Category: Gilbane Advisor (Page 21 of 28)

Happy New Year Dear Reader! We’re back from our holiday break. Though we don’t publish in December we do continue to read and select trustworthy content worthy of your valuable time. Enjoy.

Congress votes to make open government data default in U.S.

Surprise! “On December 21, 2018, the United States House of Representatives voted to enact H.R. 4174, the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2017, in a historic win for open government in the United States of America… The Open, Public, Electronic, and Necessary Government Data Act… (AKA the OPEN Government Data Act) is

about to become law as a result.” Ok, now for the implementation… Read More

AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

When people talk about “AI” the first thing to understand is what they are really talking about. There are three possibilities: first, advanced machine learning techniques such as deep neural networks (DNNs), second, artificial general intelligence (AGI) that will perform tasks at human level, and third, anything or everything from basic software algorithms to super AGIs far beyond human intelligence. Mixing these up causes confusion, hype, and fear. The first of these defines the sense of “AI” of the vast majority of existing and near term opportunities for application. This post, with input from Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis, who ought to know, explains where we are and aren’t. Read More

Childhood’s End

In this short, rich essay, George Dyson argues that the digital revolution has morphed into something else altogether right under our noses. The new “analog revolution” has begun and we need to deal with it. Definitely don’t rush this one. Grab a coffee and get comfortable. While you’ll likely see his main point quickly, there is much to think about.

We imagine that individuals, or individual algorithms, are still behind the curtain somewhere, in control. We are fooling ourselves. … The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalog or index, human thought. No one is at the controls. If enough drivers subscribe to a real-time map, traffic is controlled, with no central model except the traffic itself. Read More

The ‘Future Book’ is here, but it’s not what we expected

An instructive history of electronic books by Craig Mod. Perfectly reasonable predictions don’t always pan out.

… We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve … Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. … Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem. Read More

Also…

• Latest web dev tools adoption… JavaScript and Web Development InfoQ Trends Report via InfoQ
• How not to defend marketing campaign degradation… It’s impossible to saturate a marketing channel via Mobile Dev Memo
• Now, mobile-first indexing for over half of pages in search results globally… Mobile-First indexing, structured data, images, and your site via Google
• Plenty of room for machine learning startups serving mid-size companies – a healthy market – dive in… The Competitive Landscape of AI Startups via HBR

Mark your calendar for
Gilbane’s DX conference

April 29 – May 1, 2019, Washington DC
Digital experience strategies, technologies, and practices, for marketing and the workplace.

Learn more

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

Business value of design

Some welcome help for those of you struggling to justify the effort, and cost, of good design.

We tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies over a five-year period in multiple countries and industries. … Our team collected more than two million pieces of financial data and recorded more than 100,000 design actions. … The four themes of good design described below form the basis of the McKinsey Design Index (MDI), which rates companies by

how strong they are at design and … how that links up with the financial performance of each company. Read More

Intranet design after a merger or acquisition

When a merger or acquisition occurs, it’s not uncommon for management and employees to become frantic, unsettled, and disorganized. So, it might seem puzzling that truly great intranets may arise after a merger. But they do. In fact, each year, our Intranet Design Annual Award includes remarkable designs that were catalyzed by a merger or acquisition. Read More

The pen(cil) is mightier than the mouse

When the first iPad came out in 2010 my main interest was whether it could eventually replace laptops for general business use. For most of us, the answer is still ‘no’, but that doesn’t mean it won’t get there. Ben Bajarin has a thoughtful post on how the newest iPad Pro makes progress. His headline is about the pencil and its new gestures. But he also argues that in combination with the new keyboard and magnets there is a more integrated experience. This leads to thoughts on packaging. Read More

Is the end near for mobile apps?

Lance Ng thinks so, and though the title is click-baity he believes it, explains why, and is mostly right…

In the next three to seven years, I expect most mobile apps to disappear. With them, we’ll witness the loss of billions in venture capital that we’ve poured into the mobile startup sector. It will all be burned to ashes, with nothing left but stray lines of code. Read More, then see his responses to comments here.

Mark your calendar for
Gilbane’s DX conference

April 29 – May 1, 2019, Washington DC
Digital experience strategies, technologies, and practices, for marketing and the workplace.

Learn more

Also…

• • Brinker perspective on new Gartner survey… Martech jumps to 29% of the CMO’s budget via chiefmartec.com
  • Well, “soon” is relative, but there is a potential solution to the cost barrier… Virtuous spiralsDNA may soon be used to store computer data via The Economist
  • Can AI address health care’s red-tape problem? Target individual solutions for near term success… via HBR
  • With links to some great examples… While AR plays catch-up in other sectors, it’s taking over the enterprise via VentureBeat

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

CMS ❤ CRM – it’s nice to see two acronyms make friends

As we know, there are thousands of martech products in dozens of categories. Some categories are candidates for a being a center of gravity around which you can focus to build a stack or architecture.

Sometimes there are competing centers of gravity. Paul Ford takes happy look at how two of these, CMS and CRM, can now more easily work together. Read More

Laying the pipes of a post-advertising world

In this excellent post Andre Redelinghuys makes a compelling case that “The shift from brands and advertising to pipes and subscriptions is inevitable — and well underway.” Read More

GDPR helping a contextual targeting comeback

Jessica Davies reports some advertisers and agencies are shifting budgets away from personalization to contextual targeting. Not just because of GDPR, but because it’s value was underestimated. From Carat:

Sophisticated semantic analysis tools, exclusive access to premium environments and high quality content creation and distribution opportunities with publishers and influencers arm us with the toolkit to serve digital advertising that doesn’t require personal data yet is relevant and will resonate with its audience… Read More

AI, radiology and the future of work

Image analysis is perhaps the most obvious example of the power of deep learning, and even Geoffrey Hinton and Andrew Ng have commented on its potential to effect the future careers of radiologists. Using radiology as an example, this short piece by the Economist offers three reasons to temper worries of AI taking over the workplace. Read More

Also…

• Lots of detail yet accessible description of today’s tracking… Field guide to tag hunting: The hidden world of Internet data collection via Data-driven SaaS
• Dear Publishers, if you want my subscription dollars (or euros), here is what I expect…   Me too! via Monday Note
• For those of you already working with deep learning… Why you need to improve your training data, and how to do it via Pete Warden’s blog
• For the few of you who missed this… Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends Report. via KPCB

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

Our privacy policy & GDPR

Since the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect today we lead with our own privacy policy, and our progress in incorporating GDPR requirements. We encourage you to read it. TL;DR: We do not yet claim complete compliance. But because we don’t depend on advertising, and don’t buy, sell, or share personal data to help others advertise, complying with GDPR is less daunting than it is for many others. Our privacy policy will be updated as we continue to add support for GDPR. Read More

How will the GDPR impact machine learning?

Since GDPR is bigger than Queen Bey, we’re all being bombarded by emails and articles about GDPR, ranging from the click-baity to the ill-informed to the wishful-thinking to the doomsday-wailing to the we-can-help, to the technically-bureaucratic, to the thoughtfully-analytical, und so weiter. We expect most of you by now have waded through enough to find a favorite or two to get a handle on the basics, so we’ve chosen two posts that deserve a careful read that you might have missed. First up, Andrew Burt, digs into the details and complexity of what GDPR means for machine learning. There is no simple answer, but Burt’s article is a good place to learn why. Read More

GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

It could happen. Note that Doc Searls is not talking about advertising in general, just adtech. But adtech is, shall we, say well-funded. Read More

And now a break from GDPR!​…

Martech simultaneous consolidation & expansion

How is this possible?…

… a more accurate view of martech consolidation cycles is that they are indeed happening  but they are happening on top of a wave of underlying software expansion… That underlying wave of software expansion seems to be overtaking

the natural business consolidation dynamics that are absolutely still happening at the same time. Read More

Also…

• More useful than Duplex… Maps walking navigation is Google’s most compelling use for AR yet via Techcrunch
• It’s not only about unstructured data… An Introduction to Deep Learning for Tabular Data via fast.ai
• Here’s who owns everything in Big Media today. Probably not for long. via Recode
• ‘A fun adventure, not a business’… The Weather Channel stopped publishing video on Facebook via Digiday

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

Annoying online ads do cost business

Nielsen Norman Group reports on a new research study involving 35 million Pandora users over 21 months. The study showed increased advertising caused a 2.8% reduction in use. As they point out, this is not a huge amount, and your mileage may vary.

What is significant is the convincing quantification. Nobody wants to have to defend a drop in customer activity. Read More

Predicting content attention and behavior

Content strategist Michael Andrews argues that “The biggest weakness in content strategy today is that it lacks predictive explanatory power. … To provide predictive explanatory power, content strategy guidelines should be based on empirical data that can be reproduced by others.”. Andrews summarizes, and points to, a new study presented at the 2018 World Wide Web Conference by Nir Grinberg of Northeastern University that provides some data and interesting analysis. The summary and Grinberg’s paper are both worthy of your time, and a must read if you’re a content strategist. Read More

How Axel Springer is getting consent for GDPR

They’ve been running some tests and are kindly sharing the results.

So far, the publisher’s readers are far more likely to give consent when they receive a fact-based static message, rather than a video message or one written in a tone that requests the readers’ support. Read More

Speech recognition systems vulnerable to adversarial attacks

Nicholas Carlini and David Wagner invented a novel attack against speech recognition AI. With the addition of an imperceptible amount of noise, the attack can trick speech-recognition systems into producing any output the attacker wants.

The Gradient’s Hugh Zhang points out that this kind of

attack is also a problem for other deep learning algorithms, for example in image recognition. Read More

Also…

• Philosophers Rule!… Ludwig Wittgenstein invented the emoji in 1938 via Quartz
• A relevant contemporary syllabus with links to excellent resources for corporations or others… Ethics in data science via University of Utah
• B2B marketers and content management: what’s working and what’s not via Digital Clarity Group
• 8 tentacles… Behind the curtain: How Google got media companies addicted via Axios

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