I just hailed a taxi using NFC

By touching my phone and accepting a dialog box, I hailed a cab. The cab knew where to pick me up and was there in minutes.

What’s the big deal? I could have texted that information myself. Possibly had I a) known the taxi company’s text number, b) known the full address of where I was and c) understood the local language. The NFC tag obviated these needs in a relatively painless way.

Yes, I could have just asked the receptionist to call me a cab but I can’t help but get excited about the potential to extend the functionality of something that we all carry around all day in such a useful manner.

I follow a lot of NFC press. There’s a lot of emphasis on NFC as a way to help make transactions seamless. I feel that it’s about a lot more than transactions. NFC can act as a lubricant in our environments. It’s about making things less hard: doing things, learning things, playing games, exploring.

Are you asking, what the hell is NFC? Well near field communication is pretty well defined at Wikipedia, so I suggest you check there first although Nokia has a pretty simple-to-understand page also available for more information.

Phantom emails and the loss of a little trust.

Mail. It’s still the number one app that I use day in and day out. An upgrade to Mac OS X Lion caused a little corruption to Mail and this is the story of little trust lost.

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Mapping the news: a story of personal failure

I have a secret: I’m a closet taxonomist. I love mapping relationships and understanding how things came to be from the information that we have at our hands. Must be the biology training that I never got over. One of the projects that I am not so happy about the results was a simple idea: I tried to take news and map it.

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What every product manager needs to know about designing adaptively for mobile

I’ve been reading up on Skeleton over the past few days and the ideas behind adaptive design. Created by Dave Gamache, Skeleton is a boilerplate framework for creating pages that look great when viewed on any device or any size — so your website’s design looks different whether viewed on an iPhone, iPad or desktop. It helps you focus on the differences of content: what should be hidden, removed, downgraded in important as the screen size diminishes.

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“We’re a family business”

I’ve been having a lot of calls with mobile content publishers recently. I always like to start with an introduction so that people on the call get a sense of me and my team. I like to use the time to understand what everyone’s mandate is and get a sense of the expectations right up front.

Pretty standard stuff, right? I’ve been doing this for years now but I just had a call that left an impression. Let me explain what it was that impressed me so much.

The head of the company on the other end let each of his colleagues introduce themselves and then instead of going through the spiel himself he said that his only role was to ensure that morale was high at his company. “We’re a small company, a family business”.

To him, the high morale of his staff was worth everything. It kept the team agile, innovative and happy to come in in the mornings. It was the reason why his team stayed with the company even though it was a small, family-run business.

He didn’t say more than this, but it was enough. Enough for me to see that beneath the friendly joking on the call, his team felt respected. That respect meant that they had the confidence to really make things happen. I couldn’t help but be impressed and it sure makes me feel confident and excited to work with them.