Martech & marketing orgs

Scott Brinker looks at two surveys on how modern marketing organizations are re-structuring to manage marketing technology. In short, they have and are. Read More

What Elon Musk taught me about growing a business

Dharmesh Shah was inspired by Elon Musk’s advice on growing and scaling a business, “Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.” In this post, he explains what Musk meant in a way that doesn’t require any knowledge of linear algebra. This is a simple, practical, and powerful tool for anyone managing either a company or project. Read More

Emotional intelligence needs a rewrite

Software that can recognize emotions “emotion AI”, has a lot of potential and is already in use (learn more at this keynote at our upcoming conference). But recognizing emotions is not easy for humans, never mind software. Large amounts of data in specific contexts and application domains will continually help as data sets grow. Even so there is a lot to learn/unlearn in our understanding of how humans experience and process and exhibit emotional behavior. Read More

Google and the disintermediation of search

Jan Dawson argues, correctly I think, that the continued increase in Google’s traffic acquisition costs and effect on margins is something to watch, but of more concern…

… the threat of disintermediation could undermine the revenue base on which those margins are generated in the first place. What do I mean by disintermediation here? The fact that many of what would once have been Google searches are now pre-empted by other apps and services before the user ever reaches Google. Read More

The seven deadly sins of AI predictions

A lot of AI researchers and pundits imagine that the world is already digital, and that simply introducing new AI systems will immediately trickle down to operational changes in the field, in the supply chain, on the factory floor, in the design of products. Nothing could be further from the truth. Almost all innovations in robotics and AI take far,

far, longer to be really widely deployed than people in the field and outside the field imagine. Read More

Also…

Is AI riding a one-trick pony? No, but we are attaching too many expectations too soon. via Technology Review

Good advice… Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee via Y Combinator

This could be you… Even smart people are shockingly bad at analyzing sources online. via Nieman Lab

If you want to dig in to Facebook’s About Face re React. via RedMonk

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

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

Also…

Staying relevant… Java’s late flowering via RedMonk

Amazon’s approach to smart glasses sounds pretty smart, well, I would say “interesting” for now, via Axios

DYI Voice AI… Google’s Tensorflow team open-sources speech recognition dataset.  via Venturebeat

Safari in iOS 11 converts Google’s AMP links back to the original URLs, and Google approves. via 9to5mac.com

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

iPhone health-computing hub

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.

In the meantime check out this patent. Read More

Health care – it’s about the data

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

Also…

Origin is critical context… Distributed and syndicated content: what’s wrong with this picture?  via W3C.org

In three weeks Amazon’s 1-click Patent is Expiring via the Hustle 

In 2017, the one thing every digital-native news outlet needs is a newsletter (not an app) via NiemanLab

Is it really either/or?… Personas vs. Jobs-to-Be-Done via Nielsen Norman

Fun… Hill for the data scientist: an xkcd story via livefreeordichotomize

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 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.