One of the most underrated pillars of good marketing is customer satisfaction.

As a person who lives in a country where this concept doesn’t even exist, I know how to appreciate customer service at its best.

Being on maternity leave, I recently decided that I’d like to finally take on a project I’d been hoping to do for a long time - digitize all of my pictures.  I have boxes of old pictures that are completely wasted in their print format, and wanted to remedy the situation.

I pull out my Doxie scanner - an awesome little portable scanner - (that I haven’t used for months mind you) to discover that it’s having some issues.

I decided to be a B**** and call them out about it on Twitter, instead of being a mensch and writing them an email.

And despite my obnoxiousness, they were really nice about it, and told me they have excellent customer service, and to reach out by email.  Which I did.

After telling my story, and initially asking for a replacement accessory kit that is received with Doxie so I could clean and recalibrate it (which being the responsible people that we are - we lost at some point) - they, no questions asked, said it was going out in the mail immediately (even though I’m in Israel).  After a couple of hours, their customer service rep (who deserves a shout out herself) - Sue - of her own initiative contacted me and told me they’ve decided to replace the scanner altogether - and that we can just recycle the faulty one. I was so pleased, I actually wanted to ask if I could add $50 and get the more advanced version (but thought that would be a little too greedy on my part).  I already wanted to consume more of their products, being so happy with their customer support.

I like companies that:

1) Stand behind their products

2) Treat the customer with respect and trust

3) Are quick to respond to an issue.

This builds my trust in and respect for THEIR brand.

Thank you Doxie - you have been wonderful - I will be sure to purchase your products again.

I may be way behind the eight ball with this one, but I just discovered Springpad - which to me replaces about 100 different apps I used to use, and aggregates everything in one place pretty conveniently.

I’m not kidding - for me it’s Evernote meets Pocket meets Pinterest meets Favorite Tweets meets Amazon + eBay Wishlists meets Astrid meets Asana meets Gmail (certain functionality) meets Tripit meets Noteshelf… You get my drift. Of course, this all depends on how you consume apps & their purpose for you, but in terms of functionality for me, this is one super app to replace them all it looks like.

The devs of this app have done something simply brilliant.  Aside from having a really functional cross platform app that also has a desktop version (apropos my previous post about why this is important) - they also catered to aesthetic appeal with this app.  It’s really beautiful.

This app enables you to create notebooks in an Evernote/Noteshelf fashion - share them publicly or privately (for more personal things), and makes it super easy to save stuff to said notebooks - you can send emails to be filed in your notebooks, you can save virtually any link at the click of a button on any platform - via the Chrome plugin you can do this on a desktop too, otherwise you “spring” them on mobile devices, take pics and spring them, scan barcodes etc. etc.

You can take virtually any kind of note - see screenshot below - AND you can share individual notes or entire notebooks.

Some of the stuff I’ve used it for:

Replaced my recipe label in Gmail - where I send myself awesome recipes - I’ve made this notebook public.  Happy to have contributors there - whoever’s interested.

I’ve saved all my bookmarks from Pocket & favorite tweets.

Aggregated my wishlists from all of my favorite eCommerce sites.

Saved my notes to self for awesome marketing ideas.

Created a grocery shopping notebook - which allows me to create a page in the notebook for my weekly shopping - and actually look back to see what was bought and what wasn’t, without necessarily deleting items or without it all being under one list (Astrid or Asana-esque).

And plenty more.

What’s more - while you could feasibly do this with Evernote - it doesn’t give you the beautiful look and feel (and there are limitations due to premium features), whereas Springpad actually takes the pictures from the links so it has a nice visual experience and makes it easier to find things - Pinterest style, and allows you to file more easily.

Plus you can have followers like Twitter or Tumblr for those who like your public notebooks and want to see more.

I like that they took everything from a UX perspective into consideration:

Privacy - Check

Sharing - Check (Whatever floats your boat)

Social Interaction - Check

UI - Check

Price - FREE! (The best part about my favorite tools)

While they currently don’t have any premo schemes like other apps (as far as I can tell) - I’m sure they’ll find a brilliant way to monetize, since it looks like they have a pretty awesome team.

Find me (and Springpad) here: http://springpad.com/#!/Shar1z

This is a two part commentary on brilliant positioning versus less stellar marketing.

Allow me to start with Samsung.

I think the way in which Samsung have positioned themselves as Apple’s leading competitor these days, independent of Google (whose OS is just a means to an end); and the numbers speak for themselves (sales-wise & Apple attack-wise - just emphasizing the fear factor) - deserves serious respect.

If you had asked me who would be in this position a few years ago, I likely would have answered HTC.

But lo and behold, Samsung have made all the right moves with their Galaxy line, releasing topnotch mobile devices that are gaining serious market share, all while undertaking brilliant marketing campaigns (Superbowl commercial anyone?), but they didn’t stop there to make sure they stand out in the competitive Android arena.

They release their devices with strategic alliances to really create that tipping point. They did this with the Galaxy S3 & Flipboard, a much coveted mobile app, and then continued this trend by offering 50 GBs of Dropbox storage to Galaxy S3, S4 & Note 2 users - to provide a holistic Apple iCloud-like experience, and for me that was a major selling point. Very well played. They recognized that technical specs are becoming less and less distinguishable - and it’s no longer just about the device, but the entire experience - something Apple has known from the get-go.

On the less brilliant marketing side - I’m actually going to point my finger at Dropbox.

I don’t like Indian givers.

There’s always a catch. Well most of the time.

I remember when Box first came out with their Android app they offered a promotion of 50 GBs for lifefor those that downloaded the app in the first week.  I did that.  I hear it was so successful that they’re even doing it again now, as I write this.  And even the manner in which they initially intended to monetize (add-ins such as desktop sync), they eventually did away with and offered for free (since they realized this was a major breaker for many users).  I actually now use Box as my primary cloud storage, and have chosen to offer Box storage for marketing campaigns and such, since I liked their attitude.

Then there was Dropbox.

Dropbox on the other hand have decided to offer the 50 GBs of storage that come bundled with Galaxy devices for 24 months alone.  I don’t like that.  What’s the point of it?  Kind of like Microsoft reneging on the 25 GBs of Skydrive storage if you didn’t “claim it” (not quite sure how I was supposed to do this still).  I get that you need to monetize, but really if you chose to go into this alliance - go in wholeheartedly.  This is totally half-assed, and means I will never use that 50 GBs of storage - since I can’t just up and move 50 GBs of storage after 24 months, and I think their pricing is a bit excessive.  Take Box’s 1 TB of storage for a fraction of the price.  This is so off-putting it reeks of Apple with their vendor lock-in ploys.

Other options could have been to take back unused storage after 24 months, or to enable the storage only while owning a Galaxy device.  

The alliance was smart, but the execution was poor.

So I’m guessing you’re wondering where I’ve disappeared to…

I have a 1000 posts that are in partial draft mode - but I’m guessing I won’t be able to get to them in the next 18 years or so, since I have officially deployed my first human project.

Stuff to look forward to then (and I’m sure it’ll be pretty relevant and cutting edge stuff) -

“I’m back on Facebook - and hating every minute of it”

“CM 10.1 vs. Stock Jellybean”

“Tools I like: RabbitSEO”

“Organizing a meetup group”

Some more tool comparisons - and maybe some thoughts on the false advertising of parenthood, or something on the lines of that.

Until then… Thanks for the patience.

This one is actually one of my favorites.  It’s free, unless you need the premo features, and it is such a useful tool.

Qualaroo provides quick surveys and nudges at the corner of your web page that are unintrusive, and really provide valuable feedback.

I use it to know whether a wiki help section was useful, why people haven’t downloaded our product, and to opt-in to our newsletter (a list which you can easily export as well), and I have received a lot of actionable feedback, and grown our user-base quite nicely.

I really hope they’ll be able to provide more analytics-based features, or integrations with  existing analytics tools, since that’s really the only thing I feel the tool is missing right now.

And like all of my favorite tools - it’s free.

Check it out:  http://www.qualaroo.com.

I had the honor to be a part of an incredible initiative that came to its culmination yesterday - the first ever DevOps conference in Israel, organized together with the brilliant Nati Shalom, Uri Cohen, Ran Tavory, and Avner Algom.

Nati Shalom, summarizes quite nicely everything that went into making DevOps Con possible, but following the actual event itself I would like to just present some of the highlights and takeaways, as I see them.

It apparently is all about the content.

While there were some cynical tweets about how the presenters are from the organizations that sponsored the event - this unlike other events - actually happened the other way around, which just goes to show the real, and genuine desire to contribute to this cultural and organizational change among these organizations.  

What I mean by this, is that the content visionaries - Uri, Ran, and Nati - made sure to closely moderate the content and put together a really useful lineup of content that would start with setting the DevOps atmosphere, and then split into tracks that would concentrate on Continuous Delivery and Real Life Case Studies and DevOps Tools.  After this was completed, we realized that putting together an event isn’t only a matter of good ideas and great content, you do need funding.  So we turned to our speakers, who clearly had a huge passion for DevOps and understood the importance of holding such an event - and nearly each and everyone stepped up to the plate to contribute from a funding perspective as well, to make sure we could actually make this not-for-profit event happen.

So I would like to say a huge thank you again to the sponsors - those who were onstage, and those who contributed to the cause, just for the sake of being a part of something important.

And on this note, I would like to address some of the comments about the size of the rooms.  The only people at fault here are the event organizers (and I say this in a good way) - because we just had NO IDEA how much interest there would be in such an event.  

If you build it - they will come.  

Well, we were blown away by how many people really came and wanted to take part, after we put it together.  Being the first such event in Israel, we were wholly unprepared for the widespread interest, and really underestimated the turnout.  The sponsors of the venue did everything in their capacity to accommodate the number of participants.

The DevOps Community in Israel is Thriving and Digitized

It was amazing to see how passionate and involved the DevOps community actually is.

From the awesome and funny #devopscon Twitter feed throughout the event

Through the post-event commentary received within the meetup group (just a small snippet below)

The buzz created was inspiring.

DevOps folks love memes (especially the Boromir kind).  

We will be posting all of the presentations on the DevOps Con website (you can also find the ones supported on Speaker Deck and SlideShare), as well as the recorded sessions once they’re ready.

Already looking forward to the next event!

I recently read that Google+, while perceived by many to be a failing enterprise, has actually passed the half a billion user mark.

I’m going to dive into why and how I think they got this right.

• 1. Google Hangouts. No one can dispute that Google is a great company from a technology perspective. And I think at first the value of this tool wasn’t so apparent, and I will dive in further to other tools like Google Hangout in a post I’m putting together (such as Join.me & others). I believe the ease in which you can start a group conversion - public or private, even ad hoc with screen sharing & even recording - has actually been a real game changer for Google+ & adoption catalyst for many users. It has drawn many people in, and has given Google+ a real fresh value vs. its competitors. 

• 2. Mobile Apps. Google did a phenomenal job of launching both the site & mobile apps simultaneously, which links back to my previous post of mobile apps to support desktop apps. But they didn’t stop there. They worked hard behind the scenes to constantly improve those apps, and I can honestly say that from a UX perspective, my Google+ apps are probably my favorite apps (Android & iPad) today. They’re beautiful & fully featured, and with the caliber of users, I often find myself catching up on news & such via Google+ even over Flipboard (which provides a similar UX to me). 

• 3. Communities, Pages & More. Combining features from other successful social networks, and while this doesn’t demonstrate much originality, it does demonstrate Google’s desire to really provide its users with the maximum.  Taking the communities idea from Linkedin, and pages from Facebook, Google+ now enables companies to really leverage Google+ as a viable alternative to other tools.

• 4. Controlled Sharing. With many social sites these days, there is a real concern about loss of control, and privacy.  I think from early on Google+ did a really good job of addressing this issue, especially when it comes to photos, and other sensitive material that it is often times quite difficult to understand how to limit visibility on with other sites.  The circles and the quick settings, enable people to feel confident that their posts are being viewed by the people they’d like to have see them.

• 5. Seamless Integration & Instant Upload.  Google+ definitely learned its lesson from the whole Google Buzz debacle.  They learned that if people want to use your tool, they will, and you don’t have to shove it down their throat.  While leveraging their massive Gmail user base, they unintrusively provide a quick link in the corner, next to the rest of the quick links, for those interested in quick access.  Those who aren’t interested, can opt out.  Another perk is the instant upload that comes built-in with the mobile app.  Not sure if this is just for Android or all mobile devices, but this is probably one of my favorite features.  In contrast to DropBox, that provides a similar option, but doesn’t provide you with more space to take advantage of this perk, Google+ doesn’t limit your upload (or hasn’t yet for me at least - so I’m guessing the capacity is pretty large).

I’m happy to see that Google have learned lessons from past mistakes, and are taking the user experience to heart.  I think this tool definitely is a plus in their direction following previous flops such as Google Wave and Google Buzz (whose technology they definitely leveraged to make this tool a real success).

So in my previous post - Bizzabo vs. Sched vs. Wix vs…Plain old Wordpress? - I had a total brain freeze, and completely forgot to mention probably one of my favorite tools in this space, Lanyrd.

It fell off my radar only because I use it for the most part to track events and almost like an event social network, and forgot that this viral factor that they have actually means that they have what others still need to garner - market share.

Virtually every leading event has a profile on Lanyrd, which creates exceptional visibility for your event.

Things you can do with it:

Create an event minisite, with speakers (you can even add their Twitter handles), sessions with dedicated URLs, tracks, link back to a larger site, and even embed your schedule easily. People can track your event via the tags you use, and you can likewise track events in the same manner.

It’s definitely worthwhile to remember Lanyrd as part of an event action plan, it is a great tool for awareness and exposure.

I used to love Any.Do - seriously, I thought it was a brilliant app, and was close to my heart being Israeli-made.  

Same goes for Whatsapp (sans the Israeli made part). I just don’t understand technology companies that don’t recognize their competitive edge in time.

I constantly reached out to Any.Do to tell them - the app is beautiful, and stellar, but really missing a major feature - being able to share folders, making it virtually useless from a sharing perspective.  I also told them they seriously need a desktop app.

I feel like there is so much focus on the mobile app these days, that it’s often overlooked that one of the major values of the mobile app is the enabling of desktop apps on the go.  And that, for me, is where both Any.Do and Whatsapp failed to deliver - leaving the space wide open to be snatched up by competitors. 

Two apps that are now competing for my tasking attention are Astrid and Asana.  Both cross-platform for easy sharing with my iPhone carrying spouse (actually Any.Do wasn’t cross-platform till very recently), where you can share entire lists/projects, and can be integrated with your desktop.  Astrid is less seamless - as you need to sync with Google Tasks. Asana has had a web app before it even had a mobile app.  (And then I was complaining that it’s ridiculous that they don’t have a mobile app). 

As for Whatsapp - while it has the reach and market penetration, it too failed to deliver a desktop app quickly enough.  One of the only major envies I’ve always had for iOS has been the seamless way the messaging syncs with a desktop app - making it super easy to reply when at work. And Samsung have finally delivered with ChatOn.  

While there have been workarounds like MightyText and other such apps for Android - these synced with your SMS (which aren’t free), and your Gmail (also annoying). And with Samsung’s incredible market share - exceeding Nokia and even iPhone - I predict that ChatOn will be a serious game changer in this space.

What’s more, with the Facebook/Whatsapp M&A rumors - this may pose a very attractive alternative for those who really want to get Facebook out of their lives.  

Like me.

UPDATE: Any.Do reached out to me on Twitter to let me know that you can create a task & share it, and then all the “notes” you add to the task are then shared too. A little less intuitive - but gets the job done, I suppose. They are working on adding folder sharing functionality though. Now all they need is desktop integration & they’re covered. I decided to change the title of the post as a result.

At my previous job, where they didn’t want to shell out the big $$$ for Adobe Creative Suite, I had to find myself alternate tools for basic graphic editing - and I came to love Gimp and Paint.net.  Since then, and this is something that holds true for virtually the entire suite of Microsoft Live Tools - even Microsoft Paint has undergone quite a metamorphosis.

While I basically never use MS Paint - and often times even prefer to use PowerPoint to create simple images that don’t need to be very high-res - I can say that I’ve seen many people create pretty neat stuff with it. Obviously if I needed to rank the tools, I’d say for super-easy quick editing I’d go to Paint.net.  If I need something a little more serious, but not too complex, Gimp, and if I need a fully featured graphic editing tool - Photoshop.

Paint.net - the perks.  

It loads superfast, and has all of the basics you’d need to produce a pretty nice picture.  No real filters and there are annoying little things like being unable to edit text once you move to a new layer, or having to move an entire layer, and not just the object itself (i.e. the full size of the canvas), after placing the object (and if you accidentally use the wrong selection tool - you’ll slice your image).  But for being a freebie open source graphic editor - I can’t complain.  It’s easy, it’s UI is clean, and you can export to plenty of formats.

Gimp - the perks. 

There are certain things I still do in Gimp over Photoshop.  One of my favorites is the stamp effect.  It’s just so easy with Gimp, with its built-in brushes and options, I can make a stamp in virtually three steps, which makes me just opt for Gimp first. I also like using Gimp because I really do appreciate all the work that has gone into this stellar open source product - and am always a fan of opting for an open source product when possible.  

I like to be sure that when the day comes and Adobe has priced their creative suite at $1M - I’ll have an alternate I’m comfortable with. These days - only because it’s easily accessible I usually opt for Photoshop (and even though I’m still on CS3 - it’s honestly good enough).  I can honestly say though, that while we’ve become used to Photoshop (kind of like MS Word we can’t really fathom moving to alternate tools), but open source and free online tools are really giving them a run for their money.  I find that that holds true for MS Office too.  I have started using Google Docs way more - for the collaboration aspect and the easy cloud syncing, which makes it so convenient.

Other cools tools to check out include Aviary - for quick online editing.  And apropos my previous post about MailChimp - they actually enable you to edit photos through an awesome Aviary plugin.