Single Income, Two Kids

For a family that misses its quotas
And for budgeting cares not two iotas
It comes as little surprise
That on their drive way one spies
Not one, but in fact, two Toyotas.

VMWare Fusion Support: @vmwarefusion

I love having the option of sending out a tweet to a vendor to make a minor gripe, to see if and how they respond. It usually ends well. I complain about what I believe is a bug, the vendor’s designated tweeter responds, we have a little conversation, the issue ends up being operator error on my part, and life goes on.

Twitter presents a completely non-disruptive option for low-grade but surprisingly high-touch customer support. And think about it… a public tech support call. That’s a bit of risk on the part of the vendor. Good on ya @vmwarefusion !

TD Insurance: Meh.

In contrast to Apple’s surprise & delight approach to customer service, we have TD Insurance.

I just recently bought a Toyota Yaris and one of the point-of-purchase options is to get security engraving, which for me provides little peace-of-mind but does provide a ~$250 discount on car insurance over 5 years. So we signed up for that.

However, it turns out that the engraving service that our dealer uses is not on the approved list on the TD side, so that was just money thrown out the freshly engraved window as far as I’m concerned. Now a helpful TD chap sympathized with the misstep, and said he’d try to get us the discount at least for year 1 (about ~$40) just to make us feel better. As for the discount over subsequent years, we would have to consider re-engraving with an approved vendor.

Nice gesture… bordering on surprise and delight. Given that the company in question is an insurance company, I’ll at least give them surprise.

Well, said helpful TD chap called back today. Unfortunately, he sincerely lamented, his request to do this nice thing for us was kiboshed by an ‘analyst’ who scoured the paperwork and determined that we were told of our engraving vendor’s ineligibility prior to having actually had the car engraved. Because of this, the nice gesture had to be withdrawn. Ixnay on the enerosityjay. Never mind the fact that this window-of-opportunity occurred outside business hours. OK, so we may have had an opportunity to place phone calls and cause a dramatic scene just as the would-be engraver approached our vehicle with his… well with whatever it is one engraves with.

The only bone I was thrown was that if I had the forensic wherewithal to re-construct the scene and demonstrate a timetable that proved that the damage indeed had already effectively been done… that I could submit it to the analyst for reconsideration.

Meh.

This started out as an unsolicited nice gesture, and a minor one at that, but one that resonated pretty well for me given that it’s source was a frickin’ insurance company. Sadly, a soulless pencil-pushing analyst (perhaps a thoroughly decent person outside business hours) determined that it didn’t add up, and reversed the goodwill that had otherwise been generated at low cost.

Apple Customer Support: Surprise & Delight

I suppose Apple is taking a page out of W’s shock and awe strategy, but ran it through the Apple PR machine and rebranded it surprise & delight. I have an aging MacBook Pro which has had battery troubles for some time. If you unplugged the power cord, the battery, otherwise displaying 100% charge, would within minutes crap out and the machine was down.

After 18+ months of inaction on my part, and soon after the machine went to my wife as a hand-me-down, she took initiative and confirmed that the Extended Care was still valid, and then booked a date with a genius.

The short story is that she got a new battery.

The full story is that the genius tested the battery, determined that it had simply lost its ability to keep a charge, which happens after 300 or so cycles or less if you don’t let it fully drain. So in effect, it was up to us to spend ~150 bucks on a new battery as the issue surfaced from normal use.

Except that instead, the genius—independently, it seems, without having to escalate for managerial approval—decided to surprise and delight my wife by giving her a new battery anyway. He just decided to throw us a bone. I bone I’m still chewing, several days after the fact.

A snapshot of the support ticket.

You’d be right to call out the fact that the battery was a bit of a lemon, having degraded to the point of unusability after only about a 100 recharges, and that hell yeah Apple should replace the battery. But the fine print suggests that they don’t have to. But they did anyway.

Compare this against my experience with TD Insurance.

What Would Animoto Do?

Working with good friend and occasional colleague Louis Beauregard, I’ve helped set up a local chapter (Montréal) for the IxDA (interaction design association: ixda.org). Our ambitions for this group are relatively modest: we’re looking to build a network of people interested in design (not necessarily designers), people who moreover understand that user-centred design is crucial to product and service success.

Being just two guys with no budget, we’re keeping things simple, with an objective to hold two events in 2010. We’re ‘branding’ the events “I Made This!” and the idea is to bring in a speaker who played a central role in conceiving of, building, and bringing to market a product or service. Given our own professional predisposition, guests will tend to be from web startups, but we’d be just as happy to invite industrial designers, service designers, designers of any stripe.

The inaugural event, to be held from 6pm-to-8pm on March 11th, will feature Jason Hsiao, president and co-founder of Animoto. For more information on the event, check out the announcement on our group’s blog.

Why Animoto?

When I was at Xtranormal I spent the first few weeks doing research and competitive analysis. This was at a time where new players in the social media content creation space were popping up and/or being acquired on a daily basis. Most of them underwhelmed. Some were nice and clean, others were technologically very interesting, many were outright duds. One of the few sites to launch at that time that I pegged as a hit right out of the gate was animoto.com. I loved their site immediately and—it was in beta at the time—provided a lot of feedback and engaged in pretty deep discussion with the guys. It was great to be a more or less anonymous customer and get such committed, prompt, enthusiastic response from the other side of a Contact Us form.

Animoto rather boldy dispensed with attempts to generate revenue through traffic and advertising, and instead took the novel approach of trying to build an online service worth paying for. Adopting the freemium model, you can play for free and get a great feel for the service—in many cases the freebie is sufficient for casual consumer use—and then you can pay up for premium access to get the most out of the service.

Since then Animoto has launched commercially with consumer and professional options, is cash-flow positive, is regularly winning awards, is continuing to build a clean and hip brand on the web, and has the investment backing of significant players as they continue to grow their business. They also continue to build and nurture their community of customers, taking cues from customer feedback just like they did a couple of days after they first launched.

To this day, when faced with design and implementation decisions as a product designer or manager, I ask myself: ‘What would Animoto do?’

These guys deserve everything they’ve got, and it’s a real pleasure to host Jason in Montréal and I know it’s going to be a great meetup. I strongly encourage anyone interested in social media, design, online business models, and even cloud computing to pitch up, have a drink, listen to Jason’s story and ask him some questions.

Toyota—Customer Loyalty and Consumer Advocacy

Driving my Toyota Matrix to work today—a 2007 model that is not part of the massive recall underway—I was keeping my ninja skills engaged in the unlikely event of gas-pedal stickage. Now it’s standard transmission, so I’m pretty sure that if anything like that were to happen I could do a simple clutch-in, shift to neutral, and brake to safety. Then I heard that they’ve uncovered a brake problem in the Prius. Assuming it’s only a matter of time before finding out that my Matrix is as defective as the rest of them, my worst-case scenario now is less brake-to-safety than drift-to-safety. Maybe using parked cars to slow me down.

Then it occurred to me that there are lots of Toyotas on the road, and some of them are right behind me. With dodgy gas pedals. And it was then that the Toyota logo and its brand had manifestly changed. Suddenly, all these Toyotas, which used to be stainless-steel eggs wrapped around sensible car-buyers motivated by safety and responsibility, were potential time-bombs driven by customers whose expectations and assumptions were massively betrayed.

Truth is, I’m not really all that worried about this problem. My wife is convinced she has experienced gas-pedal stickage. I’ve been driving the car much more than her lately and I’ve not noticed anything.

For me, I’m thinking more about how this situation might influence an upcoming purchase decision. A second car looms on the horizon, and the Matrix, in year 3 of a 5-year lease, might be up for an early renewal. I’ve always loved Toyota, and I was pretty much assuming that in both cases we’d stick with Toyota.

So should I operate with a World According to Garp mentality (‘what are the chances of another massive recall?’) and keep the faith? Should I seriously consider another brand? And either way, should I shift from loyal customer to consumer advocate and research my options for refunds or class-action litigation?

In the end I think I’m think it’s time to leverage Toyota’s postion of weakness. I don’t believe they’re in a death-spiral, I suspect they by and large remain company that will more often that not release quality cars. They’ll certainly be focusing on restoring that brand perception with very real initiatives and results. That said, I suppose the 2010 line may be one that’s worth passing on. Let Toyota get its shizzle together then get out of the Matrix lease a year early with a 2011 Venza or something.

And in the mean time, in the next few months when it’s time to get that second car (my commute-mobile)… maybe I can use this Toyota situation to justify the purchase of a Cooper S as a “safety-first” purchase decision.

Mathew Ingram Busts a Move

A top tier journalist (Mathew Ingram: @mathewi) at a top-tier national newspaper (The Globe & Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com) leaves a director-level job to become a senior writer at a top-tier blog network (GigaOM).

He’s playing nice by acknowledging his excitement about the new gig and expressing some measure of lament about leaving a ~20 year association with The Globe. It’s probably not even ‘playing’ — no doubt he’s sincere about some of his attachment to the old gig. But clearly, as a journalist, he sees this as a step up, or maybe more appropriately a step in, that is, further into the space that has always been his area-of-interest, a space he has been pivotal in getting his former employer to move into (and what a colossal effort that must have been, and continues to be).

I’ve seen some tweets and posts celebrating that fact that a high-profile move like this further legitimizes the blogosphere. Well, it legitimizes part of the blogosphere. Editorially and professionally (that means financially), top-tier blogs make good homes for top-tier journalists. And let’s not forget that GigaOM is not just a little bit more than a blog… GigaOM may not have a print edition; and may have more flexibility in terms of content formats and distribution methods, but its success still comes down to what are probably simple seminal principles of journalism.

For my part I expect Mathew Ingram to continue to do good work, and he’ll no doubt have a much better time doing it, and being effective/pervasive in ways that would be more difficult to achieve under the banner of The Globe. Not too worried about him. Will keep an eye on The Globe, though. Will be interesting to see how much of the internal battle was being waged by Ingram and who/how/if the void will be filled.

At home we get The Globe one day late: piggy-backing off a friend’s subscription—he kindly drops it off each morning on his way to work. For current news my wife and I both rely entirely on online sources. Neither of us are inclined to spend money on a daily paper (for my part I’m taking my objection to newspapers from an environment perspective more and more seriously). The day-late arrangement we have satisfies a lingering nostalgia for the tactile aesthetic of the ol’ broadsheet, and little else. The nostalgia fades daily.

ReelDirector—Video editing on the iPhone

ReelDirector by Nexvio, $7.99 on the App Store (Canada)

Recommended only for the 3GS. Older iPhones/iPods will run it but only for editing sequences of stills, and only the recent iPod Touch with a headset (as opposed to just headphones) will support voice-over.

So yesterday a tweet flew by about a video editing app on the iPhone. In the business of video editing software development myself, and having spent some spare cycles imagining an iPhone version of iMovie, I just had to check it out.

Nexvio has three iPhone apps for the editing hobbyist:

• Slowmo does basic timewarps (no interframe blending or motion estimation of course)
• ReelMoments enables time-lapse photography, and stitches together a video for you
• ReelDirector is an app to edit movie sequences from videos and photos from your iPhone’s Camera Roll

I didn’t bother with Slowmo, and ReelMoments is fun, but ReelDirector is not only quite a decent app, it’s a reasonably significant event in the video editing world as far as I’m concerned.

With the iPhone 3GS you can, out of the box, shoot a video, trim its head and tail, and then upload to YouTube without breaking a sweat. This is great if you happen to capture a short, continuous moment of interest that’s worthy (the bar is low here) of a presence on the internet.

Add ReelDirector to the mix, and you can move to storytelling. These are exciting times when you are able to shoot, cut, finish, and publish a movie on-the-go using a single handheld device.

I’m not a professional editor. I know a lot about video editing software (from web services, to consumer software, all the way up to $500K DI finishing systems). I’m also an active video editing hobbyist and a huge fan of iMovie. So as much as I don’t pretend to be a master of the craft, I can certainly put any video editing system through the ringer and get a good feel for its design and function.

Using ReelDirector, after about 30 minutes of work while I was also cooking dinner I put together this video using only my iPhone.

The Low-Down
ReelDirector can only access video from your Camera Roll, so don’t think you can sync movies to your iPhone and edit from there. ReelDirector is geared for the shoot-and-cut crowd not the mashup crowd. We’re talking about the hobbyist, the vigilante journalist, the mobile videographer. No doubt some sort of porn site will spawn from this.

• Set up a project. You create a project, set properties which include an optional title slate, end slate/credits, and default transition and duration. Easy-peasy. Taking a page out of iMovie, there’s not too much flexibility in terms of title styles, but you’ve got bread-and-butter coverage. The selection of transitions is pretty good, but again, don’t go looking for massive levels of customization. This is Duplo, not Lego. Certainly not Mechano.

• Add video to the timeline. Select videos from the Camera Roll (you can trim them on the way in—head/tail are preserved—and/or trim after adding them to the timeline), and photos (all synced photos, not just camera roll photos in this case).

• Add audio to the timeline. Drop in a music track and record voice-over on-the-fly. The V-O feature is great, and you can record V-O over a music bed, though I only managed to get the left side to pick up. Might have overlooked something there. Furthermore…

  The music (or whatever audio file) workflow is not so hot. Nexvio acknowledges as much. You can’t hook directly into your iTunes library, instead, there’s this imaginative but clunky method where you get your iPhone on the same WiFi network as a laptop/desktop, then point the laptop’s web browser to an IP address, then use a file upload mechanism to get the files into a ReelDirector audio library. It works, but is the one chink in the storytelling-on-the-go philosophy in that if you don’t have the right audio already imported and you’re nowhere near a WiFi network, you’re not going to be able to get that Cyndi Lauper track that’s already on your iPhone into the mix. Let’s hope they improve this in an update soon.

• Add spit-and-polish. Although laying down sources is easy and smooth, working with timeline segments, trimming, adding transitions, and so on, is a little trickier. It’s not terribly hard to figure out what to do—the UI design is really pretty good. But the experience suffers from the fact that you can’t ever get a representative preview of the edited sequence. You can play each segment independently, but to see the transitions, feel the beats between cuts, and hear multitrack audio over video, you have to exit the timeline editor and render the entire movie.

  Now I respect that there are technical reasons for this, limitations of the device. All things considered, Nexvio has done a good job with a device that isn’t quite ready to support a compelling video editing experience. Bold of Nexvio to put this out there, and I think there will be some (many?) hobbyists and others like me who will be willing to bear with some klunk because the over-arching ability to go from concept-to-published-movie using a phone is groundbreaking.

• Render the movie. Rendering is fast enough, given that most projects in this environment will be short enough. My ~2 minute movie took about 2 minutes to render. Because of the lack of in-timeline render preview, I did have to go in and out of the editorial workspace about 5 times and re-render until I worked out some kinks. When I was eventually satisfied I saved the rendered result to the Camera Roll and used the built-in YouTube publish option to move it online.

Some screenshots:

Now what?

If I put away my professional interest in this product, and suppress my early-adopter/hobbyist enthusiasm for it… what am I left with if I distill, as much as possible, the voice-of-the-customer?

One thing about editing is that it adds some time to the process. You’ll easily spend 10 times your project’s duration in the editing phase. Another thing is that editing is storytelling, and not everyone is a storyteller, and therefore has much interest in shooting to edit and then, worse, actually editing. The consumer mobile video capture experience is and will always be (he said, boldly) primarily a shoot-and-post. The built-in 3GS trim option is enough.

For someone like me who shoots to edit, ReelDirector won’t change my habits much. I need more or less uninterrupted time to edit, and in general I’d sooner wait until I could fire up the laptop, sync the 3GS video footage to iPhoto, then use iMovie to cut-and-publish. iMovie is still a vastly superior editorial workspace.

ReelDirector is required only if I need to edit and post on the go, and I’m honestly not sure how often I’ll find myself in that situation. If I witness and capture an event that needs to get online ASAP, I’ll probably just shoot-and-post. So as impressed as I am with the product, I suspect it’ll sit there, idle, unless I make a conscious decision to use it for a project in spite of taking a few workflow hits, just, ’cause, you know, it’s cool.

There may be some valid use-cases. With this solution independent vigilante journalists have everything they need to capture, edit, add V-O and basic titles to make something that doesn’t just bear in/out witness but actually reports a story. In that case, shoot-edit-and-post on-the-go is a requirement. But I’d like to see that use-case proven in the field—at this point I just give it a maybe. And beyond that, I’m just not sure where the sweet-spot is, or flip-side, what’s missing from the product to make it a legitimate solution.

For industry peeps and hobbyists, I’d still recommend buying it if only to try it out and think seriously about what it means to have video editing on a mobile device. At $7.99 (Canada) it’s a pretty easy purchase decision, and a good price to get a taste and feel for what is a significant milestone in the video editing world.

Bell and Billing: Sorcery

I’ve got the triple-play with Bell. I remember the initial offer (many years ago) was all three services (phone, internet, satellite) for $89.99. And yet by dint of dark magic (even after several attempts by my wife, bless her soul, to purge our account of useless features and ersatz value-adds), the bill never comes in under $150.

The would-be easy-to-view One-Bill™ online view is insanity itself… with it’s endless list of items, recurring credits, licensing fees, and system access fees. To this day I can’t make heads or tails of it. I am precariously close to dumping the land line and the satellite TV. I am precariously closer to jumping ship to Videotron—except I don’t expect the situation to be any better there.

Over Christmas I’m going to dig deep, spend lots of time on the phone with a Bell customer service rep, and see if I can’t enter the new year with an arrangement that at the very least is predictable and comprehensible.

Like the NHL owners of 2004, I want cost-certainty. If I’m actually pleased with the pricing, that’ll be a bonus.

Happy DropBox Customer

File this under “well, duh…”.

Just after I nominated DropBox as best web app of 2009 (Crunchies), I was thinking about mobility, and how it used to refer to handheld devices, primarily phones. But now it’s more about data mobility.

With DropBox for example, I set up the root DropBox folder on my laptop and it syncs that data up to the cloud everytime I make a change. I install the DropBox client on the Mac Mini, on my laptop’s Windows partition, and whatever other computer I use. I have an iPhone client too. So the data follows me either becuase it resides on a portable/mobile device, or (if e.g., the airline loses my checked-in laptop/device) it follows me via the cloud to the replacement laptop/device.

I don’t miss a beat. So that makes me happy.