Posts tagged Just
Programmatic Attribution Modeling – Don’t Just Measure, Execute
May 22nd
The goal behind an attribution model is to understand how all of your marketing touch-points fit together, showing you which dollars are working the hardest, and subsequently allowing you to make smarter decisions next time around. Sounds simple, right? Actually, it’s very far from simple, and is…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Tech Superhero Sergey Brin Just Showed Us How To Take A Selfie With Google Glass
May 15th
At the Moscone Center West, where Google’s been holding its annual I/O conference for developers, we’ve seen a fair number of people wearing Google Glass, the face-mounted display-and-camera gadget Google introduced last year.
The most prominent Glass-toter was Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who drew a crowd at an after-hours party for press attending the event. He first talked to reporters, then chatted up SlashGear writer Vincent Nguyen, also a Glass-wearer.
There’s A Right Way And A Wrong Way To Take A Selfie With Glass
Then Brin put his arm around Nguyen, drew him close and made an unusual gesture: He whipped off his Glass headset, spun it upside down, and clicked the camera button to take a photo of the pair.
“So you can take a selfie with Google Glass?” I asked Brin.
“The team debated this,” Brin told me. Some felt the camera should turn off when you take the headset off, to avoid accidental photos. But Brin felt Glass users should be able to take a self-portrait. Normally, wearing Glass, you can only take a photo of what you’re looking at.
Of course, with Glass off your head, you avoid the consumerist showiness of displaying the fact that you possess a $1,500 headset. But unlike those who snap fake Glass selfies in a mirror or with—gasp—the smartphones Glass is supposed to obviate, Glass owners who follow Brin’s prescribed whip-reach-and-click routine can rest assured that they’re doing it the right way.
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Google Just Launched A Grenade At Spotify — And It Just Might Work
May 15th
As predicted, Google unveiled its own all-you-can-stream music subscription service to compete with Spotify, Rdio, Deezer and MOG. It’s a crowded space with challenging economics, but if anybody is well-positioned to win this game, it’s Google.
Google Play Music All Access will offer on-demand access to millions of songs for $9.99 per month, which is the same as every other music subscription service’s premium tier. Unlike the existing market leaders, though, All Access won’t include a free tier of access, a fact originally reported by the New York Times.
All Access will include “millions” — Google didn’t say how many — of songs within 22 genres, a Google-powered recommendation engine, Pandora-style radio stations, editor-curated playlists and the ability to blend your own library with Google’s.
At first glance, it’s a pretty compelling offering. If you sign up before the end of June, it will cost $7.99 per month. And that’s just the first competitive advantage Google has over the incumbents.
Google Is Already A Streaming Music Giant
Spotify is virtually synonymous with streaming music, but it’s worth noting that Google is already plays a massive role in the discovery and consumption of music. These days, when teenagers want to hear a new song, they don’t turn on the radio or buy a CD. They go to YouTube.
That’s because the Internet’s biggest repository of videos also happens to host millions of songs, which are readily available to stream for free. It’s the world’s biggest accidental music streaming service.
With All Access, Google is making a far more official foray into the streaming music space, having recently signed licensing deals with all three major labels in the U.S. It’s not linked directly to YouTube and its massive repository of free music, but rumor has it that the video giant could get its own paid subscriptions for on-demand music. In the meantime, All Access is another attractive gateway into Google’s content ecosystem, which hosts a hell of a lot of music.
Google’s Biggest Advantage: Being Google
The only reason we’re talking about this new music service is because of who made it. By virtue of being a Google product, All Access has the potential for massive cross-promotion throughout Google’s array of popular Web services.
More important, All Access will be built directly into the world’s most popular mobile operating system. That’s where the magic of streaming music really lies: In our ability to take it with us. It’s why Spotify, Rdio and MOG all wager that the simple ability to access all that music on our phone is enough to convince people to shell out $10 per month. Spotify has done a decent job of proving that thesis by amassing 6 million paid subscribers at an impressive 25% conversion rate.
Of course, Spotify, like Rdio and the rest of its competitors, has to compete for users’ attention via app store rankings, social integrations and plain old marketing. All Access, by contrast will be much more front-and-center within the Android ecosystem. That’s huge.
Who Needs A Business Model?
Another advantage of being a Google product is that All Access won’t have quite as much pressure to make money. Spotify and Rdio will ultimately need to find a way to profitability (or get acquired by a giant), something that isn’t easy under the current economics of the streaming music business.
A company like Spotify will have to find a way to minimize its enormous music licensing costs, which are easily its biggest expense. Google’s entrance into this space might make that harder, since the company can afford to pay out huge sums without investors holding the profitability gun to its head.
Spotify and Rdio’s other biggest challenge is converting paid subscribers. The streaming model, the theory goes, will work much better when there are many millions of people paying for services like this.
So far, Spotify has done the best job of converting those free listeners to paying subscribers. But with a competitively price competing service now shipping on hundreds of millions of handsets, the incumbents may have to get much more creative about courting subscribers.
In a recent interview on WYNC’s On the Media, technology journalist Tim Carmody suggested that this might be how the streaming music business will work:
Probably the most likely thing that will happen is that someone, whether it’s an Apple or a Google or an Amazon or a Sony, comes along and essentially agrees that we’re gonna run music at a loss and we’re going to support it with these other businesses. How do you make money on the music business? Don’t make money on the music business. That’s the answer to that question.
That may well turn out to be true, but it’s probably not quite what Spotify, Rdio and their ilk had in mind.
All Access: Merge Your Library With Google’s
Last week, I wrote that as good as Spotify and Rdio both are, neither is perfect. Spotify’s user experience could be better, while Rdio doesn’t let its users upload or merge their own music. What I described as the ultimate streaming service would need to nail both design and music selection, at the very least. From the Google I/O stage, the All Access interface certainly looked nice, although I have yet to get my hands on it to try it out.
The second part of that equation — the ability merge one’s own library with a cloud-based repository of music – appears to be a feature that All Access subscribers will indeed enjoy. By launching alongside the Google Music cyberlocker first unveiled in 2011, All Access effectively allows users to blur the line between Google’s library of licensed music and their own collection of tunes.
One detail that was glossed over at Google I/O was exactly how wide of a selection All Access users will have. Rdio and Spotify both have about 20 million tracks in their libraries, which includes not just the major labels, but a partnership with indie label rights body Merlin and countless smaller labels. How many tracks does All Access have? The Google Music integration makes that question a little less crucial, but more casual listeners without hard drives full of MP3s will want to know when they’re eyeing up $10 music services.
Related Stories
- Why Google’s Rumored Spotify-Killer Makes Perfect Sense
- 6 Million People Pay For Spotify – Is That Good Enough?
- Next Round In The Google-Amazon Death Match: Streaming Music
- The Ultimate Streaming Music Service: Just Merge Rdio and Spotify
View full post on ReadWrite
The Ultimate Streaming Music Service: Just Merge Rdio And Spotify
May 10th
The unofficial leaders of the streaming-music market, Rdio and Spotify, are both awfully good services. But neither is close to perfect, which led me to wonder just how you’d create the ultimate online music service.
The answer isn’t hard: Just merge Spotify and Rdio. Alternatively, the two sites should just copiously steal features from one another. Or someone could found a new service that blends the best of both. Whatever. I want the best of both, and I want it now.
Allow me to explain. Almost two years ago, when Spotify finally launched in the U.S., I signed up. Within 48 hours, I had canceled my Rdio subscription and agreed to pay Spotify $10 per month to access its service on my phone, ad-free.
(See Also: How To Choose The Right Music Subscription Service)
But for the last few weeks, I’ve had the luxury of using a premium Rdio demo account, and I’ve gotta say: It’s sometimes tempting to switch back. As impressive as Spotify is, Rdio is much, much better designed. On the other hand, Spotify has a few excellent features Rdio lacks. (Both sites offer approximately the same amount of music, which is often available via high-quality 320 kbps streams.)
Frankly, I’m torn. But I’d rather not have to choose at all. I suspect many other music fans — whether they know it or not — feel the same way.
What Rdio Gets Right: Design and Music Management
When it comes to design, Rdio wins, hands down. Spotify’s apps aren’t terrible, but Rdio sports what feels like a cleaner, more minimalist design. The blue and white color scheme is more refreshing and it feels like the company put some thought into typography.
More importantly, Rdio organizes your music much, much better than Spotify does. It has long blown my mind that Spotify refuses to display your music library in a way that’s at all analogous to how you’d organize music in real life. There’s no collection. There is no “Albums” tab. It’s just playlists, starred tracks and search. If I find a new album I want to routinely listen to, I have to star the whole thing or add it as a playlist. It’s bizarre.
By contrast, Rdio lets me easily add albums to what is intuitively labeled my “Collection,” which is organized by artist. To anybody who’s ever used an iPod, scrolling through a list of artists is an familiar, almost expected interface. Spotify users, for whatever reason, don’t have this simple luxury.
Rdio’s built-in music discovery is also superior. The “Heavy Rotation” tab recommends music to me based on what I listen to and who I follow on Rdio. Depending on those two details (especially who one chooses to follow), the suggestions can actually be pretty spot-on. I don’t know what powers the “Recommended Albums” carousel in Spotify’s “What’s New” tab, but the fact that it thinks I’d enjoy Kelly Clarkson’s new album suggests it’s not paying very much attention.
What Spotify Gets Right: Add-On Apps & Infinite Music
What Spotify lacks in native recommendation features it makes up for via third party add-ons available through its built-in app platform. Spotify might not be aware of what I actually like, but Last.fm is — and its Spotify app is a mere click away. If I want music to match my mood, there’s MoodAgent, which builds playlists based on things like tempo and the emotional qualities of a given song.
For less robotic, more human-curated recommendations, there are apps like Hype Machine and Shuffler.fm, both of which corral the best new stuff from influential music blogs, broken down by genre. Then there are good, old-fashioned hand-picked recommendations from individual critics via the Rolling Stone, Guardian, Pitchfork or NME apps.
Spotify’s third party app platform is by far its most promising feature, aside from the music itself. Realizing that it can’t build the end-all, be-all music service for every listener, Spotify has smartly opened up its platform to developers, who can use HTML5 and related Web technologies to build applications that plug into Spotify’s vast music library.
These add-ons have yet to find their way into Spotify’s mobile apps, but they continue to push the desktop experience forward in a way that makes it hard to break the Spotify habit.
And Another Spotify Win: Imports
The other chief advantage Spotify offers — and that Rdio and others should just steal outright — is the ability to import your own MP3 collection into the service. This is a huge perk.
No matter how many licensing deals these companies strike, their music libraries are never going to include everything. There will always be big-name holdouts like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, not to mention a score of smaller, independent artists who either haven’t done the leg work to get their music onto streaming services or simply don’t want to.
Allowing users to effectively merge their personal music collections with Spotify’s music library makes for an experience that feels more comprehensive and focused. As more of our music consumption moves online, the listening experience inevitably becomes fractured across sites and apps. We might not be able to avoid this entirely, but Spotify’s integrated approach makes it easier to at least minimize the problem.
There are, as always, technical limitations to implementing this feature. Since Spotify primarily exists as a desktop app, it can easily scan your hard drive for music tracks and index them, iTunes-style. The alternative would be to allow users to upload their tracks directly to the service, a la Google Music and the Amazon Cloud Player.
Waiting for thousands of songs to upload doesn’t present the most compelling user experience, but it is one possible technical solution. For the most part, Spotify’s local indexing approach works pretty well.
Rdio has desktop apps, but they’re more or less a clone of its Web interface without much extra functionality tacked on. If Rdio were to include the ability to import and manage music, I’d be that much closer to ditching Spotify. The desktop app is also a crucial component to syncing local MP3s to users’ phones and tablets, another feature unique to Spotify in the U.S. (Deezer does this, too).
Toward The Ultimate Streaming Service
Music is a pretty personal thing. If these companies want us to shift our listening habits into their respective clouds, they need to be particularly sensitive to what works for users. I’ve presented one framework here. Perhaps you have your own ideas, which I encourage you to leave in the comments. A flawlessly-designed, super-comprehensive, extensible and flexible music subscription service would be well worth the money.
It’s a little frustrating, because Spotify and Rdio collectively have most of the pieces required to build the ultimate streaming service. It’s almost as if the two could merge and we’d be set. It’d be unlikely, but if this new hybrid music dream service could steal a page from Tomahawk’s playbook and integrate additional music sources like SoundCloud and YouTube, it’d be even better.
Whether or not Rdio, Spotify or any of its current direct competitors deliver this mythical dream service, somebody will. The music subscription space is going to heat up substantially this year, as Google and Amazon are both rumored to be entering this market. Meanwhile, MOG will be reborn as Daisy and Deezer is expected to launch in the U.S.
We already have a few very awesome, yet imperfect music subscription services. As the space gets more crowded, there exists a real opportunity to launch something truly, thoroughly compelling. Who will it be?
Lead photo by Alexandre Normand
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Adobe Just Killed Your Ability To Pirate Photoshop
May 6th
Well, it was fun while it lasted. Countless students, artists and overall cheapskates who have long enjoyed using Adobe’s Creative Suite software without paying for it will soon have to pony up. Adobe is formally moving the latest versions of Photoshop and related design and production software to the cloud — specifically, to Adobe’s newly dubbed “Creative Cloud” — where they will only be available via monthly subscription.
It’s a smart business move for Adobe, who stands to receive a steady stream of revenue from customers who otherwise might take their sweet time shelling out several hundred greenbacks for each major upgrade. Instead, those folks can just dole out $50 per month for access to the entire collection of Adobe software, which is all tied together with the company’s cloud-based storage and offers other Web-based features.
With this move, the software we still fire up our laptops to use makes a significant shift toward a cloud-based, mobile world. Makes sense.
Uncracking The Creative Suite
Switching to a subscription model also makes it much harder to pirate the software. This is something Adobe has struggled with for a long time, routinely coming up with new ways to verify the authenticity of new installs.
Of course, each new form of copy protection also triggered a workaround from hackers who would crack the software and then make it available on file-sharing sites. The latest version of the Creative Suite Master Collection, for instance, can easily be torrented and, using easy-to-follow instructions, cracked to feign authenticity and block Adobe’s servers from discovering that you did not in fact pay $1,300 for it.
Pirating Adobe’s software — especially Photoshop — has become very common among consumers who can’t or won’t pay several hundred dollars for it, but who nonetheless rely on its state-of-the-art image editing features for school, work or personal projects. Older versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and the rest of the Creative Suite will still be available from Adobe — as well as the Pirate Bay — for some time to come.
But from now on, Adobe’s product development will thrive behind a subscription paywall. Using Adobe CS6 will be sufficient for quite a while, but eventually anybody wanting to take advantage of the latest and greatest in photo-editing, Web design and other creative production will have to pay up.
An Opportunity For Competitors — And Consumers
For those not willing to subscribe to Creative Cloud, there’s a growing list of alternatives. Nobody offers a suite quite as robust as Adobe’s, which handles photos, graphic design, print layouts, Web development, video editing, animation and more. But for each of the creative needs that Adobe meets, there are other offerings.
The most sought-after alternatives will likely be to Photoshop. Again, the original CS6-and-earlier versions of Adobe’s apps will still work. But if one ever tires of the feature set and wants to try a product that continues to evolve, desktop apps like Pixelmator and Inkscape are pretty impressive. For basic photo-editing, tablet-based apps like PhotoGene, Photoshop Touch and Apple’s iPhoto for iPad are all surprisingly capable.
For each app in the suite, there’s a different list of competitors. There’s Final Cut Pro for video, Maya for animation and um, actually learning to code for Dreamweaver.
Perhaps most important, Adobe’s shift to a subscription model presents new opportunities for other companies and developers to build new capable, competitively-priced alternatives. As for the software-crackers, we have no doubt that they’ll be busy trying to find ways to trick Adobe’s new system.
View full post on ReadWrite
Relax, The Search Industry Is Doing Just Fine
May 2nd
For enterprise SEM practitioners looking to set budgets or otherwise anticipate their needs in the space for the months and years ahead, it’s been a particularly difficult time to get a read on how the industry is really trending. Conflicting data and opinions abound; new threats to the…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
No Boys Allowed: Four Coding Schools Just For Girls
Apr 30th
Programming has always been a bit of a boy’s club. Now four startups are turning the tables.
As the coding education bubble swells, there’s room for some companies to target more specific audiences, including women exclusively. Fifty percent of the female population isn’t exactly a niche group, but it’s not a frequently targeted market in the technology industry, either.
Even in the year 2013, we seem stuck on the stereotype of the typical “brogrammer.” Women and girls have always been some of technology’s most influential users (remember who fueled the rapid rise of Pinterest, anyone?) but they’re woefully underrepresented in professional tech jobs.
Directed at women and girls of varying ages, each school on the list has a secondary motive of expanding the coding population beyond the stereotypical “brogrammer.” Check them out:
Girl Develop It
Readwrite first covered this startup back in 2010 when it was called Girl Develop IT. (See what they did there?) Two years later, it’s still going strong. This woman-only school now has chapters in 16 cities in America, Canada and Australia.
Founder Sara Chipps thinks the best way to shrink the tech job gender gap is to give women the resources to become “rockstar programmers” in a space where they feel comfortable. Girl Develop It classes are casual and low cost forays into coding.
Black Girls Code
Only one percent of technology startups are founded by African Americans, much less African American women. Founder Kimberly Bryant often finds herself to be the only black woman at tech events, and didn’t want the same life for her tech-savvy teenage daughter, Kai. So she founded a school where young black girls could learn to code surrounded by their peers.
Black Girls Code targets girls of color aged seven to 17. Originally founded in San Francisco last July, this nonprofit now offers courses in seven American cities thanks to the help of several hundred volunteers.
Girls Who Code
Part of the gender gap in programming is a mental one. Reshma Saujani founded Girls Who Code not just to teach girls 13 to 17 how to code, but to convince them that it’s possible.
“At age 13 or 14 there is something that happens that makes girls think coding or engineering is not for them,” she told ReadWrite last year. “Part of our mission is pushing girls to go into these technical fields and overcome their aversion to risk.”
The startup is about to begin its second summer program, this year available in five cities.
Girls Learning Code/Ladies Learning Code
Whether an aspiring female programmer is nine or 49, this Toronto-based nonprofit has a program for her. Ladies Learning Code invites women (and the occasional man) to collaborate on learning technical skills. All courses are currently at the introductory level in a variety of programming languages.
The more recently launched Girls Learning Code program is, in its own words, “less about ‘code’ and more about changing the world.” Girls from nine to 13 are encouraged to explore programming as a means for exploring their creativity and get comfortable with computers.
Thanks to its wide age range, perhaps the nonprofit’s most unique program is a mother-daughter hack day. How’s that for a tech-forward Mother’s Day activity?
Photo courtesy of Girls Who Code
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Learning To Code: Get A Degree, Or Just Teach Yourself? [Infographic]
Apr 26th
Say you’re interested in learning to code. Should you go back to school and pick up a formal diploma? Or just teach yourself (perhaps with some help from the Internet) in your spare time at home?
Catalin Zorzini, the founder of Web design resource site Inspired Mag, was wondering just that, so he built an infographic on the subject. “Some readers are confused by the relevance of attending university in a time where technology information is not locked within the university walls anymore,” he told me.
(See also: There’s A Boom In Teaching People To Code)
After two weeks worth of extensive research, however, Zorzini said it’s not about one type of education being superior. “The challenge is to be able to match the right type of course with the right student mindset,” he said.
Zorzini’s finished infographic, based on information from editorials, universities curriculums, reviews, and even the opinions of practicing Web designers, won’t tell you which method is “best.” But it may help you figure out which method would be best for you. Check it out below:
Photo by Joseph McKinley
View full post on ReadWrite
Learning To Code: Just Teach Yourself, Or Get A Degree? [Infographic]
Apr 26th
Say you’re interested in learning to code. Should you go back to school and pick up a formal diploma? Or just teach yourself (perhaps with some help from the Internet) in your spare time at home?
Catalin Zorzini, the founder of Web design resource site Inspired Mag, was wondering just that, so he built an infographic on the subject. “Some readers are confused by the relevance of attending university in a time where technology information is not locked within the university walls anymore,” he told me.
(See also: There’s A Boom In Teaching People To Code)
After two weeks worth of extensive research, however, Zorzini said it’s not about one type of education being superior. “The challenge is to be able to match the right type of course with the right student mindset,” he said.
Zorzini’s finished infographic, based on information from editorials, universities curriculums, reviews, and even the opinions of practicing Web designers, won’t tell you which method is “best.” But it may help you figure out which method would be best for you. Check it out below:
View full post on ReadWrite
Why Facebook Just Bought Parse, A Toolkit Loved By Mobile-App Developers
Apr 25th
Facebook has just acquired Parse, a popular suite of tools for mobile and Web app developers. The acquisition will serve Facebook’s mobile mission well, encouraging developers to build apps tied into the social network while easing the barriers to entry.
Already, Parse has attracted interest from familiar names like Sesame Workshop, which makes a Cookie Monster app, and Carnival Cruises, which used Parse’s cross-platform tools to build its Ship Mate app.
The acquisition suggests that Facebook wants brands like these to go beyond building Facebook pages and running ads to creating mobile experiences which generate activity on Facebook users’ profiles and news feeds.
With this buy, rumored to be worth around $85 million, Facebook dives headlong into the nascent game of providing the technical underpinnings for apps, also known as the back end. Parse’s peers in this emerging mini-industry are companies like Stackmob, Kinvey, and Cocoafish, the latter of which Appcelerator acquired last year.
Parse has an enthusiastic community of developers—and for good reason. The developer platform subtracts some of the nastier requirements of building apps, like server maintenance—ick! Instead, it lets app builders concentrate their energy around what matters – namely, developing an awesome user interface, or front end.
We spoke with former Hipmunk mobile developer and user-experience guru Danilo Campos about what the acquisition means for developers loyal to Parse.
“I hope the incentives are aligned such that Facebook wins when developers win,” Campos said. “It’s easy to get antsy when a [big company] buys up a gem. But I think Parse’s leadership is damn smart and if anything can navigate these waters for the best outcome, it’s them.”
Facebook refused to comment on the deal’s terms beyond saying that “this is an acquisition – not a talent deal.” Facebook has bought some design- and mobile-oriented companies primarily to hire their talent while abandoning their products. That’s not the case here: Parse and Facebook says current products will be supported.
According to Facebook’s blog:
Today, we’re making it even easier to build mobile apps with Facebook Platform by by announcing that we have entered into an agreement to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform that provides scalable cross-platform services and tools for developers. By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices.
It remains to be seen if Parse, under Facebook’s wing, will maintain or extend support for competing social platforms like Twitter. Still, Facebook didn’t seem keen on messing with the Parse’s existing well-loved products and services.
View full post on ReadWrite
