Thirsty? Start squeezing now!

Posted on Friday, October 31, 2008 by Thijs Jacobs

Folks - the wait is over; we at Linkool Labs are releasing Juice into public beta today!

Juice, our intelligent discovery engine, has been in private beta in the past two months. With helpful feedback from our private beta users, we have tweaked our user interface and our backend system with the goal of creating the best, most fulfilling experience for all our users.

Now that Juice is in public beta, we welcome everyone to go to juiceapp.com to download and try out Juice. When you have a spare moment, please also check out our brand-new, absolutely rockin’ webcast that will give you a quick start guide on Juice.

We value any and all feedback! If you have ideas on how to improve Juice, don’t hesitate to drop us an email.

Happy squeezing!

Related: download our Press Kit

Kungfumaster visits Linkool Labs

Posted on Monday, October 27, 2008 by Thijs Jacobs

Kungfumaster plugs Juice.

Cross-posted on Linkool Labs.

Juice's sidebar supper

Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 by Thijs Jacobs

The browser is the new Operating System; we’re not claiming it, you guys are! And we couldn’t agree more. That’s why we believe we got it right by casting our intelligent discovery engine, Juice, in the form of a browser plugin. Building an application on top of the browser allows us to do things that web-based applications can not (although we have some exciting goodies coming up in that area too). Unlike a web-based application that is always parked under a URL, our plugin is always accessible and always available to the user as long as the browser is open. Even if the user chooses to hide Juice, we’re always standing by to help the user find that juicy piece of rich content.

By delivering rich content inside the browser’s sidebar, Juice enables you, the user, to keep browsing while the rich content is neatly juxtaposed nearby. For example, you can now watch your favorite YouTube videos in the sidebar while you keep browsing in your normal browser window, with both your browsed content and Juice’s rich content available in plain view.

In order to make Juice the friendliest piece of UI out there, we implemented several ways with which you can trigger Juice. You could try highlighting text and dragging it (just a bit or all the way), dragging an image, or grabbing the tab that pops up next to a flash video. You could also try right-clicking content and bring up several Juice options in a context menu as well. Moreover, Juice cleverly listens to what you search for in the browser’s default search box, and finds you that juicy piece of rich content just when you may need it.

Many of our competitors choose to bother you with in-text pop-ups or rollovers that, in our opinion, disrupt your browsing experience. We strongly believe that you should be able to browse the web uninterrupted, and enjoy a rich experience only when you want it. Pre-defined pop-up content (or, horrors!, pop-ups with nothing but ads) just won’t pass the user-friendliness muster with us.

Our public release is coming very soon! In the mean time, we welcome you to sign up for our private beta at juiceapp.com (try the unlock code juiceblog, for which we’ve just extended more invites).

Cross-posted on Linkool Labs.

As worlds collide

Posted on Monday, October 13, 2008 by Thijs Jacobs

Will agencies collapse? Maybe; evolution is something that often doesn’t come natural to companies, but involves people to take notice and drive innovation within their organization. Big (and small) tech companies are starting to move into agency territory and already have changed the way agencies do business. Interesting things are abound in the agency world and they may be permanent.

In the past, agencies defined the marketing space, by owning CRM and (digital) direct marketing efforts. But, tech companies are challenging that at a rapid pace. CRM used to mean, an understanding of the customer and a marketing strategy based on hard numbers, making real ROI possible. Nowadays, tech companies hold far more data than any agency and have people locked into their services, like no traditional CRM program ever could. On top of that, there has been a massive standardization of digital marketing efforts, making it possible to deploy and track digital campaigns directly on the platform of choice (think Google AdSense and AdWords). The (hyper valuable) data, once again, is flowing directly to the tech companies, leaving agencies in the dust.

Broaden the view to PR agencies and you’ll understand, that they too, are fighting an interesting battle with new trends in user generated content. No well-written press release will be able to stop people discussing negative associations with your client’s products online. Worse, many agencies seem to be unable to even keep track of the discussions happening online and thus unable to respond in an adequate way.

It’s the data stupid!

The most important asset for any agency, should be its data. Agencies, will have to develop platforms, that will allow them to track their efforts and measure ROI across assets. It’s absolutely mind boggling, that an agency, who controls all of their clients digital assets, knows so little about the users. There is a big future in behavioral targeting and personalized marketing, as it enables agencies to deliver better results to their clients.

Agencies, however, often seem to be technically and organizationally challenged, due to their inexperience of developing and managing large scale tech projects, as their company and financial structure evolve around campaigns. Agencies would do good, to hire more product managers, instead of project managers.

Stop campaigns, start thinking long term

It’s time, to stop launching (mostly flash) campaigns and start thinking about developing client-centered applications, that will lock in users for the long term. Google’s assets have far more daily (returning) users, than any digital client asset out there, mostly due to their utilitarian nature. Niche Social Network Sites, such as my personal favorite corkd.com, are attracting more daily (returning) users than the world’s most famous brands in those same categories. There are more users leaving a plethora of personal information on brand new Web 2.0 assets, than those leaving just their email address in order to receive your client’s newsletter.

One-off campaigns, though maybe highly creative, are a bad investment by nature. Whether or not, your campaign manages to have a “viral” (ugh; bad buzzword alert!) effect, does not matter, if it doesn’t bring you return on investment or more knowledge about your users.

Agencies and clients will need to innovate

Long term applications, often don’t rime with the way clients manage their marketing budgets. It will be the agencies role, to be the enabler and help the client make the transition. The agency, by itself, will also have to realize, that they will have to think out of the box and invest in long term efforts. Regardless on which side of the fence you’re working (tech or marketing), digital innovation in the marketing space is always an opportunity.

Small disclaimer! This post is of course extremely opinionated. Also, I was part of the team, that set up operations for the Ogilvy Digital Innovation Lab in Beijing, China and worked as Head of Digital Marketing at RMG Connect.

Stepping up in China

Posted on Tuesday, October 07, 2008 by Thijs Jacobs

This post may fall in the category “rants & raves”, but it’s my personal attempt at identifying things, that may be holding up the development of China’s tech landscape or within your company. China is a wonderful country to work and live, so this is NOT a rant against China; we’ve all heard enough complaints already. It’s far more interesting to look at the opportunities at hand.

Both Japan and Korea have managed to nestle itself at the top of the world by driving high-end technological innovation, one example is the domination of giants like Samsung and Sony. Many believe China is well on its way of becoming the next technology kingdom, but when looking at Japan and Korea, it’s obvious, that these countries did not have to deal with a huge legacy of massively outdated rules, regulations, mentality and an infrastructure that’s aimed at controlling content.

So, what do you need to know? Some notes, based on my personal experiences.

A change of mentality

Chinese universities are training engineers to operate within their comfort zone, there’s few incentive to push innovation. Often corporate culture and a stringent management structure manage to kill the last bit of creativity. As a result of this, adoption of new technologies is far behind. If China is serious about competing with Japan and others, it will have to create a breading ground for creativity, a culture, where fresh ideas are encouraged. Changing a culture or the education system, is not something, that can be done overnight.

On a more practical level, let’s explore, what you can do today. If you work at a tech firm or digital agency in China, try to flatten your corporate layers as much as possible; get out of your office and talk to every single engineer on a daily basis. Share your vision, with your engineers and make them part of that vision. Explain to them, why their work is important and encourage them to help shape that vision. Once you set the goals, reward them based on their achievements (a pat on the back, may already be enough).

Exercise this, by asking yourself the question, if you know, what your engineers are working on and what problems they are facing; maybe you already know the answer. Don’t have a clue? Get out there now! Remember though, a company is not a democracy; companies that do great work, got there because of their unique vision and often stubbornness to not abandon that same vision. Same applies to leadership within a company.

It doesn’t work!

It “works”, is just not enough! The term, we’re looking for is ubiquitous. How often I’ve seen engineers in China develop a solution that fits the need, but breaks as soon as functionality needs to be added. Encourage your engineers to implement standards, document their changes and build applications, that can be extended into entirely different applications all together. This will save you time and money in the future.

Stop with the unreadable timelines, but provide clear task lists and dedicate an entire (maybe virtual?) office wall just to that. This may also be a great place to showcase engineers, that achieved their goals. Best recommendation, that I can give you, is to find someone anal in your organization and put him or her in charge of quality control.

Be even more ubiquitous and demand from your engineers, that they build applications, that can scale far beyond expectations. One thing that may help you to bootstrap costs in this aspect is going with a SaaS model in terms of infrastructure. Concentrate on the stuff you’re good at!

Keeping things simple

Engineers and Chinese engineers in particular, feel the need to overdo in the feature department. Keep your product streamlined, which will help you in the future. By building opinionated applications, devoid of unnecessary bells and whistles, you will be able to remain agile in a fast paced market. Implementing a new feature? Ask yourself if more than 10% of your target audience would ever use it.

This may be a tough message to get across to your engineers in China, as there is a (digital) cultural tendency towards quantity, rather than quality. Have a look at Sina and you’ll catch my drift. Often, people will reference Sina as an example of what Chinese netizens like. It’s not what they like, it’s just what they’re used to.

There’s more of course

There are always factors out of your direct control, such as the infamous Copy to China image, the country’s uptight way of dealing with user created content or the VC’s that are blindly dumping money into startups based on the prospect of the huge consumer market. Just remember to take the responsible approach.

Design decisions

Posted on Saturday, September 27, 2008 by Thijs Jacobs

Before publicly releasing Juice, we’d like to share with you some of our design decisions related to our exciting new browser plugin. Plenty of healthy challenges abound when designing a plugin, as we try to come up with a design that works and conveys a large amount of information in a confined space. Juice is designed to be as non-intrusive as possible, but we want to make sure that, even when the user hides our Juice sidebar, we’re still able to alert the user when our intelligent discovery engine finds new information.

When the Juice sidebar is hidden, our main communication interface with the user is our icon in the browser’s navigation bar. The icon itself is designed to convey four different application states: an idle state, a loading state (a cycle of 5 separate images), a discovery state and an open state.

Traditionally, this 32 pixel piece of icon real estate (in the case of most modern browsers) is rarely used and we wanted to tackle the challenge of alerting the user, without using any pop-ups, words or sounds. At the same time, we tried to stay as close as possible to our Juice mantra of “squeezing” the web. The final result, nicknamed the “Mexican”, is a rich and compelling icon set, using both animation and bright orange colors to indicate state changes. We hope you’ll like, and hopefully love, our “Mexican”, as much as we do!

As a bonus, we’re giving away 50 invites to Juice; unlock code: juiceblog

The final icon design is the work of our excellent designer Frank Müller.

Cross-posted on Linkool Labs.