I believe I have gotten spoiled by the database. I use databases so often in my every day life that I just expect to be able to slice and dice data any way I want it. Sort it and filter it however, and most importantly only look at what I want to look at. Imagine for a moment if all Citysearch could do is show you every restaurant in their database all at once and had no idea to minimize the list by cuisine or neighborhood. Imagine if your cell phone only had one menu layer and everything was listed. Your life would be all about scrolling. Thankfully, we don’t have to deal with that…except for on my Comcast cable set-top box guide. Argh!
Here’s a thought. I’d like to see Comcast roll out a new on-screen guide that would allow me to set a preference to only show channels that I am subscribed to. I’m to the point where I feel like I’m chasing a moving target. Every time I sit down to watch something I choose a channel that says, “Subscription required…” I’m pretty sure my setup even changes what channels I have access to on a monthly basis to just keep me guessing. It’s very annoying and I usually give up. (Thank god for Netflix) In addition to this filter, I’d also like to see the ability to customize my menu. For example, does everyone have their local network’s FCC call letters memorized? Can’t they just put NBC on the menu?
Just a thought. Hey Comcast, give me a holler if you want to sit down and draft up some new requirements. 🙂
Mobile Marketing and Location Based Services Adoption
Yesterday I was down in Santa Clara visiting a company to participate in a usability study for a new UI. On my way down, it dawned on me that I hadn’t seen a close friend for a while that lives in the south bay. Since I was going to be down there, I figured I could just work from a hot spot for the afternoon after the study and then meet her for dinner. Upon completing the study in Santa Clara I started heading north up to Sunnyvale where she lives so that I would be in the neighborhood when she got off work. After arriving to the downtown area that was very quiet I decided I wanted to be some place a little more busy to people watch (while I work of course). I then remembered that I had a gift card for Starbucks from Christmas burning a hole in my pocket. The challenge is that I don’t know my way around this part of the bay area and had no idea where the nearest Starbucks is. Doh! Could it be?! Could I really be in that strange moment where suddenly location based services and mobile marketing collide to rescue me from my dispel? Unfortunately, I do not have a GPS enabled handset nor one that even supports location based services at this time. But, I do have a Blackberry with mobile Google Maps installed so I wasn’t completely lost. So, I opened Google Maps and went to “Find a business” and entered “Starbucks”. Of course it found nine within the surrounding area and one that was very close to where I was ironically. Now, here’s where the challenges to location based services became completely apparent to me.
First let’s pause for a moment to think about the various use case for mobile marketing and location based services. When would you actually use this stuff? Well, I think there are three ways you would access such a service. The first is the most traditional use almost every web surfer employees today. This is the scenario where you are at home or in an office sitting in front of a computer with a full keyboard and large display. In this scenario it’s very easy to interact with something like Yahoo! Local, tell it you want to find all the Starbucks around a certain address and then get directions to and from where you are and where that double, non-fat, light whip, extra hot, latte is awaiting. The second use of such services would be when you’re literally mobile and on foot walking around. In this case, hopefully you have a cool mobile phone that has all these capabilities and can show you where that latte is, where you are and how you can get to it. The third, and most likely widely used scenario, is when you’re in your car. This is where today’s mobile phone options fall down fast. As I was cruising out of the parking spot I was in and heading onto one of the main roads, I struggled to key in all these inputs and view the map. I wanted to be able to just speak to my phone and say, “find me a Starbucks close by and tell me how to get there.” Now, I realize that many of the GPS navigators in cars these days have this capability, but this is a separate system and not connected to your mobile phone.
While everyone, including myself, is very excited about location based services becoming a reality, I think we’ve got a ways to go before we have a device that makes the user experience such that they would get really excited about engaging this technology. But, who knows, it could be right around the corner.
MPEG-2 Import to iMovie when MPEG2 Muxed
Traditionally, when working with a Mac, things just work. You plug things into it, and it talks to these things (see Apple ad video). Having purchased a Mac Mini a year ago, I have been slowly getting back into video editing and making movies. My first experience was digitizing my high school video yearbook to create a DVD. Recently I started a new project of putting together a video for a group of friends that took a trip together. We had used a brand new Sony DCR-SR60 camera and thought it would be very easy to later edit as this camera records the video directly to an internal hard drive. Unfortunately, it records the files as MPEG-2, which are heavily compressed, not importable by iMovie, not playable with sound by QuickTime and just all around difficult to work with.
After 15 hours of searching the web I came to the simple conclusion: Don’t get one of these types of cameras if you care about quality.
My goal in spending this time online trying to solve the riddle of getting my footage into iMovie was to find the best way with the least degradation to video and audio quality. What I found was that there really is not a good way. Here’s how I recommend doing it after my research. Please, if anyone credible has another idea, I’ll repost. 🙂
Solution
Step 1: Go buy the MPEG-2 player ($20 from Apple) so that QuickTime can even play this file. You’ll want it later to work with another application.
Step 2: Install MPEG Streamclip, a fantastic application with functionality that should be included in QuickTime Pro. This application allows you to demux the file, which strips the audio out of the MPEG-2 file and creates two separate files that you can import and convert to another format later.
Step 3: Open the MPEG-2 file (most likely saved as .MPG) in MPEG Streamclip and from the File menu choose “Demux to M2V and AIFF…”. It will then ask you where you want to save the two files. Make sure they go into the same folder as this will be important later when importing into iMovie. Note: My files used AC3 for audio, but unfortunately iMovie doesn’t support this either, so I had to convert the audio to AIFF
Step 4: Create a new project in iMovie with the default setting of having it be a DV based project (other options are MPEG and H.264, but neither of these turned out with high quality when I tested them)
Step 5: Drag or import the newly created MV2 file into iMovie. iMovie will convert the MV2 file to a DV file in the project and include the appropriate sound file. You’ll now have the clip in the project!
The above solution covers the following problems:
- “File could not be imported because QuickTime could not parse it. -2048”
- MPEG2 can’t be imported into iMovie
- Codecs: MPEG2 Muxed
- Type: MPEG program stream
Bit Rate: 9.20 Mbps
Video Tracks: 224 MPEG-2, 720 â—Š 480, 16:9, 29.97 fps, 9.10 Mbps, upper field first
Audio Tracks: 128 AC3 2/0, 48 kHz, 256 kbps
SMS Marketing on Outdoor Advertising Billboards
idea: Create additional service offering for outdoor advertising companies to provide an additional value added service of SMS marketing
Background: Having just returned from India, a more advanced mobile phone market than the US, I experienced first hand great usage of outdoor advertising and SMS marketing. While driving I saw a billboard for a bank that was promoting a specific account with a great interest rate. To get more information, the billboard instructed to text a short code. I had a Hutch mobile phone at the time and thought I would give it a try. After sending the text message to the short code advertised I received a message instantly thanking me for my interest and informing me someone would get in touch with me to discuss further. Only a few minutes later my phone rang from an outbound telesales agent ready to answer any questions I had and promote the product.
Thoughts: Not only is the integration with the call center extremely effective for those travelers stuck in traffic, but provides an instant connection with the customer and drives real sales from the outdoor ad. An alternative approach would be to simply capture the customers info and provide basic info in a reply SMS, additional menu options to get additional info or a reference to a web address where they could visit later. After a brief search for potential platforms in the US to support this marketing strategy, I found a large number of them. Given this, I think the key is to not be the platform, but the service provider that educates the customer on how to build, manage and monitor the campaigns. Goomzee Connect should stay focused on offering services related to specific industries such as real estate, classifieds, and potentially outdoor advertising. Goomzee Connect could partner with the outdoor advertising companies such as ClearChannel, CBS, and Lamar to allow them to provide this capability as a value added service to their portfolio of outdoor billboards.
Potential Customers:
– Outdoor Advertising Association of America
Platform Competitors:
– iLoop
– Soapbox Mobile
– GoLive! Mobile
– Cellit
– flyTXT
– TextSMSMarketing
– Movo
Mobile Interesting Facts and Figures
My Travels
After spending the holidays with old friends in Montana, I reflected on all the many places I have been in the world. I have been blessed to have incredible opportunities that have lead to amazing adventures. This last year I started really thinking about how I could keep track of it all. I don’t own my own home, so I don’t have that nice den wall where I could hang a world map up and start pinning it. Given how virtual my life seems to be, I wanted a more mobile version. I started out just writing down the places in my mobile PDA, but really wanted those pins on a map. Today I figured, “someone’s got to have built something online.” Sure enough, with a simple google search I was lead to several options. The one I chose was YourGMap as it actually had the pins and I could edit information about each destination. So, here’s my travels…
Magazine Article Trackback Blogging
Part of the excitement of blogging is the dialogue that is created between different people. Initially, we had the simple comment responses, but as the product developed the idea of trackbacks was included. This allowed each blogger to post their commentary on their respected blogs and link the two so viewers could still understand the dialogue and expansion of thoughts. After reading CIO magazine, I see that they do a great job of providing a short URL to each article for reference. Wired does this as well. The really cool trick would be to provide a trackback URL instead so that if a reader wanted to comment on a particular article, they could trackback to the original publisher’s article.
Frequent Traveler Woes
As someone who seems to be in the airport almost as much as they’re home, I want to take this entry to just rant about some business processes and systems that need some investment.
Canceled Flights
– If a flight is canceled or delayed significantly, the system should automatically reconfirm everyone onto the next appropriate flight rather than have the desk agent try to manually handle these. They would simply provide boarding passes or make changes when the customer has a new preference.
Membership Lounges
– If you’re going to code share, then you should share customer data as well. Recently I was in the Frankfurt airport flying Lufthansa and as a Star Alliance Gold member through United, I wanted to use the First Class lounge even though I was only business class. The lounge said Star Alliance Gold members were welcome, but I had nothing that “proved” that because my boarding pass was with Lufthansa and thus didn’t show my credential. It was surprising to me that they couldn’t simply look me up to verify I in fact had earned the right to be in that lounge. Interestingly, on another visit, I had a United boarding pass that showed I was Premier Executive (Gold) and they argued with me as to whether that was acceptable proof. Someone needs to check the customer service processes for this loyalty program.
Offshore Travel Agent
While the Internet has allowed for a significant number of transactions to be pushed out to the customer in the fashion of “self-service”, many of these are so time consuming and frustrating a business opportunity is created. One of the most frustrating “self-service” transactions in my opinion is that of air travel. When I am using company money, it’s relatively easy as I simply log into my company travel website, select my travel dates, let it validate corporate policies, attempt to find the lowest fare and… I’m done. I just click “Purchase” because it’s not my money.
Now, let’s take the situation where you’re trying to book a ticket home for Christmas. You likely live at least two connections from home and the ticket of course is close to the average monthly rent for a two bedroom apartment. So, you begin the battle of trying multiple websites and forums to uncover the top-secret, super limited, “lowest fare”. Really, you have no idea if you found the lowest fare, but after spending multiple hours and having seen potentially tens if not hundreds of fare options, you give up assuming you’re close enough. Well, I’d like to propose the airlines just change their customer pricing practices and not be such __________. But, I don’t expect that to happen any time soon.
In the mean time, there is a significant opportunity to “outsource” this task to someone else. Given the price of labor in other markets, a company could setup a call center to accept travel requests, research them and provide the customer with the “lowest fare”. The idea would be to take the pain out of the transaction along with the wasted time. A customer would call up or text message the service and outline their travel constraints (e.g., optional dates, schedule, etc.). That would be it. They’d then wait for a call or email confirming an itinerary and it would be done. If there were follow-up questions due to similar options, the service provider would call the customer and ask which option they’d like to go with. The self-service web transaction would then simply be to setup your profile with frequent flyer numbers, credit cards, etc. This of course could also all be done over the phone if you just didn’t want to deal with it online.
It would be like your own personal assistant. Imagine the possibilities. Restaurant reservations, sports tickets…
SMS City Guide Using Location Based Services
A few years ago I had the idea for SMS dating in a bar. The technology would enable people to have an online profile and then when they were within proximity to another person that matched their profile, the system would notify them. It would be great for coffee shops, bars, etc. It’s sense been built to some degree by some folks in Europe and Japan, but has not had much widespread use. Why match.com or a similar property hasn’t done this is curious.
Today I was scanning Citysearch.com for a suitable place to host my friends to meet up for my upcoming birthday. Citysearch is one of my more favorite city guides as it still adds some editorial content, but I still feel that the city guide space online has been dead for a while. There are a lot of great sites where businesses can either post their information for a fee or for free and there are of course the newspaper versions, but nothing that really provides the definitive source for where to go, where to play. Following this need to know what’s hot, other sites have popped up that are more focused on getting the masses to provide feedback, such as Yelp.com. These are great, but overall are noisy with their design and difficult to get through the rants and determine the legitimate insight.
Then it dawned on me, why couldn’t you combine mobile phones location based services and one of these sites. A wireless carrier for example could provide the data that says where users are located. You could then feed this data through a system like Google Maps and show where there are large clusters. Now, filter it through only a listing of known entertainment venues and you’d see what places are happening on any given night. Over time, you could track this by date and average it to see what places are really hot. You could even monitor trends and be able to illustrate what places are up and coming vs. dying out.
Calling India
The power to make international calls with your mobile phone at discounted prices – MobileCaller.com.
Today, many of us are finding ourselves working with people that are in countries all over the world. This poses a new challenge for telecommunications as we want to retain our mobility found with the age of cell phones, but can’t afford to use them to call internationally. Even if we charge those calls back to our employer, it’s not reasonable given the rates the mobile phone companies charge. So, oftentimes we’re stuck in our office to make those calls. Well, I’ve found a service that allows you to make these international calls from your mobile phone, home phone or any phone for very low international rates. Take a look at the various packages. I’m sure you’ll find one that works for you. I use this service for work and to keep up with friends that are all around the world.
