Brandon Muramatsu

Posts of the Week for May 31, 2011

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  • iPad Usability Study Reveals What We Do and Don’t Like In Apps: A summary of a recent Nielsen Norman Group report. Clean interfaces with clear hints are important. And ditch the damn splash screens already. Haven’t we learned anything from the multimedia apps of the 1990s?
    (NextDigest Mobile, May 27, 2011)
  • Top 10 Simple Privacy Tricks Everyone Should Use: Whitson Gordon describes some simple things you can do to help with online privacy. A couple of these I use already like fake birthdays (but I have to write them down in case I forget) for sites that really have no need for my birthday (aka Yahoo! Mail) and going “invisible” on IM.

    (Lifehacker, May 28, 2011)

  • A Step-By-Step Guide to Getting Better Customer Service: Calling any of the phone numbers we need to call these days for “customer service” is an oxymoron. Most companies have made it exceedingly difficult to speak with a live human being. Whitson Gordon has a good explanation of things you can do to help out your chances.

    I know that I’m probably in the minority here, but if I have to call, I have to speak to a live human being. I couldn’t resolve my techincal problem, billing issue, or other reason for calling any other way. I’ve already done quite a bit of work to “research the problem” by the time I call. Anything you do to make it harder for me to get “through to a real person”, and especially one that is empowered to think and address my problem is just a waste of my time.

    I normally do whatever I can to bypass IVR hell to speak to a human being. If I’m on the phone with a customer “service” representative that I think is in a non-US call center and they don’t get my request the first time, I “escalate the issue”. Simply put, I ask to speak with a supervisor right away. I’m not going to struggle explaining my problem multiple times to someone who is usually not empowered to make a decision anyway.

    There have only been a couple times where I’ve had to escalate things so far to speak with “Executive Customer Service”. Once was with a problem I was having with an Apple PowerBook that I was getting the run around on. I called up Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino and asked to speak to the Director of Customer Service. Once I wrote a scathing letter to the CEO of a credit card company after about a year of trying to resolve a fradulent credit card issued by the company. I cancelled my account, but the company sent a letter to reopen the account that I believe was stolen from my mail. Within a couple days they had purchased a really crappy computer (that was my fallback to expalin the obviousness of the fraud, I never, ever, even if trying to do something wrong would buy that particular computer). More recently I’ve had issues with AAA Southern New England (that I never did resolve adequately for the crappy server) and FTD (where I had to take to Twitter to get the issue resolved).

    (Not that I have any opinions on this topic!)>

    (Lifehacker, May 25, 2011)

  • “The Best of edw519” is now free. Reverse Happy Birthday!: This is the “free” version of a book written by Ed Weissman. It’s an interesting read for budding computer scientists and software engineers.
    (I forget the source)
  • Oren Jacob, CTO of Pixar, joins August Capital as EIR: Damn, I can no longer say I know someone that works at Pixar! Congrats to Oren. I went to Cal with Oren, and back in the day we did a project using Pixar’s SGI machines for one of our mechanical engineering classes. (We ultimately demo’d the project on a SGI in ME’s computer lab, but Pixar had a much better environment for doing the testing!) The story about how he got his internship as a render wrangler is hilarious, and I also remember it from back in the day. He’d babysit the computers rendering the scenes for the (Lifesavers) commercials Pixar was working on at the time.

    (Techcrunch, May 28, 2011)

  • Netflix For Pandas : Ethan Kurzweil writes,

    “We’re losing the ability to appreciate a truly novel business concept that doesn’t boil down to a knockoff of something that already exists.”

    And what’s worse is that,

    Budding entrepreneurs [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][are encouraged in the current system] pick an idea only slightly dissimilar from something that already exists, get it out there quickly (because someone else is probably working on the same copycat), and then sit back and cash their ticket to fame and fortune.”

    This was written from the perspective of startups but I also find that we do this in the educational technology space in which I work. We at a time of “disruption”, but we continue to try and use metaphors and analagies to what exist today.

    (TechCrunch, May 29, 2011)

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