William Gill

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of location-based services lately. The first thing that occurs to me: nobody talks about location-based services anymore. There are just ‘services’. It occurs to me that Location, in and of itself, is not an ‘experience’, per se. It is an enabler of experiences. Allow me to explain…

Benedict Evans, the well-known mobile industry analyst, has posited that we actually have no idea what it will mean in five years to “install an app on my smartphone”. The market and the technology that powers it is changing and evolving so fast that there is no way to know how the industry will look…

My father, in his younger years, was an interstate trucker. As was common in those days, he owned his own truck, instead of leasing one or driving one that belongs to a company. His truck, the trailer, the tarps and ropes and chains, were all the tools of his trade. During the week he was…

Software is a solution to a problem. Or rather, it is a part of a solution to a problem. A product is more than just the software, and it’s more than the solution. A complete product encompasses an entire product business: a consumer value proposition, a profit model, resources, processes and tools. Marketing and channels…

Here’s an interesting statistic. The top 20 grossing apps in the iOS App Store are all free apps, according to online app analytics platform Distimo. In fact, from the top 100 grossing apps, only 9 of them are paid apps, with prices ranging from $0.99 to $8.99, but most hovering around the $2.99 mark. Source…

The Guardian published a very eye-opening piece yesterday on the usage of the Google Maps app on iOS devices. The summary is: despite the massive consumer backlash when Apple ousted Google and launched Apple Maps in iOS6, and the huge number of downloads the Google Maps iOS app attracted, usage of Google’s app has been…

I’m not a designer by trade (which means I have never been to design school or worked as a designer professionally), but I spend a lot of time designing things – websites, apps, experiences, presentations, flyers, posters and so on. The tools and resources needed to design beautiful things are more accessible than they have…

At this weekend’s Product Camp in Berlin I held an interesting session on Monetising Consumer Experiences. The discussion was good and we had great input and perspectives from everyone in the room. Here are my notes from the session: Why do we care? Every product manager needs to understand their business model. Remember, an idea…

You’re lucky to have them. Without your customers you have no sales, no revenue and no business. When the line at the post office stretches out of the door and into the street, I think: “How can I avoid doing my business here next time?” When my cable goes down and it takes 30 minutes…

Just last week I posted about how the TV and film industries can battle piracy by embracing the internet as an on-demand content delivery mechanism. I compared it to the Spotify model and suggested that if you just make television available to people anytime and anywhere they want it, on any device at a fair…

The solution to online media piracy doesn’t really have to be so complicated. It’s actually quite simple: make it easier for a consumer to watch, hear or read legal material than it is to find high-quality pirated copies. Simple. Some say that the music industry is failing to keep pace with emerging technology and consumer…

In idea is not a business; and it’s not a product. An idea is just an idea. What makes an idea ready to become a product? Facts. An idea made up of only opinions is just that – opinions. Don’t get me wrong: opinions are often sensational places to start a product from. Some of…

Too many of us spend far too much time in the building. We sit at our computers and read blogs and write emails; we discuss in conference rooms and over coffee, sometimes even at the cafe down the street. But how much time do we actually spend outside the building? Your customers are not in…

The web is awash with photo sharing services designed to broadcast your photos to as many people as possible. Even before the ubiquitous Instagram services like Flickr and Facebook were flooding you with photos from your friends of their holidays, their achievements, their pets, or whatever… photos that were liked, re-shared, posted, re-posted, pinned, re-pinned…

I just heard (via @montymunford) that Google will start ranking mobile websites lower in search results when they use a “download our app” popup on the page. Read about it here. One of Google’s justifications is that the experience of seeing a pop-up banner may be ‘disruptive’ to the user experience. Is it Google’s job…

In the 1930’s, in the very early days of the Soviet Union under Stalin, the communist leaders knew they had a problem. The process of Stalinist Industrialisation forced the majority of the Russian population, most of whom had lived in the countryside, into newly constructed settlements based around factories and industry. People were dispossessed of…

Photo: Wikimedia I suffer from device fatigue. Not just the kind where I cannot deal with the sheer number of connected devices, gadgets and gizmos being released every day – but the kind where I am overwhelmed with the number of devices that I actually already own. I have a Macbook Air, a Sony Vaio…

While playing around with an iPad mini I tried out the camera, and was not too impressed with the result. These photos below were taken at the same time of day in a relatively dark room with no flash and no additional lighting. There was no post processing of the photos at all – this…

Detroit City is about to erect a gigantic statue of their three-time hero Robocop – the part man, part machine crime-enforcing cyborg. As fantastic as the story is, every day there is more and more science in the fiction. Peter Weller’s character had to die before being packed into the giant metal suit and coming…

The Financial Times reported today: “Microsoft is preparing to reverse course over key elements of its Windows 8 operating system, marking one of the most prominent admissions of failure for a new mass-market consumer product since Coca-Cola’s New Coke fiasco nearly 30 years ago.” One of the most prominent admissions of failure since New Coke? What gratuitous hyperbole…