Making Sense: Interconnection
- Disruption. STET: Epic disruption has arrived — in a package the size of a deck of cards, with the destructive power of a sci-fi disintegration ray. The smartphone has replaced calculators, wristwatches, cameras (still and video), alarm clocks, voice recorders, radios, remote controls, notes passed in class, libraries, books, bus schedules, cash registers, portable game systems, maps, compasses, GPS, telephones, and, increasingly, even the calls themselves. [...] The next physical object on the list may be us humans, as well. [...] Actual presence dissolves into a backdrop for insidiously addictive interconnection. [...] Our swipe exceeds our grasp. Everything is in our pocket and nothing is in our hands.
- Google's New Business Model. Stratechery: In short, if you consider the three business models that are capable of being the foundation of multibillion-dollar businesses – consumer devices, ad-supported consumer services, and business software-as-a-service – Google had just about maximized their potential in the ad-supported consumer services model. Enter Nest.
Making Do: Preference
- Why Most of Your Assumptions About Phone Calls are Wrong. Mark Suster: In the US alone there are 30 billion inbound sales calls every year. Just. Sales. Calls. Inbound. That number is projected to GROW to 70 billion by 2016 (Source: BIA Kelsey). [...] the most obvious mobile Internet ad unit is, in fact, a phone call.
- The New York Times’s Most Visited Content of 2013. NYT: Categories include the most visited articles and blog posts, multimedia and interactives, and videos throughout NYTimes.com, our mobile site and our iOS apps. The most visited of all our content was the interactive “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk” (December 21).
Making it: Convergence
- A travel inspiration web app pairs Instagram images with information. Coolhunting: "I thought that it would be great to see shots that random people are taking of amazing places all around the world," Netter tells CH regarding the app's inception. He began crawling across the internet to find places he would like to visit, "whether it’s an abandoned city, a desert, nature’s imperfection, a beautiful museum or a strange bar." From there, he added names to a database and developed a script that pulled 150 images off of Instagram. The script initially sorted the images by likes, but he found that this wasn't always the most relevant reflection of an image's quality.
- Introducing Newspeg — A New Way to Look at News. Recovering Journalist: There are plenty of other news-curation platforms out there, but most of them are algorithm-driven newsbots. That's fine as far as it goes, but we believe the human factor is critical. Newspeg draws from the wisdom of the crowd to create an ever-changing display of news that reflects what real people think is interesting, and to allow for the creation of deep, human-driven collections of news on specific topics.
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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effects on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.