Stowe Boyd

"@michaelwolf: Cisco Umi, Eos, Cius: All killed in last 12 months. If you’re a product manager..."

Fri, 25 May 2012 17:45:11 -0400

“@michaelwolf: Cisco Umi, Eos, Cius: All killed in last 12 months. If you’re a product manager of weirdly name brand at Cisco, dust off that resume.”

- May 25, 2012 at 02:21PM via http://bit.ly/KIw1kA

Synchronizing Ads On The Second Screen: A Study

Fri, 25 May 2012 12:25:00 -0400

Hill Holliday and SecondScreen Networks set up a study to find out how they might sunchronize the head shifting that goes along with the ‘swarm of devices’ style of TV use that goes on these days, given the emergence of the second screen:

Ilya Vedrashko, Smartphones Distract People Away from TV, Mobile Ads Help Bring Them Back

When people are in front of the TV, they don’t just watch TV.

The pioneering Middletown Media Study conducted in the pre-iPhone and pre-iPad era of 2005 showed that, at the time, 28.5% of 240.9 daily TV viewing minutes were accompanied by exposure to at least one other medium. (Talking on the phone and texting were the most frequent sources of interruption). In addition, about half of all TV minutes were accompanied by non-media life activities, such as caring for others, eating and cleaning.

The competition for TV viewer’s attention has hardly subsided. Since the study, smartphone penetration in the US soared from 3.8% in 2006 to 44% by the end of 2011. Today, for many tablet and smartphone owners (45% and 41%, respectively) using their mobile device while watching TV is a daily activity.

For any advertiser, these numbers lead to a natural question: What happens to my TV ads?

Having failed to locate a ready answer, we decided to find out for ourselves. We partnered with SecondScreen Networks, a company that sells mobile ads synchronized to what’s playing on the TV, to set up an experiment. Our formal objective was to understand the effect of advertising on a secondary screen during concurrent content consumption of television and mobile content.

They rigged up an experiment with three scenarios: 1/ no phone in hand, 2/ a phone in hand showing unsynchronized ‘ads’, and 3/ phone in hand that syncs an ad with a trailer running on the TV.

They discovered that the first scenario had higher recall and preference rates: on average 17% higher recall and 12% higher preference than the two-screen groups.

But — and this is the suggestive aspect of the experiment — the synced second screen scenario brought the preference rates up over the unsynced second screen scenario: back up 15%. Recall was lower but people are less unsettled by the second screen.

As Vedrashko tells it:

If independently confirmed, these findings could mean a couple of things. One is that TV advertisers will be looking for ways to compensate for the drop in TV ad effectiveness caused by TV-mobile multitasking either by dialing up frequency or by putting up two-screen roadblocks with the help of companies such as SecondScreen Networks.

Secondly, ads that invite viewers to engage with a smartphone right away – shazam it! scan this QR code! – might be ruining it for the next ad in the pod. The playing field of a commercial break is already uneven: an emotionally impactful ad will carry viewer’s thought way beyond the allotted 30 seconds. By getting people to fumble with their smartphones, an ad essentially makes viewers tune the TV out for the duration of the exercise.

Looks like synchronization of second screen ads is going to be worthy of more research.

Tom Gauld is the dank notes.

Fri, 25 May 2012 12:09:19 -0400

Tom Gauld is the dank notes.

Mark Wilson, This Dead-Simple Idea Could Fix iPad’s Lousy...

Fri, 25 May 2012 08:00:43 -0400

Mark Wilson, This Dead-Simple Idea Could Fix iPad’s Lousy Typing

Hooper Selection is an iPad interface concept by Georgia Tech student Daniel Hooper. He’s so excited about the project that he not only coded and filmed the demo software; he built a Wikipedia page on the technique (the poor man’s copyright for the digital age).

Very cool. Apple should hire Hooper.

"What is important is providing the conditions through which people can achieve happiness as they..."

Fri, 25 May 2012 07:50:00 -0400

“What is important is providing the conditions through which people can achieve happiness as they understand it.”

- L. Hunter Lovins, Reframing The Global Economy To Include Happiness via Co.Exist

Future Work Skills 2020

Fri, 25 May 2012 07:43:18 -0400

futurist-foresight:

The Institute for the Future released a report on future work skills that will be needed by 2020. They are:

Sense-making.

Social intelligence.

Novel and adaptive thinking.

Cross-cultural competency.

Computational thinking.

New-media literacy.

Transdisciplinarity.

Design mind-set.

Cognitive load management.

Virtual collaboration.

(Gigaom gives a quick breakdown)

The graphic below from that report highlights areas of focus:

"It’s worth contemplating one of the primary factors that drove Facebook’s adoption by (soon) 1..."

Fri, 25 May 2012 07:28:00 -0400

“It’s worth contemplating one of the primary factors that drove Facebook’s adoption by (soon) 1 billion people: Loneliness. Americans have less support than ever — 1 in 8 in the Pew survey reported having no “discussion confidants.””

- - Christopher Mims, How Facebook Saved Us from Suburbia via Technology Review

(via courtenaybird)

"Phatic posts (or small talk) in communication processes online are very meaningful because they..."

Fri, 25 May 2012 07:20:47 -0400

“Phatic posts (or small talk) in communication processes online are very meaningful because they indicate and imply social recognition, online intimacy by sharing our thoughts and feelings with others, as well as the sociability in online communities. Phatic posts potentially denote a lot more substance and weight to them than the content itself suggests. We may conclude that, in the phatic communication context, the content itself may not be relevant but the “keeping in touch” signal it delivers is crucial.”

- - Danica Radovanovic, Phatic Posts: Even the Small Talk Can Be Big via Scientific American

Small talk is big again.

Social Discovery Hasn't Found Its Way, Yet

Fri, 25 May 2012 07:16:00 -0400

Andrew Keen pans the current crop of social discovery apps, like Highlight, Glancee, Banjo, and Sonar:

Andrew Keen, Messing With Fate via The Atlantic

Applying algorithms to the personal data on networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, these apps try to introduce us to nearby people whom we might like to meet—because we listed the same career on LinkedIn, say, or because we “liked” the same bands on Facebook. That’s why my friend’s phone was buzzing: it wanted to introduce her to strangers in the vicinity of the Indian restaurant who, like her, were on Highlight. And it’s why, when I arrived at the Austin airport the next day, I was bombarded with notifications that potential “friends” were nearby: tens of thousands of techno-hipsters had just descended, and every one of them seemed to have downloaded one of the social-discovery apps that pundits were predicting would go mainstream at this year’s South by Southwest.

My own experience at the festival, however, was decidedly short on serendipity. Everywhere I went, my new apps tried to connect me to people I didn’t want to see—business partners from failed ventures, Web developers I’d fired, entrepreneurs who were selling things I didn’t need, the inevitable ex-girlfriend. Worse, the people I wanted to bump into never popped up on my phone. In the end, most people who came to Austin seemed to agree with my friend: these apps are, in their first-generation form, annoying. (Forget Big Brother; imagine a mutual-surveillance network of little brothers.) Their incessant matchmaking drains both patience and batteries.

I agree. I found Highlight useless and annoying, but I think they fail for the obvious reason: they are trying too hard. I mean, what’s the pitch for an social discovery app that doesn’t serve up lots of possible pals?

Me, I need to turn the dial down. I don’t buy the logic that there are 25 people within 1000 yards of where I am standing at any minute — even at SxSW — that are potentially pals or soulmates. I need a social discovery app that isn’t so undiscerning. I’d rather only one or two introductions per month that are dead on, even if I don’t miss a dozen could-have-beens.

PS Looking for a good Twitter analysis tool, to find more good sources of high quality insight. Let me know if you know one at @stoweboyd.

Big Data and Data Inequality: Research Is Just The Beginning

Fri, 25 May 2012 05:27:29 -0400

There was a recent hoo-ha at a scientific conference in France, when Bernardo Huberman was furious when researchers from Google and a contributing university presenting results of social data analysis declined to share the data.

John Markoff, Big Data Troves Stay Forbidden to Social Scientists via NYTimes.com

The issue came to a boil last month at a scientific conference in Lyon, France, when three scientists from Google and the University of Cambridge declined to release data they had compiled for a paper on the popularity of YouTube videos in different countries.

The chairman of the conference panel — Bernardo A. Huberman, a physicist who directs the social computing group at HP Labs here — responded angrily. In the future, he said, the conference should not accept papers from authors who did not make their data public. He was greeted by applause from the audience.

In February, Dr. Huberman had published a letter in the journal Nature warning that privately held data was threatening the very basis of scientific research. “If another set of data does not validate results obtained with private data,” he asked, “how do we know if it is because they are not universal or the authors made a mistake?”

He added that corporate control of data could give preferential access to an elite group of scientists at the largest corporations. “If this trend continues,” he wrote, “we’ll see a small group of scientists with access to private data repositories enjoy an unfair amount of attention in the community at the expense of equally talented researchers whose only flaw is the lack of right ‘connections’ to private data.”

Facebook and Microsoft declined to comment on the issue. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, said he sympathized with the idea of open data but added that the privacy issues were significant.

“This is one of the reasons the general pattern at Google is to try to release data to everyone or no one,” he said. “I have been working to get companies to release more data about their industries. The idea is that you can provide proprietary data aggregated in a way that poses no threats to privacy.”

The debate will only intensify as large companies with deep pockets do more research about their users. “In the Internet era,” said Andreas Weigend, a physicist and former chief scientist at Amazon, “research has moved out of the universities to the Googles, Amazons and Facebooks of the world.”

And of course, big data is worth big money — leaving aside the privacy concerns — and controlling access to that data is central to the aspirations of companies like Google, Facebook, and others.

Research is just the first place where the latent data inequality of the post normal world will come to light. We will each of us — as individuals — be divided from the inherent value of information about our activities and the inferences that can be made about them. As a society, we will find corporations that do not have our interests at heart working to exploit the potential value of our aggregated data exhaust. We are an exploitable resource — like the oceans of fish or the oil beneath the ground — and these companies plan to harvest all the value without our involvement.

We will find that we don’t own the information about ourselves anymore than we own our DNA. (Yes, others can patent your genes: see The Tissue-Industrial Complex.)

"@stoweboyd: Can SAP Make Business Processes Social? http://t.co/haXECM7i A social environment that..."

Fri, 25 May 2012 04:52:00 -0400

“@stoweboyd: Can SAP Make Business Processes Social? http://t.co/haXECM7i A social environment that runs above business processes, or just a sidebar?”

- via Twitter: May 25, 2012 at 01:41AM via http://bit.ly/JxeYnG

I take a hard look at a recent Financial Times opinion piece by SAP Co-CEO, Jim Snabe, and although it’s not necessarily socialwash, it doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter: how to create a social environment that runs above the entrained business processes of the enterprise, as opposed to creating a social sidebar to an enterprise model dominated by inflexible and mechanical business processes.

Read the complete piece at Work Talk Reports.

"@huddle: RT @PandoTicker: Huddle Raises $24 Million for Enterprise Collaboration..."

Thu, 24 May 2012 15:06:17 -0400

“@huddle: RT @PandoTicker: Huddle Raises $24 Million for Enterprise Collaboration http://t.co/cjg2HYSz”

- May 24, 2012 at 08:54AM via http://bit.ly/JuMfjk

What Happened To The Hype About Hyperlocal?

Wed, 23 May 2012 16:01:00 -0400

Two things today made me assess the small progress made in hyperlocal journalism to date, and to reconsider the direction we might be headed in.

First, I saw a tweet go by pointing to a WSJ story:

Keach Hagey, For AOL, a Costly Gamble On Local News Draws Trouble

Mr. Armstrong, has held his ground in defending Patch, which he co-founded in 2007 before he joined AOL, but he recently promised to make it profitable by next year. In a small step toward that goal, Patch said Tuesday it will cut around 20 jobs, or less than 2% of its workforce. The cuts will come from merging the management of its eastern and southern regional reporting operations.

Whether Mr. Armstrong can make Patch a success could determine his fate at AOL. As the ad-supported network has expanded to more than 850 towns from 30 in the past two years, its annual loss has widened sharply to more than $100 million in 2011, analysts say.

The main problem: It is tough to sell enough online ads to cover the cost of producing local news, especially while maintaining a local reporting staff and a local advertising sales force.

“I don’t think anybody’s figured out local yet,” said Rick Blair, an angel investor in several companies that run local websites.

AOL is losing $100M on Patch this year, and Ariana Huffington tried to integrate Patch into the very successful Huffington Post but then lost interest after Patch management chafed at her attempts.

My bet is that Patch will end Armstrong’s career at AOL, and Ariana will take over as CEO. She’ll either scrap Patch or integrate it totally into HuffPo. But to make it a ‘success’ Patch will have to become something very different from what Armstrong envisions.

Note that the Patch model is closed: there is no Patch for Beacon NY, where I live, and there is no provision for me or anyone else to start one. It’s all centrally managed, which just runs counter to hyperlocalism, in my view.

The second reason I am thinking about hyperlocal is that the Guardian — a group that really gets the web in a way that Armstrong seems not to — announced n0tice.org, their ‘open journalism toolkit’, which is a platform for crowdsourcing journalism capable of being used by publishers, brands, communities and developers.

I started fooling around with the tool, and immediately decided to wait for the iPhone app. I created a community ‘n0ticeboard’ for Beacon NY, where I now reside, in about three minutes. Check it out at beacon.n0tice.com.

The UX of n0tice.org is a lot like Tumblr: you login as an individual, and you can create and participate in various n0ticeboards, posting events, reports, or good to sell, swap or share. You can follow other users or n0ticeboards. And you can post to any n0ticeboards, so it is very open (which will lead to a moderation overhead, I am sure).

The Guardian plans to share revenues with those contributing, but has no firm date for that generation of the platform.

At any rate, two very contrasting approaches: Armstrong’s Patch which feels very 2005ish and limited to specific communities, and the Guardian’s n0tice which is based loosely on the basic model of Tumblr — much more contemporary — and based on ‘open journalism’ crowdsourcing. I just wish the n0tice iPhone app was available.

The Guardian project gives me hope that the dream of hyperlocal can really come true, through a very open model of participation.

Integrated Workstation Designed by Matthew Plumstead Taking...

Wed, 23 May 2012 11:54:00 -0400

Integrated Workstation
Designed by Matthew Plumstead

Taking only the most essential components of a workstation and adding a third component- the daybed, this workstation provides maximum flexibility in a very modest footprint. Standing, sitting, and reclining are each given an equal and accommodating space, making a strong statement about new behaviors and postures in the office.

One of the prototypes dreamed up by Cranbrook design students in a project with Herman Miller called Rest and Relaxation In the Workplace.

"@LeanBack2_0: GigaOm’s @matthewi says @Twitter is becoming a media company - curating tweets,..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 11:25:23 -0400

“@LeanBack2_0: GigaOm’s @matthewi says @Twitter is becoming a media company - curating tweets, hiring editors, censoring tweets. #pc2012”

- May 23, 2012 at 08:13AM via http://bit.ly/KyCG0X

F.C.C. Weighs Treating Video Sites Like Cable Companies - Brian Stelter via NYTimes.com

Wed, 23 May 2012 10:36:00 -0400

F.C.C. Weighs Treating Video Sites Like Cable Companies - Brian Stelter via NYTimes.com:

The FCC is likely to let the genii out of th bottle, and redefine who is a Multichannel Video Programming Distributor, or MVPDs, now effectively limited to the linear TV players like Comcast and DirecTV. If the rules are changed to include streaming video services like Hulu and YouTube, the landscape of TV will never be the same:

Brian Stelter via NYTimes.com

Major distributors like Comcast and Time Warner Cable want the definition of M.V.P.D. to remain rather narrow, to include only those who provide the transmission path for programming, like themselves.

Some broadcasters, however, want the definition to be broadened to include online video sites, because then the sites would be subject to the same rules as cable operators, called retransmission consent, and would have to pay fees for their station signals. A number of online TV start-ups, including the Barry Diller-backed Aereo, are trying to sidestep these rules.

Jack Perry of Syncbak, which helps stations simulcast their signals on the Web, said his company would be able to grow more rapidly if the F.C.C. adopted a “21st-century definition of M.V.P.D.’s.”

“The impact could be huge,” he said. Still other stakeholders, including trade groups that represent giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Netflix, have said that the F.C.C. should take more time before deciding.

Yeah, some large players want to avoid paying fees for rebroadcasting, and to possibly limit the entrance of new start-ups.

And the cable and satellite operators want to freeze time, and delay the inevitable, which will turn those companies’ product into a single commodity: basically bringing the Internet to our homes, through which we will be able to access whatever streaming content we want from whatever sources we want: ‘over the top’ TV. Comcast and Time Warner Cable do not want to be competing directly with Apple, Amazon, and Google, but it is in the best interest of the average person is the FCC allows this change to happen.

"The broad consensus is that Google is an empty city where the masses go to set up a profile but..."

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:34:10 -0400

“The broad consensus is that Google is an empty city where the masses go to set up a profile but then seldom return.”

- Cotton Delo, Google a Ghost Town as Brands Decamp for Pinterest via Advertising Age

Readlists via Arc90 Lab

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:26:30 -0400

Readlists via Arc90 Lab:

Arc90 — the people behind Readability — have launched a new service called Readlists. Users can create a collation of links — of whatever sort — and bundle into an e-book that can be read on a Kindle, iPad, or iPhone.

I created one using the links I pulled together yesterday on Social Operating Systems, here. They are featuring a number on the www.readlists.com landing page, too.

This is what it looks like on my iPad in iBooks:

Note that it doesn’t seem to handle the ‘related posts’ javascript, so dynamic pages might be problematic, but still: very cool.

A Model For Open Work Media

Tue, 22 May 2012 11:35:00 -0400

Over at Work Talk Reports, I’ve written a short introduction to a big idea that I call Open Work. I use the term ‘work media’ to refer to the enterprise social networking tools that are being rapidly adopted in business these days, but I think the basic premises for those tools are too limiting and limited.

Stowe Boyd, A Model For Open Work Media

I am deep into a number of writing projects, including a report on the state of work media tools (aka enterprise social networking), but a set of ideas keep coming forward in my thinking, so I decided to take a moment to capture them.

The short form of these ideas is this: the work media tools we are using today cover only a small part of the ambit of activities that make up our work.

The longer version? Work media tools are designed to handle a small set of use cases that are oriented toward collaborative activities, such as sharing documents, assigning tasks, and core business functions, like sales and customer support. These tools take a great deal for granted, and have built-in fundamental premises about the closed nature of today’s work, so that a broad range of activities that we are actually involved in every day are either managed only in part, or managed outside of these tools altogether.

A simple example has to do with project work. Today’s tools are geared toward managing a project once it has been defined, and once the various team members have been identified. A work context is defined, people are invited, and work commences. But these leaves aside all the work that preceded the project, such as cost estimates, negotiations with freelancers, proposals to the client, and so on.

Yes, it is true that these other activities could have been managed as independent and earlier projects themselves, and that is, in a sense, my point. But in general, much of that earlier coordinative effort — especially negotiation — is unmanaged, or managed via email or other interactions.

And the largest gap in the orientation of today’s work media tools is that they are almost completely closed: they are organized so that only people that are invited to participate in well-defined projects can gain access at all. With very few exceptions, nothing created or managed within these tools can be shared with the outside world, or even between other users of the various systems.

Go read the complete article at Work Talk Reports.

"Good design is innovative Good design makes a product useful Good design is aesthetic Good design..."

Mon, 21 May 2012 14:33:00 -0400

“

Good design is innovative
Good design makes a product useful
Good design is aesthetic
Good design helps us to understand a product
Good design is unobtrusive
Good design is honest
Good design is durable
Good design is consequent to the last detail
Good design is concerned with the environment
Good design is as little design as possible

”

- Dieter Ram’s ten commandments of good design, via Brain Pickings