Interview with Jason Falls on Social Media Explorer
Jason Falls just posted the video interview we did together down in Austin a few weeks ago during SXSW. It’s posted with an article on his Social Media Explorer or you can watch the YouTube version here:
Barack Obama’s “A more perfect union”….
Barack sums this speech up with the essence of why he needs to be our next president. Hope and aspiration don’t solve our problems nor do beautiful speeches, but they are the right places to start if we are to have any chance of accomplishing these feats. Despite what the nay-sayers preach, a leader first needs to be able to articulute our hopes and dreams before we have a chance of living them….
Connecting The Conversation - NYC Fete
Last night Sphere co-hosted a cocktail party with The New York Times, Automattic (WordPress), Giga Omni Media (GigaOM), Hearst Corporation and True Ventures. The event celebrated the evolution afoot in the media industry, bringing together large publishers and bloggers. Quite an evening. Thank you to everyone who joined us and a special shout out to True Ventures and Hearst for making the event possible. Here are a couple of photos from the event which took place at the top of the new Hearst Tower overlooking Central Park.
$2 bill taped to Bear Stearns HQ entrance
Just plain wrong….
Jack Nicholson ad for Hillary
Just came across this ad for Hillary that Jack Nicholson sponsored and endorsed. Pretty creative stuff….
SXSW - Recap from Austin
Woah! Seven days in Austin for South by Southwest were all I could handle (in fact, more than I could handle as I escaped for one night to Dallas). I signed up for SXSW without knowing much about it, but with the general impression that it was a fun event and unique in the professional world. Both these assumptions proved spot on. By the second day, I was referring to SXSW as Burning Man for Business. In fact, there is significant overlap in attendance and I found myself discussing Burning Man several times over the week. The format of SXSW is very similar to Burning Man, with sessions and panels organized throughout the four days of the conference (and many people skipping the sessions altogether). While some of the sessions were entertaining and educational, the real meat of the conference happened outside the convention center at the parties, in the bars and throughout downtown Austin. In the evenings, tech stalwarts like Google, Apple, Adobe and a few upstarts in a Super Bowl ad-like move, throw parties at local bars where booze flows freely (as in gratis) into the wee hours. This scenario creates an extremely social ethos, not to mention makes for late nights and late mornings, all making SXSW a giant party for the industry. If you weren’t there, this might sound like a giant boondoggle, but interestingly, I found that more valuable networking and business actually happened that at your average conference. In an industry that is relatively young, where founders and execs in their early 40s represent the high end of the range, we’d all rather do business in fun, social environments than staid office-like conference halls. This proved out over the course of the week as I networked and connected with many dozen industry professionals from around the country. I also found these relationships more authentic and more likely to lead to friendship since the formality and forced interaction are lifted. I did manage to attend a few valuable sessions, my favorite of which was given by Jason Fried on Lessons Learned at 37 Signals. His message was overwhelmingly simple and the lessons he conveyed were mostly common sense. Sean Ammirati has a nice review of the session on ReadWriteWeb. Another session that scored high marks was The Worst Website Ever delivered by Merlin Mann which you can watch here on Viddler. Overall, SXSW was nothing short of awesome, and I’ll definitely be back in future years.
Sphere vs. The Competition
People often ask us how Sphere’s products and technology fare versus our competition. While we believe that the results (namely our footprint) speak for themselves, it’s worth discussing some of the key differentiators between Sphere and other similar services out there:
- Behavioral vs Contextual - Several well-funded companies are competing for a piece of our market’s mind-share by offering related content powered by behavioral analysis. In other words, people who read this article also read this one, so we believe there is a relationship between them and you might also want to read it. This technology is very cool and we love it when it comes to e-commerce and the like. When I buy a digital camera, it’s helpful to see the memory cards that other consumers most often purchased. When it comes to content, however, we think it’s much more difficult to establish reliable relationships between, often, very disparate articles. We also understand that click-through rates generated by these services on content are typically significantly lower than those generated by contextually related content, and we think this confirms our hypothesis. Sphere contextual matching will generate higher quality results on content more consistently than behavioral analysis.
- Dynamic Results Guarantee Freshness - Sphere’s related content results are generated dynamically in Java-Script every time the page loads. This guarantees that we’ll provide the reader with the absolute freshest content. If I’m reading an article and a blogger and/or journalist published a contextually relevant piece within the past hour, this is something that I’d like to see and thankfully, Sphere will provide. Getting back to the point above, behavioral relationships typically takes time to establish, which prevents me from seeing the freshest results, from the source I’m on or elsewhere.
- Breadth of Related Content - Our technology is super-flexible and this means we can generate related content results from a multitude of different formats and sources - including articles, videos, photos and podcasts. When you integrate Sphere with your site, we can generate related content from your own articles or videos, as well as from external sources including blogs, videos and podcasts. Since we maintain one of the largest indices of the blogosphere, segmented by topics, and already work with many large video providers, this all happens very quickly.
- Simplicity of Integration - Speaking of speed and quickness, this is the icing on the cake. Several of our competitors require significant excavation and retooling of publishers’ CMS and website. Instead of offloading the work on our partners, we do all the heavy lifting at Sphere, including the indexing and configuration. When it’s all complete, we deliver some slick code wrapped in a red bow with instructions for implementation. That’s it - signed, sealed and delivered. Our typical implementation from start to finish happens in just a few days!!
If you’re a site owner or publisher and any of this gets you excited, send us an email by clicking the "contact us" link at the top right of our site.
Sometimes, you’re better off on your own….
As the quest to find decent customer service continues - one of my favorite topics - I had two infuriating incidents this week with Asus and HP. Bought a new router from Asus that has a usb port for printer sharing….’pretty cool’ I thought until I called the Asus customer service line for help setting it up. In what was probably the worst customer service experience of all time (yes, I know that’s saying a lot) we spent 20 minutes discussing the issue before the guy told me my printer was not compatible with the router. Infuriated, I hung up, only to figure the whole setup out on my own 15 mins later networking both my mac and pc. Later in the week, I had a scanning issue with the printer (post-networking). Similarly, I engaged HP customer service, which is leagues better than Asus (as it should be), but again was given poor advice. They suggested i uninstall all software and driver and then, reinstall. Unfortunately, this process continued for 3 days because the reinstall wouldn’t take. Eventually, I figured out that scanning wasn’t going to work on the printer networked through usb. In both cases, customer services provided little to negative value. Thanks guys.
Headstand!!
HUGE day in yoga Wednesday. I figured out the headstand and managed to support myself sans wall. Wow, what a feeling! Been doing yoga since 2002 and it took a new instructor (first time we met) for that little something to click that made all the difference. Yoga is really a metaphor for life. Inching forward ever so slowly, and then….a breakthrough. My ass doesn’t look this nice, but then again, you can’t win ‘em all.
NPR is impressive….and cool
It’s always fun and enlightening to meet with companies that really have there sh*t together and are on the ball, particularly when they’re not necessarily the companies you expect. Such is the case with NPR, who I met with yesterday here in DC. As a non-profit with a strong core mission of
"creating a more informed public — one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas and cultures"
they put many for-profit media companies to shame with their innovation and fresh approach to media. I was totally impressed by NPR’s innovative approach to media distribution - they are the uncontested leader in the podcast medium with 11M downloads per month and are way ahead of the game in mobile content distribution relative to others. Why are they able to get so much right as a non-profit, when others who allegedly have more incentive to innovate and produce profits, are slower to the plate? Maybe it has to do with a commitment to their core mission. I bet that a strong mission to which all employees subscribe is a more powerful form of motivation than any financial incentive, particularly when financial incentives are clustered at the top. Sergey and Larry have been quoted saying that their Google Foundation will pursue for-profit initiatives, which they believe are more efficient at innovating and producing desired results. I think that, for the most part, such is the belief in Silicon Valley, where missions are really masks for the real incentives, green. I’m not saying entrepreneurs aren’t passionate about building great products too (I fall into this camp at the moment because I’m certainly not working to save the world), but the prime motivation is different than when you’re building a great product to make a real difference in the world. They should check out NPR as an example of a non-profit model that outperforms its peers and achieves its goals - and I expect rewards its employees fairly well.