From junk food to junk news

Remarkably, surrounded by an abundance of choices people chose what feels good, not what is good. With junk food, it's a combination of fat, sugar and salt that fools taste buds into craving for more. With junk news, it's the confirmation bias that fools brains into craving for more news that conform to their world view.

According to Buzzfeed, during the 2016 election cycle fake news outperformed real news.

Due the difference in feedback mechanisms, the situation with junk news is worse than with junk food. That is, after having a junk food diet for an extended period of time, people can at least use scales to discover that their weight has gone up. By contrast, after having a junk news brain diet, people can only get stronger in their opinions because their social network keeps rewarding them for consuming and sharing the junk.

Can we solve the problem without resorting to censorship? One way to look at it would be to consider the situation from a point of view widely adopted in another domain - money and finance. That is, today's fake money is easily detected and discarded, so that the society doesn't fall into the trap of the Gresham's Law. Similarly, fake news can be detected by a variety of technologies, including a BitCoin-like approach that verifies authenticity of the news and news sources. Fake news, like fake coins should be taken out of circulation. Otherwise, our brains get stupid by consuming junk news, just like our bodies can get fat, by consuming junk food.

Lunch Talk: In 2003 Elon Musk gave a talk at Stanford about PayPal and Space X

From the Youtube blurb:

"Elon Musk, co-founder, CEO, and chairman of PayPal, shares his background: He was accepted into Stanford but deferred his admission to start an internet company in 1995. His company was zip2 which helped the media industry convert their content to electronic medium. Then, he sold the company for over $300 million and never came back to Stanford."

tags: youtube, lunchtalk, innovation, media, space

The new Digital Divide

The New York Times shows how mobile app designers devise new ways to get teenagers' attention during the day,

Push notifications — those incessant reminders that make your phone light up and ding — are the infantry of app warfare, cracking the attention span to remind users that someone on the Internet might be talking about them. All summer Wishbone had been sending out alerts four times a day, but the three men were thinking about adding more and, now that students were back in class, trying to recalibrate around the school day. 

“Can we have a friends feed at noon?” Mr. Jones asked Mr. Vatere. “It would be great to do ‘Your friends have updated.’ ”

“And you talk about it while you’re at school,” Mr. Pham added.

What are the implications: not for the business and advertisers, which the NYT article discusses, but for the kids, their families and the society at large?

We already know that frequent interruptions worsen kids' learning performance. We also know that pre-teens and teens are becoming addicted to their mobiles. Given that well-funded and market-savvy mobile app developers create new ways to target kids during school hours, we can predict that there will be a learning gap between kids who can manage their mobile distractions and those who cannot.

The old Digital Divide existed between people who had online access and those who had not. The underlying assumption was that the former were better off because they had access to all the information information needed to learn effectively.

I believe the assumption is no longer valid. Having access to the internet all the time is becoming detrimental to learning. Arguably, it's worse than television because kids get bombarded with distractions and advertisement all the time, rather than during the leisure hours.

The new Digital Divide is going to emerge between those who can manage their online time and those who cannot. Online learning may even broaden this divide because it will provide the motivated with greater opportunities to excel. Most likely, we already seeing signs of things to come through the low completion rates in virtual universities — 3-5%: few get huge benefits, while the majority does not. Paradoxically, online learning has become a natural selection environment for the next generation of schoolchildren addicted to their ubiquitous social interactions.

tags: psychology, mobile, learning, virtual, media, advertisement

LunchTalk: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings

At the 37th annual ENCORE Award event on September 23, 2014, Stanford Graduate School of Business honored Netflix, and Netflix Founder and CEO Reed Hastings, MS '88. Reed Hastings speaks on the history of the company, the challenges they faced, and how Netflix became the innovative leader it is today.



tags: internet, media, video, streamternet, source, content

Lunch Talk: How to Tell Stories with Data

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and editor of the New York Times’ data journalism website The Upshot, David Leonhardt, shares the tricks of the master storyteller’s trade. In conversation with Google News Lab data editor Simon Rogers, he shows how data is changing the world; and your part in the revolution.



tags: media, lunchtalk, information, trend, data, story,

Social Media vs TV: kill or be killed

Advertisement dominates business models deployed by social media companies, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yelp, and a host of others. Although we think of them as technology growth companies, historically advertising revenues have been flat relative to the GDP *.

Web-based ads — most famously Google AdWords — grew rapidly not because they somehow generated new economic growth in the country, but because they helped TV kill newspapers, Craigslist.com being the early hero.

Now that newspapers are effectively dead, the only way for the ad-supported internet business to grow is to kill TV-based ads. While the TV industry fights it off with YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, we should expect more video ads on our mobile screens. In the meantime, the likes of HBO and Netflix have to put a strong bet on content quality. Such a bet would be independent of the distribution media and would have a good chance for translating video streams and downloads into real growth.

* also see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1399613 
tags: internet, video, data, packaged payload, distribution, content, media,

Popular media hypes up a trivial Apple 3-D gesture patent

Science fiction writer Michael Crichton once said about journalists' cluelessness on subjects that require special knowledge:

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

The recent media coverage of US 8,933,876 awarded to Apple is a remarkable case of baloney reporting. For example, in a CNBC news segment Dan Costa, the Editor-in-Chief of PCMag.com says, he's surprised how broad the patent is. Obviously, Dan is clueless because in reality the patent claims only a vertical unlock gesture - a narrow set of functionality that is extremely easy to work around, e.g. by implementing it horizontally.

The Business Insider header says, "Apple Just Patented 'Minority Report'-Style Gesture Controls." This statement is a huge stretch of reality because Apple patented just a tiny extension of the technology already implemented in, e.g. Microsoft Kinect, Nintendo, and other devices.

As a rule, when you read something about patents in popular media consider yourself under the influence of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

tags: patents, apple, media, information, error

Amazon's "anticipatory" patent: Let's cut through the BS!

Many news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, wrote recently about Amazon's US Patent 8,615,473, issued on December 24, 2013, titled "Method and system for anticipatory package shipping." For example, Tyler Cowen, of the marginalrevolution.com fame, quoted a catchy 2-liner to describe the invention:

The Seattle retailer in December gained a patent for what it calls “anticipatory shipping,” a method to start delivering packages even before customers click “buy.”

The title of Cowen's blog entry "Back to the Amazon future" tells more about people's hyped-up perception of Amazon's delivery prowess than the actual invention.

That is, the patent is a lot more mundane than journalists and bloggers imagine. It covers a scenario where a particular item can be re-routed to a specific address while it is still being shipped to a general geographical area.

The pre-emptive part of the invention is not new at all. Retailers routinely ship products before people buy the stuff. When you go to a grocery store you buy a watermelon that was pre-emptively shipped to this location for your buying convenience. The same goes for TVs, cameras, flowers, etc. It's obvious that the retailer takes into account what Amazon calls "business variables," e.g. that people buy more flowers before the Valentine's Day, than the Father's Day.

Let's de-glamourize the patent by thinking that we deal with low-tech railroad coal shipments, instead of high-tech Amazon robotic drones. Imagine that the year is 1914 and you are in the coal business. You know seasonal patterns and you anticipate customer orders based, e.g. on the weather. If it's going to be cold in Michigan you know that people will burn more coal to heat their houses. They've done it year after year after year. Being smart, you start shipping coal to Michigan by railroad before you receive specific orders. Then, when you receive the actual orders you send a telegram to the railroad company and ask them to re-route some of the coal cars to Detroit an Ann Arbor, which happen to be close to one of your Michigan coal warehouses. That's it. Only instead of coal cars in 1914, Amazon ships socks and shoes in 2014. Nothing magically pre-emptive here.

Amazon's US Patent 8,615,473 is one of the three the company received so far on various aspects of the same invention.

The patents cover the same basic scenario: ship a package to a general geographic area, then notify the shipping company of a specific address in the area before the final delivery. Most likely, the patents will never be used because Amazon is already a dominant force in the industry.

To me, this particular media event illustrates multiple layers of "aboutness" that people pile up on top of each other when describing a hypothetical object or process. First, Amazon writes a patent application about a proposed modification to a shipping process. Then, the US Patent Office issues office actions that finalize patent claims about the invention and grants a patent. Then, a blogger reads the patent and writes a blog post about it. Then, an economist twits about the blog post. Etc. etc. Once an error creeps into the aboutness process, the entire information trail ends up leading nowhere.

tags: invention, innovation, patent, hype, amazon, media, aboutness

Logical Reasoning: Twitter popularity numbers

According to @Mediabistro, the current popularity ratings for individuals look like this:

Find a name that DOES NOT belong with the others.

tags: media, aboutness, logic, social, networking

Invention of the Day: DVR recording from a link on the Internet.

Yesterday, October 9, 2013, Twitter announced that it "will provide links that let pay–TV users record or view programs on Comcast's cable services." Bloomberg News reports about a Comcast executive explaining the new service,

“There are tons of conversation about live TV, but does that really lead to someone programming their DVR or picking up their remote?” Schwartz said. “This very clearly and in a measurable way links that conversation with consumption. If you’re a programmer, you monetize best if someone is watching that show live on a television set. It’s a win-win-win for Twitter, the programmers and the distributors.” 

More than 14 years ago when I worked at Philips Multimedia Center in Palo Alto, California, I invented (US Patent 6,611,654) a service that enabled users to accomplish scenarios now marketed by Twitter and Comcast. One of the scenarios covered by the patent involves a mobile user:

Alice got stuck in traffic on her way home. She is going to be late for the broadcast of a live piano concert. Fortunately, her palm-top Nino (or cell phone, or laptop) can access the TV programming network. With just a couple of clicks Alice sets her recording time-shifting device to cache the concert.

[Nino was a personal communications device developed and marketed — unsuccessfully— by Philips at the time. Tony Fadell, who later went to Apple to develop the original iPod and then created Nest, lead the effort.]

Even at that time, I could see that the Internet and mobile connectivity was going to bring new functionality to the users, including elements of social networking (because the nature of visual media is inherently social). Here's how it is described in the patent:

Alice loves talking about her favorite TV series. She watches the episodes frequently and enjoys every minute of it. In today's episode one of the characters behaves exactly as she predicted a couple of days ago. Alice needs to talk to her friend Jane about it. Jane is at work and cannot see the show. ...  One click and today's phone discussion (telecon) with Jane is going to be a real time experience.

The yesterday's announcement highlights the difference between Invention and Innovation that we emphasize in our book Scalable Innovation.

Source: Shteyn & Shtein, 2013. Figure P3.

Although we were able to make a first step toward innovation in 1999, e.g. by creating a prototype (first red dot on the chart), the innovation has become scalable when the connectivity infrastructure became ubiquitous. Today, phones, TVs, DVRs, thermostats, watches, and other devices are connected to the network and can be accessed by consumers in many contexts — personal, social, and business. As we show in the book, scalable innovation creates its own space. Right now, we enter a new phase (Chapters 15) when the entire system "flips" to accommodate connected devices; adding them to the network has become a "no-brainer."

Alan Kay once said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." I'm happy I was involved in inventing the right future.

Online tracking: social networking vs analytics

Hi-tech websites seem to use a lot more social networking tracking than business sites (figs below). For example, wired, VBeat, Cnet and other tech-oriented content services are more geared toward generating "buzz", while biz sites use good old spying techniques to sell ads.

 

Tracking on wired.com

(all four major social networks present)

 Tracking on bloomberg.com

(no social tracking but extensive analytic  data collected)

tags: technology, media, control, detection, social, networking, business, model

Snack Talk: iPhone 5 - first look.

tags: lunchtalk, apple, psychology, media

The Transistor: a Cinderella Story.

Transistor is arguably one of the greatest inventions of all time. Today, all computers, including mobile phones, use electronic chips that comprise billions of transistors. Nevertheless, when the transistor was invented it received very little attention from the general public. On July 1, 1948, The New York Times published a short note about the invention at the bottom of The News of Radio section, p.46. (see below).

I find it remarkable that this announcement of a great invention sits side by side with trivialities (on the left above). It makes you think that really important technology news never appear on page 1.


tags: invention, innovation, course, media, technology

Teens flock to Instagram/Facebook. Youtube next?

(Sept. 8, 2012. CNet) According to Nielsen, Instagram is the top photography site among teens ages 12 to 17, with 1 million teens visiting the site during July.
Also, a Pew report presented over the summer about teenage online behavior found that 45 percent of online 12-year-olds use social-network sites and that the number doubles to 82 percent for 13-year-old Internet users. The most popular activity for teens on social networks is posting photos and videos, the study found.

10 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that mothers of small children were the most avid picture-takers.  Kodak, HP, and others spent billions of dollars marketing to this demographic. Furthermore, when digital cameras emerged, the old guard saw an increase in picture printing revenues because people took more pictures and, out of habit, printed them. The entire business model was based on the trade-off: the more pictures one wanted to share, the more money she had to spend on printing them.

On the other hand, social networking and cheap mobile cameras broke the trade-off. That is, taking/sharing pictures became free and teenagers could finally afford an infinite amount of sharing. As the result, Kodak went out of business and HP's printing division tanked. At the same time, Facebook and Instagram soared.

A similar situation happened in the personal video space. Sony and other consumer electronic companies lost, while Youtube and Facebook won. If Google continues its momentum with Android (driving video content to Youtube), they might capture a large portion of ad revenue associated with social interaction.

tags: s-curve, trade-off, media, facebook, social, networking, google

Facebook US Patent 8,204,952 as post-modern literature.

Last week USPTO issued US Patent 8,204,952 to Facebook, the patent covering "Digital file distribution in a social network system." The core idea behind the patent is simple enough: user profile page contains a link to a digital file that can be retrieved by another user.

To make things interesting, Facebook's patent lawyers in cooperation with the USPTO wrote Claim 1 as a piece of post-modern literature, where time and space are intermingled in a highly idiosyncratic manner. In the patent claim, the timing of the steps necessary to implement the method of the invention has very little to do with the order of appearance in the claim.

For example, setting up user and privacy rights to access the profile page and the digital file are mentioned last (steps 10 and 13 out of 13), despite the fact that the setup has to happen before any content distribution can take place (see Table below).

If IKEA wrote their furniture assembly instructions in this manner, they'd be long out of business.



The table below has three columns:
1. The logical order in which the steps of the method need to be implemented.
2. The order of appearance in Claim 1.
3. A brief description of each step.
 

Logical order	Order of appearance	Description of the step
of the method	in Claim1
1	13	set up rights for PPt2 re other users
2	10	set up rights for PPt1 re other users
3	3	ID enables retrieval of P.P.
4	2	PPt1 associated w/user 1
5	1	storing ID for PPt1
6	6	insert ID into PPt2
7	4	receiving request from Tool for PPt2
8	14	decide on rights for PPt2
9	5	sending PPt2
10	8	insert ID into request
11	7	receive request from Tool for PPt1
12	9	decide on rights for PPt1
13	11	retrieve PPt1 from source by device
14	12	decide on rights for PPt2

The good news is our system model works really well for analyzing patents, even the ones that are intentionally obfuscated.

tags: patents, system, media, facebook, distribution

New Rules: Social Media Campaigns.

A simple formula for social media marketing:

Success = Tuesday + Celebrities + Prizes

(VBeat) The study suggests that factors increasing the success of YouTube campaigns include celebrity guest stars, incentivized user engagement (with prizes for commenting or posting in response), and interesting, odd titles that viewers have to click on to understand.

Incidentally, Tuesday happens to be the most productive day of the week.  Ad campaigns that parasitize on our need for information seem to be the early winners.

tags: social, networking, media, experience, advertisement,

Google+ ghost town.

Even Google with its deep pockets and broad user base has trouble competing with Facebook, an established player in the social media industry.

Feb 28, 2012. WSJ -- Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn't have data on mobile usage.
Behind the lack of engagement are Google's difficulties in differentiating Google+ from Facebook.

Youtube seems to be a much better social media property for Google than Google+. Unlike Google+ it addresses a new need with a new technology.
If Google enters the enterprise market with Google Apps, then Google+ can become an internal enterprise version of social networking, especially on mobile devices.

tags: mousetrap, social, networking, media, google, facebook, youtube

TV vs Social networking

An inforgraphic from VBeat about Americans' social networking habits:

For comparison, Americans on average spend 4hrs 39min a day watching TV, which is more than 20 times greater than on social networking. The biggest difference in these two media activities is the mode of user participation: passive vs active. With TV viewers don't add anything to the content, while social networking works because they actively add content and links. It's easy to see that adding social element to TV viewing can help content providers and advertisers engage their audience and introduce various freemium biz models, similar to Zynga's.
Implications for cloud computing and bandwidth provisioning are going to be significant as well.

tags: media, trend, gaming, source, payload

Why the content industry has to innovate to survive.

Because of its reputation of being "infamous for stealing money from artists", the content industry is going to lose jury verdicts in the majority of copyright violation trials.  Psychologically, jurors will have a hard time punishing individual users for "robbing the robbers."

SOPA  (the Stop Online Piracy Act) was designed, at least in part, to preempt copyright violations and as a result avoid court cases involving copyright infringement. SOPA's failure shows that to survive the industry hast to find a way to provide digital content conveniently and economically to the general public. Therefore, it is relatively easy to predict that within the next 5 years a new business model is going to emerge in content distribution.

RFS 9: Kill Hollywood

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

Hat tip to Max Shtein for the Y Incubator link.

tags: information, control, business, model, innovation, problem, information, media

Pop culture and the great American divide.

In a NYT column David Brooks reviews Charles Murray’s book “Coming Apart.” He talks about the great social divide between two tribes of Americans:

... there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play.

Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.

I've started reading Murray's book and the data he presents looks both impressive and disturbing. It's also disturbing to see how popular media exploits the upper/lower tribe stereotypes to sell its product. See for example, how the new Britney Spears music video presents a conflict over a girl between an abusive upper tribe hipster and a lower tribe waiter.



tags: culture, social, media, information