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Oof, you guys. We're currently on day 2 of Internet Week, and I'm being forced to choose between a rock and a hot place, aka 82°F (outside) and 37°F (inside). This is my second Internet Week, and like its predecessor, this one is stuffed to its garbardine gills with marketing/ecommerce/advertising panels led by the natty doyennes of NYC tech. As one man in the registration line said to another, "that's a fantastic bow tie."
But there is more to IWNY than bow ties! Some of it is buzzwordy bunk, but some of it is quite useful. Tara Levy's session on demystifying engagement fell (largely) into the second camp.
Levy is the Managing Director of Global Ads Marketing at Google. More impressively, she is able to say phrases like "Generation C" without incurring too many audience eye-rolls. This was good, because Generation C played a big role in her IWNY talk.
The "C" in Generation C stands for: creation, connection, community, curation. Generation C is mostly but not completely comprised of Millennials. I think Tara said 80% of GenC are millennials, but the rest are GenX, Boomers, pre-Boomers.*
What's cool about Gen-C, from a marketing/advertising perspective? You have the opportunity to become embedded in their lives 24/7.**
80% of Gen-C is on Youtube weekly. (75% of them are there to watch Truth in Tech.) Gen-C is the instant gratification generation, as any Time/Times scribe can tell you. So, what do they need to be gratified?
Choice. They want to curate. They want to create images of themselves through curation of cool stuff, and connect with like-minded communities based on these curated selves. That's the reason search engines became the dominant way to buy/learn on the web–people liked the choice. And it's not just search, anymore. Google believes we're heading towards a time when all ads are user-chosen, as well.
{Google also seems to believe that people like ads, rather than just tolerate them. "No one would buy Vogue without ads," says Levy. I wouldn't buy Vogue with or without ads, but I'm sure there are people who fall into both camps. People do buy things without ads. Like books, for example}.
However, ads do, sometimes very indirectly, sell your product, so you might as well make some good ones. For starters, ads that don't appear to be ads. Eg: Jeff Gordon in disguise, scaring the bejeezus out of some poor car salesman. That was an ad for Pepsi–signified by the can of Pepsi in the hijacked Camero. Honestly, the Camero came out better, but such is life.
So. You put out a cool ad that doesn't feel like an ad, and some people click on it. These people are occupy the tippy-top of what Levy calls the "Engagement Pyramid." The Engagement Pyramid upends Kotler's Marketing Funnel. You start by engaging a (proportionally) small segment of prospective users--the people who have already engaged with your brand, on your turf. When you hit upon something that resonates with them, expand it to digital media, and then and only then to traditional media. It's kinda like how singers start by performing in their friends' basements, and then do local clubs, and then do MSG. Nike is famous for doing this, and it's reduced their marketing budget by 40%. Other brands that successfully adopted an EP-style strategy: Airbnb, Kia, Amazon, and In-n-Out did.
A good way to engage these super users is with a direct brand community. GoPro did this nicely. They started by putting out videos shot with the Go Pro of surfing, skydiving, that type of stuff. Users loved the videos and tried to match them. Now the GoPro channel has tons of user-submitted videos.
Levy says 25% of brand content is user generated. I actually think this number is higher, if by brand content, you mean content that happens to include a brand. To get your own user-generated content, you do what Go Pro did–seed your platforms with engaging content. Measure unique views, interaction per thousand exposed views, ctr, competition rate, watch time, sentiment to determine whether you're on the right track. And spend your marketing $$ where there's engagement-based activity.
Where to begin:
- Spend some time on the Youtube Ads leaderboard. Note trends, themes.
- Type your brand and category terms into the top 5 search engines, on desktop and mobile. Do you like the results?
- Spend a full hour with your content. Do you like it?
- Pick a brand that you'd like to team up with. What do I like about them?
- Look at your top media channels. Rank them by engagement strength.
*Maybe not pre-Boomers.
**If you think this is creepy, you're at the wrong conference.
Spring is here, summer's a'comin, and we're celebrating with our second Meteor meetup! Because nothing says "hello, nice weather!" like server-side javascript, amiright?
Last time, we walked you through building your first Meteor app. This time, we're going to talk about security. Hopefully you'll talk back.
Why security? Actually, if you ask that you'll make us doubt our choice, because word on the street is: there's lots of confusion/consternation around security in Meteor. This meetup aims to alleviate that. As we learned whilst building v1 of Gander, Meteor a) has security and b) it's good, provided you know how to use it.
On the docket:
- Meteor's security model
- authentication schemes and configuration
- publishing with allow/deny
Also on the docket:
- pizza
- local beer
- merriment
In the 'hood? Please come by! It's free, and if the last meetup was anything to go by, should be a lot of fun! You can RSVP here: http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-Boston/events/117192822/
{Image via the Drone Journalism Lab}
This week on Truth in Tech, we're joined by Margot Kaminski, Executive Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and author of the upcoming "Drone Federalism: Civilian Drones and the Things They Carry" (California Law Review Circuit).
Fying robot reporters, the Department of Justice's AP phone records subpoena, Bloomberg snoops...suffice it to say that the right to know and the right to keep private are butting heads. We dive in to the future of privacy in the fourth estate.
Want to listen later? You can now download Truth in Tech in iTunes. Fancy.
What the Misinterpretation of Evergreen Hath Wrought
[cross-posted from Medium]
Let’s play a little game called content madlibs. Can you fill in these blanks?
· [number > 7] Crazy Tips That [conditional] Make You [synonym for “insanely”] Productive
· How to [synonym for “rapidly”] Become a [form of social media] Expert
· [number >= 10] Habits of Highly Successful [type of leader]s.
Now, just throw together some combination of numbers, italics, aphorisms, memories of your grandfather, and quotes by Sir Richard Branson and that Highly Successful Type of Leader Who Is Also a Woman! Don’t forget your tags and links to other blog posts you’ve written about something mentioned in the post.
All set? Great! You, my friend, have got yourself an SEO-stocked, page-view-primed blog post! Just press publish, tweet out the best aphorism, and wait for the links and retweets to come frolicking in.
Don’t trust me? Just ask Linkedin. Or Harvard Business Review. Or Inc. Or Forbes. Or Copyblogger. Or even, sometimes, Fast Company. All doing brisk business in boilerplate advice.
Welcome to the land of homogenized milk and blended honey, where the grass is evergreen and banality reigns supreme.
On the surface, the success of boilerplate posts is somewhat counterintuitive. These posts are longer than the average TechCrunch“article,” have like, one picture, never of a baby sloth, and don’t fit all the ensuing bullet points within the title. These posts aren’t breaking or exclusive—they’re what content marketing folks like to call “evergreen.” Evergreen, as in come over anytime! Evergreen, as in Steve Tyler’s lips! Evergreen, as in that cardboard tree you hang from your rearview mirror.
It’s not really evergreen’s fault, honestly. The poor dear’s been bastardized from an adjective to a proper noun, replete with specific format, tone, and lexical guidelines.The one area where specificity is not welcome is in the content itself. Eg, there are lots of posts about the “power of storytelling” in marketing, but there are very few stories. Eg. there are scads of leadership tips but few illustrating anecdotes.
It’s kinda funny that as our world grows more fractured and specific, advice for thriving in it grows more and more general.
I don’t know why this is but I do know that it’s ill-founded. Specificity does not, in fact, deter eyeballs. What specificity does do is create memorable stories. There are no new plots under the sun, but there are new settings and characters and new ways of describing old settings and characters. Eg. right now I’m rereading Random Family, which chronicles the lives of a group of teenagers and their families in the Bronx between 1988 and 1998. The plot is familiar, the characters are unique and, my third time in, the story still feels: fresh. Also: raw. Also: sickening. Also: white-knuckled. Also: sad.
To the content marketers and professional bloggers and online editors, I’d like to say: go read this book. Go scroll through Esquire’s round up of the best stories it’s ever published. Go spend a little bit of time reading something great.
The devil’s not in the details but in the lack of them.
[Cross-posted from our Tumblr]
When living the digital life, one should remain keenly aware of the “permanent” and “public” nature of their actions. For the curatorial-ly inclined, this fact permeates their every social media move as they sculpt an online presence. Admittedly one of those people, my affectation is to look as if I couldn’t care less about my online self even though I remain calculated. That is until the beautiful, fleeting, pointless Snapchat came into my life and liberated me.
Snapchat allows users to send pictures or videos to people in their phone’s address book, a la regular SMS, but the catch is that the picture/video only lasts for a matter of seconds before disappearing into the ether.*
Initially I was uninterested in the app coined as the “safe sexting app for teens”; I couldn’t see any reason why I would use this service. All of that changed once friends living far away became privy to the application and sent me an invitation.
First and foremost, impermanence is what makes Snapchat great. In a sort of McLuhanian the “medium is the message” way, Snapchat allows users to be as boring or silly as they’d like. I watch friends living in California walk to lunch, dance at a bar, even get ready for bed! I in turn send copious amounts of videos of my roommate’s cat, sunsets, and strange people on the subway. Because the picture or the video doesn’t last more than 10 seconds you’re essentially telling the viewer that what you’re sending is of no importance, enabling you to send the more pointless moments that make up your day to day.
Unlike a Vine or an Instagrammed image that you’re “presenting” to all your “followers,” Snapchat is analogous to the note jotted on the napkin and inevitably run through the wash, gone forever. Snapchat is a less deliberate, more spontaneous, and I would argue, truer digital representation of oneself.
Lastly, when I get a Snapchat of my best friend making coffee in the morning I feel like I’m getting my caffeine fix with her. Because the image/video doesn’t last, it can’t be revisited over and over in turn, most closely representing real life. The lesson Snapchat teaches us is “nothing gold stays” and speaking of gold, what I wouldn’t GIVE to see Snapchat’s database… Imagine…
*and by ether, I mean Snapchat's DB and, er, the recipient's received_image_snaps directory.
Note 1: The real title of this post is something like MRRRGGHSTUPIDSTUPIDWHYWHYUCRASSSSHURGGH. The subtitle is "How are Scanned PDFs a thing?"
Actually, I know the answer to that: scanned pdfs are a thing because they are super amazing at obfuscating data in plain sight. Which is why whenever a corporation or agency or politician is required by law to surrender its/his/her emails, they oblige by giving the requirer a Mall of America-sized dump of paper, which the poor requirer must then scan and begin some variation of the painful process I am about to detail.
Or, if you're the Guardian, you bunk the painful process and ask your readers to help you manually sort through the emails. But alas, I am not the Guardian, and my mom can only read so fast.
So! Let's begin, shall we?
Step 1: Download a free trial of Wondershare PDF Editor Pro.
You'll need this to turn your scanned pdf into a text pdf. Well, you won't need this if you have Acrobat, but if you don't have Acrobat, and don't plan on doing this on the reg, use the Wondershare free trial. If you are planning on doing this on the reg, you should probably get Acrobat, because Wondershare isn't all that great. Alternatively, if you are a developer and are the patient sort, try to muddle through the Tabula installation.
Step 2: Perform OCR on the scanned PDF.
To do this, open Wondershare and then select your pdf. Wondershare will ask you if you want to convert your pdf from image to text, which, duh. Then you have to wait. If your pdf is 1000 pages and you work off a macbook, you're going to have to wait for 3-4 hours, if you're lucky. If you're not lucky, Wondershare will crash at around 2:45 hours in. So my recommendation is to split that puppy into 200 page junks or smaller. But eventually, you should have your text pdf. Wahoo!
Step 3: Turn your PDF into a TXT file.
For this, you'll need Adobe Reader. Unlike Acrobat, Reader is free. Get it. Then open your PDF, and save it as TXT.
Step 4: Turn your TXT into a CSV.
In order to analyze your data in Excel or Fusion or what have you, you'll want it in tabular format. So open up your TXT in Text Edit or the Windows equivalent and change the extension to CSV.
Step 5: Clean up your CSV with Ruby.
Chances are, if you're dealing with a scanned PDF, your data is going to be a big ole mess. Here enters the only code of the post. You can tweak it to suit your headings and separators. Basically, it splits your CSV by "from," and then splits everything into key-value pairs like 'header => value'. These are used to create the email objects, which then get printed out with missing fields as appropriate. Ultimately, everything ends up as one line per email, with each field's value separated by commas.
Alors, here is the the script. Put it in your text editor and save it as palinparser.rb or whatever you like. Make sure you check where you're saving it to, as that's where your finished spreadsheet will end up. The only things you'll need to change are the headings (unless you're also analyzing an email set) and then the original file name.
class PalinEmail
def initialize(email)
@from = ''
@sent = ''
@to = ''
@cc = ''
@subject = ''
@body = ''
email.split(',').each do |part|
pieces = part.split(':', 2)
case pieces[0]
when 'From'
@from = pieces[1]
when 'Sent'
@sent = pieces[1]
when 'To'
@to = pieces[1]
when 'Cc'
@cc = pieces[1]
when 'Subject'
@subject = pieces[1]
when 'Body'
@body = pieces[1]
end
end
end
def to_s
return @from + ',' + @sent + ',' + @to + ',' + @cc + ',' + @subject + ',' + @body
end
end
doc = File.open('YOURCURRENTFILENAME.csv');
out = File.new('YOURNEWFILENAME.csv', 'w')
out << "from, sent, to, cc, subject, body\n"
doc.each_line do |line|
line.split('From:').each do |email|
if ! email.empty?
email.prepend('From:')
email.delete! ','
email.gsub!(/\r\n?/, "");
email.gsub!(/To:/, ',To:')
email.gsub!(/Sent:/, ',Sent:')
email.gsub!(/Cc:/, ',Cc:')
email.gsub!(/Subject:/, ',Subject:')
email.gsub!(/Body:/, ',Body:')
pem = PalinEmail.new(email)
out << pem.to_s + "\n"
end
end
end
Then, open up your terminal (Utlities-->Terminal). Check what directory you're in by typing "pwd." Change this to the directory where you've stored palinparser.rb by typing "cd [+ path to directory]". All set? Now, assuming you have Ruby, type "ruby load 'palinparser.rb' " into your terminal.
Et voila, you should have your nice neat spreadsheet.
Step 6: Analyze
Along with basic Excel analysis like send frequencies over time:
You can also use Google Fusion Tables to make network graphs. If you've never used it before, details for doing so are here. All you need is a Google account. This one shows the relationship between sender and first recipient.
The other thing I like using are word clouds, which can give you a quick insight into the most used words in a body of text. I used Stanford's Wordsift tool to make this is the word cloud of the bodies of the SP emails.
That's all I have for today. Hope it's useful! If you have any questions, hit me up in the comments or on Twitter!
KICKSTARTER
Memoto: A tiny clip-on camera that takes a picture every 30 seconds, capturing whatever you are looking at, and then applies algorithms to the resulting mountain of images to find the most interesting ones. The images are clustered by their predominant colors, and then “we get a diagram of how varied the colors are over the day,” says Källström, whose 17-person company is based in Linköping, Sweden. Filtering system to pick out the most interesting photos of the day - 30-35 moments from your day. Last fall, the team raised $550,189 from the public on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter, where they promised a camera to anyone who paid $279 up front. That was far more than the $50,000 they had expected to raise.
NeoLucida: An optical drawing tool, updated for the 21st century. It superimposes a virtual image of your subject onto your paper. You can see your hand and subject at the same time. The camera lucida was invented by Sir William Hyde Wollaston in 1807, but it's been mostly forgotten for decades. The update is portable, and weighs 9oz. After making one batch of neolucidas, makers Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin will open source the design. It costs $20 and is currently sold out.
- Goal: 15k
- Raised: 105617k
Bartendo: a Cocktail-dispensing Robot: Bartendo is a modular, open-source cocktail-dispensing robot. It's an affordable version of precision dispensing technology, made with Raspberry Pi. Comes with a user interface for drink customization and admin screens for managing dispensers, ingredients, and drink recipes. You can also view reports of the drinks made and quantities used.
- Goal: 135k
- Raised: 197,464k
INDIGOGO
Bluebee: A wireless tag that you can attach to your bags, keys, etc. It looks like a tape (remember those?). It connects to your smartphone and will show up on your smart phone map if it's within close range.It will also locate your smartphone and make it ring if you have the blue bee but not your smartphone. If the blue bee is outside of range, other blue bee users will get automatic alerts if they walk within range of it.
- Goal: 60k
- Raised: 9994
Christopher Walken T-Rex: A 13 foot tall T-rex with Christopher Walken's head. It's made using PVC piping, wood, chicken wire, shop towels & adhesive, and paint.
- Goal: 760
- Raised: 2622
De-Shock Ivan with Your Kindness: Help a Croatian poet survive as a Tisch student in NYC. Apparently the scholarship the school offered was not enough, and NYC is shockingly expensive. Give him $100 and he'll mention you in his thesis, give him $200 and he'll give you a personalized poetry night.
- Goal: 5k
- Raised: 760
MIT
MIT Researchers working on GPS to talk back to you: Designed to give the user the most time-saving, energy efficient route/directions. Developed by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and targeting Zipcar users. Through a back-and-forth interaction between driver and GPS, the algorithm is set to help the driver plan the best route and how fast to drive before the batteries run out.
MIT robot that assembles your IKEA furniture for you: “The IKEABot maneuvers based on a CAD file it’s been given. The CAD file describes the piece of furniture in terms of its geometry and screw holes, allowing the robot to use a geometric reasoning system and symbolic planner to determine where each piece goes.”
[reposted from Medium]
The problem with us millennials isn’t that we’re materialistic, or narcissistic, or falsely confident, or under-ambitious. I mean, we are those things, but not, I’d argue, to greater extent than our forebears.
The problem is that we’re flakes.
Here are some of the things I did last week: rescheduled a doctor’s appointment (Zocdoc makes it so easy!), skipped a meetup (did I really want to learn about Scala?), drank one, okay two bottles of wine with a friend while we waited for another friend to join us before she texted to say she was running super late, and we should probably just go ahead without her. We went ahead without her.
"I’m sick of flakiness,” my friend said, and finished the last of the second bottle.
I’m sick of it too, but I’m also a contributor. Here’s the thing: my generation isn’t really Generation Me; it’s Generation Everything’s So Close to Me. And when everything’s close, I can always come by later.
Later takes up a heckuva lot of real estate in the millennial mind. Later is a nice place, a hopeful place, a safe haven for tentative plans. Later isn’t new, but its ubiquity is. And whence this ubiquity? Pardon me while I fish out my daggum cranky coot card. Aha! The ubiquity of later stems directly from that hunk of metal I clutch in my hand, and the bars and rainbows that enable it to tell other hunks of metal where I am, where I’ll be, and where I won’t be because the 4/5 is express from 14th to 125th and my chicken won’t roast and the goddamn Time Warner guy still hasn’t come by (the Time Warner guy is the one thing that we think can’t come by later, but always does).
Our ability to constantly push and revise status updates, and our knowledge of that ability, bequeaths to us a world of Motel 6's, lights a’blazing. McLuhan imagined the global village would intensify our awareness of responsibility. Instead, hyper-connectivity fosters a languid semi-independence, semi because the independence depends on others’ tacit acceptance. Millenial flakiness is driven by the lure of later and requires the acceptance of the possibility of later by the flaked upon.
On paper, the cure for flakiness is simple: don’t accept it. But if, say, Meetup started suspending or banning people who didn’t show up to sold out meet ups, another meet up platform with laxer requirements could overtake it. Recently, the restaurant Red Medicine tweeted the names of guests who failed to honor their reservations. Though the public’s reception to their ploy was mostly positive, only one of the outed responded.
Still, I can at least make nonacceptance of later a personal goal. I think I will. I just have to get around to vacuuming and see about rescheduling that hair appointment first.
Don't have the time to listen now? You can also subscribe to Truth in Tech in iTunes!
Your plumber called. He wants to know about those photos you have to share. The capped social network beloved by designers and San Francisco technorati alike has come under a second round of fire for its spammy adoption practices. On Monday Stephen Kenwright downloaded Path, and then quickly deleted it without adding connections or uploading photos. On Tuesday, starting at 6:30 AM, Kenwright began receiving calls and texts from his friends, family, coworkers, and his plumber, all inquiring about the photos Path had told them he wanted to share with them.
Boston: Placesetter, a cambridge-based startup for realtors, raised $2.5million in funding. Placesetter is a real estate marketing platform to help professional realtors build their own websites. The funding was raised from a Boston seed fund, Romulus Capital, and angel investors.
New York: Rap Genius takes on the news. The spitballing Yalies behind Rap Genius are applying some of their a16z racks to a new vertical called News Genius. Since news stories these days are, like, so hard to parse, the Genii will do it for you. Right now, News Genius is in soft launch, but you can see some of the annotated stories, e.g. the FBI's Jean Seberg Memo, via its twitter feed.
IPO or M&A for Twitter? Reuters reports that Twitter has hired Cynthia Gaylor, a well-known IPO and M&A lawyer who previously worked for Morgan Stanley. Gaylor will run Twitter’s corporate development team. Past deals she’s advised on include Amazon’s purchase of Zappos and Google’s acquisition of Admob.
The new phone-a-thon. NPR's Planet Money wants to trace the life of a tee-shirt, from cotton seed to cargo ship to your credit card. To fund this complex investigation, they've turned to Kickstarter. Their goal: $50k. And yes, backers will receive t-shirts.
Bitcoin trying to make a comeback? (Well, Trump is biting.) One big detriment to bitcoins is that banks can shut down the accounts that Bitcoin exchangers use to turn old currencies into Bitcoin. Now, a mini-ATM will handle the exchanges. The ATMs cost approximately $5,000, with cheaper deals for wholesalers.
+Seller only accepts BitCoin for $1.9 million SoHo condo.
Apps/Product of the week:
- SmartCap - digitally enhanced bottle cap. pop the cap and it ignites a larger event - such as firing off confetti, turning on the music, checking you in
- Songza, the app that matches expert-created music playlists to your mood or activity, has just released a huge update to its iOS app, streamlining the experience quite a bit and cleaning up the UI to ensure that users are getting the best music to match their mood and activity in the fastest time possible. One of the biggest pain points with Songza is that it’s difficult to find the right music based on artists. Sure, you can hunt for mixes by genre, mood, activity and artists
[Reposted from Medium]
A friend of mine just returned from Cabo. On my newsfeed, there is an album called "Mexico! :)" I click through "Mexico! :)" Ordinarily, I would be looking at: dolphins, beachfront toes, margarita with paper parasol, paisley bikini, Irish sunburn, more beachfront toes, hotel patio at sunset.
But today is not ordinarily. Today, I have spoken with a brand-new hire at a company called gazeMetrix. Today, I am looking at: Tecate, Ray-Ban, J. Crew, Diptyque, Rowdy Gentleman "Bless Your Heart and the USA" tank top, Havianas, Patron Silver, The Royal Playa del Carmen.
In 68 photos, I count 35 brands. These are just the ones with clearly visible logos.
gazeMetrix does what I just did, using computer vision and machine learning algorithms, for some of the biggest brands in the world. Right now, it only analyzes Instagram photos; soon it will analyze Twitter image-sharing services like Twitpic and Yfrog.
Facebook is one image-sharing service gazeMetrix isn’t planning to analyze. In a December interview with MIT Technology Review, gazeMetrix's founder Deborat Singh said this was because “so few of the network's publicly posted photos are user generated."
Singh's reasoning offers a reason for the Instagram acquisition that I hadn't previously considered: most of the user-generated photos posted to it are public, and thus, are veritable data troves, ripe for the buying.
Which makes me wonder if, soon enough, Instagram will be the sole mechanism through which photos can be published on Facebook.
Because, think about the incentives for this! On the analytics side, gazeMetrix doesn't just count the number of times a brand appears in user-generated photos--it also serves up the photos, offers analysis on the brands' context within them, and monitors spikes in activity to predict when a brand is about to go viral. And on the content side, to paraphrase the GazeMetrix employee I spoke with: "you suddenly have thousands of ready-made ads."
Basically, this stone delivers a heck of a lot of birds.
"But wait! Those are my photos! I thought Instagram amended its ToS in my favor!"
Yep, it did. Instagram will not sell your photos, but they will serve as agent, connecting the eager brand to the unaware evangelist.In the words of Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom :
We envision a future where both users and brands alike may promote their photos & accounts to increase engagement and to build a more meaningful following.
That faint crumbling you hear is the blush of innocence departing the formerly unaware evangelist.
If you, like me, were or are an avid consumer of lifestyle blogs, you may have noticed increasing numbers of product reviews and giveaways and sponsored getaways. Lifestyle blogs started to really take off around 2004, and it didn't take long for brands to realize that hey, Ella here is already reviewing diapers of her own accord--why don't we send her some of ours to try, and more to give to her commenters. Perhaps this tactic will play out, but for now, it seems to be working.
Now, if instead of having to deal with shipping and plane tickets and publishing dates and stealing Anna Wintour's seat at fashion week, a brand manager could just republish a photograph, well, that would be a lot less headaches all-round. Especially if the photo's creator, like those shrewd mommy bloggers, has already realized the value of branded content.
And so, the dystopic, filter-bubble-phobic part of me sees a near-future landscape dominated by carefully constructed user-generated photos of sepia-toned road trippers tossing around coke bottles.
Which sounds exactly like the landscape of today, but trust me, it's going to feel, like, so much real-er.
L'authentique, c'est chique*.
*TM
A few months ago, I went through a few of the ways you can visualize your inbox, fo' free. The methods I discussed can give you a fairly detailed portrait of your inbox's interactions and vocabulary, but the visualizations themselves are quite basic. There are, however, a number of projects that take more creative approaches to email visualization. Many of them are, alas, one-offs (and many more are manifested only in research papers).
Email visualization tools you can use:
- Anymails employs metaphor, here with species representing types of email (family&friends, school, commerce, spam etc) and single animals (which look more like bacteria to me) representing each email received. The email's state is represented by the speed and hairiness of its animal: unread mail is hairy and pulses quickly; read mail is less hairy and pulses slowly, and responded mail is hairless and barely moves. The default inbox view shows all recent mail (past day, week, or month) swimming across the screen, but users can filter by species and status, and can scroll back to see how their inboxes looked in previous months.
- Made by: Carolin Horn and Florian Jenett
2. Gmail Meter
- The most straightforward (and plainest) of the bunch, Gmail Meter analyzes your Gmail and sends you a weekly chart-based activity report. Some of stats include hourly and weekly volume of email, top senders and recipients, thread length, and average response time. Gmail Meter also tells you how efficient you are given the number of emails in your inbox, archives, labels, and trash, and lets you compare internal and external email behaviors.
- Made by: ShuttleCloud
3. Calendar Analytics Add-in Tool
- Calendar Analytics analyzes your Exchange calendar and presents the data in a Power Pivot dashboard in Excel. Note: fewer words are more poetic than "Power Pivot dashboard in Excel." Some of the data presented include past and future meeting breakdown by topic and person, so you can see just how often you've been meeting with Ned from Accounting about the annual Kitty Ball.
- Made by: Microsoft
4. Luminoso
- Simply put, this MIT Media Lab hatchling understands language- subtext, slang, allusions, sarcasm and all. Put it to work on emails, and it can divine subjects, sentiment, and birds of a feather, and gussy up this information in network visualizations.
- Made by: Dr. Catherine Havasi, Rob Speer, Jason Alonso, Dennis Clark, and Ken Arnold
Email Analytics Tools You Can't Use, but Can Look at
1. Mailgarden
- Mail Garden also employs metaphor in its inbox visualization--each inbox is a forest made up of single email trees. The longer the email, the taller the tree.
- Made by: Kjen Wilkens, Damian Stewart, Jenny Cahier, and Marcela Machuca.
2. My Map
- My Map visualizes the relationships between Christopher Baker and his contacts from 1998 up to the present. Relationship data comes from the To, From, and CC fields of per 60,000 of Baker's emails. Baker's top contacts are visualized in a circular network graph, with their communication rank, emails sent, and date last contacted displayed in a mouseover. The intensity of a given relationship is denoted by line weight.
- Made by: Christopher Baker
- If you're curious about global email patterns at any given moment, check out this visualization of Yahoo's email processing. The interactive visualization shows the number of emails processed and trending subject line keywords (presently "Rachel" tops the latter, with 1341 instances in the last 20 seconds). There is no option to export or view historical data, but still, it's a fun exploratory tool.
- Made by: Yahoo, in collaboration with Periscopic.
4. OOM Creative ARUP Secret Life of Projects
- This presentation depicts a project's digital footprint over time. One component visualizes the growth of an email network, and the location, billable hours, and sent/received associated with a given node.
- Made by: OOM Creative
Boston: TV Next Hack Hackathon: This weekend, Hill Holiday and Mashery are hosting a hackathon around next generation TV apps. Participants will break into teams and build apps in one of the following categories: Guides, Connected TV, Companion Apps, TV Everywhere, and Analytics & Data Visualization. Winning teams also have a chance of nabbing the Best in Show award, plus $2500, and a slew of gadgets and gift cards.
Facebook acquires Parse: The mobile-backend-as-a-service startup built a useful set of back-end tools for mobile developers, including cloud data storage, and managed identity log-ins, push notifications, and custom code. Apparently other suitors came a’ calling, but FB won out.
There will be 9.4 Million Smart Glasses shipped by 2016: According to a new report from ISH iSuppli, the controversial eyewear will soon be, well, everywhere. Lest you cry "dork," IHS analyst Theo Ahadome says that the glasses' success will hinge on the robustness of their app ecosystems. If this is true, Google Ventures' new joint glass app fund with Andreesen Horowitz makes a lot of sense.
Bill Clinton joins Twitter: Though sadly, he's ditched @prezbillyjeff for the staider @billclinton. On the Colbert report, the president blamed his recalcitrance on insecurity--what if he tweeted something and no one tweeted back? I think it's safe to say that won't happen, as he's already amassed 450k followers in under 24 hours.
A Tweet from the AP’s Hacked Account Sends Stock Market for a Brief Tumble: A tweet about explosions in the White House caused the Dow to drop 145 points in seconds. Almost as quickly, the same machines that had alerted the hedgefunds and govt agencies of the news were able to determine that the tweet had been false, and shares immediately rebounded.
+Google Trends: Stock Market Predictor: A new study from Nature Scientific Reports shows the promise of search terms as market balewick. Researchers analyzed the query volumes for 98 finance-related search terms and found that a trading plan based on changes in search volumes for the word “debt” would have yielded a 326% return on investment.
NY: Andreesen Horowitz backs 3D Printing company Shapeways: The VC firm is not known for being particularly NYC-friendly, but they’re making a $30 million exception for the originally Netherlands-based startup, which prints things that can’t be printed on home 3D printers, like metal jewelry. This is also the first time a West coast VC has invested in a 3D printing company.
With Connected China, Reuters maps the power structures of the People’s Republic: The app, which took 18 months to build, maps who’s who in China, who they’re connected with, and how they got there.
Like what you're hearing? Subscribe to Truth in Tech in iTunes!
In light of recent events, we want to bring our community of Watertown together and share in the strength and pride of our town. Next Friday, May 3rd, we will be hosting a BBQ to benefit the K-9 Comfort Dogs, who traveled from Chicago and Newtown, CT to be with us here in Boston.
The K-9 Comfort dogs are a bundle of furry, affectionate Golden Retrievers, trained to provide comfort and care to those affected by tragedy. They were stationed at First Lutheran Church on Berekeley St. after the bombings and went around to the hospitals to visit those affected. They also provided much comfort to one of our employees, who ran the Boston Marathon. As such, they are a cause very close to our hearts. So stop by, grab some food, meet your Watertown neighbors, and support a good cause. We are one Boston.
When: Friday, May 3rd, 12pm – 2pm EST
Where:
- SoftArtisans / Riparian Data HQ
- 3 Brook St.
- Watertown, MA 02472
RSVP: http://BostonStrongBBQ.eventbrite.com
Can't make it, but still feel like donating? You can do so here.
Most people wake up on a Friday morning happy to wrap up the week, but my alarm clock last Friday was something that I hope to never experience again. It was the Belmont Police Department notifying me that my town, my home were under a “Shelter In Place”. Shelter In Place! It's usually beneficial to increase one's vocabulary, but that particular phrase is one I hope I never hear again. The reason for the SiP: Belmont, MA (my town) borders not only Watertown but also Cambridge.
My first reaction was to turn on the news, check my phone for messages and then try to piece this together. I had text messages from neighbors and an email from our CEO that the office was closed with instructions to work remotely. Then the phone calls started coming in from my family that live in other states.
A mile down the road in Watertown, minutes from our HQ, the biggest manhunt the city of Boston has ever undertaken was underway, as what felt like the world watched.
Let’s try to put this in perspective. Boston may be a big city but almost all of us knew someone that was running that day, in fact, my co-worker, Elise Kovi had an amazing run! She finished in under 4 hours and crossed the finish line minutes before the first bomb exploded. This was her first Boston Marathon and we were tracking her every step of the way! Our excitement was quickly dampened when the first report of attacks surfaced, and our hearts broke as the horrific events unfolded. Thankfully, though, Elise and her family were not hurt.
Shifting my focus to the (then) present, I wondered what could, and should be done to keep my projects moving forward given the straining circumstances. Leading talent acquisition for this team, a big part of what I do is promoting our brand, our culture and a company on the cutting edge of technology. If you are in this line of work, employer branding is big. I am the first person that candidates talk with when they are exploring a role on our team.
Quickly, I decided that Friday, April 19, 2013 was not a day for me to reach out and introduce who we are and what we do. Instead, it turned into a day of inbox zero and planning my searches for the week. I knew in my heart that Boston would prevail as a city and Monday, April 22, 2013 would be the start to an awesome week.
From this recruiter, headquartered in Watertown, MA and proud to be part of a very strong community!
Were you in the Boston area last Friday? How did you handle the Shelter in Place?
In June, Gmail overtook the email service formerly known as Hotmail/currently known as Outlook.com in global users, with 425 million to Outlook.com's 325 million. However, a peek at some of the world's most active emailers tells a different story, one dominated by Outlook.com. One exception: India, the birthplace of Hotmail. The other is the United States, where Yahoo! (still) reigns.
Two other interesting takeaways:
1) Gmail is likely the brand-name mail service of choice in much of the developing world, given its lack of appearance on the map below.
2) People who read tech blogs (which are full of Yahoo! Mail derision, though mostly respectful of the Mayership itself) are not the same people who use Yahoo! Mail, and there are more of the latter than the former.
Also, a confession/rant: when i initially got the idea to do an infographic of the world's email service preferences, I thought it would be easy-peasy. I was wrong, either because search engines don't like me, or because the information isn't there, or because it's there but behind non-searchable paywalls. Thus, this map is very incomplete at the moment, but I will keep updating it as I find usage stats for more continents and countries. If anyone has any data on email in Asia or Africa, even if it's just one provider or one city, please let me know!
WHICH EMAIL PROVIDERS DO PEOPLE USE ACROSS THE GLOBE?
Resources:
India: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-12-24/news/35991897_1_google-apps-sundar-pichai-google-drive, http://www.slideshare.net/Ethinos/snapshot-of-digital-india-august-2012
UK: http://yougov.co.uk/news/2012/10/15/hotmail-britains-top-choice/
US: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/edwardbaig/story/2012-07-31/outlook-email/56616322/1
I spent much of yesterday afternoon glued to Twitter, constantly clicking the 20 new tweets link, trying to find credible information about the events in Boston. Let me tell you--between celebrity thoughts and prayers simperings and breathless NY Post reports of double-digit death tolls, it was not easy going. Since the Arab Spring, "Twitter is great for communication during dangerous events" has been a popular refrain. It's true, but what's being communicated during these events sometimes isn't.
The spread of misinformation on Twitter drew a lot of notice from the mainstream media during Hurricane Sandy, when a user named @comfortablysmug started disseminating reports of the Stock Exchange being flooded and Governor Cuomo being trapped and Con Ed shutting down all power in lower Manhattan. Smug's tweets caught the eye of Buzzfeed reporter Andrew Kaczynski who, after confirming their baselessness, outed their author as one Shashank Tripathi, "the campaign manager of Christopher R. Wight, this year’s Republican candidate for the U.S. House from New York’s 12th Congressional District."
Kaczynski's admirable reporting resulted in deserved pillorying and, more importantly, ensured Smug's silence thereafter. But here are the rubs: 1) misinformation, especially of the hyperbolic kind, spreads faster than its corrections, and 2) there are countless Smugs, many of them with a good deal more followers. By the time Kaczynski managed to take a screenshot of Smug's tweet about the MTA shutting down all service for the remainder of the week, it had been retweeted 540 times. Yesterday, the New York Post's tweet reporting 12 dead at the marathon had been retweeted 1722 times as of 5:15 PM. The Boston Police Department's report at that same time: 2 dead (it has since been updated to 3). The police department also brushed aside the Post's report of the suspect being a "Saudi national who suffered shrapnel wounds in today's blast [and] is currently being guarded in a Boston hospital," saying "Honestly, I don't know where they're getting their information from, but it didn't come from us."
I know the Post loves blood, but this is disgusting. More than that, it's harmful, as evinced by Anti-Arab reactions to the "breaking" Saudi tweet. I'm obviously no journalist, but back in high school, I did do a stint at my town newspaper. The very first thing I was told: check your sources. The second: cite them. The third: no confirmation? No story. Such commandments are clearly not in use at the Post, or at Before It's News, or Fox 11, where "Breaking" seems to be the newest euphemism for "spurious allegations."
The thing is, of course, that there were plenty of credible, on-the-ground sources providing information via Twitter yesterday (side note: someone should give about-to-graduate NU senior Taylor Dobbs a job; his reports were and continue to be clear-eyed and comprehensive). So why, then, did people retweet aggregators like Before It's News or truth-be-damned hype machines like the Post?
The answer, in short, is: they saw the rumor tweet first. In "Why Rumors Spread Fast in Social Networks," Doerr et al find that on a social graph, given n modes with a density of more than 1, "after a surprisingly short time a news [story] spreads to all nodes." Generally, a rumor starts with user with a small number of followers. One reason for this is that users with a small number of followers pick up a rumor from one of their followers and quickly pass it on, acting as "an automatic link between neighbors." The second reason is that, once a popular user picks up the rumor, after a few rounds "all popular nodes are informed." Interestingly, a rumor that starts with a small degree node spreads to popular nodes faster, after which the remaining small degree nodes all become informed.
If you skipped all that, the summary is:
Rumor spreading is extremely fast in social networks.
Why rumors, though? In Rumor Psychology, DiFonzo & Bordia says they function "to help people make sense and manage risk," but I'd say the same can be said for any updating news, rumor or true. During a disaster, or any event where facts are presently few, people will scrabble for any information they can find, and spread it so the burden of knowledge isn't theirs alone.
During the UK Riots, the Guardian published a fascinating visualization of the flow--and ebb--of rumors on Twitter. A story like "Police beat 16 year old girl" gets tweeted, generally by someone with a respectable amount of followers, then is picked up by followers and followers' followers and so on. Sometimes, it is then picked up by shame shoddy publication like the Daily Mail; but sometimes, it is questioned, after which point it gradually dies out.
That last bit is a pleasant take away, and it's not unique to the rumors the Guardian studied. Indeed, a recent study of rumor tweets during the Japanese earthquake found that if you call out a rumor tweet as such, you can help kill it. When receivers see a criticism before the original tweet, the likelihood of their spreading the rumor decreases, and the likelihood of their stopping the rumor increases by 150%
We can't predict what we'll see on Twitter at any given point, but we can make sure to follow or keep a list of reputable journalists, and we can try to stay skeptical, especially during high anxiety events.
So, to meld a bunch of highfalutin' advice: in times of trouble, stay classy, readers, and beware the irrational, however seductive.
Haiku via Times Haiku
We use Meteorite to manage meteor packages and control the version of meteor and being deployed to Heroku.
These instructions assume the use of a custom domain (i.e. www.example.com) and securing the domain with SSL.
Part 1: Create the SSL Certificate
- Acquire SSL Certificate from SSL provider (these instructions are based on the Digicert SSL provider, but are roughly the same for everyone)
- On a computer with openssl installed, create the private key
- $ openssl genrsa 2048 > private-key.pem
- Create the csr for Digicert (fill in the appropriate fields when asked)
- openssl req -new -key private-key.pem -out csr.pem
- Country:
- State:
- City:
- Org name:
- OU:
- Common name: (the FQDN for the domain being secured with SSL)
- i.e. www.example.com
- Email address:
- Login to Digicert
- From reissue options, choose duplicate
- Copy the output of the csr.pem file into the CSR box
- Specify OTHER as the certificate output
- Enter the name of the subdomain(s) to secure at the bottom of the form
- Click process duplicate wildcard cert
- Refresh, and click download on the duplicate certificate created.
- Choose Other format, individual crts for the download format
- Combine the root and the domain certificate into one file
- i.e. $ cat star_foo_io.crt DigiCertCA.crt > ~/server.crt
Part 2: Creating a new Heroku app to host a meteor app
- Login to Heroku from the toolbelt (cli)
- $ heroku login
- Create meteor app using the meterorite custom buildpack
- $ heroku create foobar --buildpack https://github.com/oortcloud/heroku-buildpack-meteorite.git
- Install the SSL Endpoint add-on (beware, this is a $20/month charge)
- $ heroku addons:add ssl --app foobar
- Add the SSL certificate created above to your application
- $ heroku certs:add server.crt private-key.key --app foobar
- This command will output a new Heroku application url with SSL
- Add the custom domain to each Heroku application URL (derived from the previous step)
- Note: Heroku strongly suggests using sub domains instead of apex/root domains (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/avoiding-naked-domains-dns-arecords#naked-domain-arecord-limitations) for your application.
- Log into your DNS provider
- Add a new CNAME record for the Heroku application URL
- Add the custom domain to the Heroku app
- $ heroku domains:add www.example.com --app foobar
- Add MONGOHQ_URL and ROOT_URL config variables (aka environmental variables) to the Heroku app.
- The MONGOHQ_URL and and ROOT_URL environment variables are required to run a meteor app on top of node.js. The MONGOHQ_URL could reference any mongodb instance, this just happens to be the name used in the meteorite buildpack.
- $ heroku config:add MONGOHQ_URL= mongodb://<user>:<password>@some.mongo.com/foobar --app foobar
- $ heroku config:add ROOT_URL=https://www.example.com --app foobar
- Push your meteor code to the Heroku app's git repository, watch it build.
- Do a Snoopy dance.
- Bitcoin Bubbles, Bursts: After four years in the shadows, the crypto currency started grabbing headlines when its value rose from around $34 to $250 in a month, and then plummeted even faster, to around $100.
+Hoping to build a more stable, mainstream version of the digital currency, Andreesen HOrowitz-backed startup OpenCoin launched Ripple on Thursday
- Passthoughts vs Passwords: A team out of UC Berkley has built a device that scans the brainwaves associated with a specific thought to unlock protected items. Thoughts may be harder to hack than words, but are they easier to remember?
- The Imperius Curse, IRL: A new optogenetics device allows neuroscientists to wirelessly control mice behavior. Optogenetics is a method for genetically modifying neurons such that they can be activated or silenced with flashes of light.
- Google plans for your afterlife: Inactive Account Manager lets you tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die (or, apparently less likely, no longer wish to use your account). You can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube.
- Foursquare Raises $41 Million in Loans and
Convertible Debt
Thus escaping what some predicted would be an inevitable down round. How they aim to make good on their $600 million valuation: improved search and location-based ads.
- NYC: Tumblr kills Storyboard: The microblogging platform's first effort at journalism, or "marketing as journalism" came to an end after only a year. The general idea behind Storyboard was to create stories for partner publications (NYT, Daily Beast, Time) based on stuff happening on tumblr. Some of the stories were pretty great, but, as Hamish Mckenzie at Pandodaily notes, they "always had a whiff of marketing."
It’s sad for Tumblr’s hard-working editorial team that Storyboard has met an abrupt demise, but it might well be the consequence of a realization that platforms should stay away from doing their own editorial. That’s not their core competency, it’s not what their users turn to them for, and it ultimately can’t be seen as anything other than marketing in disguise.
- App of the week: Happier
Our second music video tribute to big data's best and brightest stars Hilary Mason. Along with being the Chief Scientist of Bitly (translation: she knows all about your clicks), Hilary is also: cofounder of HackNY, co-organizer of Data Gotham, author of fun social data hacks like Book Book -- Goose and One Random Tweet, lover of cats as speaking devices, and champion of programming for all (including the readers of Glamour).
In this mashup, Hilary makes the case for cozying up to your data. "At home, in your underwear, you're a total badass," she says. Preach it!
