Thursday is Teahouse/Tea Room, Accessory and Brand Review Day!

I’ve been on a roll with reviewing these iPhone and iPod Touch applications lately. There seem to be more everyday and each is a little different. Some provide custom timer options, others limit you to specified choices. How does Tea Timer by Decane fare?

Every tea timer application seeks to differentiate itself. In fact, it’s the very point of writing the apps in the first place. There’s something these developers believe they can improve upon versus their competition.

Most all of these application start out with some basic list screen. You’ve got your teas, boom! This application by Decane is no different in that regard.

Tea Timer by Decane

What is different about their take on a Tea Timer application is their trend to keep it basic. There aren’t any extra widgets or tabs. You’ve got timers and you run them. It’s a wonderful example of practicing restraint from feature creep.

Tea Timer is also the only app I’ve reviewed so far which allows you to reorder your timers. It doesn’t do it for you by alphabetical listing and it doesn’t keep them in the order you create them. While I admit it’s not the most important feature in the world, I have found myself enjoying the freedom to arrange my list as I see fit. It comes in handy when running a more structure tasting session for example.

The beauty of this interface is how it falls in line with Apple’s own example with the Clock application. Not particularly novel, but instantly recognizable and simple for the user to figure out based on rudimentary experience with the iPhone and iPod Touch platform.

Editing the Timers

Creating a new timer is fairly standard. The on interesting option is that you can toggle whether a particular timer allows you to pause it. I’m not certain what circumstances would call for this feature, but it’s an interesting one to have.

I think inviting the user to enter a “name” for their timer instead of “the display text” would have been more user friendly. It’s a odd move considering the relative usability of the rest of the application.

Creating a New Timer

Selecting the alarm sound takes you to another screen where you select the sound from a list of options. Oddly, none of these options are existing ringtones you may have and instead are custom sounds provided with the application. So if I should want to have “Katie’s Tea” as my Tea Timer sound, I couldn’t do that.

Also, when selecting a timer sound, running through the list seems to have an issue where when playing one sound then selecting another has the first sound continue playing. This is somewhat irksome especially if the first sound happens to annoy me greatly. Selecting another sound should kill the first, before playing the second.

Running a timer is pretty straight forward. You have the name of the tea, the time left on the timer, a restart button if needed and a picture of a stopwatch in the background. The stopwatch is a bit out of place seeing as you’re running a timer, but the idea comes across properly and I doubt most users are as interface anal as I am.

Running a Timer

Overall I would say $2 ($1.99) is a bit much for such a basic application but Tea Timer by Decane is a good effort to create a tea timer program for the iPhone. I still don’t think it’s perfect. There are certainly a few issues to fix and I could see room for some additional but still basic features.

Pros

• Can create custom timers
• Can reorder timers
• Can select a custom sound for each timer

Cons

• When selecting a timer sound it continues to play even after you select another
• You can’t select an existing ringtone as a timer sound

What exactly spurred me to sign up for the World Tea Expo is something I can’t reveal much about at the moment, asside from the fact that it does indeed relate to The Project.

I learned something while out in Las Vegas… though it wasn’t related to gambling, adult inhibitions or travelling. Indelibly I learned that my greatest strength and passion is, and likely has always been, with people. What makes us tick individually. It turns out that this year’s World Tea Expo, for me, ended up being all about the people.

While Saturday certainly marked a wonderful close to a beautiful and full day of tea related adventues… it was the people I met that day which truly energized me. The wonderfully high quality teas and the colorful array of accessories were really only icing on the cake.

I ate breakfast Sunday at the Roundtable All-Day Buffet at the Excalibur. The buffet was just $25 to come and go for as many trips as you’d like within a 24 hour period. My dietician would have been aghast at the prospect if she knew… but what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas… right? I actually ended up eating rpetty well there. Fruit, eggs and grapefruit juice were what appealed to me and I chose rather appropriate portion sizes. In case you’re wondering… I did go back for lunch and dinner… but I had a middle meal during a Tweetup I’ll mention later.

Sunday and Monday were where it was all at. Two more sessions: “Selling Your Tea Online Successfully” and “Creating A Menu With Cost & Creativity in Mind” bisected my morning and afternoon. Both presentations were steller! I couldn’t have been more pleased with the investment I made in paying for these two sessions.

Michael Cramer of Adagio Teas covered a wealth of great information related to community building… engaging and keeping your customers on your website and helping with conversion of simple visitors into customers who buy your products.

Melinda Decker, owner of LaTeaDa Tea Room in Clinton, IL provided an interesting presentation as well. While her ideas mostly focussed on her more traditional Victorian style tea house… she provided a number of robust and reusable ideas for making the most out of the materials you buy, simply by using the same ingredients to make multiple products… such as a cake, cobbler or pie being turned into a dessert in a glass.

I spent the rest of Saturday, literally networking with people. Hitting booths, talking people up over tea, getting my business cards handed out and really just getting to know people.

I ran into Jack Cheng of Steepster.com, Lindsey Goodwin of VeeTea, The fine guys over at Village Tea, Ty Beddingfield of Gamila… the inventors of the Tea Stick and a plethor of other completely wonderful folks on Sunday. Several of these folks, plus Ilya from Adagio Teas showed up for an evening Tweetup after the expo floor closed and we had some grub and drinks. In particular, Ty and I really talked for a while about ideas and things. A wonderful day.

After dinner Sunday night, I hit up Cherry, a dance club over in the Red Rock Hotel. This club was one hell of an experience! I thoroughly enjoyed the hours spent there dancing and admiring the crowd. I really get energized when a club is as alive as Cherry was that night. Rare I think, for a Sunday night.

Now it’s Monday morning. The sun is up… but I’ve been awake for hours already. To protect myself some from JetLag I have always tried to awaken as close to Eastern time as possible. I worked out in the rather meager (by my standards) health club in the Excalibur… an amazingly expensive $20 a day on top of the room bill.

After breakfast at the buffet again, I made my way over to the expo for some tea and my morning session: “Reaching Beyond Your Front Door For Additional Income” and then on to my afternoon session: “Price it Right & Sell it Smart.”

Ronald Eng of Kopius Teas put on a wonderful presentation. Very well spoken with great diction and clarity. His ideas were understandably expressed and he was very energetic about answering questions. A serial entrepreneur, Ronald had some great ideas and concepts to share.

Robert Hedrick of Holton & Heath also had some great insights on proper pricing, commodity vs exclusive and the power of branding potential. This was a also a very good presentation.

The rest of my “day” on Monday was spent scurrying around making my final connections with brands and companies, procurring more business cards in exchange for mine as an attempt to build more outlets and opportunities for me to grow with the tea industry over the next couple decades.

I did end up linking with Ronald Eng and Emilie Yanagi of Kopius Teas, the people at Zojirushi North America, a couple great folks over at TeasEtc, Maria Warman from Art of Tea and I cannot forget Nora of Golden Star Tea who has an amazing sparkling bottled tea beverage presented in a chapagne bottle!

At the end of the day I ran into May King of the new UK tea brand, MayKing Tea as well as a few other friends including Norman who is starting a tea garden in Hawaii! I ended up going out dancing with these two and we had a wonderful time out at Margaritaville down the strip after throwing back a few drinks at Liquidity, a bar in the Luxor Hotel & Casino.

I don’t want to leave anyone out… but I’m HORRIBLE with names… I ended up meeting several hundred people at the expo and coming away with some great friendships made over the three day event.

I have to recommend this event to anyone starting a new tea business, or anyone already in the industry!

I’ve already made the decision to head back to Las Vegas next year for another round of tea education. Maybe by then I’ll already have a small presence in the tea industry and be ready for some thoughts on expanding to becoming a tea brand. Here’s to the future!

Help a good cause: CharityWater.org