新年快乐 — or, Happy New Year! Tencent’s WeChat has greeted the year of the horse by allowing users to send lucky money via mobile. This smart marketing move is aimed to inspire transaction among WeChat’s nearly 300 million global active users, and perhaps lure new users drawn by the feature. In another nod to the increasingly visual …
Friday 5 — 1.24.2014
Google knowledge graph, which seeks to represent “real world things and their connections,” surfaces the relevant content you see on Google search results pages, like movie times. This week Google added to their results a short description of websites that are “widely recognized as notable online, when there is enough information to show.” There’s a lot of content …
Friday 5 — 1.17.2014
There are now 3.2 billion compelling reasons to get excited about the internet of things: this week, Google acquired connected home device maker Nest for a whopping $3.2 billion in cash. In return, Google gets a jumpstart in hardware and an ace design team. Privacy concerns abound, of course. Trying to make sense of this …
Friday 5 — 1.10.2014
If you’re not shivering right now, perhaps you were at CES in Vegas this week. Among the loveliest of launches is Yahoo’s News Digest app, the fruit of its Summly acquisition a year ago. With this sleek app, Marissa Mayer is making good on her commitment to prioritize beautiful product. Yahoo is cleverly delivering not only …
Friday 5 — 1.3.2014
73% of online adults now use social networking sites, per this year-end report from Pew. And more adults are diversifying their online social networking — 42% report using more than one service. Facebook and Instagram boast particularly strong daily engagement. 63% of Facebook users using the site daily, and 40% say they log in multiple …
Friday 5 — 12.27.2013
The end of each year brings a slew of “best of” posts — here are five of my favorites: Flowing Data selected data visualizations that told great stories and made meaningful, real-world observations through data. See visualizations of everything from poisoned names to pizza to porn. Looking for a way to spend your gift card …
Friday 5 — 12.20.2013
Mandatory reading for web design geeks: Snow fail: Do readers really prefer parallax design? New research poses good questions about user orientation to parallax scrolling, which may be better suited for content heavier on video and other visualizations rather than text. NPR continues its leadership in forward-looking digital initiatives by securing $17M in grants. $10M will pay …
Friday 5 — 12.13.2013
Instagram Direct lets you send your photos, videos, and messages to select recipients. While comparisons to Snapchat feature prominently in the media coverage, this feels more like a catch-up feature like its video announcement back in June. One new ephemeral capability: you can delete your photos from recipients’ phones. In another Snapchat-response move, Twitter announced you …
Friday 5 — 12.6.2013
Google Trends is a handy, visual tool for comparing topics by their relative search volume — see graph of search trends for Hong Kong and Singapore above. This latest release uses its vast historical data to offer dotted-line predictions of future search interest. Another useful feature: the algorithms now aggregate different searches likely to be …
Friday 5 — 11.29.2013
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. Betaworks, the tech studio that brought us …