Virgin America, a new low-cost carrier based in San Francisco, is set for an Aug. 8 takeoff. The carrier has faced some turbulent skies due in part to its partial ownership by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Initial routes are San Francisco to New York’s JFK and LAX, with additional service from San Francisco to Las Vegas and Washington Dulles planned. Flights from LAX to Las Vegas (August) and Washington Dulles (October) are also planned.
Virgin America is an airline that any technologist will love. See my entry on the technology that Virgin America offers, including a high-end open source entertainment system, live DirecTV, a real power plug (no adapter required) at every seat and inflight Internet access. You can also chat with others on the airplane with seat-to-seat messaging. The in-flight entertainment system offers so many features, it’s the first airline I know of that publishes an acceptable use policy on its Web site.
Initial pricing is cheap with SFO-LAX priced at $44 one way and SFO-JFK at $139. (No roundtrip purchase required.) First class is also offered, at modest prices. A first class ticket from Dulles to San Francisco is $389. A comparable ticket on United is more than $800. I should say “comparable,” because Virgin America offers much more legroom with 55″ seat pitch and massaging seats.
It’s no coincidence that Virgin has chosen routes full of tech savvy travelers. This is likely to put a lot of pressure on United and jetBlue, which offer a lot of service on these routes. Ordinarily, giants like United compete by flooding the market with low-priced seats. The technological advantage may be harder to overcome.
Virgin’s biggest obstacle may be the corporate travel managers who hold back the stampede of travelers who want to fly their airline.
The shift in methodology puts AOL at the top of the list and Google at #5. This can be attributed to two factors:
AOL gets a lot of its traffic from mail and instant messaging. From a time spent perspective, these are hugely engaging applications. They are also hard to monetize.
The best search engines get the user to what they are looking for as fast as possible. This hurts the time spent number, but provides great opportunities to deliver relevant advertising.
From an investing standpoint, getting people to spend time on your site only matters if you can get advertisers to pay for that time. Otherwise, you’re incurring extra costs to serve those people for longer.
Put another way, would you rather make $300 for 1 hour worth of work or $300 for eight hours worth of work?
Today marks the one year anniversary of this blog. I’m at 271 posts over the year (including this one).
It’s been a lot of fun. Writing this blog has given me a creative outlet and more reasons to explore all the great things people are doing out there. It has also allowed me to reconnect with some old friends and to make some new ones. I love looking at the logs and seeing visitors from Estonia, Germany, Switzerland, France, India.
I hope you’ve found it entertaining and informative. If you have suggestions, please leave them below.
Random fact: Originally, the name of the blog was going to be re:Design. I had to give up on that because My Yahoo! choked on the colon and people who were using My Yahoo! couldn’t add it to their page.
FastCompany has an in-depth look at the economics of the bottled water industry. It looks at the distribution costs and environmental impact of shipping water 2/3s of the way around the world to places where you can just open the tap and get clean, safe water. (Kudos to the reporter for snagging a boondoggle to Fiji for the story!)
The market is huge, as is the environmental impact. From the FastCompany story:
Americans spent $15 billion last year on bottled water
50 billion plastic water bottles were thrown away last year
1 billion bottles of water are moved around each week in the U.S. on ships, trains and trucks
Much of the bottled water we buy isn’t spring water - it’s purified tap water. Aquafina (from Pepsi) accounts for 13% of the market and Dasani (from Coke) is 11%. Both get their water from city water supplies and further purify it.
As much as we love to complain about the price of gasoline, most bottled water is more expensive per gallon.
The picture below (via Chris Sacca) illustrates the amount of oil it takes to transport the bottles to the Bay Area of California. The water comes from Calistoga, Ca., France and New Zealand.
Water does taste different around the world. I’m not a big fan of the taste of Arlington’s tap water. After visiting Iceland, I’ve been buying Iceland Spring water. But this picture is making me rethink that.
I went to see Live Free or Die Hard tonight. In addition to the pure mindless fun of two hours of chase scenes and car explosions, there’s the fun of talking about all the things that are so ridiculous afterward:
Although the movie is set in DC, the buildings are too tall, the crowd scenes are too white and the tunnel that is a key focus of the action doesn’t exist.
Jets and helicopters can’t maneuver the way they do.
The stereotypical movie computers that are in big airy rooms with flashing lights and displays. Real data centers tend to be sterile, freezing and cramped.
In case you haven’t seen the first three movies, here’s a fun video that will catch you up. You don’t want to miss the fine nuances of the plot.
The story of the video itself is interesting. Originally Guyz Nite included clips from the first three movies. After studio lawyers insisted the band take it down, the marketing department came back and paid them to add clips from the fourth movie and put it back up.
The Smart is coming to the United States. Smart, part of Mercedes, is a tiny car that you’ll often see in Europe. The car holds two people and two bags.
I rented two of these in Italy in 2002. When I called Avis to reserve a car, they didn’t even offer the Smart because they just assumed that Americans wouldn’t want something this tiny.
I loved it. It was great on the narrow roads and you can park it anywhere. It even made it up the hills in Tuscany.
I can see it being really useful in cities like New York and San Francisco where parking is tight and environmental concern is higher. The car is expected to get 40 mpg. It’d be a great addition to the fleet of carsharing services like Zipcar and Flexcar.
The base version will go for about $12,000. A convertible version will also be available.
Aside from Apple, you rarely see the kind and volume of media attention that Facebook is getting right now.
The exposure is deserved. Among the various social networks I’ve been on, my Facebook network has grown the fastest by far. They’re executing as well as I’ve seen a company execute.
The activity on the Facebook platform is not only helping Facebook, it’s helping the partners. Months back, someone sent me a link to Flixster, a movie recommendation site. I played with it for a few minutes and then gave up. (If I review a movie and no one is there to read my review, does it make a sound?) Now that Flixster is a Facebook app and I can see 12 of my friends using it, I’m using it much more often.
KURTZ: Do younger Facebook users — let’s be honest here — resent that their little playground has been invaded by some of the geezers we’re talking to today?
COX: You know, I wonder if they do. I mean, I know that our intern at “TIME” was on Facebook long before anyone else at the office was. And she admits — she brought up in an edit meeting once — that everybody at Facebook was really upset when they first had viewed the newsfeed because it made all your information public.
And everyone around the table said, “But wait a minute. You’re on Facebook. Everything is already public.”
We didn’t understand what her problem was. And she felt clearly upset that we were ignorant of what she thought the parameters of privacy were.
So I don’t think that there’s — there are different rules for the age groups, I think, as Jeff laid out.
But declining a “friend” request from a colleague or a boss is a slight. So, Mr. Dyer accepted the invitation, then removed any inappropriate or incriminating photos of himself — “I’d rather speak vaguely about them,” he says — and accepted the boss’s invitation.
Mr. Dyer, it turns out, wasn’t the one who had to be embarrassed. His boss had photos of himself attempting to imbibe two drinks at once, ostensibly, Mr. Dyer ventures, to send the message: “I’m a crazy, young party guy.” The boss also wore a denim suit (”I’d never seen anything like it,” Mr. Dyer says) and posed in a photo flashing a hip-hop backhand peace sign.
It was painful to watch. “I hurt for him,” says Mr. Dyer.
A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.
The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced Tuesday, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.
In today’s Web world, they’re a terrible measure of user engagement. A user who spends 10 minutes watching a video or 15 minutes engaged in a flash game counts the same as a user who hit your site by accident from a search engine.
Even for non-multimedia experiences, chasing page views can create terrible user experiences. Consider some examples:
Splitting news stories onto separate pages. Each page of the story counts as a page view. Not only is the paging annoying to the user, it hurts the way your pages are indexed making it harder for people to find your content in search engines. It’s been a while since I worked in the news business, but I’d love to see what the drop offs are at each page.
Pointless confirmation pages. Many sites take you to confirmation pages just so they can count the additional page.
Popups/popunders/etc. I read a story while back about a publisher using popup- and popunder-ads to pump their page view numbers.
Ignoring page view metrics has created some great experiences:
Google Maps. If you drag the map around the screen, you count as one page view. But to the user this is much easier and a much better experience than the old model of clicking an arrow on the side of the screen and waiting for the page to refresh.
YouTube’s embedded videos. If they’d been chasing page views, they never would have allowed users to embed videos on their own blogs.
Yahoo’s streaming quotes. You don’t have to refresh the page to see the latest stock price.
Flash-based instant messaging. You can chat with your friends without having to download and install a special client.
Not only are they much better experiences, it can save the publisher money. It takes less bandwidth and processing power to send down just the updated information than it does to generate and send an entire page.
Nielsen’s time-on-site measurement is an improvement over page views, but as with any single measurement it can be gamed. The best managers will look at a range of metrics specific to their situation.
As I was writing the posts on the product development process, I thought of a number of the questions that I ask when I’m designing the actual product.
The thoughts below are based on more than 12 years of product management experience at companies ranging in size from 18 (uReach) to 15,000 (AOL) people. Although all of my experience is in the Internet business, many of these questions are generally applicable.
What is the problem I’m trying to solve?
Try to distill your product concept into a few sentences. A paragraph at the most. Having a concise, focused problem will help when making priority calls. You can compare feature line items against this statement to see if the feature is core or if it’s a bell/whistle.
Why am I building this?
There are many reasons for launching products. Generating revenue is the obvious one. But you might also be launching a product to fend off a competitor or to build long-term engagement with your audience. If you’re a startup, your primary objective may be to get awareness of your company and your product.
Although you can have multiple objectives, it’s important to know the relative priority. If a feature would reduce revenue, but increase engagement, you need to know which is more important.
Who am I building this for?
If you’re building a product for senior citizens, it’ll be very different than if you’re building it specifically for teens. This should affect everything, from the design of the UI down to the tone of the text in your help files.
The most important thing to remember here is that chances are, you aren’t building this product for you.
At my first job, I built the publishing tools for startribune.com. News stories could go into buckets like St. Paul news, Minneapolis news, etc. I wanted the option to get Minneapolis and St. Paul news at the same time. I wanted to be able to control how many stories appeared on each page of the results and how much of each story appears in summary form. The controls were cool. But they added to the complexity of the architecture and the UI. And I was one of the few people using them.
How am I going to measure success?
The answers to “Why am I building this?” should help with this question. If not, you may want to make sure your objectives are clear.
If you’re being measured primarily on comScore page views, first try to talk to your boss and come up with a better metric. You can create really bad user experiences chasing this metric. But if you’re stuck with this, it’s important to know that going in.
Most likely, there will be multiple metrics. You need to know the interaction among these metrics.
There will probably be custom metrics for your product. If a key metric is how many people invite their friends, the application needs to log that. Knowing your metrics up front allows you to get them into the requirements and have the measurement tools built.
What are my competitors up to?
You need to look at the competition from all angles: features, pricing, distribution strategy. If all of your competitors are giving away a product and you’re trying to charge for it, you’re unlikely to be successful. (Unless you can articulate a fundamental difference; see below.)
The competitive landscape is constantly changing and will change as you build your product. You can’t (and shouldn’t) respond to every move your competitors make during that time. But if there’s a significant shift in the environment, you might want to reassess your plans.
What makes my product different?
I’m not a big fan of “me too” products. While it’s tempting to copy success, you need to thoroughly analyze the situation first. You may not achieve the same level of success because your audience is fundamentally different from your competitors. There may be network effects or switching costs that are tough to overcome. You need to know what the drivers of their success are and how they apply to your business.
At one job, I was asked to copy eBay. I did the analysis and found that even if we paid our users to list on our site, the network effects were so strong that they were still better off listing on eBay. We couldn’t get the liquidity needed.
Google Maps is a great example of a product that was late to market, but isn’t a “me too”. They came into a space with entrenched competitors and did something really different that had a large impact on the space. (VentureBeat has a good story on the creators of Google Maps, who recently left to join Benchmark Capital.)
It’s important to stick to key established conventions. You don’t want your product to be so different that users don’t know how to use it. North is still up on Google Maps.
What’s going to make people fall in love with my product?
The truly great products are the ones people become addicted to. Think about the products that you love and why you love them. Can any of those attributes be translated to your product?
Some of the products I love: Apple TV, flickr, Facebook, Google Maps. For Apple TV and Google Maps, I love the elegance and simplicity. For flickr and Facebook, it’s that plus staying connected.
Talk to your target market and find out what they love and see if you can identify common themes.
Getting people to fall in love with your product will help with getting them to spread the word and having them develop add ons for you. You want people writing blog posts titled “I (heart) your product” (See below.) I have a friend who names her car and other products she loves. You want to stir that kind of passion.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of my company?
Your company may have products, features or relationships that can make your product successful or create barriers to entry for others. A number of the products I designed at AOL were based on the Buddy List, which provided an instant network of tens of millions of networks. That’s an asset very few companies have, creating a significant advantage.
These benefits need to be weighed against the integration costs. If it’s going to take an extra 6 months to integrate those features, you may want to phase that in.
If you’re at a large company, it may have a reputation that casts a negative shadow on your product. There are lots of factors that can influence people’s perception of your product before they even try it. For example, if your company is perceived as one that sticks lots of ads in all of its products, you may want to go the other way and deliberately have fewer ads than you planned.
Some weaknesses can be addressed in functionality, others in positioning and marketing.
How can I get my product out faster?
Time to market is critical. You can always polish later. What are the key elements of your product that users will value? Get those out as fast as you can and iterate on them. There’s no point building for the perfect experience at launch; you won’t ever get it.
But if you get something out and iterate from it, you’ll learn from real users.
How will search engines see my product?
If you’re building an Internet product, it’s impossible to overestimate the impact of search engines. You need to think hard about how search engines will see your product. This includes your URLs, link structure, keywords, images and a lot more.
Unfortunately, in some cases the things you do to be search-engine friendly are detrimental to the user experience. It’s usually a tradeoff worth making. Without the search engine traffic, you’ll have a lot fewer users.
On the plus side, many of the things you need to for search engines (such as ALT tags on images) make your site more accessible for people with disabilities.
How can I get users to spread the word?
Getting users to talk about your product increases the likelihood of success and reduces your marketing costs. It works even better when the other person gets drawn in through some immediate, direct benefit. e-cards are a great example of this. You become aware of the service through getting the benefit of the greeting card sent to you.
This does not mean spamming your users’ friends. Any time you use a friend’s email address for your marketing, it should be clear to the user that that’s what’s happening. Disclosure should be obvious, not buried in fine print.
Spreading the word includes widgets, modules and badges. Think of ways users can incorporate your product into their blog, social networking site, feeds, etc.
Pay special attention when designing incentives. If you’re running a contest, make sure that users have an incentive to tell their friends. In one contest I designed, the prizes were paired; if your friend won, you automatically won the same prize. Instead of each friend reducing your chances of winning, each friend increased your chance of winning.
Whose help do I need to get this to market?
If you need the help of a big company for distribution, say a wireless carrier, you need to learn all you can about their needs as fast as you can. You will likely have to make changes to your product or plans to meet their needs.
It can take years to get a deal done. Even when you think you’re close to signing, there could be a last minute re-org and all the people you were talking to are gone and you’re back at step one. I had this happen to me repeatedly at uReach. Marc’s Moby Dick theory of large companies is dead on.
How can I get others to help build my product?
Google, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook have all been very successful in getting the Internet community to build new products around using their open APIs. Even relatively obscure products like the Squeezebox have thriving developer communities. These users are more than just developers; they’re evangelists. Nik Cubrilovic has a post on the importance of APIs that’s worth reading.
As powerful as APIs can be, you don’t want to take them lightly. You can’t just throw out an API and expect the developer community to flock to you. You need to have sufficient documentation, sample applications, code samples and support forums. You also need to recognize and reward developers who do interesting things.
Ideally, your own product experience is built off your APIs. This gives you a chance to field test them and helps to identify holes in documentation.
How will users abuse my product?
People will always find ways to abuse a product. You should spend time thinking about how people might abuse yours. Some things, like spam, you want to head off early.
My preferred approach is to identify potential areas of abuse and be ready to respond quickly. Sometimes the best uses for your product might be discovered by your users; if you’re overly restrictive at the outset, you might never find those.
Who am I going to piss off?
I had a lot of fun with this. I wrote up a list of the different groups that my product might upset. For each group, I brainstormed their likely objections and what features I could build that enhanced the product but also helped assuage their concerns. If I couldn’t build around it, I figured out how I could position the objectionable features.
If you’re not pissing someone off, you’re probably doing something not worth doing. (Especially if you’re a startup.) Pissing people off isn’t all bad; it can be useful for raising awareness. I hadn’t paid attention to YouTube until the Lazy Sunday controversy with NBC. Come to think of it, I hadn’t paid attention to SNL until the Lazy Sunday controversy with YouTube.
But if you think that you’re going to piss off the RIAA or MPAA, be sure you have your lawyers as your five.
I’ve been using it for about six weeks; it’s a great service. One thing that really stands out about GrandCentral is its use of call detail records, the log of all calls made and received. GrandCentral lets you use CDRs effectively to keep track of what is going on in your life.
Among the features:
See who called and when, even if they didn’t leave a message
See how long you talked for
Add notes about a conversation
Playback voicemail messages
Playback a recording of the call, if you recorded the call
Block specific callers
Map the caller’s location
Telcos have long relegated CDRs to back-end systems for things like billing. The only time I can see my CDRs with Sprint is when I get my bill. Some carriers don’t provide CDRs at all.
VOIP services like Vonage are providing near-real time records, but typically treat them as just logs. GrandCentral is the first I’ve seen that lets you truly use your CDRs to manage your communications. (We came close at uReach.)
Imagine GrandCentral integrated into Gmail. You’d be able to search for someone and see emails, voicemails and your calls in the results.
That’s just for starters.
CDRs can be extremely powerful. It’s a cop show cliche that one of the first things they do after finding a body is dump the victim’s LUDs. Calling patterns are an effective way to identify relationships among people. That raises all sorts of interesting (and some scary) possibilities.
If you want a GrandCentral invite, shoot me an email.
Virgin America, a new low-cost carrier based in San Francisco, is set for an Aug. 8 takeoff. The carrier has faced some turbulent skies due in part to its partial ownership by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Initial routes are San Francisco to New York’s JFK and LAX, with additional service from San Francisco to Las Vegas and Washington Dulles planned. Flights from LAX to Las Vegas (August) and Washington Dulles (October) are also planned.
