test pass | Filome sharers have read the following articles about "test pass" | www.filome.com filome.com http://www.filome.com/key/test pass You're viewing shares 1-4 of 4 total shares for the keyword test pass This is a keyword feed for "test pass" from Filome read and shared items in Google Reader. If you would like to search or subscribe to category/keyword feeds for posts that are by shared with Google Reader users visit http://filome.com. en-us Copyright for these items belong to their original publishers. No filome, google reader, shared items, community knowledge organizer This is the keyword feed for "test pass" from my read items in Google Reader. This is the keyword feed for "test pass" from my read items in Google Reader. http://www.filome.com/images/feed_image.jpg test pass | Filome sharers have read the following articles about "test pass" | www.filome.com http://www.filome.com/key/test pass This is a keyword feed for "test pass" from Filome read and shared items in Google Reader. If you would like to search or subscribe to category/keyword feeds for posts that are by shared with Google Reader users visit http://filome.com. http://www.filome.com filome beta Windows Phone 7 released to manufacturers now comes the hard work http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Winextra/~3/7UleWrGQE6w/ Shared item winextra
First shared by - JesseStay
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I can imagine that more than a few champagne corks are being popped right now at Redmond as word has come that after a lot of hard work Windows Phone 7 has been released to manufacturers. This means that handset makers can now start working on getting the final versions of their mobile handsets ready for launch day.

As Terry Myerson writes over on The Windows Blog

Today is the day that the Windows Phone team has been driving towards, and we're very excited to say that we've reached the biggest milestone for our internal team the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows Phone 7! While the final integration of Windows Phone 7 with our partners' hardware, software, and networks is underway, the work of our internal engineering team is largely complete.

Windows Phone 7 is the most thoroughly tested mobile platform Microsoft has ever released. We had nearly ten thousand devices running automated tests daily, over a half million hours of active self-hosting use, over three and a half million hours of stress test passes, and eight and a half million hours of fully automated test passes. We've had thousands of independent software vendors and early adopters testing our software and giving us great feedback. We are ready.

No kidding we're ready. We're ready for what has to be one of Microsoft's most anticipated releases in a very long time. Even more so than Windows 7 Microsoft has a lot riding on this and considering they apparently readied some $400 million alone for advertising Microsoft realizes just how important the success of Windows Phone 7 is.

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/archive/2010/09/01/windows-phone-7-released-to-manufacturing.aspx


Windows Phone 7 released to manufacturers now comes the hard work is a post from: winextra
Follow us on Twitter: @WinExtra | Don't forget we're on Facebook as well: WinExtra Fans

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Related posts:

  1. Xbox Arcade to be the backbone of Windows Phone 7 gaming
  2. All Microsoft Employees To Receive Free Windows Phone 7 At Launch An Evangelism Gamble?
  3. Leaked details about Windows Phone 7



windows phone microsoft released million windows phone microsoft released million work windows phone million hours half million hard work test passes half million hours ]]>winextra
First shared by - JesseStay
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I can imagine that more than a few champagne corks are being popped right now at Redmond as word has come that after a lot of hard work Windows Phone 7 has been released to manufacturers. This means that handset makers can now start working on getting the final versions of their mobile handsets ready for launch day.

As Terry Myerson writes over on The Windows Blog

Today is the day that the Windows Phone team has been driving towards, and we're very excited to say that we've reached the biggest milestone for our internal team the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows Phone 7! While the final integration of Windows Phone 7 with our partners' hardware, software, and networks is underway, the work of our internal engineering team is largely complete.

Windows Phone 7 is the most thoroughly tested mobile platform Microsoft has ever released. We had nearly ten thousand devices running automated tests daily, over a half million hours of active self-hosting use, over three and a half million hours of stress test passes, and eight and a half million hours of fully automated test passes. We've had thousands of independent software vendors and early adopters testing our software and giving us great feedback. We are ready.

No kidding we're ready. We're ready for what has to be one of Microsoft's most anticipated releases in a very long time. Even more so than Windows 7 Microsoft has a lot riding on this and considering they apparently readied some $400 million alone for advertising Microsoft realizes just how important the success of Windows Phone 7 is.

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/archive/2010/09/01/windows-phone-7-released-to-manufacturing.aspx


Windows Phone 7 released to manufacturers now comes the hard work is a post from: winextra
Follow us on Twitter: @WinExtra | Don't forget we're on Facebook as well: WinExtra Fans

Don't forget to check out the WinExtra Community Forums - registration is free.

Related posts:

  1. Xbox Arcade to be the backbone of Windows Phone 7 gaming
  2. All Microsoft Employees To Receive Free Windows Phone 7 At Launch An Evangelism Gamble?
  3. Leaked details about Windows Phone 7



windows phone microsoft released million windows phone microsoft released million work windows phone million hours half million hard work test passes half million hours ]]> Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:31:30 -0400 30:00 tag:filome.com,1 The value of naming things http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MarkNeedham/~3/dfDa9pBYzsw/ Shared item Mark Needham
First shared by - robdiana
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Nikhil and I were discussing some of the ideas around Test Driven Development earlier in the week and at one stage I pointed out that I quite liked Bryan Liles' idea of 'make it pass or change the message'.

Bryan suggests that when we have a failing test our next step should be to make that test pass or at least write some code which results in us getting a different error message and hopefully one step closer to making the test pass.

As I described this to Nikhil he pointed out that this is probably what most people are doing anyway and now the technique just has a name.

I think this is probably a fair assessment but then again I find it very useful when people give a name to common techniques/patterns as it makes them much easier to talk about without having to fill in a whole load of context.

For example Joshua Kerievsky has come up with some names to describe incremental refactoring techniques such as parallel change and narrowed change.

Parallel change describes a technique where we want to change a method signature but don't want to break all the clients of that method by directly changing it.

Instead we create the new method alongside the current one and gradually move the clients to call the new one instead. When they've all moved we can delete the original method.

Narrowed change describes a technique where we try to reduce the number of places where we have to make the change we want to make.

It's much easier to use the vocabulary that Kerievsky has come up with than to have to describe the techniques each time!

However I do think it is possible to go too far with naming things to the point that there are actually so many names that it's incredibly difficult to remember them all.

xUnit Patterns seems like an example of this to me.

There are an incredible number of patterns described in that book and while they do all describe slightly different scenarios I'm not necessarily convinced that having this many different patterns makes our discussions easier.

Overall though I think having names for common patterns in software development is a good thing and it does add value even though it seems like we've just 'given something a name'.



change patterns test method pass change patterns method test change describes narrowed change parallel change test pass ]]>Mark Needham
First shared by - robdiana
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 1

Nikhil and I were discussing some of the ideas around Test Driven Development earlier in the week and at one stage I pointed out that I quite liked Bryan Liles' idea of 'make it pass or change the message'.

Bryan suggests that when we have a failing test our next step should be to make that test pass or at least write some code which results in us getting a different error message and hopefully one step closer to making the test pass.

As I described this to Nikhil he pointed out that this is probably what most people are doing anyway and now the technique just has a name.

I think this is probably a fair assessment but then again I find it very useful when people give a name to common techniques/patterns as it makes them much easier to talk about without having to fill in a whole load of context.

For example Joshua Kerievsky has come up with some names to describe incremental refactoring techniques such as parallel change and narrowed change.

Parallel change describes a technique where we want to change a method signature but don't want to break all the clients of that method by directly changing it.

Instead we create the new method alongside the current one and gradually move the clients to call the new one instead. When they've all moved we can delete the original method.

Narrowed change describes a technique where we try to reduce the number of places where we have to make the change we want to make.

It's much easier to use the vocabulary that Kerievsky has come up with than to have to describe the techniques each time!

However I do think it is possible to go too far with naming things to the point that there are actually so many names that it's incredibly difficult to remember them all.

xUnit Patterns seems like an example of this to me.

There are an incredible number of patterns described in that book and while they do all describe slightly different scenarios I'm not necessarily convinced that having this many different patterns makes our discussions easier.

Overall though I think having names for common patterns in software development is a good thing and it does add value even though it seems like we've just 'given something a name'.



change patterns test method pass change patterns method test change describes narrowed change parallel change test pass ]]> Sat, 31 Jul 2010 06:55:24 -0400 30:00 tag:filome.com,2 Subscriptions are the New BLACK. (+ why Facebook, Google, & Apple will own your wallet by 2015) http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2010/02/subscriptions-are-the-new-black.html Shared item Master of 500 Hats
First shared by - robdiana
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I'm on a redeye to NYC, supposed to be working on a presentation i'm giving in a few hours... but fuck it, i can't get this outta my head, so here we go.

(note: extremely raw, uneven, long, 1st draft publish & shoot; will revise l8r)

ASSERTION #1: The default startup business model from 2000-2009 was based on growth (aka acquisition) and CPM- or CPC-advertising

Over the past 10 years, we have seen a massive shift in advertising from CPM to CPC-based advertising. This basically started happening when the 2000-2001 dotcom implosion blew the market cap of Yahoo to smithereens, and display advertising went into the shitter. Altho CPM subsequently recovered, Google's IPO and the gradual emergence of CPC as a higher-quality advertising medium has been the dominant story of the first half of the last decade. There's still a lot of page views and CPM advertising out there -- and YouTube & Facebook are making sure that doesn't change -- but as we VCs like to say:
"at the end of the day, Yahoo is now Google's bitch".

Let me say that again with emphasis so you don't miss it.

Google's ABSOLUTE FRIGGIN' SEARCH DOMINANCE has made CPC advertising the defacto monetization standard for the web.

Google is now making a ridiculous amount of samoleons: $2.5B free cash flow last qtr, or roughly $10B a year (a billion here, a biilion there, pretty soon that's cash-money, G...) -- and appears likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. Although Microsoft, Apple, Ebay, & Amazon are all minting money too there's no question Google is an unassailable Internet JUGGERNAUT, at least in Search.

But what has all this Don't-Be-Evil-AdWords-Click-Happiness done to the internet & startup ecosystem?

It's made us a bunch of lazy, ad-happy, Web-Tards with crappy ROI.

So crappy in fact, we should be ashamed to call ourselves entrepreneurs & venture "capitalists". Why, Schumpeter is probably rolling over in his grave at how little Creative Destruction we have rained down upon crotchety incumbents. It's a goddamn travesty that some aspiring startup or greedy hedge fund hasn't pummelled Yahoo and eBay into a hostile takeover by now, and Microsoft has made itself almost irrelevant in the consumer internet space -- helloooo Mr. Ballmer? please tell me how you own hundreds of millions of users and more than half the browser market and you HAVE NO VISIBLE 3rd-party distribution or monetization strategy? -- Srsly, we have monkeys driving some of the biggest trains on the Internet at the moment.

Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Fucking Way.

And while there's been something of a Startup Renaissance going on since around 2004, all these little web 2.0 wannabees have spent an inordinate amount of our attention on ad-driven business models resulting in a big steaming 2-Founders-1-Cup of FAIL. Everyone seems to have assumed that since Yahoo and Google were giants in internet advertising, therefore all internet startups should be using some form of CPM or CPC ad-monetization.

THIS IS A VERY LARGE LEMMING-LIKE ERROR IN LOGIC THAT MUST BE CORRECTED IMMEDIATELY.

We have largely WASTED an entire web decade of time, energy & venture capital on extremely inefficient revenue models. There have been a few interesting examples of startups acquired in the 00's for large amounts due to amazing growth (eGroups, MySpace, Skype, YouTube) or advertising potential (aQuantive, DoubleClick, AdMob, RightMedia). However, mostly the decade has been an uninterrupted string of uninspiring business models and small-time acquisitions of Web 2.0 startups filled with rainbows & unicorns, rather than those based on simple, transactional revenue models.

ATTENTION u ASSHATs on Sand Hill Road & u HIPPY-DIPPY Startups in SOMA -- This Shit Stops NOW.

[fast forward to Twenty-Ten & the Soul of a New Machine: Subscriptions.]

ASSERTION #2: The default startup business model for 2010 & beyond will be subscriptions and transactions (e-commerce, digital goods).

Newsflash folks: The Internet does NOT want to be FREE... It wants to GET PAID on Fucking Friday, just like everybody else on the damn planet.

Yes there is a role for Freemium, but unless you missed the TPS report the FREE part is only a loss-leader for the MEE-YUM part -- it's a test-drive before you buy something. If your users are just kicking the tires then you need to kick them to the curb eventually (unless of course they are your viral bee-yotches, in which case it's ok to have a few invitation whores as freeriders).

Free is not Forever, unless you never want to be in control of your own fate.

Gradually we are discovering that the default revenue model on the internet should probably be the simplest one -- that is: basic transactions for physical or digital goods, and recurring transactions (aka subscriptions) for repeat usage.

Let me say that one more time so you don't miss it.

Get Dem Bitches to *PAY* You, G.

Ok, so there's only one problem with this. It's called the Penny Gap.

Surprise, surprise... most people don't like to pay you squat unless they have no other choice. And aside from the user's disinclination to pull out their wallet, there's also the problem of wallet friction itself -- payment conversion is shitty for many reasons other than just price. Mainly it's because we can't remember our password. I'll repeat that about a million times in this post so you don't forget.

WE. CAN'T. REMEMBER. PASSWORDS.

This is incredibly important, and i'll explain why in just a little bit... but now, let's talk a brief walk down Memory Lane past my old workplace, PayPal.

Password Friction: Where's the Login K-Y Jelly?

Here's one of the not-so-flattering secrets of the PayPal Mafia you've probably never heard: The far-and-away #1 customer service problem -- and cost -- at PayPal was something called "forgotten password recovery". That's a nice way to say that people can't remember their fucking password.

It's the biggest goddamn problem on the Internet, but at PayPal we made it even worse by tying a payment instrument to the process, and then locking out the payment instrument if they couldn't remember their password. What a Brilliant idea! Let's see.... why don't we fuck over all of our n00b, first-use customers by forcing them to create an account they have no significant motivation to maintain yet, and then hope they don't give us a fake email address or fail to remember that password the next time they drop by... which might be 1, 3 or 6 months later. Bingo, way to create the biggest HateStorm in Internet History: make it super simple for people to make their payment method unusable by simply forgetting their password. Oh and i forgot to tell you we occasionally froze their account so they couldn't get access to their money. That was a real winner too.

PayPal was one of the classic stories of viral growth, however in this instance we also experienced viral growth in customer service: at one point more than 2 in 3 employees worked in customer service. And i'm guessing somewhere between 10-20% of first-time customers never used the service again, primarily because they forgot their password.

Look, no online service is perfect and there are often good reasons why account recovery shouldn't be too easy -- sometimes it's not YOU who wants to get access. But Password Friction at PayPal led to an unfortunate series of events which caused some signicant percentage of our users to HATE us with a PASSION that is usually reserved for politicians and lawyers. Since i was often on the front-lines running our PayPal Developer Network, i got to hear first-hand from Merchants and Developers about how this password friction caused problems with payment, and with user frustration. I got to know the folks in customer service pretty well, and i used to do my best to resolve some of our users pain.

So why am i bringing up all this bullshit now?

Well because as we transition to a Startup Ecosystem driven by direct payment & subscription business models, i want to make it clear how IMPORTANT it is to make sure users don't forget their passwords. If they forget their password, and/or can't recover it, then guess what MoFo -- YOU DON'T GET PAID.

Which means you don't get Laid, you don't get Acquired, and you sure as friggin' hell don't get to Go IPO.

So listen up & i'll share a little secret with you -- there is one very simple way to avoid forgotten passwords. Basically, it's this:

Make a Frequent-Use Product.

That's it, you say?

Yeah, that's it Sherlock. Make a brain-dead simple, frequent-use product. If users login a lot, then they don't forget their password.

Now think about that for a second...what services have users login a lot?
1) Social Networks
2) Email & IM
3) Games, Music, & Entertainment sites

Which leads me to my 3rd & final observation.

ASSERTION #3: In 2015 the default login & payment method(s) on the web will be Facebook Connect, Google Gmail, or Apple iTunes.

Now i'm not suggesting PayPal and Amazon are going to disappear overnight -- both probably have hundreds of millions of users (well, at least double-digit million *active* users anyway). And in fact, they will likely still have dominant positions in the market. But i will say this: if they rely *purely* on purchase behavior, they are fighting a losing battle against other services with more frequent usage, whose users will be more likely to remember their passwords. Like a Darwinian evolutionary experiment, only the fittest passwords survive -- and in this case, the fittest passwords will be the ones used most often. That is, the ones we use for core services like email, IM, games, music, videos. And guess what? Most of those services happen on social networks like Facebook, which currently has over 400M users and is growing like crazy internationally.

Well at this point i hope you've pieced it all together. The key to success -- one might even say DOMINANCE -- in payment systems is to begin with the foundation of frequent-use products, so that users won't forget their passwords. Whether intentional or not, Facebook has played this game to perfection. Not too far behind is Apple with iTunes, iPhone, and other related frequent-use media & entertainment products, and an App Store that people use regularly. And even Google has a shot here, with both Gmail and YouTube as two very large, frequent-use products, along with the upcoming Android platform. Twitter is probably a dark-horse here, but if user #'s continue to improve they could also have a shot. And i'd also keep an eye on Skype too, which still has a lot of frequent users and value.

Bringing up the rear pathetically here are Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL. All 3 of these services have hundreds of millions of users (via email & IM alone, not to mention other services), and yet they haven't figured it out. Yahoo had previously developed a payment product called PayDirect, but shut it down in 2004. FAIL. Microsoft had the right vision with HailStorm, but their UX was absolutely friggin' terrible (see Password Friction again), and they didn't stick with it. AOL similarly has been shedding users for a decade, and never realized how valuable their original email user base could be. It's unbelievable to me none of these Internet Giants has figured out what is going on. They have neither acquired nor merged in a payment service (Amazon, eBay) nor have they acquired a large social network. Unless MSFT develops Xbox into a widespread payment system, or acquires eBay (for PayPal), Amazon, or Facebook i just don't see them climbing back into the ring. All of those deals would be very difficult and unlikely, even for MSFT.

So that's it folks, i'm spent. This has been a complete ramble and i don't have time to edit this shit, so i'm leaving it as it is. Sorry for all the swearing and uneven pace, but hopefully some of you will take away something useful.



users password payment internet paypal ]]>Master of 500 Hats
First shared by - robdiana
syndication+ 0 | Search 1 | Shares 3

I'm on a redeye to NYC, supposed to be working on a presentation i'm giving in a few hours... but fuck it, i can't get this outta my head, so here we go.

(note: extremely raw, uneven, long, 1st draft publish & shoot; will revise l8r)

ASSERTION #1: The default startup business model from 2000-2009 was based on growth (aka acquisition) and CPM- or CPC-advertising

Over the past 10 years, we have seen a massive shift in advertising from CPM to CPC-based advertising. This basically started happening when the 2000-2001 dotcom implosion blew the market cap of Yahoo to smithereens, and display advertising went into the shitter. Altho CPM subsequently recovered, Google's IPO and the gradual emergence of CPC as a higher-quality advertising medium has been the dominant story of the first half of the last decade. There's still a lot of page views and CPM advertising out there -- and YouTube & Facebook are making sure that doesn't change -- but as we VCs like to say:
"at the end of the day, Yahoo is now Google's bitch".

Let me say that again with emphasis so you don't miss it.

Google's ABSOLUTE FRIGGIN' SEARCH DOMINANCE has made CPC advertising the defacto monetization standard for the web.

Google is now making a ridiculous amount of samoleons: $2.5B free cash flow last qtr, or roughly $10B a year (a billion here, a biilion there, pretty soon that's cash-money, G...) -- and appears likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. Although Microsoft, Apple, Ebay, & Amazon are all minting money too there's no question Google is an unassailable Internet JUGGERNAUT, at least in Search.

But what has all this Don't-Be-Evil-AdWords-Click-Happiness done to the internet & startup ecosystem?

It's made us a bunch of lazy, ad-happy, Web-Tards with crappy ROI.

So crappy in fact, we should be ashamed to call ourselves entrepreneurs & venture "capitalists". Why, Schumpeter is probably rolling over in his grave at how little Creative Destruction we have rained down upon crotchety incumbents. It's a goddamn travesty that some aspiring startup or greedy hedge fund hasn't pummelled Yahoo and eBay into a hostile takeover by now, and Microsoft has made itself almost irrelevant in the consumer internet space -- helloooo Mr. Ballmer? please tell me how you own hundreds of millions of users and more than half the browser market and you HAVE NO VISIBLE 3rd-party distribution or monetization strategy? -- Srsly, we have monkeys driving some of the biggest trains on the Internet at the moment.

Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Fucking Way.

And while there's been something of a Startup Renaissance going on since around 2004, all these little web 2.0 wannabees have spent an inordinate amount of our attention on ad-driven business models resulting in a big steaming 2-Founders-1-Cup of FAIL. Everyone seems to have assumed that since Yahoo and Google were giants in internet advertising, therefore all internet startups should be using some form of CPM or CPC ad-monetization.

THIS IS A VERY LARGE LEMMING-LIKE ERROR IN LOGIC THAT MUST BE CORRECTED IMMEDIATELY.

We have largely WASTED an entire web decade of time, energy & venture capital on extremely inefficient revenue models. There have been a few interesting examples of startups acquired in the 00's for large amounts due to amazing growth (eGroups, MySpace, Skype, YouTube) or advertising potential (aQuantive, DoubleClick, AdMob, RightMedia). However, mostly the decade has been an uninterrupted string of uninspiring business models and small-time acquisitions of Web 2.0 startups filled with rainbows & unicorns, rather than those based on simple, transactional revenue models.

ATTENTION u ASSHATs on Sand Hill Road & u HIPPY-DIPPY Startups in SOMA -- This Shit Stops NOW.

[fast forward to Twenty-Ten & the Soul of a New Machine: Subscriptions.]

ASSERTION #2: The default startup business model for 2010 & beyond will be subscriptions and transactions (e-commerce, digital goods).

Newsflash folks: The Internet does NOT want to be FREE... It wants to GET PAID on Fucking Friday, just like everybody else on the damn planet.

Yes there is a role for Freemium, but unless you missed the TPS report the FREE part is only a loss-leader for the MEE-YUM part -- it's a test-drive before you buy something. If your users are just kicking the tires then you need to kick them to the curb eventually (unless of course they are your viral bee-yotches, in which case it's ok to have a few invitation whores as freeriders).

Free is not Forever, unless you never want to be in control of your own fate.

Gradually we are discovering that the default revenue model on the internet should probably be the simplest one -- that is: basic transactions for physical or digital goods, and recurring transactions (aka subscriptions) for repeat usage.

Let me say that one more time so you don't miss it.

Get Dem Bitches to *PAY* You, G.

Ok, so there's only one problem with this. It's called the Penny Gap.

Surprise, surprise... most people don't like to pay you squat unless they have no other choice. And aside from the user's disinclination to pull out their wallet, there's also the problem of wallet friction itself -- payment conversion is shitty for many reasons other than just price. Mainly it's because we can't remember our password. I'll repeat that about a million times in this post so you don't forget.

WE. CAN'T. REMEMBER. PASSWORDS.

This is incredibly important, and i'll explain why in just a little bit... but now, let's talk a brief walk down Memory Lane past my old workplace, PayPal.

Password Friction: Where's the Login K-Y Jelly?

Here's one of the not-so-flattering secrets of the PayPal Mafia you've probably never heard: The far-and-away #1 customer service problem -- and cost -- at PayPal was something called "forgotten password recovery". That's a nice way to say that people can't remember their fucking password.

It's the biggest goddamn problem on the Internet, but at PayPal we made it even worse by tying a payment instrument to the process, and then locking out the payment instrument if they couldn't remember their password. What a Brilliant idea! Let's see.... why don't we fuck over all of our n00b, first-use customers by forcing them to create an account they have no significant motivation to maintain yet, and then hope they don't give us a fake email address or fail to remember that password the next time they drop by... which might be 1, 3 or 6 months later. Bingo, way to create the biggest HateStorm in Internet History: make it super simple for people to make their payment method unusable by simply forgetting their password. Oh and i forgot to tell you we occasionally froze their account so they couldn't get access to their money. That was a real winner too.

PayPal was one of the classic stories of viral growth, however in this instance we also experienced viral growth in customer service: at one point more than 2 in 3 employees worked in customer service. And i'm guessing somewhere between 10-20% of first-time customers never used the service again, primarily because they forgot their password.

Look, no online service is perfect and there are often good reasons why account recovery shouldn't be too easy -- sometimes it's not YOU who wants to get access. But Password Friction at PayPal led to an unfortunate series of events which caused some signicant percentage of our users to HATE us with a PASSION that is usually reserved for politicians and lawyers. Since i was often on the front-lines running our PayPal Developer Network, i got to hear first-hand from Merchants and Developers about how this password friction caused problems with payment, and with user frustration. I got to know the folks in customer service pretty well, and i used to do my best to resolve some of our users pain.

So why am i bringing up all this bullshit now?

Well because as we transition to a Startup Ecosystem driven by direct payment & subscription business models, i want to make it clear how IMPORTANT it is to make sure users don't forget their passwords. If they forget their password, and/or can't recover it, then guess what MoFo -- YOU DON'T GET PAID.

Which means you don't get Laid, you don't get Acquired, and you sure as friggin' hell don't get to Go IPO.

So listen up & i'll share a little secret with you -- there is one very simple way to avoid forgotten passwords. Basically, it's this:

Make a Frequent-Use Product.

That's it, you say?

Yeah, that's it Sherlock. Make a brain-dead simple, frequent-use product. If users login a lot, then they don't forget their password.

Now think about that for a second...what services have users login a lot?
1) Social Networks
2) Email & IM
3) Games, Music, & Entertainment sites

Which leads me to my 3rd & final observation.

ASSERTION #3: In 2015 the default login & payment method(s) on the web will be Facebook Connect, Google Gmail, or Apple iTunes.

Now i'm not suggesting PayPal and Amazon are going to disappear overnight -- both probably have hundreds of millions of users (well, at least double-digit million *active* users anyway). And in fact, they will likely still have dominant positions in the market. But i will say this: if they rely *purely* on purchase behavior, they are fighting a losing battle against other services with more frequent usage, whose users will be more likely to remember their passwords. Like a Darwinian evolutionary experiment, only the fittest passwords survive -- and in this case, the fittest passwords will be the ones used most often. That is, the ones we use for core services like email, IM, games, music, videos. And guess what? Most of those services happen on social networks like Facebook, which currently has over 400M users and is growing like crazy internationally.

Well at this point i hope you've pieced it all together. The key to success -- one might even say DOMINANCE -- in payment systems is to begin with the foundation of frequent-use products, so that users won't forget their passwords. Whether intentional or not, Facebook has played this game to perfection. Not too far behind is Apple with iTunes, iPhone, and other related frequent-use media & entertainment products, and an App Store that people use regularly. And even Google has a shot here, with both Gmail and YouTube as two very large, frequent-use products, along with the upcoming Android platform. Twitter is probably a dark-horse here, but if user #'s continue to improve they could also have a shot. And i'd also keep an eye on Skype too, which still has a lot of frequent users and value.

Bringing up the rear pathetically here are Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL. All 3 of these services have hundreds of millions of users (via email & IM alone, not to mention other services), and yet they haven't figured it out. Yahoo had previously developed a payment product called PayDirect, but shut it down in 2004. FAIL. Microsoft had the right vision with HailStorm, but their UX was absolutely friggin' terrible (see Password Friction again), and they didn't stick with it. AOL similarly has been shedding users for a decade, and never realized how valuable their original email user base could be. It's unbelievable to me none of these Internet Giants has figured out what is going on. They have neither acquired nor merged in a payment service (Amazon, eBay) nor have they acquired a large social network. Unless MSFT develops Xbox into a widespread payment system, or acquires eBay (for PayPal), Amazon, or Facebook i just don't see them climbing back into the ring. All of those deals would be very difficult and unlikely, even for MSFT.

So that's it folks, i'm spent. This has been a complete ramble and i don't have time to edit this shit, so i'm leaving it as it is. Sorry for all the swearing and uneven pace, but hopefully some of you will take away something useful.



users password payment internet paypal ]]> Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:15:28 -0500 30:00 tag:filome.com,3 A Small Production System - Current Status http://blogs.msdn.com/david_sayed/archive/2009/07/18/a-small-production-system-current-status.aspx Shared item MSDN Blogs
First shared by - KevinTunis
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We're doing more and more video work in my team, the latest being some of the videos used for our Expression 3/Silverlight 3 launch in San Francisco last week. You'll be able to see some of these on www.seethelight.com soon.

Because one of the standout features of Silverlight 3 is Smooth Streaming, our adaptive streaming technology, I want to do what I can to ensure that video content we produce is of high-quality.

Since most of our cameras are HD capable, shooting in HD is expected even if it isn't always warranted - just because it is HD doesn't mean it is going to look great - but we do what is expected, so HD it is. Sometimes, this has useful side effects. For example, the SF launch was professionally recorded and "live compositing" was performed on-site targeting 720p. The additional horizontal real estate on the screen, enabled us to have a nice large window for the slides or demo, and a decent size window of the camera feed (see below). We wouldn't have been able to do that in a 4:3 frame size. Now in this instance, the camera feed wasn't actually SD, but the output was recorded in an HD format.

But that's material for another time. This blog post is about putting together a meaty enough system for doing live capture and editing.

For a while, I've been using a combination of a MacBook Pro running Windows 7 RC or Mac OS 10.5 depending on the situation, and a quad-core AMD machine. I wanted to have hardware capture capability in order to both capture uncompressed video sources for testing and also to capture computer generated video at full frame rates. This type of capturing eats up disk space like nothing else. I also need to deal with the material once it has been captured - both editing and compression. So I'm gradually building up something that will meet these needs. Before launch, I was working with a "Frankenrig" PC that I cobbled together out of parts. The most significant additions proved to be an external 2TB drive setup as RAID 0 and an Intel Q9550 quad-core processor. The 2TB drive is a bargain basement SimpleTech from Fry's (which cost the princely sum of $199 if you can believe that), yet it has USB 2.0, Firewire 400, Firewire 800 and most importantly eSATA.

The video capture card is a Blackmagic Intensity Pro, which features an HDMI input, an HDMI output and an impressive D connector pigtail of analogue connections for audio and video. Its more expensive siblings, the Decklink series, feature SDI, which seemed to be overkill for my needs. Now I've had success with the Blackmagic cards before for video capture, but audio has always been problematic being plagued with sync issues. The jury is still out, but my hope is that with a more capable system that I outline below, I'll be setup for success.

I wanted a compact case that could be transported (and shipped) easily. At the same time, I wanted something that would have enough internal bays for a system drive and two drives for an internal RAID 0 array. Why the preoccupation with RAID 0? I need the speed, or rather HD video does. I settled on an Apevia X-Qpack2, which is for a Micro ATX motherboard and features a 500W power supply, two hard drive bays, one 3.5" external bay and two 5.25" external bays. This accommodates my storage requirements well.

I have had good experience with Intel motherboards, and I chose a DG45ID, which is a recent board based on the G45 chipset and includes on-board video. This seems to be a popular board amongst HTPC builders since it features both HDMI and DVI outputs. I paired the board with 4GB of RAM and an Intel Q9550 quad-core CPU running at 2.83GHz.

I re-used a 300GB SATA drive for the system (I like to keep the system and ideally the apps on separate physical drives, and the data on an array) and a couple of old 160GB SATA drives for the RAID 0 array for testing. I hooked up everything to the motherboard and set the RAID option in the BIOS and started installing Windows 7 RC. Here's a nice twist: I did this from a USB flash drive, which makes the installation process much quicker than from optical media or the network. Instructions for how to take an ISO and put it onto the USB flash drive can be found in many places, but I used the procedure outline here. Yet again, Windows 7 blew me away with recognising pretty much everything on the board and downloading updated chipset drivers from Windows Update. Great stuff! The only thing it didn't find was a PCI Simple Communications Controller, which was banged in Device Manager. There may be other solutions, but I downloaded the Intel Management Engine driver from Intel's site. The only trick is to run it in compatibility mode for Vista, otherwise it will fail claiming "wrong OS". I also had to download and install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager, which let me see and configure the RAID array from within Windows. The last step was to download and install the Blackmagic Intensity Pro drivers.

Blackmagic ships a useful Speed Test utlity, which is installed with the driver. It will run without a Blackmagic card in the system, and is useful for determining whether your machine is fast enough to handle video capture. I also used Passmark's PerformanceTest to evaluate raw disk benchmarks. The initial results were not at all promising. The Blackmagic Speed Test was telling me that I could get a 63 frames per second capturing 720p video in 8-bit 4:2:2 uncompressed. If I went the compressed MJPEG route, I could get better results but they caution that there's overhead that isn't reflected in those results, so it didn't look good for capturing a 720p60 source. I got slightly better results with the eSATA 2TB drive, but nothing to write home about. The disk write performance was about 80MB/s.

As an experiment I took the external drive apart and used its two drives directly as internal drives in the computer. These were much more recent drives (Hitachi Deskstars with a 32MB buffer) and they basically doubled the performance, so that's looking good.

As another experiment, I used a Highpoint Technologies RocketRAID 2642 hardware RAID controller, which uses a Marvell 88SE6445 accelerator and seems to be well received. Unfortunately, I saw no noticeable difference - in fact performance was slightly worse. Using another (more expensive) controller like an Adaptec or a 3ware may yield better results, but I do not have the ability to test this at the moment. So the Highpoint went back to Fry's and I'll stick with the stock Intel chipset for now.

A couple of notes, which may be useful to others considering a build like this. First of all, if you even think you're going to go for a motherboard-based RAID implementation at some point, select RAID in the BIOS before installing the OS. It will make your life easier down the road. Second, while BIOS updates are generally a good thing, I found that having gone a fully setup RAID system with an initial release to the latest BIOS caused the system to become non-bootable and I had to reinstall everything. Finally, the Highpoint RocketRAID card was not happy with the on-board controller set to RAID, which meant another reinstall of the OS. Thankfully installing from the USB flash drive and not having anything on the computer made it relatively painless...

I'm going to put Windows 7 64-bit on the machine since everything seems to have a 64-bit driver and we'll see how everything looks when I start capturing video. Stay tuned...



video raid drive system capture ]]>MSDN Blogs
First shared by - KevinTunis
syndication+ 196 | Search 1 | Shares 1

We're doing more and more video work in my team, the latest being some of the videos used for our Expression 3/Silverlight 3 launch in San Francisco last week. You'll be able to see some of these on www.seethelight.com soon.

Because one of the standout features of Silverlight 3 is Smooth Streaming, our adaptive streaming technology, I want to do what I can to ensure that video content we produce is of high-quality.

Since most of our cameras are HD capable, shooting in HD is expected even if it isn't always warranted - just because it is HD doesn't mean it is going to look great - but we do what is expected, so HD it is. Sometimes, this has useful side effects. For example, the SF launch was professionally recorded and "live compositing" was performed on-site targeting 720p. The additional horizontal real estate on the screen, enabled us to have a nice large window for the slides or demo, and a decent size window of the camera feed (see below). We wouldn't have been able to do that in a 4:3 frame size. Now in this instance, the camera feed wasn't actually SD, but the output was recorded in an HD format.

But that's material for another time. This blog post is about putting together a meaty enough system for doing live capture and editing.

For a while, I've been using a combination of a MacBook Pro running Windows 7 RC or Mac OS 10.5 depending on the situation, and a quad-core AMD machine. I wanted to have hardware capture capability in order to both capture uncompressed video sources for testing and also to capture computer generated video at full frame rates. This type of capturing eats up disk space like nothing else. I also need to deal with the material once it has been captured - both editing and compression. So I'm gradually building up something that will meet these needs. Before launch, I was working with a "Frankenrig" PC that I cobbled together out of parts. The most significant additions proved to be an external 2TB drive setup as RAID 0 and an Intel Q9550 quad-core processor. The 2TB drive is a bargain basement SimpleTech from Fry's (which cost the princely sum of $199 if you can believe that), yet it has USB 2.0, Firewire 400, Firewire 800 and most importantly eSATA.

The video capture card is a Blackmagic Intensity Pro, which features an HDMI input, an HDMI output and an impressive D connector pigtail of analogue connections for audio and video. Its more expensive siblings, the Decklink series, feature SDI, which seemed to be overkill for my needs. Now I've had success with the Blackmagic cards before for video capture, but audio has always been problematic being plagued with sync issues. The jury is still out, but my hope is that with a more capable system that I outline below, I'll be setup for success.

I wanted a compact case that could be transported (and shipped) easily. At the same time, I wanted something that would have enough internal bays for a system drive and two drives for an internal RAID 0 array. Why the preoccupation with RAID 0? I need the speed, or rather HD video does. I settled on an Apevia X-Qpack2, which is for a Micro ATX motherboard and features a 500W power supply, two hard drive bays, one 3.5" external bay and two 5.25" external bays. This accommodates my storage requirements well.

I have had good experience with Intel motherboards, and I chose a DG45ID, which is a recent board based on the G45 chipset and includes on-board video. This seems to be a popular board amongst HTPC builders since it features both HDMI and DVI outputs. I paired the board with 4GB of RAM and an Intel Q9550 quad-core CPU running at 2.83GHz.

I re-used a 300GB SATA drive for the system (I like to keep the system and ideally the apps on separate physical drives, and the data on an array) and a couple of old 160GB SATA drives for the RAID 0 array for testing. I hooked up everything to the motherboard and set the RAID option in the BIOS and started installing Windows 7 RC. Here's a nice twist: I did this from a USB flash drive, which makes the installation process much quicker than from optical media or the network. Instructions for how to take an ISO and put it onto the USB flash drive can be found in many places, but I used the procedure outline here. Yet again, Windows 7 blew me away with recognising pretty much everything on the board and downloading updated chipset drivers from Windows Update. Great stuff! The only thing it didn't find was a PCI Simple Communications Controller, which was banged in Device Manager. There may be other solutions, but I downloaded the Intel Management Engine driver from Intel's site. The only trick is to run it in compatibility mode for Vista, otherwise it will fail claiming "wrong OS". I also had to download and install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager, which let me see and configure the RAID array from within Windows. The last step was to download and install the Blackmagic Intensity Pro drivers.

Blackmagic ships a useful Speed Test utlity, which is installed with the driver. It will run without a Blackmagic card in the system, and is useful for determining whether your machine is fast enough to handle video capture. I also used Passmark's PerformanceTest to evaluate raw disk benchmarks. The initial results were not at all promising. The Blackmagic Speed Test was telling me that I could get a 63 frames per second capturing 720p video in 8-bit 4:2:2 uncompressed. If I went the compressed MJPEG route, I could get better results but they caution that there's overhead that isn't reflected in those results, so it didn't look good for capturing a 720p60 source. I got slightly better results with the eSATA 2TB drive, but nothing to write home about. The disk write performance was about 80MB/s.

As an experiment I took the external drive apart and used its two drives directly as internal drives in the computer. These were much more recent drives (Hitachi Deskstars with a 32MB buffer) and they basically doubled the performance, so that's looking good.

As another experiment, I used a Highpoint Technologies RocketRAID 2642 hardware RAID controller, which uses a Marvell 88SE6445 accelerator and seems to be well received. Unfortunately, I saw no noticeable difference - in fact performance was slightly worse. Using another (more expensive) controller like an Adaptec or a 3ware may yield better results, but I do not have the ability to test this at the moment. So the Highpoint went back to Fry's and I'll stick with the stock Intel chipset for now.

A couple of notes, which may be useful to others considering a build like this. First of all, if you even think you're going to go for a motherboard-based RAID implementation at some point, select RAID in the BIOS before installing the OS. It will make your life easier down the road. Second, while BIOS updates are generally a good thing, I found that having gone a fully setup RAID system with an initial release to the latest BIOS caused the system to become non-bootable and I had to reinstall everything. Finally, the Highpoint RocketRAID card was not happy with the on-board controller set to RAID, which meant another reinstall of the OS. Thankfully installing from the USB flash drive and not having anything on the computer made it relatively painless...

I'm going to put Windows 7 64-bit on the machine since everything seems to have a 64-bit driver and we'll see how everything looks when I start capturing video. Stay tuned...



video raid drive system capture ]]> Sat, 18 Jul 2009 11:54:31 -0400 30:00 tag:filome.com,4