I own or have owned several smartphones: HTC Evo, HTC Nexus One, Apple iPhone 3G, 3G S, and 4, Blackberry 8800, Palm Pre, etc., etc. For a couple of years I used the iPhone as it was the best smartphone on the market. Alas, it looks like Android has caught up.

The problem with Android is that there are several key things it doesn’t do as well as it should. Scrolling is not as smooth as it should be. While the browser is based on Webkit just like the iPhone, it is not as good as the iPhone browser at detecting what you want to zoom in to. Basically it comes down to the idea that the iOS is more polished than Android, but Android is more usable than iOS.

Whaaa?

For weeks now I have been trying to figure out how to put in to words why I prefer Android. Heck, I wasn’t even sure myself. I decided to run a couple of tests. The first test was to carry both the HTC Evo and the iPhone 4 with me at the same time and see which one I would grab when I needed to do something. I would switch which pocket each phone was in every day to ensure this wasn’t muscle memory that I was observing. The result: nearly every time I wanted to do something I went for the Evo and not the iPhone. The next test was to leave the Evo at home and use only the iPhone. See what it was about the Evo that I liked so much but could not put in to words. The result surprised me a bit.

When forced to use just the iPhone I found myself changing how I perform even the most basic actions to get around some pretty serious flaws in the iPhone workflow. For example, I can’t perform many bulk actions on e-mail such as ‘Mark Read’ so I found I would move the e-mail to another folder, wait until I got to my Webmail client, move the messages back while marking them as read. Otherwise my Inbox would read something like 800 new messages even though I really only had 12. When working with SMS alerts, I would send 3 alerts for urgent items. Since I can’t add my own SMS Alert Tones without jailbreaking the iPhone, and even then I don’t believe I can have a different tone for each contact, I was forced to change how I deal with SMS alerts and messages as well. There are usability issues like these all over iOS, which I didn’t even realize were there until I started using Android.

I have found that on my Nexus One and Evo I change the device to work with how I want to use the phone. With the iPhone it is the other way around. I change how I work to allow the device to be used at all. At the end of the day that’s why I prefer my Evo, it does what I want and not the other way around.

This is not to say that the iPhone is not a great device. The iPhone 4, even more than the 3G S, is smooth like silk. Every action is just fast, responsive and does exactly what you would think. On the Evo you have HTC Sense in your way. HTC makes some amazing hardware, but they really suck at software. They seem to think they know better than Google on usability but alas, they are very, very wrong. It takes a lot of hacking around to make an Evo battery last a full day and to get the interface to become responsive. Heck, I rooted my phone and just installed a stock version of Android which basically fixed all of the faults in the Evo. Just waiting on Android 2.2 which should make the Evo just as smooth as the iPhone 3G S, but probably not as smooth as the iPhone 4.

My point is, Android works for me because I was able to make it work. If you’re not that geeky and don’t want to spend the time to make the device truly fit your workflow, iPhone is probably for you. If instead you want a device that answers to you and not the other way around then Android is for you. Either way, it is great to see Google stepping up and giving iOS a real run for its money.

Before I mention the viewership stats for STS-132, I would like to point out that it was the final scheduled launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis, so I’m sure viewership was higher because of that. For STS-131 we had 234,079 views live. I figured that we would probably get a 1/3 bump because this was the last launch of 104, maaaaybe if we were really lucky we would get 50% more views. Best case scenario would have been 400,000 views of the live launch.

On our SD/Mobile channel alone we had 692,715 views or almost 3x the number of viewers that we had for STS-131! That’s just our SD channel and does not take in to account the HD channel or any of the on-demand versions of the videos.

To put this in to perspective, around 383,000 viewers tuned in to CNN that day according to this report. In fact there is only one news network that had better ratings than we did that day, Fox News Channel with 1,065,000 viewers. So for NASA, if they want to reach people, a lot of people who are very interested in space flight, it is time that they turn to New Media and look away from the old media sources. I full well expect that by the last shuttle flight, be it STS-134 or STS-135 we will have better ratings than all of the cable news networks, including Fox News Channel.

THANK YOU to everyone who tuned in and helped make the STS-132 live coverage so amazing. I know we were syndicated on a ton of sites and had a lot of people working behind the scenes to make things happen. It doesn’t matter if you were a viewer or contributor, thank you for helping make Spacevidcast out-perform traditional television. Not by a little, but by a landslide!

On January 19th, 2010 Spacevidcast became a real company. Technically speaking we’re Spacevidcast LLC. Now it is time to bring the A game.

There will be a bit of a format change on the show coming up. We’re still going to have fun and be personable, but the live shows really won’t be news focused. That’s what the daily shows will be for. Here’s the new game plan:

• Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday produce a daily 5 minute show on space. In this show we’ll have a couple of news items, a ‘Today in Space History’ and a featured weekly app download for your computer or mobile device. These will be highly produced shows and available only on-demand.
• Thursday nights (in the US) we will have our live show. This show will be guest centric. We will bring the guest on right away and forego the news. Hey, we already did the news in the first part of the week anyhow. This will be a well produced live show that will last between 30 and 60 minutes. Post show will remain as is.
• Friday we will make the live show available on-demand.
• We will have at least 3 new articles per week. These will be any anything human space flight related.
• We will be pulling in our KSC resources (namely Jason) a lot more to help produce segments and get exclusive epic only content and interviews.

I can’t decide on the podcasts. Audio podcasts are easy to produce, but with the amount of video we will be cranking out, that will get to be a bit much. What do you guys think? Would a weekly podcast be of any value to you? If so, what would you like to see the format be?

In addition, our launch coverage (which is already the best coverage on or off the planet) is about to become even better. I won’t ruin the surprise, but lets just say some money is being invested, some graphics are being made, and no one, not even traditional broadcast, will be able to touch our content. These final 4 shuttle missions will be truly amazing, and you can only get that on Spacevidcast.com. Did I mention you can get all of that in true HD too? Yeah.

So if Spacevidcast today is just my C+ game, imagine what my A game will bring. I can say that my laptops are all crunching new video elements, we have a new system in place for content research and validation, I have a group of people helping to get us inside access the likes of which the world has never seen, oh and since we have epic now we can afford to do all this cool stuff!

Stay tuned! These changes will start happening as soon as show 3.11 with our guest Robert Pearlman. And as the weeks go by you’ll see more and more new elements get added in to the show. This week will only be a small taste, but I think you guys will all like what you see. As always we welcome comments and feedback. What do you like about the show today? What do you hate? Where can we improve? Lets make this the best video show, ever!

Our goal was 20 members in the first month and then 30 new members each month after that. Well I’m happy to say that in Feb 2010 we got over 40 members! But March has slowed quite a bit, in no small part to us being busy and not pushing epic as much. Also a part of it is that many of the people who were waiting to buy epic now have it and don’t need to buy it again.

So here we are. Great start, but not enough. Both Cariann and I were able to go to SpaceUp and bring you as much awesome coverage as we could, but Spacevidcast epic simply was not big enough for us to both go to SxSW. This was the conference that I really wanted to go to, but had a hard time justifying over SpaceUp, ISDC and shuttle launches. So we opted to send Cariann all by herself while I stayed at home.

We attempted to record the Moon 2.0 panel but I’m not sure how much we were able to get. Cariann is also making a bunch of great contacts at SxSW and hopefully some of them will pan out. Spacevidcast epic is nice, but we’re not opposed to having advertising dollars in the bank too. Hey, we have grand visions for Spacevidcast and that all takes money.

So if you guys have any ideas on how we can raise more cash and get to more conferences, events and cool things that you want covered, please drop a line in the comments below. Each trip on average costs around $2,500, so keep that figure in mind. Once we hit 250 epic subscribers, we should be good to go to 1 event per month!

On-site credit card processing. If a potential customer has to go out, create a PayPal or other account, enter all their info, authorize the purchase and generally jump through hoops to get your product you may have lost them already. The credit card processing should be on site (secure of course), easy to use and International.

Affiliate program. My greatest evangelists are the users who already have the product and think it is awesome! Why not allow them to help sell the product and give them a kick back of each sale they make?

E-Mail marketing. Getting the customer is one step, retaining them is another. It is important to be able to communicate with everyone as to why their membership is valuable and what they are getting out of it. It is also important to allow the members to opt-out of said e-mails if they want to. The initial sale is just part of the process, keeping them is the other part.

Coupons. If I want to have a sale on the product, or give out coupons to sites that can offer a discount if they use code ‘PROMO1′ for example, I should be able to do that too! It is a great tool for cross-promotion of my content and their content.

Detailed reporting. I need to be able to see what is working and what isn’t working. What do the sales look like. Where are they coming from? How much am I making and how much has to go back out to affiliates?

Support. Pre-sales, installation and maintenance are all important. Getting the plugin to do exactly what you want will probably require a few hoops you’ll need to jump through, so you’ll probably find yourself leaning on the support team a lot more than expected.

So what did we do in the end? When it was all said and done I actually purchased three plugins to get just the right ones to fit our needs: Suma Plugin, Wishlist Member and Digital Access Pass. The final plugin we went with was Digital Access Pass. Why? Because it does nearly everything on my features list and no other plugin comes even close!

When I originally wrote the article Digital Access Pass or DAP didn’t have a key feature which was on-site credit card processing. They now support on-site processing through Authorize.net or PayPay Payments Pro. We use Authorize.net and this is nice because I have full control over the merchant and what will be done. On the customers credit/debit card statement they won’t see ‘PayPal’ but rather ‘Spacevidcast.com’. It looks like a complete and total solution. Wishlist Member still to this day doesn’t support this feature, although their support department originally told me they did. Lame.

In addition DAP already had almost all of the other features I needed. The products and drip content are quite powerful. Far more powerful than Wishlist Member.  Suma doesn’t even have the ability to do drip products or one-off sales. E-mail marketing was already built in. Affiliates are built in and scary powerful. Issues I wouldn’t have even thought of were in place allowing the sales to be properly matched to a user no matter the scenario (check it out on their site, it is quite powerful). I have detailed reporting on what is happening with my account as soon as I log in to the admin dashboard. It was almost everything I needed.

One thing DAP is missing are coupons. I believe they are working on that though as I have seen rumblings of that on the blog.

It is worth pointing out that I tried all three. Suma was a close second. It had on-site credit card processing, support was simply amazing and the product worked well. The big problem with Suma was that it was only a recurring subscription product. It doesn’t do drip products or marketing, it doesn’t do e-mail campaigns, it doesn’t do affiliate programs and while you can hack in coupons it really doesn’t do them like you would expect.

The big plugin in the industry is Wishlist Member and going in to this project I thought it would be the product I would end up with. Boy was I wrong. Other people rant and rave about their support, but in my experience I found them to be the slowest in responding, when they did respond the answer was wrong and even after I asked for a refund I don’t think I ever got it. The product does drip products / marketing very, very poorly. Worst of all you have to go off-site, create an account with a third party and hope you don’t lose your customer in the process. No on-site credit card processing (no matter what their support team says). Wishlist does a great job of marketing themselves, but maybe if they spent a little less time making videos and a little more time adding features to keep up with DAP we would have gone down that road for Spacevidcast instead.

After a week long trial with each the clear winner was DAP. It is an evolving product and even after we launched there were new updates and great new revisions to the code. I know Suma is working on a v3 beta as well. I don’t think Wishlist Member has anything in the pipe, maybe a new video they are working on? If you’re looking for a new WordPress membership plugin check out Digital Access Pass. Don’t get sucked in by flashy marketing, really look at the products. I think you’ll come to the same conclusion I did that DAP is hands down the best WordPress Membership plugin on the Internet today.

If you want to see how we used this plugin in production hit up http://www.spacevidcast.com/epic and while you’re there… Maybe buy an epic subscription!

Today Google announced the Nexus One which will work on T-Mobile and soon Verizon. While you can get voice and EDGE access on AT&T there is no subsidized price and no 3G access for AT&T users. All the cool phones are going to Verizon and T-Mobile!

While all cell phone carriers are terrible, AT&T has some serious issues on the coasts where user density is highest. I was recently in California and needed to browse the web on my iPhone. Let me tell you what wasn’t working. Oh sure, I had full bars but there was no bandwidth to be had. It was the most painful experience I have ever had on a mobile device. So painful that I went to a Verizon store and purchased a MiFi so I could have working WiFi access. I actually kept that MiFi (a device that AT&T also does not carry) and we use it for remote Spacevidcast shoots at KSC and Space View Park. You can bet that many users on the coasts are with AT&T because they want the cool phone. But what happens when that cool phone is no longer locked to AT&T or worse yet not even available on AT&T?

I think 2010 will be the year that users flee AT&T en masse for other providers. They have been riding off the iPhone success for too long and not been able to keep up with demand. In the end I think the iPhone will have ended up hurting AT&T more than helping them. They now have a reputation that is soiled and it will take a miracle or two to put them back on top.

I’m considering dumping AT&T for a T-Mobile Nexus One. I’m concerned about T-Mobiles terrible 3G maps though. What do you think? I already have a AT&T account and a Verizon account… Maybe adding T-Mobile isn’t a bad idea. I do utilize each network quite a bit as I am a bleeding edge adopter. I used to have a Sprint account, but, well they can’t seem to do anything right anymore.

Comments?

I also have some shots of the gear. This is the old ProjectMix I/O and the new Fast Track Ultra next to each other:

As always comments are welcome below. I like to start each year with a bang! All new graphics, all new set, all new everything! The show itself will be the same Spacevidcast you love, just better. This year we didn’t have the long break between seasons that we had last year, so I’m just not sure how much we can get done. Of course actually being on-air is more important than graphics, so we won’t miss this next week, but it is always nice to make a well produced show.

Thoughts?

One of the things that I *hate* with the current set is that it looks so news like. We’re behind a table talking at you, not with you. Completely wrong format for this show. The community is just as much a part of the show as we are. I want it to be more informal, more fun, less news like.

My thought was that we would get a couch and a chair. I would sit in the chair and Cariann would sit in the couch. In front of us maybe a coffee table where we would put our computers and possibly a drink (I’ll take a Hendrick’s and tonic with a cucumber, thank you). To do this right I would need 3 HD cameras (problem) and would probably stop putting the guest on the plasma monitor and only have them full screen and in the double box. Cariann and I went shopping and after searching for a while determined we may want to just do two chairs and two side tables. Here’s an interesting option from Ikea:

And the side tables would be so we have something to put our computers on. Something like one of these:

OK, well the red is a bit out there and we would not do that if we got orange chairs. These also come in white.

I still have a HUGE issue with the background. Cafn8ed came up with a nifty idea of some white foam and the possibility to cover it with a graphic of sorts. I go back and forth on that one. Could do some cool things with lights, but as I think about it more and more I fear it will just end up being bland without any kick. Maybe that’s OK. Like I said, back and forth. I could also take the current HDTV and put it back behind us with a Spacevidcast animation of sorts. No idea what to do back there that won’t look cheap and cheesy while at the same time not spending a lot of money. The white sheet really doesn’t work well, just looks like a giant white bedsheet. We could go back to black and then shine something on that to give it some color. Orange chairs and orange lights on the background may look sorta cool.

Of course I fell in love with something we can’t afford. I really like these chairs, but they are $3,500 each. At that price I would get two new HD cameras rather than chairs! But they sure would look cool!

What do you guys think? Stick with the news like desk? Make it more informal and conversational? I like the general idea of what Ashton did in the video below. Nice chair, nice couch, table and interesting background (although the background needs some love still). What do you think?

There are a few key things I think a membership plugin for WordPress should include:

• Payment processing should have the option of being on-site and not via stupid PayPal subscription buttons. It is far easier to get and keep a sale if the entire sales process is taken care of directly on the site. If the user has to sign up for a PayPal account or jump through any hoops at all, you have probably lost them. They already trust you, why send them away to another site for payment that they may not trust? In addition, not all areas of the world are able to create PayPal accounts. To this end, using PayPal Payments Pro which is their API allowing for on-site credit card processing is ideal. This does require the installation of an SSL certificate, but for anyone *serious* about a membership site this should be done anyhow (do you really want them to send their username and password in clear-text?)
• Free and premium content should be easy to manage. In the case of Spacevidcast we give most of the content away for free but keep back some of the added stuff like post shows for epic subscribers. Rather than having to remember silly short codes, or double enter my data in the post and excerpt section I should have multiple ways to protect my data. If I want to have everything above the ‘more’ tag be free and everything below be paid, that should be allowed. If I want to have only the excerpt be free and the main content be paid, that should be allowed. If I want to use a short code and protect just part of the post, that should be allowed. The plugin should not assume that one method is the best method for protecting content.
• Coupons and promotions. From time to time I may want to run a sale. The plugin should allow me to say something like ’20% off your first 3 months’ or ‘$10.00 off a yearly membership’. This also allows me to track where the sales are coming from. If I want to give all NASASpaceFlight.com L2 members a 25% discount to epic then I would just give them a specific code to use, which I would then run a report against to see how successful that campaign is.
• Affiliate program. The best people to help sell epic are those in the Spacevidcast community. If I have a member that helps bring in 10 other epic subscribers, then frankly they should get free access for a duration of time. Affiliates get a kickback of sorts to offset the cost of their own membership.
• Drip content. I personally won’t use this and will allow every epic subscriber full access to the entire catalog of content for as long as they are a member, but it should be an option for those who want to use it.
• Recurring memberships as well as single payments. If someone wants to buy access to just one article rather than pay for a full recurring membership, they should be allowed. If they pay for a membership for 60 days and then stop, they should always have access to the 60 days worth of content that they paid for and nothing else. I should also be able to shut that all off so if you no longer pay, you no longer have access.
• Full bill and receipts on the site itself. I don’t want to send my community to a third party for my CC processing, nor do I want to send them there to get their payment history, receipts, etc. The ability to quickly and easily cancel their membership should also be on the site itself, not via a third party.
• E-mail marketing. I want to keep my epic members up to date with the content that they are privy to, in order to help show the value of epic. Since the epic content will be mixed with free content, it may be hard at times to understand exactly what they are getting. Weekly e-mail campaigns (with the option to opt-out) for members should be built in or at least it should tie to another WP plugin that allows me to do this. The advantage of using a different plugin is that I can also have non-subscribers get mail messages to showing the updates on the site as well as show what they are missing out on by not subscribing to epic.
• Detailed user reports. Who bought what, when. Revenue shifts. What coupon is working best. Who is the best affiliate, etc.
• I should be able to assign memberships to users. If I want to bypass the purchase system and give a membership to someone (my mom for example) I should be able to do that and have it tracked in the system as a subscriber, not just a regular WordPress user.
• There should be multiple tiers of access. Silver, Gold and Platinum for example. Each tier could have a different amount of information, so a silver subscriber gets some of the content whereas a gold subscriber gets all of it.
• Access to all restricted content via an RSS feed specific for that user. When they are a paying member their RSS feed works showing all available content. When they stop paying the RSS feed stops working or reverts to the public feed with only partial information. Simply placing a ‘you need a subscription’ in the public RSS feed isn’t good enough, paying members should be able to see the content whenever and wherever they are, including their RSS reader.

Those are a lot of requirements. We can break that in to two sections. The first is credit card processing and account management. The second is marketing and user retention. Both are equally important but unfortunately not one of the above plugins does both.

I narrowed my search down to both Suma Plugin and Wishlist Member. I purchased both and have been playing with them. Wishlist Member has a ton of features allowing me to really advertise the system and retain members. It has a ton of options for how I will display my content, who I will display it to and when it will be displayed. I have marketing options after the fact so I can send out e-mail blasts to all of my users. The problem is that their credit card processing, which is very important, is sub par. Want to integrate with PayPal? Sure, create a PayPal button, send users to that site, have them create an account, enter their details and then they will get access to your content. If a user wants to unsubscribe that is all taken care of on the PayPal site. The moment I send them over to PayPal I already have the potential to lose them, which means from the beginning this plugin has failed. Too bad because the rest of the plugin is quite powerful. They even allow me to use other merchants, but in all cases I have to do the card processing on a different site which is a huge no-no when it comes to a real solution.

Suma Plugin is the exact opposite of Wishlist Member. This plugin does one thing and it does it extremely well… Process credit cards and give users access to your content via their subscription level. Anything beyond this and it falls flat on its face. Want to do coupon codes? Nope. Want to have affiliate marketing? Nope. E-Mail newsletters to members? Nope. Can I at least drip content to users over time so when they subscribe they don’t just get the whole library? Nah, you can’t do that either. All you can do is process a credit card on your site. They got the user from the beginning by allowing a very simple and straight forward way to purchase a membership without ever having to leave the site. They also help the member with their subscription by giving them the billing history and ability to cancel right on the site. But that’s about as far as the plugin goes.

In an ideal world the developers of Wishlist and Suma would get together and merge their products. That would allow for a very powerful solution where the card processing is done one site, the member management remains on site, and all the cool marketing and retention features would be available to keep the subscribers and get new ones. Unfortunately today it looks like the developers are either in the card processing camp or the marketing camp but not both. So what will I end up using for Spacevidcast epic? I have no idea yet. Suma 3.0 looks promising, but frankly I need/want a solution that does it all. Maybe I should just get going with one of the plugins until Spacevidcast has enough cash to get a programmer to develop the ultimate plugin, then sell that to other users who are in the same camp as we are. Or maybe one of the plugins will develop the other half of the solution that they are missing today by then.

Do you know of a plugin that does both and works with WordPress? Think I’m crazy and should be going about this a completely different way? Leave your comments below!

I’m trying to give the Spacevidcast site a badly needed revision. The site itself is getting very cluttered in the main navigation and I could use some more room in the video window. Rather than make you click on a video from the homepage to start viewing I wanted to allow you to watch the video right from there. So fewer clicks, cleaner code, better navigation and more room were a few of my goals. I do have a beta available which you can see by going to http://beta.spacevidcast.com (note that not all pages work, right now I’m only focused on the homepage). Generally speaking most users don’t seem to like the really large format video. I would like to know if you like it or not and if not, would you prefer that I stick with a theme much closer to the current site design?

Remember that this is a beta site. Nearly all the features are there they just don’t all work correctly. In your opinion is this site easier or harder than the old site? Also note that the site is fluid, so you’ll see changes in real-time on the beta site as I work on it. Your constructive feedback (and details as to why you think what you’re thinking) would be greatly appreciated.

I would also like to know… What do you think Spacevidcast is? Who are we, what do we do and why are we here? Just checking to see how scattered that answer will be.

Thanks everyone for your time and comments in advance!