Choosing Smarter

To iPhone or not to iPhone

So I've finally decided that I need a smartphone. I had a Crackberry for a few years, but when I started working from home I was rarely away from a PC for more than an hour or two, so a full email device was overkill and I went back to a voice-centric phone (with surprisingly little twitching or cold sweats, by the by...).

Now that I'm starting to travel more, though, I'm back to needing something that can handle email gracefully, and whatever else I think would be cool/useful. Naturally, I fired up a ChoiceBot to churn through the ridiculous amount of product info that I came across within the first few minutes of research.

Some notes:

• Prices are all based on a 3-year contract from Rogers (a Canadian carrier), because they have me bound up like a stuffed pig. I threw in a couple of "iPhone killers" that are available in the US, though, just to see how they stack up.
• A few features that many people care about (like Bluetooth) aren't in here, because it's my ChoiceBot dammit, and I don't care about those features. Feel free to make a copy of this ChoiceBot in your very own free MyChoiceBot account, however (click the "Cool features" menu), which allows you to add or delete products and features to your heart's content.

I like to think that I'm not easily swayed by hype, and that I make purchase decisions based on utility alone (maybe that's why I came up with ChoiceBot...), so I set up features that were based on my needs, and not what the iPhone offered. Bottom line: According to my buying criteria anyway, the iPhone blows the others out of the water. Having access to almost any web page with an interface that actually makes getting around a large page on a small screen not-painful... that's golden baby.

I hate to admit it, but Steve Jobs knows what he's doing.

Ah-HA!

I knew it.

I've had a blog post draft kicking around for a while entitled "The spreadsheet people are among us." Basically, I believe that there are millions of people using Excel to capture their findings when researching complex purchase decisions, but we're all too ashamed to fess up to our anal retentiveness to talk about it publicly. And now there's proof!

I recently upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007 (better late than never...). Upon firing up the "new" Excel, I noticed this:

Apparently, Microsoft's research revealed that so many people were using Excel to gather information for making complex decisions that they put the official anal-retentive cell formatting colour scheme right smack in the middle of the main, default toolbar/ribbon.

Having used ChoiceBot for over a year now, I can't imagine using an app that doesn't actually do anything with my colour-coding, though. That would be kind of like using a pen and graph paper instead of a spreadsheet program to work on a bunch of numbers.

Irony... get it?

Upcoming ChoiceBot demos

If you happen to be in the Ottawa or Montreal area, we will be demoing ChoiceBot at Montreal Startup Camp 3 and Ottawa Demo Camp 11, tonight and next Monday respectively. Drop by and check us out live and in person! No autographs, please.

OK, we'll autograph anything. Yes, ANYTHING. But you have to watch the demo first.

Also, I will be attending next Tuesday's LAMP development presentation by Digg co-founder Owen Byrne at the Ottawa offices of TravelPod, which recently broke into Technorati's top 10 most popular blogs. In the WORLD. Props to Luc Levesque and his team...

Stuff you missed (take 2)

Man.. I have GOT to get better at remembering to update the ol' bloggerino.

So we presented MyChoiceBot at a number of events in the San Francisco area last week, none of which you would have found out about beforehand through this blog. Some highlights:

We were in great company at Myles Weissleder's masterfully-executed SF New Tech event last Wednesday. Cool co-presenters included 23 And Me, Hubpages and Fixya, and we got many questions and "very cool" comments from the 250+ in attendance.

We also hosted our very first sponsored event, a lunch as part of San Francisco's now-iconic Lunch 2.0 series, which saw about 150 of the area's top Web 2.0-types taking in sandwiches and demos in this very funky photo studio.

All in all, a great week, interspersed with productive user, customer and partner meetings and virtually unanimous positive feedback, which is worth gold when you spend 90% of your time sweating over pixels in a basement. Looks like we've finally nailed the ChoiceBot user interface, and everyone seems to "get it" right away. Who would have thought that making something simple could be so complicated... a subject for another post.

Soooo... I hereby promise to post events where we will be presenting ChoiceBot or MyChoiceBot on this blog BEFORE the event actually happens, so you can come and check us out in person if you happen to be in the area.

Where the Web is going

This relatively short (~10 mins) presentation by Kevin Kelly at the recent Web 2.0 conference is a fantastic overview of what's now a pretty widely-accepted view of what the Web will look like in 5 or so years, possibly sooner:

I agree with all of Kevin's predictions. Most sites will make the data in their underlying databases available to other sites in a form that computers can easily understand and use. Sites talking to each other means that users don't have to manually piece data together from different sites when doing research, making reservations, etc. For example, a single site could pull data from a movie showtime site, the Google Maps site and the New York Times site to show the user all the movies starting in the next hour, within 10 miles of their home, and to which the NYT gave 3 stars or more. There are already thousands of such sites and I, like Kevin and many others, think that eventually all sites will operate by passing data around in the background to make users' lives simpler and easier. (Yes, there will be a lot arguing about data standards, but ultimately the business benefits will force everyone to play nice together.)

This is starting to be known as "Web 3.0" among bleeding edge Web types. In geek terms, it can be described as the Web moving from unstructured content (Web sites that can be easily read by humans) to structured content (Web sites that can be easily read by humans AND by machines).

I believe that, in this new structured Web, ChoiceBot technology will play a pivotal role. Hear me out...

Many Web 3.0 applications are designed to combine data from various sites in order to help the user make a decision. For example, a last-minute vacation site may pull data from a travel booking site (for seat prices and availability), a weather site (for forecasts) and a resort rating site to help the user decide where to go for that last-minute weekend getaway. Using a conventional search interface, however, such a site could return 27 vacation options that match the user's price, weather and star-rating criteria (or zero matches, or 127 matches). By the time they review all the matches or tinker with their criteria until they get a reasonable number of matches, it could be Monday.

Layering ChoiceBot on top of that same application would enable users to zero in on the flight, resort and weather combination that represents the truly best overall choice for them in less than two minutes, regardless of the number of choices available (in this example, hundreds of thousands of combinations). In most cases, this represents an order of magnitude increase in efficiency.

Google works great, but in the structured Web, it's not about keywords so the best keyword search engine in the World will be of no use. What's needed is a tool that can help users wade through potentially vast sets of structured data, which is where ChoiceBot comes in.

Delusions of grandeur? You bet. What kind of entrepreneur would I be without those? <grin>

Much to my surprise, iTunes blows

Even though I've been using a few different media players/managers over the years, I was forced to install iTunes so that my PC could talk to my iPhone. After such a stunning user experience on the iPhone, I guess I was expecting the same from iTunes. Wow. Not.

The music selection, while vast, is full of gaping wholes. Putting together a playlist for a reunion revealed that there were no Housemartins albums and -much more shockingly- no AC/DC ones. No AC/DC? Really? While not my favorite band, they're not exactly obscure...

Horrendously bloated (64.1 MB download, 100MB+ while running in memory), slow to install, slow to launch, slow to everything. Primitive music recommendation/discovery system. No mini-player mode. No all-you-can-eat-for-a-monthly-fee plan. Keeps on trying to trick me into installing Safari. Crashed at least three times. YUCK!

Most shockingly for an Apple product, though, was the terrible usability, or lack thereof. I wanted to transfer some pics from my PC onto my iPhone. Could NOT figure it out. The help file was no help at all, and I had to resort to a Google search for instructions, which were not obvious (though ultimately successful). How come no-one else is complaining about this? I don't know... maybe it's because my brain isn't wired for the Mac (i.e., where iTunes was born and ported from). Didn't seem to stop me from the loving the iPhone, though...

I just can't reconcile the fact that the iPhone and iTunes came from the same company. Definitely not from the same design team, I am sure.

Angry blogger post: deceptive PayPal advertising

We just spent several days implementing PayPal on the ChoiceBot for e-Retailers site (not the MyChoiceBot site, which is and always will be free) because they allow our customers (in our case, online retailers) to pay their monthly subscription fees using a credit card OR PayPal.

When we started testing, however, the customer was always forced to create a PayPal account and pay via PayPal, in direct violation of the "no PayPal account required" promise prominently featured all over their website.

A call to their support line revealed that customers of recurring payments must use PayPal. The problem is that this very important fact isn't mentioned in ANY of the product literature I read, not even in this detailed, page-long explanation of the "no PayPal account required" promise.

At best, a horrendous oversight. At worst, a cheap, possibly illegal ploy to get more users to create PayPal accounts. Not this time, though... anyone care to recommend an honest payment processor we could use?

I feel a bit better now, though you probably don't. Sorry about that.

Why Apple gets a free "ignore the faults" pass from the phone market

Blogger Alec Saunders recently asked why the market has largely ignored the iPhone's many flaws, whereas they won't cut Microsoft any slack when its products are less than perfect. He suggests that Apple's propaganda machine is simply steamrolling Microsoft, but I disagree that this the main reason the market hasn't focused on the iPhone's issues.

Actually, I think Alec answered his own question with the last sentence in his post "I love my iPhone, warts and all."

No-one loves Windows, warts and all, because Windows does what you need and expect it to do, and nothing more. I don't think I've actually been impressed with any Windows feature since version 3.11's addition of networked file sharing like 10 years ago or something. Maybe plug and play hardware. But certainly nothing in the last 5+ years.

The iPhone, however, impresses me. It does being a phone better than I expect any phone to. I still find little features that impress me after 3 months of owning one.

In terms of functionality and usefulness, the iPhone has lots to love and lots to hate, so the love cancels out the hate. With Windows, there isn't much to love. Just lots to hate.

New MyChoiceBot video

I've spent that last few days working on some videos to explain what MyChoiceBot's all about to new users who may not have heard of us yet (I know, I know... it sounds crazy, but yes, there are still people who haven't heard about us yet.)

The first fruit of my labours: 

Any comments and suggestions are much appreciated -pls leave them in the comment field for this post if something jumps out at you (or fails to jump out at you). Thanks.

Cool new MyChoiceBot features

Some of you may have noticed that, about two weeks ago, we updated the MyChoiceBot application with a bunch of new features and minor fixes. I think some are cool enough to merit a mention on the ol' bloggerino:

1) New "Top-ranked product" icons. Thanks to a great suggestion from TravelPod GM Luc Levesque, the "Best combination of features" callout that appeared beside the currently top-ranked product has been morphed into a "first-prize"-looking badge/ribbon thingy with a better label. For first-time users, this further clarifies that products are being ranked from overall best choice (i.e., the "winner") to worst, and are not being ranked based on a single feature:

         
 
When a reader overrides the reviewer's criteria for a feature, the graphic changes to emphasize the fact that the product rankings are now being based on the reader's buying criteria:

2) Stats tables for each feature. Of you look below the sliders for any feature, you'll see not only a description for that feature (if the ChoiceBot creator added one), but also a stats table that shows you how the products in the ChoiceBot break down for that feature (the Price feature is shown in this screenshot):

 
Gotta love Web apps... everyone has been automatically upgraded with the new features automatically as of about 2 weeks ago. More cool stuff in the works.

MyChoiceBot: Defender of democracy

OK that might be reaching, but we just created a very cool ChoiceBot to help Canadian voters decide which party to vote for in the upcoming Canadian federal election. Here it is if you want to give it a whirl:

Just as with with ChoiceBots about products, you'll be looking at the most intelligent, informed decision you could ever make within a few minutes, but in this case it's parties being ranked instead of products, and issues instead of features. Exactly the same app, though.

We'll be creating one for our US friends shortly -stay tuned.

As always, feedback (good or bad) is always welcome and appreciated (my contact info is on the right of this page).

Update: Alec Saunders just posted his own voting decision using ChoiceBot on his popular blog. Thanks Alec!

Below is just a thumbnail so something shows up in the RSS feed for this post (we're working on getting ChoiceBots to show up directly in RSS readers).