Instagram Is Visual Twitter

If you haven't heard, Instagram recently announced the ability to tag people in photos. They have cleverly marketed it as "Photos of You" which puts the focus on tagging people, but this also presents the opportunity for brands to be tagged as well.

You see, Instagram is an incredible medium for brands to communicate and engage with current and prospective customers in a visually appealing way. We saw the same sort of attraction by brands (and retailers) to Pinterest when user growth reached a critical mass, for brands were able to tell a story, without actually saying a word (a picture is worth...).

Yet Pinterest is a different medium than Instagram in that it is not conducive to what I call "content snacking™" or the short bursts of attention that users divert to media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram when they are standing in line at Starbucks or even waiting for an elevator.

Instagram, on the other hand, is ideal for content snacking and more importantly, it is more effective than Twitter.

Twitter, for the most part, requires one to actually read their Twitter feed. Sure, we can skim for the most part, but with Instagram, the story is clear immediately.

Instagram is actually visual Twitter.

Visual Twitter

Twitter is parseable, readable, consumable by computers (software) and is relatively easy for brands, retailers, celebrities, politicians, really anyone or any entity to find out who is "talking" about them...it's text afterall! For example, "Prosecco" in the following tweet is very easy to find with a simple search.

Prosecco and crab cakes. Happy Cinco De Mayo.

— Joe McCann (@joemccann) May 5, 2013

But Instagram is different.

Prosecco in my Instagram (the photo) cannot be picked out with a simple text search -- it's not text! It's an image!

Besides the incredibly overused and abused hashtag on Instagram, photos are not easy to parse, analyze and consume by software, particularly the text or even logos, because it simply is not text! It requires some specialization, such as Optical Character Recognition, or OCR for short.

OCR is not necessarily a new technology, but it is not widely known and certainly is not commonly applied to a use case such as parsing Instagram feeds for words or even logos.

However, this is precisely the type of information brands would be interested in. Who is Instagraming? When? Where and with whom? How many people are "liking" it? What is the broader reach and impact of someone's Instagram post when that brand is indirectly or directly involved?

To answer these questions, Instagram has provided a stop-gap solution with tagging photos, but it has it's own set of issues.

Applied Tagging

Allowing people to tag brands, err, people in an Instagram post, before they post the photo, is a decent start and sure the value behind tagging actual human beings is great; the network effect for Insta-book grows stronger. But as brands start to be involved more and more in the tagging, the value, in my opinion, shifts from Instagram/Facebook's network effect, and more in the earned social media that brands will obtain from the tagging.

In the image above, your's truly has tagged myself (Instagram is a bit narcissistic, innit?) and the Theory brand, button down shirt I'm wearing. Theory, now knows that I have attributed (tagged) them to something about my post. Prior to this, Theory had very little knowledge of whom was wearing their clothes, yet I've explicitly included them in my post.

In my example, there is no Theory logo here to "parse" or "scan", but imagine the following Instagram post:

Out of the absurd number of hashtags included in this post, not one of them is actually "#Nike". Yet, this photo has 65 likes and is in fact a Nike product. Is this not of value in any way, shape or form to Nike? What if the post had 6,500 likes? Would Nike's opinion of the value of the Instagram post change then? If so, how would they know about it?

Current social listening platforms have no way of discerning where Nike is truly being represented on Instagram.

Relying on acutal human beings to include your brand's logo in their Instagram post is also foolish, as most folks won't participate, unless they are incentivized in some way.

Software As A Service

Instead, this is a service that needs to be handled by software in (near) realtime and not rely on crowd sourcing (tagging, hashtagging).

A service that parses Instagram in (near) realtime, looking for characters using OCR (I wrote my own here) or logo recognition using something like IQ Engines is precisely the type of product I'm looking to build while in my new role at Mother NY.

The ability for brands, retailers or anything with a logo to get even closer to those whom are "talking" about them or better understand them is extremely valuable to the brands and provides a massive opportunity to the person or company who builds it first. Instagram is the first truly visual social network and the tooling and analytics will need to be rethought give its inherently visual nature.

Ubiquitous Self-Documentation and The Abolishment of Privacy

SXSW is truly a social experiment every year it takes place in beautiful Austin, Texas. The combination of Film, Technology (Interactive) and Music makes for a perfect blend of creatives, professionals, influencers and geeks.

What's particularly peculiar about SXSW this year, 2013, is how nearly everything, and I mean everything is documented, particularly in a visual manner (photos and video). There isn't a moment at an event where someone, somewhere isn't taking a photo, Instagramming, Vine-ing, Tweeting, Facebooking, Snapchatting, Socialcam-ing, or Youtubing any and all things around them, particularly themselves and how they are engaging in the moment. This is what I consider the begining of a large secular movement into an era "self-documentation" or how one is capturing their "now moment" and sharing it with everyone else.

And everyone is doing it.

I was fascinated when I walked through the Fader Fort to see how Fader, and the brands that sponsored the multi-day event, were enabling attendees to document all the things about the Fader Fort, and of course, the brands that were associated with it.

For example, there was a "Dance your GIF Off" booth that captured moments like the following:

What's interesting here is that Converse and Fader are leveraging a common visual element that is omnipresent on the internet: the animated GIF. From adorable cats to the dramatic chipmunk, the animated GIF has created many an internet star...and that's precisely why the animated GIF-making machine is at the Fader Fort.

You see, you too can be an internet star. You can create your very own animated GIF that will immediately be posted to the internet where you can view it and then Tweet and Like it straight away.

Oh, and what's the number one thing that's consistent in every GIF? The Converse branding, of course.

But it doesn't stop there. How about people actually "Vine-ing" some of the animated GIFs on display at the "Dance Your Gif Off" booth?

Or even someone Instagramming it.

You Are The Ad, Err Brand Ambassador

Now as clever as the animated gif machine was (and fun to boot), Converse didn't stop there. With no incentive beyond getting a photo posted to the internet, attendees lined up to take a two-part photo which would then be shared by Converse.

Again, this is all part of the self-documenting experience of being there, in the moment. Converse wins big as these brand ambassadors are creating bespoke content for their current campaign: the #dontbeboring hashtag.

Verify Your Address

And that hashtag is important, particularly if you want to be able to win a free tee-shirt or possibly a free pair of sneakers (not shoes)!

Check-in on Foursquare, effectively verifying you are in fact at The Fader Fort, and you "unlock" the Fader Fort badge. Your location is now documented.

At the time of this writing, there were 6,688 checkins and 477 photos taken with Foursquare.

No Concept of Privacy

This level of ubiquitous documentation is simply unprecedented.

But it doesn't stop there. While walking around the grounds of the Fader Fort, I noticed countless people recording video and taking photos EVERYWHERE. Whether people were taking selfies or just capturing what was going on around them, I could not hide from a camera lens. I was now a part of this documented experience, whether I liked it or not.

To the mainly young crowd in attendance at the Fader Fort, it would seem downright weird to not be self-documenting and sharing the entire experience. Why would one not just be Instagramming or Vine-ing everything, regardless of whom may be captured in it? This is what it's all about!

As young adults, adolescents, pre-adolescents and children grow up in a world of non-stop self-documentation and sharing, what will their definition of privacy actually be? And will our (ahem, we adults) definition of privacy even matter? Probably not.

Passwords Are Dead

Ask yourself this question: Is entering your username and password on your smartphone to log into your Facebook account a pleasant or annoying experience? The latter is typically the response from most people. I would agree.

Passwords Provide a Poor Experience

On a desktop computer, entering your password to log into any number of your accounts is as common an interaction as any; however, on what is effectively a 4.3 inch piece of flat glass, the experience is cumbersome, tedious and annoying.

Okay fine. I launch the Facebook app once, I enter my email address and my password and from then on I never have to enter it again...right?

Wrong. If someone sends you a link to an event that is in fact an event that was registered on Facebook, when you tap on that link, your phone's web browser opens up and guess what, you have to enter your username and password again.

In most cases, Facebok will plant a cookie in your web browser so you don't have to re-enter your username, effectively the "Remember Me" checkbox that we are so familiar with on the web.

However, it doesn't stop there. Have you ever been perusing your Twitter feed only to tap on a link that happens to be a Facebook link?

Guess what? Since the cookie that was planted in your browser isn't accessible inside your Twitter client (in my case, Tweetbot), you get to login all over again.

This interaction is highly disruptive to the short attention spans of Twitter users and fails to embrace the "content snacking" routine that is common when one is browsing their Twitter feed. Frankly, this experience is broken across the board.

And this is not just on iOS. The same problem exists on Android.

Passwords Are Ineffective

How many times in the past couple of years have major (and minor) websites been hacked and had all or most of their users' passwords or other personal information exposed? Here's a quick list:

• LinkedIn - 6,500,000 hashed passwords exposed
• Paypal - 28,000 account passwords released
• Yahoo - 450,000 passwords posted online
• Sony - 1,000,000 passwords hacked
• Zappos - 24,000,000 accounts compromised

But the blame shouldn't solely be placed on these companies. Individuals are their own worst enemy as well.

Splashdata, a password management and online security company, recently released the top 10 worst passwords of 2012. These passwords are embarrassingly bad.

But creating strong passwords themselves isn't necessarily the solution either. It turns out that programmers have developed sophisticated algorithms to crack passwords in record time.

At Passwords^12 Conference, Jeremi Gosney recently presented his latest custom built, password cracking machine which contained 25 GPUs thus enabling him to crack MD5-hashed passwords at 180 billion attempts/second and crack the much more robust bcrypt-hashed passwords at a mere 71,000 attempts/second.

It gets worse (or better depending on your perspective). Every possible Windows password can be attempted in less than 6 hours.

So where do we go from here? Biometrics of course.

Biometrics Are The Future

With such a poor experience and arguably an ineffictive solution for securely storing character-based passwords, hardware and software-based biometrics seem to be an obvious alternative.

Imagine if you could simply have Facebook "scan" your thumbprint to log you into your account? The screens of our smartphones, tablets and now PC's are already touch-enabled and are so sensitive that the granularity of a thumbprint wouldn't pose a real problem.

Imagine if the sound of your voice could confirm a purchase on Amazon? With Siri and Google Now, the behaviour of speaking into your phone is already here. Why not extend this to authentication?

Lest we forget televisions! Have you ever tried logging into your Netflix account with the Apple TV, remote? An awful experience to say the least. What if the TV simply recognized your face and logged you in to your account instead?

With the growth in sensors, cloud-based computing (Siri doesn't work offline) and the issues surrounding passwords and authentication it appears biometrics being introduced to smartphones, tablets, TVs, and PCs is inevitable.

App Downloads Are A False Metric

As a voracious reader and consumer of data and infographics, I've come across a growing trend that many companies, agencies and developers are using to measure the growth or impact that an app may have and they measure that by aggregate app downloads. This is fool's gold. Usage is ultimately what matters.

Why Downloads Don't Matter

"App fatigue", is a phrase I use to describe a user's condition of being overwhelmed with too many apps on their devices. In a nutshell, people download loads of apps; yet eventually, be it weekly, monthly or sporadically, they end up at some point culling their phone's "desktop" of apps by removing them altogether. Many times it is because they don't use them but also, apps take up space on the device's hard drive and that space is extremely precious to the device owner, so naturally, users remove the ones that are not worthy of a spot.

If an app has been downloaded by a user, that app's individual download will be added to the ever growing download tally for that app. However if the app has been deleted by the user, its deletion is certainly not removed from the aggregate download total.

This one way street leads to a false sense of success when the app downloads' tally continues to climb.

Billions and Billions Served

Years ago, McDonald's ($MCD) began leveraging this concept of an aggregte consumer metric of total "downloads" whereas "downloads" were the number of customers whom had purchased food from McDonald's. In this case, the aggregate total makes complete sense -- upon purchase of your Big Mac, you are highly unlikely to well, return or delete or remove your purchase.

The aggregate total leads to big numbers which consumers typically associate with success or at least find it note-worthy and/or interesting. This marketing gimmick has worked for decades and of course has been exacerbated in the mobile industry by companies like Apple ($AAPL) and Google ($GOOG).

There's an App For That

Recall the "there's an app for that" marketing campaign Apple so successfully launched. "We have hundreds of thousands of apps, if not millions of apps", they proclaim. And certainly, Google would need to follow suit to play catch-up and stay abreast of other platforms. Well, that time has come. Google Play recently tied the App Store in total number of apps available so this metric is soon to be table stakes for consumers -- the availability of loads of apps is just part of having a smartphone (something Windows Phone 8 is currently struggling with).

However, therein lies the rub. The more apps that are available to consumers, the more users will download overall. Which in turn means the more users will be forced to remove unused apps or apps that are taking up space (app fatigue). Even though the total number of minutes a day users are using apps is increasing (see below) there are only so many minutes a day in total so an increase in the total number of apps available to them makes it even more difficult for your app to capture their attention.

The Truth: Usage Matters

The reality is the majority of apps downloaded do not end up staying on people's devices long term. How bad is it? According to Flurry Analytics, an app has about a one in twenty chance of being used 6 months after it is initially downloaded and installed (6% to be exact).

The focus for app developers, brands, businesses, startups and the like should be focusing on the what instead of the how when it comes to app development. What will keep users coming back? What are examples of apps that people use everyday and why? Discoverability of apps is still a problem including the cumbersome experience of trying to "share" an app with someone else (it is non-trivial to send them a link to an app), but these are solvable problems. Compelling content, utility, entertainment and a solid omnichannel experience will keep users from dropping your app from their collection.

Omnichannel First

Mobile first, web second.

No.

Tablet first, mobile second.

Non.

Web first, mobile second.

Nein.

In less than 2 years we have seen VCs, CMOs, designers, developers, "social media experts" and the tech blogging illuminati proclaim that their strategy for the ever-changing landscape of internet-connected devices is correct, or at least more correct than their previous one.

Nonsense. The reality is that for a startup or even an established company to have a successful content, services, game or product strategy, it is not one or the other...it is all of them.

Users (and when I say "users" I will hastily generalize to the developed nations of the world) are accessing your content, consuming your services, playing your games and shopping for your products on every device they own. They don't care if you are mobile, tablet or web first. What they do care about is whether or not they can access you anywhere, anyway and at any time, on any device.

In the United States, 25% of the population owns a tablet. More than half own a smartphone (50% as of March 2012). How many households or individuals own a PC or laptop (or both)? What about at work? How many also own an Xbox or a Playstation? An internet connected TV? Lots and lots and lots of people do.

These devices and the way they communicate and complement each other is rapidly starting to converge and users are quickly hopping from device to device, screen to screen. 85% of TV viewers use a smartphone or tablet as their second screen while they "watch" TV.

If there is going to be one true strategy it must be a strategy that focuses on managing the myriad endpoints users (sorry Jack, I still call them users) use to consume your content. Focusing only on a single channel is a losing proposition as its failures as a strategy are highlighted by the constant shifting of strategies by the "experts" in the industry. Each "X first" strategy has its own respective set of benefits, but its respective set of shortcomings eventually require a strategic pivot. What you need to be is "Omnichannel First".

Qu'est-ce Que Omnichannel?

What is the omnichannel? In a nutshell, the omnichannel encompasses any and all touchpoints a user can and in fact will use to consume your content or services. This currently includes, but certainly won't be limited to, the web (mobile, desktop, tablet, game consoles, also known simply as "the web" as there is really only one web), mobile (smartphones), tablets (iPad, Kindle Fire), "smart TVs," video game consoles, possibly digital signage and maybe even in-store kiosks!

The challenge here should be obvious: how does one design, develop and afford to tackle ALL of these channels? Well, no one said it would be easy and frankly, it's probably healthy for the greater technology ecosystem to have some failures and have the weak hands shaken out of the mix. Another $500,000 seed round for an app that only works on one platform is almost doomed at this point.

The How

At a baseline, one needs to at least have an omnichannel web presence. This will be the most cost effective whilst reaching the largest audience. Leveraging the power of responsive design allows you to create websites and webapps that will work across any viewport whether it is 320 pixels on an iPhone 4 or 3,000 pixels on a television set.

Have a little more budget? Then a cohesive app and web strategy is key. Avoid the snake oil salesman's pitch of the popular native versus web argument: it's not one or the other, it's both. On mobile and tablets specifically, the capabilties in native applications currently outweigh what one can do in a mobile or tablet web browser. Therefore, your web presence should be your baseline for content and engagement and your app strategy is a progressive enhancement on top of it. Considering you have access to functions like the camera, the address book and push notifications, you should be leveraging these as best you can while still keeping the web experience fully in tact. The web is great at discoverability and sharing (i.e. sending someone a link is pretty universal at this point). Apps are great at rich, tailored experiences and intimately connecting with the user (e.g. push notifications). You need both of these.

The ultimate budget and timeline should concretely focus on not only providing users with key experiences across the plethora of avaiable devices, but should also focus heavily on how the devices can interact with or complement each other. If you watch Dexter or Homeland on Showtime you may be familiar with the quick plug for their interactive iPad app before and after each episode. The app provides interactive polls and additional content that's not available on TV. This type of omnichannel strategy is incredibly effective for engaging the fans of the show in a completely new and immersive way as opposed to the traditional passive form of engagement on only one screen: the TV itself.

TL;DR

In short, as the famous George E.P. Box so eloquently stated, "all models are wrong, but some are useful." There is no silver bullet when it comes to a proper technology strategy. But what we do know up to this point is what is not working. The focus on a single touchpoint first, and leaving others out as second or third or fourth, becomes not only a losing proposition, but a business risk going forward. Your users are not impressed if you aren't where they are. Provide them with your content and/or services in rich, immersive and compelling ways across all of their touchpoints and you will not only gain users, but you will keep them.

It's The Ecosystem, Stupid

In the mobile and casual computing landscape there will only be three major players: Apple ($AAPL), Google ($GOOG) and Microsoft ($MSFT). Why? Because they have and are continuing to build omni-channel, multi-device ecosystems.

Think about it. If you take a look at Research in Motion (RIM, ticker symbol $RIMM), they have hemorrhaged not only market share over the past five years (by the way, the iPhone's fifth anniversary was this past week) but also revenues through a huge drop in sales (43% year over year drop reported for this past fiscal quarter) and a subsequent 85% drop in the stock price. It is not entirely because RIM makes inferior products or that they were simply resting on their laurels, it is because their competitors are building ecosystems.

Digital Omnivores Love Ecosystems

Consumers are leveraging multiple devices to access their content consistently throughout the day. comScore studied people's digital biorhythms and the devices they used to engage in their digital world and what they discovered further underscores the need for a proper ecosystem to not only get things like email across devices, but also payment mechanisms, social networking and sharing and consumption of personal content.

Apple is the obvious example of a company feeding the digital omnivore through their ecosystem. They have hardware, software, millions of credit card numbers on file, software distribution (App Store), content distribution (App Store), computers, phones, tablets, televisions (Apple TV) and a cloud-based syncing mechanism (iCloud) to keep everything up to date and in sync with each other. In addition to all of this they have retail outlets to sell and promote their wares boasting record-breaking numbers with their stores earning an astounding $4,000/square foot (2nd place is Tiffany with $2,700/square foot).

Apple has the ability for users to access content on multiple devices, in an environment for which they are familiar and feel safe and secure using. A handset maker like RIM, has their Blackberry line of products -- and that's it. The same is the case with Nokia. They haven't a proper lifestyle ecosystem for Nokia users to plug into and Nokia's dénouement is only exacerbated by their rising handset inventories and a downdraft in accounts receivable all stemming from, you guessed it, a severe drop in sales. With $2.4 billion of cash on hand and an unprofitable business, I give Nokia 18-24 months.

Certainly an ecosystem is not what is single-handedly crushing the hearts and minds (and profits) of companies like RIM and Nokia, but for the long term, it is what will ultimately end them. Google, not directly making loads of money on Android, has invested heavily in not only Android, but in satiating the digital omnivore's appetite of a multi-device lifestyle. Sure Android is running on smartphones and tablets, but Google has integrated the likes of email (Gmail now has 425MM users), instant messaging, SMS and telephony (Google Voice à la Grand Central acquistion), social networking (Google Plus which in less than one year has amassed 250MM users, of which 60% are "active"), cloud storage and sync (Google Drive), software and content distribution (Google Play), computers (Chrome OS notebooks - not all that successful, but still an attempt at growing the ecosystem), televisions (Logitech, Vizo, and other Google TV devices) and even their own cross-device web browser (Google Chrome) to support the multi-channel experience. This is the model for success going forward and is what is pitting Apple's ecosystem against Google's whilst leaving handset manufacturers like Nokia and RIM in the dust.

Why Microsoft Survives

Microsoft, as technologically boring as a company as one may believe it is, has a solid chance of being the odd man out, or the Ross Perot or Ralph Nader depending on your perspective, to keep the seeminlgy two-horse race a triad of competition.

For years Microsoft has been dominating the PC space, yet hasn't been able to grab a solid foothold in the mobile and casual computing sector. Windows Phone has been a prototype of sorts at best and not until just recently have they even had a real contender in the tablet space; their Surface tablet is looking to change that.

However, Microsoft has been investing in their ecosystem for quite some time. Hotmail, Xbox, Kinect, Azure, Exchane, So.cl (an attempt at a consumer social network), Zune (even though it was a failure, it supported the ecosystem model), Skype, SkyDrive and now with additional hardware such as the Surface tablet, the recent puchase of an enterprise social network (Yammer), Microsoft is slowly building their ecosystem back up. In my opinion, the success or failure of the enterprise adoption of Windows 8 (consumers always adopt much more quickly), will determine whether they are truly a technological contender or simply the third wheel.

Amazon Is The Potential Wildcard

With owning content distribution, credit card numbers, devices and powering nearly half of the internet with their Web Services offering, Amazon has the ability to ultimately disrupt the competitve ecosystem space.

Amazon releasing the Kindle and its successors as yet another medium for people to access content through Amazon has been incredibly successful, capturing 50% of the Android tablet market share. But with additions like Amazon Drive, Amazon Cloud Player and their Instant Video offering, Amazon is quietly encroaching into the digital omnivore's mutli-channel lifestyle typically dominated by Apple, Google and Microsoft. Their lack of hardware beyond the Kindle franchise is made up for by their ubiquity across channels and creating new channels of their own (e.g. Kindle). Moreover, with AWS, they have the ability to scale any sort of cloud-based offering for any of their services going forward. This is a real threat to Google, Apple and Microsoft.

Apple Will Continue to Set the Bar

With Apple's walled garden approach to their ecosystem (and their relentless legal team's offense is defense strategy in patent litigation), one can expect that as Apple continues to roll out its services across their myriad devices, the experience for their traditionally affluent demographic will only continue to improve.

I would not be surprised if Apple eventually moves into cars or even the smart appliances space. Yes, this could appear as hyperbole, but to truly be a part of one's entire lifestyle experience, why would Apple not want to be involved in the day-to-day of using your refrigerator or even driving to work and back? Whilst their moves in the past may seem far-fetched (many calling for the iPhone to be a flop), they have been spot on strategically thus far and as a company; they make few mistakes. As their iCloud offering continues to mature and a true Apple Television set makes its way to consumers the effortlessness of using Apple across channels will most likely keep their nearest competitor, Google, playing catch up for the foreseeable future.

The Magazine Industry's Death Rattle

Got your attention? I thought so. And that's precisely the point of the sacral chakra-stimulating cover of last months's Esquire magazine. Sure, you're saying to yourself, "sex sells, everyone knows that" but traditionally on magazine covers it has been a bit more subtle, unless of course you are in the pornography (e.g. Playboy) or "frat-mag" (e.g. Maxim) industry. But Esquire? Esquire has conventionally been known to be a somewhat sophisticated men's magazine, yet their core reader demographic is no longer subscribing. Readership has plunged a whopping 16% according to a survey conducted by Ipsos, the first double-digit year-over-year drop in history. Where are those eyeballs going? Tablets and e-readers of course.

Naturally, a publisher can fallback on the old "put a busty, beautiful woman in a bustier on the cover" trick with the word "SEX" in big, bold letters and boom, readership increases, right? Wrong. This is the equivalent of a comedian bombing in the middle of his act and relying on dick and fart jokes to get the crowd laughing again - it is always short-lived success.

Yet, even the frat-mags are suffering and they explicitly advertise sex on their monthly covers. FHM in Australia reported an astounding 50% drop in readership, the biggest drop in Australian media history.

If sex isn't the ticket, then what is? Hot about a hot button socio-political issue?!

Yes, that's right, Newsweek, a beacon of investigative journalism we can all believe in has broken the story that no one else has: Obama is Gay!

Clearly, this type of topical pandering may work for the coming week, but long term, how many of these tabloid-style covers will Newsweek have to produce in order to stop the bleeding of dwindling readership? Is there any magazine out there that that has the content, the pedigree and the respect to not stoop to such low-brow methods?

Apparently not.

Time Magazine, a publication that is as American and historical as apple pie, has on the heels of Mother's Day, stooped to an all-time low to garner buzz through controversy in the hopes of a spike in sales. The controversial cover has gained so much buzz that an internet meme nearly spawned only minutes after the cover was released.

With readership, circulation and media spend all down for magazine publishers across the board, worldwide, why should it matter that the covers are more sexy or controversial than in the past? Seems like a reasonable business decision to most rational free market capitalists. Agreed. However, this to me is an admission of the seemingly helpless battle the publishing industry is losing against the digital screen and subsequently the eyeballs that are looking at them. The death of the publishing industry won't happen overnight, but if the covers of the magazines are a leading indicator of the speed of which the demise is due, then the pace is clearly picking up.

Google Drive Search with Alfred App

Here's a quick productivity hack for you. If you don't already use Alfred you should. It is a fantastic productivity tool much faster than Spotlight or Quicksilver, in my opinion.

Nonetheless, for users that do use Alfred and want to add the ability to search your new Google Drive account, enter the following information as a custom search in your Preferences inside Alfred.

Copy and paste the following link in the "Search URL" text input to make it easier

https://drive.google.com/?tab=mo&authuser=0#search/{query}

To add the icon, click on the followling link and save it to your desktop.

Google Drive Icon Link

After downloading the icon simply drag and drop it into the icon space provided. Click the test button in the validation field to make sure it all works.

If you've made it this far, open up Alfred and type "Drive" to start using it.

In-App Product Placement Or The Future of Mobile Ads

Ask nearly anyone if they want ads in their mobile experience and most of them will respond with a stentorian "no". The late Steve Jobs even stated in 2010 that mobile ads "suck". Yet the dollar spend in mobile "ads" is going up exponentially and is predicted to soar over the next few years, from $3.3 billion in 2011 to a whopping $20.6 billion by 2015.

Yet therein lies the rub. If consumers are so turned off by mobile ads then how does mobile ad-based revenue increase over 600% in the next few years?

A simple response can be the sheer number of smartphones and tablets that will be in use by 2015: 1 billion and 250 million, respectively according to Transparency Market Research, will in lockstep increase the number of endpoints for ads. Yet given that we look at our phones on average 150 times a day, that revenue number seems rather low. But why? Because people don't like ads!

However, people not liking ads is not the only problem. Attempting to map the dot-com web advertising pricing models onto mobile ads poses technological and user experience-based problems as well.

Mobile Ad Pricing - CPC, CPA or CPM?

Typically there are three common pricing models for desktop web-based advertisements. Unfortunately, each one has its own set of issues in the mobile space.

Cost-per-click (CPC) in the mobile context poses big issues because, well, there is no clicking on a smartphone or tablet and even if you changed the metric to "cost-per-tap", false positives would be quite high given the small screen real estate and how easy it would be to accidentally tap an ad (arguably a poor user experience). Morever, the King of click-based ad revenue, Google, recently stated on their conference call on April 12th, 2012 that “Aggregate cost-per-click growth was down 12% and down 6% quarter-over-quarter.” These decreases are on the dot-com sites as well! I can't imaging this boding well for a mobile CPC model.

CPA, or cost-per-acquisition (or conversion), is minimally viable at best. Think about it. You click on an ad for a new drill from a hardware retailer inside an iPhone app. Now, you are redirected outside of the app to the product detail page of the drill on Home Depot's website (hopefully it is mobile-formatted!) where you then need to then enter your shipping and billing information alongside your credit card information. As you can imagine, this experience on a 4.3 inch screen and without a physical qwerty keyboard will lead to huge drop-offs in conversion.

The CPM model, cost-per-mille or cost per thousands of times an ad is displayed (presents an impression), might be the most relevant, but posts its own set of problems. First, how is one to measure an "impression" in a mobile app? If I'm rapidly scrolling a list view of information (think a few hundred tweets for example) and an advertisement flies across the screen as one of those hundreds of list items, does that count as an impression? Are API calls to ad networks like Millenial Media or Greystripe considered the metric for measuring impressions?

Banner ads are somewhat effective for display yet they are a nuisance according to users. Is the risk of displaying the ad and disrupting the user experience worth the revenue gained? If you have a 4 or 5 star-rated app in the Appstore are you willing to risk lowering your rating to integrate ads?

Finally, the metrics used behind things like a CPM model are completely broken for the mobile space. In the dot-com arena, planting a few cookies on a site here and maybe some fancy JavaScript there and voilà, analytics behind impressions data becomes relatively easy to extract. Yet native applications aren't necessarily in the web browsing context. A native application using native user interface components doesn't have cookies whatsoever! Therefore, sophisticated tooling needs to be created so developers can make tracking and reporting of impression data inside the native app context a reality.

The Solution? Ad-Like Objects and Media Buys

So how are publishers and app developers alike supposed to handle the aforementioned issues? My solution is to focus on the content of your app and mesh in ads, but not in the traditional sense, but in an ad-like object.

Think of ads as natural piece of content in the flow of an application, something that doesn't take away from the native experience and actually feels like part of it. This is much easier said than done, but is possible. In this blog post alone there is an ad and if you've read this far, you've already encountered it.

App developers and content publishers will have to work closely initially to get past the archaic way of serving digital ads (banner displays, interrupting videos, etc.) and focus more on tight and frictionless app integration. Imagine applications where ad networks plug in rich media and interactive content into areas of the application where the developer decided ad-like objects' content could live. Think of it almost as product placement inside of an app.

These locations inside of the app have to be determined a priori by the developer while he or she is actually developing the application - not afterwards, which is currently the model for most of the mobile-focused ad networks. "Drop our SDK into your currently built app and watch the money flow in," says many an ad network. This is certainly not the case for the greater share of applications.

Digital product placements or "ad-like objects" may or may not follow the traditional CPC, CPA or CPM models; instead, they should be treated initially as media buys -- a flat, fixed fee for the placement and preference of content inside the application. This pricing model is not nearly as optimized as the CP-* models of the desktop web realm, but may allow for flexibility in not only the piloting of such unique programs, but actually pulling from a media buy budget as opposed to a company's digital advertising budget. For developers, this is certainly more attractive as media buying budgets are typically much larger than digital ad budgets.

In The Future...

There is no doubt in my mind that someone, somewhere will figure out a transaction-based payment model for ad-like objects as media buys may be incredibly difficult to price. Why so difficult? Because an ad's endpoint (the myriad of mobile and casual computing devices) continues to change and with that, the types of applications (and games) that are developed continue to evolve as well. As newer sensors are added to our smartphones, expect new types of applications and subsequently new types of ads.

Imagine chemical sensors that can detect the trace of alcohol on your breath. Sounds crazy now, but so did the idea streaming HD video on your phone. If you've had too much to drink, maybe an app you use frequently pipes in an ad-like object for a local taxi to pick you up at your current location because it recognizes your blood-alcohol level is above the legal limit of the State you are currently in and the ad-like object recognizes you are more than walking distance to your home. All of these data points can currently be determined by the GPS sensors on your phone and some web service calls to APIs.

Another concept that will enhance the ad-like experience will be heavily centered on ad-like objects' ability to take advantage of the contextually relevant data associated with a smartphone and the user of said smartphone. Location is an obvious one, but what about meta-data that extends simply from location? The weather, sporting events, social/music events, traffic, population density, colloquial idioms, political influences, etc. Now include past "click" (tap) history on ad-like objects and even a user's social graph. The type of ad-like objects should be and could be highly relevant to the end user and more importantly not take away from the natural feeling of the app.

The Future of Check-Ins Is Not About Location

In response to an article on Read Write Web titled Life After Death of the Check-In I felt compelled to not only comment on it, but ultimately write the following blog post.

The author of the article assumes that check-ins have all to much to do with an actual location. I disagree. The best thing that Foursquare (and BrightKite and Gowalla) did with creating the behaviour of checking into a place was getting users familiar with the concept of "checking-in". However, checking-in's value has little to do with the actual location or a place - checking in is a projection of a user's status to the outside world, a consistent curating of one's online persona.

Take GetGlue for example. GetGlue is an application that enables one to "check-in" to the TV show one is watching. 9 times out of 10 one will be in the exact same location - their couch - while checking in. However, GetGlue, one of the top rated and most heavily downloaded apps on the App Store and Google Play, has had massive success with people checking into what they are watching (over 2 million users and over 100 million check-ins).

Suffice it to say, location still plays a role in someone's checking-in (because no matter where you are, you always have a latitude/longitude coordinate pair associated with you) but it is not the essence of checking in. Check-ins 2.0 (yes I'm calling it that) will have less and less to do with actual location.

Places, things, experiences -- all of these are able to be checked-in to. And from this we will see the next wave of check-in based applications and networks.

Where The iPhone App Dashboard Breaks Down

Apple is undeniably one of the best, if not the best, user-focused design companies in the world. The marriage of industrial design with elegant hardware and software has created one of the greatest devices ever: the iPhone.

With as much thought and subsequent execution that has gone into the design and development of the iPhone, there appears to me to be a glaring issue around one of the most fundamental interactions on the device, namely, finding an application on your dashboard.

The problems is as follows: I want to find application "X", but as I repeatedly swipe through screens, I can't seem to find it.

As Apple is certainly one of the most distinguished organizations when it comes to usability it appears that even they (currently) do not have a solution to this problem.

Think about it, when you begin to look for say the "Kayak" application, you know that it is:

• A travel app
• Has an orange icon
• May possibly be in a folder

Then there comes the number number of iterations of the following:

1. View current dashboard screen (either by pressing the home button or swiping to a new page on the dashboard)
2. Scan all icons visually to determine if app is available on screen
3. If it is not immediatley visible, maybe it is in a folder, which then requires a tap to open the folder, and then scanning of the contents commences
4. If the app is finally located, then great, if it is not, then one swipes to the next screen and repeats from step 1

You'll notice there are four apps with orange icons on this screen as well!

This process appears to work just fine for a handful of apps and maybe a folder or two. But eventually you collect more apps than that. Potentially, a lot more. And so you experience "app location fatigue" -- when you think of something to do with a particular app, but you spend 15-20 seconds looking for it, that you end up getting interrupted, frustrated or distracted with something else that you end up not using the app at all.

Scott Jenson gave a great talk at Mobile World Congress (MWC) on something very similar and wrote a blog post a while back about why native apps must die (no, it's the reason you might be thinking).

Eventually, the load, scan and swipe screen process does not scale as one adds more and more apps, which begs the question, then what is one to do?

It's actually very relative to what happened in the early dot-com space in the late 90s.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, Yahoo at one point was king of the internet. People went to them for everything. News, weather, sports, games, entertainment, etc. But eventually their UI became quite cluttered and difficult to navigate based on what the user was actually aiming to do.

A company stepped in with a new way altogether of navigating the internet: search. That company was Google.

Google stripped away everything from the UI and provided one field, one input, one gateway to the interent. A very simple user interface which is now known as the "search box". Google has arguably become the most successful company in the history of world (when one looks at age of company, they are quite young relative to market capitalization and profitability - never a losing quarter in their tenure as a publicly traded company) and it largely has to do with taking something as simple as the "launch point" for internet users and building a business around that interaction (advertisements in the search results - 98% of Google's revenue to this day).

We are already starting to see this type of UI take effect on mobile. Have a look at everything.me (it only works on mobile devices).

It's a search box. Period.

It searches for anything and finds mobile webapp versions of your search results and displays them as app icons.

Why can't the iPhone (or Android) dashboard work this way?

In my opinion, fundamental changes will be coming to the overall UX of mobile app usage and location. Everything.me is just a start. Is the "Google instead of Yahoo" moment happening right now?

On The Poisonous Thinking of Dot-Com Products

A wise friend and colleague of mine said sometime last year that there is a "changing of the guards" taking place in the dot-com and pre-dot-com era technology companies with, fresh, young blood taking the helm at key positions. I wholeheartedly agree with this assertion, but what does that have to do with the title of this post.

Well, many bright and intelligent folks in the dot-com/PC era have been highly successful on leveraging the web as not only a deployment channel but also as a product shelf, meaning, one can very easily add a new feature to a current product or create a new website/app (product) altogether and immediately see the impact by deploying to one's servers and measuring ROI with various metrics (pageviews, cookie tracking, etc.).

Those days are gone.

Why? Have a look at the desktop/PC-computing device sales over the past couple of years (photo courtesy of asymco.com).

The market share of PCs versus mobile devices now sits at 50/50. This happened in an astonishingly rapid rate (less than three years). The success of the PC's reign as the dominant computing platform is quickly coming to an end with the rise of mobile and casual computing devices (casual computing devices include tablets such as the iPad) and therefore one's strategy on how to create new products and features (and from a business standpoint additional revenue streams) must also change...and fast.

But I Just Want To Add A New Feature...

The antiquated way (meaning a mere 10+ years ago) of unlocking new value on say an ecommerce site would be to add something like a one-click to purchase button, which can immediately be deployed and impact millions of users. Since your users all need to access your one-click offering through your website, you are very much in control of the context in which the user is in and the deployment channel for your one-click button.

This simply does not apply today.

Why? Well, let's think about this. Let's say you have a niche online ecommerce website, like fab.com, where people can access your wares through the traditional dot-com web channel - your website! But now, you want to add a new capability like "pinning" products to one's Pinterest page. You can add this feature very easily on your desktop/PC-friendly website, and even to your mobile-web friendly website, but how do you add it to your Android application? Your iPhone application? Your iPad application? Your Blackberry application? Your Android tablet application? Do you see a pattern?

What are the deltas between the web version and the aformentioned apps? First, the underlying technology is not simply HTML, CSS and JavaScript for a standard website or web application - no, we are now touching on technologies like Objective-C, the programming language for iOS, and Java the programming language for Android. Blackberry apps are written using J2ME (including proprietary RIM libraries). These need to be compiled into an executable application - this is not the web.

The programming idiosyncrasies for each respecitve platform is one of the most significant differences in how things are changing in the mobile and casual computing space versus the desktop/PC counterpart, but the biggest difference is the deployment channel, or more accruately deployment channels.

Right now, if you want to add that "pinning" feature mentioned above you can't simply deploy it to you site and presto chango it shows up on your iPad application. No, you must add it to your current codebase for your iPad application, compile it, upload it to your developer account on iTunes, submit it for review to Apple, wait, and wait, and wait some more, until it is either approved (or denied) and then users who have the app installed must update their version of the application. And this is only one deployment channel!

The presto chango deployment of the web is gone.

But The Mobile Web...

Lately, there has been a significant amount of cheerleading around a "mobile first approach to design and one's technological strategy overall, but sadly, when folks talk about "mobile-first" they are really saying "mobile web first". Let me say this as succinctly as possible:

Having a mobile web strategy is only one half of the equation for a cohesive mobile strategy.

The other half? Native application development.

Have a look at the latest Flurry Analytics data below; it shows native app usage is actually higher than mobile web usage (photo courtesy of Flurry Analytics).

Thinking that simply using the mobile web to fix the cross-platform and deployment issues mentioned above is foolish (and if you're an architect or technical strategist is worthy of getting fired, in my opinion) given the trend in native application usage versus mobile browser usage. Only focusing one part of the equation (the minority at this point) leaves a massive gap for the other.

That being said, I am and have been a huge proponent of the using the web as the closest thing to a universal platform (for development and deployment). However, one must not be so stubborn that one is unwilling to change one's position on their technical strategy when the data itself suggests otherwise (not to mention feedback from paying clients).

But What About Hybrid Apps...

Hybrid apps (native + HTML5/browser instance), another contentious misnomer, do provide a potential stopgap for some of the aforementioned issues, namely the deployment part, but do not fully skirt the issue of development. One may certainly use something like phonegap to assist on the development sides of things, but there is still a compilation step and the initial deployment of the application still falls under the aforementioned deployment channel problem.

Facebook has actually been somewhat successful with a hybrid-app approach with their HTML5 framework Sparta; however, if you browsed the S-1 Facebook recently filed, you'll notice that mobile is one of their biggest risks (namely, not having direct control over the platforms they are on - Apple and Google-backed platforms). Facebook recognizes the deployment channels issue as a business risk not to mention less than stellar browsers (due to a lack of native device APIs) and "near native" but not 100% native user experiences. Mobile will be one of Facebook's biggest revenue growth areas in the coming years so watching their moves from an architectural level may shed some light on a cohesive strategy you can employ.

Next Steps?

With where we stand currently in computing overall, the shift leaning heavily toward a mobile or casual computing standard, it is important for the thought leaders and the industry leaders to continue to do just that: lead. Thinking in the dot-com space, or for that matter, the desktop web space, and attempting to shoehorn the methodologies that worked over the past 10 or so years in that space, into a modern technical strategy will almost certainly set one up for failure. The clients/devices are different. The context is different. The engagement is different. The technologies are different. The deployment channels are different.

Absolute ideologies and dogma have no place in such a rapidly evolving computing landscape. Being flexible, nimble, and open to change will put one, and one's products and services, in a position to be successful. For the time being, that means having a comprehensive, multi-channel experience across various platforms - not just the web. Plan accordingly.

The Biggest Game Changer for the Super Bowl Is Mobile Apps

It's that time of the year again where loads of Americans gather around the TV, collectively consume 1.25 billion chicken wings and actually stay tuned to watch commercials. And yes, there is a pretty big football game that takes place as well.

But let's talk about those commercials again. That's right, commercials have actually become as a big of a highlight of the Super Bowl as bone-crushing quarterback sacks and one-hand grabs in the endzone. This year, commercials will radically change the viewer's Super Bowl experience and it solely rests on the devices that they have in their pockets - their mobile phones.

Shazam, the mind-bogglingly accurate audio-syncing/recognition application, announced on February 2nd that they are making the entire game "Shazam-able". WTF does that mean? Well, at any point in the game you can fire up Shazam, capture a few seconds of audio and Shazam will provide you with statistics from the game. Use Shazam during halftime and unlock the possibility to win a prize. Also, nearly half of all the commercials are Shazam-able.

This level of direct brand to consumer engagement is unprecedented for the Super Bowl, if not for any live television event.

Brands, such as Toyota (who's giving away a Camry), are not only partnering with companies like Shazam, but many brands have decided to craft their own Super Bowl specific apps.

Chevy, for example, is not giving away just one car, but twenty of them. Chevy has developed the Chevy Game Time App which is a rather engaging and attractive application.

After downloading and installing the app, the user is prompted to sign in with either Facebook, Twitter or go about it with plain vanilla registration. After filling out some additional info...

...the user is then informed they have been automatically entered to win a Camaro.

Now, here is the key TV engagement part. The user is now notified that they have there own unique license plate; if their license plate is shown during any of Chevy's commercials during the Super Bowl, they win.

Chevy also entices the user to not only watch the ads on Super Bowl Sunday, but also to check back inside the app two days later for two more chances to win.

What's also interesting to note here is that the app is available on Android and has just as high a level of fidelity in visual polish and interactivity as the iPhone version.

Here's another screenshot from an Android Galaxy Nexus:

What's interesting about this is that a brand like Chevy (or at least the agency they hired) is not only focusing on simply the iPhone users out there, but the greater share of mobile smartphone users: Android users. iOS and Android arguably make up the lion's share of the mobile operating system market and as RIM continues to bleed market share, there is little interest in exposing an application of this fidelity to Blackberry users (not to mention the pain of developing on the Blackberry platform).

The Super Bowl is providing brands new and unique ways of engaging with consumers beyond the standard television commercial. By tapping into the "second screen" of a TV viewer (the mobile phone or tablet), brands have new ways of maximizing the absurdly expensive cost of a Super Bowl ad ($3.5 million per 30 seconds - up a whopping 17% from last year) while having additional metrics to measure against an ad's efficacy. I certainly don't see this trend dying down any time soon and fully expect more live sporting events (and eventually regular television programming) to provide more and more opportunities for brands to engage with consumers between the TV and mobile applications.

Pinterest Is Not A Virtual Pinboard

With all the hubbub around Pinterest lately, people have been chatting about many things from the sexy user experience to how Pinterest is not ready for tech brands. Yawn. The real story that people are missing is how Pinterest has unlocked the secret to get their users to create personal, profiled, curated storefronts.

Think about it. People, mainly women at the moment, are creating mood/story boards which mostly contain pictures of products. Sure there is your pic of Ryan Gosling here and there and lots of food, but sifting through the noise is not all that difficult and the number of actual products on there is staggering.

Now, Pinterest could intelligently engineer how to get lead generation commissions from all the clicks that drive traffic to the seller's site; why they are not doing that now is beyond me. But, that, is not where the true value is. Sure there would be an initial surge in top line growth, but that would most likely plateau after new users joining Pinterest begins to wane quarter over quarter.

The true, unlocked value, in my opinion, is the data underneath all those "pins".

Pinterest has (and will have) an enormous amount of raw data that can be used to build targeted "brand profiles". Brands will pay for this. With the current demise of the retail sector imminent (see Radio Shack, Sears and even Best Buy) or at least serious consolidation (Wall Street talk for mergers and acquisitions and bankruptcies), brands are actively looking for the new medium to sell their wares. And what better place to sell their wares than directly to the people who like their stuff!

Moreover, with all the data that Pinterest is storing, think of the trend forecasting and sentiment analysis they could offer up as a set of business intelligence metrics to brands or online retailers.

For example, Fab.com, another blossoming startup, sells cool, chic, hip products to their members for discounted prices. What if Fab paid for sentiment from Pinterest on what the most pinned items are in home decor? Fab could then cross reference Pinterest users, with their own userbase and actually offer them the products (in their storefront - the "new" retail) with an educated guess on how many to offer and how many would sell. This is hyper-optimized supply chain management.

And guess who wins? Pinterest, Fab.com, the users and the brands themselves. The only people who lose? The dinosaurs of the industry - brick and mortar retail.

Finally, Pinterest is also building a graph; not a social graph but an interest graph. If you take the concept of Facebook (user's social profile data + user's social graph) and compare that to Pinterest (user's interest profile + user's interest graph), the data becomes incredibly more valuable. What is the "user interest graph"? Let me explain.

When I pin something on Pinterest that pin is another attribute added to my "interest profile" (things I'm interested in), that item can then be repinned by other people (thus making connections to me via the interest itself). Commonalities surface when people very much like me ("me" being my interest profile) all "like" and "repin" things that I've pinned. Pinterest now has influential data, the thing another thriving startup, Klout, is basing their business on (who are key influencers and how do they get that way).

Pinterest also has the ability to more accurately forecast trends based on a user's interest graph coupled with their influence level. If a highly influential Pinterest user pins a new pair of shoes, Pinterest can make an educated guess on how that will impact other Pinterest users AND more importantly, how that user pinning those shoes leads to more sales for the brand.

In summary, Pinterest is not a Virtual Pinboard. It is the answer to consumers engaging with brands, something Facebook has been unable to do.

Using the Async Module for Rational Flow Control

TL;DR

The bottom line: the async module provides you a way to write asynchronous code in a clean, readable and useful fashion. It should be yet another tool in your kit for node programming.

Flow

Flow control is hotly contested debate when it comes to node.js development. Many people from more traditional web development backgrounds have difficulty overcoming what could end up as "callback hell" or just plain ole spaghetti code. However, there is a module that I use for my blogging app (this blog) that makes the concept of waiting for other asynchronous things to complete much easier to manage. The module is called async.

Async is a feature-rich node.js module that allows you to do many fancy things like execute asynchronous code in parallel or in a series and even has convenience methods like forEach and map.

Typically, flow control libraries show examples (if any) of how you can write to a file in a series, but I tend to never find examples that are similar to what I'm trying to do for a real application. So I figured I'd share my experience of how I am using async in a real word sense.

Dynamic Articles Listing
--

If you navigate to http://subprint.com/blog you'll notice a list of the all of my articles with the latest article at the top. This list is generated dynamically based on the markdown files in my posts directory (I'm using dillinger.io to write the markdown files).

The following function is called in order to make this happen:

// This function grabs the list of post ids, and creates a block of 
// HTML that is stashed in blogPosts object.
function stashBlogPostData(){

  // Grab the markdown IDs objects.  One of them looks like this:
  /*
    {
      href: /blog/using-the-async-module-for-rational-flow-control
    , title: "Using The Async Module For Rational Flow Control"
    , teaser: "Flow control is hotly contested debate...shortened for brevity    
    , timestamp: Date
    }
  */
  var ids = watcher.getListMdIds()
    , count = 0
    , list = ''

  // Snag the EJS template for rendering later on.
  var ejsTemplate = fs.readFileSync(__dirname + '/views/blog-post-list-item.ejs', 'utf8');

  var len = ids.length

  // We need to do this many times depending on number of posts.
  // Eventually this won't be super scalable with thousands of blog posts.
  async.whilst(
      function (){ return count < len },
      function (callback) {

        var htmlFilename = __dirname + "/public/posts/" + ids[count].name +".html"

        // scraper is a small module I wrote that uses jsdom to scrape out portions
        // of static HTML pages, namely these parts:

        /*
          var schema = {
            href: $('#blog h1 a').attr('href')
          , title: $('title').text()
          , teaser: $('.post p:first').html()
          , timestamp: ''
        }

        */

        // the key here is in order to iterate over all the HTML files, I am using the
        // filesystem to read in each file asynchronously and extracting the data in the 
        // callback.

        scraper.getPostListItem(htmlFilename, function(err,data){
          if(err) {
            console.error(err)
            count++
          }
          else{

            // We add the timestamp to each data object (the "schema" object from above)
            data.timestamp = ids[count].timestamp

            // Now we render against our ejs template to create a block of HTML
            list += ejs.render(ejsTemplate, data)

            // Increase the count
            count++

            // Do it again
            callback()
          }
        })  // end getPostListItem()

      },
      function (err) {
        // TODO: Eventually store this in Redis or a flat file or something else.
        blogPosts.previewList = list
        // console.log(blogPosts.previewList)
      }
  ) // end whilst()

} // end stash

If you read the comments in the source code, hopefully it is somewhat clear what's going on here. Essentially I am grabbing the list of IDs for the blog posts and then iterating over each one of them with the async#whilst() method. The callback in the whilst method is calling out to a method in my scraper object (which uses jsdom) which makes use of the filesystem and reads in a file, scrapes data (text) out of it and returns only to do it again until the count < len condition is false.

This is super useful for a couple of reasons. One, as the number of blog posts increases, I don't have to actually modify any of the code (note, this is arguably not a truly scalable way of doing this, but great for the purposes of this exercise), meaning, I don't have to keep making more and more asynchronous callbacks which leads to the second reason: no spaghetti code!

Because we are iterating over an array of ids, it feels like we are simply iterating over an array of ids! If you are still wrapping your head around the art of programming in node, then trust me, this is a Godsend.

On QR Codes

TL;DR

Many insights in regards to mobile strategy overall can be gained at the flaws and failures/lack of current success of QR codes, namely from a UX perspective (poor software) and more importantly the context of the end user.

A QR Code Study

A study recently came out regarding the efficacy of QR Codes (or lack thereof) stating that nearly 80% of college students can't "figure out" QR codes.

Now, yes it is true (for the most part) what the study of 500 people (large enough sample size?) shows that many people either can't figure them out or get frustrated with the process. The latter is the part we and other mobile developers and designers must focus in on.

If the process of doing anything with your mobile device isn't nearly instantaneous then the user will give up. This is becoming hyper-sensitive in the mobile/casual computing space (is transferring to desktop computing and even waiting in line at Starbucks!). Performance and snappy responsiveness should be the number one user experience goal for any mobile application.

From my own experience with the various QR code readers on nearly every platform, Android is by far the fastest and most accurate when it comes to consuming QR codes. It actually makes consuming content/info from QR codes quite trivial. However, on Blackberry and even the iPhone the process is kludgey and utterly frustrating which I feel is largely the reason for the disappointment (and subsequent low numbers in the study). This is a software problem which can be solved.

Finally, where QR codes are super relevant are places where people have time to kill (think sitting on an airplane, back of a cab stuck in traffic, doctor's office reading a magazine, even sitting at home) and in places where people may be incentivized to scan them (think of getting a digital coupon on the label of a spaghetti sauce at a store). It appears the data supports this as well (58% are scanned at home, 50% scanned from a print magazine according to ComScore data). The context of the user should be a major consideration for QR code placement and ultimately the decision for nearly any/all things mobile.

Foursquare + American Express = Small Business Saturday

This past shopping frenzy of a weekend (the weekend following Thanksgiving with Black Friday now starting at 10pm on Thanksgiving night, which is Thursday) there was actually a program piloted by one of Foursquare's biggest partners, American Express ($AXP) called Small Business Saturday.

In a nutshell, American Express gave cardholders a $25 statement credit if they shopped at an independent, local business that accepted American Express. Sounds cool and it's good for small, independent businesses during a rather busy time for big box retailers and multi-national conglomerates. However, the process of how the user got the credit is what is, in my opinion, unique.

First, the American Express customer had to checkin on Foursquare at the small business location. Next, they had to purchase at least $25 worth of goods or services. Finally they had to load the "special" to the card.

There was some setup required ahead of time for this deal to work with your Amex, namely, you had to sync your Foursquare account with your Amex account online.

The upside here is that everyone wins. The consumer gets $25 credited to their account. The small business gets additional revenue from the small uptick in sales. Foursquare gains in number of checkins and the ability to track how many people actually unlocked and used the deal. And American Express wins, probably the most out of all, for not only do they get the postive PR by showing their support for small businesses, but Amex gets 3% of to the total purchase by the customers.

I'm willing to bet that many people didn't simply spend only $25, but most likely spent more and in some cases much more wherein Amex makes even more money on those purchases.

What's quite telling to me about this entire event (stunt?) is how a company like American Express is embracing the mobile retail experience aside from the typical "mobile wallet". American Express is taking action by partnering with a hyper-mobile and hyper-local company like Foursquare and engaging with consumers through a new form of communication. These types of opportunities exist and are abundant, yet are simply undiscovered or are currently in the works.

For me, this is only the beginning of continued integration and exploration of how mobile devices continue to impact our daily lives.