Sander asked to share some comments so here goes…

180 miles is long but doable with decent training. I didn’t have too much time to put into proper training but together with my daily commutes and some longer rides on the weekends over the last few months I was in OK shape.

I didn’t pay much attention to core body training/strength and suffered for it. On both days the total ride time was around 7 hours and my back got properly tired and started aching.

This being my first cycling event in the UK and the first sportif I wasn’t quite sure of the rules – will people ride in groups? Will they aim for good time or take it easy, stop at a pub, chill at the pit stops? Turns out it’s a very relaxed thing, they do both.

My previous data points are all from Estonia and from proper races so the amount of queueing came as a surprise – start was staggered so you had to wait for that. There was lots of queueing for snacks and water and loo at the pit stops too. Since I was riding alone I was keen on getting going again faster.

The riders, as always, were a great bunch, always up for a laugh. I guess cyclists (and people into sports in general) are the same world over :)

Surrey is beautiful! I thought my usual tracks North of London were pretty good but Surrey is much nicer. Hillier but nicer still. Box Hill was a steady 4 km uphill but not a stupid steep angle (unlike couple of other shorter climbs where I got off the bike).

Drivers in the UK are pretty darn nice towards cyclists. Given the amount of bikes on the road that it must have been rather annoying to drive but I saw maybe only one car that was overtaking cyclists in a stupid way.

At the beginning of the race I was hoping for a bit more group riding, it’s so much more efficient and helps to go faster. Not sure why it didn’t happen, perhaps people train mainly alone or with their riding buddy and working as a small group, rotating and keeping a steady pace isn’t a habit. Still, I’m grateful for the times when I did get a break catching the wind behind some guys and girls.

Would I do it again? Not sure :) It’s good to know I can cycle that long distance but two days was enough. I don’t think I’d sign up for something like John O’Groats to Lands End ride but will probably get a few more one day events in in July. Sam over at LondonCyclist has a much better overview of the race: Riding the MITIE London Revolution

For anyone interested then my tracks are in Strava: Day 1, Day 2

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Mark Meharry: “The inconvenient truth: most artists don’t make it because their product isn’t good enough.” #tallinnmusicweek

— Tallinn Music Week(@TlnMusicWeek) April 5, 2013

Little known fact: For three not that enjoyable years I went to music school to learn to play an accordion. Only later did I realize I could have played in Gotan Project…

I can still play a bit (and read the notes, great skill when learning to sing new songs to Otto) – clearly that was the reason Helen Sildna invited me to join a panel on future business models in music at Tallinn Music Week :)

Joking aside, it was my background with Flattr, the microfinancing service that has/can be used by musicians, bands and artists to tap into fan funding that sat me down on the couch together with Peter Jenner, Dagfinn Back and Mark Meharry (Music Glue). I tried to represent the views of a listener and music fan.

Roughly speaking Peter Jenner was once again pitching his idea of a universal blanket license for music – everyone pays a small monthly fee and can consume all the music they want. Meanwhile little robots keep track of what you’re listening to, what gets played in various channels and compensates the authors respectively.

Dagfinn’s MusicDNA is a company that sort of helps that dream come alive but it’s only technology, the real roadblocks for Peter’s idea are the various players in the music business.

Mark and his MusicGlue has the most pragmatic approach to helping bands and artists make more money, he goes by the slogan (I’m paraphrasing here) “Give your music away for free and sold out shows will follow”. I can totally get behind that view despite not having been to a concert in a long time (that’s parenthood for you…).

1. Make your music available

It’s a no brainer but I’m still amazed at how much of the music is put online not by the bands or their managers but rather by random people uploading it to various services. Putting it up yourselves is the only way to control quality and what happens around the music/video itself – is there a link to bands homepage / iTunes account / other place to pay and download.

2. Make it easy to buy your music

One word – Bandcamp. I’m just a single data point but all my most recent music purchased have been made on Bandcamp. People don’t give a shit about geographic licensing – they want the music now. If you don’t make it easily available then there are other ways of getting your music, The Pirate Bay being the elephant in the room.

3. Use a platform where you get most of the money

Bandcamp. Self hosting and charging via PayPal. Bandcamp charges artist 15% of music sold which is about 100% better deal than going through a label or one of the popular streaming services (Spotify, Rdio, I’m looking at you). Self hosting + PayPal will eat up only around 5% of what you charge. Try “pay what you want”…

Read this for inspiration: Louis C.K. Video Inspires New Business Model For Comedians

4. Connect directly with your fans

I should really just write “Amanda Palmer” in this paragraph. I’ll do a bit more.

This isn’t a magic bullet but these are simple steps to make things better for the band and the fan. Cut out the middle men, make the fan happy.

Timely news: Brit musos now trouser more crumpled fivers from online music than radio

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It covers pretty much everything a young entrepreneur will need for the journey:

• Sources of startup help
• Grants and awards to fund product development
• Crowdfunding platforms
• Accelerators
• Business angels
• Early stage VCs and super angels
• Specialist funds

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He’s main thesis is that most stuff startups learn about web analytics is meant for the phase when you have a solid product/market fit and it’s about efficiencies and scale. The truth is that most startups operate in the discovery and validation phase where completely different numbers and methods are relevant.

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Prices go up for MWC

Hotel’s are 3x as expensive during the conference week. EasyJet bumps up their prices 2-3 times (if note more), likely the same with other airlines. The conference ticket itself is €690!

I was super late for planning my trip so had to work around those criminal numbers.

There are always plenty of competitions happening before the event that give out free tickets. Participate. Find the companies who have a booth – they get a pack of tickets for free so work your connections (thank you, Open Signal!).

Flying in a day earlier saved me megabucks on EasyJet. Enough to pay for a night and food, see a little bit of the city and get some work done as well.

Airbnb is your friend when it comes to sleeping (or try Startupstay). I found a superbly located room for $47/night which was 4x cheaper than an OK hotel next door.

Look outside MWC

For early stage products and starups MWC might not be the right event but they should still go to Barcelona during MWC. There are so many events happening outside, on the fringes of MWC – pitching contests, talks, networking parties – that you can get away with paying nothing (free beer included).

Borrowing advice from Danielle Morrill’s excellent “How to Hustle SXSW for Fun & Profit“:

Prepping your calendar – Don’t fucking do it. /…/ Instead, put EVERYTHING on your calendar so you know what ALL your options are, RSVP for EVERYTHING /…/ If there is something you absolutely have to be at, like an event your company is hosting/sponsoring then make it a different color.

Heroes of the Mobile Fringe was great at feeding me events outside MWC. Mobile Premier Awards was great for getting access to founders of up and coming mobile apps/startups.

I only spent one day at the conference, focused on one hall (app development) and picked rest of the events from those happening outside.

Practicalities

Transport in town – Barcelona’s public transport is excellent, metro is fast and cheap (€2 per ride). Getting a taxi to/from MWC isn’t super expensive but jams are boring, take the train/metro instead.

Wifi – don’t rely on it. If you plan on pitching with live demo (either on stage or just to people you meet), then make sure you have solid 3G.

Roaming fees – they are a killer. Get a local SIM or be prepared to pay up. Find an app that does offline maps (like Barcelona MWC Offline Maps for Android). Looks like Fogg might the savior next year in this.

Battery life – if you’re relying heavily on mobile demos and use it for email/maps/Twitter then get a mobile charging solution. In my experience you can leave your laptop to your hotel, no point weighing you down.

Show, don’t tell – I made the mistake of not having a few screenshots of how Ansr.io powered mobile surveys can be distributed in the beginning. Next year I’ll have them set up in a tablet when hitting WMC stands.

Iterate your pitch – I very quickly figured out that “Surveymonkey for mobile” was the one for us. Boring but it works.

Business cards – Bring more than you think you’ll need. Note to self: remove QR code from card, add company tagline instead. A pen to scribble notes on business cards is a good idea.

Don’t forget to enjoy the tapas, Barcelona is a beautiful city.

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Mobile ad world today is very similar to those sad times 10+ years ago. Exhibit A (as seen on iPhone 4S):

I’m normally banner blind but as a former Skype employee this one caught my attention.

You can just make out that it’s Skype, webcam and (probably) shopping. Fuzzy as belly button fluff with no less than 5 competing visual elements – the webcam, discount button, the main headline, Skype logo and green call to action button.

As a friend and mobile/web developer friend Margus put it: “2x upscaling never works”.

The banner links through to Skype’s holiday gift guide – yes, a full-blown web page, no mobile optimized version for you, ma’am. I wasn’t feeling masochistic enough to try the shopping experience but wouldn’t expect a mobile-friendly experience.

All this reminds me of those annoying banner ads back in 2000 that promised something good and then linked to the site homepage that had no mention of said promotion. Or maybe you got to a proper landing page but it was impossible to purchase whatever was being advertised.

I bet the conversion from ad viewer to someone who taps on the banner to someone who takes desired action is equally bad or even worse on a mobile device.

How to make it better?

Get the basics right and you’re much closer to seeing some return of investment on your ad dollars.

• Creative and design – you have very little real estate, distill the message and visuals down to the minimum. Learn from Apple – simplicity and clarity wins.
• Design and serve – don’t serve default resolution image to retina devices. It’ll look ugly as above and you’ll see lower click throughs and waste money. If the ad network you’re using doesn’t support serving different ads based on user device then don’t use them. Alternatively don’t use them for retina device visitors.
• Device specific experience – don’t send mobile visitors to your main website. Smartphones are capable enough in displaying your site but this does not mean that it’s good enough. Build a simple mobile-friendly page and tailor the shopping experience well. It’s an investment in the beginning but if you don’t do this then you’re just wasting money on ad dollars.

Not exactly rocket science. All the more puzzling that big companies like Skype still get it wrong. The smart guys are ignoring the banner ads anyway and are building creative, engaging content-based marketing campaigns.

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Reading Paul Kortman’s The problem with a Lean Startup: the Minimum Viable Product made me realized that Ansr.io is similarly guilty of pushing its early customers off the cliff (figuratively speaking).

The basics of the lean startup philosophy are to get user feedback, do user testing, and discover if people are willing to use (and pay for) the product you are creating both before and throughout the creation process.

Paul has used minimum viable product (or MVP) methodology when building ThingShare and doesn’t feel good about it. According to lean startup school of thought you try to avoid building features and functionality before there’s an established need for it by the customers. The results is a user experience where the features are not there yet.

So our earliest adopters, the people who trusted us, we pushed off a cliff in the name of Lean Startup. What am I supposed to tell them… “Sorry it was an MVP?”

At Ansr.io we have not been that rigorous with minimum viable product approach for mainly one big reason. We had a mobile survey product already built before we launched Ansr.io. It was gradually built over 2 years as an in-house tool for On Device Research to do mobile market research for corporate customers.

Our challenge was to break the software apart, simplify and streamline the user experience, hide a lot of power user features, to be easy enough to use for customers who want to create simple mobile-proof surveys.

In the spirit of “release early, release often” we’ve taken our fair share of shortcuts which can be confusing or annoying to the prospective and existing customers.

Fake it till you make it – 3rd party integrations

That Mailchimp and Salesforce integration we tout on our homepage? Nope, it doesn’t exist yet. It was put there as a test to see if we start getting “Hi, I want to do this Salesforce integration you promise, how does it work?” as a signal that it’s important.

In hindsight it should have probably been a different test with page of various 3rd party connections and better measurable way (people clicking on “tell me more about connecting with service X”). In its current form it’s been a failed experiment.

For the record, we’re working on minimum viable API but for the first integration taking a white glove approach – no development before we’ve taken a handful of customers through the various steps manually to learn about customer wants and needs, friction points etc. Only after this is done will we (and our partner) go ahead with actual development.

No, you can’t pay us (easily)

Ansr.io is largely a free service and even for the stuff that we charge (sending surveys out via SMS or to our panel of respondents if you want to do more traditional market research) there’s no obvious easy way to pay for.

Instead of spending X amount of days on building good enough payment flow we’ve focused on the core experience (creating and spreading surveys) and taken care of payments manually. Leaving it to the customer to figure out that they need to get in touch to up the credit on their account is not ideal but seemed like the right trade off at this stage (roughly 1,5 month after Ansr.io launch).

Related articles:

User Experience is Not a Feature
7 reasons mobile surveys beat their web-based brothers
Turning fire hose into bags (and improving them with surveys)

Photo: Photochiel

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The content you create has to be the best in the industry. If it isn’t you won’t win the attention of your prospects. – Mike Volpe, Hubspot

Inbound Marketing UK 2012 certainly had its highlights (more on that later) but also stuff that should change or improve to become the best in the industry.

• Energy – 4 main speakers had it, rest of the event lacked it. And I thoughts my fellow Estonians were reserved.
• Breakout sessions – maybe it was my bad luck but these were let down. No fresh insight, not cutting edge examples, test results, tools. Could be that the people and channels I follow give me the freshest on a daily basis anyway. For me #imuk12 could have been better without the breakout sessions.
• Panel – I’m no fan of panels, they’re too polite, too soft, not hard hitting enough. There’s seldom debate and while the panel this time was above the average it didn’t hold my attention. Someone should do tweet velocity and sentiment analysis vs presentation…
• No QA session with couple of the earlier speakers.
• Understandable that Hubspot was a sponsor so plenty of mentioning of them but it sounded like there’s 0 competing software out there…

The highlights for me were definitely the main four speakers so nicely pimped on #imuk12 website. They inspired, gave some good tips, Frank Belzer in particular forced to look at inbound marketing from totally different (sales) perspective.

Too bad Alex Balfoul, the Head of New Media of London 2012 Olympic Games had so little time, it’s quite amazing what they achieved with such a little team. The whole scale of the Olympic Games is mind boggling. Sadly – no QA session.

I have a bunch of notes and ideas jotted down, will sort through them and do a separate post a bit later.

Will I be going again next year? Probably not if it keeps the current format. I’ll miss couple of world class speakers, sure. All the up to date stuff is available from various great channels online, for example follow @Hubspot if you can keep up with their tweet-an-hour velocity of pumping out great content.

Oh, and of course the organizers should have used Ansr.io to create a mobile-friendly exit survey, push it to conference participants 5 minutes before closing to get fresh feedback and raw emotion by the time people were done with their commute home :)

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Gaz-14, also known as Chaika (or seagull in Russian), was a car built for the higher echelons of the politbureau of the USSR. In Estonia it was a rare sight, I might have seen it once or twice during some parade. But all the kids knew – Chaika stood for something special, it meant old-ish important men in dark suits, military parades, power (however we understood it back then).

The Gaz-14 wristwatch rather nicely reflects those sentiments in its classic design and sharp black’n’red packaging. I might not be keen on the design of other Vostok Europe watches but the simple lines, stainless steel case and black face talk to me. If you want to go even simpler then pick the version without the chronograph as it does make for a somewhat busy design.

The chronograph has a nice little feature which is simply fun to watch – the sub-dial at 6 o’clock, which normally tracks seconds, jumps to action going back and forth denoting 1/20th second when stopped. And the large second hand does a nice little sweep around the dial when timer is reset. It’s a pretty good party trick as far as sub-200 Euro watches go.

Gaz-14 Limousine in bullet points

• Solid stainless steel round case, 42 mm.
• Japanese Miyota OS22 movement
• 5 ATM water resistance
• Tachymeter
• 1/20 sec chronograph with retrograde demo, timing up to 59 min 59 sec
• Genuine leather strap

The strap is my only niggle with the watch – it suits the watch well, matching the somewhat formal look of it nicely, but for my admittedly narrow wrists even the tightest fit was too loose. Annoying when cycling as the crown (or the buttons) start to hurt.

If you were to forget the name of the watch you were wearing then simply turn it over, the screw on back plate has a modified car company GAZ logo and the serial number of your watch (3000 will be made altogether).

Vostok Europe is not the Vostok my father knew

Vostok Europe is a rather curious watch company – while the brand Vostok is Russian, VE is actually a Lithuanian company, building watches in Vilnius since 2004. Not the first city that pops to mind when talking about wristwatches. From what I can tell they don’t use Russian movements in their watches any longer and most of the marketing I found on their Facebook page targets younger, more active audience.

How much and where?

The price listed on VE website is 194 € but if you’re in the US then it’s probably easier to get one from Amazon for $242.50. The UK Amazon doesn’t carry the one with the black dial but has some other versions available.

Should you get it? If you like the design, want a smart dress watch that works in casual settings too then yes. The quality of this watch is top notch for the price.

If you want a watch with real Russian history, the movement and all then keep searching but be prepared for a barrage of some seriously tacky design. I’m the keeper of a real Vostok from my father till my son is old enough to appreciate watches. I also own an old Russian Pobeda watch I inherited from my grandfather.

* Full disclosure: Vostok Europe sent me this watch free of charge to keep in return of this review. As always I write about products as I see and experience them, flaws and all.

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Massive Cloudbreak from the Volcom Fiji Pro 2012. Tune is Mr. Little Jeans – The Suburbs (Arcade Fire Cover)

They say never say never but I’m pretty sure this time :)

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Founder Stephen Wolfram posted a longer piece on insight that can be gained from the report. He also shares how to set it up (tip: go to WolframAlpha and type in “facebook report”).

Here’s how the ultimate ego-analysis looks like. The networks view was the most interesting part, clear clusters of friends emerge with lots of overlap in some, of course. Made me realize that I’ve added only very few non-Skype London/UK based friends to Facebook, looks like these interactions are happening mainly on Twitter.

Names have been blurred out to protect the guilty.

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Where to start… Thing is – we’ve been living in London for 8 months now but never somehow got out of the city. So when a long weekend (bank holiday aka extra free day) popped up I rented a car on a whim, booked a hotel at the last minute in Bournemouth, and looked forward to showing Kadri the countryside.

Queuing – it’s a national hobby here

We ended up having to wait in line pretty much everywhere – traffic, Peppa Pig World amusement park (in the end got 3 rides in 2.5 hours at the cost of £48 per two adults), cafe at the amusement park traffic, parking, traffic, traffic. Did I mention traffic?

The aforementioned amusement park itself is fantastic with tons of rides for smaller kids, characters from the cartoon walking around, hugging kids etc but it was pretty much ruined by the sheer volume of people. Kids get tired and frustrated by having to queue for 30+ minutes per ride.

Sadly we didn’t get to queue at the Oceanarium in Bournemouth, we accidentally arrived as the first quests in the morning.

Next time – it’ll be different

Here’s what we learned (mind you, this applies to couples with toddlers):

• Avoid travel on national holidays
• No car travel to popular destinations
• Take a train, a bus, rent locally or better yet – take local transport, hire bikes, walk
• Don’t over plan – our 1.5 year old Otto would have been just as happy destroying sandcastles the whole time. This will probably change as he gets older.
• Plan ahead – our last minute car rental and hotel booking meant we didn’t get exactly a good deal on the price. And on hotel in general.

We’re still figuring out how to combine seemingly clashing requirements of “travel off season” (fewer other tourists) and “travel in the summer” (warm).

New Forest – recommended

Back in 1079 William The Conquerer named a piece of land “new hunting forest” and ever since then The New Forest has stayed a pretty special place. Now a national park it sports thousands of free roaming horses, ponies, donkeys, cows, lovely sea side towns, plenty walking and cycling routes. We only got to see glimpses of it but it’s definitely worth going. Just go off-season.

Waze for car navigation is excellent

One aspect of the travel I’m extremely satisfied with. Instead of spending extra £15 on renting a GPS for the car I bought a cheap iPhone car charger and downloaded the free Waze navigation app.

It had all the maps I needed + because it’s social it has rather good traffic data which helps Waze to constantly calculate the best route. Social here means a few things – first of all, as you drive around you pass your speed back to Waze so it learns how good the traffic is.

It’s also possible to manually add traffic data – jams, accidents, police, other events. These get shared as well.

Did I mention it’s free? Works on iPhone and Android.

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I cheated and brought mine down from 80% to 12%. Here’s how:

My website bounce average has been 80% for quite some time now. Maybe that’s good enough for a blog-like site like this as a big portion of the traffic comes from Google and visitors either get an answer to whatever they were looking for or don’t (and go back to Google to look at alternatives).

Looking at the segment of visitors who do 1+ pageviews then the situation is quite good – average pageviews per visit is 3.7 (up from average 1.5) and time on site to 4:27 (up from 00:51 seconds).

Finding my site’s true bounce rate

Inspired by Gael Breton’s Google Analytics: A Few Cool Tips On Advanced Segments I tweaked the tracking code on my site with the following (full code example in the original post):

setTimeout('_gaq.push([\'_trackEvent\', \'NoBounce\', \'Over 5 seconds\'])',5000);

It tells Google Analytics that anyone who spends over 5 seconds on the page, even if they only look at one page and then leave, is not a real bounce. 5 seconds is long enough to read the headline, scan the top of the page and make a leave/stay decision.

The result? My site bounce rate plummeted from 80% to 12%.

Maybe 5 seconds is too short (I’m going to test with 10 or 15) but other than getting the timing right I can’t think of a downside to finding out the true bounce rate.

Combining this with other engagement metrics in Audience > Behavior menu in Google Analytics gives you a more accurate picture of how well your site is performing.

KissMetrics has a good post Bounce Rate Demystified making some good recommendations how to bring the % of one-page visits down and Brian Clifton’s Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics is one of the freshest books on getting the most out of Google Analytics. Justin Cutroni’s “Rethinking Blog Metrics” is another interesting read, I’ll probably end up testing ideas from there as well.

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GoSquared is another fun team of youngsters experienced entrepreneurs (they’re 21 or something but have been running their company for 6 years…) that I help with some ideas. Of course I had to test drive their product (you can get a preview watching the live demo).

Why real-time web analytics?

The traditional approach to web stats has been looking at the data after the fact. You check what happened yesterday, during the past week, a month. What was popular, where did the traffic come from, which pages converted visitors into sign ups etc.

Tools like GoSquared (and its many competitors) show what’s happening on your website right now. How many people are visiting which pages, how did they come to you, are they staying around or leaving in 5 seconds.

Use cases for real-time

• Campaign tracking – how is your paid search, email newsletter, affiliate deals etc driving traffic.
• On-site promotions – are you driving traffic from your front page to sub-sections?
• News sites can track story popularity, pushing more popular stories to higher spots for maximum exposure
• Launching new section or feature on your site – does it get usage?
• Which social media channels are driving traffic to you?

There are alternative ways to track all these things but they’re spread over different tools – a real-time stats dashboard pulls it all together for at-a-glance overview.

Fun to watch but so what?

The most common critique against real-time web analytics is that it’s fun to watch for half an hour but that’s it, most of the time it doesn’t lead you to any actions based on the data that you see.

Perhaps my biggest critique (or maybe it’s a feature request) of GoSquared is that I wished it provided goal/conversion tracking to help me understand which visitors are the high quality ones, which channels should I pay more attention to etc.

That would make it possible to very quickly react to spikes in traffic and optimizing conversion on poor pages, taking advantage of the few hours your site is features on HackerNews or StumbleUpon, for example.

However, looking at the data rolling in with open eyes and mind will lead to immediate ideas for improvement. For example, I noticed in the “Trends” tab that Google searches for “quadrato tissot” wrist watch were driving disproportionate amount of traffic to my site.

Looking deeper into this I discovered that I turned up #4 on Google image search for this (would be nice if GoSquared tells me more about which type of search/country origin is behind the traffic). I went back to my post about the watch and added a little content + a link to Amazon (who knows, someone might end up buying it, it’s a lovely watch).

I’m noticing other tiny trends that I can take advantage of even though this is a personal blog with no real measurable goal other than acting as a soap box for yours truly.

Their demo sucks

When guys at GoSquare launched the cool London 2012 Olympic games infographic then they also made dashboard with the real-time data for that page public. Nice move. But…!

The notifications are not set so it’s a “dead panel”. Twitter search is iffy, the term “gosquared” gets way more traffic on Twitter than it currently displays. And the biggest problem of all – the demo hides half the product – there’s a whole other tab with trends (screenshot below) that gives so much more information.

James, get your act together! (Knowing the speed the team is capable of I’m sure things will improve quickly.)

What’s your real-time web data need and what tool(s) do you use?

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Pro HDR

HDR, or high dynamic range, basically means that your camera takes several shots, exposing for different areas of the pic (dark and light) and then blends the images together to get a more evenly lit result. You get details in the shadow areas and details in the light areas. Observe.

Crouch End on a sunny evening. Normal iPhone camera app.

Same picture but with Pro HDR, default settings.

This is my most used photo app and probably the best £2 I’ve ever spent on photography. It gives my photos more details, more punch. The downside is that it’s a slow process of taking a photo, as the app needs to analyze the scene and then takes 2 shots, blends them together. Roughly 10 seconds to take the picture and then another 5-10 before you’re ready to take the next shot. This also means that it’s not suitable for moving objects and you need some steady hands.

Used creatively (or by accident) the double exposure can give pretty interesting results. Here’s an example where I accidentally changed the framing between shots.

Yes, iPhone has its own HDR option but in my experience it doesn’t provide very good results. Prove me wrong.

Pro HDR is available for iPhone and Android.

Snapseed

Powerful enough photo editing tool with a very intuitive user interface. I’ve been using it on my iPhone but it’s also available for iPad, Mac and Windows. If the iPhone version is anything to go by then the desktop Snapseed is way better than iPhoto (Mac) or Picasa (which admittedly is free).

It gives you all the normal exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation tools, spot editing, sharpening, straightening, cropping, and bunch of different filters if you want to go crazy.

My go to app when I want more control and edit a photo before posting it to Instagram (which happens to 90% of the photos I take) or emailing them.

Diptic

I admit, I only use this app because I’m addicted to Instagram. What it does is photo collage which is a sneaky way of posting three pictures of my son as one. I might think that there can never be too many pictures of Otto, my followers might disagree…

Choose the collage setup, choose the pictures and that’s it. There are some simple controls over brightness, contrast and saturation + you can tinker with the style of the frame.

Phonto

Some people are quite clever adding some text to their photos (I’m not one of them) and Phonto is a good tool for that. Decent control over font, font size, positioning. On few occasions the fine tuning of text position was a bit challenging because of the small screen of iPhone and touch interface.

Text added in Phonto, then cropped, tilt-shifted and saturation/contrast corrected with Snapseed

TinyPlanets

One of those fun apps that get old very quickly and the results are almost always a surprise. As the name says it creates tiny planets out of your pics by twisting the original pictures into circular ones. Hard to explain but easy to figure out after couple of tries which photos make for good tiny planets and which ones don’t.

Any good ones I’m missing?

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