I’m not sure I can blame Google for trying to wrap a beast of a product into a simple interface and I’m sure they’ve tried their best.  But, man oh man one wrong checkbox and you could get screwed. 

You might say “well, that’s why you have daily budgets!”  That would be true except that when you have a small budget paired with ads being shown evenly through the day, you have a different sort of problem. 

Excuse me while I go heal myself.

And therein lies the rub… See, the mobile subscriber has 30 days upon receipt of his mobile bill to actually make the payment.  He may or may not contest the charge depending on who actually made the transaction – her husband, child, friend, or dog maybe?  Regardless and if the payment is actually made, the phone company (Verizon, AT&T, etc) has to then figure out which merchant the payment should go to (and make sure they take their “fee” for facilitating the transaction through their platform).  This process takes another 30 days or so and the money usually ends up in the hands of a party known in the mobile marketing world as the “aggregator” – termed this way because they aggregate connections across the two handful of major carriers out there.  The aggregator then takes their fee and pays out the actual company providing the service to the various charities and NGOs of the world.  Wow, that was a mouthful (forgive me for not using separate paragraphs).

If you do the math and add up the time periods as money changes hands, you end up with a cumulative term of about 75-90 days before the money ends up where it ought to.  Compare this with credit card transactions which moves money in a matter of 24-48 hours on average.  Add to this that a grand total of about 35-40% in fees is racked up through the literally “trickle-down” process, and the $10 transaction evaporates pretty quickly.

You’d think that these figures would prompt a near-immediate backlash – and you would be right.  In fact, the carriers knew the backlash was imminent and so they were quick to proactively mention that all fees would be waived and the amount transacted in a much shorter period of time.  Good for them considering mobile giving was on pretty much every television station both major and cable network for the “Hope for Haiti” special with celebrities touting the method as the fastest way for watchers to donate.

The problem with this picture is that for all other charities that the company mGive provide mobile giving “solutions” to, the terms are exactly as I describe above (75-90 days with 40% fees).  Most subscribers who will more than likely be familiar with the system will equate the process to the Haiti fundraising initiatives when this will not actually be the case.  It’s estimated that the Haiti earthquake mobile giving initiatives pulled in over $12 million; at 40% fees spread across all facilitating parties involved, this would mean a staggering $4.8 million in fees alone.  Crookish I’d say.

The recent release of the “pinch-and-zoom” functionality to be released as an OTA update serves as a clue as to why it really does make sense for Google to launch a phone.

Google is really banking on public perception of Android for it to be successful.  With the heterogeneous mixture of Android versions out in the wild, this perception is bound to vary.  What Android is depends on what version you’ve seen and on which handset.  Why are there so many versions to begin with and why couldn’t the handset manufacturers just post OTA Updates when Google releases new versions?  Apart from the maintenance and development of fairly sophisticated skins that sit on top like Blur for Motorola and SenseUI for HTC, it really comes down to varying philosophical/political standpoints by each of the carriers (and perhaps just general slowness on part of the handset manufacturers). 

Motorola might generally be fearful of Apple laying down the law with pinch-and-zoom patents and therefore sit tight on this feature – in fact, this is probably why it doesn’t exist on the Droid while is available as a built-in feature of the Droid Eris manufactured by HTC.   Interesting to note is that this device runs Android 1.5 (a relatively ancient version of the OS) but features pinch-zoom functionality across the Browser and Gallery apps.  This is probably due to a lax stance by HTC on pinch-zoom; read: they don’t really give two shits about Apple’s possible litigation.

These varying stances are exactly why Google feels it necessary to jump into the handset action to lay down a vision for what they think ought to be the optimal version of Android out their in the wild getting OTA Updates in timely matters without think red tape getting in their way.  

Today I was talking to someone about their iPhone application product that made generally heavy use of Facebook Connect to publish stories to a user’s feed.  The product posted a story to the user’s feed which when clicked went (and continues to go) to a splash screen askin the user to download the app on their iPhone.  I recommended that they build out for the web and potentially mobile web keeping in mind the fact that users on the receiving end may not click on the story on an iPhone.  His answer: right now we’re iPhone app and iPhone app only.  In fact, caring about other platforms wasn’t in even on the long-term radar for them.

It’s one thing to say “we don’t have the bandwidth for that” but a completely other to disregard the obvious truth that users may not be on their iPhones when reading Facebook stories.  Instead, put *something* of actionable value to the audience so that you get the intended effect of true viralness.  Even if a friend were to have an iPhone, there’d be a good chance that she be on their laptop viewing Facebook.  What then?   A slight imagination could expect her to go back to her iPhone, search for the app in the app store and download it then – or perhaps download from her laptop through iTunes and then sync.  Seriously?

This is the fundamental problem in harnessing the value of Facebook Connect on mobile devices.  You need an all-inclusive strategy covering every platform near and far in order for it to have the intended effect of having the audience do what you need them to do.  Case in point is Twitter – they don’t necessarily have a client for each platform but they make sure that when a user clicks on a twitter profile for any user no matter whether on a laptop or a mobile device, it renders the way it should.   More and more companies are following suit with mobile versions of their website and perform quick browser detection routines and redirecting users accordingly.  I’m waiting for Wordpress to officially accept WPtouch and bake it in as a standard feature considering it renders well on webkit browsers (Android and Safari alike).

But back to the main point: Facebook Connect as a viral technology on iPhone needs serious review and thought by developers who intend to use it in the first place.

Clean and simple to use and generally just works the way it should. To get it just search for wordpress in the App Market.

Update: one small issue I noticed is that you have to refresh the categories the first time you post.

When what you’re building turns into a phenomenon accidentally – you really can’t take too much credit for it’s evolution and must consider yourself more an agent of change.  That’s exactly what the Twitter team is (or was) up until now.  In fact, I’d go out on a limb and say that now that the Twitter folks are riding this bronco of a company, they hardly know what to do with it in it’s current fashion.

Jack Dorsey lends much of his fame to his reign at Twitter – but past success means very little in the valley and many entrepreneurs spend the rest of their lives trying to outdo their first startup which came across as “beginner’s luck”.  Square is a lofty idea and only someone with super grandiose position in the tech world who could generate buzz could launch an idea into the buzz stratosphere.  If not someone then a massive company with dollars to spend on development and marketing and with a stronghold position in an existing market.  I’m talking about Verifone and PAYware.

We’ll have to see who wins in the end (or exactly what winning means) but I suspect that it will take much more than Techcrunch and Mashable articles to get Square adopted by retailers far and wide.  I’ve been surprised before though…

Through constructive feedback garnered through the communication channels provided by Crowdspring, designers “improve” their design as you critique.  You quickly weed out the poor designs from the ones worth pursuing further until you have your perfect design.

Crowdspring guarantees a number of responses or they provide a refund.  What they don’t tell you is that a designer may throw out 5 mediocre designs for you to consider and each qualifies as an individual response.  Therein lies the “rub” so-to-speak.  Depending on your bid price, you’re bound to get a varying caliber of designers – and rightfully so.  A hotshot designer is competing with at least a dozen to 2 dozen other designers (known as “creatives”) doesn’t want to waste time on several projects only to find out that he’s lost on all but 1 of the projects.

With my project, I found 80% of the submitted designs to be extremely poor – the other 20% were worth pursuing further.  Considering that Crowdspring takes your payment upfront and charges a 15% “commission” as well, you really have no choice to pursue alternative design channels.  For logo designs, the guarantee was 25 responses which at the outset looks like a fair deal but quickly turns otherwise considering multiple submissions from single creatives.  Pair this with rough prototypes for the initial versions and you get to 25 pretty quick.

Ultimately, I found a design that was professional through an seemingly out-of-left-field designer who submitted at the very last minute making the experience a “close call” and while I’m happy that I got my money’s worth, I’m weary to go through the process again.

Instead, I’d consider 99designs.com, another “design competition” site that has lower rates, higher response guarantees, and a larger base of creatives.

That being said, this Nexus One buzz makes me want to vomit.  For one, it seems to implicitly antagonize hardware manufacturers from wanting to commit themselves exclusively to Android considering the proprietor of the OS is now jumping in with a device of it’s own.  HTC wins both ways but Motorola?  Samsung?  and um… Sony?

Google decides to dock the price of the “under-contract” plan for the Nexus One by $100.  Whoop-tee-doo.  Tell me how this is a game-changer please?  The unlocked version of this phone is not a novel idea; entire sections of e-tailer websites have unlocked versions of phones available.  Quite frankly, the fact that other Android phones do not have unlocked versions makes the openness of the platform feel not-so-open.

Android now has literally a handful of OS versions out in the wild – 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.0.1, and 2.1.  2.1 was released with the Nexus One and a few days earlier than the SDK for the same was made available to developers.  This seems a bit backwards and I’m surprised that the other hardware manufacturers aren’t keeping up to pace with the Android versions as they get released.  This staggered nature of the platform simply confuses users and developers the same.

• where you go is an expression of who you are but you do so less frequently than updating your status (not matter you trivial the content of your status might be).
• users should be able to backtrack where they were and not just where they are and be able to check-in accordingly.  I’ve already found myself forgetting to check-in (quite naturally) and then wishing that I could just go back and check-in as if I were there.  I suppose this is by design.
• I’d like to be able to check in privately (and still earn points) every so once in a while.  Gowalla recently released this as a feature – and I think it’s just that – a feature.  This is an important one for the simple reason that it doesn’t dilute the value of each foursquare posting as your friends/followers see them but still allows you to keep track of where you’ve been through foursquare.  I was at IKEA today which might be fascinating but then I was also at Taco Bell which I don’t think people give two shits about.
• the context of each location should be taken into account when checking in; if i’m at the movie theater, i should be asked follow-up questions like “what movie are you watching?”; at a redbox (assuming redbox were a location in foursquare) – what movie are you renting?, etc

Overall, it’s an elitist thing to constantly post all the fancy cool places you’ve been and I think a large part of the population do not go to fancy cool places (and when they do, they surely do not remember to check in on foursquare). 

What I do think would be more interesting is immersive game play as being invented and developed at SCVNGR.  The problem with this experience is that what you take away in terms of genericism, you make up in complexity and longtailness.  I don’t want to have 18 SCVNGR type apps for each of the venues I go to.  Perhaps that is the ultimate system – location-based games tied together Ning style.

One of the most amazing features of Android is that it’s not “married” to one (or 5) particular PCs.  You can essentially plug your Android phone into any computer and start browsing files on the device.  DRM-free MP3s from Amazon means that you can transfer music from one machine to another effortlessly.  Others find iTunes intuitive – I find it the opposite and doubleTwist a natural calling.

DoubleTwist, which operates on Windows and Mac, not only syncs music but videos and photos as well – and even allows you to buy music from AmazonMP3 and share to Facebook from within the app.  My wife happens to have a Droid Eris (no accident there).  This means mixing and matching our phones with our laptops and desktop PCs loaded with DoubleTwist is a breeze.

At the risk of sounding like a doubleTwist fanboy, let me express my concerns about the product.  Considering it’s general device agnosticism, this means that no real device manufacturer promotes the software.  It’s only discovered through forums and blog posts like this – which may be alright as long they see commissions through the purchase of music through it’s AmazonMP3 store but also means that people evaluating phones based on capabilities miss out on this software gem as a feature to consider (and tip them to go Android over iPhone).

Ideally, doubleTwist would be bundled with Android phones.  Palm tried backhanded tactics by attempting to have their devices sync with iTunes when they really should just be telling users to use doubleTwist.  I’m not sure who would acquire them (and hope that’s not in the cards for them in the short term at least) – if Motorola or HTC were to, it would essentially abandon the other devices that doubleTwist is made to work with.  We’ll have to see.