All projects: Gel, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Bit Literacy
Archives / October 2010
How to speak and create a todo - from voice to text
Here are two services that, properly set up, will allow you to speak and create a todo on Good Todo:
• ReQall is a mobile app - iPhone, Android, BlackBerry all supported - that allows you to speak a voice note to yourself, and then transcribes it into a text email. Just set it up to email your list at Good Todo, and your voice note will turn into a todo on the right day. More details here.
• Jott allows you to call a phone number, leave a message, and then see the transcription in email. Again, just set it up to mail Good Todo, and you'll be able to turn your voice notes into text todos. More details here.
Lessons from a trip to southeast Asia
Somewhere in the great novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the story of a man who is shown the size of the entire universe, just so he can grasp how tiny and insignificant planet Earth actually is. (Update: More accurately, this was the Total Perspective Vortex. Thanks to Lee A. for the pointer.) The lesson: A change in location can transform your view of your own day-to-day surroundings.
I just got back from a long trip throughout southeast Asia, including visits to Hong Kong, several cities in Indonesia, and Singapore. The entrepreneurs and businesspeople I talked to have changed my view of my own surroundings - the US market, and to some extent my hometown of New York. While admittedly this was not an exhaustive research study, I thought I'd share some of what I learned.
• Asia rising: It's hard to overestimate the feeling of energy, expansion, investment, and activity that pervades the region. As the US economy stagnates, money has flooded into southeast Asia trying to find better investment yield - and the aggressive work ethic of the region (long hours, highly competitive, focus on results) has been happy to make use of that investment.
• The U.S. who? Multiple times people told me, in effect, that they just don't pay much attention to what's happening in the US - or Europe, for that matter. Asia is taking the lead in the world economy and while the US has some good ideas worth studying (and perhaps borrowing and improving upon), it is not considered the leader to be followed. Asia will grow just fine on its own, no matter what happens with the stagnating Western economies.
• Mobile, mobile, mobile. Everyone from the banking executive to the fried-rice street vendor carries a mobile device. Depending on the city, Internet access may be slow or unreliable, and mobile devices are best suited to occasional bursts of low-bandwidth activity (texting, emailing, simple apps or Web lookups).
• BlackBerry rules. Past a certain modest income threshhold, BlackBerry is the preferred device, with iPhones relegated to the wealthy - and then mainly used for music, photos, and other media. Many people carry multiple devices. I saw only a few laptops and almost no iPads.
• Customer experience isn't yet a focus. Whether because of Asian cultural norms or the recency of business expansion there, customer experience is not yet taken as a strategic imperative. It's coming - long-term focus on customer needs will always determine winners, in the long run - but we're not into the long run yet there. For now, there's not much talent even in the tactical usability and user experience realms... let alone the strategic customer experience. (Some global brands are doing good customer experience work in Asia, which I know because Creative Good has been doing project work there - but these companies are generally headquartered in the West.)
• Don't ignore Asia - or mobile. Today is still early in the growth of Asian business, just as it's early in the mobile era. But the future of customer experience lies, in part, in both of these locations. Don't forget to consider Asia, and mobile, in any strategy for your future development.
Let me know if you have your own opinions - and Asian readers, let me know what I missed or got wrong!
A mobile brand you need to know about: Taxco
In the midst of a trip to southeast Asia (including China, Indonesia, and Singapore), I came across this phone in an Indonesian shopping mall last week:
This is the Taxco W1 phone. Color screen, full keyboard, MP3 player, flashlight, camera, Web browsing, SMS, apps, an FM radio tuner, and because all of this isn't quite enough, it also shows TV. (With the antenna extended, as in the photo, live TV came through clearly.)
How much would you pay for this insanely multi-functional device? What contract would you be willing to sign?
The price is 70 US dollars - with no contract or commitment. After the one-time price of $70, the device is yours, and access from there on only requires buying a relatively cheap SIM card to cover some amount of data or phone time. Inexpensive, accessible, with lots of features: welcome to the Taxco experience.
You may not have heard of Taxco, but it's a very popular mobile brand in southeast Asia - Chinese-made, priced inexpensively for a broad swath of the market. Wealthier users prefer Blackberry - iPhones and iPads are expensive luxury items out of reach for most - while Taxco and brands like it are immediately available.
The only iPad I saw on the trip was at a Starbucks where someone was in the process of jailbreaking another patron's iPad. I saw a few Apple-licensed stores in the fancier malls but no iPhones in use outside the stores.
Taxco, HT, and other less expensive brands - mostly Chinese-made - are delivering the mobile Internet experience to millions of Indonesian users. Blackberry and some other brands (Nokia, Samsung, LG) are present, but not nearly as accessible as Taxco et al. Apple is beautifully presented but widely perceived as too expensive.
The Internet experience for many southeast Asians is not iPhone apps or even the Web - instead, it's the mobile Internet with some limited, occasional access to websites and a few downloadable apps.
Take this as a reminder. (I certainly will.) Don't get too comfortable viewing the world through the iPhone, Blackberry, or even the Web. There are millions - perhaps soon to be billions - of users who are happily using, communicating, and innovating online without ever touching the wealthier brands.
Cartoon on emptying the inbox
That's one way to do it!
Click to see the full cartoon with the punchline.
Thanks to the artist, Sam Brown - who draws the logo for Gel every year - for sending this along.
Summary of "Bit Literacy" by Personal MBA
10 Big Ideas from Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst - good summary of the major themes in the book. ("If your e-mail inbox is overflowing, your desktop is full of random documents, and using your computer is a daily exercise in stress and frustration, you need to read Bit Literacy.")
(Thanks, Josh Kaufman!)
A tip on embracing procrastination
Good essay on procrastination in the current New Yorker, finishing with a helpful tip:
Procrastination is driven, in part, by the gap between effort (which is required now) and reward (which you reap only in the future, if ever). So narrowing that gap, by whatever means necessary, helps. Since open-ended tasks with distant deadlines are much easier to postpone than focussed, short-term projects, dividing projects into smaller, more defined sections helps.
One easy way to manage bite-sized tasks is to use a todo list.
But what if there was a way to use a todo list and procrastinate, and still be effective?
That's exactly the idea behind a todo list that distinguishes between today's todos and tomorrow's todos. When each date on the calendar has its own todo list, you actually get more effective when you procrastinate. Any todo that you don't have to do today, you just redate to a future date - which then allows you to focus on the fewer todos that remain on today's list.
There are many todo lists available today, but I'm biased in favor of Good Todo, my own todo list that offers this exact feature.
Why Wesabe lost to Mint? The experience
Well worth a read is Why Wesabe Lost to Mint, a clear-eyed review of why one Web 2.0 financial site shut down, and a competitor went on to fabulous success, being bought by Intuit for over $100 million.
The review is written by Wesabe's co-founder, who concludes the following (emphasis mine):
Between the worse data aggregation method and the much higher amount of work Wesabe made you do, it was far easier to have a good experience on Mint, and that good experience came far more quickly.
It's impressive for an entrepreneur to make public such an honest review of his mistakes. And he makes a strong case for why he made the decisions he made along the way.
Still, the question remains: what will you do - today, tomorrow, the next day - as you face decisions in your work? Will you decide in favor of a good experience? Or will other goals and constituencies dilute that focus?
Once again, Wesabe co-founder Marc Hedlund has some wise words. Here's how to win, he says.
Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that. If you do those better than anyone else out there you'll win.
The fate of Wesabe provides an important cautionary tale. Never let a competitor focus more on experience than you do!
Nice profile of SittingO over at ConferenceBasics.
(I know, I haven't officially announced SittingO - hoping to get to the official announcement soon.)
Book publishing tips from Douglas Rushkoff
In "Why I left my publisher in order to publish a book," Douglas Rushkoff shares lessons he's learned about book publishing ("...naif that I was, I thought the publishing industry's primary goal was to help me communicate my ideas to the world. Live and learn.").
His thoughts closely match my own secrets of book publishing I wish I had known, posted here two years ago.
Email tools popping up, five years into Good Todo
More and more tools are popping up that promise to solve email overload. Interestingly enough, they tend to focus on the connection between email and todos - also the focus of Good Todo, my own todo list. It's the right direction for these tools and I'm glad to see it happening.
A few months back I listed todo lists other than my own - and few of them were doing much to connect email to the task list.
But take a look at...
• SaneBox ("helps you manage email overload")
• TaskForce ("the solution to your inbox pain")
• Followup.cc ("simple email reminders and tasks")
• FollowUpThen ("free, fast and simple email reminder")
....and you see that developers are really beginning to make the connection. (And of course there's Google's Priority Inbox, which I reviewed last month.)
I still think that Good Todo offers the best combination of simplicity and power in solving email overload, but I'm hopelessly biased. Whatever tool you use - mine or one of the others I've listed - it's well worth a few minutes to solve email overload. Here's a quick tutorial that may help.
(Another resource that may help - my book Bit Literacy is now a free download in the Apple iBookstore - see details.)
P.S. Good Todo, launched in October 2005, is celebrating its five-year birthday. We're still growing and developing the service - hope you'll try it out if you haven't already.
