January 2012
42 posts
4 tags
Content Is King on Facebook
American Express social media head on Facebook:
“The people own your brand now.”
Yes and no.
Brands are now media companies. Brands provide the engaging content. Without content, there’s no community, comments, or likes. Just likes there’s no fans without a record, movie, or book release.
The creative comes first, how people react second. Depending on crowd reaction, you...
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iMessage Me
iMessage, also know as free text messaging between iPhone users, is growing slowly but surely.
I scrapped text messaging 6 months ago and now am $120 richer.
SMS is for emergencies only. My whole family knows this so they simply email me if they want a quick response. And they call, of course.
Many teenagers are communicating in groups too via Twitter. It just makes sense given the shortness,...
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Murdoch's Tweets
On Rupert Murdoch’s Tweets:
His posts are devoid of nuance, partisan in the extreme and prone to crankiness, all consistent with the Rupert Murdoch we have come to know.
We can almost see Rupert Murdoch fidgeting with his iPad in one of his homes in LA, NY, or London.
He reminds us of our own Dad, making funny typos while speaking wisely from the heart and mind.
Clearly, if this was a PR...
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Contrasting Innovation
On innovation:
The Google model relies on rapid experimentation and data.
The Apple model is more edited, intuitive and top-down.
One company determines our future, the other answers our complex questions. The two companies make products that complement each other.
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Barnes & Noble, Bright and Gloomy
Barnes & Noble Chief executive William Lynch Jr. paints a rosy picture in today’s New York Times.
Store sales are up 4% over the Holiday, its holds 27% of the ebook business, and its stores “are not going anywhere.”
The reality is that stores are closing as I witnessed in Georgetown a few weeks ago and that Amazon is dominating the ebook and ereader market.
People hang out...
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Obstruction and Circumvention Vs. Free and Paid
One way to circumvent a content roadblock is to search for it on Google within 24 hours of publishing.
For example, clicking an article on financialtimes.com brings up the registration/account login screen. But Googling that same article gives you the whole article.
The Internet is all about working around hurdles to access stuff you desire.
This is why free and accessible stuff is so...
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“If Twitter Censors, I’ll Leave”
2 days ago famous artist and Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei ripped Twitter for permitting censorship.
But Twitter’s adjusted policy finally opens up its platform from the Great Chinese Firewall, which has been blocking Twitter and Facebook since 2009.
Twitter wants to be the default real-time worldwide breaking news platform and social network. The timing for its global expansion is...
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Foursquare Does What?
1. Visit foursquare.com.
2. Watch this.
Hi! I want to learn more about foursquare! from foursquare on Vimeo.
3. And now tweet a cool Instagram photo about where you are.
Exactly. Please leave a comment below if any of your friends actively use Foursquare.
The CEO still uses flickr.
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♫ Is All That Matters
Content is queen, re: Lady Gaga and Adele.
But yesterday’s article by The Guardian calls Gaga’s success “hard work” while Adele’s hits appear effortless.
It was the feeling that she delivered great music so easily. These days the results might still be exciting, but it all looks a bit like hard work.
Music is only hard work when you make songs with synched...
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Pinterest Edging Tumblr In Pageviews
Cheers to the web prodigy @shl for the tweet.
Why?
Pinterest focuses on one thing only, images. Simplicity like Instagram. Tumblr allows posts on text, quotes, pictures, video, link, chat, and audio.
“Repin” conjures quickness. Publish, boom, we feel like contributors. ”Reblog” sounds lengthy. Internet denizens have 3 second attention spans.
Pinterest is a...
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SoundCloud's Storywheel Is One Way To Make Sound...
A couple days ago I wrote that Youtube’s hour per minute upload stats essentially squashed Alex Ljung’s “sound will be bigger than video” prediction.
That’s until I saw SoundCloud’s latest Lab’s creation called Storywheel.
Storywheel integrates SoundCloud and Instagram, allowing users to tell a story through photos.
Here’s my first attempt:...
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Creativity Is China's Weakness
Creative thinking is China’s weakness and America’s strength.
But it’s hard to believe that rote learning and apathy is going to last forever. China has 500 million Internet users, the second largest app market, and a burst of microblogs.
The abundance of information across blogs, forums, and social networks will influence the Chinese to invent all kinds of stuff. Many...
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Siri, Only The Incipient Stages
Siri’s creator:
“Siri is the beginning of a huge transformation in how we interact with banks, insurance companies, retail stores, health care providers, information retrieval services and product services.”
Booking a restaurant table, hotel room, ordering a pizza, or taking a quick note and sending a hands free emergency email will all be voice controlled. Glad to be speaking again.
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#republiktwitter
Never mind the plot, it looks like the Indonesian concept of Sleepless In Seattle.
Except the relationship happens over Twitter instead of AOL.
Fortunately, Twitter is not AOL nor is it a date site although one can see obvious flirt replies in the stream. Note you need to follow both people to notice it.
More important about the movie is Twitter’s international growth. Jack Dorsey...
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4th Most Profitable Quarter of All Time
Q1 2012 financial results (via parislemon):
Revenue $46.33 billion
Net Profit $13.06 billion
37 million iPhones
15.43 million iPads
5.2 million Macs
15.4 million iPods
Apple also made history (via parislemon). Â Steve is smiling from above.
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Physibles
The Pirate Bay wants to end shipping:
We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.
The first thing that comes to mind, other than the irony and timing of this just after SOPA, is Nike Town and Amazon.
Nike Town uses a mail shoot to transfer shoes from the stock room upstairs to the customer. Amazon...
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YouTube: 1 Minute, 60 Hours of Video Uploaded
As much as I love SoundCloud, sound will not be bigger than video for this very reason:
“…roughly 60 hours of video is now uploaded to YouTube every minute..” (Reuters)
It’s still unclear whether these 60 hours are dominated by mobile uploads or pirated movie clips. Probably both.
We do know that only 30% of the videos get viewed 99% of the time. Which means if...
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Twitter Is Much More Than Social
Jack Dorsey:
“We think of it as an information utility and a communications network.”
True, I always called Twitter a social network but it’s much more than that.
It’s a discovery tool, a real time news breaker.
Sharing is just an inherent part of it.
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Utilize Platforms To Revitalize Learning
Academic papers:
“…feels to many like an exercise in rigidity and boredom, like practicing piano scales in a minor key.”
Amazing things happen when you change the platform.
Instead of a structured term paper, tell students to write an extensive blog post or use the new iBooks Author software to create an interactive report.
When Pages and Keynote came out, I was 5x more...
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On Choice: Less is more. More is less.
“Be choosy about choosing.” - Sheena Iyengar
We hear it all the time, people don’t know what they want unless they’re faced with scarcity or educated on all the choices.
But there’s two problems with this assumption.
There’s no way for someone to be happy with a product made for the masses and there’s no way for someone to be happy if the array of...
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Kodak Moment Gone in a Flash
Kodak owned photography like Google owns search. But Kodak’s myopia over digital cameras and mobile phone led it into bankruptcy.
Film today is like the vinyl of past, tangible stuff you see at garage sales and stores like Urban Outfitters that sell trendy nostalgia.
Most people will never buy a camera again. They’d rather have a Smartphone with an 8-megapixel camera and the...
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Friction(more) Web
The feeling you get when the 3G goes down passing through a tunnel.
The anticipation of the little bars rising as you see the light.
Finally the sound opens up and you pick up right up where you left that Tweet off.
5 characters later your words, images, and representations are in the air. You’re no longer in control.
Connectivity and self-promotion are external.
Reflection, thought,...
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Almost Couch Potatoes Again - SOPA Relief
Key notes from Clay Shirkey’s SOPA and PIPA TED talk:
-Scarcity before 2000 just meant another TV show, book, or album had to be decent to be paid for or viewed
-Consumers are not couch potatoes but want to create and share
-1998 allowed the copyright owners to put device destroying technology on their content. Ironically, the government did not threaten the mixtape which forms the basis...
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iBooks Author Unleashes the Amafessional
Apple gives professional tools to the wannabe.
I always wanted to make electronic music and hip hop beats. GarageBand made this possible. I released one album and loads of B sides of studio quality music. Cost: $0.
I’ve always wanted to publish a professional looking book. iBooks Author makes this possible. I will publish my first interactive book this year, combining imagery, hyperlinks,...
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Think About It @rupertmurdoch
The best solution for SOPA is to make everything available. Give people an easy, Internet friendly and cheap way to buy content and they will.
Otherwise, people will simply find what they want via a Twitter link or Google search and consume it for free.
You can’t fight free.
The music industry learned the hard way. The RIAA’s lawsuits and scare tactics only encouraged more...
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+1 on the Quora Follow Button
Quora added the follow button, a quick and easy way to get users to follow you on Quora without leaving your website. It’s an obvious copy of the Twitter follow button.
Here’s mine.
Follow Wells Baum on Quora
Quora also added boards (an obvious copy of Pinterest) just last week.
There’s no shame in emulation. All the social networks steal concepts from each other and rebrand...
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MLK's Tech Revolution
“There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion...
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C-O-D-I-N-G is the New Typing
I retook a typing exam in elementary school because I couldn’t memorize the location of the keys.
I had the same learning curve with the Internet. It took me a bit to figure out that the “Enter” button drove me to NBA.com.
Fast forward 15 years to the Smartphone/Tablet era. Internet access and the keyboard are innate tools. It’s writing with a pen/pencil that must be...
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A Retweet Is The New Autograph
I email archive special retweets from people I admire.
My most recent Retweets came from a favorite author, Hugh McLeod. Another retweet came from one of my favorite Arsenal players, Alex Song. I also get retweets from lesser known but significant technology VCs like Semil Shah.
These retweets made me feel like a kid again.
When people you admire give you attention, whether it’s in real...
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Advice For Google+
I had a chat with a Google+ employee yesterday. He’s 6 months on the job and helping onboard big brands.
Instead of giving him feedback on Google+ I gave him some advice.
Keep it simple. MySpace lost users because of page clutter while Facebook was the clean alternative. Facebook is now the one under the microscope. If there’s one thing Facebook is doing wrong, it’s the...
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SOPA Makes The World Go Dark
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) will be scary effective. It’ll flip creativity and social upside down.
Technically, any picture, video, article or any other form of media you upload or link out or reblog/retweet/repin can be crushed, along with a government mandate to close your profile or website too. The leaders in the online space like Google and Facebook should be fighting like hell to...
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Google+ Will Not Be Ignored
Google+ and Twitter are both wrong from a user’s perspective.
Last June, Twitter took the real time out of Google by allowing the partnership to expire. You used to be able to search the ‘real-time’ tab on Google and get live Twitter results.
As a result, we were driven to Twitter.com, a click outside our natural Google search habit. Not ideal.
But Google recently pulled a far...
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MySpace TV, A Last Stand
MySpace is the 5th most heavily trafficked social network in the US.
Has to be the American monkeys and robots.
MySpace went from the premier social network to dating site to a site built for musicians. For a couple years, it was the all in one solution for social just like Facebook is now. But profile customization crimped its design and usage. Widgets were super clunky.
While Myspace has been...
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iPhone: The Great Displacer
Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 5 years ago today.
Here are five devices the iPhone displaced:
Camera
Your best camera is the one you have with you. Even when the resolution was crappy 2 years ago I still used my iPhone camera in South Africa more than my canon digital camera. I just didn’t feel like taking out the canon camera and then have to go home and upload my pictures with a cord....
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From Sweet Seats To Tweet Seats
I took my wife to see Book of Mormon on Broadway. I took a few pictures before the sitter told me that photography was prohibited. I consented but I still didn’t put my phone down.
Next I wanted to Instagram and tweet out the picture I had just taken. Surely, my friends and family would like to know that I’m here. And while I got one 3G bar, my picture still wouldn’t upload....
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Distract Customers With Technology
My friend works at a car dealership. He informed me that during the sales paperwork process he gives the kids and adults his iPad. Customer satisfaction is way up.
I spent two hours at the DMV this morning and read on my iPhone while waiting. All I could think about was the slow and red taped DMV service. Had the DMV given me something, wifi for example, I may have relaxed and surfed the Net.
...
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Emerging Countries Create More Content
Emerging countries are making the West look lazy.
According to Forrester, America and Europe create less content than the emerging countries Brazil, China, India, and Mexico.
There are three main reasons for this:
-Western burnout
-Mobile Internet
-Economic reality
Western Burnout
Most westerners share, like, comment, retweet, and reblog. Pick your network (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc)...
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Apps As TV Stations
The television industry trained us to stream. The music industry trained us to download. Now, TV is headed into app downloads while music is free to stream through Spotify.
The Google and Apple TV are coming this year, and they’ll be mere representations of mobile and tablet screens. And they’ll be full of traditional apps and TV channel apps.
Your Google or Apple TV will have two...
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GoogleSoft
Google is the Microsoft of mobile phones. It took a Steve Jobs concept and decided to piss him off like Bill Gates once did by taking that concept, building a lookalike operating system, and licensing it to all hardware makers but Apple.
Just like Microsoft, Google will win a majority marketshare for years on out.
Some say that today’s environment is different from the past. Apple has...
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The Tribalization of Opinion
Opinions by nature are open-ended beliefs. They can be debated.
When there’s two sides to the debate, people are always looking to justify their opinions.
The New York Times and MSNBC provide liberals evidence to make their case while The Wall Street Journal and Fox News give the Republicans their own view points.
Blogs, Twitter, and Facebook give people yet another outlet to feed their...
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Mass Creators
If 2011 was the year of the consumer, 2012 will be the year of the creator.
Mobile is the impetus for this change.
Last year, 15 million people jointed Instagram on the iOS. These people are all content producers with state of the art cameras and filters (effects) that can make a brick wall look interesting.
Last year, Apple included Twitter in its iOS software. People are now one click away...
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Clock In, Clock Out to Always Open
Product sketch: Clocks for Robots from BERG on Vimeo.
If you read Seth’s blog today, you’ll discover that time and place is really illusory.
Seth argues that the only reason time exists is to align everyone’s productivity.
But the Internet is timeless. You can tweet at 3AM EST and expect a response from someone in Australia. Or upload a picture on Facebook or Instagram and...
