Customers don't understand your company's acronyms, processes, or business model.

It's worse than that, though - most users don't even recognise your company's name!

Here's a great example. In Zinio's world, everyone knows who Zinio are. They live in Zinio town, drink Zinio coffee from the Zinio shop. ZINIO! It's the first thing on their minds when they wake up, and what they dream of in their Zinio beds.

They are completely disconnected from the real world. They just don't understand how non-customers see them.

Which leads to this disaster.

Zinio have placed a button on the PlayBook - and, apparently, have never tested it with a non-Zinio aficionado.

The first thing to note is that no one is ever going to click on that icon. Neither the name or the graphic hold any interest to people who don't know what Zinio is.

Most normal people just don't go around clicking random buttons to see what they do. Computers are mysterious and pressing the wrong button could easily break them.

But, let us imagine that a curious user hits the button - what should they see?

A splash screen? An explanation of why Zinio is awesome? A demo? A fully working application which - later - prompts them to create an account?

In short - the elevator pitch. The trailer. The hook. Call it whatever you want - you need to make people give a damn about your product.

There's an excellent talk that Mark Curtis of Flirtomatic gives about the sign-up process. In it, he describes how sign ups to the service rocketed once they minimised the amount of information they asked if a user. Why would a user give over any information without understanding what's on offer?

In the case of Zinio on the PlayBook, there's a complete absence of understanding of a normal user.

• The icon is meaningless.
• The name is unfamiliar.
• There's no way of knowing what the app does if you open it.
• There's no incentive for the user to register.

Would anyone - who didn't already know about Zinio - ever sign up to this?

I wonder who is paying for this deal? Is it RIM paying to have a killer app on its PlayBook? Is it Zinio paying RIM to access all their customers? In either case - it looks like a wasted opportunity.

This is a step-by-step tutorial with screenshots.

On The PlayBook

Plug your PlayBook into your Linux computer using a USB cable. You may see this screen (or similar) you can dismiss it.

In the Settings menu, scroll down to "Storage & Sharing".

Ensure that the "USB Connections" is set to "Connect to Windows".

Scroll down and make sure that "File Sharing" is set to "ON".

Finally, still in settings, scroll up the left panel to "About" and select "Network" Make a note of the USB IPv4 Address (in this image it is 169.254.144.217).

On Ubuntu

Open a terminal and type

sudo ifconfig -a

You may be prompted to enter your password.

Scroll through the results and you should see an entry of "usb0".

To connect to the PlayBook, click on "Places" then "Connect to server".

Select the server type to be "Windows Share". Enter the IP address of the PlayBook (found from the PlayBook's About menu).

If all has gone well, you should see this screen:

Click on "media" and you'll have access to all of your PlayBook's storage space.

That's It!

You should now be able to copy files back and forth. Unlike a normal USB disk, you don't need to eject or unmount the drive once you've finished copying files to the device. Note - when you disconnect the USB cable and reconnect it, the IP address may change. You will need to go to the PlayBook's network settings to find the new IP address. I can't find a way to get a static IP. If you know how - or have any other questions - please leave a comment.

Update

You can set a static IP by turning on Development mode, or follow these instructions from Jarviser on the BlackBerry Support Forums

Forget the IP address, use Tablet Network Name which will always be the same...

In Storage and Sharing, after selecting Connect to Windows, touch Properties button.

You will find

Tablet Network Name - Use that instead of IP Address in Ubuntu. (Mine says PLAYBOOK-24B6) You will then be asked for Username and Password, Mine is "playbook" and the playbook's sharing password. WORKGROUP is left unchanged.