28-03-2012 01:26 Juicy J performing " Been Gettn' Money " off New 'Blue Dream & Lean' Mixtape, D/L HERE: http://www.livemixtapes.com Follow @TheRealJuicyJ @Sonny Digital (Producer) @FigzFilms (Director)
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Juicy J - Been Gettin' Money (Taylor Gang) (Official HD Video) - Video
NEW YORK (AP) -- Madness is one way to describe my experience with March Madness Live, a service for watching the annual college basketball tournament on computers and mobile devices.
Don't get me wrong. The features were great, and video quality was decent. But it wasn't easy figuring out how to get the games I was entitled to watch for free.
CBS and Turner Sports were smart to continue offering live video coverage beyond the TV. After all, many of the tournament's early games took place during the workday, when many people aren't near TVs or don't want to make it too obvious they're goofing off.
What's changed is that there's now a fee to watch the games via March Madness Live, with some exceptions. Fans may detest having to pay for something that used to be free, but $3.99 for all 67 men's games is a good deal. It's a one-time fee, so you don't get charged again for the iPad if you've already paid for access on the computer.
ON COMPUTERS:
March Madness Live offers extensive access to the tournament, starting with the March 11 selections of teams and concluding with a practice session this Friday and the Final Four on Saturday and Monday.
Visit http://ncaa.com/march-madness to launch March Madness Live in a separate browser window.
From there, you can get a schedule of games and check your picks. You get displays of both teams' Twitter feeds and tools for easily posting messages or video clips on Facebook or Twitter.
You can watch any of the games live or get a full replay afterward, all with commercials. Unfortunately, you can't pause or rewind live video. It felt like TV before I bought a TiVo digital-video recorder in 2001. Stats on individual players are also available, and a scoreboard at the top gives you frequent updates to other games.
For those at work, hitting the "Boss Button" temporarily replaces the video window with a fake email, including a humorous one pretending to be a scam to get your password information for March Madness Live. Or you can play it safe and just listen to audio produced for radio stations, while pretending to be stuck in an endless conference call.
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Review: Sea of rights limits March Madness digital
When it comes to building digital relationships with your customers--whether it's through a mobile app, a portal, or a new device--what matters is the user experience. Customers' loyalty (and the share of their wallets they devote to you) depends in large part on how they feel about your digital product or channel. Bad experiences hurt the brand and leave money on the table.
Today, CIOs are getting involved in building products for external customers, but unfortunately, creating great user experiences continues to be a struggle for many big IT shops. I see many companies that still believe that pairing a business analyst with overloaded business stakeholders will yield compelling digital products. Instead, the result is typically a laundry list of confused and confusing "business requirements" that yields a system that costs a lot and fails to excite (or even meet the expectations of) customers.
Creating Passionate Users
Good user experience (UX) designers have been tackling this problem for the last decade. To be clear, I don't mean doing more usability testing to make systems more "intuitive." This old-school approach grew up in the 1980s and '90s when computers were utilitarian data-entry and processing tools. "Usability" meant increasing task efficiency and reducing data-entry errors.
I mean embracing the strategic value of UX design. UX strategists focus on creating passionate users (engagement), getting them to come back again and again (repeat visits) and making products fun (gamification is all the rage). A strategically oriented UX designer is a complex problem-solver who can blend business objectives, technology capabilities and a rich understanding of users into innovative and compelling digital products and services.
How can CIOs use UX strategy to create digital products and services that are fun and easy to use, and that deliver all the business value they can? The challenges lie in today's requirements-gathering and budgeting processes.
This is what I see quite often: Business requirements and scope are defined, budgets and time lines are set. A contractor is hired to turn requirements into wireframes (low-fidelity screen designs). The UX designer presents the wireframes, and stakeholders suddenly start remembering things that didn't come out during the requirements-gathering stage. The CIO now faces a dilemma: miss time lines or plow forward knowing that what you release may not meet objectives.
A savvy UX designer will take a different approach to gathering requirements for a new project, or can breathe new life into an underperforming one. The strategic UX designer will get out of the office and talk to customers. For example, she may create a "user journey" that shows how your PC-based channel is not available to users when they need it. Perhaps there's an opportunity for a mobile app?
She may create personas and scenarios that go deeper than marketing-driven demographics and segmentation to shed light on customer goals and motivations that are missed by your channel. Perhaps there's an opportunity to use game mechanics to improve engagement?
Done right, UX strategy shows stakeholders how to deliver value to target customers. This is a much better basis for determining business requirements and project scope. Focusing on the customer experience also allows the team to make the proper trade-offs when desirable features run up against the realities of time and budget.
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How to Create Digital Products That Customers Love
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Twoonies, loonies litter the highway after Brinks crash on Highway 11
In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you'd like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with "Insert Coin" as the subject line. Here's a neat little project -- a parametric speaker that can only really be heard from the front. According to its inventor, the Soundlazer utilizes ultrasonic carrier waves, focusing its output in a single direction. The Soundlazer has a 20 to 30 foot range. You can hear it from head-on, but if you move to the side or shift the direction of the speaker a bit, the output drops off. The project has 52 days to go, to reach its goal of $48,000. Interested parties who pledge $175 or more will get a fully assembled speaker kit. To see the device in action, check out the video after the break. Previous project update: Well, lookee here -- it seems the public can't wait to get its hands on one of those cool Galileo iPhone platforms. The device has gone well passed its funding goal of $100,000, with 24 days left to contribute.
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Insert Coin: Soundlazer speaker plays music with extreme focus