UDID: What Apple should have done instead?

A while back a company called RapLeaf was under the microscope of several government agencies, non-profit organizations and partners for misusing private information from multiple networks to paint a “picture” of an individual’s information (email, phone, address, interests, networks, etc). RapLeaf really upset Facebook because the Facebook User Id was one of the common points to connect information from a diverse set of sites.

There were rumors at the time Facebook was going to block App developers from having access to the User Id. Thankfully, they didn’t do that, but Apple just did. In a very similar way, Apple was upset that services were using UDID (the unique identifier of a user on the iPhone) between services and apps, primarily for advertising purpose.

The majority of iPhone / iPad app developers went into a Holy-Crap-What-Do-We-Do-Now mode this week since a lot of them use the UDID to deliver customize experience without the user having to sign in (and actually give personal identifiable information) and maintain that information across app installs (or even across apps from the same Company).

What App should have done instead is to deliver a Hash(UDID, Developer-ID) instead. Actually, the UDID should have been that by default, so app developers won’t have to do anything special. What that means is that for all apps from a single Company, the UDID stays the same, but two Apps from two different companies would not be able to match their users’ databases, thus creating a more robust solution for this problem.
Now, the solution-du-jour for this problem is to use Mac Address (the network address of the device), which is a much, much worse problem in my opinion in terms of privacy. So will Apple block sniffing of Mac Address on apps now?

Which feature you’re going to remove next?

We have a problem. We think that more is better. We say that less is more, but we don’t act on it. We say we want less, but we pick the product with more. We say we’ll build a simple product, but we keep adding to it. Have you ever heard an entrepreneur pitching an idea by saying “I’ll be competing with product X by removing 50% of their features”? Yes, that happens once in a blue moon and turns out some of those products are widely successful, so why aren’t more people actually doing less?

I have a very simple and dumb theory about “more”. It’s easier to justify adding things than removing them and once you add them it is sunken cost and the idea of removing makes you feel like you “wasted” time or money.

Evaluating Less

The problem with that approach is that your product gets bigger over the years and harder for beginner (and even for some veteran) users. Case in point: Google AdWords. If you were using AdWords back in 2001 or 2002, it was a bare-bone product that was extremely easy to use. Now it has so many options, reports, screens, hints, tooltips, indirections, concepts and features that it’s overwhelming for a new user. Part is bad UX, part is the inability of the Google AdWords to bite the bullet and remove things, even if some customers are going to complain about the removal.

Yes, removing things always cause complaints from people who love that one feature. But again, if a product keeps evolving over time and all that you do is to add features, how does this becomes a better product? How many features does Microsoft Word has? 1,500? 2,000? It’s ridiculous.

I committed that crime on my first startup, Sampa. At one point we counted about 650 features. That’s a freaking startup with 650 features on its product! Not OK. The only solution was to reevaluate everything that we had and ask some serious question about the value of each feature and how it relates to the value proposition we want to bring to the end user.

At EveryMove we started with the right frame of mind. Just a couple of ago weeks we invited a few friends and family to join EveryMove. We removed at least two big features just before we invited friends, and one feature was removed just a week after they joined. Those three features were either not ready – as in value prop to end-users – or they were “noise” (but cool). Cool but not noise it’s OK to keep, but once the cool takes away from other focus point on the product, you have to nuke it.

An analytical minded person is just going to make the decision based on popularity of features, and that’s a very dangerous approach. If nobody used a feature in the last 30 days, that’s an easy cut. If 50% of users used a feature over the last 30 days, that’s an easy keep; but what about the dozens or hundreds of features with meager usage. The reality is that most of that could go, and they are undermining the value of each other. Remember, your users have a task to accomplish (even if for fun) and a limited time span, so diluting that engagement over a long list of features is probably not the right thing.

Cut Day!

What if every quarter (or month), you dedicate an entire day to enumerate all the features your system has (basically reverse-engineering from feature to user story) and ask which ones are aligned with the value proposition of your product? What if you commit to each quarter to remove at least one thing? Maybe 3? It’ll be a much, much harder decision than what to add to the product, but it’s likely to create a more focused product on what’s important.


PS: Part of this blog post was inspired by a Twitter conversation with Galen Ward (Estately) a year ago and a water-cooler conversation with Nick Soman (LikeBright) this morning.

My LinkedIn Connection policy (a.k.a. Why I haven’t accept your connection request)

I feel it’s that time of the year again. No, not spring, the LinkedIn Connection policy time. By that I mean to tell people who I accept and who I don’t accept connections on LinkedIn. I fear some people might be offended if I don’t explain why I never accepted their connection request on LinkedIn.

First and foremost, I try to keep my LinkedIn network highly curated. I’m not interested in connected with the largest number of people. I’m interested in keeping a strong business network with strong connections.

To that end, my rule of thumb of connecting with other folks on LinkedIn is pretty simple: Do I know enough about you so if Jane Doe (a connection of mine) asks me about you I would be able to give her information about you? And this is a reciprocal test: Do you know enough about me so if Joe Doe (a connection of yours) asks you about me you would be able to give him information about me?

If the answers to those two questions aren't 'yes', it’s a no go for a connection.

I’ll also accept “weak” connections, as long as we have spent at least some reasonable amount of time talking to each other so you and I can have a beat on each other.

I don’t accept connections from people I have not met. I don’t accept connections from recruiters (if I have not worked with them) even if they say they have the job of a lifetime for me. I don’t accept connections of people who want to pitch me business ideas or event invest on my startup. It doesn’t matter. My email is publicly available (marcelo -at- this domain) so if you need to “connect” with me use email or Twitter (@calbucci).

I feel like LinkedIn is making it easier for people to add people they don’t know, probably because they see how Facebook keeps pushing people to increase their number of friends, but I find that is taking away from the real value of that network.

The 11 Emotions of SXSW (from The Intense to The Unforgettable)

Instead of writing 4 or 5 blog posts about SXSW, I decided to write a meatier one, and this is it.

The Intense

This is my second SXSW and it has been as intense as last year. Actually, more intense trying to fit talks, panels, meetings, parties and meals, back-to-back, from 9AM until 2AM.  It’s very easy to lose your voice or get sick around here. If you’ve been to SXSW you know what I mean, if you have not, imagine this is a combination of Las Vegas (for the drinking), DEMO (for the startups & press), CES (for the deals being done), and many more things if I compared to them all you’d be bored with a very long paragraph. It’s all that in one, in 5 or so intense days -- at least for the Interactive part of the conference, since they also have the Film and Music parts.

The Bad

The worst of the conference were the panels and the talks. Yes, that’s the excuse people use to come to SXSW, but this year the voting and the selection committee really flopped. At least a half-dozen people, unaided by my opinion, came to the same conclusion. A lot of the panels were a show of self-promotion for their companies, with soft topics, soft questions and not a lot of new thoughts. One friend suggested that people who propose panels should not pick their moderator. I agree. Moderators and panelists, although very prepared, were too close to each other to ask more direct and hard question, or to challenge each other when something didn’t seem right.

I watched a panel called the Future of Digital Health and although the moderator was fun and great, it was just a bad panel because they talked about the present, each one describing what they did and how their company works and saying “this is the future”. Yeah, that doesn’t work.

The Sad

SXSW is growing. Although it’s not a new conference, it’s clearly going big. According to a cab driver that took us to the hotel, it sold 50% more tickets than last year. With this kind of growth, it becomes impossible for a city to accommodate so many visitors, all at once. There were lines everywhere. If you wanted a cab you had to wait at least 20-25 minutes in a line. Shuttles were often full, although better than last year, and the lines to the parties and events were enormous.  SXSW keeps growing, but the organization of the event and the city are at their maximum capacity. I expect next year to be much worse (or better, depending how you look at it).

The Efficient

If it’s so bad why would anyone come here? The answer is simple: the people. More specifically, the people you want to meet. You can say whatever you want about SXSW (and you should expect several bloggers saying it’s decadent and over), but the reality is that for 5-days, in a 10 city-block radius, 50 of the 100 most important connections who can make your business more successful are concentrated here and if you meet with 5-6 of those people, you saved yourself a ton of hoops, hurdles and time to go through. Plus, the chances you meet with them at an informal, fun, relaxed and relationship-building-inducing place is very high. You two will always have “that” connection (sober, drunk or hangover).

Personally, I can say that SXSW really beat our expectations for whom we thought we were going to meet. By being here we set in motion a few of multi-million dollar deals, a couple of distribution deals with partners who can distribute us to tens of millions of users and many seeds for recruiting and press. Ask me again in six months and I’ll give more details.

And there is the burst of ideas you get from being here. It's hard to say why or how you get those ideas, but it reminds me of Steve Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come from?

The Guilty

As I sat at the Ballroom of the Driskill Hotel watching TED talks (nope, not the video, the real thing right in front of me, not even a TEDx, but a TED event organized by TED) I felt incredibly guilty. I was drinking an expensive scotch, on an incredibly beautiful hotel, eating seared tenderloin pieces on a porcelain spoon, with top thinkers of the world, listening to top thinkers of the world and I asked myself how did I get here? Why was I lucky enough to be here enjoying all this free luxury while kids are dying of hunger around the world; while Malaria kills tens of millions of people every year; while people in first world countries don’t have enough money to pay their rent or their health insurance.

Then I expanded the thought beyond TED and beyond me. A dozen or more parties every night with amazing food (I had a lobster slider that was amazing), free drinks, gift bags with T-shirts, and lots of free things everywhere. Amazing networking opportunities, amazing deals to be done, (supposedly, see “The Bad” above) amazing talks and panels. Why all these 25,000+ (?)  deserve to be here and enjoy all this abundance? Why?

The Innocent

Some people don’t give a shit about their fellow human beings. Most people care and they can be divided in three buckets: a) they care but they haven’t done anything yet, b) they care and they have feet on the ground helping the needy, one-by-one, or c) they care and they want to make a big impact all at once. Clearly I’m on (c) bucket. I want to have a big impact improving people’s lives, millions of people, through technology. And that’s my rationalization why I deserved to be here. It wasn’t so much that I deserved as it is a call to action. Take all this learning and opportunity and make a difference. Yes, I know this can sound incredibly self-serving… “So you went to SXSW, drunk all that booze, had all that fun to better help humankind? I see!”… Yes, that’s my excuse. And I want to make this more than an excuse; I want to make it a mission. No! I want to make it everyone who came to SXSW mission. To do better by humankind by taking the opportunities and lessons presented here, using technology, and amplifying it to make this a better world. Isn’t this what TED is all about? Spreading knowledge. SXSW should be about spreading “doing”.

The Touchable

By seeing the success of the launch of the iPad 2 last year – Apple built an overnight Apple Store here in Austin to serve the early-adopter hungry crowd of SXSW 2011 – and by the incredibly long lines to buy a Nike FuelBand this year, I’ll make a prediction that more companies (big and small) will launch their hardware at SXSW and they should be prepared to sell 5,000-15,000 units in a couple of days. It has to be cool and portable or wearable. It has to have style. It has to be something that appeal to this crowd (early adopters). It totally works. I see how much money companies like Google, HTC, Nokia, Microsoft, Chevy, and others spend at SXSW, but the reality is that people didn’t talk as much about those as they talked about their newly minted Nike FuelBand.

The Visible

I probably said it last year and I’ll say again this year: *Every* *single* *marketing* *tactic* is alive and well at SXSW. From posters on poles to flyers on tables, from hot girls wearing a startup T-Shirt to pimped buses with a DJ on top, from people on costumes to homeless hotspots (be the judge yourself). Honestly, I’m not being fair to all the effort and how creative some of these marketing tactics are, some are unbelievably great. But for each great one, there are another dozen completely mediocre that falls flat.

The Unimproved

I actually think SXSW has another 5 years of life before it jumps the shark (thanks Adrian for explaining what that means). It will keep growing 20-30% year-over-year until the reason people came here (to learn and connect) is not as great as it used to be. When the ratio of people you care to meet goes from 1:10 to 1:50 then the value won’t be here anymore, but for the next 5 years there are a few critical things that SXSW can do to improve.

First and foremost it needs to fix the talks and the panels. The online voting system is not working. Popularity doesn’t mean quality. It means popularity. The talks should be curated, and the panels should be more controversial and thought provoking. Period. If SXSW doesn’t fix that for next year, the number of people buying badges to attend the event will keep dropping, because you’ll still be able to enjoy most of what SXSW has to offer without a pass. The second thing is to think more deeply about a cohesive experience for attendees. There are official and there are the unofficial events at SXSW. They are equally interesting and valuable but the SXSW official site, mobile apps and program pretend the unofficial ones don’t exist. What they are doing is creating a bad experience for me, the attendee. Those are two important things that can make or break this conference value, there are also the secondary issues of transportation, food (20 minutes line to get a coffee is not OK), badge pick up (a friend stayed 2h in the line, how about pick up your badge at your hotel?), more food carts and easy way to get a snack fast (get your sponsors to pony up the money), etc.

The Empowerment

Apparently I’m on the health industry right now, not the technology industry. Wait, it’s actually Health IT, not Health care. Whatever this industry is called or not called, it’s growing, last year the few panels on health and fitness were at a tiny room in a small hotel. This year, it was at the AT&T Conference Center, much bigger and nicer. I’m predicting next year it will be even closer to the Austin Convention Center and even bigger. I was at an event about fitness that made me even more excited about the opportunities we are pursuing. It’s such a big industry with so many big problems and so much money that basically you don’t have to “compete” you just have to “show up”. I know I’m oversimplifying the situation, but the support amongst players on this industry is just unbelievable, even if they are competing for the same dollars. It’s like we have a higher purpose than just make money. Wait… we do!

The Unforgettable

You can stop reading it here. This is just a personal note to myself for the 2013 SXSW.

• Yes, attending SXSW will be worth it. You’ll be surprised by the people you’ll meet and it’ll give you very creative ideas to make EveryMove better.
• Bring a point-and-shoot camera so you can take pictures quick. You have to capture what happens on the streets in the blink of an eye so you can document the weirdness of SXSW (& Austin).
• Bring a freakin’ umbrella!!!
• 1-2 AM is a good time to go back to the hotel. It gives you 6-7 hours of sleep.
• Don’t bring your running shoes. They just take space on your luggage and you never use them (or bring and use them!)
• Bring more energy and cereal bars.
• Arrive on Thursday (even if late night) and leave on Tuesday afternoon.
• Bring a lot of swags to friends (EveryMove stickers, water bottles, T-shirts, buttons, cowboy hats!?!)
• Buy a Mophie way ahead of time (otherwise they’ll be sold out at Amazon). Actually, buy two Mophies just in case.

The End.