fifiana hutapea: Desember 2015

Kamis, 31 Desember 2015

The headset cometh: A virtual reality content primer fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

When we talk about VR, we tend to talk in broad strokes. “Experiences,” we call them, as if that term is somehow covers and conveys the depth and disparity that exists between gaming, watching, and interacting with VR content. The reality of virtual reality, however, is not so easily categorized or described.

VR content is the big blanket term that clumsily and imprecisely covers large and vastly divergent portions of the content market as it stands. VR games, immersive video, and virtual cinema all fall under “VR content”, but they’re fundamentally different experiences, possibly appealing to very different portions of a potential mainstream VR market.

Let me get this out of the way: the Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Sony Playstation VR systems that are coming en masse in Q1 2016 are wildly dissimilar creatures. From hardware to headware, these headsets have commonalities (gyroscopes, accelerometers, lenses) but result in very different experiences, namely with respect to resolution, frame rate, quality of the image, type of content supported by each headset. But alas, that’s another story, which we’ll save for another time.

We’re here to talk about VR content and what there is to do in a headset. Who is VR for and why does it exist? What does VR content look like, where does it come from and end up, and why should anyone want to strap something the size of small(ish) camcorder on her face?

Right now, most VR content falls into two distinct (if broad) categories: video and games.

It’s no secret that a large portion of the early adopter market for VR headsets will be made up of gamers, but gaming is really only part of the story. We’ll get to it, but first let’s take a look at the sleeping giant of VR content: video.

For the time being, video in VR also pretty much falls into two categories: immersive video and virtual cinema. Video, for the purposes of this discussion, is any bit of content that you experience in a VR headset during which your degree of agency is limited to where you’re looking.

In other words, whether it’s immersive or passive, in video content, you can’t control your or interact with your environment directly or physically. In some cases, you may be able to explore it by looking around, but your impact on the world is limited to changing your own perspective. Gaming and interactive content, by way of contrast, is content that allows you to affect and interact with the environment around you, whether its via gaze-based mechanics or controllers of any kind.

Immersive Video

I’ll admit that the first time I saw Paul McCartney in concert, I cried. Paul’s my favorite Beatle, the mastermind behind most of my favorite Beatles songs (including and especially Fool on the Hill), and seeing him live, right in front of me was, to put it simply, breathtaking.

Of course, I wasn’t actually there. I was watching it in a VR headset, from a much better vantage point than any seat could hope to provide. I was right next the piano. If I’d been any closer, I’d have been sitting on the grand piano right in front of him. He was playing Live or Let Die which, while not one of my favorites, was incredible. There was no moment at which I felt just exactly like I was right there in the stadium, surrounded by thousands of people and whisper-distance from Paul McCartney. But then, I also forgot that I wasn’t right there. And that’s what VR is all about.

Immersive video content comes in a number of different forms, though it all stems from the same general principle: putting you into the story or the action.

Companies like Jaunt, Vrse, WEVR, Discovery, and even Jeep and Volvo are creating immersive video content. Right now, for both Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR, there are a number of apps and short video experiences that put you anywhere from in the audience at SNL to in a wetsuit, diving into and exploring a shark-riddled shipwreck. There are VR tours of museums and stunning locations, heart-pounding skydiving, flying and racing experiences, and human-centric stories and short films.

Discovery VR is Discovery’s foray into the world of VR and immersive video, and features a number spherical video tie-ins with Discovery Channel IPs like Mythbusters, Gold Rush, Shark Week, and Survivorman. With immersive video, the team behind Discovery VR is experimenting with VR as a new way of telling stories.

On the other end of the immersive video content spectrum is WEVR, the VR software company recently on the receiving end of a big ($10M big) investment from HTC (makers of the Vive headset). WEVR is an open platform VR ecosystem with agnostic software solutions, and it’s looking “enable a content explosion,” in the words of co-found and CEO Neville Spiteri.

Conal Byrne, Discovery’s SVP of Digital Media and one of the leads for Discovery’s VR project calls virtual reality, “the first medium where you can turn a fan or a viewer into a character by just placing them smack-dab in the middle of the story.”

And really, that’s what lies at the core of immersive video: presence.

“You need to think about the audience as being in the experience,” says WEVR’s Spiteri. “You’re not just a viewer…we use the term ‘visitor’.”

Though the idea of creating video around a viewer instead of in front her may seem simple, the effect it has on the way we tell stories is nothing short of ground breaking. “With that simple change,” says Byrne, “to be in control of your POV as you watch video–it’s a seismic change.”

Beyond presence lies another, much more illusive component of immersive video: storytelling. Right now, VR is new and novel, but there will come a time when strapping on a headset and looking at a sunset may come to feel commonplace–something like looking at a beautiful photograph. Enjoyable, stunning even, but somehow stagnant. The compelling element of any video, any experience, is the story. Immersive video will eventually develop and evolve to stretch the boundaries of storytelling, and that presents some exciting opportunities tempered by some very real challenges.

“360-degree video or ‘capture-based VR’ where you’re starting with some aspects of the real world,” says Spiteri, “is proving to be very compelling and creating opportunities for ways of creating and telling video-based stories that have different degrees of interactivity.”

Requiring complex multi-camera/lens rigs, sophisticated editing software, and a team of people who understand the complexities of capturing all 360 degrees of a scene, creating immersive real-world video content is a difficult task. But of course, creating immersive video is much more complex than simply setting up a multi-camera rig that has the technical capabilities to capture 360-degree video.

Creating immersive video content requires recognition that everything around, above, and even below will be captured on camera. Everything is in frame and it’s all a part of the story, and the viewer is going to have the freedom to consume all of it. It’s all a part of the story, even if the action is only happening in a small or partial portion of the scene.

“With traditional storytelling, the director has a pretty high degree of control over what you’re looking at,” says Spiteri. “The art of drawing the user’s attention and directing gaze becomes pretty fundamental to the story and the storytelling process.”

While much attention is given to capture and edit systems, fancy and rugged rigs, and perhaps one of the most crucial factors of storytelling in VR has nothing to do with technology at all. Instead, it’s entirely human.

“We want to make sure that humans don’t get lost in the mix,” says Byrne, “that storytellers, journeymen, pioneers, the people that bring stories to life…don’t get lost.”

In discussing the lush forest-based Survivorman experience on Discovery VR, Byrne says, “It’s one thing to shoot a 360 shot of that forest off the grid in Canada, but when [Survivorman’s] Les Stroud steps out of that forest and starts talking about what he loves about being off the grid and why he does what he does, teaching survival to the viewer, it takes on a whole other meaning and comes alive.”

Like my experience with Paul McCartney, the human element is essential. Who you find in the scene and what they have to share is every bit as important as where you are when you put on the headset.

One of this year’s most stunning examples of immersive video, however, comes from Oculus Story Studio, and features not a human, but a hedgehog. Henry is a short film that follows Henry the hedgehog as he embarks on a journey to find friends.

Unlike much of the immersive video content that exists and is available right now, Henry is an animated VR short and puts the audience inside of Henry’s animated world. The visuals are crisp and stunning, but perhaps one of the most stunning elements of the film is the way that Henry behaves within it.

Henry can look at you. Like, right at you. And while it sounds simple, that is a fundamental paradigm shift. This isn’t just breaking the forth wall, it’s pulling you inside so that the fourth wall is firmly behind you. Henry’s world was designed around the you, the viewer, and you’re a part of it.

Go to page 2 (of 2) on Gigaom .

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Twitter flip-flops on Politwoops (again) fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Twitter has reversed its decision to bar Politwoops, a service which collects and preserves deleted tweets from public officials, from using the public Twitter API.

“Today we’re pleased to announce that we have come to an agreement with The Sunlight Foundation and The Open State Foundation around Politwoops,” the company said. “We look forward to continuing our work with these important organizations, and using Twitter to bring more transparency to public dialogue.”

Both organizations previously criticized Twitter for attempting to hide what public figures said in public but later recanted by deleting their tweets. Here’s what a spokesperson for the Sunlight Foundation, which backs the US version of Politwoops, told me when Twitter moved to block the international version:

‘To prevent public oversight when our representatives try to discreetly change their messaging represents a significant corporate change of heart on the part of Twitter and a major move on their part to privatize public discourse,’ they said.

‘Imagine if the Washington Post printed a retraction of a story, would it demand that all copies delivered to the home with the original story be returned? When a public statement is made, no matter the medium, can it simply be deleted and claimed as a proprietary piece of information?’

Twitter defended the move by saying that the “ability to delete one’s Tweets – for whatever reason – has been a long-standing feature of Twitter for all users” and that the company would “continue to defend and respect our users’ voices in our product and platform.” Providing cover to politicians actually helped other users.

Now the company has reversed its decision — the second time it’s done so where Politwoops is concerned. First it said the tool would be allowed to function on its platform; then it blocked Politwoops’ access to its public APIs; and now it has reversed course so the service can monitor the tweets politicians want to hide.

This flip-flopping makes sense given the importance of politics to Twitter. But, as I wrote when the company shut down the international version of Politwoops, the company’s inability to consistently enforce its rules (let alone uphold certain ideals) is the most worrisome part of the back-and-forth between it and the tool:

Consistent rules can be lived with and worked around. Inconsistent rules, however, lend some credence to the idea that Twitter might not be wise enough to decide what outside groups can do with public tweets. The company should have either shut down Politwoops before or allowed it to run into perpetuity.

In a way, it’s a lot like the controversy created whenever Politwoops did catch deleted tweets that shamed the politicians who sent them. Many of those tweets would have been fine if they hadn’t been deleted; it was only when their senders tried to act like they never existed that problems arose. It’s hard not to appreciate the symmetry between that and Twitter’s current situation.

And here the company has changed its mind again. Let’s see if that remains the case in a few months — we’re due for another reversal of course around March.

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Rabu, 30 Desember 2015

Facebook’s free Internet service stumbles in Egypt fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Facebook just can’t give the Internet away.

A week after Indian regulators halted the company’s Free Basics program, which provides free access to select online services by partnering with local telecoms, the Associated Press reported that the program has also been halted in Egypt.

Free Basics is part of the Internet.org initiative Facebook created to provide free Internet access to people around the world through programs like this, satellites, drones, and other delivery mechanisms that haven’t yet been publicly revealed.

“We’re disappointed that Free Basics will no longer be available in Egypt,” Facebook told the Associated Press. “More than 1 million people who were previously unconnected had been using the Internet because of these efforts.”

It’s not clear why the Egyptian government halted the program. Indian regulators did so due to concerns about how Free Basics might affect net neutrality — concerns which have hounded the program since its inception.

That criticism prompted Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to defend Internet.org’s efforts on his personal Facebook page and the Times of India’s website. (The crux of his argument is that Free Basics supports net neutrality.)

Egypt’s halt might have different motivations. The country has shut down an art gallery and raided an independent publishing house, according to the New York Times, in an “expanding crackdown on dissent that now includes cultural spaces popular with activists and artists” motivated by its president’s fear of revolt.

It would make sense for the government to target free Internet services while it clamps down on physical gathering places. Stifling free access to the open Web has become something of an established tactic throughout much of the world.

Regardless of the motivation, it’s clear that Egypt has joined the Indian government, activists from Latin America, and net neutrality advocates in standing between Internet.org and those it wishes to reach with Free Basics.

Who’d have thunk giving away free Internet access would be this hard?

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What to expect from social companies in 2016 fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Social networks are in a time of upheaval. Established players are experimenting with new services to maintain their relevance, upstart messaging companies are doing their damnedest to knock incumbents off their thrones, and people have more options than ever before when it comes to connecting with other humans.

Below I’ve tried to think up some of the changes we’re most likely to see in 2016 as companies try to diversify their products, renew competition with their rivals, and make good on some of the things forecasted by changes made this last year. And, this being the holidays and all, I decided to do so in a handy-dandy listicle.

Facebook Messenger learns from Asian services

“For social in 2016 I think we will see a further entrenching of messaging and it will have a more important role in personal communications, especially in mature markets such as the US,” Gartner analyst Brian Blau told me. “As the top messaging platforms extend their functionality it will open the door to third-parties and businesses who will want to leverage messaging [as] one of their next platforms of choice when [it] comes to connecting with their customers.”

We’ve already seen this with a recent update that allows Messengers users to hail a ride through Uber without ever having to leave the communications app. The company was key to stress that this is just a test available to a limited number of users in the United States, and that Uber is just its first transportation partner, but it’s clear that Facebook plans to start expanding Messenger’s capabilities.

Snapchat works on its relevancy to the news cycle

I’ve already said Snapchat’s introduction to breaking news during the San Bernardino shooting on December 2 was refreshingly different from most coverage. The app’s ephemeral nature, combined with the fact that Snapchat’s coverage was based almost entirely on content shared by its users, made it a useful tool that provided a close look at what happened on the ground that day.

It wouldn’t be surprising if Snapchat followed this early success with other news efforts. Perhaps it could help news organizations find content on its network to share with their audiences via Discover. (Anything would have to stay within the Snapchat ecosystem to preserve its impermanence and the privacy of its poster.) Or it could just repeat its approach to covering San Bernardino in other places.

Pinterest stops dancing around its commerce ambitions

Many tech companies don’t worry about making money. They know that if they have reach enough people, and convince enough venture capitalists that they could make money as soon as they decide to flip a magical switch that could eventually rake in millions of dollars, they don’t really need to do anything else. But, eventually, investors start to expect companies to bring in some dough.

Pinterest could do that next year. The company has been flirting with commerce since it introduced “Buyable Pins” in the beginning of the year. It’s since added a dedicated shopping section to its mobile applications, introduced a search tool that makes it easier to discover goods within photos, and, most recently, updated the Buyable Pins so they can tell people when items shown in them drop in price.

All that’s left is for the company to ask for a cut of those revenues. Perhaps it will continue to indirectly profit for a while — advertising revenue ain’t bad — but eventually it wouldn’t be a surprise if it started to make money when people buy stuff they discovered on its platform. In fact, it would be the opposite: I would be more surprised if this didn’t happen than if the flip were switched next year.

Twitter introduces a competitor to Facebook’s Instant Articles

It’s weird that Facebook beat Twitter to content hosting. Sure, Facebook sends more traffic to publishers, but many people use Twitter as a content discovery service. It would’ve made sense for Twitter to introduce something that makes opening a link, especially in the company’s mobile applications, less painful than it is. (In-app browsers never seem to function particularly wonderfully.)

Given that, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Twitter at least attempted to offer a similar tool to publishers. It might not have as much success — Facebook’s efforts have succeeded in large part because it has more users, more control over the links they see, and more advertising options — but it could still give it a try. Otherwise it’ll be ceding one of its core strengths, content discovery, to its rival.

Celebrities and brands keep testing features before the public

It seems like one of the nicest things about being a celebrity, aside from the fame and the money and the prestige, is the ability to test new features before the unwashed masses ever hear of them. (And by “unwashed masses” I mean “we.”) That will probably remain true for two reasons: Giving a feature to celebrities naturally limits its reach, and access could keep celebrities engaged with a site.

Just look at how Facebook rolled out new features. Perhaps the most notable example is the service’s live-streaming tool. It debuted first among celebrities; then made its way to other public figures; and is finally being tested among a small number of Facebook users in the United States. This gave celebrities an interesting feature while also helping Facebook make adjustments to the tool.

There was also the the photo-editing features Twitter gave to celebrities before anyone else. And it’s not just celebrities: features often debut early among brands, too, so their ads can stand out from other content on the services. “With Instagram specifically, there are quite a few features they’ve offered brands that will likely make their way to users too,” said Jackdaw Research’s Jan Dawson. “Account switching, multiple-photo carousels, being able to link externally, and so on are all features users want and which might well show up in 2016.”

Facebook introduces video-streaming apps

I’ve said this already, but it’s worth repeating here: Facebook’s lack of standalone video apps is bizarre. The company has done everything it can to take over users’ phones by taking features from its main services and giving ’em their own apps. Messenger was part of Facebook. So was the ability to synchronize photos across devices, which is now exclusive to Moments. Facebook likes independent apps.

Combine that with how popular video has become on its service and it seems like only a matter of time before we start seeing these apps on our phones, tablets, and set-top boxes. Facebook will soon become a channel similar to YouTube or Netflix or Hulu. If it doesn’t, it’s only because the company decided to prop up its main application by keeping videos inside it instead of letting them branch out.

More concerns over data usage and battery life

Phones keep getting thinner. People also use them more each year. This means that battery life is the weakest aspect of any smartphone — and social networks are some of the worst culprits when it comes to using more power than expected.

This came to a head earlier this year when Circa co-founder Matt Galligan called attention to the insane amount of battery consumed by Facebook’s app. Facebook addressed the problem with an update less than two weeks later, but social networking apps like Facebook’s and Twitter’s continue to be some of the biggest drains on an iPhone’s battery life this side of using it to watch Netflix.

Consumers also have to be wary about social apps using all their mobile data. Facebook and Twitter both automatically play video advertisements in their apps by default, and this can wreak havoc on a customer’s data limits. As these apps continue to focus on videos and other rich media, the amount of battery power and mobile data they consume is likely to keep rising in the immediate future.

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Selasa, 29 Desember 2015

Twitter continues anti-abuse campaign with updated rules fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Twitter has made changes to the “Twitter Rules” that dictate how people are allowed to use its service as part of its efforts to curb abuse on the platform.

Former chief executive Dick Costolo recognized Twitter’s abuse problem in February. Since then, the company has devoted more staff to moderating its service, introduced new harassment reporting tools, and taken steps to limit abusers’ ability to spew filth at their target from numerous Twitter accounts.

Now the company has updated the Twitter Rules to make its stance on abuse even clearer. The updated rules bar Twitter users from making violent threats; sharing another user’s personal information; harassing someone; misusing multiple accounts; impersonating others; and encouraging others to self-harm.

“We believe in freedom of expression and in speaking truth to power,” the company says in the new rules, “But that means little as an underlying philosophy if voices are silenced because people are afraid to speak up.” Basically: freedom of expression only works if it has reasonable boundaries.

The updated rules, like some of Twitter’s other attempts to curb abuse on its platform, have been accused of being misguided or meaningless if the company can’t prove that its efforts are more than a public relations gambit that obfuscate harassment whilst allowing the root of the problem to fester like an infection.

Given the reports about Twitter’s shortcomings and the ability of abusers to use for their own benefit the tools designed to stop them, it’s clear that people still aren’t convinced that the company is doing enough. It’s been almost a year since Twitter made harassment a priority but yet the problem continues to hound it.

At least the company knows this. “Keeping users safe requires a comprehensive and balanced approach where everyone plays a role,” wrote Twitter’s Megan Cristina. “We will continue to build on these initiatives to empower our users and ensure that Twitter remains a platform for people to express themselves.”

There’s always next year.

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Indoor farming: Good for cannabis, not so good for food fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Marijuana is a natural candidate for experimentation — and not just the kind that leaves New York Times columnists in hallucinatory states for eight hours. Because it’s often grown indoors, and growing it legally is just becoming legal in a few states around the country, the plant is almost begging to be messed with. And, if those experiments go well, they could affect more than just Mary-Jane.

That’s according to Fluence, a startup that builds LED-based lighting systems for legal cannabis growers and partners with researchers to study their impact. Want to know if a particular strain of marijuana grows best under one spectrum instead of another? Or how much money could be saved by switching from incandescent lighting systems to LEDs? Fluence wants to be the company to ask.

The company, which was formerly called BML Horticulture, currently has to run all these experiments from a research lab in California — and rely on data from other growers and researchers — because its home city of Austin isn’t the most pot-friendly place in the nation. (The company could relocate, but right now it’s content with keeping an eye on everything with remote monitoring systems.)

“We view this as just another plant. We’re looking at all crops that are considered high-value crops or crops that can better humanity, whether that’s lettuce, other types of leafy greens, or cannabis,” said chief executive Nick Klase. The company focuses on marijuana production because that’s where the money is, he said but it wants its research to affect other aspects of agriculture, too.

Most of its cannabis-related research is meant to figure out how to grow more crop while using less electricity than other lighting systems. A report from 2014 said that growing marijuana accounted for $6 billion of the country’s electricity cost throughout the year. Installing more efficient LED lighting systems could have a tremendous effect on the amount of energy used by these operations.

But Fluence wants to figure other things out, too. Klase told me that the company is experimenting to see if different colors of light affect plant growth, for instance, or if they promote the production of specific desirable compounds. “Our goal is to better humanity with this technology, so obviously that’s going to extend way beyond cannabis,” he said. “The nice thing is that most of the things effective on cannabis is relatable to other crops.” Sounds like a dream, right?

There’s no denying the interest in growing plants other than marijuana inside. Countless reports have talked about indoor agriculture and how it’s become more popular in the last few years. This is because it’s seen as more efficient; because people are interested in buying locally-grown produce; and because indoor farming might offer a solution to problems wrought by climate change.

It just seems to make sense, right? If tech companies make efficient LED lights, and it’s going to get harder to farm in many parts of the world, why not play god and grow something that might not otherwise succeed in a particular area? As it turns out, there are many reasons. Economics might be the most important to growers. There’s also the effect these operations could have on the environment.

Louis Demont Albright, a professor emeritus of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell University, cites both factors as the main obstacles to indoor farming. “Just in today’s economic climate, if you buy enough light to raise wheat, you spend $18 for a loaf of bread just for the electricity for the wheat,” he said. Farmers won’t be able to handle those costs without assistance.

All that light would also require growers to use electricity to power their lighting systems and the air conditioning used to prevent the whole thing from going up in flames. (That is not, as I understand it, what cannabis enthusiasts refer to as “lighting up.”) This would, according to Albright, have a worse effect on the environment than growing in greenhouses to take advantage of natural light.

“The idea that’s being proposed is a production system that increases the carbon footprint by an order of magnitude,” Albright said in an interview, “and it makes no sense to me that you would solve a problem by making it worse.” According to his research it’s actually better for the environment to bring produce in from around the world than it is to grow it locally with large-scale indoor farming.

Albright isn’t the only one who thinks that indoor agriculture might be wasteful. Some cannabis growers have even realized that growing all their crops indoors isn’t sustainable from a financial perspective. Here’s what Utah State University professor Bruce Bugbee told MIT Technology Review in the same report that covered the electricity used in the process of growing marijuana plants indoors:

Eventually, as growing marijuana becomes more accepted, some farmers may turn away from grow houses altogether. ‘I’ve visited growers in Colorado who’ve grown cannabis for 30 years and have always grown it indoors,’ Bugbee says. ‘The most progressive growers have run the numbers, and instead of warehouses they’re starting to build greenhouses.’ The plants may still be sheltered, but they’re open to view—and to the natural light of the sun.

There’s no denying the effect climate change will have — and has already had — on agriculture. And it’s the human way to think that technology can save the day. But if these professors and the many other researchers who agree with them are believed, indoor agriculture won’t be the panacea that some expect it to be. It’s more likely to be a short-term solution that will exacerbate a long-term problem.

“I think agriculture will move. Wheat may move from Kansas or wherever up into Alberta if it gets a few degrees warmer,” Albright said. “But it’s still going to be grown on the land.”

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Senin, 28 Desember 2015

This was the year social networks turned into news organizations fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Social networks are the overworked writer’s best friend. It’s easy to observe the latest outrage on Twitter, grab a few good jokes from Reddit, or screen cap the ridiculous things people write on Facebook and turn them into blog posts. Writers used to have to find stories to chase — now they just have to be willing to sift through gargantuan masses of shit to find a few nuggets of social media gold.

There are a few problems with this: the people whose content has been lifted don’t always like someone else taking credit for their words, photos, or videos; relying on outside platforms can lead to the meat of a publisher’s blog posts falling right out of their sandwich of context and witticism; and social networks don’t need writers to surface their best content. They can collect it themselves.

That’s what many decided to do this year. Reddit created a publication called Upvoted to highlight the stories that propagate on its service. Twitter introduced Moments to aggregate tweets about breaking news and entertainment alike. Snapchat got into the news business during the San Bernardino shooting. This was the year social networks tried to establish some control over social media.

The reasoning behind this shift, as well as each company’s approach to it, has varied. Upvoted resembles a traditional publication that just happens to pull its stories from the Reddit platform. It’s designed at least partly to redirect some of the traffic that would’ve otherwise gone to other sites back to Reddit itself. But, as Gigaom’s Tom Cheredar wrote, it’s also meant to humanize the community:

Right now, Reddit is viewed by advertisers with caution. The reasons for this are well-documented. But there’s no denying that Reddit is popular enough that you’d be crazy not to try and get in front of its audience. The problem is that it’s often hard to predict how the discussion will form on Reddit by its community, and that’s a risk many advertisers aren’t willing to justify should things go sour — deserved or not.

Upvoted can soften those fears by enhancing the top submitted content on Reddit proper (as explained above). On other news sites that may credit a Reddit user for submitting a piece of content that gets written up in an article, usually there’s no desire to go beyond the user name. But doing so could help humanize the submitters, which might help advertisers overcome some of the negative characterizations of the overall Reddit community.

Twitter’s Moments feature (not to be confused with the Facebook photo app of the same name) has a different motivation. It’s supposed to find the best tweets so people never have to wonder why they should visit Twitter. It’s also supposed to make it easier for new users to understand what Twitter is about — a way to distill the chaos into a manageable form so normal people can interact with it.

But the implementation is very different from Upvoted. Moments doesn’t look anything like a traditional publication. Instead it looks like just another feature on Twitter’s navigation bar, making it harder to tell that serious editorial talent, like New York Times editor at large Marcus Mabry, are in charge of its content. Its team is a dedicated newsroom masquerading as part of the Twitter machine.

Snapchat’s foray into breaking news took yet a different form. Its staffers gathered content shared to public “Stories” and made them available to anyone near the area affected by the San Bernardino mass shooting of December 2. Small updates about the investigation were written by these same staffers, but for the most part, the company simply shared what its users were experiencing.

I argued that this approach, combined with the ephemeral nature of Snapchat’s service, is a refreshing departure from the majority of breaking news reporting:

It’s easy for misinformation to spread on the web. Hitting “like” or “retweet” on a false report doesn’t require much effort — certainly less than it does to spend a few seconds looking for accurate information or sharing new info as it becomes available. That misinformation often remains until someone goes through and deletes it, which is another opportunity for someone to get the wrong idea about something, share that idea, and keep the perpetual ignorance machine going.

Snapchat’s self-deleting updates don’t afford this opportunity. There’s no perpetuity. It’s a bit like talking on the phone with someone: Unless they’ve taken extra steps to record whatever was said, the information is passed along once before it disappears into the aether. The photo-and-video-based nature of the service also lends itself to eyewitness accounts, which limits the claims people can make. (Not that video or photo evidence on social media is infallible.)

These are three very different approaches, but the underlying goal is the same: Gathering user-generated content before writers aggregate it themselves. So I’m left to wonder when other social companies will get around to creating their own publications instead of waiting for writers to swoop in, gather all the free content lying around, and turn it into something that could lead to millions of pageviews.

There are some obvious contenders. Vine’s users already provide a glimpse into what’s happening during important events, so it would be trivial for the service to collect the best coverage and make it available to users. The same could be said of Periscope — instead of showing things in six-second loops, it offers live-streamed video. Twitter could editorialize both services without much effort.

Another less obvious one might be Product Hunt. That site is like a gift from the tech journalist’s gods. (That is assuming tech journalists have gods willing to serve their — sorry, our — wretched souls.) Need to find something cool to write about? Go to Product Hunt! It’s got everything from software to podcasts, and many founders use the platform to answer questions about their products.

Talk about manna from tech journo heaven. New products? Public statements? Links to the app store, animated GIFs, and ready-to-use images? Product Hunt is one dedicated “news” section away from putting a good number of tech writers out of their jobs. Let’s all take a moment to thank chief executive Ryan Hoover for sparing us from such a grisly end to our careers — at least for the moment.

Aggregating content from social networks has created a weird loop that takes something from those networks, puts it on another website, and then inevitably shares it to the same networks and other platforms. (I, and probably many other Redditors, encounter many links to BuzzFeed stories containing jokes I read a week ago.) These efforts are merely the result of social networks closing the loop.

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Amazon makes empty boasts about another holiday season fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Amazon is making it seem like consumers signing up for its Prime service just in time to take advantage of free two-day shipping on last-minute gifts is a victory. But, much like its celebration of a record-breaking holiday shopping weekend in November, the company hasn’t offered many details about its boastful posturing.

The disingenuousness begins with the company bragging that 3 million people signed up for its Prime service in the third week of December. That seems like a victory — Prime customers are far more likely to remain loyal to Amazon than shoppers who don’t want to pay around $100 per year for access to the service.

But it doesn’t count the number of people who might have signed up for free trials — Amazon often pushes customers to give Prime a try — just so they could get free two-day shipping during the holidays. As long as those people cancel within the grace period, all Amazon really did was eat customers’ shipping costs.

Even worse are the boasts Amazon makes about the number of devices it sold or how many people watched something via its streaming video service. Those claims, much like similar ones made after Thanksgiving, are represented by percentage increases that never provide a baseline for accurate comparisons.

As I wrote when Amazon pulled the same stunt last month:

Yet the fact remains that we have no idea what any of this actually means for the company. Just look at its claim that it sold six times as many Fire TV products this holiday shopping weekend as it did during the same weekend last year. Does that it mean it sold 6 million this year? How about 42 million? Nobody knows!

The reliance on percentage increases wouldn’t be so baffling if Amazon didn’t get rather specific in other areas. The company knows how many timers its Alexa device set, the candy bought through its store, and what movie people watched on Christmas. (Over four million, gummy bears, and “Interstellar,” respectively.)

Amazon was also willing to share information about the last holiday delivery it made — enough for anyone close to the person to identify them, provided some of the items were given away as gifts and the recipients happen to stumble across a press release touted by a large tech company. Here’s what Amazon said:

The last Prime Now order delivered in-time for Christmas was delivered at 11:59 p.m. on Christmas Eve to a customer in San Antonio, Texas. The order included Blue Buffalo Dog Treats, an Amazon.com Gift Card, the all-new Fire tablet, Fruitables Dog Treats, LEGO Star Wars Death Star Final Duel Building Kit, Moleskine Classic Notebook and Stove Top Stuffing Mix.

This means Amazon was willing to share more information about what a Texan procrastinator bought at the last possible moment before Christmas than about the devices it sold, the amount of time people spent watching videos through its video service, and how many of those Prime subscribers kept their memberships.

And here I thought the creepiest part of the holidays was Santa’s omniscience.

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Rabu, 23 Desember 2015

Facebook’s Internet.org stumbles in India fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Facebook’s attempt to provide free access to some Internet services has hit a roadblock: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has told the company’s wireless partner, Reliance Communications, to halt its support of the program.

At issue is the idea that providing free access to some services but not others violates the principles of net neutrality, which basically asserts that Internet providers shouldn’t be able to charge more or less for access to specific websites.

Those concerns have surrounded the Free Basics service affected by this request ever since the Internet.org initiative started rolling it out earlier this year. It even lost a number of high-profile partners worried about its potential ramifications.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg responded to those concerns in a post on his public Facebook page. “If someone can’t afford to pay for connectivity,” he said in a status update, “it is always better to have some access than none at all.”

But those concerns weren’t limited to India. Later, a chorus of activists from Latin America led the Electronic Frontier Foundation to ask if Internet.org leaves people who rely on the service without legitimate access to the Internet.

Here’s the crux of the activists’ and the EFF’s argument against Internet.org:

It is true that Facebook is not the only property made available through Internet.org. The free bundle includes open resources such as the excellent Wikipedia. But the problem runs deeper than simply which sites to which poor users should have subsidized access. It lies in the very concept that Facebook and its corporate partners, or governments, should be able to privilege one service or site above another. Despite the good intentions of Facebook and the handful of allied companies, Internet.org effectively leaves its users without a real Internet in the region.

Now it seems that the Indian government has similar questions about the effect Internet.org might have on the free Internet. As an unidentified source told the Times of India when it first reported on TRAI’s request for a halt on the service:

“The question has arisen whether a telecom operator should be allowed to have differential pricing for different kinds of content. Unless that question is answered, it will not be appropriate for us to continue to make that happen.”

It’s not clear how long the Indian government will take to examine the issue. But at least one thing is clear — the battle to decide whether it’s better to have free access to a limited Internet, or costly access to a free Internet, is far from over.

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Google’s working on a chatbot-filled messaging service fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Google isn’t content to let Facebook dominate the messaging market in the West. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company is working on a platform that will allow consumers to message assistive “chatbots” as well as real-live humans.

Details about the service are scarce. A name wasn’t revealed, for instance, nor was a timeframe for when consumers might expect to be able to use the app. But the report did reveal that Google’s been working on the product for about a year.

Including the chatbots will make this new service different from Hangouts, Messenger, and the other communications platforms Google has introduced. (Anyone remember Wave, the company’s short-lived real-time messaging tool?)

The chatbots, according to the Journal’s report, will allow people to send a query to an automated tool that “will scour the Web and other sources for information to answer a question” much like the question-answering function of Google Now.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Google’s strength is its ability to answer questions, whether it’s through a search engine or a virtual assistant, and flexing that muscle to popularize a messaging app would make sense for the company.

It would also let Google compete with Facebook’s M, a partly-automated tool that uses a mix of artificial intelligence and human workers to answer questions, doodle, find information, book appointments, and perform other functions.

If Google could use its artificial intelligence prowess to provide a service similar to M without requiring humans to perform any tasks, it could give the company just what it needs to compete with Facebook Messenger’s growing dominance.

And, with both of these companies working to create messaging apps that don’t restrict people to communicating with other humans, the combined force could help messaging services become the central hubs of consumers’ digital lives.

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Selasa, 22 Desember 2015

Ello, the startup formerly known as the anti-Facebook, grows up fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Remember Ello, the social network that was first portrayed as the anti-Facebook well over a year ago? Well, it’s still around, but the anti-Facebook framing is something it never should have been billed as, according to the founders.

Sure, there are some aspects of the service that make it seem like a response to the world’s largest social network. It started out small. It’s promised never to display advertisements, which means it doesn’t track its users around the Web. And it’s based around the idea of communicating with other people which, due to the lens through which we view the Internet, makes it a Facebook competitor.

But it doesn’t matter that Ello wasn’t meant to compete with Facebook. That’s how the service was perceived, and it was called the “anti-Facebook” so much that it became the service’s tagline in the mind of the general population. (Well, the portion of the general population that reads tech journalism, at least.) It’s also part of the reason chief executive Paul Budnitz stopped talking to the press.

“Someone, somewhere had called Ello a Facebook killer, and there was just all this hype in the news and I had basically every VC in the country trying to talk to me,” he said in a recent interview. “For most people that’s really an awesome thing and I guess what every startup wants, but for us everyone was coming for something that I didn’t want to build and we really had no interest in building.”

It didn’t matter how often Budnitz said Ello wasn’t taking on Facebook — the story had taken on a life of its own. Investors were calling with hopes of getting in early with the so-called Facebook killer. Consumers were flocking to the site in search of an alternative to that most polarizing of social networks. And writers, like me, were interested in the company mostly because of a false narrative.

Eventually the press stopped. Ello didn’t kill Facebook within a few months, its founder wasn’t giving interviews, and relatively few people used the service. An analyst for App Annie told me that Ello “essentially is so small it doesn’t and can’t compare to” Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and other established social networks or “anything that could be defined as an up-and-coming social app.”

Ello wasn’t even of much interest to researchers. Jason Mander, the director of research at GlobalWebIndex, told me Ello was included in just one of the firm’s quarterly surveys about consumer Internet usage. It wasn’t included in following surveys because it was of little interest to the firm’s clients and respondents. Ello seemed to have been forgotten by everyone outside its relatively small audience.

That didn’t stop the company from continuing its work. I reached out to its press team shortly after I started at Gigaom on a lark. Mostly I expected it to email me every once in a while with a product update, or user data, or the other innocuous things most social networks use to garner attention. It did none of those things. Instead, it sent me the same emails its users get about new features or changes.

“I’d do these interviews with these really nice people and they’d put this stuff up like ‘When is Ello going to switch and start running ads?’ and ‘You’re really not going to go for the billion dollars right now?’ So we just felt like we weren’t getting through the noise,” Budnitz told me. “One of the reasons we’re finally doing interviews is that, if you go on Ello, it’s actually really, really awesome.”

It’s also focused on inspiration, as Budnitz puts it, instead of social networking. People aren’t using Ello to connect with high school classmates — they’re using it to share the images, blog posts, and graphic designs they’ve made or discovered. All of the company’s focus over the last year has been on furthering that mission and giving users a place to connect with like-minded people around the world.

That’s part of the reason why Ello doesn’t have ads. Sure, part of it’s because Budnitz and his co-founders think the way Web ads work is kind of creepy. But the other part is that most advertisements would disrupt the look of the site. “Beautiful photographs look really crummy next to ads for car insurance and tortilla chips,” he said. So the company doesn’t, and indeed can’t, show ads.

So what is Ello? “The basic thing that we’ve been building is a safe and positive community where creators publish, share, and eventually sell inspiring work. It’s really a place for people who make things to inspire one another,” Budnitz said. “And really it’s not just high-end professionals and designers and all that stuff. I would say we have all types of people, amateurs, professionals, you name it.”

That positivity is enforced by a full-time support staff, features that give Ello users granular control over who can see what they post, and its small audience. Visiting the site feels less like signing on to a social network and more like stepping into an art gallery where people who don’t know each other gather around, look at a specific work, and then discuss it in a cool-but-congenial way.

Soon it will be a little different. Budnitz said the company plans to introduce a commerce portion of the service that will allow creators to sell things to other users. It also plans to introduce a version of the site that doesn’t require people to sign on to view work — which should go a long way towards increasing its visibility — and to (finally) release an application for Android smartphones.

But perhaps the biggest change will be the ability for Ello users to post content to other social networks through the platform. This could make it something akin to a central management tool that allows people to share things on Ello first, thus giving them access to what’s described as a supportive community filled with talented people, before sharing them with the masses on other networks.

“Our research shows that one of the most popular reasons for using social networks is because people’s friends are on them too. I think that’s why Ello struggled to attract a critical mass, because people tend to join when they perceive lots of their friends to be using the service too,” Mander said. “However, multi-networking is widespread. Globally, the average internet user has accounts on over 6 networks (rising to 7 among 16-24s). So, there’s certainly scope for Ello to sit alongside other services, even if its users are still engaging with other platforms too.”

Ello has raised around $10 million, and Budnitz said its team remains small so it can keep costs down. The commerce features will help it monetize. It probably won’t ever see the kind of success that other networks have (here I go thinking about Facebook again) but it could be a sustainable business. If anything that makes it more interesting than if it were an also-ran that died battling Facebook.

The company might never escape the idea that it’s the anti-Facebook. That’s certainly the perception I had of the service when I started researching this post. And I’ll confess that even now the cynic in me can’t help but wonder if it really was meant to take on Facebook but pivoted once the hype died down. Ello will be fighting this perception for a long time. Budnitz is okay with that. As he told me:

“We have time.”

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Senin, 21 Desember 2015

Are microservices just SOA redux? fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

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

It seems like every conversation related to cloud-native software projects these days involves microservices. During those conversations, someone inevitably draws a comparison with service-oriented architecture (SOA) or hesitantly asks the question, “Aren’t microservices just SOA?” While it might not seem important on first glance, this is actually a pressing question that gets little attention.

Usually this question is either outright dismissed in the negative or unquestionably accepted in the affirmative. As an exercise in more deeply answering the question, let’s spend time a little time understanding SOA and microservices independently and then comparing.

In the early 2000s, service-orientation became a popular design principle. Driven by backlash against highly coupled, binary-oriented systems, service-orientation promised significant increases in flexibility and compatibility. Microsoft’s Don Box was one of the first to truly spell out the guiding principles of SOA, captured in four simple tenets:

Boundaries are explicit
Services are autonomous
Services share schema and contract, not class
Service compatibility is based on policy

By adopting a service-oriented architecture that adhered to these tenets, one could unlock the value in SOA. Very quickly the world’s top software vendors capitalized on the opportunity and began building platforms and technologies to support the concept.

In fact, the SOA movement became almost entirely a vendor-driven paradigm. Vendors scrambled to build middleware to allow developers to build SOA components that could be delivered and managed in the context of those four tenets. That middleware, in many instances, became bloated. Moreover, industry specifications that defined things like SOA schemas and policy management also became bloated. This bloat resulted in heavyweight components and a backlash by developers who viewed SOA as a cumbersome, unproductive model.

In the mid-2000s, cloud infrastructure started gaining steam. Developers were able to quickly standup compute and storage needs and install and configure new applications to use that infrastructure. Additionally, applications continued tackling new levels of scale, requiring distributed architectures to properly handle that scale.

Distribution of components forced segregation of application logic based on functionality. That is, break up an application into smaller components where each component was responsible for specific functions in the app.

This ability to instantaneously call-up infrastructure coupled with the propensity for developers to use distributed architectures prompted individuals to think about formalizing thoughts for a framework. Microservices became a concept that embodied much of this and more.

It would seem that the backstory for microservices satisfies tenets 1 through 3 (although 3 is a bit more relaxed in microservices since a REST API wouldn’t typically be considered a strict contract), making microservices very similar to SOA. So how is that different than SOA?

Microservices, as originally conceptualized by Martin Fowler and James Lewis, extend expectations beyond how an application is partitioned. Microservices as a pattern establish two other important tenets:

Communication across components is lightweight
Components are independently deployable

These seemingly small additions to the criteria defining microservices have a drastic impact, creating a stark difference between the microservices and SOA.

Tenet 5 implies that complex communications buses should not be used in a microservices architecture. Something like an enterprise service bus (ESB) under the hood would create a large, implicit system dependency that would, by proxy, create a monolith of sorts since all the microservices would have one common, massive dependency influencing the functional end state.

Tenet 6 means that deployment monoliths are not allowed (which is something that was common in SOA). Each service should carry its isolation all the way up the SDLC to at least deployment. These two tenets ensure that services remain independent enough that agile, parallel development are not only possible, but almost required. While SOA meant that logic was divided into explicitly bounded components for the same application, microservices’ independent deployability means that the components need to be for the same application at all, and may each be their own independent application.

SOA set the tone for the fundamental architectural concepts embedded in modern microservices, but didn’t go far enough to create a powerful model that would solve the problems associated with bloat and speed of development. Microservices principles have a huge impact in how we think about the software development process and are not just a prescription for the architectural outcome. Thus, microservices can create a better outcome than its SOA predecessor.

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Blockchain, its new rival, and their future in the enterprise fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are already starting to shake up the financial services industry. They have also got entrepreneurs thinking about other applications for the blockchain technology that underlies them, including ones that address various processes inside non-financial companies such as contracts, audits and shipping. The digital signatures that certify each transaction and the distributed, write-only online ledger that constitute the core of the blockchain tech have the potential to offer even more security in these and other areas than more traditional approaches used by businesses.

Blockchain isn’t the only game in town either. The Linux Foundation recently revealed that it is leading an open source effort to develop an alternative to bitcoin’s underlying tech. The initiative, which has been dubbed the Open Ledger Project, is being supported by a coalition of leading financial services and tech companies, including Wells Fargo, State Street, the London Stock Exchange Group, Cisco, Intel, VMware and IBM. IBM, which has been a driving force behind the project, is reportedly contributing many thousands of lines of code to it as well as considerable developer resources.

The new kid on the block will have some catching up to do with blockchain, which is already being employed in some innovative ways. Nasdaq OMX, the parent company of the NASDAQ stock exchange, wants to use the tech to oversee trades in the stock of private firms and the Securities and Exchange Commission recently approved a plan by Overstock.com that involves the online retailer issuing stock using blockchain technology. Startups such as Digital Asset Holdings and Coinbase are also looking to profit from growing interest in digital tracking and trading using the new approach.

The firms that gain traction here will get plenty of attention. Investment banking firm Magister Advisors thinks that financial institutions will be spending a total of over $1 billion on blockchain-related projects in 2017. And finance is just one industry where the new technology could drive significant change. In the music world, startups such as PeerTracks and Bittunes are aiming to use it to revolutionize the way music is bought and shared. And in the art world, Verisart is harnessing the blockchain to improve the way art is secured and verified.

Looking at enterprise markets, there is a huge opportunity to apply blockchain technology or other variants in any place that involves swaps, trades or exchanges. One of the most obvious applications is in contractual situations where there is a need for proof that various parties are committed to a transaction. Companies such as Block Notary and Bitproof are developing ways to bind digital signatures into the blockchain and some firms are also experimenting with the technology to create escrow contracts that hold money on account until mutual agreement is recorded.

Another area where I expect to see more activity using blockchain technology is in auditing. Deloitte is one of a number of professional services firms that is experimenting with distributed digital ledgers. Here, transactions can be posted into a blockchain, which would apply a timestamp and act as a repository. Typically, auditors only choose a sample from a set of transactions to check; but using the new approach, it may well be possible to verify a much broader range of transactions securely and cost-effectively. There are a lot of regulatory issues still to be ironed out, but the opportunity to provide certainty with significantly less friction is a compelling one.

There is also a big opportunity to use the technology to improve shipping and supply chain management. An example of a startup here is Thingchain, which is applying a bitcoin-inspired cryptosystem to multiple use cases, including proving the provenance of goods and who owns them.

Many companies are still learning about the potential of blockchain technologies, so it may be some time before we see broad adoption beyond finance. But the potential is significant—and not only in the areas that I’ve outlined above. Entrepreneurs are already exploring enterprise applications that cover everything from patent registration to recording the results of boardroom votes. Expect to see more and more businesses joining the blockchain gang in 2016 and beyond.

Martin Giles is a partner at Wing Venture Capital (@Wing_VC). He was previously a journalist with The Economist.

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Kamis, 17 Desember 2015

Flipboard tries to keep publishers happy with profiles, ‘end cards’ fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Flipboard is releasing a slew of features to make its content discovery service more attractive to the publishers whose content appear in its apps and website. In doing so, it’s also indirectly responding to the threat posed by Facebook’s Instant Articles and other services that find blog posts for their users to read.

The first of these features is the ability for publishers to create profiles where all of their content will be posted. Previous versions of the service, which debuted to much fanfare alongside the original iPad, were limited to a series of feeds that had to be discovered via its search tools instead of a single easy-to-find place.

Publishers can manage their profiles with custom logos, designs, and many of the settings that can be tweaked on essentially any platform. Flipboard will also work with publishers to verify these profiles, making it easier to tell if a page is actually run by a paper like the Washington Post or if it’s managed by impostors.

In addition to these profiles, publishers will now be able to include “end cards” that link to their other content in the last “page” of their stories. Now, instead of having to worry about readers abandoning them whenever they finish a story, these content providers will be able to at least attempt to keep their interest.

Flipboard’s head of partner platform products, Jack Mazzeo, said that early tests showed these new end cards increase click-throughs by 15 percent. “We think publishers will really find that valuable,” he said, adding that Flipboard wants to “improve reader engagement” with the publishers with which it has partnered.

Both of these changes make Flipboard more competitive with Facebook’s Instant Articles, which were recently updated with similar features allowing publishers to link to whatever content they’d like at the end of their stories. The new profile pages resemble the central hub for content around which Facebook is organized.

Another change is Flipboard’s new support for Google Analytics and ComScore. Both are supposed to make it easier for publishers to sell ads against traffic in Flipboard’s mobile applications, which were previously measured by the company and detailed in monthly reports instead of up-to-the-minute updates.

Mazzeo said publishers requested both integrations. The update is meant to serve two purposes: for “larger publishers to have more real-time visibility into their traffic on Flipboard” and for “smaller publishers who want to understand how much traffic” they get to decide if they want to invest more in the service.

All of these efforts follow a report from the Wall Street Journal which claimed that the company was “floundering” because one of its co-founders left; its ad rates reportedly fell by half; and acquisition talks with Twitter fell through. Chief executive Mike McCue dismissed the report in a later interview with Fortune.

That dismissal was echoed by Flipboard spokeswoman Christel van der Boom. During the interview with Mazzeo, she said that the Journal’s report was based on “anonymous sources” and that Flipboard recently had the best quarter in its history. She later said she didn’t have the exact numbers to back up that claim.

Either way, and regardless of how Flipboard has positioned these new features, it’s clear that the company is moving past its beginnings as a social aggregator. Is that because Facebook removed the need for apps like Flipboard with Instant Articles, or because the company’s experiencing a turbulent period in its history?

It doesn’t really matter. The result is the same: An experience that relies less on the hodgepodge nature of Flipboard’s core service and makes the service more like a collection of traditional magazines. It’s happy. Publishers are happy. Now it’ll see if users will be happy, too, and that’s when the real fun will get started.

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