OurielOhayon

Made in Israel: the first UI/UX that make me think twice when looking at my iPhone

Whoever has tried to copy the iPhone interface, even Google/Android, has not come yet with something exciting and different enough.

This phone, created by Emblaze, an israeli company, is the first to make me think that something better is possible

It reminds me a lot of what Swype is trying to bring to the keyboard input but extended to everything

I may contradict myself, but we have in Israel great potential at creating some great UI/UX. This is an example. Or better said, an exception

update: ok, no so fast then. lot of left handed readers rightly complained in the comments that the device is not built for them. Good point. And one of my followers on twitter tried it and said it is the worst phone ever...wow.

via Engadget

The scandalous plague of direct marketing telephone scam/spam

update: ok. i just called bezeq again and they have a possibility to mask your number for advertiser and automated calls. it takes about a week to be implemented. we'll see after if this still happening. i received again a call yesterday. i hung up but next time i will record the name of the advertiser and will start to list them. A new plague is coming to Israel and i am sure i am not the only one suffering from it. 

For the past 2 months every day or close to, i receive at home, my personal phone number, automated calls for advertising.

Those are run by phone robots who play pre recorded advertising messages.

I have no idea how they got my number. And there is absolutely no way to know how they did it, nor to ask an opt out.

I called Bezeq, the land line phone company in Israel to ask them to block those calls. They claim they have no idea what those calls are. They can't block them since they don't know the origin. 

Let's put this aside for a sec. Because this is a totally crap excuse. If bezeq wanted to block those calls they could do it. They could originate the caller and block them on request.

Now the real problem is that there are out there companies that spam your home phone number with unsolicited calls. In countries where i lived before there are laws to prevent that and punish those who bypass the rules.

Who in Israel is going to address that? Is there a direct marketing association in Israel? Is this someone at the telco minister?

I have no idea. I want this to change because it pollutes my life (calls are coming in the evening when i don't want to be disturbed)

We need a law to

• prevent abusive collection of private number
• enable simple opt out from your operator
• track the callers and punish them
• force the advertiser to disclose how they got your number

Until this happens, Israel will remain an area of scam for israeli citizens taken hostage by stupid advertisers.

One of the coolest thing i have seen in a while

simple and genious. Innovation in simple things is also great

On the UI/UX Israeli issue

Yesterday afternoon i sat in meeting with someone who understands about user interface and user experience and we discussed how bad most of the israeli web sites are looking like in general. At the same time Michael Eisenberg covers the same matter in a great post i invite you to read carefully. He nails the issue: Israel is great at creating technologies but not some much at translating in a great visual interface.

This is something i have talked about in this blog a few times: Israelis are not good enough at consumer product design. There are more and more exceptions which is encouraging. But overall the level of execution is not good enough. I am not referring to the local israeli websites that i believe are not even worth talking about (yad2co.il, walla.co.il, haaretz...) 

We are now living in a era of Design, more than technology and Israel has never been great at Design. Michael suggests that the entrepreneurial community has not been raised with the right tools (mostly Microsoft tools). I would argue that this is a cultural and educational issue.

I am not counting now the number of times someone asked me if i knew a great UI/UX guy (UI= user interface / UX= user experience). This typical question translates perfectly what i am trying to say. There is NO such guy. He does not exist. Or rarely exist. UI/UX is the result of several skills involved in a working process that is hard to define perfectly. UI/UX is not about graphic design only, web design, product definition, consumer psychology, ergonomy, development are also very important and they are never owned by 1 guy only (or very very rarely like this is the case with Tweetie, the great twitter client for mac/iphone)

The fact that someone ask about a great UI guy, just means he does not understand what it takes to create a great UI. In my meeting yesterday we mentioned the fact that most of the time the problem starts with the fact that the founders/entrepreneurs don't really know what they want. They expect someone to magically solve that issue. Spotify has a magic interface. And this is the results of hundreds of iteration cycles between different people owning different skills.

The only way to find the right working approach is to start, make mistake and fix them. Daily. But that's not all

In all the projects i have been involved in, i always came to the conclusion that a good result comes first with a clear vision of what you want. Even if you are not a developer or a designer you need to be able to explain how you see your product. There are great tools to help you refine visually your thought: my favorite is Mockflow

But the bottom line is that in Israel there is not enough awareness of what it means to create a great user interface. The lack of awareness comes from the lack of education. And even if they are great institutes to learn graphics and design this is not enough. UI/UX should be taught in all engineer schools and all business schools. This is a cross disciplinary matter and i believe this is what is really missing in Israel 

A few tips to start

I would encourage strongly entrepreneurs interested in the matter in reading about this subject religiously trying to self educate yourself. 

• One suggestion i have is to read daily SmashingMagazine (there are more blogs about UI/UX that are great but this one is a great start) 
• I would also encourage non-techie entrepreneurs to play with tools like Mockflow, or Balsamiq which do not require any special skill to build a wireframe of your product. Just a good sense of drag and drop. 
• If you want to build a simple SiteMap i would suggest SlickPlan.
• If you start building a working process with a designer, a developer and yourself (or someone of your team), you'll need to work with a great feedback tool to facilitate answers: i suggest you use NotableApp.com

I have very strong hopes that the average Israeli web sites will have amazing design soon. Look for example at ZVZ.co.il

There are also great websites made by some israeli startups: SeekingAlpha, Ekoloko (i am advising), ... and many more. But the ratio is still small.

The key is in awareness and therefore in education.

Btw if you know people who know how to deal with a great UI/UX process i am interested. shoot me an email on myblog@ohayon.name

The beauty of simplicity

via www.ommwriter.com

Going to give this tool a shot. hard to focus writing and thinking with all those streams and features around

Litl: gorgeous little laptop with great experience

via www.youtube.com

pretty awesome. amazing how they managed to bring so much innovation in a field that seems saturated.

However my deepest belief is that we are just at the beginning. The human/computer interaction has been totally neglected for the past 10 years. We still use a keyboard and a mouse.

Apple has managed to shake the rules with the touch screen. But you can feel this is just a beginning

ICQ to be sold by AOL? that might not be a bad thing

I remember when i was at ICQ in 2004/2006 (a few years after the AOL acquisition), i was asking myself everyday the same question: What if ICQ was not part of AOL? would it perform better?

My feeling was always that a small company like ICQ with about 100 employees and thousands of miles away for the US HQ (AOL) with a product competing with the big brother (AIM) would be better as a stand alone and would move faster.

Today BoomTown is reporting that AOL may sell ICQ. If this happens that could be a good thing. ICQ is the #1 or 2 instant messengers in a few countries (like in germany i was in charge of) in Europe specially eastern Europe. With the right resources and autonomy it could innovate fast enough to build great local communities, which they have missed for the past 10 years. 

ICQ could have become Skype, ICQ could have become Facebook, ICQ could have become Twitter. But they stayed ICQ, a brand everyone remembers but very little in my generation are still using.

So let's see what happens. but i believe this could be a good news for the Israeli company.

Free idea of the day: we need the Skype for slideshow presentations

We all know the pain: you go to a meeting and want to connect your laptop to a projector for your show. it never works. period

Years of R&D and top techie advancements have not managed to solve the simple problem of getting a slide on a screen in 2 seconds. In years of watching thousands of presentations i have never seen a case this works spot on. There is always one problem: the screen resolution is not right, the image looks poor, the screen shows only part of your slide.....

The reason is that projector are dumb devices with very poor software and laptops are built with poor and complex set up to make things smooth. 

I believe there is a major opportunity for a software that will solve this pain. A software that will make any laptop 100% ready for any projector. And people will pay for it. 100%

We need an equivalent of Skype, which solved the pain of making a simple voice calls on the internet, but for slide presentations.

Let s call it Prezentify

My dream experience

• You open your laptop
• your launch this Prezentify
• you plug your laptop to the projector
• And it works, instantly.

No more need to choose the right screen resolution, plug, unplug, until it works, make your laptop restart, make your projector restart.

What would that software do?

• it detects automatically you screen resolution/laptop settings
• It detects the projector hardware connected to it and find the right settings to make it work
• It resets your screen and color set automatically for optimal screening
• it will reset it back when the presentation is done
• It will allow you to show part of the things that are one your computer, but not everything (you don't want to share those email notifications, or skype messages)
• it comes with a handy iPhone app so you can move the slide (keynote has an amazing iphone app for mac)

And of course this is not just an add on to slideshow softwares...Because you need to present more stuff than just slides.

Someone please make this

Oh yes and 1 more request to Microsoft/Mac. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE. Make that "Show as a slideshow" button ENORMOUS. People always spend seconds to look for it, because it is way to small

PS: plan B is to not use your computer but just put the file on a local connected computer. but then you can't use other resources from your computer (demo an app, settings you are used to for your browser,...). I don t like this option

iPhone: Apple owns the billing, Google Advertising

Unless you live in a cave, you have not missed that Google swallowed AdMob, the #1 mobile ad network which was particularly taking off since the inception of the iPhone (and the App Store). Now if you also following the news, you did not miss that Apple and Google play cat and mouse about who owns what on the iPhone. 

Apple from day one let the cat in by placing Google maps and Youtube as default installed apps. Google is following up with great apps of its own service. But sometimes it conflicts with Apple's own interest and their relation with mobile operators (eg: Google voice).

Now the war is moving to a new field with the acquisition of AdMob. Advertising. By owning iPhone advertising, Google, who's behind the best OS challenging the iPhone, is a tough trojan in the iPhone. They have a massive power, since they own the second most important revenue chain that feed the app developers, after Paid apps (owned by Apple). They also own key estates and very soon data intelligence about apps that will place them at the level of second brain on the iPhone ecosystem after Apple. They can also, although i doubt the do-no-evil company moves that way, push iPhone users to their own apps, or why not to other android-powered devices.

I really wonder how Apple feels about that. Advertising on the iPhone is going to become big. very big. They can't really do a thing about that, except abusing their position and blocking any app using admob codes. But that won't happen, users and the FCC look to close

What could be their next move knowing that Apple is a non-advertising-based company?

ps: Maybe they should not so worry at the end of the day, when you see the kind of advertising AdMob served me..(see above)

What a day for Google (and Accel)

What a day for Google (and Accel), originally uploaded by ourielohayon.

Google buys. Big
Accel Ventures sell. Big (they sold Playfish to EA the same day)