fifiana hutapea: November 2015

Senin, 30 November 2015

Social networks face obstacles in road to e-commerce domination fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Social networking companies have made no secret of their desire to convince people to purchase things discovered in ads, photos, and other content shared to their services. But the big social players are finding that more difficult than expected, even with the added sales activity from the holiday shopping season.

Over the last year, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest have spent much time developing ways to make shopping easier by eliminating the need to navigate outside the social network with various “buy” buttons. The idea is that if you build purchasing features directly into the social service, people will be more likely to make a transaction than if they were redirected to an online retail site or brand’s website. The problem is that consumers aren’t changing their shopping habits as much as hoped, according to a report from Recode.

The report focuses on the various “buy” buttons that have appeared on these social networks in the last year. It notes that Facebook’s is still seen as a test; that Twitter’s isn’t encountered very often even by its most fanatical users; and that Pinterest’s have led to fewer than 10 purchases a day from a retail partner.

A Facebook spokesperson reiterated the company’s stance — that it’s testing its commerce tools, and that it’s focused on discovering new products as well as allowing people to purchase them with a “buy” button — in an interview. Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment. Pinterest emailed a prepared response:

Since launching Buyable Pins 6 months ago we are encouraged by the early results for merchants. Although it’s still early days with the program we are hearing from merchants that many of their customers coming through Buyable Pins are new and we are driving higher mobile conversions. We look forward to continuing to deliver value to our partners through the holiday season and a fun, easy shopping experience for our Pinners.

It’s worth noting that criticism of these “buy” buttons doesn’t come amid a holiday shopping slump. Reports indicate that Thanksgiving and Black Friday shopping habits were “perfectly average,” and that an estimated 34 percent of purchases from the last week were made by shoppers on their smartphones.

So it’s not that people are closing their wallets this year, nor that they were too busy eating potentially-worrisome turkey products to use their phones. They’re spending a fair amount and they’re doing so via their smartphones — they just don’t seem to be using social networking companies’ purchasing tools to do so.

This might not be too problematic for Facebook and Twitter. Both companies have introduced features unrelated to commerce — like a not-so-virtual assistant and summaries of breaking news — over the last few months. But Pinterest’s inability to convert digital window shoppers into buyers could be a problem.

Commerce has been Pinterest’s focus for a while. First came the buyable pins; then came a dedicated shopping section in its mobile apps; and then came a new visual search tool designed to allow people to identify products shown in pins. It’s obvious that the company wants people to buy things found on its service.

That makes Recode’s report more damning. A Pinterest spokesperson offered several examples of businesses finding new customers through its service — the same as they do on Facebook and Twitter — but only one of a brand improving sales by a notable margin. And even that was expressed as a percentage of growth instead of an absolute value, which makes it hard to tell how big a bump that really was.

“The effectiveness of buy buttons hans’t been fully realized at this early stage. Mobile users have many options for making purchases and it will take time for this payment route have an impact on overall mobile e-commerce sales,” Gartner analyst Brian Blau told Gigaom. “I think we will see [these companies] make adjustments and continue to configure these purchase points over the coming year to optimize their role in the mobile customer purchase funnel.”

It’s still early in this game. All of these companies have emphasized that their commerce efforts are being tested, and at least for Facebook and Twitter, it’s clear that the companies aren’t focusing all of their efforts on getting people to buy things through their platforms. Those companies will be fine either way.

Pinterest’s success or failure in this regard will be more interesting. The service is often used as a way for people to learn about new products. (Or, as it seems to be used in my house, as a never-ending source of hit-or-miss recipes.) Now it just has to bridge the gap between discovering a product and purchasing it.

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Facing threat of extinction: How pro services can compete in the age of AI fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Alastair is president at Huddle.

The professional service industry — any third-party consultancy or support service that helps businesses operate better — is massive. In the United States the professional service industry is comprised of almost 20 million people, which is roughly 13 percent of the total American workforce. Those 13 percent are in grave danger, finding themselves jobless in as little as 10 years.

The latest job reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the American services industry is currently thriving, but starting to come under extreme threat. Burgeoning new markets overseas, which used to support industrial economies, are transitioning into service-based economies. That flood of new (oftentimes extremely inexpensive) labor means incredible new competition for almost every aspect of the service industry, including professionals like lawyers and paralegals, accountants, and business consultants.

At the same time, businesses and pro service professionals around the world face an even greater common threat: replacement. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation mean that professional service businesses don’t only have to worry about human competitors; they have to worry about machines as well. Today, algorithms help people solve their business problems. Software like QuickBooks and Xero attract customers who third-party accountants used to own exclusively, without anyone (or rather, anything) to contest them. And there is a program in the works that can instantly analyze the legitimacy of a legal claim. You can already see the impact of automation at work in other industries like administration and executive assistance, for example, x.ai’s says that its product — a robotic assistant called Amy — can fully replace a real human aid.

The professional services sector will face an onslaught of new competition, and when it does, service-based businesses need to be able to set themselves apart and prove their value – or die trying.

The calm before the storm

To get an idea of how quickly the professional service businesses can shift from complacency into chaos, look no further than the disintegrating world of European tax audit firms. In 2014, in the wake of a series of public fraud claims, the European Union instituted a mandatory audit firm rotation rule, which mandated that all European companies switch to a different firm every ten years. Instead of doubling down to compete on the quality of their products and services, audit firms have responded by lowering their fees. This has created an environment where competition is based on price, not quality of work. The results have been ugly, and it is only a matter of time before new competition from overseas and technology swoops in that can win on price, maybe even quality.

That experience of sudden, constant competition isn’t something that will stay limited to auditors. As technology advances and the world shifts, every professional services business will be put under the microscope by its clients and forced to distinguish itself. Unfortunately, the fields where differentiation is most critical can also be the ones that are hardest to showcase. Often there aren’t metrics to point to, and firms can’t compete with algorithms in terms on price.

To be truly successful in the new marketplace, businesses need to find new ways to set their services apart to save themselves.

Keeping the services industry relevant with new rules

One of the biggest value-adds that any professional service can offer is its knowledge—industry expertise, experience and understanding of your clients themselves are hugely important, and aren’t something that other players can easily replicate. That said, knowledge at firms can easily become siloed if resources are limited. Even the smallest companies these days often need to operate globally, so having access to knowledge from all over the world is also a massive asset, lending firms provide extremely valuable insight that competitive alternatives might lack. One way to diversify knowledge is to alter corporate structure; for example, Grant Thorton UK moved to a shared enterprise format to give voice to all of its employees. Firms should also take a closer look at software to engage and interact with remote teams and leverage their expertise as well, without relying on workflow-slowing email back-and-forth.

Another way professional services firms can distinguish themselves is to highlight their creativity. Creative contributions can’t be outsourced, automated or devalued. A company’s creativity will always be a powerful leveraging point with clients. Finding the creative areas where a firm’s creativity flourishes and how to showcase that creativity can be a huge boon. For example, this might mean hiring diversely, providing creative resources, or even acquiring a whole new company, like PricewaterhouseCoopers did last year. Creativity is one of the few assets that is completely irreplaceable, and therefore priceless.

Most importantly, service-based companies must learn to dissolve the wall between themselves and their clients. Good service experiences ultimately boil down to relationships—they’re what make or break any new client engagement. The single most important factor for developing those relationships is communication and transparency. By opening channels of communication through consistent collaboration, firms can break down the barrier between themselves and their client, becoming less of a commoditized service provider and more of a trusted partner.

Businesses today are deeply concerned with maintaining accountability (and with good reason, as illustrated by the fraud behind the European rotation). If companies can offer clients clear insight into what you’re working on, you can win their confidence and retain their business. Some companies grow closer with their clients by working on projects in conjunction. Others partner on new initiatives or share joint resources. Whatever a company can do to bring themselves closer to their client is a step closer to becoming indispensable to them.

When business is going well, it’s easy to sit back and be complacent. But truly successful organizations are constantly evolving, with an eye to how things might change in the future. Professional services are incredibly nuanced. They add indispensable value. And the more they can clearly demonstrate this, the more they’ll thrive — even in the face of a more competitive environment.

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IoT Hardware Opportunities fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

The proliferation of connected devices that is the heart of the Internet of Things, both at a consumer and an industrial level, represents a significant opportunity for hardware makers. The overall connected device market will spur growth from the data center to the edge device. But within that broad growth the application needs of IoT will favor certain hardware makers over others and provide new opportunities for those hardware developers that can produce processors, sensors and communications chips capable of addressing the unique and evolving needs of IoT.

Key findings include the following:

Future hardware growth markets fueled by IoT include microcontrollers, sensors and communications chips.
Chip manufacturers that offer excellent power envelopes, small size, competitive pricing, along with the possibility of integration of multiple applications (security, networking, sensors) will offer additional competitive products.
Unlike the x86 Intel dominated microprocessor space, a degree of customization for applications and a diverse product line are important factors for a successful microcontroller producer.
The sensor market carries risks of commoditization and favors those companies that can amass and package multiple sensors.
We remain far from settling on dominant standards for IoT, and a number of different communications protocols are competing. Communications chip makers will need to both remain flexible and ally themselves with standards bodies that have support and excellent interoperability.

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Rabu, 25 November 2015

Exploring Apple’s growing interest in VR content fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

While it’s no surprise that the presence of virtual reality is weaving its way into many sectors of tech, we’re still left waiting to find out how it’ll unfold when it comes to Apple.

Google, Samsung, Sony, and Facebook have all shared their VR plans, but Apple is remaining silent. Well, mostly silent anyway. Yesterday, Apple confirmed to TechCrunch that it had purchased Swiss startup Faceshift, which develops motion-capture technology. Prior to the acquisition, Faceshift focused on producing motion-capture solutions primarily for gaming and film applications. Most notably, the startup has done work for little film called Star Wars.

Faceshift’s tech integrated with cameras capable of capturing and deciphering depth in a space, then used the visual information picked up by the camera to influence the appearances, actions and facial expressions of digital objects like avatars and animated characters.

So, what does Apple want with Faceshift? In typical Apple fashion, it gave a stock non-answer when asked about how it plans to use Faceshift. That leaves us to speculate on how, exactly, Apple plans to leverage the work of the company that helped bring Star Wars characters to life. First, though, let’s talk a little bit about what Faceshift was doing prior to being snatched up by Apple.

Faceshift’s most recognizable and noteworthy work is obviously with Star Wars, but its tech has a number of applications that go beyond visual effects in film. One such application was in avatars.

Though avatars are frequently used in gaming, the recent uptick in interest in virtual reality and augmented reality applications has seen many content companies from game studios to film studios rethinking the way in which we see ourselves represented digitally. No longer are avatars simply a cartoonish representation of our online selves on Xboxes and Playstations — they’ve shown the potential to become key components in the way we perceive ourselves in a digital world.

Faceshift has also dipped its toes into augmented reality, using its tech in conjunction with mirrors. In one instance, FaceShift teamed up with AMVBBDO and Pepsi for an AR-based halloween prank that transformed people’s faces into horrifying It-like clown masks. On the less terror-inducing end of the spectrum, possibilities for Faceshift’s mirror tech included the ability to change or modify one’s appearance digitally in a retail setting. Say, for example, trying on a prospective pair of glasses not available in shop or experimenting with a new kind of makeup.

Taking into consideration some of Apple’s other recent acquisitions like Metaio, some degree of AR-application doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. At its core, augmented reality is about allowing users to interact with digital components in space. Virtual reality, by way of comparison, is an immersive experience — one that replaces your current reality with one that lives inside of a headset rather than adding components to your current perceived reality. It’s worth noting, however, that not all applications of AR look like mirror-based pranks, or even Microsoft’s Hololens.

What an Apple foray into AR would look like is difficult to guess. Microsoft has been implementing AR through Hololens for gaming and design purposes, but much of that comes down to the headset. Though certainly not impossible, there isn’t much to indicate right now that Apple’s planning on producing its own headset hardware.

But the reason behind acquiring Faceshift (or even Metaio) might not be augmented reality-related at all. Maybe it’s got more to do with improving features in existing Apple technology, or something security-related, like using facial recognition and mapping to improve device and information security. Or maybe — highly unlikely, but maybe — Apple intends to create its own space opera films.

For now, it’s anyone’s guess how Faceshift might factor into Apple’s plans for the future. But it almost certainly didn’t acquire Faceshift without some seriously sophisticated plans for motion capture and facial mapping technology. And, like always, we’ll be waiting for Apple to read us in.

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This food quality startup ruined Thanksgiving by analyzing turkey products fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

There are many ways for tech companies to ruin Thanksgiving dinner. Facebook could send a push notification to all your relatives to remind them about petty arguments had over the last year. Apple could release a novelty ringtone no-one but your creepy uncle will enjoy. Someone might ask you to explain Snapchat.

Or they could just analyze the brands of turkey available in grocery stores. What better to celebrate a holiday marked by the copious amounts of bearded avians that make their way onto dinner tables around the country than with a report detailing all the contaminants, substitutions, and lies associated with the birds?

Clear Labs went ahead and did just that. A little more than a month after the company released its first food report, which analyzed hot dogs and found that a greater than zero percentage were problematic in some way, the company has used its food analytics tools to examine the turkeys that will be served Thursday.

Lingering questions about the veracity of the hot dog report aside, the turkey report contains some damning information about the not-so-little gobblers on which many of us will gorge this week. Clear Labs said 7 percent of the turkey products it tested contained other meats; 5.5 percent had human DNA; and a total of 13.5 percent of the 158 turkey products it tested were “problematic.”

These issues led Clear Labs to recommend several brands of turkey products, from the “Safeway Frozen Young Turkey” to the Jennie-O turkey burgers, as well as naming the best retailers from which people can buy non-problematic turkey. (Those retailers are, perhaps unsurprisingly, Target, Walmart, and Safeway.) Of course, for all the procrastinating amateur chefs out there, Clear Labs might have saved them from purchasing a turkey from a less reputable brand. One person’s ruined holiday is another person’s last-minute stomach saver.

Here’s how I explained Clear Labs’ food reports in an earlier piece:

For each report Clear Labs needs to buy foods, catalog them, run it through a series of tests, then analyze the results against its own database and several public domain databases it uses to inform its findings. When all this is done the company will assign different brands a Clear Score ranging from zero to 100, which is supposed to indicate the accuracy of the brand’s labeling in terms of ingredients, nutrients, and other information.

At the time, Clear Labs debuted on Kickstarter to support more food reports. It was seeking $100,000 for 10 reports that cost roughly $10,000 a piece to create. That campaign was unsuccessful: The company raised roughly $86,900 via the campaign, and because it was held on Kickstarter, it won’t get any of that money.

Clear Labs isn’t the only company scrutinizing Thanksgiving. Google also published a report on what people are searching for before the holiday. Most want to know about Thanksgiving’s past or who’s playing on that day. Others look for stuffing recipes, and or how to cook a delicious bird.

That said, if you share Clear Labs report with your family you can have the benefit of grossing them out before they Google it on their own. And you know what that means: Not having to share* the remaining turkey. You’re welcome.

*OK, maybe there’s two ways Clear Labs is making your Thanksgiving better.

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Amazon Books should be the future of brick-and-mortar retail chains fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Earlier this month, Amazon opened a bookstore in a mall that used to house a Barnes & Noble. Much has been written about this foray into the physical realm: It’s been called a potential library of the future; Amazon itself has been called the Darth Vader of the books business; and some have wondered about the possibilities afforded by a location that bridges online and offline commerce.

Those are all interesting considerations, but as with Amazon’s other programs, the secretive company hasn’t said whether this is a small test or the beginning of a larger initiative that will lead to Amazon Books locations across the country. So I don’t want to consider the effect this physical store could have on Amazon — I’d rather question why other brick-and-mortar stores are resting on their laurels.

Seriously, why aren’t there more retails stores like Amazon’s book store experiment? A store with a variety of goods on physical shelves with prices that fluctuate to stay in sync with the online version of the store. Of course, there would need to be some changes to accommodate those who don’t like change, but there’s potential here to merge the online and offline shopping experience.

People use their smartphones while they shop. Often this is because they want to learn more about an item before purchasing it. One study from 2013 states that only six percent of people who use their smartphones in a physical store plan to purchase an item online. The rest were seeking more information about the item’s quality, the reputation of its manufacturer, and other data that might inform a purchase. (I’m sure that has changed significantly over the last two years, with Amazon’s image-based physical product search tool helping lead the charge.) Still, that could change as more people use their smartphones to find the best prices. Why buy something from a brick-and-mortar store when you can order it online for a lower price, even after figuring in the costs of having it shipped? Unless someone needs the item immediately — in which case someone probably isn’t comparison shopping — the lower price will win most of the time.

Retailers could change this by emulating Amazon Books’ model of automatically price-matching items sold in their stores to items sold on their websites. Right now there’s no guarantee that a Walmart store will match the price of an item sold on Walmart.com, for example, and other stores have similar policies. It’s almost like retailers actually want shoppers to treat their stores like showrooms.

The truth is that I don’t want to check the prices of items on my smartphone. I’m indecisive enough when it comes to shopping — I’ll often grab an item, think of buying it, then put it back right before I get to the checkout aisle. Multiple times. Having to worry about a price discrepancy between a retailer’s physical location and their online store just gives me even more reason to reconsider a purchase. Knowing that the price I see on a shelf is the price I’d have to pay online would make the whole process easier. (While I could still compare the price to Amazon and other sellers, it would be foolish to expect retailers to automatically match a competitor’s price instead of requiring shoppers to notice the discrepancy.) That offers all the benefits of shopping at a physical store with fewer of the drawbacks.

Of course, Amazon can get away with this because it’s running a test in one location and is comfortable with wafer-thin margins on the items it sells. Other retailers have their own challenges, like the sheer number of employees required to staff physical locations around the United States, that make it harder for them to pull an Amazon Books and bridge the gap between on-and offline shopping.

But that might be what it takes for these stores to thrive. What happens when Amazon slowly but surely competes more and more with physical locations? The company’s already expanding its grocery business, for instance, and is reducing the amount of time it takes to ship items to customers with multiple services. Amazon Books — if it’s successful — could easily become an Amazon Market. There are other advantages, too. If an item on the shelf is sold out, retail stores could provide incentives for people to pull out their phones and have the item shipped to their home later on. Surely that’s better than just losing the customer.

Stores could also apply dynamic pricing to certain goods. I’m not saying they should be dicks and implement “surge pricing” the same way Uber has — that wouldn’t sit well with shoppers, managers, or regulators — but it would give the stores more control over the price of items that sit on or fly off the shelves. Why have near-static prices that only change once a week, or when a sale goes on, when you could experiment with different prices to see what works the best?

Perhaps we’ll see more online sellers follow Amazon’s lead here. It seems easier for online stores to introduce physical locations than for brick-and-mortar stores to get people to use their websites. The future is digital; better to build for that future and experiment with the past than the other way around. Still, it wouldn’t be surprising if traditional retailers like Walmart and Target attempt this fusion.

If that happens, it will be caused by Amazon’s willingness to make shopping easy. It doesn’t ask people to leave their homes to buy something; nor will it require them to buy something online if they prefer to handle the item in person. The company morphs to suit its customers instead of requiring its customers to change their lives (even if it’s just by asking them to drive somewhere) to shop.

Doesn’t that sound better than driving to a brick-and-mortar store and having to check prices on your smartphone to get the best deal? Who wants to waste that trip? Hell, who wants to walk around stores filled with people struggling to push a cart and check prices on their phones at the same time? Grabbing an item, taking it to a register, and getting a fair price on it shouldn’t be so damn hard.

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Selasa, 24 November 2015

Amazon is reportedly running a secret shipping operation in Ohio fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Amazon is steadily expanding its delivery infrastructure, whether it’s by driving items to consumers in select cities or testing a secretive drone delivery program. Could the company also reduce its reliance on shipping companies like UPS and FedEx by running its own air cargo operations instead of using others’ planes?

A report from Motherboard indicates that Amazon is most likely behind a secretive operation from an Ohio airport dedicated to shipping consumer goods. If the report is accurate, it would appear that Amazon is at least testing a system that could give it more control over the paths its wares take to reach consumers.

This control would help Amazon sidestep any issues other carriers face. Instead of being at the mercy of UPS and FedEx, the company would be responsible for making sure items reach their new owners on time, and it would have the power to fix anything that goes wrong instead of just mopping up after others’ messes.

It could also help reduce shipping costs. As Motherboard notes in its report:

With shipping, as with all of Amazon’s $250 billion empire, efficiency is key. Amazon’s net shipping cost in 2014 was $4.2 billion, up from $3.5 billion in 2013, according to a 10-K filing from 2014 with the Securities and Exchange Commission. With delivery costs weighing heavily on Amazon and ongoing headaches with UPS and other third party shippers, the company has a lot to gain from its own logistics network, whether just supplementing shipments in peak seasons or cutting out other carriers entirely.

This is what Amazon is all about — owning everything its customers might ever have to interact with. Take digital media, for example. Amazon sells the devices used to access online content; runs services used to stream that content; and operates the network that delivers all those bits and bytes to people’s devices.

Those efforts pay off by making Amazon an integral part of digital media, convincing people to continue purchasing things from its website, and even create an incredibly valuable business devoted to the cloud computing market. Why wouldn’t the company want to replicate that success in the physical realm?

Given all that, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Amazon might be testing its own air cargo operations. If anything, it’s more surprising that it’s taken this long for a company whose greatest strength is owning every aspect of whatever business it’s in took this long to run an experiment like the one taking place now. (I reached out to Amazon for comment and will update this post if I hear back.)

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Senin, 23 November 2015

Snapchat rethinks content discovery with Story Explorer fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

A new Snapchat feature called Story Explorer will allow people in New York and Los Angeles to view specific moments from perspectives shared by other users.

Snapchat says in a blog post today that Story Explorer works by taking Snaps curated into its Live Stories and making other Snaps of the same event available with a swipe. (That sentence would have been gobbledygook just a few years ago.) Put another way: It’s like viewing a movie through multiple views instead of just one.

“It’s the first time you’ll be able to experience that incredible game-winning dunk from thousands of perspectives throughout the stadium — or feel like you’re right there on the scene when breaking news unfolds,” Snapchat says. It adds that this is possible because its users contribute “so many diverse perspectives” all at once.

A report from the Los Angeles Times says that Snapchat’s curators will still be tasked with choosing the content that appears in the company’s Live Stories. This feature simply makes it easier for people interested in a particular moment to view relevant content without requiring the curator to find similar Snaps.

Story Explorer feels a bit like Snapchat’s attempt to replicate the hashtag. That omnipresent symbol often serves as a gateway to similar content, but it’s limited because it requires people to categorize whatever they’re sharing. Snapchat’s doing something similar with an automated system that requires no user effort.

“Story Explorer relies on technology developed by our research team to provide more depth to every Snap in a Story,” the company says in its blog post. “When you see a moment that inspires or excites you, simply swipe up to see more Snaps of that same moment – from every perspective.” Who needs hashtags?

It will be interesting to see how Snapchat’s users respond to having their Snaps made available to anyone who swipes up on something shared to a Live Story. Despite the app’s utility as something more than a sexting service, its beginning as a private and ephemeral social network doesn’t lend itself to features like this.

Not from the person sharing the Snap’s perspective, anyway. For everyone else this little bit of communal voyeurism makes perfect sense. Why view something from one angle when you can view it from a thousand? And who cares about how Snapchat began if this is what it is now? The first answer’s clear; the second isn’t.

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Facebook touts the strength of its developer tools fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Facebook is tooting the horns of its various developer tools by sharing how DoubleU Games, a South Korean developer, used them to learn more about Facebook users who play in the virtual casino of its flagship DoubleU Casino.

A case study provided exclusively to Gigaom shows that DoubleU Games used Facebook’s log-in feature to make it easy for people to sign up for DoubleU Casino; used App Install Ads to promote the game; and used the Analytics for Apps tools introduced in March to learn more about how the game is played.

Facebook claims the audience gained from App Ads now represents 80 percent of DoubleU Casino’s desktop revenue. The company behind the virtual casino found that most of its users (80 percent) sign in to the app with Facebook’s login feature. It also used the social network to drive increasing traffic to the game.

Other case studies have been used to drive home the same point: Facebook’s attempts to woo the developer community with new tools are working. Given the rocky past the company had with developers, especially those working on games that went viral before fading into obscurity, that might be a tough line to sell.

Just look to the cautionary tale of Zynga. That company used Facebook’s network to make games like “FarmVille” the darling of the social games market. Then, Facebook made it harder for the company to spam users with messages about their virtual farms, and “FarmVille” became a pale vision of its past glory.

Zynga’s fall makes it hard to believe that other companies can find lasting success on Facebook. That’s a hell of a counterpoint to case studies like this: Facebook could’ve written something similar about Zynga’s past successes, but that would only describe the highs it reached before it came crashing down.

Still, it’s clear that Facebook wants to earn back the trust of developers who can build things for its apps. (This is especially tru for App Instal ads, which Zuckerberg has long touted as a big deal for the company.) Sometimes that manifests as the addition of an app platform to Facebook’s increasingly popular Messenger service; otherwise it crops up as tools like Analytics for Apps, which debuted around the same time.

Then it writes up case studies like this to show that, at least for a while, these tools can make a real difference for developers. That certainly appears to be the case for DoubleU Games: Facebook’s tools helped the company find more users, keep them engaged, and figure out how it could squeeze more money out of ’em.

The trick is for these companies to use all these tools to support a lasting business. Until then we can’t be sure these case studies are capturing more than a snapshot of companies that are cresting the peak of their success. So, sure, look to DoubleU Games to see what Facebook can do. Just remember Zynga, too.

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‘Breaker’ mixes content discovery with a messaging platform fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Holiday dinners hosted by my wife’s family are bound to have three things: sugary desserts; copious amounts of wine; and heated discussions about politics. The exact mix changes depending on the holiday, but each of those things is bound to be there, just as sure as there will be a smorgasbord of different foods.

A new messaging app called Breaker wants to encourage people to have those conversations without requiring them to gorge themselves on turkey or guzzle untold glasses of wine every time they want to discuss something in the news. Instead, it blends content discovery features with a dedicated message platform.

The app works by asking people to identify their interests. Once they do, it will recommend content it culls from hundreds of different sources to them. If they like what they read and want to discuss it with someone else, they can do so right from the app, instead of switching between services like Nuzzel and WhatsApp.

Breaker chief executive Shailo Rao says the app is supposed to facilitate private, meaningful conversations. “Instead of broadcasting to all your friends or all the people who follow you,” like you would via social networks like Facebook and Twitter, “it’s all about having a focused conversation with just a few friends.”

Those conversations are facilitated by a feature that allows people to send the same link to multiple people either as a group or as individual conversations. This makes it easier to talk about things with more than one person without forcing people to participate in hellish group messages they can never escape.

Rao says this feature rose from research he did as an intern at Google, when he found that Google Chat users would often send links to multiple people at the same time, but didn’t want to lump everyone into the same conversation. This seems small, but in day-to-day usage it could make life a lot easier for people.

Breaker in action via its iOS app.

That’s the thinking behind another feature that allows Breaker users to hold conversations through the platform even if their friends don’t use the app. If that’s the case, Breaker will send an SMS message to the non-user with a link to a Web view where they can see the article being discussed and talk about it.

That isn’t the most elegant process — who wants to tap a link to have a conversation through a mobile Web browser? — it could help Breaker sidestep the problem of consumers being overwhelmed by the sheer number of services they have to use if they want to be able to communicate with all their friends.

“People have enough messaging apps on their phones,” Rao says. “It’s okay because there’s a centralized inbox with the lockscreen, so people can manage multiple messaging apps because that’s the pathway into them, but it is tough to get all your friends to download another messaging app.” That’s understating it.

There’s also the problem of convincing people to use another content discovery platform. Many could already use something like Flipboard or Nuzzel, which have the benefits of being around longer and name recognition, and they might not be keen to switch to a different app just to make it easier to chat with friends.

Breaker has raised $375,000 from Tandem Capital and undisclosed angel investors. The app is currently available on iOS, and will debut on Android later. Right now it’s available for free, but Rao says eventually the app could utilize in-app purchases or advertising, once it has a large enough user base to do so.

Will that happen? It depends on how well the politically-charged conversations held around dinner tables across the country translate to a messaging app, how many people want to download another messaging app when they can send links via existing apps without too much hassle, or how often people really talk about their interests with friends and family with any sort of depth or meaningfulness.

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Jumat, 20 November 2015

Health care’s future is data driven fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Darren is the chief executive at Apixio.

Despite spending more than $3 trillion a year on health care in the U.S., we do not yet have a way to easily access your complete medical history. The average hospital reinvests in MRI machines every five years or so at a cost of millions of dollars. Yet, comparatively little has been directed toward unlocking some of the most valuable information health insurers, physicians, and hospitals already have about you.

The U.S. produces 1.2 billion clinical care documents annually, but nearly 80 percent of the data they contain is unstructured. This information is difficult for entities to understand and use. The medical chart contains a record of your health care — visits with doctors and hospitals, treatments, procedures, medications, diagnoses, and the results of workups. It is the key to understanding your health and improving the care provided to you. Yet, the challenge of accessing and making that information useable is immense.

The typical medical chart is stored in various fragments across different locations and systems. Your primary care physician has their record of you but not the record from your cardiologist or gynecologist or from the emergency department doctor you saw six months ago for bronchitis, for example. Imagine your entire medical record as a jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces are scattered and stored in different locations and different types of boxes, each of which is hard to open. No wonder people feel as if they are repeating themselves every time they visit a medical facility.

Luckily, technologies that make sense of the immense amount of data and preserve the patient narrative are rapidly emerging. With the rise of cognitive computing, natural language processing (NLP), and data science in health care, we now have the power to unlock untold value in health care data and drive proactive, targeted health care.

Enabling insights

The first step is being able to make sense of the rich narrative in the medical chart whether from a primary care physician or specialist practicing in different organizations, different regions or both. While your doctor is familiar with your record, the medical system as a whole is not. So medical care continues to be reactive rather than proactive.

This is where cognitive computing and NLP enter the picture. NLP tools can help extract data from free text found in the patient record creating valuable material for big data technologies to analyze. Cognitive computing platforms use NLP along with pattern recognition models and data mining techniques to simulate human thought processes in a self-learning computerized system. A cognitive computing platform refines the way it looks for patterns as well as the way it processes data so it becomes capable of anticipating new problems and modeling possible solutions.

Once doctors have access to patient data, the question is how can they use it to accurately predict what treatments are most effective. Data science gives rise to a better understanding of the relationship between treatments, outcomes and patients. Now health care organizations have the tools to combine data from different sources and paint a more complete picture of the patient to personalize their treatment.

A data-rich health care future

These technologies give health care organizations the ability to access the previously untapped 80 percent of health care data so providers have real-time access to information and a deeper understanding of patients. If doctors know more about patients, then they can make more intelligent decisions that will result in quicker recoveries, fewer readmissions, lower infection rates and fewer medical errors. Ultimately, it will supercharge the value of care.

Beyond benefiting individual patients, access to this data will also create a living laboratory of clinical data to better inform health care decisions. Now that information about clinical care can be machine read, physicians can access it and base research on the everyday clinical care of millions of patients. Rather than depending on narrowly designed studies that do not directly relate to individual patients, health care organizations and researchers can learn about health care delivery from everyday real-world data.

Big data technologies can make use of information that is locked up in our medical charts in different systems and locations so we can transform how we look at and interpret patient health. With access to the untapped 80 percent of patient data and tools that put the data to use, we can change the delivery and consumption of health care as we know it, and usher in a new data revolution in health care that will improve patient care and result in high-quality outcomes.

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Why CIOs must pursue ‘eventual symmetry’ for their cloud strategies fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Sinclair is CEO and cofounder of Apprenda.

The idea that hybrid cloud is the end state of enterprise computing is no longer controversial. Nearly all technologists, IT executives, and analysts subscribe to the idea that public cloud and on-premises computing both have a place in modern enterprise IT strategy.

A hybrid end state isn’t a bridging tactic or a strategic consolation prize, but a desirable outcome. In fact, a strong case could be made that a hybrid model allows for specialized optimization based on use cases – there are many scenarios both now and in the future that may map best to on-premises or public cloud.

There are two primary ways to implement a hybrid end state: asymmetric and symmetric.

1. Asymmetric – In asymmetric orientations, an enterprise consumes public cloud as one endpoint, and builds an on-premises cloud that is a distinctly separate, second endpoint. For example, we could look at the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer and say that an enterprise could use OpenStack on-premises and AWS in public cloud, and use processes, operations, and a brokering abstraction across the two endpoints to help normalize the consumption of IaaS regardless of what side of the firewall it came from.

In asymmetric hybridity, the technology used on-premises is different than that used in the public cloud, resulting in the need for reconciliation and the need to accept a lossy factor (i.e. the two technologies may have different features and evolutionary paths) since points of differentiation between the two need to be ignored or marginalized to ensure consistency.

2. Symmetric – Symmetric hybridity means that an enterprises on-premises assets and public assets are using the same technology, and that technology reconciles the assets on both sides of the firewall as a single endpoint. An example of this would be a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) layer that can be installed on-premises that could use local OSes and OSes from one or more public clouds all under one logical instance of the PaaS.

The PaaS hides the fact that resources are coming from disparate providers and only exposes that fact where appropriate (e.g. at the policy definition level to shape deployments). In this case, the PaaS is the single endpoint where interaction happens, and resources on both sides are used as resource units by the PaaS. Any organizational processes and consumption processes would be ignorant to the idea that a border exists in the resource model.

Pros and cons of symmetric and asymmetric models

Symmetric models guarantee that anyone within the enterprise consuming cloud infrastructure is shielded from the distinction between on- and off-premises resources and capabilities. If the end user of cloud infrastructure (e.g. a developer or data scientist) is required to acknowledge any asymmetry, they will have to deal with it in their project. This explicit need to deal with a fractured cloud creates an immediate “tax” related to consuming infrastructure and it will generate consumption biases.

For example, if one side of the asymmetric deployment is easier to consume than the other, then an end user will prefer that even if the not-so-easy side is more aligned with the project, and will cause IT itself a number of headaches when it comes to operations related to that project.

It’s important to understand symmetry doesn’t mean the on-premises and public cloud side of a hybrid deployment must be equal. Certainly, workloads may need on-premises or public assets to satisfy certain requirements the other side couldn’t possibly satisfy.

What symmetry guarantees is that a workload that is indifferent to on-premises or public never be exposed to those concepts. Symmetry also ensures a workload with requirements that can only be satisfied by one part of a hybrid cloud or another is never exposed to the technical divide between the clouds. Instead, a workload communicates its preference in the language of requirements.

Eventual symmetry

Asymmetric models might be good starting points or appropriate for certain layers of the infrastructure stack, but they’re not ideal as a final end state. Symmetric models are clearly superior in almost all other aspects.

In response to this, CIOs should pursue a strategy of ‘Eventual Symmetry.’ Eventual symmetry means that any cloud strategy must:

Choose symmetric models over asymmetric models where possible
If asymmetric is the only possible approach, ensure that the implementation lends itself to eventually being replaced by a symmetric model or that processes and technology be used to abstract the asymmetry into a perceived symmetric model

By establishing eventual symmetry as a core cloud strategy pillar, a CIO can guarantee that any disjointedness in their strategy will be resolved. He or she can also ensure consumers of IT resources are abstracted away from details related to on-premises and off-premises.

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Kamis, 19 November 2015

New features make it easier to use Facebook after a breakup fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

It’s not an application that plays Nickelback songs whenever you contact your ex, but new Facebook features could still make it easier to avoid the breakup blues.

The features allow Facebook users to hide a former partner’s posts and profile; edit past updates in which both people are tagged; and control the status updates, photos, and other content their ex-lover will be able to view after the breakup. Facebook has basically created the inverse of a couple being “Facebook official.”

“Facebook is a place for sharing life’s important moments, which for many people include their romantic relationships,” product manager Kelly Winters said in a blog post. “When a relationship ends, we’ve heard from people that they sometimes have questions about the options available to them on Facebook.”

People in the United States will be prompted to test these features if they change their relationship status. Other users won’t be told if someone uses the utilities; the point of hiding someone’s profile or posts is to make it easier to do so without un-friending or blocking that person, and the other features are equally discreet.

Introducing these features is a tacit admission of two things: There are real risks connected to using a service where people are encouraged to share everything about their daily lives. (Or at least to post images, talk to people, or check-in to events and venues.) And not everything posted to Facebook has to be positive.

Reports have shown that Facebook is a powerful tool for domestic abusers. NPR reported in 2014 that nearly half the domestic violence shelters it surveyed had a policy against using Facebook on premises because it could reveal their location. More recently, the Daily Beast reported on how Facebook’s real name policy puts women who escape domestic abuse at risk, because they can be found on its site.

These new features won’t do much to prevent those problems, but they can make it easier for people leaving toxic relationships to protect themselves. Not having to see an abuser without having to block them, which could make them angry, is a valuable ability. Being able to hide new posts could help address the same issue.

Beyond that, these new features also allow people to use Facebook without having to confront bittersweet memories about the time they spent with an ex. Sometimes it’s nice to think that an entire life can be catalogued on Facebook — other times it’s nice to be able to forget someone is no longer part of your life.

“This work is part of our ongoing effort to develop resources for people who may be going through difficult moments in their lives,” Winters said in the blog post. “We hope these tools will help people end relationships on Facebook with greater ease, comfort and sense of control.” Most users will probably think that they do.

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SeatGeek launches a marketplace for ticket sales, mobile transfers, & more fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Whether you’re doing it via Facebook or Craigslist or your shady friend Greg who has a penchant for “small-scale capitalism,” buying tickets to a sold out event is usually not a pleasant experience. With that in mind, ticket search engine SeatGeek is rolling out an update today that should make those ticket transactions less of a headache.

Until now SeatGeek has only dealt one-sided ticket sales, but starting today it’s dipping into the two-sided selling (aka direct ticket sales from SeatGeek users) with SeatGeek Marketplace, which is geared towards making it easier for individuals to find and sell tickets. It’s not necessarily meant for someone looking to buy up a bunch of tickets and jack up prices for a profit. Intended to be a peer-to-peer network, the Marketplace is positioned to be a quick, simple alternative to the time-consuming and often messy processing of listing tickets on Facebook or Craigslist.

It works like this: after fans purchase tickets through SeatGeek, they’ll have the option to transfer tickets to friends via downloadable PDFs or sell tickets if they find themselves no longer able to attend. Say you, for example, were smart enough to wake up early and hop on the Beyoncé pre-sale and managed to snag tickets for yourself and two of your friends. With SeatGeek’s new features, you’ll be able to sell and transfer those tickets to your friends so they have their own tickets on their phones come day-of-show. Direct ticket transfers are free, meaning that there are no fees tacked on if you sell and transfer tickets to friends directly.

Fans will also have the option to sell tickets publicly in the Marketplace in the event that they need to offload tickets. Using the tech behind SeatGeek’s DealScore algorithm (which essentially ranks available tickets based on the quality of the seat and price), sellers will get recommendations on listing prices to help them sell the ticket quickly and get the best price for it. Tickets sold in the SeatGeek Marketplace will come at a 15 percent fee to the seller, but buyers won’t incur any additional fees beyond list price.

“The aim is creating a dead-simple, intuitive mobile ecosystem where people can buy and sell and transfer tickets,” says SeatGeek co-founder Jack Groetzinger.

The mobile part of that statement is key. The SeatGeek Marketplace is designed to be clean and easy to use, meaning that you don’t have to spend hours searching for the right ticket, deciphering fees and decoding transaction methods. You simply find the ticket you want, purchase either via the usual methods or through Venmo, and the seller transfers the PDF ticket to you, which you can pull up on your phone when entering the event.

Right now, StubHub offers a similar service, letting fans buy and sell tickets through its marketplace. Groetzinger tells me that SeatGeek’s real advantage is the simplicity and ease-of-use of the platform. With the DealScore algorithm and SeatGeek’s comprehensive interactive mapping feature (which helps buyers get a better idea of where their seats are located and what the venue looks like through photos), SeatGeek’s buying and selling experience is focused on fans who are looking for the best way to get the best seats for their budgets.

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Nuzzel update improves news discovery for those who don’t use Twitter fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Nuzzel, the content discovery service that collects and organizes links shared to Twitter and Facebook, is branching out with an update that will allow people to find stories related to their interests without having to connect to social networks. Now all they have to do is sign up for Nuzzel, follow a couple of feeds related to things they find interesting, and wait for the app to do the rest.

Nuzzel has risen in popularity over the past year because of its ability to sift through your social networks to find the most commonly shared links among those you follow or are friends with. You can also track the most shared news articles via Twitter lists or other publicly available Twitter users’ accounts. Many have said Nuzzel makes Twitter better, and should be bought by that company.

The update is being revealed alongside a new funding round with participation from executives at Mozilla, Google, and other companies. (The funding Nuzzel shared in September, which included contributions from executives at the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and others, is part of the round announced today.) Nuzzel raised $1.7 million in the round and a total of roughly $5.1 million to date.

As for the update itself, Nuzzel users are likely to notice it right away. The app has been redesigned with a swipe-based navigation system that allows users to view their settings, their main feed, and other feeds they’ve decided to follow. Its search function has also been updated to look through stories and feeds, making it easier to find a specific article or blog post than it was in previous versions of the app.

But the biggest change is Nuzzel removing the requirement that people connect to at least one social account before they could use its service, as previously mentioned. That’s still an option — social network accounts that have already been linked to Nuzzel users will remain the same — but Nuzzel’s ability to attract new users is no longer dependent on those potential users having signed up for any other service.

“The service will probably be still used the way it was before by people who login with Twitter. That core experience is not changing much,” Nuzzel founder and chief executive Jonathan Abrams told Gigaom. “But there will be a whole set of new users who couldn’t use Nuzzel before, and they will use it a bit [differently] than the Twitter users, since their experience will involving finding relevant feeds instead of just seeing a ‘home’ feed based on their own Twitter graph of who they follow.”

Abrams said that he expects the feeds Nuzzel users will follow will be “created by influencers, experts, organizations, media companies, etc” in the future. But to kickstart the number of feeds available to users as part of this update, Nuzzel also “created a few hundred feeds” of its own. This ensures that people who don’t connect social accounts won’t struggle to find interesting things on the service.

This update follows the release of a newsletter feature that allows Nuzzel users to write short introductions to emails containing links surfaced by the service. At the time, Abrams explained that 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.” Nuzzel wants to appeal to that market instead of letting it lie.

So how do newsletters fit with Nuzzel’s update? “Nuzzel 2.0 and our newsletter product fit together to be part of our overall strategy to let everyone use Nuzzel, not just Twitter power users, and also become a platform for creating feeds and newsletters around any topic or community,” Abrams said. “Nuzzel 2.0 allows both web and app users to discover feeds or find them via search, and then subscribe” to the newsletters connected to those feeds via Nuzzel’s site and apps.

All together, these recent changes make Nuzzel much more palatable to a mainstream audience. The previous version of the app didn’t just require people to have a Twitter or Facebook account — it was also predicated on the idea that people were so overwhelmed by links shared to those networks that they needed another service to sort through them all. Those are a lot of barriers to entry.

“Connecting with Twitter remains the best way to use Nuzzel, and still provides a great personalized news experience,” Abrams said. “But a lot of people don’t use Twitter, and Nuzzel 2.0 provides a new experience for those people, that also allows non-Twitter users to enjoy the power of social curation.” So it can still help quiet the cacophony of links shared to social networks, but now it could also appeal to people who have somehow managed to avoid the din of social media.

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Rabu, 18 November 2015

With StageLight, Android finally gets a serious music editing app fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

One big reason you don’t find many audio editing options on Android is due to the operating system not being great when it comes to latency (aka when audio is slightly delayed during recording). But with the launch of Open Labs‘ new Stagelight app on Android, that should get a bit better.

Stagelight initially launched as a Windows audio editing app that could be used by everyone from casual music makers to professionals, an alternative to GarageBand for those without a Mac. It provides an easy interface to create or mix tracks, and even offers original sound libraries (for a fee) from popular artists such as Linkin Park and Timbaland, both of whom are part owners. You can import audio you’ve recorded and pretty quickly test different beats and sounds from those libraries within the Stagelight platform. Therefore, the move to Android was a natural next step that was previously held back by the last few versions of the OS not being ideal for recording, according to Open Labs founder Cliff Mountain.

“When we first started testing Stagelight on Android we realized there was 0.5 to 2 seconds of latency on some devices,” Mountain told me. “If you can imagine trying to tap out a beat, you couldn’t tap and keep up in time because the output latency would throw you off.”

In simpler terms, it would be like trying to learn an entirely new song with a band whose individual members were between one and two seconds behind what you were playing. But with release of Android Marshmallow, that isn’t the case. Open Labs worked with both Google and Intel to fine tune Stagelight’s ability to perform on par with other pro audio editing apps.

A list of all the lessons Stagelight offers for people that aren’t familiar with making their own tracks.

The Stagelight Android app, which launches today, is initially available as a free download, much like its Windows application. The free version will let users create new tracks, and offers tutorials for those who aren’t very familiar with how to make a song on the platform. Premium versions of Stagelight range from $10 to $100 and allow users to save tracks, share or upload music to sites like SoundCloud, use better looping tools, gain access to larger sound libraries, and more.

Even more than fixing the latency issues, Mountain said bringing Stagelight to Android will help further the company’s goal of getting people more comfortable with making music.

“We want to free the music. We know people have music inside them,” Mountain said. “When you walk into a room full of people and ask who enjoys music, everyone raises their hand. But if you ask how many enjoy making music, it’s usually only a subset… because there is a [preconceived] idea that producing music is difficult. It doesn’t have to be.”

Building a track on the Stagelight platform.

For Americans, this might not be as much of an issue — or maybe my worldview is biased having grown up in Nashville “Music (Business) City,” Tennessee (and having many friends graduate college with a degree in recording industry management). Internationally, there is a much bigger opportunity for a good music creation/editing on Android, especially for Stagelight, which is available in 127 countries. That’s also something Open Labs part owner Joe Hahn of Linkin Park agrees with, telling Gigaom via email that the band: “…has 63 million fans on Facebook and most of those fans are international. We know from research that most people outside of the U.S. use Android phones, so we encouraged Open Labs to develop Stagelight for Android so that everyone has a chance to use this amazing music tool.”

Open Labs said eventually it would like to add more features that allow users to share their work, as well as the ability to save audio editing projects to the cloud to make better use of Android’s mobility.

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