Category: Gilbane Advisor (Page 24 of 29)

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

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.

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