The other day, Niara and myself were discussing about patentable ideas to improve mobile phones, she had come up with a pretty impressive list. So, I started thinking about things that I would like to see and here’s what I came up with:

1. Camera-phones should have an option to ’start an album’ and ‘end an album’ so that we can make albums instead of having one huge mess of photos. Equally important is that bluetooth transfers should work for albums as a whole. This makes it easy to transfer photos instead of pressing yes for each and every photo that gets received.
   • Stretching the idea is to use tags – you have a running set of tags that gets applied to each new photo that you click.
2. Contact details should have an auto-filled field that displays when you last talked to this person, this helps keep track of whether you’re in touch with your friends.
   • Optionally, you can set an alarm to warn you if you haven’t spoken to your best buddy in a week.
3. Browsing the address book should be sorted by how frequently you call these contacts rather than just alphabetical order.
4. A default way of exporting the address book via bluetooth into a zip file or something that can be again imported (whenever the user wants to retrieve from backup).
   • Preferably a standard format that works across different manufacturers.
5. Character-voice-enabled. Instead of voice recognition for words, it should work for just one character at a time – such as alphabets, numbers, etc. It saves the trouble of typing… Of course, this idea could use some refinement.
6. One touch voice recording. Quickly jot down your thoughts or todo items you don’t want to forget. This would be very handy for me.
   • Maybe even podcast it. Could be achieved by an accompanying decent PC software.
7. Self-organizing start menu. If you use the calendar option a lot, then it bubbles up and becomes one of the important menu items so that you can quickly access it.

But, alas, as she rightly pointed out, these are not revenue-generating ideas, just usability ideas…

P.S. The irony is that I hate mobile phones. Maybe that’s why most of the above ideas are PIM-centric.

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009.

One of the many parts in the creation of ion was the designing of the look and feel of the product.

We do very limited direct selling (we sell mostly online) and from what I’ve seen, people just see the finishing and packaging of the ion and instantly buy it. My understanding is that based on how the product looks and feels, we assume that the same level of “attention to detail” has been maintained even in the internals of the product. In other words, “if it looks good, the product must work good”. Heck, we even apply the same logic to boys and girls, we obviously go for the good looking ones… must be something in the genes.

As I was saying, good look and feel increases the “sellability” of the product as well as the desire of the customer to buy the product. It so turned out that we were lucky to arrive at a combination of both good packaging and a solid product (thanks to Vikram’s electronics prowess).

We sought help from a friend Diwan Babu (of Guru ColorTech) who did some “amateur” designing for us and it came out really well. He made some four designs (well, actually three since two are variations of the same basic design):

All four were good designs, and we didn’t know how to choose between them.

My view was that I didn’t like the black one because the long ‘i’ makes it look like ‘j’ and the red one was too bright. I was biased towards the blue horizontal one, especially because I remembered what Philip once said:

“Light blue is a universally neutral colour in that all other colours that exist are either offensive or have negative connotations in some religion, or culture.”

We happened to be sitting in front of a Nike showroom thinking about what to do, and this crazy idea of asking real people came up (okay, I admit it was me who suggested it, but catching random people and talking to them is not my thing, so those two did most of the hard work). Several people, who tried to walk in to the store, were bombarded by us asking about which logo they would prefer. Just to make sure we were doing a proper survey, we changed the order of the logos (so that they’re not biased towards the one in the center, etc.), we asked people of different age groups, and so on.

It was a clear decision – the blue (horizontal) logo was going to be the look of the ion.

After that, we used the blue logo as our basis to create many more designs such as the posters, the banner and the final box design:

It was “too blue” all the way, heh.

For the past couple of months, I’ve had very busy weekends because I’ve been helping out a couple of friends launch a product.

Why talk about it today? Because today is launch day!

I’m talking about “the ion” – a charger for your iPod. Get the ion, plug in the iPod and connect the other end to the electric socket, and your iPod gets charged. No PC, no fuss, no muss.

In fact, it works with any device that charges through USB, whether it is your iRiver, or any mp3 player, or your mobile phone!

Some more cool features:

• The ion is portable, you can carry it around anywhere, especially to places where you will not have access to a computer.
• Do you really need to switch on your computer the whole night just to charge your iPod?
• You can listen to your music when your iPod is getting charged by the ion, instead of staring at the ‘Do not disconnect’ message.
• An awesome looking product. A great companion for the iPod.

All this for just Rs.399 only. As a bonus, you get solid reliability because the ion has a voltage regulator circuit that protects your device from power surges. Most existing charger products out there do not have such protection.

We’re going to get the product out in the stores soon, but^* the quickest way to get an ion is to buy it online right now!

We’ll also be trying to get the posters put up in all the IT companies so that more people get to know about the ion. If you can help us with this, please do drop us a line, we’d be glad to hear from you. If you want to grab the posters yourself, you can get the digital version and set it as your wallpaper and help us spread the word about ion

If you are curious about how the ion was born and how it was transformed into a real product that we are holding in our hand today, you can read about the interesting history of the ion.

Last but not the least, if you have any sorts of questions, doubts, queries or feedback, please do write to us.

^* Due to various circumstances, ion will not be available in stores, it will only be available online!

Yep, Moxie. That’s the codename for the next version of Flex. And it was one of the suggestions by yours truly in the internal discussions.

Why this name? My reasoning was:

Ely liked the name ‘moxie’ a lot especially because of the way the fingers are evenly distributed across the keyboard when you type ‘moxie’ , and he championed the name which convinced the Flexers to vote for it.

This led me to say:

And Ted says Drink Moxie.

Jeff Han’s “touch-driven computer screen” is so cool. That would make things so much easier to organize my photos, heh. But I wonder how ergonomic it would be since we will have to be looking down at the screen all the time and it would not be at the eye level.

I can imagine how editing of home movies would be so much easier with this, and of course more interesting games. It would also mean no keyboard and no mouse.

Then Apple brings some design fu into this… and lo, the iPhone. The interesting thing is that they have 200+ patents on it, will anybody else be able to do a multi-touch interface? Relatedly, I wonder how Steve Jobs can argue that DRM is bad while patents are okay…

What if there was a Project Runway or even an American Chopper show for programming… what would be the (minimal set of) qualities to judge on?

• Elegance (of algorithm, of code)
• Simple flow
• Attention to detail (corner cases)
• Efficiency
• Scalability
• “It Just Works”
• … hmm, what else?

Parshu (a colleague in Y! Bangalore) is presenting a session on REBIEX: Record Boundary Identification and Extraction Through Pattern Mining at the 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, New York.

I finally got around to reading Stroustrup’s “The design of C++0x”, and was impressed by Stroustrup’s sense of language design, especially the clarity of thought with which he presents the topics.

I still haven’t understood the part about “concepts” though. I wonder how it is different from interfaces (in Java).

• Rands in Repose has written a thoughtful article “Signs of Art” where he asks “Is software art”?

I think I’ll answer “Hell yeah”.

• Jason says:

The most important thing in software development is motivation. Motivation is local — if you aren’t motivated by what you are working on right now then chances are it’s not going to be anywhere near as good as it could be. In fact, it’s probably going to suck.

Food for thought, eh?

• Jason’s talk about the lessons learnt while building Basecamp is a must-hear, especially the part about the four main tenets – reducing mass, embracing constraints, getting real in the process of development and managing debt.

Banker asked me whether “you know of any good IT bios, or books related to gaming or animation or coding that are interesting enough to a layperson”.

So, I came up with:

• Hackers and Painters

  • Sampler: Why smart people have bad ideas

• Joel on Software, the book

  • Sampler: Hitting the High Notes

Any other recommendations?

Note to self: I should read all the essays in these books as well.