Category: trends
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Micro-Multinational Companies
“If the late 20th Century was the age of the multinational company, the early 21st will be the age of the micro multinational: small companies that operate globally” Hal Varian, Google Chief Economist, quoted at the Global Competitiveness Forum in Riyadh. And just one of a number reasons (from this Wired post on the subject) why…
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This Week’s Favourite Fraggl Links
My favourite links from the week, curated by Fraggl: An uncommonly straightforward, believable set of tech trends from Frog Design A good, smart piece from Ben Hammersley on wearable technology as 'the third wave in computing' A useful summary from Shane Parrish of Clay Christensen's Innovator's DNA: 'The Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators' The story of how Scott…
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Most Big Data Isn’t Big At All
Proof, if it were needed, about the degree of hype surrounding so-called 'big data' this year came in the form of the analysis done by John McDuling in Quartz of the transcripts from investor conference calls and presentations from more than 5,000 companies. 'Big Data' had been mentioned during 841 separate calls/presentations this year, up 43% from the 589 times that it…
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Doing a Snowfall
The kind of richly designed multimedia article formats that I wrote about here have become quite the thing. Just check out this already lengthy and ever expanding open list of Snowfall-like features that typically use combinations of infinite and/or parallax scrolling, and text set against large images and cleverly integrated with other formats including audio…
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The Value In Implicit Data
It was interesting to read about the new 8-strong Artificial Intelligence team at Facebook applying so-called 'deep-learning' techniques which apparently use simulated networks of brain cells, or the equivalent of 'neural nets', to process data. The application of these kinds of techniques can take machine learning beyond simpler explicit forms of data (like metadata or…
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Quartz – Email As Front Page
The shifting models in publishing continue to be fascinating. Buzzfeed, who base their approach on a ruthless focus on the spreadability of content recently announced that they'd surpassed 85 million unique visitors in August (3 times bigger than they were a year ago). Then there's Quartz, which has been growing rapidly over the past year. There's…
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Digital Marketing Structures
I've just completed a research project into how companies are resourcing and structuring their digital marketing capability, working with the smart folk at Econsultancy. It's a fascinating subject since, for all the talk about the impact of digital and the changes it brings, the challenge of how you resource your teams and capability in response…
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Stacks and Platforms
Several good reads recently around the idea of technology company platforms or 'stacks'. Benedict Evans had a good post on how Twitter is becoming more of a platform, beginning as a protocol with third party clients and many different interfaces before pivoting, taking greater control of the interface, developing advertising products, and launching Twitter cards - expanded…
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The Modern Spice Routes
PayPal have just released a report on cross-border shopping – the increasingly common practice of people using the internet to shop directly from suppliers and merchants all over the world (you have to register to get the full report but there's a PDF summary of it here). Drawing on data from Nielsen who analysed the shopping…
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On the Death Of Journalism
There's been more than enough pixel inches dedicated to talking about the death of journalism. I don't believe it. Neither it seems does George Brock who, in summarising the thrust of his new book 'Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age', takes the unfashionable view that rather than dying a…