Technology – Page 5

Evian’s “Baby and Me app” performs like a geriatric…..

According to the Danone website, “Baby & Me, created by BETC, shows a street full of people rediscovering their inner youth – and dance moves – as their reflections reveal the baby versions of their adult selves.” If you haven’t seen the advert, you should watch “Baby & Me” on YouTube, it’s fantastic; a perfect example of a viral marketing campaign with over 59 million YouTube views. This advert builds on the success of their “Roller Babies” campaign from a few years ago (69 million views). I’ve shown it to my children and my wife and everybody I’ve mentioned it to seems to have seen it. Evian is reaching a mass market with relatively little TV advertising spend.

To capitalise on the success of the advert, Evian has commissioned the production of a “Baby and Me” app for iOS and Android. On the face of it, this looks like a great idea. The application takes a picture of you as an adult and then uses pattern matching to identify over 70 facial features in a database of baby pictures. The application then creates a composite image of you as a baby. This has great potential for social sharing of images and it isn’t hard to see how this could help to ensure that even more people get the “Release the inner you” message from Evian.

There is no doubt that viral media is a great marketing tool and mobile apps are a great way to use peer interaction and socialisation to spread a message quickly. All good news so far from a marketing / PR perspective, but…….

…….There’s always a “BUT” isn’t there?

The Evian app is sadly disappointing.
Anybody who downloads an app that doesn’t work first time is highly likely to delete it and never use it again. Negative publicity from colleagues and friends who can’t use the app will do a great deal to damage any positive marketing messages that the app was intended to create

It is highly likely that the application designers and developers have been forced to work to a difficult schedule to get this application to market. Whilst individual teams may have all tested their application components; it is highly likely that proper end-to-end testing, including testing over relatively slow 3G and Wifi networks has not been done. Performance testing is crucial for applications like this, a poor user experience will result in users abandoning the application and never downloading it again.

So what went wrong?
Whilst performance testing is a well-established profession……
…testers need to evolve.

15 years ago testers needed to understand thick clients and complex client-server apps.
10 years ago, web applications dominated the market and testers skills (and pay rates) started to fall.
5 years ago, Web 2.0 and mobile technologies started to develop and many testers failed to understand the complexity of more complex multi-tier web applications.
Now testers need the ability, skills and tools to test across multiple devices and multiple networks and need a deep understanding of application architecture to ensure application stability, scalability and performance under load.

Many testers don’t have the required skills or testing tools to test complex multi-tier applications across different devices and network topologies. Evian have used big-hitting media companies, BETC Digital and B-Reel, to develop their application…. I bet they’re wishing that they had the application tested properly by an independent testing specialist before this week!

The

MindMeister Review

Last year I was doing an OU computing course and one of the modules required the team to work on a virtual software development project. Each of us was assigned a different role in the team and we had to work collaboratively both on and offline.

I’ve always liked using MindMaps because like most humans I don’t think in a straight line. I like the fact that with a mind map I can throw disjointed ideas at a page and put them into some sort of order later on. It’s great for creating a sketchy/work-in-progress outline of a document or presentation allowing you to reorder the content. I’ve used Mindjet and FreeMind in the past but when I want to do collaborative work I tend to use MindMeister.

I’ve used this in the following different ways:

With clients when planning IT projects and creating task lists / high-level project plans.
With the local Cub Scout leader when organising the new “Sixes”.
With the Vivit Board of Directors when doing a SWOT analysis for Vivit Worldwide.

If you’re interested in using MindMeister, click the image below.

Disclaimer: if you sign up for a free or paid account using this link, I get a free map…just thought you should know

Google Latitude contacts disappeared…now fixed

I’ve used Google Latitude for about four years now and have found the application really useful. For those of you who don’t know, Latitude is an app that you install on your smart phone (it supports Android, Blackberry or iOS) and it keeps track of your location. You can then use this information how you wish. You can share it with friends or family, so that they know where you are in real time, or just use it to maintain a history of where you’ve been. (I find it useful for expense claims when I can’t remember how many miles I’ve done or exactly which day I visited a particular client).

About 2 months ago my wife asked why I wasn’t showing up on her list of contacts on her iPhone. I had a look at my own iPhone and saw that I had “no contacts” either. I hadn’t made any changes to my privacy settings and thought it was curious that it affected both me and my wife on multiple devices. (Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs, multiple different browsers including Chrome) as well as on my iPad and iPhone. As a result of this, I suspected that the problem was with Google.

I tried deleting and adding my wife as a “Latitude contact”. Despite clicking on the invitations that we sent each other and accepting the request to share location information we never appeared in each others contact lists.

Searching for answers I found plenty of discussions on internet forums. Several people had reported that this was due to new privacy settings which coincided with a new release of Google Maps. The only solution seemed to be to log onto an android device and enable location sharing again.

But I don’t have an Android tablet…..

As an application tester, I’m reasonably au fait with virtualisation, so I had a quick look around the internet and I found this website which contains OVA files with images of Android Tablet devices. These can be used to emulate an Android tablet. http://androvm.org/blog/download/

These are the steps that I took to fix my problem

I already had VMWare Player on my home PC.
(Download and install this if you don’t already have a copy)
Downloaded a suitable OVA file
Open it in VMWare Player, created a new virtual machine
Start the VM and “boot up” your Android tablet
Choose a country location and go through the basic setup
(including typing in your google account credentials.)
Open the Google Play Store
Install Google Maps
Once Google Maps is installed, open maps and enable the “Latitude layer”
Enable location sharing

Google Maps”Hey presto” almost immediately all your devices will repopulate your friends lists and location sharing will work again.

It looks like the new version of Google Maps for Android has the functionality to enable sharing and accept invitations but this doesn’t work for existing, non-Android users, including those of us using iPhones.

If you’ve deleted friends whilst trying to fix the problem get your friends to send an invitation whilst you’re logged into your “new tablet” and you can accept the invitation and enable location sharing from within the Maps application.