Everything is disrupted

An oral history of the many ways technology is changing the way we buy, sell, play, communicate...and live. Search through these snippets using the tags below.

[everythingisdisrupted]

Interpreting the rise of machine intelligence as a drop in the cost of prediction doesn’t offer an answer to every specific question of how the technology will play out. But it yields two key implications: 1) an expanded role of prediction as an input to more goods and services, and 2) a change in the value of other inputs, driven by the extent to which they are complements to or substitutes for prediction. These changes are coming. The speed and extent to which managers should invest in judgment-related capabilities will depend on the how fast the changes arrive.

https://hbr.org/2016/11/the-simple-economics-of-machine-intelligence

[everythingisdisrupted]

“Right now, Apple, Google and Facebook are kind of like these private companies who, collectively, are the urban planners for a billion people’s attentional landscape,” Harris said. “We all live in this invisible city, which they created.”

http://www.recode.net/2017/1/30/14432142/technology-app-addiction-time-well-spent-tristan-harris-recode-podcast

[everythingisdisrupted]

Thanks to an inclusion on her Snap stories, artists saw returns either immediately or through the rest of the year. Call it a testament to Jenner’s ability to pluck talent from the relatively unknown, or a long-running con, but one thing’s for sure: the numbers don’t lie. People hear a few lyrics during her 10-second Snaps and rush to Google it, which is why the artist’s song pages tend to blow up on Genius after appearing on her Snapchat. Let’s call it The Kylie Bump: how much a song’s Genius views increased after appearing on Jenner’s Snapchat by averaging the views the week prior and week of her post.

http://genius.com/a/how-kylie-jenners-snapchat-turns-songs-into-hits

[everythingisdisrupted]

In media, politics, technology, and entertainment, Twitter has become an essential tool. But anyone outside the conversation can be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. Ultimately, Twitter may be less like Facebook than like eBay, a site critical for hobbyists but largely irrelevant for the rest of the world.

http://qz.com/818610/twitter-twtr-is-a-cultural-success-and-a-business-failure/

[everythingisdisrupted]

One of Facebook’s strengths is that it is what some like to call a “fast follower.” If Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees that something is working for a competitor, he either copies it or acquires them. And one of the services he has tried to copy the most is Snapchat.

http://fortune.com/2016/11/03/facebook-wants-snapchat/

[everythingisdisrupted]

In the conversation we learned of the problems with machine learning. A very expensive study was done ‘training’ a system to recognise whether a tank was a US one or a Russian one. After it was made to work, they deployed it in the real world and it tagged every tank on battlefields as Russian ones. It turns out that the factor the system used to differentiate was dirt; all the US tank pictures fed into the system were of pristine tanks parked on army bases whilst the only pictures they had of Russian tanks were of ones photographed in the wild. Back to the drawing board.

http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=80025f160be434835759d292b&id=bbd048faa6&e=34ce01ed5a

[everythingisdisrupted]

More broadly, it strikes me that 15 or 20 years ago people used to try to distinguish in ecommerce between ‘high touch’ and ‘low touch’ products, on the basis that it would be easier to buy online things that you didn’t have to touch first. That was true up to a point, but it turned out that many fewer things were ‘high touch’ than we thought, while same-day delivery and free returns are eroding much of the rest: we’ve now reached the point that it’s not clear that there is anything that cannot be bought online. But actually, the real barrier now is often not touching it, but knowing about it. These are things where a lot of the role of a physical shop is curation, recommendation and demand generation rather than logistics: the shop shapes your choice but it also tells you about things you didn't plan to buy, and you can't search for things you hadn't thought about. Some of these products might not get bought at all if you hadn't been shown them - you went in for one book and came out with ten. How will that work online? Without that, we'll have more of the  polarisation one can often see in ecommerce today, between bestsellers on one hand and the long tail on the other with the middle squeezed. 

http://ben-evans.com/?category=Search+and+discovery

[everythingisdisrupted]

Spotify has confirmed that it has more than 100m monthly active users on its music streaming service today. Based on its last count, the Swedish company is adding 1.8m users to the service monthly, and 30pc of users are paying subscribers.  #milestone 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/06/20/spotify-crosses-100m-users/

[everythingisdisrupted]

Le niveau 65 de Candy Crush est si difficile qu’il décourage 50% des utilisateurs du jeu. Ceux qui persévèrent sortent la carte bleue, si bien que le niveau représente à lui seul 10% des revenus de King. Rentable ? A court-terme seulement, selon les data scientists du jeu qui se sont penchés sur ce cas d’école : la valeur d’une application réside avant tout dans la rétention.

http://us5.campaign-archive2.com/?u=091031ed26a5905741600ad7c&id=e090a9398d&e=d0f687295b

[everythingisdisrupted]

Like Heaney, the Ron Paul supporters tended to be much younger than the average Minnesota GOP activist, and they brought with them a technological savvy that aided clandestine organizing. For instance, in districts with heavy enough smartphone use, Paulite leaders used KakaoTalk—a Korean chatting and social media app that was barely used outside Asia in 2012—to coordinate strategies during the caucuses and conventions.

http://qz.com/685831/t/408521

[everythingisdisrupted]

Mondelez says its goal is for up to 10% of its global media investments to break even or turn a profit by 2020 and plans to create more native advertising, smartphone games and live events. "Capturing audience attention is more difficult than ever," said Laura Henderson, the global head of content and media monetisation at Mondelez International. "As audiences become more empowered to control their viewing experience, the old model of interruptive advertising is rapidly becoming irrelevant. "This new approach will hold us to a higher standard of creating content that earns attention and is good enough to make money. "By developing content that people want to watch, we can begin to monetise our investments, offsetting costs, improving return on investment and making our media spending more sustainable." 

http://www.campaignlive.com/article/mondelez-launches-content-deal-buzzfeed-within-new-marketing-model/1397233#4u07JcvcOXHJPPcA.02

[everythingisdisrupted]

Ben Ratliff: Spotify’s Discover Weekly really fascinates me. I am amazed by it and I admire it, and I loathe it passionately. Avirgan: You mean as a concept or as something you actually play — Ratliff: — yeah, as a real thing. I’m sure I look at it once a week. And every once in a while they will hit me with something that is almost embarrassingly right. Like, “Wow, they got me. Damn.” It’ll be a little obscure, too. But at the same time, because the machine knows that I sometimes I look up obscure things, they’ve tagged me as a cool cat. So sometimes the recommendations they give me are indie garbage I don’t care about. I’m not sure how this happens, but they understand what “coolness” is in a very slick way. I do feel pessimistic about the whole project. I do feel that if the great push of the smartest minds in this business is moving towards efficiency in curating for you, in delivering you what it knows you will like from the great abundance, well, something’s being lost, isn’t it? Isn’t the thing that’s being lost you and your efforts to figure out what you like and you respond to?

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-algorithms-ruining-how-we-discover-music/

[everythingisdisrupted]

We used to pay $800 for 30 or 40 edited images back in 2014. So add the cost of the product, and it would be like $2,500 to shoot and have content for a few weeks. Now, if you work with some big YouTube guys, the Casey Neistats, those types of people charge $300,000 to $500,000, and brands don’t actually own the rights to it.

http://digiday.com/agencies/confessions-social-media-exec-no-idea-pay-influencers/

[everythingisdisrupted]

"Funnily enough, Facebook at Work is amazingly similar to Google+," Sand said, mainly in its focus on segmented Groups. "We're a Google company — we use Gmail and Apps — but Google+ as a tool just didn't take off for us."

http://uk.businessinsider.com/what-its-like-to-use-the-facebook-at-work-enterprise-tool-2016-5?r=US&IR=T

[everythingisdisrupted]

“A lot of Internet video, especially from traditional media organizations, has evolved in a way that mimics the structure of TV,” said Matt Vree, Vox’s executive producer of video. Under that model, large teams take an assembly-line approach to creating a video, where each person has a specific role and the person who writes a script is not the same person who edits the video or publishes it to the Internet. By contrast, “the Vox team works like independent YouTubers.” For any given video, a single person is responsible for the entire production process, from pitch to publication. “What’s made our team thrive is that we were scrappy at the beginning,” said Joss Fong, senior editorial producer and Posner’s first hire. Each person hired is “expected to have skills in all these areas. We’ve hired people at different levels, but when you set the expectation, people rise to the occasion. Every one of our team members has gotten up to speed on the process. You can’t not be invested, because it’s your idea, and you’re coming up with the design and look of it. It’s not an assignment that’s been passed down the line.”

http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/04/inspired-by-independent-youtubers-wary-of-cable-vox-com-takes-its-explainer-mission-to-video/

[everythingisdisrupted]

The development of technologies tends to follow an S-Curve: they improve slowly, then quickly, and then slowly again. And at that last stage, they're really, really good. Everything has been optimised and worked out and understood, and they're fast, cheap and reliable. That's also often the point that a new architecture comes to replace them. You can see this very clearly today in devices such as Apple's new Macbook or Windows 'ultrabooks' - they've taken Intel's x86 and the mouse and window-based GUI model as far as they can go, and reached the point that everything possible has been optimised. Smartphones are probably at the point that the curve is starting to flatten - a lot has been optimised but there's still work to do, especially around cameras and battery life, and of course GPUs for VR. That curve will probably flatten out just at the point that AR starts to start shipping. 

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/4/20/the-best-is-the-last

[everythingisdisrupted]

Uber accounted for 43 percent of ground transportation transactions expensed through Certify last quarter, while rental cars had 40 percent. Ride-hailing services, with Uber at the forefront, overtook rental cars for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2015 and have since widened their lead, according to a study by Certify published on Thursday.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-21/uber-overtakes-rental-cars-among-business-travelers?bcomANews=true