11th March 2016
I’m currently in the wonderful city of Austin,Texas attending SxSW Interactive. Here is a list of the ‘must-see” sessions courtesy of Texas monthly.
The highly readable @faris on ‘The Paradox of Buying Influence’. ‘The paradox of influencer marketing is that when we attempt to buy influence, we transform it into endorsement, which everyone understands is a commercially created fiction. Celebrities in advertisements are not influential in this sense because no one thinks they actually believe what they are saying.‘
Airbnb is on a mission to handle all of your travel with Trips. More than a product, Trips marks the relaunch of Airbnb as a company. “We studied Amazon and how they went from books to everything,” says Chesky (the founder). “We studied Disney’s ecosystem between the theme parks and the movies. The conclusion? The more you can design this as a single system, typically, the better these things work.”
The 4th Industrial Revolution – who will win? From @nesta – ‘The idea of a fourth industrial revolution (4IR) has been in play for 20 years. It usually refers to a convergence and interpenetration of digital technologies, bio, nano, info and things. It’s a catch all for many different technological trends – from prosthetic devices to the Internet of Things and new models of advanced manufacturing. On the present trajectory, the 4IR promises great benefits. But it also risks leading to a widening divide between vanguards and the rest, accelerating job destruction ahead of job creation, and introducing potentially big threats to personal privacy and cybersecurity.’
My piece this week on the Brand Learning blog – ‘The Future (and eternal truth) of Marketing : Trust’. ‘This is not one of those ‘crystal ball gazing’ kind of articles. Nor is it a compendium of mid or long term predictions. This piece is based on the universal ‘customer centric’ truth that consumers have, do, and will always ‘believe’ in brands that they feel able to rely on.’
This is Geo-Search, a technology demonstration of global scale machine learning on a new map visualisation. Or in other words, a clever way to search for similar looking places in the world.
This from quite a few years back, but the great Jeremy Bullmore is always with listening to. ‘Why a Good Insight is like a Refrigerator’.
From @warped, Google and Apple are both hyper-successful companies, but chart their patents, and they have completely different innovation signatures. ‘Apple and Google operate differently. Apple is driven largely by a centralised development structure, stemming from its fabled design studio, whereas Google has a more distributed, open-source approach to new products.’
This really helps explain something I have been struggling with – A visual introduction to machine learning.
One of the finest ‘car crash’ videos one is likely to see, as an expert’s kids disrupt his TV Interview.