Perry

Hewitt

Tag: Friday5

Friday 5 — 11.22.2013
1. Spotify closes another $250M in funding at a >$4B valuation. The streaming music service enabling instant listening now has more than 6 million paid and 24 million active free users.
2. Is it inciting generational warfare to imply that the youngs shape the direction of technology differently and more significantly than the olds? Mathew Ingram makes the case.
3. Last year I read Thinking Fast and Slow, a thought-provoking book about the different systems of thinking and their applicability to life and work. Recently Sonya Song wrote in Nieman Lab about how these two modes of thinking, fast and slow, attract two different types of attention. Interesting implications for individuals and organizations sharing content to social.
4. Most people frustrated by carrying a phone and a wallet everywhere they go were pleased by the widely-publicized launch of Coin. The digital all-in-one credit card last week met a $50K crowdfunding goal in 40 minutes. This week, Coin is answering criticisms about security and design flaws.
5. Wondering how to plan for and execute a redesign of a highly-trafficked digital property? You could do worse than read Brad Frost’s write-up of how he and his colleagues achieved the Techcrunch redesign. The part about development being part of the design process is key — the days of designers throwing PhotoShop files over the transom to front-end developers are long gone.
Weekend fun: I’m sure you’ve seen Jean-Claude Van Damme in his brilliant self-parody for Volvo already. Instead, in honor of Harvard-Yale weekend, how about some Harvard students giving fake tours of Yale (“if I hit the floor, you do the same”)?

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
November 22, 2013
Friday 5 — 11.15.2013
1. So, lots of talk this week about Snapchat turning down a 3B acquisition offer from Facebook. Was this a shrewd move, or an example of millennial entitlement run amok? Facebook’s 2012 purchase of Instagram for 1B is starting to look like it was a pretty good deal for a company concerned about its waning teen audience. And Google snapping up YouTube for 1.65B in stock back in 2006 now seems like a steal.
2. Where are those teens who are eluding Facebook? A lot of them are immersed in messaging apps like What’s App or Kik. The line between messaging and more traditional social is starting to blur as messaging apps add features like gaming and music. Also unclear: Will these services grow on their own, or be snapped up by the tech giants?
3. Wondering how much effort to put into optimizing your news site for social? 30% of U.S. adults get news on Facebook. And people who get news through social networking sites are more likely to get their news on mobile, underscoring the mobile mandate for publishers.
4. Dropbox announces 200M users and a total revamp of its platform for the relaunch of Dropbox for Business. Which they should totally just call “Dropbox for Business that You Can Admit to Using” because it’s already pervasive in the enterprise in a clunkier and less secure version.
5. How much does employee co-location matter when you’re building a company? According to Automattic’s recent 1B valuation, not a whole heck of a lot. The money quote from Matt Mullenweg: “if you give people autonomy to execute on something meaningful, and bias the environment to moving quickly, amazing things can happen.”
Weekend fun: Want to see something cool, even if it makes you (OK, me) regret your own slacker parenting? Check out Dinovember.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
November 15, 2013
Friday 5 — 11.08.2013
1. Benedict Evans says mobile is eating the world, and I am inclined to believe him. Slide 7 (above) highlights remarkable smartphone growth juxtaposed against PC flatline.
2. The news has been all TWTR all the time this week, with a few well-timed research reports and a Storify integration adding to the IPO hype. Yesterday, Twitter users Patrick Stewart, a 9-year-old girl who sold lemonade to end child slavery, and a representative from the Boston Police Department all took the podium to ring the opening bell. Perhaps overpriced at the end of the day, the media mood couldn’t have been more different from that of the Facebook IPO back in May 2012.
3. “I need help with …” pre-fills the search box on the public launch of Google Helpouts. The service provides free and paid real-time video assistance if you’re trying to master anything from Caribbean cooking to Adobe InDesign. As video consumption surges across myriad handheld and tablet screens, the time may be right for how-to videos.
4. I was late to the party on The Skimm, and started reading it only this summer. Warning: once you’re addicted to the 5:59 am snappy daily email of what’s going on in the world, it’s hard to stop. This week The Skimm received $1M in funding to grow their user base.
5. More on the funding front: Newsle, the service that alerts you when your friends make the headlines, closed 1.8M in a Series A. Founded by two Harvard undergrads, the service personalizes the news for you by serving up headlines for your address book and social media contacts.
Weekend fun: I bet you were wondering if you could watch two Harvard professors sing the names of all the Chinese dynasties to the tune of Frère Jaques. Well, sure you can.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
November 8, 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.
November 1, 2013
Friday 5 — 10.25.2013
1. For a number of years instinct and analytics have been telling us that photos are effective in social posts. That hypothesis seems validated by this week’s confirmation of Facebook and Pinterest domination of web referrals, with the former putting heavy emphasis on images in the newsfeed and the latter a nexus for image curation.
2. In an entirely related vote of confidence for the visual web, Pinterest has raised another $225 million. Pinterest is developing a global strategy, with more than a dozen country managers slated to be hired this year.
3. LinkedIn is going long on the mobile use case, rolling out a new iPad app and the compelling LinkedIn intro email feature. LinkedIn intro aims to provide color and context to your mobile email by surfacing relevant LinkedIn info about the sender.
4. Facebook is home to the accidental news consumer — most users come for other reasons, but many end up seeing the news. An important finding is that younger people who are far less intentional about going to news outlets are consuming news via the social network.
5. Wikipedia remains an invaluable news source — but how is it developing and replenishing its stable of editors? Unlike the rest of the web, which has become more global and female content creators, Wikipedia’s skew toward technical, Western, and male-dominated subject matter has persisted. Does this limited pool ensure Wikipedia’s decline?
Weekend fun: Eight million people have already watched this toddler in his Halloween costume, but in case you’d like some inspiration for your own …

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
October 25, 2013
Friday 5 — 10.18.2013
1. Google 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.
October 18, 2013
Friday 5 — 10.11.2013
1. How 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.
October 11, 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 — 9.27.2013
1. Kudos to the Boston GlobeLab team on the beta launch of 61 Fresh, which features the most popular local stories shared on Twitter. Great to see the Harvard Gazette make the top-tweeted, and I’m buying a drink for the genius who added the “mute sports” feature.
2. Maintaining a website requires constantly updating rapidly deprecating software, keeping up with new end-user hardware, and managing expiring links in the content. Law libraries have come together to create Perma.cc to mitigate link rot in academic scholarship.
3. Why do 15% of American adults report that they don’t use the internet or email? 32% of them cite reasons tied to their sense that the internet is not very easy to use. Non-users expressed both usability and security concerns.
4. WeChat is the multi-featured messaging app quietly taking over the world while U.S. based media outlets cover Snapchat. Recent enhancement include celebrity wake-up calls and vending machines, the latter being a quiet step toward a financial services offering.
5. Gaming company Valve has announced Steam OS and Steam Machines, and a third announcement is slated for today. Valve has been a case study in disruptive innovation as a lower-priced entrant that cleverly crept into the console market.
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 27, 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