GigaOM Roadmap - live notes

Jack Dorsey:

we don't just see it as payments, it's a continuum from what happens before to after. The receipt is part of that

offline commerce is still 90% of commerce - ecommerce is only about 10% so far. We still need to make that easier

it's easy for companies to look at competition and react to that, but then you're on someone else's roadmap, not yours

a lot of folks are building individual parts of payment, not connecting them together, so the merchant sees the seams

Adding the Square reader to a phone gives it a superpower, do something new

we learned a lot from sightglass - they still needed to take cash as well as cards, so we built a full PoS

we can tell the merchant item level detail of what they sold when, not just prices. Like web analytics for retail

we give access to all our information to every employee. Any meeting is required to take notes, get sent to all company

if you enable people by sharing what is happening in meetings, they don't feel that they need to be invited

we send the board meeting deck out to the entire company, 600 people have a copy of that

if we do this right, we can create company that regenerates, that outlives any of our times there

it's very hard to keep secrets - we built the structure of our office around this too - few conf rooms, lots of space

how do we make sure the rest of the tech industry think about how we make technology invisible?

the tool that has helped most has been visualising what we want to see in the world and then building up to it

it's not about technology disappearing, it's about the way we want the world to work

it's about breaking something big into very simple problems that we can solve in sequence while seeing the big vision

having patience is ok with your kind of profile and backing, but lots of startups are under pressure

people said "your previous experience was in microblogging what you had for breakfast -how can you move money around?"

I want to understand how robots can live in our world rather than forcing us to live in a robotic world

we built a robot that is almost human-sized, and moves around picking things up and moving them

to build a robot you need mechanical engineers and programmers, but once people get involved we need sociologists too

our robots can move around collecting empty coffee cups, folding towels, but they need to think very hard first

we got a Pixar animator to help our robots to show emotional feedback to humans, if they're thinking or failing

we need to set expectations for humans around the robots, so they'll catch an expensive robot if it falls off a table

Henry Evans had a stroke, he's quadraplegic. He used our robot teleoperated to scratch his own face and shave himself

our remote coworker Dallas used to be a voice in a plastic box, until we put a camera on a robot for him

A lot of the people using our robots at the moment are universities - they're like mainframes now. We need startups

it might be arrogant to presume that people have seen what I do - some typeface Meta Sans, Economist Newtype

I used to draw by hand with pen and ink - there were only 126 characters to a font then, not 600 like now

Now there's drawing on screen which I'm lousy at , whcih si why I hire young designers who can do that for me

in 2009 we were finally able to do good type on the web- you were quick to embrace it with your huge collection

for me it was very obvious - you don't have to be a fan of the screen to see people reading onscreen

It was obvious that it had to move in 2009 - Georgia+Helvetica are nice, but it's like eating dry bread + water

I remember making the pitch to VCs as type being ripe for disruption "people pay for the shapes of letters?"

I'd rather have the 10% of people who pay rather than 100% of the people who don't pay

There is a human need to compose music, write books and to design typefaces

a lot of people don't see the nuances in the expressiveness of type. Why is that?

You're not supposed to think about type - it's like water or air - if you notice it it's wrong

why are there thousands of vineyards when you have white and red? Type is in the few percent improvement

Whatever my shirt is in RGB I don't know, I'm an old print gut - it's 80% Cyan in CMYK

Erik, you said the typography in iOS7 is the folly of youth

In Clarkenwell everyone has discovered Helvetica like you discovered salt

Everyone found you can reduce helvetica by 2 pixels. It's a beautiful typeface but it sucks for an interface

whan you're a user interface designer you have to forget your vanity and think about the user

when you're young you want to make a splash so you use a typeface to stand out, rather than for use

what we do in typefaces is design the 5% - 95% is a given set of rules for what letter shapes look like

it's almost like music - you have 8 notes in music - we design the sound of a word played with strings or brass

if you're showing the world what a great designer you are, it will probably become illegible or get annoying

I enjoyed meeting type designers - there aren't a lot of them in the world

FontLab has about 2000 licensees, so there are that many. Full time ones maybe 200. It's incredibly boring.

Making a typeface is tedious and incredibly boring - it takes a very long time to go from an idea to a typeface

I sketch it out and then I have all these minions who work on the processes - I'm an art director

what we did with TypeKit was open up a much broader market with Wordpress Themes etc -very controversial

You don't buy a typeface, you buy a font - we have to adapt everything for print, screen and TV, which is worst

a lot of people feel insecure abut choosing wine in a restaurant, it's the same with choosing typefaces

in my office we have 60 people, and I go round and everyone ends up using the same typefaces as each other

as you say, it's like spotify - you use what you've used before, and keep using more of it

you wouldn't use the same images for every project, why would you use the same typeface?

Does it need to be muscular or feminine? Does it need to work at small sizes and big? Cyrillic or Greek?

its no secret in the design community that the second link in a search will be a bittorrent site for a typeface

I want everyone to have typefaces, but if you've spent 100s of hours designing it, it would be nice to honoured

of course no-one asked me to spend hundreds of hours designing the typeface in the first place...

We're designing a typeface for Firefox that will be open sourced, and I'm in two minds

my worry is that people will take it and mess it up and then I may get blamed for it

If you write a pop song you can't sue people for singing it out of tune. Don't blame me for your design

what we do as designers is interpret - we are the interface, making it easier for people to make it work

computers and technology are complex. We don't make them simpler, we make them more complex for people

I'm getting paid to make things look good. Isn't that fantastic?

Tinder is a year-old mobile dating app. You swipe people you like, and if they do it too, it puts you in touch

We have a lot of frustrations with making new relationships. There's a lack of efficiency in meeting new people

you're either a hunter out there being rejected, or your being pursued and feeling overexposed

when your friend in high school tells you that your crush also has a crush on you, that's what Tinder does

we got the information right originally - tapping and waiting felt slow. Swiping felt faster

you went to great lengths to make it more female friendly - not a sausage fest

we talked to women, and found that the guys that approach them are the creeps, not the good guys

we're putting control back in the hands of women to decide who to interact with

we wanted to make sure we were solving a core human issue. So we tested on college students

the context of how you use these tools is learned behaviour - we needed our users to show each other that

It worked on a college campus where everyone has that shared context; expanding beyond that was harder

everyone always says that problems of success are fun to have, but they're still hard and not that fun really.

it's very worrying when you have everything to lose - you have prototype code so you're hanging by a thread

If you create this double-opt-in relationship you can add a lot of efficiency to marketplaces [he still means dating]

I'm bummed out that you're doing this smoke alarm now that I've quit smoking

you're designing things that have been left unloved for decades

would you do locks? there are lot of locks on kickstarter

You have to have a smoke alarm and a thermostat; locks and sprinklers you don't have to have.

you can buy one that just goes BEEP or you can have one that is well designed

How about a smoke alarm that plays Justin Bieber? Ringtones for smoke alarms!

you should redesign the garage door opener next - that the most broken product I have

In hardware now there are a lot of blot together things now - you don't have to call motorola for a cpu

you can learn with that open hardware model, but to build a true hardware product you do need a lot of money

when you do something that si atoms based you need a lot of money and a lot of time before the first customer

Kickstarter and indiegogo are kind of for making beta products - to go mass market takes a lot more

Apple started with great hardware and then layered software on top of it. What should you start with?

you have to optimise all along the chain -you need to look at the cost of the device and include the service and apps

I'm an old school guy - I need to know how I'm going to get to profitability sooner or later

a lot of these products don't seem fully network aware - not as part of the brain of the device

It reminds me of web 1.0 - it was like digital versions of magazines or albums. Internet of things is now 1.0

Refrigerators with tablets on is Internet of Things 1.0 - they don't rethink the experience from top to bottom

just because it can be connected doesn't mean it should. It should be reinvented *with* connection

You need the right balance of rational and emotional features - Kahneman's thinking fast and slow model fits

we started to see all kinds of data coming though the thermostat, and realised we could save them money

these products aren't like cellphones that last 18 months - we have to create moments over 10 years

Instagram created magical moments by adding filters - everyone said 'wow!' = emotional impact

in 1999 I started a company no-one wanted to hear about hardware. Now they want to give me money

there are so many more opportunities to be entrepreneurs now, but do work with your heroes first if you can

[... missing tweets due to MacBook losing state...]

Danae Ringelmann:

We're now seeing project owners setting a low goal and a series of stretch goals and what they'll deliver for them

A small town in Australia didn't want a McDonalds by their preschool, so used indiegogo to raise funds to protest

the only reason you wouldn't use indiegogo is if you wanted to hide your project - you should show it

indiegogo was a place for people who couldn't get traditional finance; now its for those who don't want it

think of indiegogo as a way to build on lean startup principles by giving you insight about your product

VC can only give you a vote of confidence, they can't tell you where your market is. indiegogo can

I can see people taking a hybrid approach to finance with indiegogo showing proof for venture/angel funders

finance has always been a system where the power was in a few people's hands. Now it's in your customers hands

87% of people say they have bad feelings about a company if they have a bad experience on their website

our industry is modern plumbing to most people

our industry must abandon it's mission to mechanise people by defining them as users

GE and design? do they even go together - you make engines fro trains and planes

Now GE is about what happens when 50 billion machines come online - the Industrial Internet

what happens when machines communicate with one another? Or with people?

The future is about design, software and taking all the data the machines generate and making it useful

you want a lot of information to happen in the background, without people being aware, and to be predictive

"More technology is better but when you want to use it it has to be simpler" applies to the Industrial Internet

there has to be a different font that says "this is a machine talking" versus "this is a human talking"

you're describing the same ideology as Tony Farell and Jack did, but you're spread worldwide - how?

we have a project in rural Chengdu in China to bring our designers and engineers to see their hospital nurses

it was hard to get people to think digitally until they had iPads and smartphones in the workplace

the onus is on us to make our applications even simpler so we can cut through the noise that apps make

Maybe you could work at Zynga and then at GE om: that would be easy, just put a stand outside, they'll come

We don't say we're big and boring. We're big, with huge machines that are very sexy

there's a little boy inside all of us who wants to know how a train works

that should be your sell - come work for GE and you can drive our trains

it's not just trains, you could ride in our pilotless planes too

In many cases we have the business model figured out - we have customers who want your design and code

There is going to be more productivity - to change the kinds of jobs available

one of our areas is hospital operations management - adding sensors and robots to hospitals to ease nurses' work

sensors have been put in our technology over the last decade - customers need to track assets first

a good thing about being in many industries is that we see trends across engineering, healthcare, aerospace etc

We have a connected wall oven that you can pre-heat before you get home or check you turned it off

We have things with Quirky - a net connected power strip so you can turn anything on and off remotely

Day 2

Franz Von Holzhausen:

The Tesla design team was originally in the back of a rocket factory, which felt appropriate

a big flat battery meant we could come up with a 'skateboard' design, without the lump of metal in front

everything on the Tesla S prototype made it into production, becasue we made sure it was buildable

there is the idea of a minivan that is seen as a car you buy because you're forced to

conventional sliding doors aren't great for getting into the second and third row of seats, hence the gull wing

conventional sliding doors aren't good for getting into the 2nd and 3rd row of seats, hence the gull wing

the 3rd gen Tesla will be on a brand new platform, not based on the Model S

with the range of the Model S, you don't have to find a plug everywhere you go

Bret Taylor:

we launched Quip 3 months ago - it's a mobile-focused word processor. We started from scratch

our documents aren't on virtual 8.5" by 11" bits of paper like most word processors, but on collaboration

Quip is the first time I've ever sold a product in my life - everything else I've made has been as supported

35% of people use Quip on mobile only; 48% use it on tablets

we only added printing a week before launch, because we realised people might want thnt

there is a depth to word processing that will take a while to catch up - very specific keyboard shortcuts

even our biggest fans gave us a big list of particularr ways they had learned to use Word

price hasn't been the focal point of our sales discussions, as the product will be part of the core use of business

we charge $12/month, which is small compared to most business expenses. They key is experience

there was an arc of happiness that people had on friendfeed - initially too few friends; then enough; then too many

we lost a lot of people at both ends of this curve - the too few updates and the too many

I really like seeing photos in my twitter stream. I like the restraint they have in keeping the 140 char limit

the challenge for twitter is will they retain the soul of the product - the terseness that is their main story

Om Malik:

facebook now feels rather laborious - dealing with the feed feels like doing work

Bret Taylor:

social isn't the product, it's what you design a product around

facebook's product design challenge is that it has so many different modes of interaction- photo, video etc

a lot of design patterns are moving from the mobile/tablet UI to the desktop. As usage changes this is key

one of the humbling things going from friendfeed to facebook was how formally they handled kinds of interaction

how to break down product design into different communication channels is a good way to think about things

the first time someone adds you to a document it sends a push notification, so most communication happens in realtime

because people's phones are full-featured computers, and you can bring people in via a push notification in real time

I think notifications need to be kept as a high signal channel and people will do that by choosing apps

now that the norm in an office is that you have a phone, a tablet and a pc, how does that change design choices?

Scott Belsey:

the internet should be the greatest thing for creativity - wherever you are in the world you can reach everyone

15,000 designers entered a design contest for a $1500 dollar prize - that's 4 years of wasted effort

[...] Ryan Freitas:

The ChromeCast is great, and it needs to be there to push Apple to take its hobby seriously

Julie Ann Horvath:

Twitter has made the world so much smaller @danharmon said to shout on the rooftops until you find weirdos like you

Instagram shows me things about a place through other people's eyes, not advertisers @katiefehren: until this week…

Instagram shows me things about a place through other people's eyes, not advertisers @katiefehren: until this week

NSFWcorp is doing great shit, and it lets you unlock articles for your friends to read

rdio creates a different kind of social network - it's based on musical taste

Braden Kowitz:

I picked rdio like @nrrrdcore - it shows me what my friends are hearing, so even if I hate it I can talk about it

Letterpress seemed so basic and simple, and yet expressed itself with motion in a playful way

I never worked on Google Maps, but I'm a big fanboy. We take it so much for granted

BitTorrent Sync is like Dropbox or Google Drive, but it's totally free. It syncs laptop, desktop, phone

One Medical Group - if you fix 100 bugs in a product, it feels totally different. They did it for primary care

Julie Ann Horvath:

people owning their content and being able to surface it wherever they see fit is a huge trend. #indieweb

Ryan Freitas:

quantified self and internet of things is connecting all the objects in the world together

Josh Brewer:

the connective tissue that the mobile device provides is key to this - the mobile is the extension of ourselves

Shoshana Berger:

removing friction from the tasks we do over and over again every day. For me it is the password

Katie Fehrenbacher:

I want a device that would go work out for me

Julie Ann Horvath:

I want a teleportation device

Braden Kowitz:

if someone is designing without executing they're not really a designer, they're just thinking about things they want

Julie Ann Horvath:

learn to not be married to your ideas and iterate. People who cling to ideas can bring the entire team down.