October 2006 Archives
Over at the tranquil candlelit gardens of memory-of.com, hides the most remarkable bargain I've ever come across on the Internet:
"A one-time sponsorship fee of just $94.95/£52.75 will ensure that the memorial website will remain online forever"
Forever ? Wow. That certainly kicks the average archival service into touch. I wonder what the claims procedure will be when grandad's page goes belly up in 27,000 years' time ? I wonder how they're going to deal with solar extinction ? These people really must have the art of advance planning well and truly sorted.
Yet another one...
What the hell is an "organizational leader" ? Leaders who organise ? Why do they need to collaborate ? Hm, yes, just hold on Mr Blair, Mr Bush, we've got a wonderful new social manipulation tool for you. Direct from the blogosphere. Lets you collaborate to organize all those troublesome rebels.
And which detergent manufacturer inspired the logo ? Organizational Leaders on Spin Cycle 11.
Nice to see that my trashing of "Mobile Web 2.0" is not living in a vacuum...
"By contrast, and at such events you can spot the losers because of the vast gap between their rhetoric and their achievements, was Ajit Jaokar. Like someone frantically banging a shoe against a gerkin in the hope of making a goulash, Ajit is determined to bring the utopian nonsense of Web 2.0 to mobile phones. He runs a Mobile Web 2.0 blog - and he's written a book about it all, he reminded us. ("Bang, bang! Shoe – make stew!")"
-- Andrew "loose canon" Orlowski writing in The Register. Cruel, unfair, but unfortunately absolutely spot on.
Through Technorati, I discovered that a few people had read and commented about my recent post on MindManager and Novamind, in various places. It also led me to the blog run by Ari Oskarsson in Norway, who is a MindManager fan.
Well, so was I, but finally I decided to go for Novamind. It does get easier to use after you read the manual, and although it is a bit rough around the edges, and sometimes irritatingly inconsistent, it does get pretty smooth after a bit of practice. It has a lot of features, probably far too many to be optimally intuitive, but they can in general always be ignored. So far I could not honest place the “unique Branch Proposal System” under any category other than “gimmick”, but whatever.
After a bit of fiddling, it is possible to configure so that it looks more or less like MindManager for Mac, and it is under one third of the price of MindManager (well under one third).
I’m using it now almost constantly to keep track of a concept which is expanding at an alarming rate, and I fully recommend it.
I've been playing around with Mind Mapping software for some time now, especially with MindJet MindManager on Windows. However, that software was provided for me by a previous employer, and now I if I want to continue with this I need to buy my own solution. There seem to be quite a lot of options on the market, even for the Mac, which is unusual. And now that MindJet 6 has been released for OS X, choice gets even more complex.
There is no doubt that MindJet is expensive. Very expensive, in fact, as many reviews have pointed out. There is also a highly regarded alternative, Novamind, which is cheaper, has many more features, and has won awards. And there is the venerable Inspiration, although that is a little different, more diagramming than mind mapping. But MindManager for Mac really has a certain style and flair which makes it tempting to ignore the huge price tag.
Mind Manager 6 (here actually the free viewer, as my trial has expired)
At one point I decided to buy it...but then I actually found that this is extremely difficult. I am living in Switzerland, in the Italian speaking region. Mindjet's online store forces me to use the German website, and will not allow me to buy anything other than the frigging German version. I don't want the German version! I'm sick of umlauts! An email to customer service was not a lot of use - rather than try to help me give them money, I was fobbed off to an obscure Mac vendor in Oberschwarzwaldenzeeuntofikonberg, or wherever. They didn't even mention than I could buy the English boxed version from Valcenter, who at least I know and trust. But anyway, I don't want a box. I want a license. So very expensive, difficult to buy, unhelpful customer service...and yet. But anyway, I decided to be sensible for once, and investigate Novamind.
The trouble with most mind mapping applications is that they are clock-stoppingly, terrifyingly ugly. Lurid interfaces, dreadful clipart, total creativity killers. Inspiration, or Concept Draw, are top contenders for the so-ugly-even-their-mothers-hate-it award. Novamind is not exactly beautiful, but it isn't as bad as some. Their icon is really nice! But one thing Novamind is not, to be in any case, is intuitive. It is really, really opaque. Right-clicking brings up bizarre pop-out icon trays (can't think of anything else to call them) which appear to want me to set options. I just want to add a branch, but I can't figure out how. Dragging branches around is another that just doesn't seem to work consistently, even after reading the instructions. Finally I had to resort to the outline view, but by that point I'd forgotten what I wanted to do.
Novamind and its strange pop-outs
So Novamind, to me so far just kills off the flow of ideas, which is the last thing you want. Nevertheless, it has some great features. The screenwriter output is really good for creating scenarios as design inputs. And it is well under half the price of Mind Manager. But Mind Manager is intuitive, gorgeous, inspiring and stylish. But to be honest, the feature comparision with the Windows version is pretty unimpressive, even if I wouldn't want most of it. Export to Visio ? Yuck.
So I don't know what to do yet. I guess I'll try a few Novamind tutorials and see if it all clicks, but my feeling is if you have to read the manual to use this type of product, then it isn't working properly.
Of course, if I was famous, I'd get a free copy of Mind Manager. But I'm not. A weird thing about Mind Manager is that it was recently reviewed my MacWorld (USA), who gave it a very high score - which MindJet marketing are all over. It was also reviewed at the same time by MacWorld UK, who usually carry pretty much the same reviews - and they absolutely buried it. Unfortunately their reviews are not freely accessible on the web, but the general gist was "pretty but hopeless overpriced, under-featured and buggy". Seemed a touch unfair to me.
The blurb on Amazon tells us that "Mobile Strategies explains the different business models and strategies available for businesses looking to enter the mobile sector". Well, in this case, the book does exactly what the blurb says. Tom Weiss manages to pack an extremely complete overview of the mobile communications world into well under 200 pages. He does this with considerable style and a strong sense of narrative, whih makes "Mobile Strategies" not only worth reading, but actually pleasant to read. Obviously, he does not go into any great depth, but in terms of breadth there isn't much left out. Any book that manages to span a range like semaphore to up-to-the-minute Mobile TV in so few pages, and still remain substantial, is a rarity in the tech publishing world.
It is ironic that this book is published by the same company as "Mobile Web 2.0", which only just escapes being utterly hopeless. Tom Weiss clearly cares about style, presentation, typography and general writing and editing skills, and understands why they are important. He also obviously has a deep understanding of his chosen topic. It is a pity the authors of Mobile Web 2.0 did not pick up a few tips on both aspects before publishing their book.
For anybody getting into the mobile sector, or for anybody inside it in need of a breath of fresh air and a 30,000 feet view, "Mobile Strategies" is highly recommended.
We now officially exist - our provisional, Beta (but of course) web site has gone live. Depending on DNS propagation, it can be found now at either www.imaginventure.net or www.imaginventure.com.
There are approximately one million social, sharing, community Web 2.0 applications currently in Beta, and they're breeding (almost literally, as mashups :-) ). At lot of them, if not most, seem to stretch credibility to breaking point (for example, a community site for lonely bloggers ? Haven't we already got MySpace ?). But one which seems to offer some entertainment value, and is easy to set up, and combines various things in an intelligent way, is Plazes.
Unfortunately, although Plazes has over 4000 locations registered in Switzerland, they are mostly located in the north, and it does not seem to have grabbed much attention in my neighbourhood yet. And even when it has, the political geography seems a little off...
... and this idea of needing an application to track where your friends are seems a little dysfunctional, in a tech geek sort of way - but the extension to mobile does seem possibly interesting, especially for mundane things like finding gas stations or restaurants.
As for the business model... AdSense, I suppose. Good luck with that.
I've just finished reading "Mobile Web 2.0" by Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish, published by Futuretext. The authors have a wealth of experience of the mobile telecommunications field between them, quite enough to know what a nightmare it is for application developers to engage with mobile operators. In a nutshell, the message from this book is to bypass the walled gardens and the endless hurdles put up by the telcos, and go direct to the customer using the web. So far so good. Obviously, there are certain limitations associated with the mobile web, in particular the fact that practically nobody in the real world uses it. Partly this is because of usability issues, both in devices and in delivery, partly because of cost, but I suspect largely due to the lack of any compelling reason. Well, perhaps we can at least do something about the last part, and the authors do, to some extent, point the way.
However, although the authors may be industry experts, I'm afraid their writing and editing skills are seriously substandard. This book puts me in mind of the "I'm going to read your my Powerpoint bullet list slides" experience. It is disjointed, repetitive, hopelessly formatted (really, it is straight out of Microsoft Word, and incompetent MS Word at that). It isn't just the mechanics of writing which are at fault. Often they start to present an argument, and just. Er, stop. The frequency of either "so what ?" or "pardon me ?" moments increases as the book goes on. The endless clumsy incremental summaries are also pointless filler. It isn't so much that they don't what they're talking about - I wouldn't want to imply that - but one does wonder if they ever reviewed any part of this serial braindump. I'm not expecting Shakespeare, but even technical writing needs to come up to a certain standard of literacy and layout. Especially when it is being sold.
There are other issues that annoy me: there is a strong underlying theme of playing to the "Web 2.0" gallery: these guys so much want to be the Tim O'Reilly of Mobile Web 2.0. Fine, but cut this out and the book would be far more readable and considerably shorter. Another thing is on consumer created content (same point really)... I'm sorry, but no way does Joe Bloggs in Seat 54, Row 91, Stand A, filming a World Cup game with his SonyEricsson V800 compete with a professional cameraman on the touchline. Get real guys - do you seriously think FIFA was worried about this stuff ? Never mind "spot the ball" - you'd be lucky to spot the pitch! Even if we accept the ridiculous statement that mobile phone video is up to "DVD quality" (actually a meaningless statement, but never mind), and even if we rule out the difference between a camera phone lens and a broadcast quality zoom, the skill of the operator plays an extremely significant part. I know you want to be quoted and loved by the Blogosphere, but come on....get real.
The emphasis on mobile TV seems way off-topic. DVB-H, DMB etc are broadcast technologies on a totally separate layer. It has nothing much to do with mobile communication, it simply co-exists. If we define "web" as a collaborative medium enabled largely by TCP/IP, then DVB-H doesn't come into it.
As a free download, or a collection of blog postings, "Mobile Web 2.0" would be worth a read. But at £20 from Amazon, sorry, it isn't worth it.
Well, I can now announce to the world (or at least the 3 people who read this stuff) what my new job is. Since Monday I am the "Concept Development Manager" at Imaginventure, in Lugano, Switzerland. And I'm busy.
Imaginventure is "an integrated full-service business integrator". We select and transform ideas for online services into successful businesses. Unlike other companies working in this area, Y Combinator for example, we build up concepts internally, rather than provide seed funding for new startups. However, we have other mechanisms for partnering to bring new ideas in house.
The area we are working in is, loosely, consumer mobile web, and we are particularly interested in areas such as community-enhanced gaming and location based services. I would certainly be interested to hear from people involved in building business in these areas. I can be contacted at work at dmantripp AT imaginventure DOT com.
