Juixe Techknow

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Foursquare style check-ins is a feature not a product. Facebook Places has proven that location base check-ins are a feature easily implemented. That said, Foursquare and other location based services have tried to wrap social games and compulsion loops into their products in the form of mayorships and badges to make the check-in process more meaningful. But as a feature, as opposed to a product, checking into a place, restaurant, or business does not scratch any real business itch. I understand that to a brick and mortar business, having an idea of how often your customers are near your business and marketing to them when they are can be beneficial, but if all Foursquare is doing is checking in then users will eventually experience check-in burnout.

Location based check-ins is a feature and to one degree or another you can lock in your location on Facebook Places, Yelp, Google Buzz, Twitter, Gowalla, etc. But aside from running for mayor of my local dollar store and racking up some virtual badges there is little benefit or purpose for the end user. The missing piece of location base services is commerce, making users into customers.

Like most folks, I hate waiting in line at a restaurant. Too often when you are stuck in line you have someone crowding into your personal space, you feel like you are just wasting time standing there waiting to order some food, and worst is when people call in and their order is taken before yours. Wouldn’t it be great if you can use a location base service to indicate that you are near your favorite taqueria and have the ability to order right there using a mobile app? If Foursquare could do this, I wouldn’t mind given them my credit card number, turning me from a free loading user to paying customer.

There a ton of apps on the iTunes app store that use users’ location to find a store or deal nearby. The Groupon app can locate deals nearby. The Macy’s iShop app has a store locator that uses your phone’s location. If McDonald’s or Starbucks had a location base mobile app that allowed me to order from half a block down by charging my card and had my items ready as I walked in, that would add so much more value to the mobile app user, establishment, and location based service.

The resume as you know it is dead. Having a great resume and a perfect cover letter is not enough of a differentiator. Every candidate will have the same alphabet soup of buzzwords and they all list the same excellent communication and interpersonal soft skills in their resume. Any hiring manager will have the same experience of looking at inbox full of resumes that read the same. There is very little scientific method in the hiring process, it’s mostly voodoo. One way passionate candidates distance themselves from apathetic candidates is by learning a new programming language on their own, by contributing to open source projects, and by blogging and teaching what they’ve learned.

Recruiters are constantly looking for top candidates outside the traditional job boards, career fairs, job listings. There have been many instances where coders land job interviews because of their top rated technology blog, or their Stack Overflow reputation, or their side project in GitHub.

Recently, two stories made the front page of Hacker News that demonstrates that working running demonstrable code is better than sending out your static resume.

After Google released it’s Search Instant feature, Stanford student Feross Aboukhadijeh used the publicly available YouTube API to develop YouTube Instant. Feross was contacted by YouTube CEO Chad Hurley and offered a job via a tweet.

Designer Rodrigo Galindez gets hired by Zendesk after posting his thoughts and UI mockup to improve the new Twitter design.

As a candidate, you have to think outside the box, outside the resume. Every candidate will have a nice crisp resume. You can’t possibly distinguish yourself from other candidate by the format, font, or flow of your resume. Where appropriate be sure to highlight your contribution to open source projects, technical blog, of even the small natural language pet project written in scheme you might be tinkering with.

#ProgrammerPickupLines is a hashtag that will never trend on Twitter. Recently, some lonely nerds tired of playing with their debuggers on a Friday night tried to start a #ProgrammerPickupLines trend on Twitter. These are the type of pickup lines that only another programmer can enjoy, and since programmers came up with them, they are buggy and not what the client (women) want. Below are some of my favorite and perhaps the most desperate programmers pickup lines.

• @InfinitiesLoop: // TODO: YOU #ProgrammerPickupLines :P
• @csharphacker: hmm… I’d like to peek at your socket #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @BenAlabaster: Will you treat me like an object? #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @djg: I am immutable… but I’d change for you #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @lfborjas: for a ruby you wanted, i’d kill a twisted set of pythons #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @baugher: You’re more beautiful than a constant-time sorting algorithm. #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @JoshLessard: You’re so hot, you make me prematurely exit my for-loops. #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @BenAlabaster: If you like to Swing, my whole framework is at your IDisposable #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @JoshLessard: Baby, this will be the best hex you’ve ever had. #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @BenAlabaster: You had me at “Hello World!” #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @JoshLessard: Baby, you’ve got the nicest critical section I’ve ever seen. Ditch these threads and let me in! #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @BenAlabaster: Ooh baby, you’re causing my privates to raise events I didn’t know they had. #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @JoshLessard: I’d like to put my Element in your Vector. #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @rc_dickerson: Are your pants implemented using reflection? Because I can see myself in them. #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @xandercoded: Could I #invoke your #function with my #parameters?! #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @InfinitiesLoop: You implement me. #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @_KYA: Come home with me and I’ll corrupt your heap. #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @akroncdnr: Wanna come back to my place? Maybe issue a little mount or finger, you know, see what happens? #ProgrammerPickupLines
• @SyntaxC4: Are you into Inversion of Control? #ProgrammerPickupLines

Another programmer oriented Twitter trend was Songs in Code, which actually made the Twitter trend hot list back in 2009.

Hard core techies have been able to stream online content to their televisions for years! Even as far back as 4-5 years ago you could have streamed content through XBox and manage it through Media Center. I know some several folks that are using a general purpose Mac Mini connected to a TV to streamline video podcasts and movies purchased on iTunes. The smart TV will be big in the next several years, especially since all the major technology players are heavily investing in it. Google recently announce Google TV, Yahoo! has been working for years on enhancing television viewing experience with TV widgets.

You can find internet ready connected televisions from your favorite brands at retailers like Costco and content delivery companies are partnering with anyone they can to provide on demand streaming of video content. Netflix is going through a metamorphosis process where it knowns it’s business of sending out DVDs in little red envelopes is starting to shrink ad it has partnered up with console maker Nintendo and Microsoft to provide movies and shoes on demand.

Apple wants to do to the movie and television business what it did to music, control it from top to bottom. Apple came to dominate the online music sale by a two prong approach, through iTunes music store and iPod music player. To move into a delivering movies and television shows online it needs to develop a similar approach. Apple needs both the online retail side and the television set-top box. With a mix of hardware and software, Apple can lock down to platform and lock out out players like it has in App Store/iPhone mobile environment and the iTunes/iPod music space. If Apple can get into your living room by making the easiest possible device that can stream music and movies and apps to your television it can push a lot of product.

Apple has a track record of making seamless products in terms of industrial design and user experience. This is their strength, and compared to other products in the market Apple TV will be a more attractive choice, especially for those that don’t want to read forums all day to make things work together. The only forceable set back is that people are really interested in another set-top box! Most households already have a game console, cable box, blu-ray player, and what not connected to their television set. The future of Apple TV is to make the television with the necessary hardware and software built in to connect with with it’s iTunes store. Apple has plenty of experience making hardware, it currently makes a beautiful 27-inch iMac. I could see Apple easily adding a 32-inch and 40-inch to their product line. Apple won’t just make another television, it won’t be a Vizio. I could see an Apple branded television set, maybe an iMac HDTV, with built in app support, touch enabled, online streaming, and more.

The future of the Apple TV is not as a set-top box, it’s the as a iMac HDTV! In addition to touch, it would need a new revolutionary user interface, per se gesture base a la Minority Report. This is why I’m getting an Apple TV, not because of what I can do now, but what it will be in a few years out.

It comes as a no surprise to technologist that Google would pull the plug on Google Wave, I just didn’t expect it so soon. I also didn’t expect Google to kill it’s Google Nexus One phone. As a user of Google products, I am always apprehensive to use new Google products because they have a track record of just dropping support for products they deemed unsuccessful with little or no notice. Google has been known to buy products like Jaiku and Dodgeball only to kill them after a year. The other products that I have used and Google has killed include Google Notebook, Google Video, and Google Page Creator. This is one reason I would not use any Google product still in beta, which is most of Google’s products, for mission critical applications. Most of Google’s consumer applications are free, such as Google Docs, Google Mail, and Google Search but only because they provide zero customer support. In fact, you have a better change of finding a Google employee or Product Manager through Twitter than you do through their About Us, Contact Us or corporate website. It’s joke that you can’t even find Google customer support page for any of their products even if you use Google Search.

Google prides themselves in hiring really brilliant engineers, bordering savants and the top 5% of MENSA, and it designs products for users just like them. Basically they design for nerds, and the first response you will ever get when asking a question to a technology focused group is RTFM, and this is how Google treats it’s users. Google expects it’s user to comb through Google Groups, do Google Searches, and ask your colleagues via Google Voice because Google does not see as it’s job to help users with Google products, but to create new products and see what users use, and see how they use it, how much they use it, and how they can learn from users behaviors.

So one is left asking, what product will Google kill next? Orkut? Chrome OS? Google Reader? Google Knol?

Blippy is a site that allows you to automatically share the purchases you’ve made and the products you’ve bought with friends and followers. The way Blippy can detect products and services bought is by monitoring the transactions made on a given credit card. Blippy has been around for a while and many of the questions concerning privacy and security have already been asked. Blippy is just the next logical conclusion of all the information we make public on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. With some common sense, extra precautions, and the correct privacy settings, people feel more and more comfortable posting about the products they purchase, the locations they visit, and their private lives including relationship status and political views. Blippy is one of few companies in the social commerce web space and it complements with the strategy at Amazon that I think Amazon should make an offer of no less $100 million dollars to purchase Blippy before it gets snagged up by a competitor. The social commerce space has just been validated by Apple Ping. Apple Ping complements Apple iTunes by being a social commerce community around music and possibly other entertainment media such as movies and books. Similarly, Blippy can complement Amazon by being a social commerce engine for the products sold by the online retailer giant. Blippy also compliments the large amount of product reviews Amazon has amassed and can easily be turned on for all the users accounts at Amazon with little effort, because essentially every Amazon user has already entered one or more credit card.

More and more companies will have niche social applications around their core business, right now news networks to car companies and everything between are using social sites like Twitter and Facebook, but they will soon ask for more and more control over users data than these sites provide. Instead of being a Twitter or Facebook client to post likes and status updates, large ecommerce sites will develop their own social niche sites around their core competencies, like Apple Ping. Just like Apple has released Ping as a social engine for discovering new music, Amazon needs a similar product to compliment it’s online retail business and it’s social media strategy. The social graph provided by Blippy augments well around the data Amazon already has, such as previous purchases, reviews, and the information to generate recommendations. All things being equal, Blippy adds more value to Amazon which sells product than to Facebook that which impressions.

I’m not an insider, investor, or friends with anyone at Blippy or Amazon, but I just feel that these two businesses compliment each other very well and can take social networking to the next level into social ecommerce. When ecommerce goes social and viral it will mark the beginning of ecommerce 2.0.