Gilbane Conference 2015 call for papers deadline is May 1
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The Apple Watch’s Raison D’être
John Kirk is mostly right, but there is more to say. Though it’s fun to speculate on Apple’s initial intent, it is more useful to consider how the Apple watch actually fits into the the evolution of computing, and what it suggests about what comes next.
The effective purpose of the watch is not just to make computing more socially acceptable, or even more convenient, but to do so because computing is becoming part of the fabric of daily modern life and computing devices are inexorably shrinking. This is true across the spectrum from general purpose computers to single-purpose sensors.
The most important general purpose computer now is the smartphone. But smartphones got so small they had to get bigger because computing power is well ahead of the sophistication of our technology for communicating with them. The size of smartphones, and watches, limits their range of interactions, but is necessary for their individual utility, a prerequisite for convenience.
Convenience is a matter of degree, and no other computing devices had much of it to start and are still largely lacking. But the dramatic ramp-up in reach already happening with smartphones, and coming quickly with more ubiquitous computing clearly demands more convenience be designed in to the entire experience. This is Apple’s wheelhouse.
I still think that “Smartwatches are the most likely next-in-line competition to smartphones, certainly more so than tablets or glasses, before we enter the world of implants, stick-ons, or other fashion accessory choices.”, and I agree with Kirk’s bullishness about the Apple watch. Read more
Has Visual Design Fallen Flat?
… a lot of today’s visual language is about clean simplicity, executed well. There are a few fashion trends in there, sure, but in general this is a list of objectively desirable qualities. It reflects a maturity to the aesthetics of digital design that has been developing for decades,
When you squint your eyes and tilt your head, don’t a lot of these products look awfully, well, similar? Don’t they look pretty but, at times, a little dull?
When it becomes necessary for virtually every business to signal they value design by adopting an up-to-date style, it becomes a commodity, a box to be ticked. That fresh look quickly becomes a cliché. This descent towards aesthetic monoculture was helped… Read more
What the New York Times CIO is doing to make the newspaper a mobile-first company
CIO Marc Frons’ description of what they are doing is a good example of the kind of thinking other executives should be involved in. Read more
The promise of the web
Short (2 min read), sweet, and true…
if the web didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it. Read more
Proprietary services vs open protocols
If you only have 1 minute…
1/ the history of the internet is a series of battles between proprietary services and open protocols… Read more
A longer, related read…
Will Deep Links Ever Truly Be Deep?
This is a more in-depth post with some historical context exploring the importance of links and what much of the debate over mobile apps and deep linking misses or glosses over. Read more
Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job
For years, Google’s mission included the preservation of the past… Two months ago, Larry Page said the company’s outgrown its 14-year-old mission statement. Its ambitions have grown, and its priorities have shifted… Google in 2015 is focused on the present and future. Its social and mobile efforts, experiments with robotics and artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles and fiberoptics.
Ok. But fortunately…
The Internet Archive is mostly known for archiving the web, a task the San Francisco-based nonprofit has tirelessly done since 1996, two years before Google was founded. The Wayback Machine now indexes over 435 billion webpages going back nearly 20 years, the largest archive of the web. For most people, it ends there. But that’s barely scratching the surface. Read more
The data science ecosystem
If marketing technologists aren’t scared by scads of software tools, data scientists shouldn’t be either. Here is a knowledgable start at a landscape.
Because data science is growing so rapidly, we now have a massive ecosystem of useful tools… Since data science is so inherently cross-functional, many of these companies and tools are hard to categorize. But at the very highest level, they break down into the three main parts of a data scientist’s work flow. Namely: getting data, wrangling data and analyzing data. I’ll be covering them in that real-world order, starting first with getting data, or data sources. Read more
Links
Developers already know this, but business managers should also understand the process… Apple’s App Store review process is hurting users, but we’re not allowed to talk about it via Medium
I know, this may not sound serious at first, but it is worth a read… How The Screenshort Could Save Us From Horrible Headlines via BuzzFeed
Need to get processable data out of reports in PDF? If you’re a little technical here is some help… Purifying the Sea of PDF Data, Automatically via NYT Open
Less than half of the enterprise collaboration tools installed have many employees using them regularly… Why No One Uses the Corporate Social Network via hbr.org
Gilbane Conference call for papers deadline is May 1
The Gilbane Conference on Content, Technology and Customer Experience takes place at the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, December 1 – 3, 2015.
The Gilbane Conference helps marketers, IT, and business managers integrate content strategies and computing technologies to produce superior customer experiences for all stakeholders.
A modern customer experience must be holistic and seamless. Holistic in that customer communications be consistent within the company and across all touch points and channels, and seamless so that transitions between customer interactions are smooth and frictionless. This is a continuous process that requires an unprecedented amount of collaboration and integration between internal and external facing organizations and systems.
This year we focus on how to integrate content, data, and software to support a superior multichannel digital customer experience. 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, content marketing, business intelligence or other marketing or data management platform, join us to learn what your peers are doing and what experts are recommending.
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The Gilbane Advisor curates content for our conference community of content, computing, and digital experience professionals throughout the year.
