimeMachine

Apple WWDC 2013 keynote intro video was an ode to technological achievement, a company vision of perfection, a celebration of proper engineering and design. In video, each phrase is an ode to the growth and impact of proper user centered design. An ode for a paranoid attention to every little detail, something Apple meticulously, but it’s also an ode to experience design, to those outthere like myself who think from the end towards the beggining, overlooking the effect, overlooking how one feels upon interaction, and then designing backwards to ensure a curated and designed experience, consistent, repeatable and delighful.

Apple is in many senses unique, for there are those that do inovation by brute force differentiation and those who generate differentiation by design, in particular experience design. I work along the last.

Me happy.

“I really believe that if you look at the great monuments of culture, they come from people who are able to pay attention, who control their mind. That’s what allows us to think in the highest terms and think conceptually, think critically, uh, think in some very creative ways. And it’s this kind of thinking that’s at risk: being eroded one cute cat video at a time.”

I certainly feel that my capacity for concentration isn’t what it used to be. What do you think? What are you doing for disconnecting?

©opyright Math (TM) – a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists.

Oldy and yet so couldn’t be more timely today…

Although there are big differences in the kind of devices used across developed and non-developed markets. Feature phones still beat smartphones in emerging markets like India, proving the need and market for cheaper, entry level smartphones for those markets:

Mobility means for most use cases the use of social networks and games and mobile shopping still means a lot of product evaluation and price comparison rather than actual mobile shopping:

When we look at the actual applications usage, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter and eBay consistently rank in the top 10 sites among mobile web users around the world proving that our mobiles are indeed responsible for a big part of our attention deficit if you ask me

Unfortunately access is far from universal and the amount people pay for “being connected” still varies a lot, and in many cases and countries have even a direct correlation with usage with most users where data plan prices are higher (like India and Russia)opting for more flexible, less expensive options, such as “pay-as-you-go” data pricing, or taking advantage of WiFi connectivity:

As conclusion, there’s still much to go before we can talk about a true universal mobile access, and while we becoming more and more connected through our smartphones we’re still far from extracting their true power. The full report is extensive and also covers mobile video and mobile advertising which weren’t key to me, but which I actually recommend reading if you’re interested in those topics.

Today I came across a video made for a clinic (see below) that brilliantly shoes how we try to see the world around the company, its services, products and above all what people expect and how they use them. I like being able to walk other persons shoes, but as this video shows, it’s far from easy, the fundamental thing is that each one of us even when sharing one same experience, inevitably end up having a very different view of it.

I see more and more people thinking like me, preaching for a more centered human, more attentive services, being them digital or not and how to marry the ones that cross the digital/non digitial frontier. The goal is to deliver experiences that are worth building and going through. I keep saying that I’m tired of half baked things, so so experiences..

Seeing this video today, made me realize that probably one of the reasons I do what I do, might have been with how I processed all the craziness of my own journey trough 2 years of life and death possibilities, of procedures and badly designed machinery. Scary constructs with little or no attention and regard for the human individual in front of them.

maybe that was it… maybe that the reason I like fixing experiences..
who knows..

Check the video, its a great example on how to showcase insights in a clear, understandable and empathetic way.

Social Now is not a typical event, it presents an unconventionally format, but a very useful ones, with so many choices around, Social now was designed to help organisations seeking to understand more or evaluating work related collaboration platforms. So the entire event is meant to help people in these organisations make a decision on which to use, by helping them understand the differences and key strengths on each of the presented solutions.

Besides the very interesting keynote presentations, SocialNow will also feature an independent professionals panel to help question and evaluate the presented tools from different perspectives. I’ll be taking part of this panel to cover the user experience aspect of each tool, others will look at other aspects like business and IT.

So, I strongly recommend that if you’re working for a company which might be considering to change or deploy a new knowledge and process management tool, Social Now might just be the event you need to have on your agenda.

Social Now is organised by Knowman, a knowledge management consulting company, with Ana Neves (@ananeves) at the center, mind and heart of the whole event idea.

Hope to see you all in Lisbon next month.

The full report presented an interesting view on the current mobile market trends, although very positive it’s impossible not to see the slowdown of previous years growth. Revenues will increase, subscribers as well, but things aren’t going to be as great as they have been before..

It’s a forecast, but I’m not really impressed by these numbers, but it could be a wrong reading not sure, so here are my comments:

Considering that we are roughly 7 Billion persons today (but we won’t be much more in 2017 – 2020 seems to be the year we might pass the 8bn threshold) the growth from 3.2 to 3.9 Bn mobile subscribers by 2017 doesn’t leave me impressed. It clearly means we still have much to do on the front of universal access, as according to this numbers we’ll still have only roughly 50% of the world population connected. The number of connections seems impressive, but then again this will be mostly due to the internet of things and all the new connected machines it will bring.

LTE seems it will only be a reality for a fifth of the connected ones, ok, this is a global number, meaning that more evolved markets will see a much better picture and others will not, fair enough, but not impressive either, specially considering that some of the less developed markets could leapfrog directly to LTE when it’s time to evolve or deploy their new networks.

Globally voice will still grow, but clearly not as much as messaging and data, although a big part of the voice will probably also be data, right?

It’s good to see Joyn (the project I worked on for Vodafone) get a special highlight here on the future communications page on the report, although I personally believe it’s a critically and much needed technology upgrade to increase the overall quality of mobile user experience (fixing seriously broken experiences like video or file sharing, but also general terms of interoperability), I have to say that at the current market launch plans and delays, I’m not certain where it will be in 2017, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed and eyes open for developments there.

But then again, I’m still going through the report, have a read yourself, the full report is here, enjoy