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Tag: analytics

Friday 5 — 11.29.2013
1. Shopping on your mind today? Jeremaiah Owyang posted Ten Trends for the Progressive Retailer. Not sure how far “purpose beyond profits” will go, but some very interesting ideas here about how companies will use data about customers to reward behaviors, and the impact of sharing as a business model.
2. Betaworks, the tech studio that brought us useful services like Chartbeat and bloglovin as well as sinister time wasters like dots, is raising another 20 million. Betaworks has always supported great ideas and terrific design in nascent companies. This round may allow the studio to do more with its existing adolescent companies like bit.ly and Digg.
3. A new report from Ovum determines “social messaging” is big and getting bigger quickly, with over 2B users by the end of 2014. These messaging apps are acquiring users, growing time in-service through expansion into games and payments, and finding paths to monetization. This growth and user behavior change have implications for both legacy “desktop-first” social networks and SMS providers.
4. For years companies and pundits have analyzed Twitter as an input to understand public opinion and predict election results. Now the South Korean Intelligence Service is alleged to have posted more than 1.2 million tweets to sway a presidential election. Not the first instance of astroturfing, but what some are calling “a systematic and massive intervention in elections”.
5. Testing is the least sexy word in any digital development process. You’ll pack the house for a presentation of mood boards or a design review, but your audience vanishes when the conversations turns to usability, accessibility, or load time. Here’s a practical breakdown of useful testing considerations.
Weekend fun: Check out ten hilarious Twitter feeds to be thankful for. My own addition, especially in this holiday season of specious, multi-column trends pieces: The Times is On It (@NYTOnIt).

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
November 29, 2013
Let’s ditch the term m-commerce

It’s a sure thing — as soon as the temperature on the East Coast falls, Christmas carols fill the air and people begin to make predictions about retail performance over the holiday season.

The term “Black Friday” originated around the early 1960s, and referred to the day after Thanksgiving when a large volume of retail shoppers made businesses’ ledgers “in the black”. E-commerce became a popular, annual media topic in the late 1990s, back when it was a small but avidly measured piece of the overall retail puzzle. By 2005, a retail marketing association had dubbed the Monday after Thanksgiving Cyber Monday, a day online shoppers chased deals through an increasingly mainstream medium.

Predictably, in a year where we’ve reached 56% smartphone penetration among U.S. adults, this holiday season a number of well-timed reports have emerged about mobile commerce. The reports highlight facts like 55% of all time spent with online retail in June 2013 occurred on mobile and mobile will account for nearly 13% of all U.S. e-commerce sales. Google has even released a calculator for retailers to assess how mobile can drive in-store sales.

The best of these reports acknowledge that we’re not talking about different consumers in each of these channels. So, let’s ditch the term “m-commerce” and avoid creating another discrete silo. Just as online banking is now just banking, mobile commerce is another touchpoint along the continuum of commerce. Let’s measure and optimize the channel, but focus on integration of in-store and seamless, multiscreen approach to recognize and serve consumers best.

November 26, 2013
Friday 5 — 10.04.2013
1. Have fun playing with bitly’s new Real Time Media Map, which visualizes how content from different media outlets is being consumed across the U.S. As you can see from the drilldown above, we read a lot of The Onion here in Massachusetts.
2. Next week Google Analytics opens its free, online Analytics Academy. Another example of MOOCs as the new marketing — and a great opportunity for anyone in digital looking to develop skills in a fast-growing segment.
3. Snapchat shifts focus from the fleeting to a full 24-hour window with its move into Snapchat Stories. Users can now construct chains of moments into stories which expire after a day.
4. Group messaging service What’sApp is being billed as another great threat to Facebook. Like WeChat, the service has strongholds in multiple markets outside the U.S.
5. Twitter disclosed its IPO plans to raise $1 billion revealing both lower than anticipated revenue, and 218 million active users/month. Most significantly, 65% of advertising revenue is now from mobile.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments below.
October 4, 2013
Friday 5 — 9.20.2013
1. Upworthy, a curated service providing a “steady stream of important and irresistibly shareable stuff” received another $8M. Here’s the post.
2. Irresistible stuff of a more tangible nature remains wildly popular at Pinterest, which now claims 70M users. Unsurprisingly, Pinterest announced ads are coming in the form of promoted pins.
3. Measurement is beginning to catch up with the way we consume media today — which is less about traditional TV time than mobile screen time. As of September 2014, Nielsen will include TV viewing on a smartphone or tablet to capture new viewing behaviors.
4. Are we suffering from the Dribbblisation of design? Meaning, are we too focused on the superficial look and not enough on the ugly work of designing systems for the job to be done?
5. So long, skeuomorphism: iOS 7 came out this week, ushering in an era of flat design. The update improves multitasking, access to settings, and even lets Siri be a guy. Not every iOS app is updated yet, but here’s a rundown of some apps that made the most of the relaunch.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments below.
September 20, 2013
Friday 5 — 08.30.2013
1. The New York Times put up an interactive feature on startups to watch. It’s an interesting list of new ideas (Myo) and mass eyeballs (WhatsApp), and a clean way to get reader feedback close to the content, like annotations. Nitpick: the design seems a little unnecessarily spare, and I’d like to be able to share each item rather than the whole story.
2. Web analytics startup Parse.ly finds that Feedly is the big winner in the feed reader market post Google Reader, and that the Outbrain content discovery platform is driving more than 50M page views. More coverage here.
3. More internets = more spam, but these algorithms are killing Twitter spammers even before they start. This methodology could be applicable to other social media services. Based on several metrics including content analysis, the system in one model identified and deleted 95% of problematic accounts registered across 27 services.
4. This week marks ten years of Skype — now, “to skype” is even a verb. Here’s a terrific timeline of internet telephony.
5. In the U.S. it’s Labor Day weekend. Here’s a great video reminder: it’s time to put down your smartphone and eke out the last moments of summer.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments below.
August 30, 2013
Email: definitely not dead yet

In 2011, email was not long for this world according to virtually all the tech headline writers out there. Three recent events are reminders that there’s still a lot of opportunity inherent to highly-measurable, easily-adjustable content delivered to you anywhere on your mobile device.

Earlier this summer, Wired reminded us not to dismiss email given all the data-driven insight it provided to the Obama campaign:

Some Tech staffers had dismissed email as old-fashioned and uncool, without understanding how indispensable it would be in saving the campaign.

Last week, the New York Times realized that boomers are still heavy email users (and valuable consumers for their advertisers):

We’re pleased to announce that starting on Tuesday, Aug. 6, Booming will publish a weekly e-mail newsletter. This means you won’t have to go looking for us — we’ll find you.

And it’s not just the old media stalwarts. Quartz announced this weekend that it’s expanding its daily brief to include a weekend edition.

When we tried out a weekend version of the Daily Brief a while back, the response was enthusiastic. So from today we’ll be in your inbox each Saturday morning too, with some thoughts on the week’s big themes and the best writing we’ve seen on Quartz and around the web. Please give us your feedback, as always, by replying to this email. We hope you enjoy it.

Photo credit: greggoconnell

August 5, 2013
Share of watch as new share of wallet

The 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.

February 8, 2013
More than you wanted to know about your Facebook use, courtesy of Wolfram Alpha
It takes a curious mixture of narcissism, introspection, and discipline to engage in personal analytics on any level, much less dialed up to Feltronesque quantified self. This quick download of my Facebook activity since September 2010 confirms:
- I use words (189) more than pictures (47), and neglect video (1) almost entirely
- My friends are a bit more female (53%) than male (47%), hail from 24 countries, and include 1 fervent monarchist
- Inexplicably, I post most often at 9pm on a Tuesday night
Aside from the vague shock of realizing where one’s time goes (I recommend Rescue Time for a sobering application analyzing web use), the possibilities for personal analytics are enormous. Nike+ FuelBand is a great example of a personal analytics service that’s addictive and competitive, and effectively connects long term fitness goals to short term behavior.

What are the effects of aggregating personal behaviors at this level — not even explicit consumer tastes, just daily habits? We live our lives in public as never before, and what may seem mundane — the precise time we’re gazing into the iPhone’s glowing screen on a Tuesday evening — could lead to useful personal insights, relevant commercial applications, and of course privacy concerns.
September 19, 2012