Your Table Is Ready

Here’s a nice little service that just makes sense. If everyone now carries a mobile phone, why don’t restaurants just give you a call when your table is ready? Or send you an SMS?

That’s the business ReadyPing is in. I like it. It’s focused on solving one small problem well by recognizing that an opportunity for a better experience exists. $34.95 per month for restaurants.

Beaming An Address To Your Car

Once upon a time MapQuest offered the leading mapping technology on the web. Then Google Maps came along with a much better product and I am sure MapQuest has been struggling ever since. In fact, Google Maps is so dominant that it’s even surprising that MapQuest is still around.

Today, however, I was sent a MapQuest link and found a really innovative feature on the service. It’s the “Send to OnStar” link. If you have an OnStar account, MapQuest can send the map directly to your car’s navigation system. No more printing directions, or retyping addresses. It’s a very elegant solution.

Of course, in order to use the feature you must own a fairly new GM car and pay for the OnStar service, which is not cheap. But if that happens to be the case, this is a really compelling reason for going to MapQuest instead of Google Maps.

Design, Innovation And Familiar Faces

A while back, Microsoft released a little music app called Songsmith. I was checking this story about Microsoft’s TechFest today and found a friend, Sumit Basu, demoing the technology.

And to complete the “friends in the media” round-up, Guy Hoffman, who was at the Media Lab and is now here in Atlanta working with Gil Weinberg at the Center for Music Technology at Georgia Tech, designed an illustration that adorned last week’s New York Times Week In Review.

It was very interesting to chat with Guy and find out how he was contacted and how much time he had from request to delivery (not much time at all).

Intuit Throwing The Towel

I’ve been a user of Mint for more than a year now and really like the service. It’s quite impressive how much better their web app is today compared to a year ago. Here’s a company that is capitalizing on an opportunity, and executing really really well. It’s not surprising that they are approaching a million users.

Now, if you’ve ever shown any interest in personal finance applications, you’ve probably heard of Intuit, the company that makes Quicken. Intuit is also behind Quickbooks, an accounting package for small businesses that I use and don’t enjoy very much.

Truth is, Intuit used to be the big guy on the block when it comes to personal/small biz finance software but they stumbled and the Internet is now full of web-based applications for personal finance. Some of them are quite excellent, such as Mint and Wesabe, just to name a few. Intuit’s dominance is slowly eroding.

And then today, TechCrunch reports that Intuit sent Mint a letter questioning their adoption numbers and implicitly accusing them of false advertising. The letter became public and it’s embarrassing that Intuit chose to take this type of step to get in the way of a competitor that is running circles around them.

Having been involved in a legal imbroglio related to a trademark that completely slowed things down and cost a lot of time, energy and money, I am very critical of these sorts of legal maneuvers. If you can’t compete at the user experience level or product quality or cost, what do you do? Call the lawyers!

Sifting at TED

David Merrill, a good friend from MIT, recently showed his Siftables project at the excellent TED conference/event.

It’s a wonderful idea, a new paradigm for HCI and a great illustration of how much you can do when you start embedding computation into everyday objects. Siftables are so versatile because “blocks” are so versatile.

Another thought that came to mind after watching the video was how the Siftables follow the MIT Media Lab tradition of delivering research work that’s much more than a scientific publication. The Siftables are ready to go to market, the “wow” factor is present from the beginning and that is clear.

Spoilt Fruit No More

If you keep your fruits in one big bowl in the kitchen or living room, you might be familiar with the experience – by the time you get to the apple at the bottom of the pile, it’s always spoilt.

Sarah O’Brien, a recent graduate from the University of Louisiana, spent a lot of time thinking about this problem and came up with the Elizabowl.

“The bowl’s petals expand to yield more than a dozen flexible, fist-sized compartments. Each holds one round fruit, keeping it visible and away from the other fruits’ discharge of ethylene gas, which speeds spoilage. When folded, the collar design can cradle one or two grapefruits.”

You can find out more here.

Yahoo! Mail User Experience

Here’s an example of a really bad user experience on the web that affects millions and millions of users every day.

Why is it that when you login to Yahoo! Mail you are not taken straight to your inbox? You type mail.yahoo.com, sign in to your account and the first thing you see is a really cluttered interface with news links, tabs, photos, ads and lots more that is completely irrelevant to your intended task – send and receive email.

Obviously, Yahoo! is trying to get you to visit some other pages on its site, in order to inflate its click-through rates and make more money selling ads.

Google understands that there’s value in user interface efficiency. The sooner you get people to their intended destination or task, the more likely it is that they will come back in the future. Yahoo! is living in the 90s.