Nerd Weekly Digest

some good links on innovation, futurism, marketing, webdesign — week 39 ‘14

“People traditionally drew a really sharp distinction between off-line and online payments. Face-to-face, you would swipe your card, and online, you typed in your credit card details,” says John Collison, the co-founder of Stripe, a startup whose technology dovetails with Apple Pay, helping to power transactions via the service. “But those lines are starting to get blurred — starting to go away.”
How Apple Pay Will Destroy the Online-Offline Shopping Divide

“This special report will show that technology is profoundly changing the dynamics of advertising. Building on the vast amount of data produced by consumers’ digital lives, it is giving more power to media companies that have a direct relationship with their customers and can track them across different devices. An entire industry has sprung up around targeted ads. Third-party tracking companies gather information on browsing habits and online purchases, often invisibly.”
Technology Is Radically Changing The Advertising Business — And The Consequences Are Profound

“Despite everything we know, the entire media industry keeps talking about “the future of advertising” as if it was, well… way off in the future, like a remote land we might visit one day. Our audiences — the folks we keep trying to reach (formerly known as consumers) — woke up in the “future” roughly eight years ago, when digital became social and changed media forever. Now audiences seamlessly consume (and create) media — TV, movies, music, books, news — across all kinds of devices. (Another fact: The New York Times says NBC just paid an eye-popping $7.5 billion to extend its rights to the Olympics because “more viewers consume media on their own schedules, often without commercials.” This puts the Olympics among a dwindling number of spectacles that keep audiences watching, and advertisers paying, in real time.)”
The Future Is Now: 4 Rules for the Post-Advertising Age

“It’s the HTML select element. The invention of select dates back to 1995 with the introduction of the HTML 2.0 specification. So most of us have never experienced designing for web without select as an option. But it can be a really, really frustrating component to let into your designs. Let me tell you why.
By using the select element it’s a no-brainer to create a list of selectable options. It’s easy and it’s cheap. It’s supported by all new and old browsers in use, and it comes with a lot of nice features, such as grouping options, keyboard navigation, single and multi select and reliable rendering across platforms without me having to put on my thinking hat. It just works!
So why not just use it?”
Responsive Design: Why and how we ditched the good old select element

“While we embrace change and progress, the fast leaps of technology create challenges for companies. On the one hand, technology becomes cheaper. Starting a technology company is cheaper than ever before. On the other hand, companies need to keep up with technology development.
The fast pace of technology puts companies in a difficult situation. Either they keep up with the pace or they decide to go slower.”
Technology Moves Faster Than Companies

“The fact that data has the power to change our business and personal lives has put data science and analytics at the center of how marketing is done. Every digital click, swipe, “like”, buy, comment and search produces a unique virtual identity — something that Malcom Frank, EVP of strategy and marketing for Cognizant, calls a Code Halo™, a.k.a. digital exhaust. But in order to use data to drive meaningful results companies need to know what they’re looking for and how to make correlations. Businesses such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon have had an unprecedented growth in value based on their ability to perform mass customization — creating new expectations in consumers and causing businesses in every industry to change the way they work. I recently wrote about the 5 trends shaping the future of work — all lines-of-business can be disrupted given the rapidly evolving landscape, including information technology (IT).”
5 Must-Have IT Skills For The Future of Work

“The number one benefit of cloud computing is agility. The value of bringing new features or products to market far outweigh the other benefits such as cost reduction. PaaS takes agility to another level by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure and application stack so that developers can focus more on business requirements and less on technical requirements. If agility is king and PaaS is the king of agility, then why are enterprises so slow to embrace it?”
Top 8 Reasons Why Enterprises Are Passing On PaaS

“In August, a widely reported report from comScore, a measurement firm, concluded that the majority of smartphone users in the United States download precisely zero apps in any given month.One possible explanation is that people just don’t need that many apps, and the apps people already have are more than suitable for most functions,” speculated Quartz’s Dan Frommer at the time. New datafrom Localytics, an app analytics firm which tracks 28,000 apps across 1.5 billion global devices, lends some evidence to this theory.”
Why most people aren’t downloading apps anymore

“Recently, marketing scholars Caleb Warren and Margaret C. Campbell tried to understand the connection between conventionality and coolness with a bit more precision. They did so through a series of six experiments comparing consumer products (like the bottles above), coolness ratings (the bottle on the right does rate higher), and participant reactions. In the end, Warren and Campbell concluded that cool designs tend to be “appropriately” unconventional—that is, they challenge unnecessary norms, and aren’t too extreme themselves.Being cool requires a very delicate balance of doing something that shows that you go your own way and do your own thing, but you do it in a way that is socially desirable or at least acceptable,”
The Science Of Cool Design

“The recipe for successful innovation: begin with a good measure of disruption. Add a heaping helping of talent, and don’t forget to mix in plenty of creativity. Finally, a pinch of intuition. Stir and bake.
Recipe for innovation? Perhaps. But successful innovation? That’s another story. After all, whether an innovation will actually succeed — that is, meet or exceed its business goals — seems to require some unknown, missing ingredient to the mix. The recipe above may include necessary elements, but taken together, they are still not sufficient to guarantee success.
How’s a Digital Transformation professional to determine that secret element, thatje ne sais quoi that leads to successful innovations, every time — or at least, most of the time? Simple. Let’s get out our Big Data analytics tools and crunch some data. Surely, boiling down Big Data to a syrup of innovation to that rare sprinkling of insightwill provide that missing ingredient. Magnifique!”
Big Data-Driven Innovation: Disruption vs. Optimization

“There is still much to learn as this exciting era of technology unfolds. What many understand already is that investment in new technology not founded on authentic utility is the stuff bubbles are made of.
Wearable technology should at its core, enable us to transcend our problems. Emerging wearable tech leaders have an economic imperative to solve real problems if wearables are to become the omnipresent, multi-billion dollar industry many predict. If these conditions are met, a future of ubiquitous wearable technology may quite literally be upon us.”
10 Top Wearable Technology Design

“You may have noticed a shift in the digital world recently, where websites and brand identities have been stripped back to a very simple, minimalistic design.
Minimalism has been “in” in the design world for a number of years, but it has only just started to appear on the web. While the trend’s stripped back look and feel might not be right for all applications, there are some principles that can be applied to any design project.”
5 Reasons why Less is More in Web Design

“Geek culture’s growing mainstream impact is often attributed to the rise of wealth in the information technology sector. That may be partially true, but misses what’s attractive in the first place about this culture for young geeks, who are often maligned as socially inept misfits clinging to each other in low-status huddles. However, rather than desperation, many young people are positively drawn to geek culture for something that is harder and harder to find in mainstream culture: the joy of making things.”
Geek Culture is Smart and Creative

“Calls to Action (CTAs) serve a very specific purpose. CTAs should elicit a response from yourwebsite visitors. Whether you’re asking them to to sign-up for a free eBook or subscribe to your newsletter, the CTA is there to capture visitor information and generate leads.If your CTAs aren’t getting attention or capturing responses, their existence is almost futile. Learn the 5 crucial steps of designing a beautiful call to action”
The 5 Components of an Irresistible Call to Action

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My blog (it-IT) : www.francescopollice.it