Posts tagged Waiting~
Mailbox Takes Its Email App To iPad, With Android Waiting In The Wings
May 23rd
What has Mailbox founder Gentry Underwood and his team been up to since selling the email-app maker to Dropbox for a reported $100 million in March?
Mostly working on new versions of the product – like an iPad version of the app, which is coming out Thursday morning on Apple’s App Store.
Like the original iPhone version, which attracted a million users at breakneck speed, Mailbox for iPad lets you swipe messages off to the right or left to handle them. A short swipe to the right archives them, while a long swipe deletes them; a short swipe to the left “snoozes” messages for later reading, while a long swipe puts them in folders based on actions: “to read,” “to buy,” or “to watch.”
Mailbox for iPad doesn’t change that basic concept for email handling, but it does add a column to let you read messages alongside a list of messages in your inbox.
Resisting Design Temptation
ReadWrite sat down recently with Underwood to talk about the challenges of rethinking an app originally meant for smartphones for tablets. Underwood, a former designer at Ideo, had lots of thoughts.
“[Tablets] are these weird hybrid devices that sit in between,” said Underwood. “They’re part luxury mobile phone, and they’re part makeshift desktop experience.”
That made it harder, not easier, he said.
“Constraint is the friend of design,” Underwood said. “It’s easier for us to create a simple mail experience [for the phone]. We have to resist the temptation to take all these pixels and put in all these bells and whistles.”
That echoes comments recently made by Luke Wroblewski, creator of a polling app called Polar. For Polar’s Web version, Wroblewski left the center of the screen largely blank, rather than alter the app’s core function—because filling up pixels didn’t add to the user’s experience.
Dropbox founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi have given the Mailbox team permission to ignore suggestions from their new colleagues for cool new features, Underwood said. When Underwood showed Houston and Ferdowsi mockups of all the design suggestions and asked what the Mailbox team should work on, Houston told him, “That’s something you have to answer. What’s best for the customer?”
Putting Gmail On Notice
What would be really exciting, though, is an Android version. Underwood acknowledged that Mailbox was working on Android next, but didn’t reveal any specific plans for the product.
(See also How Google Is Wooing Developers To Make Apps For Android First.)
Anyone familiar with Android, though, can see clearly where Mailbox is headed – and why it would be a killer app, challenging Google’s Gmail on its own turf.
That’s because Android’s notification system is superior to the notification functions built into Apple’s iOS mobile operating system in a key way: Developers, if they choose, can add functional features to the notifications that drop down on the screen, allowing users to take actions without having to launch into the app.
For Mailbox, that would likely mean that its swipe-right-or-left convention for email handling could be ported into notifications, allowing users to swiftly handle emails as they come in without leaving the task they’re working on. (I suggested this to Underwood, but he declined to comment on the notion.)
Dealing with email purely through notifications is not something that Mailbox could do today on Apple’s iPhone or iPad. But it’s such a logical extension of the email app’s design brilliance, it’s unimaginable that Underwood and team aren’t thinking about it.
Photo by TechCrunch
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2PM & Seo In Young Snaps A Picture Together In the Waiting Room – KpopStarz
May 18th
 KpopStarz |
2PM & Seo In Young Snaps A Picture Together In the Waiting Room
KpopStarz Seo In Yuong and 2PM recently revealed a picture taken with each other, showing support for one another. The picture seemed to have been in the waiting room of Mnet "M! Countdown" from yesterday after their comeback stages. Seo In Young and 2PM, … |
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The Enhanced Campaigns Waiting Game
Apr 29th
Like many of my fellow PPC colleagues, I feel uneasy about the impending move to Enhanced Campaigns and the lurking cutover deadline of July 22nd. Should we convert now and get it over with? Should we run a few tests with our smaller, simpler accounts? Should we abandon tightly-crafted,…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Vizio: The Next Giant or Roadkill Waiting to Happen?
Jan 8th
Why do I like the hardware industry?
It’s the melodrama. One day, you’re an unheralded company with clunky, me-too products. (We’re the first company to deliver a smartphone specifically designed for bass fishermen!) Three years later, a few analysts and reporters note that your company has moved from number 27 to number 8 in market share. A year later, BusinessWeek prints a breathless account of the danger sports—windsurfing, bull baiting, extreme whittling—the CEO enjoys to keep himself tuned. You’re number one in your chosen markets and your company is expanding!
And then comes the final act: excess inventory, bloated product lines, tight margins and feature stories bemoaning your big bet on those touch screens.
Look at Packard-Bell, Compaq, Palm, AST, Digital, Acer, and all those people that made Internet Appliances back in the late 90s. These companies weren’t stupid or mismanaged. In most cases, they touched the Golden Fleece… right before sliding off a cliff.
And now comes Vizio. It’s one of the great success stories in digital television. At the Consumer Electronics Show this week Vizio unfurled smart phones, tablets and Windows 8 PCs. (Vizio started trickling out the PC strategy in 2012 but this year’s CES has been the launch pad.) The desktops will have large 24- and 27-inch screens while the laptops will emphasize thinness. Still, even with the accent on design it can be seen as a strange move. PC sales are flattening out and most phone companies are struggling in the shadow of Samsung and Apple. Given a choice between trying to interest consumers in Windows 8 or trying to earn a living giving massages at street fairs, you might be temped take Option B.
But, ahh… the history. Vizio has defied the odds before. Founded in 2002 by LCD veterans William Wang, Ken Lowe and Laynie Newsom, the Costa Mesa, Calif.-based company started as a consulting firm serving PC makers trying to break into the TV market. It helped Gateway release a 42-inch plasma TV system. It cost $2,999, but comparable systems at the time sold for upwards of $6,000. Although Gateway’s momentum in TVs petered out, it enjoyed a surge of sales. Gateway sold 4,000 in the first month.
Soon after, it joined a new crop of new-name TV manufacturers like Westinghouse, Polaroid, and Syntax-Brillian – HP and Dell even thought they could make it big in TVs. Vizio’s strategy was to produce the lowest price TVs in the mid- to high-price bands, a plan which allowed it to compete on price while avoiding the most challenging segment of the markets. It also specifically targeted what then were new channels for TV makers: Costco, Sam’s Club and home shopping channels. Electronics retailers, at the time, insisted on gross margins of 25 percent or more. Big Box retailers only demanded ten percent. Vizio used the strategy to undercut prices without undercutting margins too much.
It also kept headcount low. Vizio outsources nearly everything. When it overtook Samsung and Sony for the first time to become the number one LCD TV brand in America, it had only 85 employees.
“We don’t have highly paid executives or fly around on corporate jets. The efficiency of the company is not hiding any kind of latency,” Wang told me back then.
The momentum hasn’t ended: Vizio is still regularly in the top spot with Samsung in the U.S. Now reviewers like Dave Katzmaier often give their TVs high marks. Compare that to Sony or Sharp: Sharp, one of the most innovative companies in LCD technology, is this week seeking an infusion of cash from Intel and Dell.
With that in mind, let’s look at the new products. Vizio’s tablet runs on AMD’s Z60 processors. That means it is compatible with virtually every computer program on the market, unlike Microsoft’s own Surface, which runs on an ARM chip. AMD is also a company on a mission to rebuild itself and so will likely go out of its way to help Vizio make sure it succeeds. The products are attractive, different and Vizio doesn’t carry baggage like HP or Dell.
In phones, Vizio will target the Chinese market, still a new frontier for smartphones.
Then again, it won’t be easy. Vizio did try to sell phones in the U.S. a few years ago. In the summer of 2011, Lowe told me during a panel discussion that Vizio was going to come out with a line of LED light bulbs. Taiwan would produce them and Vizio would sell them. LED prices dropped and I haven’t seen the light bulbs. The company’s breakthrough channel strategy is no surprise anymore.
If these new products don’t sell well, expect Vizio to back of its commitments quietly. But if TV sales begin to flatten, Vizio may decided that its future does indeed belong in portable entertainment and computing. An effort will be made to bring a new definition to form factors. And then someone will suggest…
Image courtesy of Vizio.
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Seo In young looking like a Madonna in her waiting room – Yahoo! Philippines News
Dec 30th
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Seo In young looking like a Madonna in her waiting room
Yahoo! Philippines News [by Choi Mi Sun / translated by Joy Kim] K-pop singer Seo In young's makeup photo looking like Madonna is an issue on internet. She looks like she is preparing for a party and her makeup and hair reminds of Madonna. With glam wave hair style and … |
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Seo In Young in Waiting Room, A Sneak Peak at What Makeup She Uses – KpopStarz
Dec 11th
 KpopStarz |
Seo In Young in Waiting Room, A Sneak Peak at What Makeup She Uses
KpopStarz In recent photo shoot filming, Seo In Young was sitting in the waiting room with a gold outfit on and wavy brown hair that made her look like Marilyn Monroe. In her hand, she was holding makeup. Seo In Young that was seen through the mirror had red … |
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Competitive Intelligence: A Gift Waiting to be Opened
Nov 21st
To gain an edge this holiday season and better compete for consumers’ hard-earned dollars, you need to monitor your competitor’s keywords, paid search spend, and ad copy. Here are some specific methods for utilizing competitive PPC intelligence.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
The New Evernote For iOS: This Is The One We’ve Been Waiting For
Nov 8th
Evernote 5 for iOS is out, and it’s the upgrade fans of the life-organizer apps have needed for a long time. Everything is faster, smoother, more capable and prettier, right down to the new, classier icon. And it just gets better from there.
The most important change is that the app is now much better organized. Evernote users are organized people, but the old Evernote apps for iOS were crazy and disorganized. Even worse, they weren’t even remotely similar between iPhone and iPad versions.
The small version was basically a least-common-denominator iPhone app organized in nested lists with lots of forward and back buttons. The iPad version, frankly, was a skeuomorphic monstrosity, a flat grid of fake piles of paper that all looked the same sprawled out to the full width of the screen. In both versions, it was incredibly difficult to find what you needed.
The new Evernote 5 has a uniform look and structure, with tabbed navigation that lets you see every section at once and smoothly swipe between them. The iPad version shows nice, swipe-able previews of notes along the top. Both sizes have new Quick Note buttons, and this is such a needed feature. With one tap from the app’s main screen, you can instantly open a new text or photo note or launch the Page Camera to scan a document. Evernote is for capturing information as well as storing it, and it needed to be fast and painless. Now it is.
The update makes the note views you’re used to even easier to use, and it also adds a new Places view. Evernote has geo-tagged notes for a while, recording the places they’re created. Now there’s a tab to display notes on a map, which is a neat way to organize certain kinds of records and memories.
There’s a tab for Premium Features that you can’t remove, which free users might find annoying, but let me tell you, if you want to seriously get into Evernote, you are going to upgrade. Not only do you get a bigger storage and upload allowance, text search within PDFs, shared notebooks and other such perks, you get to store your notebooks offline, so you can access them without a connection. That is a huge benefit.
Once you’ve upgraded, the Premium Features tab lets you manage your offline notebooks and set a passcode lock for the app. You can’t make it go away and access it from the settings menu, which you get by tapping your name in the upper left corner. I wish premium users had that option, so the main screen would be cleaner. But this is a very minor gripe about an otherwise amazing update.
You can download Evernote 5 for iOS for free from the App Store. It’s a great complement to Evernote 5 for Mac, which is coming very soon.
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No Budget for SMX East? An Expo+ Pass Is Waiting for You
Sep 11th
Attend as many as 10 sessions on internet and search engine marketing from Google, Bing and more. Be inspired at two keynotes. Meet 40 leading solution providers. Participate in SMX Theater presentations and networking events. All for FREE. Just pre-register for an SMX East Expo+ Pass. Do it today!…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Google+ Waiting For ‘Hypergrowth’, Partners With Flipboard
Jun 20th
Bradley Horowitz says Google+ hasn’t yet reached the intense period of growth that has been experienced by competitors such as Facebook and Twitter. Also, Google will partner with Flipboard, allowing users to share, comment on, and +1 content.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
