Hulu (http://www.hulu.com), the web tv brand launched a month ago by NBC Universal is set to let users pick which ad to watch.

Maybe you’ve had the experience, trying to catch up to an episode of Lost that your Tivo somehow missed… You go online and are required to watch a few ads — in some cases the same ad repeated throughout the episode. This is the web. Shouldn’t it be smarter than this?

Giving the users a choice of which ad to watch is obvious. Below is a sketch of a concept we’ve put in front of some of our mobile and handheld device clients who are trying to align the gap between users and ad-subsidized content. I’ve contrasted that with what Wired describes as Hulu’s approach.

The user benefit is obvious. They self-select the message they’re interested in, or at least willing to watch. But, what’s in it for advertisers? This is a touch harder for advertisers to create a case for; after all advertisers are the ones holding all the risk. But, there’s also lots of risk in leaving the status quo. The answer is in the numbers; the data. An advertiser can know exactly which ads are getting selected with a day or 2, rather than waiting weeks for metrics to come back. What’s in it for the network, Hulu in this case? They get to charge a premium, hoping advertisers really want their juicy, data-driven ability to serve targeted ads.But is it truly a win-win-win (winners being users, advertiser, and networks)? Time will tell, but I’m looking forward to seeing how Hulu implements it.

I’m going to continue to assert that we’re just starting to see how the web and mobile lifestyle is going to turn advertising on its head. This is just one outgrowth of that. What I’m encouraged by is the evidence that advertisers and networks are putting the user in control (to a degree).

There are of course unanswered questions: how much data are the networks really going to aggregate over time at sites like Hulu? Your play history, your queue, the list of ads you’ve selected over time will inevitably be nefit you as the system starts serving you more relevant stuff. But, that aggregated data also ups the ante for networks to sell your aggregated data to advertisers.

So, user, how much privacy are you willing to sell in exchange for control?
Read the article in Wired

(Thanks Missy Kelly for the contribution.)

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Mobile marketers have a few kinks to iron out before they reach the delicate symbiosis between the marketer and the marketplace.

Burger King has announced a new mobile game. Users can play for a monthly fee of $2.99 — about the price of fries and a Coke.

So, there are two sides to put the mayo in dissecting Burger King’s rationale here.

First, let’s say the target user is a Burger King fan. She likes the kitschy enamel King from the TV ads as much as she likes BK’s juicy flame-broiled taste. But, is she enough of a fan to pay $2.99 a month to play the Burger King game on her handset?

From another angle, let’s say the target user is just a really avid casual gamer. But, of the games she could select, is she attracted to branded games of this nature; games where you have to “remember how to make a Whopper” and have to “squirt ketchup through the air while navigating through a BK restaurant?”

The jury is out on this one for me. I know we’ll continue to see experimentation with co-branded marketing campaigns, banner ads, branded content, “pay walls”, etc. I just wasn’t prepared for someone to suggest that users would like to pay recurring monthly fees for branded experiences; especially coming out of the fast food category.

Read the Press Release

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Convergence is sometimes viewed as the consolidation of multiple technologies towards a singular uber-device. I prefer to define convergence as the tendency of technologies, as they grow in complexity and scope, to overlap (and consolidate) functions. Convergence therefore refers to a trend wherein devices and functions take on commonly shared traits, but this doesn’t mean that this trend ultimately ends with a single multifunctional mega-device, no matter how cool and ‘mad scientist’ that might sound. Product mobility, technical innovation/component obsolescence, and proprietary ownership of certain functions are among the many forces that will ensure we continue to interact with ecosystems of related and overlapping devices rather than a single device with every function built in.
Nevertheless, convergence as a concept serves well to illustrate how interaction design for devices is changing. As our devices advance and change, they are often consolidating functions previously reserved for separate devices. Examples of this can be seen in most modern devices, from mobile phones (which serve as PDAs, calculators, mini-computers, and portable game consoles as well as communication devices) to Media Center PCs (which serve as DVR, stereo music player, and digital picture frame as well as a standard personal computer).
With all this in mind, here are 7 considerations to use when designing interactions for converged devices.

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This week at SXSW (pronounced South by Southwest) Jared Benson, Executive Creative Director at Punchcut, will lead a conversation titled “Mobile Manners: Mobile Presence and the Undefined Etiquette.”

Left to our own devices, what happens to our manners? Jared will lead a discussion among user experience design practitioners in discussing the profound effects the always-on mobile lifestyle is having on the way we interact with people and the world. In the same old contexts, we have a whole new set of choices: Do I really have to take this? Should I just put my headphones in and pretend I can’t hear them? Instead of calling mom back, can I text her? The cues and standards for how we communicate on our devices in the presence of others are just beginning to be defined. For the most part, individuals - not social norms - are deciding what is appropriate.

This conversation will cover what the UE design community can do to empower the user and alleviate the fear that we are becoming isolated by our technologies. Punchcut will facilitate a discussion on contextual considerations, the formality of various mediums, and the demands of emerging ideas like mobile presence.

Join the conversation at SXSW on Sunday March 9th at 5pm in Ballroom E.

Listen to the podcast here:
mobile_etiquette.mp3

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I’m discovering more and more that it’s not the user experience groups within the carriers and handset manufacturers that we need to convince about a new interface innovation; it’s the chipset manufacturers. While the vision and promise of a given UI might grease the necessary wheels of approvals to get an innovation to market, it rarely arrives without a degree of compromise.

Take the Sony XPERIA X1. In this highly-polished pitch video, the UI shucks and jives with all the agility of motion graphics at their finest. And sure, it works. For a UI that relies on a simple 3-view switcher to differentiate, it does make for a unique mobile experience. It certainly is more interesting than a lot of phone UIs out there. However, the actual device experience does lack in the speed department. The experience becomes even more painful when navigating the arched carousel, as demonstrated in this video.

Are companies hoping simple-minded consumers won’t notice these details? Unfortunately, in this example, an interesting UI transition has now become something that many users can’t help but notice — and wait for — every time they switch modes. Despite the fact that this is largely driven by the processor’s ability to push the objects around screen, this is the very stuff that perpetuates the stereotype that visual designers are all about gratuitous graphics at the cost of UI efficiency.

Sony XPERIA, marketing video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay7RMHcUuGQ

Sony XPERIA, hands-on at 3GSM:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuo9CAZCbIE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wU5eiMR57s

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Ever since we’ve hacked our iPhones, we’ve been noodling on themes for SummerBoard.

We’re happy to share six of them with you today, with more to come in the future. If you grab them, be sure to post comments to let us know what you think. Five more after the break…

1 Bit by Jared Benson

Pixels rule. What if the iPhone was released with a 1-bit display? Enjoy this old school rendition. Download it here.

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David Pogue, New York Times consumer tech writer, has a no holds barred article unabashedly praising and then trashing T-Mobile’s newest device, the Shadow.

Pogue outlines the newish environment where T-Mobile and former Apple designer have designed a device with some great innovative features and taken the third-party manufacturer (apparently HTC is the manufacturer, if you believe ZDNet) out of the picture, designed their own device and rethought a few key features. The list of praise is impressive including a rethought click-wheel for scrolling plus directional buttons for up, down, left, right selections and a Blackberry Pearl style keypad licensed from RIM. But then, Pogue says, “you turn it on.” You see, its fatal mistake is it’s running Windows Mobile 6.

Pogues’ rant reminds me of my own review of the Windows Mobile 5 Samsung Blackjack.

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Symbian seems to be in the first stage of grief over Android, Google’s new operating system for mobile. From an article by the BBC: “Google’s dominance of the web will not translate to the mobile phone market, a senior executive at Symbian has said.”

From the Symbian exec:
“About every three months this year there has been a mobile Linux initiative of some sort launched.

“It’s a bit like the common cold. It keeps coming round and then we go back to business. We don’t participate in these full stop. We make our own platform and we are focused on driving that into the mobile phone market at large ever more aggressively.”

And two paragraphs later:
“Meanwhile, the head of Nokia in the UK said the firm was in discussions with Google about using the platform.”

Read the BBC News article.

Link via Slashdot.

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The tectonic plates under Earth’s crust are moving very slowly all the time. Yet, we only notice them when enough tension builds up and there’s an earthquake. (Yes, I’m in California, and yes we had a 5.3 the other day.) The analogy applies to the dynamic you get in the mobile industry where there’s progress being made all the time, but where it’s easy to just wish it happened sooner. The trend is moving toward openness and toward user choice, but we don’t feel it until someone makes a big announcement like Google’s this week.

The shift is happening, and thankfully it’s happening faster than plate tectonics. Apple’s iPhone launch was a big deal, proving that a device manufacturer can play first fiddle in the US mobile industry (and AT&T isn’t complaining that 40% of iPhone buyers are new subscribers) and more importantly, proving that a device’s user experience can lead every part of the conversation; within the industry and with consumers.

Google’s announcement feels like a corollary to Apple’s. It adds evidence that a non-carrier can wrangle support from across the mobile industry (handset and chip OEMs, carriers, platform developers) to create an open platform.

Google’s announcement has interesting possibilities. What will device manufacturers come up with if they don’t have to pay Microsoft (or anybody else) for their OS? What will the carriers create if they didn’t have to pick from the pros and cons of the various OSs, but if they had the ability to write their own branded UI for a line of devices? What will the third party application developers be able to do with a more open, internet-powered approach (as is starting to happen on the Apple front, but that’s another debate.) What will content providers create for users if Google can prove an ad-subsidized mobile model will work?

Someday we’ll all look back and remember how cute Google was when it was just a little rainbow logo search field staring at you from a blank page.

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Mobile phones based on Google’s software are not expected to be available until the second half of next year. They will be manufactured by a variety of handset companies, including HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung and be available in the United States through T-Mobile and Sprint.

The phones will also be available through the world’s largest mobile operator, China Telecom, with 332 million subscribers in China, and the leading carriers in Japan, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI, as well as T-Mobile in Germany, Telecom Italia in Italy and Telefónica in Spain.

link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/technology/05cnd-gphone.html?hp

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