Perry

Hewitt

Tag: spotify

Friday 5 — 2.26.2016
1. Snapchat now allows users to design and submit their own geofilters — overlays that appear on snaps sent within a defined area and timeframe. Techcrunch explains how to make your own.,
2. If you’re now perpetually wandering around with earbuds in, you’re likely spending some of that time listening to Spotify. But you may not know some of Spotify’s lesser-known, cool features, like re-producing your favorite album or finding obscure musical sub-genres through advanced search.
3. A lot has been written about responsive work process, and how it can improve both team culture and product results. This Smashing Magazine article offers an especially clear and concise definition and approach, with relevant examples.
4. Is your data visualization conveying what you think it does? This article explains the role and effect of various preattentive attributes, and provides a checklist to keep your data visualization on track.
5. Chris Dixon outlines “What’s Next in Computing?” He provides a historical overview of recent gestation and growth phases in computing, as well as insights into technologies like drones and AI which are rapidly maturing in the marketplace.
Weekend fun: If 180lb walking robots are your jam, Boston Dynamics has just the video for you. I’m pretty sure the guy who pokes Atlas with the hockey stick is not going to survive his next video shoot.

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.
February 26, 2016
Friday 5 — 5.22.2015
1. For those of you already planning your Memorial Day driving routes, Google Maps has released useful, new features alerting users to delays and detours as you enter your destination. Beyond the time estimate, new cards provide additional context about potential delays. Related trivia: Google Maps also released the top destinations from Memorial Day 2014.
2. Google is once again showing tweets in search results, starting with mobile. Now you can search for topics and hashtags directly within Google. At the same time, Twitter is rolling out its own more robust search, with new features for logged-out users. My guess is that Twitter native search will cater more to live Twitter consumption of breaking news or events.
3. More than just music — everyone’s favorite social playlist subscription service Spotify is diversifying into podcasts and programming.
4. Today’s workforce spans multiple generations, new economy and old economy roles, and various degrees of digital capability. Here’s why the expertise gap matters, and why the first step is acknowledging the problem.
5. The MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) hype cycle peaked in 2012, but educators are still trying to crack the right formula for effective, online learning. Read this explanation of why primacy of location and cost still matters to motivate learners in a world outside the autodidacts of Silicon Valley.
Weekend fun: It’s the long weekend — why not let loose with some street dancing to beatboxers. Bad weather where you are? Then pore through these examples of faux code in TV and movies.

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.
May 22, 2015
Friday 5 — 12.12.2014
1. Facebook is surging ahead on mobile revenue as well as mobile market share. Facebook now accounts for about one-fifth of all data used on mobile phones, and owns four out of the top ten apps in the Apple iOS store and Google Play. More over at Quartz.
2. Dark social is a term introduced by Alexis Madrigal two years ago to define the kinds of social sharing (email, instant messaging, texting, etc.) that were not clearly attributed in analytics. Here he updates his hypothesis of dark social with the discovery that a good deal of this traffic is now trackable and attributable to Facebook sharing on mobile devices — which may be so prevalent now that it is eroding other ways of sharing.
3. Does the internet help you learn new things? 87% of Americans believe that it does. Also interesting: 72% say that the internet allows them to share their ideas and creations with others, a significant rise since 2006. This increase aligns with the mass adoption of social networking tools, and the ease of instantaneous publishing of text, images, and video through these platforms.
4. Whether you are paralyzed by choice in music discovery, or merely lazy enough to outsource all your listening habits to cooler friends, Spotify has got you covered. Try out “Top Tracks in Your Network” for a personalized, updated playlist based on what friends you follow are listening to.
5. Machine intelligence, defined here as what becomes possible as computers develop and scale abilities previously limited to humans, is poised to transform industries and create entirely new ones. Here’s a great chart of the landscape, and enumeration of relevant trends and opportunities.
Weekend fun: Deadspin may call my favorite team a “Godless Abomination,” but all basketball fans will enjoy Buckets, a quantitative approach to viewing shooting across all NBA teams and players.

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.
December 12, 2014
Friday 5 — 9.12.2014
1. When Spotify bought music intelligence platform Echo Nest, they gained access to a trove of data, and a smart team of people who could optimize curation. A new Spotify Insights blog focuses on telling scientifically-driven stories about music. This first post takes a look at how music migrates, and the varying musical influence of cities around the world.
2. The options for publishing your content online are myriad. When should you post to your “owned” properties, and when should you syndicate to communities like Medium or Rebelmouse? Ths KISSmetrics post has some useful rubrics for how to overcome the content distribution hurdle to help your content find its audience.
3. Digital disruption may have moved from buzzword to cliché, but the advent of agile marketing is a great example of this phenomenon. As technology has become both ubiquitous (so many options!) and pervasive (throughout the funnel), marketers must learn to manage for uncertainty and change. Make time for this terrific slide deck on Managing Marketing in High Gear by Scott Brinker.
4. I once read that algorithms are people’s opinions, mathematically expressed — and nowhere is that more evident than digital journalism. As news becomes more mobile, the experience of news consumption can be more tailored — and potentially more monitored. A new study sheds light on how engineers and designers think about their role in news delivery.
5. Twitter cards offer a way to create more visual tweets to drive engagement and spur specific actions. Here’s a comprehensive guide to types of Twitter cards and how to use them.
Weekend fun: Ever wonder what your favorite characters in videogames do when you wander away from the controller? Find out here — GIFS included.

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.
September 12, 2014
Friday 5 — 8.22.2014
1. Brands are active on social networks to reach engaged audiences, and the networks are finding creative ways to monetize their involvement. SoundCloud this week announced a new advertising platform, just as Instagram rolled out its analytics tools for brands. Both SoundCloud and Instagram have afforded brands huge organic growth; the challenge will be to offer them new business tools without alienating individual users.
2. We’re all suffering from The Stream, a deceptively gentle term for the firehose of ideas and links aimed at us every day by well-meaning friends, colleagues, and social network connections. Can radical scarcity improve quality? That’s the premise behind This., a social network incubated at the Atlantic which allows users to share a single link each day.
3. Twitter is addressing onboarding issues to make the platform more compelling, but both the 140 character limit and a longstanding, insider-y community can mean that new users encounter daunting jargon. If you’re struggling to tell your RT from your MT, here’s an illustrated guide just for you.
4. Launching a digital project can be like pulling the thread on a sweater — the more the new site/app/service makes possible, the more internal processes get disrupted and ideas get awakened. In a newly-launched responsive design podcast, Miranda Mulligan of the Boston Globe describes the politics between the newsroom and the design team, and how responsive design brought them together.
5. In far too many organizations, potentially transformative digital and social strategy is outsourced to agencies or relegated to interns. Or at least, it’s reliably blamed on the interns when it all goes horribly wrong.
Weekend fun: Take your pick: you can watch a fascinating brief look at texting and the internet in film, or while away the hours with Serendipity, a gorgeous visualization of songs played simultaneously on Spotify.

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 22, 2014
Friday 5 — 11.22.2013
1. Spotify closes another $250M in funding at a >$4B valuation. The streaming music service enabling instant listening now has more than 6 million paid and 24 million active free users.
2. Is it inciting generational warfare to imply that the youngs shape the direction of technology differently and more significantly than the olds? Mathew Ingram makes the case.
3. Last year I read Thinking Fast and Slow, a thought-provoking book about the different systems of thinking and their applicability to life and work. Recently Sonya Song wrote in Nieman Lab about how these two modes of thinking, fast and slow, attract two different types of attention. Interesting implications for individuals and organizations sharing content to social.
4. Most people frustrated by carrying a phone and a wallet everywhere they go were pleased by the widely-publicized launch of Coin. The digital all-in-one credit card last week met a $50K crowdfunding goal in 40 minutes. This week, Coin is answering criticisms about security and design flaws.
5. Wondering how to plan for and execute a redesign of a highly-trafficked digital property? You could do worse than read Brad Frost’s write-up of how he and his colleagues achieved the Techcrunch redesign. The part about development being part of the design process is key — the days of designers throwing PhotoShop files over the transom to front-end developers are long gone.
Weekend fun: I’m sure you’ve seen Jean-Claude Van Damme in his brilliant self-parody for Volvo already. Instead, in honor of Harvard-Yale weekend, how about some Harvard students giving fake tours of Yale (“if I hit the floor, you do the same”)?

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
November 22, 2013