Gabor hits Send

Distribution First

2012-05-23T11:11:00.002-07:00

I used to be in the "build a better mousetrap" camp. reMail's product was better email search for your iPhone. Very constrained. Most users found reMail through tech blogs or by word of mouth. It was a cool product, but growth was decidedly non-exponential.

When you look at the most successful startups of the last 5 years, one common property is that they built not just a polished product, but a great distribution strategy that was a natural fit. In some cases, it was a viral marketing scheme like Dropbox's - sign up your friend, get free storage. In others, it was that the creators had identified a segment of potential users that would immediately adopt the product - think about how Facebook forcibly created an account for all Harvard undergrads on day one. Gilt came to own New York by spamming women in their core age and income group.

In a way, coming up with distribution ideas is more fun than coming up with startup ideas, partially because it is more constrained: You have to invent a scheme that's not too expensive to operate, socially acceptable, and targeted to the demographic that would use your product. I encourage you to think distribution first.

Four Types of Mobile Apps

2012-05-23T10:47:00.005-07:00

I like this blog post by Chris Dixon that talks about the four kinds of mobile apps: Time wasters, core utilities, episodic utilities, and notification-driven apps. I think these four relatively narrow definitions cover about close to 100% of what people actually do with their phones.

Phone makers often talk about how with today's technology, you have a supercomputer in your pocket. Yet no one wants a supercomputer in their pocket - none of the app categories require large-scale processing. The games that need fancy 3D graphics are often not that popular - they take too long to load and are too complex for the small screen.

It's the simple, vertical apps that solve well-defined immediate problems that work best.

Much more left to do

2012-05-22T11:32:00.004-07:00

"Probably the biggest secret is [...] that there are many important secrets left. This used to be a convention forty or fifty years ago. Everyone believed that there was much more left to do. But generally speaking, we no longer believe that. It’s become a secret again."

-- Peter Thiel in Stanford's CS183

reMail now builds on iOS 5.x

2012-05-21T13:21:00.000-07:00

I know some of you folks are still following this blog from the days of when reMail was open sourced.

While I haven't added a lot of features to reMail since then, I've been trying to keep it up-to-date and buildable. The changes that happened in iOS 5.0 and XCode 4.2 broke the build a while ago, and a variety of downloadable zip files sprung up with forks of reMail that build on iOS 5.x.

The good news is that I just pushed a patch that builds reMail on iOS 5.x flawlessly. Many thanks to Matt Ronge who put this patch together. He helped a lot with reMail even back in the day: reMail uses the MailCore framework he built.

Android Location Best Practices

2012-05-14T11:31:00.001-07:00

Android location is complex: You have to register with different location providers, listen for their updates, derive the phone's location - all this while you're watching for battery consumption.

I've found myself pointing a lot of people to this excellent tutorial by Android's very own Reto Meier: Deep Dive into Location on the Android developers blog.

"And for other purposes" - the Four Words that Created Modern Investing

2012-04-28T06:48:00.002-07:00

I'm reading Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller who came to Google earlier this month. Here's a fascinating story from the book about how our contemporary model of investing in companies came about:

"Investment banking received further impetus […] in 1811 with the passage of a corporate law in New York State that made it clear that anyone who satisfied minimal requirements could set up a corporation, without special action by the government, and that clearly established limited liability for corporations. […] By clarifying that shareholders would never be held liable for the debts of the corporation, the law made it possible for the first time for an investor to hold a diversified portfolio, consisting of stocks in many companies."

Prior to this law, investing in a company was far more risky: in case a company went bankrupt, investors could be held liable beyond their investment.

"The framers of the New York law probably did not see themselves as the inventors of a brand new kind of market. Instead they thought of themselves as merely responding in an imaginative manner to an economic crisis. The US Congress had imposed an embargo on trade with Britain starting in 1807, citing grievances related to British behavior toward the United States as Britain fought a war with France. By 1811 the extended trade embargo was causing massive economic pain at home, for America had been an exporter of cotton and other fibers to British textile mills. There was a need to finance US textile mills, but few wanted to start a local mill, thinking it would be hard to compete with Britain when the embargo was lifted. The provisions of the bill were thought of merely as expedients to deal with this crisis. The bill followed a 1784 measure granting automatic incorporation to religious congregations, and similar measures for colleges and academies in 1781, municipalities in 1788, libraries in 1792, medical societies in 1806, and turnpikes in 1807. Yet only by 1811 did general business have the status within New York society to win the same right. Equally important, the bill clarified that stockholders in these new corporations had limited liability: They could not lose more than the money they had put in in purchasing their shares.

The full name of the act was 'A Bill to Encourage the Manufacture of Woolen Cloth, also Cotton, Hemp and Flax, and for other Purposes.' As it turned out, it was the 'other purposes' that would have lasting importance. Once again, dealing with a short-term crisis led to a financial innovation that would change the world, for the New York law became a model for new corporate law all over the world."

The Startup Formula

2012-04-20T14:34:00.003-07:00

Here's the formula for a creating a super successful startup, and the outline of a story that can easily secure funding:

(a) emerging technology that only recently became available
(b) clear customer problem
(c) easy-to-use solution
(d) multibillion dollar market
(e) team that has domain experience with the technology and the market

Note that (b)-(e) are a function of (a). Maybe the right way to approach startups is to find a new emerging technology, plug it in for (a), and try to solve for a product idea that satisfies (b)-(e). If you don't succeed solving the formula, repeat with a different technology.

Secure that IP

2012-04-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

I sometimes advise early-stage startups and get to see some of the mistakes they make. Here's one of those mistake that's easy to make and hard to fix: Not getting early collaborators sign over intellectual property (IP) they create.

Imagine this: You're just starting out and informally collaborating with a friend. You're friends and trust each other: No need to sign anything. Yet a bit later you amicably part ways. Fast forward a year. A VC wants to invest in the company, or maybe you've signed a term sheet to be acquired. Due diligence will turn up that that your friend never assigned the intellectual property right for the code he wrote to the company. You give him a friendly call, only to find out that he wants millions of dollars for that signature.

This hostage scenario is so serious that YCombinator's application form asks if the cofounders own all IP created by the new venture.

By all means, get early collaborators to sign an IP agreement. If they don't want to sign even after you explain the hypothetical horror scenario above, don't work with them.

Protip for those in California: Some states require that people are compensated for intellectual property - signing away intellectual property completely for free won't hold up in court. Apparently even $1 of compensation will do the trick.

I am not a lawyer, and this shouldn't be construed as legal advice.

Email as a Todo List Protocol?

2012-03-25T20:19:00.000-07:00

Can we reframe email as a todo list protocol, rather than a messaging system? Paul Graham pitches this as a frighteningly ambitious startup idea:

"Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. Email is not a messaging protocol. It's a todo list. Or rather, my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list.

I'm open to different types of solutions to this problem, but I suspect that tweaking the inbox is not enough, and that email has to be replaced with a new protocol. This new protocol should be a todo list protocol, not a messaging protocol, although there is a degenerate case where what someone wants you to do is: read the following text."

I agree that something needs to be done. If you're an information worker, you're likely suffering from email hell, and not having to triage messages for actionable items sounds awesome.

Yet I think there are two major problems to solve.

First, not all emails are todo items: They can be messages or photos from friends, bacon with offers that you legitimately subscribed to, or updates to calm the waters - hey, just letting you know I'm working on this." While you could build a system that is half messaging and half todo list, but if it doesn't support these patterns, people will use the system in addition to email, not as a replacement for it.

The second, much larger problem is this: If you build a great task management app like Asana and send out email updates when of task progress, you makes the inbox even less bearable. Thus you have to create an entirely new inbox concept - a new type of place - which users aren't yet familiar with. Getting larger companies to adopt something unfamiliar is very hard.

I'm optimistic that email can be reformatted around actionable items rather than unsolicited messages. The winner in this game will be a company that can (1) build a great new experience that is backwards compatible to the way we use email and (2) has a great plan to ease users into the new system so they can get adoption.

Undiscoverable Features

2012-03-25T19:51:00.001-07:00

We spend a fair amount of time at work discussing the discoverability of features. What's a great feature if the average user can't find it or doesn't know it's there? (Android's biggest discoverability offender, the Menu button, was finally laid to rest with ICS.)

My favorite example for an undiscoverable feature is on the iPhone. (I still use an iPhone for running with Nike+.) When you're running with and hit the "lock" button, the screen turns on to show this:

I bet you didn't know that you can swipe left-to-right on this screen to advance to the next track? (Or vice versa.) You don't see any visual feedback of what's about to happen. I only discovered this by accident after trying to figure out why I kept skipping to the next song.

The best way to fix this would be to add some visual feedback on touchDown - just show a slider with a >>| target on the right, and you're done. Users would notice this the first time they touch the locked screen, and could understand the effect of the swipe.

Now on the Android Team

2012-03-19T10:16:00.006-07:00

About a month and a half ago, I switched to the Android team here at Google where I'm the Product Manager for some system and UI features that you should see in the next release of Android and beyond.

I now report to Hugo Barra who you have seen in many presentations demoing new features of the OS. Android is a fascinating place inside Google. It runs at a much higher pace than the rest of the company. Because Android is open source and runs on devices that are built by someone else, you get much more exposure to the outside world than on a team that builds products on a Google infrastructure and no outside dependencies. I'm learning a lot.

The Samwer Brothers

2012-03-01T10:48:00.000-08:00

Having grown up in Germany, this piece in BusinessWeek about the Samwer brothers sparked some thoughts. For those of you who haven't heard, the Samwers are three brothers started a string of successful web businesses in Germany by copying one successful US web startup after another. I can remember buying something off their first website - Alando.de, an eBay clone - back when I was in high school in 1999. It was their first exit and was acquired by eBay for a $43 million. They have since made billions.

To someone like myself in the US startup community, the idea of the Samwer brothers sounds terrifying. Imagine you're a startup founder and your new company is just taking off. Suddenly, a Samwer clone comes along and gobbles up your European market way before you can get there - you'll end up having to buy it later for a lot of money. This has happened to Groupon with CityDeal, and it looks like it's happening to Airbnb and Zappos.

Why does their approach work?

Let's say your Silicon Valley based startup just became successful and proved out their business model. Now you has to deal with fundraising, hiring, and scaling to new users. International expansion gets put off until you have more time to breathe. Meanwhile, the Samwer brothers activate the clone machine. While you're struggling to recruit engineers in the talent jungle of Silicon Valley, the Samwer brothers redeploy existing resources and follow the models they've learned from other startups.

Another key factor is that it's easy for US founders to overlook opportunities in other developed countries. I'm not sure if this is because of the psychological draw of American exceptionalism or a genuine lack of awareness of the Internet landscape in other countries, but it's a clear blind spot. Germany, the Samwer brothers' home base, is a great country to target: High purchasing power, high-speed Internet widely available[*], and a large target market of people who all speak the same language and are technophile.

Finally, Germany has a great talent pool of technical people and a comparative dearth of interesting tech companies to work for: If you're a talented engineer, you can't go work for Airbnb or Zappos, so why not go work for the respective Samwer clone?

I've always believed that great entrepreneurs find and exploit the shortcuts to success in a system. It turns out that taking established business ideas from the US to Germany is one of these shortcuts, and you have to respect the Samwers for finding it.

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[*] To illustrate, my brother lives in a small town in Germany and his Internet connection is substantially faster than what I can get from Comcast near downtown San Francisco.

Vision video

2011-10-29T12:05:00.000-07:00

Here's an inspired video by Microsoft on how we might interact with our digital devices in the future:

There's a number of interesting ideas here to ponder.

First, notice how all the devices interact with each other. While she's in the taxi, her handheld device beams tomorrow's meeting details to the cab's display, which then highlights the building her meeting is in the next day. As she enters the hotel room, the hotel display lights up recommending running routes, and so on. This isn't something that will be very easy to build: Just imagine the security and privacy implications of having your handheld beam personal data to the cab opportunistically: The cab may not have driven by her next day's appointment, so the handheld would have needed to send more than was displayed to the cab. We'll also have to figure out how to keep these devices connected, as cell network connectivity is still very limited and short-range network technologies like Bluetooth wouldn't allow for the instant connectivity as demonstrated here.

Also notice all the gesture-based controls in the video. People are touching and swiping on surfaces, but also waving their hands to flip pages, whether at close range or sitting on the hotel bed paging through recipes on the hotel TV. I wonder how hard this will be to build. We've seen gesture-based controls in Kinect and Wii, but they only work with extensive calibration and the controls are imprecise at best for the types of interactions shown here, for example cropping and zooming the world map back at HQ. Then of course you'll have to teach humans how to use all these fancy gesture-based controls, which will require a lot of thought.

I love watching videos like this that show how the computing revolution is far from over. Lots of work left to do.

Living in the 21st Century

2011-10-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

Here's a fascinating chart from the The Economist's Daily Chart blog, slightly edited for size [*]:

The world's population and economic output are growing exponentially. No surprise there. But there's an interesting angle to look at population: Instead of counting the total number of people on the planet, you count the number of minutes lived by humans in a particular century. In the first 10 years of this century, we've out-experienced the 17th century.

We love comparing ourselves to others, and we see more people than ever having more experiences than ever. With Facebook, Google+, and Twitter permeating our lives, others' experiences are more accessible, so we're bombarded with things to compare ourselves to, giving us lots of opportunities to feel inadequate.

On the bright side, humanity has certainly earned how to make products and services. With the 21st century already at about a third of of the output of the entire 20th century, people are living healthier, more productive, more comfortable lives than ever.

[*] I realize the y-axis in the chart is a percentage, and by cutting off 1st to 8th centuries so the chart would here horizontally, they no longer add to 100%. Yet I feel like the central point of the chart still remains.

Less stuff, more happiness

2011-10-09T11:52:00.000-07:00

A great TED talk about how owning stuff makes you happier, and how this century will be about editing rather than the relentless pursuit of more.

What's in the box?

The Caller from Canada

2011-09-17T11:08:00.000-07:00

My new car has Sirius satellite radio which comes with around 140 channels of niche channels, including one channel called POTUS which is mostly politics talk.

There's a show on POTUS called "Standup with Pete Dominick", where a former comedian talks politics with random callers from all over. When I was driving back to SF from Google on Thursday around 10 pm he couldn't fill his hour-long slot, so he offered any caller 30 seconds to talk about whatever they wanted to say. (Note that there is a 7-second delay to the show to bleep out coarse language.)

One of the callers was from Canada and his advice for Americans was to have more confidence in investing in the future of their nation. Dominick put him on the spot, and asked what specifically Americans should invest in. The caller fumbled a little bit - "there's really a bunch of stuff" - and before his time was up, the only example he could come up with was "running shoes".

Running shoes are clearly not the prime example of what America needs to invest in[*], but as the clock hit 10 pm, I found myself turning off the radio and thinking about what the right answer should be.

It's clear that the US needs better infrastructure - fix the roads, improve road safety, and build faster, better trains. We need more solar panels on roofs so we can burn less coal, and more wind farms that feed into the grid. We need better education and better educators so that kids no longer drop out of high school, but prepares them for the jobs of the century ahead. Better and cheaper health care, better medical records, the list of big-ticket items goes on and on ...

One problem is that the US is a country that's in love with the quick fix, and the things we need to do are long-term investments that need years and decades. And that requires confidence. The caller from Canada, while wrong on the running shoes, was right.

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[*] To the caller's credit, he got cut off before he could launch into an argument. Maybe he was going to propose a scheme to give everyone running shoes to decrease obesity and thus long-term health care costs.

The only time you'll buy and read print magazines

2011-09-06T22:32:00.000-07:00

In the future, the only time you'll buy print magazines on paper is at the airport. The only time you'll read them is during taxi, takeoff, and landing. That's when electronic devices have to be switched off.

VC Investment Returns: Europe vs US

2011-08-02T17:18:00.000-07:00

Roughly paraphrased, the takeaway from this deck is that in Europe, startups compete for fewer investment dollars, which leads to better startups getting financed, and exits that are bigger. Thus venture investors get larger returns from investing in Europe than in the US.

You should flip through this, if only for the awesome graphics.

Earlybird Europe Venture Capital Report

-- as seen in David Cowan's post on TechCrunch

Electric Cars

2011-07-15T18:49:00.000-07:00

In the last few weeks, I've rented several Chevy Volts by the hour. I'm really optimistic about electric cars, and they're clearly the way of the future. I hope a decade from now, we'll see many or most miles driven in the developed world driven with electricity, ideally powered by electricity from solar or other renewable sources.

(Random thought of the day.)

Solar Energy - Where's the Platform Play?

2011-07-09T08:41:00.000-07:00

After my last blog post on investing in solar energy, a friend introduced me to Kerim Baran, cofounder of CivicSolar, an online distributor of solar equipment. Kerim gave me a little more data to chew on. Thus, here are some more thoughts on the space.

What does Solar on Your Roof Cost?
Installation costs right now are $5/Watt, which breaks down as follows: $2 for panels, $0.5 for inverters, $1.50 for balance of system (racks, wires, connectors, etc.), and $1 for installation. The average US residential solar installation costs around $20k.

Service companies like Solar City that plan and install solar panels on your roof typically make 30% margin on the installation of the job, and will provide financing costing an additional 10-15% which is backed by banks. So if you don't pay cash, and don't arrange the installation yourself, you're looking at $7 per installed Watt of solar capacity.

The price breakdown above also illustrates how the industry of getting photovoltaic (PV) cells on your roof is structured:

PV equipment manufacturers like Mayer and Burger, and GT Solar make equipment for a huge field of commodity PV manufacturers. Racking, cabling, and inverters are made by a different set of companies. Offline and online distributors like Kerim's CivicSolar get the wares to installers, which are often local contractors (although SolarCity also does its own installations). The local contractors often are electricians or construction companies that need third-party services like software to plan out the installation on your roof, and training on how to install the cells in the first place. These contractors are also hired by full-service firms like SunRun and Sungevity that present packaged deals of installation and financing to consumers who want solar on their roof.

Falling Costs
Don't mind the $7/Watt cost though - the US Department of Energy wants solar installations to go down to $1/Watt by 2020.

Right now, just installing the panels costs that much. Panel prices will fall, racking might become easier (think solar cells that you drape over your house like a carpet), and inverters could become cheaper (inverterless panels seem possible) or unnecessary (most devices in the average household require DC, not AC, so the extra conversion could be avoided).

The goal of $1/Watt is far away, but it illustrates just how far prices could drop.

Temporary Low
At the moment, PV manufacturers valuations are depressed because government solar subsidies are ending - Germany is one example of a country that's phasing them out. Some of the PV manufacturers' stocks are trading at 5 P/E, despite 10% profit margins and solid growth. Yet demand has declined and panel manufacturers are sitting on extra manufacturing capacity and stockpiled solar panels.

Despite this, betting against solar right now is like betting against Microchips in the late 70's: yes, demand temporarily fell, but given how much dormant demand there is, it would be stupid to bet that the solar industry will shrink long-term. Just think about all those big mansions in the Sun Belt of the US that want to reduce their $400 air conditioning bills.

Platform Plays
In the computer industry, platform plays always pay best: Build your own proprietary system that's an significantly better than the status quo and allow others to build on top of it. Think Android, Chrome, Windows, iOS, Macs, and so on - all of these are highly successful platform plays. I think it's reasonable to assume that the most powerful solar investment strategy would be in a platform play.

Where to Invest?
But what's the platform play in solar energy? All the hardware - PV cells, inverters, racking - is commodified as far as the eye can see. Photovoltaic technology is actually pretty simple, low tech stuff. What's improving is the PV manufacturing process. Yet betting on the PV equipment manufacturers feels wrong - you're betting on the second derivative here, because in order for these companies to grow, the PV manufacturers need to increase their rate of growth, not maintain it.

It's the installers like Solar City, SunRun and Sungevity that might end up becoming the platform. Homeowners can call them up and have them take care of installation, just like consumers can build their own computer out of individual parts, but prefer to buy one from Dell. If you will, these installers are building a service platform on commoditized hardware.

The problem is that it's hard to invest in these companies as an individual investor. None of them are public, and even when Google[*] put $200 million into Solar City, my understanding is that Google didn't get equity. The Sequoia Capitals of the world that invested in the early stages will reap the benefits.

[*] Yes, I work at Google but I don't do investments, nor am I speaking here on Google's behalf.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany PDF

2011-07-05T20:01:00.000-07:00

I was just recommending "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Blank to an entrepreneur. I had no idea it was available as a PDF. Here it is:

The Four Steps to the Epiphany PDF by Steve Blank

Download this to your tablet and read it on a long plane ride sometime.

Thoughts on Investing in Solar Power

2011-06-28T00:20:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about investing in photovoltaic solar energy. Here's why:

Energy consumption is growing world wide, and we need to build more capacity. As a country, your options are: Build nuclear plants, build coal plants, build wind parks, build solar parks, or encourage people to add solar to their roofs. Post-Fukushima, it's going to be hard to build nuclear plants. Coal and gas are heavy carbon emitters. Wind isn't suitable for everywhere. Solar is a great, emission-free option, especially for sunny climates.

Demand for photovoltaic will continue to grow. Solar stocks are depressed right now as some countries like Germany and Spain are ending their subsidies to install solar panels. This doesn't mean the end of solar installations though.

One crucial advantage of solar power is that the decision to install solar on your roof can be made and financed by individuals, and the electricity can be consumed where it's produced.

For example, in the US, demand will grow as people realize that they can knock down their air conditioning bill by installing solar panels on their roofs. In sunny states, air conditioning makes up 60 to 70 percent of the summer electricity bill. Solar power provides electricity precisely when air conditioning consumes it - in the middle of the day - no batteries or storage needed. From a recent visit in Arizona, it seems like few people have solar on their roofs, and there will be a lot of cells as consumers get more informed.

There have also been developments in financing solar installations. SolarCity, a company founded by Elon Musk and backed by Google, will finance your solar panels and lease them out to you. This allows people to realize savings without the upfront cost - more and more people are likely to use it.

Germany is a small, rainy country and had 7400 MW of photovoltaic (PV) solar power installed in 2010. The US, sunnier and bigger, meanwhile has 878 MW installed. There's plenty of room to go.

How to invest? It seems like there are three ways to bet on PV solar power.

It seems like the best bet would be to invest in financing companies like SolarCity. They will have reliable cashflows, high profits, and there's little competition in the space right now. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a single public company that does this. Google has made this bet by investing in SolarCity, but it's still a private company, so this isn't something an individual investor can do.

You could invest in the companies that make the equipment to manufacture PV cells. These are primarily German and Swiss companies - one example is Meyer and Burger. They have high profit margins, but by betting on the equipment manufacturers, you're betting on the second derivative: The growth in manufacturing capacity, not on growth in solar power.

Lastly, you could bet on the companies that manufacture the actual PV cells. This is essentially a commodity market, with many companies in the US (e.g. FirstSolar, GT Solar), China (e.g. Suntech, JA Solar), and Germany (e.g. Q-Cells, Solarworld). Some of these companies are trading very cheaply right now because of concerns of overcapacity. Just like there used to be 500 car companies in Detroit at the beginning of the 20th century, I expect a lot of this industry to eventually consolidate. Thus, it's crucial to pick the winners. I've ran the numbers on some of these companies. I'll share those in a second post.

A 21-year old kid coding away on his MacBook somewhere

2011-06-26T13:18:00.000-07:00

"In Silicon Valley, you get used to the thought that there's a 21-year old kid coding away on his MacBook somewhere, and that that kid will be the next Mark Zuckerberg. The underlying meritocracy of this thought is exciting."

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Unwrapping

2011-06-20T16:16:00.000-07:00

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a beautiful device, and it's thinner and lighter than the iPad 2. I just got it in the mail from Amazon, and in honor of Apple product unwrap documentaries around the world, I decided to post some pictures of the unpacking process.

Note that this is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, not the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1v, which is its slightly fatter and older brother.

For some good reviews of this tablet, check out Anandtech's review which calls it "the sleekest Honeycomb tablet" and ArsTechnica's piece which says it's a "whole new world".

I've already ordered another one of these as a gift.

Click on the pics to get the full-size view.

Package arrives from Amazon:

Packaging

Backside

Opened package

Cables - there are in-ear headphones, power adapter, a special Samsung cable (looks like an iPod/iPhone cable) and a manual

Backside wrapped

Backside unwrapped

Turning it on for the first time

Samsung logo on startup - apologies for the glare, I work in a pretty bright office

It's soo thin

Home screen

Google Maps - correctly picks up my location as the Googleplex

Google Maps 3D View

Headphone jack on top

Speakers on each side

Samsung connector (iPhone/iPod-like) on the bottom

The tablet arrived with 4% remaining battery so I had to plug it in pretty soon after it arrived. In addition to my Galaxy, I also have a Motorola Xoom that Google gave me, and compared to the Galaxy it seems outdated - it's heavier, thicker, and less pretty.

Organizing your Email into Folders is a Waste of Time

2011-05-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

Here's a brand new paper from a conference in Vancouver last month:

Whittaker S., Matthews T., Cerruti J., Badenes H., Tong J. .: "Am I wasting my time organizing email? A study of email refinding"

They instrumented the email client of about 345 users of Bluemail, an email client built by IBM research, and identified two subsets of users:

Users that do a lot of foldering (organizing email into folders)
Users that don't use foldering and rely mostly on search.

There are a bunch of great results in this paper, but let me zero in on the most surprising result.

The authors looked at operations where the user would try to find a particular email, either by starting a search, or browsing and scrolling through folders. They looked at whether the user was successful in finding the email he or she was looking for. "Success" was defined as opening an email and reading it for more than 29 seconds (the usual amount of time it takes to read two paragraphs of text), or if the user did something to the email after opening it. For example, opening an email and replying to it would count as a "success" as well.

The results are surprising: Both groups - folderers and non-folderers - found the email they were looking for 88% of the time. Non-folderers found their emails faster too: In 66 seconds instead of 73 seconds.

Organizing your Email into Folders doesn't make finding your emails easier or faster. People that put emails into folders spend more time organizing their inbox, more time searching their email, and don't find emails more often than people who just use search.