About page contains a general introduction to Paprika Lab and our 4 values that we believe in and base our decisions on. Few pictures on the right shows a glimpse of what it’s like at Paprika Lab.

Our products page shows the list of products that we’ve launched so far and a web link or a download link in case of an app.

Contact page contains the necessary email addresses for communicating with us. On the right sidebar are some images from Google Earth pinpointing our geographical location (not linked on purpose).

Well, we hope you like our new spring looks. Cheers!

“Things don’t always go according to one’s thoughts, but things rarely happen that weren’t thought about.”

Stressing the importance of goals and purpose has become a cliche, but still holds true. We tend to hope for pleasant surprises, but they rarely occur when you didn’t prepare for it to happen. Focus on the outcome and think through of what might lead to the goal, and with some luck, it will become a reality.

* Image courtesy of veruška

1. Low Prices
2. Vast selection
3. Accurate, Fast, Convenient Delivery

It’s a great insight, since business entities tend to focus on the differences between the markets, but there are fundamental needs of human being which can be similar across the world. What I do find true, however is there are some factors not included above are also critical and general across multiple markets.

1. Trust

People won’t buy products or from places they don’t trust. It’s a matter of security as well as reliability. Because they are payinig for something, because they are giving their commitment, they must be able to trust the seller, the product, the shipping & handling companies.

It’s interesting to note that how much we underestimate trust in online shopping, and it’s precisely because it comes before everything else. No matter how cheap the product is, how vast the selection is, or how “perceivably” convenient the delivery is, people won’t buy things from places that they cannot trust.

Fortunately, Amazon.com has a great brand reputation that people do trust, so even if the sellers providing the items to Amazon have not earned such trust yet, they can benefit from supplying their products through Amazon.

2. Relevancy

This may seem to dissent from “vast selection,” but ultimately, it’s not. What it means is, people don’t want to buy 100 different cars or 100 different mp3 players. They want the one that’s right for them, but because we don’t have the necessary technology or service adequate enough to address this problem, we offer them bunch of things to choose from instead.

It’s meaningful to remember that since customers don’t necessarily benefit from vast selection, and that it also hurts the sales for the sellers, one of the most important problem for commerce sites to solve is relevancy. Jason’s recent post on the problem of having to choose from too many “similar looking” printers shows this point.

Since roughly 30% of the sales at Amazon comes from recommendation services, this is a good place to start.

3. Good After Service and Refundability

After service is like a safety net. This may not seem like a big issue (it is for people who had much hassle in their previous shopping experiences), providing good A/S or at least notifying the customers of such will help sales and loyalty. As a matter of fact, Samsung is well known for it’s great A/S (at least in Korea). Whenever you buy a monitor, whatever the problem it may have, they will come to your house, pick up the product, get it fixed or replaced, and re-delivered to you all within just few days.

If you are committing yourself to purchasing something and you know the seller will be there when you have problems, and you know that they will have their money ready when you don’t want to keep the product, you are much more likely to purchase the product without much second thought.

This also helps the sellers because (unless they have a crappy product), customers usually stick to their choices, and if their experiences match up their expectations, they build loyalty toward your products and brands.

4. Ease of Payment

Too many countries in this world still lack much e-commerce, because of this problem. It’s still too darn hard to pay for something that you want. Mobile payment is an easy way to pay for small things on the go and it is quite common in some parts of Asia, but it’s still very hard to find in some of the western countries.

Sellers must provide the shoppers with as many payment options as possible (with simple interface of course) and as securely and reliably as possible.

When I was working at NCsoft, I looked through the way people pay for online games, it was clear that the more payment options you give to the customers, two things will happen:

1. Customers will pick an easier way to pay for services and life-time value increases (for example, if someone was paying via money-transfer manually every month, they are more likely to stay as a customer when they find out that they can pay by credit-card automatically, obviously).
2. New customers appear. Some customers in the “grey area” are triggered by this new found easeness and they will begin to spill over to the side of paying customers.

Online shopping and commerce in general has one of the longest history in the areas of the internet, but there are still many problems to be solved and many values to be served.

Along the streets of Gangnam, one of the most populated areas in Seoul, is now decorated with somewhat monolith-like pillars which have numerous features:

These pillars functions not only as street lights, they supply wireless internet to everyone one in the area as well.

They also have touch-screen enabled computers embedded that shows traffic and local informations like near by restaurants and cafes. People can upload their own user generated contents to these polls. (I don’t know whether or how they censor/manage the uploaded contents)

This really is an interesting way to bring ubiquity to internet access and touch-screen technology.

—W. H. Murray

[via Signal vs Noise]

But what happens if you don’t plan ahead of time? In many cases, crisis! (”Didn’t you get the tickets? I thought you were going to do that?!”) Then, when the urgency of the last minute is upon you, the reactive planning model ensues.

What’s the first level of focus when the stuff hits the fan? Action! Work harder! Overtime! More people! Get busier! And a lot of stressed-out people are thrown at the situation.

Then, when having a lot of busy people baning into each other doesn’t resolve the situation, someone gets more sophisticated and says. “We need to get organized!” (Catching on now?) Then people draw boxes around the problem and label them. Or redraw the boxes and relabel them.

At some point they realize that just redrawing boxes isn’t really doing much to solve the problem. Now someone (much more sophisticated) suggests that more creativity is needed. “Let’s brainstorm!” With everyone in the room, the boss asks, “So, who’s got a good idea here?” (Thank you, Mrs. Williams.)

When nothing much happens, the boss may surmise that his staff has used up most of its internal creativity. Time to hire a consultant! Of course, if the consultant is worth his salt, at some point he is probably going to ask the big question: “So, what are you really trying to do here, anyway?” (vision, purpose).

Instead, David suggests the natural planning model:

1. Defining purpose and principles.
2. Outcome visioning
3. Brainstorming
4. Organizing
5. Identifying next actions

What I find true about this model is the importance of clear purpose and outcome. Whenver I am involved in a project, the clearer the outcome and its purpose is, the more members are motivated, and productivity flows like a stream of water running down hills.

Whenever the purpose or outcome is somewhat vague or not agreed upon, as time goes by, people tend to drift away in their own imaginations or lose their momentum.

So, keep your goals and purposes clear and make sure everyone in your team knows where the goal is.

This super addictive, mind-bogging, brain-training game features really cute chicks squicking out of their eggs when pressed on. After playing this game for a while, your brain will spew out alpha waves and puts you in a relaxing state.

The basic goal of this game is to press the egg-shaped buttons in numerical order from 1 to 100 as fast as you can. You will be ranked based on your speed (time-elapsed) and your max-combos.

This game can be really fun when you compete against your friends and colleagues. See who can score the quickest time. First time playing men usually scores around 90 ~ 100 seconds, whereas women scores around 100 ~ 120 seconds. (This is probably due to men being more exposed to games in their lives) When you train yourself and your brain, your score will get quicker, maybe 60 seconds, or even up to 40 seconds!

Right now, the fastest player in the world scores around late 30s.

Here’s the video of game play:

When you pause the game, you will be awarded(?) with some witty proverbs so that you can take your mind off of things.

So go ahead and grab a copy here.

We’ve placed our support page on Facebook Products page.

(familiar?)

Following is a promotional video of MAC (the cosmetics) featuring black, weird Hello Kitty. It totally broke my conventional thinking of brand extension.

(Youtube video)

[via ShoppingBlog & ShinyGloss]

Here’s the run of high level agenda:

• Ensure the Full and Free Exchange of Ideas through an Open Internet and Diverse Media Outlets
• Create a Transparent and Connected Democracy
• Deploy a Modern Communications Infrastructure
• Improve America’s Competitiveness
• Prepare All our Children for the 21st Century Economy
• Prepare Adults for a Changing Economy
• Employ Science, Technology and Innovation to Solve Our Nation’s Most Pressing Problems

It’s quite interesting to see that a government is out there supporting openness of the internet and protection of privacy. America’s lack of decent broadband might get better in the next years to come. Focus on math & science education and bio-research including stem cell is also explicitly described in the agenda.

It is motivating to see that the administration’s detailed goals on the various areas of the nation is well-informed. Most of the goals are still highly idealistic, but hopefully they have some reasonable and realistic steps to reaching these goals.

The list of the designers featured in the film is enough to excite anyone who is interested in product designs.

• Paola Antonelli (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
• Chris Bangle (BMW Group, Munich)
• Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec (Paris)
• Andrew Blauvelt (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis)
• Tim Brown (IDEO)
• Anthony Dunne (London)
• Dan Formosa (Smart Design)
• Naoto Fukasawa (Tokyo)
• Jonathan Ive (Apple, California)
• Hella Jongerius (Rotterdam)
• David Kelley (IDEO)
• Bill Moggridge (IDEO)
• Marc Newson (London/Paris)
• Fiona Raby (London)
• Dieter Rams (Kronberg, Germany)
• Karim Rashid (New York)
• Alice Rawsthorn (International Herald Tribune)
• Davin Stowell (Smart Design)
• Jane Fulton Suri (IDEO)
• Rob Walker (New York Times Magazine)
• more designers TBD

Be sure to check out the official website for more updates.

Trailer after the jump:

* Photograms by Donghwan Ha, Sechan Hyung

Meet Whole Earth Catalog, the inspiring publication brought back from 1960s. Steve Jobs once quoted the last issue of this wonderful magazine in his commencement speech for Stanford. Being one of the earliest publication on DIY, spawned many subsequent publications. Now we can harness this awesomeness via web archive.

1. Delete all default lists (but, you can’t delete Inbox and Sent)
2. Create necessary Smart Lists for using GTD

That’s it! Now, let’s take a closer look at each step. Bear with me while I explain. Once you go through this article, you should become the Jedi master of GTD with RTM.

1. Delete all default lists

When you sign up for the first time, there are some default general lists already setup for you. We want to delete these lists. Click Settings on the top right navigation bar, then click on Lists tab. This will show you the list of default lists. Let’s delete everything. (You won’t be able to delete Inbox and Sent)

That’s it for step one!

2. Create necessary Smart Lists

Now, we want to create some smart lists for using GTD. As we’ve learned in the first part, you can create smart lists by following the next steps:

1. Search with specified conditions
2. Save the result into a smart list

Below is the smart list that I use followed by the search conditions. For more information on search conditions, try this link. If you are having trouble creating new conditions, you can simply copy and paste the conditions below into your search box.

You can use numbers and symbols like @ to sort the list in the order you want. Once it’s done, you’ll get a screen with tabs similar to the one below:

Let me explain a bit further why I setup the list the way I did.

First of all, all of new tasks are piled into 1_Bucket. According to the GTD Framework, all tasks that we can think of should be poured into the bucket. Once that’s done, we process tasks from the top. Tasks that can be done within 2 minutes must be taken care of promptly, but all others must be organized into other lists. We can do this by assigning tags. Here are some tag rules to get you started with:

• @buy: something that you need to buy. For example: books and groceries fall into this category.
• @contact: whether by calling on the phone or by email, your list of follow-up todos goes here.
• @home: tasks that you should do at home
• @office: tasks that you should do at your office
• @someday: tasks that you are going to do someday, but not right now. For example, a vacation trip to moon might fall into this category.

Notice that I’ve mixed context and action lists, which is not exactly the standard GTD. You should find a mix that matches your need best. There are two more tag rules that I use. Remember that you can use more than one tag on a single task.

• na: Next Actions. When you add “na” tag to your task, your task shows up in 3_Next Actions as well. For example, if you have to make a presentation for tomorrow’s meeting at work, you can tag that task “@office, na”
• +project_name: I add “+” to the front of all tasks that belong to a certain project. Anything that requires more than two tasks are considered a project in GTD. For example, if you need to paint your bedroom wall, you might have tasks like 1) buy a sky-blue paint, 2) paint the wall. Then you can tag these tasks “+bedroom_paint”

So, whenever a task is assigned with a tag, that task shows up in two places. First, a smart list assigned with that tag (e.g. @office) and 2_Review or 3_Next Actions.

You should focus on the tasks in 3_Next Actions on daily basis, and review the tasks in 2_Review on regular basis (by adding “na” tag).  With a basic understanding of GTD, you now should be able to elaborate further on from this point. Go and create some smart lists that suit your taste.

3. On Managing Projects

As mentioned above, project means something that requires more than a single task in GTD. You should create an extra smart list for managing projects (e.g. Prj_Bedroom Painting) and tag the relevant tasks with tag:+bedroom_paint. By following the conditions above, project-tagged (tags with “+” at the front) tasks won’t show up on 2_Review, because it’s not really straightforward to consider all of the relevant tasks within a project from 2_Review tab.

So, you should review your tasks on regular basis by going around 2_Review tab and your project tabs.

That’s it!

Now with some adjustments, you should be able to GTD using Remember the Milk. There are plenty of useful keyboard shortcuts for RTM, so you should check them out if you want to harness the full productivity with RTM.

My goal was to minimize the overhead of managing my tasks and having a trusted system for organizing todos. Then I gave remember the milk (RTM) a shot.

Close friends have been recommending this site for months, if not for years, but I didn’t really care to try it out because it was another web-based todo tool and I’ve tried so many in the past that I was simply too tired of poor performance and usability. Contrary to my assumption, remember the milk had a clean interface, rich keyboard shortcuts, light-weight performance, etc. I also stumbled across numerous articles implementing Getting Things Done (GTD) with remember the milk, so I decided to organize a tutorial of my own to share with the world.

Below is another, half-baked, yet simple way to implement GTD with remember the milk. (kudos to dodobing for wonderful tutorial. My work is based on dodobing’s with some added salt)

1. Getting around remember the milk

Once you’ve signed up, you should click on Tasks on the top navigation bar, or Continue to Tasks on the right sidebar, which will take you to a screen that looks like the one below:

You will see five tabs labeled Inbox, Personal, Study, Work, and Sent (these are default lists) followed by list of tasks underneath. Orange, dark blue, bright blue colors on the left side of the task list show priorities, and on the right side of the list shows additional information (like due dates and notes). Their Tour page shows the summary of features on RTM.

Here are some noticeable services on RTM that you might want to know:

• You can use RTM with Gmail by enabling Gmail Labs (read the instructions)
• If you are using Google Gears, you can use RTM in offline mode which can be quite useful for people on-the-go with their laptops.
• Tasks can be synced with Google Calendar
• You can use it with twitter as well
• There is an iPhone/iPod Touch app that you can use (it’s not completely free, unless you are using the $25/year Pro account)
• You can tag your tasks, delegate and share tasks with other people

2. What you need to know before diving into GTD with RTM

First and foremost, you need to try Smart List. I have to admit, I hate having to learn new things when I come across a new web service, but smart list was quite easy to learn and rather, enlightening.

Gray-colored tabs are general lists. They are just plain tabs. You can add or remove general lists at your will. Blue-colored ones are called smart lists. These tabs show tasks that match certain conditions (e.g. certain tags, due dates, and alike). (FYI: white-colored tab is the currently selected tab)

For example, you might want to create a list of things that are due within this week. You can make one using smart list, and the list gets automatically updated according to the conditions you assign.

Making smart list is really simple. For starters, let’s add some tasks that come across your mind. Then follow the next steps.

1. First, search something that you want to make as a condition for your smart list. Search form is at the top of the right sidebar that looks something like below. You can simply search for something by the task name, but you can also create complex search conditions using search options. Multiple search conditions can be assigned as well.
   
2. Do the search. Tasks may or may not show depending on the conditions you’ve assigned. It’s okay to not have any task that satisfies the conditions you’ve set for your smart list. Below is an example snapshot of the result that shows on your right sidebar when searched with tag:@work. You can see the summary of the search result.
   
3. By clicking on the Save tab, you can create a smart list. You need to fill in the name for your smart list. Let’s save it as @Work.
   
4. That’s it! You should see a blue-colored tab labeled @Work on your list now. Whenever you click on @Work tab, you should see the list of tasks with @work tag.

For further information, RTM’s website offers a video tutorial of using tags and smart lists as well.

So, that was smart lists. Next time, we’ll go straight to implementing GTD using RTM.

It seems like now days, everyone agrees simplicity is important, but one should ask, by how much? I recently finished reading “Yes!” and one of the chapters, “When does offering people more make them want less?,” includes an interesting research on simplicity vs complicated choices.

Iyengar and fellow social scientist Mark Lepper also examined whether the damaging effect of offering too much occurred in other domains, such as food products. They set up a display at an upscale supermarket in which passersby could sample a variety of jams that were all made by a single manufacturer. Throughout the course of the study, the researchers varied the number of flavors of the jam offered, so that either six or twenty-four flavors were featured at the display at any given time. The results demonstrated a clear and astonishing difference between the two conditions: Only 3 percent of those who approaced the extensive-choice display actually purchased any jam. Contrast that with the 30 percent who bought jam when they approached the limited-choice display. (p.31)

We tend to think offering more options and more product lines will actually drive more sales and volume, but looking at the research like this, one has to wonder if this conventional thinking is indeed true. It maybe is worthwhile to keep in mind that when Steve Jobs returned to Apple as iCEO, one of the first things he did was to trim down the tens of product lines to just four: two notebooks and two desktops. This decision lead to a hefty increase in revenue. Now days, they have iPods and iPhone, but considering their revenue and size, it’s still relatively easy to remember all of their products.

It’s interesting that iPhone alone, in terms of revenue, beat few other major players like LG which sells hundreds of product lines. Simplicity can be beneficial not only to a single user’s experience, but to overall numbers for your company.

Then somewhere in the world has been trying to change the way we donate to charity. Here’s an interesting idea implemented by Korea Smart Card: raise charity fund through NFC(Near Field Communication). Countries like Japan and Korea have wide adoption rate for NFC and idea like this will enable people to donate without having to pull out a bill from your wallet.

All you have to do is tag your wallet against the sensor and you are instantly billed a single dollar on your credit card for donation. I’m not sure whether this kind of donation is eligible for tax exemption or not, but this seems like an efficient (and maybe a bit less humane) way to raise charity.

By lowering the barriers to charity on streets, this kind of technological approach may increase overall participation. I wish some social-psychologist’s team will do research on whether this kind of automated charity program can actually increase the total amount of funds or not.

At the beginning of each year, I draft up a personal plan of the year ahead, slice them up into four-quarters (just like how companies are run), and manage them quantitatively throughout the year. I haven’t done the review yet, but I can feel that this year’s plan went pretty smooth. If my plan card’s score sums up to around 60 points (out of 100), I consider the plan to have been executed well. 80 means great. 100 means superb. Thus, the plan needs to be somewhat audacious to be meaningful and worth striving for.

The effectiveness of writing down plans and crafting necessary steps required to make those plans a reality is well described in chapter 17 of Robert Cialdini’s latest book, “Yes!,” which I think is one of the finest books I’ve read this year.

For those of you who aren’t into the whole ‘planning’ thing, you should try to write them down and build up quantitative criteria for measuring the progress of your goals. It has been working for me for the past four years and I believe there are some people out there who will benefit from doing the same.

Maybe this is why people just order from places like Dell even though they have to pay that hefty-extra price, for a piece of mind. I think this is a big, solve-worthy problem. Even if I have to buy multiple products from couple of different vendors, I want to have a consistent, simple shopping experience. Order products that I can trust from sellers, again, that I can trust.

Even after a decade of ecommerce marching through our bedrooms, there still is a huge void that needs to be filled with a better, simple shopping experience. I want to do something about this.

Now that grand finale of shopping season is coming up (hopefully everybody got their presents ready by now), I have to wonder, how many people who have shopped online for the past couple of months from places other than Amazon or eBay found their experiences to be simple, even to the extent of joyfulness.

This is a dire and meaningful problem that needs to be fixed.

The designer behind the sketch, Jay Schuster studied industrial design and possibly coming from his father(a designer for GM), he became a designer of the real world before he began his career at Pixar. As a matter of fact, team at Pixar thoroughly went through the hassle of examining the prototype of Mars rover during the development of Wall-E.

The amount of effort put into these works of art is astounding and inspiring. Even though web development these days tend to shout “release early, release often” a lot, it would be meaningful to remember that when a design is based on a more thorough understanding of how things work or should work, it will become more empathetic and intuitive to the users.

What’s even more amazing is that you can actually wear them:

I am thrilled to be able to find so many great inspirations from young Chinese artists, and thanks to the internet, we can find great artists around the globe without much hassle these days.

Few days ago, a friend told me about a simple iPhone game that had over 2,000 reviews with average score of full five-stars.

“Fieldrunners” is a simplified variation of a classical game Tower Defense, but the overall quality of its graphics and fun factors are mind blowing. Developed by Subatomic Studios, this immensely immersive game has captured the minds of people at Paprika Lab.

The touch interface is also well integrated with the game. If you want to kill your time in a most engaging manner, Fieldrunners goes definitely at the top of your list.

However if it comes with a hardware, testing would be much more important work. Hardware with several defects would make much bigger problem than software does. I would like to introduce how Nokia is testing their handsets. It might explain why they are so strong at quality. Please enjoy the video.

Nokia’s Handset Test Laboratory from Mobile Industry Review on Vimeo.

Nokia Research boasts over 700 researchers worldwide, expanding its territories into Los Angeles. As we’ve seen from our previous post, augmented reality seems to be a hot topic among researchers. Although most of these technologies are still quite early stage and somewhat cumbersome, there is a lot of room for improvement and innovation in this field.

A quick introductory video of Morph:

However, what if there is a dedicated chair for lovers? Would you love to use these love chair series with your boyfriend or girlfriend?

Loren Schwerd, a sculpture based in Louisiana, displayed loveseat series in her web page. Let’s take a look the chairs, and think about what would be the best for you.

via designboom

This really does make you wonder, how did they make this? So, here’s the behind-the-scene making footage:

[via core77]

Let me introduce briefly how this process works. Let’s assume you found a defect, then you start asking why:

1. Why didn’t login module work? An user object became nil.

2. Why did an user object become nil? An object name was changed.

3. Why was an object name changed? So-and-so changed it while refactoring authorization module.

4. Why does his refactoring break an another module? Unit tests were not executed after refactoring.

5. Why were not unit tests executed? So-and-so was not trained to execute all the unit tests after refactoring.

After asking five why questions, make five corrections, which build a startup immune system. If you want to know more about five whys, please don’t miss to read the original article.

A great application mash-up called Wikitude by Mobilizy has been announced. It uses Wikipedia and Panoramio’s data to create such a unique service. GPS and internal compass determine your exact location and direction, then relevant information is overlaid onto your display. You should definitely check out the video below:

When we had just launched Faceworthy.com, we had communicated a lot with our Brazilian customers. This experience brought me an idea that if we had brought customers in earlier stage of development, that would have been better for developing Faceworthy.com.

I got Steve Blank’s presentation material about the customer development process. Let’s enjoy learning it.

via http://venturehacks.com

Cute little animation of stickman playing inside the new LG phone “Cookie”. It seems to promote some neat features on the phone.

This reminds me of Xiao Xiao video:

Both videos run are about 2 minutes long each, so if you haven’t seen them before, besure the check them out. Pretty nifty.