There are a few things that kids grow up being obsessed about – video games and sports are two such things. I grew up a sports fanatic, not so much a video gamer. Sports didn’t run in the household – neither my parents nor my sister are into it. Just me. Somehow both playing and watching sports has proven to be my favorite pass time my entire life. I grew up mostly watching the NFL, Tennis, Cricket, Basketball and some English Premier League. I played Basketball, Ping Pong (Table Tennis), Tennis and Cricket in school. I was so obsessed with Basketball, I was one of those kids who had a giant posted of Jordan in my room and I now subconsciously stick my tongue out on my way to a layup.

Although I never graduated beyond amateur high school sports leagues, my passion for sports never dwindled. When I got to Purdue, my first job on campus was as a lab assistant for the Purdue Computing Center (then known as PUCC). Although many fellow lab assistants warned me against it, I ended up signing up to be the LA over at Purdue’s Intercollegiate Athletic Facility because I wanted to be as close to the sports action as possible (the IAF is also where I first met  a 6’0″ freshman named Drew Brees who needed some help with his website and said he might be starting at QB the next year). Sports was always close to my heart.

A few years ago, I thought that it’d be awesome if I could spend all my time working on sports. Or technology in sports, because I am a technologist geek by trade, and I love technology. There are several deficiencies with the existing sports media market that have bothered me as a forever as a sports fan (I won’t go into details here). The idea of wanting to do something in this space started to brew in my head.

And then back in February, Fred Wilson wrote this:

…

- Hunches come from being a power user of the products in your category and from having a long standing obsession about the problem you are solving.

- Domain expertise to the point of obsession is highly correlated with the most successful entrepeneurs in our portfolio. …

The seed had already been planted in my head – I saw a problem, and this problem needed a solution. Then Naval Ravikant wrote this about passion-market fit:

… So the only way you’re likely to find product-market fit is if you’re almost irrationally obsessed with the market and if you’ve been working on it for a long time. Where the journey is the reward. Then, you’re likely to have unique insights (in the details) and consistent execution, through thick and thin, to find fit. Often, the best companies are ones where the product is an extension of the founder’s personality, which shouldn’t be a big surprise, since everyone is passionate about themselves.

I joined IGN last year because I saw a huge opportunity and a very nice product-market fit. But my passion for the sports industry far outweighs my passion for the video game industry. And so I’m joining Aaron Krane and the team at Hitpost, makers of the popular Sports+ app, as CTO. I get to work on disrupting the sports media industry for a living. I couldn’t possibly ask for anything more.

Thanks to all my friends at IGN who’ve helped me get better as a product manager and as a human. And special thanks to Andy McLoughlin for introducing me to Aaron.

Onward and upward,

@ai

[Update: Bing is working on solving this very issue with their "auto app discovery" feature". Read about it here: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/06/09/iphone-mobile-app-discovery-with-bing.aspx]

I’m on my way back from Amsterdam where I was at the Mobilism conference. The opening talk was by done by LukeW on “Mobile First”. If you haven’t heard Luke speak or you haven’t seen his slides, I strongly encourage you to do so. Luke presents the state of the mobile industry and trends in a very real here-and-now sorta way. His content is very complimentary to Mary Meeker’s very forward looking slides.

I know that the mobile industry is buzzing. This industry is exploding really fast and obviously the growth rate of mobile devices is tremendous. But I think it’s too soon to be saying that all developers out there who are hatching an idea should think of doing mobile, or specifically, a mobile app only first.

There is a huge issue with AppStores today – discoverability. Let’s look at usage patterns on the desktop – the notion of searching for something (Googling for something) is very commonplace. You can’t find something – Google it. A lot of times the struggle is with phrasing your query correctly so that Google knows what set of results to give you, not necessarily that Google doesn’t know content out there exists on the web. But for the most part, it’s not so bad. And Google knows what content to serve you because they’ve done their jobs in indexing the world wide web. Easy. But you can’t compare Google, as we know it, to the search functionality in the (an?) AppStore. An AppStore search will show you results based on other things people have been searching for, or gross sales of an app, or keyword/tag matches with the app’s name and description. But that is not good enough.

Here are some examples specifically in the travel vertical:

See the problem? Content within apps (like within TripAdvisor) is not being indexed. More importantly even if it were, Google’s way of identifying which results to show first, PageRank, cannot be easily applied to mobile because the notion of (deep) linking to content within an app doesn’t exist. Sure, I can use the Google app or search in Safari to search for this, which would lead me to TripAdvisor’s website. But that defeats the purpose doesn’t it? BTW, Spotlight on the iPhone doesn’t index in-app content either.

I’m not against apps per se. I think the utility model of apps is awesome. But the content within an app is still limited to the app itself. Say what you want about HTML, but it had structure to it, which made it possible for Google, Yahoo and Bing to index the world’s content. When you look at the matrix of development platforms across the major mobile OSs, you’ll see that there is no such structure for the way data is represented on these mobile platforms.

And this leads me to think that Palm’s WebOS really got it right. It was a really forward thinking developer platform. It’s brought the notion of a “light weight web” dev platform to mobile.

So unless I’m missing something and there is a way to programmatically send your mobile exclusive app content to the a search engine, thinking mobile first for your app may not be the right thing to do. Building a game? Absolutely do mobile first (I mean, what else would you target?) Building a location based service or an app that relies heavily on the camera? I think you need to co-launch a web and a mobile app, if you can afford it. Anything else, especially an app heavy on content, you ought to be thinking hard about going mobile first. Because with 300K apps on iOS and growing, your app may never get discovered. Till a “Google for mobile app content” arises, mobile devices are going to continue to be an extension of what our desktops and laptops are today.

@ai

PS: A lot of apps use a 3^rd party analytics provider, like Flurry for example. If one of these 3^rd party providers can figure out a clever way to standardize indexing in-app content and then overlay that with an algorithm to surface results (I can’t think of how they’d do that), I think they will have solved the discoverability problem for content-heavy apps on mobile in a massive way.

The International Game Developer’s Association (IGDA) furnished an advisory yesterday warning game developers about the perils behind selling your game through Amazon’s appstore. Amazon appstore’s terms of service do sound extremely self serving. From IGDA’s post:

1) Amazon steeply discounts a large chunk of its Appstore catalog (imagine: “our top 100-rated games are all 75% off!”). Some developers will probably win in this scenario, but some developers — most likely, those near the bottom of the list — will lose, not gaining enough sales to offset the loss in revenue per sale. Amazon benefits the most, because it captures all the customer goodwill generated by such a promotion.

2) By requiring all developers to guarantee Amazon a minimum list price that matches the lowest price on any other market, Amazon has presented developers with a stark choice: abandon Amazon’s market or agree never to give another distributor an exclusive promotional window.

3) Other digital markets that compete with Amazon (both existing markets and markets yet-to-be-created) may feel compelled to duplicate Amazon’s terms, and perhaps even adopt more severe terms in an effort to compete effectively with Amazon. In essence, we’re looking at a slippery slope in which a developer’s “minimum list price” ceases to be a meaningful thing.

4) Amazon steeply discounts (or makes entirely free) a game that has a well-defined, well-connected niche audience. The members of that niche audience snap up the game during the promotional period, robbing the game’s developer of a significant percentage of its total potential revenue from its core audience.

5) Amazon steeply discounts (or makes entirely free) a hit game at a time when the game is already selling extremely well. This sort of promotional activity may attract consumers away from competing markets and into Amazon’s arms. But it might actually represent a net loss for the developer, which was already doing quite well and didn’t need to firesale its game at that moment in time.

Furthermore, Amazon is pretty strict about apps pointing back to other AppStores from within an app. From this post on Stackoverflow:

So one of my applications was rejected from the Amazon app store today. The reason was because inside my app, I linked to the paid version of the app on the Android market. Disappointing, but whatever, I guess everyone wants their cut…

The buck doesn’t just stop there. Loren Donelson shared his story about how his app was rejected by Amazon because the ads in his app (served by Greystripe) were pointing to the Android market (as opposed to the Amazon appstore). Not his app itself, an ad in his app. From Donelson’s post:

The screenshots reference a third party ad network, Greystripe, that I use to monetize the free app.  Greystripe is used by many, many Android devs including (I think) Angry Birds to monetize free apps.

In my case it looks like Greystripe presented an ad for an Android app and the advertiser’s link pointed to Google’s Android market.  That flagged me for violating Amazon TOS: all links must point to the Amazon app store.

Amazon has responded (to the IGDA) but I think more detailed communication about the rationale behind their self serving policies is definitely warranted. I wouldn’t discount Amazon’s capabilities to build an awesome appstore experience (hey, they pioneered the best webstore) but right now developers should think about how they can use Amazon’s appstore as a marketing tool as opposed to one they can bank on to make (significant) revenue.

Related posts:

• Poll: Should Developers Stay Away from Amazon’s Appstore?
• IGDA: Amazon could “use a developer’s content as a weapon”
• Game makers: Amazon’s Android appstore terms are greedy

@ai

The Point of Sale (POS) as we know it is a very old and closed system. The incumbent in the (hospitality) POS market, MICROS systems was founded in 1978. However the POS has seen very little innovation since then. There are some fundamental issues with today’s POSs:

1. Cost

According to costhelper,

• Retail or restaurant single-register “starter kits” range from $1,500-$2,500; more elaborate, multiple-station systems with features such as touch-screens, automatic ordering and sophisticated reporting capabilities can cost $15,000-$20,000 and up.
• IBM has POS systems starting around $1,999-$2,499, but costs can increase up to $4,000 or more per station.
• Microsoft offers its Retail Management System starting at $1,290 for a single store with one cashier’s lane.
• QuickBooks sells its Basic POS software for $800, a Pro system for $1,050 and a multi-store version (up to 10 sites) for $1,400; with hardware included, prices start at $1,750.

Unless bought through a reseller, some of these do not factor in the cost of installations, upgrades, deployment or support.

2. Extensibility

Many POS systems do not have a development platform. This severely limits the ability for 3rd parties to come to the POS. OpenTable, Shopkick and Groupon are some of the apps that come to mind that have made their way to the POS. Some time back, my friends and I did extensive research into this area.

It is not impossible to build an app for MICROS, as this Quora thread suggests. But it is not trivial. Radiant, another POS, charges you $25K to get a developer’s license (Quora thread).

Building an app for an exiting POS is non-trivial, if not entirely impossible.

3. Portability



This is not something you can move around easily. An iPad is an example of something that can be moved around easily.

4. Upgrades are not seamless

Like many other hardware+software systems that was built in the 90s, these POSs were not built for easy software upgrades. An upgrade to a POS involves downtime and can rarely be done in-house without the help of the POS vendor or reseller.

5. They Suck

When you walk in to a retail store today, you’ll likely see a very single purpose clunky system with some seriously shady software (that looks like it was built in the 90s).

Everyone knows what an iPhone app is today – what if this notion of an ‘app’ came to the POS. Imagine an entirely web based POS that had a lightweight HTML/CSS/JS “widget” based app platform (somewhat like the Facebook platform, but not as heavy weight, for starters at least). The POS can enable a marketplace for app developers to build apps that can be easily “installed” on to a POS. Imagine how easy it would be then for Foursquare or Venmo or Paypal or Perkville or a Bill-Splitter app or an E-Receipt app to come to the POS. This would solve #2, Extensibility.

I know of several 3rd parties who will pay a nice premium to get on to a POS (I’m saving you the details here, but I’ve done plenty of research in this area). And these guys are having to do some serious workarounds because of the pain involved in building something for an existing POS. Here’s an example of an iPad that Perkville gave to our neighborhood coffee shop (the founder of Perkville shares the pain of the POS not being as extensible):

I spent the majority of my day yesterday in a training session here at IGN. The session was aimed at helping us get better at communication, teamwork and at helping us get better as leaders in the organization.

I noticed some common themes and issues surfaced during the course of the day. And somehow for me, I felt like the solution to most if not all these issues all came down to one thing – I wish everyone would ask more questions and stop making assumptions. I felt like exercising this would rid us of a whole bunch of organizational challenges.

I wonder what it is that makes us morph ourselves from having this childlike mentality where we constantly ask questions. Maybe we don’t want to come across as not being as aware or as knowledgable as everyone else around us? Maybe we’ve been around intolerant people who just don’t like being questioned? Another theory – we sit in classrooms most of our lives and we’re talked “at” and spoken “at” by teachers and instructors. We are asked not to speak unless we’re spoken to. As I think back to my years in school and college, while I wasn’t discouraged from asking questions about something I didn’t understand, interrupting class wasn’t encouraged either. The class was X minutes long, and there was a strict agenda. It may have occurred to you to interrupt and ask a clarifying question, but how often did you actually do it? Why not?

When I’m interviewing a candidate (regardless of the role they’re applying for), I start off by asking the candidate a bunch of ridiculously vague questions and I see how they start thinking about answering the questions. The best candidates usually take a step back and ask me a whole bunch of questions about my questions. That makes the candidate a “fit”, IMO, even if the answers they provide are not correct.

“how would you design a vending machine”

I once had a candidate design the most perfect cola dispensing vending machine on the planet. As soon as I’d asked the question, he didn’t say a word, went to the blackboard and just started designing the vending machine. Sure, it isn’t rocket science to design a vending machine you say. But there’s a lot to factor in. And he factored in all the right things. Then I told him, “you know, I really want to sell iPods and peripherals through these vending machines. In Japan.” The first words out of his mouth after I’d said that were, “is Japan on 100-110V or 220-240V?”

“what is the stock price of NFLX today”

If a candidate knows what the exact price of a stock is at a given time, that’s got to be just great chance. Some times the best answer is “I don’t know”. And I try to get candidates to get used to saying that. If they can learn to ask questions and say “I don’t know” in the 30-40 minutes I spend with them, I consider them a good fit.

“should I buy NFLX stock today”

None of the candidates I interview are in a position to answer if I should buy a certain stock or not – trust me. You’ll be surprised what some of the candidates say. The best answer to this question is, “I don’t know”. Or better yet “I’m not the right person to answer your question, but I may be able to point you to someone else who may be able to better answer your question.”

Having someone on your team who “takes you back to basics” with naïve question asking is a really good thing. Often times we tend to take things for granted when we’re really far along down a thought process. We made some assumptions way back when which forced us to get to the conclusion that we’re faced with today. I suggest you work with someone who is willing to challenge those basic assumption from time to time.

Asking questions is also a polite way of “influencing someone”. My old boss, Paul Murphy, did this extremely well (“Everybody loves Paul“). It’s a clever way of getting someone to provide an answer that you really want to hear.

I’m a big proponent of people asking tons of questions. It’s a cultural thing that was encouraged at Microsoft. I’d love for it be more accepted for people to ask questions, no matter how naïve the questions might be. At IGN, we’ve already started to go down this path and have culturally accepted exercising the “Five Whys“. As a society, I’d love for us learn to be more tolerant of question-askers.

@ai

I’ve always been an avid basketball player. Of all the sports out there, I find basketball to be one of the few sports that has the fewest barriers to start playing. But living in San Francisco, a city that tends to be fairly cold year around, I find it difficult to play ball outdoors. So back in December 2006, I found one of the few full-fledged indoor basketball courts near San Francisco – a ClubOne facility in Oakland. I headed over there and played ball. I played for about 4 hours straight. The last time I’d exerted myself like that was back in high school.

Soon after I was done, I noticed that I was surprisingly short of breath. I sat in the locker room thinking about how I’d gotten through 4 hours and not felt a thing (I’ve since noticed that typically the adrenaline overrides any sensations that I may have been feeling while I play). What was bothering me even more was this heavy feeling I had in the left side of my chest. Against my best judgement, I decided to suck it up and go home. I was convinced that I wasn’t having a heart attack – I was 26 and in pretty good shape. There was no way. Right?

I woke up the next morning, and didn’t feel any better. My chest pain had gotten worse. So I headed to the ER at UCSF Parnassus and got myself checked out. After an epic wait of about 3 hours, and some fairly simple tests, the physicians concluded that I was perfectly fine. The diagnosis was … fatigue. The medication … advil. I was asked to go home and rest. Several days passed and the chest pain got better but it didn’t go away entirely. I did my due diligence and Googled the heck out of this condition. Try googling for “chest pain”. Trust me, it will scare the living daylight out of you. You will be convinced that you’re having a heart attack.

That was in late 2006. Since then, the chest pains come and go intermittently. They are extremely painful when they happen. The issue usually gets aggravated after an exerting workout. Sometimes, I think I’m on the verge of a heart attack.

I followed through after going to the ER back in 2006 and got tested by a cardiologist who concluded that there was nothing wrong with my heart whatsoever. I saw a doctor who was convinced that I had acid reflux (GERD) that was causing me the discomfort. I got on medication for fixing acid reflux. Another doctor was convinced that it was likely an issue with my throat. I was asked to participate in a swallowing study (no jokes – and I did them). Nothing was wrong. These doctors were using a process of elimination to try to figure out what was wrong with me.

There have been days when I’ve told myself that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, I’d feel otherwise (I used to work out regularly on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays – the day after the workout, I’d feel like the muscles in my chest were in a knot). So I stopped working out. And I felt better.

A couple of years ago, I found a new medical practice – the OneMedical group. I had a new “group of primary care physicians”, as opposed to just one. At the time, I was also having frequent headaches that I attribute to my bad allergies. Finally one of the doctors at OneMedical asked me to see Dr. Greenberg about my headaches. Here we go, I thought – more referrals, more running around. I went to Dr. Greenberg and he spent a solid 20 minutes asking me questions – that was unlike anything any other doctor had every done. He asked me if I had any other conditions that he should be aware of – I casually told him about the chest pains not really expecting any kind of a response.

Me: No other conditions really, just these occasional chest pains – my doctor thinks its acid reflux. I’ve had it for years.
Dr. Greenberg: Ah, Costochondritis.
Me: Wait, what? You have a name for this condition?
Dr.: Yeah, it’s not uncommon and it’s benign. No big deal. Let’s get back to the headaches.
Me: So I can ignore the chest pains? Will they go away?
Dr.: Oh yeah. Think about it – your ribs expand and contract all your life as you breathe. Occasionally, they cause discomfort if you exert yourself too much. They may not go away but nothing to worry about. Apply Volatren the next time you feel discomfort.

Holy shit. Here I thought I’ve been having mini heart attacks for the last 4 years. I’ve been diagnosed. And of course better yet, it’s not that big a deal!

Costochondritis. The other chest pain. From wikipedia:

Costochondritis is a benign inflammation of the costal cartilage, which is a length of cartilage which connects each rib, except the eleventh and twelfth, to the sternum. It causes pain in the chest that can be reproduced by pressing on the affected area between the ribs. This pain can be quite excruciating, especially after rigorous exercise. While it can be extremely painful, it is considered to be a benign condition that generally resolves in 6–8 weeks. Though costochondritis appears to resolve itself, it can be a recurring condition that can appear to have little or no signs of onset. These episodes can be years apart from one another. Treatment options are quite limited and usually only involve rest and analgesics but in a very small number of cases cortisone injections and even surgery are sometimes necessary.^[1]

Costochondritis symptoms can be similar to the chest pain associated with a heart attack.

So, why am I writing about this? Why now? A few months ago my friend Cyrus pinged me on IM and told me about  a friend of his who was googling Carnaval in Rio. Turns out she stumbled upon my post on Carnaval and saw a picture of Cyrus in my post. What a small world I thought…

So I’m writing about this chest pain I’ve had on the left side of my chest for the last 4.5 years in the hope that somehow this post will get indexed. And that someone googling for chest pains who is not really having a heart attack (if you think you’re having chest pains and you’re really having a heart attack, trust me, you wouldn’t be googling it at the time) and has been through their fair share of doctors who are at best ‘guessing’ about a patient’s condition knows that there is likely another reason.

@ai

PS: I’ve been quiet about this recent onslaught upon Google and search result quality in general. This is a great example of where something like PageRank can work against you. Basically, if I were to trust Google’s results, I would have been convinced that I was having a heart attack.

Let’s start off by taking a look at some facts.

IGN’s mobile traffic is on the rise. Here’s a chart of monthly unique visitors coming to IGN.com from mobile devices.

Monthly unique visitor traffic coming from mobile devices has doubled compared to where we were in January 2010.

What tends to be more interesting data is what percentage of our site’s total traffic is coming from mobile devices.

Today, mobile traffic coming to all of ign.com is between 8-9% of our site’s total and growing.

Let’s take a closer look at which mobile operating systems are contributing to a majority of our traffic. The following is a graph of the percentage of all mobile traffic that certain mobile devices drive to all of IGN.com (this is a % of all mobile traffic, not a % of all traffic).

Takeaways:

• The iPhone has been consistently a major traffic driver to all of ign.com.
• Traffic from Android and iPad is clearly growing.
  • Android traffic was ~9% in January 2010 and it rose to ~24% in December 2010.
  • iPad traffic was ~2.5% in March 2010, it rose to ~12% in December 2010.
• Blackberry traffic has been consistently flat.
• While WinMo and WebOS traffic is negligible, Symbian’s traffic drop from ~31% of the total mobile traffic in January 2010 to ~10% in December 2010 is most interesting, but not surprising.

So, we should start building an app for Android, right?

Traffic drivers are a key way for us to gauge what our users are using and how we can better serve them – simple. We’re keeping our ears to the ground and paying close attention to industry trends – yes, we know Android is growing like crazy. We want to build for Android, and we wish we could do it as soon as we like. Unfortunately, there are a myriad of issues surrounding development for Android.

1. Fragmentation – The Android smartphone market is ridiculously fragmented. Take a look at this chart by Google:

   
   from http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html

   This is a chart based on the number of Android devices that have accessed Android Market within a 14-day period ending on January 4, 2011.

   This is just the Android operating systems. While most Android devices run on some kind of a standard resolution, this is not a given.  Bottom-line: the hardware Android runs on complicates this chart even further.

2. Developing for Android is a bitch not easy – Android apps are written in Java. We’re a lean mobile team, and while some of us here dig Java, I doubt you will hear that we want to develop in Java. Eclipse is a monstrous beast and has poor design time support (compared with Visual Studio, for example). Not to mention that the Android dev environment is just super painful and the Android emulator is ridiculously buggy and unpredictable.
3. Do we really another native app? – Seguing from the previous point, we are not confident that we want to invest in another code base. We have a v1 of our iOS app that is available today, we are investing in a  v2 of our app with a  brand new codebase, but that process has been less than easy (the Apple dev tools are equally bad, BTW).
4. Android on GoogleTV? On Android Tablets? – Supposedly Android is coming to GoogleTV. It already powers Android tablets.  Potentially more fragmentation.

Long story short, we want to build for Android. But when we do, we want the experience to be truly rich, and we want it to cater to all platforms and form factors that Android powers.

What we’ve done for the interim is we’ve wrapped up http://m.ign.com into a native app and made it available on the Android market (I wish I could link to the actual app itself, but apparently this is not feasible – WTF?) This caters to the users who use the Android market to search for IGN, but it’s true that the experience is less than desirable and doesn’t provide anything more than the mobile optimized version of our website. This was a tactic on our part to cater to our Android users, our longer term strategy involves a native app.

But what about the iPad? And Windows Phone 7?

We really don’t want to be stuck with multiple code bases. We still run in to issues with our current iOS app – intermittent crashes and issues that we need to go back and investigate. And in spite of what people say, the iOS development environment is not an easy one to work with. I can’t imagine having to do this for a Java app, a Silverlight app, an iOS-iPad app and whatever-else-is-going-to-be-the-next-big-thing. No way.

HTML5 is our savior

In an ideal world, we’d want to have one code base, written beautifully with an model-view-controller (MVC) architecture and the ability to switch out the view based on the device’s UI so that the style and theme of the phone this app is being run on, applies automatically. This may sound easier than is to implement (especially in the case of a unique UI like that of Windows Phone 7’s, but I’m less worried about that than having to write the same app all over in Objective C, Java, C# etc.)

So we’ve decided that we’re going to make a concerted effort to create all of our new projects in HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. For one of our upcoming mobile projects we’ve decided to use Sencha Touch for our framework and we will be coupling it with PhoneGap. Yes, I know we’re foregoing the ability to do certain things that are truly native to a phone. But we don’t have any such immediate needs. So for our upcoming project, we will have a single code base that will cater natively to iOS and Android devices – these two OSs combined represent 86% of all the traffic that comes to IGN.com from mobile devices.

I’m bullish that more mobile devices will support HTML5 and this will help us bring our apps to other devices more easily than ever before.

@ai

PS: If you’re wondering why Sencha and not jQueryMobile…

I live in San Francisco, a metropolitan city, some 50 odd miles from Silicon Valley, the heart of everything technology to the world. This place is filled with “technology early adopters” and  can be considered as the Apple fanboy mecca of the world.

Bear with me for a sec as we look at the scope of just *my* observations… Furthermore, if we were to narrow down the scope of Apple products to just phones…I went to 5 group dinners with anywhere from 4-10 friends in October 2010. Every friend that I went to dinner with, had an iPhone. I take public transportation pretty regularly, I usually see a majority of the people carrying iPhones (an overwhelming majority – more than 70%). I used travel a lot in my previous job, and at SFO, I used to see more people with iPhones than any other device. I started noticing this trend back in 2007:

But like everyone else, I’ve been hearing all the buzz about how Android based devices are starting to become more mainstream, moreso than iPhones (Nielsen: Android Soars). Which is strange to me because clearly what I see everyday is not what the reality seems to be.

So I decided to look at the number of unique visitors visiting IGN.com from iPhones and Android based devices over the course of the year (I’ve deliberately hidden the scale):

Weekly Unique Visitors to IGN.com from Android (blue) and iPhone (red)

That’s pretty staggering data. We see very similar trends when we compare “Pageviews” on IGN.com from Android based devices and iPhones.

In conclusion, clearly, I live in my own “iPhone/Apple” bubble. There is a growing number of gamers visiting IGN.com from their Android based devices.

What about you? Does what you see in the real world map to the kind of traffic you see from smartphones?

@ai

Today is my first day at IGN. IGN is one of the premier gaming websites on the internet – they focus on providing reviews for games. The website is extremely popular among avid gamers – from http://corp.ign.com/:

We capture one of the top concentration of men ages 18-34 online, driving over 37.2MM unique views and 532MM page views each month with leading sites including IGN and AskMen. For millions of guys, we have cemented our reputation as an authoritative voice on games, entertainment and men’s lifestyle by delivering sharp opinions and ground-breaking visual content. For you, we offer the creativity, authenticity and relevance to help you engage our vital, premium audience.

I’m joining IGN as their head of product for mobile and other connected systems (slates/iPads, TV etc.). My responsibilities will include helping IGN’s foray into the this world. We want to help users get IGN content on their mobile phones better, and also be a hub to help people discover and share mobile games.

I’m really excited to be working at IGN – the mobile gaming space is really fast growing (Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Gaming Revenue to Grow 19 Percent in 2010) and very here and now. I’m really looking forward to making the transition from focusing on an operating system (Windows Phone 7) to the application space and trying to tackle the ever growing problem of discoverability.

If you have any ideas for me or if you can think of ways in which we can collaborate, drop me a note.

@ai

I was still in college when I read this article titled “Two Stories” by Joel Spolsky. Here a couple of quotes from that article (the bold highlighting was added by me):

“…

At Microsoft, if you’re the Program Manager working on the Excel macro strategy, even if you’ve been at the company for less than six months, it doesn’t matter – you are the GOD of the Excel macro strategy, and nobody, not even employee number 6, is allowed to get in your way. Period.

…

Who doesn’t want to be king of their own domain? Software, by its nature, is very easy to divide into smaller and smaller components, so it’s always possible to divide up responsibility among people and let people own an area. This is probably THE reason why software people love working at Microsoft.”

I’d turned down an offer to work as a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft when I was graduating in 2001 because I had an opportunity to be working for one of the fastest growing companies at the time based in the Valley (I would have been working on MSN Music if I’d accepted Microsoft’s offer back then!) But Spolsky’s article had a profound effect on me and I’d always wanted to work at Microsoft. As luck would have it, my recruiter called me back in 2004 and told me about this awesome opportunity in this team called “Developer Evangelism”. The best part – I could continue live and work in the Valley!

I started in January 2005 as a Developer Evangelist based in the Valley – my job was to “sell” developers on the idea of .NET. One of my first assignments was Visual Studio 2005 and Team System (this was Microsoft’s foray in to the ALM space). Then there was Vista. And then there was Silverlight. And then Azure. Throw a little bit of Open Source and/or Interoperability into that mix. And then BizSpark – my crossover from being a technical evangelist to focusing on marketing a “program”, a program that was really aimed at getting startups, especially in the Valley, to be able to acquire Microsoft software at no cost. And of course for the last 15 months or so as a Product Manager on Windows Phone 7’s developer platform.

The Valley

Switching gears – some time back at a Startup2Startup event, Dave McClure lined up ex-Paypalers (the “Paypal Mafia”) for a panel discussion. The takeaway from that discussion was that something about Paypal bred innovation. Later on, the audience was polled to see who they thought was a company that bred innovation, like Paypal did, and the options were: Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Apple. No mention of Microsoft. (FYI, Facebook won that poll).

I’ve spent some time over the last 6 months or so thinking about why it is that I moved to the Valley in the first place, and this quote in The Valley of My Dreams … by Vivek Wadhwa sums things up very nicely:

“Most entrepreneurs and engineers that come to Silicon Valley, come to experience this network and to embrace the culture it has created. That’s why I came, too.”

In reality, that’s why I came, too. Then I started to realize that I was working at Microsoft, a technology company that couldn’t be further removed from the Valley, in every sense of those words.

The End

I had a candid conversation with my management. I was told that while I was doing well (paraphrasing ;) in order to move ahead in my career, I needed to move to Redmond – it was a matter of ‘when’. I would have to give up my home, my family, my friends and move from one of the best cities in the world to, well, Redmond. To quote John Wood:

“There are two ways to remove a Band-Aid : slowly and painfully, or quickly and painfully.”

A couple of weeks ago, I told my management that while my career is super important to me, what Microsoft has to offer to me (in Seattle) isn’t lucrative enough for me to leave what I could make of what I have been offered here, in the Valley.

I’m sad but I know this is absolutely the right thing for me to do. I’ve met the most amazing, most diverse and by far the most intelligent group of people over the last few years. The opportunities that Microsoft has helped create for me are truly unbelievable and I will be forever grateful. Everyone I’ve met and dealt with has and will continue to have a profoundly significant influence on my life.

To Microsoft and all my colleagues: Thank you for an amazing 5+ years.

Now playing in my head: “Dead and Gone”, TI

@ai

PS: A New Beginning

I’m not ready to talk about what’s next right now since this post was mostly an ode to Microsoft, but there are a couple of things right now that really excite me – one of which is mobile gaming. This industry is exploding – Gartner predicts that the end-user revenue forecast for this market is going to hit around $11.4B in the next 4 years. That article goes on to talk about how app stores have opened this market up, however, there is still an issue around discoverability of apps and games – something else I’m really passionate about. I believe I’ve stumbled upon an incredible opportunity that melds these worlds. Stay tuned…

As you may know, we recently announced the April Refresh of the Windows Phone 7 developer tools. We’ve made some changes to some our APIs, including the way our Push Notifications work.

A few things you need to be aware of with the new tools and code for Push Notifications in WP7:

1. In your WP7 application’s WMAppManifest.xml file, ensure you have listed out the capabilities that your application will be utilizing. In this case, for your application to support Push Notifications, at the least you’d need to add the following to your WMAppManifest.xml:

<Capabilities>
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_NETWORKING" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_PUSH_NOTIFICATION" />
</Capabilities>

2. Your application needs to have an entry for the publisher. Perform the following steps since the default entry for Publisher is empty by default (changes in bold and red):

   <App xmlns="" ProductID="{5286c8f1-e346-4a8b-a0c9-1b37aa9bdc9d}" Title="PushTest" RuntimeType="SilverLight"
   
   Version="1.0.0.0" Genre="NormalApp"  Author="ai" Description="pushtest" Publisher="ai">

3. There are a couple of changes in the actual payload that gets sent. Inside the application that actually posts the notification (through Microsoft’s push notification server) to Windows Phone 7, the payload now needs to look like (changes in bold and red):

   string toastMessage = "Content-Type: text/xml\r\nX-WindowsPhone-Target: toast\r\n\r\n" +
   
   "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>" +

   "<wp:Notification xmlns:wp=\"WPNotification\">" +

   "<wp:Toast>" +

   "<wp:Text1><string></wp:Text1>" +

   "</wp:Toast>" + "</wp:Notification>";

   I’ve used an example payload for a Toast Notification above, but similar changes apply for other types of notifications.

That’s it! I’ve tested this with the ‘Push Tweets’ sample app:

Related articles:

1. Changes in the April release of the Windows Phone 7 developer tools
2. MSDN: Send a Push Notification for Windows Phone 7
3. Push tweets to a Windows Phone 7 device (via push notifications)
4. Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh

@ai

[Update: The source code for the app is now available on Codeplex: http://4square.codeplex.com]

Foursquare is one of the leading location aware applications out there today with a rapidly growing user base. They’re really hot right now – they exploded dramatically at SXSW this year. We take it for granted when things “just work” – I can’t recall Foursquare having any kind of downtime at SXSW in spite of the explosive usage they saw that week and this is a huge testament to their dev team that managed the required scale so well.

Some of you may have seen the Foursquare Windows Phone 7 app that was demo’d on stage at MIX last week. The app looks amazing and “critics agree” ;)

Here’s what the app looks like. For your information, it’s around 11.10pm right now on March 24, 2010, and I’m at my hotel, the Las Vegas Hilton in Las Vegas, NV for CTIA Spring.

Now this is something that’s a little different from what you may have seen before. You can see where your nearby friends are on a map. I’ll be honest with you – it was till I was using the Foursquare app on Windows Phone 7 when I first got to Vegas that I new Brett Petersel was in Vegas for CTIA. I happened to notice another pushpin on the map, clicked on it, and it was him.

Tonight he happens to be at the Benihana which is near the Hilton:

At MIX, I’d put out a teaser about the ‘Society’ tab within the app. Now, some time back, the Foursquare team told me about their firehose. I asked Naveen Selvadurai about a practical use of the firehose within a mobile app, and his response: “that’s your job! ;)” So I thought to myself – when I’m at an event, like CTIA, what I want to know is where it’s going down right now. Where are people checking in right now? So here’s how we use the foursquare firehose within the WP7 Foursquare app.

Clicking on the Society tab, takes me to this screen:

The number of checkins is a real-time view of checkins that have been accumulated in the past few minutes. Panning around on the map a little bit to see where the action is tonight:

Just a few minutes later, I refreshed the map again. I guess Aria’s the place to be at tonight (at least right now):

This application was written in C# and Silverlight and is an example of how we can push the boundaries of user experience and consuming real-time data within a Windows Phone 7 app. You like?

@ai

PS: Talk about Foursquare exploding, I saw this in the Las Vegas Hilton:

I had the privilege of traveling with a bunch of fellow technologists from the Valley to Washington DC a few weeks ago. The purpose was to meet with US government officials on the proposed “Startup/Founder’s Visa” – a visa that would enable entrepreneurs born outside the United States to come here and help create businesses, which would consequently create more jobs in the United States. This trip to DC happened a few weeks back, and I’ve been thinking about writing about it for a while. However, I haven’t been able to find the time to finish my thoughts. It was not till I met an entrepreneur in Austin at SXSW did I really feel the need to push this post through.

I believe in Dave McClure

A slight tangent off the main topic… I feel the need to help you understand some of the champions behind this movement. Especially that of Dave McClure’s…

As many know, the interaction portion of SXSW is the ultimate event for a tech geek. If you’re involved in technology, you want to go to SXSW. The unfortunate part is that the event has grown ridiculously over the last few years. Apparently SXSW is one of the only tech events that is seeing substantial growth in terms of number of attendees year-over-year. That poses a problem for young and cash-strapped entrepreneurs this day in age. Affording to stay in Austin during SXSW isn’t exactly going to be cost-friendly.

When I was in Austin for SXSW, I met a couple of young entrepreneurs (I haven’t run this post by them, and so I feel it’s appropriate to conceal their names for now). They have a small but fast-growing startup. I was curious to know how these young kids who’re working on a startup that isn’t making money yet, could afford to come to Austin during SXSW. They said Dave McClure helped them – he pulled out his credit card and had them charge their passes (and/or airline tickets, can’t remember now) to his card. As far as I know, this company is trying to get Dave to be an advisor (and maybe an investor) but as of then, Dave wasn’t an investor or an advisor to the startup.

This is unsolicited – Dave would’ve never mentioned this to me. I’ve known one of the kids working on this startup for a little over a year. If he wasn’t comfortable, he wouldn’t have mentioned this to me. This is how much Dave believes in startups and this story warmed my heart. His calling is to help startups.

So he helped a startup – big deal, right? Yes, big deal. The man’s got a family and is involved in at least 19 startups that we know of (if I remember correctly, he worked with over 40 startups last calendar year alone). He helps organize Startup2Startup, a monthly event for entrepreneurs to learn from one another. He helps organize the Geeks on a Plane trips. I stalk follow him on Foursquare – almost every checkin has something to do with meeting a startup somewhere. Dave McClure believes in startups, and I believe in Dave McClure.

There are some key “activists” who are a part of this organization.

Brad Feld

Brad is an investor based in Boulder, CO. I first met Brad through TechStars, a seed-stage investment program and startup accelerator based in Boulder. From Brad’s blog:

from StartupVisa Momentum

…

I have no idea how to address the entire immigration issue in the US.  However, I strongly believe that we should make it easy for people to start new entrepreneurial ventures in the US.  As a result, the EB-5 is an interesting visa to consider.  The simple version is that if a foreign national invests up to $1,000,000 in a US company that creates at least 10 jobs, the foreign national can apply for the visa.  This seems backwards to me.  Rather than grant the visa to an investor, let’s grant the visa to the entrepreneur.  If we change the EB-5 so that foreign nationals starting US companies that are backed by qualified US investors can apply for the visa it seems like we can preserve the general construct of the EB-5 while applying it to a more compelling recipient (the entrepreneur).

…

Other related posts on this topic by Brad:

• StartupVisa Video and Congressman Jared Polis Comments
• I Don’t Understand Our US Immigration Policy
• Solving the H-1B Visa Issue

Manu Kumar

Manu is an investor based in the Silicon Valley. Manu is an immigrant and has a great story of being a successful entrepreneur turned VC:

from My story and support for the Founders Visa

…

I have chatted first hand with founders of companies that are from Singapore, Ireland, India and various other countries who have to contend with visa issues. These visa issues often become one of the significant hurdles to pursuing their entrepreneurial dreams here in the United States. I am now a bonafide citizen of the United States and as a US citizen, I feel strongly that the best thing the United States can do is to attract and retain the smartest people from all over the world. Having a Founders Visa would not only encourage the formation of new ventures that would create jobs and prosperity in the United States, but would be one more way for the US to attract and retain top talent from all over the world. PG, Brad and others have already addressed how the vetting and qualification process can work to ensure that the right people are allowed into the US. Modifying the criteria for the EB-5 visa category such that the investment dollars can come from US-based venture capital firms seems to be the most efficient way to make a Founders Visa happen.

…

Paul Graham

Paul is a partner at Y Combinator, a seed stage venture fund. Paul’s probably been one of the few people who has been vocal about this initiative from a very early time.

from The Founder Visa

…

Letting just 10,000 startup founders into the country each year could have a visible effect on the economy. If we assume 4 people per startup, which is probably an overestimate, that’s 2500 new companies. Each year. They wouldn’t all grow as big as Google, but out of 2500 some would come close.

…

Eric Reis

Eric is another strong proponent of the Startup Visa movement and helped lead our trip to DC.

Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson is a popular VC and a prolific blogger.

from Startup Visas

…

His risk taking and the innovations of him and his partners and team members are creating a business in the US and creating jobs and wealth that will largely stay in the US. And he cannot even get into our country right now.

This is nuts. I’ve got an issue with our immigration policies generally, but specifically we should modify our rules around Visas for founders and key team members of startups that are at least partially based in the US, particularly if they have been well financed by angels and VCs.

…

Other related posts on this topic by Fred:

• Lightweight Advocacy
• The Startup Visa (update)

Vivek Wadhwa

Vivek is also a prolific blogger and has insightful posts about entrepreneurship.

from The Startup Visa And Why The Xenophobes Need To Go Back Into Their Caves

…

After all, this visa is about creating American jobs and moving innovation here which would otherwise happen in other countries. We can boost the economy without any cost to taxpayers. It’s not about admitting H-1B visa holders who sometimes make Americans compete for high-paying jobs, but bringing in entrepreneurs who expand the pie for everyone. Not only do the Democrats support this, but so do the Republicans (their thought leader, Newt Gingrich blogged about my previous TechCrunch post on immigration and his staff told me that he was a supporter of the startup visa). So this seems like a no-brainer.

…

News Articles

The movement has been all on the news wires. Here are a couple of recent pertinent posts:

• BusinessWeek : VCs Push StartUp Visa Act

• InformationWeek : Startup Visa Act Proposed To Create US Jobs

Current State of Affairs

On February 24, 2010, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) & Richard Lugar (R-IN) introduced The Startup Visa Act in Washington. The full text of the proposed legislation is here. This follows US Representative Jared Polis (D, CO-2), who has introduced a similar bill as part of comprehensive immigration reform in the House – H.R. 4259, the Employment Benefit Act of 2009. Later, HR 4259 was included in the overall House Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill.

I’m told that it will take a monumental effort for a bill to become a law. There are bigger fish to fry, understandably so. But we’re much further along than we could’ve ever imagined being at this stage.

The White House is…

As I’d mentioned earlier in what’s turning out to be an epic blog post, McClure, Ries and Feld helped us get to DC and meet with senior leaders of several government entities such as the USCIS, Department of Commerce, Small Business Administration and many others. It was bad-ass enough that we actually met these folks in the White House. What was even more surprising to me was how they met with us…

Fundamentally, everyone we spoke with, got it. This is an open and young government. Maybe more open than any other government out there (not that I have a lot of experience). From the get-go we were greeted by extremely friendly people and everyone took the time to meet us and know about each of us. It was very obvious that some of these were touchy areas that they couldn’t dive into more detail about. But it was so amazingly refreshing to hear directly from people working on some of the hottest areas that are in dire need of reform. Some of us noticed that a majority of the representatives we spoke with were probably in their mid to late 30s. I’m purposefully avoiding going into more detail as we were specifically asked to keep some things off the record and I want to respect their ask.

At some point during the conversation, one of the representatives leading the discussion told us about how we’ll soon read about this being one of the White House’s efforts to be more open and receptive to change (parapharsing) (which made me wonder – were they doing this and being so nice and receptive because they had to? Only time will tell…) But I want to believe that this is a sign that the government finally gets it – that when true change is needed, the government will ensure this law will go into effect without ‘baggage’ holding it back.

@ai

[Photo Credits: Crunchbase.com, StartupVisa.com]

Some time back the team and I talked about our commitment to the Silverlight and XNA platforms on Windows Phone 7 Series as the primary developer platforms. We also promised to go into more detail about these platforms at MIX.

Not to oversimplify things, but, you can think about creating an application using the following iterative process:

While I can’t help you a whole lot with the ideation, I want to drill into a little more detail about how you can Design, Develop and Test your app, and eventually Distribute and Monetize your Windows Phone 7 app. The easiest way to think about how to design and develop for Windows Phone 7 Series is to break it down in to the platform piece and the tools piece.

The Platform

Silverlight and XNA

As we’d mentioned earlier, the primary development platforms will comprise exclusively of Silverlight and XNA. The Silverlight platform will be a superset of Silverlight 3 with some specific APIs and features that cater to the phone. The .NET Compact Framework, as we know it today, will not be exposed in Windows Phone 7 Series.

Location and Push Notification Services

The need to get a device user’s current pinpoint location has become increasingly important to mobile application developers. We’ll be exposing APIs for developers to get a user’s current location. The API in turn will use a variety of techniques, including GPS, Cell Tower Information (where possible) and WiFi based lookup (where possible).

Developers also want to be able to asynchronously send information down to devices that have their applications installed. This is typically information pertinent to an application and the services they expose (like informing a user asynchronously that a friend may have posted something on their Facebook wall, for example). To enable this scenario easily, we have the Push Notification Service, a mechanism for sending information over HTTP directly to the phone, regardless of whether or not the application is running. This information in turn can be used to send notifications to the user in the form of a ‘toast’ or by updating a live tile on the start screen.

Example of a Live Tile

Hardware Design Specification

One of the biggest questions I keep getting is about the type of Windows Phone 7 devices that will be hitting the market. This is obviously a sensitive area for developers – the software looks great, what can I expect from the hardware?

There is a single Windows Phone 7 Series hardware specification – hardware manufacturers will use this specification as a baseline to build devices that will run Windows Phone Operating System 7.0. Developers can count on the fact that all Windows Phone 7 Series hardware will include

• a powerful processor,
• 256 MB of RAM with a minimum of 4 GB Flash,
• 802.11 b/g wireless,
• capacitive only screen,
• 5 sensors – A-GPS, accelerometer, compass, proximity and light, and,
• two options for kinds of screens; WVGA at launch and HVGA coming shortly thereafter.

The Tools

With previous versions of Windows Mobile, there were a myriad of issues with trying to acquire the right tools including things like the cost of actually acquiring the tools itself, localization issues, performance (of the emulators) and many more. Charlie Kindel, the developer platform lead, and Drew Lytle, lead program manager on the developer platform, talk about how they wanted the tooling to be “friction free” – easy to acquire, easy to install, easy to get developing.

You can head over to the http://developer.windowsphone.com portal and download a free tool, called the Windows Phone Developer Tools Preview, that will bring down the requisite pieces for you to able to developer for Windows Phone 7 Series. This download is about 3MBs big. These requisite pieces are also free and will include:

• Preview of Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone if you do not have Visual Studio 2010 installed, Windows Phone 7 Series Add-in for Visual Studio 2010 if you have Visual Studio 2010 installed
• XNA Game Studio 4.0
• Windows Phone 7 Series Emulator

Designers are a crucial piece to our application development story. Especially since Silverlight is one of the key developer platforms on board, we want to enable designers to be able to do their jobs well. Expression Blend is a tool that helps designers design Silverlight based applications. Today, we have a preview of Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone available which is also free. Christian Schormann is the authority on our team on Expression Blend – be sure to read his blog post on Expression Blend 4.

All that said, now imagine being able to use Expression Blend to design your applications, Visual Studio to complete the development and being able to create a sweet Windows Phone application that you can easily test on a highly performant emulator. *drool*

Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone

Windows Phone 7 Emulator

Distribute and Monetize

Once you’re done designing, developing and testing, you want to be able to distribute your application and possibly monetize. There are two components to this piece, one is the developer portal where you can submit your applications, the other the Windows Phone Marketplace client that will help you acquire applications from your device and/or your computer. The Windows Phone Marketplace will be the exclusive way to download apps to your Windows Phone 7 Series device (we will provide avenues for developers to ‘unlock’ their phones for testing purposes). We will furnish information on submitting applications to the Marketplace at a later time.

On the device, the Windows Phone Marketplace is it’s own hub. The layout is beautiful, and it will help consumers discover apps and games easily. There are also hooks to discover relevant applications through other hubs, like being able to find a music application from the Music and Videos hub, for example.

One of the key features that have been added to this implementation has been the ability for developers to programmatically support a trial mode within their application. This way consumers have the option of trying before they buy an app. Developers will also be able to ‘deep link’ to the applications they have developed and furnished on the Marketplace from their own website, thereby making it easier for consumers to download apps.

And, students who are registered for Dreamspark can register on the Windows Phone Marketplace and submit up to two applications for free.

Ideate, Design + Develop + Test Today

• We have a bunch of resources going live to help you get going. Your one stop shop to get all the required content is http://developer.windowsphone.com
• Charlie Kindel’s post: The Right MIX
• Charles Petzold is working on the first ever Windows Phone 7 Series development book, titled “Programming Windows Phone 7 Series”. An e-book will be made available shortly – stay tuned.
• I want to constantly highlight applications that you are developing for Windows Phone 7 Series both on my blog as well as the Windows Team Developer Blog. So, let me know once you have an app cookin’.
• Tim Heuer’s post: Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 development
• Michael Klucher’s post: Windows Phone Developer Tools + XNA Game Studio 4.0 Available Now!
• Christian Schormann’s post: Introducing Blend 4 – For Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone
• Be sure to follow our developer team @wp7dev, or individually, Charlie Kindel (@ckindel), Shawn Hargreaves (@shawnhargreaves) , Michael Klucher (@kluch), Andre Vrignaud (@ozymandias), Loke Uei Tan (@lokeuei) and Christian Schormann (@cschormann).

@ai

now playing in my head: Steve Ballmer screaming “Phone Developers” (a la the Marionette Windows Phone 7 Series app)

A couple of weeks ago at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the world got to see what we’ve been working on with Windows Phone 7 Series. The end-user is at the center of our focus, and we’ve built our features and our platform offerings around how someone may want to use our phones. Those who got to see JoeB’s presentation or play with the devices walked away with the notion that our phones are wonderfully different. The next logical step now is for us to remove the covers of the developer platform, so that our developer community can start building applications that will complement the experiences on the phone.

Developers want to

• create applications easily,
• be able to get to market quickly, and,
• have a clear path for distribution and/or monetization.

We used these as our guiding principles as we set off to build the platform.

The Developer Platform is (also) different

On Windows Phone 7 Series, the primary development platforms will comprise exclusively of Silverlight and XNA.

Silverlight

Since it was first announced back in 2007 as a cross-browser cross-platform browse plugin, Silverlight has  become one of the most widely accepted and acclaimed developer platforms. For the first time through XAML, the primary markup language that powers the design for Silverlight applications, we were able to  provide a great story for designers and developers to work together better. We want to be able to bring that power of Silverlight to our phones.

XNA

The number of people playing games on their phones has doubled in recent years. Naturally, we wanted to enable our  developers to build the best of breed, performant 2D and 3D games to target our phones. Using the XNA Framework, developers can create high performing games and target Windows Phone 7 Series.

Multiple “Screens”

With Silverlight and XNA, we’re on course to enable the best scenarios across multiple screens with the consistency of platform. Silverlight helps power applications on PCs (through the browser and out of the browser) as well as Windows Phone 7 Series. XNA helps power applications on the Zune, XBox as well as Windows Phone 7 Series.

A New Beginning

The inclusion of these platforms on the phone introduces a new beginning to our developer community. We’ve heard time and again from developers who’ve wanted to create rich applications for Windows Phones but have been limited by the capabilities of our platform. The challenges our developer community faced with the multitude of devices and the varying specifications of these devices also posed problems. And so, change was imminent.

There are definitely more pieces to the platform, like the tools, or the specific feature set that will be exposed via our APIs, or the Marketplace. We’ll be discussing all of these in much more detail at MIX.

You can read more over on Charlie’s blog – Different Means Better with the new Windows Phone Developer Experience

Be sure to follow our developer team @wp7dev, or individually, Charlie Kindel (@ckindel), Shawn Hargreaves (@shawnhargreaves) , Michael Klucher (@kluch), Andre Vrignaud (@ozymandias), Loke Uei Tan (@lokeuei), Christian Schormann (@cschormann). I hope to see you at MIX!

@ai

[Update: Added links to some others from the team who’ve blogged about Windows Phone 7 Series.]

It’s been so very interesting to read all the press leading up to today. Some speculation, some hype, some rumor. Today, we’re announcing Windows Phone 7 Series – a different kind of phone operating system.

The genesis

The Windows Phone 7 Series was built fundamentally with the end-user, the consumer, in mind. The Windows Phone team is committed to building an operating system, which handset manufacturers integrate, and carriers sell to end-users. In the past, somewhere along the way, it may have appeared that our immediate end-users were the handset manufacturers – our end-user is the consumer. While we still want to enable innovation in the hardware space, we also want end-users to benefit from a consistent and brilliant software experience from the phone.

The creative mastermind behind most if not all aspects of this experience is Joe Belfiore, a name you may recognize as the lead of the Zune.

Given said, here are 7 things about Windows Phone 7 Series that excite me the most. Narrowing this list down to just 7 was extremely hard, that said, there’s more of where this came from.

Seven

1. Design

   The Windows Phone 7 User Experience is different from what you may have experienced before, not just with Windows (Mobile) Phones 6.X, but others. Bottom-line – the experience is intuitive – whether you are navigating on the phone, taking pictures, sending and receiving mail, looking up a person to see their latest Facebook status or trying to purchase an application, things just plain work in an intuitive fashion.
   Today, with the majority of the phones out there, all you see are pages of icons. Every now and then I find myself staring at an icon for a few seconds before I associate the icon with an application. The icon is useful to me, but not as much as the name of the application I’m about to launch. That said, the User Interface in Windows Phone 7, as JoeB likes to say, is predominantly typographical. You’ll find clear and concise text in several menus, like signs at airports or terminals that are meant to help you get to your destination quickly and easily.
   The Start experience is one that we’ve always believed is invaluable. At a glance, you want to get vital information. If you need to perform involved tasks, you may want to launch an application. The Live Tiles feature is meant for just that. More importantly, end-users can add and remove tiles to the start screen.

2. Consistency

   The experiences I’ve described above are meant to be consistent – when a user picks up a Windows Phone 7 Series device, any Windows Phone 7 Series device, the interface the user will get to experience will be the same.
   While the software experience will be consistent, users also have growing expectations of hardware, and rightfully so. We’ve set forth on defining a base Hardware Design for phones running the Windows Phone 7 Operating System – the devices will have 3 buttons along the bottom of the phone – one for going back (to whatever you were doing last), one for getting back to the Start screen, and one for Search (more on Search below). There are several consistent hardware features you will see in Windows Phone 7 devices, such as a 3.5mm headphone jack, a minimum of 5 megapixel camera, sensors like an Accelerometer or A-GPS, 480×800 resolution, capacitive dual symmetric multi-touch screens, etc.

3. Pervasive Search

   The name says it all – one click of the button on the bottom far right, and you are taken to Bing, to search locally on the device or search on the web, with the option of searching for items that are contextually location aware.

4. People are more than just contacts

   I use the ‘contacts’ feature on my phone today to call, text or email someone. This information about my contacts primarily comes from our Exchange server. While contacting a person is key, today that’s just not enough – I want to know what pictures have they recently posted, what are they currently doing, or what does this person look like today? While I prefer text to icons with applications, I prefer photographs to names of people when I’m looking someone up.
   That said, the integration with Facebook and Windows Live lets a user ‘pivot’ on a person on your phone – you’re not just looking up a contact, you’re learning more about them by associating with the social networks they might be on. I don’t need to launch a specific app just to learn about my sister’s latest Facebook status update, for example.  

5. Marketplace++

   We all know that the notion of an on-deck Marketplace where users can discover applications, games and music is paramount both for users and the developer community. The Marketplace experience, everything from what you see on the device to the portal that developers get to use to submit applications, has received major facelifts. As much as I’d like to, I can’t dive into too much detail just yet, but the experience will want users to keep using the Marketplace.

6. XBox Live Integration

   Game changing – no pun intended. From what we’ve heard, this is a dream come true for XBox gamers.

7. Zune Integration

   The reviews for the ZuneHD have been amazing. The experience that the Zune player provides is nearly unparalleled and it is fully integrated into the phone. Your music and videos go with you on your phone.

If you haven’t already, have a go at this Channel 9 Video with JoeB demoing the experience:

Developer Platform

The developer platform on Windows Phone 7 Series deserves its own section and mention. This is the team that Charlie Kindel (@ckindel) leads, and Loke (@lokeuei) and I amongst others work on. We have so much to share about this topic, that we thought it deserved its own conference, really. So, come to MIX, and hear the likes of Charlie, Scott Guthrie, Loke and others talk about the application platform. Let me wrap this up by saying, based on what you’ve seen and heard, you’ll want to develop for this platform. Watch ’#wp7dev’ or follow ‘@wp7dev’ and ‘@ckindel’  for more.

Excited?

I hope the Windows Phone 7 Series excites you as much as it does us. We’re hoping to provide more details about the application platform soon enough so that you can start developing.

I hope to see you at MIX!

In the meanwhile, here are blog posts from fellow Windows Phone 7 Series team members:

• Hello from Seattle (@ckindel)
• Predicting the Future (@shawnhargreaves)
• Multiple Screens is the New Main Screen (@gameozymandias)
• Windows Phone 7 Series – Show and Tell

@ai

now playing in my head: “Stronger”, Kanye West

I’m glad to announce a beta version of the Foursquare app for Windows phones – WinMoSquare.

Prerequisites

The app is only available for touch screen Windows phones today. The .NET Compact Framework v3.5 is a pre-requisite for you to be able to run the application on the phone. You’d also need a phone that runs either Windows Mobile 6.1 or a Windows Mobile 6.5.

Get me them goods

You can get the goods by emailing admin@touchality.com or submitting your email address in this webform: http://touchality.com/WinMoSquare/

Futures

This is a beta. We definitely want to add features to expose the leaderboard, add new friends on the fly, and incorporate any new APIs that Foursquare may expose. There are also plans to submit this application to the Windows Marketplace for Mobile, and that will happen as soon as we hit v1 of the app and we’re confident that we’re beyond a beta.

Demo

Here I’ve installed WinMoSquare on an HTC HD2. I’ll let the screen captures do the talking as far as the functionality of the app itself goes:

Last but not least, I want to thank the team at Touchality for developing the app. Foursquare away!

ai

PS: And thanks to @kylemce for the name “WinMoSquare” :)

[Update 2/21/2010: TwtMyCard has been deadpooled :( Both Kevin and I love the concept and the promise of what TwtMyCard can deliver, but the cost of hosting the app deters our from keeping the project alive. We still love you.]

At SXSW this year, I noticed a few trends –

• everyone was exchanging business cards with everyone else,
• by hour 2 of being at the event on any given day, people would run out of business cards,
• by the end of each day, I’d have my pockets full of other people’s business cards, and,
• almost everyone I met was on twitter.

I make a conscious effort to convert physical business cards to contacts on Outlook. I really really do. But when you have over 150 business cards that you’ve collected over a week, you are limited in terms of what you can do with those cards.

The problem

(I’m going to try to use the “Dave McClure technique” of explaining the problem and the solution. Granted, I don’t have any numbers to back up my claims at this time.)

Business cards.

1. It’s cumbersome to carry around 100s of business cards.
2. The cards you receive some times never make it in electronic fashion to your computer.
3. You’re wasting paper by using business cards.
4. Some times when you meet that really important person, you almost instantly want to acknowledge the fact that you met them. I’ve noticed this as a trend as well – every now and then at a conference someone would ask me what my twitter handle was, and would want to send me a message right then and there. I’ve done this myself, here’s a personal example:

   

5. Some existing business card solutions almost force you to exchange this information in an electronic fashion instantaneously. That doesn’t really translate to how business cards work in the real world today. When you exchange physical business cards with someone, you are not obligated to electronically exchange this information as well. You’re expected to go back home and maybe transfer this on to your computer. Some solutions require you to hand out your phone number – that’s way too personal. Twitter handles are not that personal. I was really impressed that Shoeboxed slipped me an envelope under my hotel room door at SXSW this year, and prompted me to send them my business cards (which they should’ve parsed and converted to electronic format). It’s been over 6 months and I still haven’t heard back from them about the business cards that I’d mailed to them.
6. In some instances you don’t know how you met this person. Some people are prudent enough to carry around a pen, and usually make a note behind a business card.

The solution

Announcing TwtMycard – exchange business cards over Twitter. 

Here’s how it works :

1. Sign on to http://twtmycard.com using your Twitter credentials (we use OAuth).
2. Submit your profile information or upload a vCard, which we will parse for you.
3. You can set your profile to be public or private. If your profile is set to be private, your profile can only be seen by people you have explicitly sent your card to.
4. Follow @twtmycard (the ‘bot’ will automatically follow you back).
5. When you meet someone who you want to share your profile information with
   1. ask them for their twitter handle,
   2. send a direct message to @twtmycard with their handle.

      For example. I’ve just @ksmarshall, and I want to share my card with him.

      

   3. TwtMyCard will then send that person (ksmarshall in this example) a message with your profile information. The bot will act as a proxy, and send a tweet, @ message, to the recipient. That way this tweet doesn’t show up on YOUR twitter stream.

      
      (note that tweet was sent by @twtmycard, not by me)
      

   4. That’s it! Since my profile is public, visit http://twtmycard.com/anandiyer and you will see this :

      

What’s under the hood?

First off, my friend Kevin Marshall (@ksmarshall) deserves a HUGE pat on the back for this. I first had this idea first at SxSW and had created an ugly-as-sin prototype several months later. I’d coded it using WebForms in ASP.NET and C# and hosted it on Windows Azure. I shared the idea with Kevin, who basically threw away all my code and rewrote the ENTIRE thing in ASP.NET MVC and of course made it look ridiculously pretty.

There’s a front-end Windows Azure web role that you get to see, and a background worker role (we call it the ‘bot’) that wakes up every few minutes, reads all the direct messages (since the last time it read DMs), parses the message, and sends @ messages to the recipient with a link to the sender’s profile.

All the profile data is hosted on Azure Table Storage.

Future

TwtMyCard is VERY much a beta an alpha project. There’s still a decent amount of work to be done.

1. Add Microsoft Tag Support.
2. Cancel your account.
3. Add EULA and information about user privacy.
4. Add context to your tweet (so that you can recollect how you met this person)
5. Support changes in Twitter uids

Have ideas for us? Add it on our uservoice page.

What does this mean for Kevin and I?

Neither of us are quitting are day jobs. Period. This is purely a passion project. We’ll continue to work on it on the side. Maybe :)

In all seriousness, this project has NOTHING to do with my employer, Microsoft Corp., or Kevin’s employer, Clarity Consulting. These companies should not be held liable for anything related to TwtMyCard. Please dont hold us liable for any data you store on TwtMyCard. While we promise to not use your information maliciously, we cannot be held liable if something goes wrong – this is very much an alpha product.

Start using it now!

http://www.twtmycard.com

-Kevin and “ai”

At a BarCamp a couple of years ago, I heard Tara Hunt speak about Social Capital (more about Tara and ‘Whuffie’ here). It was the first time I’d tried to associate and quantify social worthiness (in my sort of layman’s interpretation) or social standing or capital with a human being. Tara’s talk, and consequently being friends with her, helped me understand the concept a lot better.

Switching gears… I attended Startup2Startup this evening, an event Dave McClure puts together every month. The title of this month’s talk was CeWebrity DeathMatch: Jason Calacanis vs Guy Kawasaki on “Is Apple Becoming Big Brother?” This obviously interested me a lot, given my new role on Windows Mobile, the recent issues that have surfaced with Google Voice on the iPhone etc. The conversation this evening jumped around quite significantly, but a few things Guy Kawsaaki said, especially about Dan’l Lewin and Microsoft, really stood out:

Disclosure : I used to (indirectly) work in Dan’l Lewin’s organization on BizSpark till about 2 weeks ago.

Dave McClure (@ 55:58) : How about Microsoft these days? I was actually surprised that there weren’t that many hands  that were going up about Microsoft being evil, because, … I’d say they’ve had a little of the edge taken off lately. I don’t think they’re as on top of their evil as they used to be.

Guy Kawasaki (@ 56:12) : You know I think a lot of that is because … well, I think one of the smartest things that Microsoft has ever done is create the Mountain View campus. And at that Mountain View campus which they, you know, you can use that conference facility all the time, it’s really cheap and it’s really convenient [Dave McClure adds, “it’s a lovely facility”]. And so now, rather than think there’s these evil people in Washington, now there are these people in Mountain View, we’re going to a conference there, and they’ only charging us for food, 20 bucks a head, so life is good. Dan’l Lewin single handedly is changing the impression of Microsoft in Silicon Valley because now they’re making sort of warm body contact, it’s not just, oh, Bill Gates is plotting the end of freedom. In Seattle.

At some point this evening, Guy had made a comment that resonated very well with the table that I was sitting at. Guy said that he never consciously says anything bad about a product, a company or a person – it’s just not in his nature to do that. And that really showed this evening. While Calacanis and him were involved in somewhat serious banter, it never occurred to me that Guy was trying to talk anyone down. Even when Ross Mayfield asked a question about what Google and Apple can do to be more open, Guy didn’t really talk either of those companies down – he simply responded by wishing they would be more open, more open like Microsoft:

Guy Kawasaki (@ 01:02:38) : Maybe Dan’l Lewin is the only open guy at Microsoft, and it’s all an illusion, but my impression is that… I have to tell you that in all the dealings I’ve had with Microsoft people, I’ve never thought that they are evil. They were very friendly, they were efficient, more efficient than Apple people, and, they didn’t carry on with this air of superiority.

Here’s the video from the event this evening.

As a Microsoft employee and evangelist, I had a huge grin on my face when I heard these comments. I was surveying the room as Guy was speaking and saying these positive things about us, and I saw a lot of people nodding in agreement, including Jason Calacanis. For the past few years that I’ve worked at Microsoft, I can’t remember when a week has gone by and someone here in the valley didn’t have something positive to say about Dan’l. This social capital that Dan’l has accrued over the years is obviously doing wonders for Microsoft and the way we’re being perceived here.

Thank you, Guy.

“ai”

PS: Some of you may recall that Guy had made similar comments when he interviewed Steve Ballmer at MIX a couple of years ago:

GUY KAWASAKI: I will tell you, you know, Dan’l Lewin and his crew down in Mountain View, I think they’ve done wonders for your image in Silicon Valley. Just having that facility and basically anybody can rent that facility and use it, so now where Microsoft was this Evil Empire up in Washington, now it’s in Mountain View, and you use their facilities, and it’s got great food, cheap, fast, great A/V. It’s a really nice facility. I just hope you have more of those facilities around, because I really think that just letting people use the Microsoft facility and seeing Microsoft employees touching them, has done wonders for you in Silicon Valley. (Laughter.)

Today we are announcing the availability of Windows phones at retail stores worldwide on October 6, 2009. The new phones will be the first to feature Windows Mobile 6.5, the latest version of our mobile phone software, and will deliver new customer experiences through an improved, easy-to-use user interface, better browsing capabilities and access to valuable services, including Windows Marketplace for Mobile and Microsoft My Phone.

Mobile partners from around the globe are committed to updating or expanding their portfolios to include phones with Windows Mobile 6.5.

• In North America: Mobile operators AT&T, Bell Mobility, Sprint, TELUS and Verizon Wireless, and phone manufacturers HP, HTC Corp., LG Electronics, Samsung and Toshiba Corp.
• In Europe: Mobile operators Orange, Deutsche Telekom AG and Vodafone Group Plc, and phone manufacturers Acer, HTC, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba
• In Latin America: Mobile operator TIM Brazil, and phone manufacturers HTC, LG Electronics and Samsung
• In Asia Pacific: Mobile operators NTT DoCoMo Inc., SoftBank Mobile Corp., SK Telecom, Telstra and WILLCOM Inc., and phone manufacturers Acer Inc., HTC, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba

What’s new in 6.5?

• Consumer oriented features – A Windows phone lets you get your work done and still have fun, wherever you are. We have been working on making Windows Phones more consumer friendly while retaining our strong enterprise focused applications, such as Outlook, Word, etc.
• Stay connected – Connect to powerful online services so the information, contacts and apps you need are always at your fingertips.
• Better UI, Better UX
  • A new home screen with customizable widgets that display glance-able updates, such as news, weather, traffic and more, from your favorite Web services.
  • An improved user interface focused on finger touch and the ability to cut through clutter to accomplish what you want. Windows phones enable a number of gestures that take advantage of the new physics engine to make it fun and easy to use the phone with your finger. Windows phones support resistive touch, which can be operated with one hand and uses pressure to activate the touch feature.

Lock Screen


Today screen

Programs Menu

• New Browser – Internet Explorer Mobile, a powerful new browser where websites will look the same on your phone as they do on the PC so it’s easy to check in for a flight, get directions or pay a bill from wherever you are. Internet Explorer Mobile is built on the same technologies as its desktop counterpart, Internet Explorer, and brings the mobile browsing experiences on par with what people expect from their desktop computers.
  • High quality mobile browsing – Using the Internet Explorer rendering engine, Internet Explorer Mobile displays Web pages on the phone in the same quality as on the desktop, allowing consumers to experience their content in the layout they enjoy. Panning and zooming capabilities, as well as mouse navigation for non-touch phones, helps people easily find and enjoy what they are looking for while browsing the Web.
  • Rich media experiences – Internet Explorer Mobile will support the rich experiences that many Web pages are built on, such as Adobe Flash. This will enable people to view Flash-based video content, like YouTube, at the same level of quality as if they were using their desktop computers.
  • Desktop consistent AJAX support - Through the support of Jscript version 5.7 in Internet Explorer Mobile, developers will now be able to deliver desktop-consistent AJAX Web experiences up to date to that of Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Mobile devices.
  • Best-in-class mobile Web transactions – With the newest experiences in Internet Explorer Mobile, Microsoft brings the mobile Web browsing experience on par with what people have come to expect from their desktops – the ability to easily view Web pages and multimedia on the Web and complete transactions, from banking to Facebook updates.

Internet Explorer rendering http://bing.com

Internet Explorer rendering http://united.com

• Sync your on-device data – My Phone, a free service, which provides Web sync of valuable data from the phone, like pictures, music and texts, to a Web portal for safe keeping and sharing.
• Download and install apps easily – Windows Marketplace for Mobile, a new, rich application marketplace available on Windows phones which allow people to easily find, install and experience the applications you want

Which phones are upgradeable to 6.5?

Some current Windows Mobile 6.1 phones will be updateable to Windows Mobile 6.5 if they meet hardware requirements. Ultimately, it’s our partners’ decision whether their phones will support the upgrade.

The Samsung Jack with AT&T, the HTC Diamond 2, the HTC Touch Pro 2, and LG phones Eigen and HQ, along with four new Windows Mobile 6.5 devices from Acer have announced to offer Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrades.

Why “Windows phone”?

As we move into the consumer space, we need to adjust our language to be more approachable and friendly. Windows phone fits naturally into consumer language and users can easily relate given the popularity of the Windows brand.

When will My Phone be available?

My Phone is available today for all users of Windows Mobile 6.0 or 6.1 phones will and can be downloaded at http://sn1-p1.myphone.microsoft.com/. My Phone will be available on Windows phones beginning on October 6, 2009.

My Phone Sync Screen


My Phone Syncing

What is Windows Marketplace for Mobile?

A rich and integrated marketplace for searching, browsing and purchasing mobile applications from Windows phones based on Windows Mobile 6.5, or from a PC, by simply using a Windows Live ID. For developers, the marketplace presents yet another opportunity to generate revenue by selling applications, but now with direct access to millions of Windows phone users. For mobile operators, it provides opportunity to increase data plan attach rates and generate a new revenue stream from application sales.

ISVs and developers will set their own price for applications, some will be available for free. We’re doing all we can to help generate revenue for ISVs and developers to encourage innovation and attract shoppers by delivering strong value and a great experience. Our model will encourage developers to sell their applications at a price that reflects their true value to customers.

What is the Race to Market challenge?

When you submit your mobile app to the Windows Marketplace, you’ll be eligible to win the Race to Market Challenge and exciting prizes. The Race to Market Challenge will reward the developer whose paid application earns the most revenue within the contest period and the developer whose free application is downloaded the most within the contest period. Winners will receive a prize package including a Microsoft Surface table and developer kit, free online marketing and promotion of their application, plus a one-of-a-kind trophy. Visit http://www.mobilethisdeveloper.com/ for more details.

Stay connected

• Twitter – @wmdev
• Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/wmdev
• Our website – http://developer.windowsmobile.com
• The Windows Phone Blog – http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone/default.aspx
• You can also meet members of the Windows phone team in person at these events:
  • Mobilize on 9/10 in San Francisco, CA
  • TechCrunch50 on 9/13 and 9/14 in San Francisco, CA
  • CTIA Wireless on 10/7-10/9 in San Diego, CA

“ai”

Update: Here is Stephanie Ferguson’s launch announcement post: Windows phones are Coming on October 6th! and our PressPass announcement : Microsoft to Deliver New Generation of Windows Phones on Oct. 6