I think this song by Jonathan Mann – an ode to Siri, so to speak – (he’s been writing a song a day and recently hit the 1000 mark), is really amusing. It also made me think of some of the talks at Playful on Friday. I’m one of those who isn’t disillusioned by science fiction and the 80′s dream that we should have seen giant robot cars by now, and I think Siri is pretty damn cool.
Via The Atlantic.
When I saw this presentation about mobile entrepreneurship in Africa by the World Wide Web Foundation at the recent Over The Air mobile hack weekend, I was reminded of a recent Wired story on tech opportunities in Africa.
There’s some exciting stuff happening there.
As always, good to listen to Kevin Kelly talking about the future of the internet. He’s summarised it with six verbs: screening, interacting, sharing, flowing, accessing and generating.
Some thoughts of his that stood out:
* a large network is more valuable than multiple small networks because sharing is easier with a large network.
* anything that can be shared, will be shared
* the move to curated streams (e.g our personal Twitter/Facebook streams) from flows, pages, desktops.
* (this bit I don’t quite agree with, though it is a reflection of the real-time Twitter-dominated times we live in): if it isn’t real-time, it doesn’t count
* I was quite amused to hear him refer to Spotify as ‘Sean Parker’s Spotify’; clearly in the US Parker is the pull, though in Europe it’s founder Daniel Ek that’s more discussed.
* The internet is the world’s largest copy machine: anything that can be copied will be copied.
* The only value is that which cannot be copied, but it should be easy to pay to access it.
* Wherever attention is, money will follow.
I joined Google Plus in the first few days of its launch but I’m still figuring out my strategy. I find that most people are using it the same way as they use Twitter, which I dislike and am refraining from. Clearly it (and everyone on it) is still finding its feet, and it will take its time to reach critical mass. In the meantime, though, this XKCD comic made me chuckle.
One one hand, you’ll never be able to convince your parents to switch. On the other hand, you’ll never be able to convince your parents to switch!
Seth Godin recently pointed to Richard Thaler’s article in the New York Times about how governments and businesses should make the data they collect about us consumers available to us in a form we understand. It is our data after all. You know the way Google and Facebook target their ads to us – he’s right when he says we have a right to know how they make those decisions to show us what they want to – rather, what advertisers want to. I think open data is the way forward and sooner or later there will be a more concerted effort made around getting this to happen. As Godin says:
Data about data is more important than ever, and being on the side of the person creating that data is a smart place to be.
Jan Chipchase also recently wrote a really good post about making field data transparent to participants, and giving them control over what is finally tabled:
Today we live in a world of data servitude, where commercial organisations own and have the rights to exploit the personal data that lies on their servers. Whilst the effort taken to harvest, sift and draw value comes with the assumption of being able to then seek commercial returns fro this investment, the relationship is one-sided, the process for the most part opaque. To truly go full circle is to give participants the rights and access to their personal data both now and for ever more, something that will enabled by the prevalence of always-on connectivity and a shift the expectations of participants.
For every Google Health that dies, there is a Keas that lives (more here, if you’re interested). (The title of this post comes from here).
Recently, I was discussing with a friend the labelling of people belonging to different generations in popular culture. Turns out that according to Wikipedia, Generation X (those born between 1960 to 1982) and Generation Y (people born between the mid-1970′s to the early 2000′s) have an overlap. In addition, Generation Y and Generation Z (those born between the early 1990′s and early 2000′s) have an even bigger overlap. Amidst all this, it is very easy to get confused – when someone mentions ‘GenX’, they may actually mean ‘GenY’ and so on.
So I was fascinated to read this article by Joshua Glenn that clearly categorizes people according to when they were born, and labels them in rather amusing ways as well: ‘hardboileds’, ‘retrogressivists’, ‘anti-anti-utopians’, anyone?!
Some pretty useful insights from this presentation by Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist. He puts forward a very basic model for profit maximization for advertisers: the value per click should be more than the incremental cost per click – there’s a simple explanation to his formula as well. He also mentions Bid Simulator, a tool to experiment with different bids, which can help advertisers assess how much they should pay (I wasn’t aware of it before though it’s been in existence for a couple of years), and in hard numbers shows the value of search to users.
Advertising on Google has had its share of issues, and rightly so, with algorithms giving more importance to search engine relevance than their real relevance, which is of course aided by advertising and content farms. I much prefer using numbers to illustrate value the way this presentation does – scientific advertising, if you will, rather than fake number-pumping for unfair gains.
President Obama is conducting a Facebook Town Hall on Wednesday – very cool.
The Associated Press has removed the hyphen from the word ‘email’ in its style guide, and quickly followed that by saying ‘smartphone’ and ‘cellphone’ don’t need to be hyphenated either. To be honest, I think it makes perfect sense, but the internet purists seem to be quite concerned. As Paul Carr says here,
For an Internet purist like me, this is starting to look like a worrying escalation: a sign that the once-staid AP might be losing their heads in the Internet age.
Yup, ‘homepage’, ‘internet’ with a small ‘i’ – it’s all coming, like it or not! I don’t think people born post-1990 will think it could ever have been otherwise.
Reminds me of a hilarious video I only saw yesterday:
Further to my post on YouTube revenues earlier this month, take a look at this TechCrunch piece on projected Google revenues focussing on YouTube, by a Citi analyst. It answers a lot of the questions I was pondering, and confirms that YouTube is indeed Google’s golden goose.
Source: Citi Investment Research & Analysis; ComScore via TechCrunch
