Mark Zuckerberg is pouring over this map

March 31, 2014

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Mark Zuckerberg is pouring over this map. It shows  basic 2G phone coverage in light blue, and darker/red indicating areas with high-quality 4G coverage and Wi-Fi access. It also shows billions of people in Africa and Asia basically don’t “exist” because they don’t have access to the Web — yet. Zuckerberg’s solution is to persuade wireless carriers to provide basic mobile phone access for free, and to give them coverage with an array of drones, satellites and lasers.

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The tragedy that is 2048

March 31, 2014

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A UI designer and web developer, Gabriele Cirulli “created” 2048 in the span of a weekend. But the creative process – aka developing an original idea and making it work –is the work of Sirvo LLC, better known as Greg Wohlwend and Asher Vollmer. It took them 570 emails and six months to create Threes, a paid-for mobile game.  2048 is its clone. Or rather, 2048 is a clone of 1024, which is another clone of Threes. They are both free. Understandably, Shirvo are cheesed. But what this really demonstrates is the difficulty of building an “economic moat” (copyright, Warren Buffet) around digital products. And is the main reason the Oracle of Omaha refuses to invest in digital. 

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Brand or content, what should be seen first?

March 31, 2014

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The UK newspaper People closed their website a little while ago, writes Furthr’s Andy Cowles.

Launched with the idea that it would be ‘Buzzfeed for grown ups’, pretty much everything went wrong, according to this excellent reporting from of all places, Buzzfeed.Patrick Smith reports that there was a lack of identity, a lack of focus, and a complete failure to grasp how the native advertising business model works.

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This lack of brand benefit is perfectly expressed in the website logo. The way it worked (or rather, didn’t), was that the People logo was preceeded by a rotating series of words; ‘Sporty’, ‘Famous’, ‘Glam’, ‘Funny’ and so on. The story underneath didn’t change, but the context did.

What this did was remove any trace of brand from the content beneath. The stories became entirely generic, no tone, no point of view, no recall.

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By way of contrast, this is Buzzfeed’s home screen from the very same day. Which, when you compare the lead stories of ‘Bachelor’ and ‘Wanker’, pretty well sums up why Buzzfeed’s tone is so sharp.

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In an extraordinary move, Microsoft admit Surface is a stinker

March 28, 2014

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Something big happened on Thursday. Microsoft made Office available on their rival Apple’s iPad. That means just one thing: their tablet, the Surface, is a failure. (It sold 4m worldwide in 2013, while Apple sold 26m iPads in just the last quarter. ) Mircosoft’s new CEO says its part of their new “mobile-first, cloud-first” strategy. The Economist is more pithy. “If they can’t sell the devices, at least they can sell the services.”

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Here’s how to get your posts on the front page of Reddit

March 27, 2014

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As you can see from the chart, the first six hours of a post’s life is crucial if it wants to get up-voted onto on Reddit’s much prized front page. A full description of how Reddit’s algorhythim works  is here. But to keep it simple, your post needs the same three things that all news needs: relevance, exclusivity and, the big one, timeliness. Without that you got nothing, friend.

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