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Friday 5 — 5.30.2014
1. Mary Meeker released her annual, comprehensive internet trends report. Lots of stats reinforce the enormous potential in mobile, like room for growth in global smartphone adoption, and opportunity in mobile advertising. She notes that the education industry is at an “inflection point,” with increasingly global user bases (particularly for duolingo above) and the rise of personalized, online education from MOOC to app.
2. Amazon and Hachette are embroiled in an escalating battle, which has led to Amazon, in some cases, refusing to sell or discount Hachette books — see this useful explainer. In highly related news, a Harvard Business Review article outlines four strategies suppliers can use to capture value from powerful platform owners.
3. Does our addiction to tweets, Buzzfeed slideshows, tl;dr summaries, and explainers mean that we no longer devote focused time to explore primary sources? This opinion piece offers one worrisome take on our facile faking of cultural literacy.
4. What does Apple buying sub-par headphone company and high-margin lifestyle brand Beats mean (apart from the fact that Dr. Dre is now linked to Steve Jobs by far fewer than six degrees of separation)? Explore some theories here.
5. We’ve discovered the ideal recipe for crowdfunding $2M on Kickstarter in less than 48 hours. Mix a heady dose of nostalgia with an accessible and compelling cause, and then add in cultural icon LeVar Burton.
Weekend fun: The bad news: otters at the Smithsonian National Zoo may well have more enrichment activities than you do at your desk. The good news: it’s pretty awesome to watch.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 30, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.23.14
1. How does your LinkedIn profile rank? LinkedIn taps into inherent narcissism by exposing your percentile in profile views compared with that of your connections, or with others in your company. Disappointed in your results? LinkedIn suggests that you beef up your summary, add more skills, and join more groups.
2. There’s a big opportunity for native mobile apps to take advantage of your handheld’s hardware from camera or accelerometer. This week, Facebook announced an imminent mobile app feature that uses the microphone to identify ambient TV shows, music, or movies. The app then offers up the content to be approved for inclusion in a status update.
3. In a surely wholly unrelated initiative, Facebook changed the default privacy setting for new users to be “friends and family” versus “public” and announced a new privacy check up tool to be rolled out in the coming weeks. Here’s hoping your new privacy settings will keep your mobile device microphone from reporting you are home in your pajamas watching Veep, rather than at the Childish Gambino concert featured in your status message.
4. The internet of things means, sadly but inevitably, ads running on all those connected things. Like on your thermostat. Or your refrigerator. See the full list as well as a couple of clarifications from Google.
5. Why did that video go viral? Success can be attributed to eliciting strong, positive emotion. Be sure to keep it upbeat — people want to see the daring rescue attempt, but no one wants to know that the kitten actually died.
Weekend fun: Speaking of viral video, here’s a slick maneuver from a clever young man who caught a foul ball — and perhaps tried to win a heart.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 23, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.16.2014
1. Foursquare begets Swarm, a mobile app that enables users to keep up and meet up with their connected friends. The check-in experience is largely the same, but new passive tracking allows for Neighborhood Sharing — which you can enable or disable with a swipe. Techcrunch describes the larger trend represented by Swarm and other invisible apps, as they move from a battle for the real estate on your home screen to just-in-time surfacing of contextual offers. Fun detail: your friends are defined as “right here” (500 feet), “a short walk away” (1.0 miles), in the area (20 miles), or “far, far away.”
2. Do you have people you like to follow on Twitter, but whose streams become insufferable during Bruins playoffs, Game of Thrones finales, or SXSW? Or people you feel professionally obliged to follow? Now you can mute them, because Twitter really, really wants to retain its user base. Here’s how.
3. Digital thinkers opine on the internet of things. Most agree on the inevitability of a “global, immersive, invisible, ambient networked computing environment …in a world-spanning information fabric known as the Internet of Things.” Opinions vary more on the benefit of ubiquitous data collection versus the associated risk of surveillance and tracking.
4. In case you missed it, Jonathan Zittrain wrote a compelling editorial on this week’s ruling that Europeans have a limited “right to be forgotten” by search engines like Google. Bottom line: it’s a bad solution to a real problem.
5. Pinterest begins its “tasteful” and “transparent” rollout of Promoted Pins, aka ads. With over 750 million boards and 30 billion pins, even a slow rollout represents a huge revenue opportunity for Pinterest (as investors behind its brand-new $200M round would agree).
Weekend fun: Watch P.J. O’Rourke offer his hilarious, skeptical view on the “dark, Satanic mills” that exemplify our current state of technology.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 16, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.9.2014
1. You likely don’t need a set of graphics and stark statistics to remind you how much work email has encroached on our personal lives. Also: thoughtful essay on how excessive corporate email promotes burnout rather than productivity.
2. Email marketing is a staple of corporate and nonprofit outreach, but how do you get those overloaded recipients to open it? See these five tips for email subject line that attract readers.
3. Here’s a comprehensive rundown on LinkedIn strategy for evolving from a resumé parking lot to an online newspaper. Growth plans include investments in mobile, international expansion, and “delivering massively personalized experiences.”
4. WordPress.com parent Automattic closed $160M in funding on a $1.16B valuation. Known for its robust developer community and emphasis on clean user interface, WordPress now powers an astonishing 22% of 10 million websites today. The investment’s a strong bet on WordPress to continue its growth beyond niche blogging to become the best publishing platform in the world.
5. Smartphones, smart watches, smart toothbrushes are now all available to contribute to our families’ personal data exhaust streams. These data streams are loyalty cards on steroids, providing a live feed of behaviors which when aggregated are a potential goldmine for retailers. Prediction: myriad law suits to emerge over parents’ use of their children’s personal data in return for discounting.
Weekend fun: Perhaps amusing only for soccer fans, Arsenal players respond to mean tweets. Extra credit for gratuitous Vorsprung door Technik joke.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 9, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.2.14
1. For a few years now, Foursquare has felt like a location data layer in search of a business model. The company just announced a move toward a more explicit user value proposition by revising its core app and splitting off a new Swarm app — a social heat map that doesn’t require an explicit check-in.
2. How can we stop wasting users’ time? Here are some practical ways to design experiences that avoid common user experience pitfalls. My favorite? Stop the madness of persnickety fields that make for tiresome web forms.
3. User growth is flat and the stock precipitously down — and now Twitter gets its very own eulogy.
4. At Facebook f8, Mark Zuckerberg announced a set of new features, few of which you might associate with Facebook as we know it. They include anonymous login, linking between apps, and a mobile like button. Also, he said trust, stable, and mobile a heck of a lot.
5. Teen-friendly, ephemeral, and visual messaging app Snapchat counters the unbundling trend of Foursquare and Facebook by adding features. Now users can swipe to chat via text or video — and true to brand, the conversation disappears when users leave the app.
Weekend fun: In one minute and twenty-three seconds you could accomplish something productive, like answering an email or flossing your teeth. Or you could watch tiny hamsters eating tiny burritos. And it’s only episode one of the series, so submit your suggestions printed on tiny tortillas via #TinyHamsterIdeas.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 2, 2014
Friday 5 — 4.25.2014
1. Are you reading this on your phone right now? Do you find you’re checking your phone compulsively? Then you might just be a mobile addict — defined by mobile analytics firm Flurry as someone who launches apps more than 60 times a day. High risk groups are identified as Teens, College Students (skewing female), and Middle Aged Parents, all of which ensures college campuses are teeming with the Infected.
2. Facebook makes nice with the media by launching FB Newswire, a service that helps users find, share, and embed newsworthy items from its vast trove of user-generated content. A partnership with social media news agency Storyful provides content verification to separate wheat from chaff. No doubt this service will do some useful sifting for overtaxed newsrooms, but ultimately Facebook and its algorithms retain editorial control by deciding what’s newsworthy enough to make the wire.
3. Fun fact from Q1 earnings report: Facebook now has 1.1B mobile monthly active users. Not including its Messenger app. Or Instagram. Or newly-acquired What’s App. For context, those monthly mobile users united would be the third largest country in the world, after China and India.
4. This week Airbnb, the website that lets you make a buck renting out your pull-out couch or luxury vacation home, closed a round of 500M on a 10B valuation. Looks like the collaborative economy is starting to have quantifiable impact at least at the lower end of the hotel market: The Economist reports on research suggesting that if Airbnb’s growth continues at its current clip, budget hotel revenue will be down 10% by 2016.
5. Codeacademy, an interactive platform that teaches people to code, relaunched its website. Here are the 10 design principles that informed their approach. Elevated social proof, commitment to fewer form fields, and enabling focus stand out as drivers of superior user experience.
Weekend fun: Wait — you’ve already seen Brian Williams rapping gin and juice? Well, you should probably watch it again, because it doesn’t get any less funny the tenth time around. Jimmy Fallon’s video editors are a force to be reckoned with.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
April 25, 2014
Friday 5 — 4.18.2014
1. Now that we’re all shooting more photos and videos than ever before, Dropbox is hell bent on storing them for you. Dropbox knows there’s a high switching cost for moving all your personal stuff (hassle, trust) so they’re making it easy and appealing to store and share, particularly via mobile. And yesterday Dropbox purchased iOS photo app Loom to continue the offensive.
2. This week, Twitter took a page out of Facebook’s monetization playbook by adopting app install ads. With a heavily mobile user base, Twitter provides an appealing audience for app creators looking for new users. Here’s hoping this proven ad revenue model shores up Twitter’s languishing stock price.
3. Hunter Walk illustrates how context matters when serving up recommendations for end users. When YouTube recommended videos to users, the interface explicitly told them why: e.g., “because you watched these puppy videos, we’re showing you this kitten.” As a result, users were less likely ignore the recommendations — and consumed more video.
4. But what if you don’t want your online behavior tracked, for relevant video recommendations or anything else? The Atlantic cites research from Zeynep Tufekci on emerging user behaviors, from passive-aggressive subtweeting to active hatelinking, that regular people are adopting to remain invisible to the algorithms that track online behavior.
5. Also filed under “what your social networks now know about you,” Facebook has launched Nearby Friends, a way for you to find out who’s close by. The technology is based on Glancee, a startup Facebook acquired back in 2012. Needless to say, early messaging is all about user control and privacy settings.
Weekend fun: Done right, Vine videos are a glorious, six-second art form. Here are this year’s winners from the Tribeca Film Festival, with my favorite Wrap Dancer winning the animation category.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
April 18, 2014
Friday 5 — 4.11.2014
1. Twitter is going all Facebook with new, expanded profile pages. The new profile pages offer a wider banner, a larger profile image, and the ability to “pin” a tweet to the top of your profile. The profile pages will now emphasize your tweets with the most engagement by making them larger. First Lady Michelle Obama is already up and running — soon you will be, too.
2. Good explainer post on the difference between the card design proliferating across the web and emerging card architectures. The former reflects a design aesthetic, which may be a more ephemeral trend. The latter supplants embedded media, and enables third-party and first-party content to co-mingle — potentially delivering more value to the user.
3. Speaking of cards, the explanatory journalism startup Vox launched this week with a lush, card-enhanced look. Bright yellow highlights tease explainer cards that act almost like dynamic FAQs. Topics range from “what is marijuana” (really?) to “is it the Ukraine or just Ukraine.” GigaOm broke down the benefits and challenges of the new site.
4. Internet of Things was canonized as the biggest new thing when John Chamber at Cisco referred to it as a $19T (t, as in trillion) market back in January. This Business Insider scrolling presentation walks you through examples (smart TVs, connected cars, wearables), venture capital investments, and security questions.
5. A new report from mobile analytics and advertising firm Flurry tracked mobile behaviors from January to March 2014. Findings confirm that native mobile apps (versus mobile web) continue to dominate, commanding an astonishing 86% of the average U.S. mobile consumer’s time. HTML5 and CSS3 were the mobile web darlings of 2010 — today, not so much..
Weekend fun: Turns out, Game of Thrones is more than a blood-thirsty way to spend a delightful Sunday evening with the family. The show’s popularity has ensured that there are now more baby Khaleesis than Betsys, and has spawned a veritable spike in female baby Aryas. But cheer up — weekend is coming.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
April 11, 2014
Friday 5 — 4.4.2014
1. A Pew report on older adults and technology use finds that more seniors are online. Today, 59% of 65+ adults are connected, compared with 53% in 2012 and only 35% back in 2008. And they’re more social: more than half of women 65+ use social networking sites, validating my theory that grandchildren photos are a critical driver for Facebook adoption. Seniors still lag notably in smartphone adoption, with only 18% penetration compared to 55% of the general population.
2. On-demand car service Lyft raised 250 M, putting them in a fundraising league with Uber as the two compete for marketshare. How big will these “collaborative economy” or sharing services grow as a generation less invested in owning enters its prime earning years?
3. Hard to believe that Gmail is already 10 years old. The service launched on April 1, 2004, via a mere 1,000 initial invitations. Gmail changed the way we think about searchable email, and turned up the pressure for ease-of-use and storage for IT departments struggling to keep up with heightened employee expectations. Fun fact: Gmail was a skunkworks project, and launched in beta on 300 old Pentium III computers nobody else at Google wanted.
4. Amazon, Google, and now Microsoft are engaging in price wars over their cloud offerings. Thankfully, gone are the days when the first thing you did when you build a website was, “First, write a million dollar check to Sun for some servers…”
5. Lots of people have great ideas for social products and services — but many of those products depends on critical mass of users. How do you grow enough to get the metrics to understand where to improve and scale? Andrew Chen lists some solid approaches to solving for the dreaded cold start problem.
Weekend fun: Lots of people are already sick of watching this video of an ecstatic two-legged puppy romping on the beach. I am not one of those people.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
April 4, 2014
Friday 5 — 3.28.2014
1. This week, Facebook acquired virtual reality purveyor Oculus Rift for $2B in cash and stock. This purchase gives the social networking company, which was only two years ago struggling to get its arms around mobile, a leg up in virtual reality hardware. What will they use it for? Gaming’s an obvious first use case, but there’s a big vision opportunity. Semil Shah penned a terrific, if pun-laden piece on Facebook’s strategy and direction.
2. In an effort to boost Google Wallet, Google enables friction-free money transfer for Gmail users. The simple user interface — as easy as adding an attachment — is sure to attract entice more people into signing up for Google Wallet.
3. What’s content marketing, again? This piece breaks down this generic term, and explains why companies like NewsCred and Percolate are closing significant financing rounds.
4. From the Something Useful Now department, the Starbucks app has added a couple of handy features. The app now enables shake-to-pay, which uses your mobile’s native accelerometer to pull up the scannable barcode, and a feature than enables tipping for up to two hours after your visit.
5. Nieman Lab runs an extensive review of NY Times Now, a mobile product launching in the app stores on April 2. The launch is a step forward into current digital news best practices (mobile-first approach, briefs, curation of third party content). But will it lure more subscribers with this new app, or introduce product confusion with too many similar offerings?
Weekend fun: Are you still immersed in March Madness this weekend? Then check out @NailbiterBot, which will tweet to you when games are close in the second half. Follow the account now, so you can quietly excuse yourself from your in-laws and tune in.

IOWAST (3) v. UNC (6) is 74-76 with 2:59 left. Watch on CBS. http://t.co/zwra5bpZ3T

— Nailbiter Bot (@NailbiterBot) March 23, 2014

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
March 28, 2014