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Entries Tagged as 'Product Development'

Google struggles

August 11th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Information Markets, Product Development, Product Markets

Google has been much in the news of late, and not for all the good reasons. Net neutrality and privacy advocates now have (even more?) reason to question where the company stands on these important issues. Crucially, it appears the company is shifting from previously stated positions. Before they were for net neutrality. Now they’re [...]

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Global energy stock screener

June 20th, 2010 · No Comments · Information Design, Product Development

I’ve been working with Tableau Public again. It takes a while to get the hang of it, but once you do it’s fairly easy to start constructing some interesting charts. Here, for example, is my quick take at a stock screener. Click the image for the larger, fully functioning chart. The speed of the Tableau [...]

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The science of motivation

June 2nd, 2010 · No Comments · Economics, Product Development, Research

Yes, it’s making the rounds on the internet, but this one seems worth reposting. Thanks Graham (at Idle Banter) and Nudge blog for the find. ~alex

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Google Finance’s new tool: Domestic Trends

March 10th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Economics, Financial Markets, Information Design, Product Development

Not sure how I didn’t see this before, but Google Finance now has a new(ish) feature called Google Domestic Trends. This is essentially Google Trends, but with the searched for keywords organized into useful concepts (i.e. retail, durable goods, automotive, etc.) and hooked into Google’s stock charts. This way a user can take a concept [...]

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Tableau Public … some thoughts

March 1st, 2010 · 1 Comment · Information Design, Product Development

Tableau, in a bid to capture some of the visualization craze that is driving sites such as Chartle.net and Timetric, has released a public, PC only, version of its software. Having never used Tableau before, but hearing that it’s quite powerful, I decided to check it out. Here are the results, a simple scatter plot [...]

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eBay takes another whack at their search UI

February 10th, 2010 · No Comments · Auction Markets, Product Development, Usability

Bits, the NY Times tech blog, calls our attention to something new going on over at eBay: Garden at eBay, a site for testing new tools, features, etc. with users before pushing them out to ebay.com. Our first response is: whatever happened to Project San Dimas, eBay’s earlier attempt to clean up the user interface? [...]

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From the file: Oh yeah, I guess it does matter

October 6th, 2009 · No Comments · Product Development, Usability

A recent article from the FT highlights Microsoft’s regret, at least concerning their mobile phone OS, they didn’t focus on the user experience of the dang thing sooner. From the article: Microsoft executives blame their focus on the business market for their failure to relate earlier to the more intuitive interfaces and wave of consumer [...]

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ProTrade closes

October 2nd, 2009 · 3 Comments · Other Markets, Product Development

When ProTrade first came out I thought they had a great idea. Dubbed the sports stock market, users could “buy” and “sell” pro athletes for play money. Presumably there were prizes for top performers. But when you went to the site the UI was pretty poor, and from what I saw last week, just before [...]

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Social currency is a nutty idea

September 12th, 2009 · No Comments · Other Markets, Product Development, Rating & Review Systems

Social currency is a powerful thing. If you have it (say, as the president has it), then that is a very good thing. People respect you (as least we hope they do). A recent WSJ blog post, though, describes attempts by some people to make social currency into an actual, real currency. I have a [...]

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The window is not the view. The browser is not the internet.

September 1st, 2009 · 1 Comment · Information Markets, Product Development

We should not be surprised to hear that Google is trying to get its browser and operating systems (“Chrome“) pre-installed on computers, just as Microsoft’s OS and browser currently are for most PCs. All of this activity, though, has prompted some interesting questions about where the browser starts and ends, and how much should users [...]

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