In what we hope will become a regular thing, this post lists what we found interesting in the last week or so:

Why Japan’s Cellphones Haven’t Gone Global
Because there’s too much emphasis on the hardware & hardware features, the software is too complex & custom from each manufacturer & Japanese telco’s mobile portals have been too successful meaning their devices are not used to access the open internet, in tandem with PC net access as smartphones are in the rest of the world.

Mobile Paradigms
Transcription of short presentation about different ways of seeing Mobiles & Computers

The One in Which I Call Out Hacker News
“The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend. Nine times out of ten, when you think an application was ridiculously easy to implement, you’re completely missing the user side of the story.”

Launch of Social Media Strategy Framework
“Today we launch our Social Media Strategy Framework. This provides guidance and a frame on how organizations can approach engaging with social media…The Framework begins with LEARN, follows two streams of ENGAGEMENT and STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT, and comes together in the ongoing imperative to DEVELOP CAPABILITIES.”

How to make graphs that work
Seth Godin shares four simple rules to not make your graphs put people to sleep.

What’s your five runs?
Think about your product or application. What’s your inflection point from casual to engaged users? My instinct says that it needs to be a simple number so that you can actively drive users to it; you can expend a lot of resource if you know you only need to get them to their fifth run.