Waze – Favorite Route

Don’t you hate it when Waze takes you with a new route just because the new route is 1 minute faster than your preferred route?

I wish Waze had a Favorite Route feature where you could set an acceptable set of criteria for it and if the fastest route is not within the set criteria then Favorite Route would be automatically selected.

If you want this feature, please “like” and “retweet” this tweet of mine. Thanks.

GrabCar – the Closest Driver vs Traffic Conditions

I’m a heavy user of GrabCar services. I have been using GrabCar for the past 2-3 years intensively, I mostly use it for transportation purposes to and from the office.

One of the things I noticed while ordering a ride from Grab is that it prioritises your request to the closest drivers around you in distance. This algorithm probably works out fine most of the time for most of the locations, however in some edge cases this can work against a customer in a very negative way. I will give very specific location as an example.

Case Study: Berjaya Times Square

Take the Bukit Bintang area at rush hour, after work, between 6pm – 7:30pm, particularly Berjaya Times Square Mall.

Here is how the traffic conditions look during the rush hour, after office hours. Area shaded in red usually has a terrible traffic congestion during this time. It’s located right across the street, opposite of The Berjaya Times Square Mall.

Continue reading

Book Review: Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

book_hookedMy Rating: 7/10 Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Nir Eyal in his book proposes a methodology for building habit-forming products. He argues that products can be built and successfully transformed into ‘habits’ by following these four steps: Trigger, Action, (Variable) Reward, Investments. One of the interesting ideas in the book is what he calls ‘internal triggers’, these are forces that trigger the usage of the app but the force is initiated by the user himself/herself – internally. For example: user decides to capture a moment that s/he feels memorable in Instagram, there was no trigger from the product – Instagram. That’s where you should get to with your product, when users have enough internal triggers to keep using your product on their own without you triggering them with ads, push notifications and email newsletters.

Video of Nir Eyal summarizing his book in 30min, watch here.

10 Steps to Personas

Lene Nielsen, who specializes in Personas has developed a “10 Steps to Personas” methodology. Below is an excerpt from her paper. Please follow the source link to read further, it’s worth to read.

The persona method has developed from being a method for IT system development to being used in many other contexts, including development of products, marketing, planning of communication, and service design. Despite the fact that the method has existed since the late 1990s, there is still no clear definition of what the method encompasses. Common understanding is that the persona is a description of a fictitious person, but whether this description is based on assumptions or data is not clear, and opinions also differ on what the persona description should cover. Furthermore, there is no agreement on the benefits of the method in the design process; the benefits are seen as ranging from increasing the focus on users and their needs, to being an effective communication tool, to having direct design influence, such as leading to better design decisions and defining the product’s feature set.

A persona is not the same as an archetype or a person. The special aspect of a persona description is that you do not look at the entire person, but use the area of focus or domain you are working within as a lens to highlight the relevant attitudes and the specific context associated with the area of work.source.

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Download PDF from personas.dk

Building Trust in Your Team: The Trust Matrix

This is an interesting article by Richard Barrett on The Trust Matrix and 18 components of Trust. I have re-created the diagram for better clarity.

trust18

Character is a reflection of how you are on the inside, your intent, and the level of integrity you display in your relationship to others. These depend primarily on the level of development of your emotional intelligence and social intelligence. Intent is demonstrated by caring, transparency and openness; integrity is demonstrated by honesty, fairness and authenticity.

Competence is a reflection of how you are on the outside, your capability, and the results you achieve in your role. These depend primarily on the level of development of your mental intelligence, your education and what you have learned during your professional career. Capability is demonstrated by skills, knowledge and experience. Results are demonstrated by reputation, credibility and performance.

See the full article at https://richardbarrettblog.net/2014/04/11/building-trust-in-your-team-the-trust-matrix/

Launching New Startups in Big Corporations

Many industries are being disrupted by new and innovative technologies and many more are awaiting to be disrupted in the next 5-10 years.

This anticipation has obviously resulted in many corporations attempting to create their own innovative products, so as not to be disrupted by a third party technology or a startup. It’s quite common these days to see Telcos, Banks and Insurance companies organizing hackathons, and trying to generate innovative ideas that could be used in their respective industries.

Generating new ideas is the easy part. But as discussed in my previous post, trying to develop totally new products in a corporate setting is very challenging to say the least.

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3 Corporate Hurdles that Kill New Initiatives

There are at least three main corporate hurdles for a successful new product incubation within a large corporate setting, these are corporate structure, approval processes and procurement processes. Oftentimes, corporations make a mistake of starting a new product without addressing any of these three pain points. Continue reading

My Fav iOS Apps (Roundup)

Over the years many apps came and went, but these apps has stood the test of time on my iPhone, some have been longer than others. I thought I would share them with you. I will save you time from the usual social network apps like Facebook and Twitter, so I won’t be including them in this post. I will also save you the long descriptions about the apps, descriptions you can find them in iTunes. Here we go:

AppShopper (free) – be notified about the latest app discounts in the appstore (iTunes)
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What happens to your Gmail and Google Drive after you die?

Not many people know that Google provides a way for your spouse or close relative to access your Gmail or Google Drive (or any Google service for that matter) after you pass on. It’s called Inactive Account Manager.

The rule is simple, after you activate the service, if you didn’t login to your Gmail for a particular time period (you can select the inactivity period from anywhere 3 months to 18 months), it will inform the person specified and share your Google Account access with them.

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Say, your inactive period is set to 6 months, after 4 months (2 months before the expiry), Google will send you a reminder SMS and email informing you that Inactive Account Manager will be activated in 2 months time. After which if you still do not login to your Gmail within the next 2 months, it will proceed to provide access to your Gmail to those people who you have specified. Below is the details of this service. Continue reading