The business of artificial intelligence

 MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have written what may be the best current article for executives on what AI can, and cannot, do for organizations. Read More

Google Glass 2.0 is a startling second act

Well, I don’t think anyone should startled by this. “Heads up” displays have been around in some form since the 80s for military and industrial applications. Back then wired to custom pre-Windows mini PCs on your back or belt. Glass Enterprise Edition as a technology does have lots of potential, if sold and supported as an enterprise product – lots of examples. Read More

Advanced social technologies and the future of collaboration

When asked about their own use of communication tools in their day-to-day work, most executives report that social technologies overall are largely supplemental. Nearly three-quarters of respondents say they rely primarily on older technologies, such as email, phone calls, and texting, to communicate with others at work. … At the same time, respondents report that the integration of social technologies in day-to-day work is greater than ever before… 45 percent say social technologies are very or extremely integrated into day-to-day work at their companies, up from one-third who said so one year before. Read More

Content isn’t king

What! Heresy! you say. But wait, read on. This is Benedict Evans talking about the power dance between media and large technology platform companies. He is arguing that there is a big difference in the strategic value of consumer content between them. Content may be king for media companies but not for technology platforms, with the possible exception of Amazon. Good read. Read More

60 countries’ digital competitiveness, indexed

Doing business in the global economy is complicated, yet increasingly unavoidable even for many small to mid-sized companies. There are obvious competencies necessary around channel and partner choices, cultural and localization differences, e-commerce and operations, to name a few. But businesses also need to look at the larger context of the digital sophistication of target countries, public policy, political stability, and associated trends. This Digital Evolution Index provides perspective on the global digital landscape. Read More

Also…

Fascinating and free… 70+ Market Maps Covering Fintech, CPG, Auto Tech, Healthcare, and More via CB Insights

You need to plan for The incredible shrinking time to legacy. On Time to Suck as a metric for dev and ops via RedMonk

What does ____ use in their stack?… Why Stackshare is quietly becoming a secret weapon for developers and Silicon Valley CTOs via TechCrunch

In a move for corporate customers Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads via Bloomberg 

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference is focused on content and digital experience technologies and strategies for marketing, publishing, and the workplace.

Conference: November 28–29
Workshops: November 30
Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel

Frank Gilbane’s Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. More or less twice a month. See all issues

The trouble with news bundles

“Tony Haile argues that the best way to put together a subscription bundle of news content is to guarantee readers an ad-free “experience” across a range of premium sites without access to all the content. That would eliminate the problem of slow-to-load pages. And it wouldn’t cannibalize single-site subscriptions.” Great discussion follows.​ Read More

Product managers for the digital world

As software and data permeate enterprise functions executives need to increase their own understanding and expand the skill sets and portfolios of managers across the organization. Neither digital transformation initiatives or less ambitious departmental modernizing projects can avoid this. As we’ve seen with marketing, there are many organizational ways to acquire the necessary technology and analytics expertise without everyone becoming a programmer or statistician. Product managers are in interesting special case, and this McKinsey article analyzing how this key role is changing will be useful to all executives. Read More

Not even wrong – ways to dismiss technology

Benedict Evans has an excellent piece on evaluating technology potential. How do we predict initial success, growth, and longevity? What is a toy and what has serious legs? How can we apply falsifiability and predictive power to our analysis? This is a must read for other investors. Read More

The most hated online advertising techniques

You can probably guess what they are, and certainly have your own most-hated ad types, but Nielsen Norman Group provides data that will hopefully inform those of you in advertising how to create fewer ads that only bots can love. Read More

Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

At gilbane.com we publish in AMP in addition to standard HTML because it is easy, and our AMP pages seem to have increased page views – can’t be sure yet. I consider myself a hard core open web advocate and would not consider only publishing in AMP, but am not ready to wish for its demise. This article, though, is worth a read before you decide what to do about AMP. Read More

Also…

Yes, match the method to the job… It’s Time to Rethink Agile at Enterprise Startups via First Round Review

Snort! Something like wishful “embrace and extend”… Facebook’s Instant Articles platform to support Google AMP, Apple News via Techcrunch

Walt doesn’t seem to be disappearing, and that’s good, as is this article… Mossberg: The Disappearing Computer via The Verge

This is about a hot programming language so not for everyone… Five Things That Make Kotlin Interesting  via RedMonk

From the fun-but-serious collection… What Happens When Work Becomes a Nonstop Chat Room  via NYMag.com

Frank Gilbane’s Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. More or less twice a month.

E-commerce: What China reveals about the future of shopping

China’s e-commerce market is the world’s largest and fastest growing. It is also more mobile and more integrated with relevant platforms than those in the West, allowing for smoother customer experiences. This goes beyond WeChat e-commerce capability, the envy of western messaging platforms.

There are reasons eastern and western e-commerce may continue to evolve differently. But there is a lot to learn from China’s experience. BCG and Alibaba dig in. Read More

Digital assistants drive new meta-platform battle

Bob O’Donnell riffs on the intersection of digital assistants, the voice interface, and platform value. This weeks’ keynotes at Google I/O, and last week’s at Microsoft Build both provide useful context to several of O’Donnell’s points.

… digital assistants … have the potential to completely devalue the underlying platforms on which they run. To put it succinctly, if I can use, say, Alexa across an iPhone, a Windows PC, my smart home components and a future connected car, where does the unique value of iOS or Windows 10 go? Out the door… Read More

Improving summarization with machine learning

That this would happen should be expected, especially after the dramatic improvement to machine translation due to ML. MIT Technology Review’s Will Knight reports on developments at Salesforce following their acquisition of MetaMind, which is what we point you to below. But you might also be interested in the more technical description of how the algorithm works — at least scroll down past the technical paragraphs to see useful sample results. Read More

Mobile First, Desktop Worst

Designing for an optimal user experience is extremely difficult even with a single screen because of the variety of media, layout, and use cases. Multiply the number of screens by n, and it seems like an impossible task. On top of this fiendish complexity, there are compromises to be made between developer objectives and brand directives. No wonder design is often dumbed down to be simply useable across devices rather than optimal. This may not be a solvable problem, though better tools, perhaps informed by machine learning, will certainly help. In the meantime, it pays not to expect too much from simple approaches. Read More

Gilbane Digital Content Conference
Call for Speakers Open

Content and digital experience technologies and strategies for marketing, publishing, and the workplace.

Proposal deadline is June 2 9 2017

Conference: November 28–29
Workshops: November 30
Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel

Also…

Know what you’re getting… A marketer’s guide to the tricks and hacks of influencers via Digiday

Have Web Standards on Mobile Caught Up to Phonegap in 2017? A look at some specific recommendations via Telerik developer network

ICYMI, Scott Brinker’s latest… Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2017): Martech 5000 via chiefmartec.com

Not-science-fiction – thinking a bit ahead… Open Water – The Internet of Visible Thought via Edge.org

Frank Gilbane’s Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. More or less twice a month.

Why the SaaS era of journalism will be our most exciting yet

During the first quarter century of the commercial internet, digital journalism has already gone through three eras: the portal years, the search years, and the social years. Each era advanced storytelling and presented new revenue streams, but I would argue that digital journalism is now entering its most exciting period yet. Think of this as the stories as a service era, where journalism will be paid for by readers, for readers… Digital journalism has been commoditized, creating new market opportunities at the bottom of a new disruption curve that is not yet “good enough”. (italics added). Read More

Parsing the IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein deal

But aren’t Watson and Einstein competing? In short, the deal is about more data; it’s a complementary marriage of Watson’s broad unstructured data capability and Salesforce’s structured data focus on their application and customer experience. Well, that’s what caught my interest anyway. But there is more to it and James Governor sorts it out… Read More

How Germany’s Otto uses artificial intelligence

Otto is the largest e-commerce merchant in Germany after Amazon. Their use of AI goes beyond pure marketing to reduce shipping, returns, and inventory costs, and improves customer experience. An instructive example of what is already being done with machine learning, and without human hands on, their system…

analyses around 3bn past transactions and 200 variables (such as past sales, searches on Otto’s site and weather information) to predict what customers will buy a week before they order… has proved so reliable—it predicts with 90% accuracy what will be sold within 30 days—that Otto allows it automatically to purchase around 200,000 items a month from third-party brands with no human intervention. Read More

How our publisher tracked down his online troll and changed our comments for the better

MIT Technology Review is determined to keep the value of comments alive. Jason Pontin reports on his efforts and current strategy in this thoughtful and thorough piece. Read More

Facebook and the cost of monopoly

Facebook may have a monopoly in social networking, and while that may be a problem for Snap or any other would be networks, Facebook would surely argue that … society as a whole shouldn’t be too bothered… The problem is that Facebook isn’t simply a social network: the service is a three-sided market — users, content providers, and advertisers — and while the basis of Facebook’s dominance is in the network effects that come from connecting all of those users, said dominance has seeped to those other sides… Facebook passed Google as the top traffic driver back in 2015, and as of last fall drove over 40% of traffic for the average site, even after an algorithm change that reduced publisher reach… So is that a monopoly when it comes to the content provider market? I would argue yes, thanks to the monopoly framework above. Read More

Also…

The history of Instant Articles’ path to Instant Recall, via The Verge

For fun and profit… Alexa learns to talk like a human with whispers, pauses & emotion via TechCrunch

Nobody is going to own podcasting. Well, at least there’s that. via Doc Searls

New technologies’ second order effects… Ten Year Futures via Benedict Evans

Staggering numbers natch… How Google builds web frameworks via freeCodeCamp

What to do about the chatbot crisis

It’s never been clear that messaging apps had a future as platforms. It is also a stretch to think of voice as a platform, at least in any general purpose sense. In either case it seems like a misuse of ‘platform’. Messaging and chat systems will continue to proliferate because they are relatively simple communication tools with simple interfaces, and because there will always be heavy competition for control of the final short distance to eyes and ears. Even with only 3-4 major platforms, countless use cases, devices, and integrations guarantee severe user experience challenges. (Cartoon by XKCD)

And that’s before adding chatbots to the mix. As amazing as the progress of machine learning is, no none knows when, or perhaps if, a general purpose AI will be available, and the better a general purpose AI gets the more unpredictable and less understandable it will be. John Brandon takes you through his enlightening experience using multiple chatbots daily. Read More

The second coming of IT

It is easy to forget that the center of gravity for commercial computing and software innovation used to be in, mostly large, businesses focused on solving purely business information technology problems. Consumer applications only trickled out slowly after personal computers had been around for awhile. This was mostly due to cost, and capability, not necessarily lack of imagination. Sam Lessin makes the case that for many of the same reasons, businesses will again be the first to benefit at scale from machine learning and AI. Read More

The first decade of augmented reality

This article by Benedict Evans has something in common with the two articles recommended above — that while there are amazing technologies promising profound business and consumer benefits, we are still in the early stages learning what they can do and how to build products and use them. Evans is one of best at asking original questions, 38 in this this post. A sample…

It does seem to me, though, that the more you think about AR as placing objects and data into the world around you, the more that this becomes an AI question as much as a physical interface question. What should I see as I walk up to you in particular? LinkedIn or Tinder? When should I see that new message – should it be shown to me now or later? Do I stand outside a restaurant and say ‘Hey Foursquare, is this any good?’ or does the device’s OS do that automatically? How is this brokered – by the OS, the services that you’ve added or by a single ‘Google Brain’ in the cloud? Read More

Why distribution still matters in the internet age

Abhishek Madhavan cautions about taking the “distribution is free in the digital age” mantra too literally, or out of context. Distribution of physical products is not free, and last mile physical distribution is a critical, sometimes the most important, component of customer experience. Building a digital business that does not include a way to control the cost and physical distribution experience is risky business. Read More

5 data assumptions that marketers should avoid

Brand managers, striving to maximize spend and performance, have an opportunity to embrace advanced marketing analytics and positively impact collaboration, real-time decision-making, and revenue. This starts by removing the perceived barriers to entry for working with data. Read More

Also…

Very cool machine learning aid for those of us drawing-challenged… Fast Drawing for Everyone via Google

A more thoughtful take on the issue than most… We Need More Alternatives to Facebook via Technology Review

It’s complicated. Danny Sullivan digs in… A deep look at Google’s biggest-ever search quality crisis via Search Engine Land

You Don’t Get AMP, it’s more than one thing. via 153.io

A unique and useful resource… Global 5000 Database Update — Q1 2017 via theglobal5000.com

Gilbane Digital Content Conference

Mark your calendar! Call for papers coming soon.

Conference: November 28–29, 2017
Workshops: November 30
Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel, Boston, MA

Frank Gilbane’s Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. See previous issues. Subscribe to email or feed. Contact.