Electronic Communication Is Dead - Long Live Electronic Communication

In the past-PC-age we entered a couple of years ago, mobile devices and ubiquitous internet access have spread enormously.
Consequently, also electronic communication has increased significantly. For a variety of applications, electronic communication is not only a replacement, but even superior to face-to-face communication.

I will further on refer to that as real communication. That's not to say that writing an e-mail or Facebook status updates are unreal; of course they are not. Yet, from my point of view, it's just not as real as talking to somebody while sitting next to him or her.

Electronic communication is a great tool when time or geographical distances have to be overcome. Sometimes, it's also helpful to address a bigger audience.

However, I strongly feel that way too often electronic communication is also chosen even when real communication would easily be feasible. That's sad. Call me conservative, but I truly believe in the value and beauty of real communication. As much as modern platforms try to position themselves as 'social networks', in their very core they are not social at all. People sitting in front of their computers are NOT social; be it 10, 100, or 100 millions of them.

Among the major reasons why electronic communication is preferred over real communication are the aforementioned. Another one is that it's simply that much easier to find out about shared interests and topics to talk about, compared to real conversations, which might be time-consuming and maybe even boring until a topic of shared interest is discovered.

Enough of ranting, and time to offer an alternative.

Why not combine those too - the possibilities that modern devices and technologies offer, resulting in real talks and discussions? I think there is a chance that electronic communication does not have to replace real communication; it might support and facilitate it instead!

Expect more on that topic soon from my side.

If that caught your attention, please leave a comment below, and I'll make sure I'll keep you up to date.

Electronic communication is dead - long live electronic communication ... as a facilitator for real communication!

The Long And Winding Road Of Funding A Business

A couple of weeks ago, I boldly announced that I'm claiming my share of the mobile market. As much as I already could imagine back then how naive that calculation is, I thought that if I could convince only 1% of the mobile clients, I'd make a fortune overnight. Quite surprisingly, though, this did not yet happen. What had I screwed up?

In the meantime, I started attending an online course about "Technology Entrepreneurship", provided by Stanford professor Chuck Eesley and hosted on venture-lab.org.

The course is split into two main parts: First of all, two "warm-up" activities, in order to learn first basic steps, and to build a team for the second part, in which we will perform further steps to bring a "business idea" to actual execution.

As the first part is done, I will quickly summarize what I learned up to now, and how this shapes my overall perception of founding a business.

The first warm-up activity was simply brainstorming business ideas, disregarding whether they sound anyhow promising or not. There are several techniques that help you coming up with ideas, but if your mind is on fire already, ideas of all kinds pop up automagically all the time anyways. I was outright amazed by the overall eagerness shared by all colleagues, and the funny ideas we came up with! Retailing alcohol to Saudi-Arabia? A sex shop for religious people? Or a stove made of wooden?

The next step was to agree on the five "best" and the five "worst" ideas, and create a business canvas model for it. The idea I had chosen was about a mobile application for automatically recognizing the current state of a physical chessboard. Using the business canvas forces you to think about certain aspects of turning this idea into a business, e.g., customer segments, marketing, core activities, partners and revenue streams.

Already in the course of doing this, we found that even an apparently bad idea might have certain positive aspects as well. Going even further, the second task was to take any "worst" idea of another team, and try to promote it as good as possible. Check the result:

Not that bad, after all, is it?

So, first key finding for me is: Each idea can turn into a promising one! (Chuck Eesley provides more comprehensive thoughts on the topic here.)

Next, Chuck doesn't get tired to stress the importance of team composition. Lacking experience in that field, I cannot quite judge on it, but it makes perfectly sense to me. Founding a business without knowing whether your co-founder snores would be kind of similar to marrying after a heavy night in Las Vegas.

But most of all, I'm getting more and more convinced that simply having "a killer idea" is not enough. Far from it. To be clear, it is an important prerequisite. But it is not enough, it is the actual execution that matters a million times more.

So, I don't yet know what it takes to fund a business. At least I know now that it's nothing enough to have an idea. Still, everything starts with an idea - even the long and winding road of founding a business.

P.S.: Already now, I'm very thankful to all my colleagues for the great experiences and good brainstorming made up to now. Looking forward to continue working with you guys!

Free Auto Currency Converter Now Available On the Android Market

Dear all,

I am happy to announce that as of now, my first mobile application Auto Currency Converter is available on the Android Market (totally free of charge).

Taken from the description there:

Automatically convert currencies! Just start the app, and see immediately the conversion between your most probable currencies. A totally simple and easy to understand screen handling.
Further features:

• Support for more than 170 countries and more than 130 currencies
• Automatically maps your native and the current country to a currency
• On app start, automatically provides conversion between your most probable choice
• Keeping track of your most recent conversions, and thus providing even better suggestions
• Capability for offline conversion (NO Internet required)
• Fully automated update of all exchange rates
• Conversion in both directions (from base to target currency, and vice versa) at the same time

Thanks to your feedback, I was able to improve the user interface a little bit. The final version looks like this:

First screen of Auto Currency Converter

If you have Android, you might want to check it out.

Each comment and rating on the market would be highly appreciated. Thanks for your support!

Progress Report: My First Mobile Application

A couple of weeks ago, I made a bold claim on this place: I want a tiny little piece of the mobile development cake. So, three weeks later, how am I doing with my first mobile application? Time for a quick update!

As I indicated in the last post already, I'll try to sharpen the knife on a simple, yet maybe useful application: a currency converter. Unlike other converters, though, on mine it is NOT required to select base and target currency yourself. Instead my converter has the ability to automatically "guess" your most probable conversion (based on your native and current location), and consequently I call it Auto Currency Converter.

Key features are:

• Support for more than 170 countries and more than 130 currencies
• Automatically maps a country to a currency
• On app start, automatically provides conversion between your most probable choice
• Keeping track of your most recent conversions, and thus providing even better suggestions
• Capability for offline conversion (NO Internet required)
• Fully automated update of all exchange rates
• Conversion in both directions (from base to target currency, and vice verse) at the same time

In order to get feedback from potential users as early as possible (remember, I want to fail fast and fail often), here is the first draft of the user interface:

First draft of the user interface of the Auto Currency Converter

Even if you are not interested in my self-estimation of the progress and don't continue reading, I want to ask for your first impressions on that draft. You like it, you hate it, you would never use an app with such awful a background color, or you would love an icon of an unicorn in the upper right corner - whatever it is, please drop a comment below.

I'll describe the progress against three different dimensions: 1.) State of achievement; 2.) Problems encountered; 3.) Future activities.

1. State of achievement
I familiarized myself with the development environment (Eclipse with Android SDK). Running the device emulator is a bit slow at time, but it's doing a fairly good job.

The Android documentation is pretty good either, and for all the things that are not fully covered there, odds are that somebody else encountered a similar challenge already. For most questions arising I found an answer on the web very fast.

Accessing the Yahoo Finance service for exchange rates is not a big deal, either. I am happy to say that all calculation-related modules are in a proper test harness, as simple as they may be.

What I'm really impressed about is the great, flawless, built in SQLite database in Android. Easy to use and just working! I'm using the database both for the exchange rates and keeping track of the user's last conversions.

So, most features envisaged are in place. Also, I managed to provide a first draft of the user interface.

2. Problems encountered
As expected, the biggest challenge for me will be the user interface.

For a small application like this, providing the required functionality is a piece of cake; providing a good-looking user interface for me is not. Not only are there some challenges unique in mobile development, but even more, it is simply time consuming.

Ensuring the application

• looks good several different devices (imagine a smartphone vs. a tablet screen) and
• different operating system versions (most smartphones still run Android 2.x, but some nice features were added in 3.x, which I want to use if available)
• supports both landscape and portrait screens (and ideally, also the transition between those two)
• finding proper free icons
• supporting different user-languages and preferences (what should be displayed as "08.02.2012" in most European countries should better be "02/08/2012" in the US)

etc. ... it simply sums up.

Some of the other potential challenges I did not face up to now (such as marketing and the likes), simply because I did not yet publish my application.

3. Future activities
Most features are in place; what remains to be done is polishing up the user interface.

What I have not yet decided, is whether to include ads (the easiest choice probably being Google's AdMob) in that first application, or not. I guess users are most likely much more opposed to ads if they are introduced later, compared to having seen them from the very beginning.
On the other hand, if I keep seeing this first app as a pure learning field, and may be a "reputation builder", there is no need for ads at all.

Oh yes, and then, finally, I should publish the app as well, and make people aware of it.

Apart from that, there is another thing that concerns me: I think that I totally lack any vision of what exactly I actually want to achieve (not with this first application, but with the others yet in the pipe). What can I provide?
Even though I know I should have a clear picture on that upfront, I hope it will work the opposite for me and will evolve over time.

For the moment, I'm just interested in getting my first mobile application done, and I feel that I'm on a good track. In order to progress further, I need your help. I would be very grateful for a brief comment about your first impression of the screenshot above.

Just a Tiny Little Piece of that Tempting Cake

Every now and then, when I hear about some major invention, two things happen: First, I refuse using it altogether - I don't need this, nobody will use it, and so on (pretty much a non-early adopter as possible). Second, I finally yield, and then I cannot stop wondering myself why to hell that invention didn't come to my mind earlier. After all, it's that obvious that exactly this is needed by millions!

I remember that was the case when Google became big 'all of a sudden' (which I initially rejected in favor of that vintage thing called altavista.com), it was the same with Facebook (which I was very convinced I would never need), and it was the same with Twitter (which I'm still proud of not using!). All of them build on a fairly simple technical foundation, yet their usage and impact was straight amazing. I promised myself not to let it happen again.

When I was in Prague for New Years Eve, I was surrounded by my friend's smartphones all the time. Over a sample size of 14 heads and shoulders, smartphone penetration reached about two thirds. And the applications, holy crap! For example, you can make a panorama picture of your friends, whose heads are then automatically detected and used as moving targets for shooting (well, you can argue about the usefulness of that). And of course, games like Cut the Rope, Angry Birds or my colleagues' successful poker. Not to mention the actually useful applications. GPS sensor, camera, ... millions of possibilities.

And millions of users, too. Namely, over 200 million on iOS, and most likely by the time well over 200 million on Android, too. A few more impressive numbers from byterevel.com:

• 15 billion apps downloaded from the App Store
• 200+ million users of iDevices worldwide
• $2.5 billion has been paid to developers

So there we go ... in total, some 400 million mobile users ... or should I rather say, potential clients? As you might have anticipated by how surprised I am about the various possibilities and these amazing figures, I am totally new to the smartphone world. I am about adopting very late once again ... but I hope it will not be too late. The pot is simply too big and too tempting. Ladies and Gentlemen, let me hereby announce that I claim my appropriate share of the mobile development cake!

As a starting point, I already purchased a tablet, an Acer A500, for what a developer do I make without any equipment (ha, finally found some proper excuse for myself to buy a tablet!).

I am totally aware of the fact that the aforementioned claim is totally naive and without any serious thinking. It sounds like a child having big plans to become a music star or actor once she's grown up. Well, I don't care. I simply feel that now is the right time to give it a shot, against all odds, so that's what I'll do.

I'm inclined to make some simple calculation:

400 million users. If, by any chance, I hit the jackpot and one of my apps turns out to be a super-super hit, and I reach only 0.1 % of the users, and if each of them only pays 1$ ... that's still some 400k!

Well, I already found it's not quite that easy. Furthermore, from a technical point, I'm starting at essentially zero. I do have some knowledge in Java and programming in general, though, so I expect this to be the smallest problem (I decided to start with Android first. For Apple development the initial investment would have been an additional development machine).

The major challenges I'm prepared for are as follows:

• Design, User Interface, Graphics ... I know that this is one of my weak points. Think I'll see how it goes, ask for advice here and there, and maybe look for a helping hand in case this turns out to be necessary
• PR, Marketing, and more specifically, buzz marketing. Literally, zero experience there. Contacts to magazines, blogs, online stores, Web 2.0 measures, psychology of the masses (animal spirits) and so on ... well, if I reach that point, I'll know I have reached a lot already, but then the real challenges begin.
• Though competition. Naturally, a huge pot attracts many others either. Roughly half a million apps on App Store speak a clear language.
• Ideas. I strongly feel that's the key point. There are several idea-provoking approaches, and I had a few ones already. For learning purposes, I decided to start with a simple currency converter. There are tons out there already, but as far as I could see up to know, none of them has that particular feature ... so stay tuned here if you're interested ;-)
• .. plus of course all the other unknown unknowns

So, TL;DR, why am I writing this at all? First, I wanted to let you all know about my new tablet ;-). Second, that's some form of PR either, right (even though I don't doubt any real PR guy couldn't stop shaking his head over what I'm writing here)?

Third and most of all, it is self-commitment! Ever since I stumbled upon Leo Babauta's 7 steps to turn your self improvement desires into reality (3. Commit thyself, big time), I found that it really helps me to stay focused onto something once I told others about it, which is what I'm doing now.

And staying focused and committed I want ... in order to get at least a tiny little piece of that tempting cake. If nothing else, I'm looking forward to facing all those challenges, and you are invited to join me on that journey.

P.S.: What do you miss most on your smartphone? In which regard do existing apps and games suck, where do you see some potential improvement? Got any other funny or useful idea? Just let me know!