As developers for tablets and smartphones we like to keep abreast of the latest mobile technology developments . This is a daily digest of mobile development and related technology news gathered from the BBC, the New York Times, New Scientist and the Globe and Mail to name a few. We scour the web for articles concerning, iPhone, iPad and android development, iOS and android operating systems as well as general articles on advances in mobile technology. We hope you find this useful and that it helps to keep you up to date with the latest technology developments.
Here's How You Can Build Your Very Own Lego Oscar
Did you see Emma Stone and Oprah Winfrey holding giant Lego Oscars and get a bit jealous? The statues from the insane “Everything Is Awesome” live-performance at the 2015 Academy Awards were made by artist Nathan Sawaya, whose creations ended up in the hands of notable nominees in the audience:
Image: Giphy
Sawaya tweeted a video of how he made the statue:
Want to see the #LEGO #Oscars in the making? Check it: http://t.co/kQPH301gxc
— Nathan Sawaya (@NathanSawaya) February 23, 2015
But if that was too quick of an instruction for you, below is a longer instructional video on how to make a larger version of the Oscar statue:
And for the more avant-garde, here’s an instructional video on how to make an Oscar … something:
How Microsoft Gets Around Carrier Dependency in Windows 10 for Phones
One of the challenges that has plagued Microsoft with Windows Phone since its inception has been carriers. If you look at the history of Windows Phone 7, 8 and 8.1, the carriers have always held the strings when it comes to updates on devices. In some cases, particularly in Europe, this has been fine as the carriers have gotten updates out in a timely manner. Here in the US however it has been nothing short of a debacle. Verizon Lumia Icon users just now got Lumia Cyan (rolled up with Lumia Denim) after it was available for a year. AT&T
The post How Microsoft Gets Around Carrier Dependency in Windows 10 for Phones appeared first on Clinton Fitch.
VIDEO: Drone boss: 'I get a lot of support'
Jordi Munoz started his company while waiting for a green card now it’s one of the biggest commercial drone makers in the world
The immigrant who became a drone firm boss
The Mexican immigrant who set up the US’s largest drone firm
Can we escape urban commuting hell?
What tomorrow’s urban transport systems might look like
VIDEO: Moves to make chess a spectator sport
MIT’s Media Labs aims to make chess more accessible to spectators by including live match data.
Hands On: Calcbot 2 (iOS, OS X)
You need a pretty compelling reason to ditch the calculator that Apple supplies on iPhones – and the new Calcbot 2 from TapBots offers several. Weirdly, Apple still doesn’t provide a default calculator on the iPad, so at some point you’re going to want one, and when you eventually need it, you’ll find this app compelling.
This Chair Assembles Itself
The last chair you purchased likely arrived fully assembled, but let’s be clear: It didn’t assemble itself. There’s only one chair in the world that can do that, and it’s way too small for you to sit on. This very special chair, standing upon a 15 cm by 15 cm footprint, is the work of Skylar Tibbits and his team at the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT.
People With Disabilities Can Easily Find Accessible Spots With This App
Inspired by his own experiences, a filmmaker has created an app to help people with disabilities.
Jason Da Silva was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a disease that affects the central nervous system, in 2006, and uses a motorized scooter to get around, according to Mashable. As a filmmaker based in New York City, he quickly discovered that it wasn’t so easy for people with disabilities to maneuver around the city.
“It was very frustrating,” Da Silva told Mashable back in 2013. “I was finding that the freedoms that I had — just simple things like meeting up with friends and things, it was becoming more and more difficult.”
With these challenges in mind, Da Silva created the AXS Map, a crowdsourced mobile app and website powered by Google Maps, that allows people with disabilities to find accessible spots. Users rate and review the wheelchair accessibility of restaurants, stores, hotels and other places.
The app launched in 2012, and Alice Cook, Da Silva’s wife and executive director of his nonprofit, AXS Lab, told Fast Company that it will eventually have a social feature. Da Silva and his team also host “mapathons” during which people are invited to get together to rate and review locations.
The filmmaker told Time.com that the ratings and reviews aspect of his app is crucial. While the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act required businesses to become more accessible for people with disabilities, he said that in reality, this isn’t always the case. The reviews allow people to note specific details about the accessibility of a certain location, and then lets others know about those nuances.
Ultimately, Da Silva told Time, he hopes that his work can help more people understand the obstacles that those with disabilities face.
“People without disabilities don’t realize all the challenges that we face, like, ‘is a restroom accessible? Is there one small step outside a restaurant that would keep us from being able to get in?” Da Silva told the outlet. “Opening up the ratings to the community is an attempt to bridge the gap between people living with mobility issues and the larger communities that we live in.”
To learn more about AXS Map, visit its website here, or check out Da Silva’s nonprofit, AXS Lab here.
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The Most Important Entrepreneurship Advice From a Serial Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist
“Leap and the net will appear.” — John Burroughs
Christopher Michel (Twitter: @chrismichel) is a writer, explorer, investor and a serial entrepreneur who has has started and also invested in a number of companies. Michel’s three distinct careers have taught him many lessons on what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. Michel first served as a Naval Flight Officer in the United States Navy, then he founded Military.com and Affinity Labs – both companies were sold to Monster.com. Michel is currently managing Nautilus Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm which he founded in 2008. Michel also travels the world telling people’s stories as an inspirational photographer. He has photographed some of the world’s most unusual places and people, from the jungles of Papua New Guinea to the edge of space aboard a U-2 Spy Plane.
Christopher Michel – Nautilus Ventures
Michel shares some of the primary success characteristics that define great start-ups and entrepreneurs.
8 ways to be a successful entrepreneur:
1. Take a leap of faith – Michel says that the single, most important piece of advice for an entrepreneur or a potential entrepreneur to change the odds in their favor comes from a quote by American naturalist John Burroughs, “Leap and the net will appear.” This quote is everything to Michel and he says, “The difference between everyone in the world and a lot of these well-known entrepreneurs is that they just took some risk.” People that are really smart, really thoughtful and understand the deep complexity of companies are often paralyzed with analysis. When Michel meets a great entrepreneur he almost doesn’t care what the idea is exactly, but if they are working on a pretty good idea, he says they should just go do it.
“Some things need to be believed to be seen.” — Madeleine L’Engle
2. Authentically believe-in your idea - Before you leap, it’s important to be authentic about your idea. To really believe in it and have passion around something that you think really needs to be fixed is a characteristic of an entrepreneur that Michel just adores. With so many people wanting to be entrepreneurs Michel is not so sure that as many of them believe in their idea as maybe they did five or six years ago: “They really believe in that idea of being an entrepreneur and they know they need to pretend to believe in their idea, but do they truly believe in it, because this is a very important characteristic. It’s not required, but it’s very important because if things get difficult and they get challenged in a really fundamental way, do they have the belief and the passion to take it all the way?” As American writer Madeleine L’Engle said, “Some things need to be believed to be seen.”
3. Have tenacity – The portfolio of characteristics that seem to work really well for entrepreneurs include integrity, caring for people, passion and some smarts. And another one that Michel feels is really important is tenacity.
“If you don’t have a lot of tenacity you will not go that far and you will potentially miss the opportunities to do some really great things,” says Michel as he recalls how over and over and over again he was faced with challenges where very smart people including board members told him to stop working in his company, but he didn’t give up. “A lot of real innovation happens through these difficult processes. And this is why a lot of big companies can’t really do the most difficult kinds of innovation, because it requires a kind of super human effort and a kind of personal sacrifice that only happens when an entrepreneurs feels that this is almost the most important thing to them.”
4. Build an incredible culture – Michel has spent a lot of time thinking about the leadership mistakes around the characteristics of great companies that he didn’t follow, like was everyone in the company an A-player, were we getting rid of people that weren’t performing that were either nice but not great, or maybe great but not good people that were not a good fit in the company and didn’t contribute to an incredible corporate culture.
One of the things Michel believes in so deeply is how possible it is for CEO’s to build incredible cultures. He says there is an approach to building that kind of culture and when you do, you can do anything. You’ve built a machine that can do anything. You’ve built the Special Forces team that can solve any problem and break through any walls.
5. Focus on activities vs. outcomes – In his blog post on outcomes vs. activities, Michel talks about how it’s easy for a company to fall into the trap of doing a lot of things that seem like good ideas or good activities, but they don’t lead to outcomes for the company. To have the discipline to see the difference, Michel recommends that before engaging in an activity, leaders need to determine if they will make a difference by asking: can you tie it to an outcome for the company, can you tie it to revenue, can you tie it to users, can you tie it to business success?
Michel thinks that CMO’s and CEOs need to be looking with incredible skepticism at a lot of these activities as they don’t move the needle for them and he says, “It’s easy to point at the things that don’t seem like good things, but it is really hard to triangulate on those few things, those few levers that really make a difference. You could do lots of good things, but there might be a few things and if you did them right, that really move the needle.”
A Christopher Michel selfie at edge of space aboard a U-2 Spy Plane
6. Have really good leadership – Coming from the military where there is no special pay package for extra performance yet people worked hard because they wanted to do the right thing and they felt proud about what they were doing and were acknowledged for it, Michel thinks that companies get confused around the things that really matter to employees. They think it’s compensation or an equity package or some earn-out or what the office space looks like, but according to Michel, while those things are important they are not the real drivers of human behavior.
“This whole pay compensation schema that we think is driving a lot of behavior is a false area of optimization. The primary driver is really good leadership. It’s really inspiration. It’s really making people feel valued that this is a good use of their time and proud of the work they’re learning. You know, those are the things that we should be working on. Those are the biggest levers. A lot of people will work for almost nothing if they like what they’re doing is important,” says Michel.
7. Build trust and connect with people - “I would say that you could skip your MBA and read a book called the ‘Thin Book of Trust’ by Charles Feltman. It’s a really short and incredible book that will take you about 20 minutes to read,” says Michel who feels that, “If you could build trust with people and connect with them, people will do almost anything for you. You can give them direct feedback, you can push hard and ask a lot of them and if they trust you, you can have a great dialogue, but if they do not trust you, you have a major problem. And you know, it’s sub optimal performance if you don’t trust people and it’s incredible performance if you can build a culture of trust.”
As a first time CEO of Military.com, Michel shares how he was sufficiently insecure and felt like he needed to bully people, or show that he was smarter and not vulnerable. Seeing how this “giant mistake” of the overcompensation of his own insecurity led to huge trust issues, he has grown to love people and love working with them and appreciate their lives and what they’re going through. He says, “Once you build that kind of environment, your relationship with your employees and company is a lifetime relationship. I even tell them that one day you’re going to lose passion about the company and I’m going to help you get another job because this isn’t a one-off transaction.”
8. Be vulnerable and talk to people – When it comes down to being a great entrepreneur, Michel thinks the first step is to be vulnerable and to talk to people. He remembers how in his latest company, Affinity Labs, they built such as cool culture that even junior people felt that they had the right and obligation to give him feedback as the CEO.
“By appreciating and being okay with hearing all of the things you aren’t doing right, you almost create a kind of invulnerability where you can look at it intellectually and depersonalize it because you are all in it together,” says Michel who thinks vulnerability is the big opportunity because it allows you to really know people and it can be a really cool experience.
You can watch the full interview with Christopher Michel here. Please join me and Michael Krigsman every Friday at 3PM EST as we host CXOTalk – connecting with thought leaders and innovative executives who are pushing the boundaries within their companies and their fields.
Hacker Extorts Bitcoin Ransom From Illinois Police Department
MIDLOTHIAN, Ill. (AP) — A suburban Chicago police department paid a hacker a $500 ransom to restore access to data on a police computer that the hacker had disabled through the use of an increasingly popular type of virus.
The police department in Midlothian, a village southwest of Chicago, was hit in January by a form of the Cryptoware virus, which encrypted some files on a department computer, leaving them inaccessible without the encryption key, the Chicago Tribune reported (http://trib.in/17k9Hkv ). Midlothian Police Chief Harold Kaufman confirmed the department had been hacked, but declined further comment. A Tribune open records request turned up a village invoice listing the payment with the heading “MPD virus.”
An unknown hacker said that if the department wanted to unencrypt the files, it had to pay a ransom in bitcoin, a digital currency that is virtually untraceable, said Calvin Harden Jr., an IT vendor who works with the village.
The village had to make a tough decision, Harden said, and chose to make the payment because going after the hacker might have been more trouble than it was worth.
“Because the backups were also infected, the option was to pay the hacker and get the files unencrypted, which is what we decided to do,” he told the newspaper.
The problem of hackers demanding ransoms from law enforcement and government agencies around the country has been spreading over the past year or two, said Fred Hayes, president of the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police. The city of Detroit and a sheriff’s office in Tennessee recently suffered Cryptoware attacks by ransom-seekers, the Tribune reported.
Hayes said his advice to departments is to back up their data.
“This is something that quite a few people recently … have been experiencing,” he said.
___
Information from: Chicago Tribune, http://www.chicagotribune.com
You're Not Losing Your Memory. You're Just Distracted.
By Melissa Dahl
Follow @melissadahl
I am constantly misplacing my keys and I am pretty terrible with names, and sometimes, I wonder: At what point do these little flaky moments of forgetfulness become something to worry about? In a recent interview with Newshour, Lisa Genova — the neuroscientist and author of Still Alice, now an Oscar-nominated film starring Julianne Moore — answered that question, as it’s one she apparently hears all the time. She briefly explained how medical experts can tell when memory issues become troubling:
So the signs are like, you can’t remember the name, and then you don’t have the first letter, you don’t have the number of syllables. It doesn’t then just pop into your head an hour [later] while you’re driving down the street. It’s not going to come on the tip of your tongue, ever. Keys, you can’t find the keys and when you do, you don’t remember what they’re for. Or you find them and they’re in the refrigerator or somewhere strange.
Science Of Us: In Praise Of Zoning Out
For most of us, though, these types of memory slips aren’t something to worry about, Genova said. Even the average, healthy 25-year-old will experience moments like these three or four times a week; the difference is that the forgotten name will soon be recalled, or the keys will eventually be found between the couch cushions. It’s less likely that these things are being caused by a degenerative disease at all; for younger, healthy adults, distraction is the real issue. “Most of us, when we can’t find our keys, it actually isn’t a memory problem, it’s an attention problem,” Genova said. “You’re doing five things at once and you never actually paid attention to where you put them in the first place.” Guilty.
Science Of Us:
Why Men Always Think Women Are Flirting
What Happens When Rich People Marry Poor People
We’re Testing Children On The Wrong Things
How To Be A Better Online Dater
Some People Have An Actual Phobia Of Growing Up
A Conversation with Esther Wojcicki on 'Moonshots in Education'
Moonshots in Education
Esther Wojcicki is an award winning journalism teacher and the author of a new book on education called Moonshots in Education: Launching Blended Learning in the Classroom. The book explores digital and online learning with models and examples from schools that are already implementing digital learning.
Moonshots is an approachable book that’s part Wojcicki philiophy and part tips and advice from her co-author Lance Izumni and contributors Alice Chang and Alex Silverman. Actor James Franco (a former student of Esther’s) wrote the foreword. One of my favorite passages is about a culture of trust.
The first thing to establish in a classroom is a culture of trust. That doesn’t mean the students are given complete freedom to run wild and do what they want; it means the students trust each other to help in the learning process and the teacher trusts the students.
A conversation
Esther Wojcicki
The interview you can hear below, a conversation really, is more than just about the book. It’s about an educational philosophy that stresses doing rather than just studying and is based on something quite radical in education — respect for students.
And the reason I call this a conversation rather than just an interview is because Esther touched on subjects that are near and dear to my heart as a former educational reformer back in a different era.
Click to listen to my CBS Radio News conversation with Esther
Where To Watch This Year's Oscar-Nominated Documentaries
The Oscars are Sunday, which means there are precious few hours remaining to catch up on this year’s nominees. And while many of the major acting races are locked up, and even Best Picture seems to have broken down to “Boyhood” versus “Birdman,” things are still a bit unsettled in the Best Documentary category. The experts’ money is on Laura Poitras’ “Citizenfour,” but “Virunga” and “Finding Vivian Maier” stand close behind. Ahead, everything you need to know about the five Oscar-nominated documentaries, including where to watch them before Sunday.
“Citizenfour”
What it’s about: “‘Citizenfour’ is a real-life thriller, unfolding by the minute, giving audiences unprecedented access to filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald’s encounters with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, as he hands over classified documents providing evidence of mass indiscriminate and illegal invasions of privacy by the National Security Agency (NSA).”
Where to watch: “Citizenfour” is still out in limited release. On Monday, the documentary will debut on HBO at 9 p.m.
“Virunga”
What it’s about: “‘Virunga’ is the incredible true story of a group of brave people risking their lives to build a better future in a part of Africa the world’s forgotten, and a gripping exposé of the realities of life in the Congo.”
Where to watch: “Virunga” is available on Netflix right now.
“Finding Vivian Maier”
What it’s about: “‘Finding Vivian Maier’ is the critically acclaimed documentary about a mysterious nanny who secretly took over 100,000 photographs that were hidden in storage lockers and, discovered decades later, is now among the 20th century’s greatest photographers. Directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, Maier’s strange and riveting life and art are revealed through never-before-seen photographs, films, and interviews with dozens who thought they knew her.”
Where to watch: “Finding Vivian Maier” is available via Showtime On Demand, Amazon, iTunes and YouTube.
“Last Days in Vietnam”
What it’s about: “During the chaotic final days of the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese Army closes in on Saigon as South Vietnamese resistance crumbles. The United States has only a skeleton crew of diplomats and military operatives still in the country. As Communist victory becomes inevitable and the U.S. readies to withdraw, some Americans begin to consider the certain imprisonment and possible death of their South Vietnamese allies, co-workers and friends. Meanwhile, the prospect of an official evacuation of South Vietnamese becomes terminally delayed by Congressional gridlock and the inexplicably optimistic U.S. ambassador. With the clock ticking and the city under fire, a number of heroic Americans take matters into their own hands, engaging in unsanctioned and often makeshift operations in a desperate effort to save as many South Vietnamese lives as possible.”
Where to watch: “Last Days in Vietnam” is still out in limited release and available now via iTunes, Amazon and YouTube.
“The Salt of the Earth”
What it’s about: “Sebastião Salgado has created some of the most indelible photographs of our time. His black-and-white images bring an artful composition to chronicling humanity’s ‘salt of the earth’ in multiyear projects such as ‘Workers,’ ‘Migrations’ and ‘Genesis.’ This film, directed by his son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Wim Wenders, brings an insider’s and outsider’s perspective on the family, illuminating the key role played by Salgado’s wife, Lélia Deluiz Wanick, and their work on the nature preserve Instituto Terra.”
Where to watch: “The Salt of the Earth” is not available in the U.S. at the moment.
Lenovo offers fix for hidden adware
Chinese computer maker Lenovo offers free software so users can remove hidden software that experts warned made them vulnerable to a cyber-attack.
Apple reportedly launching wide public beta of iOS 8.3 in May
According to “sources familiar with the matter,” Apple is intending to launch more public beta releases of upcoming system software, starting with a revision to iOS8 in mid-March. The move may be intended to help deflect criticism of recent, high-profile bugs in releases of both Apple’s iOS, as well as in its desktop operating system, OS X.
New App That Simplifies Food Assistance, Healthcare Benefits To Help Millions Of Families In Need
A new app in development could make accessing social services a much easier task for many Americans.
Single Stop, USA — a nonprofit that has served about 1 million households across the country — is changing how families in need are learning about and obtaining benefits. The nonprofit has helped low-income families access about $3 billion in existing public and private funds for a variety of programs — including food assistance, childcare, healthcare and financial aid for students — by providing in-person support in applying and receiving various forms of assistance.
And that support is going digital.
Single Stop is developing a new app based off of its current service model that’s expected to help millions more low-income families in the coming years. While the app won’t replace the need for Single Stop locations with in-person support, it will allow users to navigate the system of applying for and receiving benefits more independently.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported last September, that 45 million Americans, or 14.5 percent of the country, lived below the poverty line in 2013. Attempting to connect these individuals and families to the resources they need exposes the logistical problems that exist within the current system, according to Single Stop.
Since it was established about seven years ago, Single Stop has grown quickly across the country, expanding to more than 113 locations in eight states. Some of the locations are at community colleges, where the nonprofit serves students who are unlike those of past generations.
“The majority [of community college students] travel to school — 50 percent of them are parents, 70 percent of them are working,” Mason explained to NationSwell in the video above. “They’re facing some life-or-death issues, whether they can take care of their children, whether they can get access to medicine, whether they can actually put food on the table. Colleges really haven’t shifted how they work, even though the population that they work with has changed dramatically.”
Single Stop’s presence on 18 college campuses is bridging the gap between 21st-century students and the resources they can garner attending school. Students who access assistance through the nonprofit, for example, receive $5,400 on average in benefits each year.
Ruben Gomez is one person who benefited greatly from Single Stop’s help. While he was in college as a student body president, his girlfriend became pregnant. He knew there were benefits for him and his family, but didn’t know how to navigate the system to find them.
Through Single Stop’s help, Gomez received emergency Medicaid and food stamps, according to NationSwell. Gomez was able to remain in school and graduated as valedictorian in 2014, becoming the first person in his family to finish college.
“It’s hard, I think, to imagine what could have happened to myself and to my family if Single Stop would have never connected me to the assistance that I needed,” Gomez told the outlet.
Elisabeth Mason, the co-founder of Single Stop, said she sometimes felt helpless growing up in East Harlem, New York, and witnessing injustice and inequality all around her.
“Many of the people I grew up with are long gone, either because of the AIDS crisis, the crack crisis, or gun violence or domestic violence,” Mason told NationSwell. “I don’t know how much I felt like an outsider, as much as how hard it is as a child to see inequality at that level and feel the injustice very personally, and not be able to do anything about it.”
That feeling is what led her to turn her idea of change into an effective reality that’s only growing in size. As NationSwell reported, the nonprofit hopes to serve an additional 1 million low-income community college students by 2025.
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Facebook Ups Its Own Influence With Patent to Identify Social Media's Most Effective Influencers
In the race to determine who the most effective social media influences are, Facebook just pulled far ahead of the competition. If you didn’t know there was a race going on, now you do – and after 4 years of waiting for a patent, the tortoise is back in the lead! Facebook was recently granted a patent, that the company had filed back in 2011, entitled “Identify influencers and experts in a social network.” The patent is exactly what it sounds like, a new method of discerning which influencers are the most effective. Facebook will then be able to directly target these select people with advertisements, charging companies a substantial amount of money in the process.
Facebook is not the first to achieve an influencer-marketing patent. Other tech giants such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all have their own patents in this same category. The difference, and the aspect that seems much more likely to make Facebook’s method more effective, is in the technique used to identify the most important people. Google’s method looks at volume of connections, Yahoo’s examines how influential a person’s followers are, and Microsoft’s attempts to assemble a group of influencers with the largest unduplicated audience.
The common denominator that all these methods share is the use of connection count as a proxy for influence, instead of measuring influence itself. In other words, they base influence on the number of connections a person has, not how effective they are. And let’s be honest, having a ton of connections doesn’t mean much if they are shallow. As a business owner, ask yourself: who would you rather target – the Twitter user with 300,000 followers who rarely retweet any of his material, or the Twitter user with 30,000 followers who almost always retweet his material? An easy decision when the goal is to have your content shared as much as possible.
Number of followers is only half the battle in determining influence. Many people have the ability to gather a large number of followers. It’s the influencers whose followers are the most active in sharing content that are most valuable to advertisers. Facebook’s patent is for a method that actually measures whose followers re-shared the content, allowing Facebook to find the influencer who is the nucleus of the social media network.
In official patent-speak, Facebook’s method “comprises identifying the first users who caused the non-zero rate of sharing of the element of information to locally increase significantly.” In other words, Facebook watches the rate at which a particular piece of content is shared, and then tracks the content back to its roots to figure out whose post led to an abrupt increase in the share rate in their network.
With all of the time, money and effort spent on determining how to pinpoint the most effective influencers, you have to wonder whether they are worth all of this trouble. Of course Facebook wants us to believe that social media influencers are an invaluable marketing resource, but are they really? Companies undoubtedly seem to think so. And they are shelling out time, money, free services, and more to gain access to these influencers’ legions of loyal followers.
With some social networks, influencers seem to be advertisers’ only way in – take Instagram for example. The popular network has over 200 million users who share more than 20 billion photos – a seemingly perfect platform for brands to connect with a captive audience, and the opportunity to do it with spectacular visuals. But Instagram users are notoriously resistant to direct advertising on the site, putting companies in a position where they have to resort to influencers to reach this coveted audience. And with younger generations gravitating toward media in the form of images, companies would be remiss to pass up the opportunity.
Now that companies will be able to see who the influencers with the most reach are, perhaps they will invest more wisely. Although it is difficult to directly correlate the success of influencers in terms of actual sales numbers.
While the focus surrounding Facebook’s new methodology centers on the potentially lucrative opportunities advertisers will gain, no one seems to be considering the impact this patent will have on influencers themselves. How will influencers feel about being hyper-targeted? Select influencers will probably enjoy the significant financial opportunities companies are likely to present them with. But that financial gain could come at a price, especially considering a large following today is not guaranteed to last. Influencers who continually succumb to company advertisements risk losing sway over their loyal followers. After all, who considers an infomercial a trustworthy influencer? The more company stamps/badges a person has, the more they are likely to read sell-out as opposed to thought leader.
Whether Facebook’s new-patented method results in major financial gain for companies has yet to be seen. Facebook may be able to advertise directly to the “right” people, but they have no control over what influencers choose to do with the information received. Perhaps Facebook’s hyper-targeting could even result in a backlash from influencers who might resent their endorsement constantly trying to be bought. Only time will tell but either way Facebook is sure to profit, so I suppose some things never change.
Google, Driverless Cars and the "Gooberification" of Everything
Google is the most dominant platform in the world.
It is a pure platform company that makes almost all of its revenue from facilitating exchanges and interactions between its users. Google’s main revenue driver, search advertising, works by connecting advertisers with consumers. And with Android, Google connects software developers with consumers through the Play Store. In fact, Google has made a significant investment in just about every type of platform.
#Google has made a significant investment in every type of platform | via @Applico #PlatformInnovation pic.twitter.com/21pT5Lv93P
— Applico (@Applico) February 20, 2015
Almost all of these platforms enable Google to improve its core business: collecting data on users and using that to serve them ads.
But the last platform frontier for Google is a services marketplace, where uber-startups Uber and Airbnb reign supreme. Uber recently made headlines when it unveiled a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University to fund research for autonomous cars and proprietary mapping technology. This announcement could turn the formerly cozy Google and Uber relationship into full-blown competition. If Uber’s investment in Carnegie Mellon pays off, it would allow the company to be less dependent on Google Maps and to directly compete with Google’s autonomous car program.
And apparently, Google already sees the potential threat. News leaked last week that Google is in the early stages of testing its own Uber competitor. While Google’s autonomous car aspirations are well-documented, its interest in developing a ride-hailing service app would be its first foray into a services marketplace platform. The details on the intent and scope of Google’s program are still murky, and driverless cars are still years away from reaching mainstream consumers. But it’s easy to see why Google would want to own the future of transportation.
Google’s Blind Spots
Google makes 90% of its revenue selling text ads for every marketable product or service on earth. Search was the backbone of the consumer Internet, helping to organize traffic and information. All of Google’s core products – Gmail, Android, Maps – are given away essentially for free so that the company can extend its access to information. In essence, Google expands its revenue by “expanding the pie” for the Internet. Google wanted to be the logistics platform of a digital world, and for the most part it has succeeded. Where it’s failed is when it comes up against walled gardens like Facebook, which has reams of user data that Google’s crawlers can’t access. Enter Google’s largely failed effort to establish a social network, Google +.
Where does Uber come into all of this? For now, Uber is just a ride-hailing app, but as some of its experiments (like messenger service Uber Rush) have shown, its mission is to become the logistics platform of a connected world. If Uber’s dream becomes reality, Google could be faced with another walled garden keeping it from accessing information it wants. Google has continuously tried to expand its reach throughout the desktop and mobile Internet. So when the Internet of Things starts to come to life, I’d expect Google to try to do the same. Owning a key transportation platform through driverless cars would be one way for it to accomplish this.
The Gooberfication of Everything
So how could Google take on Uber? If Google can successfully bring autonomous cars to market, it could create what many have jokingly called “Goober,” a services marketplace similar to Uber that’s powered by self-driving cars. Compared to Uber today, Goober’s transportation prices would be substantially lower. And even worse for Uber, Google wouldn’t even need to make money from rides. Currently, Uber makes money by taking a cut of each transaction. But Google wouldn’t need to. Instead, it could offer rides at-cost and make money from its captive audience by collecting data and showing them Google-run advertising.
In this scenario, Google doesn’t even need to own the cars. A car owner could be dropped off at work and then their car could spend the day picking up and dropping off other passengers on Goober. The car owner would keep all the money they make from giving rides and Google would keep the advertising revenue and data. Everyone wins.
The more data Google can collect, the better it can target ads and the more advertisers will be willing to spend on Google advertising. By getting more users unto its platform through expand the pie initiatives like an Uber competitor, Google can continue to finely tune its big-data engine and position itself to be a central part of the Internet of Things. Game on, Uber.
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