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 …
Jelly and the visual web
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 …
Digital readiness checklist
Today 85% of U.S. adults are online, 64% are on Facebook, and a full 56% of us have a smartphone glued to one hand 1. Digital natives and immigrants alike are now accustomed to using technology in the flow of daily life. Previously discrete activities like checking email, posting photos to social networks, and shopping …
Four Ways to Scale Digital Capabilities Beyond Your Team
Posted over at Harvard Business Review blog network: Digital today is part of everyone’s job — and many enterprise organizations are adopting strategic mobile, social, and cloud initiatives to educate and empower employees. But these organizations still face a daunting challenge in distributing digital expertise: how do you develop digital competency more broadly across a …
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 …
It’s not online banking — it’s banking!
Continuous and miraculous advances in the digital sphere — cloud computing! big data! the internet of things! — lead us to have a high bar for digital experiences. So it’s particularly surprising when there are mainstream services out there, in this case a retail bank, that seem to have missed the memo on the integration …
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 …
Mastering digital project momentum
What are the factors that make a digital project take off and gather momentum—or drop like a stone? We’ve all been in kickoff meetings for large-scale web projects. People show up bright-eyed and well-intentioned, ready to take part in a brainstorm led by someone with fashionable glasses. Colorful sticky notes and Sharpie fumes create an …
Why digital is bigger than the screen
“Digital is bigger than the screen,” says Zach Dunn, who co-founded digital experience company One Mighty Roar with his brother, Sam. tweetableWe can already see how digital experiences are transcending the screen/tweetable, from ubiquitous FitBits and Jawbones to emerging Google Glass to Evernote’s move into Moleskine and PostIts. Arduino experiments are everywhere, with Intel today announcing …
Mobile mandate
In case the persistent drumbeat of blog posts, newsletters, and conferences underscoring the mobile mandate were not enough, here’s some compelling new data from Pew: 63% of cell owners are what Pew calls “cell internet users,” people who access the internet via phone. The number has doubled from 31% since 2009. See also that email and …