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The 4th wave of content marketing | Smart Insights

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The 4th wave of content marketing Is Content Marketing Headed for a Tech Revolution? Are you ready for the fourth wave of content marketing? According to Scott Brinker: "the fourth wave of content marketing, now emerging, is the proliferation of interactive content with responsive web marketing apps."

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Despite the industry buzz, articles, and World Cup tweets, you'd be surprised at how many brands and marketers are yet to jump on board or have tried it once, and given up. The excuses are numerous: it's just a fad, Facebook is a waste, no resources, legal barriers, newsjacking feels corny... I've heard them all.

If real-time sounds too over-used, too time-consuming, too reactive, then call it right-time marketing instead

But digital is not a medium where you can wait on the sidelines to master something. It's about trial and error; learning what works for your audience and your organisation, and what doesn't. The truth is, no matter what the medium, be it online or offline, truly great content has never come without at least some level of risk.

If real-time sounds too over-used, too time-consuming, too reactive, then call it right-time marketing instead. It may sound like a buzzword, but right-time means that when an audience interacts with the content it feels fresh and appropriate for them. It's relevant to what they have going on, and where they are consuming the content.

So, what should brands consider when launching a right-time strategy?

People don't share ads

The mobile feed is the new portal where people consume news and entertainment. When you have compelling content, it entices people to touch and go deeper, rather than swiping it away. People will engage with content when it grabs their attention and gives them a reason to participate. Unfortunately time and time again you see brands pushing out ads into their feeds and paid social media.

Events make great content - but to a point

Events are a successful way for brands to get started in right-time marketing. It gives them a focal point, and at times marketers can almost lay it out like activating around a traditional campaign so it provides comfort.

The problem starts when you solely rely on an event-only strategy. Audiences exist beyond events and for brands where the purchase cycle isn't defined, staying relevant 365 days is more important than a few spikes during the year.

Strive to make all the content in your ad containers something that an audience would want to share or use

Data prevents waste

The traditional marketing approach has been to push out all your content everywhere, based on a pre-determined budget defined at the beginning of the month. But not all content belongs everywhere on a loop. Test out your content so that you can continuously promote the best performing pieces based on data. Let the data drive your decision making on which content and where.

In addition to data, brands need to have a great editor or producer to stop them from joining in where they don't belong or have credibility. Focus on the consumer - let the brand take a back seat.

Content comes from everywhere

Don't just rely on one source for content. Source it from multiple places, from creating something completely original on your own, to working with content partners such as BuzzFeed, from user generated to aggregated and licensed such as Newscred. The great thing about working with content partners is that you are also buying their audience; so, when they create content on your behalf, let them do it.

The entire web is social

Strive to make all the content in your ad containers something that an audience would want to share or use. Right-time content appearing in unexpected places with participatory or entertaining features can really grab an audience's attention. Ultimately, whether you call it real-time, or right-time, every part of your strategy needs to tie back to this: content that feels right in the moment that it is consumed.

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Failed at real-time marketing? Try right-time instead

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Despite the industry buzz, articles, and World Cup tweets, you'd be surprised at how many brands and marketers are yet to jump on board or have tried it once, and given up. The excuses are numerous: it's just a fad, Facebook is a waste, no resources, legal barriers, newsjacking feels corny...

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Technology

The 25 Most Awkward Cat Sleeping Positions - perhaps not the most inspiring of headlines, but the article in question was read more than 3.5m times on BuzzFeed.
This summer the site secured $50m of funding from US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, an investment that values it at a cool $850m.

The future of content might not lie in sleeping felines, but the phenomenal success of BuzzFeed is a reminder that people remain voracious consumers of stories. As they increasingly seek to fit that consumption into snatched moments, via a plethora of mobile devices, the industry needs to embrace change.

If the perpetual handwringing in journalism is about how to make worthy topics interesting to a broad audience, among the content marketing industry, the journalistic endeavour may not be as pure, but the handwringing is just as intense. Rather than lamenting the rise of the likes of BuzzFeed, marketers must focus on how to use content better to connect with their consumers.

Content marketing may not be the industry's silver bullet, but how can marketers and agencies ensure it better lives up to its promise? The very fabric of the industry is changing and brands that have adopted the role of media-owner must face up to the new and growing challenges that come with this

1. Long live longform

In their rush to capitalise on the fast-paced action/reaction nature of social media, brands are in danger of believ-ing that fast and fleeting is the future of content marketing. In reality, longform content continues to thrive.

Daniel Zeff, chief executive of content agency Evidently, says: "Our appetite for long-form content has only been enhanced by new platforms. Our desire to binge-watch on Netflix or Amazon seems to jar with Twitter's 140 characters, but they have always co-existed."

Certainly, there has been a backlash against 'bite-sized' content. As social scientist Susan Greenfield writes: "The danger is not the trend for downloading per se; but rather the lack of an ensuing guarantee of any real understanding, or placing one thing in the context of some-thing else, of seeing one thing in terms of another. Surely we should not be reducing information, but... expanding it into a much wider context."

Brands should not make assumptions about how social media is changing the playing field. Andrew Hirsch, CEO of agency John Brown Media, says one of the most popular move-ments on Twitter is #Longreads. "Phones have become the prime medium for the long read. What we've seen the end of is lazy long copy. Long reads that offer value, make you feel glad you read them, move, inspire, inform and compel, we're going to see more of."

2. Mobile everything

Given consumer trends, there is no doubt that mobile should be front of content-marketers' minds.

Patrick Albano, head of solutions, EMEA, at Yahoo!, says mobile is offering brands new ways to reach their audience: "Now, if you create shortform content well, you can catch consumers' attention throughout their day."

This 'mobile everything' principle extends to how marketers manage their business needs and content-marketing approach. Rob Newlan, head of Facebook's creative shop for EMEA, explains that this involves installing new, simple processes. "At Facebook, [CEO Mark Zuckerberg] signs off engineering updates on a phone and from a capability point of view it is a renaissance."

According to Newlan, this shift will help address the issue of mobile creativity. "If you are an executive creative director you need to sign stuff off on the phone. We need to ask what the opportunities are and how we can maximise them."

3.Beware of talking to yourself

Just because the marketing and advertising industries have swallowed the rhetoric of 'conversational marketing', that does not mean your customers will want to participate. Chris Hirst, chief executive of agency Grey, says: "Most people, most of the time, don't want to have a conversation with a brand."

The challenge for brands is to ensure they are there when people do. Hirst adds: "It is all about place and time" - understanding the consumer, not simply driving conversation for its own sake.

Certainly there are many stakeholders - from agencies to social-media platforms - with a vested interest in pushing the power of conversational marketing for any given brand.

Jonathan Trimble, CEO of agency 18 Feet and Rising, says not every brand needs to be a publisher. "Marketers are afraid of being seen as Luddite, when what they are doing [with content marketing] is not very meaningful. It is basically being used as a direct-response channel. It all costs time and money and much of it has little impact. It is a big distraction both for brands and consumers."

4. It isn't a race to the bottom

The rise of mobile and micro-content does not equate to declining quality. As Sir Winston Churchill aptly declared: "I would have written a shorter letter if I had more time." In this paradigm, less is more.

It is easy to dismiss new platforms as dumbing-down content, but the reality is more complex. As Chris Dixon, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, explains on his blog, BuzzFeed has created world-class systems for analytics, advertising and content management. He writes: "Everything is built for mobile devices from the outset. Internet-native formats... are treated as equals to older formats... BuzzFeed takes the internet and computer science seriously."

While brands and traditional publishers have tried to jump on the BuzzFeed band-wagon, BuzzFeed is doing the opposite - using the success of its 'listicles' to branch out into more longform, quality content.

5.Beware the myth of niche networks

Global technology means that niche has gone mass-market.

"A 20-year-old American snowboarder has far more in common with a Chinese snowboarder than an American cross-country skier," explains Ola Scholander, director of distribution and partner-ships at online extreme-sports TV service EpicTV. "These two boarders are now able to talk, share ideas and even form a group that will grow too large to be considered niche any more."

Yet brands have been slow to embrace this trend - in fact, many have been guilty of seeing marketing activity on Twitter or Facebook as a substitute for a genuine content strategy.

Michael Litman, founder of micro-content agency Burst, claims Twitter is in the midst of growth problems. He argues: "User numbers are decreasing, as Twitter is largely a very media-savvy audience in communica-tion industries. Many mainstream consumers simply don't understand what it is for."

Paolo Nieddu, managing partner at agency Holler, says that WhatsApp's entrenchment in consumers' behaviour has made talking on the phone uncomfortable. "WhatsApp will be a good indication of the long tail of a campaign," he adds.

"The concept of a local business is growing more and
more irrelevant," contends Scholander. "We are now a global community, with the opportunities to reach out to anyone, anywhere, at any time."

6.Embrace the new visual economy

Neuroscientists believe that future generations will be more dominated by sensory, particularly visual, inputs in a way that will require more ongoing external stimulation. Content marketers need to adapt accordingly.

Patrick Albano, head of solutions, EMEA, at Yahoo!, says the idea of the photograph is evolving into photo storytelling. "There was this pressure for brands to tell the whole story in one picture, but, just as consumers have embraced micro-moments, brands should too," he adds.

The growth of video is also a key area. Jan Rezab, chief executive of analytics firm Socialbakers, describes videos as "the new photos" on social channels. He adds: "From shortform micro-content on Vine to longer videos on Facebook, the aggregation of video and content is a huge opportunity."

7.Look toward more fluid forms

Brands are pushing the boundaries of content marketing. Last year vodka brand Smirnoff teamed up with DJ Fresh for a world first. The DJ partnered three disabled dance music fans for the 'Mindtunes' project, in which they created music by using their brainwaves to control software.

While the marketing industry has been guilty of jumping on the tech bandwagon in search of nothing more meaningful than a splash or PR, content marketers have a huge opportunity to recognise and adapt to emotions in more nuanced ways.

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Technology The 25 Most Awkward Cat Sleeping Positions - perhaps not the most inspiring of headlines, but the article in question was read more than 3.5m times on BuzzFeed. This summer the site secured $50m of funding from US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, an investment that values it at a cool $850m.

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Stephen McCarthy / SPORTSFILE / Web Summit

DUBLIN, Ireland -- Hardware and software engineers drive innovation in today's tech industry. But entrepreneur Jay Bregman plans to add regulatory engineers, too, for his new startup to help companies use drones without breaking the law.

Silicon Valley's libertarian ethos bristles at regulatory constraints, but Bregman believes the privacy and safety concerns about drones mean they're necessary. His as-yet-unnamed startup plans to bake those rules into drone control software so drone makers and operators can fly the robotic devices without fear.

Bregman, who only weeks ago left his job as chief executive of taxi-flagging startup Hailo, revealed the plans in an interview with CNET at the Web Summit conference here.

"Unlike previous generations of computing technology, robots have a very special capability where they can move in space. They can bump into each other or into people. They can take pictures where they shouldn't," Bregman said. "The only way to regulate this is through an independent third-party company that produces compliance modules."

Drones are a hot topic right now as services companies like SkyCatch, which offers 3D aerial scanning services for construction firms and industrial customers, join consumer drone makers like Parrot and DJI. These unmanned aircraft, typically maneuvered with four small rotors, can give people an eye in the sky. If Google, Amazon and startup Matternet get their way, burlier drones also will be used to deliver goods to our homes faster than delivery trucks.

Stephen McCarthy / SPORTSFILE / Web Summit

One of the big problems with drone-focused businesses, though, is that they're currently illegal in the United States. Other countries are more liberal, and the US Federal Aviation Administration is working on looser regulations, but even then, drones will come with legal challenges. Collision and hardware failures pose safety risks, and even innocently aimed cameras on drones can encroach on privacy.

Bregman has some experience adapting companies to the the prevailing social order. His previous company, Hailo, adopts the smartphone-based hailing and payment mechanism of rival Uber but then uses licensed taxi cabs for actually transporting customers. In contrast, companies like Uber, Lyft and BlaBlaCar have often had fractious relationships with regulators and taxi medallion owners.

"One of my big interests has been regulation and policy and politics. I got a hell of a dose at Hailo negotiating with governments and medallion owners," Bregman said. "It taught me what you need to manage those interests. From what I've seen in Silicon Valley, nobody wants to know what the regulations are."

Regulating drones is hard, though. The FAA simply isn't equipped to handle tens of thousands of buzzing aircraft, Bregman said.

"It's a safety agency for regulating large commercial airliners," he said. The approach doesn't work with drones, where you can't find a drone's registration number or pinpoint who -- if anybody -- is piloting it. That's why he's hoping for technology that will "enforce those regulations via [software] code rather than enforced by new agency we'd have to create."

Bregman's company is also looking beyond drones to self-driving vehicles and other robotic technology, where the same issues of safety and regulation exist. But it's starting with drones. "That's the most urgent use case and what we know best," Bregman said.

There wasn't any problem with Hailo, in which Bregman remains the largest shareholder. But it was time to move on, he said.

"I left Hailo operationally months ago. I left because because I'm a builder. I build companies up to a certain point, mechanize them, hire the right people and let them do the job," Bregman said. When he discovered drones, "I got so seduced. I couldn't resist."

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Law-abiding drones? Hailo founder aims to make the idea fly

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DUBLIN, Ireland -- Hardware and software engineers drive innovation in today's tech industry. But entrepreneur Jay Bregman plans to add regulatory engineers, too, for his new startup to help companies use drones without breaking the law. Silicon Valley's libertarian ethos bristles at regulatory constraints, but Bregman believes the privacy and safety concerns about drones mean they're necessary.

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FB's plan to change Apple's dominance of apps

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FB's plan to change Apple's dominance of apps

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For years, Apple has dominated the $45 billion app business with its App Store. Android has always been the second-best place for apps.

Facebook, however, has a plan that could change all that. This hastily scrawled diagram on a whiteboard in its London office represents that plan, and it ought to scare the folks at Apple who work to maintain the primacy of iOS among app developers. (We explain the diagram below.)

iPhone and iPad users are generally more lucrative than Android people for apps, in terms of download fees and in-app payments. So the best apps are developed first for Apple's iOS mobile operating system. Only if they are successful do companies produce an Android version, often months or years later. Even then, Android apps tend to be copies of the original iOS app, with all the flaws and compromises that implies.

The dominance of iOS creates a bizarre distortion in the app market: In many major markets, Apple has only a about a 12% share of mobile users; 80% of users are on Android. Android has twice the number of activated devices globally (~1.6 billion versus ~775 million), according to BI Intelligence. Yet the majority is treated as second class in the app world. It can actually be difficult to hire Android developers because staff members want to work only on iOS. And you can be hugely successful as an app creator, even if the vast majority of phone users have no contact with your product.

At Facebook in Europe, however, executives think that Apple's iOS dominance might be about to weaken.

We spoke to Facebook's Europe, Middle East, and Africa platform director Julien Codorniou recently and were surprised when he told us that the trend he was seeing favored Android. Revenue generation on Android is catching up to that of iOS, and more developers - particularly for game developers - are going Android-first, especially in Europe.

Facebook is hoping to take advantage of this via its Parse app development platform, which Codorniou believes virtually erases the two-step iOS/Android development process, letting companies release new apps on both platforms simultaneously. (He drew the diagram for us as he explained how the Parse platform works - it is obviously not Facebook's "official" business plan.)

Erasing a key selling point for the iPhone.

That would actually be good for Apple in the sense that a robust, growing app market only increases Apple's App Store revenues. But it would also be bad for Apple, because if apps are released simultaneously on Android, it erases one of the key selling points of the iPhone: that users who want the cool new apps must be Apple users to get them.

As we discussed the app market, Codorniou drew the diagram (see right) on a whiteboard on the eighth floor of Facebook's cavernous London offices. We have annotated it here so you can see what's going on.

Traditionally, app developers would essentially make two separate apps - one for iOS and then, later, one for Android. They needed a lot of operations to support them, like servers. Facebook's Parse platform replaces that: It lets companies build, store, and serve apps directly from the Parse cloud. All developers have to do is create an iOS client, an Android client, and even a Windows Phone client, and publish them as needed.

Once the apps are in the Apple App Store and the Google Play store, then developers can use Facebook's various marketing products - mobile app install ads, engagement ads, and the Facebook Audience Network - to promote them.

The inequality statement at the bottom of the diagram, "CPI < LTV," indicates what developers are aiming for: As long as the Cost Per Install (the marketing investment it took to persuade you to download an app) is less than the Long Term Value of new downloads, users, and in-app payments, then the company should keep spending on more ads on Facebook. If the cost is greater than the value, the companies are advised to halt what they are doing and think again.

More than 270,000 apps are using the system, up from 100,000 the year before. (For scale, both Apple's App Store and Google Play have more than 1 million apps available. So Facebook is partnering with a significant chunk of the market.)

"We see more people being Android-first because of the size of the market."

But does the Parse platform compete with Apple or Google?

"I would say no," Cordoniou says. "We can make you big on Facebook.com, on the web, on iOS, on Android, on Windows phone, on any new platform coming up that we support. The main value proposition of Facebook is the fact that it's cross-platform."

Developers still have to build separate clients of course; that isn't going away. But are they more likely to continue to build the Apple one first?

"We see more people being Android-first because of the size of the market. The Parse technology is like Unity in gaming," Codorniou says, referring to the game development platform on which you can create games for multiple systems. "You build on Unity, you're almost de facto on iOS and on Android. You see a lot of cross-platform tools, this is why we have an amazing partnership with Unity on top of Parse and on top of Facebook Canvas, because if you build on Unity, you can build on iOS, Android, and Facebook at the same time. You see a lot of games like that being developed by Russian developers."

"It's easier to update your app on Android."

Android-first, really?

"People look at the numbers," Codorniou says. "They want downloads, installs. They know that the monetization is catching up on Android. Of course iOS is the better platform when it comes to monetization, but it's easier to update your app on Android. There are many people on an Android phone ... The world you described [in which Apple is dominant] was true a year ago, but I see that things are changing.

"The vision we have with Parse and with the platform in general is to accelerate the time to market. It should not take you six months to develop from iOS to Android.

"There is a pattern coming from Eastern Europe. The Russian developers develop on Android first because of a big audience, and it maybe being easier to develop. They liked the fact that they could submit a new version of the app every day. [With Apple, each new version of the app must be approved before it hits the App Store. There is no new-version approval for Android.] This is a trend that I see and I think it is going to accelerate."

Codorniou has a team spreading the word, too: "As of today, I have four guys from my team in Paris talking to Android developers about the greatness of Parse, Facebook login, app links, app events, all of these things we introduced at f8. It's a very important bet for us."

Time will tell, of course. The App Store is generating perhaps $10 billion in annual revenue for iOS developers, while Google Play is generating $5 billion. It could take a long time to shift that momentum in such a way that developers become encouraged to go Android-first or even Android-equal.

But if it were to happen, Facebook wants developers to know it has just the system to help with that.

NOW WATCH: 8 Tips For Google Search That Will Streamline Nearly Everything You Do

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This Diagram We Saw Inside Facebook's London Office Made Us Think Twice About Apple's Dominance Of Apps

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For years, Apple has dominated the $45 billion app business with its App Store. Android has always been the second-best place for apps. Facebook, however, has a plan that could change all that. This hastily scrawled diagram on a whiteboard in its London office represents that plan, and it ought to scare the folks at Apple who work to maintain the primacy of iOS among app developers.

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In 72 hours Apple Pay surpassed all other contactless payment providers

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In 72 hours Apple Pay surpassed all other contactless payment providers

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Ask ten people to answer the question, "What sets Apple apart from other consumer electronics and technology companies?" and you're likely to get twenty different answers. Some point to its design sensibilities, others its savvy branding and marketing. Some might even cite supply chain mastery (architected in no small part by Tim Cook). Fewer still will likely point to Apple's history of input innovation, first inventing the mouse, then the iPod clickwheel, then multi-touch screens for the iPhone, and most recently the Apple Watch's Digital Crown.

They're all good answers, and have all been critical to Apple's monumental success over the last two decades. But for my money, they all miss what's truly sets Apple apart from its competitors: the ability to drive adoption.

It may not be a single skill -- rather it spans marketing, sales, distribution (physical and digital), and business development, among other disciplines. But it's the coordinated dance between these areas, nearly perfected by Apple, that sets the company apart apart.

Take for example Apple Pay, which launched about a week ago. To make this new platform a success, Apple needed to get millions of NFC-enabled (and TouchID- and secure element-enabled) mobile devices into the hands of consumers. But that wasn't enough. It also needed to negotiate and sign partnerships with banks and payment networks. The same goes for retailers. But all of this would have been moot if Apple didn't make the media, and subsequently a large segment of the consumer population, excited about the new payment technology.

The result? Just 72 hours after going live, Apple Pay surpassed all other previous contactless payment technologies combined in payments volume. This, according to Tim Cook, who spoke at the WSJD Live event on Monday. Cook, who revealed that Apple updated more than 1 million credit and debit cards in this three day period, tells WSJ editor-in-chief Gerard Baker:

"Visa and MasterCard, we talked to these guys today, and they told us if you sum up everyone else that's in the contactless mobile payment at the point of sale, we're already number one. And not just number one, but we're more than the total of all the other guys. And we've only been at it a week. I feel fantastic.

"We've got a lot more to go. We have a lot more merchants to sign up, we have a lot more banks to sign up. And we have the rest of the world. We're only in the US right now. And so, we're just getting started, but the early ramp looks fantastic." What makes this level of early adoption so staggering is that Apple Pay is not that different from prior contactless payment options like Google Wallet. Sure it adds more security, thanks to TouchID, but tens of millions of US consumers (hundreds of millions, worldwide) have had the option of using their smartphone at checkout for several years. And yet, Apple is already the market leader after 72 hours. With just a few million less-than-month-old phones in the market.

Few consumers, beyond those deeply entrenched in the technology or financial services industries, have even been aware of Google Wallet. And Google did next to nothing to sign up additional banking and merchant partners, or to drive adoption and usage of its platform among consumers. Ditto for Samsung, Motorola LG, and HTC, the big Android device makers. (Make no mention of Amazon, with its intersecting role in consumer commerce and mobile devices, which has been nowhere in this market.)

Google Wallet certainly wasn't enough of a threat to anyone to drive a consortium of the world's largest and most powerful merchants to turn off their NFC terminals like petulant children, rather than risk supporting a technology that would make their customers' lives better -- albeit stripping them of valuable consumer data. You can't get much more validation than that. On the other side of the equation, banks are so excited about driving Apple Pay adoption that they're giving their customers free money just for trying it.

Cook concluded his discussion of Apple Pay by explaining why he thinks the platform has driven such early excitement:

"I'm getting flooded with emails from customers that are just - it's sort of that 'ahh' moment. You use that phone and that's all you have to do. You know, I went to the Whole Foods and did this and it's incredible. You're no longer fishing for your credit card, you're no longer worried about the merchant losing your credit card - that happened all over the place this year and last year. So I think it's the first and only mobile payment system that both easy, private, and secure. So I think we hit on all three key points that the customer cares about."

As spot on as Cook's assessment is, it overlooks the essential element of getting Apple Pay in front of all the right constituents, from consumers to merchants to banks, to make this level of adoption possible.

DaringFireball's John Gruber sums up this situation, writing:

It's just marketing, and Apple's ability to let their users know about new features like Apple Pay, and their ability to partner with a bunch of nationwide chains right off the bat. [Emphasis his] There's no "just" about any of that. Getting users to know about new features is not easy. Getting partners on board is not easy. Selling tens of millions of brand-new phones in the first month is not easy.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. These NFC terminals have been in stores for years, and never became popular. Then Apple Pay went live one week ago, and the iPhone is already the market leader. This is just the latest example of Apple driving adoption, and building consensus, around the launch of a new product. It did the same, in a post-Napster world, with the launch of iTunes, bringing labels to the digital music table and convincing consumers that music was still worth paying for. Later, when it launched the App Store, it convinced thousands, then millions of developers to learn a new programming language, build for a new platform, and adopt a new distribution channel. At the same time, it convinced everyday consumers, most of whom previously had never paid for software beyond Microsoft Office and some antivirus, that apps were worth paying for (although how much has become an issue in and of itself).

It's easy to point to Apple's worldwide brand, and its standing as the world's most valuable (and cash rich) company and write off these successes as inevitable given that context. But as nearly every other company in the ecosystem has proven, time and again, driving adoption of something new is no easy task. It's hard to sell millions of devices, to excite and recruit millions of eager early adopters, to sign up hundreds of thousands of channel partners, and to command the business world's attention, all around something new and unproven.

And yet, Apple has done this time and time again. It's tough to encapsulate the "skill" of driving adoption into a neat soundbite, which may be one reason that it's so underappreciated. But there's no arguing that Apple's in a class of its own.

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Apple Pay's first week reminds us that Apple's secret sauce is in driving adoption

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Ask ten people to answer the question, "What sets Apple apart from other consumer electronics and technology companies?" and you're likely to get twenty different answers. Some point to its design sensibilities, others its savvy branding and marketing. Some might even cite supply chain mastery (architected in no small part by Tim Cook).

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FT launches FirstFT to bring readers must-reads from around the web

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Andrew Jack said: "In an age of information overload where readers are shying away from the perpetual social media stream, trusted editorial judgment and aggregation is an increasingly valuable convenience for busy readers. FirstFT is carefully crafted, analysed and illustrated by our world-class journalists and provides a new way for readers to get the FT's take on the essential news of the day."

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The Economist launches Espresso daily digest

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The Economist launches Espresso daily digest

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[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHte6ipno1U width:595]

Today we are delighted to announce the global launch of The Economist Espresso, a new morning briefing from the editors of The Economist. Delivered to your smartphone or inbox before breakfast, it tells you what's on the global agenda in the coming day, what to look out for in business, finance and politics and, most important, what to make of it.
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Published each weekday morning in three editions for the Americas, Europe and Asia, Espresso brings you up to speed in just a couple of minutes at the start of your day. Displaying The Economist 's characteristic brevity, clarity and wit, it provides a concentrated, stimulating shot of global analysis that can be consumed quickly as part of your morning routine. Like the weekly, it is designed to be "finishable"-gathering up what you need to know into a compact package, with no need to click on links to get the full picture. Read it, and you're ready for the day.

Espresso can be accessed either via an iPhone or Android smartphone app (search for "Economist Espresso" on the App Store or Google Play). We are offering non-subscribers a one-month free trial via the apps, after which full access will cost £2.49/$3.99 a month. If you are already a digital-only or print-and-digital subscriber to The Economist, then full access to Espresso is now included with your subscription. Simply log in to the app using your registered e-mail address and password for Economist.com or, for delivery direct to your inbox, opt in to receive Espresso via e-mail, starting next week. For more information about accessing your digital subscription benefits visit economist.com/digital

We have put a lot of effort into developing this new complement to the weekly edition. The first daily edition in The Economist 's 171-year history, it does what we have always done, distilling what's important from the news and telling you what it means, but on a daily rather than a weekly basis. We hope you will enjoy it.

-The Editors

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video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHte6ipno1U width:595] Today we are delighted to announce the global launch of The Economist Espresso, a new morning briefing from the editors of The Economist. Delivered to your smartphone or inbox before breakfast, it tells you what's on the global agenda in the coming day, what to look out for in business, finance and politics and, most important, what to make of it.

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Mobile development has never been easy. Unfortunately, it's about to get much harder, according to a new Forrester report that predicts eight key changes for the mobile world in the coming year-shifts that will keep mobile developers on their toes.

Really on their toes, if Forrester has it right. The analyst firm suggests that while developers are still trying to master application development, the market is shifting:

... away from apps, and toward more contextually relevant micro-moments, delivered across families of devices, that are personalized to anticipate unique customer needs.

Just what are these "micro-moments," and how should developers build for them?

Big Changes Coming In Mobile Development

Due to a variety of hardware and software ecosystems, not to mention intermittent Internet connectivity and awkward app delivery methods, mobile application development has remained a black art for many. Even so, a significant number of developers feel that they've come to terms with mobile app development.

See also: 50% Of App Developers Focus On Mobile, But They're Not Writing The Next Flappy Bird

"Nothing could be further from the truth," declare Forrester analysts Jeffrey Hammond and Michael Facemire.

In fact, they write, even as mobile developers struggle to catch up with the market, the market is about to change in eight significant ways in 2015:

Standalone apps will lose their luster

Hardware-driven innovation will enable new opportunities

Mobile competition will shift to accessories and ecosystems

Composition will dominate front-end mobile experiences

The merger of physical and digital worlds accelerates

Mobile context becomes high-def

Service virtualization and API design tools will appear in every development toolbox

Low-code platforms will move into the aggregation tier, but struggle to go mainstream

Underlying all of these is a need for faster iteration and more contextually relevant interaction with the customer.

So, with regard to API design, for example, Forrester insists that "[a] well-defined API ecosystem is required for a front-end (mobile or otherwise) experience to be flexible enough to adapt to continuously changing customer demands." That's because without that flexibility, "firms are forced to maintain separate back-end architectures for each front-end channel, which is simply not scalable."

See also: Why Mobile Developers Are Really Starting To Embrace The Enterprise

But the most surprising (and hard to stomach) change may well be the shift away from standalone app development as ground zero for mobile development.

Embracing Micro-Moments

One of the big challenges awaiting mobile app developers has been profound and proliferating fragmentation: fragmentation of devices, operating systems, screen sizes and more. While the problem is endemic to the mobile landscape, generally, it's particularly scary for Android developers, as this OpenSignal visualization shows:

Source: OpenSignal (Android fragmentation, July 2013)

To a certain degree, developers have adapted to fragmentation by ignoring it. Rather than ensuring their app will work on every device, they've optimized for the majority of the market.

That approach may no longer work.

Or, rather, a pristine app experience may no longer be the right target, according to Forrester. Micro-moments are, as Hammond notes in a separate blog post:

Instead of customers intentionally using apps a few times a day, developers need to think about how they engage customers in 5-10 second interactions many times a day. As a result, development focus shifts to favor notifications, widgets, and cross-device interactions, all of which are better supported in iOS 8 with new APIs. In a sense, the golden age of the self contained app is over, but developers still need to adjust.

Previously this would have been impossible for developers, but Apple, Google and other platform vendors are opening up access to platform services as well as device sensors. According to the report:

Micro-moments are presented through platform features like Google Now and iOS8 app extensions. These provide APIs so that developers can inject contextually relevant information into platform mobile services or aggregation apps like HomeKit and HealthKit. Additionally, actionable notifications, available since the 4.0 Android release and now in iOS 8, will move to the forefront of developers' attention as a way to proactively grab a customer's attention with contextually relevant data.

Rather than a top-down approach, in other words, Apple and Google are finally allowing development partners to play a bigger role in their respective ecosystems.

This is great news for developers and the customers they serve. It's also really hard, because it requires more than a Field of Dreams "if we build the app they will come" approach.

Getting To Know You

In fact, the experience is no longer really about the app at all. It's about the analytics that inform interaction:

Micro-moments require a deep understanding of what a customer wants, and how and where they want that critical information delivered. They are informed by aggregated local, historic, and operational context which requires real-time data integration with internal and third-party data.

Forrester adds the obvious addendum: "Teams that have already invested in comprehensive APIs will be well positioned to support micro-moments, but others will struggle to adapt."

As the digital and physical worlds blend in meaningful ways, developers must think hard about how to take advantage of micro-moments to take advantage of what's happening in the physical world (a particular location, for example), and surface the right digital content at precisely the right time.

Easy? No. Essential? Absolutely.
Lead photo by Matthew Wilkinson

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8 Predictions For Mobile App Development In 2015 - ReadWrite

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Mobile development has never been easy. Unfortunately, it's about to get much harder, according to a new Forrester report that predicts eight key changes for the mobile world in the coming year-shifts that will keep mobile developers on their toes. Really on their toes, if Forrester has it right.

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Amazon extends Prime to partner sites - All Saints in the UK

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Amazon extends Prime to partner sites - All Saints in the UK

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Can Amazon Prime become the VIP pass for the rest of the web?

For the first time since launching its Prime membership program in 2005, Amazon is extending some of the club's perks to its members as they shop on other big shopping sites around the Web. But mistrust among other online retailers could prove a big hurdle for Amazon's plans to make Prime more valuable outside of its own websites.

Amazon announced its first such deal Tuesday with the mid-size British fashion retailer AllSaints, which has started offering Amazon Prime members free, next-day shipping on purchases they make on AllSaints.com.

The deal comes with a few moving parts. First, AllSaints has started to advertise its products in search results on Amazon.com - something that many fashion retail brands have so far been reluctant to do. Amazon customers who want to buy AllSaints apparel found on the giant marketplace will have to click through to AllSaints.com, log in with their Amazon usernames and passwords and use the payment methods they have stored with Amazon to qualify for the free shipping deal. Amazon charges AllSaints a small fee each time one of its customers clicks through from Amazon.com to AllSaints.com, but does not take a cut of the sale. In that way, it's closer to an advertising deal.

The move underscores the growing importance inside Amazon of the Prime program, the $99 annual membership that gives members two-day shipping on a wide range of products and access to a large library of TV shows, movies and songs that can be streamed online. And it's clear why: Prime members spend double the amount that non-Prime members do on Amazon in a year, according to research studies conducted by various industry analysts.

As a result, Amazon is looking to add more perks to the program to attract more members, which may number as many as 50 million worldwide, according to one prominent analyst's estimate. On Tuesday, Amazon announced that Prime members will receive free, unlimited photo storage going forward.

The pact with AllSaints also highlights Amazon's ambition to grab a bigger piece of the giant apparel industry, which totaled $174 billion in sales to U.S. adults in 2013, according to research firm NPD. But Amazon is facing an uphill battle as it tries to court higher-end retailers - with their healthy profit margins and high average order size - to advertise or sell their products on Amazon's marketplace.

Over the past year, Amazon has failed to convince other retailers to sign on for this retail program, known internally as Prime Pass, according to industry sources. Abercrombie & Fitch and Neiman Marcus are among the retailers that have declined to advertise their products on Amazon or offer shipping perks to Prime customers on their sites, these sources said. Both companies are instead working with ShopRunner, an Amazon competitor that sells a $79 annual membership that gives its customers free, two-day shipping on orders placed on a wide range of partnering e-commerce sites.

The list of fears retailers have about doing business with Amazon is long. At the top is the worry of diluting their brand image by advertising their products on Amazon's marketplace, which is still best known as a place to buy items such as consumer electronics, tools and toys, not $1,000 leather jackets.

"When we go to open a store in the mall, we're very careful about who is around us," one high-ranking retail executive told Re/code recently. "On Amazon, because they are serving up customized results, our stuff may appear next to some Joe Schmo or third party selling similar goods at half the price."

Retailers said they were reluctant to give Amazon a view into which of their products were most popular among Amazon shoppers. Some of these fears stretch to the border of paranoia. Several competitors told me they are convinced that Amazon may one day cut its own deals with clothing manufacturers to sell apparel under its own brand names that compete directly with its own retail partners.

"The more information they have, the more deadly they get as a competitor," another retail executive said in a recent interview.

I ran these concerns by Amazon VP of Seller Services Tom Taylor and AllSaints global digital chief Rich Ascott in an interview Monday during an industry conference called Money2020.

When customers log in using their Amazon account information on AllSaints or other sites, Amazon provides the retailer only the customer's name and e-mail address so it keeps track of the customer, Taylor said. He also maintained that Amazon only sees the purchase total, and not the items ordered, when someone completes a sale using their Amazon payment information on another site.

Ascott, for his part, understands the fears, but believes many are misguided. To maintain its brand image, AllSaints will have a storefront on Amazon.com that more closely resembles its own site than other Amazon pages. AllSaints also will only ever sell from its own storefront, so shoppers shouldn't expect to be able to buy a pair of AllSaints boots directly on Amazon.com.

The AllSaints exec also believes strong fashion brands should have little to fear going head to head with Amazon if it chose to sell its own line of clothing. Some might call that confidence, others naïveté.

The AllSaints brand, "is precious enough that you wouldn't want to give it away and let Amazon put it in its own brown boxes," Ascott said. "But it's robust enough that it could stand up to the worry that these guys might one day use the data to build a competitor to AllSaints."

AllSaints is handling all of the packaging and shipping itself. Ascott said the retailer decided to offer Prime customers next-day shipping instead of the normal two-day window that Amazon promises because it wanted the partnership to stand out. AllSaints is also considering giving Prime customers a first look at new products and may eventually offer some clothing exclusively to this group of shoppers.

"Prime could be the VIP pass to the Internet," Ascott said.

Amazon customers complete purchases after placing items in their shopping cart at a rate that's 34 percent better than non-Amazon customers, according to AllSaints. The Amazon payments integration has also reduced checkout time by more than a minute on AllSaints.com and boosted sales. That's one reason why Amazon said it will guarantee that its payments button will help increase a site's sales within 30 days or it will reimburse the partnering site for the fees Amazon collected on up to $100,000 in transactions.

"I'm drinking the Kool-Aid," Ascott said. "But the stats back it up."

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Amazon Begins Extending Prime-Member Perks to Other Shopping Sites

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Can Amazon Prime become the VIP pass for the rest of the web? For the first time since launching its Prime membership program in 2005, Amazon is extending some of the club's perks to its members as they shop on other big shopping sites around the Web.

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How Apple creates leverage - and the future of Apple Pay

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How Apple creates leverage - and the future of Apple Pay

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Tim Cook said something very revealing on last quarter's earnings call:

Last month we introduced two new categories; the first is Apple Pay, an entirely new way to pay for things in stores and in apps...The second new category is Apple Watch, our most personal device ever and one that has already captured the world's imagination.

Did you catch that? Cook put Apple Pay on the same level as Apple Watch. It is no hobby.

Something that has characterized most of Apple's recent successes is the degree to which they have depended on partnerships with normally intractable industries. The two most obvious examples are iPod/iTunes and the music industry, and most obviously, the iPhone and the phone carriers. This perhaps seems counterintuitive: Apple is famous for being difficult to deal with, working diligently to ensure it always has the upper hand, even as it holds its partners to impossible standards.

This reading of Apple's partnership abilities, though, mistakenly rests on the assumption that business deals grow out of personal affinity. The truth is that while personal likability may help on the margins, the controlling force in Apple's negotiations is cold hard business logic. Thus, in order to understand why Apple has been so successful in previous partnerships - and, looking forward, to better estimate the chances of Apple Pay becoming widespread - it is essential to understand how the company acquires and uses leverage.

The most important term in the study of negotiation is BATNA: Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. Your BATNA defines the point at which you are willing to walk away from a deal. In order to "win" a negotiation, you want to make your BATNA as high as possible, so it's easy for you to walk away, even as you work to make your counterparty's BATNA as low as possible, so that they will concede more than they would like. Leverage is the means by which you change your counterparty's BATNA.

When the iTunes Store née iTunes Music Store launched in early 2003, Apple was a very different company than they are today. The iPod had been on the market for a year-and-a-half, but it only worked with a Mac, which was still stuck at well under 5% of the market. This, though, worked to Apple's advantage in their negotiations with the music labels: not only did Apple not have much to lose, but the labels didn't really see Apple as being a major player. The labels were far more concerned about the widespread sharing of music online; suing Napster to oblivion simply made music sharing more distributed and harder to control, which, of course, benefited Apple: their customers had alternate means with which to fill their iPods. So when Apple showed up with an offering to build a music store for their small audience, well, why not?

Just a few months later, Apple expanded iTunes to Windows, and what could the labels say? Despite the fact it only existed on the Mac, the iTunes Music Store was already the number one music download service in the world. It turned out Apple had another ace in the hole: a customer base that, while small, had an outsized willingness and ability to spend. After all, they had already dropped at least $1,500 on a Mac and iPod (and likely a lot more), what was an extra $0.99? At a more basic level, said customers were loyal to Apple not because it made sense from a feature or price perspective, but simply because they loved and valued the experience of using Apple products. That, ultimately, was the key to Apple's favorable position: they had the best customers because they had the best user experience; if the labels wanted access to them, they had to agree to Apple's terms.

Over time the labels' addiction to iTunes revenues only deepened, and by 2008 iTunes was their biggest source of revenue. Music executives would rant and rave about Apple's power, and try to increase their own leverage by, for example, allowing DRM-free songs on Amazon but not Apple, but it didn't matter because Apple had the best experience, and thus the best customers.

Apple's negotiations with the music labels was just a warmup for the phone carriers. While Apple in 2006 (in the runup to the iPhone) was in a much stronger position than 2003, they were still much smaller ($60.6 billion market cap) than AT&T ($102.3 billion) or Verizon ($93.8 billion) on an individual basis, much less the carrier industry as a whole. More importantly, carriers weren't facing a collective existential threat like piracy, which significantly increased their BATNA relative to the music labels.

The music labels, though, benefitted from a relatively low elasticity of substitution: if I wanted one particular band that wasn't on the iTunes Music Store, I wouldn't be easily satisfied by the fact another band happened to be available. The carriers, on the other hand, largely offered the same service: voice, SMS, and data, all of which was interoperable. This increased elasticity of substitution gave Apple an opportunity to pursue a divide-and-conquer strategy: they just needed one carrier.

Apple reportedly started iPhone negotiations with Verizon, but it turned out that Verizon was already kicking AT&T's (then Cingular's) butt through aggressive investment and technology choices, resulting in increasing subscriber numbers largely at AT&T's expense. Verizon saw no need to change their strategy, which included strong branding and total control over the experience on phones on their network. AT&T, meanwhile, was on the opposite side of the coin: they were losing, and that in turn had a significant effect on their BATNA - they were a lot more willing to compromise when it came to branding and the user experience, and so the iPhone launched on AT&T to Apple's specifications.

That is when Apple's user experience advantage and corresponding customer loyalty took over: for the first time ever customers were willing to endure the hassle and expense of changing phone carriers just so they could have access to a specific device. Over the next several years Verizon began to bleed customers to AT&T even though their service levels were not only better, but actually widening the gap thanks to the iPhone's impact on AT&T. Four years after launch the iPhone did finally arrive on Verizon with the same lack of carrier branding and control over the user experience; in other words, Verizon eventually accepted the exact same deal they rejected in 2006 because the loyalty of Apple customers gave them no choice.

Apple followed the same playbook in country after country: insistence on total control (and over time, significant marketing investments and a guaranteed number of units sold) with a willingness to launch on second or third-place carriers if necessary. Probably the starkest example of the success of this strategy was in Japan. Softbank was in a distant third place in the Japanese market when they began selling the iPhone in 2008; finally after four years second-place KDDI added the iPhone, but only after Softbank had increased its subscriber base from 19 million to 30 million. NTT DoCoMo, long the dominant carrier and a pioneer in carrier-branded services finally caved last year after seeing its share of the market slide from 52% in 2008 to 46%. Apple had all the leverage, because they had customers who cared more about the iPhone than they did their carrier.

Apple is certainly not shy about proclaiming their fealty towards building great products. And I believe Tim Cook, Jony Ive, and the rest of Apple's leadership when they say their focus on the experience of using an Apple device comes from their desire to build something they themselves would want to use. But I also believe the strategic implications of this focus are serially undervalued.

Last year I wrote a piece called What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong that explored the idea that the user experience was the sort of attribute that could never be overshot; as long as Apple provided a superior experience, they would always win the high-end subset of the consumer market that is willing to pay for nice things.

However, this telling of the story of iTunes and the iPhone suggests that this focus on the user experience not only defends against disruption, but it also provides an offensive advantage as well: namely, Apple increases its user experience advantage through the leverage it gains from consumers loyal to the company. In the case of iTunes, Apple was able to create the most seamless music acquisition process possible: the labels had no choice but to go along. Similarly, when it comes to smartphones, Apple devices from day one have not been cluttered with carrier branding or apps or control over updates. If carriers didn't like Apple's insistence on creating the best possible user experience, well, consumers who valued said experience were more than happy to take their business elsewhere. In effect, Apple builds incredible user experiences, which gains them loyal customers who collectively have massive market power, which Apple can then effectively wield to get its way - a way that involves maximizing the user experience. It's a virtuous circle:

Understanding this circle and how it interacts with the relevant actors is the key to evaluating the prospects of Apple Pay.

When it comes to Apple Pay adoption, there are five collective players that matter: Apple, Apple customers, credit card networks (Visa, Mastercard and American Express), banks, and merchants.

Apple has, as is their wont, spent a significant amount of time on the Apple Pay experience. Over the last several years they have built the various pieces of Apple Pay, including Touch ID, their own chips (which include the secure enclave), an experimental NFC antenna design, as well as the software to make it work, with the bonus of 800 million credit cards stored in iTunes ready to be potentially added

Apple customers continue to have higher amount of income as well as a demonstrated willingness to spend. Apple customers are also very willing to use new technology offered by Apple, including Apple Pay

Credit card networks are the closest parallel to the music labels in that their overriding concern is the existential threat posed by potential networks or payment options that cut them out of the loop entirely. No one particularly likes them or the fees they charge. Thus, when Apple declared its willingness to build Apple Pay on top of credit cards, they jumped at the opportunity to take part

Banks are the carriers in this story. In the long run Apple Pay completely obscures their role in a customer's payment activity, and the inevitable end for any invisible service is competition on price. However, banks have two problems when it comes to Apple Pay:

Banks are involved with every single Apple Pay transaction, which means if your bank does not support Apple Pay, it simply won't work

Banks are easily substitutable. Sure, switching banks can be a bit of a pain, and you might have been with the same one forever, but if Apple customers were willing to switch carriers to get the iPhone, surely many would be willing to switch banks to be able to use Apple Pay

Moreover, the banks benefit from Apple Pay's increased security and correspondingly lower fraud rates - just as, I might add, carriers benefitted from iPhone customer's higher average revenue per user (ARPU). Sure, it's just as bad being a dumb bank as it is a dumb pipe, but better a dumb bank that makes money instead of one that customers simply leave

Merchants are much more difficult, and there is no real corresponding analogy in Apple's previous dealings. Apple has much less leverage for a few reasons:

Merchants have a lower elasticity of substitution: on the low end, day-to-day purchases aren't worth the hassle of a longer trip simply to use Apple Pay, and on the high end, retailers are highly differentiated by the products they offer

Merchants see much less direct benefit from Apple Pay. True, it's likely that over time total transactions from Apple Pay-using customers will increase due to the decrease in friction relative to credit cards, but in the short term merchants are paying the exact same fees regardless of how a payment is made

On the flip side, the anonymized nature of an Apple Pay transaction deprives merchant of valuable customer data that can be used to better target marketing campaigns and/or be sold for a profit

This explains the situation that Apple's payment initiative is in today: Apple Pay as an experience works incredibly well, Apple's customers are eager to use it, the credit card networks fully support it, banks are falling over themselves to not only sign up but to pay Apple 0.15% of every transaction for the privilege, but retailers, particularly big chains that pay the most in credit card fees and reap the most benefits from data collection, are much more hesitant.

So now what?

It turns out that Apple has acquired a few more pieces of leverage through this process:

In the U.S., October 2015 brings the liability shift in which the less secure party in a transaction (i.e. a magnetic swipe card used at a payment terminal that accepts chip-enabled cards, or swipe-only terminal accepting a chip-enabled card) assumes liability for that transaction. This should spur the purchase of new credit card terminals at the vast majority of merchants; most of those new terminals will likely have NFC

By adopting industry-standard NFC, Apple has ensured that Apple Pay will "just work" at any NFC-enabled payment terminal that is not explicitly configured to not accept Apple Pay. This means that by the end of next year it's likely that Apple Pay will work in a large part of the "long tail" of retail

For retailers that are still holding out, Apple has two new bargaining chips:

The 0.15% that Apple is receiving from the banks for each Apple Pay transaction could be funneled back to the retailers, resulting in an immediate impact on the bottom line. Keep in mind retail is a very low margin business; turning down any reduction in credit card fees will be difficult to do

Apple Pay could incorporate retailer loyalty programs, helping close the loop when it comes to data collection. This could work similarly to the offering Apple has for Newsstand publishers: customers opt in to sharing data, an offer that most will likely accept in exchange for the various discounts that typically accompany such programs. In fact, it seems that such an offering is already in the works

In short, Apple could very well soon have an offer that might be too good for the vast majority of retailers to refuse: get the lift that comes with seamless transactions, plus a reduction in credit card fees, along with the seamless inclusion of pre-existing loyalty programs. Oh-and-by-the-way, if a particular retailer or three still wishes to hold out, then Apple's loyal customers will sooner rather than later have a huge number of alternatives willing to take their business.

Presuming this works out as well for Apple as I expect it to, there are two key lessons to be drawn. First, all of Apple's leverage ultimately - either directly or indirectly - stems from consumer loyalty, which itself is based on Apple's focus on the user experience. Second, the reason why Tim Cook so confidently called out Apple Pay as a new category is that he knew it was an area where Apple could bring that leverage to bear, just as they did in music and telephony. This is in marked contrast to the Apple TV, which is still a hobby: TV remains a much stronger business that is far more resistant to disruption than most people in tech appreciate, and until Apple has a means of obtaining leverage it will only ever remain so.

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How Apple Creates Leverage, and the Future of Apple Pay

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Tim Cook said something very revealing on last quarter's earnings call: Last month we introduced two new categories; the first is Apple Pay, an entirely new way to pay for things in stores and in apps...The second new category is Apple Watch, our most personal device ever and one that has already captured the world's imagination.

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How Apple creates leverage - and the future of Apple Pay

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How Apple creates leverage - and the future of Apple Pay

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The Samaritans suicide prevention charity in the U.K. has suspended its controversial Samaritans Radar Twitter app, which scanned the tweets of people that subscribers follow, in order to find signs of heavy depression and alert the subscribers. Critics, many of whom have experience of mental health issues, pointed out that the app was a gift to stalkers and trolls, and a disincentive to using Twitter to vent. Consent was a major issue, with the people being monitored not even receiving notifications when their tweets were flagged. In a Friday blog post, the Samaritans apologized "to anyone who has inadvertently been caused any distress" and said they would test "potential changes" to the app. The suspension took too long to arrive, but I'm glad it has.

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Suicide prevention charity suspends tweet-scanning service over ethical concerns

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The Samaritans suicide prevention charity in the U.K. has suspended its controversial Samaritans Radar Twitter app, which scanned the tweets of people that subscribers follow, in order to find signs of heavy depression and alert the subscribers.

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Facebook: wants to improve users' newspaper and magazine content experience via its app

The plan is in its early stages, but the idea is for Facebook to host newspaper and magazine content on its mobile app as it bids to become its users' own curated newspaper.

The social network views publishers' own sites as slow to load content, and thinks people would get a smoother experience if they could open articles through its app. Revenues from advertising would be shared between Facebook and the publishers.

But caution abounds. Charlie Cottrell, the editorial director at We Are Social, says publishers will be reluctant to put content on to a platform where they cannot control distribution, as this could compromise editorial integrity. "Facebook's success will depend on both satisfying publishers' desires and allaying their fears," she says, adding: "When Facebook releases a functionality, it is usually as a first step to something that profits the platform rather than its partners."

She points to the way Facebook drew brands in with the free marketing potential of "likes" from fans, but then brands found they were expected to pay for brand content, with bigger investments needed each month to reach their fan base.

"If Facebook controls news content, publishers could find the platform is in a position to dictate the level of that ad split over time in their favour," she adds.

Chris Cox, the chief product officer at Facebook, plays down this issue, saying: "Because we play an increasingly important role in how people discover the news, we feel a responsibility to work with publishers to come up with as good an experience as we can for consumers. We want and need that to be a good experience for publishers as well."

Phillip Dyte, the paid social media manager at iProspect UK, warns of a potential backlash. "It's about editorial integrity and Facebook trying to tell people what to think. People often leap to the worst conclusions about this sort of thing," he says. He believes that, if the idea were to take off, it could benefit writers rather than news brands.

Meanwhile, Andy Pringle, the head of performance at ZenithOptimedia's Performics division, thinks Facebook is moving away from simply being a place where brands can drive "likes" and connect with customers to being a "mass-targeted-reach channel" with the allure of 27 million consumers in the UK.

Facebook wants users to see the site as a self-created newspaper where they explore their interests, Pringle says. This does seem to move into YouTube territory as a platform to "explore your passions" rather than just a place to connect. Pringle adds that Facebook is now asking brands for "add-vertising", which informs users' interests through content marketing. Hosting articles on the site would play into this.

Print brands are getting used to adapting to formats they may have once rejected - offering free publications and giving away content online. Facebook's results last week showed that daily active users - all-important to advertisers - increased 19 per cent on the year to 864 million in September, while mobile now makes up two-thirds of its ad revenues. Publishers may find they have little alternative but to play ball with the biggest mobile content player around.

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Facebook app plans will test publishers' resolve

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The plan is in its early stages, but the idea is for Facebook to host newspaper and magazine content on its mobile app as it bids to become its users' own curated newspaper. The social network views publishers' own sites as slow to load content, and thinks people would get a smoother experience if they could open articles through its app.

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Touchpoints5 includes passive mobile data

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Touchpoints5 includes passive mobile data

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WHAT IN THE NAME OF ACTUAL FUCK!?!

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Visit: http://sky.bizzby.com for more info. On-­demand lifestyle services App BIZZBY is trialling BIZZBY SKY, a groundbreaking consumer collect­ and­ deliver on-­demand drone service using the Company's proven realtime smartphone technology platform. Based in London's TechCity, the company's research and development team have developed a fully autonomous drone that's capable of delivering small items between addresses at the push of a button via a smartphone App.

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AMSTERDAM/SAN FRANCISCO: Contrary to the perception that young consumers growing up with social media are happy to share their lives online, significant proportions regret posting something and have asked for content to be removed.

The latest Digital Diaries research from Dutch online security firm AVG surveyed 4,000 teenagers aged 11-16 in nine markets - including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, New Zealand, the UK and the US - on the topic of online privacy.

This found that 28% of respondents admitted to having second thoughts about something they had posted, but just 9% thought they shared too much about themselves.

The biggest problem seemed to be other people. Almost one third (32%) had asked someone else to remove content related to them, mostly because they didn't like it (61%) but on occasion because it was too personal (28%).

Often the culprit was close to home - one in five (18%) who had taken this action identified their mother as the offending poster. And over one in four (28%) have talked to a friend or family member whom they felt shared too much.

Tony Anscombe, senior security evangelist at AVG Technologies, warned parents against "sharenting" - the practice of sharing about their children online and creating a digital footprint for them over which they have no control.

"The reality is that we have all - teenagers included - embraced technology without much question and the result has been the steady erosion of our online privacy," he said.

Most teenagers are aware of the problem, with 71% of respondents claiming to understand what online privacy means and a similar proportion having changed their settings on Facebook, for example, to make it more difficult for people to find them.

Despite this, however, only 29% could say they properly knew all of their Facebook friends.

Emily Cherry, Head of Participation at the NSPCC children's charity, said the young should be aware that people were not always who they appeared to be online and she warned of a potential "privacy time bomb" if teens were not offered adequate protection.

Data sourced from PR Newswire; additional content by Warc staff

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AMSTERDAM/SAN FRANCISCO: Contrary to the perception that young consumers growing up with social media are happy to share their lives online, significant proportions regret posting something and have asked for content to be removed.

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Content marketing, a live report (Jon W post)

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Content marketing, a live report (Jon W post)

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Nest announced a partnership today with Electric Ireland to provide its smart thermostat for free to customers who sign a 2-year contract with the utility provider.

Tony Fadell, chief executive of Nest, confirmed the new partnership on stage today at the Web Summit in Dublin.

'Could change Ireland'

"This is huge," he said.

We think this is a huge announcement that could change Ireland.

Details of the partnership were not immediately available.

Fadell said the Nest Learning Thermostat would be distributed by Electric Ireland which has 1.5 million customers.

The Google factor

Fadell dropped the news during a conversation about how being acquired by Google had changed Nest.

He said that Google's resources had allowed Nest to expand internationally much faster than it could have on its own.

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Nest to offer its learning thermostats for free in Ireland - UKTN (UK Tech News)

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Nest announced a partnership today with Electric Ireland to provide its smart thermostat for free to customers who sign a 2-year contract with the utility provider. Tony Fadell, chief executive of Nest, confirmed the new partnership on stage today at the Web Summit in Dublin. 'Could change Ireland' "This is huge," he said.

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Sky invests in YT network for millenials

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Sky invests in YT network for millenials

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Whistle Sports: Sky invests in YouTube channel

Sky and Whistle Sports will work together to make sports content targeted at young people. The partnership will improve Whistle Sports' access to Europe's top leagues and athletes.

Whistle Sports covers less traditional sports such as skateboarding, trick shots and ultimate Frisbee.

It also works with traditional sports organisations such as the NFL and PGA Tour to create content designed for "millenials" to share online.

The company tends to create content featuring online stars and celebrities popular among youth audiences to make sports content more accessible to younger people.

The deal is the latest investment Sky has made in startups and follows similar arrangements with the online video aggregator Pluto.TV and Sharethrough, the native adtech company.

Barney Francis, the managing director at Sky Sports, said: "Whistle Sports has very quickly established itself in the US as a major new sports network.

"We see lots of potential to harness Sky Sports' content and relationships with major sports bodies and brands to work alongside Whistle Sports' talent network.

"We look forward to exploring opportunities to collaborate on video content that helps broaden engagement in sport, especially for younger audiences."

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Sky invests £7m in YouTube network for millennials

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Sky and Whistle Sports will work together to make sports content targeted at young people. The partnership will improve Whistle Sports' access to Europe's top leagues and athletes. Whistle Sports covers less traditional sports such as skateboarding, trick shots and ultimate Frisbee.

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Build Your Own Mercedes-Benz GLA on Instagram

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We all take photos and make friends on Instagram, but did you know you could build a Mercedes-Benz? To celebrate the launch of the all-new 2015 GLA, we've created the first Build Your Own on Instagram, allowing you to customize the compact SUV of your dreams, in just a few taps.

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Lysol buys search ads relating to Ebola panic

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Lysol buys search ads relating to Ebola panic

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A few weeks ago, we shared the not-at-all-surprising news that Americans are buying more cleaning supplies, especially disinfectants, than we normally do at this time of year. We can partly credit the Ebola virus. While cleanliness is rarely a bad thing and Ebola is a terrifying disease, we do have to give some side-eye to Lysol for buying ads on Google searches about Ebola.

The search result is no longer there, but Vice's Motherboard blog took a screenshot at the time. The item urges the searcher to "learn the facts about Ebola virus from Lysol(R)." While it is clearly marked as a sponsored result, it also sat above what might be more helpful links from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, or even Wikipedia.

Even Lysol realizes that, and their "Ebola Update" page currently refers curious people over to the CDC. At the same time, the page also says:

Lysol products like Lysol Disinfectant Spray and the other products listed here are approved as hospital-grade disinfectants and though not specifically tested to kill the Ebola virus, based on their ability to kill similar as well as harder to kill viruses, these products are likely to be effective against the Ebola virus.

The problem is that diseases tend to spread person-to-person. Ebola in particular spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids, which wiping down every surface in your home will not help with.

"I think this is a corporation riding on false fears of an epidemic to sell its product, thus reinforcing those fears," a Columbia University epidemiologist told Vice.

No, Lysol hasn't actually been tested for its ability to kill Ebola. It kills similar viruses, so it's likely to kill Ebola. However, we like to imagine that researchers with samples of the virus are using it to work toward finding possible cures or vaccines, not testing the efficacy of cleaning solutions that are available at Walmart.

Vice takes a look back in consumer and public health history, pointing out that Lysol advertised its disinfecting power against the Spanish flu epidemic. Sure, Lysol also killed that version of influenza, but that virus was also more likely to be transmitted from person to person.

​Lysol Bought the Top Google Search Result for 'Ebola' [Motherboard]

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Lysol Buys Google Search Ads To Take Advantage Of Ebola Panic

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A few weeks ago, we shared the not-at-all-surprising news that Americans are buying more cleaning supplies, especially disinfectants, than we normally do at this time of year. We can partly credit the Ebola virus. While cleanliness is rarely a bad thing and Ebola is a terrifying disease, we do have to give some side-eye to Lysol for buying ads on Google searches about Ebola.

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We are a company built on dreams. And these dreams inspire us to create innovative products that enhance human mobility and benefit society. We see "The Power of Dreams" as a way of thinking that guides us and inspires us to move forward.

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What happened to interactive digital advertising?

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What happened to interactive digital advertising?

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Earlier this year I was putting together a talk to inspire a global group of digital marketers for one of the world's biggest brands.

It was an intimidating brief because they do a lot of very good digital work, in one of my favorite genres of work: do nice things for real people in the real world, film it, put it on YouTube.

In order to bring something else to the table, I decided to lean into the interactive part of digital work. Advertising that the user can do something with, to, that they can INTERACT with in some way.

I put a call out on Twitter asking for work of this nature and...well there just wasn't very much. There were a few beatifully designed websites, and lots of lots of films.

Since we started our own company and I no longer work for a big ad agency, I've not judged as many advertising awards this year as in the previous few.

The award shows are really helpful, especially if you are prilveleged to be asked to judge, since you get a crash course in all the best work in the world in that category over a few very intense days of viewing & debating.

So I went to look at what won the anachronously named CYBER category at Cannes.

The Grand Prix Winners were: Volvo Epic Split,

Pharrell's 24 HOUR music video for Happy,

and The Scarecrow by CAA for Chipotle.

Notice anything?

They are all films.

One is an ad, plain and simple. One is a very long film. One is a film with an associated game, but the film is what made all the impact. [Did any of the judges play the game? I wonder.]

Not very interactive. In fact, no role for the user - just for a viewer.

Film has plenty of categories to be awarded in. Indeed Epic Split won in basically every category. Maybe 80s nostalgia, who knows.

So I was a bit saddened that now the digital category was simply the place for films that were online. It seems to diminish it, for me. The beauty of interactive work was that the user was in the driving seat, as it were.

Sound of Honda won a gold - it's a great use of data and technology, but for most people it can only be viewed as a film.

Droga picked up a gold for Newcastle Brown Ale's IF WE MADE IT. This was a SuperBowl hijack where the made some - you guessed it - films. Animatics of how they might have made a SuperBowl spot. They made a bunch of these animatics, including a version of the Chobani ad they also worked on.

British Airways [and BBH/OgilvyOne I think?] won gold for the Magic of Flying. This is a beautiful piece, amazing use of real time data technology to inform a digital billboard. It's great. I love it. It's not interactive.

All Eyes On S 4 won a silver for the excellent HEIMAT for Samsung. It's a wonderul installation piece, where you have to keep your eyes on the phone for 60 minutes and you win it. In Zurich station. Online, you can only watch the film.

You get the idea. I guess I just miss ideas that work on the web, where the user is in control of the interaction. Where everyone gets an interactive experience.

So, I was really, really pleased, with the Honda piece that came out today: THE OTHER SIDE. Super simple, incredibly beautiful pieces of film, yes, but the user controls the interaction, and it's SUPER FUN.

[btw: if you have more good examples please send them my way @faris. I also liked The EA Giferator and Hashtagmyass of late.]

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What Happened to Interactive Digital Advertising? - Faris - Medium

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Earlier this year I was putting together a talk to inspire a global group of digital marketers for one of the world's biggest brands. It was an intimidating brief because they do a lot of very good digital work, in one of my favorite genres of work: do nice things for real people in the real world, film it, put it on YouTube.

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Netflix gets GIF-y in latest breakthrough idea by Ogilvy Paris Credits : Client: NETFLIX (http://www.netflix.fr) Advertising Agency: OGILVY & MATHER PARIS Executive Creative Director: Baptiste Clinet Creative Director: Nicolas Lautier Creative: Julien Chiapolini (Art Director), Riccardo Fregoso (Copywriter), Hélène Boudin (Creative Assistant) Account: Anne-Sophie Carbo (Business Director), Alexis Valero (Account Executive), Joo-Hyung Lee (Assistant Account Executive) Planning: Alexandra Mimoun (Director of Strategy Integration), Amélie Delacour (Strategic Planner) Production: François Phan (Producer) Production Company: Delapost Paris Media Agency: MEC, Screenbase

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Victoria's Secret: faces backlash over its Perfect Body campaign

The campaign launched last week across the brand's UK stores and US website, with an image showing slender models in Victoria's Secret lingerie and emblazoned with the slogan 'The Perfect 'Body'.

The ad references the brand's Body range, but critics said the campaign was damaging to women's self-esteem.

Fashion retailer JD Williams has responded with its own 'Perfectly Imperfect' campaign, encouraging users to share their favourite aspects of themselves under the #FavouriteFlaw hashtag on Twitter.

A spokesman for the retailer said: "We have a responsibility as a retailer to promote positive body image to our customers and that means being representative of women in the UK."

Dove has also stepped into the fray, releasing an image of curvier women in their underwear with the slogan 'The Perfect Real Body', in reference to its 'Real Beauty' campaign.

The brand tweeted, "Today we celebrate the perfect REAL body and all the women who have said "#IAmPerfect the way I am."

Retailer Dear Kate has also recreated the Victoria's Secret ad to show women from a range of different ethnicities and body shapes wearing its underwear.

A petition has been created on change.org that calls on Victoria's Secret to apologise and amend its "irresponsible" campaign. So far it has received more than 20,000 signatures.

It appears that Victoria's Secret has pulled the image off its website. The company has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Read next

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Brands jump on Victoria's Secret 'Perfect Body' backlash

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The campaign launched last week across the brand's UK stores and US website, with an image showing slender models in Victoria's Secret lingerie and emblazoned with the slogan 'The Perfect 'Body'. The ad references the brand's Body range, but critics said the campaign was damaging to women's self-esteem.

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As I noted when reporting yesterday's launch of Samaritans Radar - a Twitter app that alerts people to potentially suicidal tweets made by those they follow - a lot of people really don't like this idea, particularly those with experience of mental health issues.

The Samaritans are the leading suicide prevention charity in the U.K. and Ireland, providing valuable and much-used counselling services. The new service that has caused so much outrage scans Twitter to help identify vulnerable people, based on keywords and phrases suggesting depression. When it spots a tweet saying, for example, "I want to end it all", it sends an email to the person who subscribed, leaving it up to them to take further action.

I find the incident to be an excellent example of how modern web services come up against existing data protection law in the U.K. and the EU - from where British data protection laws are derived - and a worthwhile case study to bear in mind when thinking about how these laws will evolve. Personally, as you'll see in yesterday's piece, I began by viewing the Samaritans Radar project positively. However, several of the excellent points that people have raised in the last day have changed my mind.

Let's begin with some of the most salient observations.

Backlash observations

Jon Baines noted that the Samaritans are processing sensitive data, which is "afforded a higher level of protection under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA)." He suggested that this processing doesn't meet any of the conditions that allow such data to be legally processed, except perhaps the one that states: "The information contained in the personal data has been made public as a result of steps deliberately taken by the data subject." Even there, though, the data comprises "not just the public tweet, but the 'package' of that tweet with the fact that the app (not the tweeter) has identified it as a potential call for help."

Susan Hall, meanwhile, reckoned the app may fall foul of a clause in the DPA that lets people object to having their data processed by purely automatic means, if it leads to the controller (the Samaritans) making a decision "which significantly affects that individual." She also reckons, as do I, that the right to "object to processing that is likely to cause or is causing damage or distress" could apply as well, depending on the circumstances.

"Latent Existence" criticized the Samaritans' response to the outrage, which literally read: "If you use Twitter settings to mark your tweets private #SamaritansRadar will not see them." The blogger wrote: "The idea that people should lock their account to avoid something is one that is also frequently used to defend harassment and to defend doing nothing about harassment." The big issue here is consent - the Samaritans only get the consent of those who opt into having their followees monitored, and there's no way for people to opt out of having their "depressed" tweets flagged up.

Adrian Short characterized this as a "surveillance system... that will let almost anyone be alerted when almost anyone on Twitter might be particularly vulnerable." He provided an interesting run-through of the various scenarios that could play out - false positives, true negatives and so on, with the tool being used by both friendly and antagonistic players - and concluded that "it's very hard to see how Samaritans Radar will have an overall positive effect."

As with other posts, that of "Delusions of Candour" discussed the public/private nature of tweets and the distinction between responding to a distressed tweet and setting up an automated system for doing so: "The latter feels invasive and intrusive. It's not dissimilar to the contrast between bumping into a friend in the high street, and following that friend down the high street so you can engineer an encounter. There is also a risk that this app could be used to target vulnerable individuals; I have at least one friend who is outspoken about her mental illness and receives all kinds of abuse as a result, even (sometimes especially) when she is in crisis."

Sarah Myles shared an email she has sent to the Samaritans, bringing up the crucial matters of autonomy and, again, consent: "Vulnerable people need to feel that they are calling the shots with regard to their own wellbeing. Samaritans Radar sweeps that away, simply by having no 'opt-in' facility.... By launching software that specifically purports to be activated 'discreetly', which a user's followers will have no knowledge of until they receive a communication checking up on them, you are sending the message that vulnerable people cannot be trusted to make their own choices about who to communicate with."

"Bear Faced Lady" had similar concerns: "I never expected when I first joined Twitter in 2009 that it would become a trusted and safe space for me to talk about the depths and despair of my mental health but it has. It has for many. It's a hard, sad fact that people kill themselves. That they genuinely see no place for themselves in the world, or the world they inhabit is just too damn hard. What is harder is to accept that it is their right to seek help or not. You can show them support. You can be a friend. You can tell them you care. You really don't need an app for that."

Opting in, opting out

I don't believe that informed consent is possible in the case of Samaritans Radar. This would entail people opting into having their tweets monitored for suicide risk, and I suspect that people would rather just approach an organization such as the Samaritans directly if they were feeling that low, rather than dragging people who might be near-strangers into the equation.

Consent is not a legal requirement under current British and European data protection law, though it is one of the aforementioned conditions that can confirm the legality of the processing of sensitive personal data. This situation will change under the incoming revamp of the EU data protection law, which will explicitly require controllers (such as the Samaritans in this case) to gain the data subject's consent for any processing of their personal data - for specified purposes, no less.

It's difficult to overstate the impact of this shift, if indeed the new data protection rules clear the final hurdle of member states' approval. The consent requirement for the processing of personal data will affect every app that sucks in the user's contact list (the people on that list will technically need to give their permission), every service that solicits data for one purpose then uses it for another, and many analytics apps that plug into services like Twitter, such as Samaritans Radar.

I'm torn on this one. On the one hand, this is not how online services currently work - they constantly send data between themselves to achieve various goals and to try out new models, and the new rules may slow the pace of innovation. On the other hand, it's right that people should retain control over their data and only let others process it with permission, for agreed purposes. That's not just a matter of theoretical ethics; the Samaritans Radar debacle is an excellent example of how the principle makes a real difference.

But that's future legislation, and the current legal landscape should be enough to make the Samaritans reconsider what they're doing. After all, at the end of launch day the charity said it had just over 1,500 sign-ups, meaning it was already monitoring around 900,000 Twitter feeds. They said this had already led to 258 alerts, of which 10 saw "subscribers" confirm that they were worried about the tweeter, but at the same time the rapid network effect means the potential for damage is widespread.

As everyone who has addressed this topic in the last day has stressed, the Samaritans do terrific work and no one doubts that Radar was born out of the very best intentions. But its practical application is at the least partly unethical, and quite possibly illegal too. Unless the charity can come up with a way to fix these issues - allowing people to opt out of being monitored would be the bare minimum requirement - it should end this project immediately.

UPDATE (9.50am PT): The Samaritans now say they are letting people join an opt-out "whitelist" by direct-messaging them on Twitter - they claim to have disabled the feature that blocks DMs from strangers. They also say they themselves do not receive alerts about worrisome tweets. As they told me yesterday, though, they do briefly keep a record of tweets that were flagged up but not acted on, to better train their algorithms.

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What's wrong with automatically scanning Twitter for suicidal tweets?

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As I noted when reporting yesterday's launch of Samaritans Radar - a Twitter app that alerts people to potentially suicidal tweets made by those they follow - a lot of people really don't like this idea, particularly those with experience of mental health issues. The Samaritans are the leading suicide prevention charity in the U.K.

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FB is changing the way we consume journalism

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FB is changing the way we consume journalism

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Though other services, like Twitter and Google News, can also exert a large influence, Facebook is at the forefront of a fundamental change in how people consume journalism. Most readers now come to it not through the print editions of newspapers and magazines or their home pages online, but through social media and search engines driven by an algorithm, a mathematical formula that predicts what users might want to read.

It is a world of fragments, filtered by code and delivered on demand. For news organizations, said Cory Haik, senior editor for digital news at The Washington Post, the shift represents "the great unbundling" of journalism. Just as the music industry has moved largely from selling albums to songs bought instantly online, publishers are increasingly reaching readers through individual pieces rather than complete editions of newspapers or magazines. A publication's home page, said Edward Kim, a co-founder of SimpleReach, will soon be important more as an advertisement of its brand than as a destination for readers.

"People won't type in WashingtonPost.com anymore," Ms. Haik said. "It's search and social."

The shift raises questions about the ability of computers to curate news, a role traditionally played by editors. It also has broader implications for the way people consume information, and thus how they see the world.

In an interview at Facebook's sprawling headquarters here, which has a giant, self-driving golf cart that takes workers between buildings, Mr. Marra said he did not think too much about his impact on journalism.

"We try to explicitly view ourselves as not editors," he said. "We don't want to have editorial judgment over the content that's in your feed. You've made your friends, you've connected to the pages that you want to connect to and you're the best decider for the things that you care about."

In Facebook's work on its users' news feeds, Mr. Marra said, "we're saying, 'We think that of all the stuff you've connected yourself to, this is the stuff you'd be most interested in reading.' "

Roughly once a week, he and his team of about 16 adjust the complex computer code that decides what to show a user when he or she first logs on to Facebook. The code is based on "thousands and thousands" of metrics, Mr. Marra said, including what device a user is on, how many comments or likes a story has received and how long readers spend on an article.

The goal is to identify what users most enjoy, and its results vary around the world. In India, he said, people tend to share what the company calls the ABCDs: astrology, Bollywood, cricket and divinity.

If Facebook's algorithm smiles on a publisher, the rewards, in terms of traffic, can be enormous. If Mr. Marra and his team decide that users do not enjoy certain things, such as teaser headlines that lure readers to click through to get all the information, it can mean ruin. When Facebook made changes to its algorithm in December 2013 to emphasize higher-quality content, several so-called viral sites that had thrived there, including Upworthy, Distractify and Elite Daily, saw large declines in their traffic.

Facebook executives frame the company's relationship with publishers as mutually beneficial: when publishers promote their content on Facebook, its users have more engaging material to read, and the publishers get increased traffic driven to their sites. Numerous publications, including The New York Times, have met with Facebook officials to discuss how to improve their referral traffic.

The increased traffic can potentially mean that the publisher can increase its advertising rates or convert some of those new readers into subscribers.

Social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn want their users to spend more time,or do more, on their services - a concept known as engagement, said Sean Munson, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who studies the intersection of technology and behavior.

Facebook officials say that the more time users spend at its site, the more likely there will be a robust exchange of diverse viewpoints and ideas shared online. Others fear that users will create their own echo chambers, and filter out coverage they do not agree with. "And that," Mr. Munson said, "is when you get conspiracy theories."

Ben Smith, editor in chief of BuzzFeed, a news and entertainment site, said his rule for writing and reporting in a fragmented age is simple: "no filler." News organizations that still publish a print edition, he said, have slots - physical holes on paper or virtual ones on a home page - that result in the publication of stories that are not necessarily the most interesting or timely, but are required to fill the space. It was partly to discourage such slot-filling that BuzzFeed did not focus on its home page when it first started, he said.

Mr. Kim of SimpleReach says he advises established media companies that "it's dangerous to start chasing social. You'll end up like everyone else, and you'll lose your differentiation." The question that older publications that are not "digital natives" like BuzzFeed have to ask themselves, Mr. Kim said, is "Are you creating content for the way that content is consumed in this environment?"

Ms. Haik, the Washington Post digital editor, is leading a team, started this year, that aims to deliver different versions of The Post's journalism to different people, based on information about how they have come to an article, which device they are on and even, if it is a phone, which way they are holding it.

"We're asking if there's a different kind of storytelling, not just an ideal presentation," she said. For instance, she said, people reading The Post on a mobile phone during the day will probably want a different kind of reading experience than those who are on a Wi-Fi connection at home in the evening.

The Post is putting time and energy into such efforts, Ms. Haik said, because it is "ultimately about sustaining our business or growing our audience." More than half of its mobile readers, she said, are so-called millennials who consume news digitally and largely through social media sites like Facebook. Some publications have found a niche in taking the opposite approach. The Browser is edited by Robert Cottrell, a former journalist at The Financial Times and The Economist. Mr. Cottrell skims about 1,000 articles a day, he said, and then publishes five or six that he finds interesting for about 7,000 subscribers who pay $20 a year. A recent selection included the life of an early-20th-century American bricklayer and a study of great Eastern philosophers.

"The general idea is to offer a few pieces each day which we think are both enjoyable and of lasting value," Mr. Cottrell said. "We're certainly at the other end of the process from the algorithms."

Artificial intelligence, he said, may eventually be able to find a piece of writing moving, in some sense, and want to share it. But for the moment, computers rely on information gathered online "and that is going to be a very, very impoverished data set compared to a human being."

Mr. Marra, the Facebook engineer, agrees that a human editor for each individual would be ideal. "But it's not realistic to do that at scale for every person on the planet," he said, "and so I think we'll always have these hybrid systems like News Feed that are helping you find the things that you care about." It is simply, he said, "a personalized newspaper."

Correction: October 28, 2014

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How Facebook Is Changing the Way Its Users Consume Journalism

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Though other services, like Twitter and Google News, can also exert a large influence, Facebook is at the forefront of a fundamental change in how people consume journalism. Most readers now come to it not through the print editions of newspapers and magazines or their home pages online, but through social media and search engines driven by an algorithm, a mathematical formula that predicts what users might want to read.

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Google has led a $542 million investment in Magic Leap, a technology startup based in Florida, the company announced Tuesday morning.

Magic Leap is a stealth company that describes itself as being a "developer of novel human computing interfaces and software." It just closed a $50 million-plus Series A round in February. The company is working on a new kind of augmented reality - which it calls cinematic reality - that it believes will provide a more realistic 3D experience than anything else that's out there today.

Google, not Google Ventures, nor Google Capital, is making this investment for Google. As such, Sundar Pichai, who runs Android, is joining the board of Magic Leap. Other investors in the round include Andreessen Horowitz, chip-maker Qualcomm, movie company Legendary Pictures, Ev Williams' investment group Obvious, KKR, Kleiner Perkins, and Paul Allen's Vulcan.

Peter Kafka and Liz Gannes at Re/code reported on the company its raise previously.

Not much is known about Magic Leap. The company is being intentionally vague about what it is building. However, the loose idea is that instead of creating an immersive virtual world separate from the real world, as with the Rift headset from Oculus VR (which Facebook bought for $2 billion earlier this year), Magic Leap will weave " 3-D light sculptures" into the world around us, using a combination of proprietary hardware, software, and firmware.

Thomas Tull, CEO of Legendary, tells Fast Company: "It's so badass you can't believe it. It's one of the few things I've ever experienced in my life where I came out and said, 'This changes everything. This is a marker of the future.'"

You can get an idea of the company's vision on its website, where you see a video of a little elephant that looks as if it's hovering in someone's hands:

The company's founder and CEO Rony Abovitz told the South Florida Business Journal that he wanted Magic Leap's technology to be disassociated with current ideas of what virtual reality or augmented reality was like.

"It is a new way for humans to interact with computers," he says.

Magic Leap's technology will project high-resolution images into the world in front of you, most likely through a pair of glasses, according to details in a recent New York Times article. Abovitz says he envisions Magic Leap's technology being used in people's day-to-day lives, not just for gaming.

Based on its website, the company also has educational ambitions:

"The space program had Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, and we're in our Apollo phase," Abovitz tells Fast Company. "We know that space travel is possible. We're in the middle of full-blown product development and commercialization."

Abovitz says there's no specific date for it to come out, but: "It's very near term. But although we're trying to deliver on certain date, we're also trying to achieve an, 'Oh my god, I feel like I'm a kid again' experience."

Magic Leap has a partnership with Weta Workshop, the special effects team behind movies like "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit." The two companies are working on multiple projects together, and a Magic Leap team is even embedded with Weta in New Zealand. Weta's founder, Richard Taylor, is on Magic Leap's board. You can feel the pull toward the mystical on Magic Leap's site:

One of the things Weta and Magic Leap worked on together was an app called "Hour Blue," which let users interact with an augmented reality "speakbot." Abovitz has since called that app " more of a red herring" in regard to what the company is working on now.

Before Abovitz founded Magic Leap, he cofounded a surgical robotics company called MAKO that sold for $1.65 billion. He describes that company now as " like bringing 'Star Wars' droids to life to help people in medicine."

Magic Leap has a bunch of patents, including one for a tactile glove for human-computer interaction, an ultra-high-resolution scanning fiber display, a 3-D display that uses a " wave guide reflector array projector," a system that lets one or more people interact with the same augmented reality environments, and a head-mounted optical system (diagrammed below):

One of Magic Leap's central concepts is that its technology will feel more natural than anything else on the market. No bulky goggles here.

"What is remarkable is how well the human body and mind respond when technology respects biology, so truly magical experiences become possible," Abovitz says.

The company is currently based in Florida, and Abovitz says he plans to remain there despite the pulls of Silicon Valley or Boston, eventually growing the business into an Apple-size company. Since it launched in 2011, Magic Leap has grown to over 100 employees, including well-known tech marketer Brian Wallace, who said that seeing Magic Leap's product in action was " one of the most profound moments I've ever had."

Another hire, games developer Graeme Devine, told Polygon that Magic Leap's technology blew him away when he first saw it:

"I went to the offices and I saw something that I did not think was possible. I like to think I know technology and I am not easily impressed. I worked at Apple, but when I saw what they were doing, I just said, immediately, 'How can I help?'"

Abovitz seems like a fascinating guy. In 2013, he gave a strange performance called The Synthesis of Imagination at TEDxSarasota:

In an eerie performance, Abovitz dressed as an astronaut and shared the stage with two furry creatures.

"A few awkward steps for me, a magic leap for mankind," he intones.

The creatures, called "Shaggles," were created by Travis Boatright Design, and based off the company's comic series, called "Magic Leapers":

Watch the whole performance here:

Get the latest Google stock price here.

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Google Is Leading A $542 Million Investment In Magic Leap, A Crazy-Sounding Startup Building A New Way To See The World

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Google has led a $542 million investment in Magic Leap, a technology startup based in Florida, the company announced Tuesday morning. Magic Leap is a stealth company that describes itself as being a "developer of novel human computing interfaces and software." It just closed a $50 million-plus Series A round in February.

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Showing the impact of simplicity on the world's leading brands.

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The experience of our primary mobile screen being a bank of app icons that lead to independent destinations is dying. And that changes what we need to design and build. The end of apps as we know them is near.

How we experience content via connected devices - laptops, phones, tablets, wearables - is undergoing a dramatic change. The idea of an app as an independent destination is becoming less important, and the idea of an app as a publishing tool, with related notifications that contain content and actions, is becoming more important. This will change what we design, and change our product strategy.

No more screens full of app icons

This is such a paradigm shift it requires plenty of explaining. Whilst it may not transpire exactly as I'm about to describe, there is no doubt what we have today - screens of apps - is going to dramatically change. Bear with me as I run through the context.

Apps sit in the background, pushing content into a central experience.

The idea of having a screen full of icons, representing independent apps, that need to be opened to experience them, is making less and less sense. The idea that these apps sit in the background, pushing content into a central experience, is making more and more sense. That central experience may be something that looks like a notification centre today, or something similar to Google Now, or something entirely new.

The primary design pattern here is cards. Critically it's not cards as a simple interaction design pattern for an apps content, but as containers for content that can come from any app. This distinction may appear subtle at first glance, but it's far from it. To understand it, and chart the trajectory, we need to quickly run through two things.

Designing systems not destinations

I covered this topic in detail in a previous post, so I'll quickly summarise here. Most of us building software are no longer designing destinations to drive people to. That was the dominant pattern for a version of the Internet that is disappearing fast. In a world of many different screens and devices, content needs to be broken down into atomic units so that it can work agnostic of the screen size or technology platform. For example, Facebook is not a website or an app. It is an ecosystem of objects (people, photos, videos, comments, businesses, brands, etc.) that are aggregated in many different ways through people's newsfeeds, timelines and pages, and delivered to a range of devices, some of which haven't even been invented yet. So Facebook is not a set of webpages, or screens in an app. It's a system of objects, and relationships between them.

Recent changes to iOS and Android notifications

Things changed with iOS 8 and Android KitKat. Notifications used to be signposts to go to other places. A notification to tell you to open an app. To open a destination.

But that is changing fast. For a while now, you can take action directly in Android notifications. Sometimes that takes you to that action in the app itself, but sometimes you can do the action directly, meaning that you don't need to open the app at all.

iOS is following suit here and raising the bar. Interactive notifications. No need to open the app. The notification is the full experience.

The next version of Android takes this even further, breaking notifications into independent cards. You can see that cards stack below each other.

We've moved pretty quickly from notifications as signposts, to containers (cards) that include content, and actions on that content.

Next up: cards housing full product experiences

The next iteration is obvious. Lots and lots of notification cards that enable full product experiences and independent workflows right inside the card. Comment on the Facebook post. Retweet the tweet. Buy the item on Amazon. Check in for the flight. Share the news story. Add the reminder to your to-do list. Book the restaurant. Swap the fantasy football player. Annotate the run you just finished. Pay the bill. And on and on.

Towards apps as services

Breaking things right down into the individual atomic unit, including the content and actions. The atomic unit separate from the container of the app itself, so that it can show up anywhere, on any device. The atomic units are then reassembled based on context. Aggregated in a centralised stream. Or pushed to you on your watch.

The content may be reformatted to enable more natural user input, optimized for your situation. Des sent me a text based message, but I'm driving so my watch reads it out to me. I speak my reply to Siri/Google and Des receives it as a text based message, because he's in work at his desk. The actions available change. All this and more is just about to happen.

The app is primarily a publishing tool.

It may be very likely that the primary interface for interacting with apps will not be the app itself. The app is primarily a publishing tool. The number one way people use your app is through this notification layer, or aggregated card stream. Not by opening the app itself.

In a world where notifications are full experiences in and of themselves, the screen of app icons makes less and less sense. Apps as destinations makes less and less sense. Why open the Facebook app when you can get the content as a notification and take action - like something, comment on something - right there at the notification or OS level. I really believe screens of apps won't exist in a few years, other than buried deep in the device UI as a secondary navigation.

A concept design to make this concrete

This is such a fundamental shift that to highlight where it may go, I'll start with a rough system design for how one might interact with a connected device in this world.

Imagine a vertical stream of cards, individually personalised and ranked based on who and what you care about, your current context (location, availability, etc.) and your likelihood to care about things based on historical data when you were in a similar context.

The cards can come from any source that you care about or have given permission to.

This looks a lot like Google Now, but on steroids. You will have almost as many unique sources in your stream as you have apps on your phone.

This also looks a lot like your notifications centre on your phone, but rather than merely signposts to open apps, these cards are notifying you, presenting you with the content to decide what to do next, and with the ability to interact with the content right there and then. So a card from Facebook has all the actions you would have for that content if you viewed it in the Facebook app. Like, comment, share, save, etc. all inline, with no need to open the Facebook app. Cards from travel apps allow you to book, cards from commerce apps allow you to buy, the list is endless.

This is the beginning of the end for apps as destinations. Why open the app when you don't need to? Let's take this a step further.

Imagine that you can scroll horizontally, and that shows you more content from the same source. So on a Facebook post, that is effectively your newsfeed presented horizontally rather than vertically.

This would be the same for all sources, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, news apps, etc. And of course on all devices.

OK now let's go a step further again.

Imagine that a parent card can support a child card, so for example a Facebook card can support (embed) a card from the BBC. Indeed something similar already exists with Twitter.

This is also a little similar to the recently launched Apple Extensions, and is already happening in app development in China with Baidu and WeChat, where smaller apps are being bundled within bigger apps, only surfacing when some interaction in the UI invokes the smaller app. For example, in Baidu Maps you can find a hotel, check room availability, and make a booking, all inside the app.

But again the apparent subtlety masks something much more profound. Embedded cards (child cards) within cards (parent cards) also mean you don't need to install the app to experience the content from the child card. You just need the parent card app on your device. Again, this is already happening, Twitter cards currently support Stripe payments inside the card. You don't need the New York Times app to see their content on Twitter. But imagine this pattern was widespread. Suddenly app developers have a powerful discovery channel. And some businesses may be comfortable always appearing as a child card, without ever having an app at all.

One final step further. What if the cards came from other ? Like vending machines that you walk up to and pay through the card? Hotels you walk into and order your breakfast or pay for the wifi?

The ramifications for websites might also be huge. If a publishing company, for example the New York Times, can push content to cards, and those cards can be seen in many different third party places (with revenue sharing agreements) why bother having a website at all? It's just a huge overhead.

We will still open apps. Sometimes

In this world, it feels dumb to open apps just to see what lies behind the red counter, or to have to switch between apps. Opening apps is still necessary and great for many contexts, especially composition of new content and dedicated deep workflows, and maybe changing preferences. But not for seeing what's new and interesting. A bank of app icons as a dominant design pattern feels old and inefficient now, and I think it'll disappear within a couple of years, correctly relegated behind a "show me my apps" action.

The system will learn, creating new competitors

As people interact or don't interact with cards presented to them, the system will learn when to show more or less from a specific source (app). As content from different apps will be presented side by side, this changes who you might think you are competing with. Competition is between products that do the same job, not products that are in the same category. This is already the case today; when faced with multiple notifications on a phone screen, they all compete with each other for your attention.

Competition is between products that do the same job, not products that are in the same category.

Here at Intercom, we're big proponents of the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework, which asks what Job people need to get done that your product fulfills. If you focus purely on the job, and not the industry, you realise airlines selling business class seats are competing with Skype for customers, as they address the same job: the need to have clear communication with colleagues.

Similarly, apps will realise they are competing on Jobs they may not have realised their product addresses. Twitter for example, may be competing much more with apps addressing the Job of 'entertain me while I have a short amount of free time' e.g. Games and News apps, than with other social products.

This intense competition means businesses will have to spend time designing great notifications/cards, because they will potentially be competing with cards from Facebook, or Amazon, or Google. The days of sending lots and lots of notifications to bring people back to an app are going away, with a much better focus on designing notifications that people engage with there and then, independent of opening the app.

Three critical questions

One of the biggest challenges will be whether these experiences will occur:

at an app level (like an evolution of Google Now),

at a notification level (an evolution of the Android or iOS notification centre),

or at the root OS level (a redesigned iOS for example that removes the sea of app icons).

Maybe we will have a friends stream, a news stream, a work stream.

There are many signs pointing towards a near future that looks something like this. But many questions remain - these are three that I have no answers for:

Maybe there will be a Google version, an Apple version, etc. Or more open systems that are interoperable across platforms (like the web itself), the first of which (like Wildcard and Citia) are being built now, could come to dominate.

1. Will this happen at the app, notification, or OS level?

2. Will this be one consolidated stream, or multiple streams?

3. Will this be owned at a company level?

Towards better businesses and products

This is just a sketch but at a conceptual level I think it's largely where we are headed. Large parts of this are built already; things like Google Now, Android notifications, iOS8 interactive notifications, iOS8 extensions, Twitter cards. Emerging platforms like Android Wear and Apple Watch are confirming these trends towards cards that work as notifications, content and actions.

There are also a multitude of user benefits:

This new paradigm matches much more closely with how real life works. We don't live our lives in silos, like the app silos that exist today. People start to forget about "apps" and just think about businesses and products and services. This is a great thing, the container for content should be invisible to users.

This new paradigm also solves a critical problem around volume of incoming content. Navigating to lots of apps is so inefficient. A new problem emerging is an overwhelming volume of notifications. Things will need to be ranked, which will make them more manageable. It's also a better experience, apps maximising their usefulness in a quick lightweight fashion rather than dominating your attention in a slow heavyweight app-oriented experience.

The container for content should be invisible to users.

The constraint of an individual card also makes you think about the most important thing you could show, and only the most important actions relating to that. That constraint is very powerful.

These patterns reinforce two things we wrote about here on Inside Intercom early in their development. That cards are the future of the web, and designers need to design systems not destinations. Cards are happening. Systems are happening. Get fully up to speed on both of these things.

Responsive design is a nice thing, but we're heading way beyond that. We're talking about designing content that may appear on an incomprehensible number of devices and in an incomprehensible number of situations. This will need new design principles, new ways of thinking about researching context. Push forward with this yourself, don't wait for it to happen.

Designing the notifications, and the actions within them, will become an increasingly important part of product design. We will need to spend as much of our time on this aspect of the experience, as on the experiences within the app. Change how you think and work now, rather than when it is too late. Sketch systems, not screens.

Think about who you might integrate with. Integrations as part of a product strategy are increasing, witness the explosion in available APIs, Webhooks and the emergence of services like Zapier and IFTTT. Integrations make things possible that you could never do alone. They give you access to new audiences. Make integrations part of your business plan, product strategy, and product design.

I carry around both an iPhone and an Android phone. I often also have my iPad Mini. I wear a Nike Fuelband. I've tried Google Glasses whenever I can (in private ;-)). When I can I'll buy an Apple Watch. We all need to dive headfirst into this, eyes open, trying to see what works and fails, trial and error.

For businesses, it also starts to solve the app discoverability problem. Rather than relying on App Store promotion, advertising, or new deep in app linking to get discovered, an apps content can appear as a card in our stream, particularly when embedded in a parent card. Indeed there may not be a child app, the content and actions in that child card may come from the web.

This paradigm shift also starts to ask questions of the bundle or unbundle dilemma (btw both are happening now, it's not just unbundling). Maybe in this world you can have your cake (unbundled simple focused one task experiences) and eat it too (bundled into a coherent individual stream). A deliberately designed eco-system of cards where cards are simple, but can carry information and context from other cards you build.

5 key takeaways

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. Whilst the trajectories seem clear, much is unknown, we'll all figure this out together. So please let us know your feedback, thoughts, ideas below, and we'll do our best to respond and keep the conversation moving forward.

Update: Read our follow up piece: It's not the end of apps.

There are many other people writing about these things and I'm indebted to them for sharing their thinking. Here are some key articles if you want to read more:

Thanks also to my colleagues at Intercom for contributing to this and making it much much better.

Like what you read here? Why not come and work with us? We're hiring for roles in Dublin and San Francisco.

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The end of apps as we know them - Inside Intercom

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The end of apps as we know them is near. The future of apps is not going to revolve around the current experience where our primary mobile screen is a bank of app icons that lead to independent destinations. That world is dying, which changes what we need to design and build.

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The 6 most significant social investments in Q3

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The 6 most significant social investments in Q3

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LONDON: After years of decline, the UK's regional print industry has detected cautious signs of recovery with one industry figure declaring "the worst is over".

Regional newspaper group Johnston Press reported that the fall in advertising revenues had slowed to -3.4% in the third quarter from -4.6% during the first half. This was in large part due to a 19.5% rise in digital income.

Its portfolio of local news sites was now attracting more than 27m monthly unique users, a 40% rise on the same time last year. And the number of mobile users had doubled to around 6.5m a month.

"We're increasingly confident in saying the worst is over for the regional press," said CEO Ashley Highfield. "We might not be completely out of the woods but the growth in digital audiences, and in fact the performance of print, tells us we'll get there."

Another factor expected to boost figures is a regional advertising partnership struck with satellite broadcaster Sky back in May, which is only now coming into effect. This enables local firms to run highly-targeted TV ads, using Sky's AdSmart product.

Separately, an analysis of data from the Advertising Association/Warc Expenditure Report by Suzy Young, Warc's data and journals director, suggested that regional newsbrands could be " on the cusp of growth".

She noted that the significant growth in digital adspend in this medium over the last three quarters had not been enough to offset the decline in print adspend. But, placing the data in context, Young pointed out that the rate of year-on-year decline had moderated from -15.8% and -26.2% in 2008 and 2009 to an expected -5.0% this year and a predicted -4.3% next year.

Digital adspend revenues for regional newsbrands are predicted to rise 17.4% in 2014 and 8.1% in 2015. Additionally, for the first time since 2004, total recruitment advertising, across print and digital, is expected to post a 5% year-on-year increase this year, buoyed by the recent falls in unemployment.

Thirty million people a week still read regional newspapers and the sector is far from being in terminal decline. "It's certainly feasible that advertising revenues will start to register growth," said Young.

Data sourced from Daily Telegraph, Guardian, MediaTel; additional content by Warc staff

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LONDON: After years of decline, the UK's regional print industry has detected cautious signs of recovery with one industry figure declaring "the worst is over". Regional newspaper group Johnston Press reported that the fall in advertising revenues had slowed to -3.4% in the third quarter from -4.6% during the first half.

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Last week the Samaritans launched Samaritans Radar, a service which monitors Twitter feeds for words such as 'depressed' or phrases such as 'need someone to talk to' and then sends an alert to people who have opted in to the service to raise an alert of a potential cry for help.

The hashtag was trending in the UK on Wednesday - the day of launch - with, unsurprisingly, a lot of concern over privacy and questions around just how much the Samaritans had researched and thought about this service.

There have been countless tweets from Twitter users with mental health problems who have voiced their concern and also from those of you who have volunteered with the charity.

The majority of the tweets seem to be rather critical of the service but there are people that support it.

Mental Health (@Sectioned_)
I hope those behind #SamaritansRadar appreciate all the feedback they're getting. Turns out there are some serious concerns to address.

Emsy (@elphiemcdork)
Ever since I've been a @samaritans volunteer I've always defended them but I can't approve of this app. I am willing to bet other vols don't

Mollywallop (@mollywallop)
I try not to tweet about my mental health too much because I got told off for being negative. But #SamaritansRadar puts me off even more

A Million Sighs (@MillionSighs)
@PaulbernalUK As an ex-Samaritan Volunteer, my view is that this initiative is marketeer driven and not fully thought-through.

Angelene Gaal (@angelenemary)
I like this a lot. Sometimes the only way people reach out is through cryptic statuses. http://t.co/GPrGuEji3O #SamaritansRadar

Pride in London (@LondonLGBTPride)
Well done @Samaritans for #SamaritansRadar - a clever use of social media with the potential to really help people: http://t.co/4MIdPwGHRy

Antonia Bance, communications and policy director for a domestic violence charity, argues that it's a valuable service that puts the charity's mission above fundraising. She says: "How brilliant to see charity digital innovation that is about a mission, rather than fundraising.

"In the fifties, Samaritans set up the world's first telephone helpline so of course, now, they would be at the forefront of trying to help more people as how we communicate with each other changes. And that's controversial - what innovation isn't? Many charities would have played it safe, not willing to be out there for those who need them, for fear of criticism. Samaritans deserve a round of applause for putting their mission front and centre."

She believes Radar is just a new way to show you're a friend - and a nudge to do what any friend would do. It's a way of reminding us in an atomised world that we can reach out to others in distress - and that we should do so more often, according to Bance.

But, what about the charity. How does it feel amid all this criticism? Does it defend its decision? "At the heart of Samaritans' work is the belief that ordinary people listening to the problems and feelings of one another can make a big difference to people struggling to cope," says Sophie Borromeo, director of communications at the charity.

"We know from research that vulnerable individuals go online to call for help, in the hope that someone will reach out to them, so we developed Samaritans Radar particularly for those using Twitter for that purpose," she adds.

Twitter users who want to be notified if one of the people they follow Tweets messages which sound concerning, can sign up and receive an email alert about the tweets.

Borromeo says: "We want to emphasise that Samaritans Radar has been in development for well over a year, and has been tested with several different user groups who have contributed to its creation, including young people with mental health problems. We've also been working with academic experts from the University of Glasgow, and the University of Cardiff's School of Social Sciences, whose research has helped develop the app."

She says the charity is listening to concerns expressed on Twitter and as a result has extended its 'whitelist' function to individuals, as well as organisations, so people who don't want Samaritans Radar to send alerts to their followers have the choice of 'opting out'.

"The aim of the app is to highlight potentially worrying Tweets - which are already public - from people talking about their problems, to give their followers a second chance to see their Tweets and respond," she says. "The app works in such a way that the alerts sent out are only seen by the subscriber, who would have sight of the information anyway. Samaritans does not monitor the tweets or view them - we're just giving people who have signed up to Radar a second chance to see a call for help, which they might have initially missed, from a friend that is in need of support."
Kirsty Marrins is a content and community manager at If you work in the charity sector, please join our free network for charity professionals. JustGiving. Topics

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Samaritans Radar: 'Charity deserves round of applause for putting mission front and centre'

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Last week the Samaritans launched Samaritans Radar, a service which monitors Twitter feeds for words such as 'depressed' or phrases such as 'need someone to talk to' and then sends an alert to people who have opted in to the service to raise an alert of a potential cry for help.

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Samaritan's Radar - paved with good intentions

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Samaritan's Radar - paved with good intentions

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Today, most of us watch TV- especially live events- with a smartphone in hand. We're connecting with others, sharing the same experience at the same time. Brands are trying hard to become part of these collective moments. When it works, it's magical. But it's hard. Through our work with two brand partners, Nike and Electronic Arts, we've found that relevance is key. It entails giving people something that's a real companion to the main event. We also learned that even though it's real time, it means planning ahead.

There's a reason tickets to the Super Bowl go for thousands of dollars. Watching an event live, sharing the moment with other fans, is a singular and special experience. To a great extent, technology has brought that experience into our living rooms. Even if we're watching an event alone-not just sports games, but awards shows, reality shows or the season premiere of our favorite show-we can talk about it with other people as it happens. Friends, rivals and strangers can watch together; and even if separated by geography, they are united by a shared experience.

Over the past few years, much has been said about marketing in real time. But it isn't easy to pull off, and that's why there are so few success stories. Ironically, acting quickly requires some planning, both from a media and creative perspective. I'd argue that to be truly successful, we need to rethink what real-time marketing actually means.

Mobile connects us in the moment

First let me say this: It's no wonder we're still figuring this out. A dramatic shift in consumer behavior a shift to constant connectivity happened practically overnight. Between the 2010 and 2014 World Cup finals, Google Search traffic from smartphones more than tripled, from 18% to 70% of total volume. That huge jump reflects our new reality: When a big event is happening on TV, or right in front of us, we turn to our second screen and search. Right after that, we watch highlights on YouTube. The following day, we might use our smartphone to buy a dress we saw on the red carpet. Nielsen research suggests that 84% of smartphone and tablet owners use their devices as second screens while watching TV (Nielsen, The Digital Consumer, February 2014).

When a big event is happening on TV, or right in front of us, we turn to our second screen and search.

Real time is all about relevance

The numbers tell only part of the story- the what. To get at the why, we headed out into living rooms across the country and spent time with sports fans. We sat with them, cheered with them and held our heads in our hands with them. And we saw up close and unfiltered how they use mobile devices during games, uncovering three key motivations:

To feel closer to the action: experiencing a more intense, more real, more visceral moment

To share their feelings on the events they were seeing: jumping into chat, social streams or fan forums

To get information they could share in real life: finding facts and stats to sound smart at the watercooler the next morning

What's clear is that in real time, people are simply looking for relevance- for something that adds to their experience. When viewing it this way, the goal shifts away from filling social streams and battling for likes to making people's experiences richer. It means giving something that's a real companion to the main event, not another distraction. And it means planning ahead, not just reacting. Over the past six months, Google's Art, Copy & Code team has been exploring how to do this with two iconic brand partners, Nike and EA.

Nike takes a "Phenomenal Shot" at the World Cup

In our work with Nike, Wieden+Kennedy, Grow and Mindshare around the World Cup, we focused on the first two fan motivations: the need to feel closer to the action and the desire to express how we feel. For "Phenomenal Shot," we created rich 3D ads featuring Nike athletes in their signature celebratory poses inspired by the animated film "The Last Game." These ads ran within seconds of a goal being scored. A mobile web experience let users do things they couldn't do on a desktop, such as pan around a 3D version of Neymar Jr. by just tilting their phone. Fans could also remix and share these winning moments- all through the ad. Over 2 million fans created more than half a million "Phenomenal Moments" of their own.

Phenomenal Shot helped Nike deliver on its promise to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world like never before. "The technology is an exciting way for us to scale our interaction with athletes in real time and deliver content to them that will help fuel their conversations," says Davide Grasso, chief marketing officer at Nike. "It's a very powerful way to engage with Nike during some amazing moments in sports."

Fans riff on GIFs with EA Madden's GIFERATOR

More recently, to support the launch of EA's Madden NFL 15 video game, we tackled all three motivations with the Madden GIFERATOR. With EA SPORTS and its agency, Heat, along with our agency, Grow, we built a content engine that could generate around 100,000 different ads, depending on the player, the play and the team. All of these were created out of Madden NFL 15 in-game footage and turned into animated GIFs. We married this content engine with a live feed from the NFL that has details about every game across the nation. This allowed us to both create and deliver ads in real time. In the first four weeks of the NFL season, fans created more than 340,000 GIFs and EA served 970 real-time-relevant ads across the web (on desktop and mobile), where fans were following the game and reading NFL news.

The team at EA is excited about how the GIFERATOR is adding a new dimension to the engagement the brand has with its fans. "People are talking about the NFL in real time, and we need to be able to talk to our fans and engage them around the things that are happening," says Anthony Stevenson, vice president of global marketing and brand at EA SPORTS. "We know that things trend and then in 20 minutes they're gone. If we're not there, we're not going to be part of the conversation. We've almost completely eliminated the time between the event and when the fans are engaging with our brand ... that allows us to have a personalized and hopefully long-term relationship with our fans that we hope they're passionate about."

Ads that don't just reach, they resonate

Nike and EA were quick to recognize the value of creating advertising that doesn't just reach an audience but resonates uniquely in that moment with that audience. If brands can do that- connect with people in the moment, not take them out of it-then everyone's a winner. We're all writing the playbook in real time, and here are some things we've learned so far:

1. Start with the data
In moments of need, curiosity and excitement, we search. This creates a database that can reflect our collective thoughts and interests like nothing else can. It's the world's largest consumer panel, one that's uniquely vast, timely and authentic. For marketers, it's a potential gold mine. Examining this data can help with not just what we create but when we present it to the world.

2. Add to the experience
Marketers have long known that reaching people at the right moment is crucial. Technology has made that possible in ways we'd never imagined. But we can't let the technology lead. To be truly relevant, we have to figure out how to add to the experience.

3. Plan for all possibilities
Since you can't predict what's going to happen, build yourself a plan that can be tweaked on the fly. Technology now allows you to dynamically adjust creative based on what's actually happening in the moment.

4. Go big on small screens
The dramatic shift to constant connectivity, fueled by mobile, is at the root of real time. It's a mobile-first behavior, so your marketing should be too. Think about the experience on mobile before anything else. Make ads for small screens, don't just downsize desktop creative. Create mobile web experiences and apps that take full advantage of the platform.

5. Make companions, not campaigns
When creating tools and content for the second screen, it's crucial to remember that you're the cheerleader, not the quarterback. So instead of creating whole new campaigns, distracting from the action, one way in is to make "companions"- ways to fuel the passion without getting in the way.

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Rethinking Real Time: How Brands Can Really Matter in the Moment

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Watching live events with a smartphone is becoming a standard practice. Brands such as Nike and Electronic Arts are latching onto this trend and giving audiences a real companion to the live event. But it's not an easy thing to do, and requires planning ahead.

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Last year, Microsoft Research revealed Illumiroom -which used projectors to stretch the image on your TV to take over a whole wall. Now comes the sequel. Called RoomAlive, this new system can turn every surface in a room-from the floor to the couch cushions to your own skin-into a glowing screen that reacts to your movement. It's as if your whole analog world has been digitized. And that digital world can see where you're looking, pointing, and touching, and adapt itself accordingly.

Microsoft hasn't yet built Star Trek 's fabled Holodeck, but as project researcher Brett Jones quips, "we joke that until we discover matter to energy conversion, this might be the closest we can get."

Until we discover matter to energy conversion, this might be the closest we can get.

In the minds of its creators, RoomAlive is the antithesis of the Oculus Rift and other virtual reality headsets that isolate you, and pull your attention from the people and world around you. Instead, it's a means to keep play physical and social as we enter an era where virtual reality is plastering pixels straight on our eyes.

But let's back up for a moment. What is RoomAlive made of, exactly?
RoomAlive is a hive of really smart projectors.
The core unit of RoomAlive is called a node, and each node has three parts: A projector, a Kinect camera for depth sensing, and a computer. The node is installed to the ceiling of a room, where it creates a 3-D map of what it sees through the Kinect. Then, it can " projection map " the space, applying a coat of digital paint to the room.

Using as few as three of these nodes, Microsoft Research can map the average living room with a RoomAlive skin. Projection mapping is a somewhat well-trodden technology. What makes RoomAlive enticing is that it can effortlessly scale without limit. As nodes are added, they recognize one another and calibrate themselves to work together automatically. You could hypothetically map a whole house in RoomAlive.
RoomAlive also has all of the real-time body-tracking cleverness of the Kinect.
This is where things get really wild. RoomAlive can take your position into account all of the time, which means that any surface can become a makeshift touch screen because the projectors see what you're touching. RoomAlive can also project parallax images images that dynamically shift in response to your precise perspective, allowing you to peek over and around the images. With parallax technology, 2-D projections of spikes sticking out of a wall can actually appear 3-D. RoomAlive can even create the illusion of an object floating in three-dimensional space by projecting at an exact spot on you wall or floor with just the right scale and shadows.

"It's not completely like a 3-D stereo hologram, but it's a very compelling illusion," Benko tells Co.Design. "If you covered one eye, the experience is exactly what you see with a camera."

You could hypothetically map a whole house in RoomAlive.

But RoomAlive's tricks of perspective don't stop with just one person. Microsoft researchers expanded the project through technology they call Mano-a-mano to offer two people in the same room a unique perspective. "If we're looking at each other, face-to-face, most of the surfaces I see are things you don't see," Benko explains. "Things on my body, things behind you-we're using this trick." This trick manifested in a Street Fighter-esque fighting game, in which two people fired energy beams at one another, each seeing their shots fire in an illusion of 3-D.
Video games are a natural extension for RoomAlive, but not the only extension.
It was clear, when talking to multiple researchers on the project, that gaming, and ideas of play, were what immediately came to mind with RoomAlive. Several ideas-ones that you don't see here-were prototyped. Even more were discussed.

"You can imagine playing a tower defense game in your living room. You run over, grab the pillows and build a pillow fort that's your base," Jones says. "A lot of this is about bringing back the physical world, and we think that's important with kids playing games."

Another concept proposed was a Dora the Explorer style of game, where a child would don a map and a backpack, and that backpack would magically glow and talk to its wearer on their adventure (a very cool idea, if you disregard the fact that you can't see your own backpack!). But of course, there is plenty of less G-rated gameplay potential RoomAlive, too. The researchers demoed a system for projecting bullet wounds onto players that you could imagine in a future Call of Duty.

"If you had gunfire, and the bullet hit someone's body, that wound would actually follow your body from one projector to the next," explains researcher Raj Sodhi. "Each projector takes over and makes that transition completely seamless."

"Once, Raj had the blood dialed up way too high, so as you walked around, the blood would splatter on the floor and you'd leave a trail of blood in the room," Jones says.

Video games are the most obvious use cases, but beyond that application, the research team is exploring RoomAlive's potential for the business world, like advanced telepresence and augmenting conference room meetings with digital information.

With its prototype nodes costing $500 to $800 a pop to assemble, there are no plans to bring RoomAlive to market yet-though maybe you'll see it in your next-next-next Xbox?-but Microsoft Research is already exploring what it can do with RoomAlive next.

"We're trying to push the boundaries of what is possible and see the potential of what's possible, not cost reduce the particulars of one device," explains senior researcher Hrvoje Benko. "What's interesting to us is merging the real and virtual worlds, in a contextually relevant sense, so the virtual things behave in relationship to real things," Becko continues. "I think we have a lot of work to do to make that a reality-which is good, it keeps us busy."

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Microsoft Can Now Turn Any Space Into The Holodeck

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Last year, Microsoft Research revealed Illumiroom -which used projectors to stretch the image on your TV to take over a whole wall. Now comes the sequel. Called RoomAlive, this new system can turn every surface in a room-from the floor to the couch cushions to your own skin-into a glowing screen that reacts to your movement.

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The smartphone vendor story so far: http://t.co/uZKhWDxwAs

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The smartphone vendor story so far: http://t.co/uZKhWDxwAs

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The smartphone vendor story so far: http://t.co/uZKhWDxwAs

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The smartphone vendor story so far: http://t.co/uZKhWDxwAs

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The smartphone vendor story so far: http://t.co/uZKhWDxwAs

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Real time advertising spoof - 'Reactvertising'

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Real time advertising spoof - 'Reactvertising'

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Does your agency take hours to respond to the latest trending hashtag or celebrity death? Is your brand missing out on being part of the conversation because you're reacting too slow? With Reactvertising™ from Toronto ad agency john st., your brand will never miss another opportunity to own the conversation.

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Guardian joins forces with Telegraph for planning tool

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Guardian joins forces with Telegraph for planning tool

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Guardian joins forces with Telegraph for Audiences not Platforms tool

For the first time, media buyers will be able to build campaigns around the audiences of the UK's two leading quality newsbrands in one simple process.

The granular planning tool offers easy access to 22 million adults in the UK (roughly 43 per cent of the adult population) across 200 GNM and TMG platforms.

The new tool includes a greater breakdown of audiences via sections on desktop and apps, as well as featuring third-party aggregation sites such as Flipboard and Google Currents for the first time.

Audiences Not Platforms 2.0 promises to "maximise the reach and frequency of any campaign booked across the two media owners' print and digital platforms" by focusing campaigns around distinct audiences, regardless of print, mobile or desktop platform.

It is designed to acknowledge audience cross-over between different channels, sections and devices, as well as amplifying brand impact through cross-platform ad exposure.

David Pemsel, deputy chief executive, GNM, said: "It's great to work with the Telegraph on the latest iteration and answer the calls of the industry by offering an increasingly simple and effective way of planning campaigns across quality publishers."

The collaboration is said to have been born out of industry demand for more simple and efficient planning across media owners. It also addresses the need for greater transparency on the effectiveness of multi-platform campaigns.

Dave King, executive director at TMG, said: "We hope this is just the first step in quality publishers working collaboratively towards giving our customers the single source data they require across multiple platforms."

Audiences not Platforms 2.0 will launch later this year and will be offered to existing IPA Touchpoints 5 subscribers for free. GNM and TMG will be visiting agencies to showcase the new tool and offer training.

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Guardian joins forces with Telegraph for media planning tool

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For the first time, media buyers will be able to build campaigns around the audiences of the UK's two leading quality newsbrands in one simple process.

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Retailers 'disabling' Apple Pay in the US

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Retailers 'disabling' Apple Pay in the US

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CVS Pharmacy has decided to disable all NFC terminals in all of its stores after it was discovered that Apple Pay would work with the hardware. CVS sent a memo to its stores, which was posted by SlashGear, saying that Apple Pay was not a supported payment type and that customers would have to choose some other payment method in order to check out.

The notice also explains the reason for the change: CVS is currently part of a consortium of retailers attempted to create an alternative mobile payment method called CurrentC. The new system isn't based on NFC. It is, however, based on something you've probably seen before...

Please note that we do not accept Apple Pay at this time. However we are currently working with a group of large retailers to develop a mobile wallet that allows for mobile payments attached to credit cards and bank accounts directly from a smart phone. We expect to have this feature available in the first half of 2015.

If customers attempt to pay for a transaction with Apple Pay, a message will prompt both customer and cashier for a different form of payment. Please instruct cashiers to apologize to the customer and explain that we do not currently accept Apple Pay, but will have our own mobile wallet next year.

CurrentC, which was detailed today by TechCrunch, is, quite frankly, a horrible attempt at creating a mobile payment system that doesn't rely on technology like NFC (which Apple doesn't allow third-parties to access at this time), and instead uses a complex system of-I kid you not- QR codes.

How does it work? Well, get this: first the payment terminal shows you a QR code which you scan using your phone. The phone then presents a QR code, which the cashier scans using a separate QR code reader. Here's the best worst part: because these stores want to save money by cutting out the payment networks like MasterCard and Visa in these transactions, they will link CurrectC directly to your checking account, not your credit card.

Sounds great so far, right? Hang on, we're not done yet. CurrentC is specifically designed to make it easier to track customers' shopping habits. While Apple Pay was designed with privacy in mind, CurrentC is essentially the opposite, and was built for the sole purpose of making you easier to track by storing your receipts and other data on the service's cloud server.

Oh, and it's going to need access to your health data for some reason.

Because the coalition of retailers wasting time on this system has decided that any store using it must use it exclusively, you can expect the following stores to adopt the QR-code based system in leiu of Apple Pay or any other NFC payment system:

But hey, they're going to offer coupons to people who use it. That's totally worth forking over your health data and checking account info, right?

CurrentC is expected to roll out in stores some time in 2015, but you can already download the CurrentC application for free on the iTunes App Store. You can also rate it and leave reviews, for whatever that's worth.

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CVS begins disabling NFC terminals in stores to cut off Apple Pay support in favor of 'CurrentC'

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CVS Pharmacy has decided to disable all NFC terminals in all of its stores after it was discovered that Apple Pay would work with the hardware. CVS sent a memo to its stores, which was posted by SlashGear, saying that Apple Pay was not a supported payment type and that customers would have to choose some other payment method in order to check out.

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Mobile Is Eating the World, 2014 (slides only)

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There is no point in drawing a distinction between the future of technology and the future of mobile. They are the same. In other words, technology is now outgrowing the tech industry.

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Last month, I introduced the concept of marketing apps - more interactive features that marketers could deploy across their websites and campaigns to better engage prospects.

As a follow up, I'd like to share some ideas with you about how such responsive web marketing apps can have a tremendous impact on the evolution of content marketing in particular.

I propose that we've seen three waves of content marketing on the web, and that marketing apps may herald a fourth wave of interactive content on a mass scale.

The First Three Waves Of Content Marketing

The first wave of content marketing was how it began: companies publishing as much as they wanted on their websites (and eventually on blogs and social media platforms, as well).

Granted, most of this content was text. But text was easily indexed by search engines, which made that content discoverable. Companies would publish pages, search engines would ingest them, searchers would find them with keyword queries, and good content would earn links and rise in rankings. Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) were joined at the hip.

The second wave of content marketing moved from text to richer, more visual content, such as videos, infographics, slide presentations, and beautifully designed e-books and white papers.

While not always optimal from an SEO perspective, this rich and visual content was often much more compelling in the eyes of its human audience. This second wave corresponded with the growth of social media marketing. Content was increasingly produced to encourage "shares" on Twitter and Facebook.

But as more companies have jumped on the content marketing bandwagon, the river of content has become a flood. For marketers, it's ever more difficult to gain visibility for any one piece of content in this torrent. And for audiences, wading through all of this content can feel like a slog.

The third wave of content marketing, on the rise now, is about using personalization technology to try to filter the right content for the right people.

Personalization holds much promise, but it requires data about prospects in order to make educated guesses about which content is right for them. That's more feasible in bottom-of-funnel nurturing and sales enablement programs - when we truly start to know someone - than it is in top-of-funnel marketing campaigns.

However, all three of these waves of content marketing have had one major constraint in common: they revolve around passive content. The audience had to patiently read, watch, or listen to try to absorb the information as if they were reading a textbook or sitting in a lecture.

The Fourth Wave Of Content Marketing: Marketing Apps

The fourth wave of content marketing, now emerging, is the proliferation of interactive content with responsive web marketing apps.

Marketing apps are participatory, not passive.

A marketing app might be an assessment tool, to help someone understand which stage their company is at in a maturity model for a new technology. A marketing app might be a game-like quiz show to debunk popular myths around a product category. A marketing app might be an interactive e-book that embeds real-time polls, adjustable data visualizations, and an ROI calculator.

Marketing apps often deliver the same material as passive content, but they deliver it in a more engaging way. They take inspiration from the two-way conversations of great salespeople and the active learning techniques demonstrated by great teachers. That's the "engagement axis" in the graphic above.

They also enable marketers to experiment with different "business models" for their content, too. Passive content has typically been either free (i.e., anyone could access it anonymously on the web) or gated behind a lead generation form (e.g., if you wanted to download a report or attend a webinar, you had to fill out a form with your contact information).

Each end of that content business model spectrum has its downsides: free content may not directly generate leads; but, gated content is often not "bought" by most of your audience.

However, marketing apps can blend these models to provide "freemium" content. A prospect can begin interacting with a marketing app for free on the web, to get a sense for the value embedded in it. Then, once they've found the experience to be useful, they can be offered extra features or bonus material in exchange for their contact information.

For instance, that assessment tool example mentioned earlier might let anyone take the assessment for free, to learn what factors contribute to the maturity model and determine what stage they're at. Then at the end, they could be offered premium content, such as a ranking with their peers or a guide of next steps tailored to their current stage, gated by a short lead generation form that's built right into the app.

These four waves of content marketing are not mutually exclusive. In fact, when orchestrated well, they can reinforce each other's strengths. For example, observing prospects interact with marketing apps can feed valuable data into personalization algorithms to better tailor other content offers to them.

P.S. Future-thinking readers may wonder what the fifth and sixth waves of content marketing will be. I don't know. But the seventh wave ... (autoplay video)

Graphics provided courtesy of ion interactive.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author

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The 4th Wave Of Content Marketing: Marketing Apps - Marketing Land

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Last month, I introduced the concept of marketing apps - more interactive features that marketers could deploy across their websites and campaigns to better engage prospects. As a follow up, I'd like to share some ideas with you about how such responsive web marketing apps can have a tremendous impact on the evolution of content marketing in particular.