Today’s summary covers the past two weeks of worthy reads, with a strong dose of the Internet’s twin titans Facebook and Google. I’ve also been busy writing on Searchblog, so you’ll find three of my own pieces highlighted below.
Facebook’s new Atlas is a real threat to Google display dominance — Gigaom
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One of the great joys of my career is the chance to speak at gatherings of interesting people. Sometimes it’s an unscripted, wide ranging conversation (like during Advertising Week, for example), but other times it’s a formal presentation, which means many hours of preparation and reportage.
These more formal presentations are opportunities to consolidate new thinking and try it out in front of a demanding audience. Last month I was invited to speak in front of group of senior executives at a major bank, including the CEO and all his direct reports. I was asked to focus my remarks on how new kinds of companies were threatening traditional incumbents – with a focus on the financial services industry, as you might imagine.
Read MoreNext up is Silicon Valley, which goes off Oct. 21 – 23, centered on the axis of Palo Alto. This year’s Silicon Valley festival is a pilot – Silicon Valley is more of an idea than an actual *place* per se – and NewCo tends to thrive in city centers. But we’ve found a great partner this year in the city of Palo Alto, which really is as close to the beating heart of the Valley as any city in the south Bay. After all, it’s where Google, Facebook, and hundreds of other game-changing companies started. So this year we’re piloting NewCo Silicon Valley in two parts – first with visits to a small number of legendary Valley company campuses, and second, with a full day of 30 or so companies based in downtown Palo Alto. Here are the companies I plan to visit this year, and why, along with my “runners up” – companies I wish I could also visit, were there two of me.
Day One – October 21
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Early in a conversation with Alex Austin, CEO of mobile startup Branch Metrics, I had to interrupt and ask what seemed like a really dumb question. “So, wait, Alex, you’re telling me that the essence of your company’s solution is that it….makes sure a link works?”
Alex had heard the question before. But yes, in truth, what his company specializes in is making sure that a link works in a very particular kind of mobile use case. And doing so is a lot harder than it might seem, he added. Branch Metrics, a three-year old startup that began as a way to create and share photo albums from your iPhone, is now devoted entirely to solving what should be a dead easy problem, but thanks to the way the mobile ecosystem has played out, it’s just not. (Alex has written up a great overview of his journey at Branch, worth reading here).
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(image) This past week’s links are rife with people asking hard questions of Google and Facebook, and so much the better, I’d warrant. You don’t get to the lead position without raising questions. In fact, that seems to be the theme of the week – asking interesting questions – of our online services, our marketing, and our food (yes, our food). To the links:
How Facebook and Google are taking over your online identity – Quartz
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Some years ago while attempting to explain the thinking behind my then-startup Federated Media, I wrote that all brands are publishers (it was over on the FM blog, which the new owners apparently have taken down – a summary of my thinking can be found here). I’d been speechifying on this theme for years, since well before FM or even the Industry Standard – after all, great brands always created great content (think TV ads or the spreads in early editions of Wired), we just didn’t call it that until our recent obsession with “native advertising” and “content marketing,” an obsession I certainly helped stoke during my FM years.
Today, there is an entire industry committed to helping brands become publishers, and the idea that brands need to “join the conversation” and “think like media companies” is pretty widely held. But I think the metaphor of brands as media creators has some uneasy limitations. We are all wary of what might be called contextual dissonance – when we consume media, we want to do so in proper context. I’ve seen a lot of branded content that feels contextually dissonant to me – easily shareable stories distributed through Outbrain, Buzzfeed, and Sharethrough, for example, or highly shareable videos distributed through YouTube and Facebook.
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This week’s Else is brought to you by good design, which trumps good code any day. And by the Alibaba IPO, which kind of pissed me off (see below). Enjoy the links!
The UX App That’s Driving Design Everywhere, From Airbnb to Zappos – WIRED
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A caveat before I think out loud, quite possibly getting myself into a running battle I know I can’t win: I’m not a public market stock investor, I’ve never been one, and take the following ruminations at the price they’re offered: IE, free.
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A year or so ago Chas Edwards, a colleague, pal, and member of the founding team at Federated Media, came to my office for a catch up. I had heard he was cooking up a new venture, but I didn’t know the details.
Little did I know what Chas and his new partner Douglas McGray had up their sleeve – a new *print* magazine built specifically for California.
But…print is dead, right? Apparently not. Chas and MacGray have a thesis that California is ready for a well-written, beautifully designed print publication, and all that was standing in their way was the cost of circulation, a major impediment in today’s market. They solved that issue with a clever hack of today’s newspapers – California Sunday is distributed free inside selected California newspapers. In essence, they’re piggybacking the launch of their brand, adding a valauble new product to what is a staid and attenuated newspaper brand.
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I’m easing back into this weekly Else column, or put another way, I missed last week’s Else due to preparations for NewCo SF, which I’m proud to say was a huge success. This week is Detroit, then New York, London, Boulder, LA, Palo Alto, but I get ahead of myself. For today, I’ll just focus on the best stories of the past 14 or so days. Much has happened in that time period, including Microsoft buying Minecraft, Alibaba filing for an IPO in the US, and yet another Apple announcement. I like the watch best, but in the shorter term, I think Apple Pay is the first mover. Bigger iPhones? Been there.
Why Apple Pay could succeed where others have had underwhelming results (ars) It all comes down to timing and getting the back end players to play nice. Apple most likely will have a hit on its hands – once they update the OS with the service.
A Cambrian Explosion In AI Is Coming (TC) THe author, former CEO of what is now Apple’s Siri service, predicts a new marketplace beyond search and the App store. Sounds like a place I’m interested in, given this: Early Lessons From My Mobile Deep Dive: The Quickening Is Nigh.
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