Stowe Boyd

Tumblr launches ‘highlighted posts’. from Tumblr...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:44:00 -0500

Tumblr launches ‘highlighted posts’.

Introducing: Highlighted Posts

Every now and then, a post comes along that’s meant for big things. It could be pulling the wraps off your new project, promoting your next show, raising awareness for a cause, or just sharing a truly incredible photo.

Today you’ll have a new option to Highlight those extra-important posts. For one dollar, your post will stand out in the Dashboard with a customizable sticker to make sure your followers take notice!

MG Siegel thinks its a good idea. I guess I am ambivalent, and I will have to see what strange interactions highlighted posts might have with other Tumblr features, like Explore and reblogging.

Note that I don’t seem to have access to this new feature yet, or I would have highlighted this post.

"Silicon Valley’s dirty little secret is that the startup boom is mostly a disguised jobs fair..."

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:23:57 -0500

“Silicon Valley’s dirty little secret is that the startup boom is mostly a disguised jobs fair that directly benefits the big corporations. Occasionally, an innovative startup makes it past this stage but it has to be so bad that no one wants it — not even for its team. It’s from among those ugly ducklings that the swans of the new age emerge: FB, Goog, Twitter, Yahoo! and others — no one wanted them at first, then they couldn’t get enough of them.”

- Tom Foremski, The Dirty Little Secret Of Silicon Valley’s Startup Boom… via SVW

"@stoweboyd: Yammer is raising a $40M round after a year in which ‘everything tripled’..."

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:08:44 -0500

“@stoweboyd: Yammer is raising a $40M round after a year in which ‘everything tripled’ http://t.co/AdnHl05s Work media is the future of business software”

- February 03, 2012 at 06:02AM via http://bit.ly/yfEj4u

Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:09:00 -0500

Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal:

I explain a little of my plans as chief curator for The Futures Agency:

Stowe Boyd via futuresagency:

The curators work is something like that of a poet, then. We all return to the same themes, and we build upon the thoughts of others, trying to bring some added value, helping others to gain some new insight, or finding distant analogies to underscore another’s thoughts.

So, I will be offering up a daily take on what I have seen stream by, with special attention to the areas of investigation that Gerd and I are most involved. Areas like the future of media and other crucial aspects of modern business, like sustainability. And we will be looking into what I call post-futurism: facing the future, but with considerably less science fiction and boundless technological optimism.

I haven’t had time to explain the nature of the relationship with Gerd Leonhard, a sort of cooperative research fellowship focused on the future of media. A more detailed description is in the works.

Eliza Dushku is following me?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:31:11 -0500

Eliza Dushku is following me?

"@BorowitzReport: The only way Facebook is worth $100 billion is if all of those sheep in Farmville..."

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:37:25 -0500

“@BorowitzReport: The only way Facebook is worth $100 billion is if all of those sheep in Farmville are real. #facebook”

- February 01, 2012 at 06:33AM via http://bit.ly/wj5RhO

The Point Of Social Leverage Is Mobile?

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:06:00 -0500

I see that my old friend, Keith Teare, has written a guest post at Techcrunch, making the case that Facebook and Google have inherent ‘structural’ problems in the way they manage information sharing which have become starkly apparent with Google’s new privacy policy and Facebook’s endless privacy issues.

Keith Teare, Google, Facebook, Privacy — And You

There is a big structural problem for both Google and Facebook as they contemplate the product consequences of consumer reactions to their product roadmap. In a centralized platform it is incredibly hard to create easy-to-understand controls that give each user the ability to control, at a granular level, what they share and who with. Grand policy shifts, like that which came out of F8 and which we are now seeing from Google, tend to assume all users are the same and will want the same thing.

In reality, users are more complex. I might want to save a private video to a personal storage space one moment, share something with a select group of friends another moment, and broadcast something to the world five minutes later. The web services infrastructure that both Facebook and Google are based on does not easily permit such fine grained control for users without also imposing serious effort. As we all know, that leads users to stick with the default settings most of the time.

So, despite good intent by the teams at both companies, one-size-fits-all decisions are the norm.

Mobile to the rescue?

Structural problems usually require structural solutions. What it seems consumers are asking for is a world in which we all know what we are sharing and who with — but where we don’t have to do a huge amount of work to achieve that. Google Circles seems to be a nod in this direction as are Facebook’s groups. But neither is really easy enough or sufficiently integrated into the flow of the products to really solve the problem. Both require a huge management overhead.

As I argued earlier this week in “Google, Look Out Behind You!“, the spread of smartphones may be part of the solution here. Hundreds of millions of consumers are now carrying around connected still and video cameras with lists of contacts in the address book, often already organized into meaningful groups. Decentralized decision-making is very easy when there are decentralized software clients under the unique control of each user. The ability to be private one moment, selectively share the next and then publicly broadcast a few minutes later is easy to achieve in this decentralized software architecture. And service providers can never become bad actors — simply because they do not own our information or the full social graph. The cloud becomes a means of delivering messages to the phones and the place where we store our media. But it’s not the place we need to trust to make decisions about what gets shared and who with.

So, Keith broadly paints a picture — users being forced into an oversimplified social architecture by Google and Facebook in which groups (or circles, which are a slightly different take on groups) are the mechanism of sharing — and hints that the problem is intractable for web-based social tools.

The answer is smartphones, he suggests: our personal devices, which we already use in myriad ways to connect with and share with others. He must believe — without saying so explicitly — that the solution lies in observing what we share and with who on our smartphones, and to refine that natural body of information into a bottom-up determination of who’s who in our world.

Imagine a Venn diagram of dozens — or hundreds — of sets of friends, where any friend could be in zero to all the sets, and all the sets are constantly in flux. And without us having to create all the scaffolding for it to work.

Obviously, Teare is not content to wave his hand at this: he’s started a company to actually build the solution:

Keith Teare, Seed and Series A Funding

just.me is a new architecture built on top of the mobile, and particularly the smartphone, ecosystem. It doesn’t take the web as its starting point, it takes the highly personal and ever-present mobile Internet as its starting point. As such it is focused on defining a new consumer software experience, not replacing an existing one. It is also focused on the freedom that comes from placing social tools on a device the consumer fully controls, and not building a big cloud service that owns or acts on the consumers data. We don’t know all of the questions this gives rise to yet, never mind all of the answers. But we are really excited about building on this new ecosystem and learning with users as we go.

I’ve been suggesting that the next wave for social networks is the social operating system — where exactly the problems that Teare is talking about are solved by building social primitives into the foundation of our online experience — but Teare is pushing at a transitional step, based on the mobile device as the logical point of leverage in the transition to the next generation of social tools.

"@nytimesbits: On Facebook’s big day, Fred Wilson explains how social media has fragmented..."

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:07:36 -0500

“@nytimesbits: On Facebook’s big day, Fred Wilson explains how social media has fragmented & why Facebook won’t be the sole winner. http://t.co/UCju1Ja9”

- February 01, 2012 at 01:50PM via http://bit.ly/z3B8fc

Unmanned and computer-controlled drones, with no ‘man in...

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 05:46:00 -0500

Unmanned and computer-controlled drones, with no ‘man in the loop’?

William Hennigan via LA Times

The X-47B is an experimental jet — that’s what the X stands for — and is designed to demonstrate new technology, such as automated takeoffs, landings and refueling. The drone also has a fully capable weapons bay with a payload capacity of 4,500 pounds, but the Navy said it has no plans to arm it.

The Navy is now testing two of the aircraft, which were built behind razor-wire fences at Northrop Grumman Corp.’s expansive complex in Palmdale, where the company manufactured the B-2 stealth bomber.

Funded under a $635.8-million contract awarded by the Navy in 2007, the X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System Carrier Demonstration program has grown in cost to an estimated $813 million.

Last February, the first X-47B had its maiden flight from Edwards Air Force Base, where it continued testing until last month when it was carried from the Mojave Desert to Naval Air Station Patuxent River in southern Maryland. It is there that the next stage of the demonstration program begins.

The drone is slated to first land on a carrier by 2013, relying on pinpoint GPS coordinates and advanced avionics. The carrier’s computers digitally transmit the carrier’s speed, cross-winds and other data to the drone as it approaches from miles away.

The X-47B will not only land itself, but will also know what kind of weapons it is carrying, when and where it needs to refuel with an aerial tanker, and whether there’s a nearby threat, said Carl Johnson, Northrop’s X-47B program manager. “It will do its own math and decide what it should do next.”

As Dashiell Bennett observes, doing its ‘own math’ raises many questions:

It [X-47B] could also revolutionize military and international law, as leaders must decide if they can authorize machines to make “lethal combat decisions” — and if anyone back home can be held be responsible when they do. We all saw the Terminator movies, so we know that usually turns out.

thenextweb: Internet advertising spending in China increased by...

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:18:57 -0500

thenextweb:

Internet advertising spending in China increased by more than 50 percent last year to finally overtake print media ad spending, according to data from iResearch, cited by the China Internet Watch blog. (via Research: Internet ad spend up 57% to overtake print media in China - The Next Web)

"Finnish mobile giant Nokia today released its fourth quarter financial results, posting a €1.07..."

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:13:00 -0500

“Finnish mobile giant Nokia today released its fourth quarter financial results, posting a €1.07 billion ($1.4 billion) loss as sales declined by 21% year on year with smartphone sales and mobile sales down 31% and 1% respectively. Whilst it shows Nokia still has a lot of work to do, it sold 19.6 million smartphones and 93.9 million mobile devices, meaning that over the quarter, sales were up 17% and 5% respectively on the last quarter.”

- Matt Brian, Microsoft Paid Nokia $250m for Windows Phone Use via TNW

Form Letter Template For Acquired Startups

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:02:00 -0500

By panicsteve via Github

Dear soon-to-be-former user,

We’ve got some fantastic news! Well, it’s great news for us anyway. You, on
the other hand, are fucked.

We’ve just been acquired by:

[ ] Facebook
[ ] Google
[ ] Twitter
[ ] Other: _________________

As you are aware, we’ve always provided a free service, and have never even
tried offering a for-pay option. This means we’ve never had any income and
have been operating at a loss for our entire existence. Since any schoolchild
can see this is unsustainable, it should have been more-or-less obvious to you
from the get-go that we were either going to crap up the site with ads at a
few cents per-click, or that we’ve always intended to be an acquisition target.
You can do the math on that one.

Your personal data which, until just now, was critical to our core business
will be deleted:

[ ] Immediately
[ ] Within a week
[ ] Within 30 days

We are excited to continue our core mission of connecting people with
solutions at our new home. Please realize that this is so vague a statement
as to be completely meaningless. But we just made so much money that at the
moment we genuinely believe this horseshit. In reality, you will never hear
about us or anything we create ever again. We are probably going to end up,
like, implementing a new scrollbar for Google Reader or something.

Thanks so much for making our business so valuable and enticing to a much
larger company with more money than sense.

Now grab your data while you still can and get out of here,

Shiny happy Shit.ly management ninjas
Connecting people with solutions
“Shit.ly loves you!”

"@sandymaxey: Anil Gupta defining grassroots: “Minds on the margins are not marginal..."

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 07:52:57 -0500

“@sandymaxey: Anil Gupta defining grassroots: “Minds on the margins are not marginal minds” http://t.co/9fysU9ng”

- January 21, 2012 at 04:45AM via http://bit.ly/yokhHr

"@stoweboyd: Doree Shafrir of Rolling Stone to oversee culture coverage at BuzzFeed..."

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 07:37:22 -0500

“@stoweboyd: Doree Shafrir of Rolling Stone to oversee culture coverage at BuzzFeed http://t.co/ZUxaiaPx Joining Ben Smith from Politico”

- January 21, 2012 at 03:07AM via http://bit.ly/zJkoS6

A Momentary Flow: Study shows that kids, unlike adults, think technology is fundamentally human

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:15:12 -0500

A Momentary Flow: Study shows that kids, unlike adults, think technology is fundamentally human:

wildcat2030:

Via Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future

Growing up with the Internet gives today’s children a very unique view on the way the world works — one that is vastly different from that of older generations. These kids, the ‘digital natives,” are raised with modern technology deeply…

Passed on by Seb Paquet (@sebpaquet), dreamed up by Mike Arauz,...

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:57:00 -0500

Passed on by Seb Paquet (@sebpaquet), dreamed up by Mike Arauz, Simone Lovati and David Carr.

This seems to lack the added dimension of the social scenes we are embedded in. Specifically, it lacks the impacts that individuals can have when they influence others, and those others carry on ideas to yet another set of others. So it is possible that you don’t know of Stowe Boyd, but you’ve heard the term ‘social tools’ that he coined. So people can be influenced by others before direct awareness of their existence.

"The unwillingness of Facebook and Google to share a public commons when it comes to the intersection..."

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:00:50 -0500

“The unwillingness of Facebook and Google to share a public commons when it comes to the intersection of search and social is corrosive to the connective tissue of our shared culture. But as with all things Internet, we’ll just identify the damage and route around it. It’s just too bad we have to do that, and in the long run, it’s bad for Facebook, bad for Google, and bad for all of us. (BTW, Google also doesn’t show Twitter or Flickr results either, or any other “social” service. Just its own, Google and Picasa.)”

- - John Battelle, Search, Plus Your World, As Long As It’s Our World

Once again, Google steps in a pile of doodoo with its maladroit efforts in trying to absorb the social web. Unwilling to simply index things and offer them up as search results, Google wants to ‘socialize’ search. What this means is that search is just another battlefield for Google to fight the war for the future against Facebook, Twitter, etc.

On one hand, you have to admit that Google faces a new world, one that is increasingly social, and the search company has to get in there. But this is not the way to do it.

I continue to be amazed that Google doesn’t look at its email and calendar apps as a good place to build social, instead of dicking around with search.

"@ballardian: Swedish cities could connect via bike superhighway: http://t.co/BIdFjpL2 | via..."

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:37:21 -0500

“@ballardian: Swedish cities could connect via bike superhighway: http://t.co/BIdFjpL2 | via @sustaincities”

- January 17, 2012 at 08:47AM via http://bit.ly/Ae0NOQ

"To pivot is, essentially, to fail gracefully. While the term has been in the start-up lexicon for..."

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:20:04 -0500

“

To pivot is, essentially, to fail gracefully. While the term has been in the start-up lexicon for decades, it is coming up more often in the current Internet boom, as entrepreneurs find that many investors are willing to keep the money flowing even if a start-up takes a hard left turn.

“Ideas are like lightning in a bottle, so if the company is small enough and didn’t seem to capture lightning on their first try, it makes sense to try again,” said Ben Horowitz, one of the founders of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “The art of the pivot is to do it fast and early. The older and bigger the business, the harder it is to change directions.”

Mr. Horowitz speaks from experience: A decade ago, he went through a pivot of Loudcloud, a publicly traded enterprise services firm that he founded with Marc Andreessen, into Opsware, a networking software company. “That was very public and very scary,” he said. “We dropped down to 35 cents on the Nasdaq, and although we went back up to $14, it took awhile. When you’re a small company, no one really notices if you make a big change.”

”

- - Jenna Wortham, For Some Internet Start-Ups, a Failure Is Just the Beginning - NYTimes.com

The use of the term ‘pivot’ in startupland is the corollary to the now commonplace notion that you may have to fail in order to learn a life lesson. While this has become conventional wisdom, startup founders are reluctant to admit their baby is ugly, or that massive success is not going to come with the next release. The adoption of pivoting is a great metaphorical headshift, and it’s one great example of ambient innovation: the startup scene has adopted, applied, and spread the concept of pivoting, and that has had major impacts on founders willingness to junk weak ideas.

"@joshsternberg: RT @hueypriest: “Hollywood’s right to make bad business decisions stops at the..."

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:07:19 -0500

“@joshsternberg: RT @hueypriest: “Hollywood’s right to make bad business decisions stops at the point where it threatens our freedom of speech” @evanatwired”

- January 18, 2012 at 05:31AM via http://bit.ly/y2EJi0