Many authors and industry experts on the web have been preaching the release fast, fail fast model.

The main mantra was: start working on a project, run it for a few months, see if it works and stick with it only if it grows like crazy as an overnight success. Otherwise just kill the project and move on.

I disagree, totally. Ideas need time to evolve and grow up to an inflection point where they become really strong and viable as products. A product needs to mature with usage and that, can not be done overnight. Secondly, a great team can only be built through time, by winning a few battles together.

Think of Rovio, OMGPOP, Fab, Pinterest and many other “overnight successes” that took 3, 4, or 5 years of hard work.

… the marginal utility of a good or service is the utility gained (or lost) from an increase (or decrease) in the consumption of that good or service. Economists sometimes speak of a law of diminishing marginal utility, meaning that the first unit of consumption of a good or service yields more utility than the second and subsequent units.

To explain it simply, we can use the thirst/water analogy.

When you are really thirsty you’d pay as much as you can for the first few drops of water, but much less for the last few drops in the bottle.

You wouldn’t care t0o much about the design of the bottle when thirst would actually be the problem you are trying to solve.

However in a world with immense supply, where you can get even the first drops of water for a relatively low price (or part of income), the problem of thirst is solved and a high marginal utility needs to be created elsewhere addressing another problem.

Perhaps in a bottle design that will be shaped better, or a bottle design that will communicate specific values and place the owner in a special social group.

Now let’s try to apply this thinking to a mobile & web product environment.

If there is no existing solution to a problem, the marginal utility of the solution on the market is huge and the people that are on the verge of dying without it would pay absolutely anything to get it.

But when such a solution becomes a commodity, the extra edge and new high marginal utility can be found in the experience around the solution. That is why services like Path or Instagram have good odds of causing some serious damage to the existing web mastodons in respective areas.

To really value good UX we need to be rich enough to be able to afford the basic experience with no sacrifice. That is why design becomes important once a specific point in an industry is reached and why several startups enjoyed huge success even without a great design or user experience.

In Europe many people just buy prepaid SIM cards, but that isn’t really convenient if you are traveling just for a day or two. I’ve liked the concept of FON since I’ve first heard of it a few years back. The main idea is to share a little wi-fi bandwidth at home and roam on other FON spots for free. Brilliant.

I believe the same concept could be easily applied to mobile. Create an app that will be able to take advantage of the personal hot spot functionality that is present on most smartphones and limit access to people that are using the service. Voila.

It might not be the perfect timing yet, but the time for such a service is really close if mobile operators will not cut the roaming charges or if someone like Apple or Google does not implement a global data plan.

p.s.: if someone wants to go ahead and implement this I’ll be glad to share more thoughts.

I did several public demos in my life, but this one was the most ad-hoc demo I have ever done. The plan was to do a standard five minute pitch that I have been refining all week and answer a few questions from the audience afterwards. Just like on a Y-Combinator Demo day.

While the other teams were already pitching at a quick pace I had an interesting conversation with Mathieu from Psykosoft. We sort of agreed that Demo day should be about actual demos – show and tell if you like. That is when I decided that I’m going to do a live demo – no planning, no scripts, just a plain showcase of the main functionalities of vox.io after a slightly shorter pitch than usual.

One of the main reasons that made me do this decision was the full confidence I had in the product. I knew the vox.io team has been working extremely hard for the last nine months and was fully confident, that the product was stable and working so that I could show it at any time.

At the end of the day it was not the idea or pitch that got us the nomination among the top startups; it was the demo and that is why this success was made by the team, working hard behind the scenes, not by my performance on stage.

Thanks Anže, Jan, Nil, Janin, Matej, Anton, Jakob & Vid – you rock.

The service is called Supervizor (Superviser) and has been developed by some of the best of breed talent in Slovenia.

From now on, anyone in the country can check how his money is spent, who earns it and the institution that is using it. At the dawn of a new potential crisis this tool will make sure government spending is peer verified. Supervizor is revolutionary and something only the power of software can bring us and would not be possible without an information society.

Today is a big day for Slovenia and its transparency. We’ve finally demonstrated our country is moving in the right direction. I’m proud of that. Hopefully someone will follow.

Note: Hit this Google translated link if you want to try it out in English.

Update: This post has received an unexpected amount of love on HackerNews and has been picked up by TechCrunch

Some people carefully keep their life curves flat – not too high in order to not go too low. Let’s call these the “keep it flat people”. They minimize risks, do not move around a lot, do not experiment. They know their life is not great the way it is, but do not have the balls to try to change it – what if it gets even worse? Sometimes an itch starts, but they quickly burry it, to prevent something disruptive from happening; you never know.

The other type is always on the look for the extreme highs, and they are aware those highs will almost always be followed by a dip. The difference between the highs and lows is bigger than the one happening to the “keep it flat people”, but the general level of happiness/satisfaction is usually higher, even when the local minimums are hit. I like to believe that startup people (founders & early team members) fit in this second group – I call them “roller coaster riders”.

Riding a roller coaster gets scary from time to time, but when the ride comes to a stop you just have to run back in the queue for another shot – it’s just the way it is, enjoy it.

But this is not a story about the expedition, even though their adventure was really an adventure in every possible way. This is a story about getting things planned and plan for the worse.

The planning and preparation started out six months earlier than the expedition. The training for the two climbers started even earlier. Almost each day for the next six months they meet up for 15 minutes and delegated specific tasks to one another. Moving on from high level tasks such as “prepare the time schedule for the days in Nairobi” to lower level tasks “buy 30 kilos of pasta (Barilla)”. One could call those meetings, product meetings.

Then there were weekly strategy and study meetings. Looking at photos from the single previous expedition to Mount Poi, studying the existing route and the massive vertical wall for a potential new route. I never again saw such attention to detail in a preparation phase. Of course these guys knew, as expert climbers, even though they were all in their mid twenties, that only such dedication and preparation will bring them home alive. They played with the negative scenarios, including the time it would take to get to the nearest hospital at any given moment during their expedition.

I see a similar pattern with startups. There are many weekend projects selling themselves as startups, but most of them lack the intense preparation, planning and study phase that is needed to execute properly, specially when trying to solve hard problems. If you know that in six months, when you will be in a full speed ahead mode, you can count on a good plan and not get distracted by every small detail you stand a much better chance to stay in the game a little longer. You might argue that having a planning phase will slow you down, but I am actually finding it quite the opposite. Thinking about several scenarios that can happen a bit in advance can help you move quicker and predict the future better.

Lastly, they had a day to day execution plan that had some buffer for unpredictable events. Even though they planned for a lot of things a few unpredictable events happened but they overcame them easily with on spot improvisation. As they later explained they did not think on the spot, but just acted and adapted the planned scenarios to the reality that was happening around them.

My take form this experience was to think a lot about what can happen, so you can react faster when it does happen. If you are unprepared it my cost you your life or the one of your team mates. In climbing as in startups.

In memoriam: this post is dedicated to Rok, who tragically passed away while doing what he loved. In the end, you can not plan for everything.

• what is vox.io
• where are we now
• how are we perceived in Slovenia and abroad
• and give an advice to potential Slovene entrepreneurs

You can imagine that it is impossible to spend much more than a sentence on each of these points and one cannot really go into deep thoughts. I am not going to elaborate those points here, except for the last one.

I stated something on the line of:

Don’t be afraid to try, have self-confidence and try to win on a global scale.

One of my mentors wrote to me saying that perhaps I have been emphasizing only the good points of entrepreneurship, when we both know that building up a company is much more about blood, sweat and tears than having a smooth ride. The people listening need to be warned that it will not be a walk in the park if they want to get where we are (as it might seem from the outside).

He is right. Building a company and a product has not been an easy ride and I firmly believe it cannot be done by just anyone. But those that actually listen and hear what I am trying to communicate when telling our story are probably smart enough to get the point and understand that we had to work really hard to get to where we are.

We had to build a team of extremely capable people, we had to overcome a lot of difficulties and work for long hours, during weekends, skip holidays and parties. We are still working from a pretty basic office space – no Aeron chairs, carpeting or art pieces at vox.io HQ. But we love doing it and this makes it fun. Blood, Sweat & Tears are forgotten when we see good metrics, get positive feedback from our users or when one gets a pat on the back from one of the teammates. We know that it hasn’t even started for real – if you’d put us on a progress bar it would still be at 0%.

If you are starting a company be smart, do your homework, train, practice and learn everything you can beforehand. But once you feel ready and reassured by the people around you, do the leap of faith and try to build something great. It is going to be a lot of blood, sweat and tears, but you’ll enjoy every moment of it*. If you are reading this, you are probably smart enough to make it. Consider yourself warned.

* you might not enjoy it at that exact moment

This post describes the second part of the journey. If you want to know what happened in London, NYC and Boston, you should read US Tour [part 1].

Silicon Valley & San Francisco

After spending the weekend in Squaw Valley we continued our journey to the technology Mecca – Silicon Valley. Our base camp was at the Black Box Mansion, a house just like the one in The Social Network.

No wonder our first stop was at Facebook HQ in Palo Alto. A massive office space, full of interesting propaganda posters with great copy: “Hack”, “Move fast and break things!”, “You don’t get to 500 million mobile users without feature phones” and the most interesting of them all  “This journey is 1% finished.” I just hope this propaganda phrases are not covered by the NDA you have to sign at the entrance. We met with a few FB teams and discussed a wide variety of topics, from the philosophy behind the open graph to details in the news stream publishing API. I have to say I was positively surprised by the attitude of our hosts at Facebook. Even though a lot of people (including me) have been critical about their approach to data portability I got out of the meeting much more confident that they will eventually open the access when the time is right and all the privacy issues are addressed.

There are no timeouts on the Seedcamp tour. Even when the schedule is not completely full there are a lot of things to do. We spent the early afternoon collectively improving our pitches at the Black Box Mansion, before visiting the 500 startups office in downtown Mountain View.
500 startups is a seed fund and startup accelerator run by Dave McClure and his great gang. They provide value to startups by helping them with design, data and distribution. Seedcampers had the chance to pitch head to head against the 500 startup companies in a relaxed atmosphere, with a lot of questions and funny interruptions (with pitch several improvement tips). We finished the evening off with mandatory startup pizza & beer.

On day two in SV we drove down to Google’s campus in Mountain View for Seedcamp Silicon Valley (classic format: pitches + mentoring sessions). The mentoring lineup was amazing once again. Imagine having Saul Klein and Bryce Roberts in one mentoring group, followed by Dave McClure, Anil Hansjee (Google) and Chrysanthos Chrysanthou (Cisco). It hardly gets better for a startup like vox.io.

Thanks to Kamila, we got the chance to tour the Googleplex and meet with several Google teams in tailor made meetings for each company. The Googleplex is like a small city. The campus includes a gym, free laundry rooms, two small swimming pools, multiple sand volleyball courts, and eighteen cafeterias of diverse selection open till late. When we were leaving the campus at 9pm, there were still a lot of Googlers around, which proves that Google still has some mojo in it, despite the hiring spree.

After a good night sleep (almost six hours) in our ubercool Atherton HQ, the caravan drove to Mountain View once again. This time we visited Microsoft as guests of their BizSpark division (kudos to Ludovic for inviting us) and LinkedIn. Both are incredibly close to Google’s HQ. It is also interesting to compare the cultures in the big 5 – I’ll not go into details, but let’s say they are very different. They are also very different from the smaller NYC startup culture or what we saw at Sermo. Of course there are several factors influencing this, but I believe that one could guess which company a person comes from within minutes.

To end the day, we drove to San Francisco during rush hour (hey, every experience counts) to meet the Twitter folks in their shiny office on Folsom in SoMA. In a brief meeting we got to discuss their history and some of their future plans. The best part of these company visits were the three minutes discussions in private after the “official” tour meeting. If you are well prepared and have a set of direct questions to ask, you’ll always get out with an answer or in the worse case with a direct email of the person that can address your question. Another invaluable part of the Seedcamp US tour.

While the rest of the caravan run back to the Black Box mansion, I managed to persuade Dino and Mathieu to join me and meet with Twilio, which is on the same road as Twitter. Twilio is doing a great job in connecting web applications and telephony in an easy fashion.

The meeting was short but sweet, as we had to drive back to the Black Box mansion where a surprise party was waiting for us. The Black Box folks managed to gather an immense number (seriously!) of cool folks under a single roof to meet the Seedcamp companies. We improvised with 3 min standup pitches and talked the night away over good food, beer and wine. It is impressive how many good connections you can make in such relaxed atmosphere, full of positive vibes.

Important note: if you take part of this tour, plan to sleep no more than 4 hours per night.

We finished our Valley visit with pitches at Sequoia, before going to San Francisco one more time for Seedcamp SFO at I/O ventures. I/O ventures is a really interesting co-working space/incubator on Valencia street. Needless to say the Seedcamp SFO was a great event, by now you should have been used to it. Once again Seedcamp managed to gather A class people for mentoring, including Jeff Clavier (SoftTechVC), Tony Conrad (About.me), Scott Rafer (Mashery, MyBlogLog) and many more… I hope you get the point.

Seedcamp SFO was also the last official pitching session and it was impressive to see how much the pitches of all the companies improved during the two weeks we spent on tour. Even though we had to shout the pitches out (as there was no microphone and a bar full of random people), messages came across very well in a concise fashion. Thanks Mike. The training at 500 startups came very handy as well, as we got used to people chatting around while we were presenting. Thanks Dave.

All in all, I left the Valley and San Francisco with a positive feeling. Once you are here, visit these Internet giants, talk to people at emerging stars and experienced folks in several industries, you understand that everything is possible if you play your cards right. There is no conspiracy that will make you fail. You are only doomed, if you are bluffing, but if you have a fair amount of knowledge about what you are doing, you are passionate, and you know how to argument certain decisions you’ve made, you will eventually get the chance to prove yourself. In addition to that I found out that US people tend to like Europeans, mainly because we usually have knowledge about several domains, while the default US mantra is being focused on a specific vertical. I believe you need a combination of both to innovate and create great products.

Seattle

After catching our flight at 5am (remember the note from above?), we flew into Seattle to visit Microsoft and Amazon Cloud Services team. I believe it was worth it for those companies who use their services or technology. In addition to that it is always good to hear and see how big companies operate – one can learn a lot from it.

Austin

We wrapped up the tour in Austin for SXSW. SXSW is probably the biggest interactive conference and it is most certainly the wildest one. 14k geeks, startup founders, social media experts and business developers + around 1k plain humans, gather in Austin to attend approximately a million parties, BBQs, chill-out lounges and some sessions at the conference. It was my first time at SXSW and I failed at RSVPing to the best parties early enough and spent most of the time wondering from club to club, but nevertheless I had a great time. SXSW was the perfect chance to remeet with a few of those who we met during the tour and bond even more. I am not sure I’ll go back next year, but SXSW is definitely something you should experience at least once.

To conclude this epic journey, we flew from Austin to Houston and back to Europe. I can say I came back totally exhausted, but full of new insights, inspiration, experiences and ideas. If you get the chance you should definitely endeavor on such a tour with Seedcamp, but to do that you need to become a part of the Seedcamp family. Apply now, it is worth it!

Tips & tricks:

• organize private meetings way in advance (otherwise the schedule will kill you)
• check the schedule and prepare a set of questions for every company you plan to visit (they will answer them!)
• read as much as possible about the mentors beforehand (you’ll save time in mentoring sessions and will know who is relevant for your business)
• prepare and practice several versions of your pitch
• consult with the Seedcamp folks about your pitch
• write a daily journal (otherwise you’ll end up writing two long blog posts)
• bring as many aspirins as you can (you’ll need them)
• bring and use sunscreen!
• remember that is all good fun and that those around you are there to help you

Finally, thanks again to Philipp, Carlos, Reshma & Jakob from Seedcamp for making it possible and to all the Seedcamp teams for being awesome peers on this journey. You rock!

To sum it up for those of you who won’t be reading the whole post or series:

It was superawesome!

Thanks to Philipp, Carlos, Reshma & Jakob from Seedcamp for making it possible and to all the Seedcamp teams for being awesome peers on this journey. Let’s start!

London

I started my trip with a few meetings in London to warm up a bit, payed a visit to my friends from LeStudio52 in Shoreditch and met a some very interesting people on their Friday Waffle breakfast. The interesting thing about Shoreditch and East London is the creative energy that floats around, you can see and feel it everywhere. Very Brooklynish.

East London is trying hard to become a technology hub, but there is still a lot of work to do. This is a topic for a standalone post.

New York City

We flew to Newark from London and got a great surprise at the start of the trip. Limos. The Seedcamp team made us feel really special for the whole trip and the start was appropriate.

In the following days we visited several NY startups including hot ones such as Foursquare, 10gen (MongoDB) and Etsy. I was impressed by the friendliness all those companies showed us, since we were more or less crashing in their offices. It was specially interesting to see how Foursquare was getting ready for their yearly highlight event – SXSW. The focus inside their office was amazing – everyone was working at full speed and even though Dennis spent a few minutes with us, one could see that he is eager to go back to work and deliver his awesome product. Admirable.

Google NYC hosted the first Seedcamp tour event in a classic Seedcamp format – pitches and mentoring sessions, with some top mentors. Imagine being mentored by people from Google, Betaworks, Zemanta, Hot-Potato (recently acquired by FB), AOL, TimeWarner, Daylife, Aviary and more. You just can’t get out of the day without being blown away by those people. So many comments, ideas and genuine advice are given that you can’t process everything on the spot – notes are mandatory.

Another NYC highlight includes a morning chat with Fred Wilson (AVC) at the Betaworks office. Fred is incredibly sharp and open, he shares his views without keeping back (as he does on his awesome blog). From my personal perspective Fred is very different from other investors in the way that he understands the entrepreneurs problems and admires everyone who is trying to change the world, but only if the entrepreneur tries to do that in a clever and educated fashion. Too bad we only got one hour with him, as we could probably chat the day away.

I also managed to sneak into the NY tech meetup where some of the hottest young startups were presenting. As an analytics freak, I was specially impressed by chart.io, but there were several interesting startups presenting. I would love to be part of one of these events in the future.

Finally I was luck enough to get one hour with Bostjan from Zemanta. A good friend and helpful advisor in these times. If you are in NYC and want to meet someone really awesome, try to meet Bostjan and his wife Gaja.

All in all the NY startup scene is great. Very focused on beautiful products and experiences, a bit less on technology. I find this rather interesting and good in many ways.

Boston

It was my first time in Boston. I heard many stories about it and most of them were true. Boston is a neat city with a vibrant startup scene including some internet mastodons like Akamai, HubSpot, Sermo, Brightcove, SkyHook and many more. On the other hand Boston is full of emerging gems such as Celtra, SCVNGR, Where and the likes.

Our first stop in Boston was Voltage Cafe, where we met with Fred and Dustin from Atlas Ventures for a great coffee and morning chat, before heading to the Sermo HQ for an inspiring talk by their CEO Daniel Palestrant. Sermo is a really interesting company with an even better culture. They have about 10 dogs running around the office, do I need to say more about their culture?

Next stop – Atlas Ventures. Atlas is one of the major venture firms in Boston, well known for investing in Dailymotion, Moo, Songbird, Seedcamp, Zoopla and many others. Entrepreneurs talk very well about them, and after meeting them I can see why. They are clever, open and helpful.

The HubSpot office was the venue for the second Seedcamp on tour. The HubSpot is conveniently located in the same building along with Atlas, ZipCar & Sonos. With slightly improved pitches the Seedcamp winners were shining again and opened up a whole set of questions for mentoring sessions. The attendees in Boston were slightly more formal than in NYC, but nevertheless brilliantly clever people. I was lucky to get into great mentoring sessions (but I doubt any mentoring sessions were lacking greatness). The Seedcamp event was wrapped up by a talk from the HubSpot’s CEO Brian Halligan with some great insights into how HubSpot brings value to their customers.

We ended the at Venture Cafe – another interesting event where influentials from the startup scene meet with peers and potential investors. If you are in Boston make sure to attend one of these events.

Before leaving Boston we stopped at the MassChallenge HQ in the seaport area, the MIT museum and took a walk in the university campus.

To sum it up, Boston is a great city, a bit “boring” if you are looking for that Brooklyn or San Francisco hipster feel, but appears to be great for those who tackle difficult high tech problems where you really need the brightest minds.

Continue to part two, including details on Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Seattle and Austin.

“I want to live like common people,
I want to do whatever common people do,
I want to sleep with common people,
I want to sleep with common people,
like you.”

A couple of days ago the tech world waked up, shocked by a big move from two big players in the mobile space. This post is not about that, but it is a reflection on how disconnected most of the tech scene is from reality.

While endless debates about OS-es, development environments, programming tools and more were being discussed among experts none of the real users seemed to care. I was wondering why, when I met with a couple of my non-geek friends who have been faithful Nokia users from the early days till now. They know that Android exists, that Microsoft has a mobile OS and that my iPhone is as shiny as it gets, but they really do not care much about that. No one buys a phone because of its OS.

Image by tomazstolfa via Flickr

What they care about is the experiences a mobile device can bring them. They care about being able to throw birds at pigs with a slingshot, they also care about poking a talking cat or playing a game that engages their mind. What they also care about is being able to call, text and keep in touch with others and answer an email from time to time. Finally they care about finding good places to eat or have a beer. They do not care if this experience is done on Android, IOs, Symbian or HTML5 – as long as it meets their expectance. And they should not care.

It is up to us to deliver them the experiences that they deserve in the best possible way as long as it is economically viable (not necessarily financially). It is up to us to choose the technology, OS, or ecosystem if you want, that will enable an experience. If the ecosystem does not support such an experience it is not something you can do a lot about and the people that are expecting a certain level of experience are probably not on that ecosystem anyway.

The next time you start complaining about the technology, just remind yourself that common people (those who you are building a product for) do not care about it. They care about the experience. Go and deliver that experience, in the best possible way for common people.

During my flight back from London last week, I had some time to reflect on all those pitches. I came to the conclusion that spending a lot of time pitching might be good for feedback, but it will not make your product any better unless you sit down, take a Moleskine (or your sketching tool of choice) and think about how you can incorporate that feedback back into the product without alienating it or bloating it with features.

As for myself, I know I have to plan my pitching periods well and not get caught in an endless loop of pitching without incorporating the feedback back into the product.

And for those of you who still have just an idea on paper (or in a slideshow) – pitching that idea will not make your product any better, until you have something to show. Go work on it until it communicates what you want and is ready for demo; it does not have to be fully functional, but it needs to show a user scenario that your potential customers can identify with.

You will get better feedback and other founders, investors and potential partners will take you much more seriously.

A thing that piqued my interest was the immense number of people recording the event & taking pictures with their mobile phones or cameras. I kind of predicted this would happen (that is why we started working on Balumbo) a few years back.

I managed to find the time to reflect a bit on the observed behavior. My main question was:

“Why would someone choose to trade the experience of a long awaited live show for a shaky recording with crappy sound or a blurred picture.”

From an economics perspective this is just a simple trade-off. In a simplified model you have you have a memorable, enjoyable and quite rare experience (the MGMT and White Lies do not come to Slovenia very often) on one side; on the other side you have a recording experience, durable recording, but most importantly a shareable proof that you have attended the event.
This last part being the most important. Obviously the second part is becoming more important for several people, as technology becomes more accessible and the barrier to entry gets lower, so the cost of picking the second option become more accessible.

Here comes the theory – we (humans) function on envy. Humans apparently need others to envy our experiences, wealth, social status (…) to feel good. That is why people pick the second option if the costs of both options are comparable – to show that they have been part of something instead of just enjoying the experience. That is (at least from my perspective) the main driver behind tweets, check-ins, photos and videos posted from the event. People want their peers to see what they missed and desire that they would have been there, to tape and post the event recording themselves.

I am not saying that this kind of behavior is right or wrong, it is just an observation so feel free to correct my thoughts.

We all have mentors; often several, but defining the role of each mentor is not easy. On the other hand, we all become mentors at one stage or another.

Mentorship refers to a personal developmental relationship in which a more experienced or more knowledgeable person helps a less experienced or less knowledgeable person. The receiver of mentorship was traditionally referred to as a protégé, or apprentice but with the institutionalization of mentoring the more neutral word “mentee” was invented and is widely used today.
Source: Wikipedia

The experience fallacy

I am experienced enough, I don’t need a mentor.

If that thought ever crossed your mind you were (or maybe still are) very wrong. We all need mentors either you like it or not. No one has experience in every possible field and consequentially does not have in depth knowledge about every matter, but most importantly – none of us has enough time to gain that knowledge or experience all by ourselves, with no external advice on which is the right path. That is why we all need mentors – to give us directions, to support us and to criticize our work or approach when necessary.

What makes a good mentor?

Good mentors provide smart advice at the right time and know when to listen carefully. They usually lead by example and encourage their protégés to gain experience by trying new things, but always armed with valuable advice and with a clear goal in mind – to learn something new. Good mentors always establish a two way relationship, challenging the protégé to think with his own brain and open up new points of view while sharing his thoughts with the mentor.

From my personal experience two way relationships are essential for the mentor – protégé growth and should be nourished carefully through the mentorship cycle.

What makes a good (smart) protégé?

Being a smart protégé is not that easy, specially if you find yourself stuck in the experience fallacy. Falling into one should be avoided at all costs as the experience fallacy may cause the mentor to lock down the access to his knowledge & experience. Definitely not a good idea for the protégé as she can not gain much from such a mentorship. A smart protégé will always respect the mentor and vice-versa.

A protégé should listen to his mentor, but challenge every assumption the mentor has in a positive way, with the common goal of learning. Mentorship advice should be taken more like a guideline, a starting point on which to build on and research further.

One or many?

From my personal perspective you need a mentor for each field you want to explore. If you are very focused on just one vertical than a mentor in that vertical will probably suffice. On the other hand, if you are more the hybrid type, you will need a few mentors, one for each field you are studying or are involved into.

Fin

You need mentors either you like it or not. Invest into getting the best mentors out there as it is definitely worth it, but remember to take their advice with a pinch of salt.

This post is more a note to self before anything else. I have been intrigued by game mechanics for a long time now and have tried to incorporate them into some of the products I’ve been imagining and designing – for now only as future concepts that can be enabled at a later stage.

Nevertheless, I am trying to understand the underlying principles and thanks to Tadej I discovered these two slide sets that do a great deal of explaining what gamification is and why a simple pointing system does not make your product a game.

Related articles

• The Gamification of Healthcare (designmind.frogdesign.com)
• Gaming education (radar.oreilly.com)

SIP with proprietary magic

Soon after FaceTime for iOS was released a few network dumps of FT calls were published online. What is clear from those dumps is that Apple built its own, proprietary peer discovery mechanism (which they promised to open, eventually). The peer discovery is made via encrypted requests to Apple’s servers.

The calls are just plain, usual, vanilla SIP with a twist. The codecs used for media are not standard video telephony codecs. While the video codec might even fit in the “standard” pack, the audio codec is something new for the telephony world. This implies that FaceTime can not be easily integrated with standard video call equipment owned by mobile operators and common mortals. That equipment usually uses (or used to use) h263 as the video codec and AMR-NB as the audio codec of choice in SIP that was later transcoded to H.323 H.324M in order to get it on a 3G video phone. This technology has some really funny limitations, with its culmination in a total of 64 kb/s for both audio and video (fu** yeah!).

No wonder FaceTime’s quality is much better – it uses a newer codec + has much more available bandwidth for audio & video streaming.

The funniest part of this story is that both mobile operators and vendors in this space knew this was possible, but there was so much legacy equipment (deployed a bit to early) in place that it did not make sense to change everything all over again.

FaceTime is great on the UI level

In terms of user interaction FaceTime for iPhone is quite brilliant. Initializing a FT call is easy, but there have been other phones with dedicated HW keys for video calling that were even easier to use. From my perspective the best (and most innovative) part of the FaceTime experience is hidden in the little details during the call – the unobtrusive interface, the automatic rotation (probably just a message passed via SIP) and some other candy.

Compare that to a video call interface on a Nokia or Motorola 3G video call enabled phone and you will see what I am talking about. The same applies to FT for Mac – take your time, test some SIP clients that let you make video calls and prepare to be surprised by the poor interface design.

Will FaceTime be mainstream?

Well, I believe that video calls have their own spot under the sun, but I can hardly believe that all calls will be video calls some day.

As Tomi puts it – one media does not kill the other, they complement each other to bring satisfaction to users. Video calling on Skype is huge and I am sure Mac to Mac FaceTime calls will thrive, but I can’t really see people doing all that video calling to mobile devices where people are on the move and are not “ready” for a visual contact with the caller.

Conclusion

FaceTime is nothing new in terms of underlying technology. SIP has been around forever (originally designed in 1996). H264 for video and AAC for audio streaming are nothing new, but the combination of those technologies was not in line with any standards, but it produced much better results than its predecessors with h263 and AMR-NB. That is the innovation Apple made – fu** the standards and make something that works better than those “standard” compliant competitors.
Secondly, Apple really added a great layer of design knowledge on top of that technology in order to simplify the experience for users and personally I believe there is room for further improvement, specially when this kind of experience will be available in the browser (not in a closed App Store), linked to existing services.

Note: this post was written on a Mac in a web browser.

In this blog post I will focus on iceberg applications – applications that feature a maximally simplified user interface hiding a big mountain of technology in the background. Hopefully you will find the examples given relevant enough to admit that some of the best tools around are actually icebergs.

Definition

An iceberg application or service is defined by a minimalistic and simplified interface, masking a complicated system in the background.

This definition applies to physical objects as well. Another thing that needs to be clarified at this point is the interface – every piece of an object that can interact with the external world (or be interacted with) is an interface. This includes APIs, which are often not regarded as interfaces by product designers.

Examples

Google search

Really simplified interface. Just a text box in addition to basic links. One small textbox masks a huge software engine in the background that does almost all of the work before search results are displayed.

The original iPod

Again, the original iPod is masking (for that time) advanced technology required to decode and play music files behind a single wheel and a single button. The process of getting the music from the disc, decode it and transform it to sound is abstracted from the user and the interface.

Good old telephone

Fixed line telephony is also a great example of an iceberg service. The user only sees a device with a really simplified user interface and is not aware of what is going on in the background. The user does not have the option to use a specific codec, select the type of messages that need to be passed or enter any authentication details in order to make a phone call. Once again, the interface abstracts the technology to a point where the user does not have to worry about it.

Good old TV

The final example is well known to all of us. The one device that could be the king of iceberg apps (but is not). In the old days TVs had only two buttons. One for turning it on. And one (round) for searching channels. Users did not have to understand how the signal is coded, modulated, decoded and then shown. Because of a feature frenzy the TV is a nightmare today. 105 buttons on every remote for functions that are merely useful (and are really used every once in a while).

Similarities

What all this products have in common is that the complexity is hidden under the surface. The interface to interact with them is relatively compact, compared to what is hidden in the background.

Weighting flexibility against simplicity

Of course you might argue that if complexity is hidden things are not customizable or hackable. You do not get to decide what protocol to use, or what frequency a signal is going to be broadcasted. If you are a geek/nerd (pick the title that suites you better) you probably won’t believe this, but most people really do not care how things work if they get the job done. However, they do care about what kind of effort is required from them, and if the level of effort required vs. outcome value is to high they will just switch to an simpler alternative where this ratio is better. This does not apply to professional products where you want to have control of every possible detail.

That is why I believe iceberg apps, with simple interfaces and a lot of hidden magic will always be more successful than the ones that expose all the complexity to the user.

A very interesting thing happened yesterday (1st of July, 2010) – Slovenia’s leading mobile operator, Mobitel, announced (no English news available) that they will be cutting down the amount of data traffic available in its subscription packages. They have been offering packages including 1GB of data traffic for more than 12 months and got many new subscribers on board during this period.

Yesterday, Mobitel decided to cut down the amount to 100MB, 900MB less. Users revolted, filling Mobitel’s Facebook page with angry comments in addition to a huge amount of posts on Twitter.

It is quite clear why Mobitel had to do this – their network was hardly keeping up with the heavy usage induced by almost flat fee pricing as 1GB per user is a lot in mobile. Some users with unlimited, flat fee packages commented that they transfer almost 70GB of content in a normal month, combining mobile surfing and tethering, mainly using YouTube, Flickr, MySpace and other web applications.

From my point of view this shows us an interesting insight – apparently many, many common users (not early adopters/geeks/nerds) care about their online mobile services and that they regard mobile web/data access as something really important, as important as calls or SMSes.

This is quite exciting for those of us who are trying to be active in the mobile space, meaning that we can hope the mobile web will become as ubiquitous as the “attached to a wall” internet is, not only from the technology perspective, but also from the user’s perspective, thus forcing operators to adapt and provide an even better service.

In the last year there have been a ton of mobile application challenges. Mainly because other players in the industry want to compete with Apple‘s iPhone ecosystem – the iPhone SDK and the Appstore being at the center. Nokia, HTC, Samsung, Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile and many others (including some local operators in the Adriatic region) have been trying to spur mobile development by pouring massive amounts of money into prizes for dev competitions. I firmly believe this approach is wrong and that it can yell no tangible results in the long run.

The problem(s)

App challenges are usually organized in order to convince developers to try a new platform. It is important to stress out “new platform”. This means that the skill levels of developers on these new platforms are usually low to medium and in very rare cases advanced. In addition to that app challenges usually target developers who have few if any mobile projects in their portfolio and are only experiencing the mobile world for the first time – lured in by technology that is similar enough to what they have been used to develop for in the past (Java in Android, C++ in QT, Objective C for iPhone).

Furthermore these developers (who are usually not mobile professionals) need some guidance and assistance, specially in order to avoid classic design pitfalls and in order to deliver a great user experience – let’s face it, developers need designers and vice versa.

Finally, many apps lack the business/marketing component that would make them viable in the long run.

The goal

Setting the right goal is crucial. Getting 101 amateur apps (remember the low/medium skill levels from above) is not really what you want unless you just want to crunch numbers. Aiming for a small number (5 is a nice number) of high quality apps is a better strategy (at least from my personal perspective).

The (proposed) solution

With the problem and goal in mind the solution offers itself. To solve the problem you need to bring those developers to at least a medium skill level to start with, help them build teams and monitor their work process in order to be able to help.

You can then help them get in touch with mobile experts, organize one on one sessions and nudge them in the right direction when needed.

Long term benefits

I fully understand that this kind of approach requires much more effort than just naming a large prize and wait for applications to start flying in, but I firmly believe that the results will be worth it.

With this kind of approach several long term benefits for developers can be achieved:

• developers learn how avoid mobile design pitfalls  (always handy, no matter what the technology)
• developers learn how to deliver a great (not average) mobile application
• developers get to know designers, mobile experts and business mentors
• get applications that can sustain themselves in the long run, so that their creators see the benefit to keep working on them
• the contest organizer has the possibility to build up an organic community through long term interaction
• the technology providers can build up a knowledge base about their SDKs – learn what sucks and needs fixing

In this spirit I will be joining the Nokia App Forum Slovenia‘s summer Academy, where we (along with Matevž, Andraž and Žiga)  will try to take teams of young ambitious developers on a journey of mobile application development and teach them all the tricks of the craft in the process.

btw: the deck was selected among Slideshare.net‘s featured presentations.