The part that was not recorded is this: Bo was hanging out with a bunch of new friends, one of which works in a hotel as a manager. So Bo asked her if she knows a new app called “Overnight”, which is kinda like “Airbnb for hotels”. And to Bo’s biggest surprise (which I still don’t understand why), she heard about it. He is surprised because he always believes himself to be the first person in his social group to get hand on new information, like new companies, new products or new technology. That’s how we started the show.

03:00 From Overnight, “Airbnb for hotels”, to the trending term in China, O2O (online to offline). We spend some time discussing the on-demand valet service in San Francisco, Luxe. How the business runs, or how the service works for customers?

13:00 Services like Luxe is going to compete with Uber, Wash.io, and other services on human resources. So Bo proposed the idea to provide a service for the freelancers to maximize their income by helping them schedule their day for on-demand services. 

25:00 But will people be willing to do several services at the same time? Joy described how Didi Dache (Chinese version of Uber), and deliver service work in China. Bo argued that if the services help freelance workers make more money, people will use it.

53:00 More and more services in the future will not be using flat rate any more. Like Sprig, they are charging differently at different time in a day. For busy hours, they charge higher delivery fee.

P.S. Apologies for the choppy voice, the slow Internet is the one to blame.

We started with backpack. Bo has always been interested in backpacks with high quality and great features. At first, I think i would just be quiet and let him do the talk, yet, we started talking about customization, VR, 3D printers, drones and other things. And in the end, we ended with smart suitcase. It’s an interesting talk.

01:00 How we switched from talking about backpacks to customization of software.

11:00 Bo started talking about the value of mass customization. If it adds value to users, then making the interfaces customizable to every user will be on the top priority to companies. But the reason why customization is not popular is that people are too lazy to do that. Bo drew the connection with the popularity of VR. We extended the topic a bit further to include 3D printer and drones.

24:00 A lot of products from the beginning are toys.

34:00 We returned to the topic of backpacks again. Bo raised an interesting question: there are so many new design of backpacks on Kickstarter, why is that? And also we started talking about a smart suitcase from Kickstarter. We mainly discussed about the use cases of the product.

55:00 A better suitcase of better Internet of things of products require better battery in the future. And we also talked about beacon and QR code for a bit.

What is hover board? Why is it important? While Australia, the whole nation, banned hoverboard, Bo thinks that hoverboard is the future of transportation.

04:00 The safety concern: hoverboard on fire in several places in the States and other parts of the world; and it doesn’t seem to be safe riding outdoor.

15:00 Bo quoted Ben Thompson’s predictions on the future of transportation: electric powered, self-driven, sharing the ownership of vehicles.

21:00 The skateboard or hoverboard is to solve “the last mile problem”. But to me, it sounds like a “first-world problem” –– everything is about efficiency. Why the rush?

34:00 What if the hoverboard becomes a robot, it follows you when you are not stepping on it and your hands are not available to hold it?

41:00 Then we extended a bit into the delivery service in China, drones, etc. All future transportation tools now are still toys, but in the future, they might become something crazy.

The recording started with a choppy "hello", due to my crappy connection at home. But as we started talking, things got better. The topic we discussed was furniture rental: how it became a problem to modern people, who have to move couple times before they finally settle down somewhere; and how new approaches can be applied to solve some problems in the process. In the end, we got into a small fight about users. It was a bit embarrassing to listen back, but I decided to leave it as it is. Well, it's part of the communication process.

Side note: We’ve tried several recording tools. Cast.fm is a great tool, but too bad the connection in China doesn’t support it well. So we switched to Skype Recorder, and so far it works great. My voice has been so much clearer!

We continued the topic on personalized search. In this talk, surprisingly, both of us sound so calm and chill.

01:00 We started with Slash the Keyboard. It allows users to search while typing while use some symbols “/” and the channels to search in. It works like coding.

08:00 From technical perspective, how does Slash the Keyboard work?

17:00 We continue digressing on the topic and started talking about “How Apple is Giving Design a Bad Name”.

28:00 As we slowly get back to the topic, Bo asked us to take a step back and think about the right context for mobile search. We spent some time talking about the trust issue of searching results: results from people you know to strangers from the Internet, or from Magic the service.

39:00 How do we envision the future of mobile search?

50:00 Bo mentioned the concept “opinionated data” and how difficult it is to collect data from users to get insight from it.

Bo and I have been working on Umi Search, a personalized search related product, for about half a year. It didn’t turn out well in the end, but we realized it would be helpful if we can talk about the idea from the very beginning, and visualize how it could be in the future.

05:00 How Bo started the idea from four to five years ago. He sold everything to start business in China, and met Umi, his wife there. Without phone or Internet connection, she became the source of information to him.

13:00 The problem can also be rephrased as how to do mobile search more efficiently. Umi Search try to solve it by searching within your social accounts, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Wechat.

21:00 If the search results are most often UGC, some results might be redundant or of low quality, how could Umi Search solve that?

33:00 Technical problem might be one aspect that we were not proceeding with Umi Search, but it seems from the conversation, there are more issues to it, like the definition of personalized search.

49:00 We talks about Slash the keyboard as an interesting approach to the problem. It seems interesting if some shortcuts can be applied in the mobile search process, just programmers use code lines to create actions.

53:00 If the search product actually comes out, the user group might be pretty limited.

Before actually getting into the topic that we were ready to talk about, we spent almost an hour talking about random “first-world problem”: hot water heater, smart water cup, tickle machine, etc. Though the two items sound really random and low-tech, but if you really look for it, people are actually working on them.

And there are snippets of how we made this show. Most of the recording is just crazy laugh sound. Just for fun.

What can we do? In this episode, we discussed some of our proposed solutions. 

0:00 We share the research results from asking our family and friends on how the seniors use mobile phones. The use cases in the senior user group are pretty diversified and different than people at our age (late 20s to early 30s). The major apps that the seniors are using (in China) include Wechat and some games. 

07:10 As usual, we digress a bit and get into the discussion of Wechat as a platform for new products.

11:00 Three directions on the possible new products:  Information-related, service-related, and technology-related solutions. We propose some ideas and criticized on it. 

23:00 Joy talks about most of the current mobile design is not friendly to the senior users.

27:00 How about creating an integrated app specifically for the seniors, with completely new technical writing, new iconography, like a stripped-down version of Uber? We had back and forth discussion on the approaches, which is how sometimes product manager or engineer argue with designers. 

37:00 What is the problem we are targeting? And who might be our target audiences?

47:30 How about the need for looking for caretakers? There’s difference among China and the US. Then Bo suggests how about getting on-demand tech support like you call an uber?

01:00:00 What’s the next step? 

What have been done for the senior user group?

03:00 Recap from last episode: we’ve discussed about the problem, the situation, and came up with our own solutions.

04:35 Joy shares her research on existing products, like wearables, and apps. But everything seems designed to protect the senior groups instead of letting them to leverage the technology to learn and to grow.

07:55 The copy in apps is written for the younger generation, which is a higher level of accessibility than font size or font color. 

09:40 Community level senior care in San Francisco and other places, like Japan, China, and Hong Kong. 

16:50 Existing apps seem focus more on the physical wellness of the seniors, and it seems more can be done to help connect the senior users together.

23:20 The concept of an app might not be a good solution to the seniors, because they have to jump between apps to accomplish tasks. So what are the services that needed to provide?

31:00 How about a joint account for the kids and the parents? It seems rather confusing for the senior to manage different accounts and passwords. 

49:00 We talked about business model of startups and then we digressed. Bo got the idea that we can work on a project for certain topics and talk about it in the podcast, like a scum meeting. 

56:30 Wrap-up of the episode. 

1:05:00 We digressed a bit further to discuss the format of podcasts (with the eternal call for sponsorship).

In the pilot episode, we talked about a problem that we, and friends around us are facing now or soon: How to take care of your parents when they are far far far away? How to leverage the technology nowadays to better communicate with your family? Is video call enough? Is on-demand caretaker the solution? 

Let's find out!

Show notes:

02:40  Let’s talk stuff.  –– That’s how we started the podcast ITiL.

12:41 Questions to explore: how to take care of parents when they are far away (not in the same city or the same country)? The question arose from Bo and his friends’ experiences. 

15:00 Building communities among seniors might be a solution to approach senior care, such as religious communities.

23:21 But the problem might be bigger than what we are facing. It’s a global issue, it’s a wicked problem that some people have already started solving by creating apps or building new services, like Honor (Bo made a mistake here saying the service called Honest).

31:01 The senior users are not tech-savvy, so it might be better to leverage traditional communication channels, like phone calls instead of emails or text messages. (We kinda took a side walk and talked a bit about innovation in China. ) 

41:10 How can we make changes? Joy is looking at the big picture and Bo suggests how about finding an aspect of the problem and thinking about the possible solutions. We discussed wearable solutions, meetups for the seniors, assistant account for seniors in apps, etc. But one thing for sure, the product is not going to solve everything for the kids, but to remove the frictions in communication with the seniors. 

01:00:00 What’s next? Drill deep into one topic and talk more about in three to four episodes. And the name for the show? We decided it to be ITiL. You will find out the meaning of it if you can listen to the end. 

Music Credit:  "dodge thisss" by Tenacity