Posted by Steve Burzynski on May 29, 2008 @ 3:27 pm
Since Google introduce Google Gears last year, they have been influence to get the standards changed to make HTML more powerful. As a consequence, HTML 5 will be implementing and improving upon some of the features that are available in Google Gears. I can see Google Gears being a great development tool for improving how we store and access data on our tools. One thing that is exciting to me about all this new and improved technology is that it will make our next generation of iWorksite and ClubWorksite more complete, faster and easier to use. -- Gerald Stanley
Posted by Gerald Stanley on May 29, 2008 @ 1:04 pm
Starting off the day is a keynote speaker talking about user experience. One of the first topics that the keynote speaker mentioned was the design of the main page of Google. The "genius" design came about because the founder said "We don't have a designer and I don't do HTML." There you have it, the design was by accident not intentional.
Secondly, when they introduced the website, some users sat and waited when they were suppose to be using the Google search tool. They asked the users, "what are you waiting on?" and they would respond, "the rest of it."
These are definitely funny insights to the origins of the Google website. Over the years, the design has stuck because it's simple following Occam's Razor.
Google also measures the effects of design changes to their site and measures the success and user acceptance of the slight design changes. For example, they changed the color of the sponsored ads from blue to yellow and found that the yellow yielded higher revenue and more searches from users. Furthermore, speed testing was also done to see how this affected users.
They did a test where they served up 30 results per search result instead of 10 results and found that over a 4 - 6 week period of time, search declined by 20% because it took longer to server up 30 results. User experience does matter for conversions.
Google gave some insight on the "urgency" to develop new products. "Don't let the urgent drown out the important." The goal for them (and is encouraged to other businesses) is to look 2 years out instead of the urgency of getting built what is popular today.
-- Gerald Stanley
Posted by Gerald Stanley on May 28, 2008 @ 11:35 pm
My third session of the day centered around the choice to use Open Source software as a company. Imavex uses all Open Source software including PHP, MySQL and Apache (the big three). Listening to the speaker who has been developing in the Open Source community for the last 15 years has solidified my choice to use Open Source software.
Google is the next big company to contribute to the Open Source community. All systems and platforms used at Google are Open Source systems. Furthermore, the skepticism to use Google tools because of the big brother mentality is also laid to rest because of the Google's philosphy about Open Source projects and software: Build the internet bigger and that creates more revenue for Google. So as Google pumps tons and tons of money into the internet and Open Source, then more and more avenues are going to be used to search for that content and reliant upon Google's money make ventures such as AdWords.
-- Gerald Stanley
Posted by Gerald Stanley on May 28, 2008 @ 11:34 pm
Android is a great framework for building applications that will work on multiple phones. I see this being a great tool for capturing video and transmitting it to Streamotor to be processed and automatically added to your account and possibly your blog. I think this a great tool that would require some investment on Imavex's part to make it happen. I can also see this being beneficial as an interface to build a tee-time application for our current facilities. The application would be realtime-non web based application for easily see what times are available and who is already signed up to golf on the tee-sheet. As the phone industry evolves, I believe this framework will be widely used.
-- Gerald Stanley
