Perry

Hewitt

Author: Perry Hewitt

  • What does a $3 million dollar wikipedia bio look like?

    Breakthrough winners

    The Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences was awarded this week to eleven scientists  “who think big, take risks and have made a significant impact on our lives.” The size of the gift is intended to drive leading research, but also to advance the public presence of people who are changing the world through life sciences.

    From the eleven winners’ wikipedia pages, I selected the copy in the header, background education, and research sections (the very different page metadata was also interesting), and created a wordle to see what the picture looked like. Only one of the two female winners had a wikipedia page (making the case to Lean In?), so I lifted a few paragraphs from her university bio.

    This illustration is highly unscientific, showing only word frequency in self- or third-party reported accounts of the prizewinners’ lives. Two observations: much of this life sciences work still takes place in university settings, and there are a lot of smart minds working specifically on cancer.

  • Privacy in a world of indiscriminate tracking

    privacy lockHow do we understand privacy in a world full of tracking? This week Julia Angwin spoke at the Shorenstein Center (recap here), and offered a high level overview of some of the privacy concerns specific to the data-rich world we  inhabit today. These ranged from the specter of government surveillance drones over U.S. cities tracking your every movement to car dealers fully briefed on your online research before you enter the showroom, so they know what to sell you. (Personally, I find the car dealer scenario more ominous.)

    Angwin spent some time describing behaviors that are legal but problematic for our current social norms. How buried can the fine print of authorization and consent be on websites and applications? I don’t know many people who click through Apple’s 50-odd screens of Terms & Conditions before they update their iPhone software, nor do I find it easy to retrospectively find one-click agreements for YouTube channels. Can corporations argue that this constitutes informed consent, or is this a kind of specious authorization that should be regulated?

  • Facebook intent by age cohort

    Many commented on a recent Pew report finding that 61% of all Facebook users admitted to taking a break from the popular and addictive social networking site at some time in the past. Reasons included everything from avoiding too much drama and gossip to fasting or observing Lent. The chart below from the same report caught my attention:

    Pew on plans for spending time on Facebook

    According to Pew, 1% or fewer of 18-29 year olds see themselves spending more time on Facebook in the coming year. Is this accurately depicting a trend borne of the frustration with issues like privacy concerns and monetization plans (like dreaded autoplay video in the news feed) for the site? Or is it, like the 2010 media hype over the anti-Facebook Diaspora project, more wishful thinking about the behavior we would like to show versus what is likely? Either way, the prediction of declining usage by age above tells a story.

  • Social media strategy for leadership

    Six social media skillsToday large organizations face a pervasive gap in social media competency among their ranks. A recent Stanford GSB report highlights that executives are aware of social media opportunities and risks, but that few have put into place the kind of systemic practices that advance an organization. As a result, there’s a lack of understanding of and preparedness for the rapidly changing terms of communications and engagement. Leadership risks being well equipped for fighting the last war.

    McKinsey Quarterly makes a similar argument, and identifies six social media skills every leader needs [free registration required]. The six skills are divided into Personal Level (Producer, Distributor, and Recipient) and Strategic/organizational Level (Adviser, Architect, Analyst.) Using GE as a case study, the article describes each role in detail and how strong execution can have an impact on culture and outcomes.

    The role of the social media leader as architect and enabler across the organization is particularly powerful. The word is out on the social media revolution: with their parents on Facebook and their kids on Snapchat, employees are by and large eager to get on board with new technologies. Leaders who develop an organizational culture that celebrates and empowers rather than censors and condones social media adoption will identify more loyal champions and idea generators among its ranks.

  • Crowdfunding models in media

    Small business lending statistics take no account of Kickstarter and crowdfunding; [Andrew] Sullivan’s experiment with The Dish has so startled traditional media that people are only beginning to understand how potent, powerful and perfect a model it might be – that is, when people pay something for content they value because they understand that everything costs something.

    – Zachary Karabell in The Atlantic on The Kickstarter Economy How Technology Turns Us All into Bankers. Perhaps “backers” is a better term than “bankers” – the new transparency into the layers of businesses allows people to see and determine for themselves where the value lies, and put their money there.

  • Share of watch as new share of wallet

    watchThe term “attention economy” has been bandied around just about as long as the commercial internet — I found this Wired piece referring to attention as the new currency dating back to 1996.

    Last week, three separate events illustrated ways that products are trying not only to compete with each other for existing time, but also to create and capture new time for media consumption.

    The first of these was the launch of Guide, Leslie Bradshaw and Freddie Laker’s news venture with a twist. Guide turns online news, blogs, and social media into video that you can watch anytime, anywhere. It’s reminiscent of Qwiki (before its recent pivot), but acts more as a customizable aggregator. I use Google Reader to aggregate news sources, but am keenly aware that I am always behind (847 unread at last glance) on my reading. What if all those RSS feeds could be read to me while I’m commuting?

    The second event was Chris Hughes’ talk at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center about his digital evolution of the New Republic. He spoke to a digital strategy addressing the usual suspects: mobile, social, and analytics (with Chartbeat shoutout). The consistent theme was meeting users where they are — and using new means (fancy cross syncing, complete audio tracks of content) to make the news readily accessible to them.

    Finally, Twitter’s acquisition of Bluefin Labs speaks to the rise of social TV, and the strong desire to understand and manage second screen time. According to Nielsen, 85% of mobile owners use their tablet or smartphone while watching TV at least once per month, and 40% do so daily. All those people tweeting through presidential debates and Game of Thrones episodes represent a new behavior — previously untapped time.

    We’re nearly two decades into the so-called attention economy. As products vie for our increasingly limited attention — is “share of watch” the new “share of wallet?”– we’ll see more innovative approaches to create, understand, and capture media consumption time.

     

  • Social sector must embrace risk

    For social impact organizations to scale in the same way entrepreneurial tech companies do, investors need to increase their tolerance for non-moral failure. They need to foster a culture of innovation and risk-taking. … Most importantly we have to stop pumping support into struggling ventures because we are afraid to see them fail and be prepared to back again those who have learned from their failures. Smart people are more willing to attempt disruptive change when they know their value will not be destroyed if it doesn’t pan out.

    – Sir Ronald Cohen and William A. Sahlman in HBR blogs on the importance of building a tolerance for failure and risk-taking in social enterprise. Two related thoughts:

    • The corollary piece of advice is to start small – venture capital has ample homerun cushion to pay for all those strike outs and singles. Small, iterative projects that succeed or fail advance learning in the organization and promote risk-taking without betting the store.
    • Being willing to stop doing something marginal is far more difficult to do than walking away from an absolute failure. The former is an important skill to cultivate – smart people with high aspirations and a lack of tolerance for “just OK” in an area where “great” is well within reach.

  • How to visualize interconnections

    MOMA has a terrific visualization as part of a show on Inventing Abstraction that opened back in December 2012. Visualization projects that map interconnections become complex quickly in a number of ways:

    • Content for each subject: How much should you display? This seems like the right amount, although there’s something hilarious about seeing Picasso’s interests reduced to an all-caps summary: GUITARS, MODELS, CUBISM, SUMMERS IN CATALONIA
    • Content that informs the connections: What’s the data source for these? Who relates to whom? How closely? How do you display relative strength of relationships, if at all?
    • Overall user experience: How will users know what to do? Where to start? Is the story that is emerging the one you started out telling?
    • Movement: What’s too sensitive? What’s not sensitive enough?
    • Technology: How can this work everywhere you need it to? This is mostly a solved technical problem, but not trivial in a world of proliferating devices. Will this ever be projected? What’s the level of accessibility required?
    • Flexibility: Depending on the life of your product, how do you handle new data about relationships? What’s the governance process for change post launch?

    Information aesthetics also points to a great three-minute movie made about the mapping process which gets to the complexity under the hood here.

    Reviews of the show overall can be found in The New Yorker and The New York Times, but only the latter of these mentions what struck me immediately in the visualization — the unusually large number of women represented as creators and not only subjects of an artistic movement.

  • Highlights from #hackharvard

    HackHarvard 2013The third annual #hackharvard brought together 17 teams collaborating over 10 days, attending 21 seminars, meeting with 24 mentors, and consuming an undisclosed and no doubt enormous amount of Red Bull and candy.

    Today’s demo day was the culmination, with a terrific keynote from Hugo Van Vuuren (serial Harvard alum and Experiment Fund partner) and deft panel moderation by Brent Grinna. But the student #hackharvard projects were of course the main event.

    A few takeaways:

    • PlayedBy.me enables guests to insert themselves into the host’s playlist — I can see clear benefit in crowdsourcing music from trusted friends for parties. The single author, standalone playlist feels increasingly dated.
    • Personal mission can lead to smart solutions. One student, inspired by a foster sister with autism, built an app called emotr to improve recognition of facial expressions.
    • Mind your meds keeps it simple and smart — observing that 48% of Americans take prescription medication with varying levels of compliance, and that “medicines don’t work on people who don’t take them,” the founders launched an intuitive service for email and text message reminders.
    • Another basic truth — university students are always hungry — led to Harvard Foodfinder. Finding out which events have food — and how close they are to you right now — could revolutionize campus event attendance in ways that flyers and Facebook events never will.

    Committed leadership matters — hats off to Lexi and Zach, as well as aged alums Peter and Hugo, for pulling off the third successful #hackharvard with an interrobang.

    Photo credit: Peter Boyce, whose photo I appropriated in a desperate attempt to find a photo without him in it.

  • The inevitability of big data hacks

    Geeks often talk about “layer 8.” When an IT operator sighs resignedly that it’s a layer 8 problem, she means it’s a human’s fault. It’s where humanity’s rubber meets technology’s road. And big data is interesting precisely because it’s the layer 8 protocol. It’s got great power, demands great responsibility, and portends great risk unless we do it right. And just like the layers beneath it, it’s going to get good, then bad, then stable.

     

    Other layers of the protocol stack have come under assault by spammers, hackers, and activists. There’s no reason to think layer 8 won’t as well. And just as hackers find a clever exploit to intercept and spike an SSL session, or trick an app server into running arbitrary code, so they’ll find an exploit for big data.

    — Alistair Croll in Stacks get hacked: The inevitable rise of data warfare. Croll points out that with each new technology, there’s an evolution from good to bad to stable — and we should expect that same trajectory with big data.

    Interesting to think about how large-scale exploits to corrupt the data about everything from public opinion on an issue to real estate attributes could have massive effects on decisions and markets.