Posts tagged learning
Q&A: Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley on What He’s Learning From Twitter and What’s Next
Feb 8th
Foursquare, about to celebrate its third birthday, is big but not huge. It has signed up 15 million users, hired over 100 employees and now boasts several million check-ins per day. That is impressive work for three years, but it must keep growing.
To do so, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley says the company is in the process of redesigning its mobile app for a broader audience, disassembling it and trying to put its features back together in a way that’s more useful and interesting. It has also launched new features on its Web site, such as the neat and powerful “Explore” tool, which can help you find cool places to visit in your neighborhood or in an entirely new city.
As Twitter realized a few years ago, Crowley says Foursquare is seeing a big chunk of its growth from people who want to use parts of Foursquare, but not necessarily broadcast to the world. That means building a service that’s useful to more casual users, and not just early Foursquare diehards.
I recently sat down with Crowley at the company’s brand new, roomy headquarters in New York City, for an idea of what’s next. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our chat.
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ReadWriteWeb: Where is Foursquare right now?
Dennis Crowley: I think we’re starting to get to the point where people are starting to see where the product is going and where the vision is going. The most exciting stuff for me to watch is all these people who have been Foursquare users for a year or so, writing their own blog posts and tweeting their own stuff about “oh, now I get it.”
After we launched Explore on the Web, they’re like, “This isn’t about points and badges anymore. This is about using the data that Foursquare’s getting from check-ins in order to do all this interesting stuff about surfacing things that are nearby, things that I might like, places I should go, experiences that I should have.” That’s been our goal all along.
One of the big tasks that we have this year is getting people to think of the product more as something that’s all about discovery and introducing them to new places, and making their experience in new cities and unfamiliar neighborhoods easier for them. As opposed to just checking in to unlock points and badges. I think we’re still stuck with a little bit of that stereotype, and this year’s about us getting out of that.
Foursquare’s new Web-based “Explore” feature.
How do you get past that stereotype and grow?
The challenge isn’t really that dissimilar than some of the growing pains and hazing that Twitter went through. For a long time, Twitter was “oh, it’s just people tweeting what they had for lunch, or that they’re going to the movies.” That wasn’t interesting for a lot of people.
Then they hit a moment that was a little bit of critical mass and a little bit of clarity, where people started using it to break news and share headlines and spread information. And that’s when it started clicking for a lot of people. For me, I was always interested in it, but when the plane landed in the Hudson and that’s how you were learning stuff faster than CNN was breaking it, or when Michael Jackson died, those were the big moments that I think solidified Twitter’s importance for a lot of people.
For us, we’re starting to get to that point where people see that we’re more than just a standard check-in app. You can go into Foursquare any time of the day and it will recommend interesting things that are nearby. So it’s not analogous – it’s not exactly the same as the Twitter experience. But we have that problem of perception that we’re still working to overcome.
I look at what those guys went through, and if you just keep pushing at the vision long enough, it will eventually turn itself around or make itself clear to people. That’s why, looking at those blog posts, it’s really rewarding for me, because I can see that the change is already happening already.
What will you change?
There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done in the app. We’re in the process of going through a redesign in the app, in a sense. We’re basically taking all the stuff we built over the last two years or so, disassembling it… You put all the pieces on the table, and figure out, “Okay, what is the best way to put these pieces back together so that it tells the story of Foursquare in the way that we want it to be told?” And I think if we can do that properly, then that’s our ticket to really being able to effectively communicate how powerful the data is and how powerful a lot of the tools are.
A peek at Foursquare’s brand-new, sunny headquarters in New York
What about making money? Will we start to see more advertising-based content in streams?
It’s a project for the near term. That’s a lot of what the Amex stuff is. (Foursquare has a broad partnership with American Express.) It’s experimenting with merchants to figure out a way that we can put products that are monetizable into the Foursquare product, in a way that you don’t look at it and say, “I can’t believe Foursquare put advertising in the stream.” You say, “this is great, there’s a $10 discount here.”
Since 2009, we’ve been pushing different ways to get merchants involved in the conversation with users. If users are looking for places to go, put merchants in there to help entice them. We did it initially with mayor specials, we’re starting to do it now with the Amex stuff, and we’ll be continuing to push that.
Our belief has always been, in order to connect people to places, and places to people, there’s a way to insert a dialogue with a merchant that in a way doesn’t feel like advertising, because the users are getting some tangible benefit out of it. It can be just special treatment, like you get to cut the line. It could be that you save a couple bucks. It could be that when you bring your friends, you get something special. There’s a whole wide variety of it. It’s just rewarding the user for things that they’d be doing anyway with Foursquare.
This is a bit out-there, but Netflix has built up a huge advantage for its streaming movie service by getting it installed everywhere, from new TVs to videogame systems. Can you use that concept for Foursquare, in a car perhaps?
Yeah, why not? I think anywhere where you see maps. Any map should have Foursquare dots on them. The dots could be representative of a number of things. It could be where your friends are right now. Or once you put your car in park, these are the five things you should be doing in this neighborhood.
And you could see a world where it’s like, here’s five things that I’m looking at, and I instantly send them to my phone, and then as I’m walking around, Radar (a serendipity-manufacturing Foursquare feature) buzzes me to let me know about them. When you think of all the other places that you’d probably encounter maps, being able to put Foursquare dots on them is a really interesting thing for us.
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Rich Snippets & Learning To Love Not Being #1
Jan 17th
#1 rankings have a hallowed place in the minds of most SEOs. Many of us use #1 rankings as bragging rights (I’m guilty) or as one of the key metrics for campaign success (guilty again). But long-term trends in the way search engines rank pages and display results are both changing that. Now,…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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The Robot Takeover of Work & the Rise of Online Learning
Dec 27th
Tools provide leverage for people to get work done; in many cases they enable us to do new kinds of work. Now consider robots in the workplace. They seem like bad news but do they have to be? What if robots weren’t a threat to humanity, only intended to steal human jobs, but were tools that enabled all of us to do new things and live life differently? We may need to start seeing things that way, for our own sake.
The iPhone and iPad tablet manufacturer Foxconn employs more than 1 million human beings around the world. (They produce other electronics as well.) The company said last month that it plans to cut that number in half with the enlistment of 1 million new robot workers, a 100X increase in its robot workforce, over the next 3 to 5 years. “An empire of robots,” the company says. Human workers? They will move up the value chain, the company says. How might that actually happen? People say that education is undervalued, what if robots saved us from that?
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This Might be Bad News
A cynical, apocalyptic view of that plan to build “an empire of robots” is easy to imagine. If Foxconn builds 1 million robot workers, that will likely double the number of robot workers on the planet today. I want to consider a potential upside to all this; with regard to human freedom, creativity and opportunities for innovation in learning systems and technology.
But the robotization of the workforce does have clear risks. Enterprise 2.0 forefather Andrew McAfee is the co-author of a new book called Race Against the Machine. He put it this way in an interview with Steven Cherry at IEEE Spectrum earlier this month:
..it is possible for some people to be left behind, even as productivity surges ahead and even as our society as a whole benefits. There is no economic law that says that everyone has to share in those benefits equally, and when we looked around we started to see a lot of people–and particularly a lot of workers in the economy, people who wanted to offer their labor to the economy–we saw a lot of people being left behind as the machine races ahead.
McAffee is concerned that this could lead to a violation of the social contract and widespread social unrest. On some level, this definitely makes sense. The situation may be vastly understated and need of more human compassion. McAfee:
“…the social contract has been something like, If you are willing to work, there will be a job waiting for you. And we’ve done a fairly good job with that social contract, not a perfect job obviously, but pretty good. When I hear a lot of the protesters talk, I get the impression that they believe that social contract is fraying. When we looked at the data, we came to the same conclusion.
What does that mean in an era where there is less and less demand for unskilled labor, though?
Maybe We Can Make Some Great Lemonade
Whether due to robots or due to an increasingly competitive and complex world, it seems apparent that there is a growing imperative for human workers to move up the value chain – to develop and more widely distribute the skills to perform more skilled, creative work.
53% of US manufacturing firms believe that their human workers lack the skills and work ethic to do high performance work.
A survey this year of US manufacturers by The Manufacturing Performance Institute found that 53% of US manufacturing firms believe that their human workers lack the skills and work ethic to do high performance work.
That’s not good news for humans.
Parents have been telling their children for years now that computers are going to change the world and young people need to develop skills to offer in the marketplace.
It may soon come to the point, if it hasn’t already, where the supply of and demand for skilled labor become imbalanced enough that the market value of skill building shoots through the roof.
Human Capital Acquisition and Management, otherwise known as training people and keeping track of the skills available in your organization, is an increasingly potent field.
I can’t stop thinking about SAP’s acquisition of Human Capital Management firm SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion this month. That ten year old company is one of many firms focused on building, retaining, optimizing and managing skills in the workforce.
If an empire of robots eliminates a substantial amount of the demand for unskilled human labor, that may mean that both companies and individuals have a strong economic incentive in moving people from low-level jobs where they have to be told exactly what to do and how to do it, into higher-functioning roles at work where they can be told simply what needs to be accomplished, then be capable of accomplishing it in whatever ways make the most sense.
Systems that help optimize that learning process would then confer a powerful competitive advantage. Successfactors is huge. Rypple, a small player in the same market, was just acquired by Salesforce, which says it is now building out a new product suite in Human Capital Management called SuccessForce. WorkDay has an IPO pending; analyst Josh Bresin calls its software “amazing“.
That sounds to me like a world in which humans get to learn new skills as fast as competitive cloud services can train them on those skills. Then they can act as creatively and intelligently as they have been empowered with new forms of Human Capital.
Including work in creative use of cloud services and robots. Have you seen the new social network for robots, MyRobots.com, for example? Rather than worry about having robots and machines doing the things we used to do, why not focus on learning how to work with the robot and machine cloud layer of data and functionality?
The ability to move from being told explicitly what to do into a role where you’re told generally what needs to get done is not just an economic change – it’s a change of conditions for the human spirit.
There are certainly equity, justice, privacy and other issues that need to be figured out. But it’s not all bad news – far from it.
If robot workers can in fact be treated as tools for a human workforce that is effectively moved up the value chain, using services from an increasingly competitive Human Capital Management sector to make that shift, then I think the end result is win-win. Less unskilled labor, more support for better systems for teaching and learning.
Will it work that way? We’ll see. That seems the likely trajectory for the future.
Photo: Menace From The Land Before Color, by JD Hancock
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Making You More Awesome: The Red-Hot World of Online Learning Services
Dec 23rd
The joy of learning is among the most valuable ways to find meaning in life. Combine that with the substantial imbalance between supply and demand of skilled labor in the United States, and a period of economic upheaval, and you’ve got a recipe for for something magical to happen.
While traditional schools struggle to fit the bill, the internet is finally rising the the occasion. Startups like Treehouse, CodeAcademy, Lynda.com and of course Khan Academy are capturing the imagination of learners around the world, of all ages. Can these sites give traditional education the “Wikipedia vs. the encyclopedia” treatment? Why are these new websites aimed at teaching new skills so hot right now? A discussion of those questions leaves me feeling very optimistic, for the future of humanity even.
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Human Capital Management is Hot
The phrase human capital might seem cold and unappealing, but when you think of capital as something with the capacity to create economic value, then having some becomes important for anyone who can get it. The future may be characterized by the big gap between the quality of life of a relatively small population of highly skilled workers and a much larger population of unskilled workers. There certainly can be dignity and value in unskilled or semi-skilled labor, but I’m guessing that most readers here are people interested in the world of skilled or highly skilled work.
I remember first reading about Human Capital Management years ago when people were writing about the huge waves of baby boomers about to retire. What could be done to retain the incredible body of business knowledge they had amassed after they leave the workforce?
I’m not sure how well that human capital was maintained, but the paradigm seems to have become even hotter in recent years. Looking at the economic outcomes of some recent companies in this sector should make anyone sit up and pay attention: SAP acquired talent management service SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion in cash this month. Jason Corsello, of talent management company Cornerstone OnDemand, once called SuccessFactors “not only the hottest vendor in the HCM (Human Capital Management) space but in the entire enterprise software sector.”
Then last week HR and performance management feedback loop web app Rypple got acquired by Salesforce. Now business services provider in the cloud WorkDay is reportedly planning a very big IPO.
As computing gets faster, lighter, more mobile and more powerful, optimization of precious human resources to leverage it is becoming an increasingly imperative and potent opportunity for software and services to focus on.
“The total US training market is massive, it’s a $125 billion market and it’s moving online fast,” says Tom Turnbull of training marketplace OpenSesame. His startup aggregates training content from more than 100 providers with 10,000 different courses. “We’re creating Amazon.com for courses,” Turnbull says. “And many of the content creators are individuals who didn’t previously have access to the corporate market. It’s also a chance to make education more affordable and broadly available.”
Enter the DIY Web Apps
How does the individual relate to this? As Napoleon Dynamite said 7 years ago, “Nunchaku skills… bowhunting skills… computer hacking skills… Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills!”
Where are you going to get those great skills?
“The future of education is DIY and built through collective intelligence.”
“People (not just kids) aren’t able to get the tech education they need through traditional channels like face-to-face formal education or even face-to-face mentoring,” says Janet Clarey, Senior Analyst at talent managent analyst firm Bersin & Associates, “so they turn to sites like Codeacademy and Treehouse to learn with others. No one can wait for a broken, cumbersome educational system to react. The future of education is DIY and built through collective intelligence.”
Treehouse is a subscription site where you can view videos about and acquire skills in web and mobile application design and development. Founder Ryan Carson says a number of factors have contributed to his startup’s rapid early growth:
“Huge numbers of people are switching careers because they got laid off or their business failed. Professionals in other industries are realizing they need to learn how to design/build web sites or iOS apps. There is a massive global swell in the desire to learn Web Design, Dev and iOS. Movies like the Social Network have popularized the idea of creating tech startups.
“We take people from knowing nothing to being able to launch a site or app. There really isn’t any other service that holds your hand and guides you through that entire process.
“We’re hoping to help people land jobs after they finish a certain number of Badges. We’ve partnered with Facebook, Living Social, WordPress and more to help them start recruiting Treehouse Members.”
Self-Actualization as a Service
It’s not just about amassing human capital to maximize your employability or workplace effectiveness. Another set of startups is emerging that is focused on skill building and life change outside of work. Startups like DailyPath, MightyBell and Obvious Corp-backed Lift could be described as instrumenting self-actualization through social software.
Whether at work or in life, there is a continuum of skill levels that we all can be understood within; you could say it goes from “low task,” in which people must be told what to do and how to do it, to “high task” circumstances in which people are capable of being given a general direction and then figuring it out on their own. We probably all sit in different places in that continuum in different circumstances in our lives. (I got to thinking about this after listening to this brain-exploding podcast interview from SuccessFactors with Marc Demerest, CEO and Principal of Noumenal Inc., titled Leading knowledge intensive organizations under duress.)
These kinds of web applications could be understood as helping people move up that continuum towards higher level functioning in life and work. The independence, confidence, power and freedom that come from that represent some of the best things the web could possibly offer us.
With so much business and personal potential, learning services like this are only going to grow in number and sophistication. When there’s a crowded market looking to serve a world hungry for these kinds of technologies, then all the startups will have to continually improve in order to compete with each other.
That sounds like reason enough to feel very optimistic about the future, for the growing number of people with the access and time needed to take advantage of these rapidly expanding opportunities.
Illustration titled “Blogging Au Plein Air, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot” by Flickr user Mike Licht
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How Search Engines Use Machine Learning for Pattern Detection
Dec 1st
Search engines use machine learning for pattern detection. While it’s impossible to explain in one short article how machine learning influences our lives, understanding the basics of machine learning can give you some insight into search al…
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MLB.com Challenge 7th Inning Stretch: What Are We Learning?
Nov 15th
It’s a bit unusual for us to be following the story of a bunch of Syracuse University kids being given a long, overnight assignment to build a proposal for a next-generation Web application about Major League Baseball. Granted, our series is slowly gaining popularity, including some welcome coverage from The Wall Street Journal, and quite a bit of late trending among social news sites. But what’s our point, really?
We think – and by “we,” I mean the folks who create Web technologies, produce Web publications, teach Web methodologies, wear “Web” on our T-shirts – that we are creating the nucleus of the future economy. We have the nerve to believe that the world’s business, culture, entertainment, and communication will all take place through this twining together of hypertext. Here at last was an opportunity, in a mere 29 hours, to see if we’re right.
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There are some striking truths that emerged last November 11 in Syracuse. And no, it’s not a recitation of Whitney Houston singing about kids and our future and leading the way. Here’s what I found out on the 11th that I did not know for sure on the 10th:
1. Facebook is as mortal as any other service. I’ve been around this business long enough to have collected a treasure trove of services and products that are “with us to stay.” MySpace is just one. There’s also Prodigy, AOL, MS-DOS, Telenet, Usenet, Gopher, XML, the phone modem, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and everything with the brand name “Atari.” There’s a moment in time when multiple members of a product’s target market agree with one another that “this product sucks.” And when that moment comes, I can hear it like a dog can smell a jailbreaker.
Facebook is still a principal tool used by almost every one of the students whom I witnessed with mobile devices. I did not conduct a “Facebook poll” among users; I merely listened to how Facebook was referenced among students who were designing concepts for apps that could be used remotely. None of them, not one, invoked Facebook as a positive example of design, functionality, or usability. Many invoked Facebook as a negative example. I heard “Facebook sucks” or similar language from at least eleven students. And when one designer (the “Saltine Warrior’s” Ariel) built prototype screens using Facebook’s color scheme, she then appeared to apply style changes to intentionally make her app look less like Facebook as time went on.
Students who love their iPhones don’t like Facebook. And students who have BlackBerrys don’t like Facebook either. I heard the same language five years ago applied to MySpace.
2. The extent to which resources such as server power, database size, and bandwidth are boundless, is over-estimated. You haven’t seen the presentations yet; they’re coming up in the “8th Inning.” But there were many proposals for Web apps and mobile apps that would rely upon colossal bandwidth, such as multiple simultaneous video feeds; as well as databases of statistics and graphics that would challenge any modern cloud. Imagine “every printed program from every MLB game played in the 20th century,” and you get the idea.
The back end, at least with respect to computing, is never the fun part. It’s fun to make apps for devices you can hold in your hand and scroll up and down, but accounting for all the back-end work that makes those apps possible is a process that, when not considered dull, is not considered at all. SU students did not have to demonstrate their knowledge or understanding of back-end services, though Prof. Jeffrey Rubin was listening to see if any of the kids would willingly incorporate a mention of back-end resources in their proposals to mock investors. None did, not one.
3. More colleges are teaching real-world problem solving as a basic skill. How do you demonstrate to someone that you have the skills necessary to solve a complex problem and build a new and viable system, when… well, when you don’t? Many of the students in the MLB.com Challenge were freshmen, some majoring in a course other than information systems. Fewer than half could actually develop code.
But that wasn’t the issue here; the judges and professors knew the students’ real-world qualifications, and no one was hiding anything. The real challenge here was for students to test their own skills in ascertaining what their future skills would need to be. Even if they’ve never hacked a single instruction line, could they identify the skillsets they would need to either learn or acquire by way of collaboration? I’m not just talking about learning Java or Ruby on Rails. I’m talking about cooperation, leadership, open-mindedness.
In every group in this challenge, natural leaders emerged through one route or another – some through their ability to teach skills, some by demonstrating skills the others needed to succeed, some through sheer charisma and even personal popularity. But not every participant needs to be a group leader to succeed. Some students embraced the principles that were proposed by others, and articulated them well enough. (Hey, it worked for Steve Jobs.)
Success has different routes. Real-world problem solving includes ascertaining which route will work best for oneself. When a person has that skill mastered, the later details of languages and protocols and methodologies will seem to solve themselves.
TOMORROW: After 21 solid hours, the presentations and the victor.
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Pearson Acquisition Brings Online Learning Pressure to States
Sep 17th
Pearson, the world’s largest education publisher, acquired Connections Education, one of the country’s largest online learning providers, last night for $400 million in cash.
The bid for Connections, which has been growing at 30% year-over-year, shows that online learning is being driven by the private sector.
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Decisions about what type of education a child receives are traditionally made by state legislation, but the acquisition of a strong player like this by a very large publishing company will put pressure on states to make online learning more widely available.
Connection Education’s online learning business, Connections Academy, serves 40,000 students in 21 states. The acquisition will also make for more competition and put pressure on Connections’ biggest rival, K12, to innovate and grow. K12 Inc. considering buying Connections at one point.
Education watchers say that the private enterprise push for K12 education that blends online learning with a traditional classroom approach is going to become the trend for growth. Typically, it has been small, non-profit charter school operators that have pushed online learning efforts.
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SEO | Law Firm Launches Learning Center for Lawyer Website Management – EIN News (press release)
Aug 31st
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SEO | Law Firm Launches Learning Center for Lawyer Website Management
EIN News (press release) /EINPresswire.com/ Tampa, FL – SEO | Law Firm is on a mission to help attorneys build a bigger law firm. With the expansion of Seolawfirm.com, the law firm marketing company debuted its Learning Center as a one-stop resource for attorneys to manage all … |
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Learning SEO – Search Engine Marketing is a Long Journey – EQuicknews
Aug 22nd
 EQuicknews |
Learning SEO – Search Engine Marketing is a Long Journey
EQuicknews SEO- Search Engine Optimization means еxactly that, optimizing уour site ѕо thаt іt cаn be found bу the search engines. There аre а few terms thаt уou neеd tо know ѕo уоu сan start talking nerd with all thе оthеr people doіng а web site. … |
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MIT Launches Center for Mobile Learning with Support From Google
Aug 17th
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has announced the creation of a new Center for Mobile Learning. The center will be housed at the MIT Media Lab. Google supported the creation of the center with a grant from Google University Relations. The center’s first project will be the adoption and further development of App Inventor for Android, a do-it-yourself tool for building apps for Google’s Android mobile OS with no programming skills required.
App Inventor was a Google Labs project that was discontinued last week, but Google open-sourced the code. The MIT Center for Mobile Learning’s adoption of the code comes as a relief to fans of App Inventor, many of whom worried that no one would step up to carry on its development.
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The Center for Mobile Learning will be co-directed by professors Hal Abelson, Eric Klopfer and Mitchel Resnick. Abelson’s input helped shape the initial development of Android App Inventor in 2008, aiming “to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world.” He says that Resnick’s Scratch software, also housed at MIT, was inspiration for the project. App Inventor uses the OpenBlocks framework, another MIT project advised by Klopfer, to visually represent blocks of code, so that App Inventor users can simply build their applications from a menu of modular options.
The center’s stated goal is “transforming education and learning through innovation in mobile computing.” Android App Inventor was popular among computer science educators because it lowered the barriers to entry for new developers and served as a teaching tool to computer science students. Its new home at MIT will reassure those who feared that this tool would become deprecated after Google stopped development.
“Google incubated App Inventor to the point where it gained critical mass,” says Dr. Maggie Johnson, Google’s Director of Education and University Relations. “MIT’s involvement will both amplify the impact of App Inventor and enrich the research around it. It is a perfect example of how industry and academia can work together effectively.”
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