How is AI disrupting marketing?

An excellent summary from Scott Brinker on the current/near-term reality of “AI” marketing applications. “…here’s the irony: as much as the hype has overstated what AI

might do formarketing in the next 12-24 months, the reality of how AI is already working in marketing today is often under-recognized.” Tis true. Read More

The NYT is boarding the AR train — here’s what that means for storytelling

One of the areas we’re paying attention to this year is the use of AR content for serious enterprise applications and truly useful consumer use cases. In the case of publishing, The New York Times, Quartz, Axel Springer, and others, are experimenting with how the unique characteristics of AR content can enhance customer experiences rather than distract. As powerful as the AR promise is we don’t know how news consumers will react to the extra, more active, effort involved. But it’s time to find out. Read More

How blockchain could kill both cable and Netflix

Not this week, but there is keen interest in using blockchain technology to build decentralized peer-to-peer content management and distribution applications. There are a number of these kinds of projects planning to go live this year. Rizwan Virk describes much of the collective vision and potential disruption. A good place to start learning more. Read More

Smart homes and vegetable peelers

Andreessen Horowitz’s Benedict Evans doesn’t have a unified vision of the future of smart homes, but he does have some ideas and lots of enlightening questions. In this post he looks at smart home ecosystems and questions smart thing use cases, market dynamics, platform roles, integrations, and how we’ll interface with them. He remains “extremely skeptical” of voice as a new major platform, and rightfully so. This a must read for anyone building or investing in products or businesses around smart things – not just for the home. Read More

Also…

• • The retina is the next screen to deal with, and… Intel’s new Vaunt smart glasses actually look good via The Verge
  • Interesting analysis… 8 Lessons from 20 years of Gartner Hype Cycles via Michael Mullany
  • As they say at Axios “Be smart”… Bitcoin, Blockchain, and the Trouble with ICOs via Wired 
  • Think the future of things should be more like the Open Web? See… “Project Things” – An open framework for connecting your devices to the web via the Mozilla Blog

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December. See all issues

Molecular content & the separation of concerns

The creation and management of content continues to increase in complexity as we need to design for nmachines in addition to n screens. Content Strategist Michael Andrews lays out why we need to move beyond, single sourcing and modular content.

Michael proposes an approach based on “molecular content” combined with the concept of the “separation of concerns”. A good read for anyone involved in content strategy. Read More

Beyond the Bitcoin bubble

As most of you know, the really interesting thing about Bitcoin is not the actual currency but the Blockchain architecture it is built on. And while we don’t cover financial technology, Blockchain is very much applicable to the information management technologies and applications we do focus on, for example in publishing or marketing. On a grander scale, a trustable distributed ledger of X that competes with or complements a trusted (or not) central authority of X has broad societal implications. One of these is the walled garden threat to the Open Web. And sure enough, there are serious efforts underway to build /rebuild a sustainable Open Web using Blockchain technology. Steven Johnson has written a non-technical article that provides an excellent explanation of what you need to know and why. Read More

Is your company’s data actually valuable in the AI era?

In the AI economy, the value of your accumulated data is limited to a one-time benefit from training your AI model. And the value of training data is, like oil or any other input, influenced by the overall supply — it’s less valuable when more people have it. In contrast, the value of your ongoing operational data is not limited to a one-time benefit, but rather provides a perpetual benefit for operating and further enhancing your prediction machine. Read More

Maybe Facebook should abandon the news feed altogether

Facebook has almost always wanted to be a platform, if not The Platform. Their recent shift away from news in their news feed back to mostly social interactions raises questions about their long-term future and what kind of platform they will be. John Battelle has an interesting suggestion. He admits it is a long shot, but his thoughts aren’t as crazy as he suggests his solution might sound…

What if Facebook *really* pivoted, and became a … truly neutral platform — an AWS for attention and identity, if you will. What if the company dedicated itself to a set of stable policies that encouraged other companies to tap into its social graph, its vast identity database, its remarkable engagement machinery? Read More

Also…

• There are logical limits… Something doesn’t ad up about America’s advertising market via the Economist
• Very funny… Burger King explains net neutrality via Fight for the Future
• Great reporting on buying followers… The Follower Factory via New York Times
• A bit of catching up to do, but why not?… Apple’s Getting Back Into the E-Books Fight Against Amazon via Bloomberg

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. More or less twice a month except for August and December. See all issues

Scoring news stories is hard​

Frederic Filloux dives into some research and unique challenges the News Quality Scoring project faces. A worthy project to benefit producers and consumers, the NQS “is aimed at assessing the value-added deployed by a media for a given news coverage in terms of resources, expertise, thoroughness of the process, and ethical guarantees.” Read More

True AI is both logically possible and utterly implausible

Wonderful and witty example of a philosopher rescuing us from a current confusion.

… It is like a two-knife system that can sharpen itself. What’s the difference? The same as between you and the dishwasher when washing the dishes. What’s the consequence? That any apocalyptic vision of AI can be disregarded. We are and shall remain, for any foreseeable future, the problem, not our technology. So we should concentrate on the real challenges. By way of conclusion, let me list five of them… Read More

1 million software companies by 2027?

Consolidation does not necessarily mean shrinkage ― the CMS market is a perfect example of one just kind of software company. The idea is not as crazy as it may sound. Read More

Software 2.0

This is a bit technical but will help you understand the types of applications where you’ll need machine learning to be competitive, which “at the very least involve anything to do with images/video, sound/speech, and text” (managing unstructured data or CMS 2.0!) and what kinds of developer skills are required.

I sometimes see people refer to neural networks as just “another tool in your machine learning toolbox”. They have some pros and cons, they work here or there, and sometimes you can use them to win Kaggle competitions. Unfortunately, this interpretation completely misses the forest for the trees. Neural networks are not just another classifier, they represent the beginning of a fundamental shift in how we write software. They are Software 2.0. Read More

Also…

Thankfully still plugging along… HTML 5.2 is a W3C proposed recommendation via W3C

Since we are waxing philosophical this issue… On software development, language games, tech adoption and the death of the author via RedMonk

Yay! Millennials flocking to pay for trusted news sources via Politico

The prediction season starts…Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018

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