This is a visualization of StumbleUpon’s internet audience by topic:
I made it using ManyEyes, which might be the most amazing thing in the world, and StumbleUpon’s list of ad topics.
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Most Popular Browsers on Grattisfaction
June 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment
I’m always curious about the web capabilities of the visitors to my blog.
The most popular browsers in the last month were:
Most popular web browsers on Grattisfaction for May - June
Trends and Insights
- Internet Explorer is dramatically underrepresented, and Chrome, Firefox, and Safari are dramatically over-represented. I attribute this to the heavily technical crowd my blog draws.
(See Pingdom’s post on Browser market share here.)
- Rockmelt and Camino visitors come to the site. These browsers are so rare in the market today they are not represented in most browser market share statistics. Again, I attribute this to the technical/early adopter audience my blog draws.
- There is absolutely no need to support IE6 or other early browsers on my site.
- Conversely, technologies that only support later browsers (like HTML5) could be used quite successfully here.
Popularity: 2% [?]
WordPress GPL/Themes
July 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment
There’s been a good deal of conflict in the past couple of days within the WordPress community about Premium Themes.
The whole issue comes down to: do themes that run on a CMS that’s under a GPL license automatically acquire that GPL license?
It depends who you ask. Because I’m not a lawyer, I’ll let you learn about from the experts. Here is a discussion between Matt Mullenweg of WordPress and Chris Pearson of Thesis.
The embed isn’t working – so check it out here at Mixergy.
I think it’s important to respect the license of software. It’s as simple as that.
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I Was Wrong – About the iPad
April 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Dear Readers,
I wish to formally apologize to you, because I was wrong. I have misled you. I have abused your trust.
And I am sorry.
But after a few hours with the iPad, you will find yourself no longer asking “what do I use it for when I have a laptop and an iPhone?” but rather, “Why isn’t my computer like this? The interaction here is just so much… better.”
I was wrong about the iPad. It’s pretty awesome. I think it’s going to take off.
Why? More than anything today, we consume content via the internet. This is mostly what we do with our internet applications – consume content, or consume content while making some small selections or inputting less than 3 sentences of text. Sometimes we click on things, too. Shopping, social networking, video, most of the things people do with the internet today are about consuming content.
And on the iPad, consuming internet content is an amazingly fluid, excellent experience. It makes the desktop web seem clunky and antiquated. It even makes me want to read USA Today just because it has a neat app.
I also think it’s going to take off in the enterprise – Joe Logan guest-wrote a great article today about this in the Ondeego blog – Why the iPad will be a Game-Changer in the Enterprise.
It’s also worth noting the degree to which Apple is pushing people to store documents in the cloud with the iPad – getting a pdf on over the wire hasn’t been easy.
All in all, it’s a great thing. I recommend you get one. I recant any earlier opinions, recommendations, or comments. I will be purchasing an iPad after the price drops by $100 for the least expensive one. I predict this will take place in June.
Ideas? Opinions? Hate the iPad? Let me know and leave a comment…
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Marc Andreessen on Iteration in Technology Startups
February 19, 2010 By 1 Comment
Marc Andreessen co-founded both Netscape and Opsware, so he’s one of the few people to found not one but two billion dollar companies. Recently, he launched his new venture fund, Andreessen-Horowitz. (That is actually their website. I kinda like it.) So he knows a thing or two about startups. I found a video where he shares his thoughts on iteration and agile business for technology startups. The relevant section starts at the two-minute mark, but the video is good.
“If you look at the history of the major technology franchises, most of them started off doing something very different from what they were ultimately successful in doing. So Intel started out doing memory chips, and ended up doing CPUs. Microsoft started doing programming tools and ended up doing operating systems. Apple started out doing the Apple II, and ended up being most successful with the Mac, which had no bearing, no relationship to the Apple II. Silicon Graphics, my partner Jim’s company, started out making graphics cards for mainframes and ended up making supercomputers. Somebody the other day said that trying to understand what is going to happen – how a tech startup is going to be successful – is a little bit like looking at a sonogram and then trying to predict the baby’s hair color. It’s incredibly hard to tell.
The idea really matters, and the products really matter, and that all matters, but you know so little about the adventure you’re undertaking when you’re starting a new tech company that you, in our view, have to assume that things are gonna change.
- Marc Andreessen, October 2009 Interview
What do you think? Leave a comment…
Popularity: 2% [?]
I Like Open Source but Just for Infrastructure
February 16, 2010 By 2 Comments
I really like using open source components for enabling technologies.
The first part of that statement is incredibly obvious. Open source software is generally free, usually functional (provided you can get it to work), and probably has a pretty good feature set/extension library.
WordPress is a great example of a piece of open source software I absolutely love. And one of the reasons WordPress is great is that while they’ve built a great core, they let people make their own user interfaces and extensions.
However, when open source projects have to be usable by people other than contributors, bad things happen. It rapidly becomes “Dancing BearWare,” where the bear doesn’t dance very well, but at least it’s dancing at all. Read more about it in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
While not all open-source stuff is user un-friendly (WordPress, for instance), a lot is. And because a picture is worth a thousand words, I will close this post with a picture of mouse designed for OpenOffice.
Update: I am not the only person that thinks this. Today I watched a video on wordpress.tv of Matt Mullenwagg (founder of WordPress) talking about this. He calls it the “bike shed color” problem. (It’s at 12:30 in the video. He explains it better than I can.) He also compares OpenOffice’s options panel to a tax form, which I’m inclined to agree with. (That’s how it spawned the mouse at the bottom of the article.)
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how salesforce.com uses customer development
January 24, 2010 By 1 Comment
salesforce.com is one of the great enterprise software companies of our time. It’s one of my favorite companies – I love the product, the philosophy, and the philanthropy model.
Because I was so impressed with the company, I ordered Behind the Cloud
I eagerly tore the book out of the Amazon box and devoured it, reading all of Marc Benioff‘s 111 business plays. It’s consistently great advice from one of great Founder/CEOs of our time.
As with most start-ups, salesforce.com started with a vision – a web-based CRM application, available inexpensively.
As with most successful start-ups, salesforce.com also modified their vision according to customer feedback – both qualitative - gathered by talking to their customers, and quantitative – from web analytics on all salesforce.com accounts.
How salesforce.com Iterates on Customer Feedback
-Get a product out there and get people using it.
-Gather qualitative feedback from individual customers and quantitative feedback from the wisdom of crowds
-If you’re trying to move up/down market, spend time with the customers you want to understand your needs.
-Iterate on your service, being careful to add the minimal amount of features possible.
Marc Benioff on Customer Development
From ‘Behind the Cloud’
From the very beginning, we initiated a dialogue with these users about what was missing in the Sales Force Automation (SFA) application. Salespeople routinely asked prospects about features they wanted and relayed their feedback to the product managers. We queried prospects on why they decided not to go with us, and we spent time with large enterprises – customers that we weren’t initially able to serve – to learn what additionally functionality was required to make them consider our service. We heard about missing features, such as the ability to track multiple products or a way to manage price lists. We might have thought of these on our own, or we might not have, but we certainly wouldn’t have known which were in the greatest demand.
Thanks to our “no software” model, we have another way to listen to customer response. The on-demand architecture offers us the opportunity to “watch” how users use the application. We don’t do this in a Big Brother way, where we can see data or information about a company. Rather, the system simply counts broad patterns anonymously and notifies us if there are issues. These insights into how users are using our service allow us to learn about what they use and what they don’t.
As we evolved our service in response to customer’s needs, we faced the risk of changing our service too much – and making it so specific that it couldn’t commonly serve all customers. If we wanted to continue to have mass appeal, we needed to apply changes with a broad brush.
Do you use the wisdom of crowds or interviews for customer development? Which one works better? Leave a comment…
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