Dear Readers:
Hope you had a fantastic summer. We are back from vacation and our new school-year resolution is to publish more bite-sized issues more frequently – tougher curation and quicker delivery to you.
Beyond the iPhone
is the watch, as the next general purpose personal computer that is. I still think that has always been Apple’s plan, with fitness a viable commercial entry point and learning path to the much larger health care market and everything else. In this regard the AirPods were the most interesting of the recent announcements. As Ben Thompson points out…
… one of the devices that pairs with AirPods is the Apple Watch, which received its own update, including GPS. The GPS addition was part of a heavy focus on health-and-fitness, but it is also another step down the road towards a Watch that has its own cellular connection, and when that future arrives the iPhone will quite suddenly shift from indispensable to optional. Simply strap on your Watch, put in your AirPods, and, thanks to Siri, you have everything you need… just as the iPhone makes far more sense as a digital hub than the Mac, the Watch will one day be the best hub yet. Read More
Facebook’s Power Struggle Over App Links
This long slow cold war requires monitoring by marketers, developers, and publishers. The Information’s Cory Weinberg is watching.
Apps are caught in the middle of a power struggle between Apple, Google and Facebook to control mobile browsing habits. The fragmentation benefits Facebook, which keeps people inside its browser instead of supporting apps’ deep links on iPhones. Read More
Google’s AMP Viewer: the Tinder UX for content?
Google is also increasing its reach and control over the browsing experience. All marketers, not just news publishers, will be affected.
AMP links will no longer be limited to the Top Stories area of mobile results; instead, Google will link to the AMP version of a webpage any time a valid AMP is available. This “blue links” expansion will dramatically increase AMP traffic overall and enable discovery of a rapidly growing universe of non-news and long-tail AMP content. … Publishers might not realize that Google won’t just link to AMPs, but will present them in a Google-hosted viewer which is certain to alter user flow and engagement from mobile search. Read More
How The Daily Beast gets 40 percent of readers to visit its homepage
While the Beast gets its fair share of traffic from Google and Facebook, it focuses more on getting those readers back via email (its subscriber base has doubled in the past year) and its app than on maximizing the reach of content it publishes elsewhere. It has eschewed Google AMP and, after a brief dalliance with Facebook Instant Articles, has stopped using those too. Read More
Also…
“Basically, we have two problems with CX: complexity and perspective.”… The cash model of “customer experience” via Doc Searls
Handy… Introducing the Bots Landscape: 170+ companies, $4 billion in funding, thousands of bots via Venturebeat
NYT and WaPo just edged out Buzzfeed and Huffpost for the most digital readers… Revenge of the ‘legacy’ sector via Politico
The front-end needs the back-end… Digital Experience and Content Operations Need More Attention via EContent
Why are deep neural networks good at solving complex problems? Is the secret buried in the laws of physics? via Technology Review
Main conference: November 29 – 30
Workshops: December 1, 2016
Fairmont Copley Plaza, Boston
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