Category: Thoughts
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Jobs to be done analysis: taking a tour
In the post City touring for those who don’t use tour guides I alluded to the concept that people hire a guide for a walking tour for reasons other than just learning about a particular place. That sounds entirely counterintuitive. How else could there be any reason to hire a tour guide other than to learn […]
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City touring for those who don’t use tour guides
The ability of Google’s Field Trip app to let a person know what’s around them as they walk through a city has been a long desired feature for travel apps. Not everyone wants to employ a tour guide. But this type of ambient local discovery app is not going to present a major disruption to the […]
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“Software development: the middle class job of the next generation”
I’ve never been entirely comfortable self identifying myself as a software developer. My degrees are in English and Library & Information Science. But I make a good living developing software. It’s rewarding, not just financially, but creatively as well. Indeed, it’s the creativity that keeps me developing with software. There are various degrees of software […]
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“leisure travelers don’t scale”
The quote “leisure travelers don’t scale” is from an interview with Rafat Ali (founder of paidcontent) at the Next Big Thing. (At the 6:35 mark in the video if you want to skip over him talking about his new venture Skift, though if you’re interested in the travel industry then you should become familiar with Skift.) […]
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Field Trip app hints at Google’s future
Aimed at travelers & locals curious to learn more about their city, Google’s Field Trip app (Android only for now) serves up content based on your specific location within that city. The app launches today in six cities. The app, oddly for a Google product, presents a very nice visual design. There’s even a sleek made-for-tv […]
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Where are the Apps for the Armchair Traveler?
Mobile developers & entrepreneurs occasionally forget that smartphones and tablets are often used in the home. The iPad makes an excellent lean-back device. We mostly recognize that tablets excel as devices for reading, watching, shopping, & other “passive” activities. Obviously I’m leaving out a wide range of tablet uses but for the sake of this […]
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Focus on the vertical niche
Imagine you’re interested in selling a set of how-to guides as e-books on a particular topic. A few years back you could throw up a Web site & find an audience after an intensive amount of SEO. That might also have involved blogging on your topic. Now it’s a lot tougher to find that audience […]
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Something’s cooking in Cupertino
Apple observer John Gruber points out that trusted sources are not always accurate…at least, the trust sources of others….but Gruber does state: “Something big is going on with Apple TV in Cupertino, but it’s still being cooked.” Meanwhile, Apple’s AirPlay technology offers ways to present apps on iOS touch devices while utilizing a TV display […]
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The Applification of TV
Midway through episode 41 (around the 31 minute mark) of The Critical Path Horace Dediu talks about on the future of TV & apps. In those 8 minutes he forecasts a platform that will be as popular as smartphones and tablets. The first part is about the value proposition of a disruptive entrant in television […]
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Growing old with the Net. Energized once more by apps
For the last twenty years apps have determined my world. Early 1993: sitting in front of a Sun workstation I read an intriguing e-mail announcement from an Illinois college student describing a GUI application for X Windows/Unix that combined Internet protocols (telnet, FTP) with the hypertext of the new World-Wide-Web system. I grabbed the code, […]