Looking for a new kind of Program Manager....

Photo by Helico

- Do you know which new web service has jumped the shark when others are just hearing about it? 

- Can you juggle a bug database, a client call, a brainstorm session and a presentation in a day? 

- Do you know how to ship a quality software project on time with limited resources? 

 WE WANT TO MEET YOU! 

We're a young startup incubator and interactive agency who create and design for a broad selection of household names ranging from NASA to Nestle. We've built some of the most talked about software on the web while at Microsoft and now 8ninths is looking to fill a critical role in a Program Manager. 

Frankly we're looking for someone special. 

You'll be helping us manage multiple projects, interfacing with clients and helping to design and drive new products, services, concepts and pitches. As part of the team you'll work with a fun, creative and experienced team building truly cutting edge user interactions for Web, Tablet and Mobile Apps. You'll collaborate with our developers to deliver amazing work that pushes the envelope of what's been done before. 

We're here to do the best work of our careers and we want you to feel the same. If you think you fit the bill give us a shout and attach your resume. 

Responsibilities: 

- Act as point-person for all projects being run for 8ninths 

- Manage project schedule, requirements and delivery. 

- Develop custom presentation and pitches. 

- Work directly with business, design and development team to define apps and online experiences. 

Requirements: 

- Superior analytical skills and problem-solving abilities. 

- Proactive, able to extrapolate and mitigate for potential issues. 

- Ability to work in a fast-paced, constantly evolving team environment. 

- Excellent communication and organizational skills. 

- BA/BS degree preferred with a strong academic record. 

- Ideally 2 years of experience, preferably within software development or media. 

- Experience and ability in common business applications (e.g., OSX or Windows, Pages, Word, Microsoft Excel, Keynote, PowerPoint). 

WE'RE HIRING!.....Interaction / Product Designer

Do you appreciate the simplicity of mint.com?

Does your work belong on the front page of FWA? 

Can you argue the relative pro's and con's of twitter vs. facebook?

WE WANT TO MEET YOU!

We're a young startup incubator and interactive agency who create and design for a broad selection of household names ranging from NASA to Nestle.

We've built some of the most talked about software on the web while at Microsoft and now 8ninths is looking to fill a critical role in an Interaction / Product Designer.

Frankly we're looking for someone special. 

As part of the team you'll work with a fun, creative and experienced team, defining the features, behavior and user interactions for Web, Tablet and Mobile Apps. 

You'll collaborate with our developers on bringing your designs to life and pushing the envelope of what's been done before.

You'll work with creative technologists and marketing gurus on very high profile, cutting edge projects. We're here to do the best work of our careers and we want you to feel the same.

If you think you fit the bill give us a shout. Send your a link to your online portfolio or resume to:

recruiting@8ninths.com

Responsibilities

• Work closely with product management, development and other internal stakeholders to build storyboards, proof-of-concept mockups, demos and prototypes of proposed and planned 8ninths applications and features.
• Collaborate in the definition of user interface design standards for 8ninths applications.
• Conduct ongoing research of web-based user interface development, technologies and best practices.

Requirements

• Fluency with web standards and technologies, including: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, JSP, XUL, XAML
• Strong web graphics production capability and practioner experience with and other mockup tools such as Adobe Creative Suite (The more diverse the better i.e. Photoshop, InDesign, Flash, Final Cut Pro, After Effects)
• Experience with methodologies such as Iterative development , Agile, SCRUM
• Creative approach to problem solving, innovation and issue resolution
• Superior interpersonal skills and the ability to collaborate actively and proactively with others in a cross-functional team
• Ability to communicate effectively in writing, verbally and as a presenter
• Self-motivated and self-managed with a high degree of analytical ability and intellectual curiosity
• Strong attention to detail, and a commitment to delivering highly-polished web-based prototypes under tight time constraints
• 1-3 years of experience in web design / development, with specific expertise with web-based applications preferred.  

Help me Obi-Wan Kinecti!

We love to find novel uses for cutting edge tech and the open source community has been busy taking apart Microsofts awesome new sensor for the Xbox, The Kinect.

In the video below you'll see how okreylos managed to grab the camera depth and color information in order to create realtime 3D reconstructions directly from the Kinect. Many potential uses of this might include scanning yourself for inclusion into a game or networking a number of Kinects to create a 3D holographic image from multiple angles. Fun stuff and reminiscent of the Photosynth project we worked on previously at Live Labs.

With Lion Apple Takes a Mac-kward Approach

Today Steve Jobs did his usual Willy Wonka impression and walked us through the latest innovations to emerge from the fruit factory. There are subtle but major updates to iLife with updates to iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband that really are focussed less on features and more on encouraging people to use the products more.

With iPhoto there's better sharing features with facebook and it's even easier to make a book for your grandparents. With iMovie you can create a truly professional looking trailer and sound effects. Garageband adds Autotune-esque timing abilities to your jam sessions as well as new and improved lessons.

The iLife model is genius in itself. Add features that delight customers on an annual basis, charge a reasonable price ($49). Done. Why wouldn't you upgrade?

But the meat of the presentation was reserved for what we think is a major, major, paradigm shift.

The Lion just roared.

Apple is doing something that to many of it's competitors would be almost unfathomable. They're bringing a mobile interface to the deskop.

The original iPhone user interface was originally designed not on a phone, but an early iPad prototype. It was refined on the phone and then unveilled to the world on the iPad.

Today, Apple came full circle and brought the mobile interface paradigm we now know and love from our iOS devices to the desktop. There's an AppStore, there's apps with persistant states, there's gestures. 

Essentially Apple is taking a huge bet that people will want to interact with their desktops and laptops in the same way they interact with their mobile devices and that bet could end up being the biggest change in the desktop computer user interface this decade.

Read more about the details over at Engadget 

mind blown

About as Bladerunner-esque as I can imagine, a field of LED's hovering above a city depicting any image one could imagine in 3D. Technical hurdles to be overcome for sure but it'll happen and probably in the not too distant future. Read more at http://senseable.mit.edu/flyfire/

MAG+, Reading magazines in the future....Well next year...

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Nice concept video from the guys at BERG (talented guys, I once met Matt Webb at a conference in San Francisco and his business card just had his name positioned at the exact point of the golden ratio). They worked on a concept project to articulate how people might interact with digital magazines in the near future, something we've also talked about in 'The Changing Face of Photography'. Both Apple and Microsoft are rumored to be releasing a tablet / e-reader this year and I think the experience that BERG demonstrates is very much in line with what we can expect in terms of functionality. Worth checking out.

Barnes and Noble: Not Losing (quickly) is Everything

photographs courtesy Philip Greenspun

Barnes and Noble, the physical book store chain, is the master of the Just-Enough competitive response.  Back in the dotcom years, when Amazon exploded into the scene and threatened to take over the book retail business, B&N put together its first online web site to stem customer defection to Amazon.  Since then, it has done a decent but unspectacular job online, certainly has not done much to steal online market share back from Amazon.  They have done an just-ok job at linking their online and brick/mortar stores, such as making the $25/year membership program good at both bn.com as well as the stores, and putting a few kiosks in the store for users to search for books on bn.com.  Hardly innovative nor aggressive.  If they really want to put pressure on Amazon, they'd sharpen their discount online, do a much better job of shipping book orders to the brick+mortar stores for pickup, etc.  As it stands, B&N can offer "fast delivery" which means that they'll get the book into UPS's hand within 3 days of your online order.  Well, 3 business days to be exact.  This is the best they can do after a decade of competing against Amazon, who can ship the book out often within 24 hours, and with the $79 Amazon Prime program, can get the book in my hands within 2 days, from hitting submit button to my door steps, and often at a lower cost vs. B&N.

It just seem that B&N's strategy is to do just enough so that they can maintain leadership in the the physical bookstore business, while the world gradually and surely moves towards more online book purchases.

So it's not surprising that B&N seems to be following this same tactic when Amazon announced the Kindle.  Hardly a runaway success yet, the Kindle nonetheless poses a strategic challenge to the physical, carbon-based printed book, and by extension remove the necessity of a physical book store.  

B&N's tepid response is to offer a me-too version of the ebook reader, by joining into a strategic partnership with Plastic Logic to sell an ebook device, oene which won't hit the stores until 2010.  In the meantime, it's offering software ebook readers for the iPhone, PC, and Mac, to go along with its nascent ebook store, which it was able to offered via an acquisition of Fictionwise earlier in 2009.  It's enough to placate shareholders and offer something to go up against arch rival Amazon, but it feels like that it is again caught in reaction mode.

I wonder whether B&N just wants to milk its existing position for as long as possible, losing as few customers to Amazon as possible.  Or is it that the management needs to have a big shakeup, and put in place folks with a little bit of the vision for the future?  

The whole situation reminds me alot about the newspaper industry back a few years.  They know the end was coming, and fast.  And yet the complacency and/or the incompetency was so great, that they just did as little as possible to adjust to the rapidly changing trajectory.

bing is the sound of your cash rebate

Bing Shopping, previously known as Live Search Shopping, and before that MSN Shopping, had launched a cash back rebate program back in mid-2008, and yet very few people heard about it.  The terms are pretty generous: you searched for the product via bing/live/msn shopping, and if you purchased the goods you get a percentage back of the purchase price.

What was surprising to me was how little known it was.  Here you have one of the Big 3 search engines offering consumers 4-7% back for Buy.com purchases, as well as a whole slew of other stores like Overstock, Barnes and Nobles, Newegg, Walmart; not small potatoes on the eCommerce space.  And as long as you click thru Bing to get to these retailers, you get the rebate back after a little bit of work.  But it seems like nobody has ever heard of it; and that included me, living in the shadow of Redmond, with all the friends in the world working in Microsoft.  Two weeks ago I haven't heard a peep about it, and I consider myself a shrewd bargain hunter.

And up until recently, that was a microcosm of what MSN/Live Search was all about.  They couldn't get people to pay attention to them even when they were doing things right, or even when they were throwing money at you.  They could have had the most amazing search technology in the universe and it wouldn't have moved the needle in search market share.  I think Bing's marketing campaign and a rash of good press coverage have changed that, a little.

But back to the rebate cash-back program.  This is not a new offering in the web.  Shopping site Fatwallet has ran a cash back program for years.  And if you look closely at the list of stores, you'll find alot of similarities between the participating stores on Fatwallet's list, and the Bing Shopping list.  But Fatwallet is a bit of a niche site, for those bargain hunters who really go to alot of trouble to save a bit of money.  Bing search takes the concept to a whole new level of accessibility.

I believe Fatwallet, an independent site without major financial backing, is able to offer the discount because these retailers offer to kick back some commission back to Fatwallet for driving traffic to their site.  Add on the loss rate for users who don't bother claiming the cash back later on, Fatwallet was able to make a decent profit on the scheme.  For example, if you go thru Fatwallet to Buy.com, you can collect upto 2.66% of rebate.

But that's meager compare to Bing's 4-7% rebate for Buy.com(which doesn't even count the ongoing "double days" promotion, where the rebate is doubled to 8-14%).  It could very well be that the Bing folks are able to drive a harder bargain with Buy.com than Fatwallet was able to, or that Bing were able to throw in search advertising and other goodies to sweeten the deal to Buy.com, but I wouldn't at all be surprised that Microsoft is throwing money into the program out of their own pocket.

And it makes sense as an investment for Bing: Shopping is one of the key scenario for search engines, and if this cash back program can generate new user interest in using Bing rather than  Google, or even better yet, get them to stick with Bing for the long haul, Ballmer would be happy to pay for the program within reason.

How long this last is anyone's guess though.  Google Checkout had done something similar when they launched, running a promotion during the 2006 holiday season, where you get $20 off any $50 purchase.  It generated a bit of buzz, and certainly enticed a good amount of folks to setup Google Checkout account, but I don't know that it fundamentally changed their competitive position vis-a-vis PayPal.  

My take is that Bing's cash back program will help, but throwing money at users won't fundamentally alter the challenge that is facing Bing.  And at some point, Ballmer is going to have to answer to shareholders about the cost of this program, and whether it is effective as a customer acquisition tool.