Perry

Hewitt

Month: October 2015

  • Friday 5 — 10.30.2015

    Friday 5 — 10.30.2015

    cards

    1. In the early 90s, corporate marketing departments produced physical brand books, illustrating dos and don’ts for print, TV, signage, trade shows, etc. Fast forward a couple of decades, and the digital world requires a wide-ranging brand treatment that enables variations in volume, and concepts like stacking. See this gorgeous Netflix brand rollout for a best-in-class example.
    2. I’m a longtime fan of Nuzzel, a useful service to see what your friends and colleagues are sharing online. Pro tip: try the dropdown that allows you to sort content by timeframe. This week Nuzzel rolled out a new automated newsletter to attract audiences other than superusers (the polite term for addicts) of Twitter.
    3. How (and where) are we using the internet of things? A study by Accenture found security (hello, dropcam!) and quantified self apps topping the list of applications. A bigger takeaway comes at the end — rather than connect just our homes there’s a greater opportunity to connect ourselves to the context of the physical world as we move through it.
    4. Organizations are adjusting their tactics as digital capabilities become more broadly distributed. Hence the New York Times recently shut down its City Room blog, citing DNA [that] has spread throughout the newsroom.
    5. 68% of U.S.. adults now own a smartphone — double the number who did back in mid-2011. And iPhone growth naysayers be damned: Ben Thompson explains that the ever-increasing importance of smartphones in people’s lives means that the market size of people willing to pay a premium for their smartphone is actually growing.

    Weekend fun: If the pumpkins weren’t enough of a tipoff, the sheer number of inbound Snapchats of costumes remind us that it’s Halloween. Spruce up your digital self with Halloween icons from the Noun Project, and check your actual costume’s popularity using Google search data. But if Halloween is just not your thing, hide at home this weekend watching all of Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting on Twitch (well played, Adobe!).

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • HUBweek moments

    HUBweek moments

    HUBweek 2015 is a wrap. 46,000 people took part in this weeklong celebration of the work and impact at the intersection of art, science, and technology in Greater Boston. The festival was co-founded by Harvard, MIT, MGH, and the Boston Globe, and benefited from creative collaborators from dozens of institutions across the region.

    A few of my favorite moments:

    “Who you are; who parents think you are; who your computer thinks you are can be three totally separate people.”

    – Alexis Wilkinson on the role of technology in our lives at Fenway Forum [video]

    “We live in the Golden Age of surveillance, where law can subvert technology and technology can subvert law … the most intimate surveillance device I have is my cell phone.”

    – Bruce Schneier, presenting on The Future of Privacy and Security in a Big Data World

    “Metadata isn’t neutral.”

    – Andromeda Yelton, sharing big ideas and practical truths in Libraries: The Next Generation [liveblog by David Weinberger] [video]

    “Narrative of podcast can be as technology, business, or the art form – and the most interesting is the art form.”

    – Benjamen Walker, in State of the Podcast 2015 [video]

    Below are selected images from the week — find more on the HUBweek Instagram account, or stay tuned for HUBweek 2016.

    MIT SOLVE stage
    Chris Shipley kicks off SOLVE conference at MIT
    Perry Hewitt Hugo Van Vuuren and MIT cheetah
    Making robotics fly in Harvard Stadium with Hugo Van Vuuren
  • Friday 5 — 10.23.2015

    Friday 5 — 10.23.2015

    add to slack button hand

    1. “Just a Brown Hand” takes a look at the decision process behind a seemingly small detail: the skin color of the hand depicted in the new Add to Slack feature launched this week. It’s a good reminder of the normative defaults often hard coded into software we use.
    2. Curious about the future of tech and media? If so, this 136-slide Activate 2016 Tech and Media Outlook is definitely worth the time. A few points in particular stood out for me: the rise of messaging over “traditional” social media; the 31(!) hours a day we now have for consumption thanks to multitasking; and the difficulty of getting rich via the app store.
    3. Tom Davenport explains five essential principles for understanding analytics. I particularly like the point about getting close to your organization’s small, structured data, the value of which often gets lost in the endless big data hype.
    4. Buffer blogged this week about the sharp, year-over-year decline in social traffic to its blog. The post reviews in detail the likely suspects causing the decline, and then posits two potential solutions: paid reach and more targeted content. They’re opting for the latter, but I suspect the combination might be the answer.
    5. Facebook is now making public posts — all 2 trillion of them — accessible via its powerful search engine. A robust search capability gives Facebook a stronger foothold in breaking news and following live events, which has traditionally been Twitter’s turf. But let’s cut to the chase: here’s how to hide yours.

    Weekend fun: So we didn’t get our hoverboards in time for #BacktotheFuture day, but we did get this insane Magic Leap video. If you’re looking for a more manageable digital achievement, you might want to try Instagram’s new Boomerang app. There are already more than 125K boomerangs in the wild — here’s one for inspiration:

    Synchronized Sisters 👯 – #boomerang from @instagram

    A video posted by Harlow, Sage, Indiana & Reese (@harlowandsage) on

     

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • Friday 5 — 10.16.2015

    Friday 5 — 10.16.2015

    teens tech and romance

    1. When you’re in love, you text daily. Or at least our teenagers do 72% of the time, compared with only 39% who talk on the phone daily. And when they break up? 43% untag or delete photos shared online. Read the full report on teens, technology, and romantic relationships.
    2. How do you manage product feedback in a period of exponential growth? Slack’s first product manager explains the value of smart hypotheses, his approach to quantitative and qualitative data, and common biases to avoid. Many of these process recommendations are as applicable to product management for enterprise digital services as they are to a rapid-growth startup.
    3. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages — Google’s recent attempt to improve mobile rendering speed while preserving content monetization models. With mobile usage exploding, creating an open web standard that improves content consumption that supports existing business models is a problem worth solving.
    4. Twitter has navigated a revolving door of CEOs, a stock price in free fall, and a significant layoff this week — but the product may have doubled down on its core value with the launch of Moments. Ben Thompson explains why a tweet-based newspaper may be a valuable product renewal, offering improved, more accessible user experience and a better, more targeted advertising model.
    5. If you’ve been using the web since the 1990s, you’ve likely experienced vanishing content — being unable to find something that existed before. In order to ensure the survival of the content we’re all putting on the web, we need to preserve not only the websites but maintain the technical environments in which they first appeared. This story of a nearly-lost journalism series posits that we may be living in the internet’s dark ages.

    Weekend fun: Try to get away from the tech this weekend, now that a photographer has shown us just how creepy our screen addiction has made us. Before you unplug, though, you might want to check out this virtual reality demo. Demos like these help us see how Oculus Rift can create shared human experiences closely aligned with Facebook’s mission.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • How Budweiser won the Nobel Prize in chemistry

    How Budweiser won the Nobel Prize in chemistry

    It’s easy to spot the difference between an organization with digital DNA and an organization still making the transition. Here’s an example highlighting different approaches to breaking news.

    On Monday morning the Nobel Prize in chemistry was announced. The Wall Street Journal was pushing the story via multiple Twitter accounts. So I clicked on one of their links in my feed.
    Twitter Feeds

    Beer. Suddenly I found myself reading a story about Budweiser beer, and wondering how on earth this won someone a Nobel Prize. My morning brain had to click in and out of the story a few times via both WSJ Twitter accounts until I noticed the breaking news banner at the top. That red and black bar isn’t an ad or a design element: it’s the lead story the tweet was directing me to. Banner blindness, a known phenomenon since 1998, caused me to ignore it entirely.

    At around the same time, a tweet came through from Buzzfeed. I clicked through, and here’s what I saw:

    nobel prize Buzzfeed

    Buzzfeed sent me straight to the content on the Nobel Prize site. I can’t recall whether they framed the copy in some way on their own mobile site, but Buzzfeed took me straight to the news without any confusion. Several minutes later, I checked the Buzzfeed site again, and they’d written their own story:

    Buzzfeed Nobel story

    It’s a small example, but a reminder of the stark difference between an old media organization still working on the transition to a mobile, social environment, and a new media organization that can’t envision news consumption any other way. As someone who has worked in large organizations making the shift to digital, I can empathize with the challenges. User experiences like this can be telling ‘iceberg’ examples, though: when you see these kinds of misses on the surface, they are signs of problematic software design practices and business processes lying beneath.