Facebook forked over $19 billion for WhatsApp, and the internet is full of articles explaining why. Among the most compelling is Buzzfeed’s take that WhatsApp posed a significant threat. WhatsApp is growing fast globally, consumes a great deal of young users’ smartphone time, and fills that critical “staying in touch” niche that Facebook would like …
On jazz hands and ad networks
Everybody is very enamored by Google’s self-driving cars, you know, Google making glasses. That’s all jazz hands. It’s a big, huge distraction. They’re an advertising network. They’re putting a 25 to 50 percent advertising tax on everything created in the world. That’s all their doing. It’s a huge ad network. They’re going to subsume all …
Friday 5 — 2.7.2014
Is your app addictive enough to make money? Eric Reiss lists eighteen elements to consider when gauging your app’s ability to engage and retain users. If you’re trying to see what an addictive app looks like, you could do a lot worse than Flappy Bird. This difficult game manages somehow to infuriate and retain users, raking in $50K …
Digital in the enterprise
Thanks to Vala Afshar and Michael Krigsman for inviting me to participate in a CXO Talk: Conversations About Innovation in the Enterprise. Vala wrote up our conversation about digital transformation and teams, content strategy, and the (erstwhile?) role of a CDO over on the Huffington Post.
Friday 5 — 1.31.2014
新年快乐 — or, Happy New Year! Tencent’s WeChat has greeted the year of the horse by allowing users to send lucky money via mobile. This smart marketing move is aimed to inspire transaction among WeChat’s nearly 300 million global active users, and perhaps lure new users drawn by the feature. In another nod to the increasingly visual …
Digital world and humanity
It is not enough to be passersby on the digital highways, simply “connected”; connections need to grow into true encounters. We cannot live apart, closed in on ourselves. … Media strategies do not ensure beauty, goodness and truth in communication. The world of media also has to be concerned with humanity, it too is called …
Friday 5 — 1.24.2014
Google knowledge graph, which seeks to represent “real world things and their connections,” surfaces the relevant content you see on Google search results pages, like movie times. This week Google added to their results a short description of websites that are “widely recognized as notable online, when there is enough information to show.” There’s a lot of content …
If engineering managers should code 30% time, what’s a digital leader to do?
Should engineering managers responsible for teams and deliverables still continue to code 30% of their time? Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of Mongo DB, published a persuasive argument for bucking the accepted path of coder –> dev lead –> non-coding manager. Why? Horowitz points out that a manager who still codes will be more skilled in …
Friday 5 — 1.17.2014
There are now 3.2 billion compelling reasons to get excited about the internet of things: this week, Google acquired connected home device maker Nest for a whopping $3.2 billion in cash. In return, Google gets a jumpstart in hardware and an ace design team. Privacy concerns abound, of course. Trying to make sense of this …
Friday 5 — 1.3.2014
73% of online adults now use social networking sites, per this year-end report from Pew. And more adults are diversifying their online social networking — 42% report using more than one service. Facebook and Instagram boast particularly strong daily engagement. 63% of Facebook users using the site daily, and 40% say they log in multiple …