How Katy Perry inspired LinkedIn’s redesign; Facebook’s real mobile problem.
The royal Nokia screw-up that shouldn’t have been [PANDODAILY]
That gets to the larger problem: The entire phone isn’t ready. On stage, Nokia had nothing specific to say about when the Lumia would go on sale. A day later, perhaps after noticing that providing a launch date for its make-or-break phone could be somewhat important to the future of its entire business, the firm leaked word that it is planning to launch the 920 in November. That’s about a decade from now in mobile time. In particular, it’s more than a month after the new iPhone will go on sale, a month during which Apple could sell 20 million or more devices around the world.
Valve, a video game maker with few rules [THE NEW YORK TIMES]
On Monday, the company will begin a public test of a new television-friendly interface, Big Picture, for buying Steam games and playing them on computers in the living room. … Valve’s exploration of new forms of game hardware comes as the PC, the device on which it has depended for much of its history, is changing in ways that could undermine its business. With a new PC operating system, Windows 8, coming out in October, Microsoft will start its own online marketplace for distributing software, including games. The move could take some of the, well, steam out of Steam.
How Katy Perry inspired LinkedIn’s global redesign [WIRED]
For LinkedIn, Katy is an exercise in simplification.
“If you look at the average user today, she’s getting a lot more sophisticated, she’s using a lot more tools both for productivity and entertainment,” says Deep Nishar, senior VP of products and user experience. “At some level, we are becoming generation ADD, so we don’t have that much time to focus and spend on things…. At the end of the day, if we have fewer things across which to make decisions, we end up making choices and taking action.”
Facebook’s real mobile problem: Unbundling [CONTINUATIONS]
The real problem, I am beginning to think, is more dramatic: the shift to mobile may make Facebook less relevant altogether.
Why? Mobile devices are doing to web services what web services did to print media: they unbundle. On my phone another app is just a button push away and there is relatively little that fits on each screen. So it is just as much effort to go to another part of the Facebook app as there is to go to a different app altogether. So Facebook for mobile may not be Facebook at all but rather a combination of say Instagram, Kik, Twitter, Foursquare and others.
Spotify will launch a browser-based version [TECHCRUNCH]
If you’re wondering why the Spotify desktop software has hardly been updated in a year, it’s because the company is preparing to launch a completely overhauled browser-based version of its streaming music service, multiple sources confirm. Along with moving to the web, the redesign will focus more on discovery, including following the listening habits and playlists of influencers in addition to your friends.
