147 karma · joined December 6, 2010
src: http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-boss-moves-from-yahoos-ind...
src2: I worked on the Yahoo Search team at the time of the deal.
I too believe that mobile web will one day overtake mobile native apps for most peoples' daily usage. I just don't think it'll look or act anything like what we're currently doing. Luke Wroblewski gives a great talk about the early days of a new medium being an awkward state where we try to shoehorn what worked in the last medium into it. At some point we'll figure out a design and usage patten for the mobile web that'll make a world of sense in hindsight. We're just not there yet IMO and of course I have no idea what this looks like.
The FDA, while being a pain in the rear at times, will actually work with you to meet compliance. But you have to show work and be continually in touch with them and show progress (and document everything according to your own procedures, complying to regulations of course). You can't just say you're working on compliance and then not follow through and show evidence. The issue for 23andMe is the on-label use of the product "in the diagnosis of disease or other conditions or in the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, or is intended to affect the structure or function of the body." They market the product this way. If you want to market your product as such, you have to show proof to the FDA and receive approval to label the medical product in this manner. It looks like 23andMe is either not working towards compliance (and is misleading the FDA) or is doing a terrible job documenting their work towards compliance and keeping the FDA abreast (my guess is this is what's happening). That in itself will get you in trouble, but then expanding your marketing for even more on-label use of the product - which hasn't been submitted to the FDA apparently - while at the same time not having FDA approval for the original use is just plain stupid.
We never advertised off-label. Whether it's legal or not, I do recall you'd get slapped by the FDA for lack of controls. We had many cases where doctors would use a product off-label and it'd come back to us in the form of a complaint or defect (product comes back as defective, we investigate and find out the doctor was using the product for an off-label procedure it wasn't designed for and would fail, hence the 'defect'). At which point we'd have to proactively train doctors to not do this and other corrective action measures would have to be put in place. If upon investigating we find this would be a good use of the product, we'd have to go through another round of FDA fun (sometimes clinicals and how much testing depended on some factors, definitely rounds of internal testing and implement new QA tests and procedures to ensure the product can work for the new use and have proper fault tolerances as well as new labeling and training, etc).
Now, do companies try to skirt around this? Sure. Part of my job at the time was to make sure we didn't. FDA Warning letters are no joke in this industry, it can literally put you out of business.
The NFL has driven me crazy with not adopting a similar model. I can't get DTV at my home (condo), I don't care about the local teams, and paying for the whole league wasn't available on my local provider. They had a PS3 streaming option last season but I read it didn't work reliably so I didn't bother. Like you, I'd happily pay to follow a few teams teams + Red Zone. Luckily, as someone above posted, there's a great deal for $99 this season to purchase Madden and get Sunday Ticket included. I jumped all over that!
- my personal amex
- my business amex
- my debit cards (multiple banks)
- my store cards (multiple)
- all my other ID-like and reward cards (ex: Costco, Avis, etc.).
EDIT: url to report: http://www.slideshare.net/zebs/nielsen-mobile-apps-whitepape...
As for your questions:
1) Generally 10-15 minutes depending on the tasks assigned. 2) We facilitate the tests however we try to have the process be as natural as possible. One thing we learned is that it can be incredibly helpful to sit down a new user in front of the app. Things we assume as developers aren't always obvious to the average person. You'll see in the recording the steps a normal user would take so you as a developer can fix the process. 3) For the time being we are picking the demographic for the buyer to keep it simple. We'll be adding the ability to choose specific demographics later as demanded.
On the web side, I really think cost is the driving factor more than anything. As long as there's a free (open source) solution to MS's framework that is on par (we can argue either way which frameworks/platforms are better) there's little incentive for startups to go .NET. If a LAMP stack started costing as much as a .NET stack the landscape would be very different. .NET faces the problems going against the Java stack.
In the end, it's about the money. Which platform can I make more money on and does it more than pay for the costs to be on the platform? Right now on mobile it's iOS and on the web it's typically LAMP or lately a Ruby on Rails stack.
And to be fair, the Dreamcast was about as open as a 7/11, but that didn't fair too well for Sega.