Perry

Hewitt

Tag: Friday5

  • Friday 5 – 06.28.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Is the 800 million dollar valuation of Snapchat the sign of the bubble poised to burst or a smart bet on the need for ephemeral content in an always-on world? Here’s an interesting read on the valuation and the parallels with Instagram, including shared focus on experience over revenue.
    2. Fragmented operating systems and the mobile-first world we live in are just two of the drivers for content management systems that encourage the right amount of structure for content. Contentful headed into beta this week, seeking to solve the problem with a publish-everywhere, API-driven approach.
    3. Enterprise is heading for mobile to reap productivity gains, and enterprise mobile is heading for the cloud, largely via backend-as a service. Here’s a take on how it’s all playing out.
    4. What’s a library these days if not card catalogs, dark wood and walls lined with  books? Lots of smart people hard at work on this problem, and Pew Internet weighed in this week with a report on Younger American’s Library Habits. Unsurprisingly, Americans ages 16-29 expressed a strong interest in apps for finding library materials within the library or accessing library services on their mobile.
    5. Since it’s the Friday before a holiday week, and everyone’s planning their barbecues and/or reading reddit, why not craft your invitation using this handy new meme generator from Imgur?

  • Friday 5 – 06.21.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Facebook, as widely predicted, rolled out a comprehensive Instagram video offering. Instagram opted for a 15-second format — practically longform compared to the mere 6-second Vine. Will 13 filters, editing capability, and a stabilization feature topple Vine?
    2. Twitter purchased Boston-area Spindle. The mobile-only discovery app had a talented former Microsoft team behind it, and will add an important location data layer for Twitter.
    3. Highland Capital Partners announced a $25 million fund to jumpstart Leap Motion development for “solving human scale problems” in sectors including education, healthcare IT, big data, and productivity. There’s a post-mouse world coming, and 3D mobile tech will need developers to beef up the application ecosystem.
    4. WhatsApp now has more than 250 million active monthly users. Messaging is a crowded space, but it’s already bigger than Twitter and has the telcos concerned.
    5. Fascinating read for marketers and scholars alike: English is not the dominant language of the web. Ethan Zuckerman explains how this understanding changed Global Voices editorial approach.

  • Friday 5 – 06.14.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Twitter quietly opened its analytics platform for general use. Now even small publishers can view and track follows, unfollows, and clicks to gauge performance of an account, and even download a CSV.
    2. Facebook embraced the hashtag. This development has been greeted by many as the ultimate victory of advertisers over users. I agree with this Atlantic piece —  the pound sign doesn’t signal the apocalypse as much as a desire to engage users more through search and organized conversations and, yes, help those advertisers.
    3. It can be tempting to rush to new technologies to pursue the grail rather than optimize what you have. This book excerpt details how the Obama campaign enjoyed success by optimizing a technology people love to declare dead — and by overcoming a dread of being annoying.
    4. Kids like the handhelds and grownups like the tablets, according to Pew. Tablets  skew toward higher household incomes and educational attainment, but apparently there’s no significant difference in tablet ownership between men and women, or among different racial or ethnic groups.
    5. Did you think it was only your preteen obsessed with Snapchat? Apparently it’s the summer of Snapchat for Wall Street bankers as well. Looks like the startup may have a shot at being worth the 100M round it’s rumored to be raising on a half-billion or so valuation.

  • Friday 5 – 06.07.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Despite the oft-declared demise of RSS, many recoiled at the announcement of a Google Reader shutdown in July. Feedly, Pulse, and others have picked up migrating users, but Digg has an upcoming launch of a social news site / RSS reader said to be uncluttered and functional. Here’s an interesting interview with the team.
    2. In case Mary Meeker hasn’t convinced you, mobile behaviors continue to indicate that there’s a lot more upside ready to be monetized. YouTube announced that its mobile ad revenue has tripled, and revealed that 40% of U.S. video views are on mobile.
    3. HBR offers an elegant envisioning of the state of email — which is not dead, but evolving. Each year workers spend the equivalent of 111 workdays dealing with the frustrations of email, and its clunky utility is not going away anytime soon.
    4. Similarly, calendar functionality feels like it could get a lot better. Sunrise launched back in early 2013 to reimagine calendar via lush design and smarter data sources —  here’s hoping its new 2.2M round will continue to advance the product.
    5. Personal security is a headache. The system of requiring human brains to come up and remember ever more human-unreadable passwords is unsustainable. Looking for a better way? David Pogue offers a comprehensive review of Dashlane as one solution.

  • Friday 5 – 05.31.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. If you click one link this week, let it be the Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends slides. It’s a terrific state of the internet summary, with insights into mobile upside (still!), wearables, and the hockeystick rise of digital, tagged content like photos, video, sound, and data.
    2. Security’s not sexy, but it’s essential as we store more and more info online. Kudos to Evernote for their recent adds of two-step verification, authorized apps, and access history.
    3. Speaking of verification, Facebook finally offers verified pages for brands so users know the pages are legitimate. It’s a gradual rollout — more info here.
    4. If you manage a content management system as an admin, work as a content strategist, or just post information to the internet, check out Karen McGrane’s terrific DrupalCon keynote. It’s a great balance of evangelism and understanding the messy content world we live in.
    5. Do women and men use social media differently? RWW reports on some Microsoft-sponsored research with some interesting observations about gender. Women report more social media use for collaboration on work products, and men report more use for professional networking.

  • Friday 5 – 05.24.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. There’s a new Pew Internet/Berkman Center report on teens and privacy. The report confirms that sharing on social is up overall; more teens are on Twitter; and enthusiasm for Facebook and its drama may be waning. 
    2. Those mobile-savvy teens eschewing Facebook in favor of Tumblr now find themselves on Yahoo, as the 1.1B purchase was finalized this week. With a mixed track record for acquisitions, can Yahoo keep its promise not to screw it up?
    3. Storify and Typekit team up to help brands customize their stories. As the world becomes more real-time and social, Storify is a canny curatorial end run against enterprise CMS; offering better customization options for paying customers is a smart move.
    4. Over 2 million Oklahoma tornado tweets have been automatically processed. As citizens have solidified their presence as social media news sources in recent events including Oklahoma, Boston, and London, automating analysis using algorithms will be essential to separate news from noise.
    5. Finally, NPR reports from the future on the use of bots in therapeutic settings. As we begin to narrow what falls into the uncanny valley of creepy, human-like interaction, I predict these kinds of bots will turn up in a wide range of interactions from caregiving to news reading.

  • Friday 5 – 05.17.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Google celebrated I/O by dialing up the design, it seems. There are some sexy, new fast actions in Gmail and a flat, card-based Google+ re-launch that shows they’ve been doing plenty of pinning over in Mountain View.
    2. David Carr on Snooping and the News Media: It’s a 2-Way Street. Best line about digital trails: “The absence of friction has led to a culture of transgression. Clearly, if it can be known, it will be known.”
    3. Twitter buys some visualization skills so we have more ways to make sense of all those tweets.
    4. Quartz takes a look at why iPhones still have the lion’s share of mobile data activity. “So while it is true that Android phones vastly outsell iPhones, Apple users seem to be getting a lot more out of their devices. For now, at least.”
    5. There’s a lot of crisp thinking and beautiful writing going on in this elegant longform piece on MOOCs, Harvard, and higher education by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker.