Three Important Things for Plasma Active 3

[Inge Wallin]

Excellent selection of points, i would say! In both areas.

However, what I'm missing is who Plasma Active (PA) in general and this 
release in particular is aimed at. Is Plasma Active aimed at the general 
public who browses the web and watches videos? Or is it aimed at tinkerers 
(hobbyists or professionals) who really need a fully customizable platform?

My guess is that the first category would be served well by PA itself but 
would find the very limited number of downloadable applications a major turn-
off. But for the second category there is more or less NO alternative. In 
other words PA is unique for them.

And the general marketing wisdom is that you should build on your strengths. 
So I suggest that you emphasize strongly the fully free nature of PA and that 
it enables the user to build customized systems using PA where they have total 
control over the result. It's also free in the money sense, which is good too. 
It's no coincidence that Linux is now totally dominating the embedded systems 
arena. These two factors are incredibly powerful.

This is also the market segment where we can build a strong community. And a 
nice side effect is that it will be people who have money and who can put 
full-time people into the development effort. Having the first mover advantage 
here means that for at least a period, PA can get ALL the paid development 
that will happen around tablet based free systems.

So please emphasize this strongly in the announcement and also think about 
which search terms a person who was looking for a fully free tablet OS woud 
use.

Btw, does KDE still have the free adwords from Google or are they used up?  If 
we do, I think this would be a very pwerful way to use them.

	-Inge

On Saturday, October 13, 2012 13:31:06 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> Hi :)
> 
> So I've been mentally chewing on the question of "what are the three
> important messages for PA3?" Some suggestions were made in a previous
> thread on this topic, and several of them really resonated. What follows
> is built on the foundations of this input .. so thanks to everyone who
> contributed there :)
> 
> The point of 3it (i hesitate to turn it into a proper acronym ... ;) is to
> give us a shared message that we can communicate outwardly in a consistent
> and effective manner.
> 
> I think we need not one but *two* sets of 3it for PA3: one for people who
> know nothing about PA, and one for the people who have been following our
> progress to date. The first 3it will track with us from release to release
> and should become our long term messaging track; the 2nd is our iteration
> message: what are we bringing new that we haven't previously.
> 
> So ... Three Important Things about Plasma Active;
> 
> 1) Activities -> Plasma Active is a mobile user interface focused on
> personal productivity. It achieves this through the information-centric
> concept of "Activities" wherein a person can have the life experiences
> they are most engaged in reflected in the computing device. Whether it's a
> short term event such as "a party next week", a topical endeavour such as
> a research project or business report or a long term interest such as
> "parasailing" or "tropical fish", these become topics which the device
> reflect as you experience them. Information in the form of books,
> documents, images, videos, web sites, people and more are collected
> together to form the definition of each activity the person defines, and
> the device can then be requested to focus on a given activity. This means
> that one device can become your exclusive party planner one minute and
> with the flick of your finger morph into the quarterly report review
> project that you have to deliver next week. The device reflects who you
> are and what you are doing.
> 
> 2) Useful from the moment you turn it on: we aim to create a useful
> productivity environment complete with essential tools such as book
> readers, groupware, content delivery systems, file managers and more. This
> makes Plasma Active not just a starting point for a mobile experience, but
> a complete mobile experience right from the start.
> 
> 3) Freedom -> There is no vendor lock-in, no design behind closed doors, no
> code kept behind a royalty structure or other pay-wall, no artificial
> technical barriers to adoption and extension. This makes Plasma Active the
> perfect platform for custom application building taken to a whole new
> level: not only can your write "an app", you can build an entire device
> experience ... no barriers, only possibilities. This is what drives our
> collaborative approach.
> 
> 
> 
> Three Important Things about Plasma Active Three:
> 
> 1) Apps: Plasma Active Three brings numerous new and powerful applications
> all designed with easy-to-use touch-based interfaces. These include:
> 
> * an Add Ons app that speaks to a Free software content server
> * a file manager that incorporates tags, timelines and content discovery:
> want to see all your books from last year? No problem. Want to mannage
> your videos? Simple. Want to see all your images tagged as being from your
> vacation last month? One touch.
> * an eBook reader that integrates seamlessly with both the file manager and
> Add Ons apps, so seamlessly you may not even notice it's there!
> * Alarms: a simple thing, but so useful to have on a mbile device
> * News Reader: a beautiful touch interface to keep up with all your
> favourite online news sources
> 
> Existing applications were also enhanced, such as the improved settings and
> web browsing experiences. Each release sees incremental improvements to
> existing applications in addition to the release of new ones.
> 
> 2) Performance and stability: compared to Plasma Active 2, Three really
> flies. From faster boot times to vastly improved application launch
> performance, the experience is much smoother. Opening the image viewer,
> for instance, has gone from taking a noticably long time to start (5+
> seconds on many devices) to ~1 second on the same devices.
> 
> 3) Upgraded OS: the base operating system used as the reference development
> platform, and which we build our reference images on, is now Mer, which is
> the community continuation of the MeeGo, Maemo and Moblin efforts. Mer
> offers Plasma Active fresh kernel and user space packages which allows
> Plasma Active to take advantage of the latest developments in Linux based
> systems. This has brought significant improvements in performance and new
> under-the-hood features that the user will notice in the form of things
> such as a nicer and more featureful network experience (Need to access a
> VPN from your tablet? No problem!), an improved on-screen keyboard and
> more. Mer, with its vibrant development community focused on open
> development and collaboration, also reflects our core values and allows us
> to work on advancements at the OS level with other companies who are also
> working in this space.
> 
> 
> Ok, so those are my thoughts / ramblings / suggestions. Feedback very
> welcome. Nothing in the above is a "sacred cow" ... if we come up with a
> better idea for any point or sub-point above, we can and should use it :)
> 
> Also keep in mind that the above is the verbose version. Next step will be
> pare each point above down to 2-3 key phrases which we can use in passing,
> with the rest of the content being our "back story" for those phrases. This
> gives us the ability to go from the "soundbite sizzle" to the "supporting
> steak" in conversation.
> 
> Sound bites -> expansion of concepts that pique the audience's interest ->
> in depth exploration of Plasma Active (hopefully including sth hands-on)
> -> ??? -
> 
> > profit ;)