Perry

Hewitt

Tag: video

  • Friday 5 – 06.21.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Facebook, as widely predicted, rolled out a comprehensive Instagram video offering. Instagram opted for a 15-second format — practically longform compared to the mere 6-second Vine. Will 13 filters, editing capability, and a stabilization feature topple Vine?
    2. Twitter purchased Boston-area Spindle. The mobile-only discovery app had a talented former Microsoft team behind it, and will add an important location data layer for Twitter.
    3. Highland Capital Partners announced a $25 million fund to jumpstart Leap Motion development for “solving human scale problems” in sectors including education, healthcare IT, big data, and productivity. There’s a post-mouse world coming, and 3D mobile tech will need developers to beef up the application ecosystem.
    4. WhatsApp now has more than 250 million active monthly users. Messaging is a crowded space, but it’s already bigger than Twitter and has the telcos concerned.
    5. Fascinating read for marketers and scholars alike: English is not the dominant language of the web. Ethan Zuckerman explains how this understanding changed Global Voices editorial approach.

  • Friday 5 – 06.07.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Despite the oft-declared demise of RSS, many recoiled at the announcement of a Google Reader shutdown in July. Feedly, Pulse, and others have picked up migrating users, but Digg has an upcoming launch of a social news site / RSS reader said to be uncluttered and functional. Here’s an interesting interview with the team.
    2. In case Mary Meeker hasn’t convinced you, mobile behaviors continue to indicate that there’s a lot more upside ready to be monetized. YouTube announced that its mobile ad revenue has tripled, and revealed that 40% of U.S. video views are on mobile.
    3. HBR offers an elegant envisioning of the state of email — which is not dead, but evolving. Each year workers spend the equivalent of 111 workdays dealing with the frustrations of email, and its clunky utility is not going away anytime soon.
    4. Similarly, calendar functionality feels like it could get a lot better. Sunrise launched back in early 2013 to reimagine calendar via lush design and smarter data sources —  here’s hoping its new 2.2M round will continue to advance the product.
    5. Personal security is a headache. The system of requiring human brains to come up and remember ever more human-unreadable passwords is unsustainable. Looking for a better way? David Pogue offers a comprehensive review of Dashlane as one solution.

  • 6 ways to view the new YouTube trends map

    YouTube trends mapVideo on the internet has come a long way from the jerky, plugin-encumbered frustration of the late 90s to its speed and near-ubiquity today. YouTube now reports 1 billion unique monthly visitors watching more than 6 billion hours of video each month. The proliferation of smart phones and accompanying rise in social sharing mean that mobile video viewing is at an all-time high.

    Data visualization pro Martin Wattenberg has collaborated with the YouTube trends team to create a map of trending videos in the U.S. Six ways to explore the data:

    1. Click on any of the video thumbnails on the map to play. I’m generally not a fan of the lightbox treatments because they lose the metadata that provides context — but it works well here. Interestingly, the lightbox views seem to have no pre-roll. 
    2. Mouse over the video list by cities/regions at right. The other videos on a map will gray out and let you see at a glance what’s playing where nationally.
    3. Next, toggle between Shares and Views in the filter bar at top. I love this as a metric to understand what people enjoy watching versus what they suggest others watch.
    4. Click Male or Female in the filter bar to see what’s trending by gender. On Tuesday, the females seemed to be watching Blake Shelton while the males tuned into Charles Ramsey.
    5. Click the age ranges to see what’s trending by the usual bands. The high overlap between the 13 year olds and the 65+ crowd confirms my suspicion that the age reporting in YouTube is highly suspect. Twelve year olds tend to sign up as senior citizens to avoid age restrictions, and Google prevents them the changing the age on the account when they go back to fix it in their late teens.
    6. Finally, scroll down below the map to see the top videos trends bars. The colors cleverly derive from the video thumbnail, and offer a great visual that changes as you select filters up top. It’s a great way to see, for example, that tonight there is uniformity in what people are watching but far more variety in what they are sharing.

    The trends map is an immensely readable view of the enormous U.S. video data set. For large publishers of video to YouTube, this would be a terrific at-a-glance addition to a video performance dashboard.

  • What makes a video go viral?

    When people starting calling/texting/emailing me on Monday about Harvard baseball’s inspired version of “Call Me, Maybe,” I had a sense it might captivate people – but I didn’t predict how much. The video’s been picked up everywhere from Good Morning America to New York Daily News to Mashable, with views closing in on 880,000 at the time of posting. It’s hard to predict what catches people’s imagination, but there are a few elements of this video that makes it ripe for sharing:

    • Harvard as a brand captures people’s attention. Harvard in a online headline will dramatically increase page views, as journalists who cover education know. This video featured Harvard prominently but plays against Harvard stereotypes as well — it’s a bunch of guys on a decidedly unglamorous road trip, lipsyncing to pop music. They’re all wearing Harvard caps, but these are regular guys you might have gone to high school with, having a good time.
    • There’s a lot that’s visually unexpected in this video. It’s shot driving along a highway; there’s a seeming incongruity of the sise of the guys and the size of the van, and more of them keep popping up, Keystone cops-style.
    • Good God, this song is an earworm.
    • It’s funny, really funny. From the guy sacked out in the back left throughout to the use of a phone prop to the player with his head thrown back at 2:28 (“Baaaaby!”), this is hilarious choreography. Well done, Conner Hulse and crew.

  • Serendipitous convergence

    The day after the Berkman Center convened news thinkers to talk truthiness and Alan Rusbridger spoke of the impact of open journalism, KONY 2012 broke all records for viral video.

    All the right ingredients for the perfect social case study of discerning “truth” after the narrative spreads like wildfire. The Guardian asks “What’s the real story?” while Kristof that this scrutiny obscures the key point about the devastation. As the competing narratives unfold, am looking at people quantitatively analyzing the impact to understand more about the inherent risks and opportunities in social news’ accelerated spread.