http://www.derrickfountain.com Derrick Fountain is a visionary mobile industry veteran with a passionate curiosity for life-enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information. Copyright (c) 2010 Derrick Fountain derrickfountain_latest_insights_2 http://www.derrickfountain.com/#/viewpoints/latest_insights_2 Tue, 13 Jun 2010 02:08:09 GMT About the Author Derrick Fountain is an online media professional and visionary committed to crafting life enabling technologies that transform how societies access and share information. Call 641-453-0728 to hear a Spoken Web version of the latest viewpoints by Derrick Fountain. Visit the contact page and share your questions or comments on this viewpoint.]]> derrickfountain_latest_insights_3 http://www.derrickfountain.com/#/viewpoints/latest_insights_3 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:08:09 GMT About the Author Derrick Fountain is a visionary mobile industry professional with a passionate curiosity for life-enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information. Call 916-770-4127 to hear a Spoken Web version of the latest viewpoints by Derrick Fountain. Visit the contact page and share your questions or comments on this viewpoint.]]> derrickfountain_latest_insights_5 http://www.derrickfountain.com/#/viewpoints/latest_insights_5 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:08:09 GMT About the Author Derrick Fountain is a visionary mobile industry professional with a passionate curiosity for life-enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information. Call 916-770-4127 to hear a Spoken Web version of the latest viewpoints by Derrick Fountain. Visit the contact page and share your questions or comments on this viewpoint.]]> derrickfountain_latest_insights_6 http://www.derrickfountain.com/#/viewpoints/latest_insights_6 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:08:09 GMT About the Author Derrick Fountain is a visionary mobile industry professional with a passionate curiosity for life-enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information. Call 916-770-4127 to hear a Spoken Web version of the latest viewpoints by Derrick Fountain. Visit the contact page and share your questions or comments on this viewpoint.]]> derrickfountain_latest_insights_7 http://www.derrickfountain.com/#/viewpoints/latest_insights_7 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:08:09 GMT About the Author Derrick Fountain is a visionary mobile industry professional with a passionate curiosity for life-enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information. Call 916-770-4127 to hear a Spoken Web version of the latest viewpoints by Derrick Fountain. Visit the contact page and share your questions or comments on this viewpoint.]]> derrickfountain_latest_insights_8 http://www.derrickfountain.com/#/viewpoints/latest_insights_8 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:08:09 GMT About the Author Derrick Fountain is a visionary mobile industry professional with a passionate curiosity for life-enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information. Call 916-770-4127 to hear a Spoken Web version of the latest viewpoints by Derrick Fountain. Visit the contact page and share your questions or comments on this viewpoint.]]> derrickfountain_latest_insights_9 http://www.derrickfountain.com/#/viewpoints/latest_insights_9 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:08:09 GMT About the Author Derrick Fountain is a visionary mobile industry professional with a passionate curiosity for life-enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information. Call 916-770-4127 to hear a Spoken Web version of the latest viewpoints by Derrick Fountain. Visit the contact page and share your questions or comments on this viewpoint.]]> derrickfountain_latest_insights_10 http://www.derrickfountain.com/#/viewpoints/latest_insights_10 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:08:09 GMT About the Author Derrick Fountain is a visionary mobile industry professional with a passionate curiosity for life-enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information. Call 916-770-4127 to hear a Spoken Web version of the latest viewpoints by Derrick Fountain. Visit the contact page and share your questions or comments on this viewpoint.]]> derrickfountain_latest_insights_11 http://www.derrickfountain.com/#/viewpoints/latest_insights_11 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:08:09 GMT About the Author Derrick Fountain is a visionary mobile industry professional with a passionate curiosity for life-enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information. Call 916-770-4127 to hear a Spoken Web version of the latest viewpoints by Derrick Fountain. Visit the contact page and share your questions or comments on this viewpoint.]]> derrickfountain_latest_insights_12 http://www.derrickfountain.com/#/viewpoints/latest_insights_12 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:08:09 GMT Spoken Web Project. The Spoken Web is a solution that I've been researching and developing for the last 4 years to help human beings overcome what I like to call "situational disability." Situational disability occurs when any human being finds themself in a situation where they that lack the "ability" to access information due to internal and external handicaps. The common way for human beings to overcome these situational disabilities is through the use of assistive technologies. As human beings, we can only carry so many grocery items when we walk through the aisles of a grocery store. A shopping cart is an assistive technology that helps us overcome this handicap. Remove the shopping cart from the shopping experience and you will see a cascading negative effect that imapacts both consumer purchase behavior and average revenue per customer. A scarcity factor is brought on my the limited number of items that can be carried. This introduces more rigor into the selection process and less ad-hoc tossing of shopping items into the cart. This cascading effect impacts the shopping experience even before the customer enters the store. At home, I'm forced to alter the way I create my grocery list, by picking and choosing only those items that I can comfortably carry (or what I'm willing to pay someone else to carry for me). Assistive technologies such as shopping carts improve human performance. The shopping experience is not much unlike the navigation and selection process that occurs when a person enters the home page of a busy news portal. Again, we run into a similar handicap. A human being can only consume so much information in a one sitting. When presented with too many options, a condition known as "choice paralysis" occurs, forcing users to choose nothing. We have a situation where an overabundance of information creates a poverty of attention. We are blinded by too many options, and as a result, are unable to pick any one option. The biggest handicap of the modern world is the overabundance of information and the scarcity of time. I have concerns over the future of the internet and the accessibility of the information that it seeks to deliver. There are situations that prevent me from accessing information; information that might change how I manage my health or raise my future children. There are situations that render my ability to purchase a $2,200 mobile phone reader out of my reach due to the expensive nature of such devices. Situational handicaps can come in the form of your personal financial situation or even your physical situation. Perhaps you may even find yourself handicapped by your time situation. All of these situations handicap your ability to get the information you need, when and how you want it. In the coming years, we will see talking computers move out of the extremely overpriced "assistive technology" market and become more mainstream to help everyday humans access information in a more convenient and efficient way. About the Author Derrick Fountain is a visionary mobile industry professional with a passionate curiosity for life-enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information. Call 916-770-4127 to hear a Spoken Web version of the latest viewpoints by Derrick Fountain. Visit the contact page and share your questions or comments on this viewpoint.]]> derrickfountain_latest_insights_16 http://www.derrickfountain.com/#/viewpoints/latest_insights_16 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:08:09 GMT prioritize design time on a project. I am a strong proponent of moving beyond pretty pictures and prayers and using real data to inform design decisions. In the interactive industry, I have seen how emotionally driven decision-making can eat away at project scope. Perhaps one of the biggest culprits is the broad category of "accessibility" and the reasoning that "any" website should be accessible to "all" users, regardless of ability. Whenever I see or hear those two words, "any" and "all" in the same sentence, I immediately question everything that comes after. I have a hard time taking anyone serious that uses those two words within a single sentence. I exercise similar caution with any man that doesn’t tie up his shoes. (Particularly, those shoes with Velcro straps instead of laces.) Let’s say, for instance, that your analytics tell you that 0.02% of the people that visit your site over the course of a year do so with the aid of an assistive technology, such as an automatic screen reader. From data this you infer that 0.02% of visitors to your site have some sort of visual impairment or other inhibiting factor that is preventing them from consuming information on your site using common browsing methods. If I were to act on that 0.02% and change the underlying code and alter the design of your site to cater to this tiny fraction of your audience, you run the risk negatively impacting how potentially 99.98% of your target audience engage and interact with your brand on the web. This would impact your ability to use sight, sound, and motion to tell your story to your core audience. Regardless of what the accessibility pundits say, it costs more to build a single site that’s accessible to both people with disabilities and those without. Don’t believe me? Have you ever seen a mobile phone that retails for $2,820? Why does it cost so much? I’ll tell you why. Because it’s made "accessible" for people with disabilities. At that price point, I’m not sure exactly how "accessible" it is for those who can’t afford it. Don’t get me wrong. I believe in accessibility. Perhaps, just not in the same way as most industry practitioners view accessibility. The term itself needs account for more than physical handicaps. We need to broaden the circle to include what I call "situational disabilities" that handicap people from accessing information when and how they want. At the heart of every project on this site is one single objective. Knock down barriers to information. Make it easy to get to stuff. Remove friction and help people overcome the broader set of social and technological handicaps that affect their life. If time constraints handicap our ability to read all the articles we want in a single sitting, that’s fine. I understand. Let’s create a technology that makes it easy to consume some now, and save some for later. Having trouble reading text on a small screen? Don’t bother. Pick up the phone and call 641-453-7208 to access the same information by phone. That’s how modern society will be transformed and overcome these physical and situational handicaps. The single most important factor that this new definition brings to the world is a cure for a particular kind of situational disability known as "choice paralysis." Choice paralysis occurs as a result of information overload. We overcome this by letting people listen to the web instead of reading the web. About the Author Derrick Fountain is a visionary mobile industry professional with a passionate curiosity for life-enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information. Call 916-770-4127 to hear a Spoken Web version of the latest viewpoints by Derrick Fountain. Visit the contact page and share your questions or comments on this viewpoint.]]> derrickfountain_latest_insights_13 http://www.derrickfountain.com/#/viewpoints/latest_insights_13 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:08:09 GMT About the Author Derrick Fountain is a visionary mobile industry professional with a passionate curiosity for life-enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information. Call 916-770-4127 to hear a Spoken Web version of the latest viewpoints by Derrick Fountain. Visit the contact page and share your questions or comments on this viewpoint.]]> derrickfountain_latest_insights_14 http://www.derrickfountain.com/#/viewpoints/latest_insights_14 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:08:09 GMT Lexy. Additional brands have competing and rival products. These include Stitcher Radio and Google Listen. What the last two failed to realize is that their services are not "all the way" mobile. Lexy is all the way mobile. Voice and SMS text messages are a primary means of navigating and interactive with the service. Voice and SMS are also the primary ways that people use these devices. I am not fully against text-based content on mobile devices. Over the years, I've developed innovative ideas for navigating long-form text on a mobile device. Instead, I believe that the act of reading text on a small screen falls at the bottom rung when it comes to prioritizing the patterns of consumption. In every interface that I've conceived, packaging content to go has been the top priority of the interface. This prioritization of the user’s ability to package up content "to-go" is my desire to make information convenient and accessible to people encountering what I like to call "situational disability." If you find yourself in a "situation" where your ability to listen or read is handicapped, then there are alternative means of getting to the same information on any number of alternative devices or screens. This is accomplished by allowing you to easily move information to another device in a format that is more conducive to your situation at that time. You can access the same information and pick up where you left off by reading, printing, calling, or listening. Whichever feels most accessible to you at the moment of want or need. About the Author Derrick Fountain is a visionary mobile industry professional with a passionate curiosity for life-enabling technologies that transform how we access and share information. Call 916-770-4127 to hear a Spoken Web version of the latest viewpoints by Derrick Fountain. Visit the contact page and share your questions or comments on this viewpoint.]]>