Bencredible

For those who don’t know me, I am a tech junkie. A technoholic as I used to say during the TechnologyEvangelist.com days. When new technology comes out, I grab it, learn it and decide if I want to keep it or not. This holds true of smartphones as well.

I own or have owned several smartphones: HTC Evo, HTC Nexus One, Apple iPhone 3G, 3G S, and 4, Blackberry 8800, Palm Pre, etc., etc. For a couple of years I used the iPhone as it was the best smartphone on the market. Alas, it looks like Android has caught up.

The problem with Android is that there are several key things it doesn’t do as well as it should. Scrolling is not as smooth as it should be. While the browser is based on Webkit just like the iPhone, it is not as good as the iPhone browser at detecting what you want to zoom in to. Basically it comes down to the idea that the iOS is more polished than Android, but Android is more usable than iOS.

Whaaa?

For weeks now I have been trying to figure out how to put in to words why I prefer Android. Heck, I wasn’t even sure myself. I decided to run a couple of tests. The first test was to carry both the HTC Evo and the iPhone 4 with me at the same time and see which one I would grab when I needed to do something. I would switch which pocket each phone was in every day to ensure this wasn’t muscle memory that I was observing. The result: nearly every time I wanted to do something I went for the Evo and not the iPhone. The next test was to leave the Evo at home and use only the iPhone. See what it was about the Evo that I liked so much but could not put in to words. The result surprised me a bit.

When forced to use just the iPhone I found myself changing how I perform even the most basic actions to get around some pretty serious flaws in the iPhone workflow. For example, I can’t perform many bulk actions on e-mail such as ‘Mark Read’ so I found I would move the e-mail to another folder, wait until I got to my Webmail client, move the messages back while marking them as read. Otherwise my Inbox would read something like 800 new messages even though I really only had 12. When working with SMS alerts, I would send 3 alerts for urgent items. Since I can’t add my own SMS Alert Tones without jailbreaking the iPhone, and even then I don’t believe I can have a different tone for each contact, I was forced to change how I deal with SMS alerts and messages as well. There are usability issues like these all over iOS, which I didn’t even realize were there until I started using Android.

I have found that on my Nexus One and Evo I change the device to work with how I want to use the phone. With the iPhone it is the other way around. I change how I work to allow the device to be used at all. At the end of the day that’s why I prefer my Evo, it does what I want and not the other way around.

This is not to say that the iPhone is not a great device. The iPhone 4, even more than the 3G S, is smooth like silk. Every action is just fast, responsive and does exactly what you would think. On the Evo you have HTC Sense in your way. HTC makes some amazing hardware, but they really suck at software. They seem to think they know better than Google on usability but alas, they are very, very wrong. It takes a lot of hacking around to make an Evo battery last a full day and to get the interface to become responsive. Heck, I rooted my phone and just installed a stock version of Android which basically fixed all of the faults in the Evo. Just waiting on Android 2.2 which should make the Evo just as smooth as the iPhone 3G S, but probably not as smooth as the iPhone 4.

My point is, Android works for me because I was able to make it work. If you’re not that geeky and don’t want to spend the time to make the device truly fit your workflow, iPhone is probably for you. If instead you want a device that answers to you and not the other way around then Android is for you. Either way, it is great to see Google stepping up and giving iOS a real run for its money.

I have not been posting here lately mostly because I have been trying to make Spacevidcast coverage freaking AMAZING! I think it is working out well over there, but it sure does take a lot of time. In the end, I truly believe it is all worth it, even if I basically work 24 hours a day.

Before I mention the viewership stats for STS-132, I would like to point out that it was the final scheduled launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis, so I’m sure viewership was higher because of that. For STS-131 we had 234,079 views live. I figured that we would probably get a 1/3 bump because this was the last launch of 104, maaaaybe if we were really lucky we would get 50% more views. Best case scenario would have been 400,000 views of the live launch.

On our SD/Mobile channel alone we had 692,715 views or almost 3x the number of viewers that we had for STS-131! That’s just our SD channel and does not take in to account the HD channel or any of the on-demand versions of the videos.

To put this in to perspective, around 383,000 viewers tuned in to CNN that day according to this report. In fact there is only one news network that had better ratings than we did that day, Fox News Channel with 1,065,000 viewers. So for NASA, if they want to reach people, a lot of people who are very interested in space flight, it is time that they turn to New Media and look away from the old media sources. I full well expect that by the last shuttle flight, be it STS-134 or STS-135 we will have better ratings than all of the cable news networks, including Fox News Channel.

THANK YOU to everyone who tuned in and helped make the STS-132 live coverage so amazing. I know we were syndicated on a ton of sites and had a lot of people working behind the scenes to make things happen. It doesn’t matter if you were a viewer or contributor, thank you for helping make Spacevidcast out-perform traditional television. Not by a little, but by a landslide!

Until January 2010 Spacevidcast was more of a hobby than a business. We really didn’t have any competition and we owned the space podcast marketspace (outside of NASA produced podcasts of course). If I’m being honest, since it was more of a hobby I really only brought by C+ game at best. If we couldn’t make a show, then, you know, cancel it. If it was too hard to do an event, just skip it.

On January 19th, 2010 Spacevidcast became a real company. Technically speaking we’re Spacevidcast LLC. Now it is time to bring the A game.

There will be a bit of a format change on the show coming up. We’re still going to have fun and be personable, but the live shows really won’t be news focused. That’s what the daily shows will be for. Here’s the new game plan:

• Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday produce a daily 5 minute show on space. In this show we’ll have a couple of news items, a ‘Today in Space History’ and a featured weekly app download for your computer or mobile device. These will be highly produced shows and available only on-demand.
• Thursday nights (in the US) we will have our live show. This show will be guest centric. We will bring the guest on right away and forego the news. Hey, we already did the news in the first part of the week anyhow. This will be a well produced live show that will last between 30 and 60 minutes. Post show will remain as is.
• Friday we will make the live show available on-demand.
• We will have at least 3 new articles per week. These will be any anything human space flight related.
• We will be pulling in our KSC resources (namely Jason) a lot more to help produce segments and get exclusive epic only content and interviews.

I can’t decide on the podcasts. Audio podcasts are easy to produce, but with the amount of video we will be cranking out, that will get to be a bit much. What do you guys think? Would a weekly podcast be of any value to you? If so, what would you like to see the format be?

In addition, our launch coverage (which is already the best coverage on or off the planet) is about to become even better. I won’t ruin the surprise, but lets just say some money is being invested, some graphics are being made, and no one, not even traditional broadcast, will be able to touch our content. These final 4 shuttle missions will be truly amazing, and you can only get that on Spacevidcast.com. Did I mention you can get all of that in true HD too? Yeah.

So if Spacevidcast today is just my C+ game, imagine what my A game will bring. I can say that my laptops are all crunching new video elements, we have a new system in place for content research and validation, I have a group of people helping to get us inside access the likes of which the world has never seen, oh and since we have epic now we can afford to do all this cool stuff!

Stay tuned! These changes will start happening as soon as show 3.11 with our guest Robert Pearlman. And as the weeks go by you’ll see more and more new elements get added in to the show. This week will only be a small taste, but I think you guys will all like what you see. As always we welcome comments and feedback. What do you like about the show today? What do you hate? Where can we improve? Lets make this the best video show, ever!

One thing that Spacevidcast epic is supposed to do is bring in enough income to help pay for trips to conferences. This is good for the space community because we want to bring you as much coverage of stuff as possible. The idea has been working, but since it is so new, we’re still a bit limited in what we can do.

Our goal was 20 members in the first month and then 30 new members each month after that. Well I’m happy to say that in Feb 2010 we got over 40 members! But March has slowed quite a bit, in no small part to us being busy and not pushing epic as much. Also a part of it is that many of the people who were waiting to buy epic now have it and don’t need to buy it again.

So here we are. Great start, but not enough. Both Cariann and I were able to go to SpaceUp and bring you as much awesome coverage as we could, but Spacevidcast epic simply was not big enough for us to both go to SxSW. This was the conference that I really wanted to go to, but had a hard time justifying over SpaceUp, ISDC and shuttle launches. So we opted to send Cariann all by herself while I stayed at home.

We attempted to record the Moon 2.0 panel but I’m not sure how much we were able to get. Cariann is also making a bunch of great contacts at SxSW and hopefully some of them will pan out. Spacevidcast epic is nice, but we’re not opposed to having advertising dollars in the bank too. Hey, we have grand visions for Spacevidcast and that all takes money.

So if you guys have any ideas on how we can raise more cash and get to more conferences, events and cool things that you want covered, please drop a line in the comments below. Each trip on average costs around $2,500, so keep that figure in mind. Once we hit 250 epic subscribers, we should be good to go to 1 event per month!

A little while back I wrote about the woes and troubles I was having trying to find a membership plugin for WordPress that did everything I need. Here is the list of items I was looking for:

On-site credit card processing. If a potential customer has to go out, create a PayPal or other account, enter all their info, authorize the purchase and generally jump through hoops to get your product you may have lost them already. The credit card processing should be on site (secure of course), easy to use and International.

Affiliate program. My greatest evangelists are the users who already have the product and think it is awesome! Why not allow them to help sell the product and give them a kick back of each sale they make?

E-Mail marketing. Getting the customer is one step, retaining them is another. It is important to be able to communicate with everyone as to why their membership is valuable and what they are getting out of it. It is also important to allow the members to opt-out of said e-mails if they want to. The initial sale is just part of the process, keeping them is the other part.

Coupons. If I want to have a sale on the product, or give out coupons to sites that can offer a discount if they use code ‘PROMO1′ for example, I should be able to do that too! It is a great tool for cross-promotion of my content and their content.

Detailed reporting. I need to be able to see what is working and what isn’t working. What do the sales look like. Where are they coming from? How much am I making and how much has to go back out to affiliates?

Support. Pre-sales, installation and maintenance are all important. Getting the plugin to do exactly what you want will probably require a few hoops you’ll need to jump through, so you’ll probably find yourself leaning on the support team a lot more than expected.

So what did we do in the end? When it was all said and done I actually purchased three plugins to get just the right ones to fit our needs: Suma Plugin, Wishlist Member and Digital Access Pass. The final plugin we went with was Digital Access Pass. Why? Because it does nearly everything on my features list and no other plugin comes even close!

When I originally wrote the article Digital Access Pass or DAP didn’t have a key feature which was on-site credit card processing. They now support on-site processing through Authorize.net or PayPay Payments Pro. We use Authorize.net and this is nice because I have full control over the merchant and what will be done. On the customers credit/debit card statement they won’t see ‘PayPal’ but rather ‘Spacevidcast.com’. It looks like a complete and total solution. Wishlist Member still to this day doesn’t support this feature, although their support department originally told me they did. Lame.

In addition DAP already had almost all of the other features I needed. The products and drip content are quite powerful. Far more powerful than Wishlist Member.  Suma doesn’t even have the ability to do drip products or one-off sales. E-mail marketing was already built in. Affiliates are built in and scary powerful. Issues I wouldn’t have even thought of were in place allowing the sales to be properly matched to a user no matter the scenario (check it out on their site, it is quite powerful). I have detailed reporting on what is happening with my account as soon as I log in to the admin dashboard. It was almost everything I needed.

One thing DAP is missing are coupons. I believe they are working on that though as I have seen rumblings of that on the blog.

It is worth pointing out that I tried all three. Suma was a close second. It had on-site credit card processing, support was simply amazing and the product worked well. The big problem with Suma was that it was only a recurring subscription product. It doesn’t do drip products or marketing, it doesn’t do e-mail campaigns, it doesn’t do affiliate programs and while you can hack in coupons it really doesn’t do them like you would expect.

The big plugin in the industry is Wishlist Member and going in to this project I thought it would be the product I would end up with. Boy was I wrong. Other people rant and rave about their support, but in my experience I found them to be the slowest in responding, when they did respond the answer was wrong and even after I asked for a refund I don’t think I ever got it. The product does drip products / marketing very, very poorly. Worst of all you have to go off-site, create an account with a third party and hope you don’t lose your customer in the process. No on-site credit card processing (no matter what their support team says). Wishlist does a great job of marketing themselves, but maybe if they spent a little less time making videos and a little more time adding features to keep up with DAP we would have gone down that road for Spacevidcast instead.

After a week long trial with each the clear winner was DAP. It is an evolving product and even after we launched there were new updates and great new revisions to the code. I know Suma is working on a v3 beta as well. I don’t think Wishlist Member has anything in the pipe, maybe a new video they are working on? If you’re looking for a new WordPress membership plugin check out Digital Access Pass. Don’t get sucked in by flashy marketing, really look at the products. I think you’ll come to the same conclusion I did that DAP is hands down the best WordPress Membership plugin on the Internet today.

If you want to see how we used this plugin in production hit up http://www.spacevidcast.com/epic and while you’re there… Maybe buy an epic subscription!