During the height of the Great Depression, Pierce-Arrow, known for producing cars for the high and mighty (including Presidents and dignitaries) offered a $10,000 car known as the Silver Arrow. It was the last car that Pierce-Arrow ever produced.

Today, Tesla rolls out the first production electric-powered car for a cool $109,000 (which can go up to a well-equipped $125,000).

The difference?

Tesla is fore fronting the next wave of political lobbyist haters by presenting something that, while no doubt priced to recoup $40 Million for the investors and R&D costs, will have a significant impact on the future of car production and fossil fuel dependency.

Or will it?

Many have tried, including the aforementioned Pierce-Arrow, to build a car that doesn’t follow standards. The new wave of “green” will offer chances for us to save our environment (if it’s not already too late) and give the consumer a reason to fight the sheer crutch that is fossil fuels.

In the next year, Tesla promises to begin production on a five passenger family sedan with enough of a charge to go about 200 miles before having to stop and get a “refill”. Experts say that’s enough to fuel a trip to work and back and possibly stop for some groceries.

Support or Death

The key to the success of Tesla and other like car companies will be in the country’s ability to build an infrastructure that can sustain and maintain a balance of outgoing (50 more years?) fossil fuel depots and electricity charge stations.

I hope that like other technologies, the advancement of electric transportation becomes affordable enough to make it a viable option in the near future. If Tesla is successful, expect every car company to force their hands in the market and also expect to see tens of thousands in production in the next 15 years.

May 5, 1961

One last note: The irony should not be lost on technologists, who will more than likely remember May 5, 1961, as the date Alan Shepard became the first U.S. man in space. His flight lasted only 15 minutes. Let’s hope the Tesla and its new brand have a much longer time line.

It was a fantastic quarter for the company and I’m especially thankful for the word of mouth advertising network. In the past three months we’ve been working on:

• Auspice Corporation - defining the user experience and designing a browser-based application for both mobile and desktop delivery that will be used across the cable industry.
• Harvard University - delivering a top-level assessment of a large-scale query tool.
• Harvard University - defining the user experience and delivering a comprehensive top-level information architecture and content mapping strategy for the entire finance division.
• CSO (CSOonline.com) - designing the user experience and developing a standards-compliant set of front-end templates for the new CSOonline.com
• Vantel Pearls - delivering enhancements to the back-end order entry process and delivering a booking report for demonstrators.
• Apex Properties - continued the design and development of a new corporate Web strategy

The new quarter looks to continue with great success as we respond to RFPs for major learning institutions and corporate marketing divisions. We’d love to hear from you and look forward to helping you solve any user experience problems.

Speed: It can make you look like a rock star or a rock star’s discarded gig wear.

Mobile UX: It can make you a helpful, innovative leading-edge company or it can make you look like someone’s old Windows 3.1 application.

From a banking application to a quick Twitter session with your friends, I believe that speed and ease of use are the ultimate drivers for mobile applications. Web and application developers have been going through a growth path that includes the typical questions:

• What’s a mobile application?
• Who would ever trust such a thing as a mobile application?
• How fast can I get one for my business?

Years ago, the question surrounding the viability of mobile, image-less browsing was relegated to R&D and people with a great deal of time on their hands. These days, it’s becoming more and more a requirement in our proposals and presentations. Have you seen an increase? Do the requests make sense?

Trust Me

Trust is a key factor in many of the decisions our customers make as to whether or not they belong in the mobile community. My personal advice to any company who has a service or application that can be used in quick sessions (less than a three-minute transaction) is to go for it. Build the application using the latest and greatest security you can employ and create your mobile application as soon as possible.

Trust comes with time. Established in x year. Since xxxx. Time is a great way to generate trust to your audience. It isn’t going to carry you very far, but it’s a start and it’s something you won’t have if you don’t move now.

Again, Again!

Once you’ve gone through a comprehensive design for the mobile version of your offering, it’s critical to keep the ball bouncing. By standing still and keeping your early iterations in production, you’ll lose the edge.

Paying attention to new browser versions, the ability to incorporate time-saving development environments and keeping your application or service fresh is going to keep the customer alert and keep you on the right path.

Remember the Past

It’s a significant effort to produce the right UX for a mobile environment. It takes a deep understanding of your product, your staff and the design process for human factors and behavior.

Additionally, it takes time. Most often, we notice that failing mobile ux is a product of not taking enough time to sort out the business requirements. It’s not effective to take what you have and “re purpose” it. The mobile version should have the same care and feeding that was established with the big sister or big brother product.

In most situations, you’ll run into some nasty speed bumps such as

• language versions / regional codes
• brand elements
• functional buttons / iconography
• vanity

That last bullet is pretty important. Vanity can kill a mobile application. If the logo is too big, the first impression might be that the provider cares much more about themselves than they do about me. If it’s too small, or ignored altogether, the customer may feel that the provider isn’t being transparent.

Corporate vanity has a strong place in the mobile world: marketing materials, about pages and tasteful watermarks.

Conceive and Create

Use your product knowledge and your creative staff to work together. It’s an effort that can not be successfully carried out by one or the other. Both departments (or vendors) need to work in harmony to effectively produce your mobile application or service.

You could smell death in the air the moment Warner chose to support Blu-Ray. With five major studios and a major game system (Playstation 3) behind it, Blu-Ray was picking up steam and slamming press release after press release in the face of Toshiba, Microsoft and Intel.

But this victory may come at a significant cost to the consumer. As much as it would be lovely to think that supporters of the new format would be competing against each other in the hardware space, this may not be the case. Blu-Ray will be less expensive, eventually, just like all technology based items. However, the road to affordable personal development of high definition DVDs will be bumpy for sure.

I have seen both formats and have been swayed by the marketing effort of Blu-Ray. They simply did a better job with their brand. With a tip to my cap to Toshiba, congratulations to the new / old next best thing.

A quick knock on the big-house brew companies: Costco is now going to take a bite out of your annual revenue by creating it’s own line of brews. That’s right, Costco Wholesale is entering into the private-label brew business.

I am not surprised in the least, but the quote from the article states that sub-premium beers will suffer more than well-known national brands. I think that’ll be the case UNLESS Costco decides it wants to enter the ad wars of tomorrow and build up a deeper roster of brews.

What’s next, Under Armor selling athletic footwear?