1. I cannot pay for apps with my USA iTunes account, since the address for the Credit Card is in Canada
2. I cannot change the account’s country, because I have left over funds
3. I cannot spend left-over funds because they are too small and too uneven to buy anything or to create gift certificates
4. I cannot pad left-over funds  as I would need a Credit Card for that (see point 1)

I could somehow buy USA iTunes gift card and add that money to my account, but it is not a sustainable practice and feels like being a hostage. I could buy a pre-paid Visa card that allows to put in any (including USA) address, but that has expensive overhead.

Or I could email Apple support and ask them what they can do about it. Which is what I’ve done. But it does not feel nice.

(Update) ‘Nice’ of Apple to break the Catch-22 by relieving me of my funds:

Alexandre, as the store credit was less than the minimum possible purchase I have removed the store credit from your account. … Please note that the funds will not be returned to you once you have switched countries.

I guess you could call it a service fee.

(Update 2) And it still does not work. Pressing the “Change country” button throws an error of “iTunes store is busy”. You can press other buttons and things work, but once you press “Change country”, all the buttons stop working. Well, I guess Apple does not want any more of my money. And perhaps, just perhaps, I will not bother with iPad 3, if this does not get solved at all. It is funny how the little things may have big influences.

Imagine a pasta cooking application on an iPhone. You pick a recipe, chose how soft you would like it and what sauce you would like to make for the pasta. Finally, before you start, you put your Bluetooth headset in and say “Start”. Application, recognizes the key phrase and starts walking you through the recipe. The sequence will – roughly -  look something like this:

1. (App): Put the water to high-heat and add salt to it. When ready, say “Next”
2. (Cook): Does the steps, says “Next”
3. (App): Now that we are waiting for water to boil, let’s start cooking sauce. If the water boils, please say “Boiled”.
4. (App): Let’s start with the sauce, please collect X, Y and Z ingredients together; when you are ready, say “Chop”.
5. (App, 5 minutes later): How is pasta water going, remember to say “Boiled” when it is boiling.
6. (Cook): “Boiled”
7. (App): Great, now let’s add pasta slowly; when done say “Cooking”
8. (Cook): Adds the pasta, says “Cooking”
9. (App): Great, we now have about 10 minutes, let’s continue with our sauce, you were doing Step C
10. ….
11. (App, 8 minutes later): In about two meetings it might be a good time to check on pasta, I’ll remind you then.
12. (App, another 2 minutes later): Let’s look at that pasta. Pull out a piece and bite it. Say “Ready” if it feels just chewy enough, otherwise say “More cooking”
13. (Cook): “More cooking”
14. (App): No worries, let’s finish off the sauce while we wait for the pasta.
15. ……

The basic idea is simple, let the application walk you through the instructions and voice recognition to control it. Bluetooth headset means the interaction can happen without having to switch between the cooking and looking the steps up, though of course the current step(s) can also be displayed on the screen. To keep things interesting, the app can also play music or tell little stories about ingredients.

Enough for the idea, now let’s think about making it a viable application people would pay money for:

1. Let’s start with a free application that has 3 starter dishes that can be prepared separately, but will demonstrate the parallel-cooking capability if prepared together as a full meal. The free app will mean more people will try it out, thus driving the visibility.
2. Now that people can see the app’s benefit, they can buy sets of recipes using in-app purchase. The sets can be based on style (Italian, Thai, Japanese), theme (Xmas, Thanksgiving), time of day (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner) or dietary requirements (Atkins, vegan, South Beach).
3. In addition to the recipe purchases, there could be a Pro version. One feature would then be asking how many burners are available and optimizing for that. Another feature would offer ingredient substitution.

This gives us a core behavior, but the apps work best if they have some sort of engagement/gamification built-in. Let’s see what experiences we can add outside of kitchen time:

1. A successful application will have new recipes issued (programmed/voiced) over time. Let’s allow people who are using applications to vote on which recipes should be made available next. And to drive users to the application, this voting can only be done inside the application, though the results should be show on the application’s website. This specifically means that recipes can be voiced just in time based on the demand and voting results.
2. To encourage voting, give away a small number of winning recipes to the people who voted for them, either randomly or for the first person to vote the recipe up.
3. Similarly, allow people to vote on how difficult a particular recipe is, how much they like it and other normal features found on the recipe websites.
4. The gamification principles would obviously give us a score board for cook-offs where friends could try a particularly challenging recipe or reward points/badges for doing a recipe or progressing from easy to hard recipes.

Not all the money has to come from the end users. Once enough people download the application, the usual cross-promotion and third-party revenue streams become viable:

1. An application can offer sponsored recipes for free (“Brought to you by X”).
2. Recipes may use using product placements (“Brand X sweet chile sauce”)
3. Affiliate and referral fees can be earned by creating ingredients packages and sending the users to online-shops to buy them
4. Finally, white-label services can be offered to other recipe magazines or books to show off several of their recipes and drive people to buy the full book/magazine

We know such an application is possible. Now somebody just needs to make it real.

My view on project management is quite different. In a small organization, projects are often unmanaged in any real sense of the word. However that has a price that those projects then can cause sudden unexpected problem and have to be dealt with.

I feel that this is basically choosing a price to pay. It can be paid early in project management overhead, or later, through overpaid consultants, failed projects and/or burned out people who suddenly have to deal with unexpected consequences.

The problem however is that management often does not experience the pain directly and therefore does not feel the pressing need to invest in deliberate, planned Prince2 embedding process. After all, if they already were effective in coordinating efforts to achieve results, why would they need Prince2?

So, what I feel is needed in those situations is a lightweight, gradual rollout of Prince2 that can be done by the person actually doing project management and therefore interested in reducing risk, improving processes and reducing possibility of project failure for which they will be blamed. Not very Prince2 of course to blame PM, it should be The Executive’s fault, but go tell that to the Executive.

Yet, the gradual rollout – by stealth – would require a very different set of strategies that Prince2 manuals seem to cover. I would have expected to see discussion points such as:

• most bang for the back,
• starting with daily log,
• are we there yet,
• the simplest Project Initiation Document, and
• 10 Prince2 questions to ask at the start of the project, without being obvious

Some of this is covered by other project management books, but, given the popularity of Prince2, it would have been useful to have some specifically tailored for that methodology and cycle definition.

What is interesting to me is that once one looks at the world through the lenses of gamification, it is easy to notice the core concepts being discussed in seemingly unrelated literature that predates the term.

I have a number of recent examples:

The first couple is from the works of Franklin Covey business productivity group.

In the – otherwise mediocre – Audio CD “The 4 Disciplines of Execution“, the middle two disciplines are “Pick the lead measures, which is are measures one can actually influence” and “Keep A Compelling Scorecard“. So, basically, create a real visible score system and then have a leader board, so everybody can feel they are playing for the top spot. Leader boards and scores are the core parts of gamifications.

In the “Focus Audio Workshop“, Covey is talking about writing the tasks for the day as the first thing in the morning. And “writing the tasks” is actually the first task on the list, so one gets to tick it off right from the start. This obviously gives the person some starting adrenaline  rush and therefore encourages them to continue with the game of “doing the tasks” and “keeping the score”. This easy first success is also part of gamification principles of trying to get the new users into that funnel of participation. It is known that most of the people are lost on the real first step, so if that first step is very easy, it improves the overall statistics.

The other example comes from a book on Knowledge Management by Kimiz Dalkir. In there, she talks about companies such as Xerox that tried to improve internal knowledge management by setting up a competition where “workers could win points (convertible into cash) each time they solved a customer problem“.

So, why is this interesting? It is interesting because these techniques are looked at as “something that worked” but are not analyzed any further in terms of when they are appropriate, what kind of situations they best fit in and how to adapt them to other real-life scenarios.

Gamification seems to be interested in answering those questions. It puts together a framework that explains what the components of a successful system would be, and – the part missing in the examples above – what principles drive those components. Covey and Dalkir may have witnessed – or at least explained – only part of the interplay of behaviors and incentives that make a person want to achieve the desired goals. Gamification can add in some more of the pieces in the puzzle.

This means that with understanding of the gamification principles, one could easily come up with implementation that is most appropriate to the workplace and uses the terms and concepts everybody in that workplace are familiar with.

What would be interesting to me is gamification of Knowledge Management (KM) in an organization. Often, attempts to introduce Knowledge Management in an organization fail because the KM rewards are disconnected in time from the KM efforts and it is quite hard to convince people to spend time on doing KM.

A champion is usually offered as a solution to the problem. However, a single champion – however persuasive or high-ranking – will often run out of energy before KM becomes deeply embedded in an Organizational Culture.

A gamified Knowledge Management would structure the KM introduction in such a way that it would be very easy to start and easy to get early rewards. And, of course, there would be some sort of score along the way and people would actually be interested in getting to the ‘top’, while getting more and competent in Knowledge Management applications along the way.

Now, that would be a book, I would love to read. I just hopes somebody writes it soon, before the Champions run out of steam.

However, all the tool usage descriptions are geared towards using it with automated JavaScript testing library. I just wanted to test the tool on a couple of public web pages, both ones we maintain and others.

Here is the sequence of steps to inject and trigger BidiChecker into any Arabic page using jQuery and Firefox+Firebug:

1. Load the page in the Firefox with Firebug console enabled.
2. Inject jQuery if you don’t have it on the page already. I use jQuerify bookmarklet
3. In Firebug’s console paste the following code:

   jQuery.getScript(
        "http://bidichecker.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/lib/bidichecker_packaged.js",
        function(){
            var bidiErrors = bidichecker.checkPage(true, top.document.body);
            bidichecker.runGui(bidiErrors);
   });

4. If there are any BiDi issues, the BidiChecker’s error navigation window will pop up and the offending text will be shown in red in the page itself. If you used jQuerify plugin, you may get one for the “jQuery injected” message itself.

Loading BidiChecker library directly from Google Code’s SVN is probably not a particularly polite way of doing it, but it is great for a quick test and introduction to the tool.

It is also possible to use a standalone BidiChecker bookmarklet, but I prefer Firebug approach as it then lets me to explore the page further using Code Inspector and other tools.