Micah Alpern

Recently I was able to travel to the Yahoo offices in Taiwan and meet my counterparts in Taiwan and Hong Kong who work on local versions of the Yahoo! Answers product known within the region as Knowledge Search. After several days of meetings I was able to spend some time touring Taipei and visiting the National Palace Museum.

• Video of my trip to Taipei

News of PayPal’s Mobile Payment Product has started hitting the web. I saw it first from Russell Beattie and now Reuters has the story. I wasn’t involved in the project but I’m super exited to see it released.

I tried to give it a try, but ran into some problems with the phone activation. I think it may have had something to do with the fact that my cell phone and I are currently “Roaming” in Vancouver (I’m in town for the IA Summit). I’ll be able to fix my cell phone when I get back home next week, but in the mean time I thought I’d try something a bit more creative… I opened a SkypeIn account.

Here’s the description from the Skype site:

With SkypeIn, you can get your own, regular phone number. So if your friends who aren’t using Skype want to call you by dialing a regular number, you can still receive the call in Skype. No matter where you are.

…

SkypeIn numbers are sold on a subscription basis:
a 12 month subscription is € 30 and 3 months is € 10.

I could even make it a number from near my old home town in Cooperstown NY.After I signed up for a number I activated it for mobile PayPal.

10 seconds latter I get a call from the PayPal automated calling system, I enter my PIN, and am sending money by just saying phone numbers. Very slick!

Chuck Norris does not sleep, he waits.

Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.

If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can’t see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death.

Wikipedia on Google Answers“One of the popular non-conventional usages is to ask — usually but not always within the realm of the $2-$5 price range — nonsense questions. One of the most popular questions of this genre is in fact one of the most frequently asked questions on Google Answers — “What is the meaning of life?” [2]. Others questions request jokes or Chuck Norris “facts”. It should be noted, that Google Answers Researchers are not always keen to answer such questions.”

This weekend I’ve been watching and listening to more about Microsoft Expression / Sparkle / Interaction Designer.

Manuel Clement, the Sparkle product design has a blog where he points to several PDC 05′ talks by the Sparkle team.

Warning these are funky Powerpoint video presentations must be viewed in IE with an active-x control.

Clement wrote:

My PDC 2005 presentation of Sparkle is available online

http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/TLN/TLNL10_files/Default.htm#nopreload=1&autostart=1

My attempt at explaining:

. Sparkle Interactive Designer

. The Designer and his/her view of developers

. The world before XAML

. What XAML means

. Working with developers

You can also watch other Sparkle talks: Overview by Pete Faraday (Group Program Manager) and Architecture by John Gossman (Architect).

No Comments

 

This is a draft weblog post that I’m writing & editing out in the open. It started as an email thread with two designers, Luke Wroblewski and Jamie Hoover.

Luke kicked things off:

In Semantic Typography: Bridging the XHTML gap, Mark Boulton explains how to turn a visual design into a semantically marked-up document by taking a real-world example and breaking it down into structural elements. Mark’s article is a good introduction to semantics and document structure for anyone who hasn’t already started thinking structurally when marking up documents.

For some reason, the whole concept of document structure and actually using structural elements like headings and lists seems alien to most content authors I have met. And if authors aren’t semantically structuring documents in their word processors, they sure won’t do it before publishing their documents on the web.

I’ve been thinking a bit about why most people don’t structure their word processing documents properly, and I’m not sure why that feature is so underused. It could be a usability problem with word processors though – it’s often less obvious how to use styles properly than how to change the font and text size.

Here was my response:

I’ve been thinking a bit about why most people don’t structure their word processing documents properly, and I’m not sure why that feature is so underused.

Digg users spurred to register and contribute

“To me Digg is like Fox News on the surface, and International Press underneath. The frontpage gives you alot of junk that is potentially biased or skewed in some way, but if you take the time to look, you find alot of quality informative stories.”

For more on the role of Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers in social applications see see LukeW excellent presentation:
The Web Now: Social (4.5 MB PDF)

Kleiner Perkins’s 7 rules for start-ups (Don Dodge link)
1. Instant Value to customers - solve a problem or create value with the first use
2. Viral adoption - Pull, not push. No direct sales force required
3. Minimum IT footprint, preferably none. Hosted SaaS is best.
4. Simple, intuitive user experience - no training required.
5. Personalized user experience - customizable
6. Easy configuration based on application or usage templates
7. Context aware - adjust to location, groups, preferences, devices etc.

via ben barren - rss’ing down under

Joel Spolsky has started a series of article on “Great Design“. We’ll see where he takes it.  I did enjoy this quote:

Design is something you only have to pay for once for your product. It’s a part of the fixed costs in the equation, not the variable costs. But it adds value to every unit sold. That’s what Thomas C. Gale, the famous Chrysler automobile designer who retired in 2001, meant when he said that “Good design adds value faster than it adds cost.”