Great Discoveries of the Month - Feb 08

There have been a couple of sites that have caught my attention this month.

Thinkature

First up Thinkature. On the Thinkature website they describe the service as follows:

" With Thinkature, you can create a collaborative workspace and invite coworkers, friends, and colleagues to join you in just seconds. Once inside your workspace, you can communicate by chatting, drawing, creating cards, and adding content from around the Internet. It's all synchronous, too - no need to hit reload or get an editing lock"

As a person who spends most days teleconferencing it can be really difficult to explain things without drawing a diagram. Well this now makes it easy. Everybody can be looking at the same workspace.

Zoho Wiki

Next up create your very own wiki in less than 30 seconds with Zoho Wiki. Not used wikis extensively but this just makes it so easy. Now have my very own wiki just to save notes and various ideas somewhere where I can access then easily.

Telebid

The Telebid site looks like such an amazing deal. At first glance there appears to be some amazing bargains available. Nintendos for £30 iBooks for £70.

According the the site itself:

"There’s a few key things that are different from other auctions you might have used online:

• Bidding on our auctions starts at just 10p, with no reserve prices.
• The price only goes up by 10p with each bid placed. (7p on international auctions).
• If a bid gets placed in the final moments, we extend the auction by up to 40 seconds.
• There’s a small charge for each bid placed: this helps us offer you such amazing bargains."

This site is genius each bid costs 50p, and are available in "BidPacks" of 20, 50, 100 and 200 bids. So every time you make an incremental bid of 10p the site makes 40p. This is amazing - bargains appear to be available right up to very last seconds until everybody piles in. And each time somebody piles in the bidding period is extended by 10 seconds or so. So what may have looked like an amazing bargain at first can very quickly look less attractive. But Telebid make 40p on every bid!

Doing some rough maths if an auction for a Wii closes at £120 thats 1,200 bids at 10p but Telebid have made £480 - just on the bids. Plus the £120 towards the cost of the product. They are quids in. But the winner can still get a bargain provding they haven't made to many bids.

I wonder whether this site was designed with the help of an Economist or somebody who knows a lot about Game Theory. The rules remind me of the auction for mobile phone radio spectrum in the UK which netted the UK government £Billions.

Scottish Usability Professional Association Event

January 29th - Implementing usability changes on an already successful site, Tamlin Roberts, Mercurytide

Entrance will be free to UPA members and £10 for non members (£5 for student non-members).

Venue: Scottish Enterprise Atlantic Quay Glasgow

Time: 18:30

If you already have a site that is doing well, have lots of visitors and they are using the site as you want them to, then should you be changing it? Many will argue that ‘if it’s not broke, don’t fix it’ but others will say that you have to constantly update to keep ahead of the competition.
The property market is highly competitive and in Scotland this company is no small player, but when they we were asked to update an already successful site we had to be sure that usability was a priority and that we were going to add something to the mix rather than take it away.
Come along to this case study presentation to learn how usability can be applied on a commercial site with a wide audience and extensive content. A wide range of user centred design methods, as well as AJAX web design were applied to provide an overall positive user experience.

If you would like to sign up for this SUPA event, please do so via our website at http://www.scottishupa.org.uk/events.html

Pandora Shuts Down in the UK

As did many others, on Monday I got an email from Pandora, my preferred internet radio station, telling me the following:

" in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible"

It appears that both the PPL and the MCPS/PRS Alliance have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so one of the best internet radio stations has had to close.

This seems to have happened just at the same time as DRM and digital copywright legislation are being dropped making music much more freely available. I am now using Last FM