Just playing around with the user interface of Canon ImageMixer product design

Figure 1: ImageMixer screenshot

Figure 2: ImageMixer screenshot with product enhancements

Introduction
This document covers product design enhancements to the Canon ImageMixer video editing software. It describes the idea behind the addition of new design features that will improve the users’ experience.

Product Description
Canon ImageMixer is video editing software used for processing videos shot using digital camcorders. The software is capable of post processing the video input in H.264 format and creating output video in H.264, mpeg or DVD formats. While there are many features that the product offers, the design of the user interface has significant scope for improvement. The rest of the document attempts to enhance the product through the addition of better and useful product design features.

Current user interface

Figure 1 represents a screenshot of the user interface. On the left is the library that allows the user to create multiple video albums from several video captures. On the right is a preview screen for the videos and below that is the graphical timeline of the video. It is evident from the picture that a lot of features expected from a video editing tool are missing from the organization and layout of this product.

Enhanced user interface
Figure 2 represents a screenshot of the user interface with new buttons and modifications.
The additional features and enhancements are described below.
1. Button to select additional videos to include in this movie
2. Tab to increase the width of the preview screen
3. Choose transition schemes from one clip to the next. Special effects button is used to add other effects to the video.

The following features are related to the preview/edit video screen on the right in order to make it easy for the user to perform these functions. It is expected that a user will perform these tasks on the video very often.
4. Add color effects to the video
5. Adjust brightness and contrast to the video clip
6. Incorporate external audio input into the file
7. Preview the edited video file
8. Button to create the final movie
9. Cut portions of the video that are not needed
10. Add captions to the video at specified times
11. Button to add credits to the video file
12. With so much video content on websites and blogs, this button makes it easy to upload the current video to any webpage.
13. Preview the video on external monitor display output
14. Repeat the preview in continuous loop

The following additions are made to the graphical timeline of the video.
15. View time markers on the previewed video
16. Zoom timescale
17. Display frame information of the video to help user analyze the video frame by frame
18. Keep clip from current marker to end of video
19. Keep from beginning of clip to current marker

Summary
This document details simple product design enhancements to the ImageMixer software tool. These additional features will help the user perform often repeated tasks with the click of buttons that are readily available and easily accessible. These will greatly enhance the user experience by making things very intuitive in their minds through the use of appropriate icons and thus promote product penetration in the market.

Analysis on BillShrink

BillShrink is a Silicon Valley startup providing web service to customers to find out the best gas, phone and credit card deals by analyzing individuals’ lifestyle and spending behavior. A brief analysis of BillShrink and proposal for future growth from an outsider’s perspective follows.
Consumer spending can be categorized into recurring spending and discretionary spending. Recurring spending includes such items as cell phone and gas while credit card usage could include discretionary spending such as travel, dining and entertainment. BillShrink has developed internal algorithms to match consumer behavior and spending patterns with the best possible deal. Some of the other markets that can use similar algorithms would be car insurance, rental insurance and financing options. In all these cases, the markets are very similar with a large number of service providers from which consumers can choose from. The partnerships needed to deliver the best deals to the consumers need to extend on the technology developed for the gas and phone markets.

It is clear that all the cases of recurring spending need an aggregation point at various levels. The insurance markets (auto, home, rental, travel, and healthcare for visitors) provide a lot of choice to consumers with varying levels of coverage, liability and other options such as rental and towing coverage. An insurance agency such as Progressive also claims to provide people with their rates against the rate of the competition. However, customers typically use insurance agents to obtain their policy selections. BillShrink could serve as an aggregator of information about insurance companies, rates and service and provide matching criteria based on customers’ preferences. The revenue model of BillShrink is based on lead generation to service providers. With no insight into its current business relationships, it is clear that the model is based on significant volume in terms of the number of referrals. Hence, markets such as insurance with potential for significant volume provide good revenue growth opportunities.

BillShrink can also use its technology to provide services that might not have much aggregation but can generate volume through repeat users and referrals. One such example would be to provide the consumers with the best bang for the buck at a particular product level. Let’s consider the case of Hi-def televisions. Based on the customers’ budget, BillShrink would direct them to the right mix of product and cost. This would require partnerships with categorization search engine companies such as Kosmix.

On the discretionary spending of consumers, BillShrink’s approach to provide savings requires detailed analysis of credit card usage. Once the expenses are analyzed, it can be used to provide customers with alternate options that provide better value based on customer preferences such as reliability, quality, and other personal preferences.

Thoughts - news on inflation

Found this interesting article on inflation. I had a few questions which were clarified by a Phd student in finance. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Goldman-Sachs-fails-to-excite-apf-879362838.html?x=0

1. Why did treasuries tumble on news of inflation

One of the Fed’s primary responsibilities in implementing its monetary policy is to guard against high inflation. It does this by acting to influence short-term interest rates. By buying or selling Treasury securities itself in the open market, the Fed is able to increase or reduce the money supply, for example. It is possible that investors, seeing news of higher-than-expected inflation, fear that the Fed will act sooner than they had expected to combat inflation, which would entail increasing rates. If investors believe that rates will be higher in the future, prices of Treasury securities must fall.

Practically speaking, however, the Fed might be constrained in its ability to raise rates, as doing so would be counter to the goals of promoting expansion of the economy in order to more quickly end the current recession. They’re in a particularly tough spot right now!

2. Long-term government debt tends to be sensitive to reports of higher prices, as inflation erodes the value of fixed-income securities over time - what does this mean.

Second question, think about how inflation affects lenders. Suppose that you lend me $100 today (interest-free, for simplicity), and I pay you back one year from now. Any inflation over that period reduces the purchasing power of the $100 that I return to you at the end of the year. The higher the inflation, the less I’m paying you back in real terms—the less you’re able to actually buy with that $100. This is good for me, as the borrower, but horrible for you, as the lender.

Holders of Treasury bonds are, in effect, loaning money to the government. Higher inflation means that the principal repayment to bondholders won’t be worth as much in real dollars, making the bonds less valuable, and leading to lower prices. The problem is worse for bonds with longer time to maturity, since inflation has an affect over many more periods for long-term bonds. Thus, one might expect long-term treasuries to suffer disproportionately from this report.

My post from TiEcon 2009

Friday, May 15 2009 -> Got to attend TieCon 2009 held in Santa Clara, CA. Here are some interesting tidbits from the conference.

The morning session started off with a talk by Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit. One of the insights into how Intuit interacts with customers is to have a roundtable session on their campus where they let customers be the CEO for a day and ask them to suggest what they would do. Intuit has also embraced the model where they allow employees to propose new products and innovate a certain percentage of the time they spend at work. Check out http://intuitlabs.com/ for more information.

The next speaker was Hans Morris, President of VISA. He was specifically talking services that VISA is looking at such as pension payment in India using mobile phones. Visa alert, offer and locator are other services they are working on. Prepaid visa cards is in its infancy which is used in certain geographies as a form of payment. Three things to consider when people are looking at innovation – Cash flow, Control and Convenience.

There were 5 parallel track sessions covering these areas – Internet Infrastructure, Wireless, Cleantech, Software and Consumer Web. I attended the Wireless session with the following panel members – Bernard Gershon from Gershon Media, Atif Hussein from Nokia, Yves Maitre from Orange and Dilip Venkatachari from NEA. One can think of two kinds of wireless applications – Information rich and Entertaiment rich. Typically, the entertainment rich ones have shorter shelf life. The key to looking at applications is to identify if there is anything sustainable. A few questions from the audience were – What about sensors in user interface, Voice based input. An example of Location Based Service (LBS) was fishermen finding out from their wireless phones the place that gave them the best price for the catch of the day and landing their boats in that area. If we consider 1B phones sold, 100M of these were smarphones and the majority are plain vanilla phones. When thinking of a market, consider this key fact.

Next panel I attended was called “Building your Sales Organization”. Check out www.startup-advisor.com – 7 steps to a successful startup. The sales process consists of Suspects -> Prospects - > Qualified customers -> Closing customers. The key is to measure the ratio of conversion as one proceeds from suspects to eventually closing customers.

The afternoon keynote was by Vivek Ranadive, CEO of TIBCO. He spoke about his entrepreneurial journey. Key takeaways – Things can always be done better; Surround yourself with smart people; Persevere, no matter the pain. Never give up.

Afternoon panel was called Rules for Renegades. This panel had Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Danae Ringelmann, Heidi Roizen, and Robin Kelly Tomb. Useful website www.helpareporter.com.

I attended presentations of a few TiE top 50 companies. They were BuzzinTown, Jajah, Kiva, Kosmix, Like.com, Mochimedia, and Playspan.

UCLA video marketing contest

The contest was held in September 2008. Team members were Julie, Dani, Vanessa, Mark, Adam, John, Serdar and Sai.

Online video search market

I have been fascinated by online video search and navigation within videos. Interesting companies in this space include Everyzing, Blinkx, truveo, Casttv, GAudi and Gotuit.