WiredBarn Blog

50,000 Foot Implications of the iPad

2010-04-11T22:48:00.000-07:00

April 11, 2010

The iPad is here at last... it's been both the best and worst kept secret in Silicon Valley. Speculation on Apple's tablet raged for years prior to the launch, what actually was launched was in some aspects quite a surprise.

This is the first document I've written on an iPad, hopefully a solid opinion will develop by the closing. Clearly for casual web browsing and email, the device is great. The debate is raging if this will be a content creation device or if it will be subjugated to the ultimate coffee table book.

To write my first article, I decided to use the iWork Pages app ($10) as the text editor. For blogging, I'm sure a full fledged blog editor app will be available soon. I wanted to test the document creation capabilities right out of the box. So far, I can tell it will take a bit of getting used to, but it will be more than just a pretty picture. Its just becoming clear what the 50,000 foot implications of this device are.

I purchased Apple's $39 case, which includes the ability to prop the device up at just the right angle in landscape mode for perfect typing.

With auto-complete and shortcuts such as double space for a period, typing is already going quite well, a few mistakes here and there, but this is the first text longer than a tweet, so this is to be expected. For me this may be a complete laptop replacement. My Macbook Pro has become a semi-permanent workstation, connected to a 20" Apple Cinema Display with wired Ethernet for backup and VOIP applications. The iPad will become my primary mobile device. I am confident, that simple apps will be developed for all of the features I need on a daily basis, anything more complicated, and I'd rather be in my office anyway.

If the iPad computing model takes of, which I think it will, the implications are many. Banning Adobe Flash is a big issue. Also affecting Adobe, an issue over using 3rd party development tools for creating iPhone OS apps. Finally changes to the developer agreement limiting data collection activities puts several VC funded analytics and targeted advertising companies in peril. The last issue is developing quickly. Several start-ups have been identified with business models specifically prohibited by the new developer agreement.

The sum of these issues, makes for a significant shift in the internet landscape. The Flash issue alone, shifts advertising in mass to the new device, a brilliant move. The effect of limiting Flash to move onto the device and taking over the in-app advertising is a powerful combination, seizing control of eyeballs. The is also another subtle change which puts much of the existing online inventory out-of-sight for the iPhone and iPad audience, which will soon be over 100 million well healed individuals. When you use the iPhone OS Safari browser with a touch interface, you are able to immediately zoom into the column you are reading, skipping 80% of the advertising property on a typical site. Combine this with the in-app ads and Apple has just taken the most prominent position in what may be the most lucrative advertising market ever created.

There you have it, my initial insights on the iPad. Hats off to Apple and Steve Jobs for a job well done! Stay tuned for continuing developments.

Back on the content creation topic, with only a few hours on the new device to me it is clear that quite a bit of content will be coming off of iPads everywhere, just as soon as we get a few more apps and the hang of a new computing model, sans mouse... John Dvorak said 1984 "The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things." For the first time since 1984, no mouse required.

From my iPad

Social Media Brand Metrics - What's Measured Improves

2010-03-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

There are many ways to measure the effectiveness of your social media investment. For brand marketing, social media represents a huge opportunity along with a good deal of risk if the proper precautions are not taken. Determining which metrics are most important is more of an art than science as social media itself is a varied ecosystem almost as complex as the fabric of our offline social relationships.

Peter Drucker is famous for saying "What's Measured Improves". A solid plan for accurately measuring your social media investment, will most likely positively impact the overall success. To start inventory all of the potential measures and rank order by relevance. Once the most relevant metrics have been identified the next step is to define your strategy for measuring, monitoring trends and communicating results of your social media program to your stakeholders (including your customers). Below is a list of potential metrics.

Which are right for measuring your brand's social media channel effectiveness?

Campaign Engagement Metrics

Return on Investment (ROI) by Source and Type (Video/Text)
Branding Campaign - Brand Messages Delivered
# of Comments/Posts Relevant to Company or Products
# of Comments with Sentiment Positive/Negative
Fans/Followers by Interaction Type
Unique Visitors from Social Media Sources
Click-Thru Rate - Number of Visitors to Site from Social Media Links
Coremetrics View-Thru Rate - Visitors to Social Media Site to Main Site Over an Extended Window of Time (impression attribution)
Conversion Rate - Number of Customers Sourced from Social Media Links

Audience Profile Metrics

Performance by Age, Gender, Geographic Segments
Performance by 3rd Party Segments i.e. Nielsen Claritas PRIZM
Related Behaviors/Interests - Contextual Classification of Key Audience Segments

Influence Metrics

# of Comments by Influencers
Influencer Reach - Number of Followers/Viewers of Comments/Posts
Influencer Sentiment - Positive/Negative
Unique visitors from Influencer Links
Threat Level of Negative Posts by Influential Commentators
Influencer Involvement as Source of Viral Links

Industry or Business Specific Metrics

User Proximity to Business Locations
Promotion Specific Metrics
Visits to Social Media Optimized Sections of Main Site
User Generated Content Sourced from Social Media

Jobs Created by Stimulus Spending

2010-02-22T11:40:00.000-08:00

Recovery.gov is the U.S. government’s official website providing easy access to data related to Recovery Act spending. Tableau Public allows anyone to create an interactive visualization for a blog or website. Put the two together and you can see exactly where the stimulus dollars are being put to work and how many and what kinds of jobs are being created.

The first chart is a map of where the stimulus funds have been awarded. The size of the dot is relative to the number of jobs reported as created by the funds. The background of the map shows the population density which aligns with where the funds are being deployed. The slider at the bottom allows you to select the minimum award amount, $10M is the default, if you move the slider to zero you will see a lot more dots representing stimulus projects. Moving the slider to $100M you will find only the largest stimulus projects.

The second chart shows a scatter plot of the number of jobs created versus the amount of stimulus dollars awarded. The size of the circle is relative to the number of jobs created. Projects in the top left have produced more jobs per dollar than those in the bottom right. Hover over the various points on the graph to see what types of projects are most effective at creating jobs.

Note: the chart may take some time to appear due to the large amount of data.

Data Visualization of Advertising by Medium 1919 - 2007

2010-02-18T09:54:00.000-08:00

Data and chart take a few moments to load

Tableau Public has Arrived

2010-02-17T13:51:00.000-08:00

Tableau Public allows anyone to create advanced data visualizations and publish the results to a blog or website for free. Below is an example I created in a few minutes using a data from Internet World Stats showing the relative number of internet users by country and an interactive slider allowing you to select the % Internet Penetration level.

On the surface the map is pretty basic, however there are quite a few features that help to navigate the data. Using the tools at the bottom, you can zoom into an area of the map, try zooming into Africa and see just how few people have access to the internet, something we almost take for granted.
Data and chart take a few moments to load

The tool itself looks to be every bit as powerful as the full professional version of Tableau, with the caveat that anything produced must be published for all to see online. The full professional tool is roughly $1800, so this is quite a bargain. Windows is required, however the source data can be in a wide range of formats including Excel, Text or many different database structures. If you need to make a highly interactive info graphic for your website, you can't beat Tableau Public.

Here is another example showing a Data Visualization of Advertising by Medium 1919 - 2007. Have fun...

Mobile Data Explosion

2010-01-26T20:33:00.000-08:00

Big changes are a brewing in the mobile industry. One thing is for certain, everyone will soon gain access to the mobile internet and the cost to the consumer will drop faster than your bank account balance after walking into an Apple store.

Billions upon billions (not to sound like Carl Sagen) of telco dollars are being spent to build out the mobile internet. There is far too much at stake to let the cost of the service get in the way of the trillions to be made off of services enabled by the mobile internet. The cost of the monthly service fee will plummet at the same time enormous sums of cash are being poured into building out new towers and backhaul network. Now I'm not a finance wiz, but somethings gotta give.

Here's how its going to work, our friends at the telcos are going to get a cut of everything you download online and your service fee will be zilch. This is the model that will fuel the massive infrastructure build-out ahead. Time to load up on some of those telco gear suppliers.

What do you think of this model for funding the mobile internet?

iSpeculate

2010-01-18T12:33:00.000-08:00

On January 27th, Apple has scheduled a media event:

Years of speculation will come to an end when Apple reveals their latest creation which will almost certainly be a tablet type computing device. There has been a lot of discussion on the form factor and features, however I would bet that they have some real surprises up their sleeve for the launch. Apple has been kicking the idea of a tablet around for a very long time and Steve himself is clearly actively involved.

Here's my wish list from the rumor mill floating around:

Front facing web cam - Face-to-face video may make a major breakthrough. It has been easy to do this for a long time, but Apple may be able to make it cool. This would do wonders for remote workers everywhere. If personal video conferencing were to ever take off, it would do more for the environment (by reducing the need to travel) then any electric car could ever do.
Gesture based input - Improvements over mouse or touch input in current mobile devices. Not sure what form this will take, but Apple has paid a lot of attention to this area recently, this would be the device to roll out this functionality, which will hopefully make it's way back into the Macintosh line.
Full motion graphics without Adobe Flash. Adobe is a train wreck when it comes to performance and security lately, we need the capability, but with Apple's touch.
A new publishing platform for Newspapers, Magazines and Books. Show us the real possibilities of how traditional media can migrate to a mobile platform.

Now it's time to just wait and see what they come up with. You can be certain a ton of sweat has gone into the process.

Location, Location, Location

2010-01-13T15:39:00.000-08:00

There's been no shortage of predictions on new technologies hitting the mainstream this year. It must be the odometer making a decile change that brings reflection and prediction for the coming decade. I'll leave it to the blogosphere to cover the most important technologies of the last decade, except for one topic: 2009 was the year that the smart phone went mainstream. How will this impact society as a whole and what does this foreshadow for 2010?

The smart phone itself is less of a phone and more of a mobile computing platform. Earlier attempts at the mobile internet failed due to poorly designed hardware, an attempt to port the desktop internet to a very small screen and of course a lack of high bandwidth network coverage. We're finally at a point where the hardware, software tools and developer community can deliver a highly functional internet application to the palm of your hand.

For some tasks I've completely surrendered my mind over to my iPhone. When looking for an address in the city, I'll open up the map app with GPS and watch as I move the dot to the destination. I don't even bother figure out what street names I need to take a left or right on. Google is setting up virtual billboards to slip us ads as we navigate through augmented reality. This is today, not some futuristic sci-fi we're talking about.

Google's acquisition of Admob and Apple's acquisition of Quattro Wireless makes it clear that a majority of interaction with the internet will be on mobile handsets. Gartner is predicting that the mobile internet will surpass the PC internet in 2013. What is different between the PC internet and the mobile internet? There is the screen size, we've figured out how to work around this, and that other thing: Location, Location, Location. After the next few years, people will forget that the phrase comes from the real estate business.

Location adds an entirely new dimension to computing as a whole. There are some obvious applications for integrating GPS coordinates into a mobile application. The first of course is to put a dot where you are on a map, this can be very helpful, but it only scratches the surface of the utility of an integrated GPS computing platform with internet connectivity. The next set of applications already available are the "around me" type apps that provide something of interest in your immediate vicinity. Yelp will show me restaurants in the area with review, a movie app will automatically show me what is playing at the closest theaters.

Geotagging is showing up in applications, allowing your updates to be tagged with the location. Integrated cameras tag the photos with geo coordinates allowing you to view your photos on a map rather than in traditional folders. This particular feature gets interesting and useful when you crowd-source a large number of geotagged photos. A current example is a map of Haiti showing real time geotagged photos uploaded to flickr showing the earthquake damage.

So far the addition of location provides some marginal utility and other cool new things you can do, but it is not until the concept of location is tied to one gigantic business that it gets really interesting. Location based advertising will be the killer business model for the coming years.

Advertising is a big business, Wikipedia puts 2010 global offline and online advertising at $450 Billion. Online advertising is still a relatively small part of the overall pie at $40B or so with about $25B going to Google. Classifieds have moved online and newspaper advertising is in decline. Even network TV is now feeling the heat, the growth of internet video will take a big piece out of their earnings. Search turned out to be the killer app for the desktop internet. Location will make search and display advertising infinitely more relevant for many businesses that could not take advantage of the PC based internet.

So will I be seeing ads for the local bookstore while I sip coffee down the street? And will I see relevant virtual billboards when I navigate in Google street view? you bet! A significant portion of the $Billions in offline advertising will make it's way on line and location services will make this possible.

Location based advertising is not as simple as knowing your coordinates, there are layers of information regarding your location and the radius that will be required in order to fully leverage this new capability. It will be important to know the location of other businesses and entities in the area. This is most likely the reason for Twitter's acquisition of Mixer Labs the maker of geoAPI. This service can take a set of coordinates and return the contextual relevance of location to tweets. The same service would be valuable to marketers for targeting advertising based on coordinates.

Location, time of day and history will also be an important factors. An area you visit daily during business hours may want to pitch you dry cleaning services. Your nighttime location may pitch you a special offer at a local restaurant. Many other aspects of your profile will be combined with your precise location, time of day, possibly even factors such as weather. The local tire shop may find success by reminding you to check your tires during inclement weather.

In a way, location enables a smart yellow pages of local services, showing only the most relevant information at precisely the right time. Competitive offers delivered when you are at the service location is something that could never be done before. Imagine pulling into a gas station, checking your mobile and seeing a small banner indicating gas is 10 cents cheaper a block away, without taking any action. The possibilities are limitless.

Services to assist marketers with using this vast new source of targeting information will be in high demand. Google has shown that as long as the advertisment is highly relevant it is generally not viewed as intrusive by the recipient and the ability to make an ad relevant has just grown infinitely easier. Google is extremely well positioned for this next wave of internet expansion.

Google's Admob versus Apple's Quattro Wireless

2010-01-06T13:49:00.000-08:00

On the same day Google launched the Nexus One, Apple announced the purchase of Quattro Wireless a mobile ad network. This was not a coincidence, Apple and Google are positioning for an all out war. Apple has done exceedingly well with an integrated approach to hardware, software and web services. Google has shown its might in advertising and web applications. How different are their businesses? and what does it mean that Apple is now in advertising and Google is now in hardware?

Here's my bet: Apple will fail in the advertising business and Google will fail in the hardware business. The odds are in my favor on both of these bets.

Everything that makes Apple such an innovative and successful player in the hardware business will work against them in the advertising business. The advertising business involves lots of players with big egos who seek to maintain control over their fiefdom. Apple's approach to vertically integrating business lines and controlling every aspect of the user experience will be a major challenge in this industry. Advertisers and agencies will not play this game.

Google has an entirely different business model. Google treats advertising as a form of information to be made relevant. The user experience is in it's essence their ability to provide relevant information. Advertising is the monetization scheme for all of their business lines, even mobile phone hardware. Apple on the other hand succeeds by maintaining the highest margins on hardware that was once thought to be a commodity through an unparalleled focus on design. Google understands simple design, but not elegant design. Hardware will ultimately go to the best design. If the makers of Porsche could sell their car for roughly the same as a Chevy, Porsche would own the market. Due to the small amount of materials and the scale of the market, it wont cost significantly more to produce an iPhone than a gPhone, no matter how many bells and whistles it has.

What makes Apple want to be in the advertising business? and why would Google divert their precious attention to the mobile hardware business? The lure of the mobile platform.

Both Apple and Google know that within a short period of time the mainstream population will be going mobile. Today there are 50 or 60 million iPhones, millions of Blackberries, Android and Pres floating around. I don't know the exact current figure, but somewhere in the low 100's of millions of users have access to smart phones and the mobile web. Where will this be in 1-3 years? I bet we will hit a billion much faster than anyone thinks, maybe this year or next, and we could hit 3-4 billion shortly after this. Why, the market opportunity created by virtually everyone in the world having a mobile computing platform is beyond comprehension. Google does not want a competitor such as Apple being able to shift eyeballs away from their services much the way Microsoft has done for years in the OS and desktop application market. Apple wants a piece of the lucrative web services business that the mobile platform will enable.

Today they are jockeying for position and firing warning shots across each others bows. While there is a lot of showmanship going on, eventually they will both realize there is a massive market opening up which they both have a huge part of and they will focus on their areas of strength. What is so amazing is the lack of Microsoft in the equation. It seems, for now at least, that they have decided to let Apple and Google fight it out and hopefully be able to swoop in later to pick up their share, a risky bet.

Twitter in 7886 Characters

2010-01-04T16:20:00.000-08:00

I recently read a great NYT article: Why Twitter Will Endure, by David Carr. The author does a great job of describing the benefits of Twitter to readers who may not be familiar with the service. One excerpt that caught my attention was: “At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup: if it looks like Apple is going to demo its new tablet, or Amazon sold more Kindles than actual books at Christmas, or the final vote in the Senate gets locked in on health care, I almost always learn about it first on Twitter.”

This illustrates the use of Twitter as a news reader, harnessing the power of crowd sourcing to gather news and other related announcements. There is so much interesting information which I would most likely never be aware of if it weren’t for the collective power of the network I’ve hand selected. It has taken quite a while to build the network of individuals with a broad range of specialties I am interested in, but it is well worth it. Over time my network grows from members of my network reference other interesting folks or me searching down others that I hear about or read about in what’s left of my offline reading and conversations.

I follow the updates of the technorati: @leolaporte, @THErealDVORAK and reluctantly @arrington and @scobleizer. @BreakingNews provides brief accurate and timely updates. I get key updates from the brands and services I interact with. For instance @comScore let me know today that they will be streaming their presentation from a conference I’m interested in but will not be able to attend. I find the updates of start-up and VC veterans like @joshmedia, @VCMike and @Furrier particularly interesting and useful.

Blogs were a big story in the last decade. Now I rarely go directly to any of the blogs I am interested in, I get brief headlines with links to their stories from my favorite authors and editors. @Blam get me his tech reviews real time from Gizmodo.com and @joshuatopolsky from Engadget.com. In addition to links to their latest stories, I get in inside view to how the stories develop and occasionally a front row seat for discussions with key contacts in the tech world. @huffingtonpost provides a wide range of interesting political and news updates much like listing to NPR radio. Of course @nprnews is right there on twitter as well. Public announcements are another area that fits nicely into the Twitter model. @SpareTheAir announces no burn days in the winter and when to avoid using 2-cycle engines and car travel in the summer.

If life were made of pure news it would get pretty old, so it is fun to mix it up with comedy and fun stuff. @BorowitzReport by Andy Borowitz provides hard hitting comedy on the most current stories. Andy broke the news first in the last minutes if 2009 that “Tiger Vows to Be Faithful for Rest of Year”. Then in the first days of this year I learned that “Tiger Hopes to Set New Record in 2010”. It seems that comedy in 140 characters or less is becoming something of an art form, kind of like haiku with lots of folks giving it a try here and there. Never underestimate the power of a good laugh. At one point I was posting comments about a map issue I was trying to have corrected. TomTom posted an update that they had partnered with Fiat to provide navigation in their vehicles. I posted the comment “Now you can get lost and break down in the same trip RE: @TeleAtlas @TomTom partners with Fiat”. After months of waiting, my map issue was corrected the same day :)

If twitter were just a human powered RSS reader that would be the end of the story, but there is much more. Search is the next big use. Every day I scan for posts about town I call home, Mill Valley. I often learn about cool and interesting things happening that I would never had know about. A band is playing in the town square or there is a dispute over a town plan I am among the first to know. Last night the surviving members of the Grateful Dead played in a small theater in town and Twitter was a buzz about the number of deadheads hanging around in the square. Any topic is likely to have a discussion taking place on twitter, by searching for it you can find new people with a common expertise or interest. If beanie babies are your thing, I’m sure it is a topic on Twitter. Trending Topics are Twitter’s attempt to show users what topics are hot, most often these are not of interest, but when an #Earthquake happens you see people’s reactions real time.

I touched on a customer service issue earlier related to the map issue, this is another key use of Twitter. By airing your issues for all to see, there is much more of an incentive to close the issue quickly without any sore feelings on either side. Before companies had no issue with making you wait on hold for long periods waiting to transfer you to someone who most likely could not fix the issue. Why should I have to waste more of my time when in most cases I had no part in the error. Much better to post the issue for all to see and hope that the company has a swat team searching for references to their name ready to act to avoid any issues. @comcastcares and @VirginAmerica became well known for responding quickly to customer complaints. If this practice becomes more widespread it will make everyone’s life much easier and give us much more accurate information on what products and services have the fewest customer complaints.

Geographic tagging is the next big thing for Twitter. The explosion of mobile users with integrated GPS and web access will change the world. Now from my phone, I can post my geo coordinates along with my status updates. This will give the web a new dimension. There are far too many posts on twitter for me to get an accurate read on what is going on in total, but now I can look at all of the posts from my neighborhood to see what is going on where I care about most. Hyper local is the next big thing for the internet in general. Making sense of an ever increasing sea of information will require lots of new ways to slice and dice the information. Geotagging is the 1st step in this process. Going forward I would imagine more and more devices will keep track of where they are and what is going on around them. This will make all sort of new products, services and general information awareness possible in the near future. Twitter just purchased Mixer Labs the folks behind @geoAPI. They provide 100's of gigs of Geo data available with sub 50 millisecond response times, the applications for Twitter are limitless.

It is utterly amazing how useful this simple service which is essentially a text only update limited to 140 characters can be. I think the real value is in forcing users to condense their thoughts down to their essence with the ability to link to the larger story. The real value of Twitter has yet to be fully realized as more and more uses are identified every day. Recently I heard about a bathroom scale that you can setup with a Twitter account to post your weight anytime you get on it. I’m sure many people would find this over-sharing of information, but for some it may just provide the accountability they need to stay on a diet.

It’s hard to say where this is going, but one thing is for sure, there is a wealth of information available at our fingertips that we never knew would be so important. While Google grabbed the world’s attention by indexing the information that was already scattered across web sites, library’s and computers everywhere, Twitter found an entirely new source of limitless information that had not been recorded yet. All I know is that there will be a lot more information to sift through and the tools to do so will be more important than ever.