Perry

Hewitt

Author: Perry Hewitt

Friday 5 — 6.20.2014
1. Email subscriptions can be pernicious — almost every online interaction bullies you into adding another. Try Unrollme to clean up your inbox by unsubscribing from the mail you never quite get around to reading.
2. What will wearables mean for the workplace? Salesforce releases code libraries to inspire app development, with potential impact on both in-office productivity and lifestyle/fitness.
3. Content management systems and their admin interfaces aren’t usually the sexiest of web topics. But this comes close: the Nieman Lab’s look under the hood at the New York Times’ CMS.
4. Amazon this week launched its long-rumored Amazon Fire Phone. Of note: multiple front-facing cameras to offer 3D perspective and Firefly, which enables you to scan products for additional information. The phones ship next month on AT&T at $199 (32GB) and $299 (64GB) price points.
5. A step-by-step look at Twitter’s cumbersome signup process shows why the company is struggling to grow. But on the bright side, Twitter finally supports GIFs to add a little fun to your timeline.
Weekend fun: OK, Jon Stewart! The Daily Show takes down Google Glass in inimitable style. Fear not: no Glassholes were harmed in the filming of the segment.

Heads up: Friday 5 is taking a break next week to celebrate the World Cup, and resumes on the 4th of July.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
June 19, 2014
5 ways Google delivers winning World Cup results
If you can’t watch every game live, you may be spending a lot of time surreptitiously tuning into the World Cup via search. Google serves up a clean, selective summary on the search results page above the organic news and web links. A search today for “France World Cup” yielded the interface below on desktop view:
1. The desktop view directs the eye to a visual view of current game score, with flags as the focal point. The timeline defaults to “Matches” tab with “Standings” tab accessible.
2. The interface offers relevant but limited additional information, like a reminder of the Group, and of other France matches.
3. There is selective use of color (‘Live 9’ in green) so you can see the game’s progress at a glance.
4. The sidebar brings in visual and text content from the Wikipedia entry, with general team information and roster.
5. The mobile view offers slightly different navigation. On mobile, the result omits the Wikipedia entry up top in favor of showing the roster via “Lineups”, and defaults to “Timeline” during the game. The scrollable interface highlights the great use of icons for elements like yellow cards, penalties, and own goals. As with the desktop view, playable video clips are prominent.
So many sports sites and television interfaces — for reasons that include both ad revenue needs and poor design choices — succumb to confusing, poorly differentiated visual clutter. Google’s clean interface does a solid job of serving up status and context at a glance for the World Cup obsessed.
June 15, 2014
Friday 5 — 6.13.2014
1. Amazon launched a streaming music service — a relatively commoditized offering with competitors like Spotify, Beat, and Rdio. The differentiator may not be a more robust feature set, in part because Amazon’s offering does not include Universal Music Group’s catalog. Instead, as this article points out, the Prime bundling with free shipping and book lending may tip the balance over its competitors.
2. Can Twitter survive against the Facebook juggernaut — and other rapidly growing social networks? Today, Twitter usage hovers at about 19% of U.S. online adults, versus 71% for Facebook. This Pew Research Center article suggests that Twitter may have niche staying power, with use cases around breaking news, political influencers, and activists.
3. What is the impact of unmoderated comments on your website? In one study, respondents rated articles with comments as lower quality— with as much as 8% difference in perception.
4. With over 200M active users and a top ten smartphone app, Instagram is a draw for many brands. Buffer offers a great how-to guide for businesses getting started on the photo sharing social network. Also included: best times to post to various social media outlets.
5. We’re in the midst of a hardware renaissance, and excitement about the promise of virtual reality (VR). Oculus Rift CEO Brendan Iribe talks about the potential of the technology and its role within Facebook, which acquired the tech company back in March for $2B. Salient quote: “When you put on Oculus, people are just streaming with ideas, dreaming about things.”
Weekend fun: Irritating linkbait meets brutal satire at the Onion’s new venture, Clickhole. And it’s a winner whether people know it’s satire or not.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
June 13, 2014
CIA’s epic first tweet

How to tweet (brilliantly) as a decidedly un-B2C brand

June 7, 2014
Friday 5 — 6.6.2014
1. LinkedIn really, really wants you to buy a premium account, and is disrupting its current paid model with a less expensive $9.99/month option. This includes new, more visual profiles, and tools to help you optimize for search. For early access, you can sign up here.
2. Despite the growth of and improvement in speech recognition software with Siri, Dragon, et al., inferring meaning from language remains a difficult problem. Natural language processing pros, take note: the U.S. Secret Service has posted a request for vendors who can help them detect sarcasm. Whatever.
3. AirBnB has a beta in-app concierge service for San Francisco only. As collaborative economy services disrupt existing models, this seems like a smart experiment to determine what people might miss about hotels.
4. Social product spotter Product Hunt got a glowing write up in TechCrunch this week. And here’s an analysis of the early Product Hunt data — product names seem to be converging around IO, iOS, Me, 2.0, One, Up, Box, Hub, and Hello.
5. Google is reportedly in talks for a $1B acquisition of Twitch, which allows gamers to stream their gameplay for others. And watching others play video games is serious business: Twitch has 45 million visitors and more than a million new videos each month. Surely, some are from newly-funded Super Evil Megacorp.
Weekend fun: John Oliver explained net neutrality clearly enough that Americans finally became outraged about a system with “all the ingredients of a mob shakedown.” And maybe his plea for vitriolic internet commenters to channel their indiscriminate rage in a useful direction took the FCC website down.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
June 6, 2014
Summer reading picks
With Memorial Day and Harvard’s commencement in the rear view mirror and temperatures in Boston threatening to stay over 50º F, it’s time to start thinking about summer reading. Not a lot slows down at work, but I invariably put together an overly-ambitious summer reading list. This year, I’ll try get through at least five of them, lest the sea of tweets reduces me to faking cultural literacy.

A few useful lists as starting points:
- The New York Times By the Book Archive, especially Gillian Flynn and Gary Shteyngart (whose own “Little Failure” was hilarious)
- Condé Nast Traveler: David Sedaris tells you what to read this summer
- Harvard faculty picks: Summertime, and the reading is easy
- Roundups for product managers and digital strategists (with a few adds, including colleague Misiek Piskorski’s Social Strategy: How We Profit from Social Media)
- In-person scanning of the shelf tags at our terrific independent bookstore, Newtonville Books
Many swear by goodreads, but the site feels too vertical a social network to stay connected with more than periodically. Also, I trust someone’s reading tastes far more when served up within the context of an overall social network profile. After all, how seriously will you take a satirical novel recommendation when it’s posted among 74 toddler pictures?

Mostly I read on Kindle for iPad, but for vacation I rely on the physical books, which are excellent for resisting the temptation of toggling to work email. Summer provides an opportunity to shut down the laptop and with focused attention — something too often in short supply.
June 3, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.30.2014
1. Mary Meeker released her annual, comprehensive internet trends report. Lots of stats reinforce the enormous potential in mobile, like room for growth in global smartphone adoption, and opportunity in mobile advertising. She notes that the education industry is at an “inflection point,” with increasingly global user bases (particularly for duolingo above) and the rise of personalized, online education from MOOC to app.
2. Amazon and Hachette are embroiled in an escalating battle, which has led to Amazon, in some cases, refusing to sell or discount Hachette books — see this useful explainer. In highly related news, a Harvard Business Review article outlines four strategies suppliers can use to capture value from powerful platform owners.
3. Does our addiction to tweets, Buzzfeed slideshows, tl;dr summaries, and explainers mean that we no longer devote focused time to explore primary sources? This opinion piece offers one worrisome take on our facile faking of cultural literacy.
4. What does Apple buying sub-par headphone company and high-margin lifestyle brand Beats mean (apart from the fact that Dr. Dre is now linked to Steve Jobs by far fewer than six degrees of separation)? Explore some theories here.
5. We’ve discovered the ideal recipe for crowdfunding $2M on Kickstarter in less than 48 hours. Mix a heady dose of nostalgia with an accessible and compelling cause, and then add in cultural icon LeVar Burton.
Weekend fun: The bad news: otters at the Smithsonian National Zoo may well have more enrichment activities than you do at your desk. The good news: it’s pretty awesome to watch.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 30, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.23.14
1. How does your LinkedIn profile rank? LinkedIn taps into inherent narcissism by exposing your percentile in profile views compared with that of your connections, or with others in your company. Disappointed in your results? LinkedIn suggests that you beef up your summary, add more skills, and join more groups.
2. There’s a big opportunity for native mobile apps to take advantage of your handheld’s hardware from camera or accelerometer. This week, Facebook announced an imminent mobile app feature that uses the microphone to identify ambient TV shows, music, or movies. The app then offers up the content to be approved for inclusion in a status update.
3. In a surely wholly unrelated initiative, Facebook changed the default privacy setting for new users to be “friends and family” versus “public” and announced a new privacy check up tool to be rolled out in the coming weeks. Here’s hoping your new privacy settings will keep your mobile device microphone from reporting you are home in your pajamas watching Veep, rather than at the Childish Gambino concert featured in your status message.
4. The internet of things means, sadly but inevitably, ads running on all those connected things. Like on your thermostat. Or your refrigerator. See the full list as well as a couple of clarifications from Google.
5. Why did that video go viral? Success can be attributed to eliciting strong, positive emotion. Be sure to keep it upbeat — people want to see the daring rescue attempt, but no one wants to know that the kitten actually died.
Weekend fun: Speaking of viral video, here’s a slick maneuver from a clever young man who caught a foul ball — and perhaps tried to win a heart.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 23, 2014
Next gen mobile: your app data finds you

The news industry is still struggling with the shift to digital, as the leaked New York Times innovation report underscores. Apart from new required competencies like video, data visualization, and analytics that digital transformation demands, there is a similar tectonic shift in reader (user) expectation. News has gone from being a canonical resource that people are expected to consult to a digital, just-in-time service delivered to people wherever they are. It’s now been six years since we first heard, if news is important, it will find me, and news outlets are still striving to realize that vision.

The current expectation that important news will find the user is highly relevant to mobile. Chances are, your handheld device knows everything about you: the location of your favorite restaurant, your movie preferences, and even your fitness habits. And yet in many cases we are still using our phones the way we read print newspapers — consulting them when we need information, and optimizing our home screen (front page). But as people spend more of their mobile time interacting with apps, there is an ever greater opportunity for those apps to take advantage of the data via the software and the hardware to deliver what users want when they are likely to need it.

Yahoo is moving toward contextual search, which would enable them, if granted API access, to provide far more relevant search results informed by apps. And the idea of invisible apps running in the background and serving up information and services on the fly is taking hold. Just as the news industry is responding to the shift in user expectation that the important news must find us, next-generation mobile will require that context-aware, timely information gathered via software and hardware finds us, too.

May 19, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.16.2014
1. Foursquare begets Swarm, a mobile app that enables users to keep up and meet up with their connected friends. The check-in experience is largely the same, but new passive tracking allows for Neighborhood Sharing — which you can enable or disable with a swipe. Techcrunch describes the larger trend represented by Swarm and other invisible apps, as they move from a battle for the real estate on your home screen to just-in-time surfacing of contextual offers. Fun detail: your friends are defined as “right here” (500 feet), “a short walk away” (1.0 miles), in the area (20 miles), or “far, far away.”
2. Do you have people you like to follow on Twitter, but whose streams become insufferable during Bruins playoffs, Game of Thrones finales, or SXSW? Or people you feel professionally obliged to follow? Now you can mute them, because Twitter really, really wants to retain its user base. Here’s how.
3. Digital thinkers opine on the internet of things. Most agree on the inevitability of a “global, immersive, invisible, ambient networked computing environment …in a world-spanning information fabric known as the Internet of Things.” Opinions vary more on the benefit of ubiquitous data collection versus the associated risk of surveillance and tracking.
4. In case you missed it, Jonathan Zittrain wrote a compelling editorial on this week’s ruling that Europeans have a limited “right to be forgotten” by search engines like Google. Bottom line: it’s a bad solution to a real problem.
5. Pinterest begins its “tasteful” and “transparent” rollout of Promoted Pins, aka ads. With over 750 million boards and 30 billion pins, even a slow rollout represents a huge revenue opportunity for Pinterest (as investors behind its brand-new $200M round would agree).
Weekend fun: Watch P.J. O’Rourke offer his hilarious, skeptical view on the “dark, Satanic mills” that exemplify our current state of technology.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 16, 2014