chris's blog

Since reading and blogging about Getting Real, I've become more interested in what 37Signals has to say. I've started perusing their Signal vs Noise Blog from time to time and have found a couple more gems worth sharing.

The first post that caught my eye was a response to Jason Calacanis' now infamous post on how startups can save money. I had already read what Calacanis has to say and found it to be generally good advice. If you want to get the most out of people, you should indeed set them up for success. But I was irked by the same point that David at 37Signals was, that Calacanis recommended firing non workaholics, and was interested to read the response post Fire the workaholics. Clearly there is a happy medium, but I found that I generally agreed with the 37Signals point of view, that working smarter not longer should be a priority. This is clearly a heated topic near and dear to people's hearts, exemplified by the outrage at the original post. Just read the comment stream to see how sensitive a topic this really is. Clearly there is a need to work hard and put in extra hours from time to time, but some of the studies mentioned in the comments talked of the effect working long hours can have on motivation. It seems that, in the long run, more hours to a point does not equate to increased productivity. It's counter intuitive, but then that's psychology for you.

The second post that I fell in love with was this one about Questioning your work. It lists a series of questions to ask yourself before embarking on a new project or even when starting simpler tasks. If you are really doing the right thing, the answers to these questions will confirm that. But if you are undertaking folly, asking yourself these questions will help you realize it. What are we doing and is it worth it? What else could I do that might be better than this? Is there an easier way to do this? I will surely ask myself these questions and others like them more often in the future.

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

Hello and thank you to all the kind users who gave our Symbian Beta a try and then shared their experiences with us. We used as much of the feedback as we could in the upcoming commercial version and we haven't forgotten the rest. The Symbian Beta phase is now over, making way for the commercial release of our Symbian version next week. Thanks again to all of those who tested our Symbian Beta version, we really appreciate your efforts.

I am also pleased to announce that Darla Mack won the EQO iPod Shuffle for filling out the Symbian Beta Survey. Congratulations Darla, I hope you enjoy your iPod!

The Symbian Beta will still be available for download at the Symbian Beta page and we will still gladly accept all feedback coming our way, but the beta period is officially over. I hope you'll all try our next Symbian version! Please stay tuned.

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

This is either a brilliant April Fools joke or a blatant example of carrier idiocy, both of which I appreciate very much. Engadget, possibly the best blog ever, is reporting that T-Mobile sent them a cease and desist for their use of the color magenta in their logo. They are also claiming that this is not an April Fools joke. I'm leaning towards joke considering how ridiculous this is, but either way I find Engadget's actions quite funny. They have changed their background to magenta and are calling themselves Engadget T-Mobile. Secretly, I hope that T-Mobile really is stupid enough to claim the color magenta as their own. Happy April Fools.

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

Two years ago I was kinda sad when I ended up with a Motorola V635 and not a RAZR as my personal phone. RAZR's were so freaking cool back then, but they generally sucked from the nerdy technical point of view. Just try running EQO on a RAZR V3 and you'll see what I mean, slow... I was really happy with my V635 when I got it. It was way better than my circa 2002 Audiovox (colour screen!) and made calls just fine. It wasn't until I got my hands on some other high end phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson that I realized just how greatly Motorola phones paled in comparison. Motorola pulled off a marketing coup with their four letter 'almost a word' naming scheme, featuring RAZR, SLVR, PEBL, KRZR, ROKR, RIZR and so on. It seems that the consumer community has gotten over the then cool RAZR form factors and voted with their dollars because Motorola's phone division isn't doing so well. Who'd a thought better qualities products would sell more?

The news today is that Motorola is actually splitting off it's phone division from the rest of its business, a move many see as protecting the successful business from the phone division's inevitable failure. I'm not really surprised by this and I don't recommend that anyone buy into the pending IPO of Motorola Mobile.

UPDATE:  Wow, didn't know it was this bad!

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

I've been following the 700MHz spectrum auction for almost a year now, mostly because the potential is huge for the wireless industry to do something amazing with this frequency. It was uplifting to see Google get involved with their petition for openness, and then it was equally depressing when Verizon sued the FCC for taking Google to heart. Now it it is finally over...

We don't know who won yet and I am pretty eager to find out who, but it looks like the FCC have achieved their basest goal of hauling in the cash! I'm really hoping it was Google (good) and not Verizon (evil) who won. Whoever wins, I hope they use this tasty spectrum to enable us wireless consumers to consume lots, quickly, and for not very much money, because I'm pretty sure KoodoMobile isn't going to do it for me.

Read the Engadget and TechCrunch reports for some of the dirty deets.

Update: Verizon won, shoot. 

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

I've recently started working with our web team at EQO, which has been quite fun.  Web developers and designers tend to be quite interesting people, usually more trendy and social than your typical engineer type (me).  At EQO, our web team is dually focused on product development and marketing content pages, which has produced some interesting contentions.  No one was hurt, nothing serious!  But I've since become interested in how to optimally produce web services and work with web developers and designers.

A friend recently pointed me in the direction of Getting Real, a free 37Signals ebook on the best ways to build web applications.  I now consider myself a disciple and recommend that anyone and everyone in the tech field, not just web people, read this book.  It's short and simple message is pure gold and is well worth the few hours it might take you to read it.  Seriously, every page either taught me something new, prompted change in my behavior, or affirmed some of the good things that I do.  Their message in short is keep it small, keep it focused, be honest, and make it simple!

Another precious gem that has caught my eye of late is Brook's law, which states "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later".  This is contrary to conventional wisdom, but my experience has generally proven this to be true.  I thought this was a great concept to grasp and being mindful of it will surely help me in the future.

Lastly, this Seth Godin post about working with designers was very humbling in a good way.  While professional design is not an art contest, designers do like to do their own thing.  Micromanaging and constraining designers is a surefire recipe for disaster.  The fact that I suck at design is why I'm not the designer; it's all about trust.

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

We at EQO are in a continual pickle when it comes to Samsung and LG phones. We would love to support them all, but there are just too many for us to get our hands on. To make matters worse, neither have developer programs that are of any use. Thank you Nokia and Sony Ericsson for being so helpful!

We currently only support a small percentage of the estimated 47 billion different Samsung and LG models out there and we need our user's help to support more. If you are interested in helping us support your phone, please send us an email to beta@eqo.com providing your phone model, country, and mobile service provider. If we think there is a chance that EQO Mobile will work we'll help you try EQO, which will hopefully lead to us officially supporting your phone. Helpful beta testers will have the chance to win EQO Prize Packs, in addition to the tremendous honor of being the first to use EQO Mobile on a particular model. We thank our users in advance for their kind efforts and hope to hear from you soon!

Cheers,

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

We have released version 1.2.1 of the EQO Symbian Beta for Nokia Series 60 3rd edition phones. This version alleviates many of the "Memory Full" errors that our testers were getting. This problem may not be solved for people with over a thousand contacts, but the general population should be much less afflicted. Problems with the symbol table for text entry persist on some phones. Affected users will surely realize right away. We have addressed this bug, but the fix didn't make it into this release. Version 1.2.1 also contains many other minor bug fixes that make this release faster and more stable.

When upgrading to the latest version of the Symbian Beta it is a good idea to remove the old client first before upgrading to version 1.2.1. There are some issues with upgrading over the old version, be warned. Get the latest version from our Symbian Beta page or by visiting get.eqo.com/symbian on your mobile browser.

Thanks again to all of our testers and please keep the great feedback coming in our Symbian Beta Forum. After this next Beta period, we'll be announcing the winner of the EQO iPod Shuffle!

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

It is amazing how the simplest of web tools can make life just a little bit easier. I have played on an indoor soccer team for the past five years and it has always been a bit of a headache for the team manager (thankfully never me) to make sure the team is organized for each game. The league has always posted their schedule online and we have a team Facebook Group, but our manager has still always had to individually contact each player to make sure they are coming, a time consuming minor headache.

Lately, I've come across many web tools that shoot to make recreational team organization much easier. Unfortunately, our league has mandated one of my least favorites by only posting the league schedule at Pointstreak.net. I am not a fan, especially considering that I have tried many superior sites. Two of my favorites team organization sites are local Vancouver products, TeamPages and RosterBot. I recommend TeamPages to teams looking for a more involved home on the web with forums, stat tracking, photos, and more. If you are looking for a simple tool that lets you organize your team, find out who's playing, and get people to the game, use RosterBot. TeamPages is really the social networking version of RosterBot and I prefer the latter's simplicity, which is really what makes any web tool standout for me.

When it comes to tools like RosterBot, what I want is something that lets me do what I need to do (not what I might want to do) as easily as possible. I don't need to make friends with other soccer players, chat about the game, post pictures, and whatnot. What I need to do is create a group for my team, add players, schedule games, find out who's coming to the games, and get everyone to the game. RosterBot does all of that with sweet email notifications, maps to the game, and calendar integration. TeamPages is cool, but RosterBot just does it for me without the clutter. Here's hoping for next season...

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

Here at EQO we have a giant mobile phone library consisting of just about every type of phone imaginable. Us lucky employees get to try everything and take our pick. My mainstay to date has been the Nokia E61i, a Symbian, wifi enabled, full keyboard super phone that's as functional as it isn't sexy. Lately, I've been carrying the iPhone in my leisure time while still using the E61i at work (EQO doesn't run on the iPhone, yet). I must confess that I now love the iPhone and loathe switching back to the E61i every day. While the iPhone isn't technically more advanced than my E61i, it is supremely better to use. This giant leap in mobile experience got me thinking about the future of mobile in general. Now that calling/texting, mp3 players, cameras, push email and so much more is ubiquitous, what's next?

1. Web on mobile, not mobile web. Thanks to iPhone, I can now use the web, the real web, on my phone. The real web differs from the mobile web (scaled down versions and bad interfaces) in that it doesn't suck. In the future, all phones will be like iPhone in that the web experience will not suck. The proof is in the hits, Google is finding out.

2. GPS will bring us killer location based services. Google Maps Mobile can now tell me roughly where I am and tell me about nearby businesses of the kind I am looking. Soon enough, I'm expecting my phone to tell me stuff without my asking it:
Phone: Hey Chris!
Chris: Yeah, Phone?
Phone: There's a bar 30m ahead then 20m right that your brother-in-law Erik loves. Try the Scottish Ale.
Chris: Thanks phone, I'll check it out.

3. Real Applications. The mobile app market is growing and improving, but is only exploited by the brave few technical souls willing to suffer with installation and connection problems (generally caused by the near sightedness of mobile operators in general). With the advent of open platforms (Android) and the web on mobile (not the mobile web!), developers will be able to easily build and distribute applications to wireless devices. I'm expecting to be able to do all that I do on my PC, much of which is increasingly web based, on my phone, just as easily.

4. Real Usability. The traditional phone interface at its basest level presents a list of contacts with some options. Generally, this is where people spend 90% of their time even though their phones can surf the (mobile) web, play music, take pictures, and then some. The iPhone was a great leap in usability. It's the most discoverable phone I've ever used. Technopeasants can easily figure it out. I believe the iPhone affect on mobile usability perception will enable the majority to take advantage of what phones can technically already do, beyond calling and texting.

5. Media Factories. We are seeing this now. The most potent of phones are media factories, but again only for the technocracy. Currently, it is too challenging and/or costly for most people to shoot video and beam pictures around. This will change. Facebook mobile image uploads are just the beginning. Lifecasting, live reporting, photo diaries, and the like will become easier to produce and distribute.

6. Modu. While I hate pre announcement hype videos that don't tell you what the product is going to be, I must say I was pleasantly surprised to find out about Modu. Modu is essentially a next generation SIM card, a SIM card that makes calls. As a SIM card is to a phone, Modu is to all other electronic devices. I'm eager to see what they have in store for their modular gem.

7. Real VoIP. There are many mobile voip services out there, including a bright shiny orange one from EQO. None are truly the equivalent of Skype on a PC. Services using wifi aren't truly mobile, not until wifi covers the world and handoff is perfected. Services using 3G connections still require a contract with a mobile operator. All other VoIP services provide a cost benefit via other mechanisms. Existing mobile voip services are great, but they are only steps towards pure voip.

iPhone is the best mobile I've used to date that makes powerful mobile services usable. I'm not just saying that as an Apple fanboy, I really believe its the best phone ever. I can't wait to see how the rest of the industry will respond to its brilliance. One thing is for certain, things are looking up for the consumer.

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist