Posts tagged Between
Fixing The Agency Disconnect Between Search & Display Buyers
Dec 21st
It is my sincere hope that at some point during the holiday season, the people who work on search at various digital agencies have had an opportunity to meet the people who work on display ads. Because the likelihood is, whether it was at the company holiday party or even over fruitcake and eggnog…
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Nerf Guns Hold the Line Between Startups and Corporatocracy
Dec 9th
Growing up on the coast Maine we would do all sorts of things to pass the time. In back of our house was a small stream with steep banks surrounded by a forest that ran from the tidal sections of the Royal River to the Cousins River. We called it The Creak. By the time we were about 10 years old or so, The Creak had become an epic battle ground for the neighborhood kids, would-be commandos yielding sophisticated weapons chasing each other through the mud and sticks. It would be my introduction to the Great Nerf Wars.
I had mostly forgotten about the simple joys of Nerf guns. That was until I started covering technology and spending time at the offices of local startups. There is a theme that permeates the startup ecosystem from coast-to-coast – the Nerf gun is king. We decided to take a deep look into this phenomenon to answer the basic question: Why are startups obsessed with Nerf? So, we went to go pick a fight.
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The destination: TechStars Boston and DogPatch Labs at One Cambridge Center in the heart of MIT. The incubator, I had heard, boasted a healthy artillery of Nerf weapons. It is also the best place in Boston to find a bunch of stressed out startups in one place looking to blow off some steam.
Note the Advil.
There were a variety of answers to the question of why startups like Nerf.
“So we get to take up all of our pent up aggression on each other without killing each other,” said one of the co-founders of Kinvey, a mobile cloud “backend-as-a-service” startup that just partnered with Urban Airship.
“We were a bunch of geeks growing up and because our mother’s wouldn’t let us play with them when we were younger,” said the Ginger.io team, a startup working on behavioral health analytics through smartphone data.
“Stress release, you can hit someone and not hurt them,” said team members of PromoBoxx, a retail promotion platform startup.
“We all grew up with Mom saying no ball in the house,” added a Kinvey team member. “Now we have no Mom.”
The Angry Bird is going to get it!
Less than a mile away lay the offices of SCVNGR, where founder Seth Priebatsch describes himself as “chief ninja and Nerf artillery acquirer.” Priebatsch said he once Nerf ambushed venture capitalist Peter Bell from Highland Capital with his entire team.
That is an interesting way to go about getting funding.
“Startups like Nerf because it keeps productivity high. Not because it’s fun (though they are) but because they’re effective,” Priebatsch said. “Meeting running too long? Nerf gun to the face. Fill out expense reports? Nerf gun to the face. Build a great product? Ok… nerf guns down. A copious supply of Nerf guns are the only thing standing between startup culture and sigma-six certified corporatocracy.”
Am I stalking my prey, or trying to get out of the camera frame? (OK, I was trying to get out of the camera frame.)
Back at TechStars, the weapons were assembled. TechStars and DogPatch do not have a variety of artillery. Rather, they lots of the same gun (pictured above) and they can be found in every nook and cranny on the sixth floor of One Cambridge Center.
Word was spread that a Nerf battle was to take place. It did not take long for the forces to assemble. They came willingly and quickly. It was a surprise how easy it was to pull more than a dozen people away from their desks for a Nerf fight at a moments notice.
Carnage ensued.
At the end, when the stricken went back to their desks and the victors picked up the mass of little foam darts, a valuable lesson was clear. Startups are often made up of young, brilliant geeks that face enormous pressure to create companies out of nothing. They have clients, venture capitalists and the media to answer to on a daily basis. Idiosyncrasies evolve. Having Nerf guns around is a quirk that helps relieve the tension, causes a chuckle and ultimately does not damage. It is the same reason you see Ping Pong tables or dart boards.
Nerf may predominate, but there are a ton of other ways that startups blow of steam. How does your team do it? Let us know in the comments.
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The Industry Speaks On The Overlap Between Search & Display
Nov 9th
We talk a lot in the digital industry about the overlap between search media and display media, and how when planned and operated in unison, there is a 1+1=3 benefit model that magically appears, resulting in higher returns than could be generated by those channels on their own. But does this…
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Bridge the Gap Between Live TV and Web Video With Boxee’s Next Update
Nov 9th
You might call me a cable cord cutter, except that I never subscribed to a pay TV service in the first place. Instead, my HDTV set is hooked up to a Boxee Box, with a MacBook waiting in the wings in case any Web TV content isn’t available via Boxee.
Yet every now and then, even the most ardent cord cutter still has a need to tune in to something in real-time. It could be a sporting event or a local news broadcast. For me, it’s the fact that members of my family are being featured on the current season of PBS’s This Old House, something I like to check out when each episode first airs. Soon, I’ll be able to watch those broadcasts without leaving Boxee.
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When its next software update drops, owners of Boxee’s set-top box will be able to view over-the-air broadcast content from the device itself, according to GigaOm. An advance build of the next version of Boxee’s software reveals that the device will feature a new “Live TV” menu option, from which one can view local broadcast channels. If you do subscribe to cable or another pay TV service, that content can be viewed through the same UI as well.
The new feature is enabled by a USB dongle that will plug into the back of the Boxee Box. The company has not announced when the dongle or the software upgrade will be available.
When it arrives, it will help bridge the gap between live TV and Web video content in a way that may make devices like the Boxee Box a bit more attractive to the average consumer.
With this move, Boxee follows in the footsteps of Google TV, which already integrates with broadcast TV. Google’s set-top box software recently saw a major update designed to reverse the product’s initial failure to catch on with consumers. For its part, Apple is reportedly building its own HDTV set, something the late Steve Jobs saw as a major next frontier for the company.
Rather than killing off traditional TV, Web-based premium video services and set-top box software are better positioned to supplement it. Web TV is going to need to peacefully co-exist with its legacy media counterparts, at least for the time being. Updates like this are a step in that direction.
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Google Plus Finds Sweet Spot Between Facebook & Twitter
Oct 27th
Google Plus got a few more fun features today in addition to workplace ones. There’s a new feature called What’s Hot that surfaces popular posts (don’t call them “trending”), and a very cool visualization tool called Ripples that lets you watch Plus conversations flow out across the network. These are neat ways to track social activity that Facebook and Twitter don’t offer.
Google Plus is very proud of its photo features, especially the instant uploads from Android phones, and today’s Plus update also adds new photo editing tools called Creative Kit. It has basic editing tools as well as filters like everybody has these days.
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What’s Hot On Google Plus
What’s Hot appears underneath new posts inside the main stream as well as in the Sparks area on the left sidebar. It’s a new way to discover content on Plus that makes a nice algorithmic complement to the right-now real-time search tool. Discovery on Plus is now nicely positioned between the ways Facebook and Twitter work.
Ripples: Watch Sharing Happen
Ripples is a sexy feature that lets you visually follow the flow of a conversation. It even incorporates some analytics. That’s much more data than other social networks give casual users about their posts. Very Google-y. Visual representations of data are catching on at the Googleplex. The Google Analytics team also recently introduced a flow visualization tool.
Creative Kit for Photos
Google touts 3.4 billion photo uploads as its favorite metric of the success of Plus. When Android users (who have turned on Google Plus) take a photo, it uploads automatically, so that’s sort of cheating. The photos are kept private until a user decides to share them on Plus, which then makes them visible instantly. If Google talked about how many photos were shared, then we’d have a real sense.
Today’s update gives Plus users some tools to spruce up their photos, which may increase sharing as users get more excited about photos. Trendy filters and Halloween gimmicks aside, Plus users can do much more with photos now.
The editing tools are desktop-only for now, but I’d put money on them coming to mobile apps soon.
What do you think of these new Google Plus features?
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Bit.ly Sees The Private Gap Between What You Click and What You Share
Oct 19th
At today’s Web 2.0 conference, Bit.ly Chief Scientist Hilary Mason reminded us that what we share is only a part of what we’re clicking. Her talk delved into the difference between the links we’re sharing versus the links we’re just clicking and most likely reading, and also took a look at the ways topics are discussed differently based on geography. The real focus of the talk was centered on what happens between identity and privacy, that space where the secrets of our subconscious come out.
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Using word clouds, Mason looked at how pizza was discussed in New York, where slice was the biggest keyword, in Rome where it’s all about the cheese and San Francisco, which is far more artichoke-focused. If we can see how people are feeling about pizza based on their geographical location, that’s just the beginning.
Take a politician for example: Discussions about Herman Cain varied depending on geography, too. In the midwest, more people were talking specifically about his 9-9-9 plan, whereas Floridians were listening to Bill O’Reilly and South Carolina was mostly paying attention mostly to how Cain was leading in that state’s polls. This data map shows some of the top headlines by state.
In another example, Mason looked at Bit.ly links from Tunisia over the past year, where a revolution occurred in January 2011. “The way people consume social media changes as their government changes,” said Mason. “Human activity is reflected by something so simple as the number of people clicking links.”
What Does This Mean for Privacy?
What you share is your identity, and what you read is your privacy. There’s a space in-between, and that’s what Mason is most interested in. Yesterday, 80 million links were fed into bit.ly, and 27% of those were from the U.S. She breaks it down by the top shared posts from yesterday, which include a Fast Company story about the great tech war of 2012, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle noses, a press release about free RIM stuff and a news article about the oldest marathon runner.
What do these all have in common? They make us go “wow,” or satisfy our entitlement to free stuff from tech companies who we feel like have screwed us over. We share those stories with our fellow man, who we believe probably feel the same way. We receive more shares, likes and clicks, and we feel better.
The top most-clicked stories from yesterday look at lot different. They probe our inner thoughts – they are our private lives, the parts we don’t share publicly. They are a story called “Know Your Neighbor: He’s Racist,” an animated boob GIF on Tumblr and a story about Hilary Duff revealing if her baby is a boy or a girl. Racism, oddly sexual imagery and ambiguous gender – is that what we’re all really thinking about? According to bit.ly, the answer is yes.
“We need better tools to curate, search and analyze in order to consciously curate the things we keep private and the things we share,” said Mason. But don’t be fooled – bit.ly isn’t trying to help you, persay – they are just trying to “build products that help people express themselves in the way they want to express themselves,” said Mason.
We might want to appear like Superman, but we’re really all a bunch of Clark Kents, right? What if we’re a little bit of both? And if we are, why shouldn’t our identity reflect that?
Images courtesy @hmason.
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The Relationship Between Enterprise SEO & PPC: SMX East Recap – Search Engine Land
Sep 26th
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The Relationship Between Enterprise SEO & PPC: SMX East Recap
Search Engine Land SEO & PPC – Why Can't We All Just Get Along? The following day, I was on this panel, which turned out to be lots of fun. First of all, this is a topic I could discuss for hours (not that anyone would want that). Second, I was sitting alongside Tim … |
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The Relationship Between Enterprise SEO & PPC: SMX East Recap
Sep 26th
During a whirlwind stay at SMX East, I had the enviable opportunity to speak at length about two of my all-time favorite topics: Enterprise PPC, and the relationship between paid and organic search. Enterprise PPC It was interesting to get some very different takes on Industrial Strength SEM from…
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New Chrome Blurs The Line Between Web and Native Apps
Sep 16th
Google just shipped a new stable release of the Chrome browser that includes two new technologies: Native Client, which allows execution of C and C++ code within the browser, and the Web Audio API, which brings advanced audio capabilities to JavaScript. These features were released in the beta channel in August.
The update also contains some long-awaited improvements for users of Mac OS X Lion, which did not get along well with Chrome previously. In addition to fixing “many crash bugs” and adding “some all-around visual polish,” this release adds Lion’s new scrollbars and support for its full-screen mode.
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Native Client, which was released in the beta channel in August, now allows all Chrome users to run applications written in C and C++ securely inside the browser, blurring the line between native and Web applications. Currently, Native Client only supports Chrome Web Store apps, but Google says it is “working to remove this limitation as soon as possible. Google also plans to make Native Client available as a plug-in for other browsers.
Check out what Native Client can do:
The new release also opens the Web Audio API, which enables Web developers to build in cool audio effects instead of just playing back simple sound files. Google provides some examples of the kinds of cool audio effects made possible by this API, and they’re worth a listen. (Note: you’ll need a browser that supports the Web Audio API, so try it in an updated copy of Chrome.)
This Chrome release expands the realm of possibility for browser-based applications. Now that native-level code can run in the browser, where is the line between “Web apps” and “native apps” in the desktop environment?
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Apple’s iMessage Will Work With iChat, Bridging the Gap Between Text and IM
Sep 14th
When Steve Jobs unveiled iMessage, Apple’s new cross-device mobile messaging feature, at the WWDC in June, fans of the company’s products were excited to see a potential “SMS killer” coming down the pike. What the company’s then-CEO failed to mention is that the service will work with their iChat desktop client as well.
iMessage, which will be rolled out to iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch users when iOS drops this Fall, will apparently be available to users of OS X Lion via the iChat application, according to Mac Rumors.
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A developer noticed two new properties in the source code for the iChat framework that are only supported in iMessage and have to do with the timestamps of sent messages. The evidence is not particularly overwhelming, but the move would make sense. Apple has plugged the gap between iOS and Mac OS X with other services, including Facetime video chat. Enabling people to use iMessage from iChat would take Apple’s purported “SMS killer” and extend its functionality all the way to the desktop, making it that much more attractive to users.
Sending and receiving SMS messages has long been a source both of revenue for mobile carriers and pain for consumers, who tend to pay fees for texting that are disproportionate to the size of the data being sent.
Although it’s not clear exactly when the feature will be rolled out to desktops, it will arrive for mobile and tablet users as part of the next version of iOS due to roll out in a matter of weeks. Other sought-after features in iOS 5 will include a new notifications system, wireless syncing of content and data across devices, deep Twitter integration and a native to-do list management app.
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