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There are 3 types of data that every product manager or application owner should have easy access to: User Activity, Product Usage, and Revenue.

This data is easy to come by in any well built application, and offers invaluable insights into how users value your application, what features they use, and what will encourage them to pay. You can get this data in many different ways, this post focuses on how Intercom offers quick insights to answer common questions.

1. Insights into User Activity

Here are some questions you should be able to answer about your product within seconds…

What percentage of our userbase have been active in the past day, week, or month?

What amount of sign-ups from 3 months ago are still active this month, and who are they?

Who is online right now?

Who was online in the last few days?

These are not vanity metrics. Knowing if your product has value that keeps your customers coming back is vital, especially if your business model depends on long-term customers. Braden’s article about the difference between discoverable value and immediate value is a fantastic guide to understanding how you should position your product and get people using it.

Additionally, knowing who is affected by live bugs or poor responsiveness allows you to follow up and apologize to them specifically. You never want to tell your entire userbase about something that affected a small percentage, so being able to identify who used your product when is crucial.

Intercom and User Activity

A basic install of Intercom logs user activity leaving you able to answer the above questions by applying filters to your list of users. Many of our customers create Auto Tags to easily identify customers at risk (last seen > 30 days) and long term customers (signed up > 365 days).

2. Insights into Product Usage

These are the types questions every every UX designer and product manager should be able to answer quickly while making product and design decisions:

How many users haven’t uploaded an avatar?

Which users have installed the iPhone app?

How many reports have been created since we launched the reporting feature?

How many users have created more than 5 projects?

Obviously the nature of the question will vary from domain to domain, but if you can’t quickly answer usage questions as a designer, you’re fighting one-handed. Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Re-designing a feature because no one used it is the ultimate self-delusion.

When no one uses a feature it can be because it was either missed, misunderstood, or miserable. A redesign can only solve the last of these, and even then only in some circumstances.

Intercom & Product Usage

Customers who send usage data to Intercom can instantly see the effects and uptake of new features as they are rolled out. For example, if you launch a new feature, or roll out a new onboarding process, you’ll quickly see if it’s achieving the desired effects; i.e. are there more photos uploaded or reports generated etc.

3. Insights into Revenue & Conversions

Here are some questions a product owner must know to work out everything from pricing through to feature promotions.

What are some good indications a user will convert?

Looking only at users on the day they convert, what do they have in common?

What’s the best indicator that a paying user is drifting away and may quit?

What percentage of last year’s premium customers are still active today?

What percentage of last year’s free customers are still active today?

Is freemium working for us?

A great indication of what your customers value is what features they’ve used most when they convert into a paying customer. A good app owner has a great understanding of what key features customers value. This previous post helps identify quick wins and what’s good to focus on for your product.

How does Intercom help?

By sending information about either price plans, or lifetime value of customers to Intercom you can ask quickly answer important questions such as “What do all premium users have in common when they convert?” or “How many of our customers are on the wrong plan?”. Again Auto Tags help you easily identify segments that matter such as premium active users, active trialists etc.

Insights lead to actions

When you study data and context you get evidence. Evidence combined with experience leads to insights. Insights should be actionable. This is what separates the questions above from vanity metrics.

So much product design is misguided due to the availability heuristic. People are disproportionately influenced by the data that’s easiest to get, which is often page views, sign-ups, tweets, etc. It’s important to come up with, ask, and answer hard questions about your application and the assumptions that you’re making. If you build a new feature that everyone is asking for you, who is actually using it, how often, and are they more likely to start paying you more money?

There is no guaranteed correlation between lines of code added to your app and value created. There is, however, a goldmine of insights sitting in your database waiting to be discovered. This is the information that helps you identify and add value to your product.

Which is what it’s all about, right?

You're reading Getting Insight Into Your Userbase, a post from the Intercom Blog.Intercom is a powerful CRM and messaging tool for web app owners.

Regardless of Android or the fact that 96 percent of its revenues come from advertising, from the beginning Google’s mission statement has been “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google’s mission changed the Web, and it remains true that, if you know what you’re looking for, there isn’t a more useful search tool. But if you don’t, that’s not always true. Take education, which sees 3.7 billion searches every month. Generally speaking, education-related decisions — like what school to go to, what to study — aren’t made in a snap, but the process nearly always starts with a Google search. Go search for “test prep.” Sure, PageRank serves some helpful results, but the tutor or program that’s right for you may be on page 20.

Knowing that it can take weeks or even months to refine a search and make a decision on all matters education, Noodle Education is today launching what it believes is a better solution: A search and recommendation engine that helps refine the process and suggest educational opportunities based on what’s important to you.

Like Google, Noodle is attempting to organize an enormous amount of data, aggregating information on a wide range of learning options. As it is today, the search and discovery process for education is fragmenting, as you navigate to one resource for test prep, another for pre-K schooling options, another for guidance counselors, and so on. So, Noodle is attempting to create the first education discovery engine that combines aggregated data with socially-enabled search to help find formal and informal educational opportunities — from tutors and schools to study abroad programs and guidance counseling.

Noodle launched in limited beta in late 2011, but today’s full-scale launch reveals a much more advanced resource, which includes 120,000 education providers across nearly a dozen academic verticals. And even so, the user experience is simple: Searchers enter the term they’re looking for, at which point Noodle asks a few questions to add context to the search. Once answered, the engine serves personalized recommendations for “best-fit” educational opportunities.

There’s a lot at stake when making education-related decisions, and it takes time. Plus, people want to get advice from those they trust. To address this, Noodle allows users to save, organize, and share their favorite results, and to connect with friends and other students, for example, by engaging their social graph. Students can create their own profiles within Noodle, and share their lists of top schools with friends and family, and add comments as they refine their search, or subscribe to publicly-guided lists, like Princeton Review’s ranking of top universities.

Today, educational institutions spend inordinate amounts of money on lead generation, which, as one would expect, is largely driven by educational providers. Noodle’s model aims to flip traditional lead generation marketing on its head, so that, instead of institutions reaching out to prospective students or customers, users initiate the dialogue with providers based on Noodle’s recommendations.

Since its limited beta launch, Noodle has also added what it’s calling a Groupon for tutoring, or a form of discounted group buying. Hiring the best tutors can be an expensive proposition, so Noodle allows students to create small groups of their friends, identify the tutor they want to work with, and receive discounted rates. Tutors get to charge the same price per hour, fill up their slots, while three or four students, for example, get to share the cost.

Going forward, Noodle wants to become an end-to-end platform for education providers and students, and it hopes to be able to offer providers the opportunity to integrate their tutoring learning management systems, scheduling, etc. based on a rev-share model. The team also sees potential to power education-related search for other verticals, like real estate.

Noodle is embarking on an ambitious mission, but it seems to already be attracting the funding and leadership that will be able to help see it through. The startup has already raised $3 million in angel funding, and is in the process of closing its Series A round. What’s more, Noodle was founded by John Katzman, who previously founded both The Princeton Review and 2tor, and, in February, Noodle brought on Joe Morgan to serve as its CEO. Morgan is the former president of Blimpie Subs, a founder of Colloquy, and is a former SVP at Kaplan.

As education becomes increasingly competitive both among startups and among students competing for positions in universities and beyond, it’s become more important than ever for them to be able to identify and discover educational opportunities that are right for them. Education needs better search, and, coupling that with a dynamic recommendation engine makes Noodle an appealing destination.

For more, check out Noodle at home here. Video intro below:

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Tweet this: New @ONPM post: Answering your calling by @PGopalan http://wp.me/pXBON-3eI

It has been an interesting, or should I say serendipitous week, that I came across a couple of very good articles about career choices even as I have been working for a while (years!) on my own calling.

First was this really good post in HBR blog: Make Your Job More Meaningful

It talks about the differences among the three –  job, career and calling. Job is something you do for a fixed period of time in a day and charge for it – e.g. waiting at a table in a restaurant.   Most jobs are in-between things you do before you figure out what you REALLY want to do next.

Career is working from one job to another job, up the ladder (if you are lucky), mostly in the same company and/or industry. Some mistake a job for a career at places where the outcome even after many years turns out to be just a job, despite a lot of energy and time spent there with no real path to what was promised initially.

Calling is when you know your purpose is beyond sucking up to your boss or doing the same thing over and over with no good result. Calling is about building something, creating meaning for yourself and others. Calling has very little to do with money, position or power. It is about making real change in whatever you are after. It’s about delighting yourself and others around you.

The second blog post I read was on Victor Cheng’s website: The Decisive Advantage in Career Choices. I know Victor, have used his training material and followed his posts for a long time. He is an incredible teacher and a great guy. Victor minces no words when he says these two things – 1) NEVER compete in a competition where you don’t have a major advantage over the competition. 2) Get OUT of any market that you’re ALREADY in, where you have no decisive advantage.

In other words, drop your ‘me too’ strategy and figure out what your real strengths are compete on that basis. And also know not to compete in places where your strengths won’t work. The latter is very important, more important than the former.

For example, if you are an innovation driven product guy (or gal), don’t go and look for a position where product (or service) innovation is secondary to the firm. That’s just a plain misfit. Even if you have a lot to offer, you are simply not going to make sense to the people around you or the firm.

But if you want to just keep a machine running, e.g. flipping burgers (a job) that’s a different story. There’s always going to be people wanting to eat at undifferentiated burger chains. These burger chains solve the simple known problem = feeding hunger at $1.99/burger (let’s leave the question of health out of the picture for now). There’s nothing wrong with these places. They serve a real need in the market – low priced meat+bun packaged and sold in convenient drive-throughs/accessible locations (e.g off highway service roads).

Working at these burger chains for some can be mind numbing. If your mind comes up with ideas like these: what about coming up with better customer service, better ingredients, better menu and so on, you have lost the race for the job. These burger chains can be innovation killers for those that work in the line jobs. They focus on one thing really well – their model – flipping burgers fast to feed the hungry at $1.99/burger (or even less if they give you a deal).

And here’s a twist: Just as the candidate (because flipping burgers is a job) is aware that this is going to be a job so should the burger chain owners know that they are not looking for real innovative talent or demanding loyalty to fill their vacancies. Once that understanding is reached, both sides can happily go about flipping the burgers. It is the lack of understanding there that results in most firms and employees confusing themselves on what they want from each other.

Clear that understanding and we will all have more meaningful work.

- Prabhakar

Tweet this: New @ONPM post: Answering your calling by @PGopalan http://wp.me/pXBON-3eI

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Razen Cain sez, "David Hunter is a public school teacher who is trying to raise cash on Kickstarter to create a Standards Based curriculum that uses a zombie apocalypse to get kids invested in learning geography. It's a genius idea and David comes across so passionate in the video that it's impossible to say no to him."

What we’re doing here, is teaching how to be a geographer by learning skills needed to survive a zombie apocalypse. Imagine being in a classroom where instead of reading about maps, you’re designing them to show the spread of a zombie outbreak. Instead of reading about the distribution of resources on Earth in a textbook, you are researching available resources to plan your post-outbreak settlement. I’m not just talking about learning where places are or memorizing capitals of states or countries, I’m talking about learning the deeper concepts of geography that geographers actually use. And all in an exciting scenario.

Zombie-Based Learning: Geography taught in Zombie Apocalypse

Just wanted to share that next week while thousands of New Jersey school children will be subjected to the annual ASK standardized tests, my 12-year old son Tucker will not be among them. We made a formal request to opt out, which is our legal right in NJ, and he’ll be staying home during the testing periods. (The absences are excused, btw.)

Wendy and I came to this decision after seriously considering the potential effects for the school and after some serious conversations with Tuck. Obviously, he didn’t mind the staying home part, but he did have concerns about what others might say or think. I’m thinking that won’t be a problem, but we wanted to make sure that in the end he was on board, and he is.

Below is a letter that we’re sending to the local paper and to nj.com. It articulates our reasoning and, I hope, might get other parents and community members to start some conversations around the tests. Just fyi, as a courtesy, I’ve already sent a copy to the principal at Tucker’s school to make sure she didn’t have any issues.

Interested in your thoughts, as always.

To the Editor:

After much thought, we have decided to keep our son home during the 7th Grade NJ ASK standardized assessments that are being given in his school next week. It is our legal right to do so, and we are basing this decision on our serious concerns about what the test itself is doing to our son’s opportunity to receive a well-rounded, relevant education, and because of the intention of state policy makers to use the test in ways it was never intended to be used. These concerns should be shared by every parent and community member who wants our children to be fully prepared for the much more complex and connected world in which they will live, and by those who care about our ability to flourish as a country moving forward.

Our current school systems and assessments were created for a learning world that is quickly disappearing. In his working life, my son will be expected to solve real world problems, create and share meaningful work with the world, make sense of reams of unedited digital information, and regularly work with others a half a world away using computers and mobile devices. The NJ ASK tells us nothing about his ability or preparedness to do that. The paper and pencil tasks given on the test provide little useful information on what he has learned that goes beyond what we can see for ourselves on a daily basis and what his teachers relay to us through their own assessments in class. We implicitly trust the caring professionals in our son’s classroom to provide this important, timely feedback as opposed to a single data point from one test, data that is reported out six months later without any context for areas where he may need help or remediation. In short, these tests don’t help our son learn, nor do they help his teachers teach him. 

In addition, the test itself poses a number of problems:

Over the years, the “high stakes” nature of school evaluation has narrowed instruction to focus on only those areas that are tested. This has led to reductions in the arts, languages, physical education and more.

Research has shown that high scores can be achieved without any real critical thinking or problem solving ability.

The huge amount of tax dollars that are being spent on creating, delivering and scoring the tests, dollars that are going to businesses with, no surprise, powerful lobbyists in the state capitol and in Washington, DC, is hugely problematic.

Proposals to use these test scores for up to 50% of a teacher’s evaluation are equally problematic. The tests were not created for such a use, and to create even higher stakes for the NJ ASK will only create more test prep in our classrooms at the expense of the relevant, authentic, real world learning that our students desperately need.

These tests create unnecessary anxiety and stress in many students who feel immense pressure to do well.

In no way are we taking this step because of our dissatisfaction with our son’s public school, the teachers and administrators there, or our school board. We have simply had enough of national and state policies that we feel are hurting the educational opportunities for all children. At the end of the day, we don’t care what our son scores on a test that doesn’t measure the things we hold most important in his education: the development of his interest in learning, his ability to use the many resources he has at his disposal to direct his own learning, and his ability to work with others to create real world solutions to the problems we face. And we feel our tax dollars are better spent supporting our schools and our teachers who will help him reach those goals as well as the goals detailed by the state standards in ways that are more relevant, engaging and important than four days of testing could ever accomplish.

Will and Wendy Richardson

Delaware Township

The HTML5 canvas element is used everywhere. From WebGL games to some amazing browser experiments, web developers are jumping on the canvas bandwagon and enjoying the ride.

But are we always using the right tool for the job? In many cases, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) offer a better alternative but it’s easy to forget about the technology when it’s hidden beneath the wave of canvas hype. If you’re not considering SVG, perhaps the following reasons will make you think again…

1. SVGs are Scalable

That should be obvious, but it’s a huge benefit — especially now people are using high-resolution iPads and monitors. It’s also a bonus for responsive designs and your logo or chart can scale accordingly.

2. Designer Tools

Canvas is a programmable image. Even importing a static graphic requires JavaScript and it’s certainly not possible to define animation or effects without delving into code.

But anyone can create an SVG. Many of the tools are free and offer custom animation facilities. Have a play with:

Inkscape

OpenOffice or LibreOffice Draw

svg-edit — an online tool

3. Language/Framework Support

Canvas elements are manipulated using client-side JavaScript. You can do the same with SVG but you can also create partial or complete images in advance. In addition, SVGs are simply XML; you can create or modify them using any server-side technology.

4. Browser Support

SVG and canvas elements are supported by all the HTML5 browsers. Neither have native support in IE8 and below, but shims such as Raphaël are available.

While that’s not necessarily a case for choosing SVG over canvas, you certainly can’t reject SVGs on the basis of browser support.

5. Accessibility and SEO

SVGs are accessible: text remains text, and something should appear even when your browser doesn’t support every element.

Humans and machines can understand SVG code even if they can’t render it. Search engines such as Google already parse SVGs but canvas elements will always require a fallback.

6. DOM Handling

SVGs have a DOM so it’s easy to attach event handlers and manipulate elements like you would for other HTML block. To move an item you simply change its co-ordinates.

The same is not true for canvas. To determine whether your mouse cursor is over an object, you need to compare the two locations and react accordingly — perhaps re-drawing the whole of the canvas again.

7. It’s More of What You Know…

SVG is XML and uses tags just like HTML. It also supports CSS, webfonts, and the JavaScript techniques you’re familiar with.

Canvas manipulation isn’t difficult but it requires a different mindset and you’ll need to learn the API.

…and the Future Looks Bright for SVG

The technology may have been around for more than a decade, but SVG developments continue to advance. Browser vendors are adding support for CSS backgrounds and inline integration as well as implementing mobile engines, animations, transforms and filters.

Canvas is also evolving but it remains a self-contained programmable bit-mapped image element. That will always impose limitations.

The Downsides

SVGs certainly aren’t necessarily the best solution in all situations. If you’re animating hundreds of items — perhaps for a firework or explosion effect — canvas will always be quicker because it’s not constrained by the number of DOM elements the browser can handle. Canvas will generally be the best choice for fast action games.

In addition, SVG performance isn’t always perfect and the webkit engine seems especially poor. You can often see Chrome and Safari redrawing each element in turn and, although they support animation, you can’t apply SMIL nodes to the SVG DOM with JavaScript.

However, SVGs remain a better alternative for logos or charts with fewer intensive effects. They’re not as trendy as canvas but that’s no reason to avoid them.

Look out for some new SVG tutorials on SitePoint soon…

Earlier this month, Redpoint Ventures and BV Capital’s eVentures announced the formation of a new, joint firm in Brazil — called, somewhat predictably, Redpoint eVentures. Managing director Yann de Vries and founding partner Anderson Thees were in the Bay Area this week, so I had a quick talk with them about their plans.

Brazil’s startup ecosystem is taking off, but until now, Thees said VC firms have fallen into two camps. On the one hand, you have small, local firms, and on the other hand, you have “helicopter VCs” who have offices in Silicon Valley or elsewhere, and make their investments from afar. Redpoint eVentures, on the other hand, has the resources of an international firm, but Thees is also “Brazilian born and raised,” and both he and de Vries are based out of Sao Paolo.

“We do have a local presence and dedicated partners, but at the same time we do bring a very integrated and a global network,” Thees said.

International firms will probably find the “high-pedigree Brazilians who studied at Stanford or [Harvard Business School] and know the lingo,” de Vries said, but Redpoint eVentures’ local connections will help it find entrepreneurs outside that circle.

He also touched on one aspect of the global strategy that I wasn’t expecting — in addition to connecting Brazilian startups with international partners and customers, the firm is also looking for ideas that it can bring back to Brazil. So if there’s a new product that seems to be taking off in China, and it seems like it would also work in Brazil, Redpoint eVentures might put together a startup to pursue the idea locally.

The firm has announced four investments — Viajanet, Grupo Xango, Shoes 4 You, and 55Social. Thees and de Vries told me they have since made a fifth investment, in yet-to-be-launched jewelry site Sophie & Juliete.

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The Mozilla Foundation is on a kick to show people just how amazing HTML5 can be, and to that end, they're releasing a series of free, open, ambitious in-browser apps to inspire developers and users. The latest of these is BrowserQuest, a multiplayer online role-playing game built completely out of native HTML, with no plugins, and with sourcecode for your learning, tweaking, and repurposing pleasure.

BrowserQuest is a tribute to classic video-games with a multiplayer twist. You play as a young warrior driven by the thrill of adventure. No princess to save here, just a dangerous world filled with treasures to discover. And it’s all done in glorious HTML5 and JavaScript.

BrowserQuest can be played by thousands of simultaneous players, distributed across different instances of the in-game world. Click on the population counter at any time to know exactly how many total players are currently online.

Players can see and interact with each other by using an in-game chat system. They can also team up and fight enemies together.

BrowserQuest – a massively multiplayer HTML5 (WebSocket + Canvas) game experiment

(via /.)

By Phil Hill

Part 2 in this series, on a key difference in educational delivery methods, can be found here.

Traditional education or online education. In the past decade it seems that the dominant conversation has been around the potential for online learning, both from for-profit and non-profit options, to disrupt education as an industry.

What I believe we are seeing in 2011 and 2012 is a transition to an educational system no longer dominated by traditional education and one or two alternative models. As my colleague Molly Langstaff has described, educational technology and new educational courses and programs are interacting to create new language and models for education. What does this emerging landscape of educational delivery models look like?

While I do not claim to be able to solve this problem, I would like to offer a more descriptive view than the dichotomy of traditional and online education describes.

There is a growing number of models on how to deliver education effectively, which is natural given the investment and interest in fixing or disrupting education (and yes, I know these terms are over-used and often ignore the innovations happening within traditional educational circles). Not all of these models will end up thriving in the long-term, but I do foresee that there is room for more than just two models.

For example, here’s one list of models, followed by a view of how they differ in terms of course design and the channel by which information is created and transmitted:

Traditional Non-Profit Face-to-Face Programs

Non-Profit Online Programs

For-Profit, Both Face-to-Face and Online Programs

Competency-Based

Open Education Practices

Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs

Flipped Classroom

Why does it matter that we describe these educational delivery models with finer granularity than just traditional and online? Because the aims of the models differ, as do the primary methods of how these models are created and delivered. As an example, there are really two variations of MOOCs with quite different approaches – witness the Stanford and MITx version vs. the rhizomatic version. Given the changing landscape, the judgment of how successful these models will become, as well as how well learning platforms help solve the associated problems should differ as well.

I plan to write several upcoming posts looking at some of the key attributes of these models and how educational technology is serving these models.

How well does this landscape describe the existing and emerging educational delivery models? What elements are missing from this view?

UPDATE: Graphic changed to clarify faculty involvement with instructional design team

Phil's blog at Delta Initiative. For a more complete biography, view his profile page.

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Philipp Lenssen sez, "I've set up RootStrike as a minimalist site for easy referencing of root problems in online discussions. Problems -- like the corrupting system of US campaign funding -- which, if solved, would also help us a lot in solving many other problems. The site was inspired by Lawrence Lessig's book Republic, Lost, and many other sources and people."

Two state consortia—Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium—are hard at work putting ambitious designs in place for new assessment systems. They have released materials and will soon select contractors to build assessments and the infrastructure to support them. What do their current plans look like?

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You want to hide something on a page, so:

.hide {
display: none;
}

But wait! By applying that class to an element you've immediately made that content "inaccessible" by screen readers. You've probably known this forever, but still the poison apple sneaks into our code once in a while.

I don't want to re-hash all the specifics. Your best bet is to read "Now You See Me" by Aaron Gustafson on A List Apart to get an understanding of this if you don't already.

One way to encourage yourself to do the right thing is by creating more appropriate class names. Your regular hide class should position the content off screen, which still leaves it screen reader accessible:

.hide {
position: absolute !important;
top: -9999px !important;
left: -9999px !important;
}

I use !important here because if you've gone to the trouble to add a "hide" class to something, you probably mean it and don't want to think too hard about if the specificity value is strong enough. And if you know that you need to display: none something, the class should help you understand it:

.remember-this-will-NOT-be-read {
display: none !important;
}

Another option for accessible hiding comes from some Snook research and the HTML5 boilerplate:

.visuallyhidden {
position: absolute;
overflow: hidden;
clip: rect(0 0 0 0);
height: 1px; width: 1px;
margin: -1px; padding: 0; border: 0;
}

OK you got it. Easy peasy when you're totally in control of class names and all you do is apply and remove them. But things get a little tricker with JS libraries that apply their own CSS. For instance in jQuery, after you .slideUp(), you'll have a display: none in the inline CSS to deal with. Yes, screen readers run JavaScript and yes, that's still a problem.

Again Aaron Gustafson has us covered there, who suggests applying the accessible class name after the sliding is done and then removing the display: none by sliding it the other direction.

var $button = $('#myButton'),
$text = $('#myText'),
visible = true;

$button.click(function() {
if (visible) {
$text.slideUp('fast',function() {
$text.addClass('hide')
.slideDown(0);
});
} else {
$text.slideUp(0,function() {
$text.removeClass('hide')
.slideDown('fast');
});
}
visible = !visible;
});​

Here's a demo of that:

View Demo

Now we have the tools we need to stop using display: none and start using more accessible "hiding" methods.

FAQ pages

If you're hiding the answer until the question is clicked, hide with an accessible class name. Careful you don't .hide() and then slideToggle(), that's not good enough!

Labels

It's tempting to use placeholder text as a label replacement (especially now with some browsers improved UX of leaving the text until you actually type), but don't display: none or remove the labels. I recently heard a heartbreaking story about a blind girl trying to apply for college and the form had missing labels so she had no idea what to put in what fields. So if you're going to use placeholder text as a label replacement, use an accessible hiding technique for the labels.

Tabs

Just because a panel of content isn't the "currently active" one doesn't mean it should be inaccessible. Hide it with an accessible hiding technique instead. Or, you may not even need to. If all the panels are the same height, you can just flip-flop which ones is visible by adjusting z-index.

@media queries

Turning on Voice Over in OS X and using Safari is a screen reader. Now imagine that Safari window was open to a very narrow width and the page had some @media queries for handling smaller viewports. And say that @media query hides some things with display: none in order to better visually accomodate the space. This could be good or bad for accessibility. Are you hiding a bunch of crap that isn't important to the page? Or are you hiding useful things that a person using a screen reader should have access to like they normally would.

No Expert Here

This entire post is based on the premise that display: none is bad for accessibility. It's not based on my deep and thorough understanding of screen readers and general accessibility. If you have more to add, things to correct, or personal experience to share, please do.

Places It’s Tempting To Use Display: None; But Don’t is a post from CSS-Tricks

Today I was doing whatever it is I do when I ran across this link from Joel:

NYC teacher “effectiveness” ratings are bogus, and the data prove it garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/02/28/ana…

— Joel Spolsky (@spolsky) March 1, 2012

…and my brain started pattern matching. Replace “NYC teacher” with “programmer” in this tweet, and you’d be in classic Joel on Software land. After all, one of Joel’s self-stated missions is to make programmers’ lives better (you can see his efforts played out in both the principles of Fog Creek and Stack Overflow), and he’s spent plenty of time trying to convince us of the stupidity of using automated metrics to assess programmers.

Before we go any further, here’s the gist of the post about NY’s teacher effectiveness ratings that were recently released to the public: they have major flaws. Read the post — but this chart says a lot:

Every point is a teacher that taught the same subject to two different grades in the same year. Think of a middle school teacher handling both 6th and 7th grade math. The x-axis is their effectiveness rating for one of the grades, the y-axis is the other grade.

You don’t have to stare at the graph long to see a surprising lack of correlation. If you’re effective at teaching 7th grade math, shouldn’t you be effective at 6th? Wait. Before you throw effectiveness ratings out the window, read the comment further down the page that points out the increasing usefulness of the published data as you look across multiple years of teachers’ past. Ok, that makes sense. But still, judging teachers on test score summaries alone is madness. Perhaps they’re useful feedback when given to teachers appropriately, with caveats, and all? Maybe the ratings need some tweaking?

None of this matters if the data is published to the public and uses a single, automated metric to reward or punish teachers.

There’s a good reason Bill Gates tore apart the decision to publish this data. He knows that a single metric is bound to be not only flawed, but, if used as an incentive system, also destructive to both teachers and any attempts to improve the metric. His nuanced argument for a system that combines data and highly trained teachers evaluating their peers sounds pretty similar to the belief that highly technical programmers should be the only ones managing other programmers:

But student test scores alone aren’t a sensitive enough measure to gauge effective teaching, nor are they diagnostic enough to identify areas of improvement. Teaching is multifaceted, complex work. A reliable evaluation system must incorporate other measures of effectiveness, like students’ feedback about their teachers and classroom observations by highly trained peer evaluators and principals.
— For Teachers, Shame is Not the Solution

Again, replace “teachers” with “software developers” up there and you’ll see Bill Gates is making the same crusade he made for developers — protection from the type of overly simplified management incentives that destroy your ability to focus on the tasks at hand when working in a complex, creative profession.

I was lucky enough to step into professional programming at a time when an exploding number of forward-thinking companies were starting to treat and recruit programmers effectively. I was never promoted or demoted based on the number of bugs I created or lines of code I wrote. But it’s clear that wasn’t always the way things worked, and when I was in college I remember reading Joel and Paul Graham, who both stood out as Defenders of The Programmer against destructive management.

This is why we’d never, ever use Khan Academy data to single-handedly “rank” teachers or anything else so ridiculous. Khan Academy data (and there’s a lot of it, we just passed 400 million practice problems done) is to be put in the hands of teachers, for teachers, as a powerful tool that lets them dive deep into their students’ individual levels of mastery. We aim to empower teachers with the best tools available and believe that the only people assessing them should be highly trained teachers who understand the nuances of their craft and work with them to improve. Sound familiar to you, devs?

I’ve never been a teacher, but I do know that I’ll never even consider working for a company that assesses my performance based on a single automated metric. I think I have Microsoft and Google and Joel and Paul Graham and co. to thank for the software world’s culture of respect for both data and individuals. And now it’s really cool to see Bill Gates and Joel taking a similar stand in defense of teachers.

Ten bucks says none of the teachers in The Academy for Software Engineering suffer from a single metric incentive system.

Another month has passed so it’s time to look at the browser market once more. During February, Chrome 16 became the world’s most-used browser version and exceeded IE8′s market share by 5%. Can Chrome continue it’s meteoric rise? Let’s look at the latest worldwide StatCounter statistics to find out…

Browser

January

February

change

relative

IE 9.0+

11.45%

12.09%

+0.64%

+5.60%

IE 8.0

20.82%

18.86%

-1.96%

-9.40%

IE 7.0

3.63%

3.32%

-0.31%

-8.50%

IE 6.0

1.56%

1.48%

-0.08%

-5.10%

Firefox 4.0+

20.01%

20.39%

+0.38%

+1.90%

Firefox 3.7-

4.77%

4.49%

-0.28%

-5.90%

Chrome

28.45%

29.88%

+1.43%

+5.00%

Safari

6.61%

6.76%

+0.15%

+2.30%

Opera

1.96%

2.02%

+0.06%

+3.10%

Others

0.74%

0.71%

-0.03%

-4.10%

IE (all)

37.46%

35.75%

-1.71%

-4.60%

Firefox (all)

24.78%

24.88%

+0.10%

+0.40%

The table shows market share estimates for desktop browsers. The ‘change’ column shows the absolute increase or decrease in market share. The ‘relative’ column indicates the proportional change, i.e. another 9.4% of IE8 users abandoned the browser last month. There are several caveats so I recommend you read How Browser Market Share is Calculated.

There’s a little good news for Microsoft: IE8 has become the most-used browser version once again.

The bad news:

It only occurred because Google released Chrome 17. Half of Chrome’s user base upgraded last month which resulted in version 17 gaining 13.7% while version 16 retained 13.4%.

IE8 slipped below 1 in 5 users for the first time since November 2009.

Internet Explorer lost almost 5% of its user base in one month. That’s a shocking figure.

IE10 may be stunning, but it’s unlikely to appear for a while and IE9 is being left behind. Microsoft’s decision to abandon XP users has also back-fired: the aging OS still accounts for more than one in three PC users who must either stick with IE8 or switch to an alternative browser.

Technically, IE8 isn’t too bad and will happily support HTML5 with a little JavaScript shim-magic. But it lacks basic CSS3 features such as rounded corners and shading which we’re all using. The result: sites are usable but look terrible in IE8 when compared with any other browser.

Of course, Microsoft want users to upgrade to Windows 7 or 8 so they can use IE9/10. Unfortunately, that won’t happen quickly. Even if the economy and costs were not factors, large organizations implement long-term IT plans and upgrading thousands of users takes time. The PC market has also been saturated for several years; many individuals will stick with XP until their machine breaks down and they’re forced to buy a replacement. And let’s not forget that XP remains a capable OS; some users prefer it and Microsoft would not contemplate withdrawing support for major products such as Office.

Microsoft has a simple choice: either release IE9/10 on XP or continue to lose massive chunks of market share. There will be technical hurdles but IE9 already has a software rendering mode and few would complain if the XP version was slower. The relatively tiny Opera can create a modern HTML5 browser which works on Windows 2000 — Microsoft has few excuses. Users are increasingly browser-literate and, once they’ve switched to an alternative, it’ll be tougher to get them back on IE.

Usage patterns are not quite so straight-forward, but the bulk of those IE users switched to Chrome. If anything, the browser’s market share gains appear to be accelerating as its user base expands. There’s no sign of the predicted growth plateau.

Mozilla Firefox held steady at 25%. Version 10 has been well received and many of the memory and add-on glitches which frustrated users have been solved. Mozilla hasn’t reversed the downtrend, but Firefox’s future looks brighter.

Safari and Opera both enjoyed modest gains. Significantly, Opera has broken through the 2% barrier once again — it’s been below that level for more than 12 months.

Mobile Browser Usage

Mobiles accounted for 8.53% of all web activity during February 2012.

The primary mobile browsing applications are:

Android — 22.67% (up 1.28%)

Opera Mini/Mobile — 21.70% (down 1.64%)

iPhone — 21.06% (up 1.55%)

Nokia browser — 11.24% (down 0.58%)

Blackberry — 6.53% (down 0.15%)

The top three have almost identical usage figures but Opera has been knocked off the top spot for the first time. The Android browser has been rising steadily at a rate similar to Chrome — it’s desktop cousin.

Blackberry has fallen a little further. It held a 19% share just 18 months ago which illustrates just how fickle the mobile market can be.

I’m currently involved in three open online courses: Change, CCK12, and LAK12. Altogether, I’ve facilitated about a dozen of these courses, with about 15,000 participants being involved in various ways. Some participants, such as in the current CCK12 iteration, take the courses for credit. The vast majority do so for other reasons (and I’m not sure what those are – personal interest? desire to connect with others? general curiosity?).

Participation varies significantly. The Change MOOC has about 2400 participants, yet we get typically get about 40 participants per live sessions, 5-10 blog posts a day, and 20+ daily tweets related to the course. Some are active throughout the course (though when I did an analysis on CCK08, only a few of the most active participants in week 1 were still in the top ten by week 12), some have spurts of activity, and others subscribe to the daily but don’t engage in ways that are visible to us as facilitators. Consistently, as the course progresses, active participation declines.

This isn’t unique to our courses. Even the current darling of open courses – Udacity – suffers from this. Their course on “building a search engine” had 2303 views for the introduction video and only 486 views for one of the last lecture videos of week 1. Video counts are a great way to track what people are actually doing in a course as creating something (artifact, blog post) is done less frequently in open courses than listening/reading. Wonder how long until companies like Udacity move away from YouTube to keep hit counts on videos in-house.

While active participation in our courses declines as the course progresses, subscribers to the Daily increase. I’m not sure what to make of that. If I was getting five emails a week on something I wasn’t interested in, I would unsubscribe. Does that mean we can view Daily subscribers as a) people are still engaged, b) people can’t find the unsubscribe link, or c) that we’ve subjected over 15,000 people to guilt about not being active in MOOCs?

While I’m not sure of the impact of open courses, I can state I’ve absolutely loved the learning experience of open courses since 2007. I enjoyed reading Laura McInerney’s post on the best learning of my life:

In the last few weeks I have experienced some of the best learning of my life…But even more amazing for me was that as the presentation was going on I could check information online, pull research articles as they were mentioned, broadcast ideas I had to twitter and get feedback from teacher colleagues here in the UK who were sat in their hous watching tv quite unaware of what I was listening in to. There was just so. much. learning. And it was awesome in the literal sense of the word – for the entire hour I was in awe of how much information I was able to take in and make sense of in so many different ways.

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When your product extends a platform’s functionality, one of the main risks you face is that the platform could embed your product’s key features within the platform – what is sometimes called subsumption risk. This happened to a lot of startups in the 90s that built products for the Windows platform.

When you depend on a platform for distribution (acquiring and retaining users), you take on different risks. Specifically:

1) Oversaturation. The risk that supply of products on the platform significantly outpaces demand. This seems to have happened recently to the iOS App Store: there are over 500,000 apps and counting, and popularity tends to be highly concentrated, making it very difficult for new apps to get noticed. Oversaturation also happened to Google (organic) results in most query categories in the last 2000′s.

2) Barriers to discovery. The risk that the discovery methods on the platform aren’t meritocratic. iOS apps depend upon appearing in iTunes’ Top 25 lists, leading to a “rich get richer” bias, along with aggressive attempts to game the system. Apple has other app discovery mechanisms like its Featured Apps and Genius features, but those seem to drive far fewer downloads than the top lists. Google search has increasingly been favoring Google’s own products and also seems to heavily favor older, well-entrenched websites, making it very hard for new sites to gain significant SEO traction. Currently, social networks like Twitter and Facebook seem to have the most meritocratic discovery mechanisms, which is one reason so many startups target them for distribution.

3) Throttling. The risk that the platform will throttle distribution or monetization (for apps that rely on paid advertising, throttled monetization also means throttled distribution). Facebook started out letting apps send unfiltered notifications to users’ timelines but then introduced algorithms that heavily filtered them (thereby entrenching the position of leading app makers like Zynga). Facebook also started out letting apps charge users directly, but later changed that policy and imposed a rev-share.

If you are launching a new website or app, you should have a distribution strategy beyond just “people will love it and tell their friends about it”. Your strategy should probably involve at least one major platform. And you should think through the distribution characteristics of the platform and decide if they are a good fit for your product and how best to mitigate the risks.

Finally, it is worth noting that some of the most successful startups grew by making bets on emerging platforms that were not yet saturated and where barriers to discovery were low. Today, the most interesting new platforms are probably Android tablets and emerging social networks like Foursquare and Tumblr. Betting on new platforms means you’ll likely fail if the platform fails, but also dramatically lowers the distribution risks described above.

Mobile HTML5 (Scott Davis)http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Mobile-HTML5
Want to get excited about what HTML5 lets you do easily to adapt to mobile environments....
Input tags that desktop browsers don't recognize (e.g. tel, email, etc.) revert to text so you can write for mobile while not hurting desktop.
Touch is coming to desktop/laptops soon.
Responsive Web Design (book reference)resizemybrowser.com

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Microsoft funds Pixel Lab to make an HTML5 version of Cut The Rope originally by ZeptoLab.

Nerds call it out for using some Flash.

Robby Ingebretsen writes really interesting article explaining why.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Troubles with HTML5 is a post from CSS-Tricks

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Elements with the contenteditable attribute can be live-edited right in the browser window. But of course those changes don't affect the actual document on your server, so those changes don't persist with a page refresh.

One way to save the data would be to wait for the return key to be pressed, which triggers then sends the new innerHTML of the element as an Ajax call and blurs the element. Pressing escape returns the element to it's pre-edited state.

document.addEventListener('keydown', function (event) {
var esc = event.which == 27,
nl = event.which == 13,
el = event.target,
input = el.nodeName != 'INPUT' && el.nodeName != 'TEXTAREA',
data = {};

if (input) {
if (esc) {
// restore state
document.execCommand('undo');
el.blur();
} else if (nl) {
// save
data[el.getAttribute('data-name')] = el.innerHTML;

// we could send an ajax request to update the field
/*
$.ajax({
url: window.location.toString(),
data: data,
type: 'post'
});
*/
log(JSON.stringify(data));

el.blur();
event.preventDefault();
}
}
}, true);

function log(s) {
document.getElementById('debug').innerHTML = 'value changed to: ' + s;
}

Live demo on JS Bin by Remy Sharp.

There has been a bunch of takes on responsive data tables since I first published about it.

View Demo

The idea of the original was to abandon the grid layout of the table and make each cell it's own line. Each of those lines is labeled with a pseudo element. This creates a much taller table, requiring more vertical scrolling, but does not require horizontal scrolling. It's easier to browse the data without losing context of what's what. The downside is that you might lose the context of data comparison, since you no longer see see cells of data right next to other cells of that type.

Mobifreaks published a very similar idea, which uses the same layout change and pseudo element labeling. They used HTML5 data-* attributes for the labeling, which removes the need to have custom CSS for different tables. I don't buy into the SEO part, but the code is good.

Derek Pennycuff took the original and applied the "mobile first" concept. Instead of starting with table markup it starts with definition list markup, then forces it into a table layout when the screen is large enough to accomodate it. While I love the thinking here, I'm not sure I like what it takes to get it done. The markup is much heavier and (ironically) I don't think it's semantic. Tabular data should be marked up as a table. I think the philosophy behind "mobile first" is keeping things simple and lighter by default and heavier and more complex for larger screens. This demo starts out and stays heavy.

Scott Jehl cooked up two clever ideas. One was to build a chart from the data in the table. In this demo it's pie chart that is much narrower than the complete data table and thus more suitable for small screens.

View Demo

Pretty cool, but clearly all tables can't be converted into charts. I'd also argue a data table and a chart are pretty different things. If you are going to go through the trouble of making a chart, it would probably be good to show that to the larger screen as well as it provides context in an useful alternative way. Or at least have an option to see it.

Scott's other idea focuses on the problem that large data tables can stretch out the width of a parent container beyond what a small screen is capable of displaying. So to prevent this, a media query is used to hide the table on small screens, replaced with a small mock-table and a link to view the full table.

View Demo
Stewart Curry had the idea of just hiding less important columns for smaller screens. One of people's earliest gripes of mobile-specific sites was that just because they are on a mobile device doesn't mean they deserve a less-than-full experience than a user with a larger screen (especially since these devices are totally capable of maneuvering around "full" sites).

View Demo

I think Stewart was on to something though. Using small screens to focus information to the most important things is great, it just shouldn't lock away information with no recourse. Maggie Costello Wachs of Filament Group also had the idea of hiding non-essential columns on smaller screens, but also providing a dropdown menu where you can re-enable them if you wish (which you can get to see with horizontal scrolling).

View Demo

David Bushell also tackled the idea of not altering the basic table format, but still solving the "too wide" problem. His concept flips the table on it's side and applies overflow-x: auto to the tbody meaning the data cells can scroll left and right if it breaks out of a small screen, but you still always see the headers (as if they were fixed position).

View Demo

Brad Czerniak has an idea he calls Rainbow Tables where on smaller screens the grid structure of the table is abandoned and the data cells are squished into each other as tight as they will go, while still being a "row". Then instead of the data be identified by which column it is in, the data is color coded to match a key.

View Demo

If you've seen or have an idea for more possibilities for responsive data tables, let us know in the comments below. I'll keep this post updated with all the design patterns for this I know about.

Responsive Data Table Roundup is a post from CSS-Tricks

Recently I judged the accessibility component of the Australian Web Awards. Time and time again I saw the same errors when it came to ALT attributes. Success Criterion 1.1.1 – the ALT attribute requirement – is a complicated success criterion.

Missing versus empty ALT attributes

Images must always have an ALT attribute. Don’t believe me? Then read When Not to Use an ALT Attribute and see if I can convince you.

ALT attributes are not TITLE attributes

TITLE attributes provide information on mouse hover. This is their purpose. The purpose of an ALT attribute is not to provide information on mouse hover – even though the ALT attribute does sometimes appear this way in certain browsers (such as Internet Explorer). The purpose of the ALT attribute is to provide an alternative, textual description of the image, for use by people who cannot access or see the image. So if you have some information that you want to appear to the user when hovering over an image, use the TITLE attribute, and keep the ALT attribute for describing the image.

Problems with ALT attributes

Also remember that ALT attributes (and TITLE attributes) are not available to keyboard users – therefore you should never put anything in an ALT attribute that isn’t conveyed by the image. That means no author or attribution text, dates or copyright information (unless it is displayed in the image itself).

Another issue occurs when people are browsing with images turned off. In Firefox, the ALT attribute is constricted to the size of the actual image – so if you have a 10 by 10 pixel GIF then it will be almost impossible to read the ALT attribute. In Internet Explorer the entire ALT attribute displays, but does not wrap, so can cause horizontal scrolling. In fact there has been an accessibility bug raised about this on Allybugs, and if you are interested you can co-sign the petition.

Writing ALT attributes

ALT attributes can be difficult to write. It is important to describe the function of the image, not the actual image itself (with one major exception: image galleries, which I will cover in another article). The context of an image will always inform what you should write in the ALT attribute. For example, an image of the world might have several different images, depending on its context within a site:

On a Greenpeace website it might say “Save our world”

On a travel website it might say “International travel”

On a University website it might say “We have campuses around the world”

On an auction website it might say “World globe approximately 30 cm in diameter, made of plastic and fully inflatable”

How long can ALT attributes be?

There are no hard and fast rules about the length of ALT attributes. The Working Group considered adding a 100 character maximum to the ALT attribute technique, but decided against it in WCAG2. While it might not be in the WCAG2 Techniques, it is a good rule to follow.

Next article I will be talking about specific ALT attribute requirements for images such as art, graphs, maps, links and images of text.

After seeing this map on The Guardian, I was curious about what other data was available from the National Highway Traffic Safety Association. It turns out there's a lot and it's relatively easy to access via FTP. What's most surprising is that it's detailed and fairly complete, with columns for weather, number of people involved, date and time of accidents, and a lot more.

The above shows vehicles involved in fatal crashes in 2010 (which is different from number of crashes or number of fatalities). This data was just released last month, at the end of 2011 oddly enough. It's a calendar view with months stacked on top of one another and darker days indicate more vehicles involved.

Nearly every single data point also has location attached to it, so I tried some mapping, but they look like population density more or less. Here's one that shows crashes that occurred on local roads (orange) and those on freeways, highways, etc (blue). Road patterns start to come out for the major interstates.

If you're a teacher looking for data to use with an assignment or just want to practice, this is a good set, despite the somber topic. You can find the data here, and there's an FTP link in the footer of the page to download more detailed data. You'll also need this guide [pdf] that defines all the variables.

As product managers we are constantly bombarded with requests:

Put this new feature in the product!

Drop everything - I need you to travel to a customer and do a product demo!

Quick, give me a competitive selling sheet by tomorrow!

We don't have a tech writer - you need to write the manual!

You have to talk to this customer and explain why our product can't do what they want!

And the list could go on and on...

If you don't learn to firmly say "No" then you become what we here at the 280 Group call a "Product Janitor" - always cleaning up other's messes and doing the work that no one else wants to do. If you aren't careful then you'll end up doing a lot of low-level work and have no time for the strategic (and most important) part of your Product Management job.

Here are some suggestions for how to say No more gracefully:

For feature requests implement a formal process for capturing requirements and communicate to everyone (many times) how you go about capturing and prioritizing requirements. Oftentimes all that your customers, salespeople, executives and others who insist on their pet feature being included just need to feel heard. And many times when you get to prioritization they will have completely forgotten about their request!
 

Clarify your role and responsibilities - what you DO and what you DON'T DO and proactively communicate this to everyone you interact with. Post it in your cube. Get your boss's support and backing. Then stick to it.
 

Practice saying No to another person. This may sound too simple to work, but I did this in a workshop once and it was amazing how many people had a hard time just saying No firmly. Have a friend or your spouse sit down with you and make several dozen requests and simply say No. Don't apologize. Don't try to justify why you can't do it. Just say No or "I'm sorry but I won't do that".
 

When you do say Yes ALWAYS be thinking about how to leverage it. If someone asks you to go to a customer to do a demo and you say yes let them know that you will only do it if they learn the demo so you don't have to do it again for them (and write out a demo script for them so you can use it with others.

So here is our challenge to you for 2012 - count how many times you say No in the next 30 days.

Then come back and comment on this post and tell us how many times you did it, what worked and what didn't.

Ampush Media, an online marketing startup, has acquired Academic Earth, an online education video site that’s sort of like a “Hulu for Education” and a Bill Gates-favorite. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As we’ve written in the past, Academic Earth is a user-friendly, curated platform for educational videos that allows anyone to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. The site offers 350 full courses and over 5,000 total lectures from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface.

Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.” Since the site’s launch in 2008, Academic Earth has grown to attract 400,000 unique visitors per month, primarily through word of mouth.

Gates is a big fan of Academic Earth, and even mentioned the startup in his newsletter from the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation, in 2010 as an idea that could help revolutionize online education.

Ampush Media also works in the online education space, developing a technology platform that helps students identify higher education options that fit their interests. The company says it plans to invest heavily in building out social and interactive user features to Academic Earth and adding new lecture material to the site.

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Experience the restart sequences from a number of operating systems, all from a single page. Love this. (via stellar)

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Lenovo wants to replicate the 2011 success found in Asus’s Transformer Prime tablet, showing off its own tablet with keyboard dock in the IdeaTab S2. No pricing or availability was announced on Sunday evening at the Consumer Electronics Show, but the hardware appears capable, will be running Google Android 4.0 out of the box, and runs for 20 hours with an optional keyboard dock.

 

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The 10-inch tablet is about one-third of an inch thick and weighs 1.1 pounds, making it one of the lightest 10-inch slates on the market. Instead of a quad-core CPU — something I expect to see quite a bit at CES this year — Qualcomm’s dual-core 8960 chip powers the S2, which should be plenty powerful enough. Like many other hardware-makers, Lenovo is putting it’s own software twist on the user interface with what it calls the Mondrian UI. The tile-like UI reminds me of Microsoft’s finger-friendly Metro interface.

Perhaps most appealing to potential tablet buyers is a hardware keyboard dock, reminiscent of Asus’s popular tablet. With it, Lenovo says the S2 can run for 20 hours on a single charge, due to an integrated battery in the dock. It’s a clever idea: Gain the usability of a keyboard and extend battery life at the same time.

I’ll be meeting with Lenovo representatives later this week and plan to get some hands on time with the S2, so watch for additional details. If Lenovo prices the S2 competitively and delivers the product soon, it will be interesting to see if it can capture some of the positive momentum Asus found last year with a similar Android tablet.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

The rise of tablets in the enterprise

Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust

Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

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A lot of the biggest Web successes in the past few years have been services that have achieved some sort of "check-in effect." By that I mean their users are actively checking in to their services for updates. Check the latest deal. Check my activity stream. Check on my farm. Check if there are more updates or comments.

This seems even more the case for mobile successes, where more traditional traction verticals (e.g. email, adwords) are less useful. The successful apps (more in the non-game space) make the home screens often because people want to check them repeatedly and often.

A lot of services could be recast slightly with the check-in effect in mind. For example, taking data sources and chopping them up into streams and push updates in some useful fashion, or highlighting trending topics. I've seen this most noticeably in LinkedIn's redone app.

Our marketing team made it to a total of 33 conferences this year, from New York to San Francisco, Orlando to Madison, and many places in between. We had a great time talking to educators, administrators, and other edtech aficionados at each one.

One of the highlights of the year was the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Philadelphia, where we unveiled a brand new booth to showcase our technology and give the conference attendees a chance to try out Knewton for themselves.

Here are a few pictures of the evolution of our booth (thanks to Spitball for their design help, and these pictures!):

The initial blueprint:

Time to add the graphics:

The finished product: 

Jessie and me in front of the booth in the EDUCAUSE exhibit hall: 

Finally, for a more comprehensive sense of what EDUCAUSE was like, here’s a fun timelapse video:

Of course, EDUCAUSE was just one of many great conferences we attended in 2011. Here’s the full list:

March:

General Education and Assessment 3.0: Next-Level Practices Now – New Orleans, LA

American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) Annual Conference – Seattle, WA

Sloan Blended Learning Conference 2011- Oak Brook, IL

April:

22nd International Conference on College Teaching and Learning – Ponte Verde Beach, FL

Education Innovation Summit – Scottsdale, AZ

American Association of Community Colleges Annual Convention – New Orleans, LA

National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics Annual Conference – Indianapolis, IN

Jessie and Charlie at Sloan-C in Orlando

May:

Degrees of Change: Private Sector Innovations Transforming Higher Education – Washington, DC

Learning Impact 2011 – Long Beach, CA

SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit – San Francisco, CA

The Conference on Instruction & Technology (CIT) – Oneonta, NY

June:

Educause Southeast Regional Conference – Charlotte, NC

2011 International Conference on Student Success – San Diego, CA

EduComm Conference 2011 – Orlando, FL

2011 Venture Capital in Education Summit – New York, NY

Goldman Sachs | Stanford University Global Education Conference – Palo Alto, CA

ISTE (International Society of Technology in Education) Conference – Philadelphia, PA

Jose speaking at FASTech in NY

 

July:

4th Annual Emerging Technologies for Online Learning International Symposium – San Jose, CA

Campus Technology Conference – Boston, MA

August:

27th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning – Madison, WI

September:

Schools for Tomorrow: Bringing Technology Into the Classroom – New York, NY

October:

MobilityShifts – New York, NY

U.S.-India Higher Education Summit – Washington, DC

National Summit on Education Reform 2011 – San Francisco, CA

World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education – Honolulu, HI

Educause National Conference - Philadelphia, PA

South Carolina EdTech 2011 Conference – Myrtle Beach, SC

November

FASTech Conference – Redwood City, CA

14th Annual Sloan-C International Confernce on Online Learning – Orlando, FL

Virtual School Symposium – Indianapolis, IN

New York State Association for Computers and Technologies in Education – Rochester, NY

You’ll find us at even more conferences in 2012! Check out our event schedule or subscribe to our Plancast page to hear about our conference plans on an ongoing basis.

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There is a rumour that an imminent Apple event is going to concentrate on two large educational projects, a subject area that was close to the heart for Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs.

Insiders and those ‘in the know’ are reporting a strong possibility that one of these projects is based around the iTunes and iBook stores storing and providing digital textbooks, eBooks, or eTextbooks.

“MacRumors reported that Apple has filmed promotional interviews with executives from the textbook publishing industry, possibly affirming that this upcoming event will focus on digital textbooks. They noted that while these interviews have indeed been worked on, there is no confirmation that they relate to this upcoming event.”

The other big project is rumoured, by Goodreader, to put Apple in direct competition with Amazon (again) by making it easier for self-published work to be made available through the iBook store. It is recognised that content that Amazon and B&N provide with the Kindle and Nook devices make these devices enough of a threat to Apple to mean this attempt from Apple could be a way to redress the balance? Expect a handsome percentage from any book sale to go to Apple before you, the author, gets a look in though.

So, here’s your chance to say what you’d pay, or expect to pay, for a digital edition of the paper-copy. Bearing in mind the costs involved in getting a paper-copy to of a (e.g.) $30.00 textbook to the shop (based on the figures in the Guardian: ‘The true price of publishing‘) are in the region of 10% ($3.00) to print and distribute the book, how much of the remaining 90% is for the author, editor, reviewer, etc?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

The poll will run until February 1st, 2012.

Image source: Elio Rojano

Related posts:

Poll – “Where do you host your academic / training videos?”

Poll – “Which term do you like/use for your student-centred ‘learning environment’?”

WordPress Plugin #11: Poll

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The early days of web development were a thrill as new technologies and techniques were discovered. We experienced a few stagnant years in the middle of last decade but, thanks to HTML5, web development has become exciting again. In particular, CSS3 is evolving rapidly and you’ll find some interesting gems in the specifications.

In this article, we’re going to examine the CSS cursor property which, as you’d expect, allows you to change the cursor style as the mouse moves over an element. It’s become increasingly important for interactive web applications…

CSS2 Cursor Styles

CSS2 offered relatively few options (hover over any element to see how the cursor changes):

cursor: auto

cursor: inherit

cursor: crosshair

cursor: default

cursor: help

cursor: move

cursor: pointer

cursor: progress

cursor: text

cursor: wait

cursor: e-resize

cursor: ne-resize

cursor: nw-resize

cursor: n-resize

cursor: se-resize

cursor: sw-resize

cursor: s-resize

cursor: w-resize

CSS3 Cursor Styles

We have more styles to choose from in CSS3. These work in IE9 and the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera except where indicated:

cursor: none (not IE, Safari, Opera)

cursor: context-menu (not Firefox, Chrome)

cursor: cell (not Safari)

cursor: vertical-text

cursor: alias (not Safari)

cursor: copy (not Safari)

cursor: no-drop

cursor: not-allowed

cursor: ew-resize

cursor: ns-resize

cursor: nesw-resize

cursor: nwse-resize

cursor: col-resize

cursor: row-resize

cursor: all-scroll

Browser-Specific Cursors

Mozilla and some editions of Chrome and Safari offer a number of vendor-prefixed cursor styles which are likely to become part of the CSS3 specification:

cursor: -webkit-grab; cursor: -moz-grab;

cursor: -webkit-grabbing; cursor: -moz-grabbing;

cursor: -webkit-zoom-in; cursor: -moz-zoom-in;

cursor: -webkit-zoom-out; cursor: -moz-zoom-out;

Creating Your Own Cursor

Finally, you can create your own cursor graphic, e.g.

cursor: url(images/cursor.cur);
cursor: url(images/cursor.png) x y, auto;

Note:

Internet Explorer requires a Windows cursor file (.cur).

Firefox, Chrome and Safari require an image — I’d recommend a 24-bit alpha-transparent PNG.

Firefox also requires a second non-URL cursor fallback value.

It’s not supported in Opera.

x and y are optional properties in Firefox, Chrome and Safari which define the precise pointer position from the top-left of the graphic. If omitted, 0 0 is assumed.

Nice, but it sounds like too much effort to me! I’ll be sticking with the standard cursor styles…

Business strategists have long preached the advice, “Adapt or die.” Adaptation is happening in the social pond with a user’s social graphs influencing online and offline decisions. A user’s community is more important than ever. Businesses are mining online communities for valuable consumer information that can influence every phase in their go-to-market cycle, from product innovation to fostering repeat purchases. The definitive tome on the social movement, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies,...read more
By Kristin Zibell

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For a number of years, my partner Jason Mendelson has been teaching an extremely popular course at CU Boulder Law School with Brad Bernthal titled Venture Capital – A 360 Degree Perspective. While it’s a course taught in the law school, it’s (not surprisingly) become popular with the MBA students at CU Boulder.

Brad Bernthal, Phil Weiser (the Dean of the CU Law School), and I have been talking about a new course to complement VC 360 called Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Public Policy. We’ve decided to take a crack at a cross-campus course (law, engineering, and business) that focused on contemporary issues around entrepreneurship, would be a great introduction to any student who wants to immerse herself in entrepreneurship, and would enable us to create some unique content around this topic.

We envision a two hour a week course (over seven sessions) that has a heavy reading, class participation, and writing component. Our goal will be to put this up on the web as well to provide content (and potentially interaction) to a much wider community.

Following is a first draft of a syllabus. I’m looking for two types of feedback: (1) comments on the syllabus and (2) suggestions for web services to use to package this content up for broader distribution.

This one credit course, available to first year law students in their second semester as well as a select number of graduate students in the Business School students and School of Engineering, will explore a set of cutting edge questions around entrepreneurship.  Students in the class will be required to write a ten page paper as well as participate actively in the course (including on a class blog).  Since class participation is a core part of the course (counting for 20% of the grade, with the other 80% based on the paper), any missed class must be made up by writing a 1 page reaction paper.

1. Being an Entrepreneur. Reading: The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (Hoffman, Casnocha). Five Minds for the Future (Gardner).

2. Leadership and What Makes a Great Founding Team. Reading: Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup:  (Cohen, Feld). Leadership Lessons From the Shackleton Expedition (Koehn).

3. Building and Scaling A Business. Reading: The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (Ries).

4. Entrepreneurial Communities. Reading: Startup Communities: Creating A Great Entrepreneurial Ecosystem In Your City (Feld). Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity 1996 – 2010.

5. Financing Entrepreneurial Companies. Reading: Venture Deals: How To Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer (Mendelson, Feld). Improving Access to Capital for High-Growth Companies (Department of Commerce – National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship)

6. Entrepreneurial Leadership in Government. Reading: Alfred Kahn As A Case Study of A Political Entrepreneur (Weiser). Start-up Nation:  The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (Senor and Singer).

7. Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy: Reading: Accelerating Energy Innovation: Insights from Multiple Sectors (Henderson, Newell).

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I really like the 60-Second Solutions videos on Entrepreneur.com. I thought that the recent video by communications coach Carmine Gallo on creating a 60 second strategy to tell your story was especially useful.

Sometimes it’s hard to explain to people what it is you really do. Many people hear the word ‘freelancer’ and don’t quite understand what it means, other than you probably work from home in your pajamas.

Gallo suggests you come up with one sentence answers to the following four questions to keep your “What I Do” story to 60 seconds.

What do you do?

Are you a graphic designer? A freelancer writer or photographer? Do you have a niche or topic (like small business, agriculture, health) that you concentrate on? Turn this into one sentence. Example: I am a freelance blogger and I write about small business financing for several online magazines.

What problem do you solve?

If you don’t solve a problem…then why do you exist? Maybe you are a wedding photographer and work with couples to capture their big day. Maybe you have an MBA and share small business advice for newspapers and websites. Maybe you create logos to help companies better brand themselves. Whatever you do—put it in the context of how your services solve a problem. Example:

I help small businesses create and implement a social media marketing plan.

How are you different?

Competition is everywhere, and you need to know what makes you better than the next guy that does the same thing you do. Why do you prefer to shop at Home Depot rather than Lowes? Target rather than Walmart? Pat’s Pizza rather than Jason’s Pizza?

Is their customer service better? Prices better? Does their pizza delivery guy show up faster? Use your talents and experience to tout yourself. Example:

I have an MFA in graphic design and stay up to date with the latest trends and technology by attending professional development workshops twice a year.

Why should people care?

Tell people how you are going to make their life easier. Maybe you are a whiz at creating compelling websites and will take the time to teach your clients how to manage them on their own. Maybe you have contacts in the media and can help promote your clients news and events effectively through press releases and social media marketing. Maybe you know of a way to help your client’s business run more efficiently, saving them money in the long run. Example:

I have a database of media contacts throughout the state and can help you promote your annual fundraiser by creating press releases and writing stories for the local newspapers.

Once you get these sentences down, practice them in front of a mirror. Then head out to a networking event and try them out. Someone might not ask you all four questions at the same time, but it’s still good to have a response ready and waiting.

By keeping your answers to one sentence, you keep from rambling on about yourself. Being succinct shows that you really know your business and are comfortable and confident talking about whatever it is that you have built your freelancing career on doing. Don’t be afraid to ask other people the same four questions—see if their responses are as good as yours!

HTML5 Angry Birdshttp://www.infoq.com/presentations/Angry-Birds-on-HTML5
Focused on desktop and not mobile. Nice low key presentation on the issues facing HTML5 game developers including 60 fps performance considerations such as garbage collection, splitting rendering and game physics logic.

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Remember Cow Clicker? This great Wired article by Jason Tanz is worth a (long) read:

And then something surprising happened: Cow Clicker caught fire. The inherent virality of the game mechanics Bogost had mimicked, combined with the publicity, helped spread it well beyond its initial audience of game-industry insiders. Bogost watched in surprise and with a bit of alarm as the number of players grew consistently, from 5,000 soon after launch to 20,000 a few weeks later and then to 50,000 by early September. And not all of those people appeared to be in on the joke.

See also: The Life-Changing $20 Rightward-Facing Cow.

∞ Permalink

Here's Joel Spolsky's latest post and project. Worth a read if you think about software, business models or how people use Excel.

And Clay Shirky's latest is about the future of newspapers. Again and again, he's right.

Any day when you can learn something new from either of these guys is a good day. Hard to imagine that just six years ago, knowledge like this was carefully hidden or non-existent.

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