May 2013
1 post
Thanks John! And I hope Aviary does you proud at...
I’ve never met John Battelle, though I owe a lot of my career to him.
Let’s rewind… I was at Cardiff University, finishing my PhD in the school of Civil Engineering, as the consumer web started taking off in the mid-90s. I fell in love immediately, and co-founded a “portal” (remember those?!) with some college mates. We didn’t know what we were doing, and neither did anyone else around us. The...
April 2013
1 post
Native ads, in the context of a massive amount of...
This year over 500 billion photos will be taken worldwide, and nearly half of them will be taken on smart phones. Considering that all those mobile photos can be shared widely across text messages, group messages, social networks, blogs and more, it’s clear that mobile photography is massive.
So what opportunities do brands have to tap into all this mobile activity?
Brand engagement on mobile has...
March 2013
1 post
Native Advertising: Harmonious with the User...
At Dan Greenberg’s excellent Native Ads Summit last week, one panel tried to define what “Native Advertising” is.
To me, it’s paid-for content that looks and feels like organic content, and can be engaged with (commented on, shared, etc) in exactly the same way. A Promoted Tweet is the best example – it looks and feels like a Tweet, can be retweeted, @replied, fave’d, but it’s been paid...
February 2013
1 post
Mobile is dead. Long live mobile.
iWatch is coming. Google Glass is coming. “Mobile” is moving from the 5 inch mini computer in your pocket towards the world of wearable technology - and fast.
How will the mobile devs of today translate their services to these new platforms? Or will consumer demand mean they have to develop entirely new ones - leveraging native capabilities that enable new and unique user experiences....
December 2012
1 post
I joined Aviary today as the company's CEO
I joined Aviary today as the company’s CEO, and I couldn’t be more excited. Here’s why:
Aviary has built the best SDK for photo editing, sharing and monetization. More than 2,500 developers already use that SDK in apps across mobile, tablet and web. In November, Aviary saw 25m unique end users across that developer network. On Thanksgiving Day alone, Aviary’s technology helped...
November 2012
1 post
4 tags
Just got acquired? 10 adjustments to make when...
I just left Walmart. I arrived in September 2011 as part of the transaction that saw OneRiot acquired by the world’s largest retailer. We had some clever technology for targeting relevant content at mobile consumers based on their social signals, not to mention a super-smart team of Big Data devs and Machine Learning PhDs. Meanwhile, Walmart was beginning to realize that social and mobile would...
October 2012
1 post
Facebook retargeting, what Twitter should do next,...
I got retargeted on Facebook today – and it was magical.
Here’s what happened. I wanted to buy a Ted Baker gingham check sports shirt. So first I went to Google and searched for “Ted Baker gingham check sports shirt”. That’s a pretty explicit signal indicating that I’m looking to buy a pretty specific item. The top result was for a matching product page on Nordstrom.com, which I clicked. On that...
September 2012
3 posts
The genius of the “Like”
In the old days of social, there was the 1:9:90 rule. That is:
1% of your users created the content.
9% commented on the content.
90% passively consumed the content.
That’s really hard to monetize (e.g. with advertising).
The 1% are too cool to pay attention to any attempts to monetize. (e.g. they ignore ads you might put in front of them).
The 90% give you absolutely zero information about...
Technology to track my health
When i was at University in the early 90s, i ran every night. The technology i used was… a Sony Walkman. I’d shove in a well worn tape cassette of New Order’s “Technique”, put the headphones on, hit play and start running. That album is just shy of 40 minutes. I’d run… get half way through… turn around and run home again. That was probably about 8KM...
Why do i still use an RSS reader?
I dont understand why i still use an RSS reader to get my industry news. More to the point, i dont understand why i dont feel comfortable that one of the automagic, social-signal-using, content aggregator thingies will show me everything i need to read.
I’ve tried them all - from flipboard, to wavii, to the latest darling prismatic. OneRiot even took a vertical-focused hack at this with...
August 2012
5 posts
Hipset. It's the stupid algorithm, stupid.
This weekend, the world’s gone gaga for Hipset.
It’s a cool service. Essentially, it delivers a stream of content that’s been socially shared by bands you’ve “liked” on Facebook.
The chances are, you would miss this content by looking at your newsfeed on Facebook.com. When a band (or anyone else) shares something on Facebook, less than 20% of their...
quick break down of WordPress for iOS 3.1
As i’m using it, my thoughts are:
It’s a publisher-centric experience
- opening screen’s CTA is to “pair” with an existing desktop blog, or create a new one
- there appears to be no notion of “consumption first”; i.e. discovering cool content on the network or any other means of uncovering network value quickly
Create a new blog
- the experience on...
Driving decisions by a regular cadence of meetings...
When I was CEO of OneRiot, we started doing board meetings every 4 weeks.
But we fell into a trap of subconsciously running the business - and driving the product - to a cadence where we had to have good stuff to put in a deck to talk about at the board meetings.
This didn’t necessarily line up with the pace our customers were running or, more importantly, what our sales and engineering...
July 2012
1 post
Skate to where the puck is at on ad models
In start ups, it a cliche/truism that you should skate towards where the puck is heading. However, if you’re a consumer play, and thinking about an ad product for monetization, there’s an argument to be made that you should skate towards where the puck is at right now.
Digg skated towards where the puck was heading - when they invented native ads. (Native ads are paid-for content that users...
June 2012
1 post
Testing the new tumblr iOS app
It’s a nice app - but it’s obviously a mobile app built to support a desktop web service. It just ‘feels’ like that. There must be room for a ‘mobile-first tumblr’ (or a ‘mixed media instagram’) featuring - beautiful design for mobile web - pick from several themes, or customize in a way that’s easy/quick/optimized for mobile - set up new blogs from the app (eg Tobias’ blog) - set up sub blogs...
January 2012
1 post
3 tags
Getting pumped up about this year’s plan of attack
Today was a very odd first day back at work. I’m kicking off 2012 not as CEO of a startup (OneRiot was acquired by Walmart), or even the leader of a standalone business unit. Instead I’m a cog in the wheel of a big company’s machine. For the last 10 years I would have spent the last week thinking: how do I make sure the troops are fired up on day 1? This time I’ve been thinking: I wonder...
