Perry

Hewitt

Category: General

  • Techonomy recap: digital reach and repercussions

    Am just beginning to digest last week’s Techonomy conference – three days packed with discussions of the impact of digital technology’s acceleration and reach. Sessions focused on technology’s transformative effects on our daily habits, our society, and even our brains themselves.

    There were plenty of truly remarkable examples of the improvements – from predicting elections to curing cancer to enabling worldwide education (the Forbes magazine with Salman Khan on the cover was omnipresent). But the strength of the conference was examining tech’s effects from divergent perspectives. Three sessions in particular made it easy to envision longer-term uncertain outcomes of a technology-driven future:

    • When Ray Kurzweil spoke about the Singularity (still on track for 2029) and his new book about the rewriting of our brains, then it was easy to go to a dystopian future where humans are ruled by machines. (Apparently in a hallway conversation, he did allow that John Connor was in with a chance.) As computers come closer to self-aware – and the examples of IBM’s Watson’s Jeopardy answers were astonishing – what is the risk to the humans we intended them to serve?
    • Andrew McAfee convened a thought-provoking panel called “Where’s my robot”. Here the dystopian future was less about artificial intelligence installing our new robot overlords, and more about a world of 75% unemployment when the robots have served us all too well. When robots have intelligence and dexterity, how many jobs will be left? As McAfee aptly remarked, “If you’re a mid-skilled, mid-educated, mid-ambitious knowledge worker, I think things look pretty chilly.”
    • Finally, a crash course in geoengineering with David Keith and Andrew Parker from Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center introduced an ethical and policy challenge. If sulfur can be manually added to the upper atmosphere to reduce the planet’s temperature, who gets to decide where the global thermostat is set – when as much as half a degree might have ruinous effect for one nation alongside benefits for another. (Lance Ulanoff remarked he and his wife couldn’t agree on the right room temperature for their home – how can India and China be expected to agree?). As technology decisions erode borders, and enable us to craft global solutions with vastly different regional effects, who gets to decide?

    If those were the longer-range future concerns, Techonomy also teed up immediate  examples of tech’s effects on policy and ethical considerations.

    • A panel on Transforming Social Enterprise covered the current use of microtasks distributed by systems like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Employment can be reduced, one presenter commented, in favor of a “flash workforce” available for piecework that could move beyond one-penny microtasks to more complex operations. There was little discussion of the potential societal costs – what happens to workforce stability? And what happens when the worker has no visibility into the overall job? Would you complete a small pattern recognition microtask for a nickel, knowing that the microtasks collectively might add up to a cure for cancer? How about if they add up to a capability for an authoritarian regime to better monitor its protesting citizens? (Watch Jonathan ZIttrain for a far more eloquent presentation of this argument.)
    • Finally, a discussion of Facebook product strategy saw David Kirkpatrick zeroing in on the newsfeed feature. If Facebook’s goal for the newsfeed is to become our newspaper of record, where is the transparency that helps us understand what the algorithm is filtering out on our behalf, and why? Kirkpatrick acknowledged the unprecedented global communications platform Facebook provides – but correctly pushed the question of the “invisible hand” of the algorithm and its effects.

    Technology is responsible for remarkable transformations – thanks to ever better, faster, cheaper computing power, we have previously unimaginable information dissemination and discovery opportunities created by big data. The positive implications in areas like global health are staggering. Unlike the breathless nature of most tech conferences, Techonomy forced some focus on all the consequences – explicit and unintended – that we often miss in the excitement of digital acceleration.

  • 5 online first impressions

    XKCD cell numberIn the offline world, clichés about first impressions abound. From the oft-repeated “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” to articles admonishing us about body language and the importance of women wearing makeup to appear competent, there’s lots of advice floating around for acing the first in-person meeting. Here are five things you may be communicating about yourself online well before you walk through the door:

    1. Mobile phone: For younger job seekers, the diagram above usually tells me where your parents live. The piece you can control: make sure your mobile phone has a sensible greeting (no jokes or diatribes) and that you check the old-school voicemail messages. Don’t worry — once you get the job, we’ll just text.
    2. Email address: There are still a lot of TMI addresses floating around out there in the spirit of johnsmith2006@gmail.com, ilovesalamisandwiches@juno.com, or jackiesmom@yahoo.com. Don’t date yourself with the year you received your gmail invitation. Also, your parental status and abiding love for luncheon meats can be safely omitted here.
    3. Twitter handle: The handle is capped at 15 characters — so there’s less opportunity for free expression. Keep your handle on target and not spammy, and if it’s an asset you ably cultivate, make it easy to infer from your email handle.
    4. LinkedIn profile: Did you know you can set up a custom URL for your public profile? If your name is “John Kim” you’re likely out of luck for an exact name match, but you can probably set up something shorter and more meaningful than the default.
    5. Domain name: Owning your own domain name is a low-cost investment for consistency in your online presence with a minor search results benefit. Set one up, even if it refers to a directly to a LinkedIn or your Google profile.

    Job seekers in particular are mindful of their online presence, although HR usage of social media for screening (as opposed to recruiting) is more cursory and less exhaustive than the media would have you believe. It’s good practice, however, to get the basics of your online presence right — clean, personal metadata — to make a good first impression online.

    Source: xkcd

  • On the web, what is the job to be done?

    While the overall economy haltingly recovers, web and mobile development have resumed at full tilt. Maintenance on digital properties deferred since the 2008 financial crisis is now critical to perform. The growth in mobile device adoption and the proliferation of tablets in multiple form factors are forcing even the desktop-devoted to accelerate mobile development. Vendors are busy, RFPs are everywhere, and clients are eager to get started.

    But when clients undertake a web project, what is really the job to be done? Back in the 2000s, Clay Christensen pointed out that “every job people need or want to do has a social, a functional, and an emotional dimension.” The customer’s articulation of the job, which he offers up in his popular milkshake example, is not always the job that needs to be done.

    Christensen’s findings ring especially true today during this renewed digital development boom. Clients say, “I need a web refresh/mobile app,” as a statement of their perceived functional need. But often what they are looking for is a strategy that guides them through:

    • Walk me through my audiences in the digital realm
    • Help me understand how digital technology will change my core business processes
    • Show me where my company fits in a new competitive landscape in a disrupted environment
    • Teach me about social media, and how to use it

    Large management consulting firms have the chops to tackle many of these questions, but often without a strong delivery arm for the quick prototyping and execution required for digital. Conversely, web and mobile development shops want to solve a technology problem, ideally with a reusable product, and may be ill-equipped to take on the strategy component. The right blend of digital firm does exist, but may not be on the clients’ radar if they are beginning with the functional end in mind. What’s the solution? Re-focus your team on the higher level of problem — the complete social, emotional, and functional job to be done by your web presence.

  • Stop the Madness: Password Proliferation

    The growth of the internet has been blamed for a good deal: the decline of conversation, an explosion of pornography, and even the re-wiring of the human brain. But perhaps the most egregious crime is the proliferation of passwords required to navigate one’s everyday life. From newspaper subscriptions to checking accounts to all flavors of online retail, we’re relentlessly prompted to create and remember passwords. Each site has its own rules around the length, capitalization, and the number of special characters permitted (or required). Effectively, we’re reinforcing a system that trains people to create passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess. And if you work in an enterprise IT environment, Sharepoint and Peoplesoft will cheerfully remind you to recall and re-enter those passwords again and again as Draconian settings time out within minutes.

    And guess what — it’s not working. This week SplashData released the top 25 passwords of 2012 — and once again, “password” topped the list. It’s easy to mock passwords like “123456” and “abc123” (although I like the vaguely paranoid “trustno1”) but the fault is with the system, and not the users. The proliferation is unmanageable, and leads to people either using the same password for everything or keeping long lists in Google docs and sticky notes — exactly the kind of data insecurity passwords were designed to prevent. Password management services like LastPass and 1Password address this need, but have yet to see widespread adoption.

    So, what’s the answer? Within the enterprise, it means tackling single sign-on, which is challenging in any organization with large legacy systems. Web applications are relying heavily on social network integration before smartcards or retinal scans obviate the need.

    And as passwords get harder to manage, Facebook has cleverly capitalized on this pain point ever since it launched Facebook Connect back in 2008. I’d never want Facebook feed to allow Spotify to display my dubious taste in music, but I was damned if I’d create yet another password and defaulted to Facebook login. Innovations like the news feed in 2006 and acquisitions like Instagram in 2012 are often cited as drivers for Facebook’s success. Perhaps we’ve got it all wrong: the creation of Facebook as a seamless password management system with a social network on the side may have been the cleverest innovation of them all.

  • It’s Time to Find the Women in Tech

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    “Where are all the women?” is an irritatingly common refrain in tech circles. Plenty of executives and investors, male and female, are seeking to advance more women in technology. But how?

    We need to take a three-pronged approach, bolstering education, opportunity, and visibility for women in technology.

    Increasing the pipeline of qualified women is a first step. Improving girls’ access to science, technology, engineering, and math education is vital: organizations like the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy are investing heavily in so-called STEM initiatives. Get girls interested in science and math, the thinking goes, and they grow up into women earning 33 percent more than their peers in non-STEM jobs.

    Myriad organizations work to advance girls’ interest in technology, from the brand-new Girls Who Code to the Girl Scouts, with long-established programs for “STEM girls.” At the undergraduate level, courses like Harvard’s CS50 are aimed at first-time coders, and their unintimidating, practical approach has encouraged more young women to learn to write software. Similarly, as the need for web technology in all industries increases, the need for mid-level programming will create roles for “blue-collar coders” with fewer formal educational credentials.

    Matching qualified female candidates with employment opportunities remains a challenge, however. Just getting qualified women in to meet tech company hiring managers demands that industry insiders broaden their professional networks to include more women.

    An organization called CODE 2040 has developed an approach to improving minority representation in the industry. It mentors black and Latino technical students and places them in Silicon Valley startup internships, and has a similar program for young women in the works.

    Mentoring is key to expanding opportunities. Young women need to see mid-level and senior tech industry women succeeding. Last year, I attended a networking event where I spotted fewer than a dozen women among several hundred attendees. The “woman in technology” keynoting the event was a celebrity marketing organic baby products, while a male colleague explained the underlying business model on her behalf. It’s discouraging, and a missed opportunity, for young women not to encounter role models to spotlight the path towards leadership in the industry.

    Visibility is the third prong. There are many qualified tech industry women out there. They’re hiding in plain sight. The “Where are the women?” refrain often occurs after a male-dominated tech conference where few women were considered to speak and even fewer actually spoke. In such contexts, some women may consider the risks of being outspoken to be disproportionate to the rewards. The experience of women bloggers would seem to bear out their concerns. They experience more ad hominem criticism than men, as well as actual sexual harassment, according to Rebecca Greenfield in her Atlantic Wire article, “The Plight of the Girl Tech Blogger.” And although women outnumber men on Twitter, they are less likely to be followed and less likely to be retweeted. To encourage women to dare to be visible, we have to change how women with opinions and agendas in technology are treated.

    Broadening the definition of professional technology roles could also increase women’s visibility in the sector. As important as it is to create more female engineers, it’s equally important to avoid the internecine conflict about “who counts.” Sheryl Sandberg’s commencement address at Harvard Business School this year spurred debates about whether women who get on the rocket ship of a startup instead of building it are setting their sights too low. Let’s instead pitch a bigger tent: embrace digital project managers, technical writers, and female executives as part of the growing women-in-tech community.

    Getting these three pieces—education, opportunity, and visibility—in place will go a long way to expanding the presence of women in the tech industry and answering “Where are the women?” once and for all.

    This post originally appeared in Techonomy.

  • Getting to scale: advancing platforms for online content

    These days Software as a Service (SaaS) is ubiquitous. Project management? Got Basecamp for that. Bulk email at scale? See Constant Contact or Mailchimp. And say goodbye to your server logs — Google Analytics has been widely adopted for understanding website performance. The move to SaaS has long been the case for bloggers, who from the early days migrated to solutions like TypePad. Today, many would rather have a Tumblr instance or a site on WordPress.com than be in the business of building and updating an application.

    Currently I’m involved in two projects, one as part of a team implementing and promoting a multi-tenant Drupal instance, and the other as a client for migrating the server side of an open source mobile application to a SaaS platform. In both cases, moving to a platform will enable updating and scale at lower cost — but it’s highly instructive to sit on both sides of the table simultaneously and see transition pain points. A few observations on ways to drive platform adoption:

    • Give people control of their pixels. Enabling admin users to make small tweaks for brand or preference make an organization feel more ownership of the process and the CMS.
    • Invest in admin UX. The boring “killer app” behind adoption is often a clean admin user interface. If the person charged with updating the content doesn’t feel confident in the user interface, updates occur less frequently.
    • Create systems that enable adaptive content. Karen McGrane speaks persuasively about why we need to stop the madness of systems that cram print layouts into ever-smaller screens. Systems that enable authoring the right content types and metadata are essential — they help publishers reach users on the proliferation of devices today, as well as the ones not even created yet.
    • Meet the need for speed. Content publishers, especially for news sites, live in the admin interface. A system that lags on the backend will fail to impress, especially in today’s environment where 400 milliseconds (the blink of an eye) is now considered too long to wait.
    • Be explicit about ways platforms remove pain points. Custom online publishing platforms for web or mobile rarely calculate total cost of ownership at a level that includes both feature enhancements and maintenance updates. Open source systems update frequently, and even in a cleanly-coded site where the Drupal core is untouched, these updates require time and testing.
    • Expose and sell the roadmap. Platforms need a product roadmap informed by both articulated user needs and emerging trends. Too much on the former, and you lose a coherent product. Too much of the latter and you slow adoption. Find the right blend collaboratively with content creators and designers, and iterate.
    • Integrate social services. We’re no longer building independent publishing systems, we’re integrating them into an ecosystem of always-on channels of social applications like Facebook. Make sure the content types enable compelling and clean sharing to social.

    For those making a move to a platform, remember that feature set alone is rarely the differentiator for a great online presence. A thoughtful investment in content and social strategy drives effective digital communications, particularly for those in the information business — whether that’s an educational institution, a news organization, or a consulting firm. Find the right platform to provide a solid underpinning, and focus on a strategy that delivers what matters for your online audiences.

  • Unpacking the algorithms behind online experiences

    Relinquishing human free will to the machines generally gets a bad rap. In the media, all kinds of scientists are nefarious in their data-driven ways — even well-intentioned science yields Frankenstein’s monster far more often than the reasonable paleontologist in Jurassic Park. The Terminator franchise in the 1980s was among the first to introduce the concept of the Singularity to mass media — what happens to humans when their systems become self aware? — with predictable dire results. (According to futurist Ray Kurzweil the Singularity is now only 17 years away — so look busy.)

    And yet in our online lives, we cede more and more to algorithms and machine learning. Eli Pariser highlighted the risks of our collective inattention to the use of algorithms in his 2011 The Filter Bubble. He pointed out that applications like Facebook show us only a curated subset of our friends, just as Google in 2009 began to filter our searches for us — even when we’re logged out. Apart from intermittent outrage in front page stories (“Target knew my teen daughter was pregnant before I did!”), we don’t often question the convenience that all these behaviorally-fueled algorithms offer us. We may cringe at ads that re-target us around the web, but as long as we use the conveniently-timed coupons offered to us, we are encouraging rather than curtailing that behavior.

    Recently I’ve been reading more about Echonest, the technology that sits behind music discovery applications like Spotify and Vevo. In many ways this feels like a highest and best use of an algorithm. Who has time to manually curate playlists for everything from a workout to a night out? The algorithms go further to infer musical compatibility among friends, and have even taken a swing at how musical tastes align with political leanings – handy for those throwing national conventions or debate watch parties. The risks seem low compared to algorithmically-led access to one’s friends, but of course there’s the opportunity to skew music discovery to industry-backed new artists à la Clear Channel. While some analysts are bullish on Pandora’s music genome approach (similar to Art.sy’s attempt to map the art genome – h/t Cesar Brea), other investors are betting heavily on Echonest. A few weeks ago Echonest made public their Discovery playlist, which updates each week with emerging music from around the globe. Algorithms find out what people are listening to and taking about, and offer a great way to find new music around the world in a ways most humans can’t scale — well before it’s piped to you in the mall.

    In the end, it’s all the same acknowledgement of the impossibility of the big data in our lives. It requires admitting the information overload is too great, and a degree of outsourcing selection to the machines. So maybe algorithms are less creepy when we know they’re out there working for us, and when they are finding needles from the broadest possible haystack — music we might like, seeing friends through the lens of musical compatibility — rather than surreptitiously defining the status updates we get to see.

  • Is health care next for digital disruption?

    Health appsMuch has been written about the internet’s disruption of longstanding models for education. The success of Khan Academy in K-12, the launch of Coursera, edX and others in higher education, the publicity garnered by the Thiel fellowships, and the aggressive funding of edu start-ups everywhere (EdSurge provides solid coverage) all illustrate the opportunity to take a well-established system and do things differently. Digital channels enable a shift to explore new ways to learn that are not confined to one era of your life (undergraduate years) or location-based (on campus). The goals are clear: reduce cost, provide equal or better outcomes, and spread educational access to the world.

    Is health care next? Today, the founder of RunKeeper focused on mobile health with a terrifically titled GigaOm piece, Your phone will soon be your new doctor. The piece focuses on mobile and the myriad apps that have sprung up to connect mobile device users to their day-to-day health awareness and performance. But, beyond mobile, the larger point about digital disruption is there. Health care today is episodic — you go to the doctor once a year and/or when you’re ill, it’s location-based (in the doctor’s office, out of your element), and it’s heavily reliant on your memory as a diagnostic device. Mobile health can be just the opposite: always on, always with you, and reliant on hard data (number of steps taken, heart rate, meal consumption) in a way the traditional health care model cannot be. The future is here: welcome to your personal health KPIs.

    Venture capitalists and nonprofits alike are moving fast ahead into both education and health care, exploring ways digital channels can create new markets amidst disruption. New Pew research released about the news industry this week feels like a cautionary tale: it’s time to focus on new delivery models before the older ones are on life support. In education and in health care, the hunt for digitally-driven reimagination is on.

  • More than you wanted to know about your Facebook use, courtesy of Wolfram Alpha

    It takes a curious mixture of narcissism, introspection, and discipline to engage in personal analytics on any level, much less dialed up to Feltronesque quantified self. This quick download of my Facebook activity since September 2010 confirms:

    • I use words (189) more than pictures (47), and neglect video (1) almost entirely
    • My friends are a bit more female (53%) than male (47%), hail from 24 countries, and include 1 fervent monarchist
    • Inexplicably, I post most often at 9pm on a Tuesday night

    Aside from the vague shock of realizing where one’s time goes (I recommend Rescue Time for a sobering application analyzing web use), the possibilities for personal analytics are enormous. Nike+ FuelBand is a great example of a personal analytics service that’s addictive and competitive, and effectively connects long term fitness goals to short term behavior.

    What are the effects of aggregating personal behaviors at this level — not even explicit consumer tastes, just daily habits? We live our lives in public as never before, and what may seem mundane — the precise time we’re gazing into the iPhone’s glowing screen on a Tuesday evening — could lead to useful personal insights, relevant commercial applications, and of course privacy concerns.

  • Death in the social era

    Today marks the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Antietam, whose 23,000 casualties marked the bloodiest single day in American military history. The American Experience film on Death and the Civil War (based on Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering) focuses on the scale of the death, and the corresponding lack of societal structures to manage death logistics and communications. It seems hard to believe but before the Civil War, there was no national cemetery system, no federally recognized system for identifying the dead, and no means of informing family members. The federal government would, by the end of the war, have constructed “a new bureaucracy of death.”

    A then-emerging new technology played a part in people’s perception of death. Mathew Brady’s October 1862 photography exposition in New York shocked viewers with what was for many the first graphic photography of death. While it’s unlikely viewers in New York would have known the subjects, it brought home an understanding of the loss in a way that both augmented and circumvented newspaper accounts.

    The public photography in the Brady show marked a paradigmatic change. Over the next century and a half the death business gets routinized and bureaucratized, with funeral homes, death notices, $25 caskets, and online guest books. In the late 2000s, widespread adoption of social media immeasurably quickens and widens the notification process. Like its disruptive effects in other industries, social media “debureaucratizes” death communications in a new and interesting way.

    The public nature of the way we broadcast our lives through social networks today necessarily transforms how we communicate death. New technology enables us to share the mundane to an astonishing level, with applications like Instagram transforming the way we experience the mid-day meals of others. Documenting the birth and times of our babies is so ubiquitous that if you want to block those images, there’s an app for that. But there are few apps, and no established social protocols for announcing death through social media. Twitter is rife with death rumors for public figures, but what are the rights and responsibilities of next-of-kin of a regular person, suddenly deceased?

    A terse Wikipedia entry of “death and the Internet” tells you the facts: Gmail will pass on your email to next of kin while Yahoo declines; Facebook will, with proper documentation, allow you to create a memorial for the deceased. Last month an app called If I die launched aimed at the pre-dead — it allows people to leave video and text messages in the event of their own sudden demise. There’s a growing need, but the both the structures (what happens to email accounts?) and the practices (how do I announce a death on Facebook?) are not yet mature.

    150 years after Antietam, the military’s notification teams are skilled in the delivery of bad news and corresponding support structures — but now struggle to stay ahead of social networks to inform families. Even without a sudden catalytic event of a war destroying 2% of the population to prompt the shift, social norms around online communication are forced to adapt for death as they have for life.