Quick hit: I lost my phone in a cab last night, and while the sweetest kid EVER found it and got it back to me, it made me think twice about my mobile contingency plan. I realized I had a few holes, so I wanted to share what I’ve already done, and how I’m patching the holes. All of these are Android-specific; I haven’t investigated iOS options for my iPad yet.

• Contacts. All of my contacts are through my Google Apps account for deannazandt.com, so we’re good there.Apps. I’ve rooted my phone, so I use Titanium Backup Pro to create regularly scheduled backups of the application and application data on my phone. The free version sends the backups to your SD card; I bought the Pro version so I could have those apps backed up to Dropbox, too.SMS & MMS. I use Backup to Gmail for this. It automatically sends your SMS, MMS and Call Log to your Google account, and files them in the Archive with appropriate labels.

  Photos. This was the big one for me: I have a lot of photos on my phone that aren’t shared on my social networks. I was mourning the potential loss of some precious Christmas photos, for example. I’m now trying out SugarSync to back these up to SugarSync’s cloud, and then to my laptop; I chose this one because many services wanted to use public social networks for the backup. That was too risky for me. Plus, it seems that SugarSync has good reviews on managing battery and scheduling, and you get 5GB of free space.

  Locator. Tara Hunt turned me on to Prey, which is a full suite of services for a lost phone. You can locate the lost device, send messages to it for the finder to tell them how to get in touch with you, and if they don’t comply, you can brick the device.

  Those were the biggies for me. What else am I missing?

Google Forms are great: they’re dead simple to build, and they can be accessed on the web via Google and (through the use of <embed> code) any other website as well.  Support for email publishing is great, and Google Forms work seamlessly with Google Docs spreadsheets.  It’s been my experience that within small and mid-sized businesses that are already using Google Apps, the internal use of Google forms has become routine.

What’s interesting, though, is that you tend to see them being used much less often out there in the wilds of the public internet.

That’s because Google Forms have one major weakness: unlike within the Google Apps ecosystem, public submissions are completely anonymous – so there’s no way check against users submitting multiple responses to the same form.  Granted, it’s not an easy technical problem: browser cookies are one option, but users can always delete them. Comparing the IP address of each submission against those of previous submissions?  That’s not a perfect solution either: consumer ISPs typically issue dynamic IP addresses, multiple legitimate users could be sharing the same internet connection, and lastly, there are, as always, privacy concerns.

And that’s just the technical side of the issue – from a PR perspective, of course Google has to be very careful about being perceived as being in the business of anything remotely resembling the tracking of users out there on the public web.  Still, it’s hard to imagine why Google hasn’t yet implemented a transparent, user opt-in system to prevent multiple public Google Forms submissions (even if it might reduce the number or submissions).

In the meantime, for all the <embed> code and URL access, Google Forms is essentially crippled as a public web service.

OK, so that’s the web – what about Google Forms sent via email to a private finite set of known respondents?  Here, the privacy issues (both real and perceived) are much reduced – and technically speaking, identifying data could easily and securely be embedded within the ‘Submit’ link contained within each email – but yet, even privately emailed Google Forms responses are completely anonymous (and therefore uncontrolled) as well.  As a result, a Google Forms email survey subject could ‘game the system’ by clicking on the ‘Submit’ link in their single email any number of times.

Conclusion   As a public web service, Google Forms has great potential – but addressing the unique/multiple submission issue would involve technical challenges, privacy concerns, and a potential for third party misuse that are clearly beyond Google’s comfort level.  As a result, any serious use of Google Forms remains limited to within the Google Apps platform.

Sure, a nod has been made towards the public use of the service (Google URLs, <embed> codes, email distribution) – but it seems that Google’s comfortable with letting Google Forms remain merely a Google Apps value-add.

In the meantime, here’s a completely anonymous (and therefore completely meaningless!) Google Forms survey for you.

Vote early, vote often!

It’s interesting how online banking in Germany differs from online banking in the US…

Arguably, they’ve been at this electronic banking thing over here longer than we have in the states – in fact, the routine writing of personal checks ended in Germany sometime well before the end of the last century.  But while the move away from paper has progressed much further here, funnily enough you can’t do any personal online banking at all in Germany without one very important sheet of paper: a TAN list.

A TAN list is a numbered list of unique codes (usually 50 per sheet).  Each time you make a transaction online, your bank’s website prompts you for a random code from the list (i.e. “Please enter code number 43“).  The idea is not only to present the user with an additional authentication challenge – a simple “What is your first pet’s name?” type of question  accomplishes that – but to also make that additional challenge unique to the transaction.

Why is a transaction-specific authentication challenge important?  It’s a way way to fight keystroke logging software – malicious code capable of quietly recording each and every keystroke you type (including, of course, passwords).  Until recently, my US bank had been addressing the key logging issue a bit differently, requiring that I enter an additional “Security Key” by clicking on the keys of a virtual onscreen keyboard.  That avoided the physical keyboard (and thus key-logging), but the problem remained that my single Security Key was static rather than unique to each transaction.  As a consequence, if just one of my transactions was overseen (or screen-recorded), I could still be compromised.

…which is why they just changed over to the system shown below:

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Just back from a trip to Germany, while over there I ended up in several serendipitous conversations about our increasing embrace of technology to help organize and memorize our everyday lives.

From the many appointments and conversations to ad-hoc thought streams, new log-ins, phone numbers or email addresses, we increasingly love to tether ourselves to nearby hardware and software managing our lifes’ personal and professional data streams – preferably instantly and on the go.

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I have a few  friends who’ve had ID chips implanted in their expensive purebred pets over the years.  I’d always thought of it as a vaguely creepy, almost comically yuppie thing to do – until we found ourselves having to do just that in order to legally bring our cat (of somewhat more humble animal shelter rescue origins) with us when we moved here to Berlin.

Since the chip in question is only about the size of a grain of rice and is completely undetectable lying somewhere under the loose skin behind his neck, I had completely forgotten about it.

Until I noticed the uniforms worn by the wait staff at a trendy Berlin café I was at the other day, that is…

QR code  Originally developed on Japanese automobile assembly lines to keep track of individual parts, QR code represents the state of the art in bar code technology, and is capable of storing textual information much more densely than the old-school vertical bar codes found on your groceries.  With the advent of high-quality smartphone cameras and QR code-scanning mobile apps, the square pixelated images have started showing up in print ads, billboards, catalogs, and signs everywhere, as consumer-facing businesses have co-opted the technology for marketing purposes.

Technical takeaway?  QR code makes the transfer of a small but meaningful amount of data from a physical object to a machine over the air possible.

User experience takeaway? Your cellphone is learning to read.

All well and good – but seeing these codes plastered across uniforms worn by humans rather than on inanimate physical objects – well, it reminded me a little bit of that chip inside our cat.

After thinking it over a bit, though, I think it’s just an example of technology as fashion statement – like simulated “shark fin” car antennas, merely an affectation more about conveying a certain level of affluence and technological hipness than anything having to do with actual functionality.

That would make the whole thing a bit silly, wouldn’t it?  Still, less silly than the alternative: imagine patrons actually trying to use these codes, frantically pointing their smartphone cameras at the backs of waiters and waitresses as they quickly pass by, hard at work in a busy café – all in an effort to get the menu or website URL onto their mobile devices.

That, to me, would be not only silly, but a little sad, too – and might just be what too much technology would look a little something like.

Some people are really bothered by imperfect grammar.  Other people can’t stand the sight of people chewing gum.  I don’t share either of those particular pet peeves, but there is something that really gets under my skin: usability-challenged software.

Which brings me to Microsoft Outlook, an application a lot of us spend the better part of our adult waking hours using (I know – kinda sad).  While setting an Out of Office message on the 2010 Mac version the other day, I was struck once again by how even a simple operation can be made needlessly limited and confusing.

In Outlook, the sending of auto-reply messages to internal and external senders is independently configurable – well, sort of.  See the “Send replies outside my company to:” checkbox to the left?  It’s greyed out unless the user has first selected “Send out of office messages“.  In other words, the assumption has been made that nobody could ever possibly need to auto-reply to an external sender if they weren’t already auto-replying to internal senders.

Two things…

• First of all, what a curious and arbitrary assumption to make.  Imagine you’re a worker who typically gets a lot of external email traffic, but those emails need to go unanswered while you work against deadline on an important internal project that demands routine and timely internal email.  Now imagine that as a courtesy to your clients, you’d like to send them an auto-reply for a day or two until the deadline is past.  Not an unreasonable scenario – and just the thing for an enterprise email client that allows independent external and internal auto-replies, right?  Well, with Outlook you’re still out of luck.  Memo to designers: before you impose an operational hierarchy on the user, make sure there’s a reason for it.
• And how about at least clearly naming the options as implemented?  Would it have been too much trouble to correctly label the  “Send Out of Office messages” option “Send Out of Office messages inside my company“?  That would provide a helpful hint to all the harried office workers out there that the options towards the bottom still need to be checked and filled out before heading out on that vacation.  And another thing: if you take the trouble to inform the user that external senders will only receive one auto-reply, why not display whether or not the same is true regarding email coming from internal senders?

How big a deal is this in the grand scheme of things?  OK, not too big – but maybe this kind bothers me only because it’s so unnecessary.  I mean, here’s the thing:  software development, like math, is hard.  The folks creating these applications are highly intelligent.  Why is it that all too often (this is by no means limited to Microsoft, by the way) the easy things – the ‘low hanging fruit’ of simple usability considerations – are overlooked by engineers?

It’s even more difficult to explain in the face of abundant evidence that when a product does get usability right (dropbox and iOS come to mind), it turns out to be not only good for users, but good for business as well (for more on that, see our recent post on Sony and Apple).

It was reported recently that Sony Pictures is in final negotiations to bring Walter Isaacson’s soon-to-be-published (and much anticipated) Steve Jobs biography to the big screen.  To anyone who’s followed the consumer electronics market even casually, the irony is hard to miss: it’s hard to think of anywhere Steve Jobs (and his relentless focus on user experience) appears to have been less understood than at Sony.

Armed with concepts such as “Engineers remain the ‘movie stars’ of the electronics industry“, CEO Howard Stringer as led the company through recent years in which too many new Sony products were incompatible, user-unfriendly, and/or simply misguided.  The results?  Tremendous losses (3.1 billion US for the fiscal year ending March 2010), a decidedly unsafe-for-the-workplace Onion news clip that’s been viewed almost 5 million times on youtube alone (in fairness, Apple’s received the Onion treatment as well), and lastly, a near complete loss of brand value in regards to consumer electronics and innovation – this for the company that gave us the Walkman.

Despite having had its lunch so thoroughly eaten by Apple, though, Sony still doesn’t appear to quite get it: “If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US”, Stringer claimed in a 2009 interview.  The logic behind this spin almost works, if one ignores the fact that Apple itself is perhaps the poster child for closed ‘ walled garden’ system design (iTunes, anyone?).  No, a stubborn attachment to proprietary technologies such as ATRAC and the Memory Stick was not the primary cause behind the current sad state of affairs at Sony (although it almost surely contributed).  Instead, a more constructive place to look would be towards the products themselves – towards the utility, value, and user experience they offer.

As it turns out,  maybe engineers aren’t “the movie stars of the electronics industry”, maybe they’re just the engineers of the electronics industry – and if there is anyone deserving of being put on a pedestal, maybe it’s the consumer.

That’s perhaps at the core of Steve Jobs’ professional legacy.  As to regard for the consumer over at Sony, just the fact that Stringer is quoted above using the term ‘electronics industry’ rather than the more common (and accurate) term ‘consumer electronics industry’ is perhaps telling.

Here’s hoping that if he’s still at Sony in a few years when his Steve Jobs movie finally comes out, Sir Stringer watches it closely.

The announcements today (October 4th) coming from Cupertino’s giant didn’t make everyone smile -most did not get what they expected.  It was a tough first presentation for the new Apple CEO – the first in the era after Steve Jobs – and he really might have wondered if he had raised the bar high enough.

But why should he?  Apple continues to sell the current iPhone 4 briskly and is moving strongly into new markets like China.  So the company is focusing on more efficient and stable production conditions and the optimization of international sales.  And what could be more needed than a “World Phone”, a phone running all international mobile network standards and providing ultimate flexibility?  Not only for customers, but also for their retail chain.  Simply put, one model to be sold worldwide.  A producer’s dream coming true…

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First it was the era of the call center:  “You call is very important to us – Estimated hold time: 47 minutes”.

Next, it was decided that the call center was a little more than we all deserved, and soon CRM phone systems were inviting us instead to visit the corporate support website (shortly before politely hanging up on us).  No problem, the website often had a live chat feature.  From a cost-cutting  perspective, the live chat feature was a brilliant inovation: in the added time needed for a customer to type their question rather than speak it in real time, still more productivity could be squeezed out of the support staff, who could now be asked to handle several customers simultaneously (all while the customer on the other end has the illusion of receiving individual personal service).

What could  be the next step in the evolution of online customer service management technology?  Here’s Continental Airlines with their take on a more recent innovation: let’s just fake the live web chat.  Let’s camouflage  a simple HTML search form as a live chat feature – we can include a wholesome, smiling, helpful-looking avatar, her hands (just out of sight) surely poised above a computer keyboard to answer our questions.  We can even give her a name – let’s call her “Alex”.

That’s what I ran into while tracking down my Hurricane Irene-related refund from Continental recently (it turns out there’s nothing like a hurricane to close almost everything down in Manhattan by noon and make a Saturday afternoon in my old hometown as quiet as a Saturday afternoon  in Berlin,  my new hometown – but that’s another story).

The thing is, I would much rather be put on hold or given an email form to fill out than have my intelligence insulted by ‘Alex’ – I guess disingenuous software and user interface design is just a pet peeve of mine.

P.S. On the other hand, I really get a kick out of clever website design – even small gems like the status line I once saw atop the comedy central website: “You are so not logged in”

First, let’s just say it: roaming outside the US with a US-carrier smartphone and SIM card, no matter what you do, is highway robbery. There, now that that’s out of the way…

I have a global phone from Verizon (shoutout: Droid Incredible 2, w00t w00t), and I’d planned on purchasing a German SIM card to use on my trip, since it’s too expensive to use Verizon’s global services. To do so, I called ahead and got the unlock code for my phone (this is not “jailbreaking” or “rooting” as some have asked in forums online— this is just unlocking your phone to be able to use with another carrier).

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