Author: <span>philip</span>

UX Note: I see dead people…on WhatsApp.

Post published:March 5, 2014
Post author:philip

How and why WhatsApp grew at the rate it did in the years it has been in existence is a topic of much discussion. Most people attribute it to the fact that WhatsApp got rid of the concept of a 'buddy list' and just used the person's address book in their phone to connect them to other WhatsApp users. I feel like the side-effects of this system haven't been discussed in detail. Multiple SIM Cards One topic I have seen discussed is the problem people run into when they use multiple SIM cards, such as switching cards when traveling. I recall traveling last year and was surprised when I loaded a different SIM that WhatsApp recognized the phone was operating on a new number, and asked if I wanted to switch to the new number. At the time I didn't realize the significance of the switch. When you change numbers, anyone who has your other number in their address book becomes disconnected from you (unless they also have the new number). Why is it that a single WhatsApp account can't be connected to more than one phone number/device? It seems a silly limitation. Changing the number from the WhatsApp perspective…

The only “barrier to entry” you can create is to consistently build a great product.

Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box.com

The long goodbye to passwords

Post published:March 3, 2014
Post author:philip

First of all, if what's written above is your password, you need to change it now. I'll wait. Okay, good, now for the rest of the article. Why Passwords Don't Work It's not much of a secret that passwords are not a very good way to secure information. The real problem is when companies try to make users utilize more secure passwords, they end up making the whole system less secure. Does that seem counterintuitive? Here's a scenario. A company wants to make their corporate systems more secure. They decide that the passwords their employees are using are not secure enough, so they institute rules for passwords, which include: Must be 8 characters or longer Must include a lowercase letter Must include an uppercase letter Must include a number Must include a non-letter/number character Must not be the same as the previous password used Must not be the same as the username, or contain the username You've probably run across these rules before. You may not have seen all of them, but you've probably seen most of them, and probably many of them with a single system. In theory, these are all good rules. Where they lead to a less…

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

Albert Einstein

Stephen Wolfram never disappoints…

Post published:March 2, 2014
Post author:philip

http://youtu.be/_P9HqHVPeik No one will come away from this video amazed at how humble Stephen Wolfram is, but that's not the point of the video. It's an introduction to a forthcoming programming language from Stephen Wolfram, named appropriately enough Wolfram Language, that attempts to build on the past 30 years of his work creating Mathematica, his book A New Kind of Science (humbly referred to on his site as Wolfram Science), and Wolfram|Alpha. It takes the knowledge and algorithms built in to Wolfram|Alpha and makes them available in a symbolic programming language. The demo is fairly entertaining (considering its topic) and it should be very interesting to see what is done with this language once it's available to the general public. For more information, see the Wolfram Language section of the Wolfram Research web site.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World

Jon Medved interviewed on recent Israeli exits

Post published:February 26, 2014
Post author:philip

Great interview with Jonathan Medved, on Bloomberg TV in Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress (MWC), about Israeli companies and the many large exits recently, both acquisitions (shown in the graphic above) and the recent IPO of Wix. Last time I saw Jonathan Medved was actually in Barcelona at an earlier MWC when he was CEO of Vringo. Now he's running the very interesting OurCrowd crowdfunding firm, where accredited investors can invest a minimum of $10,000 into startups (a VC for the masses - or at least the accredited masses). Take a look: http://youtu.be/E1qae-vSoCc or view it on Bloomberg's web site.

Technology is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet.

Douglas Adams, author

What happens when you try to video mountain biking using your phone?

Post published:February 21, 2014
Post author:philip

http://youtu.be/jRDOzMYIXGo This is just a fun post of some video I filmed last week while mountain biking in my hometown of Modi'in. This trail is on a hill behind a major highway. There are a few things I'd like to point out about the video. I filmed it using an iPhone 4S mounted very securely to my bike using a machined aluminum Rokform bike mount that screws into the steering tube. The mount and the phone do not move at all. The blurry parts and wavy video that makes it look like I'm on an acid trip must have something to do with the CMOS sensor in the camera. A GoPro this is not. I don't know how current iPhones perform with extreme video situations like this, but I hope they're better. The stabilization correction is done using software called Elasty. It normally would remove the black edges, making the video rectangular as it was originally (losing some of the edges), but I think the rotating box is more dramatic and gives you a better sense of what the stabilization software is doing. Youtube added the extra black space on the left and right sides of the video, I guess…

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn

What the heck are stickers? A half billion dollar and growing business…

Post published:February 16, 2014
Post author:philip

Viber Sticker Store

http://youtu.be/o5LKXDwpqPE I've noticed something when talking to friends about messaging. If they're not from Asia (yes, technically I live in Asia, but Israel is not Asian in that sense) they don't get what stickers are all about. Why would they really? In the United States, and I believe Europe as well, stickers are more or less irrelevant. I would venture to guess that most Americans think stickers are just fancy emoticons. Facebook added stickers to it's messenger app, but although it's called the 'Sticker Store' it appears they're all free. Perhaps this is a first step towards commercialization in the future, but I think if you get something for free you don't really appreciate it, and in this case it probably means most Facebook users ignore this feature. It's also, as I mentioned, viewed as just bigger emoticon. Viber, which just sold a couple of days ago for $900M to the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten, implemented a sticker store as its first monetization strategy, followed by connecting calls to the traditional phone network. Stickers, in fact, are available on all the major messaging platforms with the solitary exception of WhatsApp. See the nice chart from Mark Watts-Jones on the 10 ways…

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Mark Twain, author

Lots going on in the mobile messaging space

Post published:February 14, 2014
Post author:philip

It's an interesting time to be in the mobile messaging space. I discussed the history of Internet and mobile messaging less than two weeks ago in my post The history of messaging, and where it’s going, but even in just the past few days, lots of things are shifting in the space. Just yesterday Skype (a division of Microsoft) announced that they are enhancing the chat functionality of their apps, enabling them to sync properly between apps on different platforms. Clearly, this is an attempt to take the fight to the mobile-first messaging companies that started with text, but started moving into Skype's audio and video call space. Skype has had text messaging for a long time, but if you looked at your messages on your computer, they would not show up as read on your phone, or visa versa. This is what Skype is fixing. A few days ago it was rumored that an un-named Asian messaging company was looking to buy Viber for up to $400M. Speculation was rife, with obviously names like WeChat, Kakao, and LINE being bandied about. The head of Viber, CEO Talmon Marco, denied it outright. Well, he was not lying. Viber was not…

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Peter Drucker, management consultant and author

More than I wanted to know about Twitter

Post published:February 13, 2014
Post author:philip

While I've used Twitter since 2007, I was generally a fairly passive user. One account I used was mainly automated postings from another blog of mine, and the account I'm now using was largely dormant. My original account I just used to follow people and read their tweets. Recently, I've decided to build up @trauring as my tech-focused account, and I've been trying to learn the intricacies of the world of Twitter. As part of that I've been trying to watch who follows me, and in general I want to determine what I do that causes more people to follow me. When I post an article on this site or tweet a tweet, what topics result in more followers? It's a bit narcissistic perhaps, but I look at it as a temporary experiment and challenge. Eventually I'll get the hang of things and leave well enough alone. It was thus with some amusement that I've been watching some of the accounts that have been following me. I say accounts, not people, because clearly some of these accounts are not real people. Today I noticed two new followers, Reita and Jed. What was so unusual about Reita and Jed? Here's what…