Artificial ignorance

There are a few things that kids grow up being obsessed about – video games and sports are two such things. I grew up a sports fanatic, not so much a video gamer. Sports didn’t run in the household – neither my parents nor my sister are into it. Just me. Somehow both playing and watching sports has proven to be my favorite pass time my entire life. I grew up mostly watching the NFL, Tennis, Cricket, Basketball and some English Premier League. I played Basketball, Ping Pong (Table Tennis), Tennis and Cricket in school. I was so obsessed with Basketball, I was one of those kids who had a giant posted of Jordan in my room and I now subconsciously stick my tongue out on my way to a layup.

Although I never graduated beyond amateur high school sports leagues, my passion for sports never dwindled. When I got to Purdue, my first job on campus was as a lab assistant for the Purdue Computing Center (then known as PUCC). Although many fellow lab assistants warned me against it, I ended up signing up to be the LA over at Purdue’s Intercollegiate Athletic Facility because I wanted to be as close to the sports action as possible (the IAF is also where I first met  a 6’0″ freshman named Drew Brees who needed some help with his website and said he might be starting at QB the next year). Sports was always close to my heart. Continue reading

[Update: Bing is working on solving this very issue with their "auto app discovery" feature". Read about it here: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/06/09/iphone-mobile-app-discovery-with-bing.aspx]

I’m on my way back from Amsterdam where I was at the Mobilism conference. The opening talk was by done by LukeW on “Mobile First”. If you haven’t heard Luke speak or you haven’t seen his slides, I strongly encourage you to do so. Luke presents the state of the mobile industry and trends in a very real here-and-now sorta way. His content is very complimentary to Mary Meeker’s very forward looking slides.

I know that the mobile industry is buzzing. This industry is exploding really fast and obviously the growth rate of mobile devices is tremendous. But I think it’s too soon to be saying that all developers out there who are hatching an idea should think of doing mobile, or specifically, a mobile app only first. Continue reading

The International Game Developer’s Association (IGDA) furnished an advisory yesterday warning game developers about the perils behind selling your game through Amazon’s appstore. Amazon appstore’s terms of service do sound extremely self serving. From IGDA’s post:

1) Amazon steeply discounts a large chunk of its Appstore catalog (imagine: “our top 100-rated games are all 75% off!”). Some developers will probably win in this scenario, but some developers — most likely, those near the bottom of the list — will lose, not gaining enough sales to offset the loss in revenue per sale. Amazon benefits the most, because it captures all the customer goodwill generated by such a promotion. Continue reading

The Point of Sale (POS) as we know it is a very old and closed system. The incumbent in the (hospitality) POS market, MICROS systems was founded in 1978. However the POS has seen very little innovation since then. There are some fundamental issues with today’s POSs:

1. Cost

According to costhelper,

• Retail or restaurant single-register “starter kits” range from $1,500-$2,500; more elaborate, multiple-station systems with features such as touch-screens, automatic ordering and sophisticated reporting capabilities can cost $15,000-$20,000 and up.
• IBM has POS systems starting around $1,999-$2,499, but costs can increase up to $4,000 or more per station.
• Microsoft offers its Retail Management System starting at $1,290 for a single store with one cashier’s lane.
• QuickBooks sells its Basic POS software for $800, a Pro system for $1,050 and a multi-store version (up to 10 sites) for $1,400; with hardware included, prices start at $1,750.

Unless bought through a reseller, some of these do not factor in the cost of installations, upgrades, deployment or support. Continue reading

I spent the majority of my day yesterday in a training session here at IGN. The session was aimed at helping us get better at communication, teamwork and at helping us get better as leaders in the organization.

I noticed some common themes and issues surfaced during the course of the day. And somehow for me, I felt like the solution to most if not all these issues all came down to one thing – I wish everyone would ask more questions and stop making assumptions. I felt like exercising this would rid us of a whole bunch of organizational challenges.

I wonder what it is that makes us morph ourselves from having this childlike mentality where we constantly ask questions. Maybe we don’t want to come across as not being as aware or as knowledgable as everyone else around us? Maybe we’ve been around intolerant people who just don’t like being questioned? Another theory – we sit in classrooms most of our lives and we’re talked “at” and spoken “at” by teachers and instructors. We are asked not to speak unless we’re spoken to. As I think back to my years in school and college, while I wasn’t discouraged from asking questions about something I didn’t understand, interrupting class wasn’t encouraged either. The class was X minutes long, and there was a strict agenda. It may have occurred to you to interrupt and ask a clarifying question, but how often did you actually do it? Why not? Continue reading