The exponential increase in phone functionality is something of a ‘chicken and egg’ conundrum: is the functionality there because we as users need it? Or do we use it simply because it’s there? The smartphone itself is an impressive device in that it provides the ultimate in convenience. It’s the convergence of your phone, computer, camera, address book, calendar, music, maps, games, the list goes on. But some of these programs can even be utilized via other platforms sometimes more effectively. So the question is: which features do we really need on our phone?

Compulsively checking email, twittering our every thought, bringing engaging conversations to a screeching halt to find out what Google thinks of something rather than trusting our own opinion… It’s behavior that’s transforming us into creatures of action and reaction rather than contemplation and consideration, and we’re more dependent than we think.

According to Pew, 87% of smart phone owners access the Internet or email on their handheld, including 68% who do so on a typical day. When asked what device they normally use to access the Internet, 25% of smartphone owners say that they mostly go online using their phone, rather than with a computer. Are people even making phone calls with their phones anymore? Not too many. One in three Americans who use text messaging would rather text then talk, and according to data released by JD Power, fewer calls are being made or received, with the average monthly call volume down to 450 minutes (from 527 in 2009).

The Bauhausians among us would claim that a device is typically named after it’s primary function, so when the ability to make a phone call is but a tiny percentage of the functional capacity of modern phones, how long until we cease to consider it a phone? We’re at the cusp of transition from the old taxonomy to the new; mobile phones and wireless networks led to the dropping of the ‘tele’ suffix from ‘telephone’, Apple’s decision to exclude an optical drive from the latest MacBook Air and Mac Mini (and to drop the CD from the iTunes logo) heralds the continued obsolescence of physical media for content distribution.

So when is a phone not a phone? Someday not long from now I predict we will have a new name for our phones. Will it come from a major player, someone with enough market clout and cache to carry it off? We all know how consumers react to self-imposed monopolies and proprietary formats (Microsoft, Sony, I’m looking at you). I doubt any of the mainstream manufacturers will be able to pull it off; it will need to be an outlier, adept at surfing the zeitgeist wave and defining the cultural taxonomy in its wake. The obvious candidates right now are Google and, perhaps even more likely, Apple. Don’t be too surprised if the next-to-next iteration of the iPhone drops the ‘phone’ part altogether.

So what else can we call it? It can’t be gimmicky or pseudo-cool or brand-driven; it has to be a term that is universally accepted but innocuous enough to not carry any polarizing connotations for the user. We don’t need a new paradigm; we simply need a convenient term of reference. Ask yourself: what is it that we use our phones for these days? What’s the primary function? Communication. Maybe I’m letting my geek flag fly, but I credit the creators of Star Trek for their prescience by inventing the hand-held communicator. Or more succinctly, The Comm. “Honey? Have you seen my comm?” “Dude, check out my new comm!” “$#%! I dropped my comm in the toilet!”

I like the way that sounds. It sounds like the future. Just remember you heard it here first.

Apple will be fine without Steve Jobs. Because Steve Jobs isn’t just a CEO, he’s an idea and an idea that all companies should embrace. I know, because I aspire to bring him to life every day at my company.

Steve Jobs represents an ethos that is core to Apple’s culture. He, as an idea, is a simple one. It’s all about building amazing, intuitive, life-changing products that people love. To embody this principle, Apple doesn’t need Jobs. It can live on through the shared vision of Apple’s talented people who deeply care and are dedicated to creating greatness. As long as that culture continues to thrive in Cupertino, Apple will be fine.

That said, it’s also a culture other companies would be well-served to have. As MarketWatch reporter Brett Arends wrote last night, “What Apple has achieved isn’t impossible. Why don’t more companies do it?”

Because it’s really, really hard. At HUGE, we all come together, every day, to try to build Apple-caliber digital products that people love to use. That’s what our clients are asking from us when they hire us to create a new mobile application, website, social media experience, outdoor digital installation or anything else. They want us to produce something so special, something that’s so genuinely loved by their users, that their business is dramatically transformed as a result.

That’s no easy task. It means pushing yourself to design something, and then throwing it all away to try to make it better. It means constantly challenging yourself to see if the experience can be easier, more beautiful, simpler, more elegant, more in tune with what people will embrace. It’s a painstaking undertaking that means sweating all the details, because your heart and soul is in it, and because it’s become your baby and you want it to be absolutely perfect.

Then one day you release it to the world – in our case turning it over to our clients and their audience – and you hope for the best. You catch yourself holding your breath, sitting at the edge of your seat, engaged in a very pregnant pause waiting for feedback. But in your heart of hearts, you know that it will be ok and the product will be a success for one simple reason: you designed it for yourself. That’s the secret to all great design: you may not be a member of the product’s target demographic, and you may never use it in real life, but you designed it for yourself. And your goal was to build a revolutionary product. Your self-imposed expectation of performance exceeds that of most technology users in the world. And that’s what makes great products great.

But most people don’t bother to do this. That’s why Apple is such a stand-out. For many the passion, the heartache and the pressure that’s required is just too much. They fall back to what is easy: mediocrity. They punch the clock, go home at five to play soccer with the kids, and don’t really push themselves or their team toward greatness.

HP’s TouchPad is a case in point. Think for a moment about that product and the team behind it. Were they really trying to reinvent the world? To create the best tablet possible? No. If they were, they certainly weren’t trying hard enough. Because all they created was an iPad clone with a few extra bells and whistles. Why would anyone buy a bad imitation of the original for the same price? They wouldn’t and didn’t.

If HP had a Steve Jobs culture, they would have made something completely different. They would have pushed themselves to make something better. Better could have been cheaper; better could have been something dramatically different that makes people rethink whether an iPad is the tablet for them; better could have had consumers wondering how they ever lived without it. But HP took the easy way out.

For many years, taking the easy way out was relatively acceptable. You could get away with it and keep a product on the market. No more. In the tech world this has come to life as a “Sell Big or Die Fast” mentality. To non-tech companies, the stakes are the same. There’s no such thing as an offline business. Every company’s customers, employees, job candidates, “friends,” and “followers” are technology users. They create mass public opinion and operational performance; they shape brands and drive sales. In 2012, 50 percent of consumer spending is going to be influenced by or transacted through the Internet, according to Forrester Research. This means every company must provide users with a first-class digital experience they want to use, ideally one worthy of Steve Jobs’ approval. This is what I write about in Users, Not Customers. Every company can and should provide people with outstanding digital experiences, because it is increasingly becoming the point of difference between companies that thrive and those that die.

So the opportunity for you, as a manager, executive, technologist, or whatever your job is, is to follow in Steve Jobs’ footprints. Be the Steve Jobs of your company. Just like him, you can push yourself and your team to create exceptional digital products and experiences that are so special in forty years you’ll look back and be proud that you were part of it. It’s the key to your business success, your company’s ability to compete in today’s digitally-driven economy, and it’s the key to a rewarding, fulfilling career and personal happiness. Make something you really, really love.

And that’s good. The bad news? Many traditional outside SEO agencies are not well positioned for this new world. They are not part of your business, not in your hallways, not talking to your designers, developers, and content strategists. They don’t understand your industry, people, or your business processes. Smart businesses appreciate this and are taking ownership of incorporating SEO into everything they do.

The iced tea metaphor.

Have you ever added a packet of sugar to a glass of iced tea, only to watch it settle at the bottom of the glass? Well, if you take sugar and boil it in water first, making simple syrup, it mixes readily with the tea. Much smarter. Much more cohesive. Get the metaphor? SEO is the sugar and the iced tea is your business. Smart companies are finding ways to better integrate the two, creating a new breed of businesses that are consequently search-aware.

OK, but what does that mean in practice? It means search becomes incorporated into all of the digital areas of expertise;

• SEO-friendly design
• SEO-friendly coding
• Keyword-informed architecture
• Search-aware content strategy
• Keyword-aligned social media

The end result is a new type of company that effectively incorporates search at a fundamental level. Fewer SEO audits and recommendations decks gathering dust – more happy users and great business results. Essentially a better glass of tea.

SEO. Don’t pour it on – mix it in.

Building or re-launching a web site involves a number of things, including creating a content plan, structuring the navigation, and conceiving information taxonomy. Search-aware organizations make sure SEO is mixed into this process from the beginning, such that site navigation and content aligns with keyword strategy – a crucial step. This is where developing and committing to a keyword strategy pays off. You know exactly what keywords to target, what content to create, what links to create, and what URLs to use.

Search-aware organizations don’t just focus on content. They code so that engines index pages easily. They align their social media editorial calendar with their search keyword strategy. They make UX and design choices that lead to people enjoying, sharing, and linking to their site. They don’t focus on search, they focus on users and use search as another way to meet users needs.

Regarding the proper placement of cart & horses.

Unless you are an SEO firm, doing SEO is not your real line of business. SEO is important to your work but it shouldn’t consume your organization’s resources. The point is to understand what it takes to rock in search, mix it into your business, and then go focus on the important things.

Is your business search-aware?

90% of what used to be done in SEO – cloaking, buying links, keyword stuffing – is now off limits according to the engines, and such practices are unacceptably high-risk. That means for most businesses, SEO is no longer a series of outsourced tactics, it’s a strategic effort to build equity in the engines over the long term. Therefore if you are working with an outside SEO agency that is phoning it in you are going to lose to competitors that are doing SEO right.

So what can you do? Go find an agency partner that gets SEO. That mixes it into the work they do. Then get on with the business of creating great web experiences for your customers. And if your business or agency isn’t doing this yet you can be assured your competitors are. Just look for them above you in the rankings.

We decided to do some internal user interviews here at HUGE to gauge people’s reactions to it. Now, speaking with HUGErs about a new digital product is a bit like talking to a mechanic about a new car: you probably won’t get the same perspective as you would from a random person on the street. In that sense, this was less of a pure research exercise than a brainstorming one. But our “testers” made some interesting (and sometimes contradictory) observations that we thought were worth sharing.

Because Google+ is still in its nascent stages, and because any predictions about its future are, at this point, educated guesses at best, we’ve decided to do the responsible thing and frame these observations in the pseudo-provocative veneer of two outrageously overstated and diametrically opposed predictions. Enjoy, and do tell us what you think.

3 Reasons Google+ is a Facebook Killer

1) Circles are awesome. Google has clearly invested a lot of time and effort into creating a system that supports “real” social networks (a la Paul Adams’ “Real Life Social Network”). Circles (arguably Google’s version of Facebook’s “Groups” function) seems to accurately reflect how users see the world—a place filled with different categories of people that vary in how users relate to them (e.g., “Extended family,” “Co-workers,” “Friends who share my obsession for Justin Bieber,” etc.) And whereas Facebook Groups feels like an afterthought, Circles governs the entirety of Google+’s operations, making social relationships the core of the user experience.

2) Integration with other Google products makes for a seamless experience. Let’s face it. Google likely dominates every non-Twitter and non-Facebook part of your digital experience. And having all your stuff in one place kind of makes life easier.

3) Loyalty is overrated and evolution is expected. Going in to these conversations, HUGE suspected users would feel an attachment to their Facebook profiles. All that hard work tagging and untagging photos, “Liking” this thing or that, curating profiles so as to perfectly capture one’s (digital) essence of being…surely that would give people pause at the thought of abandoning it all? Turns out, it doesn’t. People aren’t necessarily tied to the social capital they’ve accrued in social media. It’s as if the value we’ve created on social networks is inherently ephemeral—in which case we’re not only willing but excited to explore new spaces and new kinds of interactions. It’s all an evolution, as users told us. Remember Friendster? Then MySpace? And Facebook? Now, it’s Google+’s time in the spotlight.

3 Reasons Google+ isn’t a Facebook Killer

1) Circles are not so awesome. Dragging and dropping people into Circles is fun for a while (that little “+1” icon? Adorable). But then it gets complicated. Where do you put a co-worker who is also an occasional weekend drinking buddy? The lines are fuzzy, and as it turns out, it takes a lot of time and effort to thoughtfully build your Circles. How many Circles are people realistically willing to manage?

2) Inertia. Though the HUGErs we spoke with were enjoying their exploration of Google+, intentions for future use centered on a key theme: critical mass. The classic, “I’ll use it if my friends use it” mentality. While it doesn’t take that much effort to create an account, most of the users we spoke with told us they saw Google+ as an either/or proposition vis a vis Facebook, not as a potential complement. And in that light, how much incentive do users have to exchange their existing social networks for a totally new space? Considering this, Google+ will likely be reliant on how well it can attract and cultivate a base of dedicated activists who can create an environment that’s attractive to people.

3) Your Mom doesn’t want to be “followed.” The one-way nature of relationships on Google+–one’s ability to “follow” or “Circle” others without reciprocation–is in one sense a more powerful and flexible approach to establishing a set of relationships online. On the other hand… it’s kinda creepy. Sure, you and your tweeting friends understand why people you don’t know may want to follow you. To the less digitally-immersed, though, this new dynamic may be odd, confusing and intimidating. Most of the people we spoke with either had yet to fully grasp the one-way nature of relationships on Google+ or indicated that it took them some time to figure it out. The experience of receiving “added to Circle” notifications was too similar to that of being friended on Facebook.

Web and graphic design blog UnderWorld Magazines recently featured HUGE UX School, and interviewed Michal Pasternak, Partner, User Experience at HUGE to learn more about the program. UX School trainees and teachers also shared their thoughts – what they’re excited about, what they’ve learned so far and what sets UX School apart from other UX programs.

Michal Pasternak, Partner, User Experience, HUGE

UnderWorld Magazines: We would like to welcome you to UnderWorld Magazines. Please introduce HUGE UX School and tell us about the idea(s) that started this program?

Michal Pasternak, HUGE: HUGE UX School is an intense, hands-on training program in which we take creative and bright students and grads interested in pursuing careers in User Experience and train them to be successful Interaction Designers.

We designed the program to match the flexible, adaptive approach we take with our work. Each client and design problem is unique so we teach students how we think, solve problems, and work across disciplines, rather than just equipping them with a set of rules to follow. We focus on generating ideas and evolving them to greatness through feedback and testing, rather than simply teaching technical skills and a go-to formula.

We started the program after we had an insight about our own company: many of our most successful employees are home grown; they started out pretty green with lots of potential and learned by doing. While training people on the job has worked well for us in the past, we felt it took too long for new IDs to get a holistic understanding of our work (meeting business goals, working through technical constraints, and everything in between) and also our working style. We’re hoping that UX School will give new IDs a stronger foundation so they can jump into HUGE more quickly.

At the end of the program, any number of our trainees may be offered a full time position with us. In making this decision, we’ll be looking at how much each trainee has improved over the course of the program, how strong his or her individual and team contributions are, and if they have the ideas, passion and drive that we cherish. We are investing heavily in all of them – no matter the final outcome – with the hopes of creating an amazing group of interaction designers.

Continue reading the full article here.

Our next speaker is Paul Irish, who will present The State of HTML5, Summer 2011: Sparkle Edition, on July 5th at 7pm. Paul is celebrated by the front-end development community for his efforts in numerous open source projects. He is the cofounder of the HTML5 Boilerplate, Modernizr, and is the lead developer of CSS3, Please.  These projects have helped push HTML5 and related cutting edge technologies forward. Paul is currently responsible for developer relations with the Google Chrome team and is a leading contributor to the JavaScript framework jQuery.

Paul thinks of web development as a craft and considers knowledge sharing pivotal to the advancement of the web. We asked him why this is so important, he had this to say:

“I think making people more passionate and excited about what we do, talking to people about craftsmanship rather than “your job”, make learning and sharing more fun, more whimsical, encourages people to stay more engaged in the community.

Web development is hard because in order to do things well you need to pull information from a hundred different sources. It’s not like you can read one book or one site and know the best way to do it. So centralizing information into a standard library becomes really useful.”

There’s still space available so RSVP to come hear Paul Irish talk about the state of HTML5. More details can be found on the Meetup event page. You can also read more about Paul Irish on his website.

And here are a few examples of how HTML5 makes the web a better place, and why we’re developers to begin with.

If there’s two things our research team loves it’s playing with cool tech and watching regular people interact with new devices and digital experiences, so when we finally got our hands on Kinect earlier this year, we couldn’t wait to put some people in front of one of these things and watch them use it.

Users we tested Kinect with were all familiar with the device and their overall initial impressions were unanimously positive. Many of the people in our test were “hard-core gamers” who were intrigued by the technology, but skeptical as to whether early games for the device would be good enough to be worth investing in.

Kinect User Testing at HUGE

Much has been said elsewhere about how fun Kinect is to use, and that was certainly supported by our user testing. Even the most seasoned, cynical gamers couldn’t help but admit they were having fun. But our users also viewed Kinect as a bit of a novelty – “a Wii without nunchucks.” Comparison with the Wii was frequent and not always positive, which we feel is a bit unfair, given Kinect is a completely unique platform.

We observed a number of usability issues while watching users navigate the system. One of the most interesting was people’s overwhelming instinct to attempt to “grab” something with the hand icon, and then “click” it by pushing forward. Currently, Kinect only requires a user to hold their hand over an option for a period of time in order to select it, but this type of passive selection is not intuitive for most users. Obviously, the point and click interaction learned in desktop computing has become highly ingrained in people’s thinking about digital interfaces and as a result, users fundamentally expect to perform an active gesture to select an object or trigger an action.

Kinect Adventures: Rally Ball

Secondly, Kinect does not recognize two-handed play, yet users tend to respond to losing control of the hand cursor (which happened frequently in our testing) by waving both hands. The swapping of the cursor from single hand to single hand and the placement of menu options in the center of the screen frequently resulted in unintended selections; users were often too busy reading instructions on screen to notice they were also selecting something. This caused confusion when the screen changed. As one user commented, “It’s very easy to select the wrong thing.”

Kinect Adventures: Space Pop

Another experiential challenge we encountered in our testing was that users were too focused on their physical space to be totally absorbed in the game. They enjoyed Kinect’s creation of a 3D space around them (a distinction from the Wii), but the boundaries of this 3D space were not clear and users were cautious about overstepping them. Onscreen prompts to move back or forward provided good visual feedback (when users saw them) but because users had no sense of where the virtual boundaries were in their physical space, they were unable to learn from the feedback or correct their mistake.

These and the other usability issues led to a disconnect from game play as users were constantly interrupted by the physical world, making it difficult for them to become fully engaged in the game world.

Thoughts on the Future

A number of writers have already described the limitations of Kinect’s gesture based user interface, most notably by Jakob Neilsen and Don Norman but their frame of reference tends to relate more to existing user experiences. But what will the user experiences in the era of Kinect be like? Better? Worse? Something else entirely? Can we even begin to imagine them right now?

In today’s digital world, content defines the platform. The original XBOX was soundly bested in sales terms by the PS2 (a technically inferior machine) because PS2 had better games. Kinect’s gaming experience at launch is often clumsy and rudimentary, and the repetitive game play in the existing suite of games does not punish errors or force skill development. As a consequence, it’s difficult to determine users’ ultimate enjoyment of game play given the limitations of existing game options and the platform’s current usability issues. The next batch of games released for Kinect will need to significantly improve in order to engage new users and keep early adopters enthused.

Reassuringly, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last week, Microsoft announced a number of promising Kinect developments including:

• Gestural and voice command enhancements to games like ‘Gunsmith’ and Fable, giving players the ability to reconfigure weapons using voice commands, and use gestures to aim, zoom, fire, cast spells, and control the reins of a horse-drawn carriage.

• Expanded voice controls for XBOX Live which allows you to search Bing, find games online and watch live TV using only voice commands.

• Kinect Fun Labs with realistic avatars and bobbleheads (3D object scanning and finger tracking), Sesame Street ‘Once Upon a Monster’ living storybook, and classic Disney animation interaction (strictly for the young at heart).

Of course, within a gaming context, Kinect is just a device, but if you consider gaming as just one of it’s potential utilities it becomes something else entirely; it becomes a platform, and that opens up a whole new world of possibilities. To consider Kinect as merely an XBOX accessory or party gaming device is shortsighted, and will only serve to cement its novelty status. But that is how Microsoft has positioned it; presumably to encourage early adoption by portraying it in terms with which users are familiar. For Kinect to evolve it needs to change this perception and change it fast.

Kinect is a powerful and sophisticated device and its emergence heralds an evolution in user interaction, but as Microsoft must know all too well by now, having the most powerful hardware does not guarantee a superior product or a better experience. The best way for Kinect to avoid the long slow doom of all other novelty gaming devices would be to open up the system, spurring the creation of new experiences worthy of its potential.

Demand for this among users is already evident, as an impressive number of Kinect hacks have sprung up in the relatively short time the product has been available. News that Microsoft has already released an official software development kit (SDK) which would allow Kinect to run on a PC is encouraging, and we hope we’ll see Microsoft takes steps to open Kinect up as a platform for third parties soon.

An exciting example of the kind of non-gaming potential of the device can be seen in Razorfish’s announcement of KinectShop last week, which allows users to overlay clothing and accessories onto a virtual image of themselves. This builds on TopShop’s Magic Mirror approach by placing the context of use in the user’s home and allowing them to “grab” items using a natural gesture.

We’d love to see this kind of application pushed further. Imagine, for example, using Kinect to create a personalized 3D body model with a body scan which could then be used across products and stores to assess fit, as well as look. We’ll be exploring this idea and going into more detail on our research findings in “You Can’t Touch This: Microsoft Kinect and the future of gestural interfaces” a full report on Kinect to be released later this month.

While it’s exciting to see so many companies making the choice to invest in developing mobile applications, the truth is that most applications fail because companies invest in them for the wrong reasons. This post is devoted to analyzing some of the right – and wrong – reasons to develop an app.

The wrong reasons

When asked why they want to build an app, one of the most common responses companies give is that an app would be a great way to raise brand awareness and engage new users.

Any tactic meant to raise awareness should revolve around reach. The unfortunate truth is that native mobile apps do not have reach. Sure, Angry Birds racked up 40 million iOS downloads after its first year, but the success stories you hear are all anomalies. According to Pinch Media, the average number of downloads for a free app is 71,000. This average paints a skewed picture, because a handful of hit apps account for the vast majority of downloads. Based on their download distribution curves, half of all free apps actually get fewer than 7,600 downloads. This is hardly the kind of reach a marketer gets excited about.

Many of our clients are major consumer brands that expect major results. Even apps backed with the marketing budget to ensure a place closer to the front of the download curve won’t reach that many new customers. Apple and Google have made significant improvements in the app acquisition workflow, but getting an app on your phone is still a significant hurdle. First, a user has to find the app in the App Store, then download it to their phone, and finally invest the time to learn exactly what the app does. More often than not, it’s the existing customers who already know and love your brand that will make the effort to download your app.

Another popular reason for considering an application is revenue. Companies often believe that an app could be an exciting new revenue stream.

Yes, an app could generate significant revenue, but more likely than not it won’t. The economics of native apps simply aren’t attractive. AdMob reports that the average iPhone app purchase price is $2.27. For iPod Touch, its $2.47, so lets split the difference and assume the average app sells for $2.37 across both platforms. Going back to Pinch Media’s figures, 1,000 downloads is the median for paid apps. This means half of all paid apps will earn less than $2,370.

What about advertising revenue? Repeat engagement on native apps can be challenging, and only 5% of the users who originally download an app continue to use it after a month passes. So lets assume on average a download drives 10 sessions over its lifetime. Let’s be optimistic and assume your users are willing to put up with a heavier dose of ads, so each session results in 2 impressions. With an average CPM of $13, we’re looking at $18,500 in total revenue – better than the paid model, but the order of magnitude still isn’t worth pursuing on its own.

The right reasons

While successful mobile apps can and do improve brand awareness, drive engagement and bring in incremental revenue, the primary reason for building these apps should stem from longer-term goals.

One of the best reasons to build a native app is to help extend a company’s core value proposition in a compelling new way.

To use a client example, HUGE has been working with HBO for the past year to take HBO GO mobile. HBO already creates programming that their subscribers know and love. The right application for HBO needed only extend this core offering to mobile devices in order to let subscribers watch HBO shows wherever and whenever they want. All those people who love HBO now love HBO that much more (there’s a loyalty component in here, but we’ll expand on that in a future post).

The result? HBO GO mobile made its way to the top-ranked free app in the App Store on its first day of release, and received one million downloads in its first week.

Target’s mobile investments hold a similar lesson. The popular Target iPad app has managed to garner an astounding 4.5 stars over the course of 6,160 user ratings – a level rarely achieved in the App Store.

There’s a recurring theme that emerges after combing through the multitude of positive reviews. Users keep mentioning Sunday ads, the Sunday paper or weekly deals. They’re referring to Target’s Weekly Ad, weekly circular that’s comes with the Sunday paper. Target shoppers know that the Weekly Ad is a great way to discover deals, and Target has built a mobile experience that lets them access the same deals on their iPad and saves them the cost of the newspaper.

Another good reason to build a native app is that doing so will help a company learn more how mobile can help its users.

Mobile is growing by leaps and bounds, but it’s a constantly changing space, and identifying the exact right way to leverage mobile can be challenging.

We’re firm believers in the test and learn model. If it’s unclear how mobile fits into your digital ecosystem, one of the best ways to tackle the problem is to put an app out there and learn from the experience. Discover what resonates with your users and learn how mobile can impact your business.

There’s no longer a question of if your competitors will invest in mobile, but when. Firstmover advantage is a very strong reason to invest now. One of the best responses we’ve gotten to our question of “why” is simply: “By the time our competitors are first venturing into mobile, I want to be on version 5.3.”

25 Reasons People Will Leave Your Website in 10 Seconds. The list includes usual suspects like autosound as well as a few good ones like the immediate demand for registration and the prioritization of ads over content.

If Pee-wee Herman had a secret word for this week it would be transparency. This week we read all about airport scanners, Wikileaks, convicted murderer party pics on Facebook, TSA-proof undies, data miners offering to “peel back the curtain” to fight Do-Not-Track, and a great Jon Stewart clip all about transparency, well, and privacy. Maybe, if we’re lucky, next week will be something new. A big announcement from Google and Groupon perhaps?

Also this week, Google made trees 3D, got ready to track Santa, got told to pay a buck for trespassing, and changed its algorithm to stop rewarding businesses that have bad customer service.