Savvy Avi

Are you familiar with the project constraint triangle? Budget, time, scope? Improving in one aspect often comes at the expense of the other two. Or, as some put it, pick any two because projects seldom finish on time, on budget, and at scope. The project constraints measure the quality of the process of building an end product. I have learned that there is a similar triangle for product constraints. Constraints that measure the quality of the product itself:  ease of use ,  effectiveness  and  maintainability . Read more in Jumptap's Tech Blog  where I originally published this post.  

I recently started drawing cartoon figures for my daughter, after years of not drawing. It occurred to me that the drawing skills I learned back in the day help in mocking-up user interfaces. It’s about perspective and outline Drawing a cartoon figure is simple, really. The trick is to find a distinctive outline (the shape Mickey-Mouse’s head, the curve of a horse’s body) and drawing it first. Then you lineup every other detail in relation to the outline while keeping perspective in mind. I do the same thing when drawing a mockup of a web page or dashboard. I start off by what should draw the user’s attention (usually in the top center of page) and then layout elements around it. Use the least amount of material to convey a message Cartoon figures are made from just a few lines. These few lines make up a shape (a dog, a bird) and also convey a character. Tweety’s beak is curved to suggest a smile, Road-Runner’s limbs tell us the Road-Runner is in motion. Picasso...

I recently wrote a blog post on click to call mobile advertisement and some of the cool technology I built in Jumptap to improve click to call advertisement success. The post has the catchy name "5 Steps for Successful Click to Call Display Ads". "When mobile advertising first hit the scene, Click-to-Call banners held the promise of being the coolest and most direct way for advertisers to drive direct leads from mobile banners. The challenge, however, was that if a large number of consumers accidentally clicked on a Click-to-Call ad, the advertiser would be charged big money for those ‘misfires’. Recently, Jumptap helped change the equation by offering optimization for reducing this problem. Now, Jumptap can track real calls made from Click-to-Call ads and optimizing around sites that result in large quantities of ‘misfire’ calls. This new function, as well as four other important steps, is critical for any advertiser looking to leverage Click-to-Call for a success...

I think I work pretty hard with a demanding job at Jumptap, EvoTech in the evenings and weekends and being a new father. Then I met the 2012 System Design and Management (SDM) students in “boot camp” and was reminded that one can be even busier. A team of SDM students worked on EvoTech in their design challenge 2 assignments. We asked them to focus on EvoCloud a telemedicine offering we want to pair with our endoscopy camera. They came up with interesting findings: possible NGOs to contact, connections to telemedicine player in India, evaluation of 3G coverage and quality in Africa, a mockup and a fresh look at a new market. In the picture below SDM fellows presenting their work on EvoTech (left to right): Steve Ajemain, Bhushan Desam, Mike Meyer, Sascha Boehme, Andy Campanella, Rajesh Nair, Jake Whitcomb.

IDEO.org , IDEO’s branch for social venture work, has chosen Evotech for a 5 week project. We have a talented team: a mechanical engineer, a designer and a management consultant, working to improve EvoCam’s design and market strategy. It’s a great show of confidence for Evotech, and will no doubt improve our readiness to go to market. Read more in IDEO’s blog post . Working on Evotech part-time, progress comes slow. For every grant, business opportunity or competition won, we’ve lost at least two. However, so far, every achievement is several times bigger than the one before it, and that means we are moving in the right direction.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend I built a website for Evolving Technologies. Check it out. www.evotechmed.com . At Evolving Technologies, an early stage venture, we were debating whether it makes sense to have a web presence at such an early stage. After all, we are not looking for customers just yet. Some of us argued that we should be focused on a short list of strategic tasks that doesn’t include maintaining a website. However, we found out that, contacts you talk to expect to be referred to a url. It is also useful in email introductions. What’s more, today with good content management solutions it only takes a day to build a reasonable website, it’s fun and it allows you to show case the things you’ve been working on. So we got one, hope you’ll enjoy it!

A small office, off the infinite corridor, hosts MIT’s International Development Initiative program (IDI). IDI’s mission is to help ideas, worked on at MIT, become products and reach people in developing economies creating a social benefit. Most ideas never make it into products. The gap between good ideas to good implementation is even wider when the intended user is many miles away from the inventor. IDI helps to bridge the gap, many times by flying the entrepreneurs to the destination markets where they refine and test their ideas. This summer IDI granted its Technology Dissemination Fellowship to Evotech , the affordable endoscopy venture I am part of. We are using the grant to develop a medical light source to work with our endoscope. With the grant we hired an intern from MIT who works on prototyping and especially on the light’s electric board. We also used the fellowship to purchase components needed for the device and its development: a refurbished scope, LEDs, circuit bo...