K-Voltage blog

I just start reading The Collapse of Complex Societies. Title of a book that Clay Shirky mentions on his blog post The Collapse of complex business models which, by the way, is a very interesting read for anyone working on any industry where business models need constant change.

I can’t tell much about how good or not the book is since I just began reading it, but I just wanted to transcribe a few interesting lines listed in the first few pages about why usually societies collapse and these are because:

• A lower degree of stratification and social differentiation.
• Less economic and occupational specialization, of individuals, groups, and territories.
• Less centralized control; that is, less regulation and integration of diverse economic and political groups by elites.
• Less behavioral control and regimentation.
• Less investment in the epiphenomena of complexity, those elements that define the concept of ‘civilization’: monumental architecture, artistic and literary achievements, and the like.
• Less flow of information between individuals, between political and economic groups, and between a center and its periphery.
• Less sharing, trading, and redistribution of resources.
• Less overall coordination and organization of individuals and groups.
• A smaller territory integrated within a single political unit.

This, of course, aren’t the only reasons, but they represent the common factor on most of the societies we know from the past and didn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Reading this list, I see a prominent deficiency and that is the lack of communication or the lack of its use. Things like less sharing, trading, and redistribution of resources; less flow of information between people and institutions; less integration and acceptance of diversity. I can’t help but think that communication channels weren’t much of a priority or certainly they were overlooked.

Now, the book was written in the 1990′s when the author certainly didn’t know about the internet or even imagined how it would grow along with networks, computers, and you name it — devices of all kinds, sizes, capabilities we use today to communicate and stay in contact with everyone and everything. It seems that with the growth of social networks as tools to connect people, people with organizations, people with political parties from every one of the social stratum, we have solved a major communicational problem. Certainly today we would have solved 50% of the issues on that list simply with communication. Or maybe not because now we know too much from too many sources and in real-time. But that’s for another discussion.

However, since “civilization can die, because it has already died once*” ; what would be the reason ours will die from considering we are clearly aware of many of these issues now?

* extrated from the book which quotes Mazzarino [1966: 174]

Last week I finished putting up together a revamped hostelworld’s mobile site.

The work I did was to clean up old code, fix some functionality issues and redesign it with simple UI primarily aiming at devices such as the Nokia Z70, Sony Ericsson k750i and several others under the same category, which have basic level browsing and rendering capabilities and most likely very limited network connections.

The site should be very easy to use using only the numbers on the keyboard or other keys such as the * or # (except a few exceptions) to navigate through the pages. Should you take it for a spin, give me a shout how it goes or if there is anything to make it better

Recently the BBC went through a site redesign. The site now looks simple, load fast, most of the important news you would be interested in are within scrolling-pixels, and doesn’t feel that you have to do a lot of clicking like in the previously design homepage.

There’s no particular reason to dedicate a blog post on a site redesign (after all, sites are redesigned and designed constantly on a daily basis), but, what stroke me and fascinated me the most (as a designer) was the styleguide the BBC has put together. Not only is clearly organized with thoughtful information architecture, simple and straight forward design, but it’s also a big step on the commitment the BBC as a news organization has with its audience.

Via Mark Wallis through his post on Twitter.

1. Designing a package that looks bigger on the shelf.
2. Designing an ad for a slow, boring film to make it seem like a lighthearted comedy.
3. Designing a crest for a new vineyard to suggest that it has been in business for a long time.
4. Designing a jacket for a book whose sexual content you find personally repelent.
5. Designing a medal using steel from the World Trade Center to be sold as a profit-making souvenir of September 11.
6. Designing an advertising campaign for a company with a history of known discrimination in minority hiring.
7. Designing a package aimed at children for a cereal whose contents you know are low in nutritional value and high on sugar.
8. Designing a line of T-Shirts for a manufacturer that employs child labor.
9. Designing a promotion for a diet product that you know doesn’t work.
10. Designing an ad for a political candidate whose policies you believe would be harmful to the general public.
11. Designing a brochure piece for an SUV that flips over frequently in emergency conditions and is known to have killed 150 people.
12. Designing an ad for a product whose frequent use might cause the user’s death.

Extracted from the book Glimmer.

This week I’ve been reading ‘Glimmer – How Design Can Transform Your Business, You Life, and Maybe Even The World’ by Warren Berger —a book that, so far, has been an amazing read with plethora of insights and stories from well-known designers—and I came across a paragraph including some quotes from Irene Au, Google‘s director of experience design, outlining some of the considerations the company has at the moment of making design decisions. Check the following transcription:

Google’s designers are ruthless when it comes to streamlining; even the most minor elements on the page are tested, and survival is dependent on being deemed useful by a given percentage of users. The density of information on the page is designed in accordance with people’s behavioral patterns on the Web. “For a long time people didn’t want to scroll and even now they prefer to see what’s most relevant at first glance,” Au says. “Part of it is basic human factors, and it’s very logical.” But the Google experience also can be surprisingly emotional, in terms of, say, how people feel about certain colors. If Google changes the color or even the shade on its header bar, “it can have an impact on how many searches per day we have.” Overall, in terms of its design the search experience is quite fragile; “even pixel-level changes have a dramatic impact on usage,” Au observes. “It’s the kind of thing where you move things two pixels this way or five pixels that way, it can mean plus or minus a million dollars in revenue.”

This just amazed me because how on companies of the scale of Google, tiny details such as this could cause millions of dollars on revenue or loses. For designers, this sometimes is extremely demanding and frustrating when there is so much reliance on data. The best example here is Douglas Bowman, who was the lead Visual Designer at Google, and left the company because it got unbearable to deal with such minuscule details.

Design details are just one aspect, there are also loading times—Google’s main concern as well—where half a second delay can cause a 20% drop in traffic and kill user satisfaction.  This same issue cost Amazon lots of money, where a 1 millisecond delay can represent a modest 5 million dollars loss. I’m sure that Amazon make pixel perfect decisions for their pages and products as well, but I don’t have info about that.

So, the moral of the story here is: the bigger your company gets, the harder the smallest details can punch you in the nuts. Or at least for me, it does sound painful enough

Last Wednesday I downloaded the android wordpress app with the sole purpose of testing it and see how it works. Not only interested on how it works, but how it feels blogging from your phone. Today I’m finally making my first post from my HTC Hero.

As I start typing I’m thinking of people that would make good use of this mobile blogging tool. One thing that pops in to my mind is that doesn’t seem very confortable scenario for writing a blog post as I imagine a context where you have a desktop screen, keyboard, and browsing through pages for resources, links, etc. Which on my Hero wouldn’t be an easy task which would involve swapping screens, selecting text not by drag-select and couple other thrills.

Another thing is the typing. Of course, the HTC Hero is not the best device for typing extensive posts or chunks of text, but here we are managing. So, how confortably would you feel if you have to write several posts from your device? On my personal mobile context it would be too time consuming.

Now on that note, I think it can work very nicely if you were drafting ideas and saving them as they come along on your mind for later editing, but then if that’s the case I’m currently feeling more confortable doing it in the Evernote app

Other aspect to consider is perhaps the topics or the pase of the blogging you do. For instance, maybe you have a considerable amount of people as your audience, and your posts are tweet-like snippets of text that generates interesting and juicy contributions from your readers. In that case I would consider it very useful. Otherwise Twitter is quicker, to the point and you have several apps (such as Seesmic, Twidroid, HTC Peep, etc) you can chose from. Another option as well would be tumblr.

Anyway, the WP app is looking good, still in beta and looking for testers. I would be interested to see how people are finding mobile blogging. I’m not much of a regular blogger myself, but excited to see how this platform will change the way we blog.

As an extra note and as you probably noticed, I’m posting with quite a narrow scope, device-wise, that can use the WP app and I’m outlining a first quick impression from a first post on my Hero. So, on that note and if you blogged already with the WP apps, what do you think of it? Have you tried it on other devices?

NOTE: I wasn’t able to figure out how to make links of words on the application, so, I’ll make them from the computer.

An interesting video where Faris Yakob discusses “How technology is changing the world of advertisement”

Since he is a very good presenter and the outline of the presentation is quite nicely put, needless for me to describe it on text.

[via trendspotting ]

On my previous post I pointed a few issues with the phone I was having as well as other people who’ve got the HTC Hero. On this post I’ll list a few things you can do to boost your phone performance. I’m not sure if it will help with the SIM card ‘No Service’ message, but it’s worth exploring (thanks to Jonathan Cremin, for pointing this sources) 

To root your phone in one click you can try this video from the unlockr. It’s pretty straight forward and easy to follow even if you are not much of a programmer.

You might what to customize the ROM of your phone as well. Once again, go to the unlockr site and follow this handy video

An the last thing I did was to download the Radio ROM to improve the wireless services performance. Following the same steps as when customizing your ROM, get the latest radio and install it on your phone.

If you feel more confortable and you are confident about your phone software-wise, you can try this way for a more intrinsic approach.

I’ll test this to see how it goes and I’ll post any updates in case I run in to issues. But so far seems to be all good.

I’m currently using a billing plan on meteor.ie with my new HTC Hero which I also got from meteor. Everything works fine on the phone and I love it, but unfortunately, I keep getting an annoying error from time to time where the phone doesn’t seem to detect the SIM card or indicating ‘No Service’.

The solution to the problem is by turning off and then back on the phone—precarious, I know, but that’s what I’m doing. At this point I’m a bit annoyed since I’m having to do it quite often. I depend on the phone for communicating by several means—twitter, flickr, facebook, emails, not to mention and most importantly phone calls and SMS’s. So I’m getting worried that I might miss important calls or the phone might fail on important eventualities.

My guess is that there’s something going on with meteor.ie network but so far no certainty. Meteor has set up a twitter account: @meteor_mobile but they haven’t been able to give me an answer yet after a few DMs exchanged nor have they been updating their twitter posts since December 9th. Customer Service in store or online doesn’t have much idea either

So, I’m wondering if anybody else out there, with their new HTC Hero here in Dublin (Ireland) have had issues with the meteor.ie network or seen fairly often the ‘No Service’ message? What about the customer service or feedback on the issue? Anything at all?

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UPDATE: 21/12/2009

After an email exchange with a rep from meteor.ie, I’ve got asked these questions which I responded on the following extract.

1. When did the problem started?

Started as soon as I bought it. I had an HTC Hero for a few weeks, with different SIM card and it happened. Then lost and bought a new phone (different SIM card) and happened again up till today.

2. The nature of the problems e.g. inability to able or receive calls, bad quality of call, call dropping during conversation, failure when sending SMS’s

Check out blog post. No problem with anything as long as I don’t get the error.

3. How many signal bars does your handset display when you have problems

It usually happen when I’m not using the phone. Just when I touch the screen to do something with it, I get welcomed with the image I have on my blog post I don’t know the amount of bars.

4. Do you experience the same problems when you put your SIM card into another Meteor handset? If you have not tried this can you please do so

I don’t have another handset at the moment. And I’m not buying another.

No, I didn’t have a problem before with any of the previous handsets I had. Again, the problem happen from time to time randomly. Sometimes it doesn’t happen in a couple of days, and sometimes happen 2 or 3 times in a single day.

5. Do you experience the same problems when you put a different Meteor SIM card your handset? If you have not tried this can you please do so

I had two different SIM cards and I had the same problem with both on the two HTC Hero’s I had. Never had a problem with any phone before, just the HTC Hero.

6. What error message do you receive when you try to make calls or send text messages?

I don’t get any error messages when I try to make call or send messages. Again, the error happens when I click on the ‘home’ button to do something with it, not while I’m using it.

7. Are there other Meteor customers in the area with the same issue?

I don’t know. In the store they told me that they are, but they don’t know what it is. A customer rep told me that the phone is flawed and needed to modify the software in it.

8. Can you forward 3 examples of dropped calls that you made within the past 24 hours?

As I said on my blog post, and here as well, there wasn’t any call drops or anything wrong while I use the phone, The only problem I have is that when I don’t use the phone and then I press the ‘home’ button to do something, I get that screen I posted on my blog

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Looks like this problem has been reported on a forum thread at meteor.ie site.

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One of my co-workers, Paul, found this forum thread that might just do the trick and from the several comments I did this:

Put your Virgin SIM card into another phone. Enable the SIM password (PIN1). Remember that PIN! Then put it back into the Hero. When prompted, key in the PIN, and you should be good.

If you don’t have a spare phone lying around (or cannot bother someone to lend you theirs for 10 minutes), then a replacement SIM may be easier.

from .dan!el post on the same site

Have a look at the entire thread on the forum. There are a few explanations and interesting insights to have an overall idea of the problem.

Anyway, it’s been an hour since I’ve done it and hopefully that will be the end of my conundrum (and all the others) *Knock on wood*. I’ll keep updating this post if this didn’t work.

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UPDATE: 22/12/2009

Unfortunatelly the previously solution quoted didn’t work. About an hour after I did it, I got the ‘No Service’ screen again.

However, I tried something else which I don’t know if it’ll make any difference or not, but it is another option. I went to the phone Settings >> Security >> Set up SIM card lock >> Change SIM PIN; and then change the pin number from there. I don’t know if this will work or not, but like I said, it’s another option. Let’s see what happen

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UPDATE: 26/12/2009

So that last option didn’t work either. As I kept exchanging a couple of messages with the meteor people, looks like they are going to replace it:

I have been advise by our technical team that the issue is not a network issue but a handset issue and I would advise you to return the phone to us so we can verify the fault and will issue you with a replacement phone.

This is it then. I’m going to do this and hopefully will be the end of our phone idyll.

I’m very excited to hear that the 17th of November Google DevFest 2009 will be held in Argentina with an awesome line up of speakers.

Some of the topics that are going to be presented and are quite trendy at the moment are HTML5/Chrome, Cloud Computing, Android, Development Tools and Social Web among others.

I wish I could be there hang out with those guys. Definitely I’m liking what I see it’s happening in Argentina in the fields of web and technology