Mobile Fizz

Last night, Google’s Gmail team announced Inbox: its mobile-first reimagining of the email inbox, now available by invitation only. Google has applied its learning's from Google Now to Inbox, transforming your email inbox from a list of messages to a feed with added value by calling out important information. Similarly to the Google Now app, Google’s server will read your emails and use that information to help get you "just the right information at just the right time." For example, when I receive an email with a boarding pass, Inbox will highlight that and show it in my so that I don't need to dive into the email. Google even made a web version but to be honest its nice but just not the same as the app which has all the lovely gestures in it In the screenshot above, the attachment is front and centre for easy access. This makes perfect sense -- why have attachments been at the bottom of emails or tiny icons for so long? For example, I might not read...

Why is the experience of using a TV just soooooo bad even down to the UI? I mean really some of these companies Samsung, Sony, LG and Sky are huge companies they can afford at least one good software designer and one good hardware designer right? Or is there so much red tape at these companies they cant even make an easy to use remote? You know what my perfect remote is ... ...we can make this screen into whatever we want. This screen can learn that I never press the red button only use volume and the on/off button showing me only the buttons I need and not the buttons that the company wants me to press. In fact it was one of the reasons I cancelled my Sky subscription (not to mention its ludicrous price) it was just not the easiest thing to use and didn't really give me what I wanted. It drove me crazy flipping between channels searching for something to watch. Isn't the idea of channels crazy? It's all wrong who cares that Archer is on FX I care about the show n...

Last week, Google held their annual developer conference, Google IO 2014, where they announced major updates for all products including Google Cloud, Android and Chrome. This year, it’s evident Google is slowly but surely making all our dumb things smart, from cars to TVs. They previewed loads of products but below are a few key areas that they focused on: AndroidOne initiative, get the next 5 billion online Android Wear Android Auto Android TV & Chromecast Chrome OS  gets closer to android Enterprise gets a boost Google Fit To give you an idea of the scale and reach Android has to date, Google started the presentation with the following stats: 30 day active users are now 1 billion up from  530 million in 2013 20B text messages are sent every day 93m selfies per day (31 million are apparently duck faces) Users take approximately 1.5 trillion steps per day Phones are checked a total of 100B a day 62% of all tablet shipments ar...

Now every now and then I move between phones and most of the time (maybe 99%) I usually go between android devices. Last year I used a total of 13 phones in one year, a record for me and one I don't think I could ever beat. By use I mean USED put my sim card in and copied over my whatsapp messages and re-login to everything and use it as my daily driver. Sometimes the playing around would last 2 weeks and other times more, currently the phone I was using the Moto X held the record of 3 months if you include this January. One major reason for this is because as part of my job I need to know my way around all phones and how their UI and use cases differ. Within android all the different skins make each device different whereas the iPhone has stayed pretty static, even the recent update was more a lick of paint in my eyes than a complete rethink of iOS. The second is the fact that it is for me anyway really easy to move across between android devices, text messages, whatsapp, images...

An interesting thing is happening in mobile and that is the fact that mobile is becoming the first internet connected device for a majority of the next 1 billion people to get online. This next billion will not be mainly from the developed world but the developing world and that is where there is a hell of a lot of innovation taking place to make that a reality. Having access to the internet can change lives whether that's access to a medical journal and doctors or knowing what the weather is doing so you know when is best to harvest crops, having access to the internet will be one of the biggest changes for good in this century. We can start to see the importance of mobile in the developing world where often you can’t invest billions of dollars in wiring to get peoples homes connected to broadband. This is why you have to think out of the box and innovate in different ways, for example in Kenya nearly 33% of the countries GDP actually goes through mobile. What an incredibl...