In my recent visit to the Silicon Valley we visited some of the best known internet brands. Before heading over to the West Coast, I was obviously excited about visiting the Twitters and Facebooks of this world. In hindsight those were not the most insightful visits: Youtube was a software engineering ghost town with everybody silently hacking on, Facebook resembled an oversized kindergarden with 24/7 services and supervision and Twitter shared little news beyond what one can learn when reading up on them.

Talking to founders and understanding their way of thinking and vision is the only way to observe what happens at the cutting edge of innovation

Contrast this with one of the highlights: visiting storify.com. Burt Herman and his team have realized the disruption social media brings to journalism. They went out and built a tool that leverages social media as an additional source. Additionally they want the journalists to do what they’ve always done and what seems more and more important: curating. How should mere mortals stay on top of the news and non-news that we are exposed to? How should we be able to prioritize what is happening in all the channels available today? Storify has a bold vision: change how stories are being told.

Talking with Burt Herman – one of the co-founders of storify – you could feel the many hours he and his team have been thinking about every feature of the tool and how to make it as simple as possible to use. You could feel how well they understand the disruption social media is to today’s journalism and you could feel the passion they have for journalism and new ways of story-telling.

Not surprisingly the backend software engineer happy with solving really hard coding problems in the core of Facebook’s code or the marketer trying to bring the magic of Twitter to ever more countries around the world have less to tell. Talking to founders and understanding their way of thinking and vision is the only way to observe what happens at the cutting edge of innovation.

So I arrived to San Francisco on Sunday after a seemingly never ending flight. After the welcome dinner we now get into the real deal. Here you find the schedule for the week.

Monday, March 18th 2013
First Day of the Silicon Valley Study Tour already full with highlights:

Tuesday, March 19th 2013
On the second day we’re heading further south for the first time: Palo Alto including a walking tour at Stanford University is on the plan


Wednesday, March 20th 2013


Thursday, March 21th 2013


Friday, March 22th 2013

Software is the new hardware: companies we would have never thought they’d be into software are releasing smartphone and tablet apps or even APIs so that developers can program against their platform:

• It looks like Nike is not releasing one piece of kit that is not in some way connected and full of software and web services. And obviously they have an API
• Philips releases smart light bulbs with an API so developers can program the next great disco light turning your house into an app
• In Switzerland the national railways recently released sbb.connect – a local services and game app similar to Foursquare for public transports
• Print publishers are releasing mobile app after tablet app and struggle to figure out what the world will look like in the post-newspaper era

So everyone and their dog is doing software, web services and mobile apps. What follows? Some of these apps are crap. Especially mobile and tablet apps from media companies are often buggy, slow, either totally under- or insanely over-featured and too complicated for the average user. The complexity-part is worsened by the fact that every app seems to have a different paradigm of navigating with swipes up, down, left, right and with buttons that bring you somewhere or nowhere.

How comes than that these products often are mediocre? One or all of the following reasons may apply – and probably many more:

• The app in question is created by an external agency on a fixed budget – sweating the details of a great user experience can often not be achieved in such a setup
• The product manager in charge is not technical enough or doesn’t have the user experience chops to deliver a great product
• The software engineers are not top notch. Ask yourself the following question: if you’re an engineer, what company would you join: Google, Facebook or any other cool kid on the startup block or a media company where technology is an afterthought?

So if in your business technology is still an afterthought, you need to change that or you will fall behind. You’ll probably need to build internal know how – either in technology or perhaps more importantly in how to manage tech. Your main challenge will probably be to attract top talent – they’ll have better places to go to.

Everybody knows these mobile phone shops: rows and rows of shiny new gadgets attached to some security device that beeps horribly if you pull a bit too harshly on the string attached to the phone you want to try out. How on earth have these shops and their terrible user experience changed so little? Some observations about what is wrong with the customer experience.

Some time ago I was waiting for my turn at our local Orange shop. As anybody reading this piece probably knows, I’ll most likely be one of the very last people to switch away from my beloved iPhone. But hey, I had a couple of minutes and there was a row of smartphones from all the companies and mobile phone platforms known to man in front of me, why not give them a spin? Does Windows Phone really look and feel that cool? How is it that Samsung seems to produce some worthy competition for the iPhone? Questions that needed to be answered someday!

Have tech retailers really learnt nothing in the twelve years since the first Apple Store?

But, alas, it was not this day or any other day in a regular mobile phone shop for that matter. Why? These things, though very nice feeling phones, were totally useless for checking out some of the most common features:

• No SIM-Card in the demo-phones
• No connection to the internet
• No preconfigured email address or email inbox
• No preloaded photos to experience the photo gallery app
• No interesting apps or games preloaded on the device to explore

How the hell am I supposed to find out if this phone is any good? How shall I experience its web browser, email app, and great screen if there is no connection to the web, no configured email account, and no gorgeous pictures in the photo gallery app? Have tech retailers really learned nothing in the twelve years since the first Apple Store? The only thing that is better than it used to be: you usually won’t find any of those ugly fake phones with a sticker as their screen anymore – they’ve learned that. A next post will be about why this might be the case. But until then let’s look at somebody who seems to have nailed it.

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