Continuations: Tumblr and Yahoo
It is now official that Tumblr will become part of Yahoo. Marissa announced the news in style with an animated gif. I have been lucky to be part of Tumblr’s journey as an angel investor and as an active blogger on the service since February 2008.
I am excited about the combination with…
Exclamation: Tumblr. + Yahoo! = !!
I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!
We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and…
Know the app that uploaded your contacts and messages friends in background? It starts with a “P” and Google called it out last week during I/O in this slide, “The Uncanny App Valley.”
48px touch input (Android) v. 44px touch input (iOS)
WSJ reports Yahoo board has approved a $1.1 billion deal — in cash — to purchase Tumblr.
That’s a lot of cash. Wonder if they’ll be able to work from home. It’s hard to see Yahoo improving the user experience.
Source: joshsternberg
Google openly welcoming developers to the Navigation Drawer paradigm during today’s UX session on creating delightful Android experiences. According to Rich Fulcher and Jens Nagel of the Android design team, this new pattern is “future proof” when adding more data to one’s app.
Q1 2013: Focus Small, Build Backwards @ Travelzoo
It’s been a busy few weeks into Q2 for Travelzoo that I missed a quarterly report on the mobile and social business, which we disclosed to Wall Street in April. Looking at what we achieved in 90 days at the start of 2013, it’s clear that we’re following through on our ethos of “focusing small” but “building backwards” to deliver a quality, on-the-go and connected experience in the leisure travel market.
Some highlights from the quarter:
- Mobile now represents over 35% of traffic to Travelzoo throughout North America and Europe. When we started in 2011, mobile constituted just 10% of visitors engaging with the brand.
- Our product and engineering teams unveiled a complete overhaul of the iPhone app, skyrocketing passed 1.5 million global downloads and grabbing a feature from Apple in the App Store. Not just that, we introduced the first single-purpose app for Local Deals merchants for faster paperless redemption, a huge (photo centric) update to the Android app and enhanced mobile marketing features throughout the web experience.
- The social audience continues to grow, passing a huge milestone of 1,000,000 engaged followers on Facebook and Twitter channels throughout the world.
- Redesigned desktop deal pages for Travel and Local Deals, with a greater and cleaner emphasis on sharing via Facebook, Twitter and Email.
- Beta partner with Twitter as one of 10,000 developers to launch Twitter Cards for rich-media views of Travelzoo content on the web and in Twitter’s mobile apps.
Thank you to every member of the team (in Mountain View, CA + New York, NY + Europe - you know who you are!) for being inspired to “ship” and deliver our own journey into the future.
Spotted last night in the back of a yellow cab in NYC: a sponsored ad for the Travelzoo mobile app! Also note the enthusiasm of Kuzma’s shout “Dave’s app!” toward the end of the clip.
But what if there isn’t another Google? “If there’s not going to be another Google,” Graham said, “then we’re so deeply screwed that we all should be getting bags of silver and shotguns.
…when you have internal stakeholders who understand the design process, you don’t need to worry about constantly building consensus. Deliverables like lengthy specs, comprehensive wireframes, and pixel-perfect PSDs are all artifacts from a time when risk-averse clients needed to enforce progress and limit variability. Inside of a product company, these efforts waste time, create politics, and mask responsibility.
