The Bible app is designed to make absorbing the Word as frictionless as possible. For example, to make the Bible app habit easier to adopt, a user who prefers to not read at all can simply tap a small icon, which plays a professionally produced audio track, read with all the dramatic bravado of Charlton Heston himself.
We have a core value here at Twitter that says we want to defend and respect the user's voice. And that's important to us on a global basis. Someone doesn't sign up for a service expecting that their sign up information is going to be handed over without them being asked... We're going to defend our users' rights.
I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.
What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal. Moooo!
The user's going to pick dancing pigs over security every time.
Before Mint.com, I was a long-time user of 'Microsoft Money' and Intuit's 'Quicken.' Both were powerful tools, loaded with features and functionality around taxes, investment, budgeting - too feature-laden, in fact. They took hours to set up, forever to learn, and an hour a week to maintain.
I'm not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular company or person: for example, the software immediately behind a web site's user interface. But the vast majority of software is actually pretty generic.
As a wheelchair user, you can't move about freely. That's the only thing that bothers me a little. When I'm in the Euro Group in Brussels, colleagues who want to talk to me have to come to me. But I hope they know that this has nothing to do with arrogance.
We can listen in to a call while it is still at the ringing stage and within a fraction of a second know everything about the user. Then we can listen in to the call.
I have discovered that there are two types of command interfaces in the world of computing: good interfaces and user interfaces.
The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.
The big exchanges that hold customer deposits are a big target for hackers, and unfortunately, most bitcoin exchanges store user funds.
The FCC banned throttling for good reason, namely that Internet service providers should not bias their networks toward some applications or classes of applications. Biasing the network interferes with user choice, innovation, decisions of application makers, and the competitive marketplace.
Samsung and Apple seem to think that they're going to provide everything. Apple believes services will drive hardware, while Google wants to own each user regardless of hardware, so you have differing philosophies.
We've never much liked the idea of charging a participation tax, a phrase we coined to represent what it feels like when a software company charges you more money for each additional user. Participation taxes discourage usage across a company.
Companies in Silicon Valley invest a lot in understanding their users and what drives user engagement.
Phones were created as social tools. Smartphones are especially good at being social, integrating text, voice, video and images in an endless number of apps that can serve a user's needs, and all without the need for a web-based social network.
Monetizing by creating more value for a Venmo user makes a ton of sense to me. But other forms of monetization that are more intrusive, like in advertising or something like that, the jury is really still out for me.
Think of a pitch in terms of advertising: You're trying to hook a reader the way a commercial tries to hook a detergent user.
The biggest challenge for open source is that as it enters the consumer market, as projects like WordPress and Firefox have done, you have to create a user experience that is on par or better than the proprietary alternatives.
The gasoline tax is a user fee, but it does not fill enough of the need, and you want cars to be more efficient.
We want to ensure that as a user is moving through their world, their data is following them in an appropriate manner.
The whole concept of data science is that the software becomes the expert, and you, as the average user, are able to understand what's going on.
Mobile forced us to rethink the user experience and do something people would be able to carry out on in a couple of seconds on the mobile phone. By stripping out all the work the user used to do and putting that on the company, we were able to create a much better user experience.
If a major source of the nation's news is personalizing user experiences, people with different points of view will end up in echo chambers of their own design. Facebook didn't create that problem, but it shouldn't aggravate it.
Every point in your career is a learning lesson - I learned a lot about how much work is required to grow a user base and create a new product. I also learned that things take time and extreme hard work and passion.
Be reactionary. React to what the market wants. And the market wants one-on-one real time engagement. Now that we have the tools to engage, I'm going to continue fighting for the end user.
In addition to making Android available for free, Google also lets phone makers change the code and customize it so that an Android phone made by, say, Samsung has a different user interface than an Android phone from Motorola.
We are a consumer company and our success is directly linked to our users trusting us. Therefore we have the same incentive as the user: they want to see relevant advertising so their experience of Google is positive and we want to deliver it.
Within HTC, hundreds of ideas are tested and discarded to find those rare ideas that define the HTC user experience.
One of the cool things we're seeing at TaskRabbit is local tech and gaming startups hiring TaskRabbits to test their products and deliver immediate user feedback. As the founder of a tech startup, I can tell you that this type of focus group testing is paramount - and usually really pricey and difficult to coordinate.
Pinterest is offering consumers a way to discover things on the web, in a serendipitous way, with a beautiful user interface. So it's offering a whole new paradigm called 'discover' and allowing users to be creative.
All through the 1980s, Apple kept its prices high. There were many reasons Microsoft's much bigger user base managed to resist moving to the GUI - but price was high among them.
If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same.
Generally, our approach with products at Google is to first develop the right user base and then to figure out what's the right experience for the ads.
Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers.
