Good Product/Bad Product — July 2017

Good Product — AntShares Re-branding — Neo

For those unaware, Antshares (now NEO) is the largest China-based altcoin. Antshares is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with and has been called the “Ethereum of China”. At the time of writing, Antshares is the 13th largest coin by market cap, with a cap of $359 million.

When I first heard of AntShares (altcoin), I initially thought the coin had been created by Ant Financial, owner of the largest mobile payment platform in China, AliPay, and a subsidiary of Alibaba. However, there is no (known) connection between the two. AntShares is run by Onchain, who already has partnerships with Alibaba and Microsoft.

Now, AntShares is re-branding to NEO.

In Paul Graham’s essay on startup naming, he notes that “best kind of names are the ones that are both cool words and refer to what the company does.”

NEO will remove its ambiguous naming relation to Ant Financial and gain a more ‘mature’ coin name that should play better with Western audiences. While NEO doesn’t say what the company does, the naming is much “cooler” than AntShares and gives the coin a more unique identity.

In addition to the branding, the NEO devs are updating the network with a full smart contract system — excited to see how this system matures and is picked up by the dev community.

The only thing I’m concerned about with this re-branding is the fact that NEO will continue to trade on exchanges as ‘ANS’. Will be interesting to see how this turns out.

Good Product — “Take on Me” in Augmented Reality

300k views in 3 days? Not bad

Everything about this demo is great and it was set for going viral: popular culture reference most adults know, good length, understandable and available to non-techies. It also shows how ARKit can be used to edit reality (changing the images of the children and the room) and add things to reality (with the 3d model of the singer).

This is the first solid ARKit demo I’ve seen so far. Most of the ARKit demos I’ve seen thus far (like a Falcon 9 landing and a home decorating tool), have been pretty simple and not too interactive. Nothing that would really interest the average consumer.

This is the first demo that has genuinely excited about the potential of ARKit and made me want to try developing with it. Props to the team at TRIXI Studios for this, can’t wait to see what they create next!

Bad Product — Pokemon Go Fest — Niantic

What a complete disaster. Pokemon Go Fest was supposed to be the first big, in-person Pokemon Go event, to be held at Grant Park in Chicago. But to say that it even happened would be a stretch.

What could have been done better:

• Knowing dependencies — Listen, I get it, load testing Verizon’s infrastructure isn’t that feasible. But when you’re about to slam them with traffic from your app, you should at least have an idea of how much they can handle — mobile infrastructure can’t handle infinite connections. Was there even any communication between Niantic and mobile carriers? It doesn’t look like there was.
• Better failure scenarios — Before the even started, there were reports of apps crashing. There is no valid reason for an app to simply crash without giving the user any notice or acknowledgment on re-opening the app. Less transparency means more customer frustration. At least open a “contact us” page when re-opening the app.
• Side note, Niantic, please hire a design team, you’re UI sucks.

Bad Product — Google Autoplaying Videos on the Search Results Page

Google recently has begun testing auto-play videos on search result pages. The new product will “put the autoplaying video at the top of search results as part of the knowledge panel for certain searches”. This is pretty odd, considering Google has previously shown that they don’t want auto-play ads for their users.

I understand that they’re probably just trying to test the waters and gather some data from this experiment, but Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”, so they shouldn’t even be playing with being evil in the user experience. Maybe this is just me being angry, but this doesn’t seem like its in customers’ best interests.

tl;dr: Can we please stop with auto-playing videos!?!? I don’t want this, no consumer wants this! This is the complete opposite of customer obsession.

/rage

Disclosure: I am currently employed as a software engineer at Amazon.com