Facebook is releasing a new feature that will eventually give all publishers and users the ability to embed any public post from the social network onto their website or blog with just a tap of the button.
This is one of the company’s attempts to further connect the rest of the Web with the social network and it’s only beginning — CNN, Huffington Post, Bleacher Report, People Magazine, and Mashable will be the first to have access to it, but Facebook says “broader availability” will be soon.
Perhaps one of Facebook’s most prominent efforts to help make the millions of websites on the Internet more social is through its platform. We know that over 550 million people are having social experiences each month and that more than 1 billion stories are shared daily, and this is 6 years after the company unveiled its Platform service. Now, Embedded Posts are just another easy and straightforward way for everyone to bring in Facebook content into their site without needing to be a full-fledged developer.
Embedded Posts will only work with public messages, no matter if it’s a status update, Instagram photo, video, etc. To see if it can be embedded, hover over the audience selector (it’s a globe icon). If it is marked as public, click on the “Embed Post” option in the dropdown menu. It will display HTML code that you can copy and insert onto your website — similar to what you would find with Instagram.
Once inserted onto a site, visitors can interact with it similar to how they would in their Facebook timeline. This surely will help aid in the discovery of new content, especially if your site is a heavily trafficked one. These posts will show not only text, but pictures, videos, hashtags, and any other content supported by the platform — it’s almost like having an iFrame of Facebook occupying a piece of real estate.
With an embedded post, people can view not only the content, but like or share it directly from the site (no longer needing to first go to Facebook to do the sharing). In addition, the author can be “Liked” and the post’s comments, photos, and hashtag can be viewed just with a click of a mouse.
There are already widgets that users can embed onto their websites that tie back to their Facebook presence, including “Liking” an article/story, being a fan of their Page, and more. But Embedded Posts adds a bit more context to helping site visitors understand who the author is and why they should be more connected with them on the social network.
This new feature could affect third-party services like Storify, which helps to curate social conversations. With Embeddable Posts, journalists could simply take public posts and insert them directly into their stories, thereby showing conversations happening within them. But it might not be a big of a factor, especially when you consider that Storify looks at interactions happening in social networks beyond Facebook, thereby giving people greater access to a well-rounded discussion.
As you can imagine, Facebook is rolling this out for the Web, and hopefully it won’t take as long for people to have access to compared to Graph Search. But a public rollout for the service to its 1.15 billion monthly users can’t be easy or quick — they’ll need to properly test to make sure its infrastructure can support all the activity.
It would be interesting to see Embedded Posts become integrated with Facebook’s mobile apps. Imagine being able to tap on a public post and select “embed” and push it to Tumblr or WordPress via their own mobile app.
Randall Munroe's web comic XKCD has long been known for pushing boundaries in strange ways, but his latest experiment topped them all. Over the course of four months, "Time" grew as a frame was added every 30 minutes or so, ending up with over 3,000 individual frames by the time it wrapped up earlier this week. Now that the epic comic has finally wrapped up, Munroe is talking a bit about the backstory behind "Time" and some of the clues he dropped in the comic to help the passionate fanbase that grew up around it piece the story together. As reported by Wired, "Time" takes place not in the past, but 11,000 years in the future. "In my comic, our civilization is long gone," said Munroe. "Every civilization with written records has existed...
What do you really want in a smartphone? Do you want the biggest screen possible? The best camera? The most elegant operating system or the one that gives you the most freedom to make it yours?
How about a phone that learns about what you want, where you are and responds to your gestures, commands and wishes?
That is what Motorola wants you to think and it is releasing a smartphone to do just that. The Moto X is the first smartphone designed by both Motorola and Google after the search giant bought the original cellphone make almost two years ago.
What is Google’s magic touch? Well, if you put all the power that is Google into a smartphone operating system and add intuitive capabilities that employ the device’s sensors, you start to get the idea.
Touchless Control & Active Display
The Moto X's biggest feature is Touchless Control. If you thought Siri was smart as a way to control your iPhone with your voice, Google is upping the ante to let you use your voice not just to search, but to control almost everything that the device can do, from reading your text messages to opening apps, making phone calls, asking about the weather and more. Voice commands work even when you haven’t turned the phone on or from across the room or in your pocket.
All you have to do is tell your phone, “OK Google Now …” and then a command. The select few that have had access to Google Glass will recognize this command, since Google's augmented reality goggles react to voice commands preceded by “OK Glass.”
Google Now is Google's semantic search, which tries to figure out what you want to do or what you are looking for before you actually search for it. For instance, today I was traveling to New York City for the Motorola event. Google Now checked my last search for New York City and gave me directions and estimated time of arrival to the event. It knows I live in Boston and like sports and will give me the Red Sox score before I want it. Google is trying to extend this smart search technology into the operating system of the Moto X.
The Moto X also responds to the way you handle it. Google estimates that people pick up their device and turn it on between 60 and 100 time a day. Usually that is just to check the time. With a feature called Active Display in the Moto X, the phone will allow you to see the time and notifications on the sleep screen of the device, fading in and out. Rick Osterloh, senior vice president of product management at Motorola calls this “breathing.”
You can preview your notifications from the sleeping Moto X and drag one to open the app. Active Display will activate when you pick up the phone or flip it face up. The Moto X's 4.7-inch OLED display will only light up the pixels it needs to show time and notifications in Active Display, significantly saving on battery life.
The camera on the Moto X also responds to gestures. Called the “Quick Capture Camera,” the phone's camera app activates if you twist a sleeping phone in the air like a corkscrew. The camera will pop up and you can then tap anywhere on the screen to take a picture. That means you don’t have to unlock the phone, open the camera app, configure settings and snap. Just twist and go.
A feature called Moto Assist will know when you're performing certain actions and need to interact with the phone in a certain way. For instance, if you are driving, the Moto X will detect your speed and read you text messages or let you change music. If you're in a meeting (which Moto X would know from your calendar), it will automatically silence itself and send an auto-reply to any connections.
The X8 System Makes Moto X Possible
The Touchless Control, Active Display and gesture-based actions are governed by a proprietary Motorola/Google system called X8. Unlike the Android system that runs the rest of the Moto X, Google and Motorola are not planning on making X8 open source. This is their magic, and they're holding on to it.
The X8 Mobile Computing System is really a hardware feature. It is running eight computing cores, starting with a Qualcomm dual-core Snapdragon S4 Pro chip. Four other cores do nothing but running the graphical processing units (GPUs). A dual-core 1.7 GHz Krait CPU runs most of the phone's other functions.
Two cores are focused only on the natural language processor used for Touchless Control and the “contextual computing engine” that knows when you are holding the device and how you interact with it.
This is a smart use of hardware by Google and Motorola. The Moto X is not just about speeds and feeds (though it has plenty of power for the casual gearhead); it's optimized towards performance and feature functionality.
Google Aims The Moto X Right At The Ordinary User
Motorola’s Osterloh said that Google is aiming the Moto X at the mass market, not the tech elite or people looking for the cheapest smartphones they can find. The normal, everyday smartphone buying public is the market that Google wants to capture. The Moto X thus manages to be interesting while lacking the pretension of the iPhone, HTC’s flagship One device or Samsung’s Galaxy S4.
Motorola will make a wood-back Moto X in Q4
Google wants people to customize the look of their smartphones. Consumers can choose the front and back colors of their phone and add customized writing on back (such your email, in case you lose your phone) as well as a message to the bootup screen when you turn the phone on. Through a website called “Moto Maker,” consumers can choose from a wide variety of back covers and textures like hot pink or forest green.
More than 2,000 variations are supposedly possible with Moto Maker. Motorola’s slogan for the Moto X is, “Responds to you, Made for you, Designed by you.” The phone will be assembled in Fort Worth, Texas.
Motorola will certainly attract some customers to the Moto X with the customization alone. The look and feel of the Moto X eclipses that of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 and the features that Motorola has added are simple and intuitive, not scattershot and buggy the way Samsung’s are.
The Moto X is coming to five carriers in the U.S. (the four major carriers plus U.S. Cellular) starting at contract prices of $199 for a 16 GB version ($249 for 32 GB version). Motorola promises that consumers will get their phones from the Fort Worth factory within four days of ordering. The availability of the Moto X will vary by carrier, but generally will be on the market by the end of August.
Does Motorola still have any consumer mindshare to attract people to the Moto X? We will soon see.
In a move that definitely couldn’t backfire at all, game studio Zynga has filed a lawsuit over the use of the phrase “... with friends.” I guess from now on we can only hang out with acquaintances and strangers.
Specifically, Zynga, which owns popular phone-based amusements like Words With Friends and Chess With Friends, has elected to sue the makers of hookup app Bang With Friends for allegedly selecting its name “with Zynga's game trademarks fully in mind.” Thoughtcrime! As the BBC reports:
"Zynga filed a lawsuit to stop blatant infringement of its valuable 'With Friends' brand," Renée Lawson, the firm's Deputy General Counsel, said in a written statement.
A company calling itself 'Bang with Friends' - whose own founders played Zynga's 'With Friends' games - decided to gain attention for its sex-related app by leveraging Zynga's well-known mark. Zynga is compelled to file suit to prevent further consumer confusion and protect its intellectual property rights against infringement.
Let me get this straight: You’re telling me the developers knew what the word “friends” meant, and furthermore knew how to use the preposition “with,” and even managed to deduce that the two could be used together to describe exactly what their app hoped to accomplish? And that we should be worried that someone will buy Bang With Friends out of confusion, on the assumption that it’s just a new board game they haven’t heard of? Makes sense.
Bang With Friends, which bills itself as the “anonymous, simple, fun way to find friends who are down for the night,” had already been summarily wiped from the Apple store for “inappropriate content,” yet apps like Grindr (for LGBTQ hookups) and Ashley Madison (which facilitates adulterous affairs) are still available. Is there no place in this world for casual hetero sex?
The lawsuit is a pretty bold play for Zynga, the developer of Words With Friends, which is itself a ripoff of Scrabble with just enough microscopic differences to keep Hasbro and Mattel from making a similar legal stink. It’s almost as though they believe that the English language is public domain … except when they’d rather it wasn’t.
To Zynga’s credit, the Bang With Friends name is almost certainly a play on their “With Friends” franchise—but it’s not the sort of infringement that’s easy to prove, and it’ll be even more difficult to establish damage to their brand from an app you can’t even get on an iPhone. The possible upside to such legal action remains vague.
Plus, shouldn’t they be busy working on other games? I’ve got a ton of pitches. “Connect Five With Friends” would be a smash hit, and I think “BattleBoat With Friends” could do equally well. Or what about “Exclusive Control of a Commodity With Friends”?
After all, with friends like Zynga, who needs fresh ideas?
Ever get annoyed with your friends snapping photos of your meal at a restaurant before you're allowed to tuck in? Do they get mad at you for doing it? Well, food photo fetishists now have a perfect excuse: There's evidence to suggest Instagramming your food can make it more flavorful.
Researchers from the University of Minnesota and Harvard University found performing rituals before you take your first bite can actually make a meal taste better and help you savor it longer. Since the act of snapping, editing, and sharing a photo is a ritual, Uproxx extrapolated the hypothesis to argue Instagramming food makes it taste better.
The researchers carried out four experiments for a paper published in the Psychological Science journal this month. The first found those who carried out a ritual before eating chocolate found it "more flavorful, valuable, and deserving of behavioral savoring." A delay between a ritual and eating apparently makes the latter more enjoyable, while making random gestures before chowing down was less effective in making the grub more sumptuous.
But just watching your friends whip out their phones and update their Instagrams wont give you the same effect as participating yourself. The fourth experiment in the study showed that "rituals enhance the enjoyment of consumption because of the greater involvement in the experience that they prompt."
It doesn't just have to be snapping photos. It could be tapping a desk, saying grace, or doing 50 jumping jacks while gazing at your reward for exercising. Rituals seem to prepare your mind for what comes ahead and make you more involved in a given situation.
Somehow, the knowledge that all the food-porn on Instagram was probably even more delicious than it looks in photos doesn't make us any less envious of our fine-dining friends. Maybe the next study should investigate whether viewing friends' foodstagrams from afar leaves a bitter taste in one's mouth.
The Sharknado machine is showing no signs of slowing down. Since taking over Twitter on its July 11th premiere, the absurd Syfy TV movie has only expanded its audience with each airing, luring millions with chainsaws and airborne killer sharks. The film set another milestone Saturday night when, on its third broadcast, it garnered its highest ratings yet.
According to Syfy, Saturday night's broadcast pulled in a total of 2.1 million viewers, up from the underwhelming 1.4 million who tuned into the premiere and the 1.9 million who watched its encore. It also attracted 791,000 adults in the coveted 18 to 49 age demographic, and ended the evening with a 1.4 household rating between 9 PM and 11 PM ET/PT. That makes Sharknado's third act the...
Crowdfunding platforms solve three key problems for startups, two of which are obvious. Kickstarter and Indiegogo, among others validate demand and provide short term financing by marketing product ideas and accepting pre-payment for future delivery. Consumers vote with their dollars to catalyze product development.
The third, less obvious benefit, is the platforms cajole startups to follow a product management process similar to Amazon’s process, described below by Ian McAllister in his Quora post What Is Amazon’s Product Management Process?
For new initiatives a product manager typically starts by writing an internal press release announcing the finished product. The target audience for the press release is the new/updated product’s customers, which can be retail customers or internal users of a tool or technology. Internal press releases are centered around the customer problem, how current solutions (internal or external) fail, and how the new product will blow away existing solutions.
It is easy to draw a parallel between the Amazon press releases and the project pages on Kickstarter:
Here’s an example outline for Amazon’s internal press release:
Heading - Name the product in a way the reader (i.e. your target customers) will understand.
Sub-Heading - Describe who the market for the product is and what benefit they get. One sentence only underneath the title.
Summary - Give a summary of the product and the benefit. Assume the reader will not read anything else so make this paragraph good.
Problem - Describe the problem your product solves.
Solution - Describe how your product elegantly solves the problem.
Quote from You - A quote from a spokesperson in your company.
How to Get Started - Describe how easy it is to get started.
Customer Quote - Provide a quote from a hypothetical customer that describes how they experienced the benefit.
Closing and Call to Action - Wrap it up and give pointers where the reader should go next.
Amazon’s product management philosophy champions the idea of working backwards, something I’ve written about in the past. By initially focusing on the value proposition, features and positioning to maximize future customer demand, Amazon’s product teams should be consistently delivering products that delight customers.
Crowdfunding sites take this idea one step further than Amazon’s process by enabling product teams to truly measure demand after having written the press release. These platforms are some of the best customer development and market research tools available to product teams because they enforce a product management discipline and then empower the product teams to refine and distill an idea, prove market demand, and use this data to potentially raise external capital to get to market.
In 1999, Professor Baba Shiv (currently at Stanford) and his co-author Alex
Fedorikhin did a simple experiment on 165 grad students.They asked half to
memorize a seven-digit number and the other half to memorize a two-digit number.
After completing the memorization task, participants were told the experiment was
over, and then offered a snack choice of either chocolate cake or a fruit bowl.
The participants who memorized the seven-digit number were nearly 50%
more likely than the other group to choose cake over fruit.
Researchers were astonished by a pile of experiments that led to one bizarre conclusion:
Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same
pool of resources.
Spend hours at work on a tricky design problem? You’re more
likely to stop at Burger King on the drive home. Hold back from saying what you
really think during one of those long-ass, painful meetings? You’ll struggle with the
code you write later that day.
Since both willpower/self-control and cognitive tasks drain the same tank,
deplete it over here, pay the price over there. One pool. One pool of scarce, precious, easily-depleted resources. If you spend the day exercising
self-control (angry customers, clueless co-workers), by the time you get home your cog resource tank is flashing E.
The tank is empty.
And even if
you loved solving tough puzzles at work, the drain on your self-control still
happens. One pool. Whether the drain was from something you love or
hate doesn’t matter.
Cognitive resource tank don’t care.
You snap at the kids or dog over the tiniest thing.
Or the dog snaps at you.
An experiment
asked one group of dogs to sit, just sit, nothing else, for a few minutes before being
released to play with their favorite treat “puzzle” toy (the ones where the dog has
to work at getting the treats out of it). The other group of dogs were allowed to
just hang out in their crates before getting the treat puzzle.
You know where this goes: the dogs that had to sit — exercising self-control — gave up on the puzzle much earlier than the dogs that were
just hanging out in their crate.The dogs that were NOT burning cognitive
resources being obedient had more determination and mental/emotional energy for solving the puzzle. Think about that next time you ask Sparky to be patient. His cognitive
resources are easily-depleted too.
Now think about what we're doing to our users.
If your UX asks the user to make choices, for example, even if those choices are both clear and useful, the act of deciding is a cognitive drain. And not just while they're deciding... even after we choose, an unconscious cognitive background thread is slowly consuming/leaking resources, "Was that the right choice?"
If your app is confusing and your tech support / FAQ isn't helpful, you’re drawing down my scarce, precious, cognitive resources. If your app behaves counter-intuitively – even just once – I'll leak cog resources every time I use it, forever, wondering, "wait, did that do what I expected?". Or let's say your app is super easy to use, but designed and tuned for persuasive brain hacks ("nudges", gamification, behavioral tricks, etc.) to keep me "engaged" for your benefit, not mine (lookin' at you, Zynga)... you've still drained my cognitive resources.
And when I
back away from the screen and walk to the kitchen...
Your app makes me fat.
If our work drains a user’s cognitive resources, what does he lose? What else could he have done with those scarce, precious, easily-depleted resources? Maybe he’s trying to stick with that diet. Or practice guitar. Or play with his kids.
That one new feature you added? That sparkly, Techcrunchable, awesome feature? What did it cost your user? If the result of your work consumes someone’s cognitive resources, they can’t use those resources for other things that truly, deeply matter. This is NOT about consuming their time and attention while they're using your app. This is about draining their ability for logical thinking, problem-solving, and willpower after the clicking/swiping/gesturing is done.
Of course it's not implicitly bad if our work burns a user's cog resources.Your app might be the one place your user wants to spend those resources. But knowing that interacting with our product comes at a precious cost, maybe we’ll make different choices.
Maybe we’ll think more about what our users really care about. Maybe we’ll ask ourselves at each design meeting, “is this a Fruit-choosing feature or a Cake-choosing feature?” and we’ll try to limit Cake-choosing features—the ones that really drain them — to that which supports the thing they're using our app for in the first place.
(Yes, cognitive resources can be partly replenished throughout the day by getting glucose to the brain, but be careful with that. A high-protein snack combined with small infrequent sips on a sports drink can help, a lot.)
But even if we can justify consuming our user's cognitive resources while they're using our product, what about our marketing? Can we honestly believe that our "content marketing" is a good use of their resources? "Yes, because it adds value." we tell ourselves. But what does that even mean? Can we honestly say that "engaging with our brand" is a healthy, ethical use of their scarce, precious, limited cognitive resources? "Yes, because our content isuseful."
And that's all awesome and fabulous and social and 3.0ish except for one, small, inconvenient fact: zero sum. What you consume here, you take from there. Not just their attention, not just their time, but their ability to be the person they are when they are at their best. When they have ample cognitive resources. When they can think, solve-problems, and exercise self-control. When they can create, make connections, and stay focused.
Is that "content" worth it? Maybe. But instead of "Is this useful?" perhaps we should raise the bar and ask "Will they use it?" (and so, yeah, I'm more than a little self-conscious about typing that as I consume your cognitive resources. But I didn't start Serious Pony to save your cognitive resources; I want to help save the cognitive resources of your users).
I'm not against "content marketing". On the contrary, it's nearly the only form of cog-resource-draining marketing that can be "worth it". It's the one form of marketing that can help people become better at something they care about. It's one form of marketing with the potential to deliver the user-learning so few companies care about. Content marketing can (and should) be "the missing manual." It can (and should be) the inspiration for our users to learn, get better (at the thing they care about), and connect with other users.
But if it's "content" designed solely to suck people in ("7 ways to be OMG awesome!!") for the chance to "convert", we're hurting people. If we're pumping out "content" because frequency, we're hurting people. I'm hurting some of you now. That's on me. It's why I try to use graphics to make the key point, so you don't have to read the post (also because I'm really rambly-aroundy, I know, workin' on it.)
My father died unexpectedly last week, and as happens when one close to us dies, I had the "on their deathbed, nobody thinks..." moment. Over the past 20 years of my work, I've created interactive marketing games, gamified sites (before it was called that), and dozens of other projects carefully, artfully, scientifically designed to slurp (gulp) cognitive resources for... very little that was "worth it". Did people willingly choose to engage with them? Of course. And by "of course" I mean, not really, no. Not according to psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics research of the past 50 years. They were nudged/seduced/tricked. And I was pretty good at it. I am so very, very sorry.
My goal for Serious Pony is to help all of us take better care of our users. Not just while they are interacting with our app, site, product, but after. Not just because they are our users, but because they are people.
Because on their deathbed, our users won't be thinking,"If only I'd spent more time engaging with brands."
Help them conserve and manage their scarce, precious, easily-depleted cognitive resources for what really matters. To them. And don't forget to take care of your own. Think of the kids. Think of Sparky.
(That's actually my Icelandic sheepdog Boi)
--This post began as a small essay I wrote for the lovely group at Uncommon.
(And you really do want to meet the horses at our Icelandic horse farm.)
(Update: fixed the memorization graphic -- thought bubble didn't match the text)
Cultural branding studio Faust has created a tactile immersive experience for kids to accompany an extensive exhibition of work by artist Nick Cave (no, not that Nick Cave, but rather the American fabric sculptor, dancer and performance artist Cave).
The exhibition, Sojourn, at the Denver Art Museum, promises an immersive journey through the artist's imagination. The Second Skin installation, designed by Faust in collaboration with Cave, is a family-friendly interactive space that complements the main exhibition, inviting visitors to exercise their own imagination through hands-on activities.
It includes a floor-to-ceiling felt wall and felt silhouette mannequins that kids can embellish and re-embellish with colourful cut-outs, as well as kids punching bags and a super-sized projection of Cave's film Drive-By.
Much of the design is inspired by Cave's work. For example, the kaleidoscopic wallpaper is created from a photo of ceramic birds taken in Cave's studio, with the graphic carpet design also derived from that pattern (see the inspiration art work below).
The punch bags are printed with graphic interpretations of Cave's Soundsuits, his series of elaborately crafted suits, designed to create noise when in movement, and which he uses in many of his performances. The 3-D felt mannequins are also inspired by the Soundsuits, interpreted by Faust from photographs of Cave performing in them.
Below is a video from the Denver Art Museum showing Soundsuits in all their glory - the super-slo-mo section is particularly mesmerising.
The studio also designed the exhibition's title wall, which features the title cut through a 2.5-feet wall covered in the same ceramic bird-inspired wallpaper design of Second Skin, creating telescopic vistas into the first gallery. "It is a micro/macro kind of experience that gets the senses going and ready for a special experience," explains Faust founder Bob Faust.
The accompanying exhibition catalogue (as well as marketing material) is also designed by Faust and picks up the cut-out letterforms on its cover with a die-cut design. It contains a 40-page journal on the making of the exhibition, set within a cut-out void in the front section of the book (see below for book cover and spreads).
Faust has been working with Cave for more than 15 years, and Bob Faust is also Cave's studio and special projects director. "So every project is collaborative and pushes the boundaries and expectations," he says. "We wanted to provide something for everyone, similar to how Nick's work is, in that you can take it on a purely aesthetic level, be awed by the craft, or go deep into history or political message.
"Nick's approach to his own work is all based on feelings and not ever from a written or sketched plan. Our hope with these projects was to set the stage for a visitor's barriers to be brought down and their own imagination to take over."
Nick Cave: Sojourn is on at the Denver Art Museum until September 22. For a peek at Sojourn, see Cave's guide below.
You can buy the August issue of Creative Review direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe to make sure that you never miss out on a copy - you'll save money too. Details here.
Charles Krauthammer once predicted that the first American to shoot down a domestic drone would be a folk hero. Phillip Steele, a resident of Deer Trail, Colorado, wants to enable that hero. As the FAA loosens regulations on domestic drone use, Steele has submitted an ordinance to his town's board of trustees that would create America's most unusual hunting license: It would permit hunting drones and confer a bounty for every one brought down. Only 12-gauge shotguns could be used as weapons, so the drones would have a sporting chance.
Wouldn't the hunters be breaking federal law?
Of course. I wouldn't be surprised if the feds are already watching Steele as a result of his rabble-rousing. But he isn't dumb. "This is a very symbolic ordinance," he told a local TV station. "Basically, I do not believe in the idea of a surveillance society, and I believe we are heading that way .... It's asserting our right and drawing a line in the sand." Actually, it's more like drawing a line in the clouds. But you get the idea.
Whether or not the Deer Trail ordinance passes on August 6, when it's up for a vote, Americans should expect to see a lot more efforts at the local level to thwart the surveillance state and protect privacy. Some measures will be effectively symbolic. Others will vex or even thwart federal authorities. Privacy activists pondering these measures would do well to study up on the history of the anti-nuclear ordinances the passed in the U.S. and abroad beginning in the 1970s.
By the time Oakland's especially stringent nuclear-free ordinance was declared unconstitutional in 1990, there were anti-nuclear ordinances on the books in more than 160 localities.
One of the first was passed in Missoula, Montana, in 1978:
The biggest jurisdictional victory, for those opposed to nuclear energy, was the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987. It declared nuclear energy verboten in the whole country and barred nuclear ships and submarines from entry into NZ waters. Will a liberal democracy declare itself a surveillance-free zone to escape a defining feature of our era?
Privacy buffs can hope.
Meanwhile, I wonder what U.S. municipality will next declare that it doesn't want spying to happen within its borders, whether symbolically or by trying to thwart surveillance in some clever way. City leaders probably can't stop the NSA from monitoring communications that originate locally. But they can, for example, refuse to track any license plates in their jurisdiction.
The Framers intended the states and the people to act as a check on any excessive concentration of power at the federal level. The surveillance state, as presently constituted, concentrates extraordinary power in the executive branch, has already been abused since 9/11, and is certain to be abused again unless it is reformed. The first priority should be changing the makeup of Congress, so that members are more invested in safeguarding the civil liberties of the people than the power of the executive branch and the bottom lines of defense contractors. But big symbolic statements and small dissents at the local level aren't to be ignored. The surveillance state should be fought at all levels of government until it is consistent with the Bill of Rights, targeting suspects with a warrant rather than everyone in America.
Residents of Deer Trail shouldn't actually shoot 12-gauge shotguns into the sky. But they should pass that ordinance. If its symbolism inspires more pragmatic ordinances in other jurisdictions, Steele may himself turn out to be the folk hero for saying, "Down with domestic drones," at least until, per Senator Rand Paul's efforts, the FBI needs a warrant to use them.
Perhaps the biggest worry you hear about electric vehicles is "range anxiety." And yet, on the "vast majority" of days, people in the United States drive fewer than 50 miles, averaging around 30. Which is to say: For almost all commuters, it doesn't make much sense to buy a huge car with a range of 400 miles. And yet, we do. And that has major climate and energy impacts.
This consumer peccadillo has driven alternative transportation advocates bonkers for years. So, why do people buy 7-passenger SUVs with four-wheel drive in California when they usually carry a single passenger in 70 degree weather on a highway?
People buy cars for their peak (imagined) need. If you can imagine that one day you'll drive more than a handful of people to Lake Tahoe to go skiing, then (if you can afford it) you might choose a massive sport-utility vehicle.
In other words, you can right-size your commuting vehicle without losing peak capacity.
As far as I'm concerned, bundling car ownership and access is one of the great possibilities in alternative transportation. And I hope the other car companies get in on it. The amount of steel and glass moving down the highways would go down. The energy required to send these behemoths would be reduced. And consumers would still get what they want, maybe even *more* of what they want.
One further thought: When we talk about electric vehicles, we tend to assume that the entire business model and system around them has to remain static. But why?
Any car company could cut a deal with Zipcar right now to bundle in car-sharing service along with the purchase of some other vehicle. Or they could use their existing service centers and build a brand-specific car-sharing service that would function like a "subscription" to BMW on top of your purchase. The recurring revenue could help offset some of the ups and downs of car sales, too, and couples nicely with service. You go in, pick up your SUV, and leave your electric vehicle for a tuneup.
The time has come for this idea to go mainstream. The future of the car could well be small, cheap-to-operate electric vehicles for the workaday commute and a sports car or SUV whenever you want one. Doesn't that sound great?
(And one last thing: if the electric vehicle doesn't have to solve all your transportation problems, it can be slightly less capable, and thereby cheaper. Which would be nice for those of us who drive 2003 Volkswagen Golfs.)
Companies are worth a multiple of their earnings and that multiple is directly related to earnings growth rates. When you are growing rapidly, you are worth more.
But living forever and growing forever have something in common. You can't do it.
I was talking to the CEO of one of our portfolio companies that has grown at close to 100% per year for the past five or six years yesterday. And we lamented about the law of large numbers. Growing at 100% a year when your top line is in the billions is a lot harder than growing at 100% a year when your top line is $25mm.
Of course, you can come up with new lines of business, new hit products, or make acquisitions to keep on the growth treadmill. But recognize that is what you are on. You can and will become a slave to it.
Startups and their rich uncle pennybags (VCs) are particular slaves to this drug. We build and finance companies that are designed to grow and grow and grow. That's how we create wealth, jobs, and impact. It's a fantastic ride that I cannot get off. But these rides do slow down and even end sometimes. And that's a bitch.
That escalated quickly. When Google unveiled its Chromecast dongle for streaming YouTube, Netflix and Chrome tabs, it announced a promotion for three free months of Netflix with purchase of the device, but the deal is now sold out due to “overwhelming demand”.
Savvy shoppers quickly did the math yesterday ($35-$7.99*3=$11.03) and scooped up the device in droves. Google announced that the offer was no longer available little more than 24 hours after launching Chromecast.
Google Play lists Chromecast as shipping in 3-4 weeks, while Amazon is currently only selling the device by way of third-party sellers. Best Buy has also sold out of the dongle online, though it is listing in-store pickup in my area in 3 to 5 days.
Google has issued the following statement about the offer:
Due to overwhelming demand for Chromecast devices since launch, the 3-month Netflix promotion (which was available in limited quantities) is no longer available on Google Play.
Google’s free Netflix offer may have been a generous one, but it hasn’t been handled well. For instance, its promotional page for Netflix is still live with no indication that the deal is over. Sure, the fine print says “Offer available while supplies last,” but shouldn’t the company, you know, tell us when those supplies run out?
I bought a Chromecast on Amazon on Wednesday shortly after it became available, and it arrived on Thursday afternoon. However, the email with the Netflix promo code, which was supposed to go out after the device had shipped, has yet to arrive in my inbox.
When I called Netflix about the issue, a support representative said the email and code would come from Google, but when I called Google, a rep said it was on Netflix. I’m not the only one having these issues.
It’s nice to see Google have a hardware hit on its hands, especially after its struggles with the Nexus Q and Google TV, but the company needs to get better about communicating if it’s going to keep selling devices directly. My colleagues and I like Chromecast and see a lot of potential in it, but customers aren’t going to stay happy if they bought the device expecting a Netflix promotion and end up with nothing.
The internet can be a great tool for anyone to learn more about their health conditions and the treatments that may be best for them, especially with personalized platforms such as Medivizor. Now MedSnap ID aims to help patients to accurately identify pills to ensure they take the right ones.
Users first place the medication they want to identify onto a precision imaging surface that comes with a subscription to the MedSnap ID service. Multiple types of pills can be placed on the surface before the user takes a photograph with their smartphone. The app instantly recognizes the pills by matching them with images in its database, bringing up data such as name, use, dosage recommendations and other important information. Patients with multiple prescriptions can ensure they know which pill they’re meant to be taking, and doctors can use it to quickly identify unlabelled pills in their inventory. The app has also been designed to work without an internet connection, making it useful for health professionals operating in remote areas or in the field. The video below shows the app in action:
Users can choose between a pay-as-you-go subscription for USD 7 a month, or an annual membership for USD 70, and have a choice between the USD 20 portable imaging surface and the USD 30 premium surface with protective covering. Could similar identification technology be useful in other industries?
Atul Gawande, the American surgeon known for his book “Better”, wrote an article in this week’s New Yorker called “Slow Ideas: Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the ones that don’t?” He describes the challenges faced by healthcare institutions all over the world: despite the advances in research, the most difficult part of improving care isn’t availing doctors and nurses to these breakthroughs, but changing their behavior. Some doctors simply won’t wash their hands no matter how many times they are told it reduces infection rates.
While the stakes in technology adoption are less dire, changing user behavior is just as challenging for information workers as doctors. Startups may research the market, understand customer use cases, solve the users' problems on paper, but unless they change behavior, their efforts are no more useful than the healthcare research trapped in a doctor’s file cabinet or email inbox. Insights and tools must be put to use.
That’s why I think there ought to be an additional step in the Product Market Fit process, the image at the top of the page. This step begins after Customer Validation and before the scaling of the sales and marketing teams in Customer Creation.
This step should be called Customer Engagement. The goal of this step is to develop a process to drive product adoption and behavior change within an organization. As Gawande writes:
To create new norms, you have to understand people’s existing norms and barriers to change. You have to understand what’s getting in their way.
Eliminating obstacles to change and understanding how to motivate new users to adopt the tool repeatably are essential to deploying a product. The current PMF framework emphasizes finding value proposition fit with each customer segment and then optimizing sales efficiency. But sales without engagement leads to high churn and the mirage of product market fit that will vanish when it’s time to renew customer contracts.
Understanding customer needs and building the product to solve those needs are critical. But so is developing a process to destroy the inertia of doing things “the old fashioned way” and catalyze users to change their workflows to enact change. That’s the only way to speed the adoption of change, whether in medicine or in technology.
The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that an adaptation of 1995's 12 Monkeys, the beloved post-apocalyptic film starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, is likely headed to the Syfy network. The new series will reportedly start with a 90-minute backdoor pilot, similar to Syfy's Battlestar Galactica, which is said to be followed by an initial season of eight to ten episodes. 12 Monkeys' original producers Chuck Roven and Richard Suckle reportedly submitted the pitch to the network, and 24's Jon Cassar will be tapped to direct the series.
Beyond that, it's still early days for the show, and casting has not yet been announced. Syfy president of original programming Mark Stern told The Hollywood Reporter that the team has a "great pilot" but...
Motorola will make a wood-back Moto X in Q4
