That trend is the decline of the need for technical proficiency due to increasingly cheap and powerful infrastructure. I am not saying that you will still need computer scientists solving difficult algorithmic problems. Millions of records in a database and the difficulty of scaling is still an issue. Serving fast pages and responsive designs is a big part of a great user experience and you can’t do that without having a technical person on your team.

The thing is, at some point, serving a website with bad quadratic algorithms will be equally fast (or negligibly so). With the current cheap architecture available such as Amazon’s EC2, AWS and Heroku, a lot of developers in the past can now run services that would’ve taken considerable effort a few years ago. The point has been surpassed where a developer can make a livelihood for themselves without the need for incredible technical knowledge and this trend is going to continue.

You can do more with less. Just look at Instagram. They are close to about 11 people (about 4 were hired during the past month) and have 15 million users. This is impressive and they are mainly using Amazon’s architecture.

What is starting to matter is not whether something can be done, it is whether someone will want to use it.

That is why the newly started designerfund is backed by Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. 2012 is the tipping point. They realise that what is going to make or break a start-up is not the technical infrastructure. If it is bad, your users will notice. If it is good, your users won’t notice, because that is the way it’s supposed to be. It is becoming increasingly difficult to be bad at it due to the increase in amazing infrastructure. If your design is bad, users will notice. If your design is good, your users will definitely notice it.

So, while you are learning to code with codeacademy, do also learn how to understand what makes a great user experience. Learn about design, colour patterns, visual hierarchy, Fitt’s Law, Hick’s Law, etc. Do some basic marketing courses. Read up on A/B testing. Whatever.

The startups who are a success purely based on technical merit are dwindling. You have to start producing value and a superior user experience.

Looks like the tablet wars is about to get another combatant. However – this one will come from a company who actually understands user experience better than most. Amazon.

Right now the tablet market is a little one sided. It is pretty much iPad versus the rest. Those of us who follow tech news everyday have grown a little tired of “JAAT” (Just Another Android Tablet). Every day we read about another company jumping into the tablet game with no clear differentiation in their products. All of them share similiar form factors and run the same OS, so we just do not care anymore. But Amazon’s latest Kindle might be different. The rumour mill has now kicked off with an article by MG Siegler -Techcrunch apparently has some sources which told them a lot about the device.

The Kindle has always been a pretty simple device – a e-book reader with some small additional features. But its success relied on its content back-end. It had Amazon’s giant e-book library at its disposal. Now with the Kindle “Fire”, Amazon is going to sell a tablet class device firstly as e-book reader, but this time it gains a lot of multimedia power. For example – it will be able to connect to Amazon Prime for music. What should be pointed out however is that the Fire will probably rather focus on content consumption than personal information management. Think movie player, not exchange.  So do not bet on a email client – but we might be surprised. It is Android after all.

So what about the hardware design? No photos are yet available but current sources suggest a similiar form factor to the Blackberry Playbook. So you are looking at a 7 inch backlit display, hopefully with not as thick as bezel as the Playbook. Current rumours point to the fact that the Kindle Fire is also made by the same designers as the Playbook. Internals will apparently be a dual core 1.2 GHz processor, but that is about all that is known. Also – it will not run Honeycomb (Android 3.x). It will be running Android 2.1, with a custom Amazon interface. Risky move, but it does focus the device more on the current Kindle user, instead of techies who want Honeycomb. Those techies can of course just download the Kindle App on their device of choice.

The other differentiator of Kindle Fire might be its price. Kindle’s recent price drops have done wonders for its sales. If Amazon can somehow make it land under $250, they can expect massive uptake. Also, time will tell whether people are willing to give up their e-ink displays on their Kindles…

Luckily we do not have to wait too long to see it – Jeff Bezos will be showing off the Kindle Fire tomorrow.

Source: TechCrunch

Jay Marine, director of Amazon’s Kindle division says, “Kindle for iPad includes all the features customers love about Kindle for iPhone, including a massive selection of over 450,000 books, along with a beautiful new user interface tailored to the look and feel of iPad.”

One of the iPad-specific features is page turn animation, designed to replicate the experience of turning a page in a physical book. Customers will have the option of switching this feature off and opting for “Basic Reading Mode” instead. In addition, readers will be able to dim the iPad’s screen within the app and will have a choice of background colours, font sizes and font colours, to ease eye-strain and make reading easier.

As with the other Kindle apps currently available (for iPhone, iPod touch, Mac and PC), readers will be able to sync their books, last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights across devices.

Marine says, “Kindle for iPad is the perfect companion for the millions of customers who already own a Kindle or Kindle DX, and a way for customers around the world to download and enjoy books even if they don’t yet have a Kindle.”

Let the ebook-reader wars begin.

The guys who have been busy selling online books at a loss just to gain market share — which is something that will not happen forever — are now accusing other companies for wrong intention. However, it’s interesting why the whole fuss since Google caters to out-of-print books and doesn’t constitute a threat as of now.

Well it looks like Amazon (which is currently the largest seller of books online) is trying to cement their rank into the e-book industry, too — the only problem is that their Kindle is not yet popular — so the only solution was to play the smart game of pointing the finger at someone else.

You know Amazon, as much as we like you, we’re not dumb and we can figure out what you’re up to in the back.

[via AuthorsGuild]