We seem to talk a lot about Nike and Nike+. Maybe it’s the tanagramster team’s passion for running or Nike’s well rounded approach to digital ecology. It doesn’t really matter because we, the consumer, want more. The following list is a summary of features we’d like to see on the iPhone 3GS version.
1) Emergency response – As an urban runner, on of my biggest fears is an attack or accident that renders me unable to seek help. I would feel better if I had an option to alert loved ones or authorities with a simple button press or even better, after an accelerometer detected shock followed by no movement (accelerometer or sensor). Perhaps we could use MobileMe Find-my-phone or the GPS to send coordinates to those who need to know? Even a quick access link to a speakerphone dialed 911 call would be appreciated. Obviously there are risks with auto dialing emergency services, but I think safety catches could be engineered into the solution. I wonder if Nike could partner with these guys?
2) Notes Transcription – This one is a little quirky, but I do some of my best thinking during a run and would greatly appreciate a capture device more secure than my memory. Mic-in-headphones technology would likely be required for this, but we’ve got that. Speech-to-text tech would make this better, but I’m not holding on to his idea because I’m pretty sure the noise of the run would confuse the system pretty quickly.
3) Telemetrics – I have no doubt the folks at Motorola want or have something like this, but us pro-sumers would love live run streams for loved ones and trainers as we slog through our local runs. Consider the opportunity for coaches to monitor multiple runners’ performance against individual profiles. It’s an easy connection to make for team efforts, but what about sports consultants coaching paying individuals through a Marathon.
4) VOIP Push-To-Talk (PTT) – Technology similar to Skype (not the PTT part) would allow a coach or teammate to provide real-time insights / conversation regardless of distance.
5) 3rd Party Integration – In a world where services are currency, Nike has still not embraced allowing third-party developers (hardware or software) to add their personal twists to the plus ecology. If they offered a SDK, the market could take their hardware and grow it into all sorts of interesting spaces. Perhaps their lacking revenue model is to blame?
5) Playlist Sync OR Local Area Music Broadcast – It’s nice to run with friends, it’s extra nice to run to the same music (same tempo). The ability to sync music or share music via bluetooth or wifi would be awesome. I could use the same tech on the ski slope. Extra credit for developing a networking architecture that expands distance as the number of paired machines increases.
6) GPS Integration – This one is a no brainer. The Nike+ system needs to be manually calibrated (i.e. you type in a distance after a run). Instead we think it would be great to intermittently start the GPS chip (every 1 min to save battery) to determine actual progress. Not only would this data be useful for calibration but it would also be nice to automagically draw routes. Clever web services monkeys might even be able to create a function that alerts you if you are approaching another Nike+ user and allow you to contact them, race them, etc.
7) Digital (virtual) Running Mates – Illness kept me from running the last Human Race, but there is another opportunity for Nike+ to network their communities. Imagine as you are beginning your run, your Nike+ app speaks into your ears that there are X number of runners of similar skill starting at the same time. After being presented the option, you opt to join the group and during your run you can chat with them via VOIP technology. Imagine those runners are scattered across the world. WOW! “Hi, what’s your name?” “I’m Roy from Manchester, and you?” You get it…
I hope the fine folks at Nike don’t consider these ideas as criticisms. More than half of our office is wired into their service and we adore their smart combination of style and tech. As fans for life we just want to help. See you all at the Bank of America Shamrock Shuffle!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on February 4, 2010
We love iPhone applications. Heck we may even be making one of our own, but here are a few of our absolute favorites. Most are free – some are fee – all are worthy. (we are not).
- GeoPedia – GeoPedia is basically a location-based Wikipedia interface for your iPhone.
- AmazonMobile – The note/snapshot feature is still pretty cool!
- iTransitBuddy – a robust, easy to use public transportation schedule application. Multiple cities including Chicago.
- enCamp – BaseCamp application for the iPhone. Best of breed so far.
- Facebook – We hate and love this app. Mostly love it.
- GuitarToolKit – Guitar players this has chords, an accurate microphone-based tuner, metronome and more. Very cool.
- Kindle for the iPhone – You don’t carry your Kindle everywhere but you carry your phone. The UI is super easy and readable.
- NowPlaying – Movie listings, ratings and more.
- OmniFocus – It’s expensive but nothing does GTD better.
- PhoneFlix – Netflix client for iPhone. Very useful when a movie idea hits you on the train.
- Skype – VOIP for your iPhone. We eagerly await SMS capabilities in the upcoming releases.
- SpeedTest – Cuz we’re paranoid that our bandwidth is less than it should be. This app tests WIFI and EDGE/3G bandwidth speeds.
- Tweetie – Absolutely the category killer for twitter clients. Worth the money.
- Weatherbug – The best weather information we’ve seen to date.
- Wordpress – If you’ve got a blog post that needs to be up now. This is the app for you.
- FSS Hockey: Because when you’re waiting for half an hour to be seated at a restaurant, it’s time for a few games of air hockey.
- ICanHasCheezBurger: Lolcats and LOL generation optimized for the iPhone.
- Labyrinth – the most beautifully designed game application. This person knows physics.
- Remote – if you have wifi, this app works with keynote.
- CTABusTracker – really a web page, but use it alot and is very accurate.
- Shazam – this music analyzer works surprisingly.
- New York Times – they have made it more sophisticated, but it is also more unreliable.
- Pandora – use it every day and very easy to use.
- WunderRadio – great streaming radio application.
- Units – the best designed measurement application
- Bejewelled 2 - It’s addictive like crack.
- Ocarina. $.99 turns your iPhone into a flutelike musical instrument.
Honorable mention (not quite applications)
- TrafficGauge – Very easy to digest traffic info for your favorite major metropolitan areas. I use this web app EVERY day.
- Meebo – use it every day
Do you have favorite apps that you can’t live without? Do share!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on April 29, 2009
The dust has settled, we’ve caught up on our sleep (Rudy is a sleep camel), and now we would like to reflect on the Phizzpop competition. We really had a blast “Phizzing” and “Popping” the challenge. While we don’t usually share intimate project details with the public, Phizzpop was purely conceptual work so there are no lawyers to hunt us down. That said, we’re thrilled to share the gory details with you.
Assignment
Our assignment, from a high level, was to engage teens between the ages of 13 to 18 and get them excited about the 2016 Olympic bid. We were to build a system that would empower them to show their support, build a community, and create momentum showing the world that the 2016 Olympics could be held no where else. The result had to include a rich interactive experience using Microsoft Silverlight technology, three days to design and build it and 8 minutes to present it. You can download the full assignment document here. It’s a great read, very well prepared.
Method
Tanagram, with development partner Geneca, responded to the challenge using the same processes we use to develop social architectures for clients like Tribune Interactive.
- Understand target demographic and project goals
- Define quick-convert subset(s), key penetration points and growth/sustain model
- Prototype, test and evolve
With three days to produce results we didn’t explore the situation with our typical rigor and we didn’t have the opportunity to field test prototypes but initial feedback on the results has been very strong and we’re very satisfied.
Understand target demographic and project goals
During our presentation I joked that Rudy spent the weekend hanging out at American Apparel watching teens. Truth be told the internet and some high-level research from our friends at Ogilvy provided us with our pool of insights. Obvious findings included teens are extremely socially motivated. They care a great deal about social status, peer recognition, and to a large extent fame. Interesting findings included 97 percent of today’s teens carry a cell phone and do a great deal of connecting via SMS or text messaging. The phones they carry are not rich media devices like the iPhone but instead hand-me-down Motorola Razors, or cheap carrier-branded phones.
Project goals included:
- Building a large community rapidly (the Olympic bid decision is October 2, 2009)
- Designing a system that would be valuable before, during, and after Olympic events (we added 2012 AND 2016 to our goals)
- We added building a system that would capture and execute upon the goals of WorldSportChicago, an Olympic bid leave behind organization dedicated to encouraging youth to achieve athletic excellence
- We added help change the U.S. perception of exercise and athletics including motivating people to get out and burn a few calories
- We added pushing the social networking domain by exploring real-time connectivity experiences
Define quick-convert subset(s)
The key to rapidly growing a social network is to leverage the power of multiples for expansion. This is done by identifying those members of your demographic set that are most easily captivated and converted to use your system and giving them tools to recruit new members for you. We chose “athletically inclined youth” as our champion subset because we found they were most likely to have knowledge of and be interested in the Olympic institution, they were already participating in an athletic program, and likely had some form of basic support network (meaning potential recruits) already in place.
Key penetration points
Key penetration points are valuable offerings that enhance the lifestyle of the champion subset. Key penetration points for our system included:
- A place to record and publish athletic achievement
- A place to voice opinions and build integrity among a community of peers
- A platform that provides easy addition and presentation of text, audio, photos, and video streams
- A mobile component that leverages available technology in ways currently unavailable to our champion subset
- A system that encourages real-time participation and interaction multiple times daily
- A brand association that improves the desired perception of the athlete
Growth/sustain model
We found that one of the keys to the degree of success of an athlete was a strong support network. Friends, family, peers, and even competitors connected to give support and guidance for the athlete in training. We designed our system to enable athletes to recruit a support network by adding fans to their distribution list for their training blog. With a meager goal of converting 1 million athletically inclined youth each recruiting an average of 10 fans we were satisfied that we had a model that would expand appropriate to our needs.
We built a ranking competition / reward system into our model to help motivate the recruiting process. The athlete’s ranking in our system would be determined by the number of fans in their network, the amount of interaction with the system, and donated calories provided by exercising fans.
Fans, once signed up, would receive both blog and statistics (i.e. new best time) updates from the athlete and could respond with messages of encouragement (improving ranking). Fans could also “donate” calories burned doing basic exercises to athletes to further add to the athletes ranking score. It was critical that all of these activities be tied to the Olympic bid. At the very start, sign up as an athlete or a fan includes a digital petition showing support for the 2016 bid. Athletes could also flag themselves as Olympic potentials in the system and in doing so gain additional ranking points and benchmarking capabilities.
Athletic training requires dedication and daily commitment. Our system was designed to be a key component in the training process and because of that it would be very relevant to our champion subset’s daily needs. We designed our system so that athletically inclined youth could capture/monitor their training progress, share it with their supporters and even benchmark it against peers and Olympians. Our system would provide connections between athletes at various levels of training; novice athletes could connect with Olympians for inspiration and guidance, expert athletes could connect with others for support and to share best practices. To maximize the value of the interactive system we built a rich-media blogging platform that enabled athletes to post (in addition to text) audio, image and video streams of meets and other events. The video blogging system was enabled by Microsoft’s Silverlight Streaming cloud service, a system that allows simple upload, conversion, and hosting of video files (up to 10GB for free). Our goal was to develop a system that enabled athletes to build a digital record of their career, a monument of their effort.
Finally and perhaps most exciting to us, we built our system to be fully enabled through SMS. For the demonstration we used a 3G GSM modem connected to an ActiveSMS server to show a small scale version of what our system was capable of. For purposes of the presentation we did not expose the full feature set (even though we sent and received ~300 SMS messages in a period of 8 minutes) but our system was designed to enable subscription, bi-directional communication to multiple subscribed circles (perhaps by sport) for both athletes and fans, performance statistics entry by the athlete on the field, and the ability to send cheers to athletes as they compete. We thought it would be cool if athletes carrying a cellphone on silent could get occasional nudges (vibrates) from fans wishing them well. Testing would determine if this was annoying or distracting. We were on the fence.
Why Big Shoulders?
Carl Sandburg has had his poem “Chicago” associated with far too many initiatives but for us we referencing it allowed us to talk about Chicago without making our concept about Chicago (the Olympic bid is a U.S. initiative) and it also allowed us to talk about a support network in an interesting manner. Big support comes from big shoulders.
A note about athletics in the U.S.
It will probably not come as a shock that athletics in the U.S. are in decline. We found one study tying the decline in athletics to the tripling of obesity in teenagers since 1974. Another study found that today’s teens are less able to get and hold jobs because of lacking athletic experiences. Obviously studies all have their slants, but it’s clear to us that athletics in America need our help. We built our system to allow fans to donate calories with the hopes that if one person did 10 push ups and it wasn’t that hard and did it again, perhaps they might consider a regular exercise routine, maybe even develop over the years to have Olympic aspirations of their own. Physical fitness is a key health issue in the U.S. increasing fitness will reduce health care costs, improve stamina and positive attitudes in practitioners and even teach values like honor and commitment. The value of hard work is a lesson being lost on today’s teens and America will benefit if we can find a way to teach it.
Big Shoulders screen shots
Big Shoulders home screen pristine
Big Shoulders home screen with SMS text flowing in background
[caption id="attachment_439" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Big Shoulders home screen with Rudy hot state"]
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Big Shoulders home screen with Rudy Details open
[caption id="attachment_441" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Big Shoulders home screen with Rudy Stats screen open"]
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Big Thanks!
Special thanks to the folks at Microsoft (Chris, Bob, Josh, Brian, Sara) for inviting and supporting us. Thanks to our team-mates at Geneca for their support. Supreme thanks to Rudy Chou and Matthew T. Boeke for staying awake for three days to develop this awesome concept. You guys rock!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on December 2, 2008
It’s been a little over a year since we made our voyage to Beijing for HCI International and the dustball we witnessed has transformed into an event to be watched by the world. You can join in too on your mobile phone with the help of Google’s new Olympic updates feature. If you suddenly have the urge to shout an obscenity in another teams native language you can use Google’s new mobile phone optimized translator service.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on August 8, 2008
Maybe I’ve been thinking about this topic because of the recent arrival of my twin sons Pascal and Thibault, but it seems to me we are about to take the next evolutionary step in the digital world with regards to replication. Digital replication, creation, or programming, has traditionally had a steep entry curve, requiring very smart people with very specific skills to create anything of value. Today games like Spore™ and LittleBigPlanet™ are replacing yesterday’s object oriented programming languages and are making online content creation accessible to a much larger audience. Virtual worlds like World of Warcraft™, Second Life™, and even the upcoming Diablo III MMORPG offer trading and even sale of your creations for fun or profit. Inworld artifact and content creation doesn’t represent the end, the next-generation replicator will allow users to create self-sustaining, independent objects that can exist outside (outworld) the domain of their originating world. These objects will be able to easily travel between devices (including mobile platforms) in ways that are relevant to their creator. Perhaps these objects themselves will contain within themselves the ability to replicate, perhaps even evolve?
Post back if you’ve already seen this in the wild and have a great weekend!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on August 8, 2008
Mike Bingaman sent me this link today and it really got me excited.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/theitemswecarry/pool/show/
It’s a Flickr pool someone created that contains pictures of things they carry daily. This should be pretty interesting to mobile platform researchers for a number of reasons.
The first is that it is an interesting, albeit subjective, look into over 1000 individuals bags to see what they consider important enough to carry with them. As researchers we should not devalue this input because it is idealized but instead approach it as a rich set of examples of what people want us to know they carry.
That leads right into the second reason and why I find this is fascinating; over 1000 people have posted pictures to this pool. Why? Do the contents of your bag form an identity? Do the aesthetic qualities of these objects have value? I encourage you to run this around your head a few times. Share with me if you have an opinion.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on February 6, 2008
A very popular topic at DUX ’07 was social networking sites. By my informal tally, every presentation of the 3-day conference made at least some reference to Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn and similar sites in order to provide a context to their main subject. I counted 12 presentations that focused specifically on social networking. These lectures addressed issues such as where the space is going and how they’ve been adapted to address traditionally offline tasks, such as smoking cessation. Some examined Second Life, a 3D rendering of Social Network (one of many ways Second Life can be defined). Peter Mortensen and Conrad Wai of Jump Associates gave an interesting presentation on the individual trust social networking sites require for them to be successful.
Bringing this topic back to Tanagram has sparked an exciting debate within our office. Do social networking sites connect or disconnect people? Our staff seems to be divided on this. In the disconnected camp, the argument goes that a Facebook post is short and uninformative. It is a cheap replacement of a phone call that allows me to check in on someone on my time and at my convenience without having any real interaction with that person. I am not required to invest any effort for this interaction and so the value of it is less.
In the connected camp, the argument is that these sites create a new line of communication. People can continue to connect via the phone and email but now you can interact quickly via Facebook to see what a person is up to at this moment. Each form of interaction (social networking, email, phone, blog) has its own value and it is not a choice of either/or communication.
I’m firmly in the latter camp. I do have a Facebook page (go ahead and look me up – I’ll gladly add you as a friend). I admit that I’m not a social networking guru. I’m perplexed by some of the more bizarre interactions it fosters. A couple of my friends – Mark and Andrew – are currently waging between them a month-long zombie war. I see daily updates of this such as: Andrew’s Bishop in the Church of Zombie regulated on Mark’s Lieutenant Zombie! Victory dances ensued. Huzzah! There seems to be no end in sight to this war.
Still, Facebook has allowed me to find friends that I’ve not spoken with in years. I readily admit that some of these friends I would probably never pick up the phone to call because I can’t honestly think of anything I would want to say to them. Perhaps I shouldn’t call them friends anymore? Yet that supposition seems harsh and I do wish them well even though I don’t seek a personal conversation with them. I think there is value in these brief connections allowed by social networking sites. I’m able to see the daily happenings of a friend’s life and I think there is an intrinsic value to this.
What strikes me most about the disconnected argument is that this line of reasoning is quite similar to the arguments against email 10 years ago. Back then email was viewed as a lazy way of writing a letter, lacking any sort of thought or consideration. This too is similar to the debate over proper cell phone etiquette as the mobile device became widespread. Calling a person to chat while you waited for a plane suggested you weren’t willing to invest the time for a proper phone call when you were at home (I believe a Seinfeld episode captured this argument a while back). I think it’s odd we now hold email and phone calls as the ideal alternative to social networking.
Social networking sites, in my opinion, offer a give-and-take proposition that lets us come out ahead. Our interactions through these sites may be less thought-intensive, certainly less self-invested, but they give us much more everyday connection. Since we don’t live our lives in a vacuum – seeing some friends on Facebook but also communicating with them via email, phone, and in person – it is possible to augment our relationships through these sites.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on November 29, 2007
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