Perry

Hewitt

Tag: media

Friday 5 — 7.29.2016
1. Nieman Lab shares insights about the progress and user adoption of Stela, the New York Times’ in-house analytics platform. As publishers adjust to living in a world of distributed content and to using analytics data to drive decisions, there’s value in more than aggregating the data: make it approachable, simple and fun to use.
2. Make your buttons look like buttons. Nick Babich takes a look at the evolution of the humble button user interface , and offers current best practices.
3. I’ve tried a bunch of analog and digital to-do solutions, and last year finally swapped Evernote for Google Keep. This article makes the case for cobbling together Google products — with their killer app, reminders — to become your go-to productivity tool.
4. As digital products proliferate in large organizations, it can be challenging to craft a cohesive design system. Nathan Curtis explains how starting with a product portfolio with a focus on flagships can set the stage for an attainable design consistency.
5. Digital businesses require leaders with exponential mindsets, according to Mark Bonchek in HBR. When people charged with digital initiatives focus on the incremental and fear of giving up control, they are missing the opportunity for true innovation.
Weekend fun: It was all DNC all the time this week, and Hillary Clinton’s team landed a digital hit with the “Trump Yourself” campaign. Also: David Attenborough fans might enjoy his narration of a new kind of fauna: Pokemon.

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.
July 29, 2016
Friday 5 — 1.15.2016
1. Mobile apps versus native web is a false dichotomy, per Luke Wroblewski. Brands need both: the former offers rich experiences, while the latter provides greater reach (including in-app browser views).
2. We have a longstanding, love-hate relationship with email, where gratifying immediacy for the sender often means notification hell for the recipient. The Atlantic explains how we got here, why email is a cornerstone of the open web, and what may or may not be next.
3. As we cling tenaciously to our remaining New Year’s resolutions, decluttering may still be high on your 2016 agenda. Try these tips on decluttering your digital life — it’s not as daunting as it seems.
4. Noah Brier excerpts an article on a resolution of ditching the executive review. New ways of working transparently using tools like Slack and Trello can provide access to ideas, reinforce social accountability, and avoid the cumbersome “big reveal” of the executive review.
5. First the Wall Street Journal did it. Then the White House did it. Organizations are turning to Snapchat to reach new audiences, particularly since the app is rumored to serve seven million mobile video views each day.
Weekend fun: Have you ever really wanted to reply to a spam email, and see how far you can take it? Luckily for us, James Veitch did.

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.
January 15, 2016
Friday 5 — 8.15.2014
1. Lots of buzz about the U.S. Government’s launch of a new SWAT-team digital service, and its digital services playbook. The tenets above are clear and proscriptive, and, true to the complexity of digital transformation, allude to the tremendous change management effort required. It’s not trivial to enable institutional culture shifts like “Address the whole experience from start to finish” and “Default to open.” Read about the launch, and check out the full playbook.
2. Email is both our dopamine-producing fix and a time sink that’s the bane of our existence. This list of gmail productivity plugins can help ease the pain. We’ve covered unroll.me before — Boomerang can delay email sends to conceal the shameful fact that you were looking at spreadsheets until 2:30 am.
3. But maybe we can help kill email off, instead? Collaboration tool Slack is doing a pretty reputable job of it for a number of startups out there.
4. Is Buzzfeed a media company or a technology company? Andreessen Horowitz invested $50 million in Buzzfeed this week, with the view that a tech-first media company with rising traffic and robust native advertising might be the one to crack the future of news code.
5. Long before Uber became a verb, directionally-challenged folks like me were avidly using the app to avoid getting lost in cities designed by sadists, like Boston. Uber’s new cruise control provides drivers and passengers alike turn-by-turn directions to make finding one’s way even easier.
Weekend fun: If you used any form of social media this week, you’ve no doubt seen the ice bucket challenge to raise awareness and cash for ALS. Notable participants have included Mark Zuckerberg, Martha Stewart, the New England Patriots, and Jimmy Fallon and the Roots. Questlove is not amused.

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 to get a weekly email.
August 15, 2014
Next gen mobile: your app data finds you

The news industry is still struggling with the shift to digital, as the leaked New York Times innovation report underscores. Apart from new required competencies like video, data visualization, and analytics that digital transformation demands, there is a similar tectonic shift in reader (user) expectation. News has gone from being a canonical resource that people are expected to consult to a digital, just-in-time service delivered to people wherever they are. It’s now been six years since we first heard, if news is important, it will find me, and news outlets are still striving to realize that vision.

The current expectation that important news will find the user is highly relevant to mobile. Chances are, your handheld device knows everything about you: the location of your favorite restaurant, your movie preferences, and even your fitness habits. And yet in many cases we are still using our phones the way we read print newspapers — consulting them when we need information, and optimizing our home screen (front page). But as people spend more of their mobile time interacting with apps, there is an ever greater opportunity for those apps to take advantage of the data via the software and the hardware to deliver what users want when they are likely to need it.

Yahoo is moving toward contextual search, which would enable them, if granted API access, to provide far more relevant search results informed by apps. And the idea of invisible apps running in the background and serving up information and services on the fly is taking hold. Just as the news industry is responding to the shift in user expectation that the important news must find us, next-generation mobile will require that context-aware, timely information gathered via software and hardware finds us, too.

May 19, 2014
Multi-generational takes on tech

What will technology creation and use look like as the early adopter population ages? How can existing baby boomers — the pig in the python — contribute to and engage with the new tech economy? How can older adults keep up with younger generations in an increasingly digital, social, and mobile world?

The Washington Post hosted a half-day summit, Booming Tech, to address these topics and more. Sacha Pfeiffer moderated a quick conversation with Zach Hamed and myself. We offered a few ideas for ways older adults can benefit as consumers and creators of technology — which both of us owned up to using far too much. Also, don’t miss P.J. O’Rourke, who closed out the day with a hilarious take on what technology gets wrong.

May 13, 2014
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

January 28, 2014
Friday 5 — 12.6.2013
1. 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 related.
2. Foursquare has released a new version of its check-in service, with a sleek new design and location-aware push recommendations. Just arrive at the Beat Hotel in Cambridge? Now Foursquare may suggest the tuna spring rolls based on your friends’ behavior. Since its 2009 launch, Foursquare has amassed a significant location data layer, and this release may be one way — apart from its rich API — to take advantage of it.
3. Monday Note pulls together a number of recent charts to recommend mobile trends to keep in mind if you produce digital news. Thoughtful validation of the power investment in content strategy, with “newsletters designed for mobile that are carefully — and wittily — edited by humans.” Mobile news consumers on smartphones need more than automated headlines and snippets to keep their attention.
4. In case you missed it, here’s a great post on Boston tech company / innovation economy performance. Fun fact: 51% of Boston’s “massive winner” companies had an immigrant founder.
5. Did Apple’s U.S. mobile hardware marketshare peak at 40%? Latest Comscore data spots a flattening trend, compared to a gradual rise of Samsung devices now at 25%. Google’s Android still dominates with 52% of the U.S. mobile software platform market.
Weekend fun: Sherlock fans and other Cumberbatch disciples, you are in for a real treat: Here’s a video of Benedict Cumberbatch reading R. Kelly’s Genius lyrics.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
December 6, 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
Crowdfunding models in media

Small business lending statistics take no account of Kickstarter and crowdfunding; [Andrew] Sullivan’s experiment with The Dish has so startled traditional media that people are only beginning to understand how potent, powerful and perfect a model it might be – that is, when people pay something for content they value because they understand that everything costs something.

– Zachary Karabell in The Atlantic on The Kickstarter Economy How Technology Turns Us All into Bankers. Perhaps “backers” is a better term than “bankers” – the new transparency into the layers of businesses allows people to see and determine for themselves where the value lies, and put their money there.

February 10, 2013