Open up your mind and say, ahh...

In 2005, whether you were using a dumb phone with T9 Word or a BlackBerry with a physical keyboard, you were probably texting without looking at your phone, at least occasionally. It was just part of the times, like Brick Breaker, or Nelly. Then, in 2007, the iPhone showed up with its bold, buttonless design and erased all of that functionality. Texting suddenly became a two-thumb, eyes-on affair–a Dark Age of text entry we’re still suffering through today. Fleksy wants to change that. And what sets it apart from all the other alternative keyboard apps is that, from the moment you try it, you get the sense that it just might be able to.

Ioannis Verdelis and Kostas Eleftheriou, the two Greek computer scientists behind Fleksy, didn’t just set out to make a better touch-screen keyboard. They set out to make one as good as the keyboards we were using in 2005–or at least to make one that lets us type as well as we were on those infinitely more primitive devices. Their software is currently available in beta for Android and as an iOS app, and while it’s still rough in places, that core, no-look functionality is already there to a remarkable extent. I loaded up Fleksy on my iPhone, directed my gaze elsewhere, and thumbed in my best approximation of the word “difficult.” Without having to learn anything new, and without letting the app figure out what kind of thumb-typist I am, and without even pausing at first to make sure my fingers were lined up in any particular way beforehand, Fleksy got it right on the first try.

The founders claim Fleksy can recognize words even if you miss every single letter in them. Or if you’re not even typing on the keyboard section of the screen at all. The reason it’s able to do so, Verdelis explains, is that in addition to using conventional autocorrect cues like context and word frequency, Fleksy was built from scratch to accommodate the sorts of errors we make on our mobile devices. Errors, unsurprisingly, that are totally different from the ones we make on our laptops–and ones that demand a totally different approach to autocorrection.

“Most other touch-screen keyboard technologies, including those built-in and most third-party ones, use technology that derives from research done for Microsoft Word and hardware keyboards,” Verdelis says. Essentially, those keyboards look at the buttons, or letters, you tap, and then attempt to suss out your intended words from there. But on a smartphone, that’s a problematic approach for one huge reason: Those touch-screen buttons don’t really exist, and we’re not very good at using them.

On our laptops, the tiny bumps on the “F” and “J” keys keep our fingers oriented. With time, you learn to find them every time you put your index fingers down on the keyboard, and your other digits just fall in place naturally. Touch-screen keyboards don’t offer this type of tactile feedback, so our thumbs can never be sure where they are–at least not without our eyes double checking. As a result, we’re not missing letters every so often on our smartphones; we’re missing them as a matter of course. Occasionally, we drift off and miss entire words at a time.

But still, that doesn’t mean we’re typing poorly. We’re just not typing in quite the right place. “A user will be typing,” Verdelis explains, “and the overall pattern of the word might be the same, but he’s missed all the buttons because his finger has been 10 pixels up … So rather than look at buttons, which don’t exist, we look at where you touched the screen and the pattern of the words you’re trying to type.” That’s Fleksy’s secret sauce. Instead of looking at the on-screen buttons you happen to be tapping, it looks at the patterns between those taps and from them deduces what you meant to type. It erases the very possibility of not typing in the right place.

The solution is a smart one, and it’s clearly effective. But for the last several months, Fleksy has had the added benefit of being in the hands of a large, concerted group of test users: the visually impaired. The developers introduced an early version of the app to the blind community last summer at a conference for the National Federation for the Blind, and they quickly amassed a user base numbering in the thousands that has generated a great deal of insight, feedback, and, of course, raw typing data.

For the rest of us, though, the current version of Fleksy will only be so useful. The Android beta is the newer of the two versions, so it still needs considerable polish, and the iPhone version, shackled by Apple’s unwillingness to let users swap in alternative keyboards on a system-wide level, is constrained to a standalone app. And while the word-to-word accuracy is astonishing right from the start, that iOS version version relies on a somewhat complicated series of swipes for spaces and punctuation–upping the learning curve for true adoption considerably.

Verdelis hopes that someday Apple might reverse that policy, but he and Eleftheriou think there’s plenty of room for their technology to flourish regardless. In fact, their real vision is for Fleksy to become not just a replacement available to users but a replacement for suboptimal stock keyboards at large. Verdelis says he and his partner have seen “incredible interest” from hardware manufacturers about building the app into next-gen smartphones, and they’re currently in talks with a handful of potential partners. Hopefully that pans out. We could certainly use a more enlightened way to text.

Android users can grab the beta here; the iOS app is available in the App Store here. More on the app can be found on the Flesky site.

Illustration: Shutterstock

I am not much of a fan of Will.i.am ‘s music. He’s the guy behind the Black Eyed Peas and several other bits of dance magic. I appreciate that he hits his target perfectly. I’m just not his audience. But I now respect the man immensely.

Thanks to this article in Fortune, I’ve come to realize just how bright a lad he is. He’s not only doing great work in marketing his own products and services, but he’s helping corporate America figure out some of their challenges as well. What’s most interesting to me, however, is that what he’s doing is coming to the picnic with ideas.

Most times, when someone famous is brought in to help a company, they are usually used as a kind of proxy. So, when Michael Jackson did the big deal with Pepsi, he just kept on Michael Jacksoning, and there was some Pepsi logo stuff behind him. By comparison, Will.i.am brought the idea of Ekocycle to Coca Cola, and he fleshed out the entire vision. It’s his project that Coke totally understands and supports, because of how Will.i.am laid it all out.

That’s the lesson to us. You can offer to help or you can bring an idea of great value to your prospective client or customer. One will get you a little bit of business. The other will lead to partnerships of great value.

Cheers to you, Will. And thanks for getting that Britney song stuck in my head. Argh.

Service matters. We know this in our guts, and yet, most companies make service an after-thought, and a cost center. They say, “We value our customers,” quite often on their pre-recorded 6-8 minute long hold message tape. Service has always mattered, but it’s coming to be a vital competitive edge. With that in mind, I wanted to offer you 9 starting points for improving your service craftsmanship.

Cure Your Amnesia

If someone buys from your organization and then later communicates with you about some matter, it would be good to know that they are a customer. Though we’re not really supposed to treat people differently, you would be foolish not to treat your best customers with the utmost of care. Remember that “most money paid” isn’t always the criteria for best. You’ll know the difference. To cure this, simply be sure that every system that requires one to know a name also gives that file some kind of nod to the fact that the customer is a repeat patron of your organization. Want to go a step further? Remember what I did last time and ask me if I want more of the same.

Consider The Extra Touches

In almost any business transaction, there’s an opportunity to add an extra nice touch. Quite often, this makes a powerful impact on your customer. What can you do? It can be simple, inexpensive, or even free, if it’s timely and shows a level of connectedness with your customer. Christopher Lynn from the famous Hotel Colonnade in Boston knew that Jacq and I were out at a Black Keys concert. He ran over to the mall across from his hotel, picked up a copy of the latest CD, and had it on our pillow when we came back. It was a perfect little touch that cost about $15 and 20 minutes of his time, but that strengthens my commitment to staying at the Colonnade any time I’m in Boston. What extra touch can you give? Can you draw smiley faces on my sales slips? Even that’s nice.

Communicate Simply, Clearly, and Almost Often

Airlines seem to have mastered the art of vagary, especially lately. As I experience more and more delays on flights, I’m getting answers like, “we’re just waiting on some paperwork.” First, it’s 2012. Do we really use a lot of paper? Evidently so. Second, why are you holding up my flight 10-15 minutes for a piece of paper? Answer: that’s not really why they’re delayed.

People want to feel informed. This improves outcome, even if the response from a company is a bit negative. It’s better to know that you’re not going to get your package today than it is to say, “Well, we’re tracking it and there haven’t been any updates to the status.” Be simple, be clear, and communicate fairly regularly (but not too much- if you over-communicate, it’s showing fear).

Reduce Friction Everywhere

Most processes come about from past experiences, and rarely from current circumstances. They almost never come from “what’s best for the customer.” If you have a process that makes it harder for people to do business, why would it shock you that people won’t do business with you? Policies are meant to facilitate business, not hamper it. Revisit every policy frequently to determine whether it’s giving you or your customers/clients a problem. It’s amazing what you’ll turn up. Sometimes, fixing this kind of friction costs money, but often, it’s as simple as crumpling up a piece of paper and starting with a new perspective. The rewards are magical.

Say Thank You

Companies have a strange history with saying thank you. Sometimes, they get the words out, but follow them up with, “And I’d love you to buy THIS item, too!” Other times, they say thank you only when they’re ready to hit you up in the sales process again, or when they need something. Get in the habit of thanking your clients and customers. It’s a magic secret to creating good service.

Service Craftsmanship

Service Craftsmanship is part of the Human Business Way, a set of guiding principles and practices we’ve assembled for professionals in companies of any size – solo to mega corporation – so we can help you build a sustainable, relationship-minded business. If you want to learn more about the Human Business Way, I’d recommend checking out my weekly newsletter (it’s FREE).

Your customers are not only becoming increasingly social, their digital lifestyle is fueled by mobile devices. Whether it’s a smart phone or a tablet, they are masters of the small screen experience and accomplished in the art of communicating with both their thumbs and their voice. The most riveting facet of the mobile revolution is not only what we’re witnessing, it’s what we’re missing in these important times of transformation.

These connected customers or Generation C as I refer to them are critical to your organization beyond their role of consumer. They are increasingly taking over the inside of your company as your everyday workforce. So in many ways, we are the very people we’re trying to reach. And, to do so takes standardization, transformation, and empowerment. This is the dawn of the mobile enterprise and as a result, digital strategists must think beyond the idea of a social business. Now’s the time to lay the foundation for an adaptive enterprise where mobile becomes one of the pivotal screens for employee and customer engagement, communication and collaboration. Without leadership and standardization however, employees will use their mobile devices as part of their work, but do so without regard or knowledge of best practices on what to do and what not to do and how it aligns with corporate policies and security.

Chris Silva, my colleague at Altimeter Group, just released a new report, “Power to the People: Identify and Empower Your Mobile Workforce A Three-Phase Strategy to Serve Mobile Workgroups.” It was written with the intention of helping businesses better understand the state of the mobilized workforce and how to increase productivity while empowering the connected employee.

As Silva noted in his post announcing the report, “My collaborator and editor Jeremiah Owyang and I began with a hypothesis that, as the age of mobile = email has come to a close, are mobile employees being served with the proper applications to make them be more productive? Our guess was that they weren’t, and largely, rollouts are just getting started but there are already some lessons to be learned. The most important is that different roles have different needs from mobility, and determining who is using mobile today, and what their needs are from mobile is the first step to a defensible mobility plan.”

As always, a successful mobile rollout examines employee and customer expectations, business goals, and long-term trends to develop a strategy that looks beyond Blackberries, iPhones and iPads and Droids. One of Silva’s observations hits the new mobile opportunity squarely between the eyes, “Within one large law firm that we spoke with, in the course of one year, the company went from 100% BlackBerry devices for mobile users to just 5% — the other 95% were all iPhones. As mobile application ecosystems continue to flourish, supporting mobile users is no longer about email.”

In his report, Silva lays out a three step process to choose the right tools and ultimately develop the construct of a mobile and adaptive enterprise…

1. Conduct a mobility audit

2. Examine Roles

3. Partner Choice

His research encourages those leading technology strategies to start with understanding the constituencies inside the organization. As executives, technical workers, and contractors have varying needs for mobile productivity, they do share the need to stay connected and productive wherever whenever.

Silva’s research identified three common internal roles around mobile engagement…

1. Information Worker: Need = consume

2. Field/Sales Worker: Need = collaborate

3. Executive/Technical Worker: Need = compute

Consume: Users inside of organizations are looking to access corporate information on the go. These information consumers are seeking information that is accessible and digestible on their device of choice.

Collaborate: Workers may be creating information in the field, such as notes, drawings, recordings, and photos, and need a path to access and store information on corporate data stores. Current tools in place, such as Microsoft SharePoint, rank poorly among these users and IT departments due to a lack of support for popular mobile platforms.

Compute: Heavy travelers and temporary workers (like contractors) are looking to tablet devices to be the only piece of tech they carry day-to-day. An emerging class of solutions aims to give these users access to the enterprise applications, the corporate desktop, or both from the tablet or even smartphone the user is toting.

Participating organizations were then asked to rank their mobile challenges. Collaboration associated with remote/field professionals ranked at the top of the list with 61% followed by those who need access to complex computing tasks at 27%.

To help businesses grasp the state of mobile chaos within the organization, Silva leaves decision makers with three actionable steps to assess, learn, and design an informed and scalable mobile enterprise…

1. Conduct an audit for level-set: Before embarking on user identification and role analysis, the initial and most critical step is to perform a level-set. The question to answer is what are the devices and who is using them?

2. Understand user needs by conducting detailed stakeholder interviews and human factors analysis: The analysis completed in step 1 will highlight favorite tools, but as Silva cautions, they may not be the ideal choices for the long term.

3. Choose the right solution by creating a weighted partner model: Inputs form the previous two steps will help identify the platforms that demand support, as well as the groups most in need of mobility.

With all of the talk about social media and the need to create an infrastructure to support a social enterprise, we cannot overlook the importance of mobilizing the workforce. Doing so enables employees to more effectively collaborate with team members within to improve collaboration with customers externally.

The story of Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, a helicopter, and how thinking a little bit bigger about networking will get you a lot further.

Landing a helicopter on Johnny Cash’s lawn unannounced in the late ‘60s is the kind of thing that could put you on the wrong end of a shotgun. But for country legend Kris Kristofferson, it’s the stunt that finally made Cash take notice of the songwriter.

Kristofferson had tired of the handing off demo tapes to Cash and his associates to no avail. It wasn’t getting him anywhere because Cash wasn’t even listening to them. (Cash later told Kristofferson he threw the tapes in the lake.)

Instead of giving up, Kristofferson decided to go guerrilla. By thinking big, thinking creatively, and using the resources at hand, the former Army pilot was able to cut through the noise of ho-hum networking and stand out from the crowd of Nashville songwriters hoping the Man in Black would record their songs.

It was a high risk, high reward approach–and one that’s become near-apocryphal in the details–but that’s what guerrilla networking is about. And as long as the risks are measured, payoff can be big. “I think there’s a big risk in any type of networking or marketing endeavor,” says Monroe Mann, author of Guerrilla Networking: A Proven Battle Plan to Attract the Very People You Want to Meet. “But if you’re trying to play it safe, you’re probably not going to get noticed.”

To break the tedium of traditional networking, Mann advocates that people stop trying to meet as many people as they can. Instead, he says, seriously consider what kind of person other people in your field want to meet–and then be that person. “Networking isn’t about just banging on doors over and over. If you have nothing to offer to other people, it doesn’t matter how persistent you are. Johnny Cash probably said ‘If this guy has the creativity to do this, maybe his music is just as creative.’”

As an actor and filmmaker, (with a film out that showed at the Cannes Film Festival recently) Mann has had success using guerrilla networking tactics to navigate a very competitive industry. Here are some tips from his playbook.

Consider Your Audience

Thinking only of what you want to get out of a networking contact is not only self-centered, but anti-productive. You’ll be viewed as a parasite–you want to be viewed as an asset. If you can sit down and figure out what your target wants and needs, you’re more likely to be welcomed in.

The good news is that everybody needs something. “If you want to meet Steven Spielberg, think about who he wants to meet,” says Mann. “He wants to meet a guy with an amazing script. He wants to meet somebody that can introduce him to 20 million bucks.”

Produce Your Own Projects

As a struggling actor, Mann was blue in the face begging for acting parts. It seemed a waste of energy, so he put his efforts into producing his own films. Soon, his inbox was filling up. “All of a sudden I wasn’t just a stupid actor. Now I was a filmmaker. I was a producer. I had hundreds of people people sending me head shots, I had cast directors saying ‘we can help you.’”

Having a product to show people pulled a lot more weight than trying to convince others he was a good actor. “A world opened up because I had become the kind of person that all these people wanted to meet.”

Don’t Rush It

People tend to approach networking as a numbers game, thinking the more at bats, the more likely they are to get a hit. But Mann suggests people take more time to create a solid strategy before spending time implementing it. “People do traditional networking by just pushing their way in and giving out business cards thinking that’s what’s going to make progress.”

Guerrilla networking takes more time and effort but ultimately the results are often superior. “It takes longer because you’ve got to think creatively like Kristofferson did, and it may take resources to put that into play–a helicopter, finding where to land, clearing it with FAA or whatever it may be. That’s a lot more than just trying to put it in the mail.”

Be Memorable

Several years ago, Mann employed a small but very creative tactic in order to get the attention of agents in Canada: He sent agents checks for a million dollars, writing “void” on the back, but also indicating that that could be their payday if they worked with him. “It was enough for them to remember the name ‘Monroe Mann,’” says Mann, who got ten or fifteen calls back and couple agents representing him.

Don’t Fear Rejection

Basically, you have to be willing to fail when it comes to guerrilla networking. But there are some calculations that can be made when determining whether an idea is worth the risk. “Whenever I make these decisions,” says Mann, “I’ll often brainstorm what’s the worst that can happen if I do this and then write down all the different possible scenarios. You don’t want to cross over the line from persistent to a pest–or god forbid you get a restraining order against you.”

Image: Flickr user Steven Martin

The UAE has just launched an effort to embed its National ID card system into smartphones. Yup, that could mean you have to carry your phone at all times. Scary. Could it happen here?

We write a lot about NFC technology and its power to change pretty much everything from the way you shop, to the way you exchange information with other phone owners to advertising and so on. Many interesting innovations involve smartphone NFC tech, but it’s not all for good. The United Arab Emirates plans to incorporate NFC into its newish National ID card scheme.

The government has just begun work with local cell phone operator Etisalat to get the project off the ground. Etisalat, remember, was caught in 2010 trying to force a “network upgrade” code patch to its BlackBerry users that was instantly identified as plain old officially sanctioned spyware. So right from the start, this partnership isn’t sounding like the best friend of human rights.

But it gets worse. The National ID card scheme, created in 2004 in its modern smart-card guise, means every citizen has an official ID number which is associated with their chip-enabed card. On its tiny sliver of silicon it also carries personal identification information, a photo, and digitzed versions of the owner’s fingerprints. Carrying your ID card is mandatory, all the time. To be fair, the various parts of the UAE have been a bit lenient with imposing the scheme, but its all-encompassing power is still a bit threatening.

In some ways, popping this information into a smartphone seems like a great idea. The card is a legal requirement, and losing it must be a pain in the ass for citizens–and we all know how easy it is to misplace a tiny credit-card sized slip of plastic. Embedding the data into a phone means it may be harder to lose, as you’ve got more of an incentive to keep hold of your smartphone nowadays because of the way it keeps you digitally connected to the world, and because of all the really personal data you hold inside like credit card numbers and passwords.

But the weird thing is that if you embed your ID into your phone, then you’re probably legally mandated to carry your phone with you. Everywhere, assuming you’re not carrying your old-fashioned card, that is. And it doesn’t even matter if the phone’s battery is dead because, depending on what NFC implementation the UAE authorities ultimately plump for, the NFC ID information could be read anyway–the antenna in the NFC loop can actually power the NFC chip to radiate its information out (which is how your train ticket systems work). You’d basically have to haul your phone around at all times, even if it were out of juice.

And, again dependant on what NFC tech the UAE chooses, there’s the possibility of remote-readable NFC systems. The kind you’re probably familiar with from ticketing or secure door entry systems need very close proximity between reader and card–partly due to the laws of physics. That’s why sometimes you have to wiggle your wallet on the sensor pad to get the card to “ping.” But there’s no reason that an NFC card can’t be activated by a remote sensor system, if it’s carefully designed.

That’s a bit worrying. Of course the ID information inside will be encrypted, and probably only government-approved people will carry the technology that can remotely read and decrypt the information. But hackers do exist, and weak encryption was probably one of the reasons a digital ID card scheme that was once proposed for the U.K. was eventually tossed out. And quite apart from hacking, there’s the issue of “feature creep” on behalf of the authorities. Because once you’ve got remote-readable NFC cards, then how tempting would it be–for the purposes of anti-terrorism–to install public reader systems in train stations or public spaces? No one’s saying the UAE authorities are actually going to do this, but the idea should give you pause. Especially when you remember the bizarre Mexican iris-scanner public-tracking scheme.

Now, skip to 2015 when more of us are carrying NFC-enabled smartphones, and some of the stickier problems around agreed-upon information-storage standards have been worked out. At this point we may be comfortable having our credit card info and Starbucks loyalty card info inside our phone, and we’re probably highly adapted to the tech. Wouldn’t it be a natural step to put your driving license and passport information in there too–in a highly encrypted form, of course? The authorites would probably love it, as faking ID would be a whole bunch trickier.

Then in situations where you’re supposed to carry ID with you at all times, you’d effectively have to have your smartphone with you at all times, just as seems likely in the UAE.

Image: Khomulo Anna via Shutterstock

Via Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com