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Posts Tagged ‘Geeks’

Polaris’ Ryan Spoon and Hollrr’s David Hegarty on life in incubator Dogpatch Labs (video)

I recently stopped by Dogpatch Labs, the San Francisco incubator space run by Polaris Venture Partners. The venture firm recently exported its self-described “frathouse for geeks” concept to Cambridge, Mass. and New York, but San Francisco is where the idea began in 2008.

Basically, Dogpatch is a cool space (the San Francisco location is on Pier 38) where entrepreneurs can rent desk space with a bunch of other startup folks. There are lunches, talks, and other community events. And even though it’s owned by Polaris, you don’t have to be or to become a Polaris portfolio company to get in.

I interviewed Polaris’ Ryan Spoon about life at Dogpatch Labs. For an entrepreneur’s perspective he introduced me to David Hegarty, chief executive of just-launched product recommendation site Hollrr, known as the “Foursquare for Products.”

(Sorry for the shaky camera. I’m buying a tripod before I do another video, I swear.)

Companies: Hollrr, Polaris Venture Partners

People: David Hegarty, Ryan Spoon

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MIT jumps straight to wirelessly powering multiple devices
Ah, wireless power. One of those mythical mysteries that are far more likely to remain “something to strive for” rather than “the next big thing.” Oh sure, we’ve got Palm’s Touchstone and the Powermat, but until we can hang a 50-inch plasma from our bedroom ceiling and power it up without a single wire, we’ll remain firmly unsatisfied. Thankfully for those of us in that camp, MIT exists, and a few of the school’s best and brightest are toiling around the clock in order to develop a technology that would power not one, but multiple devices sans cabling. Thanks to the wonders of coupling resonance, we’re told that the “overall power transfer efficiency of the wireless system could be increased by powering multiple devices simultaneously, rather than each device individually.” In theory, the system could be implemented by “embedding a large copper coil in the wall or ceiling of a room,” but there’s obviously no set time frame for release. We’ll be looking for you geeks at CES next year, okay?

MIT jumps straight to wirelessly powering multiple devices originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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LG not interested in proprietary smartphone OS, likes Android and Windows Phone 7

LG has told the press at MWC that it will not be developing its own smartphone platform “at least for the next two to three years.” We think companies should focus on what they do well, and given our ambivalence toward the S-Class UI, it’s probably a good thing that LG will narrow its operation down to churning out delectable slabs of electronics and leaving the software side to the geeks over at Google and Microsoft. The head of the company’s handset unit, Skott Ahn, has indicated that the future of LG smartphones will be shared between Android and Windows Phone 7 (sorry, Symbian lovers). It will have taken plenty of restraint to not respond to local nemesis Samsung — who has just introduced its first Bada handset — but LG appears to be of the opinion (which we share) that the smartphone OS sector is already overcrowded, and its expectation is that over the next couple of years the market will distill itself down to just three predominant operating systems.

LG not interested in proprietary smartphone OS, likes Android and Windows Phone 7 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 04:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Open Thread: The Internet Is Hard

Earlier today, we had a runaway hit of a post that went viral within a few hours, getting unbelievable pageviews and hundreds of retweets and comments.

The trouble was, it wasn’t because of the post’s content. Due to some interesting SEO magic, the post was one of the first search results for the term “Facebook login.” As a result, hundreds of confused readers bombed us with angry comments about how much they hated the “new Facebook,” a.k.a. our Facebook Connect comment login.

We could laugh (and we did), but we could also consider that these are our customers and users – the people we make the Web for.

How can we balance making the Web simple enough for all users while still creating tech cool enough to satisfy geeks like us? And who says either group – nerds or users – is “normal,” anyway?

Sponsor

Here are some valuable lessons we were taught today by the commenters on the thread. We’ll employ the term “user” here to indicate the non-geeky, average person who uses the Web primarily as a way to navigate his or her real life. Feel free to disagree with this terminology or suggest new nomenclature in the comments.

1. Users don’t care about what you care about.

This quote from another RWW post pretty much sums it up:

“Especially in Silicon Valley, where it’s easy for entrepreneurs to isolate themselves in circles with like-minded techies and fellow entrepreneurs, I feel that a huge amount of startup CEOs and designers… make product decisions that appeal to their own interaction behaviour with such applications or what they think their friends will find cool.

“Building for geeks makes for great customer immersion if you’re building something like (the wonderfully useful) GitHub, but that same process doesn’t work so hot if you’re building a site for middle-aged moms.”

You and your geek friends != middle aged moms. And your users are often statistically more likely to be middle-aged moms.

2. Users don’t read your copy or look at your branding.

Banners, logos, carefully crafted wordsmithery – this is all filler, we’ve found out. Users have been calloused by 15 or so years of surfing through bad ads and marketing babble, and they are unconsciously tuning out everything but the one thing they came to find.

For example, none of the 200 or so confused Facebook users who commented on our earlier post read the post itself, the huge logo at the top of the page, the many links to non-Facebook-related content or the huge, all-bold paragraph about how ReadWriteWeb is not, in fact, some ill-conceived redesign of Facebook. They simply searched for “Facebook login” and, upon navigating to our site, scrolled until they found the one button they wanted to click. Which brings us to our third assertion.

3. Users gravitate toward the simple and the familiar.

A ton of the confused commenters scrolled down far enough to find the Facebook Connect button for logging into the comments section – as evinced by the fact that their Facebook profiles were then linked to their comments.

I’ve often criticized the ripped-off look of social media UIs, but once a UI becomes familiar, is it not a service to certain types of end users to continue in that vein? Two hackneyed expressions will back me up, one about reinventing wheels and the other about not needing to fix things that aren’t broken.

As a tech geek of the 12-hours-a-day-online variety, I appreciate innovative and intuitive web interfaces. But a lot of users don’t. Even if it’s simple, it needs to be familiar. Why do you suppose some of our current, deeply entrenched web design elements – from buttons to text blocks – even exist?

4. Users rule the Internet.

Finally, this is the reason we’ve stopped mocking the poor folks who left those comments long enough to write this post.

400 million people now use Facebook, and they don’t all have CS Master’s degrees from Stanford. But if you work in the IT/tech/Internet/online media industries, they do manage to pay your bills. They’re the ones who open emails, click ads, make purchases, sign up for subscriptions and generally take the majority of actions that make our whole ecosystem work.

And most of them have no idea what a web browser is or how it differs from a search engine or a social network. They’ve chosen to be smart about other things, like building cars or making art or raising families. I’ll bet some of them are terrific dancers. We have to build the Web for them, too.

As a user, a developer, a designer, a marketer, a startup dude or lady, whatever you happen to be, how do you balance the need to find or create cool tech and apps with the need to build with these kinds of users in mind? Do you get frustrated? Do you get feedback? Do you kill features and make buttons bigger?

What have been your successes and failures, or where have you learned lessons? We’d love to know, so please tell us in the comments.

Discuss

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Mac OS X 10.3 installed on Nokia N900 via PearPC, barely usable for impatient geeks

Curious folks around the world enjoy a bit of hackintosh every now and then (although once is enough for many), but no geek has successfully ventured as far as Toni Nikkanen of Finland, who became the first person to run OS X on a phone — the Nokia N900. As you can see in the video after the break, Toni’s hack relies on PearPC — a PowerPC emulator — to install good ol’ OS X 10.3 (Panther), but the mammoth sluggishness means it’s far from usable. Still, if you can spare 90 minutes for each boot-up plus plenty more for the snail-paced cursor, then head to the source to learn from Herra Nikkanen.

[Thanks, Matija]

Continue reading Mac OS X 10.3 installed on Nokia N900 via PearPC, barely usable for impatient geeks

Mac OS X 10.3 installed on Nokia N900 via PearPC, barely usable for impatient geeks originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 19:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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App news & reviews: Trapster, Observation, Foto Brisko and more

Filed under: iPhone, App Review

	Speed trap checker Trapster for iPhone updated to 4.0 We’ve mentioned Trapster once here on the site before, but we haven’t really covered it in any depth yet, I believe. It’s the official iPhone app [iTunes link] for an online database of speed…		Amateur astronomers: Log your sessions with Observation 1.1 for iPhone Being proper geeks, a lot of us here at TUAW are amateur astronomers (we won’t count Mel Martin, who is so incredibly good at astrophotography that he should be considered a professional)….
	Foto Brisko: leading you to the places where great photos are made iPhone developer Bill Dudney is well-known for his classes and books on iPhone development. When he’s not teaching others how to write iPhone apps, he’s writing his own code for Gala Factory…	Also of interest: Skype for iPhone adds landscape mode, but lacks push & 3G Acrobat.com Mobile now available on the iPhone; free, but expensive Check out the App Hub for more reviews!

TUAWApp news & reviews: Trapster, Observation, Foto Brisko and more originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Linux Foundation sets up Job Board, cites 80 percent growth in Linux-related jobs

As the Linux Foundation tells it, the Linux-related job market is today 80 percent larger than it was five years ago. Whereas other industries have had to shed workers in the current recession, the Foundation is hopeful penny-pinching measures might actually encourage businesses to transition to Linux-based software and thereby further stimulate employment opportunities within the sector. We’re not told exactly what “Linux-related” means in this context, but the newly set up Linux.com Job Board indicates that the vast majority of new openings are for system admins. That’s right, the corporate world is crying out for more geeks — won’t you answer the call?

[Thanks to Overlord59 for the Tux images]

Linux Foundation sets up Job Board, cites 80 percent growth in Linux-related jobs originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Jan 2010 07:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Found Footage: That sinking, gonna-need-a-new-phone feeling

Filed under: Found Footage, iPhone

What other recent TV show (Big Bang Theory aside) has given geeks as much cred as Chuck? The hourlong spy-dramedy returned with first-run episodes this week, but promptly threw a wet blanket on our enjoyment by… well, just look. No matter what Andy Ihnatko’s experiments demonstrated, I don’t think a pile of white rice is going to fix this.

Past episodes of Chuck have featured an all-knowing classic Mac, a thinly veiled dig at our favorite iCEO and a weaponized G5 tower, much to our delight. We’ve been loyal fans, NBC, but we must protest the wanton cruelty shown to an innocent smartphone in this scene: it’s brutal, it’s damp, and it will not stand.

[Apologies to our international readers for the US-only Hulu clip. Once there's a geographically agnostic version of the video available, we'll link to it.]

TUAWFound Footage: That sinking, gonna-need-a-new-phone feeling originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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