ZumoCast

Oct 06 2010

If you have been reading this blog, you will know that I have been trying out ZumoDrive and Dropbox.

Both of services are, at the fundamental level, file caching services where you want to access the same files from different devices (PCs, Macs, iPhones, iPads, Androids etc). Both ZumoDrive and Dropbox keep a copy of the files online (in the “cloud”) and you can either use their proprietary applications or a web browser to access these files.

Zecter (the folks behind ZumoDrive) launched their new ZumoCast streaming service recently.

What ZumoCast does, is not so much as cache a copy of your files in the “cloud”, as stream your files through the “cloud”, with a focus on video and music streaming.

The downside, compared to regular ZumoDrive or Dropbox, is that the computer where the files reside, has to be powered on and running, along with the ZumoCast application.

The upside is that to stream music or video to the device that you have at hand, all you need to do is to go to zumocast.com (via a web browser), sign into your ZumoCast account, and select the music or video you want to listen or watch. The selected media file will playback through the web browser without the need to install a player application.

I use a MacBook Pro for both work and home. I have a separate user account for work use (along with a Windows VM running on VMware Fusion) and another user account for personal stuff. My iTunes library is stored within my personal account.

Before ZumoCast, I could not access my iTunes music when I am on the work account.

However, with ZumoCast, I log into the personal account and start the ZumoCast application. Then I do a user switch and log into the work account. Now, I start up a web browser, log into zumocast.com, and then before you know it, I am streaming music from iTunes!

This may not have been the original intended usage, but it works pretty well and I am really happy with it.

Comments are off for this post

The Other Competition

Sep 24 2010

In my previous article, I talked about the need for the right mindset or philosophy  when looking at competitive products.

Here, I want you, dear reader, to realize that the competition is sometimes where you don’t expect it to be.

There are two types of competitors: the tactical, and the (for want of a better term) strategic.

Tactical competitors are companies or products you compete with toe-to-toe for the same market. For example, in an RFQ process, your tactical competitors are the other companies bidding on the same RFQ. Examples of tactical competitors are McAfee and Symantec in the PC security/anti-virus space.

Strategic competitors are those, which if successful, will wipe out your raison-d’être. They will cause such a large paradigm shift that your market will disappear beneath you. In the example of McAfee and Symantec, think about what will happen if Apple were to grab 95% of the PC market tomorrow. While Apple’s OS X operating system is not 100% malware proof, it is so much better than Windows that the need for McAfee or Symantec security products will mostly disappear. Yet you don’t think of Apple as a competitor to McAfee or Symantec.

Strategic competitors are harder to spot because they are often not on your radar screen. Most times, they are outside of your space, yours or your company’s area of expertise.

The only way to spot strategic competitors is to be ecosystem-aware i.e. know what makes up the ecosystem of products or services in the space that you are in, and understand the effect on the ecosystem if something changes either within it or on the periphery.

Every time a new product comes out, think about what the impact it will have on the ecosystem. This is particularly true for products that are launched with a great deal of buzz. The publicity surrounding these products can result in a snowball effect (of similar or complementary products) that can topple a pillar propping up the ecosystem.

You also want to watch influencers like Apple whose latest-and-greatest often change the world order, and cause a ripple effect on multiple ecosystems.

When you do spot a strategic competitor, can you do something about it? Most of the time, the paradigm-shift is larger than any single company.

The solution here is to be agile enough to re-tool and ride the new wave. Being able to do this counts towards beating your competition as most of your less savvy tactical competitors will probably not survive the shift.

Comments are off for this post

The Competition

Sep 22 2010

Here’s a quote from my forthcoming book, The Art of Ben:

When evaluating your opponent, focus on his strengths for they may reveal your weaknesses. Focusing on his weaknesses will not necessarily reveal your own strengths. Rather, it reveals only your own arrogance.

When we look at a competitor’s product, we tend to look for the bad parts: what doesn’t work, the bugs, the poor user interface, experience, flow, implementation, performance etc.

We tend to want to look at our own product in a better light.

That is a perfectly human reaction. When I come up with what I think is a great idea, I want to put it on a pedestal and show the world how smart I am. I don’t want someone or something to come along and smash that “great” idea to smithereens with counter arguments and counter examples.

However, an idea is not great if it cannot withstand the weight of counter arguments and in the same way, a product is not great, if it cannot stand on its merits with respect to the competition.

Dealing with the competitor’s products is not just the product manager’s job. The company’s leadership has to set the tone:  that competing products are not dismissed out of hand as poor implementations and therefore don’t matter, that the entire organization take the threat of competing products seriously, whether in fixing the weak areas on one’s own product line, or improving the quality or just by a matter of better and faster execution.

This is difficult to do in a start-up organization. Partly because passion and enthusiasm drive such organizations and you don’t want to extinguish that with talk of the competition being better. Partly, because such organizations want to move fast and hence have little time and energy to look back at the competition.

In any case, it is better to be paranoid than sorry. And that is yet another saying from the Art of Ben.

Comments are off for this post

Apple’s new iPod Nano

Sep 14 2010

I’ll be at IDF (Intel Developer Forum) today and after the mid-day exhibit hours, I’ll walk over to the Apple Store at Union Square and get myself a new iPod Nano.

Between myself and my kids, we have almost all generations of the iPod Nano.

We also have a couple of generation of the iPod Shuffle. But the Nano beats the Shuffle hands down in usability. If you have been frustrated by the “select playlist” double-click on the previous generation Shuffle’s remote control, you’ll know what I mean.

The new iPod Nano is very interesting in terms of what’s new: touch screen, multi-touch user interface, built-in clip etc. From a product point of view, what is more interesting is what is not in the new Nano.

If you look at different generations of any given product, you’ll notice that as the product evolves, it gets more and more features. A tiny 1977 Honda Accord hatchback sits in my driveway. Next to it is a 2007 Honda Accord, which is almost twice the size, and categorized as a mid-size car. A great example of feature bloat is Microsoft Office, which has so many features today that you need to Google to figure how to do anything with it.

Apple is not immune to feature bloat, but when that happens, it is usually in a very controlled manner and for a good reason. Bigger is no necessarily better at Apple.

Which brings us back to the new Nano. Size-wise, it is much smaller than the previous generation. Some features are also missing: camera and the ability to play movies/TV shows. While I don’t mind the missing camera (which was added only in one generation of the Nano), I do miss the ability to watch TV shows. In fact, I bought the previous generation Nano for that purpose: to watch Eureka episodes on the plane while on business trips.

What Apple did with the new Nano was to basically refocus the product. The new Nano is music-only: music with a very very cool user interface.

Apple would have gone the “normal”, evolutionary route: keep the features of the old Nano, but add a touch screen interface.

The resulting product would have been a ho-hum skinny iPod Touch.

Instead, Apple chose to come up with completely revolutionary version of the Nano. As a result,  the new Nano is a very unique and must-have gadget. Strategically, it is a way to bring consumers back to the iPod line.

This is a very brave move from a product management point of view: it is always easy to tack on more features, but hard to justify the removal of some. There will always be consumers who will be vocally disappointed at the lack of features that they are used to seeing. Witness what happened when Apple removed Firewire from the MacBooks.

But, hey, if you really must have video-playback and a camera, just go get an iPod Touch. It’s not a lot more expensive than the 16GB Nano.

One response so far

« Newer posts Older posts »