Of all the different functions and systems that need to be integrated to provide a clean consistent customer experience, content management systems and commerce systems are the most obvious. Speakers look at three areas: e-commerce and CMS integration, why content is so critical to e-commerce success, and strategies for optimal conversion.
Will Microsoft’s new augmented reality patent kill the keyboard?
Well, there is a difference between the function of a keyboard, typing, which has legs for the foreseeable future, and its physical instantiation, which will eventually be eclipsed by something virtual. There are those who think voice will replace keyboards, and perhaps even typing, but it is way too early to confidently predict the relative adoption of voice versus typing. There are use cases, limitations, and reasonable preferences for each, as experiments with chatbots illustrate. Both typing and voice will likely last until well into the future of brain-to-computer interfaces. Read More
How the personal data extraction industry ends
Doc Searls with a positive outlook on personal data protection…
Our influence will be most corrective when all personal data extraction companies become what lawyers call second parties. That’s when they agree to our terms as first parties. These terms are in development today at Customer Commons, Kantara and elsewhere. They will prevail once they get deployed in our browsers and apps, and companies start agreeing (which they will in many cases because doing so gives them instant GDPR compliance, which is required by next May, with severe fines for noncompliance). Read More
Yep, that web project should be a PWA
Whether you’re a technologist, marketer, or both, it’s difficult to keep current on web tools and technologies. A well-researched and thought-out decision made a few months ago may no longer be optimal. Less technical colleagues or executives may be mis-informed by an out of date perception or current yet incorrect article. Aaron Gustafson provides an in-depth update on the state of progressive web apps. If you haven’t considered them in a while you may be surprised. Read More
and of course there is…
Framework Churn
This is perhaps a more hopeful article, and from an interested party. Nonetheless, it is a good explanation of the problem. Ionic’s Max Lynch argues the solution to Framework Churn is web components. Read More
Apple is going after the health care industry
While no surprise to anyone paying attention, most discussion to date has focused on technical details of devices like the Apple watch, the seemingly intractable challenges around managing health care data, or the quicksand of FDA approval. In this research brief CB Insights looks at the business and market leverage Apple has over the large players in the health care industry, including reach, customer experience relationship, and revenue model. Apple is progressing on all fronts. As CB Insights says, “Other players in health care should take notice.” Read More
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
Join us in Boston to learn how your peers and competitors in marketing, IT, business, and content across industries integrate content strategies and computing technologies to produce superior customer experiences for all stakeholders.
The Gilbane Digital Content Conference is focused on content and digital experience technologies and strategies for marketing, publishing, and the workplace.
CB Insights found a new Apple patent for an “Electronic Device That Computes Health Data”. The examples use an iPhone, but the patent covers any computing device with “a camera, an ambient light sensor, and a proximity sensor”. This covers Apple’s current main products, and will certainly cover future versions of some of their wearable products.
Needless to say, a combination of integrated Apple devices computing health data in concert, in addition to communicating with third party devices and apps, is a powerfully flexible hub environment. This model plays to Apples strengths, is applicable to other IoT applications, and suggestive of future strategy.
When Apple launched the watch I argued that the watch was meant to be a general-purpose computing device, and as such the most likely successor to the iPhone, and that health would be a focus because “fitness is a great way to enter into the much larger healthcare opportunity, which in turn provides an environment to learn about new user experience
technology and the complex device integration and data sharing necessary for it, and other complicated applications of general purpose computing.” The other candidate is glasses, but we’ll see. In any case, the devices will be working together.
Health care data includes much more than individual and aggregate tracking. How the data is analyzed, used, and shared, by patients, providers, and payers provides an even larger opportunity to improve care and reduce costs. In spite of the challenges caused by proprietary health data systems — which still seriously need to be dealt with — there is some encouraging activity. For couple of examples Read More here, and here
Apple signals it’s willing to let next-gen web apps compete with iOS apps
Translation: Apple is adding support for “Service Workers” to WebKit, which means that Safari will be able to support Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). PWAs, developed by Google engineers to allow mobile web apps to better compete with native apps are supported by Google, Mozilla, Opera, and Microsoft browsers and appear to be a hit with developers. This support is obviously important for both Apple customers and the open web. Read More
Introducing the news business’ first “initial coin offering”: Ethereum to the rescue?
Blockchain, in the abstract, can do for content supply systems what it is touted to do best: speed up supply chains. By making more transparent all the steps with the content origination, permissioning, pricing and billing reuse chain, it presumably may speed the business of syndication sales. Read More
“Get Started” stops users
Get Started buttons and other ambiguous calls-to-action can degrade the user experience and should be avoided… This button is often the most prominent and enticing call-to-action on the homepage, and can appear to be the right path for nearly every activity a user is looking to complete… But when this button lands naïve users into a complex flow instead of providing them with the basic information they expected, people lose trust and become annoyed with the site. Read More
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
Join us in Boston to learn how marketers and IT, business, and content managers across industries integrate content strategies and computing technologies to produce superior customer experiences for all stakeholders, including:
How to architect and build digital experiences around your customer’s journey
Successful examples of multichannel content architectures for B2B and B2C
The importance of integrating content and ecommerce systems, strategy, and measurement
What you can do today with AI technologies to engage more deeply with customers, and extend your reach
How to choose martech suites, conversational apps, and content marketing software
Content strategies for global brands, publishers, and multilingual collaboration applications
What you need to know about the latest web and mobile development technologies
How to increase the lifetime value of your content assets
Whether you are just getting started with managing multichannel content, need to improve the consistency of the web and mobile discovery experience, or are ready to integrate with an ecommerce, collaboration, business intelligence or other marketing or enterprise system, join us to learn what your B2B and B2C peers are doing, and what industry analysts, technologists, and service providers are recommending.
We hope to see you in Boston at this year’s Gilbane Digital Content Conference!
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
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
“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
We’re building the program for our annual Boston conference in the next few weeks and want to make sure you have the opportunity to apply to be a speaker.
As a speaker you’ll be addressing our influential community of content management, digital marketing, and technology experts and practitioners. Join us to educate, learn, and network. We are proud of our speakers and promote them as a key benefit of the conference.
The Gilbane Digital Content Conference is focused on content and digital experience technologies and strategies for marketing, publishing, and the workplace.
The deadline for proposals is Friday June 2, 2017!
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. 
