SXSW Inspiration – FourSquare: CEO Dennis Crowley on the challenges of growing the business and the opportunity to design the future of maps…

SXSW Inspiration – Swiss Miss: Designer Tina Roth Eisenberg on following your passions, and the 11 rules to live and work by…

SXSW Content – Social TV: how great technology and UX can engage audiences with online video as a social experience, using the case study of social video platform OVEE.

SXSW Content – Exploring place in cross-platform storytelling: how technologies like geo-tagging, location-aware devices and augmented reality are combining with traditional storytelling…

SXSW Content – Viral content and social content advertising: BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti on how to create and distribute viral content in a world where ‘share’ is the key to success…

SXSW Games – OUYA: Julie Uhrman, CEO of OUYA, discussing kickstarting an open gaming ecosystem  and bringing a software system to the television…

SXSW Mobile – Africa’s $100bn mobile market: an overview of the scale and pace of change of all things mobile as the primary, scalable, transactional route to impact and change.

SXSW Health -Aetna: an overview of the Aetna healthcare ecosystem to illustrate the opportunities for mHealth startups and investment.

]]> http://sarahtierney.me/2013/03/14/sxsw-interactive-2013-highlights/feed/ 0 sarahtierney 1.-Airbnb-Image-Coyrtesy-Amazonaws Unknown swissmiss ovee_logo Jerusalem BuzzFeed-logo ouya-logo IAP4082 aetna http://sarahtierney.me/2013/03/13/sxsw-inspiration-tina-roth-eisenberg/ http://sarahtierney.me/2013/03/13/sxsw-inspiration-tina-roth-eisenberg/#comments Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:24:12 +0000 Sarah Tierney http://sarahtierney.me/?p=1079 ]]> As SXSW Interactive draws to a close, one of the stand-out highlights of the festival was an inspirational keynote from Tina Roth Eisenberg. The creator of design blog SwissMiss, Tattly, Creative Mornings and Studio Mates inspired the SXSW crowd to follow their passions and pay attention to their “side projects”…

Full talk available here. Tina’s 11 Rules To Live (& Work) By:

In today’s SXSW session, BuzzFeed’s Founder and CEO Jonah Peretti discussed how to create and distribute content in a world where ‘share’ is the key to success…

BuzzFeed  features “the hottest, most social content on the web” and now boasts 40 million unique views per month. Peretti highlights that we are in the midst of a big shift in media consumption from portals, to search, to social. Facebook, Twitter and the social web are now mature and content spreads faster and further than ever before. This means that owning the printing press or broadcast pipe matters less and less in a world where creating “content people love to share is the key to success”. So Peretti cautioned that you have an idea but also a way to spread it, and this should be a 50:50 effort. But good quality content does not necessary mean that it will go viral, so how do you create content that will spread?

BuzzFeed has multiple mechanics that drive engagement, including “reaction buttons”: one-click actions are easy and low-effort; they reduce some 80% of uninteresting comment posts that are simple expressions of emotion; and once users have reacted to content they are much more likely to share. Peretti then gave insight into BuzzFeed’s “viral rank” (R): the science behind predicting how viral a piece of content might become by measuring by the “social reproduction rate” (i.e. the likelihood people will share, and the size of potential distribution via their social graph). The potential for sharing is impacted by the lifecycle of content on different platforms: Twitter has a ‘R value’ of an hour, Pinterest a week. And the type of content that spreads also depends hugely on the platform: users behave very differently depending on where they are on the web. On Google, the focus is on connecting users with the information that they know they want (i.e. powered by search). On Facebook, the focus is on connecting people with their friends and giving them the means to communicate and express themselves (i.e. powered by social reinforcement and content is the key vehicle to connect). In summary, “Google is the place for content where no one is looking, Facebook is the place for content when everybody is looking”.

Peretti commented that BuzzFeed was founded on social, emotional, shareable content. But as social has matured, the platform has needed to evolve to capture the appetite for long-form content and serious reporting. With core editorial hires and a shift in strategy, BuzzFeed rounded-out its focus across both emotional and informational content to capture the expanding, diversified market for social content. “Scoops and quality reporting now work for social: what gets shared is the newest, quality, summary piece rather than the specialised, aggregated, longer, slower piece of quality journalism”. Traditional media has published in silos (i.e. serious, hard-hitting content only), fearing that mixed content (emotional, light) somehow disqualifies serious content. But Peretti believes that traditional outlets now have no choice as social sharing mixes content types, powered by user’s diverse needs and interests. BuzzFeed has captured the market by making this mixed media available at source.

Peretti reports that this big shift in media consumption is now coming to advertising: social content marketing is now totally pushing out traditional advertising such as banner ads which “do not tell a compelling story”. BuzzFeed’s “story units” have 1-2% CTRs, some 10-times industry average, powered by the platform’s core viral rank. BuzzFeed’s advertisers are now becoming authentically embedded in story unit content, becoming part of the narrative. Interestingly, BuzzFeed charges brands for “seed views” but not for “viral views”, so the powerful social uplift is a bonus as Peretti does not believe in “penalising success”.

Some other lessons from the session: ”Social is a way of thinking, not a trick”. Don’t focus on one narrow trick to make content work (e.g. a feature of Facebook) as this is not sustainable and the numbers will collapse. Think integration. Have a heart: emotional intelligence is more relevant in the social space. Content is about identity: people are highly motivated to share content that reflects their lives and experiences. Don’t try to engage everybody: it’s often better to engage a smaller group who care more deeply as people share content that touches their identity. Capture the moment: don’t publish into the void. Be responsive. Not everything has to be funny but humour is a very important way of connecting people to each other on the social web. Nostalgia and human rights are powerful social drivers as it connects people to each other via shared identity or beliefs.

In yesterday’s SXSW session, Scott Belsky put forward his thoughts on connecting the creative world and empowering creative people to make ideas happen..

Scott Belsky is Adobe’s Vice President of Community and Head of Behance, the “leading online platform for creatives to showcase and discover creative work”. His SXSW talk acknowledged that new technologies and online platforms empower creatives to connect directly with international brands, clients and collaborators. However, Belsky argued that the web currently does not truly foster creative innovation, and lacks key forces like attribution, transparency and data-driven tools that will produce meritocracy for creatives across industries. In response, he outlined three key challenges and calls-to-action for creative innovation on the web:

Challenge 1: The long tail is backfiring 

There are innumerable communities of interest springing up online to serve the long tail. But what this is actually doing is verticalising and isolating interest on the web. Belsky argues that discovery and innovation happens in the over lap and intersection of different communities of interest, and delivers users a diversified understanding of the world.

Realisation 1: Belsky encouraged the audience to “host the overlap and prompt the innovation”.

Challenge 2: We’ve empowered the masses without discernment (the influence of the ‘like’ button) 

Is the crowd a good judge? When it comes to community curation in the future, can we assign weight based on influence? Should we be thinking beyond how many people like something, to who likes it? Belsky argues we should be empowering the credible mass over the critical mass.

Realisation 2: Identifying and amplifying the credible mass is the best route to meritocracy.

Challenge 3:  The web is terrible at attribution. When attribution is not supported, opportunity is lost. 

Tumblr and many other sites often promote creative work but without attributing the author or creator, meaning the cycle necessary to sustain work (of creativity, discovery and transaction) is broken. While most sites seek to keep users within their own pages and reduce signposting of external sites, Pinterest is bucking the trend and now has an attribution link on each and every pin.

Realisation3 : With attribution, discovery can out-weight referral.

Learn more about Scott Belsky and his work here.

This afternoon’s SXSW session saw game industry veteran Julie Uhrman, now founder and CEO of OUYA, discuss the future of an open gaming ecosystem. 

Aiming to “crack open the last closed gaming platform – the TV”, OUYA is a “beautiful affordable console built on Android”, developed via a $8.6m Kickstarter campaign. The OUYA is essentially taking the low-cost / high-performance aspect of mobile gaming and moving it into a TV-friendly space (watch a promo here).

But the ambition was never limited to hardware: “OUYA is a game ecosystem…we are basically bringing a software system to the television”. Uhrman has previously reported that even with the popularity of mobile gaming, TV gaming still wins over mobile. The average gamer spends 4 hours a week on consoles, versus 3 hours on mobile. For core gamers, it’s 7 hours a week on consoles, compared to 3.5 hours a week on mobile devices. Console gamers are also worth 6 times more than mobile gamers…

But how to drive users into this new ecosystem? By copying the Apple model and creating a closed loop ecosystem: inventive, proprietary, free-to-try gaming will drive the hardware purchase. Adoption of the app store model will also create lower barriers to entry for independent developers to sell on to the platform. “What we did is challenge the status quo…for less than the cost of two games on traditional hardware you are getting a system where the games will be free to play.” OUYA is “about enabling the creators” and already has 7,000 sign-ups to the Developers portal. Uhrman reported that mobile and triple-A game developers are being attracted back to creating for the “immersive, private and personal TV screen”. She also said that as a platform, OUYA will think differently about indicators of a good game, by prioritising “fun, engagement metrics” over traditional download metrics or user numbers. OUYA platform content will be curated by discoverability and community enjoyment, to drive the more traditional metrics of success.

Lastly, Uhrman reported that OUYA is talking to the content-giants Google, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. OUYA “will have content beyond games”, signalling that the ambition for the hardware, beyond a game-specific console, is to capture the content ecosystem as a ‘set-top box’. Disruption runs deep for OUYA, with the hardware remaining a “hackable box”, albeit feeding into a proprietary ecosystem and platform.

]]> http://sarahtierney.me/2013/03/11/sxsw-games-julie-uhrman-ceo-of-ouya-on-kickstarting-an-open-gaming-platform/feed/ 1 sarahtierney SXSW1Logo2 ouya-hand http://sarahtierney.me/2013/03/11/sxsw-the-future-of-data-and-maps-with-foursquare-ceo-dennis-crowley/ http://sarahtierney.me/2013/03/11/sxsw-the-future-of-data-and-maps-with-foursquare-ceo-dennis-crowley/#comments Mon, 11 Mar 2013 18:30:34 +0000 Sarah Tierney http://sarahtierney.me/?p=1003 ]]> At this morning’s SXSW session, FourSquare CEO Dennis Crowley discussed growing the company on data, maps and recommendations, and the future of location data as a utility…  

With DodgeBall (a location-based social network acquired by Google in 2005) Crowley came to understand the value of geo-located check-ins, and conceived FourSquare using game mechanics (badges, leader boards etc) to motivate users to check-in. In four years, FourSquare has attracted over 30m users, growing at 1.5m users per month, with more than 1m merchants on the platform, and 60% of users now non-US. The ‘place database’ has over 50m entries. Interestingly, giant tech companies – from Twitter’s Vine, to Path, to Facebook’s Instagram – see FourSquare as “neutral space” and deliver location services through FourSquare’s API. And this is becoming a closed loop, with user tagging of videos or photos on these platforms driving FourSquare’s location intelligence. Despite all this, FourSquare is just 160 people, shipping new or updated software products every few weeks.

Crowley commented that there is a lack of insight into the massive opportunity and future impact of FourSquare transitioning from “cute” points, badges and gamification to mining the 3 billion check-in data points created by their user base. The “small human actions” that fuelled Google’s growth was clicking of links, and Facebook was ‘likes’: FourSquare can now mine the aggregate value of their user’s small human actions – which now amount to billions of data points – to draw conclusions about community, location, consumerism and sophisticated recommendations. “People are out there crawling the real world the way Google spiders crawl the web”.

What 500,000,000 FourSquare check-ins look like as data points on a map…

Crowley commented that the opportunity lies in “understanding the context of use”: phones passively track where the user is and then “perking up” when a user deviates from their usual routine or place to actively make suggestions and drive behaviours (FourSquare Radar). For merchants, FourSquare has enough data to begin joining-the-dots around community and user profiles to more actively grow local businesses. Crowley hinted that in the future, users may no longer have access to all deals, with the apps rewarding the best users (by frequency of interaction and possibly some socio-economuc measure of value as a customer) with varying value and quantity of offers.

Asked about his mistakes, Crowley said one error was not putting search functionality front-and-centre sooner, as it drives people to think about the service as default local search. Talking about the future, Crowley echoed other keynote speakers from SXSW: don’t lose focus, just fix one thing well (“location is the thing that we do”), don’t get distracted by trying to do everything (e.g. the short-run “follow mode” that FourSquare tried, mimicking Twitter). In terms of future functionality, these will include: context data (queues, waiting times etc), including using data visualisation to “map the shape of places” based upon activity (e.g. roads); social-graphs and interest-graphs will have joint impact to construct dynamic recommendations; as above, increasing emphasis on passive geo-location (FourSquare Radar to “own the local discovery of places”) to drive active recommendations; and while they don’t have ambitions to be a transactional provider, Crowley believes FourSquare has a huge opportunity to make “point-of-sale transactions smarter”. Crowley is ultimately massively passionate about making it easier for people to consume data on what’s going on around them. “Local is going to be huge, maps need to be reinvented, FourSquare gets to invent the future of this stuff…”.

At this morning’s SXSW session Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky talked candidly about the challenges of growing and scaling a disruptive business model.

Chesky began by charting the road to investment: from financing the startup on personal credit cards, to dabbling in breakfast cereal (Obama-O’s, making $30k to keep the company afloat), to securing investment. A year-and-a-half from launch, Airbnb had just 100 users. But Chesky talked passionately about the power of these early adaptors as champions for the business: “better to have 100 people love you, than a million people sort of like you”. Embracing this concept, the founding team went door-to-door in New York taking “professional” photographs, for free, to help early users better represent their homes.

He encouraged the SXSW audience to have a lot of ideas, and not worry too much if they seem like bad ideas. “Airbnb seemed like a crazy idea at first, as did the free photography, as did the $50k guarantee (that is now a $1m guarantee)”. Chesky commented that too many entrepreneurs prioritise ideas that will promote growth – to drive growth metrics and investment potential – rather than simply focussing on good ideas that people want. It’s simple: “make good product that people love”.

Chesky and his co-founders made early mistakes, including a short phase focussing on apartment groups (believing that this would allow them to scale faster) rather than individual homes. Having stayed in a bland apartment building in London, followed by an old Parisian home, he felt convinced that the key is to “always use your product”. So, in June 2010, Chesky moved out of his apartment and since then has largely only lived in Airbnb homes…

Having built the company on personalised experiences, how do you scale? “Work out how to do something remarkable and then use technology to scale it”. Coming back to his central driver – make good product that people love – Chesky commented that the habits of the first 100 will be what the next 1,000,000 will look like. Get those first experiences right: tweeking it for 100 is simple; changing it for 1,000,000 will break the business. Like Steve Jobs, Chesky believes “design isn’t how something looks, it is how something works”. Design the end-to-end user experience in detail (Airbnb hired a feature film storyboard artist to capture the ideal user experience “frame by frame”) and then you can plot where the users’ journey deviates from this, and why. Create emotional attachments to experiences, as these are the ones that stick. Airbnb heavily prioritised growth from within their early community of users, prioritising cities which had global reach – such as New York and London – so that users would go home and spread the company message.

Talking about company culture: “I don’t want to do what will make me win, I want to do what I think is right and will make me want to come to work everyday. A community of missionaries will beat a community of mercenaries every time”. Good company culture runs deep, shown through the Airbnb and NYC team-up to offer free accommodation to Hurricane Sandy victims. But it’s not simply philanthropic: “the best marketing is investing in the user and they will do the marketing for you”.

Chesky briefly discussed the current controversy over alleged “illegal rentals” in New York, and the impact of Government legislation that is arguably out of date, lagging behind technological change. Moving on to Airbnb’s position as “the face  of the sharing economy” – a people powered economic system – Chesky commented on the disconnect between consumption, production and product availability. He used the example of power tools: “people don’t want power drills – there are some 80m powerdrills in the USA, each one used on average for 13min in its lifetime – they want holes in their walls”. This leads on naturally to asset sharing – including time, the country’s largest asset – which is “naturally the thing after mass production, technology is allowing us to cycle back from generic brands and mass manufacturing, to personalised and local consumption. Ask yourself what won’t be local and personal in the future? You’ll probably conclude that the sharing economy could replace a huge amount of the existing economy…”.

Asked if they see the Airbnb becoming a larger platform beyond vacation rentals, Chesky commented that while there are now many “amazing spaces” listed on the site – boats and castles, tree houses and the entire country of Liechtenstein - they aren’t tempted to become the marketplace for everything. Chesky wants to do one thing well, namely travel. Efforts remain in this space, focussed on being vertically integrated rather than horizontally spread across multiple markets.

Five years on from the credit cards and breakfast cereal, some 50,000 to 60,000 people now use Airbnb every night across 170 countries. At this year’s SXSW festival alone, 8,000 delegates are staying in Airbnb sourced accommodation. AirBnB’s operational success can be traced to three levers of competition which form the basis of strategy on most platforms:

1. Creation of new sources of supply
2. Creation of new user behaviors on the demand side
3. Architecting a strong curation system

Read more about Airbnb’s competitive advantage on TheNextWeb.

Next up at SXSW was “Exploring Place with Cross-Platform Storytelling“: examples of how new technologies like geo-tagging, location-aware devices, interactive video and augmented reality are being combined with traditional storytelling methods to explore the world in richer, more in-depth ways than ever before…

The panel was made up of: Mike Knowlton, CTO of Storycode; Danny Harris, Creative Director at StorySocial; documentary filmmaker and cross-platform producer, Liz Nord; and Executive Director of ARTE France Cinema, Michel Reilhac. Knowlton began by talking about “story as software”, suggesting that cross-platform storytelling and new technologies allow creators to make more immersive, more iterative content. As scene-setting, he introduced some case studies: ”The Silent History“, serialised iPad/iPod novel; “Rough Ride – The Oil Patch Tour”, interactive documentary; “NY Hearts” interactive neighbourhoods project; and ”Welcome to Pine Point” created by NFB.

Liz Nord introduced her project “Jerusalem Unfiltered” which offers an immersive insider’s perspective on the city. Interestingly, Nord has launched the content-rich site more than a year before the film is due to complete in late-2014.

Danny Harris reflected on his StorySocial project, People’s District, which became “Washington D.C.’s largest and most ambitious non institutional-based oral history project”. Over three years, Harris traveled across all 120+ city neighbourhoods to piece together a “people’s history” of the District told through some 2,000 diverse interviews. Explore more StorySocial projects here.

Michel Reilhac showcased one of the most unique immersive projects, ARTE’s CinemaCity: a geolocalized augmented reality project which allows users to overlay the physical experience of walking through Paris with excerpts of films shot on that location. Costing $417k, the project will launch in June 2013, when Paris city authorities will open up the wifi network so free connectivity will drive update. Reilhac reported that the ambition is to roll-out the project to the world’s other “film cities”.

The panel commented that integrating physical space into storytelling “allows the audience to consume the narrative in a far more intimate way”. Knowlton summarised that place can be integrated via technology to make the storytelling experience deeper, but also to encourage audiences to physically explore place to unlock narrative content. As creators, Nord suggested producers need to fully interrogate the impact of immersive place on the narrative approach, from the degree of user autonomy to platforms and devices.

This morning’s SXSW session, “The $100bn mobile bullet train called Africa“, revealed the scale and pace of change of all things mobile across the African continent, now the world’s fastest growing telecoms market.

Gareth Knight, from Tech4Africa, and Toby Shapshak, Editor of ‘Stuff’ magazine, began by stating that more people have a cell phone than have access to electricity across Africa. PC (or other computer) penetration is as low as fixed-line penetration. Some 80% of the world’s mobile transactions are now made in East Africa, with 40% of Kenya’s GDP transacted through mobile money (carrier billing).  There was $171bn made in mobile payment transactions in 2012, forecast to be $607bn by 2016. The SIM card is the credit card of Africa.

The vast majority of the population do not have a bank account or credit card, yet there are 700m SIM cards in Africa, nearly all pre-paid, and growing at 20-25% each year. Most are comparatively low-functionality, but Shapshak reminded the audience that every phone in the world (4.2 bn) has SMS functionality, and SMS has a hugely high “open and read” rate – 97% versus 5-20% percent for email - and that this often overlooked mechanism has huge potential for disruption in Africa. High illiteracy is overcome by picture or numerical SMS messaging. And the landscape is changing: in 2015, there are forecast to be 125m smartphones in Africa, driven mainly by significant middle-class population growth.

Examples of mobile services and product ranged from micro-finance and micro-loans, such as M-Pesa, to paid-for social media networks to electricity ordering via text. One example was iCow: mobile phone applications which give diary farmers information on how to better manage their livestock. With agriculture contributing about 25% of Kenya’s GDP, the majority of farmers in Kenya remain small-scale, lacking opportunities and finances for professional advice. The iCow platform has 25,000 users after two years in operation and has seen many farmers more than double their income due to improvements recommended by the app. Another example was Mxit, Africa’s biggest social network and mobile instant messenger network. Although facing fierce competition from user migration to Facebook, Mxit is managing to monetize interactions and content in a way that Facebook still struggles to do, with some 750,000,000 paid-for messages sent every day via the platform.

Discussing unemployment and lack of access to education, Shapshak championed an example of Nokia’s web-based MoMaths service, which aims to plug learning gaps in pupils from low-income households, and create new business opportunities in Africa. In 2011, 8,000 South African high-school students racked up a total of 2.5m exercises on MoMaths, with 82% of this activity taking place after school or during the holidays.

Discussing the growth in mobile internet as a utility, Knight and Shapshak touched on the potential of networks like Facebook and Twitter for a range of impacts, from political change to finding employment opportunities, but returned to the realised potential of SMS to have impact now. The session concluded with these statements: Africa has skipped the desktop – have a mobile-first strategy for any product or service launch across the continent; and that the opportunity lies in providing utility value to the 750m and growing SIM cards by solving day-to-day problems that are endemic across Africa, to free up time and energy to become more productive. In short, this brilliant session made crystal clear the social and economic opportunities now for innovation via mobile as the primary, scalable, transactional route to impact, change and value-chains across Africa.

Update: Another notable innovator in this sector is Worldreader, a US and European literacy non-profit whose mission is to make digital books available to children and their families in the developing world. Worldreader has partnered with biNu technology to deliver a smartphone-like eReader experience to low-end feature phones. Worldreader Mobile is currently installed on 4.5 million phones, mostly in Asia and Africa, with 500,000 unique readers consuming 20 million pages per month. The organisation hopes to reach 10 million people by the end of 2013.

Update: Great article from The Atlantic here: “Medicine by Text Message – Learning from the Developing World”, 4th April 2013.

The Online Video Engagement Experience (OVEE) platform was created to present high quality film and television content online, and building a real-time engagement experience around it for public television viewers, teachers and communities of interest, to “watch together, from anywhere”. OVEE is a freestanding web application that synchs up multiple streams on the PBS COVE website, and allows online viewers to interact in real time around content by signing on through the platform or via Facebook.

“ITVS acknowledged that it was the business model that was getting in the way of truly social commercial TV, with appointment-to-view and broadcast revenue still dominant” said Dennis Palmieri, Director of Innovation & Media Strategies at ITVS. But as a public television station focussed on engagement and education, ITVS could move beyond the business model to innovate. Understanding that audiences want interaction but that lean-forward/lean-back experiences are different, OVEE sought to fuse second screen social interaction with primary screen content viewing.

At its heart, OVEE seeks to recreate the experience of going to a live screening venue and watching with an audience. To set up a screening on the OVEE platform, users browse multiple screening types, preview content, and schedule a screening time (up to a year in the future). They then choose whether to make the screening private (invite only through the OVEE email system, used by businesses and education) or public (an open unique URL with ability for attendees to sign in publicly or anonymously). Other options include electing a moderator for the screening, adding panelists or special speakers (who can join via webcam), adding branding or advertising if desired, and even pre-programming interactive moments throughout the screening (polls, announcements, extra information, links etc). Up to 500 users can then join the screening, watch, interact, comment, vote and more, with OVEE syncing concurrent streams within 3 seconds of each other.

Palmieri revealed that OVEE has cost $1.7m to develop to the current beta stage. The focus has been on making PBS’s huge content archive available, but in time the focus will shift to user generated content and a “roadmap to YouTube”.