ailon's DevBlog

Could this be the first Google Glass game?

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:20:50 +0300

I’m not sure if Google Glass already has specialized games or not, but a game my friend has just released – The Howler – has got me thinking. Check out this short video demo and decide for yourself.

Yes, you will look like a complete dork from the side, but aren’t people getting Google Glass going for that dork look anyway? Even the International League of Anger Managers recommends it.

Anyway… Even if not for Google Glass this game looks fantastic – it features amazing art based on the sights of my hometown of Vilnius, Lithuania with that darkish steampunk(?) look. And the craziest thing is that all of this art was made by the artist who has probably never used a PC. All of these beautiful images were hand drawn on paper. I can imagine the originals going on my wall, but I guess I won’t be able to afford them once this game becomes a cult item.

Check it out:

The gameplay is casual and fun. Your goal is to pick up and deliver a package using an air balloon or some other contortion, which you control by either touch or voice. You have to consider wind currents and other obstacles. And you can blow them up just by screaming “UGGH!!!”. It’s a fun and sometimes challenging game, but even if you are not into this kind of game it’s worth getting just for the crazy awesome and unconventional art.

Available on iOS and Android (via Amazon).

Microsoft Should Promote an iOS Game

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 17:09:26 +0300

Angry Birds came to Windows Phone a year late (or something), Instagram is still not there, etc.. It doesn’t matter that there are other alternatives, it’s a status, validation thing. iPhone and now Android users always looked down on us, Windows Phone users, and bragged that they have the Hip App X, but we don’t and that they had the Fun Game Y 3 months before we got it.

But guess what? Things are changing. Even if slowly. A few weeks ago I had an experience at a semi-drunk party where people came up with an idea of having their faces “ugglified” by some real time phone app and the app in question was CamWow. Surprisingly (or probably not) it worked better on my Lumia 920 than iPhone 4s and 5. I’m not sure what was better, but my iFriends wanted to look ugly on my phone rather than theirs. And another friend with Galaxy S3 was sitting silently in the corner. There’s no CamWow for Android. Now I’m pretty sure there are other similar apps on Android, quite possibly they are even better. But you know what? There are other photo editing apps on WP, some even better than Instagram, but Instagram is a status thing and I get it.

There are also quite a few physics games on Windows Phone. At least one of them is better than Angry Birds, in my humble opinion. The game is called Krashlander and it has been available on Windows Phone since day 1. Now – 2 years 3 months and some days later – it makes it’s debut on iOS and our iPhone friends can finally enjoy what we have finished 2 years ago. Good for them! Go get it.

I think Microsoft should make a bold move and promote Krashlander for iOS. I’m sure this will never happen, but a TV ad saying something like “The Windows Phone hit game comes to your iPad, finally.” would be very cool and show that times are changing.

In any case go get Krashlander on iOS or Windows Phone (if you managed to miss it somehow) and you are welcome.

Public App Feedback #1: Nextgen Reader for Windows 8

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 18:03:22 +0300

I’m going to try something new. There are quite a few apps that I use very often and like a lot, but obviously I have a few things I don’t like about them or some minor things I miss. I was meaning to send feedback to developers of these apps for a long time, but couldn’t find the time/willpower.

At the same time I promised myself to blog [almost] daily. So I thought I can shoot 2 of these goals with one shot. Hopefully this feedback is valuable not only to the developers of said app, but other developers too. If not, just let me know in the comments below and I’ll consider shutting down this new “section” of this blog.

To be clear, I’m only doing this for great apps that I really like, so you can consider these feedback posts as my endorsements of the apps. I have no interest in providing feedback for crappy apps (well, unless I have some special feelings towards the developer ;)

Nextgen Reader for Windows 8/RT

The first app in this series is Nextgen Reader – an RSS reader (Google Reader client). I’ve tried quite a few of the feed readers. Some of them were more “powerful” than Nextgen Reader, some offered more “innovative” approach to reading RSS feeds, but I prefer the straightforward approach of Nextgen Reader.

That said I had a love/hate relationship with the app for some time because it wasn’t very stable a couple of minor versions ago. At some point it was crashing too much and I thought I had enough. So I switched to Feed Reader which is another great reader even though I don’t like the UI all that much.

It seems that after an update a couple of weeks ago Nextgen Reader stopped crashing (at least didn’t crash on me yet), so I’m back to using it as my primary reader and here are things I don’t like or miss…

Do we need 2 modes?

One of the “killer” features of Nextgen Reader is support for 2 modes: “classic” which is close to Google Reader or Mail app or something you would expect a feed reader to look like (left); and “modern” which looks like People and other Windows Store apps with large panels for each feed item.

I assume the first is aimed at keyboard-mouse users and the second one at touch users? Honestly I don’t know which one I prefer. And most importantly I don’t hate any one of them. I could’ve used one or the other just fine. The presence of 2 modes just adds confusion and wastes my brain cells when I think about switching (or not switching) to the modern mode on every launch. I’m pretty sure it also wastes precious developer time. But I guess there are people who feel strongly in favor (or against) one or the other. So dropping one of them now could result in a public outcry.

At the very least there should be an option to pick the mode it launches in. Or better yet just persist the mode between launches.

OneNote-like collapsing of hierarchy

Another annoying thing is that in classic mode all 3 columns (feed list, feed post list and content) are always visible. This is not a big deal when used in full screen mode, but I mostly have a Tweetro snapped to the side when reading feeds and all 3 columns suffer:

I really don’t need to see the feed list column when I’m reading 20 articles in a particular feed. The list should be collapsed. Most of the other RSS reader apps do this. Even craptastic Mail app does it. And OneNote does it beautifully.

Wider reading pane in “filled” mode

Hierarchy collapsing would allow for content pane to be wider in classic mode and there’s no reason for reading pane to be as narrow in filled mode as it currently is.

Just make it wider.

“Open in browser” is behind ellipsis in “classic” mode

When I read a post and want to read the comments or post my own I’d like to go to the website in a browser. In “modern” mode the “open in browser” button is front and center (top left, actually ;) (see the screenshot above). For some reason in “classic” mode the “open in browser feature is hidden behind an ellipsis

There’s more space in that top bar to fit it even in the filled mode. And I sync once per reading session and wouldn’t mind going to that sub menu or app bar to do that, but I’d love to be able to open the post in browser without that extra tap.

Video resizing

New version resizes images to fit the reading pane. That’s great. It would be great to do the same for videos (at least YouTube) and I think it’s pretty easy to do.

Part of the video doesn’t fit and YouTube’s HTML5 player craps out a little when it doesn’t fit into the screen.

Sync doesn’t load feeds that had no posts

And finally a minor bug report. It seems that after you’ve read all the posts in a feed syncing doesn’t load new posts for that feed.

That’s it. As you can see most of my issues are pretty minor and otherwise Nextgen Reader is an awesome app. Highly recommended.

The End of Post-PC Era

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 18:57:59 +0300

Photo by Yutaka Tsutano

In 2010 Apple introduced the first iPad and basically created a new segment of devices – tablets. iPad wasn’t a full PC replacement (and still isn’t) but was considered a big step towards the real post-PC era. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that at some point in the near future iPad (and possibly similar competing products) would replace PCs for most purposes, except maybe some very specific areas. That said, to this day it’s pretty much inconceivable for someone who ever really needed a PC to be able to get by without one. Starting with school kids, to students, to “knowledge workers” its either impossible or, at the very least, less productive to use a tablet instead of a PC.

Android device manufacturers tried to compete with Apple on the similar 10” field and pretty much failed. Then they moved down to the 7” form factor and things started taking of for Android tablets. 7” tablets don’t have an ambition to replace PCs. They know their niche as a portable universal consumption devices and are fine with it. It’s possible to imagine doing actual work on a 10” device, but 7” is definitely out of the question. Steve Jobs famously dismissed 7 inch tablets as dead on arrival, but in 2012 Apple caved in and released iPad Mini. All the people I know personally and virtually who owned a big iPad and bought an iPad mini love the little one and basically stopped using the 10” tablet.

People love their 7-8” tablets and I take it as vote for placing tablets in a special separate niche (like mp3 players) and abandoning the ambition of dethroning PCs as the most important computing devices. And larger phones are pushing the tablet category from the bottom with 5”+ phones making 7” tablets irrelevant for their owners.

As of today I think there are 3 categories of potential tablet users:

people who never needed PCs (mostly elderly people) or who don’t need a PC yet (small kids)
people who actively dislike large smartphones
people with first-world-problems (aka excess money)

Everyone else is pretty much set with a large-enough smartphone and a PC. Agree/disagree?

Introducing PhoneNameResolver–a lib to decipher Windows Phone models

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 20:31:54 +0300

On Windows Phone you can get information about device’s manufacturer and model using Microsoft.Phone.Info.DeviceStatus class. Unfortunately the results you get do not always represent model names people are used to (see the screenshot above). To make matters worse same models made for different network operators quite often return different values. Additionally returned value quite often changes between batches of the same model. With Windows Phone 8 Nokia went one step further and introduced so many variations of the model name that it became extremely painful to account for all of them manually. That’s why I decided to dedicate a few hours on a weekend to make a small lib that helps with this problem.

PhoneNameResolver (released under MIT license) is a very simple static class that has only one public method called Resolve(). You pass the manufacturer and model name from the DeviceStatus and it returns an object of type CanonicalPhoneName which contains resolved “canonical” (official and/or widely used) model name.

Here’s a sample:

var phone = PhoneNameResolver.Resolve(
    DeviceStatus.DeviceManufacturer, DeviceStatus.DeviceName);
SomeTextBox.Text = phone.FullCanonicalName;

CanonicalManufacturer and CanonicalModel include manufacturer and model separately and are always set. In the case the lib wasn’t able to resolve the model they will be set to the same values passed to the method and IsResolved property will be set to false.

At the moment the lib resolves Nokia, HTC, Samsung and LG model names. The reported/canonical value pairs where collected from public unofficial sources so there’s absolutely no guarantee in the accuracy of the results.

The lib is basically a single C# file and all the model name definitions are included in the same file. I did this to make it extremely easy to just drop the file into your project and to make it work as fast and as config free as possible. That said this is probably not the best architecture to update model definitions without recompiling an app. I’m still open to ideas and this may change in the future. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

2 Years of Entrepreneurship

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 15:39:00 +0300

Well, actually I’ve been doing something like entrepreneurship for the past ~14 years, but the last 2 mark the first time I went all-in, hence the title.

This write-up is mostly for my future self. It’ll be interesting to read this in a few years and compare to my thoughts/experiences on the subject. You are more than welcome to tag along, though. If you have any thoughts or arguments either in agreeing or disagreeing with me, please, do not hesitate to express them in the comments.

On starting up

I had an idea for AdDuplex in December 2010. There’s nothing radically new about it. That said, for some reason, no one thought of it at that time (at least as far as I know). Anyway, I decided to scratch my own itch and implement it on Windows Phone. Some thought (and probably still think) I was stupid not to jump to iOS and Android immediately once I got proof that developers really needed and liked a service like this. Some also said that should’ve moved to Silicon Valley immediately and I would’ve been “golden” by now. Well, I didn’t and I didn’t.

I think the most likely outcome of both moves would be either dying because of money running out before we get to something meaningful across all the platforms, or, in case I managed to secure enough funding to start, being forced to “pivot” to something that has a better theoretical chance of becoming “a billion dollar company”. More on that later. Anyway, I’m enjoying being an important part of the Windows Phone and now Windows 8 ecosystems. And I like living in Lithuania. And we will see about that summer house in California ;)

One thing that really helped me start this was the fact that I had reasonable semi-passive income from now defunct .NET part of amCharts. Ironically other 2 big pushes came from really bad news from Microsoft. First one came in a form of only 30 countries “allowed” to develop for Windows Phone. This is now resolved, but If not for that blow I would probably be developing some mediocre WP apps at the moment. Another big blow came right at the time I’ve started seeing traction with AdDuplex. At the first Windows 8 announcement event Microsoft has famously “forgotten” to mention WPF/Silverlight or any other XAML/C# based development technology as a platform to create Windows 8 apps. This resulted in the sales of our (amCharts) WPF/Silverlight controls dropping to virtually zero. It was a clear signal that I needed to find a new occupation and a source of income ASAP. So I jumped from being 50/50 involved with AdDuplex and amCharts to something like 90/10 and then going all-in with AdDuplex.

As I mentioned having a passive income was very important, so I think you should always think about having some passive income so it’s way easier to jump aboard your next crazy idea. Check out The 4-Hour Workweek for some ideas on this. In case you don’t have that, but itch to start something, I think its more productive to stay at a 9-to-5 job and moonlight, than trying to mix entrepreneurship with some consulting work. I’ve tried to do that for more than 10 years and it never actually worked out. Both sides suffer, but the startup side suffers more. Consulting brings real money in after all.

There’s always an option of getting an investment for your startup. Good luck with that. Unless you have a Name or are a world class bullshitter this is a waste of time in the very early stage, imho.

On being a solo founder

Right when I had the idea and got unreasonably excited I’ve shared it with a fellow developer (who should probably remain nameless). He tried to cool me down by saying he doesn’t think it’s such a good idea, and even if it is, we would be blown away by the big boys once they figure there’s something in it. My next several attempts to “recruit” co-founders failed in a similar fashion. I guess it’s the main (only?) disadvantage of being a startup founder in mid-thirties – most of the people you know have families, mortgages and other commitments, and their minimum viable income expectations are much higher than when they were 10-15 years younger.

Anyway I decided that enough is enough and I’m not going to look for co-founders just for the sake of it. There was a limited list of people I’d like to team up with and I’ve exhausted it. And, after all, I thought I had everything needed to for the first step – I can do the server side myself, I can do the SDK on my own, and I have a sense of “ugly”, meaning I know that if I really try to Design something it will end up ugly, so I should keep it simple.

They say being a solo founder is hard. There’s no one to kick your butt when you are slacking off. There’s no one to say something optimistic when you think you are screwed. Etc., etc. Well, I don’t see this as anything tragic. Sometimes it actually is really productive to slack off a little. No matter how counter intuitive this sounds. There’s also a benefit of having no one to fight for “who deserves more” and there’s only one “because I said so”. Decisions are way easier to make. Sometimes even dangerously easy. In any case I think there are obviously cons of being a solo founder but there are pros too. Definitely nothing tragic about it.

On investments/investors

My idea of a perfect business is something in the middle between what VC world calls “lifestyle business” and “a billion dollar company”. In other words I’d rather run a $10m 5 person business, than a $500m 300 people company.

Unfortunately in my experience most of the Silicon Valley crowd is anally fixated on the “show me how this is a billion dollar company?” question. And by Silicon Valley I don’t mean the exact location in California (even though it is in high concentration over there), but places all over the world trying to replicate SV. The question is totally understandable for large VC funds. This is how their mechanics work and it’s fine. But all the lower levels of the ecosystem are very focused on how you are going to raise your next round, therefore everyone looking to invest $10k is asking the billion dollar question. Some people tell me this is not the case and there are lots of investors who don’t care about that and “I totally see you being acquired for $50m”, but immediately follow by “but we only care about $100m+ opportunities”. Anyway I’m obviously exaggerating and I don’t have enough experience in this since I never seriously looked for an investment, but from the limited experience that I had I came out with this takeaway. Take it or leave it.

I came really close to getting a sort-of institutional Angel/Seed investment once. As close as having all the investment papers reviewed and negotiated with lawyers, but things fell through in the end due to something you could probably call force-majeure. I had a technically less attractive (from pure economics) offer from my friend/previous business partner on the table, but I wanted to get a more “formal” investment at that point. One of the reasons I wanted that, was my belief that having an outside investor would indirectly introduce more discipline in my solo act.

Anyway, I ended up getting that FFF (friends, family and fools) investment. The reason I need it was that half a year after I’ve started I found myself deadlocked most of the time. I was a developer (server and client), designer (ahem), marketer, sales person, support and everything in-between. Once this thing has taken of I couldn’t perform any of these things effectively. I was making some money. More or less enough to feed me, but not enough to safely hire someone to help with some of those functions. So I needed a buffer to get to that next level. And I got it.

On hiring

So far at AdDuplex I’ve only hired one person, so not much wisdom I can provide here. That said I ended hiring based on cultural fit over (perceived) competence more than a year before reading a post by Brad Feld of the same title. I’ve interviewed 4 people. All had very similar salary expectations. I ended up hiring the youngest guy with less experience on paper, but the one my hunch told me was a right fit. I’d be lying if I didn’t see the most potential competence in him over the other 3, but most likely the decisive factor was the fact that he just felt like the best fit. One year later I’m totally happy with that decision.

On accelerators

Once I’ve got accustomed to people calling what I’m doing a startup, I started paying attention to startup accelerators. Not that I ever seriously considered setting going to one of them as my goal, but I’ve sent a couple of half-assed applications to TechStars and some others. In late 2011 I’ve learned about Startup Sauna and applied (again half-assedly) via their referral track. Needless to say half-assed applications don’t get you invited. When Startup Sauna had their warm-up in Kaunas in early 2012 I applied and prepared more carefully. My reasoning for doing this is documented in this post. Long story short, we’ve got invited to the final program, traveled to Silicon Valley and talked to a ton of smart people and investors (smart people too ;). It was great and it was a great way for introvert technical geeks to expand social horizons dramatically, learn a few things about running a business and get a real life experience pitching your product to real investors.

In short, I think if you can get into a great accelerator like Startup Sauna you shouldn’t think twice. It really does accelerate things for you. Even if the thing it accelerates is failure, it’s still a good thing. “Fail fast” and blah blah blah.

On networking, PR and marketing

One of the main realizations over these 2 years was that personal connections are as important in the capitalist community of the 21st century as they were in the Soviet economy of the 20th. Great product is as important as ever and likely more important than it was in pre-internet days, but lack of visibility could be more tragic than before too. The main asset of PR agencies (besides the ability to write boring press releases with stock CEO quotes) is personal connections to media. If you start working on your connections after you launch your product its probably too late and using a PR agency is probably the easiest way to get in front of the media.

Luckily for me I loved Twitter way before I could so conveniently claim that I’m using it for work ;) For an introvert geek like me Twitter is an awesome tool and the channel I made most of my personal connections through. That said real life interactions help deepen the connections you make on Twitter and this is one of the things I wish I realized sooner. I was averse to the idea of going to social gatherings, conferences and such, but I’ve started changing my outlook on it and I can even say I started liking it recently. Obviously the process is long and you have to go through a phase when no one knows you anywhere and it’s really boring and even depressing, but as I said, this is the large part of this entrepreneurship thing and not doing it handicaps your business in a pretty major way.

I have a whole post on the subject of networking for the geeks like me. Hopefully I’ll get to posting it soon.

On travelling

I didn’t count, but I’m pretty sure I’ve travelled more over the last 2 years than in the previous 35. It’s amusing to see how my own view on the travels changed. Just a few years ago I would thoroughly prepare for each trip I take. I would be puzzled by the lack of desire from, say, conference speakers to go sightseeing during their trips. I’m not at that point yet, but I already feel that quite often I have to force myself to go check out the surroundings during one of such trips.

It also takes its toll on vacations. The thought of going to some all-inclusive-lazy-laying-by-the-pool resort was nauseating to me just a few years ago. Now this is my most coveted type of vacation. Second only to not going anywhere at all.

On growth

We are at a point again, like I was a little more than a year ago, when we just have too much stuff to juggle for just the two of us. Again, we are making enough money to carry on with what we do, but not enough to expand comfortably. And I’m confused as for what to do next. Should I look for investment? Should I double down on the money making side of the business even if it means sacrificing the growth? These are the questions I have opposing definitive answers to every time I wake up in the morning. Oh, well, uncertainty is probably the most certain thing about entrepreneurship.

Onwards

Anyway. This was probably the longest blog post I’ve ever written and I should wrap it up and go do some real sh*t. Overall I’ve enjoyed the last 2 years very much and wouldn’t change anything for the world. I’ve been out of the real job market for too long (12 years) and I don’t think I want to go back anytime soon or any time at all. So, I love what I’m doing and this what I hope to be doing until I get rich and lazy (not that I ever wasn’t lazy) or until I die trying. We’ll see how it goes.

11” Tablet is Bigger Than 17” Notebook

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 17:26:09 +0300

TL;DR – jump directly to the explanation of the title to skip the pre-story.

So here’s the deal. I spend 95%+ of my “computing” time at my desk in the office. Let’s say 4% consuming content at home on a tablet (or a shared living room PC) and 1% on the road with a laptop. That 1% forces me not to own a notebook. On the other hand I use that notebook so rarely that it would be a waste of money and it’d be always “out of date” when I need it. So here’s my setup today:

Ever since Windows 8 was announced I was dreaming about replacing that laptop with a powerful tablet. My thesis was that since I use that table keyboard 1% of the time there’s no need for it to collect the dust on my desk. Most people found that to be a weak reason to suffer with a Bluetooth keyboard in that 1%. Oh, well. I still wanted that tablet/PC. I wanted to take a lighter (even though that ASUS ultrabook is pretty light) tablet home, sacrifice nothing at work and didn’t mind using external keyboard in rare occasions when I need the full notebook experience.

Windows 8 arrived and it seemed like most OEMs shared the vision that there’s no need for a really reasonably powerful tablet/PC. The only device that even remotely satisfied my thesis was Acer Iconia W700.

Unfortunately it was quite substantially underpowered: Core i5 max, 4gb of RAM max, 128gb SSD max. Additionally its docking station has only USB and power cord ports. You still need to plug your monitor, headphones, etc. separately when you bring it from home.

So I was waiting for someone to come up with a similar but more advanced model (or Acer to introduce higher end versions of W700).

Then at CES Lenovo introduced ThinkPad Helix:

This is full power (to a reasonable extent) PC and a tablet. Perfect! Even though it doesn’t address my “dust thesis”. One of the “crazy” features of the Helix is that you can detach it’s “head”, use it as tablet or attach it backwards like this:

Many people got excited about the Helix but I haven’t seen anyone excited about this “backwards” mode. Tim Danton at PC Pro writes:

It’s harder to be convinced by Lenovo’s claims that there’s a genuine advantage from one of the Helix’s key features: that you can “rip and twist” the screen so the screen faces in the opposite direction to the keyboard.

…

… I’m doubtful as to how often most people will want to do this, but I’m happy to be corrected …

Most people on Twitter didn’t get it either:

@ailon @gcaughey @thurrott oh that is silly, how would I use the keyboard?
— Peter Bright (@DrPizza) January 7, 2013

My explanation was that my laptop keyboard just stands between me and the notebook’s monitor for no reason. Then I had another idea and did a little experiment:

What you see here is 10” Surface RT placed at the front edge of my 13” laptop and photographed from my usual sitting position. It’s not difficult to see that the Surface fully covers notebook’s screen. I’ve calculated that a 9.2” tablet would be virtually bigger as a second monitor than a 13” laptop.

By the same logic (and math) 11.6” Helix placed at the front edge of a 15.6” random Lenovo laptop would have a screen virtually comparable to a 17.3” monitor attached to the end edge of said laptop. Here’s a diagram:

So there you have it. Hopefully I didn’t mess up the math, but the diagram which is done more or less at scale confirms my calculations.

Is it a reason enough for me to get excited about the Helix and its “odd feature”?

Outlook.com is great, but ...

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 20:04:53 +0300

I’ve recently switched my personal email account from Gmail to Outlook.com. I’ve been using Outlook.com for several weeks now and I really like it. I’ll need some time to figure out if it’s really great or was I just wowed by its slickness. On the surface it feels nicer, faster, more natural when navigated with keyboard, etc. But that’s another story.

This post is about one “feature” that made its way from Hotmail to Outlook.com. It’s the thing I hated the most in Hotmail. I complained to support about it like 3-4 years ago and got a response that, no, it’s not possible to switch this feature off. It’s been several years since then, a new UI, a new domain, a new name but this ridiculous feature is still there and you still can’t turn it off.

That feature is a popup (you can see it at the bottom of the screenshot above) offering you to collect your emails from another account into your Outlook.com. The email address in question is the one I use as my Microsoft Account (formerly know as Live ID). It’s not a @hotmail.com or @live.com or @outlook.com address. There’s no real mail box behind it so I can’t set it up to make this dialog shut up. And even if I could, what if I just don’t want to?

You can close this dialog, but the next time you visit Outlook.com it will pop up again. How difficult could it be to make a way to disable this “feature” permanently? I don’t have any hope of getting it fixed via official support channels so the only thing left is bitching on the internet. So here you go, I’ve bitched. I can now return to the regular things. Right after I click that “Close” button and swear.

Apps I use on my Surface

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 20:49:55 +0300

I’ve been using Microsoft Surface with Windows RT for 2 months now. I was lucky to get one at the Build conference and while I still think a dedicated tablet doesn’t have a place in my life, but since I already got it I’ve been using it and warmed up to the idea a little.

Surface is not perfect, user experience is not perfect, but it improved pretty dramatically over the past 2 months and it gets updates frequently. There’s no need to post another Surface review, so rather than doing that I decided to cover the apps I’ve been using on it.

I’m not going to cover built-in apps. Most of them are pretty basic at best. I’ll only cover apps that I’ve installed from the store. And I’ve downloaded a lot of them. But I’ll only list the apps I actually use regularly.

The order is pretty random and is based on the order of these apps on my start screen. Prices are for US store as of January 3rd, 2012. Screenshots are linked to the store.

Tweetro+ ($4.99, no trial)

Whatever I do on the Surface I usually have Tweetro+ snapped to the side. Conceptually I may like Metrotwit better, but as far as polish goes, Tweetro+ is the best Twitter client on Windows 8/RT at the moment.

Skype (free)

Well, Skype is Skype. Not much to add here. It was very raw when Surface was released but it got an update or two since then and is pretty fine now.

ICQ (free)

Old habits die hard and I still have a few friends with ICQ as our primary communication channel.

Nextgen Reader ($2.99 with unrestrained trial)

Arguably the best RSS reader at the moment with two way sync with Google Reader. It has some stability issues and a few other quirks which hopefully will be addressed soon (I’m going to send my list to the developers). Nothing major though and it’s safe to say Nextgen Reader is my second most used app after Tweetro.

HackerNews Reader ($1.49 with ad supported unrestricted trial)

Well, the name says it all. I didn’t research if HackerNews Reader is the best, but for an occasional user like me it does the job just fine.

OneNote (free)

While it doesn’t do everything its desktop counterpart does, it’s pretty close. It also features a really innovative and well thought out UX unlike some other Microsoft apps (Mail, I’m looking at you!). OneNote is a living proof that pretty complex Metro apps can be done and can be a joy to use.

Trello (free)

Official Trello app does a great job as the Metro companion for the Trello web app. Even though it doesn’t do everything the web app does, it definitely looks better ;) And in case you don’t know what Trello is, in their own words “Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process.”

Calculator² (free)

Strangely enough Windows 8/RT comes without a bundled Metro calculator. Calculator² was one of the first apps to fill the gap and it does it pretty well for my needs that I never had a need to look for anything else. Plus it uses AdDuplex which doesn’t hurt either ;) If for some reason you look for alternatives check out Calculator X8 made by Gergely Orosz.

Timer & Stop Watch (free)

We always tend to go over time on AppBizDev podcast so I needed a simple way to track time. I’ve tried quite a few stopwatch apps and this one was the simplest and does exactly what I need it to do.

NovaMind Mind Mapping (free + feature IAPs (up to $14.99))

Mind mapping is a fancy way to replace bulleted lists when brainstorming, taking notes etc. NovaMind is the best app, imho, to do that on the Surface. The core app is free and lets you do all the basic stuff. You can buy extra features ranging from saving to SkyDrive to checkboxes to extra themes.

PrimeTube (free)

PrimeTube is a really nice YouTube client. One of the reasons you want a YouTube client is that it keeps playing when you switch to some other app (unlike Internet Explorer). The only issue I have with PrimeTube is that it doesn’t play fullscreen when in Filled mode (with other app snapped to the side of the screen).

mobile.HD Media Player ($3.49 with time limited trial)

It’s no secret that the default video player is not able to play your absolutely legally obtained MKV video files ;) That’s where mobile.HD Media Player comes in. So far it was able to play everything I’ve thrown at it. It also plays the files over the network. I didn’t do exhaustive testing though, but as far as I can tell, I have no real-life need for the much hyped VLC player at the moment.

Fresh Paint (free)

Fresh Paint is a finger (stylus?) painting app from Microsoft. A couple of ugly paintings I’ve used in earlier posts were made with it.

Files&Folders (free)

Files&Folders is a nice file manager. Not that I need it too often, but when I do it’s a way more touch friendly way to manage files than Windows Explorer.

That’s it. Do not hesitate to suggest better alternatives to what I use or other great apps in the comments.

What’s wrong with Music and Podcasts in Windows Phone 8

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:06:55 +0300

I love Windows Phone 8, all the new features it brings and this Nokia Lumia 920 phone. That said there’s one area that degraded so much from Windows Phone 7.x that it makes me really sad. To make things worse it’s not some obscure area that no one ever uses. It’s the part of the system that I use every single day. It’s music and podcasts.

It may not be as painful to those who used these features on WP7 differently from how I used them. For some it maybe even worse though, because Podcasts for some wildly inexplicable reason are only available to users in US (I use my phone in US “mode”).

So here’s a list of things that bother me. You may have your own list or I may have missed something that would make my life easier. In this case, please, let me know in the comments.

Music

Sync. I don’t feel the need to have my whole music collection on the phone. I mostly listen to music on the phone when driving. I listen and “discover” music on my PC. So I had a “current” playlist and gradually added (or removed) songs to it in Zune (PC) and it was set to sync with my WP7. That’s it. Worked like a charm.

Zune knows nothing about WP8, Xbox Music on Windows 8 knows nothing about WP8, Windows Phone app doesn’t know much about Xbox Music, Windows Media Player knows nothing about Xbox Music DRM, Windows Phone desktop sync application can (manually) sync playlist from PC to phone but some (all?) DRMed songs refused to play on the phone. I may need to play more with that sync app, but it’s definitely not going to be as seamless as it was with Zune until something more fundamental changes.
Cloud music. The [theoretically] cool feature of Xbox Music on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 is that the music you get on your PC shows up in your library on the phone. The actual files are not downloaded to the phone. They just appear as “links” to the cloud. So when you play the music it’s streamed over whatever data connection you happen to be using. As I mentioned, I mostly listen to music on the phone while driving so it uses my mobile data connection. Now I don’t know about global mobile data situation, but my understanding is that unlimited data plans are not widely available and are actually on the decline (at least in US). And honestly, I don’t want to pay more for data to get an unlimited data plan. Especially to listen to music that I’ve already downloaded to my PC.

So I thought I’ll just copy the album I wanted to listen to the phone and it’ll play locally. Little did I know that it’ll play the same songs twice – once from the local storage and once from the cloud. So as far as I understand at this point you either have to go download the same music twice – once on the PC and once on the phone, or you just disable the “cloud music” on the phone and copy the files.

Podcasts

Here’s a part of Windows Phone 8 FAQ admitting there’s something terribly wrong with podcasts on WP8 if Microsoft is “forced” to recommend using iTunes!

▼How can I get my podcasts on my phone?

There are a couple of ways to get podcasts, but not with the Windows Phone app. The first way is to get them from the Store on your phone. If you'd prefer to get them from your PC, you can download them in iTunes, then use the Windows Phone app for desktop (beta) to sync them to your phone. To learn more, see Sync with my Windows 7 or Windows 8 PC.

So here’s my list for podcasts:

Sync. I know many people don’t see this as an issue since they didn’t use podcasts this way on WP7 either, but I used to subscribe to podcasts on the PC (in Zune) and then autosync them to phone whenever it’s plugged into the PC (which is for 8-12 hours every day).

What are the benefits of this? 1) you can easily mark multiple episodes as played (more on this later); 2) you can finish listening an episode on your PC (it autosynced position); 3) you can force a check for new episodes (more on this later); 4) you can subscribe to podcasts via RSS.

I know that most of these issues were identical on the phone side in WP7, but they were mitigated by my use of Zune to manage podcasts.
Sort order. It’s not about sort order itself. It’s about sorting by oldest being unusable for any podcast with a sizeable history and sorting by newest being quite an odd experience when you are not 100% done with all of the episodes when a new one comes out.

When you sort by oldest you get the whole history of the podcast as unplayed until you mark all of the old episodes as played. And you have to do it one episode at a time (unless I missed something).

Sorting by newest doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Maybe only if you choose to store one latest episode only and delete the older episode independently of it’s played status. If you choose to keep more than one episode you’ll end up listening to the newest episode when you hit the play button next to the podcast even if you were only half way through the previous one. So to have any sort of reasonable listening order you have to monitor the progress yourself and manually pick an episode you want to listen to.
Manual refresh. The podcast service/app on the phone chooses when to check for new episodes based on some black box algorithm. It’s very annoying when you know for a fact that the new episode of your popular show is out but it’s not yet on your phone for some reason. The only workaround I know is unsubscribing and resubscribing to the podcast which is annoying, looses listening history, etc.
Podcasts from store only. There’s no way to add podcasts other than looking them up in the store. I guess that’s the reason why podcasts are a US-only feature. In any case not every podcast in the world is listed in the Zune store. And it’s going to get worse since there’s no equivalent for the podcast part of Zune on Windows 8.

Even though it was a pretty long post, I’m sure there are things I’ve forgotten to mention. I really hope that situation changes as soon as possible. I assume the podcast situation can be somewhat resolved by using a 3rd party app. Which one is your favorite? As far as music goes, I wouldn’t want to drop the Xbox Music Pass, so I hope to find ways to make it work the way I want.

Best books I’ve read in 2012

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 16:53:00 +0300

I’ve just counted the books I’ve read in 2012 and apparently there are only 12 of them (14 if you count the one started in 2011 and one I’m still reading). Somehow I thought there will be more and I managed to promise myself to read at least 10 non-fiction books in 2013.

Considering I’m a pretty slow reader (and a pretty fast fall-asleeper when reading) that’s going to be a challenge. But I accept it!

Anyway here are a few of the best books I’ve read in 2012. Nothing too sophisticated so don’t judge! ;)

Disclaimer: links to these books include my referral code so I’ll make a few cents if you buy any of them via these links. The “funds” will go towards my reading in 2013.

Fiction

11/22/63 by Stephen King. I think this is the first Stephen King book I’ve ever read and it’s awesome. It includes just a little of “fantasy” stuff and I love this kind of book. The story revolves around a guy from our times who finds a “portal” to a specific date in the past and goes on a mission to save Kennedy.
Gone Girl: A Novel by Gillian Flynn. I’ve stomped over this book while writing a blog post on Kindle book pricing, liked the description and bought it despite the ridiculous pricing. The book is written as “merged” diaries of husband and wife (one chapter from wife’s diary, next from husband’s, etc.) One day the wife goes missing and sh*t hits the fan. At first I thought the writing style was a little “pretentious” but then I got used to it and really enjoyed the book. Definitely buying the other 2 Gillian Flynn books.
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I’m not a fan of Sci-Fi but this one is considered a classic so I decided to read it and I can attest that this book is great. That said I’m still not of a fan of the genre and I’m not reading the other 4 books in the series.

Non-fiction

I’ve only read 2 of the Malcolm Gladwell’s books this year: Outliers: The Story of Success and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Amazon categorizes the first one as Cultural Anthropology and the second one as Decision-Making & Problem Solving which I think is pretty accurate. Outliers is about “why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential?” and Blink analyzes the way we make snap decisions. Both highly recommended.

I’m also 30% into Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely and it’s really interesting so far.

And that’s basically it. I’ve read some more filler fiction to clear my head before sleep, but nothing else stood out for me over this year.

AdDuplex Gift Coupons for Your Developer Friends

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 14:49:38 +0300

Do you have Windows Phone or Windows 8 developer friends? One of the best holiday gifts you can give them is some extra exposure for their apps. That’s what AdDuplex gift coupons are fore.

There are 3 types of coupons:

$15/5,000 impressions
$50/20,000 impressions (list value $60)
$100/20,000 impressions (list value $200)

That’s an easy and valuable present for your geek friends.

Buy AdDuplex gift codes here.

Shifts Calendar apps for Windows Phone

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:34:54 +0300

My wife works in shifts. Randomly distributed over a month. Every month she gets a sheet of paper with a list of shifts in a table with other people. What I usually did was take a picture of that list and then look through it trying to figure out her schedule for today/tomorrow. This isn’t difficult but pretty inconvenient. So for a month or so I was musing about doing a personal hackathon to make an up to do that more conveniently.

Does your idea pass a “Google test”?

Well, this app was never meant to be a business, because I always thought it’s too niche. That’s why I never thought it could exist and never bothered to search for an app like this. But as they say “there’s an app for that”. Even for something you think only you and 2 other people need. So I finally stopped procrastinating and did a search for “shifts calendar”

The funny thing is that I either didn’t find SaTurnos when I did the search on the phone or missed it because the name and tile didn’t catch my eye. So I’ll only cover the remaining 3 in this post.

My requirements

I had 2 must-have requirements:

easy to enter shifts – I don’t want to spend half an hour to enter the shifts.
live tile – I want it to be easier to check the shift with this app than to look it up in the photo, way easier.

There are a few things that would be nice-to-have but I can live without them, namely

export to [real] calendar
share the data file with other copies of the app (wife’s, daughter’s, etc.)

Choosing an app

Here’s a brief look at my thought process when choosing one of the 3 apps.

First of all only one of the 3 apps had trial – ShiftCalendar

Since it was only one of the 3 that had a trial it was an obvious choice to try first without even going through description or reviews. Glance at the screenshots and instant download. At this point, if it satisfied my requirements it would be over for the other 2. Can’t understand why would anyone decide not to do a trial or a free version with upsell/IAP/ads.

Anyway. Unfortunately 2 other apps got a chance because ShiftCalendar failed both of my requirements. Entering shifts is relatively painful – for every day it opens a windows to select a shift. You can select multiple dates for the same shift and then set it. Still a little suboptimal, imho. Moreover it only lets you pick a color for the shifts so you end up with a colorful calendar where you have to remember which shift each color represents. Probably easy after a few days of use, but still an odd decision. And no live tile.

So, as I said, only the fact that it didn’t satisfy my requirements gave the other 2 a chance. Since they didn’t have trial I had to read their descriptions and reviews relatively carefully.

First was Shift Work Calendar. The screenshots looked nice and feature list impressive. The app has way more than I need, even though it doesn’t have any of my nice-to-have features. That said it has an export to image feature which on one hand is better looking and easier to digest and share than the original sheet of paper, but on the other hand screenshot feature on Windows Phone 8 basically renders this a non-feature.

So the calendar looks nice, entering shifts is easy (even though I envisioned a better input UI for my imaginary app) and live tile is listed and showcased on one of the screenshots.

With everything looking pretty good one “feature” threw me off completely and made me buy the other app first and I only bought Shift Work Calendar after I decided to do this review.

That “feature” is:

30 page user guide downloadable from the help page.

Seriously! This is the reason I chose the other app. That and the fact that some people in the reviews mentioned this “feature” as something you would need to figure out how to use this app. And I actually had to reread the description (managed to do without the user guide) to get a hint on how to get the life tile to work since it didn’t work on the main tile (you need to go to calendars, select a calendar you want to pin and press the edit button (pencil) and there you’ll find a button to pin it).

The tile looks a little washed out (probably due to the fact it was made for WVGA displays) but otherwise displays all the essential information – today’s shift on the front and tomorrow’s shift on the back.

So this brings us to the third app and the first one I’ve bought – Shiftwerk. The app looks pretty good, even though I prefer the look of Shift Work Calendar. The data entry is pretty much identical to Shift Work Calendar and is fine with me. Like ShiftCalendar it only shows shifts via colors in the calendar, though. That said if you tap on the date you see the details under it. Another thing is that it always uses Sunday as the first day of the week and doesn’t pick it up from your regional settings and doesn’t have a setting to set the first day manually.

Live tile worked “right out of the box”, looked crisp and it didn’t require reading a 30 page manual ;) Unfortunately, though, there’s one major flaw with the live tile for me. It show the next shift. Meaning that if you work say from 2pm to 8pm today it will start showing tomorrows shift after 2pm. This is probably fine if you are the one working in shifts – you would probably know that you are at work at 3pm. But since I need it to know someone else’s shifts it doesn’t work for me. If 3pm was the first time I decided to check it I will have no idea if today was a day off, first shift or second shift. Not a super-major issue but still a minus in my book.

So it looks like I will be using Shift Work Calendar after all, but I’m keeping all of them pinned at least until the end of the month to see if I’ve missed something. Here’s how they look pinned:

So $30 Android phone is a PC, but a Smart TV isn’t?

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:37:56 +0300

Numerous online (and probably offline) publications covered Internet Trends presentation by Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers. Judging from the slides it was really interesting and I’d love to see a video of it, but …

Most sites used the above slide as the main takeaway from it and cited the numbers as the biggest reveal of that presentation. I haven’t heard the comments accompanying this chart, so I’m having a hard time understanding what does it represent?

Does “Apple” include OS X and iOS on iPad, iPhone, iPad Touch, Apple TV? Does Android represent Android tablets, phones, cameras, etc.? Judging from the fact that Android’s chart starts in 2007, I would guess that all of them are counted in. Are all of these PCs or PC replacements?

Let’s say we consider the cheapest and crappiest Android phone a PC. This sounds absurd, but OK. But If we do, then why “smart TVs” are not on this chart? Why not eInk readers? Why no Xbox or PS3 or Wii? Why no Sega Mega Drive (or whatever) in the middle of that chart?

I’m pretty sure Amazon has sold a substantial amount of “classic” (non Fire) Kindles to warrant a place on this chart. And Samsung alone expects to sell 25 million smart TVs in 2012. So why don’t we count them in?

You may say these are not PCs and I’ll agree with you. Android based camera isn’t a PC either. And even a mid range Android phone that was never used for anything but phone calls is not a PC. So what constitutes a “Personal Computing Platform” in this chart and what doesn’t?

I’ve definitely watched more YouTube videos on my smart TV than I did on my phone. I did more “internet commerce” (bought ebooks) on my Kindle 3 than I did on any of other devices except for PC. So what makes these devices non-PCs but, say, HTC Magic a PC?

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Android. But I do have a problem with this chart and the idea of using it to make ANY conclusions. It’s just a pointless piece of infographic created to deliver some message.

Deciphering Nokia’s Model Names

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 18:33:33 +0300

Windows Phone SDK v.7.1 introduced a class called DeviceStatus with a property called DeviceName which returns a model name of the device your app is running on. There were some variations and discrepancies with what different devices returned, but overall it was quite fine in the Windows Phone 7 world.

For reasons unknown to me Nokia decided that this was too good and their new Windows Phone 8 devices return model numbers like RM-820_nam_att_100, RM-821_eu_turkey_343, RM-845_nam_vzw_100, RM-821_eu_russia_216, RM-821_eu_finland_207, etc. As you can see all these “model names” include letters RM followed by some internal model number and then country/region and a mobile operator. Update: I’ve got a tip that the actual structure is <RM-Code>_<Region>_<Variant ID>

I was unable to find a single list that would decipher these model names so I’ve decided to compile my own by looking up each model number I’ve seen individually. So here goes:

RM-820 and RM-821 are Lumia 920
RM-824, RM-825 and RM-826 are Lumia 820
RM-845 is Lumia 822 (exclusive to Verizon in US)
RM-878 is Lumia 810 (exclusive to T-Mobile in US)

I’ve also seen RM-867 but couldn’t find what this stand for.

Things are a little better with HTC. They report “Windows Phone 8X by HTC” most of the time. Except for Verizon version where they decided to report “HTC6990LVW” instead.

Ode and a [slow] farewell to Twitter

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 19:48:45 +0300

“Facebook is for people you went to high school with, Twitter is for people you wish you went to high school with”

-- Someone on Twitter

It wouldn’t be a huge exaggeration to say that my current occupation (and success, if you will) is 50% thanks to Twitter. I’ve joined Twitter in 2008 considering it (as it was advertised at the time) a micro-blogging platform. I enjoyed blogging but sometimes things I wanted to spill to the ether were too short to warrant a blog post. And that’s were Twitter was supposed to come in. Little did I know that it will become the most important communication platform, news source and marketing channel in my life.

MIX10k

In late 2009 I’ve noticed an interesting competition announced by someone on Twitter. It was called MIX10k and the objective was to create a Silverlight (some other technologies were allowed too) app with less than 10kb of source code. So I’ve created this 3D Tic-Tac-Toe game, submitted and campaigned for it on Twitter. I didn’t win the Grand Prize, but won a Community Prize. Thank you, Twitter!

And the prize was [partially] paid trip to MIX10 conference in Las Vegas. That was my first major conference and actually the first trip to US. Moreover that was the conference were Windows Phone 7 development story was unveiled. And Windows Phone development was what I wanted to do next. Unfortunately I got some bad news at the conference, but nevertheless met a ton of cool people who were and still are active in the Windows Phone community on Twitter and elsewhere.

So my initial life plan for 2010 failed, but I’ve stayed active in the #WPDEV community.

AdDuplex

I was hanging on Twitter with my Windows Phone developer friends (among other interesting people) all the time and was curious to see their successes once Windows Phone platform launched. What I saw was some happiness, but mostly disappointment in the way indie developers (especially game developers) struggled to get any visibility in the Store (called Marketplace back then) and as a result not getting any meaningful income from their ad supported apps.

Seeing this I had an idea that developers could help each other by promoting each others apps utilizing the ad space that doesn’t bring them any meaningful income anyway. That’s how AdDuplex was born. And it’s my primary occupation for more than a year now. Thank you, Twitter!

The End Is Near

I’ve met a ton of awesome people on Twitter. I went and/or got invited to a ton of awesome events via Twitter. I’ve met a ton of awesome people in real life via Twitter. Most of these encounters were made possible thanks to different usage patterns that 3rd party Twitter apps provided us. Currently I’m using Metrotwit on the desktop as my primary Twitter client. It allows me to see a bunch of different activities at a time and constantly occupies a whole monitor. I don’t read twitter as a newspaper or an RSS feed. I glance at it from time to time and engage in conversations if something catches my eye. I see my timeline, mentions, DMs and a couple of search columns all at the same time and get a lot of value out of it.

Unfortunately Twitter thinks I’m using it wrong. They are enforcing their vision on 3rd party developers and basically just kicking them out of the platform in an effort to improve monetization. That’s their right and totally understandable. It just doesn’t play well with the way I’ve used and want to continue to use Twitter.

My copy of Metrotwit still works pretty much as I want it to. But for how long? How enthusiastic do Twitter client developers feel this days? I know for a fact that their morale is pretty low. Twitter clients are going away and with them goes away the Twitter I used to love.

I was very skeptical when I heard about app.net initiative. I thought it was an utopia. I still do. But with recent developments around Tweetro and after watching This Week in Startups with Dalton Cardwell I feel it’s time to look for alternatives. And as of today app.net seems the closest thing to it. No matter how utopic paid social network may sound.

So, I pulled the plug and registered on app.net. You can follow me @ailon. You can still follow me @ailon on Twitter too. I’m definitely more present on Twitter than on app.net for the time being, but for how long?

Thank you, Twitter! I’ve loved you. I still like you. And I still want to be friends with you. I just don’t love you anymore. I’m like that spouse that stays only because there’s no strong enough reason to move out just yet. But it’s only a matter of time.

Monetizing data!? Yeah, right!

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 17:19:00 +0300

Over my current ~2 year stint in the startupland I’ve seen a number of startup founders claiming selling of the data they collect as their monetization strategy. This statement always makes most of the serious serial entrepreneurs and investors smirk. “Yeah, right!” – they say. And I agree with them.

I’ve never thought about the data we collect at AdDuplex as a direct source of revenue. After some time, I’ve discovered that it’s a pretty good marketing asset, though.

Last week a story on AdDuplex blog was covered by CNET, CBS News, Neowin, ReadWrite(Web), PC World, Computerworld, LA Times, Tom’s Hardware, etc. This story was totally based on the data we have. And was only possible because of it.

And the effect of it was actually undermined by the fact that I underestimated the fact that there are only a few companies in the world that have any data on the penetration (I don’t want to infer sales, but some pundits did ;) of the Microsoft Surface. And apparently there’s a lot of interest in these numbers.

Unfortunately I treated that blog post the same way I treated all the previous statistics blog posts that were mostly of interest to people inside the “Windows ecosystem” and didn’t make an attempt to break out of the specialized media loop. But even without it the post found its way into mainstream. I’ve got my first “urgent request for comments” emails from multiple media outlets, etc. That makes me feel great and at the same time a little sad that I didn’t anticipate it upfront and didn’t approach this PR opportunity properly.

Last week I’ve attended Silicon Valley Comes To Baltics conference and the best talk there (at least for me) didn’t come from Silicon Valley. It was “Insurgency Marketing: How to get attention for your startup” by Andris K. Berzins from the neighboring Latvia. One of the points of that talk was using interesting stats to attract attention to your under-the-radar startup. Because, you know, no one cares what you actually do.

Build 0.11 - Andris K. Berzins from HackFwd on Vimeo.

So it’s still very unlikely that you’ll be able to turn your “data” directly into a revenue stream. But I can definitely attest that it can be a very valuable marketing asset.

Notes from a trip to Microsoft BUILD 2012

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 19:59:48 +0300

Yesterday I’ve returned from the Build conference in Redmond. The content was awesome, the swag was awesome and, most importantly, the people were awesome. But there were a few less than perfect things which can be reduced to one …

Location #1

This was my first visit to Microsoft’s campus, so it was really interesting in that regard. Other than that it’s hard to explain the choice of venue.

Except for keynotes which were held in what is now known as BAT (big-ass-tent) the rest of the sessions were held in 2 buildings (Microsoft Building 33 and 92). As you can guess by the building numbers these are not particularly close. Here’s the map:

It takes at least 15 minutes to walk from one to the the other. Microsoft tried to mitigate this by running shuttle buses between the buildings. I’ve tried to use the bus once. Ended up waiting 10 minutes for the bus in the rain and then when I finally got to the other building the session I wanted to attend was already full. So from day two I decided to choose the first session of the day and based on that stay in the same building for the day.

Another consequence of this layout was the need to have 45 minute breaks between the sessions. I’m not sure I mind this since that left more time for networking which is the most valuable part of the conference anyway (especially considering online availability of the content). But it’s worth mentioning that all the content would easily fit into 3 days if it was in the same building with ~15 minute breaks. And we could’ve had more content on day 4 (I’ve heard some sessions didn’t fit in).

Location #2

One of the main selling points of doing the event on campus was supposed easy access to Microsoft employees. While I was told that we actually got more talks by real engineers (as opposed to evangelists) than we would if the event was held somewhere else, I’ve heard from multiple Microsoft employees that they were forbidden to get close to the conference. Add that to the fact that they have their own life in Seattle area (spouses, kids, hobbies) and they have to go home and you actually get less access to them than you would if they were on “workation” in Vegas.

Location #3

This is totally random. Sorry for mentioning it here. But on the day I arrived I wanted to get a beer. So I wiped out my Windows Phone, launched Local Scout and found the closest place to the hotel that served beer and burgers. It’s called Red Robin (a chain burger joint). So I went there and ordered a beer. Bartender asked me for my ID. (and no, I don’t look like I could be younger than 21). I complied and gave her my European Union ID card. She was really genuinely sorry, but said that it wasn’t good enough and she needs a proper passport (which I left at the hotel). I was a little upset, but agreed to settle for a burger w/o beer. To my surprise she said that not only I’m not getting a beer, but can’t stay in the “bar area” of the establishment and non-bar (restaurant) area was full. Oh, well.

When I returned to the same restaurant on the last day of my trip with passport in my pocket no one seemed to care about my age.

I don’t know if this is a state of Washington thing or what. I wasn’t asked for passport in US (except at border control) never before and never after that accident.

Few notes on the hotels

Night shot of my hotel taken with Nokia Lumia 920

Tim Heuer has a great post with hotel tips for PDC in 2010. I would add one thing though.

I’ve chosen Silver Cloud Inn Redmond based on proximity to the event and actually walked from and to it from the Microsoft campus. That’s great, but … There was a great and free shuttle service from/to all of the official conference hotels (there were 17 of them) so the proximity to Microsoft wasn’t that important. On the other hand I’ve been to 2 parties (including some drinking and late return to the hotel) in the Bellevue center, plus I went there for shopping and actually went to the airport on a public bus (yes, I’m cheap) with layover in Bellevue center.

So, if I had to choose again I would choose a hotel in downtown Bellevue, rather than close to Microsoft Campus.

It was great, really!

I know this post sounds sour, but lets write this off on the fact that I was born in USSR or am European or whatever. I’m having hard time praising the awesome things (they were awesome what’s there to talk about?) and would rather mention the things I didn’t like (things that can be improved on). That said //build/ was awesome and I would do it again without blinking.

See you at BUILD 2013!

We Need More Windows 8 Devices Like Acer Iconia W700

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 19:04:16 +0300

I’ve blogged a couple of months ago about how I imagine my next PC. Windows 8 launch is just few days away and there’s only one device on the market that somewhat satisfies my criteria and it’s Acer Iconia W700.

It has things I’m looking for:

Reasonably powerful Intel Core i5 CPU
4gb of RAM (could’ve been more, but most of the competing products come with 2, so I’d settle for 4 for now)
128gb SSD (256 would be better but most tablets max out at 64 so 128 is already good)
11.6” Full HD IPS screen (10” is too small for my intended second screen use)
Up to 9h battery life (I don’t buy it, but if it holds 6h+ I’d be happy)
Has a desk docking station
Doesn’t dock into a keyboard (mostly useless dust collector/space waster for my intended usage)

A few things I still miss:

A real docking station. This one acts only as a stand and USB hub to be honest. I’d like to have my external monitor and headphones hooked up to the dock so I don’t have to plug/unplug them every day. Plus this one is pretty ugly :)
A model with more than 4gb of RAM and 256gb SSD

Other than that it looks close to perfect (at least on paper) and I’m probably going to buy it. Even if to express my support for this form factor. Looks like it went ignored by other OEMs and I don’t like that.

Ad Rotator (Gergely Orosz and Simon Jackson) on AppBizDev

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 16:00:53 +0300

If you monetize your Windows Phone (and Windows 8) apps with ads you probably know not to rely on a single ad network. Some do better in one region and have nothing to show in all others, some pay more in some countries but less in the others, etc. And the fill rate is never 100%. So to make sure you utilize your ad space to the max you use multiple ad providers.

It’s not too difficult to implement a system that will switch from one ad provider to some other when there’s no ad to show. But if you want to do it really well you’d probably need to have different defaults for different locales. And to make things more complicated performance of different ad networks changes regularly. So you don’t want to hard code any of these settings into your app and issue an update whenever market situation changes. You can still implement an intelligent system like that yourself, but why reinvent the wheel?

There’s an open source project called Ad Rotator which can do all of the above and more for you. We’ve interviewed lead contributors to the project – Gergely Orosz and Simon Jackson on the latest episode of AppBizDev podcast. Check it out and make sure you subscribe in Zune, iTunes or any other tool to get new episodes automatically.

And, btw, if you have some music skills in addition to your awesome dev skills, you can get a MILLION free ad impressions on AdDuplex network by contributing a theme music to the podcast. Check out more details here.

The Last Act of App Gold Rush

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 15:46:20 +0300

App gold rush is over. Creating an app and going straight to refreshing your bank account is not a feasible plan anymore. Even if you are extremely naïve, it’s unlikely that you still think it’s possible.

There are more than 700,000 apps on iOS, almost 700,000 on Android and, even on Windows Phone, we have more than 100,000 apps. Yes, analysts still predict that the mobile app market will grow to $25 billion by 2015 and I don’t disagree with them. It’s just that the lions share of that grows will be collected by the likes of Electronic Arts, Zynga or Rovio. Not hundreds of “2-guys-in-the-garage” teams like it was possible just a few years ago.

So no, you won’t get a medal or a pile of cash just for posting an app into the store in 2012.

The app gold rush is over. Almost over. There’s only one act left.

More than 16 million people have tried pre-release versions of Windows 8. That’s more than iPad 1s ever sold. One of the early apps on the platform – Cocktail Flow – has already seen more than 100,000 downloads, even though the OS is not publicly available yet. Microsoft expects to sell about 400 million copies of Windows 8 in its first year.

And there are only ~~2,000~~ 3,600 apps (the number is growing fast but it’s still very low) in the Windows Store at the moment. And the official public launch is only few weeks away.

So, the app gold rush is almost over, but there’s still one act left. And you are perfectly positioned to take advantage of this opportunity. Being there at launch means that you have great chances to be mentioned in early OS reviews across the web, get early adopters who will spread the word about you to their friends, low competition, etc., etc. This is a luxury that costs a lot of money and effort later on, but you can get it for free by acting fast.

I encourage you to jump on the bandwagon while it’s still hot. I’m pretty sure this is the last opportunity in this cycle and it won’t repeat until someone invents some new revolutionary concept. App stores are done for the small guys and this is the last launch that matters.

Spotify-like App Stores

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 15:03:52 +0300

Photo by ZeroOne

I’m the last person to say good things about iTunes, but there’s no denying it brought legal digital music to mainstream users. Same goes for iOS App Store. Geeks were buying Windows Mobile apps long before the App Store, but Apple made it easy for a regular person to buy apps for their smartphones. That said, buying MP3s-to-own sounds very old school in 2012 and I bet only the most devoted fans or those who have never heard of Spotify, Zune Pass, Rhapsody, etc. still do it.

But what about apps? All of the app stores still operate in the “classic” iTunes model. Even though it’s clear that paid 99 cent app model never really took off on Android, all Windows Phone success stories are ad based, and even on iOS free-to-play games reign supreme at this stage.

Yet, I think it should be way easier (from the legal standpoint) to introduce the subscription model to the app stores than it was (is) in the music world. Obviously not every smartphone user would like to pay a monthly fee for the app firehose and not every niche app maker would agree to get pennies for each download/use. But, in general, the 99 cent developer crowd should be happy and power users would happily pay $5/month for unlimited access to most of the app catalog. And it shouldn’t be just one or the other.

There’s no doubt it would take a lot of math, market testing, etc. to perfect the formula, but overall I think it’s a win-win solution and an obvious next evolutionary step in the app store history.

What do you think?

Should Google and Microsoft Pay OEMs to Use Their OSs?

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 14:55:55 +0300

These days no one seems to debate the cliché phrase that it’s no longer a war of operating systems or devices, but a war of ecosystems. And, since actual devices and operating systems are only enablers of these ecosystems, it’s quite obvious that one of the ways to move an ecosystem forward is to strip the profit margins of the devices completely. And Amazon is a perfect example of this.

Photo credit Android Authority

Amazon is happy to sell you a Kindle with no margin, happy to exchange a broken one without grilling you too much about validity of your warranty claim. That’s not where they make money. But it’s where consumers buy into the ecosystem – “Look this tablet is awesome and it’s only $299!”

Apple has a seemingly opposite business model, but they can easily switch to the Amazon’s way of doing business if they choose or are forced to.

Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, are very dependent on the OEMs making the hardware and those OEMs in turn are dependent on having a reasonable margin on top of the costs of the hardware and OS. Google can make their “own” Nexus devices, and Microsoft can make their own Surfaces, but they are not free to compete on the hardware prices as long as they care about OEMs even a little. And I guess they have to care at least for now.

So, unless Google and Microsoft either somehow compensate OEMs for the lost profits on the hardware or let them in on the revenues from the ecosystem as a whole, it looks like it will be difficult to compete with Amazon and (possibly) Apple in the ecosystem play.

Luckily for Google, Amazon doesn’t make phones yet. Luckily for Microsoft they don’t make proper computers yet. Luckily for both, Amazon is still very US-centric in the content department. All of this can change any day, though.

Introducing AppBizDev Podcast

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 14:53:29 +0300

I’ve had this idea for a long time, but I know that I’m not the right person to do it. And then I thought the recruiting the right person would be much easier if I just do the pilot myself and set the bar really low ;) So here we go…

AppBizDev is a bi-weekly podcast about Windows Phone and Windows 8 app marketing, funding and monetization, and we are looking for a lead host! Are you interested in app development business? Is English your native language? (let’s be honest, people can’t stomach 2 hosts like me ;) Can you commit to spending an hour once every other week? If the answer is “yes”, then please get in touch at feedback@appbizdev.com

If hosting a podcast is not your cup of tea, but you are interested in creative ways to promote, monetize and fund your apps, subscribe to the podcast feed in your favorite podcast client and, please, do not hesitate to provide any feedback in the comments or via email or twitter.

Check out the first episode “The First and The Worst”.

Why Every Sane Entrepreneur in Baltics and Nordics Should Apply To Startup Sauna Warmups

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 14:26:04 +0300

Yesterday we had BarCamp #15 in Vilnius and one of the VIP guests was Antti Ylimutka, former Wingman and current Captain of Startup Sauna. I must admit the Wingman title sounded cooler, but I guess Captain sounds #LikeABoss and it’s all that matters, right?

Anyway, I was contemplating saying a few words there, but being an introvert developer lagged. So my Sauna comrade Mawuna beat me to it and following his in vitro fertilization metaphor was kind of hard. So I stayed put and am spilling what I wanted to say here. And it has nothing to do with the fact that I prefer typing on my keyboard to talking to real people. So here goes…

A few months ago I've read an article in Forbes and it had a punchline that said "If you are accepted to an accelerator; you don’t need them." And the reasoning was that accelerators are not charities (even though Startup Sauna is as close as it gets to being a charity). They are basically investors and they pick the teams they believe have the biggest chance of succeeding ... with or without them.

So it got me thinking about the reasons why I applied to Startup Sauna Warmup in Kaunas about half a year ago? Well, I guess the answer is that I wanted some outside validation that what we are doing at AdDuplex is interesting to business minded people outside of our pretty closed developer community. Whether we were invited to the final program or not was secondary to hearing that feedback and being approved (or not) by people who have seen a fair share of startups.

This reminds me of my school/university years. I've been the king of mathematics in my pretty crappy school. Then I went on to study at the faculty of mathematics at the university and guess what? I was one of the dumbest students at math there. So it motivated me to work hard and get at least somewhat decent at it. Something that wasn’t possible without external powers showing me that I suck.

So what I'm getting at is that you can be a super fancy startup founder in your own sandbox, but only by stepping outside of it you can learn your own worth, get hard but important questions about your business and improve your pitching skills. And one of the most cost effective ways for a Lithuanian (or any Baltic/Nordic) startup to get that experience right now is to apply to Startup Sauna warmup in Riga (or any other city). And then if you manage to get an invitation to the final program you can decide if you want and can make the commitment. Well, of course you do, you are not stupid, but think about the warmups first and the real value you are getting from that one single day trip to Riga.

And regarding that "you don't need it" phrase. Sure, you don't need it. "Need" is a desperate word, and you are not desperate, right? So you don't need it, you want it!

Apply now!