An Epic Failure to Service the Customer and Resulting Revenue Loss

This is notes from a recent dialog I had with an Big company representative who utterly failed to comprehend that she lost her employer money by not escalating this.  To be fair to them, I got on the phone and a person stayed with me until they solved the issue.  Their phone service is awesome.  I guess you could say that every barrel has its' 'bad apples'.  Private info is blacked out.

**************FIRST MESSAGE FROM ME********

Hi:

For some reason, I cannot retrieve my password for duanexxx. I no
longer seem to be able to get access to emails at nickull@XXX.com or
duanexxxx@XXXXXXXXXX.com which are listed as the emails that the password
reset goes to.

Can you please reset the password for duanexxxxxxx and send it to
duane@XXXX.XXX?

I am trying to buy software.

Duane

**************MESSAGE BACK***********
Hello Duane,

It's me again, Grace. I apologize for the delay in response, I just got back from my two days off. Thanks for your understanding.

Sorry to hear about that, Duane. However, I still wanna thank you that you have been an  customer. Should you have other concerns, please let us know. Cheers!

Sincerely,

Grace
Please Note: I work Mon-Fri, 8:00AM-5:00PM CT
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to assist you.

**THIS IS THEIR RESPONSE WITH MY SECOND MESSAGE INLINE***
 Inline:

On 12-01-18 1:38 PM, wrote:

Hi Duane,

Thanks for contacting Support again. This is Grace and I'm
taking over on Gagan's behalf. Glad to assist you today.

I understand that you need assistance in resetting your password for
"duanexxxx". I realize your eagerness to have this taken care of,
and I'd be happy to help.

Duane, I can reset the password for you. Before I can do this, I
require that you provide at least one of the following, for your
security:

- the order number of one of your purchases
DN: #120020XXXXXXX

- the last four digits of the credit card used for your account
DN: MasterCard .... XXXX

- the answer to one of your security questions

And two items from this list:

- your birth date
DN: April XX,XXXX

- the billing address listed on the account
DN: XXXX West Xth Avenue, Vancouver, BC XXXXXXX

- the phone number on the account
DN: One of these
604 XXX XXXX
604 XXX XXXX
604 XXX XXXX

Upon receiving your response, we will verify your billing address,
reset your password, and send you an email with your new password.

Take care and have a good one, Duane!

Sincerely,

Grace
Please Note: I work Mon-Fri, 8:00AM-5:00PM CT
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to assist you.


*****THE MESSAGE I GOT BACK A DAY LATER****

On 12-01-18 2:49 PM, wrote:

Hi Duane,

Thank you for providing the information that was requested, Duane.
However, the credit card number and order number you provided did not
match our records. Now to have this sorted out, please respond to this
email and provide other credit card numbers you used on the account
that you are trying to access. Or, provide an order number that you recall
you made on the account "duanxxxxxx".

Thanks for your patience, Duane. Hope to hear back from you. :)

Sincerely,

Grace
Please Note: I work Mon-Fri, 8:00AM-5:00PM CT
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to assist you.


*************MY RESPONSE*****************

At this point I sent her several emails showing orders made from the specific account in question
and using the credit card.  All these orders were labelled with all the data she had requested.

I also asked her to please expedite this as we are trying to make a decision to go with a competitor.

*******MY (SEMI RUDE) RESPONSE**********
So screw you. We decided to buy (A competitor) instead. As I told you
yesterday, we were trying to buy software from [you]. I am
responsible for IT buying in my company and you made the decision easy.
We will now use [someone else's software] as the standard.

I am really angry at the fact I have provided you everything you asked
for below and you don't even phone me or respond.

You just lost your company $$$

GoodBye!

***AND YET ANOTHER DAY LATER I GET A CHEERFUL BUT USELESS REPLY***

On 12-01-19 10:18 AM,  wrote:

Hello Duane,

I'm sorry to hear about that. It's really a pain for me as an
advisor to loose a valued customer like you. But please, allow me to
explain the other side of this issue.

If you feel that way because I am unable to reset your password right
after 30 minutes, and I am unable to phone you, I admit that it is my
complete mistake as I haven't given you a heads up. Please note that we
are receiving volume of emails and there are tendencies that we
overlooked replies. Further, [our company] does not provide
assistance via phone call so we are doing our best to provide you with assistance
through email.

Duane, please don't get me wrong about this, as much as possible I would
not want to be the reason of loosing a valued customer, so I apologize
about what happened.

Thanks for bearing with me. Have yourself a wonderful day!

Sincerely,

Grace
Please Note: I work Mon-Fri, 8:00AM-5:00PM CT
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to assist you.


**************NOTES*************


OK.  At this point I am now completely pissed off.  WTF is she talking about 30 minutes???  I gladly would have loved if it had been done in twice that time.  The "Have a wonderful day" quote is about as stupid a thing you can say to a pissed off customer.  The last line "Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to assist you." should perhaps only be used when the customer service rep actually does something.  What about not being allowed to use a phone to sort this out????

But wait - there is more...

*********MY RESPONSE*************


So are you giving me access to my account or not? I sent you all orders
I have copies of, answered every question you asked etc. I also waited 24
hours now, not just 30 minutes, which would be okay. I haven't bought [your competitors software] yet so if you can do this in the next hour, maybe we will stay as customers.

Reset the duanxxxx password and or change the email account used to
retrieve the password to duane@xxx.xxx or duane.xxx@xxxx so I
can do it myself.

If not, not only will you lose a customer, I will seek any legal remedies
that are available to me against you for denying me access to my
account and previous purchases.

Since I have given you everything you asked for, you should just do this
right now. I should not suffer anymore because your company does not
allow you to pick up a phone to verify me.

Duane Nickull


************HER RESPONSE*************


Hi Duane,

Thanks for your response again. As you have requested, I reset the
password for "xxxxxx". This is the password: xxxxxxxx.

Please let me know if it still does not work. Thank you!

Sincerely,

Grace
Please Note: I work Mon-Fri, 8:00AM-5:00PM CT
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to assist you.


************NOTES*************


Guess what?  It did not work!!  I sent another barrage of emails explaining politely that it did not work.  This is where I decided to call and got a smart, capable  rep who fixed the issue.


*********HER REPSONSE (24 hours later)**********


Hi Duane,

Thanks for letting me know about that. I checked your account and found
that "xxxxxxxxx" is renamed to "xxxxxxxxx". This is why
you're still unable to access the account.

Now, please sign in with "xxxxxxx" using the password I
provided. If you still can't, I will have to reset the password again for
you.

Thanks for your patience.

Sincerely,

Grace
Please Note: I work Mon-Fri, 8:00AM-5:00PM CT
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to assist you.


*********NOTES*********


So at this point I had the issue solved by the very capable and heroic guy from their help telephone desk.  I tried her advice again and once again, it did not work.  This prompted me to send yet another email back saying "It doesn't work"


**********HER RESPONSE (A DAY LATER)********


On 12-01-20 3:41 PM,  wrote:

Follow-Up: 173662775

Hello again,

I wanted to send a quick note to see if you are still experiencing any
difficulties with the  Store. Resolving your issue is important to
me, so please don't hesitate to reply if you need any further assistance.

Sincerely,

Grace
Please Note: I work Mon-Fri, 8:00AM-5:00PM CT
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to assist you.


*********MY FINAL RESPONSE************


???

You didn't think it was important enough to fix when I asked yesterday so
we went with [competitor] instead. We will not buy your products for our
office.

Duane

************FINAL NOTES**********

Ok - I got mad.  I acted a bit unprofessional but honestly, this sort of thing should be a lesson for anyone doing customer service.

1.  Don't wait 24 hours each time.  Note the entire thread took place over 6 days.
2.  Escalate things if you can't figure them out.  I don't claim to know everything and will gladly escalate stuff to whomever can help.
3.  Don't be condescending to the customer with crap like "Have a wonderful day" when you know they're frustrated at you.

and lastly...

Grace - you are an idiot!!!!

More on (Moron?) SOPA

Funny thing about SOPA is that it keep my awake at night.  I actually took the time to read the bill to understand it better and it seems that around 2:45 AM my brain makes random connections as to why the Stop Online Piracy Act might pose threats to people who don't event know about it.

Today a colleague wrote a post also outlining some additional thoughts entitled "10 Reasons Lots of Websites Violate SOPA and Don’t Know It".  Now according to several news sources, SOPA has been shelved so no one is actualy violating it as it is not in effect.  Nevertheless, it is worth thinking about from a perspective of false positives and what could happen.  On the InternetServiceProviders.org blog I found the following arguments.  I've reposted a few to share here but urge interested parties to go to the source to leave any comments or read the rest.  These are five of the ten reasons.

"1. Vague Language – Though House supporters have claimed that SOPA is designed to protect the intellectual property of Americans from foreign profiteers that illegally distribute content in exchange for advertising and membership revenue, the vague wording of the bill makes it difficult to understand exactly what constitutes a violation and certainly doesn’t offer immunity to inadvertently-offending American sites."

My take on this is that there is certainly ambiguity and penalties in the forms of takedown notices.  The innocent ones here who might be the most liable are the ad servers themselves. If the bill was put into effect as written, it is not clear how some of the enforcement mechanisms might be implemented.  My stance is that most of the illegal copyright and trademark infringement has actionable paths under existing laws, many of which are not enforced.  If existing laws are not enforced, who amongst us believes a new, untested bill will stop this.  Not me.

2. User-Submitted Content – If a site allows any sort of user-submitted content to be posted as part of their business model, they could very easily find themselves in violation of the Stop Online Piracy Act. Under the current language of the proposed law, the owner of the site that hosts the content, the user that posts a link to the content and the website that allows the user to submit that link could all potentially be charged with violating the bill.

Our gut feeling on this is true, but once again, this is illegal under existing laws.  Why do we need a new law to stop someone from selling fake merchandise over eBay?  Use existing laws.

3. The “Friend-of-a-Friend” Effect – Do you remember when you were a kid, and the friend of a friend did something that got you all in trouble? Maybe you weren’t directly involved, and maybe you didn’t even like that person very much, but your mom still said that you were “guilty by association.” Under SOPA, the same principal applies: even if a link to legitimate and legal content housed on another site is shared, the site that posts the link could be punished if the hosting site is found to house illegal content as well.

Not quite correct.  According to the SOPA act, as written today, a takedown notice would be issued.  This would still have the effect of creating a lot of work for webmasters.  Even the odds that the Technoracle blogroll points at a site that might contain an ad that is subject to SOPA laws is very high.

4. The Comments Section – One of the quickest ways to lose faith in humanity and the education system is to take a look at the comments section of a YouTube video or comedy article; comments are almost universally inflammatory and poorly spelled, but that’s still legal. Should SOPA pass and one trolling user posts copyrighted material in the comments section, the site would be in violation and could face blacklisting, blocking of revenue and DNS blocking.

This is not how I interpreted the SOPA Act but in such cases  take down notices would be issued.  What I am curious about is how the government intends to patrol all these comments.  Even as we contemplate this today, I would argue our NTi ( an index of collective content production vs content consumption) is reaching the point where most people create more than they consume.  Bots using RSS feeds and aggregators add to this menace.  To enforce SOPA, one would have to patrol the web with a virtual army of police to scour all such comments.

It is more likely that peer to peer interactions are going to be more effective against such comments.  I've deleted some spam from this site on numerous occasions.  Google also once in a while let's me know if there is a comment up here violating the Blogger terms (which I take down).  I would not voluntarily censor anything for SOPA if it was not directly violating someone's copyright or trademark against the true copyright owners will.

There are six more comments on the original article - a good read at http://www.internetserviceproviders.org/blog/2012/10-reasons-lots-of-websites-violate-sopa-and-dont-know-it/

Very Important SOPA and PIPA Information!

The SOPA and PIPA acts are now at the forefront of the internet revolution.

Here is some important information about SOPA you need to know.

 

Do not support SOPA.  Censorship hurts!  Tweet this now!

DNS Provision Pulled from SOPA!

I wrote some of my thoughts about SOPA down in this earlier log post.  Now it appears that common sense has prevailed.  After a good discussion on the O'Reilly Foo Campers Alumni list, some of the participants of which were asked to get opinions, it seems that the DNS provisions of SOPA are being dropped.  This was just reported on SlashDot http://politics.slashdot.org/story/12/01/13/2222203/dns-provision-pulled-from-sopa .

The Republican Chairman Mr. Lamar Smith has historically been one of the biggest backers of the so called Stop Online Piracy Act.  CNET ran the story and claimed Mr. Smith announced that he plans to remove the Domain Name System or DNS-blocking provision.

"After consultation with industry groups across the country," Smith said in a statement released by his office, "I feel we should remove DNS-blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the [U.S. House Judiciary] Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision"

Read more at CNET

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) - aka HR 3261

Several people have recently asked for an opinion on the US proposed legislation to stop online piracy of intellectual property.  Rather than read the opinions of others, I decided to read the actual proposed legislation itself.  For the record, the version I read is at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c112:1:./temp/~c112UufGtF::   There are many worries about limitations on freedom of speech and costs that will be born to internet service providers (ISP's) including potential legal actions to recover damages from those who find themselves participants in such transactions.

DISCLAIMER:  I am not a lawyer, nor am I am US citizen.  I am a musician and have a vested interest in enforcement of IPR laws.

I found the bill somewhat flawed, despite what appears to be a noble attempt to correct an injustice.  I initially like this section:

"SEC. 2. SAVINGS AND SEVERABILITY CLAUSES.

(a) Savings Clauses-

(1) FIRST AMENDMENT- Nothing in this Act shall be construed to impose a prior restraint on free speech or the press protected under the 1st Amendment to the Constitution."

This alone alleviated many of my worries. My first issue was section 101 (23) paragraph C:

"(23) U.S.-DIRECTED SITE- The term `U.S.-directed site' means

an Internet site or portion thereof that is used to conduct business

directed to residents of the United States, or that

<SNIP/>

(C) the Internet site or portion thereof does not

contain reasonable measures to prevent such goods and services from

being obtained in or delivered to the United States;…<SNIP/>

I am sorry but I do not believe that I should have to take measure to comply with US law.  First of all, the internet is "opt in" by default.  Anyone may take any publicly served file and re-serve it via another website.  I can reference files and there is no clear demarcation of paragraph C that ensures I am not wrongly classified as such a site.   I am also not a US citizen, I have no physical presence in the US.  Your laws do not apply to me.  Furthermore, I, like many other website hosts, have no way to prevent such goods or services from being obtained in the USA.

As far as the original question goes, there is little elaboration on the impact to ISP's.  Section 102 C reads: 

(c) Actions Based on Court Orders-

(1) SERVICE- A process server on behalf of the Attorney General, with prior approval of the court, may serve a copy of a court order issued pursuant to this section on similarly situated entities within each class described in paragraph (2). Proof of service shall be filed with the court.

DN: Inference - ISP's do not need to take proactive action, only respond to court orders.  The problem is that there could be huge numbers of these court orders and most of the violating sites will be not on USA soil, hence out of reach of United States law.  This concerns me since each ISP must block each site via their own system as well as potentially making the sits visible again should they not be in violation anymore.

(2) REASONABLE MEASURES- After being served with a copy of an order pursuant to this subsection, the following shall apply:

(A) SERVICE PROVIDERS-

(i) IN GENERAL- A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order, including measures designed to prevent the domain name of the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) from resolving to that domain name's Internet Protocol address. Such actions shall be taken as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within 5 days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order.

DN: Filtering an IP address or domain name is very little effort but may have unintentional consequences.  For example, Apache virtual servers may share a common IP address but use virtual hosting based on the http.config file.  Such actions may block legitimate sites causing financial losses.

(ii) LIMITATIONS- A service provider shall not be required--

(I) other than as directed under this subparagraph, to modify its network, software, systems, or facilities;

(II) to take any measures with respect to domain name resolutions not performed by its own domain name server; or

DN: This means that ISP's are not required to perform any further work in these cases?

(III) to continue to prevent access to a domain name to which access has been effectively disabled by other means.

DN: My gut feel is as follows:

- there is a problem that needs to be addressed WRT IP theft.

- in parallel, I believe there are issues with orthogonal systems such as the USPTO/WIPO and the problems cannot be adequately addressed alone via HR 3216.

- if it proceeds to become legislation, it will take a while to establish legal precedent and find where the bill in practicality does not work.

- the criminals who sell the IP of others knowingly are likely crafty enough to use revolving IP addresses or even hacked legitimate servers to complete such transactions making it virtually impossible for an effective countermeasure.

Then again, what do I know?

Duane Nickull

The Mobile Tipping Point - Five Key Facts

Contributed to Technoracle by Amielle Lake (CEO of Tagga)

We have been friends with Amielle for years and watched her take on some tough challenges in the mobile markets.  She wrote this great article and agreed to let us share it with you here on Technoracle.

Tagga was launched just months before the first iPhone hit the market. Over the last four years, we have witnessed the life-transforming impact that mobile devices have in our everyday lives. Yet, brand budgets for mobile are still surprisingly small. As we leap into another year, I am optimistic that things are improving for us mobile marketers. I might even be so cliché as to say that the year of mobile is here or at least near! While brand adoption may not have been as rapid as the industry might have earlier predicted, warp speed growth is definitely in store. Here are 5 reasons why we have reached the tipping point.

1. Smartphone adoption in the US has neared almost 50% Smartphone adoption marches on, with 44% of mobile phone users owning a smartphone, compared with 18% in 2009, according to Nielsen. For more, PCWorld - Adults Now Spend More Time With Mobile Devices Than With Print Media 2. Adults read more news on their mobile than print: eMarketer released a report that found the “average adult consumer spends 65 minutes a day on their mobile device, while they spend only 44 minutes with print media--26 minutes with newspapers, and 18 minutes with magazines.” For more, USA today - Smartphone adoption means more text, less talk 3. Global brands issuing RFPs for Mobile Agency of Record: Perhaps this is a less observed trend, as it certainly isn’t something that industry analysts follow. However, Tagga has been party to and witnessed several formal RFP calls for Mobile Agencies of Record. If this is not a definitive sign of commitment to mobile by marketers, then I don’t know what is. Smaller brands will follow suit. In fact, Agencies are now clamoring to improve their capability-set to demonstrate a robust mobile foundation – many opening up mobile divisions. Top brands as of late signing up “MAORs” (Mobile Agency of Record) include American Cancer Society, Proctor and Gamble, Kraft Foods and a host of others. 4. Global brands are changing their DNA to launch truly integrated campaigns: Tagga had the pleasure of participating and speaking at a conference where the Chief Marketing Officers of Visa, Citigroup North American and Samsung (LATAM) participated. Each presenter spoke of dissolving their siloed digital and traditional teams in order to combine them into a single group. Why? To effectively launch truly integrated multi-channel campaigns. These thought-leaders clearly saw mobile and social as mechanisms to add more value to their traditional media initiatives. By breaking down marketing silos, brands will be able to harness the true power of mobile - engaging with a consumer wherever they are and giving them what they want, whenever they want it. 5. Social Media is Mobile: With social media and mobile on the scene, marketers often grappled with the notion of how the two mediums play together. Facebook CEO best settled the debate by pronouncing Facebook as on path to becoming a mobile company. According to a recent CNET article, “Facebook has more than 350 million mobile users (out of 800 million total), and that the proportion will swing to more than 50 percent within the next year. Most of Facebook's users in India, Southeast Asia, and Africa, are via mobile devices.” As the lines between social and mobile become increasingly blurry, marketers will drive towards an approach that integrates technologies that leverage all capabilities of the mobile device, from foursquare to augmented reality. With the rapid adoption of mobile devices, in particular smartphones, the challenge of the marketer has shifted. Consumers are channel agnostic, and want to be communicated to in a relevant, transparent and timely manner - whether they are on the go or not, offline or online. With the convergence of these trends, it is not hard to see why marketers will turn to mobile to drive results. To quote Frost & Sullivan, it is not hard to see why mobile marketing will become “the most important vehicle of all time” (Frost & Sullivan, 2010).

Rooting the Galaxy Nexus with one click!

Android Central is buzzing with news of Wug's new root application.  Specifically, Wug's Galaxy Nexus Root Toolkit contains all the files requires to both unlock (aka "root") your nexus and also to restore it to factory settings with the OEM lock.  The kit contains the necessary drivers and SDK that will also install the latest samsung drivers,  extract the latest android SDK to your %HOMEDRIVE% and more.

Figure courtesy of WUGFresh and AndroidCentral

For developers, you will also be able to update your systems "Path" environmental variable to include adb and fastboot locations however the entire Toolkit appears to only run on Windows.   The Toolkit can push su.zip (Superuser.apk) to your Nexus's SD card and flash the clockwork mod.  The device itself will walk you through the rest of the process via on screen instructions.

Read the full feature set here.

The reality is that it seems to be pointless for handset providers to lock devices.  The average time until someone can root a particular device is nearing the point where root toolkits are sometimes available before the actual device is on the market.

If you find this useful, please consider donating to the software publisher.

SEO Lesson #3: Content, Content, Content

Google's search engine ranking algorithms have always been a moving target.  Two significant updates occurred in 2011 that have both raised and lowered rankings of many sites.  Around February 2011, engineers tweaked the system, in what became known as the "Panda update".  This could explain why more and more people are looking into free article writing services to get fresh content for their sites.  The first update was focused on the North American markets however the changes were rolled out worldwide.  So why did this update matter so much?  It is very simple.  Having your page show up on page one of the results is critical.  Studies have been done that generally indicate around nine out of every ten clicks are on sites ranked one through ten, although I have never seen a perfect study.

The penalty is simple.  Panda penalized sites with poor quality content.  Google has been fairly warning SEO firms that content is king and we agree.  As written on our previous posts, original, relevant and timely content always beats black hat SEO tricks in the long run, nevertheless, so many people still try to land in the top ten spot with a site that has very little content of use to the searcher.  This does not help anyone over the long term other than the SEO company that made a few bucks.

As noted by the Google webmasters:

"Almost the whole year of 2011 was a series of several updates related to content. Initially observed closely by SEO practitioners talking about the decrease of ranking of various sites and asking each other in forums if there was an observed algorithmic change and was dubbed as the Farmer Update which I believe the name probably came from Webmaster World where most group named algorithm updates come from. The changes were too evident already that when Google decided to talk about it already, they said they already have a name for the update and it was the Panda Update. And then this is were the series of updates came in."

Google's Matt Cutts, an anti SEO webspam policeman, noted that in the initial rollout, only around two percent of Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP's) were affected.  Apparently many of those affected have simply been scraping content from other pages.  This happens a lot with Technoracle posts.

A second update went after content farms and pages with large amounts of advertisements compared to content.  This is often done in conjunction with the scraping.  A good example of this can be found here:

http://www.seofacts.biz/flash-seo-more-secrets-from-technoracle/

This site takes content from Technoracle, adds tons of ads and publishes.  Such pages will never beat the original page in terms of rankings unless some additional content is interpreted as useful.

Panda has been criticized, largely by those who feel their sites were unfairly ranked lower.  Since the original Panda release, an update has shown promise to fight perceptions of false positive rates (FPR's).
Barry Schwartz reported that some sites actually recovered after the 2.2. rollout.

Google’s Panda update runs for all languages worldwide except for Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

The big take away from all of this?  Simple.  Like in real estate (Location, Location, Location), in SEO land the mantra is Content, Content, Content.    Focus on good, unique content and interested parties will come. 

Adobe Community Help

This is a personal blog post.  Since I, Duane Nickull, no longer working at Adobe, I have received a ton of emails from people asking for help on various Adobe related technical issues.  I don't want to sound uncaring or unsympathetic, but the reality is that I cannot offer these services for free anymore.  Adobe has made a conscious decision to cut down on the number of employees helping their community and customers.   I was one of those and if I continue to offer free help, I working for free.

Please understand that this is not a personal attack, retribution or in any way something I am doing to be vengeful.  It is simple cause and effect.  I want to thank the 98% majority of you who respect this and understand why I am no longer offer free, unpaid consulting, development, tutorials or help around Adobe products.  For the few of you who have issues with it, please bring it up with Adobe.  It is their responsibility to ensure adequate support for their technologies and perhaps it will do you and them some good if they can let them know where they can be more effective.  

Uberity.com is my new company and we are working on something cool and new.  At the same time however, if you are really stuck and need consulting or IT services for LiveCycle ES, Flex Mobile Development or AIR development, Uberity does offer these services for a very reasonable rate.   Simple email info (at) uberity (dot) com.   Every Uberity employee is either a MAX Master, evangelist or top engineer from an Adobe product.  We employ the best of the best and would love to help you for a fair price.  We are open for business.

Once again, I also want to point out that there is no anger intended here.  This is just a simple boundary that needs to be set in order to help manage expectations.  I am not ruling out that I may print some tutorials in the future either but these will be done on a less frequent basis.

Best wishes to everyone for a prosperous 2012!!

SEO Lesson #2: More Guayaki Yerba Mate

Yesterday we posted on a friend's company who is examining their search engine visibility. The company is called Guayaki and they sell products based on the culture of a plant named Ilex paraguariensis, commonly referred to as Yerba Mate. All the founders of Guayaki have a passion for mate but they also want to be socially responsible. They have pioneered an innovative business model that directly links their customer’s purchases to partner farming communities in their supply chain, enabling fair trade, fair wages and the ability to restore parts of the rain forests from which the Yerba plan grows.

Yesterday we explored how Google's results vastly vary based on where a search is being done from.  This is largely a baseline for understanding where the results are.  Today we will examine what course of action could be taken to elevate their relevancy for various searches.  As always, Technoracle never recommends cheating on SEO.  The rules and systems used by various search engines are very fair and have feedback mechanisms to promote relevant results.  There is no point in coming up #1 for a topic like "horses" if your website is all about golfing.  This serves no purpose and will annoy anyone unlucky enough to find your site.

Having said that, the first thing to do is to try and determine the actual search inventory that is available and what related searches might be useful.  We ran some reports on various systems and determined the following:

The term "yerba mate" has relatively low competition and there are 246,000 global searches and 8,100 local searches per month. The term "yerba" by itself has over 823,000 global searches per month while the term "mate" has 13,000,000 plus. The latter must be heavily discounted since it is a term with a plurality of meanings. People may be trying to find a mate instead of yerba.

The company itself has done well and every month, over 9,900 searches are done for Guayaki. This indicates a good brand presence yet shows us that there is a lot of upside potential.  Stated simply, being able to capitalize on close to a million new eyeballs per month on their website would be potentially lucrative.

There are also mis-spelled variants of "yerba mate" such as "yerbe mata" which are commonly used plus a third word "la" (spanish) used as an article in conjunction with the term. It is possible that capturing this traffic is something that could be of interest.

At this point we are ready to generate a report to present to Guayaki. The company is strong, has a great community and is ready to grow.  There are various techniques that can be used to build search engine traffic but the most proven way is to ensure what you are serving your website visitors is what they are looking for.  Our next step is to use some analytics to understand what the people searching for are hoping to find when they land on the website.  Google Analytics is probably the best tool in the business for this.

On a final note - Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it!  This will be our last post until after the holidays.  Peace and blessings and thank you for supporting our blog.

SEO Lessons: Guayaki Yerba Mate

As part of our ongoing technical work at Technoracle, we like to work with business owners to help them understand search engine optimization (commonly referred to as “SEO”) and provide better results for them. An initial step is often to ascertain the current state however this proves problematic. To explore this problem, we will use the case study of Guayaki. Guayaki is a company using a restorative business model to help provide fair wages to everybody in their supply chain and also restore sub tropical South American rain forests. in fact, it is referred to as the the "Mata Atlantica", or Atlantic Rainforest, deemed one of the top 5 priorities for biodiversity conservation in the world by conservation international.   The Atlantic forest has been reduced to 7% of its original size.They sell products based on Yerba Mate, a substance commonly used and shared by civilizations for centuries and a common stimulant drink. The powers of Yerba Mate are very restorative and we have started consuming it while coding instead of coffee. On a personal note, it seems to be better for productivity than straight coffee or Coke/Pepsi.

Since most people curious about Yerba Mate seem to search for the term “Yerba Mate” or “Yerba Matte” (mis-spelled), they desire a good ranking and currently have it in some areas. The first step was to use our Google Adwords account to ascertain the most relevant search terms and search term volume for any given month. Google however, uses localization and profiling as factors in ranking search results. To illustrate this, we asked several of our networked associates and friends to help do a straw poll on the current rankings. From what we understand, most of them had never searched for this term before so the results were probably more accurate than someone who has already logged several searches for the term and has those searches linked to their profile. This blog post is a summary of some of the results we encountered. While not considered scientifically conclusive, these results may be of interest to others.

Google uses geographical location and Guayaki’s head office is in Sebastapol, CA, USA. Most of their business is in North America. The request was simple. We asked random associates to navigate to http://www.google.com and search for the term “yerba mate” and note where any guayaki.com hosted page appears in the results. Here is a random sampling of results:

This is only a small sampling but it shows a pattern of higher results in countries where the product is sold.  We tried to search via google.com however google redirects the browsers to google.ca.  We consider ourselves tainted as google could note that we (Yerba Mate fans) have visited guayaki.com several times and hence elevate it in my results via any personal google home pages.  Nevertheless, we found it on page 2 in 12^th spot.  This was shocking considering one of the principals and co-founders is located in British Columbia and does considerable business here.

So what does this mean? 

Simply stated, search results seen by one person are not necessarily universally shared.    The first step in SEO is to get an accurate read of where your site appears before any attempts to optimize.  This, in itself, is a difficult feat.  Google uses cookies, IP addresses and a host of other mechanisms to determine how to provide you with the most relevant search results.  If you commonly search for your own brand, it is possible it may appear higher in search results on your computer than a computer that has never searched for the same term.  Google, Yahoo and Bing have all stated this policy clearly but have not explained what that means exactly in terms of results.

What would we recommend for Guayaki?

Since the first site that appeared most commonly was Wikipedia, we found a way to link Guayaki to the Yerba Mate page in Wikipedia.  This is done is accordance with Wikipedia’s terms of service and standards.  The page itself claimed sources were required for verification so we added a footnote to show verification that Yerba Mate is in fact sold as an iced beverage in a can.  Be careful about this however and do not try to spam others with links to your page.  Some types of links are not even followed such as blogger comments.  We never advocate trying to hack the system.  The system is set up to govern itself via feedback and respecting terms of use is something we encourage all people to do.  

Having said that, there is a potential that this blog article itself may end up elevating their ranking since it contains links to their site but that is not the intent of this post. 

DISCLOSURE:  David K. from Guayaki is a personal friend.  He has not asked us to post this blog to help with SEO.  We are merely helping him as we would with any other client to understand the SEO landscape.  We have not been paid to post this article.

How does this information help you?

Before you start any SEO project, try a similar grass roots poll to understand where you currently rank and in what geographical areas your brand is ranked higher.  Match this information with your goals.  You may find this is a chicken and egg problem as business in one area may be slow due to the fact no one finds your website or brand via a search in Google, Bing or Yahoo.  If you are trying to build business, approach SEO as a regional endeavor.

If you have any follow up questions on this topic, please don’t hesitate to contact duane at Nickull dot net.  We’re always glad to help.  If you want to know more about Guayaki, check out this video.

Data Mapping with Inference and Feedback

We've worked with thousands of companies for most of the 1990's and early Web 2.0 era.  Every Medium to large enterprise has typically struggled with data integration projects. Every new acquisition, system or IT project creates a new integration project. To make matters worse, there are no standard crosswalks for data mapping. This problem is not only epidemic, but increasingly neglected by many enterprises. David Luckham hinted at “IT Blindness” when a company makes incredible blunders that are compounded by false beliefs, often generated by a lack of real data or the inability to process events (both simple and complex). David has developed a set of patterns for solving some of these issues (Complex Event Programming or CEP), yet the events themselves still must be minable for data that can then be integrated.

The Problem:

Data mapping has historically been a rather time consuming practice, often done manually. There are multitudes of issues with data mapping, some of which are dependent upon the context in which instance data might appear. To illustrate this point, let us assume that we could create a single data dictionary of all the terms used in business. This approach has been tried many times with various EDI and XML dialects. Defining a simple data element such as one that would denote the first name of a human being should be easy, correct? The definition itself is not the issue, it is the ability to map it automatically when encountered. The logic of context often makes this hard. Take this data element for example:

Element Name: FirstNameOfPerson 

Type: String64

Description: a string value representing the legal first name of a human being.

We could easily serialize this into an XML element as Duane. Now account for the fact that we must map this data format into a second format that has an element and semantics as follows:


Element Name: PersonFirstName 

Type: String

Description: a string value representing the legal first name of a human being.

It might be easy to figure out that in a vacuum this is pretty straight forward. The challenge comes when the aspect of “context” is added. To illustrate this issue, consider the following data structures:

//PurchaseOrder/BuyerParty/FirstNameOfPerson

and

//PurchaseOrder/SellerParty/FirstNameOfPerson

While both use the same data element for the first name of a person, the semantics (or pragmatics rather) are slightly different based on the hierarchy and context. If both of these appear on the input side, they cannot be mapped to any instance of the PersonFirstName (the second example above) without contemplating the special nature each context brings. The meaning is the first name of a person but the two are not equal. One is the first name of the buyer party and the other is the first name of the seller party. Not immediately apparent is that the instance data set is now also bound to a process (procurement in this case).

The approach of manual data mapping has been around for a few decades. Automating this process is extremely difficult. A processor must be able to account for subtle differences in mapping rules based on a number of things. Even with the best schema and metadata support, exceptions and errors are likely to be encountered.

A Computational Intelligence (CI) approach caught my eye the other day. We at Technoracle have studied this problem for a number of years. The CI approach combines an inference engine with a graphical user interface. As input data is encountered, the user interface guides users by uggesting optimal mapping scenarios. Unlike more traditional approaches to auto-mapping that require a significant amount of preparatory work, the inference approach semi-automates some of the work.

Disclosure:  we were contacted by an agent for Contivo to write about their system.  No consideration was paid in exchange for this blog post.  Technoracle reviews technology and does not speak for or make claims as a representative of the companies we highlight.

The approach espoused by one company in particular has caught our eye. Liaison’s Contivo (http://liaison.com/products/transform/contivo) builds reusable mappings by associating the metadata with a semantic "dictionary". The method uses an analytics model to parse incoming data, then it references that input against a dictionary that captures and stores mapping graphs. The dictionary is portable and can be leveraged by future transformation maps.

Liaison’s Contivo then establishes an integration vocabulary and thesaurus that may be fine tuned by manual methods. Contivo then leverages the vocabulary and thesaurus to automate data transformation and reconciliation tasks that are traditionally implemented using manual mapping techniques.

Figure – a snapshot of the Contivo Mapping

This approach was the basis for the long term product roadmap in XML Global Technologies, a company co-foundered in the dot com era. Their plan was use the mapping graphs built from their GoXML Transform product (now part of Xenos Group) and store these maps into a metadata Registry/Repository organized using a business ontology so they could be accessed by an entire community of users rather than one single enterprise. This approach made a lot of sense back then and makes a lot today. It also mitigates the issues of changing schemata and EDI vocabularies.

The problem has not gone away. There is a lot of great work being done my companies who can automate the mapping of integration data into known system. Using a feedback loop such as Contivo helps a system evolve over time and can facilitate a much more intelligent approach to solve this problem.

A long term architecture Contivo might consider is to use a social approach to learning via a centralized repository of mapping knowledge. Each of the users systems could continuously update and commit to a central knowledge base that uses the global trade dictionaries and various EDI and XML business dialects alongside a feedback circuit to learn the finer nuances of data translation.

We are left wondering if a standard should be developed for declaring reusable mapping graphs and if so, who should develop it. Many open data initiatives would benefit from this as would those who use the open data.

Samsung 1, Apple 0

Victory!  Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 was the subject of Apple's vexing for a long time.  At one point, Apple even had a temporary injunction against Samsung which halted sales of the tab in Australia of all places.    The good news is that according to the Android Community, an American judge has ruled in favor of Samsung and the new tablet is cleared for sale in North America.


The Android Community blog then goes on to state:


"In November a judge ruled that Samsung’s tablet might indeed violate the patents, but expressed doubt that such was a justification for granting a sales injunction. District Judge Lucy Koh made good on those statements today, saying, “”It is not clear that an injunction on Samsung’s accused devices would prevent Apple from being irreparably harmed.”  (full story at http://androidcommunity.com/us-judge-denies-apple-injunction-samsung-sales-are-safe-for-now-20111203/)


Oh when will those in power learn this one simple lesson?  If you try to ban or censor anything, all you do is feed it more attention.  Apple in this case has probably itself to thank for the rise of this tablet's fame although Samsung was quick to taunt Apple with some very clever ads with slogans such as "The Tablet Apple Tried to Stop".  Have they learned nothing since the Sex Pistols music was banned from public airwaves in the UK in the late 1970's?  Have we not thought about the impact of the Spencer family trying to ban the Boomtown Rats "I don't like Mondays".  Pouring gasoline onto a fire is an understatement.


Samsung officials have also indicated they will bring as many units to the public market as possible.  Get them while you can!  I do hope to enjoy mine in Canada!

App Store SEO (Continued)

Earlier we published a blog entry discussing the important emerging market of App Store SEO (read).   What we are learning is that there is a disturbing trend taking place with people who publish apps.  Many simply direct users to their apps by phrases like "Go to the Apple Store or Google Market and search for <term>".  Of a list of several dozen of these we researched, several of the searches now reveal competing apps are showing up above the vendors' application.

So why is this emerging place so important?  Simple.  Users search for applications.  If you do not rank high enough in any filter query or search, the potential end user will not find your application.  Most developers want a wide as possible implementation base of their mobile applications.  We have spent a lot of our lives working on SEO.  There are several posts on this blog about this topic.

Mobile application SEO is not only an emerging market, but will likely become a large part of an enterprises digital presence.  Once again, the rules that determine most of the "relevancy" in various mobile app marketplaces has not been made public leaving us to test and hypothesize.  Uberity has now come to understand the evolution of such systems.  So what should individuals do? Short of getting an online degree in an effort to understand this, here are some tips.


1.  Don't refer potential application users to your application with non-deterministic mechanisms like "search".  You have no control over AppStore SEO and it is a dynamic place with new apps being added every minute.  A better method would be to use absolute mechanisms to resolve directly to your app such as QR codes or a URI.

2. If you are trying to get a higher ranking in either the AppStore or the Google Android Market, do some research to find out what terms people are actually searching for that are relevant to your application.  For example, if you have a financial stock market monitoring application, you might find that people are searching for terms like "Dow Jones", NYSE, Stock Market and more.

3.  Use the terms from your research in your applications title and description.  Some of these words are used for building a relevancy index for mobile applications.

4. Divide and conquer.  Simply put, use your existing web presence to augment the mobile app visibility by creating links to it from your blog, website or other presence.  Our initial research has shown some promising trends.

5. Don't use punctuation marks in your app title.  This is valuable real estate and most are ignored by the search utilities.  For example, searching for a "*" reveals no applications (https://market.android.com/search?q=*&so=1&c=apps) while searching for either "!" or "+" reveal a bunch of Google applications (https://market.android.com/search?q=%2B&so=1&c=apps).

6. Ensure you categorize your mobile application properly.  Misclassifying a game as a business app would confuse people.

If you are reading this and want to know more about what we are doing, please contact us at info at uberity dot com or by visiting our website at http://www.uberity.com.

Uberity.com

I want to thank everyone in all my communities and networks for the huge outpouring of support and well wishes.  I am once again humbled to realize I am a truly blessed individual and have great support and friends.  My mood every day is less and less complacent, a trait I cannot stand.  Working at a large company too long breeds complacency and bureaucratic tendencies.  These are rapidly fading as our new venture starts to shape up.  Invention is the mother of all genius and intuitive improvisation is the key to that genius (the latter part applies to the Richard Dean Anderson in all of us).

Many of you have asked me what I am doing next or offered me jobs.  I appreciate that and the thought of entering into another job is horrifying to me.  I worked eight years at a big company, learned a lot, and have to digest the good, the band and the truly ugly.   Adobe has been a very important role in my life and will continue to be a company I work with.  My colleagues on the Evangelism team are all great individuals and I'm sure we'll cross paths again, even if I am hopeless at video games.  I honestly wish all of them the most in terms of happiness and fulfilment.

So what is next?  As the blues brothers did, so has Yellow Dragon Software.  We are "Getting the band back together" to work on some game changing services and software.  The new company, aptly named Überity, is operating in stealth mode right now.  A lot of you have requested information and we honestly are in stealth mode right now.  We cannot divulge anything publicly however if you wish to be amongst the first to know what we are doing, you can sign up now at http://www.uberity.com and request to be placed on the list.

Why are we doing this?  Simple.  Doing what you like to do to earn a living is coolest thing an individual can have.  Me, a former professional mountain biker, professional musician and tech guy understands this better now that I did a decade ago.  We LOVE innovation and solving complex problems.  We love delivering value to society.  We love doing what we love doing.  Our work has to be fun.  How cool would that be?  This is why Überity exists.

According to the urban dictionary:

Uberian

The adjective form of the adverb, "uber." Used to describe nouns that are "uber cool," without using the phrase "uber cool" and sounding like a lil babe. Uberious has also been known to be used, as well as the noun form, "uberity." Dude I totes love that club it was uberian.

To us, doing what we love for a living is about as cool as it gets.

Open Data Initiatives - Growth or Failure?

One of the key areas of growth I have been watching is the birth of the open data movements.  The Open Data Foundation is an important group who's mandate includes helping many agencies migrate to an open data architecture.  (Disclosure: I sit on the Advisory Board). As a standards guy for more than a decade, I find their mandate admirable:

"The Open Data Foundation is committed to using and contributing to international standards and is a project- and results-focussed organisation. We believe in using open standards to deliver measurable benefits in solving business problems in the collection, production, and dissemination of statistics. The aim is use and integrate these standards in a coherent and consistent way, to develop tools and techniques to make them easy to use, and thereby work towards a universal and harmonised statistical architecture."

As noble as it sounds, the devil is often in the details.  I have a meeting later today with David Eaves, an Open Data guru who has worked with many governments including the Government of British Columbia, Vancouver City Council (as championed by Andrea Reimer) and even at the national level.  The gist of the work is that if we, as taxpayers, are footing the bill to create this data, shouldn't we be able to use it to make informed decisions?  The answer to me is an overwhelming yes.  So what about the details then?

If you take a look at the data publishing done my most agencies, it is often in mixed standards (flattened PDF's, Spreadsheets, Custom CSV (both text and binary), XML and more.  Some o these format are easy to work with but trying to parse a spreadsheet with a non-deterministic style to it is a daunting task.

I recently took on such work for a proof of concept for the government of British Columbia.  I worked with some CSV data from this stie and created a mobile application that runs on iOS, Android and BlackBerry Tablet.

One of the things that jumps right out is that open data needs a specialized set of Message Exchange Patterns and the published data has to be deterministic, available in many formats (like JSON/XML) and that callback and notification support is required in the event the data changes.  As an example, this data is published as static data.  As soon as I use it by embedding it, it could be obsolete if the original copy changes.

Another issue is that spreadsheets are not deterministic.  If you have a spreadsheet and output CSV such as this:


Duane, Nickull, Human, Vancouver
Bill, Gates, Human, Seattle

This is an annotation.  No one knows how to account for this if it changes nor how many lines it takes.  Sometimes, naturally occurring commas can also be inside an annotation.  OMG - what can be done?

Second, Set, Of, Data
Third, Set, Of, Data



This is an annotation.  No one knows how to account for this if it changes nor how many lines it takes.  Sometimes, naturally occurring commas can also be inside an annotation.  OMG - what can be done?


Second, Set, Of, Data
Third, Set, Of, Data

it can be major headaches for those trying to parse the data.  XML is far better yet this XML has issues:

These are relatively small data sets too.  Imagine large data sets being requested by mobile devices?

What is required in this industry is a new type of data server that can address some of these problems.  Ideas are rolling in my head already.

Goodbye Adobe - We had Fun

As many of you have heard, I am no longer with Adobe Systems as a Sr. Technical Evangelist.  While on the 3rd day of my vacation in Mexico, I got the call with the explanation that Adobe is doing a major refocus and as part of that, many of us "enterprise" types are no longer required. "Überflussig" I guess is the correct German word for the situation.    Keep in mind that I now speak as an individual, not as an Adobe employee.

I missed most of the official story due to the timing of my vacation but caught up with a few news outlets to get the rationale. Techworld News reported the following:

"In order to drive increased Digital Marketing bookings, which are recognized as recurring revenue, the company will reduce its investment, and expected licence revenue, in certain enterprise solution product lines," it said in a statement.

Its enterprise products include Adobe Connect and Adobe LiveCycle, as well as web content management software it acquired last year when it bought Day Software."

On top of this, another statement from Infoworld confirmed that Adobe has indeed thrown in the towel on Flash for mobile browsers. The headline reads "Adobe ends mobile Flash Player, reveals enterprise pullback" and subtext reveals a focus on AIR and HTML5 for mobile.

Confused?  I guess being known as the enterprisey guy for so long has now sealed my fate.   Although there was a minor shock as I got this news just a week after finding out that my Adobe MAX AIR Mobile Code Camp (one of the areas of major focus for Adobe) scored an all time high for the AIR track of 4.96/5 with over 70 responses.  My Flex Mobile Code camp also scored the same (4.96/5). This makes me a MAX Master for the second year in a row although I somehow doubt I will be there for the next MAX.

Nevertheless, the words I once heard from friend and fellow mountain bike racer Alison Sydor rang in my head.  Any time you have been doing something for longer than five years, it is time to re-evaluate and re-think.   Perhaps it is time to move on to a new opportunity.  I loved working at Adobe and appreciated everything I learned there.  The people are great, awesome company and the next generation of tools are things I will be working with.   It is too easy though to become complacent if you stagnate for too long a time.

I also want to thank the Evangelism Team publicly for working through a lot of hard challenges and say it was truly amazing.  Adobe - thank you and best of luck!!

So what is next?  Can't tell you but watch this space for a new announcement on Uberity!

Adobe Continues Its Move into Online Advertising

Adobe announced this past week the acquisition of Auditide Inc., a provider of video advertising technology, in its third advertising industry purchase in the last couple years.

The purchase reflects both Adobe’s interest in branching into the industry and the increasing sophistication of online advertising in the first place. During the early years of widespread Internet use, online advertisements were generally basic and unrefined compared to advertisements found in print and television media. Internet ads, often displayed in the form of blinking banners, unrelated gimmicks, and direct textual appeals, represented a crude and fast-growing business – one that grew rapidly alongside the web but displayed little tendency for innovation. As hosting companies evolved to offer services like Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint Hosting, many marketers used these platforms as the basis of more advanced and holistic adverising. 

These ads still proliferate online these days, but site managers and developers more and more often look to create ads that are more professional, unobtrusive, and better targeted towards an intended audience. Businesses can create these targeted ads by tracking information about a person’s browsing habits, and the ads can then be easily disseminated through services such as Google’s AdSense. If an Internet user spends a lot of time searching Google for old high school friends, for example, they may soon thereafter see an ad for classmates.com or Anywho.com. These ads now more likely mirror advertisements made through other media channels in both content and construction.

More recently, online advertisers have turned their focus to newer frontiers. Prime among them are advertisements inserted into internet video. With people increasingly watching not just short clips but also full-length movies and television shows online, internet video advertising is an increasingly specialized and lucrative business.

Which brings us to Adobe’s recent purchase of Auditude. Auditude, which has raised funding from a variety of venture capitalist firms, provides a service for putting ads into online videos and works with publishers to create a standardized advertising approach across various video types. The company will be bringing its clients, software, and expertise into Adobe’s fold, which promises to quickly spur Adobe’s quest to enter and excel in the online advertising industry.

Adobe’s intentions to branch into advertising are nothing new. Over the past couple years the company has acquired several businesses to help achieve this goal, most notably Omniture in 2009 and Demdex, a business that manages audience data, earlier this year. The purchase of Auditude was only the most recent development in this quest.

In a statement released by Adobe, the company said that its technology fits well with Auditude’s advertising platform, which it will integrate with the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite. While the terms of the sale were not disclosed, the deal has an estimated value of about $120 million.

In conjunction with the Auditude acquisition, Adobe also announced the launch of a service it calls Project Adthenticate, which will use IAB’s Rich Media Creative Guidelines to test and optimize online advertisements. The service, the company hopes, will draw clients to its burgeoning ad business and make it a leader in more sophisticated marketing technologies, such as those behind the growing use of interactive ads.

It is yet to be determined whether Abode will become one of the leaders in the booming online advertising market, especially in the realm of video ads. But with its recent moves and acquisitions, there is little doubt that it is moving in the right direction.

Adobe Edge - My First JQuery/HTML5 Application

So I downloaded Adobe Edge a few days ago and installed it yesterday.  Within ten minutes I was able to create a simple animation with almost no coding.  Adobe Edge Preview 3 literally blew us away in the first few minutes by allowing the creation of JQuery and HTML/CSS animations using a WYSIWYG editor environment.

To see this again, just hit "reload".  Note that the JavaScript files are located on a remote server.  This could result in a slower loading.  The total size of all files to build the animation above is only 191 KB.  The source code for this is clean, elegant and nicely formatted.

The Edge Preview release APIs are also documented online at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/resources/jsapi.html.  I feel like I need a good project now to fully test Edge in a production environment.  Any ideas?

App Store SEO

I've been toying around with mobile application SEO for some time now and doing some structured research.  The field is focused on the study of how applications are sorted and ranked when a generic search term is utilized within a mobile application marketplace.  I believe the field of app store SEO will be a large area of focus for developers in the years to come.  The practice of optimizing mobile application listings within the dominant application stores in addition to the search engines will be an essential survival skill.   Basically, if your application is not found, it will not be installed and used.

Here is a use case.  I built an application called Magic Screen Pro.  It is a drawing application yet when I search on "drawing", my application does not show up in the first 100 search results.

There are currently only a handful of dominant mobile application stores such as Apple's App Store, the Google Android Market and BlackBerry's App World.   Additionally, to add to the complexity of SEO for Mobile applications, many app stores exist with variants of the major app stores and are  filtered by criteria such as ratings, downloads, languages, countries, and paid vs. free apps.  In a coming series of articles, I will build off previous SEO articles and write about some of my preliminary findings.

One of the first things to note is that the models used by Apple, Google, and RIM all seem to have both similarities and major differences.  Unlike web searches, app store results are presented as a combination of filter query and rankings algorithms.  The filters have several normalized components such as "most popular" and "price".  The problem seems to arise when a generic mobile application is sought via the search tool in an app store.  For example, searching on Google's Android Market for "Stock Market" results in over 1,000 results on the first set of results (over 21,000 in total as of the date of this post -  https://market.android.com/search?q=stock+market&so=1&c=apps).  The results are ordered the same whether you search from the Google Market application itself vs. a web search.

This similarity also appears within the Apple App Store.

So how do the results get ranked?  Let's look at Google first.  The Android Market uses three specific filters - price, safe search (presumably to ward off adult content), and a "sort by" filter.  The latter has "relevance" selected as default.  They are shown below.

The "Sort by Relevance" is the key filter to understand.  The exact mechanism by which it works is private, similar to Apple's App Store.  So how does Google determine "relevance"? At first I had assumed it was the size of the install base however this turned out to be a dead end.  In fact, at a meta level, the first five results are not correct.  Fox Financial News has the first application.  I find it hard to believe it is the most relevant for the term "Stock Market".  The second highest ranked app is actually a link to the "App Brain Market".  When a user clicks through to https://market.android.com/details?id=com.appspot.swisscodemonkeys.apps&feature=search_result and looks, there is no mention either in visible text or source code of the search term "stock market".  The third result is by Snapworks Technologies and has an install base of between 100,000 to 500,000.

By Google's own admission, the following criteria is available to search for apps:

Featured: great apps hand-picked by the Android Market team
Top Free: popular free apps of all time
Top New Free: popular free apps less than 30 days old
Top Paid: popular paid apps of all time
Top New Paid: popular paid apps less than 30 days old
Top Grossing: applications and games generating the most revenue, including app purchases and in-app payments
Trending Apps: apps showing a hockey stick growth in installs in the last 24 hours
Editors' Choice Apps: Some of the very best apps available for Android, chosen by the Android Market team
Top Developer: Some of the very best developers on Android Market, chosen by the Android Market team

On top of this, some variants of Android markets allow users to filter results based on the version of Android.  There are some additional criteria for allowing applications to be found.

Priced applications availability: Priced apps are only available to buyers in these countries. If you are not in a buyer-supported country, you will be unable to view priced applications.

Location: You may only view the version of Market for your country. For example, UK users may only view the UK version of Android Market from their devices. If a developer has not targeted his app to your home country, you may be unable to view it.


Mobile service provider: In addition to targeting for location, a developer may also target their application to specific mobile service providers. If a developer is not targeting your mobile service provider, you will not be able to view the application.

Note that Google declares that no application may appear in a top spot as a result of paying to be featured.  Could it be that they intend to let the market dynamically choose the top results as is done with normal search engine results?  I believe that this is in fact the case.  The pattern is very simple - the first search result page contains code that tracks which applications users select.  The system itself is not perfect and will need to be augmented with ontological classifications, however it is the only logical path to take.

So what works?  For starters, the title of the application seems to be worth its weight in gold.  Recall the earlier example of my Magic Screen Pro application not showing up for the term "drawing".  When I search for "Magic Screen", it appears in the #7 position out of 805 applications.

Google also seems to track the clicks on a search result, hence the more people that click through on each app counts as votes towards raising the ranking in the overall application store.

What seems to not affect mobile application SEO?  I have found that the choice of technologies used to build an applications seem to be irrelevant.  Even in the App Store where one could suspect that Apple might be prejudiced against applications built using Adobe Flash Builder tooling, it seems to make no difference.

What needs to be researched more?  I plan on conducting further research into the exact mechanisms used including external links, links from other mobile applications, keyword usage in app descriptions, and more.  This aspect of technology is relatively new and requires proper research to help developers understand the basics.  Stay tuned for more as information becomes available.

Adobe Edge Explained

Adobe's push into HTML5 has been around for a long time.  On top of participating in the actual standards development effort to move the web forward, Adobe has been building some of the first major implementations of HTML5 authoring tools.  Given the adoption of any technology is inversely related to the complexity to use it, Adobe Edge represents a great potential for people to author complex HTML5/JQuery/CSS and AJAX applications.

This blog explains the recent changes of the newer release and some great tips on how to use it.  As a former standards guy, I love this direction!

Don't take my word for it.  Try it for free by downloading it here:
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs_edge

Very Cool AIR Mobile Application

Burhan Bozkurt has built a mobile IM and Video Chat application with Adobe AIR.

The name of the application is B-Messenger.  Thanks to AIR 3, both Android and iOS versions are very stable and functional now.

iOS version iTunes links:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/b-messenger-private-video/id464791873?mt=8

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/b-messenger-lite-private-video/id464773864?mt=8 (Lite Version)

Android version Android Market links:

https://market.android.com/details?id=air.com.bilye.b_messenger

https://market.android.com/details?id=air.com.bilye.b_messenger_lite (Lite Version)

Silicon Valley Code Camp Materials

The 2011 Silicon Valley Code Camp rocked!  Peter and the other organizers have really put on a first class event and it is great to watch it grow year over year.  The high point of this event is that it is all free and covers so much disparate technology.  I plan to be there next year.

For those who attended my sessions, here are the files I promised.

1. Customer Experience Management (CEM) for Architects - this is a look at an emerging architectural discipline surrounding multi-channel user experience.  The key relationships between running a successful enterprise and having a good user experience over disparate channels are discussed.

CEM-SVCC_Oct2011.ppt.zip - PPT format (18 MB)

2. Hands on Mobile Development using Flash Builder for iOS, Android and BlackBerry Tablet OS - during this course you will learn how to set up your development environment, architect and build a mobile application, use arrays, switch-case statements, while loops, data binding, remote data handling, Accelerometer access, Camera and Microphone access, GPS Receiver and all basic gestures.  Anyone can take this course with a little XML syntax knowledge and basic programming experience.

BL3453-ALL.zip - ZIP archive of source code, icons, preparation guide and courseware

Enjoy!

Very Cool SAP & Adobe Train Race Event

My colleague Doug Massa is organizing a three-day pre-SAP TECHED training and contest designed to help you develop an enterprise application based on the SAP NetWeaver Gateway platform and related SAP partner technologies. The SAP Train Race will start in Paris with a one day, immersive training event focused on SAP NetWeaver Gateway and Adobe technologies . After the training teams will have the opportunity to get hands-on with the technology with the help of SMEs from SAP and partners, before joining us for a ride on the Elipsos Train Hotel to the SAP TECHED conference in Madrid. On the train, teams will develop an enterprise app using NetWeaver Gateway and Adobe Flash Builder. On the train will be SAP and Adobe resources to help with design and implementation questions and offer best practices for Gateway and Flash Builder, which includes FAQ and registration information.

Who Should Participate:

We are looking to have four Adobe teams with 2-4 people per team. The overall team should have working experience with SAP ABAP and be comfortable with Flash Builder 4.5. Ideally teams are attending Tech Ed Madrid. There is no cost for this event but it is encouraged for people attending Tech Ed Madrid to participate.

Sign Up Deadline: We would like to have all teams registered by Oct. 11th.

More information:
SDN (SAP Developer Network) posting: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/26738
SAP Train Race site: www.saptrainrace.com

Gateway Beta Program: If anyone wants to be part of our pre-release program please send Doug Massa an email (dmassa@adobe.com). Developers interested should be familiar with SAP and comfortable using Flash Builder.