From the Egyptian Revolution to the Superbowl to a snapshot of your co-worker's lunch, Twitter has seen an immense amount of content posted in the seven years since the site's founding (adding up 425 billion pieces of content, including photos and linked pages.)
San Francisco-based startup Topsy announced this week that it has indexed all of it into one easily searchable database.
Take the the search engine for a spin yourself at topsy.com.
Hand over control to your audience or risk losing them, said actor Kevin Spacey in a recent speech at the Edinburgh Television Festival.
Spacey knows what he's talking about: the Oscar winner's "House of Cards" series broke with the traditional TV model by successfully launching an entire season simultaneously and exclusively on Netflix.
Lesson learned, Spacey says, for any industry experiencing disruption: "Give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, and they'll more likely pay for it rather than steal it."
Twitter gets a facelift with new, conversation-friendly UX
In effort to make it easier for users to follow conversations, Twitter has rolled out an update to it website and mobile apps. In a nutshell, users will see full conversations grouped with a blue vertical line and in chronological order.
The update will also allow users to share conversations and individual tweets via email (Android users can even share tweets via private message).
This update, which aims to "humanize" the platform represents a significant shift from the Twitter feed as we've known it - a stream of single messages that often appeared without context.
Read the full story via the Twitter blog: http://bit.ly/1drnibe
See the more coverage on TechCrunch: http://tcrn.ch/17klw6E
Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is teaming up with a consortium of technology giants to launch an initiative that aims to bring the internet to the five billion people without access. This global venture - dubbed Internet.org - brings together Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung in an effort to get the whole world online within the next ten years.
According to Zuckerberg, Internet.org is about creating a world where all people have ”same ability to share their opinions and speak freely”and not about generating more revenue for Facebook. “If we really just wanted to focus on making money, the first billion people who are already on Facebook have way more money than the next five or six billion people combined,”Zuckerberg said.
Watch the CNN interview here: http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2013/08/20/t-zuckerberg-cuomo-internet.cnnmoney/
Read the press release here: http://bit.ly/16Nynjb
- Alexandra C. Wood (@alexcwood)
How long is a trip from L.A. to San Fran? If entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk builds the Hyperloop, his high-speed train concept, you could get from the Valley to the Bay Area in just 30 minutes—by traveling at 800 miles per hour.
(The roughly 400 mile trip currently takes about six hours driving, and just over one hour to fly.)
The hypothetical $6 billion project, if realized, would seat travelers in pods and whisk them across the state in tubes mounted on earthquake-proof pylons.
Read more here.
Sensoria footwear promises to track stride, speed, distance and calories (but sorry, they won't walk themselves to the washing machine when you're finished).
The Little Dongle That Could: Google's Latest Tool to Revolutionize TV
Google has just unveiled its newest tool in the quest for world domination - Chromecast. In a nutshell, it allows you to broadcast whatever's on your computer or mobile device onto your television. To sweeten the deal, installation is easy (just install an app and then plug the Chromecast dongle into your TV) and cheap ($35!).
While functionality is still a bit limited, e.g. not all apps are yet supported and the only browser you can only mirror from is Chrome, Chromecast is a welcome, low-cost addition to the sea of video streaming options.
Want more info?
Gizmodo gives us the highlights here (http://bit.ly/13w90fy) and TechCrunch here: http://tcrn.ch/14E3pmC
No internet? No smartphone? No problem, for 100 million Facebook users who access the social network through an app specially designed for non-smartphones.
Growing its user base by leaps and bounds in developing markets, "in just two years, Facebook For Every Phone has successfully put Facebook into the hands of millions of people around the world with limited access to the Internet," the company said earlier this week. With just over one billion total users, that puts about one in every ten Facebook users on a "dumbphone."
"Should it want to, Facebook could even become a powerful tool for efforts to improve the lives of people in poor areas, where the site is gaining traction," MIT's Technology Review speculates. (Read on for more insights on how users in Kenya and Kuwait use the platform.)
Havas Worldwide New York celebrates the Mad Sci Lab with the Intel Perceptual Hackathon! Look at the results here. http://madsci.havasworldwide.com/?p=899
Facebook rolled out its new Graph Search to all US users on Monday -- with mixed reviews.
Salon led with "scary good", calling the tool, "Facebook’s ambitious attempt to turn your social network into a personalized search engine."
But The New York Times points to its limitations: foremost, that Graph Search can only pick up what your friends have said they "Like": "For example, when I searched my social network for “friends who like ice cream,”Facebook only returned 12 results. Left out was the silent majority who regularly lick cones and never bothered to tell Facebook."
And the Wall Street Journal reacted with a piece of advice: "Check your privacy settings." (In fact, there's actually no way to opt out.)
Barbarian Group's "Cinder" Nabs Grand Prix in New Innovation Category @ 2013 Cannes Lions
Q: What is Cinder?
A: It's an open-source piece of software that allows developers to create "mind-blowing visualizations." Even more impressive - several of the awards at Cannes went to projects created with the software. Innovation fueling innovation? We're into it. Watch the video below to learn more:
Want to learn even more? Go to the source (pun intended): http://libcinder.org/
ICYMI: Google launches "balloon-powered internet for everyone"
From the team that brought us Google Glasses, the tech giant has unveiled its latest game-changing innovation from their Google X Lab: Project Loon.
According to Google, "Project Loon is a network of balloons traveling on the edge of space, designed to connect people in rural and remote areas, help fill in coverage gaps and bring people back online after disasters."
Go to the Project Loon Google+ page for a behind-the-scenes look on the pilot, launching in New Zealand: https://plus.google.com/+ProjectLoon/posts
I'll have video with that - Instagram to add Vine-like capabilities to platform
In a move seen as a direct response to Twitter's Vine, Facebook, Inc. is rumored to be adding short video capabilities to Instagram, the app it acquired last year. More news to come at a press event on June 20th (http://abcn.ws/11H6Hob).
Walk for Water, a new iOS app, launched this week. Conceived as a donation platform that encourages healthier living, the app uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to count steps that users take while attending certain special events. A brand sponsor then makes a donation to charity: water based on the successful completion of a pre-determined goal for each user. The 2013 Cannes Lions Festival, which takes place 16–22 June, is the first of these events.
“We wanted to create a fun way for people to contribute, simply by doing something they do everyday without even thinking,” explains Valli Lakshmanan, marketing director of Walk for Water. “The app promotes an active lifestyle, raises awareness and generates funds for an organisation that’s doing some really incredible work.”
charity: water is a non-profit organisation bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. All proceeds from the app will fund their infrastructure projects across the globe – like handwashing stations, latrines and water wells. By directly supporting people in need, these community investments make vital improvements to their everyday lives.
Walk for Water is free – simply download it from the App Store and start walking. To find out more, go to walkforwater.co.
A Technique to Bridge the Gap Between Marketing and IT
Originally published on the HBR blog, author Brad Power: http://bit.ly/17MMyFx
To learn more about emotions, the customer intelligence group took several banking products and processes and measured customers' reactions to them. They found that their offerings trigger more emotions than they had realized. Some provoked positive feelings, but some also prompted frustration, anger, and stress. They also found that customer satisfaction does not depend solely on the functionality of a product or service; it can depend on reliability and ease of use. Verhaaf said they realized that "to create more positive reactions and build trust with our customers, we really need the help of IT in changing our products and processes."
While the customer intelligence group was learning about customers' emotions, Ron van Kemenade, the new chief information officer, was learning about ING's IT organization. He found IT to be completely detached from anything like a real end customer. The IT group treated the internal organization as their customers, rather than the actual bank customers. That meant that they were focused on delivering internal processes. For example, through a standard process model for IT (ITIL), they had identified the incident management process, (an incident is a customer problem), and were happy that 80% of incidents were resolved in two hours. But nobody looked at statistics that showed that incidents were increasing. And nobody looked at what these incidents were doing to the bank's customers. When they looked at the real customer impact, they realized they needed to reduce incidents dramatically. They started with 1,000 incidents per week. This was a surprising and scary number for their CEO. By focusing on reducing incidents, they got them down by 40% to 600 per week in a year. Van Kemenade: "In our most recent report we are down to 450 per week. Customers can now depend on a more reliable bank, which is helping us regain their trust."
How did marketing and operations at ING learn to marry these customer insights and operations? Answer: Cross-functional collaboration using "Agile Scrum."
As I described in a previous post, ING's IT organization has been transitioning from the traditional development approach of (1) define functional requirements, then (2) design, then (3) build (the "waterfall" approach) to making quick, small changes to systems ("Agile Scrum"). Ron van Kemenade: "Our focus on customers has led us to reduce our development cycle from months to days. We've moved from a project orientation to continuous delivery, applying Lean Six Sigma approaches."
Agile and Scrum have allowed ING to respond quickly to signals from customers. But moving to continuous delivery is a struggle. Some business people who are used to the traditional waterfall method can fall into an unfortunate cycle: taking months to develop requirements, then waiting for IT to respond, then telling IT that's not what they wanted. Now instead at ING they say, "Here's your team. You need to be in every daily or weekly Scrum cycle or sprint to decide if the work is meeting your needs." It demands more time from the business people, but they are engaged and own it.
While Scrum has been employed primarily in software development, ING shows that it has broader management applications. They have used Agile Scrum as a key tool for collaboration across functions in processes such as developing new products and in marketing campaigns. And the frequent (daily or weekly) meetings accelerate decision-making.
Historically, people at ING were either internally focused or externally focused. They worked either to increase efficiency or to address customers' emotions. They have learned that to be the preferred bank, they have to do both at the same time. And that requires close and constant collaboration between marketing and IT.
