Biz Stone’s new visual Q&A platform called Jelly launched this week. The mobile app lets you use images to pose brief questions to your social network, which is defined rather expansively to include friends of friends on Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly, the site is positioned more for the helpers than for those seeking to crowdsource …
IFTTT for the future
Many people in the tech community rely on a canny service called IFTTT. Short for If This, Then That, the service automates conditional statements in our day-to-day lives. For example, if I go the the gym and check in on Foursquare via smartphone, then IFTTT records a workout on my Jawbone Up. These conditional statement “recipes”, a word I am …
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 — 12.13.2013
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 …
Let’s ditch the term m-commerce
It’s a sure thing — as soon as the temperature on the East Coast falls, Christmas carols fill the air and people begin to make predictions about retail performance over the holiday season. The term “Black Friday” originated around the early 1960s, and referred to the day after Thanksgiving when a large volume of retail …
Friday 5 — 11.15.2013
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 …
Digital strategy, content, and cake
What do you get when you bring together 400 folks interested in digital strategy for content and community in higher education — and add cake? ConfabEDU offered a heady mix of ideas and energy for innovative content approaches in the digital/social/mobile world. Superb keynotes from Kristina Halvorson, Dan Roam, and Karen McGrane were interspersed with terrific sessions …
Friday 5 — 11.08.2013
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. 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 …
Friday 5 — 11.01.2013
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 …