Is human curation the next cool thing?

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Rumors are the Apple is looking to do this for Beats music. I think it would help me find stuff to listen to.

Roku is having some luck with it:

One hint of how that might work is Roku’s Roku Recommends barker channel. Roku’s search engine is well regarded for its ability to search for content across all 2,000-plus apps on the Roku platform. But in mid-December the set-top box maker launched the human-curated Roku Recommends channel to help surface content consumers didn’t know to search for. According to Roku VP of programming Doug Craig, the channel is now among the most popular with Roku users.

This was taken from here :: http://concurrentmedia.com/2015/03/06/supply-side-content-discovery/

It’s cool to have bots and big data but maybe nothing beats human taste?

flockdata

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Met one of the founders this week, Jeremy, for some coffee. Jeremy used to work at AWS Singapore and also did a local startup after that. Then he moved back to the USA to start flockdata with a partner from New Zealand.

http://www.flockdata.com/

There is so much going on in the data world. For guys like me I swear it takes a lot of work just to keep tabs on big data. My world now is keeping tabs on languages, advertising products (customer acquisition and revenue), web tech, mobile tech, streaming tech, analytics and now data. 

There are always lots of ways to skin something – you can roll your own, use the off the shelf stuff from AWS, grab lots of open source stuff or spend lots of cash on commercial products. I guess it all depends on money and time to market.

flcokdata has an interesting model and I plan on checking into it more.

Nice work RedMart

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I took a slight beating by some folks yesterday for this :: http://www.nokpis.com/2015/03/05/whither-redmart/

I don’t think I was doing anything but being honest. I love RedMart. Use it weekly or every other week. It has greatly enhanced my family’s life – we spend less time dealing with gathering items. I just open the app and presto – my wife lets me know they show up a few days later. Awesome sauce.

So when it all fell apart – I wrote about it. I was stunned to get this awesome reply on my blog :: http://www.nokpis.com/2015/03/05/whither-redmart/#comments

My premise was not bashing that things went wrong but they way they handled it.

I also think I discovered that they took care of the site, when things went haywire, but not the app – seems they corrected that. Cool.

So now they have also blasted this out :: http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=1df5711c06916e07a5b8832a9&id=7d6aaf3897&e=cb69f6516a

Congrats to them for being open, honest and clear in their resolve.

RedMart is a part, critical part, of people’s lives in Singapore. Congrats to them for getting to that point so quickly. It is telling that when things went wrong – people were affected. That means the service is a home run.

Hope the regular diaper deliveries resume soon!

Whither RedMart

~ michael_msft ~ 4 Comments

Update: As a fellow startup guy, nowhere near as successful as RedMart, I feel their pain. I am not trying to bash but in my opinion there are zero excuses for poor customer service and lack of communication to loyal customers. That is the stance I won’t back down on.

I opened the app last night – placed my order. My wife added a few items and then went to checkout.

I get a nice error – sorry, system error. Failed to get delivery slot. please try again later.

It’s 2015 folks. Why can’t it schedule me for days down the road so at least my order is complete?

Why didn’t the app tell me before I tried to order that I wouldn’t get a slot so I should wait till later?

Why didn’t it email me after I tried to place an order to let me know what’s going on?

Nope. Nadda. Nothing.

So it was 9pm. I called the help line. No answer. Called a few times. App says support is till 10pm. I guess I am in the wrong time zone.

I sent an email. Got the auto-reply. As of this morning no one has replied to the email.

So then I called the help line again. Got a nice person explaining to me there are no delivery times available. He doesn’t know when there will be. He said the site should have told me. I said I have never used the site – I use the app. Why doesn’t the app warn me before placing an order? He doesn’t know. I am guessing he can’t help. I feel bad for the guy answering the phone to be honest.

Throughout all of this I have been tweeting at redmart – yet to get a reply on twitter either.

Yes – I know they moved their logistics and shit – fine. But this deplorable customer service is inexcusable.

Also – this is not just me this is happening to :: https://vulcanpost.com/183101/redmart-customer-service/

Netflix launches in Australia & New Zealand on March 24

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/03/netflix-australian-launch-date-revealed-march-24/

We knew it was coming but now we know when. Will be interested to see if this finally buries Quickflix and how Stan will get going.

I guess we will start to see if having regional TV and newer Hollywood movies will help combat the sheer scale and tech of Netflix.

Will get this worked into the list :: http://www.nokpis.com/ott-asia/ 

Watching the Aussie market and thinking about SVOD

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

In our little part of the world the most advanced video advertising market and the market with lots of OTT competition is generally considered to be Australia and New Zealand.

For example :: http://www.nokpis.com/2015/03/02/quickflix-is-starting-to-fall-apart/

Some of the players :: http://www.nokpis.com/ott-asia/#australia – guessing more are coming as well.

So it is interesting to read an article like this :: http://mumbrella.com.au/svod-catalyst-tv-evolution-278126

For example this is a very good point:

Subscription video services have a monetization model devoid of creativity.
They rely on subscriptions and subscriptions alone to bring in the mullah. It makes it easy to balance the books and has the potential to be quite lucrative in a market like the US where there is a whopping 115 million households that will potentially buy the product.
In comparison, Australia will only have nine million households to market to by 2016.
This means that the maximum revenue potential for the entire SVOD market is roughly $1.1b (based on a $10p/m subscription) in Australia.

But I think this also points to the fact that a large regional player looking at ANZ region as just a piece of the puzzle probably doesn’t care too much about the economics. To me the guys that have to worry about these numbers are the one or two country services. Like Quickflix for example which is already hurdling towards going out of business.

This is the good part though:

I am glad that the TV industry is getting scared.
This invasion of innovation and technology will hopefully spur the industry to evolve.
The SVOD infrastructure seems like the perfect foundation for a new ad funded model that blends the programmatic, targeting and measurement benefits of digital advertising with traditional television.
With a web-augmented and data fueled TV and ad experience the TV industry could have something financially viable on their hands. They could give people the tailored and on-demand content that they desire.
They could banish the Nielsen family and create a robust and reliable TV measurement model.
They could continue to sell us that precious ad space.
If the networks use this opportunity to evolve, the arrival of SVOD services could be the best thing to happen to Australian TV since Kerri-Anne Kennerley.

There is room for some innovation. There is either subscription model or freemium or just free with ads. There are lots of other ideas but generally what happens is the folks that own the content don’t allow the OTT services or the OTT aggregators room to innovate. They are stuck doing the same old thing and having to kowtow to the owners of the content. To me the lack of innovation around the OTT space has to be blamed on the content owners who frown on doing things like download or experimentation around social or payment models. That leaves the content owners needing to be the ones to come up with something cool. Maybe they can use TV to do that or try to take advantage of the what OTT can offer by coming up with something truly innovative.

I am not really holding my breath waiting for it to happen though.

The app economy

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

As I browsed DF today I can across this :: http://vesperapp.co/blog/native-support-for-ipad-and-landscape/

I think I bought the vesper app when it was on sale for 2.99 and thought to myself that it was a decent price for the app. I didn’t think it was a steal or a huge bargain because I felt like that was about what I would pay for a notes app. I am sure others thought that it was a huge bargain, an app made by some semi-famous folks that was suddenly on sale.

So here we are today looking at a 9.99 price tag now that the app goes horizontal and works on an iPad. I find this slightly comical. Any of us in the app world normally won’t ship an iOS app that doesn’t work on an iPad from day one. At least I wouldn’t.

The app economy is bizarre since the whole notion of pricing has been eroded to the point where Gruber is almost using this move as a line in the sand. Hey indie devs – put your price up so people value the ecosystem more and truly respect the value of our craft.

I hope it works but somehow I doubt it will.

If Gruber and his tribe can’t survive on a reasonably priced app – 10 bucks is not reasonable, then I am not sure who can. Without a doubt vesper gets way more traffic flowing across it than most other apps just due to Gruber talking about it all the time. 

Unlike Marco with overcast, who has open sourced some of his financials, vesper is three guys who ship stuff pretty slowly. It’s nice stuff but I never have seen it as earth shattering or amazing. Just a good solid notes app that I use to supplement my Evernote addiction. Trip stuff, quick meeting notes and my grocery list type of things are in vesper. Everything else is in Evernote.

So if Gruber can’t make it on decently priced apps then who can?

I know lots of indie devs – http://www.mailtoself.com/ – but these guys have a day job. They are doing this to be able to craft stuff outside of work and see how they can dent the universe with apps. 

Then there is – http://www.cleanshavenapps.com/ . I use dispatch all the time and I have beta tested some new stuff they are working on. This team does well but I don’t know how well or what their view is when it comes to this pricing stuff. I do know that they realize it’s more about marketing than anything else now.

I can remember when I did one of my fist startups whike blowing through millions of dollars having to buy real hardware, databases and app servers – just to launch. Now one guy can rent hardware and use his own code with open source stacks to launch an empire.

However the issue still is about how does one get exposure? Some have to buy it thus increasing the need for capital. Some people are famous and use their fame to launch or propel an app. I am guessing with the vesper price move they didn’t get as big as they had hoped cause if they had millions of users even on 2.99 they would be doing okay.

When I chat with any indie dev it’s all about getting the word out, holding on to their users and the hope that if they build something new, their current users might be customers of their new product.

We all know the app gold rush is over. Done.

Users think everything should be free or cheap – it’s sad it got to this but it happened. I don’t know what the answer is since I have only built apps that come as part of a service versus building an app I needed to sell to make a living.

Will be interesting to see how vesper does with the new premium pricing.