from MediaFile:
Instagram’s Facebook filter
The startup had millions of users, but, from the beginning, just one customer.
The predominant way of interpreting Facebook’s billion-dollar purchase of Instagram, in light of the social-networking giant's forthcoming IPO, is that Mark Zuckerberg had to pick up the photo-sharing app to boost his company’s mobile engagement. That would allow him to guard the mobile flank against incursions from Google, Twitter, and whatever other social-media tools might next arise.
That may be true – and it may even be the way Zuck thought about the deal when he swallowed hard and ponied up the purchase price. But that way of analyzing Facebook’s pickup, and the pickup of dozens of other startups, not just by Facebook but by Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and others, is probably not telling the whole story. Here’s a different theory, one that better describes the tech world that we, the users of the Internet, now inhabit: Instagram may have had millions of us as its users, but it was really built for just one customer: Facebook.
Silicon Valley, for too long, has confused the issue of what it means to be a user of a website, service or app, and what it means to be a customer of the app. Intuitively, you’d think they would be one and the same: The person using the app is the person consuming the app. But increasingly, apps are being made to grab the attention of the hegemonic companies in tech. Whatever it takes to get bought.
Sure, startup CEOs are careful to refer to their user bases as just that – users – but even when money changes hands, those users are cattle to be herded toward a cell on a venture capitalist’s spreadsheet, to help the VC decide whether to fund another pivot, engineering acquisition, rack of servers, whatever. Users are just another dart, basically, that startups have to hurl at the bull's-eye and ensure success.
A colleague of mine tells a story: You can tell when a tractor was made to be purchased by a farmer, and you can tell when a tractor was made to be purchased by a corporation to be used by its employees. Tractors whose users are also the customers come equipped with every convenience, from a satellite radio to Wi-Fi to all the cupholders a farmer could dream of. They drive well, and their controls are intuitive, because that’s what the average tractor driver wants, and what the tractor competition provides. Tractors bought by companies, for earthmoving, rock breaking and the like, come equipped with nothing but a hard seat and a prayer. Employees – mere users – don’t get any say on the amenities, or lack thereof.
from Paul Smalera:
The piracy of online privacy
Online privacy doesn’t exist. It was lost years ago. And not only was it taken, we’ve all already gotten used to it. Loss of privacy is a fundamental tradeoff at the very core of social networking. Our privacy has been taken in service of the social tools we so crave and suddenly cannot live without. If not for the piracy of privacy, Facebook wouldn’t exist. Nor would Twitter. Nor even would Gmail, Foursquare, Groupon, Zynga, etc.
And yet people keep fretting about losing what’s already gone. This week, like most others of the past decade, has brought fresh new outrages for privacy advocates. Google, which a few weeks ago changed its privacy policy to allow the company to share your personal data across as many as 60 of its products, was again castigated this week for the changes. Except this time, the shouts came in the form of a lawsuit. The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the FTC to compel it to block Google’s changes, saying they violated a privacy agreement Google signed less than a year ago.
Elsewhere, social photography app Path was caught storing users’ entire iPhone address books on their servers and have issued a red-faced apology. (The lesser-known app Hipster committed the same sin and also offered a mea culpa.) And Facebook’s IPO has brought fresh concerns that Mark Zuckerberg will find creative new ways to leverage user data into ever more desirable revenue-generating products.
This is the way we’re private now. It’s ludicrous for anyone who loves the Internet to expect otherwise. How else are these services supposed to exist -- let alone make any money? Theft or misuse of private user data is a crime, certainly. But no social web app -- not one -- can work without intense analytics performed on the huge data sets that users provide to them voluntarily (you did read the terms of service agreement...right?).
And the issue compounds when people connect one site to another. By linking their Twitter to their Facebook to their Google+ to their Foursquare to their Zynga to their Instagram to their iOS, users are consolidating their lives, and in the process making them more attractive to marketers. While Facebook, Twitter and other services have made attempts to warn users about hitting the “connect” button, many of us hit that button with reckless abandon, without a thought of who’s slavering on the other side.
The reason social media and digital information companies want that data is because of what we refuse to give them: money. No one wants to pay for the privilege of chatting with their friends or using a coupon, and to this day, no one has to: Go ahead, ring their doorbell or pick up the free coupon book from your front stoop. But if you want to chat using Facebook or Gmail, or you want to buy a groupon for an 80 percent-off Botox service, you will have to tell those companies who you are. And those companies will use that information to tailor their offerings to you, increasing your value as a user and a customer. They will slice their data sets into a million different pieces and show those pieces to people -- advertisers -- who will pay them money for the privilege of using their service. They’ll use it to get to you.
This is an update on an old media model. Magazines and newspapers for decades could only guess at the readership of their product and the demographic of their customers. But now social and new media demand to -- and can -- know exactly who you are before they agree to let you use their free services. Even email newsletter services like the increasingly hot Thrillist -- which might innocuously start you on their service by asking only for your simple email address -- deploy click trackers, pixel trackers and other online data-gathering techniques to start to put together a picture of you as a user, both individually and in aggregate. A deceased magazine like Spy could only dream of that kind of intel.
It is utter rubbish to claim that we cannot have a better internet than the one we have right now. Most users simply do not really understand what and how much they have given up. And what has been given up unknowingly can be reclaimed. That is what laws are for.
Europe has a much better system, and much more privacy. And we can improve on that, without wrecking the essentials of the internet.
Stopping the Stop Online Piracy Act
Now that Congress has hit pause on its controversial Stop Online Piracy Act and nearly every argument about the merits and failings of the piece of copyright legislation has been made, it’s a good time to ask: what, in 2012, will it take to actually stop a bill like this?
Because despite the delay, the situation still isn’t looking so hot for those looking to bring down SOPA. Amendments to tone down the bill’s more disliked points have been routinely defeated in the House Judiciary Committee by numbers sufficient to pass the bill to the full House floor.
But, at this point in the process, numbers aren’t everything. In the wake of the Arab Spring, talk of censoring technology hits the ears differently. More important is that in SOPA’s short two-month life, opposition to it has catalyzed online and off. But to succeed, its opponents will have to both boost the volume of their public alarm and convince Congress that, in an Internet-soaked 2012, questioning SOPA needn’t be politically fatal.
Washington isn’t the land of Luddites it once was. Members of Congress, of course, love their smartphones; Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are political staples. (Twitter says just over 85 percent of representatives in each chamber are on the service.) But the challenge for SOPA’s opponents has been to demonstrate that the power and joys of Facebook and, say, SOPA’s questionable domain-name filtering policy are two parts of the same webby whole.
We’re seeing that understanding catalyze amazingly quickly—at least among web users. Starting with a small band of early objectors, resistance to SOPA has been spreading out, gathering steam, and popping up in all sorts of places. There’s been a tsunami of Twitter traffic against the bill, much of it tagged with the #SOPA hashtag. That chatter has driven blog posts, given journalists fodder, and provided constant commentary on Congress’s often convoluted and confusing proceedings.
And, notably, the bill has prodded the entrepreneurs who run some of the Internet’s best-known sites into creative acts of protest. The blogging site Tumblr mock-censored itself. The file-sharing site Scribd posted a SOPA button that, when clicked, disappeared documents. Wikipedia is considering a temporary block on access to its millions of entries. Beyond that, heaps of calls have been made to Congress, engineers have written letters, and SOPA-doubting editorials have been penned by such newspapers as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Ronald Reagan engineered operation Plagiarized Indigantion to get rid of people hacking the Department of Defense and pentagon and he did a great job of it, ten years after his death it still serves globally.
Electronic medical records after Google Health’s failure
By Vineeta Vijayaraghavan and Clayton Christensen The opinions expressed are their own.
It may seem that the viability of electronic health records looks dismal after the failure of Google Health, yet in integrated health systems around the country they have been implemented and utilized by patients. In Google’s failure we must see an opportunity to address the fragmentation of our healthcare system and take notice of those health systems that are offering innovative services that help provide better care at a lower cost.
Earlier this month, Google announced that it was closing down Google Health, its foray into personal health records, because it failed to find “a way to translate limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people.” Based on 30 years of research, we are firm believers that technology will enable disruptive innovations in healthcare – the types of innovations that will dramatically lower costs, increase quality and improve access to millions. But Google Health was doomed from the start. The obstacle standing in the way of its success was the massive fragmentation of our healthcare system, and its closure signifies the urgent need to integrate healthcare.
Google thinks big. With Google Health, it would have loved to solve the fundamental problems facing consumers – making it easier to schedule appointments and communicate with doctors, allowing patients to manage medications remotely, or even helping them avoid the doctor’s office entirely. Accomplishing these goals would have almost certainly inspired consumers to embrace electronic health records. But to do so, Google needed a fragmented maze of insurers, hospitals and medical groups to also share their data, requiring them to clear complex regulatory and privacy issues to complete the onerous process of bringing their own information online. These organizations do not have the right incentives in place to invest in such an effort, and so Google Health failed.
There is only one way to speed up the process of getting robust health records online, and that is integration. Over the last year, we closely studied seven integrated health delivery systems – which typically contain a medical group, an insurer and a hospital – and found that electronic health records are immensely popular with consumers enrolled in the systems because they solved their most urgent problems.
At one well-known system, HealthPartners in Minnesota, patients can access their online records to schedule an appointment and have all their files automatically available to a new specialist the patient might never have seen before. At Group Health Cooperative in Washington, when patients go in for a blood test, test results have often been emailed to them and added to their electronic health record before they even arrive home.
Even the Medicare population served by some Group Health physicians has embraced electronic health records, contrary to expectations. In fact, some physicians have seen a 50 percent drop in in-patient visits by Medicare patients while retaining the same satisfaction ratings and outcomes. If replicated widely, that result has astounding implications for lowering the cost of care across our healthcare system.
Vineeta,
There are, of course, a bazillion different reasons why a given idea might or might not work in practice, with much of that most immediately having to do with the skill (or not) of the entrepreneur bringing it to market.
In that regard, rather than become fixated on the idea that “the reason’ for failure is due to the fragmented condition of our health care system, one must take the perspective that Google Health failed because it did not take the fragmented condition of the health care system into account – and while there’s only a subtle difference in those words, the difference in meaning is anything but.
Said another way then, the responsibility to develop a business proposition which drives critical stakeholders towards adoption lies with the entrepreneur and not the other way around. Clearly that did not take place for this initiative and as such, the project (in its current form and under this particular sponsorship) died a predictable and poductive death. That isn’t to say that a universal medical ID won’t ever come into existence, it only means that that it’s not going to come about in this particular form at this particular moment.
On what remains in the discussion, I’d challenge the assertion that integrated health systems are necessarily ‘better’ than modular systems. Whereas integrated systems can be configured for optimal overall cost at a given point in time, such efficiencies can be developed in a manner which detract from other stakeholder priorities – and since existing integrated health care systems have not come to dominate the health care industry despite having had a longstanding opportunity to do so, I’d suspect that such may be the case here.
So while it could be that we’re all being held hostage by one or another monopolistic element within the existing system, you and I both know that once an appropriate disruptive innovation becomes deployed AND adopted, elements such as these will fail and fall by the wayside of their own weight – and the next era of healthcare management methodology will take its place.
On that basis – what has transpired is just another of the failures needed to guide providers towards convergence on a method or means that will actually work well enough for a enough people such that it has the opportunity to become improved and eventually assume the dominant role in the way health care is managed and maintained. Until that time, we can (and should) surmise and experiment, but only the market can dictate which approaches will be sufficient to initiate the eventual (and inevitable) departure from the incumbent system.
Google’s greatest skill – and challenge
By Jeff Jarvis Jarvis is the author of “What Would Google Do?” and teaches at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His next book, “Public Parts”, will be published later this year.
The miracle of Google was that it could accomplish anything—let alone become the fastest growing company in the history of the world and the greatest disruptive force in business and society today—while being run by a committee, a junta, a council of the gods.
In management, as in every other arena of business, technology, and media, Google broke every rule and made new ones.
It should not be a shock that Eric Schmidt has stepped aside as CEO and made room for Larry Page. Schmidt was the prince regent who ruled until the boy king could take the throne while training him to do so. We knew that this would happen. We just forgot that it would.
When I interviewed Schmidt a few weeks ago and asked about pressure over privacy, China, and lobbying, he said, “This is not the No. 1 crisis at Google.” What is? “Growth,” he said, “just growth.”
Scale is Google’s greatest skill and greatest challenge. It scaled search (vs. quaint Yahoo, which thought it could catalogue this web thing). It scaled advertising (vs. the media companies that today don’t know how to grow, only shrink). It is scaling mobile (by giving away Android). It has tried to scale innovation (with its 20 percent rule)—but that’s the toughest.
Initially we thought these guys were God — Now we know they are God.
Google street view: shades of Nazi spy era?
The following article by Krista Kapralos first appeared in GlobalPost.
FRANKFURT, Germany — It wasn’t too long ago that apartment dwellers in Germany assumed that someone, somewhere in the building, was taking notes on everything they did. Even people who owned their own homes could never be certain whether a government mole was listening in on their conversations.
“Making sure the law was kept,” said Jobst Krause, a 67-year-old Frankfurter, of the surveillance during the Nazi era.
Krause is too young to have experienced the worst of Nazi surveillance, and he lived in West Germany when the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police force, kept tabs on citizens. But he understands the pang of worry that shot through the hearts of many Germans last week when Google, the American search engine giant, announced that it would launch its Street View application in Germany before year’s end.
Google began sending camera-equipped cars throughout Germany’s 20 largest cities in 2008. Once launched, the Street View program will offer panoramic, ground-level photographs of most streets in those cities, allowing Web surfers to virtually tour those cities as if they were walking or driving.
The program was launched in the U.S. in 2007, and has since spread through 23 countries. But Google found fierce resistance in Germany, where strict privacy laws and suspicion about the company’s reasons for widespread data collection have led to a handful of investigations.
Thirty years ago, it wouldn’t have been possible, so they would have been laughed off the stage for a very different reason than you’re implying.
What Google could learn from Pixar
The following article originally appeared on HBR.org. Former venture capitalist Peter Sims is co-author of True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership. His next book, Little Bets, will be published next spring. Follow him on Twitter. The views expressed are the author’s own.
Google has reached a pivotal moment in its history. What can it do to expand beyond its incredible core business, which is now reaching a more mature phase? For insight on how it can develop, let’s look to Pixar.
Pixar is as close to a constant learning organization as there is, with a proven ability to reinvent and a genuine cultural humility. Google’s founders could learn from Pixar’s founder and president Ed Catmull’s prolonged and determined efforts to counter the natural human reactions to success by aspiring to proactively (and honestly) seek-out and solve new problems constantly, recognizing that he doesn’t have all the answers on his own.
Despite an unbroken string of 11 blockbuster films, Catmull regularly says, “Success hides problems.” It’s an insight Google should acknowledge and act on. Google’s leadership admirably tolerates failure on side-projects (and big projects as well), but what Pixar has that Google does not is a culture where the fear of complacency is a strong motivator, where new problems are identified, discussed, and addressed openly and honestly, all of which requires humility.
As David Price describes in his superb The Pixar Touch, Pixar began its life as a computer hardware company. Price writes that Steve Jobs never expected Pixar to be a film company when he bought the company from George Lucas in 1986. Pixar was then the 45-person computer graphics group of Lucasfilms, led by Catmull, whose dream since graduate school had been to make a full-length digitally animated film. The group had developed the Pixar Image Computer, a computer graphics machine that produced high-end visual imaging (such as for MRIs). Jobs thought the technology had breakout potential when he bought it, yet the Pixar Image Computer never found a market.
Jobs also shrewdly allowed a tiny animation division, led by John Lasseter, a former animator from Disney, to make little bets on short animated films (and, later, TV commercials). Shorts would become the company’s vehicle to build the technical and storytelling expertise, as well as the credibility necessary to ultimately coproduce (with Disney) Toy Story in 1995, the first digitally animated feature film.
to reuters: i thought u guys wanted to “get it on”?? u could host some really exciting discussions here but u seem to be constraining urselves. i can help… no charge in this limited case.
http://www.futureknowledge.biz is me
Google, google everywhere
The following is a post by Stephen Adler, editorial director of Thomson Reuters professional, that was taken from one of his blog posts at aif.thomsonreuters.com. Adler is a moderator at some of the panels at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which runs through July 11. Thomson Reuters is one of the sponsors of the event. The opinions expressed are Adler’s own.
Do a Google search for David Drummond and you’ll learn, amidst the 211,000 hits, that he is Google’s senior vice president and chief legal counsel. What you won’t learn is that he’s an especially eloquent spokesperson for his employer as it tries to live by its own “Don’t Be Evil” rule in a world of complicated choices. You need to come to the Aspen Ideas Festival to learn that — or you could watch a video of him on You Tube, which is also, of course, owned by Google.
Google is on everyone’s mind because it has so quickly become essential to our lives and a powerful disrupter of orthodoxies. It always seems to be on the front lines, on one side or the other, in big societal battles over such issues as censorship, the right to privacy, the meaning of copyright, the evolution of 21st century antitrust law, the future of the news industry, even the nature of the workplace.
In Aspen on Wednesday, Drummond was interviewed on stage by Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute and former editor of TIME magazine. After calling Drummond “a lucky lawyer” for having connected with Google’s founders when they were just starting out in 1998, Isaacson went on to ask some good, tough questions. Drummond flicked them away pretty effortlessly. Some highlights from the lucky lawyer:
CHINA: Google is doing the right thing by refusing to provide a censored service within China while directing Chinese users to an uncensored version based in Hong Kong. “You can say the moral thing to do is to be engaged or you can boycott. Trying the middle way is a lot harder — to try to do some good locally while not compromising the principles.” PROFITS VS. PUBLIC INTEREST: “More information is always better. Serving the user really aggressively is what we want to do. We’ve never really seen that big a conflict” between making money and serving the customer. PRIVACY: “If you’re willing to let a company like Google know more about you, where you’ve been and what you’ve done, we can deliver much better services [such as really targeted advertising]. That has to be done in a way where the user knows what’s going on and has control over it” ANONYMITY ON THE WEB: It’s not either, or. There are people who are very comfortable with revealing their identities. Anonymity can be good too – people should be able to use Google services anonymously. THE MOBILE FUTURE: We’re absolutely moving from a PC world to a mobile world. The mobile experience will improve through continued innovation and will be even better than the Web experience because it will be more social and more easily targeted to the individual user. QUALITY JOURNALISM, ANYONE?: “Ad-based free journalism online hasn’t been enough to sustain the kinds of newsrooms, remote offices and bureaus that quality journalism needs. We want to be part of the solution – to the extent it involves paid content we want to be a distribution arm for that too.” Information doesn’t need to be free. But it should be accessible.
Drummond also pointed out that Google News — which grabs news from multiple sources and which the news industry views as an app that truly kills — was developed quite innocently by a Google engineer during his “20% time.” It seems he loved cricket and wanted to invent a way to pull in cricket scores from around the world. Then he realized it could pull in general news too. It’s the kind of story that makes you love and hate Google all at the same time.
It appears that Google were only involved in mapping the location of WiFi hotspots and that any collection of user data was purely inadvertent. The owners of the subject WiFi hotspots should have enabled the security measures included in their devices. Google are the very least of their worries if they leave their WiFi devices unsecured in proximity to public thoroughfares.
from Ask...:
Murdoch mad as hell and ready to charge
Rupert Murdoch is mad as hell and it appears he’s not going to take it anymore. The media mogul and News Corp chief is upset at Google, saying the Internet search giant is ruining the newspaper business.
Not one to sit and around and just gripe about things, Murdoch says he might pull News Corp’s news from Google’s Web search results and list the stories on Microsoft’s Bing. The catch is that Microsoft would pay for the service, giving Murdoch a fresh revenue stream.
The problem is that many news organizations are fed their Web audience via Google search. If viewer rates fall, so too, the theory says, will ad dollars.
If it works, however, you can bet big dollars that other publishers and content providers will follow suit.
What do you think? Will Murdoch’s gamble work? Should search engines pay for the privilege of listing a publisher’s content?
Leave your comments below.
Other perspective in social media, deep concern about the proportional balance of mass media/journalism ethic against business in R.Murdoch and all others media. after long decades in dispute and debate among peoples.
Here now, When e-news had came as 3rd-wave & wind of Change, and it did. If we can see it clearly, actually this is the awaiting answer for that polemic’s dilemma of New’s Stigma.
The Google’s news and others e-news, are the ANSWER. It surely will redeem the News exploitation empire without succession. At last peoples had chose and justify it to recovery the News For Peoples, From Peoples & By Peoples.
as like the American’s father said.
Obviously, with the “Adwords & Adsense” and “Everyone authors/publisher” in Google, it is self explanation of “Justice for All” in People News media as American-way.
what else could be “FAIRLY” than it.
Ex-Google China chief’s dream factory
– Wei Gu is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own —
Google’s former China head Kai-Fu Lee wants to create China’s next internet giant in a factory. He believes that by combining the smartest entrepreneurs, the shrewdest businesspeople and the brightest business ideas, he will be able to create five highly sellable companies a year. That sounds like an ideal model for venture capital, but is he being realistic?
Lee’s plan, formulated while he spent time in hospital over the summer, follows a battle with Beijing regulators who wanted to censor Google searches that lead to pornographic sites. It has drawn strong support from investors.
Lee has managed to raise $115 million in just one month, winning support from YouTube Inc. co-founder Steve Chen, as well as Foxconn Electronics Inc., Legend Group, New Oriental Education and venture firm WI Harper Group.
Consider the fact that everyone remembers the ‘Cultural Revolution’ and what happened to people who used their creativity. Also consider Tien an min where the youngest, best, thinkers in China were shot or jailed for thinking freely. Now consider creative talent lining up for this. It’s not going to fly.
