fifiana hutapea: Oktober 2015

Sabtu, 31 Oktober 2015

Why ‘ad-free’ YouTube Red will actually be filled with ads fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Zach is a media analyst at Fabric Media.

YouTube Red, Google’s $10 per month ad-free subscription tier, has finally arrived. And when you look at the pure volume of content and consumer demand, it’s easy to see that Red is justifiably the sensible next step in the video service’s evolution.

The move to launch YouTube Red, however, is also about a viewer’s preferences for how that content is consumed, according to Juan Bruce, CEO of Epoxy, which helps YouTubers market and measure video across social channels. “Every platform entering the video space gives viewers another option for how they want to interact with content, whether it’s traditional YouTube, live streaming, a Vine feed, Facebook’s social experience or paid services.”

It’s also a potential cash cow, is it not? There’s an OTT land grab right now, so why wouldn’t the platform with (arguably) the most loyal video community on the web make a go of it?

In addition to its new premium features, Red will offer premium content, created specifically for the platform and available only through its service. Creators like The Fine Bros, PewDiePie, Joey Graceffa, Lilly Singh, and Rooster Teeth are just a few of the individuals committed to creating original material for the newly launched service.
The alleged draw of the new premium content from PewDiePie and others will be twofold: 1) the subscription revenue will help pay for content exclusively produced for Red customers; and 2) the content will be uninterrupted, or ad-free. The problem with the latter is can you truly call it uninterrupted ad-free content if you have native advertising involved?

Call them native ads, brand sponsored content, or what you will, the point is, ads are pervasive and baked into the actual creative of so many top tier YouTube channels. Even the TV industry is incorporating native ads in-program, so are we to expect the YouTube market to change when it has been incorporating branded content into videos for years?

‘Ad-free’ threatens YouTube’s business model (and consumer trust)

The above calls into question two things: what does ad-free mean to creators and digital networks on YouTube who rely on brand deals? And, assuming YouTube doesn’t bite the hand that feeds it, is Red really delivering consumers an ad-free service?

Considering the economics of legacy YouTube — YouTube channel sponsorships, in-video brands integrations — there’s a lot of questions surrounding how the existing native advertising model fits into a premium “ad-free” YouTube subscription service. For YouTube creators and multi-channel networks (MCNs), integrating branded content natively in videos is a key revenue driver. In fact, we’re seeing these types of branded integrations popping up all over the Internet — from the gaming industry and its sponsored levels in Zynga to the music industry and its branded pop-up stations like the Halo 5: Guardians station on Dash Radio.

Frank Sinton, CEO of Beachfront Media, knows the industry intimately, having worked with over 100 YouTubers to deploy apps across connected TVs and mobile phones. He points to a specific YouTube native advertising example from Dude Perfect, saying: “The ads in his content are part of the video. If it’s supposed to be an ad-free platform, it should be completely. But how does that happen?”

YouTube is saying it’s sharing new subscription revenue with creators, but what about brand deals? Where does YouTube stand on native brand integrations being a part of YouTube Red?

There’s no need to guess. Google-owned YouTube already informed the market where it stands earlier in the year. More specifically, it happened when YouTube made moves against brand-sponsored videos, requiring creators and MCNs to work Google’s sales team for deals.

Go forth, and question

At an initial glance, the premium features of YouTube Red are enough to sway a portion of the population over to the subscription-based model. Especially with the promise of premium content from top creators in the not so distant future, but the term “ad-free” has been brushed over, and applied to the platform without any real concrete details. With all of the new features YouTube Red is offering, it’s definitely worth a shot, just don’t be disappointed when “ad-free” turns out to be “pre-roll ad free” and a lot of branded content.

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Jumat, 30 Oktober 2015

The next information revolution will be 100 times bigger than the Internet fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Ambarish is cofounder and CEO of Blippar.

Every day I see something I want to know more about, something I can experience at a deeper level, and share with my friends and family. I’m hardly alone in that; the average citizen of any connected country is an avid consumer, seeker, and sharer of information — driving over 5.7 billion Google searches each day. But what happens when you see something you can’t describe? Or when you encounter something you can’t accurately communicate to a friend, let alone a search engine?

Sadly, the platforms and tools of the current age of information aren’t much help when trying to learn about . They restrict our ability to learn more about things we cannot describe with words. And while the Internet has powered a new era of human networking and intelligence, the first information revolution fell short of realizing the potential of technology to provide us with the keys we need to fully unlock the world around us in any given moment. This isn’t a new development. Throughout history, our ability to express curiosity for the world around us has been limited only by the technology available.

In today’s age of information, mobile devices and global connectivity have brought an impressive amount of knowledge to our very fingertips. The Internet and powerful text search tools enabled us to discover nearly everything about anything we can describe with words – any text that can be typed into a search engine. But words cannot express the reality of the entire human experience. That said, for all our advancements, the human experience remains largely driven by sight, as it has for millennia. Unsurprisingly, eyeballs have always had a shorter path to the brain than any other sense. And, our ability to quickly derive information and make decisions based on visual data evolved far before our ability to understand language and invent the alphabet.

When the next information revolution arrives, it must then open the door to the physical, visual world and enable people to quickly discover contextual information about the objects and images around them. The future of discovery will be pointing at things we’re curious about and learning relevant information without even having to ask a question. This revolution will transform how we access shared knowledge and impact nearly every aspect of our lives at home and in the workplace.

Revolution is coming, and soon.

Fortunately (and excitingly), this revolution is going to happen much more quickly than many realize. New technologies like image recognition, wearable hardware, machine learning, and augmented/virtual reality have created an ecosystem capable of bringing us closer to a world in which information isn’t just at our fingertips, but accessible through every shape and form around us.

This is the “Internet on Things” — an environment in which information is autonomously accessed in real-time, immediately upon encountering and interacting with something in the world. Unlike the often referenced “Internet of Things,” technology from the Internet on Things isn’t embedded within an object. Instead, the object itself is the key that allows another platform to find and deliver associated data, unlocking relevant information and experiences.

The potential applications for such technology are undoubtedly exciting. But are we ready? A revolution, after all, is inherently disruptive — in the truest sense of the word, not the buzzword bandied about today’s tech community. While the Internet on Things will undoubtedly have a positive, transformative effect on the lives of average consumers, it will pull the rug out from under a range of established companies and create new business practices in virtually every industry.

To get a sense of the far-ranging implications of a new information revolution, we can consider the massive shift the search business drove in the wake of mainstream Internet adoption. As PCs became cheaper and connectivity improved, millions of consumers needed a better way to access the wealth of information that was now available within their homes and offices. In meeting that need, the search industry established the infrastructure that is today continuing to disrupt everything from print advertising to brick & mortar retail.

The best example of the long-term ramifications of an information revolution is, of course, Google.

Google is a microcosm of innovation and disruption. The company took advantage of a vast “Blue Ocean” opportunity created by new technologies and changing consumer preferences, and rode a tidal wave of change that let it grab an increasingly large share of the technology industry at large. Today that includes long-term ripples of the first information revolution, such as YouTube, drones, and self-driving cars.

Putting aside the potential for a “new Google” to hatch in the wake of the next information revolution (one that would further transform advertising, e-commerce and more), the Internet on Things will also cause disruption through the infrastructure required to support it.

Powering this new model will mean indexing all of the world’s visual data — every object and image — and building machines smart enough to return the right, context-sensitive information to an end user. This will require massive investments in technology — both software and hardware — and will be the first barrier for companies seeking to exploit this dynamic space.

There are enormous opportunities on the horizon, but they come alongside a host of challenges. Today we stand on the cusp of a revolution that will reimagine how we interact with the physical world and disrupt industries in every market across the globe. If we can rise to the occasion and overcome the hurdles in front of us, tomorrow we will stand in a world awash with information, an environment in which every person can acquire relevant knowledge about their surroundings in microseconds. Empowered with such ability, what will humanity accomplish next?

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Turning bookshelves into playlists: Book app ‘Shelfie’ gets social fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

The vast majority of physical books I own are mostly only good for collecting dust once I’ve finished reading them. Despite that, I’m happy to devote space for them to sit on bookshelves in my office — except of course when I’m traveling and wish I could add a few of them to my tablet without re-purchasing at full-price.

The solution to this problem, according to Vancouver-based startup Shelfie, is to snap a photo of each shelf and allow its mobile app to automatically identify all the titles available as ebooks — some of which can be purchased within the app at a deeply discounted rate (81 percent on average). For this purpose, Shelfie makes for an excellent utility that some have likened to a Shazam for books. Although, it isn’t great when it comes to actually converting your print books into digital book in-app purchases, due in large part* to licensing complexities with publishers. It’s nudged Shelfie into becoming an app that only occasionally gets used, despite seeing regular user growth of about 15 percent per month, the company told me.

Print-to-ebook service Shelfie’s new social features.

With the latest update, however, that may soon change.

Shelfie aims to evolve into a service that wants to celebrate your personal library while adding to it. Now when you snap a bookshelf photo, it can be shared to a public feed on Shelfie. Other Shelfie users can follow your activity and vice versa. You can also rate books, or just share when you’ve added a new one to you library. Clicking on a book title gives you some info about it, and provides a list of other folks that also own or have read it. Overall, the new social features are pretty standard, but perhaps the most valuable aspect is that you’re bridging the divide between your print and digital bookshelves.

“Essentially, what we’re doing is transforming bookshelves into playlists, adding that element of socialization to books that helps uncover those hidden gems,” Shelfie cofounder and CEO Peter Hudson said in an interview with Gigaom. “A shelf of books says a lot about what you like to read. We wanted to make that more accessible to the world.”

My “Shelfie” devoted to Warren Ellis.

Theoretically, Hudson makes a good point. I’d imagine most people organize their bookshelves with some degree of methodology. For instance, I have an entire shelf dedicated to author Warren Ellis, and it would make sense for folks with similar tastes to discover a little-known Ellis title upon viewing my “Shelfie” photo. Then again, I also have nearly an entire shelf devoted to stuff I haven’t gotten around to reading yet, which isn’t obvious upon casual glance and may prove useless to strangers.

Although Shelfie generates revenue from referral fees for business it sends to outside sellers like Apple’s iBookstore or Amazon, Hudson explained that the startup isn’t competing with well-known players like GoodReads (even allowing new users to sign up with their GoodReads account), which is focused on detailed book reviews and discussion. The reason, he added, is because reviews are a good way to drive book sales, or for those looking for thoughtful analysis of a particular title. Yet, they aren’t great at “socializing books.”

Shelfie also isn’t concerned about competition from unlimited ebook subscription services such as Scribd or Kindle Unlimited, nor does Hudson believe business strategy of those unlimited services to be favorable to the readers themselves.

“It’s the gym membership model. It’s great, as long as no one comes. Gyms make money because people sign up for a membership January 1, go three times, then never go back but forget to cancel their subscription,” Hudson explained. “Everything works really well so long as people only read two books a month. The problem is, the people who converted (to unlimited subscriptions) read way more than that because it makes economic sense to them.”

One way subscription services compensate for the increased licensing costs is to surface lesser-known, or self-published books that have lower licensing fees, Hudson said. “When you think about the economic model for something like Scribd, they actually don’t want to push the good stuff to you, because those are books from the big publishers that cost the most.” Such a practice would obviously makes it harder to find something you want to read.

“The other challenge for unlimited subscriptions is that there’s no effective way to browse online (that compares with a physical store). Everyone’s done it. You defocus your eyes a bit while wandering down the aisles of a bookstore until something jumps out at you to stop and dig in. That experience doesn’t exist online. You can put about four book covers up on a tablet screen. Any more than that and it becomes too small to read the text, the detail of the artwork.”

The takeaway, from Shelfie’s perspective anyway, is that people will be buying physical books for a long time despite the availability of digital versions. That, and people want options for how to read the book they own, which the startup is happy to oblige.

The new social tools are a huge portion of Shelfie’s strategy for success, but ebook sales are still at the forefront. However, now people have a reason to stay active on Shelfie while it signs more publishers (it already has agreements with 750, including two of the “big 5,” MacMillan and HarperCollins). Additionally, my old books are finally doing more than accumulating dust.

* Lack of selection due to licensing is the biggest culprit, but the process of converting print to digital is also kind of a pain. To get a discounted ebook version, you have to prove you own the print book by snapping photos of a book’s barcode, cover art, and copyright page with your handwritten name in all caps. Although, considering you’re getting the ebook version so cheap (or free), it does seem worth it to jump through hoops.

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Kamis, 29 Oktober 2015

Amazon’s disingenuous plan to remove Fire TV’s competition grows fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Earlier this month, reports indicated that Amazon planned to stop selling the Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast products through its online marketplace. While the devices are still available right now, they’re scheduled to be pulled at some point today, according to Bloomberg’s initial report on Amazon’s plans.

So why is Amazon doing this? Well, the company would have you believe that it’s trying to prevent consumer confusion, because neither of those competitive devices support its Prime Video service as well as its own Fire TV set-top boxes. But several reports published over the last few days offer an alternative theory.

First came a GeekWire report about Amazon’s apparent plans to introduce a QVC-like channel to the Fire TV. This shopping network would complement a new feature the company is reportedly testing with a small number of users: The ability to purchase items shown on-screen directly via the Fire TV remote.

The report says that Amazon wants to sell items via banner ads shown on the main Fire TV interface, and through the X-Ray feature, which uses Amazon’s IMDb service to share information about whatever a person is watching. (It can identify actors, for example, or share background info about a scene.)

These shopping features wouldn’t be as easy to implement on competitive products. Nor would Amazon make as much money from them — Apple takes a 30 percent cut from all transactions made through its platforms, which is why Kindle users can’t purchase new books via the company’s iOS applications.

That’s a compelling enough reason not to believe Amazon’s claim on its own. Saying it was trying to help its Prime customers was likely disingenuous; it seems more like Amazon is trying to do its best to promote a potential revenue scheme than like it was trying to make sure its most loyal customers are happy.

Then came the revelation, courtesy of BuzzFeed’s review of the new Apple TV, that Amazon could very well introduce its Prime Video service to the platform. Here’s what the review said, captured in a handy-dandy little “screenshort”:

Why Amazon Prime Video isn't on the new Apple TV https://t.co/BuUwuhBbyW pic.twitter.com/A4v3tWk4xJ

— BuzzFeed Tech (@fwd) October 29, 2015

I’ve reached out to Amazon for comment on this claim. Right now it seems damning. If the company can introduce Prime Video to the Apple TV, wouldn’t the customers it’s trying to save from befuddlement be better served if it did that, instead of pulling from its website a device they might want to purchase?

None of this will really stop people from buying a new Apple TV. Like I wrote when Amazon’s plan was revealed: The company isn’t hurting anyone but itself, given the ease with which someone can point their Web browser to Apple’s website instead of refusing to buy something not on Amazon’s market. It’s very possible that Amazon is trying (likely in vain) to retain some of the market share for streaming boxes it swallowed up due to years of Apple neglecting to update the Apple TV.

I’ll update this post if Amazon responds to my request for comment. Not that I’m holding my breath — when the company isn’t sending me press releases about new products or making sure I see Medium posts, it’s fairly tight lipped. Given the apparent duplicity at work here, I don’t expect any comment from it.

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Rabu, 28 Oktober 2015

Facebook changes iOS share sheet, announces F8 2016 dates fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Facebook has announced that members of FbStart, a program devoted to helping early-stage startups, have received more than $250 million in benefits since the program was introduced during its developer conference in 2014.

The program is supposed to help startups by giving them free access to products from Facebook’s partners; offering guidance from people inside the social network; and providing a network of startups that can help each other.

Facebook says more than 7,200 startups across 130 countries have signed up for the program. It’s also announced that new companies — including Dropbox, Animoto, and Twilio, among others — have partnered up with the program.

The company has also updated the “share sheet” used to post content from other apps to its service. (That’s the thing that pops up whenever you tap the “share” tool on an iPhone.) Here’s a comparison of the old and new versions:

“Since F8, we’ve been testing versions of the share sheet to incorporate feedback from people and developers,” the company says in its blog post. “We learned that people want a simple experience that takes them directly to the composer after they click ‘Share,’ shows a clear preview of what they’re sharing, and allows them to complete the share quickly in just a few steps.”

Developers whose apps already support sharing to Facebook won’t have to do anything to enable the new share sheet, and getting the new one set up is just as easy as it was before. Users should “start to see the new experience” today.

In addition to those changes, the company also announced that F8, its annual developer conference, will be held between April 12 and 13 next year in San Francisco. Facebook often uses these conferences to announce new products, give developers new tools, and offer guidance on how to work with its services.

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‘Wine Ring’ app removes some stress from wine buying fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Walking into even the smallest wine store, or perusing the shortest wine list at a local restaurant, can be daunting. How are you supposed to pick one bottle from the many choices? What the hell does “Brunello di Montalcino” mean? And when do people who seem to know about wine find time for all of this stuff?

Some people are inclined to answer all those questions. (Carefully, it’s an Italian wine, and stuffed into the crevices in their lives like the bottles they have stashed in every nook and cranny in their homes.) Others might want to use an app like Wine Ring, which debuted this week, to get recommendations based on their preferences.

A screenshot of Wine Ring’s app making a recommendation based on your taste preferences.

Wine Ring claims to have created an app that can guess how much you’ll like a wine based on your ratings — on a scale from “Love It to Dislike It,” which is apparently unique enough to warrant a trademark — of what you drank before. You know how Netflix recommends movies based on the ratings you give to films you’ve already seen? Wine Ring is like that, but for fermented grape juice.

There are a slew of other wine-related apps available: Delectable is basically a social network where wine lovers don’t have to worry about being called snobs by their Two-Buck Chuck-guzzling friends, Vivino is a cellar management tool and a rating system, review app Corkz, wine search service Plonk, and so on and so forth. Wine Ring aims to be different.

“Wine Ring’s technology is fundamentally different from any other wine app, and for that matter any consumer app,” says Pam Dillon, the company’s chief executive. “We’ve solved the problem of consumer preference, and can deliver a whole range of novel recommendation functionalities either in the context of the world of wine, or on an inventory-specific basis.”

The company has been granted several patents for the systems it has developed to power its app, and Dillon says it will make its money by selling aggregate data to retailers and restaurateurs. The idea is that businesses will learn more about wine drinkers, which will help them sell more wine, at least in theory.

“The entire wine industry supply chain – producers, importers, distributers, retailers and restaurateurs – knows what is bought and sold, but it doesn’t know what is preferred, and in what market it is preferred,” Dillon says. “Aggregate preference data creates the opportunity for much more efficient production, and much happier consumers.”

I’m not convinced Wine Ring will lead to reputable producers or importers changing their decisions, nor that they should. Part of wine’s appeal is that the best examples are true to where the grapes that were sacrificed to make it were grown. Some people like manufactured, reliable wines; others like the variety that makes every wine, or indeed every bottle, different from its shelf-mates.

That might be the thing that makes me most skeptical about Wine Ring, actually. Recommending a wine is hard, and because there can be significant amounts of bottle variation, even a single wine can defy expectations. (Hence “There are no great old wines, only great bottles.” You can nix the “old.”) The app has no way of knowing how well a particular bottle has fared, and it only takes one corked wine to make people distrust a recommendation tool like this.

It’s similar to the problem Netflix encounters in making its recommendations. Does it have a good idea of what people like to watch? Sure. But there’s no accounting for taste — and when someone’s literal tastebuds are involved, it becomes even harder to know what they’ll like. Wine Ring can’t be perfect.

Still, it could be good enough. Sometimes people don’t want to have to guess what they might like to try, and they don’t want to ask anyone else for help. A recommendations tool like this can make their life easier, more comfortable, and less stressful whenever they have to pick a bottle of wine. If those people are willing to drink a few duds and forgive the app, it’ll be just fine for them.

As for me? I’ll try to figure out what I like the old-fashioned way — by drinking every bottle I can get my hands on. It’s time to really put this liver to work.

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‘Poshmark’ adds retail brands to its seller community fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Poshmark announced today that it will start adding well-known retail brands to its active community of women’s fashion-focused buyers and sellers.

The move is pretty significant for Poshmark. The service launched in 2011 as an online marketplace that brings buyers and sellers together and has, until now, been a platform for designed primarily for clothing and accessory resale. There are over a million sellers on Poshmark uploading the inventory equivalent of a Nordstorm store every week. With the combined power of Poshmark’s sellers, the platform is essentially opening just over 50 Nordstrom stores each year, with more than 5,000 brands represented in said inventory.

Not only is the seller community active, though — Poshmark’s buyers are also a very active bunch. Poshmark founder and CEO Manish Chandra highlights the importance of the strong, active community to Poshmark’s success. Much of the company’s efforts revolve around building user feeds and providing both buyers and sellers with tools that keep users engaged.

“The result is that today, our average user opens the app somewhere between 7 to 9 times a day, and spends somewhere between 20 to 25 minutes a day in the app,” says Chandra. “So, you have some Instagram/Facebook-level of engagement in the platform.”

Those are some pretty impressive usage stats. Over the last few years as Poshmark has been scaling rapidly, with their users following suit. Though many of the sellers in the Poshmark network likely started selling out of their own closets, some have begun tapping local wholesale markets and, as Chandra says, “effectively converting their closet into a full-blown fashion boutique.”

That said, this is why the move to expand into retail opportunities makes a lot of sense. Poshmark’s expansion is going to center around a wholesale portal that’ll give sellers the opportunity to connect with brands and buy merchandise to sell in their online Poshmark stores through said portal. For many sellers, this means access to new wholesale channels and inventory. Style Mafia and Snob Essentials are among the first round of brands spearheading the retail expansion, but dozens more are set to join the charge.

“We wanted fashion brands to be able to connect this massive sales force of one million sellers that we’ve created and also for sellers to have access to the best of the best and even to the new fashion brands that are emerging,” says Chandra. “So to do that, we’ve created a wholesale portal, which allows fashion brands to stock up wholesale inventory into that portal and for our sellers to come in and shop… and really buy wholesale inventory directly from their brands on our platform, and then use that existing commerce and logistics engine to service their platform.”

On the buyer side, the Poshmark experience will give buyers the flexibility to choose between resale and retail items, or to browse both. Chandra compares Poshmark’s vast catalog and new shopping options to Uber, where users have some flexibility in tailoring their experience, whether it’s UberX or Black Car service. “It gives a flexibility that shoppers have really never had on any platform out there to choose how and what they shop.”

Though Poshmark is expanding its services into an entirely new arena with retail opportunities, much of Poshmark’s main focus is unchanged. Because Poshmark’s strength doesn’t necessary lie with specific brands or a single outstanding feature, it lies within the community. This expansion isn’t an attempt to overhaul user experience, but to give the buying, selling and brand communities new ways to access one another.

“In one shot, [brands] can move inventory into a group of sellers that they never had access to. For sellers, they can come to one area, choose the brands they like, and stock up their stores in ones shot. And for our shoppers, they start to get access to an increasingly large selection of merchandise, which gives them the power to shop resale and retail. And we’re launching the wholesale portal partnership with over a dozen different fashion brands, with many many more in the pipeline.”

In addition to the retail wholesale portal expansion, Poshmark is also announcing a new “Poshmark Fashion Entrepreneurs Fund”, which will award $500 grants (not loans, grants) to 50 Poshmark sellers to help them begin scaling their business.

“That, I think, is very much who we are,” says Chandra. “Our growth is synergistic with the growth of our community, and everything we do is really to support our community to grow, which ultimately drives the growth of Poshmark.”

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Nuzzel branches into content creation with newsletter platform fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Nuzzel is expanding its social reading service with a newsletter platform that automatically collects five of the most popular articles in a user’s network, allows that user to write a short message to their subscribers, and sends out the whole thing in an email delivered to subscribers’ inboxes each morning.

The newsletter platform is a bit of a departure from Nuzzel’s existing service, which combs through a user’s social feeds and presents the articles their friends have shared to Facebook or Twitter without requiring them to scroll past baby pictures. (It’s basically the “discover” tool Twitter should’ve built.) Today’s announcement also comes shortly after the debut of Twitter’s Moments feature, which is the social networks answer to news aggregation — something many thing Nuzzel has done much better.

“Our newsletter platform is a natural extension of technology we have already built in our app and website, but […] we are expanding beyond a personal consumption experience to also being a platform where people can share stuff,” Nuzzel chief executive Jonathan Abrams says. “This is good for spreading the word about Nuzzel, but it’s also pretty logical for a service that is completely based on social-based news discovery to have more social features.”

Newsletters have enjoyed quite the rise over the last few years. Publications use them to present the news to readers in easy-to-digest formats, writers send them to promote their work and stay in touch with their audience, and services like MailChimp’s TinyLetter exist to make sending a newsletter pretty simple. So, where is Nuzzel’s new platform supposed to fit into this trending category?

“[W]e believe that +90 percent of influencers don’t have their own newsletter, because getting up at 5 a.m. and editing it manually every morning is way too much work,” Abrams says. “So, by offering an automated approach to generating a relevant newsletter, we think this enables a whole group of influencers to have a newsletter who might not have had one otherwise”

The struggle will be in finding the balance between automating the process to make it easier for people to share articles that (supposedly) interest them, as well as giving users enough control over the email to make them feel personal. Nuzzel is trying to find the right balance by using its curation tools, while also giving its users the ability to write short introductions for their morning newsletters.

This will make things easy for people who are interesting in jumping aboard the newsletter bandwagon, but hesitate to do so without a little assistance. (A technological springboard, perhaps.) It could also get Nuzzel in front of people who would never use its service otherwise. And given that the company is a venture-backed startup that just raised more funding, that’s not a bad thing.

“Our apps are great, but there are probably hundreds of millions of people who would subscribe to an email newsletter but not install an app or have a Twitter account,” Abrams says. He adds that getting a newsletter ostensibly curated by a friend is more personal than getting “a news digest from a newspaper or from Yahoo or Google,” at least from Nuzzel’s admittedly-biased perspective.

It’s a win for Nuzzel either way. It doesn’t matter if someone likes the newsletters if they decide they like a curated reading experience and sign up for the main service, nor does it matter if they like the main service so long as they like receiving the newsletters. And if they like both? Well, that just makes them the kind of engaged user that social startups just love to hold on to.

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Selasa, 27 Oktober 2015

Here’s how much Twitter’s restructuring is expected to cost fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Twitter has released its third quarter earnings report under its newly appointed CEO. And besides sharing that ad revenues have jumped, monthly active users have stayed relatively flat, and trumpeting its recent product changes, the company also revealed that it expects corporate restructuring to cost between $5 million and $15 million next quarter.

That news comes as new-again chief executive Jack Dorsey lays off employees to cut the social network’s costs. In a not-so-jargon-free letter published with a tweet, Dorsey confirmed that Twitter expects to “part ways” with up to 336 people from “across the company,” with a special focus on the engineering team.

“Product and Engineering are going to make the most significant structural changes to reflect our plan ahead,” Dorsey wrote in the letter announcing the layoffs. “We feel strongly that engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team, while remaining the biggest percentage of our workforce.”

The layoffs came as a surprise to many in the company, at least some of whom found out they would have to start looking for work when they attempted to access their Twitter email accounts and were told their logins no longer worked. Others heard the news through phone calls or, if those were missed, voicemail.

Dorsey announced plans to give one-third of his Twitter stock (roughly 1 percent of the company) to remaining employees a little over a week later. That equates to a $200 million giveaway, which Dorsey explained as him preferring to “have a smaller part of something big than a bigger part of something small.” It seems the corollary is that he’d rather share a big chunk of money with a smaller team.

Now there’s a dollar amount attached to all the changes Dorsey plans to make now that he’s back at Twitter’s helm. The company’s stock fell in after-hours trading when the earnings report was published.

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It’s time to shake up the enterprise software market fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Kristoffer is chief executive at Starcounter.

The enterprise software industry as we know it is changing significantly. Recently, it’s seen a rise in ‘best of breed’ apps, which in turn, has contributed to the fall of the enterprise monopoly. More specifically, there are three factors fueling this change, including the reality of the problem, the collective app economy, and new technology enabling the next generation of business applications.

The reality of the enterprise problem

Over $600 billion is spent on enterprise software each year. And to date, modern enterprises have had two options: buy big, unfocused packages that excel in nothing; or buy small, focused ’best of breed’ apps and risk an integration nightmare.

First off, the major software platforms purchased by IT departments provide tools to make thousands of different features for thousands of different types of users. These products are cumbersome when they are overloaded, often perceived as hostile by the user, and difficult to learn. What’s more, this obstacle isn’t bypassed when they move to the cloud in an attempt to keep up with changing trends. But since these products seem to solve everything, they’ve been successful for quite some time and become the status quo in the software market.

In the meantime, the ’best of breed’ apps have been the preferred choice by business executives, and they have increasingly received support among all employees. With the consumerization of enterprise technology, products now enter a company from the bottom up, rather than the top down.

In the private space, you can easily compose your own suite of software tools to accomplish a task. To throw a birthday party, for example, go to the app store and get a calendar app, a social app, an invitation app and you’re set.

Those who have grown up today with the ease of an app store are entering into the positions at enterprises. They want their daily business tools such as accounting and smart marketing tools to be as accessible as messaging apps and car navigators. Enterprises must endorse this through the fast and easy delivery of efficient tools to employees who need a certain software to accomplish a special task.

Although these have been the two prevalent options among enterprises, the reality is that 68 percent of IT projects fail. These failures are forcing CIOs and CEOs at enterprises to seek change from the status quo.

The collective app economy

When multiple small apps band together, they can upend the status quo – this is the new collective app economy. Today, new technology is allowing this to happen:

Allowing enterprises to mix and match best of breed apps without the need for complex and expensive integration projects.
Allowing each vendor to be on top of its own food chain.
Allowing new business models to outperform the existing ones in the enterprise software business.
Allowing app stores, for example, to deliver interoperating apps and to be truly polylithic.

The ’best of breed’ app vendors often have an innovative edge because of their focus and domain knowledge. Though they still cannot check off as many boxes as the big vendors with their ecosystem of piggy-backers, and buyers shun complex, expensive, lengthy and risky integration projects.

The incumbent software platforms will not be replaced by a single app, no matter how elegant, intuitive, and powerful the app is. That’s because a single app can never replace the full functionality of the large players’ platforms. The best of breed apps must be able to be mixed-and-matched without the need for complex integration projects.

A single mobile payment app, for example, cannot replace a full retail solution. However, combining best of breed apps for accounting, product stock and point of sales results in a virtual retail suite that can outperform the larger players. These new apps are promising and must meet two critical conditions to gain any significant market share:

It must be possible to run multiple independent business apps by different vendors side by side in a modern web user interface. Together they create your virtual business solution.
The apps must operate on the same set of data without knowing about each other. All apps being aware of all other apps simply does not scale. APIs have been the peer-to-peer glue between apps for 50 years, and independent business apps still do not operate on a single set of data.

As new technology is now solving the vital, if not all, components of the ”shared data and shared screen” problems, this will have a major impact for enterprise software vendors and enterprises.

The next generation of business applications

Technology comes before revolution. Always. Though not typically obvious when first introduced, the importance of truly novel technology is not something reserved for tech geeks; in fact, it is and has always been vital for the evolution of the human race. Modems and computers were not invented to power the web. Rather, the web was discovered because we had computers and modems.

The new generation of in-memory application platforms will not only transform the database industry; it will forever change the enterprise software industry. How? By combining an in-memory database engine, data processing and application server into a single business operating system. This technology can deliver the capabilities of a huge data center in that single server. It can allow many small independent applications in combination to replace a monolithic application. It can remove the need for a single application to be the master of all others. Plus, the speed, radical efficiently, low costs and openness will help drive fast and wide adoption.

Time to band together

The enterprise software landscape will change dramatically in the near future. The new software landscape will be simultaneously fragmented and connected, with new business models created by collaboration among many small vendors.

It is time for vendors and talents to band together in order to provide businesses with the freedom to use the best tools needed to meet their goals, instead of being locked into a single vendor that is a jack of all trades, but master of none.

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Senin, 26 Oktober 2015

With updated notifications, Facebook pulls people down the rabbit hole fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Facebook is rolling out an updated notifications tab today that puts local news, upcoming events, and other miscellaneous information next to the messages informing people that someone has liked a status update or shared a photo.

Facebook’s newly updated Notifications tab aims to move beyond alerts for comments, likes, and friend requests.

The update is a tacit admission that Facebook holds too much information that people are expected to hunt down. A friend’s birthday is on their profile page, the address for a concert is on its event page; and the time a television show airs is found on yet another page. Now that will all be funneled into a single place with today’s update.

Facebook will offer other information, too, in this updated notifications tab. Want to know about the weather? How about when a movie is playing? Or a list of recommendations for dinner spots? Sure, you can find all those things with other services, but now you can also see everything right from Facebook’s app.

It’s a bit like Google Now but for Facebook. Google wanted to become the one place where people turn to find information; now Facebook wants to do the same. There are differences — Google Now pulls information from other apps, whereas Facebook seems to be limited to its own data — but the idea’s the same.

Facebook also has the benefit of sticking this in a place where everyone will see it. The company has occasion to make people’s phones buzz in their pockets many times throughout the day, thanks to the sheer amount of comments, likes, shares, and other forms of interaction available on everything that’s shared to it.

Now, every time one of those notifications is sent, people have a chance to fall down the rabbit hole. Only instead of finding the Wonderland into which Alice fell, they’ll enter a world where people share their opinions, their photographs, and the funniest memes in exchange for the only currency that matters, “Likes.”

It’s a good plan to make people more dependent on Facebook, to spend more time in its mobile app, and even to provide yet another place where the company can put advertisements between the things people really want to see. The update is rolling out to Android and iPhone users in the United States now.

For a closer look, check out the demo video below from Facebook.

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Airbnb tests Journeys, a fully-managed travel service fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Airbnb is testing a new service that will give people something to do in new cities and, in the process, forever dispel the notion that its platform is just about helping people find a couch to crash on in a kindly stranger’s apartment. It’s called Journeys, and it’s currently available as invite-only to people who want to visit San Francisco in December, but haven’t yet booked their trips.

Journeys offers full three-to-five-day travel plans to its selected testers. Through it, Airbnb will offer a free meal during each day; planned excursions devoted to San Francisco’s nightlife, natural wonders, or food scene; agent-selected rooms; and a Lyft ride from the airport to wherever the person is staying. These trips will reportedly cost between $500 and $750 for the individuals invited to use it.

The Next Web, which first revealed Journeys, compares it to the discontinued concierge service Airbnb introduced in 2011. That service was supposed to give travelers everything they could ever want, from offering advice on restaurants to locating the nearest emergency room. Journeys is focused more on providing a good trip — think of it less as a personal assistant and more as a travel agent.

The service also follows other Airbnb tests, including a service that gathered strangers together for meals in San Francisco, and another that made cleaning services available to hosts in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. Neither of those services has become available to people outside the invite-only tests; Journeys could be destined for a similarly long time spent in the testing phase.

Consumers will decide if Journeys is worth the cost. People visiting a city on business, or staying in a neighborhood with which they are familiar, are unlikely to find much value in the service as it currently exists. But those heading to a diverse place like San Francisco on a lark might appreciate having someone to plan their trip for them instead of having to worry about everything themselves.

Journeys could have a larger impact, though, and that will be on the perception of Airbnb as a member of what tech executives dubbed the sharing economy.

The term “sharing economy” has always been a misnomer. Sharing implies that people are offering something without expecting anything in return. But the economy aspect of that all-too-common buzzphrase requires money to change hands, turning the entire concept into a paradox that allows companies to use it in their marketing even as they got lots of money for their “sharing” platforms.

Airbnb was founded to give people a cheap place to stay. Now it’s operating much like a hotel company — and, with Journeys, a full-fledged travel service — that doesn’t happen to own the rooms its customers are renting. This reduces overhead, allows the company to avoid training a full staff for each rental, and otherwise gives it a nimbleness that traditional lodging companies are lacking.

This convenience often comes at the expense of luxury. Billing a platform as the place to rent someone’s apartment in Brooklyn is great for spendthrifts, but the real money is in getting people to see Airbnb properties as a valid alternative to expensive hotels instead of to the Holiday Inns or grimy hostels of the world. Journeys is one step towards that goal, and one away from the sharing economy.

“We are always experimenting with new ways to create meaningful experiences on Airbnb,” a company spokesperson said when I asked for comment on this story. ” We don’t have anything specific to share at this time.”

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‘Your Trainer’ app wants to help you work out smarter, not harder fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Working out is hard. And most of the time, it sucks. Like all things that suck, though, tech is trying to making working out better. It’ll likely be awhile before our devices can work out for us, but in the meantime, there are a few companies trying to help folks work out on their own terms. Enter Your Trainer: the startup behind the app of the same name that employs user feedback to generate a personalized exercising regimen.

We all work long hours, put in overtime, drink too much coffee, get too little sleep, and have Netflix queues that overfloweth. We buy gym memberships, go regularly for three weeks, make excuses and then cancel over the phone in shame two months later. It’s fine, it happens to the best of us. Maybe it’s because actually going to the gym is a big enough pain in the ass that we’re willing to bail. Maybe it’s because we don’t have anyone keeping us honest. Maybe it’s just because we have no real idea how to work out effectively. Normally, this is where a personal trainer comes in.

Personal trainers are great. Really. If they’re qualified and mostly decent human being-wise and care about helping you reach your goals, they can be a huge asset in the fitness game. But they’re also really expensive. According to the National Strength and Conditioning Association, personal trainers run an average rate of about $50/hour. For those of us ballin’ on a budget, that lands us pretty much right back where we started: on the couch.

Don’t get too comfortable just yet though — there might be a better way to work out.

At first glance, Your Trainer might seem remarkably similar to DailyBurn or any of the other dozens video fitness apps available. But where Your Trainer differs from the DailyBurns of the world is the ability to tailor workouts to you body, goals, and preferences and to adjust those workouts in realtime. You get a series of short training videos that changes based on your feedback and needs.

“What we set out to do was leverage technology, exercise science, and behavioral psychology to provide all of the benefits of a personal trainer,” says Your Trainer CEO and founder Larry Cotter.

It works like this: Your Trainer features over 3,000 short 3-minute videos with a variety of personal trainers. These videos are strung together to create workout streams that are personalized, based on the information you give the app about yourself (height, weight, age, goals, injuries, obstacles) and your preferences (I hate burpees but love Russian Twists*).

Cotter calls these videos “the periodic table of exercise elements.” From this massive library of fitness videos, YourTrainer’s learning algorithm (which we’ll get to in a moment) draws up a workout stream that’s built for you.

“We provide you with these interactive controls. Say something hurts your ankle — well, you can ‘dislike’ it and say it hurts. Then we know to skip that immediately and learn from that, so the next time through, you’re not going to get that exercise, or other things that are hurting your ankle.”

Which brings us to why, exactly, this app is called Your Trainer. Like a personal trainer, the app has information about you and uses it to find effective exercise elements to put you to work. Your Trainer also provides you with the closest digital equivalent of turning to your personal trainer and saying, “If you ever make me do that again, I swear I will never work out again.”

“We provide you with these interactive controls,” says Cotter. “Say something hurts your ankle — well, you can ‘dislike’ it and say it hurts. Then we know to skip that immediately and learn from that, so the next time through, you’re not going to get that exercise, or other things that are hurting your ankle.”

Your Trainer comes in three pricing tiers: Weekly ($6.99 per week), Monthly ($9.99 per month) and Yearly ($99.99 per year) for unlimited workouts.

The goal? Cotter says that Your Trainer is looking to demystify process of getting fit. “What we want to do is remove the guesswork out of the exercise routine.”

*Obviously not true–no one loves Russian Twists.

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Jumat, 23 Oktober 2015

How hybrid will reshape the entire cloud market fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Sinclair Schuller is the CEO and cofounder of Apprenda, a leader in enterprise Platform as a Service.

When the phrase “hybrid cloud” is mentioned, some technologists will tell you it is the eventual end state of cloud computing, while other technologists chuckle. Those that chuckle typically view hybrid as a phrase used by vendors and customers who have no cloud strategy at all. But hybrid is real and here to stay. Not only is it here to stay, but the hybrid cloud will also reshape cloud computing forever.

People today imagine public cloud to be an “amorphous, infinitely scalable computing ether.” They think moving to the cloud rids themselves of the need to detail with computing specificity and that cloud makes you location, risk and model independent. They think enterprises that move to the cloud no longer need to depend on pesky IT departments and deal with risks associated with centralized computing. This perception of computing independence and scale couldn’t be further from the truth.

The promise of cloud is one where anyone who needs compute and storage can get it in an available, as-needed, and robust manner. Cloud computing providers have perfected availability to the point where, even with occasional mass outages, they outperform the service-level agreements (SLAs) of internal IT departments. This does come at a cost, however.

Cloud computing is arguably the largest centralization of technology the world has ever seen and will see. For whatever reason, many people don’t immediately realize that the cloud is centralized, something that should be heavily scrutinized. Possibly because the marketing behind cloud can be vague and lacking a description of a tangible “place.” Don’t be fooled.

When an enterprise selects a cloud vendor, they’re committing to that provider in a meaningful way. As applications are built for or migrated to a cloud, switching cost gets very high. The nature of this market is driven by a network effect where, assuming all else is equal, each prospective customer of a cloud provider (AWS, Microsoft, etc.) benefits by consuming a cloud that has many of customers over one that has fewer since it indicates lower risk and helps drive the economies that make a given cloud attractive.

If we play this future out, we’ll likely see the cloud infrastructure market collapse to just a few massive, global providers. This will partly be driven by success of the individual providers and the consolidation of smaller players who have great technology but simply can’t compete at that scale. Just take a look at the acquisition of Virtustream by EMC just prior to Dell’s acquisition of EMC for a recent example.

A look at recent market share estimates show exactly that, with Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Google accounting for 50 percent of the global cloud infrastructure market. One day, these five vendors will likely account for 80 percent of the market. Compare that to the often-criticized banking world, where despite the massive size of today’s banks, the list of banks that hold 50 percent of global deposits is much longer than just five banks. If we applied the same standard to cloud computing, we’d certainly be infuriated and demanding that these “too big to fail” computing providers be broken up.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that what’s happening is bad or that public cloud is bad, but rather to point out the realistic state of cloud computing and the risk created by centralizing control to just a few providers. Cloud would likely never have succeeded without a few key companies making massive bets. The idea of a truly decentralized, global cloud would likely have been the wrong starting point.

Let’s explore the idea that a global decentralized cloud, or something more decentralized than what we have now, is the likely end state. Breaking up cloud providers isn’t necessary or optimal. Unlike banking, technology is capable of layers of abstraction to mitigate these sorts of centralized risks.

Most large enterprises looking to adopt cloud are making two large considerations in their decision process:

They can’t shut down their entire IT department and replace it with cloud. There are many practical reasons why this is unlikely.
Many are keenly aware of the risks associated with depending on a single vendor for all their cloud computing needs.

The first consideration makes it difficult to adopt a public cloud without at least considering how to reconcile the differences with on-premises, and the second makes it difficult to choose one provider at a level that is incompatible with another provider. The result of centralization in public cloud providers and looking for symmetry between off- and on-premises computing strategies is driving enterprises to explore (and in some cases demand) hybrid capabilities in layers that abstract away infrastructure. In fact, hybrid has transformed to be synonymous with multi-cloud.

Technical layers like enterprise PaaS software platforms and Cloud Management Platforms have evolved to allow for multi-cloud capabilities to cater to a modality where resources are abstract. Over the coming years, we’ll likely see multi-cloud features in these technology layers to lead to a much more decentralized computing model where something like a PaaS layer will fuse resources from public clouds, on-premises infrastructure, and regional infrastructure providers into logical clouds.

At least in the enterprise space, “private clouds” will really be an amalgam of resources and will behave as the single, “amorphous ether” that we tend to assign cloud to begin with. The cloud market will not be one where five vendors control all the compute and customers are at the mercy of the vendors. Instead, cloud will be consumed through multi-cloud layers that will protect customers from inherent centralization risk. The end state is a decentralized model with control points owned by the customer through software – a drastic reshaping to say the least.

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