Tag Archives: veloread

Twitter-Bags or my problem with Twitter

Posted by veloread on 15/11/2010 1 comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the VeloRead.com team, formed by David Scarlatti and Luis Pérez.

I opened my twitter account (@dscarlat) in June 2007, because a friend of mine told me: ” it seems funny”… my friend never twitted, and I was for years neither using it… now I’m not a heavy user but follow a few people and a few people follow me… but I still don’t feel totally happy with the experience… and I think the reason is a missing feature that probably somebody has built in some of the thousands of twitter based apps… but I’ve not found.

At the end, twitter is just a tool people use to interchange information, but obviously it applies to all exiting tools available in the internet (email, blog’s, forums, social networks…) so let’s see a few characteristics that make it so special:

FROM: single TO: the world. Twitter works in broadcast mode (at least the broadly adopted use of twitter) and this is not new, it is in the foundation of the Internet, but twitter is “the place” where people stands up and says something to the world. Obviously the world is not listening to you all the time, only a few (your followers) are listening in fact, but what you say stays for a while in the cyberspace and maybe somebody who was not listening to you ends up reading your words… I like this broadcast to not only a few (your friends, customers, members, subscribers…) but to whoever is listening. Yes, it is the same in a blog, but blogs are everywhere… and tweets are only in a single place: twitter.

Conversation. The next interesting thing is whoever listens to you, can reply to you. So it is not only bidirectional, it allows you to chat virtually with whomever (ok, from twitter’s user community, “only” 145 million people…). I like this too. And you know he/she is not going to throw you more than 140 characters!!

Now. Twitter allow people to say something now and nobody expects you to catch-up whit his/her tweets form last week… it’s in fact a real time conversation, if you’re doing other thing, you are not in the conversation, and this is ok…. Conversations can be repeated over an over, each time with different people and new data. Retweeting is not a crime. The 140 character limit helps to reinforce this “instantly” character of twitter, if you spend too much time writing your tweet it becomes too old for twitter!!!

About: You can tweet about whatever is your interest… and you can follow people who tweet about whatever is your interest… and here is where my problem starts… I’m this strange kind of people who are interested in several different things… really, I’m interested in social networks, and in android devices, and in motorbikes, and in cinema… so what happens: I follow people who tweet about these themes. But these people are a bit weird and some of them are interested in cooking and others in the future of the European Parliament… So if I want to read other’s thought about last BMW model, I’ll “hear” too about his last experience with his/her broadband provider.

Lists don’t help here. Lists groups people, but unless this people just tweet about a single theme (some people do it…) you still are exposed to a bunch of unconnected tweets.

The solution is tags, and people spontaneously use it to group tweets about a single theme, event or whatever… but the problems with tags are they are not standardized, and people not always use it. If I’m watching the F1 race, I’d like to filter tweets about the event, but I don’t know which tags to use… and I don’t like to write the tag each time I tweet about it.

Then, what I’d like to have is somebody doing the tagging for me, something not so simple like a search pattern but with a bit of intelligence, so put the tweets about motorbikes in a bag, the ones about the current Dexter show in other and the ones about great restaurants in other; all of them, from my friend Carlos who tweets about these three themes and even other weird ones I prefer to ignore…

This concept of “twitter bags” is a super-class of the “twitter rooms” by asi.

Maybe it’s something already available… Any hint?

Speed Reading on Smartphones

Posted by veloread on 02/11/2010 2 comments

If you feel the need of reading faster, and probably you do, specially for documents you are somehow obliged to read but you are not very interested in, you can benefit form the myriad of speed reading tools available to you.

Image: www.freeimages.co.uk

The first thing you should do is to learn how fast you read in deed. Maybe you are reading slower or faster than you think. There is no agreement on neither the “normal” nor the maximum speed you can achieve. But generally speaking reading at 250-300 wpm can be considered normal for an adult, and doubling this speed is quite realistic using speed reading techniques. These figures are valid for reading on paper, when reading on screen this drop between 10% and 30%. So take two or three different online tests form all this ones available and see where you are.

If you find you could read faster then you can opt for several ways of action:

Take a course at some specialist school, you’ll need to visit the school once a week a few months
Buy some self-study material and learn at home
Use any of the speed reading software available in the market

With any of this options you’ll learnt a bunch of techniques to increase your reading speed, and after a lot of practices and exercises you’ll master them and will be able to apply it to your usually reading sessions.

However, all this efforts are directed to change the way you read and are based on the hypothesis you have to deal with the texts as they are presented to you. This is very sensible when talking about reading on paper. But what about reading documents on the screen of a computer or similar device? In this case the constraints of the immutable printed document should not exist… and then, some of the techniques of speed reading could be used the other way around, adapting the text in a way it is easier to read.

Some ereaders allow you to change a few aspects of the text (font type, size, background color…), but still aim to resemble the printed page in order to reproduce a paper-based experience. This implies a lot of limitations specially when using small screens (about 3″) like in smartphones.

But there is still room to adapt the text to make it more suitable for speed reading if you forget about the concept of page. There are two main techniques you could benefit from using the right software:

Constant rhythm is essential to achieve higher reading speeds, you need to read words at the highest pace you can. In this sense it would be better if the text is presented to you following that constant pace instead letting you to establish it.
Chunking is the process of reading words in groups instead one by one. The bigger the chunk, the faster you read. It will help then if the text is presented to you already broken in the chunks you can deal with.

These two functions are available in the RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation) tools. Unfortunately there is not RVSP alike software for smartphones.

Veloread is developing a tool based on RVSP which will allow you to read on your phone taking advantage of the speed reading techniques.

Veloread concept

Reading Experience on Smartphones

Posted by veloread on 19/10/2010 2 comments

I’d like to share a typical experience trying to read something longer than a three paragraphs message on my smartphone. I’m using one of the best phones in the market, the HTC Desire, so I suppose things are not too different with other smartphones.

I tap on my Gmail icon and I find on my inbox an email form my friend Luis recommending me to read “Lessons From Silicon Valley VC Legend – Don Valentine“. I tap on the link on the email and the internet browser shows me the webpage, literally unreadable due to the font size. At this point (remember it later) I know what I would like to be able to do… but the only think you can do is to use the nice pinch to zoom feature to find the maximum you can zoom without losing a part of the text… result: the text is still too small. Then I flip the screen, and thanks to the nice auto-rotate feature I can zoom a bit more using now the wide screen in landscape and… ok, now I could read it, but it’s definitively not the best size for reading it. It’ll take me too much time and will make me tired soon.

Ok, I don’t want to give up and ask Luis to send me the text of the article attached to an email, in a .pdf or .doc format. He is so kind to do it and then I open the attachment ready to have a nice reading in my way back to home. But, hey, I open the document attached and I can see a nice “picture” of the page I would like to have in paper, but I can’t read that small font size… in fact I can’t even see the whole lines of text. Dude, use the menu option for “reformated view” and zoom again… done, what do I have now? again a text too small for me. So I decide to read it later once at my desktop, faster and with less effort.

That is the situation: I have a huge 3.7-inch OLED capacitive touchscreen and a powerful 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor but… I can’t choose the font type, size, color, whatever… to read a text comfortably.

If I were trying to read an e-book, I could use some of the good available readers offering certain control over the text… unfortunately (or not) what I want to read in my smartphone are emails, news, blog posts, attachments… you know, the whole stuff. Fore some reason, we accept typical limitations of the physical world (you can’t change the text size or font on the newspapers, magazines, books…) in a much more powerful environment.

Then, what would I like to be able to do (remember at the beginning)? Simply, once I have a text on the screen, let me tell to my SMARTphone: hey, mate, show me this text the way you know I like for reading, I want to read it now and quick.

Veloread.com is making it possible soon. Keep tunned.