Nanonote sales to date? (functionality marketing message)

Ernest Kugel erik.kugel at gmail.com
Wed Nov 23 12:31:19 EST 2011


Hi, looking at the Nanonote sales, not saying I'm disappointed, but, 
this thing should be selling way more. The device is great, so this 
could be purely a marketing problem. One marketing problem is that the 
nanonote is universal - you can use it for almost anything. This is 
great practically, but is not a very well defined marketing message. I 
know some will say that the nanonote's message is one of open source and 
open hardware - I will agree that that is a vision, but hardly a 
marketing message for a specific product (from most users perspective).

Maybe some focus on specific functionality could really boost the sales? 
For instance, we could choose to focus a bit on gaming, and porting more 
half-decent, higher-graphic arcades like the supertux we have now. If we 
have 5 - 10 "good" games we could put gaming as part of the marketing 
message. Or, we can focus on porting bits from different office suites, 
and make sure we have a good word/sheet processor. We can then tell our 
less tech-savvy potential costumers what they can expect from this 
device (play simple arcade games, edit basic documents on the go), much 
like Apple goes through great paint to state the obvious fact you can 
watch a movie and surf the web on an iPad.

The greatest obstacle right now to any such focused marketing message is 
the fact the Nanonote *software* is a random collection of whatever we 
could port. I love this fact, there is nothing wrong with that, but as a 
marketing massage, "a random collection of whatever we could port" will 
send less tech-savvy users away screaming. If we could decide on a 
functionality (i.e. - gaming) and then focus all our joint efforts on 
building that functionality in (i.e. porting a few more supertux-like 
games), we could then add that to our marketing message (i.e. "The 
NanoNote - A Great Gaming Device!) and move on, until we have something 
like "The Nanonote - A Great Device for Gaming, Office apps, and Making 
Espresso IN YOUR POCKET!" or whatever. If we have that, ladies and 
gentlemen, I can start pushing the thing without diving into complicated 
explanations about the advantages of Open Source. Open Source is and 
should be our main commitment, but we should do everything we can to 
make sure Open Source is accompanied by the best message it will sell with.

Maybe we already have enough bits to sharpen our functionality message 
with current software? If not, which functionality should we focus on, 
and how could we get a few people to hammer on a project until its done 
instead of focusing solely on random bits?

Ernest Kugel


On 11/23/2011 12:00 PM, discussion-request at lists.en.qi-hardware.com wrote:
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>     1. Re: Nanonote sales to date? (Wolfgang Spraul)
>     2. Re: New OpenWrt Release: stable 2011-11-13 (Xiangfu Liu)
>     3. Re: New OpenWrt Release: stable 2011-11-13 (David Kuehling)
>     4. Re: New OpenWrt Release: stable 2011-11-13 (Wolfgang Spraul)
>     5. Re: New OpenWrt Release: stable 2011-11-13 (David Kuehling)
>     6. Re: New OpenWrt Release: stable 2011-11-13 (Wolfgang Spraul)
>     7. Re: New OpenWrt Release: stable 2011-11-13 (David Kuehling)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:19:17 +0000
> From: Wolfgang Spraul<wolfgang at sharism.cc>
> Subject: Re: Nanonote sales to date?
> To: "English Qi Hardware mailing list - support, developers,	use cases
> 	and fun"<discussion at lists.en.qi-hardware.com>
> Message-ID:<20111123081917.GA16448 at asus.wolf>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>> A thought occurred to me- are there still 1500 or so Nanonotes in
>> circulation? I am wondering how many precious Nano's are floating
>> across the globe.
> Yes, sales are slow (5-10 / month) so it's still around 1300.
> And yes, they are precious :-) I think I will move to the next level
> of using mine, and move my irc/jabber and email to it (networked via
> my notebook). That should be fun! :-)
>
>> By the way, come xmas time I am ordering another to cast my vote for
>> non-intel and for Freedom as a sustainable future! Hats off to Qi!
> Definitely. I should write up some thoughts for the next steps in
> another mail, I'm just hopelessly behind the new news, so that first...
> http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Qi_Hardware_2011-11-20
>
> Thanks a lot for the Christmas gift!
> Wolfgang
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:19:06 +0800
> From: Xiangfu Liu<xiangfu at sharism.cc>
> Subject: Re: New OpenWrt Release: stable 2011-11-13
> To: cenobyte at dragoncrypt.com
> Cc: "English Qi Hardware mailing list - support, developers,	use cases
> 	and fun"<discussion at lists.en.qi-hardware.com>
> Message-ID:<4ECCAC7A.6010607 at sharism.cc>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
> On 11/23/2011 04:02 PM, cenobyte at dragoncrypt.com wrote:
>> OK I left listener on for about 15 minutes and conversed with my
>> brother and it picked up everything. Thanks for the 'aplay' tip and
>> what an interesting program to hack with!
> cool.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:27:59 +0100
> From: David Kuehling<dvdkhlng at gmx.de>
> Subject: Re: New OpenWrt Release: stable 2011-11-13
> To: "English Qi Hardware mailing list - support\, developers\,	use
> 	cases and fun"<discussion at lists.en.qi-hardware.com>
> Message-ID:<8762ibjl9s.fsf at mosquito.pool>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>>>>>> "cenobyte" == cenobyte<cenobyte at dragoncrypt.com>  writes:
>> I forgot to mention a tip I have found useful for making ogv videos. I
>> use ffmpeg2theora to convert clips I save from Youtube or what have
>> you to Nano size. I pass along the -x 320 -y 240 options as well as
>> the -sameq. Make sure not to use the ffmpeg syntax of -s 320x240, that
>> won't get you far.  I have been experimenting with ripped DVD's and
>> have converted one to size, but it is off sync (it was encoded off
>> sync, not played back off sync). I have tried passing the --sync
>> option along but so far no luck, the program will not begin
>> encoding.
> ffmpeg2theora seems to have some problems with syncing against mpeg
> streams.  As a workaround, you could use mencoder (i.e. the one that
> ships with mplayer) to first transcode to a losslessly compressed .avi
> file, then feed that .avi into ffmpeg2theora.  Mencoder's sync handling
> is superb.  The resulting .avi file will have no per-frame timestamps so
> ffmpeg2theora conversion won't introduce audio desync.
>
> mencoder -oac pcm -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=huffyuv:vstrict=-1 \
>           -o intermediate.avi
>
> (maybe you'd want mencoder to already do the scaling:
> -vf scale=320:240)
>
> cheers,
>
> David




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