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ThinkUp App Goes For-Profit In Bid To Decentralize The Social Web

2012-03-26T21:49:15Z

ThinkUp App, the open source web application born from the non-profit Expert Labs that lets you capture, store and analyze your activity across various social networking sites, has rebooted as a commercial entity.

ThinkUp the company will be headed up by Lifehacker founding editor Gina Trapani and famed early blogger and entrepreneur Anil Dash, who have been working together on Expert Labs since 2009. Expert Labs, meanwhile, will be shutting down, according to blog posts by Trapani and Dash.

To help fund its early operations, ThinkUp is seeking to secure some $1 million in a grant through the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge (ThinkUp estimates it will need a total of $2.4 million in outside funding.) And this is where it gets really cool: According to its application there, ThinkUp aims to utilize the content it collects on existing corporate social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Foursquare to essentially subvert the closed ecosystem they’ve come to embody — “using those connections to enable the creation of a new decentralized network behind the scenes.” In effect, ThinkUp wants to use the weight of the existing social web against it — a Judo move to ultimately make the Internet a more open place.

So why is ThinkUp going to the journalism-focused Knight Foundation for help with this? Because it also plans to build a sexy, newsy website to convince people that decentralized social networking matters. From ThinkUp’s Knight application:

“We will draw people in through a compelling media site that encourages participation via our decentralized platform. We have unique experience in creating some of the most important tools and most influential sites on the social web. And we’re using that experience to build a decentralized, peer-to-peer network that powers a great media property with broad appeal — imagine if Digg or Reddit were open, decentralized and powered by a network instead of votes.”

It all sounds very ambitious, but also very worthwhile. Open web advocates believe that decentralization is essential for maintaining the competition and diversity necessary to keep technology moving forward. But as more and more people spend the majority of time interacting with the Internet through a handful of websites controlled by increasingly powerful companies, in many ways we’re farther away from an open web now than ever before. ThinkUp wants to shake up this status quo. Dash explained ThinkUp’s mission in his blog post thusly:

“…What ThinkUp represents is a lot of important concepts: Owning your actions and words on the web. Encouraging more positive and fruitful conversations on social networks. Gaining insights into ourselves and our friends based on what we say and share. And the possibility of discovering important information or different perspectives if we can return the web back to its natural state of not being beholden to any one company or proprietary network.”

ThinkUp acknowledges that it is not the first to try to make the open social web a reality, and that Diaspora and Singly’s Locker Project have similar aims. But ThinkUp’s Knight application says these projects have limited traction because they “focus on the tech first rather than a compelling user experience.” ThinkUp, on the other hand, is building a super slick app from the start. It also is apparently looking to work alongside the Facebooks and Googles of the world, not totally against them — and to me, that is what could ultimately make ThinkUp a winner.

To be sure, ThinkUp has a long road ahead of it, as it is facing off against some of the most powerful forces on the web today. It’s great to see big names such as Trapani and Dash committing to such an endeavor, and it will certainly be interesting to watch ThinkUp’s evolution in the weeks and months ahead.

Photo of Gina Trapani courtesy of Flickr user ginatrapani; photo of Anil Dash via dashes.com.

ThinkUp App Goes For-Profit In Bid To Decentralize The Social Web

2012-03-26T21:49:15Z

“We will draw people in through a compelling media site that encourages participation via our decentralized platform. We have unique experience in creating some of the most important tools and most influential sites on the social web. And we’re using that experience to build a decentralized, peer-to-peer network that powers a great media property with broad appeal — imagine if Digg or Reddit were open, decentralized and powered by a network instead of votes.”

“…What ThinkUp represents is a lot of important concepts: Owning your actions and words on the web. Encouraging more positive and fruitful conversations on social networks. Gaining insights into ourselves and our friends based on what we say and share. And the possibility of discovering important information or different perspectives if we can return the web back to its natural state of not being beholden to any one company or proprietary network.”

Malbonnington: +1. @GSP's @garethk tells agencies to be 'truly radical' - http://t.co/40piaVAk

2012-03-27T00:51:25Z

Malbonnington: +1. @GSP's @garethk tells agencies to be 'truly radical' - http://t.co/40piaVAk

joshuamarch: Slides from my talk this evening on social customer service metrics: http://t.co/FNwQulZA

2012-02-15T23:49:09Z

joshuamarch: Slides from my talk this evening on social customer service metrics: http://t.co/FNwQulZA

The growth of social: GlobalWebIndex 6

2012-02-08T11:52:12Z

Every wave of research tells us something new but each one has also shown that social media is deepening its reach month-by-month and year-by-year. GlobalWebIndex founder Tom Smith exclusively explains the implications of their latest research.

Social networking is the fastest-growing active social media behaviour online, increasing from 36% of global internet users in GWI.1 to 59% managing their profile on a monthly basis. This is followed by updating a micro-blog, which increased from 13% to 24% and uploading video, which increased from 21% to 27%.

The most social engaged internet market in the world is China where 84% of internet users contribute at least once a month to either social networking, blogging, video uploading, photo sharing, micro-blogging and forums. Next in line are Russia, Brazil and India, demonstrating how BRIC markets dominate the social landscape.

In the UK the figure is 64%, in the US 60% and in Germany 52%, demonstrating that even in less social markets, contributing online is still mainstream.

What this means for brands is that social networks have become a key brand contact point for nearly a third of consumers. In GWI.6, 59% of global internet users had visited a brand website in the last month, 29% had liked a product or brand and 24% had visited a branded social network profile. The preference for social brand interaction is more marked in emerging internet markets such as Indonesia and the Philippines, where 50% of users had visited a branded social network page in the last month.

Based on these statistics, it’s clear that social networking can now deliver mass reach for brands and the trend is most visible among younger internet users with 16-24s much more likely to “like” a brand or product than older age groups, for example. However micro-blogging remains a far more targeted social strategy with just 9% had retweeted a branded post and only 13% had opted to follow a brand on a micro-blog.

Consumers that interact with businesses in the social media space do expect something in return with future discounts, better customer service and personalised recommendations cited by all age groups as the leading motivations.

Such expectations are significantly higher in emerging markets with Argentina, Philippines and Brazil indexing highest across a range of areas, demonstrating how consumers in these markets are particularly open to building relationships with brands online.

But the growth of social media as a genre does not mean success for all platforms. Google+ is firmly in the growth phase but there are also concerns about Facebook with increasing evidence from the US, it’s first big market, that users are become less engaged.

Our data also shows the massive growth of Google+, which is already the world’s second biggest social network. Our data indicates that a massive 22% of social network users now have active profiles – peaking in India at 49%.

By contrast while the number of visits to Facebook continues to grow across all platforms but the world’s largest social network has reached saturation among active internet users in more and more markets, with user growth restricted to growth internet markets such as India, Indonesia and Brazil.

More importantly across three waves of research in 2011, Facebook users on a global basis have reduced the frequency of key Facebook activities including sending a digital present, searched for new contacts or sent message to friends.

GWI.6 data shows Facebook fatigue spreading in the US from the early adopters who we identified as disengaging in GWI.5. Declines in social networking activity such as messaging friends fell 12% over the six waves of research, searching for new contacts fell 17% and joining a group 19% among all Facebook users in the US.

Something to think about if you are considering investing in the world’s most hyped IPO.

eyeIO Unveils Breakthrough Video Encoding Technology, Netflix First to Deploy

2012-02-01T12:30:46Z

eyeIO has announced its first commercial license agreement, with Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX). eyeIO video encoding is fully compliant with existing standards, making high quality video available anywhere in the world, on any connected device.

More on Networks from the irrepressible Mr Rheingold

2012-02-06T11:01:39Z

This is a doosie. Not sure we'd agree with everything.

Put your feet up for 15 minutes and listen to the man.

OK Go | Needing/Getting

2012-02-06T10:32:35Z

Shit songs, great videos.

UPDATE: I’ve got to admit I was pretty disappointed when Jab tipped me off about this being an ad for a car called a Chevy Sonic, I honestly trusted them to not trick me. I don’t even like OK GO, but I still cried a little inside. Not as much I cried when I found out that this Wipeout thing was also lie. It was just an ad for Wipeout on (the lovely) PSVITA.

Obvious Engine | AR

2012-02-06T10:27:35Z

A lot of people (understandably) struggle with AR and see it as a novelty/pointless item. Currently if you want to use it you have to pull out a device, open the browser, select the appropriate layer, point your camera at stuff and read info from a fairly tiny screen (while still pointing). Admittedly, that’s quite a lot of effort compared to a lot of other stuff that does the same job. While I see their point, I think a lot of that thinking is based on the current value of mobile phone based marketing using AR. Not the value of a technology that enables you to add data to your view of the world. It’s hard to argue that being able to access contextual data that is visualized around you would not be of value – it’s just that the current tech means AR can’t always cut the mustard. But if you think about the technology applied to contact lenses or glasses with voice activation, all of that bad UX goes away making Augmented Reality very valuable indeed – for both utility and entertainment.

Obvious Engine is a vision-based augmented reality engine for indie games companies, digital artists, developers and brands. The engine can track the natural features of an image, which means you no longer have to use traditional markers and glyphs. The engine now works with 3D objects and curved surfaces and there’s no need to modify existing forms.

Impressive.

Slipstream: Employers and Brands Use Gaming to Gauge Engagement (Natasha Singer/New York Times)

2012-02-06T11:45:02Z

Natasha Singer / New York Times:
Slipstream: Employers and Brands Use Gaming to Gauge Engagement — FOR the last few weeks, Kenneth Brown has reigned over Samsung Nation, an online loyalty program that offers virtual rewards to consumers who talk up Samsung, the electronics giant. — In the three months since the program …

AttentionUSA: The Next Social Networks: 'Bite Sized Curation' http://t.co/KE99jZXt (via @ChrisBrogan)

2012-02-06T16:12:01Z

AttentionUSA: The Next Social Networks: 'Bite Sized Curation' http://t.co/KE99jZXt (via @ChrisBrogan)

Device Experiences & Responsive Design

2012-01-24T00:00:00Z

I recently updated my article on Device Classes & Responsive Design for Facebook's HTML5 resource center, which is designed to help developers reach people on desktops, smartphones and tablets using web standards. Check it out on Facebook.

Device Experiences & Responsive Design

While the task of designing Web applications and sites for multiple devices can be daunting, two techniques can make the process more manageable: classifying device experiences and designing/building responsively. Here’s how these two approaches can work together to optimize interface designs across a wide range of connected devices. Read More...

willsh: Path feels more like a lesson in top class mobile design, less so a must-have network RT @NeilPerkin Intimate Networks http://t.co/zLaRFshZ

2012-01-11T05:57:39Z

willsh: Path feels more like a lesson in top class mobile design, less so a must-have network RT @NeilPerkin Intimate Networks http://t.co/zLaRFshZ

andyheadworth: Here you go - the latest 2012 stats for the UK social media usage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) http://t.co/3D9Xk6Bm

2012-01-11T07:53:09Z

andyheadworth: Here you go - the latest 2012 stats for the UK social media usage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) http://t.co/3D9Xk6Bm

Econsultancy: 101 examples of f-commerce : http://t.co/cNaIsw3D

2012-01-01T20:00:55Z

Econsultancy: 101 examples of f-commerce : http://t.co/cNaIsw3D

Will you track your health data with apps or a device?

2011-12-26T14:00:13Z

Will apps or devices track the quantified self?

As people lurch into the New Year vowing to lose their holiday pounds, my hunch is millions of consumers will be aided by a few fitness devices and apps scored this holiday season — all designed to help them count their steps, calories, sleep and other personal metrics. But in the emerging world of connected wellness tools will newly aware consumers be using apps or devices? Or does it even matter, since the service is king?

We’ve called it the rise of the quantified self, as mobile devices and an always-on connection meet cheap sensors that can connect back to the web. Dedicated devices such as the Body Bugg or the FitBit (see disclosure) take advantage of sensors to track movement and even sleep, and then send data back to a web-based portal. On the Apple-only app side, iTreadmill, Lose it, The Eatery and others help with tracking steps, making sure you eat well and other wellness goals. The Android market has MealSnap and RunKeeper, while blending the two are dedicated products such as the Nike+ system that links a physical sensor to a variety of apps such as RunKeeper.

Dedicated devices are a hot gift this season.

As a Fitbit user for the last eight months, I’m a convert to the device side (although I have tried my fair share of apps as well). So far, the device side has seen a boost this holiday shopping season, according to Amazon and analysts. Amazon said the personal health tracking device category is on the rise for best-selling brands include Fitbit, BodyMedia, Muve and Zeo. A spokeswoman emailed, “Fitbit is our #1 Most Wished For in this category and the #2 and #3 Best Sellers (depending on color).”

Deutsche Bank analyst Jonathan Goldberg expected that such devices have hit a tipping point in the retail channels. He noted that 67 percent of 100 Best Buys DB surveyed stock some form of smartphone fitness accessory. And 48 percent of stores stocked Fitbit. Customers also seems pretty aware of the devices in general. He said via email, “My take on all this is that this idea really resonates. If a tiny, privately held company like Fitbit can made itself known to almost half the Best Buy retail clerks across the country, that tells me there is something deeply appealing about the idea.”

The category has been somewhat dominated in this last year by the Fitbit and the BodyBugg, but last week Jawbone introduced the Up device, which Darrell reviewed. But Up disappointed customers so much that Jawbone halted production to fix the problems in the device. That hasn’t deterred Jawbone’s investors, which just awarded the company $40 million more to break into the category. And discussions with other consumer accessories companies indicate that more such products are on the way next year.

The app market has been around for longer and is growing.

The Fitbit tracker.

But for most people adding a device to track their steps, or going to a web site to enter in their caloric intake, might be a bit much. Already people probably use an application or two to track their food or perhaps their daily runs. According to research in November from ABI Research, the sports and health mobile application market will grow to over $400 million in 2016 – up from just $120 million in 2010. Unsurprisingly many of these apps will get an added boost from tying to some of the devices already in or about the enter the market, according to ABI.

This may relate to an app like RunKeeper that synchs to the Nike+ system for better tracking and trail history, or it might be the ability to send your food data from Lose it or The Eatery over to your Fitbit web page, or vice versa.

The leading edge of early adopters in this market are the die-hard fitness fanatics and maybe some geeks that like to play with data, but as this holiday draws to a close, I think we’re about to hit a tipping point where average people interested in improving their health start to try out gadgets or applications and services designed to get them motivated and monitoring their wellness progress. The key will be making it easy, accessible and giving consumers the ability to link devices to the app ecosystem quickly. In that way services might be the best bet.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The year in big data and data science

2011-12-26T14:00:00Z

Big data and data science have both been with us for a while. According to McKinsey & Company's May 2011 report on big data, back in 2009 "nearly all sectors in the U.S. economy had at least an average of 200 terabytes of stored data ... per company with more than 1,000 employees." And on the data-science front, Amazon's John Rauser used his presentation at Strata New York (below) to trace the profession of data scientist all the way back to 18th-century German astronomer Tobias Mayer.

Of course, novelty and growth are separate things, and in 2011, there were a number of new technologies and companies developed to address big data's issues of storage, transfer, and analysis. Important questions were also raised about how the growing ranks of data scientists should be trained and how data science teams should be constructed.

With that as a backdrop, below I take a look at three evolving data trends that played an important role over the last year.

The ubiquity of Hadoop

It was a big year for investment for Apache Hadoop-based companies. Hortonworks, which was spun out of Yahoo this summer, raised $20 million upon its launch. And when Cloudera announced it had raised $40 million this fall, GigaOm's Derrick Harris calculated that, all told, Hadoop-based startups had raised $104.5 million between May and November of 2011. (Other startups raising investment for their Hadoop software included Platfora Hadapt and MapR.)

But it wasn't just startups that got in on the Hadoop action this year: IBM announced this fall that it would offer Hadoop in the cloud; Oracle unveiled its own Hadoop distribution running on its new Big Data appliance; EMC signed a licensing agreement with MapR; and Microsoft opted to put its own big data processing system, Dryad, on hold, signing a deal instead with Hortonworks to handle Hadoop on Azure.

The growing number of Hadoop providers and adopters has spurred more solutions for managing and supporting Hadoop. This will become increasingly important in 2012 as Hadoop moves beyond the purview of data scientists to become a tool more businesses and analysts utilize.

More data, more privacy and security concerns

Despite all the promise that better tools for handing and analyzing data holds, there were numerous concerns this year about the privacy and security implications of big data, stemming in part from a series of high-profile data thefts and scandals.

In April, a security breach at Sony led to the theft of the personal data of 77 million users. The intrusion into the Playstation Network prompted Sony to pull it offline, but Sony failed to notify its users about the issue for a full week (later admitting that it stored usernames and passwords unencrypted). Estimates of the cost of the security breach to Sony: between $170 million and $24 billion.

That's a wide range of estimates for the damage done to the company, but the point is clear nonetheless: not only do these sorts of data breaches cost companies millions, but the value of consumers' personal data is also increasing — for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes.

Sony was hardly the only company with security and privacy concerns on its hands. In April, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden uncovered a file in Apple iOS software that noted users' latitude-longitude coordinates along with a timestamp. Apple responded, insisting that the company "is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so." Apple fixed what it said was a "bug."

Late this year, almost all handset makers and carriers were implicated by another mobile concern when Android developer Trevor Eckhart reported that the mobile intelligence company Carrier IQ's rootkit software could record all sorts of user data — texts, web browsing, keystrokes, and even phone calls.

That the data from mobile technology was at the heart of these two controversies reflects in some ways our changing data usage patterns. But whether it's mobile or not, as we do more online — shop, browse, chat, check in, "like" — it's clear that we're leaving behind an immense trail of data about ourselves. This year saw the arrival of several open-source efforts, such as the Locker Project and ThinkUp, that strive to give users better control over their personal social data.

And while better control and safeguards can offer some level of protection, it's clear that technology can always be cracked and the goals of data aggregators can shift. So, if digital data is and always will be a moving target, how does that shape our expectations for privacy? In Privacy and Big Data, published this year, co-authors Terence Craig and Mary Ludloff argued that we might be paying too much attention to concerns about "intrusions of privacy" and that instead we need to be thinking about better transparency with how governments and companies are using our data.

Open data's inflection point

Screenshot from the Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Government Data Map.

When it comes to better transparency, 2011 has been a good year for open data, with strong growth in the number of open data efforts. Canada, the U.K., France, the U.S., and Kenya were a few of the countries unveiling open data initiatives.

There were still plenty of open data challenges: budgets cuts, for example, threatened the U.S. Data.gov initiative. And in his "state of open data 2011" talk, open data activist David Eaves pointed to the challenges of having different schemas and few standards, making it difficult for some datasets to be used across systems and jurisdictions.

Even with a number of open data "wins" at the government level, a recent survey of the data science community by EMC named the lack of open data as one of the obstacles that data scientists and business intelligence analysts said they faced. Just 22% of the former and 12% of the latter said that they "strongly believed" that the employees at their companies have the access they need to run experiments on data. Arguably, more open data efforts have spawned more interest and better understanding of what this can mean.

The demands for more open data has also spawned a demand for more tools. Importantly, these tools are beginning to be open to more than just data scientists or programmers. They include things like visualization-creator Visual.ly, the scraping tool ScraperWiki, and data-sharing site BuzzData.

Strata 2012 — The 2012 Strata Conference, being held Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.

Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR20

Related:

7 Supermarkets to Visit in 2012

2011-12-26T18:24:32Z

When interviewed for my book So You Want To Be Customer-Centric, Georges-Edouard Dias of L'Oréal pointed out the opportunity to truly improve the customer experience in many traditional supermarkets. In his view: “Many stores today aren't really user-friendly. You need to drive there and park far away from the entrance. When you get inside, it's hard to find the information you're looking for. There are too many products to get a clear picture, and the staff aren't always much help either. Not to mention that even if you know exactly which product you want to buy, it may not be in stock.”

FastCoDesign: In case you missed this: Designers Behind Facebook Timeline-- 5 Keys To Creating A UI With Soul http://t.co/wpYTIMbY

2011-12-26T19:01:03Z

FastCoDesign: In case you missed this: Designers Behind Facebook Timeline-- 5 Keys To Creating A UI With Soul http://t.co/wpYTIMbY

The battle for the future of social video

2011-12-27T10:56:39Z

Boxee, which continues to be one of the easiest ways to bring movies, TV shows, photos and music from the web to your TV, has become increasingly social over time. Boxee allows you to “connect your social life to your TV to get recommendations from ...
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