Great UX, thwarted by walled gardens

Readmill is a great reading environment. That their designers obsess on visceral user experience makes it a true pleasure to use. It may very well be the best “feeling” ereader application out there. This is a critical attribute for an environment in which you can spend hours a day.

But it suffers from the thing that any book-related company or product or startup that is not a Kindle suffers from: It’s a slog to get content into it.

This is a discussion less about DRM (although, it is that, too) and more about seamless user experience. Sure, you can hunt down a copy of “Gone Girl” on a website you’ve never bought a book from before. Enter your credit-card information. Download it. Then upload it to your Readmill account. Or, you can click “Buy now with 1-Click” on Amazon.com and have it on all your devices in 10 seconds, ready to be read in the Kindle reading application. You have to be really persuasive to beat that kind of convenience.

Since Amazon would never allow its library to be accessed by reading applications other than Kindle, this is a non-trivial problem for a startup like Readmill to surmount.

A community to challenge Amazon

Goodreads has always been a bit of an enigma. Truth be told, I’ve never been an avid user. There’s a number of reasons why, but the biggest is simply that the distance between my books — and the activity that happens within them — and Goodreads has always seemed ginormous. That is, updating reading statuses for books on a website always felt odd and forced. It felt odd in 2007 when I was mainly reading physical books, and it feels odder still in 2013, where I’m mainly reading Kindle books. That said, 16 million people clearly don’t agree with me.

So why did Amazon buy Goodreads? Well, the promise of a collaboration between Goodreads and a great reading platform (like Readmill) loomed large. A combination like that had the chance of being the Last Great Stand against Amazon. Goodreads is many things but most defensibly it is a community. A strong community. An engaged community. (And now, a slightly enraged community.) Sixteen million users is nothing to dismiss. It’s not Facebook or Instagram levels, but 16 million excited people is a firehose to be reckoned with. What Goodreads didn’t have was a reading application.

It also should be noted that publishers love Goodreads. No surprise there; it’s just as one would imagine. Goodreads is an amazing platform for promoting books to an avid, core readership. So if Goodreads were to develop a reading application, it doesn’t take much imagination to see them signing up the catalogs of the big five and launching a Goodreads store for the Goodreads reader. And were that reading application to plug seamlessly into the Goodreads ecosystem — the community — then getting those 16 million users to switch from Kindle to Goodreads Reader would have been one of the easier platform sells in publishing.

Goodreads users already want to hang out at Goodreads. If they could read there too — in an app — I suspect many would.

Kindle flaws present opportunity

Despite the maturity of the market, the tablet reading space is still weirdly under-polished. Kindle reading environments have hardly changed in the last three years. The Kindle app has seen some improvement — mainly in support for complex KF8 formatted titles — but the polish around the reading experience, that visceral component, for novels and other mass-market books has remained largely unchanged. Books in the Kindle applications still don’t hyphenate. And page slides still stutter ever so slightly. These are small details that add up.

Certain polish aside, Kindle’s strengths are manifold. It has a vast catalog and transactional trust. It has all our credit-card information, making purchasing seamless. It is also supremely good at cloud data — consistent and reliable storage and retrieval of our books across devices. What it doesn’t have — and no inkling or iota of — is community.

What might have been

So you can see, there was a combo here. A curious matchup. Take one of the most polished, most satisfying digital book reading applications and merge it with one of the most engaged reading-specific communities. A marketplace could have developed that might have been the first real competition against Kindle. Not one built around competing with Kindle toe-to-toe as Barnes & Noble and Kobo have attempted (and failed at), but competing on ground on which Amazon has no footing: community.

It’s a certainty that Amazon, too, saw this. Which is why the sale this week comes as little surprise. I’ve always imagined that secretly, deep down in the murky stacks of Amazon headquarters, they had a crackerjack team making kindle.amazon.com the best social reading network in the world. Maybe they did. Or maybe they just realized it would be easier to buy the one that already existed.

Craig Mod is an independent writer, designer and publisher focused on publishing and storytelling. You can follow him on Twitter @craigmod.

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The key to service is an updated version of MOG’s iPhone app, which automatically connects to Sync when connected via the USB port in 2012 Sync-enabled vehicles, including the Fiesta, Fusion, F-150, Super Duty, E-Series, Mustang and Expedition. The app can relay its settings, playlists and downloaded content to the car’s stereo. It also uses the iPhone’s 3G connectivity to link to MOG’s Internet-based services, giving the driver access to MOG’s curated radio stations, as well as playlist and ‘favorite’ songs not stored within the phone.

The integration goes beyond merely streaming the app’s audio feed through the car’s speakers. Ford worked closely with MOG as part of its App Link program to port the service’s user interface and core functionality into the dashboard. Basic Sync voice commands can be used to start the app, move between songs and shuffle playlists. Users can assign MOG radio stations and playlists to the stereo’s preset buttons, and they can designate new songs as favorites using through voice prompts, adding them to their music collections.

Ford has been positioning Sync App Link as a mobile platform over which developers can build apps for cars just as they would for Android or iOS phones. Ford, however, hasn’t yet opened App Link to the general developer community. Instead it has selectively added applications through direct partnerships. It’s primary focus has been on companies a lot like MOG – music or other audio content streaming services, as opposed to more visually oriented apps that might distract the driver.

Ford’s first big dev partner was Pandora, but the automaker has since included in the program Clear Channel’s digital streaming service iHeartRadio, audio magazine provider Stitcher, Slacker Personal Radio, and news services NPR and Orangatame OpenBeak.

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Nuance Communications wants you to have a conversation with your car via the cloud. The speech recognition company already powers many of the voice technologies embedded into today’s automobiles, but on Tuesday it unveiled Dragon Drive, which moves beyond simple voice commands into the realm of natural language understanding.

Voice command technologies like Ford’s Sync allow drivers to audibly initiate basic tasks like playing music, control the thermostat or answer an incoming call, but there are limits to what Nuance’s onboard software can do. But by tapping into a 3G or 4G connection, a driver’s command can reach out to Nuance’s cloud-based language servers, which can not only understand a far broader range of commands but interpret those commands and deliver results with much more sophistication, said Mike Thompson EVP and GM of Nuance’s mobile division.

What does that mean exactly? Well, according to Thompson, the long-term result will let drivers have a natural conversation with your car – something akin to talking with KITT, the sentient Trans Am from the 1980s TV series Knight Rider. In the near-term we’ll see many of the same capabilities found in Apple’s Siri personal assistant: an interface that is not only able to perform basic tasks and search for information, but also interpret context and intent.

“We are already making KITT in many ways,” Thompson said. “There is a Siri-like effect sweeping across all product categories. … There’s a huge demand for it in automotive.”

Nuance is starting small. The first Dragon Drive application will be an SMS service, allowing drivers to send a text message to a number or contact in their address books as well as dictate the message itself. That service will start appearing in vehicles on dealer lots this summer, Thompson said. But soon, Nuance will start layering on more functions.

Many of the features available in Nuance’s consumer services, such as Dragon Dictation and it’s voice-powered semantic search app DragonGo, will make their way into the dashboard, but Thompson said Nuance wouldn’t simply be repurposing all of its applications for the car. The focus for Dragon Drive, he said, will be services like vehicle navigation and points of interest that are much more useful to a driver, who isn’t going to be spending much time scouring Wikipedia or shopping for handbags online (hopefully).

Music is a good example of where the power of a cloud-based intelligence will come to bear. For instance, if you were to ask a Dragon Drive-equipped car to play a track not loaded into your car’s console or smartphone, the service could give you plenty of other options besides silence. It could search your cloud-based music collection for the track and stream it through your in-dash stereo. It could offer to create a Pandora station based on the particular song or artist. Or it could ask you if you would like to buy the track or album and download it over the air.

Image courtesy of Flickr user PopCultureGeek.com

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The program has three major components: Calendar Cleaner, Contacts Cleaner and Sync Tune-Up. If you want just one of the components, you can purchase the first two separately at the Mac App Store. However it’s likely you’ll need all three so I recommend the buying the full package.

Contacts Cleaner looks for issues that could cause errors such as invalid characters, malformed phone numbers as well as duplicate information. What I like about this program is that it not only finds the errors, but tells you why it thinks they represent a problem. For example, I’d often put “husband and wife” in the First Name field, but Contacts Cleaner warns me “This contact has a space in the first name. In some cases these names can become transposed after syncing with Google.” Sure enough when I went into Google, I noticed that problem.

Calendar Cleaner does similar checks for errors that can occur with your various sync destinations. My calendar was fraught with malformed recurring events that wouldn’t sync, and a pass by Calendar Cleaner fixed those in no time.

Both programs give you the option of opening the item within Address Book or iCal in order to make sure you know what kind of change is being made before you authorize it. Apple’s Address Book application looks for merged items itself, but doesn’t give you options to control what is merged. iCal users have no built-in options to search for duplicates and merge events.

Finally, Sync Tune-Up (only available as part of the bundle) gives you a front end for more fine-grained control over fixing your sync-related issues, such as de-registering individual devices and software, or the “nuclear” option which rebuilds the entire sync database. If your sync is taking extra long or you’ve made a bunch of changes with your devices or accounts, a nice reset can do you a world of good. A good indication of problems can be found by looking at your console logs and looking for mentions of the “truth” and too much vacuuming.

The more you sync, the more likely it is that problems will occur. To prevent or repair these problems, Spanning Tools is a great option.

Disclosure: Spanning Tools provided a copy of the software for review purposes.

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After I wrote my recent article about Bluetooth integration with car audio, Ford contacted me about the Microsoft SYNC  functions built into the Ford Fiesta and asked if I knew about the AppLink functions. I took it for a test drive (literally) and surprisingly, I found that a new Ford may just be about the best (and probably most expensive) iPhone accessory out there.

What is SYNC?

SYNC is a Microsoft Windows-based embedded automotive system found in a variety of Ford cars. Go ahead and get the Blue Screen of Death and “crash” jokes out of your system, because SYNC actually worked quite well in my testing, and is smartly integrated with iOS devices.

SYNC is a suite of functions that combines Bluetooth audio and phone functions, USB audio, and extended “services” via a yearly subscription. Pressing a button on the steering column activates voice recognition and allows a driver to issue commands. In select Ford models, AppLink allows software developers to interact with SYNC via APIs and a software development (SDK), allowing for the creation of apps specifically for Ford cars.

For my test drives, I used my iPhone 4 and Ford provided both the vehicles and the complimentary SYNC services account.

Bluetooth phone functions

Similar to many factory or add-on car stereos, SYNC supports standard phone functions such as dialing by name, and answering phone calls via the SYNC button on the steering column. Calls were crisp, clear and understandable, so no complaints in this regard.

Bluetooth audio functions

SYNC supports AD2P audio which allowed me to stream iPod, Pandora and Audible content via Bluetooth from my phone to the stereo. While audio paused when a call came in via the iPhone, when SYNC was announcing directions, the audio did not pause. This is completely consistent with my Bluetooth experiences with other integrated car systems, but still not ideal.

USB audio functions

Now things get interesting. The car comes with a USB port that’s treated by the iPhone as a standard dock connector. Using it, you can control your iPhone’s audio functions via the steering wheel controls, and when SYNC gave directions, the audio did not drop out. In fact, when SYNC detected I was playing music, it simply showed the directions as text on the radio display and didn’t interrupt playback.

AppLink

An API for your car? That’s what AppLink is all about. Currently only Pandora and Stitcher for the iPhone support the AppLink APIs (BlackBerry has more). I tested the system with Pandora. When I open the app and instruct SYNC to take control, a Microsoft SYNC logo shows up on my iPhone screen and SYNC assumes control.

There’s nothing to download, as the SYNC support is already baked into recent versions of the Pandora app. Once SYNC’ed, I could then issue voice commands to switch stations, mark items with thumbs up or thumbs down, and skip songs.

The experience is a bit clunky. The app must be open and in the foreground, and the iPhone must be directly connected to the car’s USB audio port. Hopefully, developers will be able to access more features of iOS in later versions of Apple’s mobile platform to make this process more natural.

The potential of AppLink is amazing. Theoretically, any iOS app could be made to use SYNC; it’s just a question of iOS developers adding SYNC functionality to their apps.

SYNC Services vs. Siri

A yearly subscription (three years free are included with a new car purchase) includes access to a “Services” call center that extends the function of SYNC to the realm of a virtual assistant. When you click the SYNC button on the steering column and request services, your phone will dial a special toll-free number that recognizes your iPhone and provides you access. This allows you to take your account from vehicle to vehicle, as it’s tied to the phone and not your car.

SYNC services provide a range of information, such as weather forecasts, news, and phone number lookups. These requests, unlike with Apple’s own Siri, had to be issued in a rigid structure as opposed to using natural language. Additionally, you have to wait for Services to dial a phone number, while Siri is more or less instant.

Navigation is where SYNC shined. The first vehicle I used couldn’t determine my current location. Apparently, its GPS sensor needed a reboot, but the second vehicle had flawless navigation. Instead of requiring downloaded maps or updates like a standard GPS, Services downloaded the directions directly to the car and provided turn-by-turn instructions via audio and visual signals on the car stereo. This relies on the car’s own GPS sensor, and currently can’t use the iPhone’s built-in location services. The download process took about a minute. If you go “off-route,” SYNC offers to dial and get new directions.

Both Siri and SYNC can search for destinations either by business or category (for example “Computer Repair in Lawrence, Kan.”). SYNC also offers a downloadable app for bookmarking destinations, however. You can use nicknames like “hotel” or “conference venue” and then call services and ask for the destination. This is something Siri can’t do. If you have a set of destinations you’d like navigation for, you can’t easily pre-plan and give it a complete route. Having navigated with only the iPhone, and then having SYNC services grab GPS turn-by-turn directions for comparison, I was extremely impressed. Plus, SYNC services works with any phone.

Similar to Siri, SYNC services requires a carrier signal to make a phone call. If you’re lost and can’t make a call, you are out of luck. A standard GPS doesn’t suffer from this flaw, but Siri also needs the ability to access data to complete queries, which SYNC does not.

Another function of SYNC is the ability to contact 911 after an accident. Unlike GM’s OnStar system, SYNC uses your mobile phone to call 911 directly on your behalf and provide your location. This “911 Assist” function relies on your mobile phone not being damaged during the crash.

But how did it drive?

I’m by no means a car reviewer, but having recently test-driven a number of cars, I was impressed. What’s surprising is the Fiesta is a very affordable car, and these type of tech features I’d expect on a higher-end model. When I was on my last car search, built-in navigation, Bluetooth audio and hands-free cost several thousand more as add-ons.

Overall, I was extremely impressed with the iPhone integration via SYNC. If more iOS developers use the SYNC APIs, Siri’s virtual assistant will seem rather limited by comparison, at least when you’re driving. While Siri is stuck inside my iPhone, SYNC has the ability to directly talk and interface with my car itself, which can come in very handy on the road.

Special thanks to Thoroughbred Ford of Kansas City for the initial demo and training.

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As you can see from this checklist, iWeb publishing, Gallery and iDisk are all getting the axe. Apple has said that it will continue to support iWeb publishing, posting and viewing photos in MobileMe Gallery, and reading and writing to iDisk cloud storage through June 30, 2012 if you’re an existing customer, even if you choose to transition to iCloud before that cut-off date. If you’re looking around for a hosting alternative for your site, check out Geoffrey’s rundown of some of the options available.

Services you can’t take with you if you transition early include syncing of dashboard widgets, keychains, Dock items and System Preferences. You’ll have to remain a MobileMe user if you want to continue using these features, but they’ll also be shut off for everyone on June 30, 2012. Apple points out that while the services listed above are ending, iCloud brings new features not available in MobileMe, like iTunes in the Cloud, Photo Stream, Documents in the Cloud, automatic downloads for purchased content, and cloud backup and restore.

Services that you can take with you — including Mail, Contacts, Calendar and Find My iPhone — will still be accessible via web apps after the transition to iCloud, Apple says, which is a nice plus for users who want to be able to access their info, email and contacts on devices they don’t own.

As someone who’s been using MobileMe since the service was first introduced, I can honestly say that I’ve only ever used a couple of the services being discontinued (Gallery and iDisk), including the sync options. Even the ones I did use, I used only sparingly, and not recently. I think Apple’s making the smart move here, by cutting the fat as it shifts the focus to the much more generally useful services coming with iCloud.

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Crazy as it sounds, Google, Apple’s chief rival in the smartphone market, will be the one saving iOS users stuck in this donut hole. Moving to Google syncing requires only minor modifications to your iOS gadgets and your Mac, and you’ll be able to keep your contacts, calendars and email in step across devices. You’ll need to sync your iOS device to Google as well as sync your Mac to Google, and you should always backup the data on both before doing so. Note that doings so requires at least Leopard for Mac users.

Google has excellent instructions on how to set up your iOS device with a Google account. You’ll need to set up the Google account first of course, but most people already have that. Note that other email addresses you happen to be using on your devices that aren’t tied to your Google account won’t have their data backed up.

Setting up your Mac to sync with Google is also quite easy again due to excellent instructions, in particular on how to sync your calendars and how to sync your contacts.

While you’re at it, you might consider moving from iCal to BusyCal, as BusyCal syncs simply with Google using only your login credentials, while syncing with iCal is a multi-step process.

Google has a great opportunity to get users signed up in this window between Apple’s announcement and when its service goes live. Both Google and Apple will soon be battling for the right to store users’ data, a much different fight than that going on between operating systems. Any advantage in that coming fight could be a significant one.

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The company sees a bright future providing syncing services as more devices become connected and more services tie into Dropbox. While the service started largely on desktop and laptops, it has grown mightily in the last year with the popularity of smartphones and tablets. Next up, it will be TVs, cameras and even automobiles, said Drew Houston, CEO and co-founder of Dropbox.

“It’ll be everything with an on switch,” Houston said. “Literally, anyone with an Internet computer or phone can find Dropbox useful. That’s really all walks of life.”

Houston said he’s hearing from “countless companies” looking to build Dropbox into their products. The idea is that users will be able to view their personal photos on a TV or play their own synced music on a car via Dropbox. Houston said in the near future, consumers will see an array of products in Best Buy and other stores offering the ability to sync with Dropbox.

“There’s never been something like Dropbox to tie all these things together. So one of the big things we’ll be doing over the next couple years will be building these kinds of seamless experiences with leading partners and putting them in tens and soon hundreds of millions of people’s hands,” Houston said.

The push from 25 million users to 2.5 billion users, Houston’s lofty goal, will clearly take some time. But the team at the San Francisco-based company has shown they’re focused on building a solid product with proven reliability, even with a crush of new users. That influx of users is a big reason why usage has soared to 200 million files saved a day. For perspective, that’s more files saved than there are tweets posted on Twitter each day. Dropbox has managed to grow without advertising because it has great word of mouth. That has extended overseas, where the company now sees half of its usage. It sells in 175 countries, which is pretty remarkable for a company that has only put out an English version until today. The company just announced German, French, Spanish and Japanese support for the first time.

Co-founder Arash Ferdowsi said Dropbox will be putting even more emphasis on its platform this year, and will be looking to get it integrated with more apps and services. There are more than 200 apps that currently hook into Dropbox and Ferdowsi said there are many more opportunities to make the service ubiquitous as it scales up. He said the company is working on its APIs to make it easier to access and pull content from Dropbox. If all goes well, many sites will give users the ability to back up their content directly to Dropbox, something we’re already seeing with many productivity apps.

“Imagine a world where you go to photo-sharing site, click a button and connect to Dropbox,” Ferdowsi said. “When we have hundreds of millions of users, it’s a lot more compelling for these services to add hooks into Dropbox.”

Houston and Ferdowsi are quiet on their next funding move. They said even with the explosion of users, the business model of offering 2 GB of free storage for users while upselling a fraction on premium services is holding up. The company, a former Y Combinator start-up, previously raised $7.25 million in a Series A round from Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. It will likely need another big chunk in the near future, because the company has very big plans.

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