Perry

Hewitt

Tag: apps

  • Friday 5 — 5.16.2014

    Friday 5 — 5.16.2014

    1. swarmFoursquare 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.

  • Friday 5 — 3.28.2014

    Friday 5 — 3.28.2014

    1. facebook rift This week, Facebook acquired virtual reality purveyor Oculus Rift for $2B in cash and stock. This purchase gives the social networking company, which was only two years ago struggling to get its arms around mobile, a leg up in virtual reality hardware. What will they use it for? Gaming’s an obvious first use case, but there’s a big vision opportunity. Semil Shah penned a terrific, if pun-laden piece on Facebook’s strategy and direction.
    2. In an effort to boost Google Wallet, Google enables friction-free money transfer for Gmail users. The simple user interface — as easy as adding an attachment — is sure to attract entice more people into signing up for Google Wallet.
    3. What’s content marketing, again? This piece breaks down this generic term, and explains why companies like NewsCred and Percolate are closing significant financing rounds.
    4. From the Something Useful Now department, the Starbucks app has added a couple of handy features. The app now enables shake-to-pay, which uses your mobile’s native accelerometer to pull up the scannable barcode, and a feature than enables tipping for up to two hours after your visit.
    5. Nieman Lab runs an extensive review of NY Times Now, a mobile product launching in the app stores on April 2. The launch is a step forward into current digital news best practices (mobile-first approach, briefs, curation of third party content). But will it lure more subscribers with this new app, or introduce product confusion with too many similar offerings?

    Weekend fun: Are you still immersed in March Madness this weekend? Then check out @NailbiterBot, which will tweet to you when games are close in the second half. Follow the account now, so you can quietly excuse yourself from your in-laws and tune in.

     

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

  • Friday 5 — 2.7.2014

    Friday 5 — 2.7.2014

    1. flappy bird gameIs your app addictive enough to make money? Eric Reiss lists eighteen elements to consider when gauging your app’s ability to engage and retain users.
    2. If you’re trying to see what an addictive app looks like, you could do a lot worse than Flappy Bird. This difficult game manages somehow to infuriate and retain users, raking in $50K in revenue per day in the process.
    3. QuizUp, the delightfully addictive and competitive quiz app, has launched an iPad edition. The additional real estate will be used to surface more navigational elements, particularly those that drive social engagement.
    4. Maybe we’ll play games like QuizUp on our iPads, but have we by and large moved on from the tablet? This article posits that the pace of technology innovation is leaving tablets in the dust as phones become larger and, well, “phabulous.”
    5. Internet audio still seems like an incredibly undervalued medium. Maybe PRX’s launch of Radiotopia, a new site that aggregates the best story-driven shows on the planet, will get more people tuned in and turned on to the possibilities.

    Weekend fun: Is it binge-watching or bingewatching? Should Bitcoin be capitalized as a concept and lowercased as a currency, or vice versa? Can duckface truly be one word? If these kinds of questions keep you up at night, Buzzfeed’s excruciatingly correct style guide to the words we use today is well worth reading.

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

  • Jelly and the visual web

    Jelly and the visual web

    jelly questionBiz Stone’s new visual Q&A platform called Jelly launched this week. The mobile app lets you use images to pose brief questions to your social network, which is defined rather expansively to include friends of friends on Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly, the site is positioned more for the helpers than for those seeking to crowdsource the help. Have five minutes in line at Starbucks or the post office? Use it to help someone in your network out.

    The site discourages the long back-and-forth threads of Reddit, and at first glance doesn’t seem to attract the thoughtful commentary of Quora. Without any means of sorting by upvoted or downvoted responses, you have to wade through a bunch of bad answers or jokes to find the right one. There’s also an element of randomness to the requests themselves — is it Chatroulette for fleeting questions? — without any kind of categorization for questions you might like to answer, like you’d find on Metafilter or QuizUp.

    jelly harvey ballThere are some great details in the UX, like the way a small Harvey ball fills to show you are approaching the character limit as you type a question. The sound effects are terrific, even if the stream of alerts is a little noisy. And the ease with which you can send a civilized and shareable thank you will promote social virality.

    But what’s the end game here? Is there a differentiated and solid enough use case to make a visual Q&A platform like Jelly a standalone business? An alternative theory is that this app is a smart approach to analyzing an increasingly visual web. Gathering a large amount of data about how social networks of people respond to, understand, and share images would be a step toward solving a valuable equation. Combine that human sensibility with algorithms, and there might be a real opportunity to develop and scale insights about performance and effectiveness of images in the visual web.

  • IFTTT for the future

    IFTTT for the future

    rube goldberg machineMany people in the tech community rely on a canny service called IFTTT. Short for If This, Then That, the service automates conditional statements in our day-to-day lives. For example, if I go the the gym and check in on Foursquare via smartphone, then IFTTT records a workout on my Jawbone Up. These conditional statement “recipes”, a word I am familiar with only from binge-watching Breaking Bad, can be created and shared with others.

    The looming New Year got me thinking, though. What great IFTTT recipes will we need in 2014? Everyone claims it’s the year of the internet of things and wearable tech, so shouldn’t we be automating our Glorious Future™ now? These seven recipe ideas would really put the internet to work for me …

    Read the rest of 7 IFTTT recipes we desperately need for 2014 over at Medium.

    Photo credit: Jeff Kubina

  • Friday 5 — 11.01.2013

    Friday 5 — 11.01.2013

    1. Has a Chinese language photo app become the first one to achieve global popularity? This app allows you to snap a selfie and then modify as a cartoon character. Its meteoric rise has prompted some skepticism — can an app with instructions only in Chinese be so popular in Australia, US, and Canada, or are the numbers somehow being gamed?
    2. Healthcare.gov remained in the news this week, with more fingerpointing and testy hearings. This article argues for the US government’s developing a “digital core” of in-house expertise with more direct control over resources and deliverables.
    3. Pew reports that both image creators and curators are on the rise, at 54% and 47% of internet users respectively. 18% of cell phone owners have Instagram, and 9% have Snapchat — the latter speaking to this hunger for just-in-time but oh-God-not-forever content.
    4. More on this visual web: Pinterest late last week signed a deal with Getty. Pinterest licenses the images, and Getty hands over the metadata. Seems like a smart win for both, and not the last deal we’ll see where clean, searchable metadata about visual assets is core to the value.
    5. Many would kill to have a review from Michiko Kakutani that concludes the author “tells this story of disruptive innovation with authority and verve, and lots of well-informed reporting.”  If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, leadership, and the internet, run don’t walk to, well, the device in your hand an order it. Amazon is the most innovative and algorithmically-optimized internet company that people rarely talk about, and The Everything Store is about to change that.

    Weekend fun: Recovering from the World Series and Halloween, and just a few things left before you get to the weekend? Perhaps you can relate to this mouse’s struggles …

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

  • Friday 5 — 10.18.2013

    Friday 5 — 10.18.2013

    1. ngram social network wildcardGoogle Ngram Viewer allows you to search and plot words appearing in books from 1800-2008 — and has just rolled out some new features. The new wildcard feature allows you to find which words appear alongside others. Above, I’ve plotted which noun appears most frequently after “social network.” From about 1990 on, the answer is “analysis” as mapping social connections becomes more an established internet-era discipline.
    2. Facebook announced that teens 13-17 will have the ability to share posts publicly, as they do on platforms like Twitter. Unlike Twitter, Facebook has a real names policy that may result in more real world consequences for teens.
    3. Lots of high stakes digital project failures in the media this week, from the heavily covered healthcare.gov to the buggy first release of the college admissions Common App. These projects are complex, with data and system integration challenges, multiple stakeholders, and large, public constituencies.
    4. When do Americans use mobile apps? News app usage peaks around 7am, while entertainment and games get big at 9 pm. And it turns out we’re surprisingly heavy consumers of mobile apps throughout the weekend.
    5. As the world goes mobile, so does YouTube. Mobile on Youtube is now 40% of all video views from 25%  in 2012 and 6% in 2011. Starting in November, an upcoming YouTube mobile release will allow users to save and watch videos offline.

    Weekend fun: Conquer your acrophobia and bring Peg Man down to Earth by playing Map Dive.

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

  • Friday 5 — 10.11.2013

    Friday 5 — 10.11.2013

    1. Social media study word cloudHow do the words we use segment us by personality, gender, and age? An open vocabulary study of over 700 million Facebook posts by 75,000 volunteers provides a range of insights into attributes associated with language use. As the word cloud shows, men use profanity and talk about xbox far more than women on the social network.
    2. Direct messaging, long the neglected stepchild of the Twitter user experience, are about to get a lift with experimental new feature @eventparrot. Follow the account and it will direct message you with personalized breaking news, defined as news items noticed by the people you pay attention to.
    3. GigaOm posits why app-based tablet magazines are a failure, despite a few notable exceptions. Paid individual magazines titles continue to draw only a very small market. The desire to create the bespoke apps seems to stem, as one commenter put it, from an obsessive need for control of font and layout rather than a more sensible embrace of the messy, social open web.
    4. Perhaps the other end of the continuum of perfection and permanence is analog and ephemeral, like the live performances of Pop Up Magazine. As many of us relentlessly record and document, a new niche emerges for a live 100-minute show, where nothing goes online or is recorded.
    5. 91% of US adults own a cell phone today, and 41% of them use it to watch video. Pew’s latest report on online video shows continued growth not only in consumption, where comedy and education videos lead the pack, but an increase in adults posting video online to 31% from 14% in 2009. A full 35% of those video posters harbor hopes of their video going viral.

    Weekend fun: fancy a little telekinetic rage with your coffee?

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

  • 5 apps for self-improvement in 2013

    Having survived the near-miss apocalypse, today we’re all turning our calendars over to 2013. Many are pausing for a natural moment of reflection and resolution — all those things we were yesterday will henceforth cease to be, and today we begin again as our newer, better selves. At least until we remember where we hid the cookies.

    Here are five apps useful to those looking to track time, create new habits, or merely keep a firmer grip on their to-do lists in 2013. I recently read The Power of Habit, which underscored the importance of documenting what you intend to do in order to actually get the damn thing done. The social overlay is powerful in these aspirational apps — it’s one thing to tell oneself in the mirror of one’s intention to walk five miles a day, and quite another to tell a couple hundred Facebook friends. These apps promote behavior change by understanding the importance of social capital, and that “‘individual’ health behaviors are actually complex network phenomena” which play a part in spreading conditions like happiness to obesity.

    1. Wunderlist 2 :: Ideal for the task management obsessed, this app has elegant list making and sharing. Am still muddling through its recent (Christmas Eve!) upgrade and attendant syncing problems, but a really lovely user interface.
    2. Evernote :: This is my go-to productivity app, and Evernote 5 delivers a raft of useful, new features. It always makes me feel vaguely guilty — am I Evernoting to my full potential? — but features like the page camera and the audio are killer.
    3. Lift :: Think of Lift as cleanly-designed reminders to be that better person in 2013. Pre-set options include “Unclutter” (4,190 participants); “Go to gym” (10,867 participants); and “Tell my wife I love her” (3,426 participants — presumably the husbands are already hearing this, or the wives just can’t be bothered?). The social network feels like a big benefit here: if that many other people can unclutter a cabinet, why shouldn’t I?
    4. Everest :: Everest captures your long and short term goals and allows you break them into small steps. It’s designed to be a lush, photo-rich experience. As the name implies, much of the user content seems more focused on long-term goals rather than the banal day-to-day. (h/t Eric Kuhn for prompting me to check this out.)
    5. Timer :: If you’re anything like me, a task can expand to fill any amount of time allotted to it. There’s no hidden, killer feature — it’s set of lovely, clean programmable buttons that prompt you to keep yourself on track and on time.