Tag: culture

  • Quick takes on Southeast Asia digital

    Quick takes on Southeast Asia digital

    I began 2015 with a few weeks off the grid in Vietnam and Cambodia. The trip was all about learning and exploration — touring, reading, reflecting — and a break from the hyperconnected day-to-day. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but pay attention to the rapid encroachment of technology, and compare digital behaviors to those back in the U.S.

    Asia will be a major contributor to the next billion internet users coming online, and this shift will have ramifications for internet language and culture. Vietnam, in particular, is eagerly adopting the internet and is investing in a strong tech sector to bolster its economy. Today, 43% of Vietnam’s population is connected to the internet, compared to 87% of the U.S. and just over 5% in Cambodia.

    A few observations:

    • Internet Cafes are still popular in both Vietnam and Cambodia, and popular for those seeking convenient online access, P2P gamers, and high school students looking to avoid their parents — a universal shared value. Internet at home remains costly — white collar professionals gain access through their offices, and rely on mobile. In Vietnam, one in three adults has a smartphone, compared to over 60% of adults in the United States.

    internet cafe

     

    • Mobile technology is visible everywhere. Texting and driving are nefarious enough in cities with wider streets and recognized traffic signals — it’s utterly terrifying in a sea of motorbikes, cyclos, and cars. Mobile access is not prohibitively expensive; in Cambodia, the cost of a data plan is $5 USD/month — out of reach for many, but affordable for middle class professionals in Phnom Penh or Siem Reap.

    mobile motorbike

     

    • Facebook is a universally acknowledged platform and service. In both countries, people nodded in comprehension at a mention of Twitter as something they’d heard of, shrugged at Instagram, but lit up at Facebook. Facebook and Messenger were mentioned repeatedly. Messaging services like Line and Skype also came up, and very occasionally Viber. In Vietnam in particular, Facebook URLs showed up on storefronts.

    facebook on storefront

     

    • In Cambodia, we saw a few informal gaming spaces set up for kids. These were desktop games, not yet internet-enabled, and drew an eager crowd. These boys were playing something called Age of Naga.

    naga game station

     

    • And in Cambodia’s Smart telco retail store, staff assured me that the iPhone was the most coveted device. Check out those prices — they’re in U.S. dollars! Hard to believe that price point is tenable beyond an affluent minority.

    iphone sign with prices

  • Friday 5 — 12.5.2014

    Friday 5 — 12.5.2014

    harvardx production studio
    Seen at HarvardX
    1. We’re all producing more video, but who’s watching? Unlike written content, where a strong open may draw a reader in, there is a divide between those who press play on a video, and those who don’t. This post suggests that video consumption may not be evenly distributed across your audience — and you may have a very specific segment that forms your core video-watching audience .
    2. Anyone still wondering how much people would actually buy via mobile should read these reports [click the + signs at the bottom to see earlier reports]. On Cyber Monday, mobile shopping accounted for 42.1% of traffic, and 22% of sales. Within mobile, purchasers still prefer tablet over smartphone, a preference that may change as more adopt phablet devices.
    3. Benedict Evans poses thought-provoking new questions in mobile. Now that Apple and Google have won the platform war, what are the new issues around interaction models and wearables? And how will the industry change as mobile scales to 4B smartphones worldwide.
    4. How do Chinese mobile app user interfaces differ from those created for Western consumers? WeChat product manager Dan Grover wrote a fascinating post with everything from the rise of chat as universal UI to the the use of cutesy mascots.
    5. What does the way you move your mouse reveal about you? Google announced that it has found a way to use that movement to surmise if you are human. Now you can click a checkbox confirming “I am not a robot” instead of deciphering squiggly text. Those annoyed by Captcha will rejoice, but others may raise concerns about privacy.

    Weekend fun: Be sure not to miss the parodies of the new Star Wars trailer. I’ll be watching these trailers with a few boxes of Girl Scouts’ Thin Mints, obtained via the magic of the internet.

     

    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.

  • Summer reading picks

    Summer reading picks

    widener libraryWith 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:

    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.

     

  • Friday 5 — 5.30.2014

    Friday 5 — 5.30.2014

    duolingo coursera growth

    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, 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.

  • The promise and reality of collaborative culture

    The promise and reality of collaborative culture

    The promise of computer-led collaboration long pre-dates the late 1990s commercial internet. Earlier that decade, the potential for enterprise efficiency and growth through content sharing among expanded internal networks led to the creation of knowledge management initiatives. The principles behind the initiatives were laudable — improve access to expertise across silos, facilitate innovation, and reduce product development cycles. Unfortunately in most enterprise organizations, the reality was just the opposite. Too often, knowledge hoarding rewarded employees far more than knowledge sharing, and business units did not perceive enough benefit to promote collaborative behaviors. As the saying goes, culture eats strategy for lunch — despite the new technological tools, organizational culture reinforced status quo behaviors.

    It’s hard to create effective top-down initiatives that promote collaboration. Similarly bottoms-up collaborative production efforts can run into roadblocks, like falling victim to the tragedy of the commons, wherein everyone pulls from a common resource without contributing back. Prominent exceptions like Wikipedia exist, but struggle to attract and retain a wide pool of contributors.

    lyft carAnd yet, a robust collaborative economy is emerging. This can’t be attributed to a sudden spike in altruism, although the millennials may be more conscious of consumption than other generations at the quarter-century mark. Rather, technology has for the first time allowed for services to spring up that promote sharing of resources with financial benefit to the sharer. Think of what Airbnb has done to disrupt the hotel industry (which is starting to feel the impact) and how UberX and Lyft have transformed getting a ride. Collaborative behaviors are solving real problems by disintermediating established product and service providers that acted as middlemen in transactions. While the new services continue to experience growing pains, disruptive models are clearly emerging.

    As Zachary Karabell observes, the rise of the collaborative economy is disrupting existing industries and laws. Many established businesses are trying to put the genie back in the bottle, alongside governments struggling to keep up with policy. But there’s no going back — whether it’s ride sharing or lodging or learning, collaboration fueled by an exchange of value is here to stay.The promise of unlimited internet-driven collaboration was a Utopian ideal, and many important projects like Wikipedia and open source software reflect that early promise. But the relatively recent ability for a peer-to-peer value exchange is creating a broad, collaborative economy of differently-mediated services. Smart corporations from the traditional economy are launching rapid experiments, alongside their consumers, to re-imagine their businesses for this new, collaborative normal.

    Photo credit: Via Tsuji

  • Alone together, or shared space?

    Alone together, or shared space?

    chat phonePew Internet reports that 25% of married or partnered adults who text have texted their partner when they were both home together.

    Is this a good or a bad development? The answer may well depend on the circumstance.

    Social behaviors vary dramatically by age cohort. danah boyd’s new book focuses on social media behaviors of teens — and how they may differ from their parents’ habits and understanding. In one instance described here in the FT, parents are far more immersed (and isolated) by their use of mobile devices in a crowd. In stark contrast, teens are using their smartphones to locate others, share images, and connect.

    So 25% of couples texting each other at home is a big number, but what it means depends on who is doing it, and how.

  • On death and online culture

    On death and online culture

    As Facebook knows, a digital world raises new problems. To be sure, Facebook made a mistake not considering enough the mortality of those who would use their product. But to be fair, when have inventors or designers ever had to before? Think of other classic American brands—Ford or Coca-Cola, for example—whose products are not so intimately linked with their customers’ fates. Cokes and cars are disposable or easily transferable after death. But Facebook, whose product is your own identity, deals in an individualized item that’s nontransferable after death.

     

    — Alexander Landfair in the Missouri Review, discussing the emerging and problematic ways we acknowledge death through social media

  • Digital in the enterprise

    Digital in the enterprise

    Hewitt graphicThanks to Vala Afshar and Michael Krigsman for inviting me to participate in a CXO Talk: Conversations About Innovation in the Enterprise.

    Vala wrote up our conversation about digital transformation and teams, content strategy, and the (erstwhile?) role of a CDO over on the Huffington Post.

  • Digital in the DNA matters

    Digital in the DNA matters

    More and more, it’s becoming apparent that digital publishing is its own thing, not an additional platform for established news companies. They can buy their way into it, but their historical advantages are often offset by legacy costs and bureaucracy. In digital media, technology is not a wingman, it is The Man. … How something is made and published is often as important as what is made.

    — David Carr, writing in the New York Times about the vital role of digital in the DNA for creating great media

     

  • Digital world and humanity

    Digital world and humanity

    It is not enough to be passersby on the digital highways, simply “connected”; connections need to grow into true encounters. We cannot live apart, closed in on ourselves. … Media strategies do not ensure beauty, goodness and truth in communication. The world of media also has to be concerned with humanity, it too is called to show tenderness. The digital world can be an environment rich in humanity; a network not of wires but of people.

    — Pope Francis, who recently referred to the internet as a gift from God, reflecting on the nature of digital and social connection for World Communications Day