February 2013
30 posts
“I feel like eSports is happening with or without us. Games have become the biggest unofficial sports league in the world right now. People are competing all the time and it’s competitive by nature.”
—Interview: Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg Believes ESports ‘Could Be A Big Part Of Gaming’ Moving Forward (Q&A)
Here's Exactly What It Looks Like When Something Goes Viral On Tumblr - Forbes →
forbes.com
The access Union Metrics has to the Tumblr data firehouse allows it to chart just how that post spread through the Tumblr ecosystem, identifying the users who played the biggest role in amplifying its reach. This is what that looks like, visualized:
It’s worth noting that this level of detail is only available on Tumblr, not Twitter, whose data doesn’t allow for tracing back the chain of an individual retweet… Being able to target the individual users whose assistance in getting a message to go viral would be most valuable — that’s the kind of surgical marketing brands dream of.
Great visualization, and yes, Tumblr can be a marketer’s dream.
Why Twitter Dropped Close to $90 Million on Bluefin Labs →
allthingsd.com
Mike Isaac shared Bluefin’s Co-Founder Deb Roy’s quote from D: Dive Into Media today:
“This whole thing is about taking common sense and making it scale and making it quantative,” Deb Roy, co-founder of Bluefin, said at the conference. “If you can take [our analytics service] and not just do it about [one event like] the Super Bowl but do it for all TV shows … now you have this comprehensive view into how TV is driving engagement.”
Several startups have attempted merging the social and television spaces, but I can’t think of one that has done it extremely well. When I first heard about the acquisition, it was difficult to understand why Twitter would make such a move.
The more I read about the perspective, the more I believe an acquisition like this is not just a good one, it’s a crucial one for the long-term business success for the company. Merging the TV analytics with Twitter’s ad business could drive significant revenue for the popular social networking site — on top of the already-successful promoted trends.
Before He Died, Steve Jobs Said He Wanted Apple To Make A Car →
businessinsider.com
Jay Yarow spotted a gem of a line in Nick Bilton’s post on Apple’s curved glass iWatches:
In a meeting in his office before he died, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and former chief executive, told John Markoff of The New York Times that if he had more energy, he would have liked to take on Detroit with an Apple car.
Twitter Hikes Its Promoted Trend Prices Again, to $200,000 a Day →
allthingsd.com
Peter Kafka on the bull trend for Twitter Promoted Trends:
Twitter’s newest price hike went into effect earlier this year, and represents a 33 percent increase over the $150,000 rate the company was asking for in 2012. And it’s up 150 percent from the $80,000 a day it was getting for the ads back when it launched them in 2010.
It’s definitely a positive sign that Twitter is able to command increasingly-higher prices for Promoted Trends, but I’m still not sold.
From their perspective, any revenue is better than no revenue, and at the very least it’s heading in the right direction. But I have to believe that Twitter will have to find another solid revenue stream beyond a Promoted Trend to command real respect from plenty of doubters on the business model.
IBM’s Game Show Winning Watson Computer Goes to Work Treating Cancer →
allthingsd.com
Arik Hesseldahl:
During what I’ll loosely call its training period, Watson has to date “read” some 600,000 documents of medical evidence, two million pages of specialty medical journals and clinical trials focusing on oncology or the treatment of cancer. The point of all this is to be able to answer complicated questions, based on evidence, about the treatments of cancer.
Watson conquered Jeopardy!. Now, time to set sights on a much bigger challenge: cancer.
“[Google] announced on Friday that there are now 2,000 schools using Chromebooks for Education around the world. Just three months ago, there were 1,000 schools, showing an impressive adoption rate so far.”
—
Google announces that 2,000 schools now use Chromebooks, up 100% in three months
Chromebooks will continue to dominate education, and the low pricepoint is a huge reason why.
Super Bowl plans to handle 30,000 Wi-Fi users at once—and sniff out “rogue devices” →
arstechnica.com
That’s why wireless security doesn’t stop when the game starts; the Superdome will use spectral analysis equipment to detect interference. “We’re always monitoring the network. So we have a plan in place if there is an interfering signal to identify that and remediate that problem,” Stewart said.
In last year’s Super Bowl, 12,946 attendees were on the stadium WiFi: They downloaded over 225 GB and uploaded 145 GB.
Let’s just say the NFL is ready this year.
Facebook's "Articles Related To" May Signal A News Shift →
techcrunch.com
Josh Constine highlights an interesting opportunity for Facebook and their “Articles Related To” feature — a personalized newspaper.
Social Readers continue to pop up, but serve up random content at times based on your social graph’s reading preferences. For Facebook, it makes sense to bring the content together and aggregate the most popular content from your newsfeed.
It’s too early to say if a news discovery initiative would overtake popular newsreading apps like Flipboard or Zite, but it’s certainly worth monitoring. Facebook hasn’t exactly been successful in driving engagement on startup-inspired apps (Snapchat/Poke, Places/Foursquare).
“The reasons that exceptional defenses fare so much better in the Super Bowl are still somewhat murky, but this factor bodes well for this year’s 49ers, whose defense belongs in the elite group, according to S.R.S. (it ranks 17th among Super Bowl teams),” wrote Silver, in part.”
—
Nate Silver Picks the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl (Awaiting Karl Rove Guess)
It’s always a good sign when Nate Silver picks your team to win. Go Niners.
January 2013
8 posts
“The paper, published in the journal Building and the Environment, found that classroom design could be attributed to a 25% impact, positive or negative, on a student’s progress over the course of an academic year. The difference between the best- and worst-designed classrooms covered in the study? A full year’s worth of academic progress.”
—Study Shows How Classroom Design Affects Student Learning
“The product’s potential is undeniable: Socially speaking, Graph Search is a friend finder, a dating service, and even a way to learn things about friends and family that you never thought to ask. But there’s almost an uncanny valley we’re approaching of knowing too much about a stranger, and whether that information becomes repulsive or liberating will come completely down to a few pieces of design.”
—Facebook’s Graph Search Could Make Us Closer … Or Creeped Out
“What struck me about our brief conversation wasn’t that Mr. Cook was talking about two teensy buttons — this is Apple, after all — but that he never once mentioned the technology in the iPad Mini. Instead, he talked about one thing: design.”
—Disruptions: Design Rivals Technology in Importance
“
Aaron is dead.
Wanderers in this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.
Hackers for right, we are one down, we have lost one of our own. Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders, parents all, we have lost a child.
Let us all weep.
timbl
” —Tim Berners-Lee
“CES is thousands of industry folks standing in front of a giant wall for a week, throwing armfuls of spaghetti and waiting to see what sticks over the next year.”
—Welcome to CES: A Trade Show, Not a Tastemaker
December 2012
1 post
August 2012
9 posts
eBay Now Will Change Your Expectations Of Shopping Online →
techcrunch.com
Say hello to eBay Now, a same-day shipping service that will deliver purchased items from select stores straight to your doorstep, all in the same day.
Yes, this service has the potential to make a huge immediate impact, given the number of active eBay users and the never-ending thirst for immediate gratification.
It’s currently a private launch in San Francisco, but you have to think that eBay will scale this nationally as soon as they iron any kinks out in the service or the app.
TechCrunch’s Josh Constine notes that Amazon’s CFO doesn’t believe that same-day delivery can operate on a broad scale while remaining economical.
Regardless, it’s an intriguing step for eBay and people will definitely be interested in seeing how effective this service can be in the limited rollout. I’m personally surprised that eBay was first to get to local delivery before Amazon, and it appears that eBay is well-positioned to make an early significant impact in San Francisco.
Is Apple About To Make A Serious E-Commerce Move? →
businessinsider.com
Apple is currently pursuing The Fancy, a social commerce site similar in nature to Pinterest, according to Owen Thomas at Business Insider.
Thomas:
The objective: to secure a role for Apple in the growing e-commerce market, putting the 400 million-plus users with credit cards on file with Apple’s iTunes Store to work shopping—with Apple getting a cut of the action.
This almost makes too much sense for it not to happen.
Facebook Just Killed This Once-Promising Feature →
marketingland.com
Remember Facebook Questions? Well, Facebook hopes you probably have forgotten already, as it appears to have phased out the Q&A component to their site.
Q&A naturally made sense for the social network, as interactions within the news feed quickly had the ability to reach incredible-sized audiences with every interaction.
The press was quick to position Facebook Questions as a potential Yahoo Answers-killer and direct Formspring competitor. Quora was never really threatened as the feature tended to focus on polling and opinion rather than authoritative answers.
Facebook Questions certainly didn’t seem to hurt the company — I recall seeing a few of these posts in my timeline from time-to-time. But it’s possible that Facebook didn’t want to put any more time into developing what could have been a game-changing feature that wasn’t going anywhere fast.
(via Marketing Land)
June 2012
6 posts
“It’s called Amazing Alex. It has this character who builds these chain reactions, like Rube Goldberg machines. It’s based on a really acclaimed game that released last year. We purchased the property. We really like the game. It was really successful, but it never got a big audience. So we acquired the property and we did some re-branding to make it, from our point of view, more universally appealing in a global perspective. Now we’re really excited to bring it again to the market. It was highly praised but it never got the audience it deserved. With the sort of audience we have for “Angry Birds,” we’ll see what we can do.”
—Ville Heijari, Rovio’s vice president of franchise development, on Rovio’s next game
