Wow, Comcast buys Plaxo

Just recieved and email from Plaxo. Apparently they've been acquired by Comcast. Check out the press release here.

Before Business Requirments you need a Vision statement

This past week I sat down with a co-worker who took over an hour to describe a feature of an application we are building. After the download I was really impressed, this feature was the "killer app" and a high priority item in a product we were building. But I realized something was missing. We needed a way to distill his 40+ page document (filled with loose business requirements and wish list items) and his required 1 hour explanation to something more easily digested. What was missing was the Vision! I've talked about this process in the past and used the term "Definition statement". I was first turned onto this approach at Apple Tech Talk conference that discussed building applications for the iPhone.

The process was at times frustrating but it really forces you to step back and think about what you want to build, which features are important and where you need to make compromises. Our end game was to develop a one page definition or elevator speech that described our feature to the project team. The vision would guide development of this feature and serve as a mission statement or something to hold ourselves accountable to. Interestingly I just finished reading a blog around user experience, which referenced this approach was employed by the team developing Google Calendar (see screenshot above). Creating a Vision statement can be painful, but overall it is a really rewarding process that helps to get everyone on the same page.

BrightKite: New location based Social Networking site

This morning I was checking my iGoogle and came across the following blog post that reviews a new social networking application called BrightKite. What separates Brightkite from many other social networking apps is that every activity and or event is based around your location which is really cool idea. After watching a video review it also seems to integrate with Google Maps so events and activities are visually plotted out using Google’s Maps API. Sites with this kind of intelligence are definitely the future. And fit into the roadmap of what the semantic web is all about; an internet that offers targeted content centered around what the user wants versus the one size fits all mentality. I've signed up to try the app and look forward to sharing some insights.

The mobile web.... slow adoption

This week I finally entered the Smartphone world with a Blackberry curve. It seems everywhere I look these days people are using Smartphone’s. Whether iPhone or Blackberry I notice a large amount of people's heads buried in these devices at meetings, lunch, out to dinner, cafes or even bars. So I was quite amazed to see the slow adoption of the "mobile web" has been in a recent emarketer article on mobile media advertising.

I can attest that despite liking the access to email and calendaring on my Blackberry the web experience, which is a combination of WML and basic HTML for me was fairly disappointing in this day and age. So I am probably another contributor to the statistic of someone who has a smartphone but isn’t embracing the “mobile web” just yet.