The future is mobile and apps, except that it isn’t
You may have read other articles making similar arguments but this post by Ben Evans is certainly one of the best.
There are two charts that capture a lot of the way we think about mobile today. In the first, we see that mobile devices are approaching a majority of traffic, and in the second, that a large proportion of all web traffic (a majority in the USA in this instance) and the vast majority of mobile traffic is coming from apps rather than the web. … However, if you’re not careful you can get quite the wrong impression from these. Read more
And if you’re a marketer how do you think about the tradeoffs?…
Apps versus the web
There’s an involved, technical and (for people like me) fascinating conversation in tech about smartphone apps and the web – what can each do, how discovery works, how they interplay, what Google plans with Chrome, how watches affect things, whether the web will take over as the dominant form and so on. … But for an actual brand, developer or publisher wondering if they should do an app or a website, I generally answer that the calculation is much simpler and less technical: Do people want to put your icon on their home screen? Read more
Ad blocking software has figured out native content
This is going to get messy. Just one of the problems…
… ad blockers have grown exponentially in every market, and are now threatening the whole ecosystem.Their reach now extends to native advertising—which was, until now, relatively spared because native ads can be managed by the publisher’s Content Management System instead of an ad-server. But ABP’s engineers found a way to spot and remove any phrase like “sponsored content” or “sponsored by.” This creates pernicious side-effects, as the user won’t be able to distinguish between commercial and legitimate editorial content on websites. Read more
A Murky Road Ahead for Android, Despite Market Dominance
Farhad Manjoo provides a well done summary of Google’s challenges with Android. Read more
Speaking of mobile challenges…
Mozilla, mobile, and the web
Mozilla has a mobile problem. It also wants to keep the web healthy and provide an alternative to mobile walled gardens. Its mobile operating system, Firefox OS, is a worthy attempt to address both these issues. But this is a huge challenge. Read more
Influence People by Leveraging the Brain’s Laziness
For designers and marketers to consider…
… there is still an assumption that the environment is treated as a reflection of information that should drive preferences. For instance, it’s assumed that people tend to stick with the default option because they do not know enough to change it. … This view of decision-making assumes that information is always at the core of the cognitive economy. But in fact, energy is the key currency that the cognitive system seeks to preserve. … people are not treating the environment around them as information in most deliberative processes. Instead, they are performing the easiest actions with as little thought as possible. So if we want to influence other people’s behavior, we must make desirable behaviors easy and undesirable behaviors hard. Read more
Speaking of lazy brains…
Beware Spurious Correlations
A quick look at a graph can be a dangerous thing.
We all know the truism “Correlation doesn’t imply causation,” but when we see lines sloping together, bars rising together, or points on a scatterplot clustering, the data practically begs us to assign a reason. We want to believe one exists. … Statistically we can’t make that leap, however. Charts that show a close correlation are often relying on a visual parlor trick to imply a relationship. Read more
UX is UI
A little long but food for thought for product managers, UX/UI designers, and their execs.
… Product Managers: You might think you have all the answers with a combination of Google Analytics and your own hubris, and that’s fine if you can afford to be wrong. But please, stop hiring UX Designers to just implement what you’ve already decided. … UX Designers: If you want to make the world a better place, you have to take a strategic hand in defining what gets put into the world, not just how that thing works. Read more
4 topologies of integrated marketing technology stacks
Will there ever be a dominant marketing technology platform / ecosystem? Will there be n overlapping platforms with competing components and centers of gravity? Where will there be stronger links? weaker links? Scott Brinker frames up the situation… Read more
And now for a look at another kind of ecosystem…
Apple Watch and Continuous Computing
Ben Thompson’s non-review review and analysis of the watch and its place in the computing ecosystem is excellent. Read more
Short takes
What do service providers really care about? Less lipstick on the As-a-Service pig please… via horsesforsources.com
A techie experiment with cross-posting on Medium. via Medium
Inside Quartz’s thinking and a little bit of what’s coming… Quartz is an API via NiemanLab
A reminder that your Instagram photos aren’t really yours: Someone else can sell them for $90,000 … Well, not exactly, but still an interesting story. via the Washington Post
Some good points on the supposed Power of the Screenshot via Medium
Mary Meeker’s 2015 Internet Trends report may not be, or have much news, but has lots of stats. via Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Tim’s Web Decay Graph is a bit depressing, as are the broken links on my 19 year old site even after multiple link updating efforts. via tbray.org
Lenovo’s smartphone that can project apps right in front of you is interesting but what we need is a configurable movable holographic display. via Business Insider
About
The Gilbane Advisor curates content for our conference community of content, computing, and digital experience professionals throughout the year.
