Category: Services & Products

90 seconds of luxury

It’s really a luxurious thing, not the products that the LVMH ad promotes but one can enjoy 90 seconds of good music (by Gustavo Santaolalla) and wonderfully made video in the midst of lousy and noisy TV shows. The beautiful message from the first ever TV ad of Louis Vuitton –

What is a journey ?
A journey is not a trip.
It’s not a vacation.
It’s a process, a discovery.
It’s a process of self-discovery.
A journey brings us face to face with ourselves.
A journey shows us not only the world, but how we fit in it.
Does the person create the journey, or does the journey creat the person ?
The journey is life itself.
Where will life take you ?

User Experience – Fare Conversion Table

After months’ of discussion, finally the flag-fall fare of all taxis in town raised by $1 yesterday. Since there is only a rise in flag-fall fare but not the fare per kilo-meter, the new taxi fare is therefore quite easy to calculate – just add $1 to the meter reading.

And since there is not enough time to re-calibrate all the meters of all taxis, so the local government’s transport department issued a taxi fare conversion table to display in each taxi for passenger reference (see below).

Taxi fare table

Yesterday in one taxi trip I had a chance to read this conversion table – it read something like this:

$ 15.00 -> $ 16.00
$ 16.40 -> $ 17.40
$ 17.80 -> $ 18.80
….

Yes you read it right, it just add $1 to all the small numbers in the table above. I mean, to make this piece of paper a lot more useful, why not just print one simple but bold sentence ?

Add $1 to the meter reading, thank you !!

Now you can tell, how our government officials use their brain …

When a phone is not a phone

The charismatic leader Steve Jobs once said the killer application of a mobile phone is … making phone calls. He said it last year when he introduced the iPhone and sure, iPhone changed the world a lot in terms of mobile device usability and applications. But seriously, most of time I found people are just playing with their iPhone as a toy or a fashion icon, instead of making phone calls. Look around, and you know what I mean.

I can imagine a mobile phone with good UI, good application is a powerful device and platform; and I firmly believe mobile commerce will be a totally new ball game (unlike other says, mobile commerce is only an extension of Internet eCommerce).

But before all that, get ready to spend more time to play with your phone, change the look, desktop, widgets etc. etc. See the following, another new UI system from Samsung F480 …