3 Lessons Bussinesses can use from Angry Birds
/3 Lessons learned from Angry Birds:
Short and clear Goals
Instant and actionable/measurable feedback
Increasingly Challenging Goals
Read More3 Lessons learned from Angry Birds:
Short and clear Goals
Instant and actionable/measurable feedback
Increasingly Challenging Goals
Read MoreJust read this article on huffington post on how hard spotify is trying to get new customers before the big boys (Apple, Google) enter:
While $400,000 is a significant amount of money to give to a potential competitor, Spotify is going where the eyeballs are, aggressively trying to court as many new users as possible before the already competitive streaming space -- Pandora, iHeartRadio and Last.fm are just a few of the established players -- becomes even more competitive. And that requires exposure, even if that means writing a check to a competitor.
The aggressive move seems inspired by a combination of fear and opportunity. For the moment, Spotify appears in an enviable position to capture a fatter slice of the emerging market for streaming music, but that moment may already be ending as enormous new competitors loom -- not the least Apple and Google.
It made me wonder what else can Spotify do other than spending a lot of money? Any feature they introduce can possibly be copied by the big boys. If it has a patent a work around could be found. The other way to succeed is to use the Network Effect. Spotify already is doing good things on the social front. We have seen how ebay and craigslist are successful because of the Network Effect. By releasing more features that will be advantageous for a user because of his/her network on spotify, spotify can stop users from jumping ship when the big boys come in.
I could think of 3 things that they can do now to gain a Network Effect
For a free user that reward could be some ad-free listening time. For paid customers it could be some credit/discount to their service, or say a free month. Depending on the Karma points level one gets more benefits if they get to higher levels (similar to pyramid marketing) . That could also add a gamification angle and we can compare friends scores (similar to foursquare). It can also do others things such as users can get more karma points the more he or she listens. In a sense spotify has to do price discrimination based on a user's network and create a path dependency so that user's will not switch out easily.
In one line, using the Network Effect to its benefit is the best defense ( in long term) against competition.
After leaving Raritan I've been in the process of retooling. Used Java/Applets, Flash/Flex and now I know I have to move on to html5 and mobile. While reading about all the possible tools/frameworks I have to learn, I came across the below rant on a discussion about this topic on Hacker News. The below comment was very amusing/appropriate and to the point:
I agree, I can't keep up, I just finished learning backbone.js and now I've found out on HN that it's old news, and I should use ember.js, cross that, it has opinions, I should use Meteor, no, AngularJS, no, Tower.js (on node.js), and for html templates I need handlebars, no mustache, wait, DoT.js is better, hang on, why do I need an HTML parser inside the browser? isn't that what the browser for? so no HTML templates? ok, DOM snippets, fine, Web Components you say? W3C are in the game too? you mean write REGULAR JavaScript like the Google guys? yuck, oh, I just should write it with CofeeScript and it will look ok, not Coffee? Coco? LiveScript? DART? GWT? ok, let me just go back to Ruby on Rails, oh it doesn't scale? Grails? Groovy? Roo? too "Springy?" ok, what about node.js? doesn't scale either?? but I can write client side, server side and mongodb side code in the same language? (but does it have to be JavaScript?) ok, what about PHP, you say it's not really thread safe? they lie?? ok, let me go back to server coding, it's still Java right? no? Lisp? oh it's called Clojure? well, it has a Bridge / protocol buffers / thrift implementation so we can be language agnostic, so we can support our Haskell developers. Or just go with Scala/Lift/Play it's the BEST framework (Foresquare use it, so it has to be good). of course we won't do SOAP and will use only JSON RESTful services cause it's only for banks and Walmart, and god forbid to use a SQL database it will never scale I've had it, I'm going to outsource this project... they will probably use a wordpress template and copy paste jQuery to get me the same exact result without the headache and in
halfquarter the price p.s. it would have been a longer rant today, I have lot of new things to add to it, sadly things didn't get any better: Now I'm trying to choose between yeoman and brunch, coffeescript vs livescript vs typescript, LESS vs Sass vs Scss vs stylus, Haml vs Jasmine vs that weird language called HTML, testacular vs mocha, fixtures vs mocks, RequireJS vs CommonJS, with almonds or without, I started using underscore then figured out it's already "old school" and I need to actually use lo-dash. So I think I'm going to take your advice ;).
At Squarespace, I had to write automated tests for a css/js heavy website and that couldn't be done using just Selenium. Once I integrated Sikuli with Selenium, I was able to do get the job done. I had best of both worlds. I hosted a meetup at AOL/Huff Post office in NYC to talk about Sikuli and explain its benefits. The presentation can be found below:
There are 6 reasons to integrate selenium with sikuli. All about that is explained here.
Feedback received from the 40+ folks in the room, before and after the presentation:
This meetup was covered by huffington post here.
Back in 2006, I first came across a tool Selenium IDE that saved me a lot of time to do manual boring stuff. I slowly starting doing stuff that not just saved some time for me but also saved a lot of time for the whole team and improved the time to market for our products. That also great improved our output quality. Below is a brief presentation that shows the path I took. It doesn't get into a lot of technical details but is really a mix of process and tools.