Embark Entrepreneurs

Watch Brooks @ the Aspen Ideas Festival: Best Talk I’ve Seen this Year

Tristan Harris — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 21:13:16 +0000

David Brooks at the Aspen Ideas Festival talks about “Educating the Emotions”, subtitled, “A Middle Aged Guy Talks about Engaging Passion.” Brooks tells a story of one disadvantaged woman’s meandering path through life, from the guise of the latest research in behavior economics, physiognomy, the neuroscience of love, and our emotionally-driven irrationality.

At the end of the day, it’s a great narrative emphasizing a new humanism and kind of policy-thinking driven by what Brooks calls a “cognitive revolution.”

“We don’t have any competitors”

Tristan Harris — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 23:01:14 +0000

I often get asked if Apture has any competitors, and have seen many of my friends who’ve started companies been asked to answer this question.

I think many entrepreneurs feel a temporary and passing uncomfortable *gulp* upon hearing it, because it’s never fun to answer.

If you’re trying to build a new kind of company and change the world, your drive comes from the most sincere, genuine and burning passionate fire inside of you. It’s that burning passion that fuels you to drop whatever you were doing and have the guts to pursue the idea.

So for an entrepreneur, admitting that you have competitors is like admitting that your unique ideas and burning passion are the same as someone else’s. Artists don’t like to think that way, because the whole point is to do something that’s never been done before. Artists never believe that they’re just copying someone else’s work.

So when the founder answers “oh, we don’t have any competitors,” the audience rolls their eyes. It’s seen as a character flaw, because their ego or naïvité is manifesting in a failure to recognize other competing companies that could kill you.

There are always competitors. Everyone knows that you can identify companies in either a related space or ones that compete head-on. But when entrepreneurs answer the question, and they feel that discomfort, I respect their feeling that there is no one who is doing what they really do. Because there is no one who understands the vision and idea the way you do.

So what is the answer for Apture? We’re trying to accomplish something incredibly unique, and I don’t believe that anyone else is working on the problem the way that we are. I’m also aware of more than probably a hundred companies doing related products that are sold to web publishers on similar value propositions.

Sure you could compare us to the annoying green double underlined spammy advertising guys, or search companies, or browser plugins, or “related content” companies, or “bar” companies that offer cute tools in some real estate. And as an entrepreneur, I must be dutifully aware of the features/benefits/customers/traction of each one.

But none aim to do what we do. In fact many of them in my mind are completely unrelated.

So I think there is the personal answer – “no one is doing this the way we are” – and the pragmatic one – “here are other companies working on various aspects of this problem”. But I think it’s important not to disqualify entrepreneurs who say “we don’t have any competitors,” because it’s these entrepreneurs who have a vision that is vastly unique and forward-thinking from everything on the market who push things forward. Sometimes it even means that you have to be a little crazy, and keep these two ideas in your head at the same time, the pragmatic and the personal.

P.S. I was surprised last year when I noticed someone came up to me a year ago acting strangely cautious and distanced. I questioned him about it, and he said that he thought that my company was competing with him. I hadn’t even heard of his company, nor did I ultimately think it was competitive when I found out what they did. It can go both ways.

Context: The Future of the Web & Inklings of SXSW

Tristan Harris — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:55:24 +0000

This is an intro to my panel next week, exploring the Future of Context w/ Jay Rosen, Staci D. Kramer, and Matt Thompson. I’m writing this to share some early thoughts and get you involved in the conversation, so pls leave your feedback in the comments and come Monday the 16th!

Say you’re walking into the Metropolitan museum of New York on a sunny afternoon in May. You walk inside and stroll down a hallway of 17th century paintings from Italy. If you’re like most people, you probably don’t know much about the paintings that line the halls, or why a certain piece is particularly notable or revolutionary. You just sort of go along with it. You’re obeying an implicit social contract you have to the museum during that half an hour– “I’m in a prestigious art museum in NY and society says the paintings here are important, so I might as well pay attention for a little while.”

But the reality is, you don’t really know or care much about the paintings on the walls. While you might glean bits and pieces from the tiny yellow notecards appearing next to each piece – year, author, type of paint used – the whole experience is relatively flat. The paintings haven’t given you any reason to care about them. Put another way, if you peered into your brain during this experience, you’d probably see it light up pretty simple, low-order sensory areas: “look, there’s a black brush stroke on a giant white canvas.”

Compare that experience to this one:

Suppose you walk into the Met and an NYU Professor of Art History suddenly appears saying she wants to tell you everything about art in the museum. She grabs you by the hand and leads you through the hallways, enthusiastically explaining the different artistic periods, pointing out the significance of each flourish used by the painter, describing the life and economic status of the artist during the time they painted, and so on. Equipped with this framework to understand the painting, instead of just seeing colors and lines on top of canvases, you now appreciate detailed information about each piece that you couldn’t have before… it’s almost as if you’re perceiving a different painting than the one before the Art History teacher showed up.

This is how I think of the word context.

Context is information that informs your understanding of the world, literally allowing you to derive more meaning from an experience. In the case of the painting above, it deepens the meaning of your experience in the Met by increasing the # of features, patterns and ideas you’re aware of in each painting. Even though the rectangle of colored brush strokes is the same as the one you saw before the NYU professor told you all about it, you actually see the painting in a different way after you have context.

Context in web-based news and storytelling:

So how does this relate to my panel next week on the Future of Context in publishing?

If you think about it, the way we read news on the web is much like walking down the hall of the Met without having context. Much that we read relates to big topical issues we probably don’t fully understand: the Health Care debate, the standoff between Iran and the United States, the Financial Crisis. We know we should pay attention to these topics, yet we’re massively under-equipped to understand their nuances and complexity of the issue, especially since it comes to us in a daily flood of headlines (e.g. “UN weapons inspectors are visiting Iran today…”). Articles like this are about as helpful as the little “yellow notecards” are giving basic information about each painting in the Met.

Re-inventing publishing around Context

As Jay Rosen put it, the word “context” itself implies something that information that is secondary or supplemental to the “main” text. But you can see from the examples above that that’s wrong. Context is primary. You actually need context before you can make much sense of what’s in front of you.

The exciting thing is, the web is most incredible tool we’ve ever had to solve this problem. We’re at the point where there is always something out on the web – a video, a background story, a Wikipedia article, a set of photographs, or an idea in someone’s head – that could provide a greater context and understanding for the topic. Go ahead, think of any topic in the world, and there’s something out there.

A new approach to context

At our panel we’re going to explore a new context-oriented approach to publishing and user experience. As I see it, the problem breaks down into a few distinct challenges:

Repeatable & leveraged work: how do we provide context in a scalable way?
- How can organizations leverage existing work and not re-invent the wheel each time they want to explain something or provide context? It bugs me that when NYTimes or BBC creates a fantastic infographic explaining how subduction plates cause earthquakes, they don’t re-use that infographic the next time an article runs about the next big earthquake or tsunami.
- Coming from an engineering background & culture, you learn that you should never do work you can’t modularize and re-use. This was the whole revolution of object-oriented programming in the 1980s. But journalism doesn’t follow this practice at all. Articles are written from scratch every time, never truly re-using or building upon previous writing to save time and money. What news needs is object-oriented journalism in which context is a basic building block upon which to create articles.
Personalization
- When walking in the Met, maybe some of us know a lot about 17th century Italian painters, but a lot of us don’t know anything about it. Context needs to be personalized to the audience so we don’t waste time repeating information to those who already know a lot, while still giving fresh audiences a good entry point into the topic. Like Malcolm Gladwell once paraphrased at TED, the answer for creating the best experience isn’t about finding the single best article for everyone, it’s about finding the set of best articles so that there is a version of the story that suits each customer of the news perfectly.
Sources of context
- What sources can we leverage to provide context, and with what guarantees of authority? What about all the information harnessed in the vaulted archives of media organizations (all previous articles, photographs, videos, or interactive infographics)?
Brevity and hairstring attention spans
- Suppose we were to invent the perfect way for people to be provided with context, as humans we are bound by the physics of shortening attention spans. People have less and less patience for articles that cause the scrollbar in our browser to shrink to a tiny little nib, and we have less and less time to invest in learning something new.
- How do we design context for the attention-strapped psychology of our minds?
Structure & Design
- What is the ideal structure to communicate context anyway? Is it just another web page, a contextual window appearing within the page, or a wiki? Many news organizations today attempt to solve the problem by providing “topic pages” with links to further materials… but everybody knows a page full of links is overwhelming and too web 1.0. Who has the time for more links to more pages, and inevitably more tabs? We need a content-oriented context architecture, one that aims in the shortest amount of time to give people the information they need, without leaving the page (sounds familiar, probably)
Business model and web economics
- Changing how articles are written & published will inevitably affect how publishers generate revenue from advertising, and how it impacts things the ecosystem of link-love and SEO. We can’t re-invent news around context without respecting the business models that allow publishing on the web to thrive.
- What we’ve found so far though, is that today’s most popular sources of context (Wikipedia, NYTimes Topic pages, fascinating blog posts smothered in link love) are largely rewarded by Google in SEO. If you Google for just about any topic, how likely is it that Wikipedia is in the top three results? This speaks good things to publishers if they were to succeed in re-orienting their content into SEO-rich, evergreen pages with persistent URLs that describe the bigger picture.

I’ve been fascinated by the role of context in our lives for more than four years and can’t wait to discuss them with you and several leading thinkers in this area next Monday.

What do you think? What else should we address in our panel?

Come see me speak at Stanford’s Leadership Seminar

Tristan Harris — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:34:52 +0000

I’m honored to be invited to Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership seminar tomorrow February 10th. Some old friends of mine from the Stanford Mayfield Fellows program will be speaking too, Kimber Lockhart, Jeff Siebert, Clara Shih who wrote “The Facebook Era”, Steve Garrity, and Josh Reeves. All of us have gone off to start companies at a young age, so the dialogue should be interesting.

And one of my favorite professors, Tina Seelig, will be moderating.

See you then! BTW, here is where we’ll be speaking (at 4:30pm):

The Right Answer

Tristan Harris — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 22:52:16 +0000

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Live your life this way. Most important decisions in life are almost impossible to resolve. The right answer is usually the impossible simultaneous achievement of two opposing extremes. The intuitive answer to find an average solution in the middle, to be balanced, is a sure way to find mediocrity. More to come on this topic!

Keep Pulling with Vision

Tristan Harris — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:25:21 +0000

Startups are tough. I’ve several friends doing different companies and projects. Some have been going at it for three years, others only six months. Some of my friends’ companies have been bought after 3 months of launch. I’ve seen others keep working for multiple years without any traction at all. How do you convince people to stay on board with you to keep pushing?

What I realized is this:

Your best substitute for traction is strong vision.

Statistically, most startups don’t make it. Most products that are launched require many, many iterations before they see even basic pickup in the market. But you have to substitute the lack of traction during those iterations with something else – and I think that’s vision.

Think back to when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997. The company’s financials were a disaster. The company was corrupted by poor positioning, tons of confusing product lines, and lack of concise leadership. Talk about a situation where a company’s health does not look good.

Think about it. If you’re an employee of Apple in 1997, how can you ignore the market? What confidence can you have? How would you trust Steve to turn it around? Phrases like “Macs suck” and “Apple is going bankrupt” dominated public perception. Arguably even Steve’s track record — at NeXT — wasn’t very successful.

So what have you got left? Vision and leadership.

And look what Steve did. He spent the next 10 years revolutionizing the Music, Film, and Telecommunications industries — and perhaps soon, the Publishing Industry.

Watch it in action. Here’s one of my favorite videos of Steve demonstrating a simple idea, but presenting it with pure charisma.

Keep leading with vision.

5 Things “Nosferatu” teaches us about “Next-Generation” Storytelling Techniques

Tristan Harris — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:53:03 +0000

(Sorry for the long blogging hiatus. I should be back to your regularly scheduled blog programming over the next few months).

This Halloween, I went to San Francisco Davies Symphony Hall with some friends to see a special screening of Nosferatu, a 1922 Dracula film that pioneered the horror genre.

But while watching the film, what struck me was just how innovative it was. F.W. Murnau ‘s crew invented suspense-creating techniques that are still used in film today (80 years later!).

First, let’s remember. This is a silent film. It’s all black and white. Made in the age of print and barely radio, not television or film. Made before directors used cut aways to retain teenagers’ 1 second attention spans. And despite the film’s scratchy, messy texture, it still manages to get your heart pumping into a pseudo fight-or-flight response which good horror films do so well. How did they do it?

These innovative techniques stood out to me. All are examples of Murnau’s ingenuity to shape the horror-genre with storytelling that took advantage of a new kind of medium:

1. Look and Feel: Shadows and Chiaroscuro

Sure, the film is already in black and white, but Mernau leverages the space between these two colors further to set the film’s dark tone. With chiaroscuro scenes of long dark hallways and half visible mysterious figures, and distant shots of the quiet and barren castle where the vampire lives, he makes the viewer mistrust the environment and have concern for the helpless man seeking to meet the vampire. The use of shadows for example enhances the hidden image of the vampire’s long claws.

2. Accentuating Physical Appearances: Costume and Makeup Design

The physical appearance of actor Max Shreck, who plays the vampire, is disturbing. The costume designers altered his nose to make it extra long and bent. His fingers are long claws. He has pointier ears. Bulging eyes (when used in longshots of the vampire). A warped ratlike mouth and teeth. And he’s a thin, stodgy creature whose shoulders placement don’t match a normal human body.

These tweaked facial features remind me of Stephen Jay Gould’s study of how Walt Disney evolved the character of Mickey Mouse to gradually look more cute over time by making the face rounder, with bigger cheeks, bigger eyes, smaller foreheads, and big ears to gradually match the way we evolutionarily perceive animals with these characteristics as “cute.” Mernau is almost using the opposite effect to make us detest Count Orlok’s appearance.

Of course, costume designers knew these techniques long before film (theatre, for example), but combined with moving images, chiaroscuro, and b&w cameras that can be repositioned to better exploit character’s unsettling features, the effects have greater impact.

3. Hiding Things Behind the Camera

You know the cliché horror movie effect of the villain’s shadow slowly looming over a victim, without ever seeing the villain’s body – guess what? These guys invented it. Why does this work so well? It’s because the audience can’t see the vampire behind the camera that makes the scene so terrifying. And it’s something you can only do in film. (See example clip below – you only have to watch about 10 seconds worth because I’m using the Apture YouTube clip time feature)

4. The Surreal: Unexplainable Characters

If you were told to make a story feel surreal in the medium or radio or printed text, how would you do it? You’d have to call surreal qualities explicitly — talk about strange characters’ visual features, or inconsistencies in the scene. But Murnau uses subtle techniques to make things not make sense.

For example, there’s a point in the film where the unknowing victim reaches the remove village near the vampire and accepts a ride from a mysterious horse carriage whose driver looks exactly like the vampire (who the audience will meet later). It’s as if the vampire himself is omnipresent, spying on him and existing in two places at once. This technique has been used in other films, but I believe Nosferatu is the first. (see clipped video below)

How would you have communicated that in radio? Or in words?

5. Making Things Stand Out: Extraordinary Physical Abilities

This one is a classic technique. At one point in the film, Count Orlok (the film’s vampire) is able to rise up magically from the coffin to being completely vertical. I’m not sure if they use a hook or captured this sequence in reverse, but either way the effect is chilling if you’re a movie goer in the year 1922.

Summary

The German crew who invented these techniques were mostly born in the 1870s and 80s. There weren’t many books on these techniques. All they were given was a new canvas and creativity. And when you look back on the innovation in the new medium of film, you wonder what new techniques and strategies people have pioneered in the new medium of ‘web’?

Apture wins AlwaysOn Global 250 Award

Tristan Harris — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 07:48:45 +0000

It’s moments like these that it’s important to sit back and reflect on how far you’ve come after three years of long hard work. Congratulations to the entire Apture team for all that they’ve done to earn this recognition!

How Apture can create meaning in the brain by channeling Tom Wujec’s TED Talk

Tristan Harris — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:01:28 +0000

Watch Tom Wujec, Information designer at Autodesk discuss three key qualities of successful information design to create meaning. It is fascinating:

The video outlines how good Information Design builds meaning in the brain by activating three key areas: the ventral stream of the visual processing pathway, the dorsal stream of the visual processing pathway, and the limbic system to deepen the way people experience information. Tom’s message is identical to how Apture presents content and enhances the way readers experience information on the web.

Five years ago at Stanford University, I took Professor Kalanit Grill-Spector‘s classes on the Psychology & Neuroscience of Perception and read certain literature which influenced a lot of how I think about Apture’s user interface.

Here are the three take-aways and similarities I saw:

1. Use images to clarify ideas.

Apture let’s you turn flat phrases of text and flesh them out into visually rich and memorable representations: images, videos, slideshows, etc. For example, you can turn the word sad, into something rich. Turn the word happy into something more colorful.

How this relates to the brain: Wujec suggests that images activate the “what” part of our visual perception pathway, the ventral stream which deepens how those ideas get stored.

2. Interact with images to create engagement.

Apture doesn’t just let you present information, it lets you interact with it. You can open, close, drag and maximize any Apture window and move them around as you see fit. Try one now. We’ve found in user tests that readers frequently drag a window around and feel pleasure in having the control to rearrange them as they read. Interactive maps are an even cooler example.

How this relates to the brain: Wujec suggests that being able to spatially manipulate images (or Apture windows) activates the “where” part of the visual perception pathway: the dorsal stream and deepens the meaning of our engagement.

3. Augment memory with persistent and evolving views.

When we designed Apture, we chose to include animations so that users had a persistent and evolving view of a content object. As a window spawns or maximizes, it happens smoothly and creates continuity. But there’s another reason too: the right animation can literally cause an emotional response. It can be fun!

How this relates to the brain: Wujec suggests that animation activates the limbic system, which is the part of the brain responsible for feelings & emotions that are very core. If we’re doing our job right, you should say “oh wow, that animation just feels so nice!”

Other thoughts

Certainly there are many more ways to deepen a person’s understanding without depending on your visual senses, specifically. After all, we have four other senses we use to experience the world. But I believe there is something to this idea: that the more senses you can engage in a story, the more deeply you are able to process and experience it.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

My Interview with “The Deal” now posted

Tristan Harris — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:26:46 +0000

Below is my interview with The Deal, who wrote up a great post about Apture’s fundraising back in March. Thanks Mary Kathleen!