Perry

Hewitt

Tag: harvard

  • Friday 5 — 12.20.2013

    Friday 5 — 12.20.2013

    1. 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.
    2. NPR continues its leadership in forward-looking digital initiatives by securing $17M in grants. $10M will pay for the development of a new, presumably mobile-first platform to provide a personalized, location-based listening experience for content from NPR and affiliate stations.
    3. Harvard’s Berkman Center published its annual compendium of essays in Internet Monitor 2013: Reflections on the Digital World. Sections include governments, companies, and citizens as actors in the digital world. Favorite excerpt: Potentially lost in the debates over privacy, security, and surveillance, is the fact that access to information plays a critical role in human development, governance, and economic growth across all sectors, including health, education, energy, agriculture, and transportation.
    4. What’s App, a company of ~50 employees, is up to 400M users — and added 100M over the last four months alone. But how will all these social messaging apps make money? Some smart plays are emerging around e-commerce, with flash sales and sticker products driving revenue in Asia.
    5. This terrific, long read outlines a step-by-step approach to digital marketing success. Written by digital marketing evangelist and bigtime analytics nerd Avinash Kaushik, the piece provides great guidance on how to focus your analytics efforts and avoid endless “data puke”.

    Weekend fun: In case you’re suffering through an awkward office Christmas party or Yankee swap today, let me ratchet up your holiday envy: Bill Gates is an awesome Secret Santa.

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

  • Happy Thanksgiving (and stay dry)

    rain
    Winding down in the wet for the break — Happy Thanksgiving and safe travels!
  • Friday 5 — 11.08.2013

    Friday 5 — 11.08.2013

    smartphone growth

    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.

  • Five Mistakes to Avoid When Managing Digital Teams

    Five Mistakes to Avoid When Managing Digital Teams

    What’s the best way to tackle management of digital teams to keep engagement and output high? I’ve been through two Internet booms and busts in corporations, nonprofits, and startups — so I’ve made plenty of management mistakes by commission and by proxy. Posted over at Harvard Business Review, five common mistakes I’ve seen or made myself.

  • How to solicit smart comments

    How to solicit smart comments

    Articles about the complex issues affecting women in the workplace are lightning rods for impassioned conversation. This New York Times article on gender equity at Harvard Business School was bound to elicit strong opinions, just like the original 2003 Opt Out Revolution piece and its 2013 sequel (spoiler alert: damned if you do, damned if you don’t). [tweetable hashtags=”#content”]How can editors ensure thoughtful conversation and minimize ad hominem, all-caps outrage?[/tweetable]

    Midway through the HBS article, the Times article introduces a full-width block with three specific questions to respond to:

    inline questions

    It’s an Oprah’s book club type of approach, with an entire section of questions for readers to consider. Rather than a mass call for comments, it’s a prompt for directed discussion. The mid-way through placement is smart, giving readers questions to consider as they (presumably) finish the piece. Mid-stream blocks with calls to action can be surprisingly successful. Analytics pros will be taking a hard look at the comments originating with a click here versus those starting from the text block at the bottom.

    There’s a nice segmentation of the comments at the bottom, where you can read the comments not only by question but by author: all, business school alumni, recent graduates, men, and women. Again, the questions remain highly visible at left and up top.

    questions bottom page

    Previously, I took a look at the rising use of annotation — here’s a good example of an annotated piece on opting-out at Medium. These are all valiant swings at a pernicious, unsolved problem: how to benefit from the wisdom of the crowd while keeping comments from devolving into an angry lowest common denominator? The article on the HBS gender equity experiment will no doubt put this approach to the test.

  • Digital Problem Solving at the Berkman Center

    One of the best parts about working in digital strategy is that you’re surrounded by compelling and unsolved problems.

    [tl;dr for current Harvard students: we want to figure some out — sign up here.]

    social network adoption by age

    The commercial web and email have been widely adopted for only about 20 years, so individuals and organizations are still figuring out ways to be and to interact online. In organizational settings from higher ed to corporate, digital natives are learning and working on teams with digital immigrants. We’re nearing an inflection point for a new organizational understanding of the role that digital, social, and mobile technologies play in community members’ lives.

    The rise of social media, in particular, adds a new kind of complexity. Today, 72% of online adults use social networking sites. Facebook is only a decade old and has 1.15B users. Twitter is a significant enough news platform that it gets hacked right along with the New York Times. LinkedIn is a major content company, soon to admit teenagers to the professional fray. Music, travel, and fitness are just a few of previously private activities that now often reside in social shared spaces online. Given all these changes wrought by our new digital/social/mobile world, how do we think about new understandings of privacy on social networks and how expectations of privacy jibe with people’s organizational roles?

    All these changes create new and interesting problems to be considered and solved about how organizations and their constituents interact. At Harvard we have myriad organizational social accounts, and of course students, faculty, and staff have their own. What are the new social norms for interaction?

    Luckily Harvard’s Berkman Center has pulled together a pilot initiative around these digital problems and more. We are looking for current Harvard students to help define the questions we should be asking and develop some initial hypotheses. Please join me, along with faculty members including Misiek Piskorski and Joe Blitzstein and Harvard College senior and entrepreneur Zach Hamed. Read our guiding principles, and sign up here.

    Source: Pew Internet

  • How to Build a High-Performing Digital Team

    How to Build a High-Performing Digital Team

    Organizational development is hard — and new digital capabilities require some new mindsets and skillsets. Posted over at Harvard Business Review blog network: six attributes to consider when sourcing talent for a high-performing digital team.

  • Friday 5 — 07.05.2013

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

    1. Coverage of RSS technology that had largely faded from conversation reached a fever pitch this week with the July 1 shuttering of Google Reader. Digg Reader launched; Flipboard experienced some transition pain; and Anil Dash tries to direct attention to what matters.
    2. An undertold story on July 1 was the new COPPA regulations affecting data collection from people under 13 years old. If you’re developing an app for K-12, watch this space.
    3. Pew Internet confirms it: 6% of online adults are reddit users. Males 18-29 lead the category, and a casual glance at the headlines will confirm that many journalists are spending time sourcing stories on the site.
    4. I’ve long been an advocate for devil-in-the-details digital as a greater determiner of online experience than the direction indicated by mood boards. Here’s an interesting argument for the value of “micro-moments” in ux design.
    5. And the Harvard Gazette gets its first major refresh since 2009. Approach is mobile-first, analytics-informed, and media-rich. Baked in WordPress, measured by Google Analytics and Chartbeat, and hooked into social, the site reflects  a create-once-publish-everywhere (COPE) approach. Check it out for yourself.

  • Commencement morning

    Calm before the storm
    Harvard Commencement 2013: the calm before the storm

  • 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.