Breakfast Taco Day 4: For more R&D in the media, what we can do with AI (and something about China)

Howdy from Austin! 🙋

The worst thing you can struggle with at the SXSW is FOMO, Fear of Missing out. For the first two days I had a guilty conscience in every session, because I wasn’t sitting in three other panels happening at the same time that sounded just as exciting. Only yesterday did a certain amount of relaxation set in over the day.

Maybe it just takes a little while to come to terms with the fact that you can’t be everywhere. Maybe the slight hangover from the evening before helped to rush less hectically through downtown. Or the fact that the first two sessions were already so great that the last two felt like an add-on to an already very good day — and they were also amazing.

Instead of a fifth session I had a fantastic coffee with Sachar Klein from Hypr for his podcast Talking Digital and talked about the Media Lab Bayern and what AI will bring us in journalism. Spoiler: Good things, hopefully!

What do I look forward to today? Our first Media Startup Night in Austin! Starting at 6pm in the German Haus. You can find out what to expect in the section #MustSee.

🔮 #MediaTrends

Admit it, you’ve been waiting for the subject of Al. Yesterday there was a fantastic all-female panel on AI in journalism with the Quartz Bot Studio, the Washington Post and an AI researcher.

And these are their most exciting ideas what we can do with AI in journalism:

Next Generation Personalization:
Quartz Bot Studio is experimenting with my favorite thing: How can we adapt texts so individually for each reader, that not only the content is tailored to them, but also the level of information? I’ve been wondering for so long why nobody seemed to be working on it. It can’t be that hard to track what I read and analyze how much I know about a topic. The innovators at Quartz are probably on it as we speak. Finally!

Filter Bubble Remedy:
Quartz has also tried a new kind of A-B-testing and has given readers a choice to read an article with an opinion that corresponds to their own — or doesn’t at all. Result: Readers are actually more committed if they read what they don’t like first.

AI is Best When You Feel Like You’re Always Writing the Same Story:
And that leaves for the human journalist: opinion, and “finding the story”. Of course, a computer can recognize outliers or trends faster than humans from a lot of data, but I don’t think that within the next 10 years there will be enough structure to fish every story out of data sets. (But just in case: I may be wrong.)

And three things that give the speakers sleepless nights:

Deepfakes
The website thispersondoesnotexist.com shows a new image of a computer-generated person on every reload. And this is only the beginning. Scary. I always thought of the topic of “fake news” as overhyped, but we should start thinking about what we can do to counteract deepfakes. (Ideas? Tweet me!)

Privacy
People don’t understand what’s happening to their data. For example, that the workplace Slack is actually not private, but can be read quite easily. Emily Withrow of Quartz strongly advocates informing people more.

Discrimination
There’s just a lot of inequalities in the world. Now we have to make sure that algorithms don’t adopt them. (Nobody here in Austin so far has had a good answer to this.)

👩 #TechThatChangesTheWorld

I know we talked about corporate innovation yesterday. But it’s one of the bigger trends in the schedule — and we’ve been working on it more and more in the Media Lab.
After everyone started their first experiments, the topic of innovation in the media industry is just beginning to grow. I regularly talk to various media companies about how they are looking for processes to institutionalize innovation. Yesterday there was an exciting panel with the R&D managers from Eventbrite, Adobe and InVision.

The good news first, dear industry: the tech scene hasn’t found *all* the solutions yet. But here’s a 7-step innovation process from the panel:

Why do we need Research & Development?
Nice explanation from Samantha Warren from Adobe: “You can’t control the ocean, but you can prepare for the big wave.” Learn how to surf before the big wave hits.

So what is innovation?
“Everything that exists today is just a remix of what existed before.” And 70% of a product already exists with learned UX. A user profile needs a login, a password, and so on. For the remaining 30%, there are four or five different ways, and you just have to try them. Sometimes there is an ingenious idea, which then becomes a UX habit — like the right-wing swipe in Tinder, which is now learned as an action for positive feedback.

And what about the risk in innovation?
“As soon as you are sure that the problem you want to solve with the product exists exactly like that, the risk is actually gone”. Thanks, Tom Giannattasio from InVision, that’s what we preach all the time: Start with the problem!

Cool, but how to continue?
“Quick”. Most teams would still take too long to release their first product. Today, even a MVP might be a six-month, forty-developer project. But the product must get into the hands of the customer as soon as possible (Amen!). Actually in two or four weeks. From there you develop further, polish and finish your product.

And what does a team need for that?
A vision. One that is communicated. Everyone has a different idea of the product and the future, so you can’t overcommunicate what you want to achieve ( A prototype? A vision?) and why.

Top. And who does that then?
Interdisciplinary teams. Period. (Smart addition from Eventbrite: As small as possible. Rather 2–3 people with know-how and motivation than teams that are too big.)

And after that? Hand over the product or let the team continue?
There is good reasons for both. Let it continue: This team is already familiar with it, why should they give away their baby? Nobody likes to give away their baby. If thats the plan, however, it helps to open up the scenario of how a startup would proceed with an exit as early as possible, in the development stage. What if the product were acquired now by another company? What would it need technologically? In terms of content?

But the last step also shows that R&D is above all a constant hiring process. New products need new resources and skills (“Teams should be able to focus 100% on the innovation project!”). That just makes sense. After all, R&D should make new products possible, i.e. new business areas, i.e. new revenue streams. And that justifies hiring people.

By the way: My colleague Ronja and I at Media Lab Bayern are busy with corporate innovation processes right now. If you have any ideas or would like to talk, we’re always up for Mails, DMs & Coffee!

💡#CrazyIdea

Instead of a crazy idea, three things I finally understood yesterday on the SXSW.

👓 XR & Autists
AI and XR can do good. That was my ❤-talk of the day and I’m still thinking about what we can learn from that for media. A joint project of Magic Leap and psychiatrists allows people with autism to practice job interviews or smalltalk between colleagues with digital counterparts. The Magic Leap glasses track how I talk and where I look via sensors and give feedback immediately after the fictitious interview, whether I have improved and, for example, no longer looked at the floor so often. It is easier for people in the autistic spectrum to practice such situations with 3D-animated people than with real ones. Fantastic!

XR content is often too expensive to create for journalism. But maybe there are still a few use cases for media in the area of education and training. Why shouldn’t a media brand use Magic Leap to build tutorials? Everything that needs to be practiced and is expensive or elaborate or both to train could be suitable. The… Hiking-Tutorial from the hiking magazine? The woodchucking tutorial from the gardening magazine? Do you have ideas? Send them to me on Twitter and I’ll list them here tomorrow!

🇨🇳🎶 China & Media
When people around me are all excited about what is coming from China, I have smiled mildly so far and said: “True, in all industries. But not in the media. Cultures (and politics) are far too different.”
After a friend of mine has been talking about China and AI lately, I’ve been strolling to the “Will China Eat Us For Lunch” panel. And there they said, that so far no solely Chinese product has managed to have the same success in the USA as in its home market — and vice versa. Except one: TikTok/Musical.ly. The video app from Shanghai is the only app that has taken the hearts of US and Chinese teenagers in a landslide. And it’s so much more media than any other bicycle or messenger payment startup you’d talk about.
What’s to come in the future?

👪 Community & KPIs
The media industry currently talks a lot about communities — always with monetization in mind. Harmony Eichstaedt of “Worth The Journey” yesterday argued that this might be relevant at some point. But the topic of community in particular couldn’t be squeezed into the usual business figures, because the return on investment starts much later and is perhaps not measurable at all. Tackling the issue therefore requires courageous leadership.

🚀#StartupLearning
Philipp of our audio community startup Upspeak has taken away from the day that the biggest competitor of Facebook is not Google or Twitter, but its users time. Visual platforms usually need the full attention of the user and compete with everything else he wants to do. The USP of Audio only is that you can do things on the side. Will Facebook invest in audio soon? Or do other apps and products grab the niche here?

Mustafa is currently developing the social CMS Kerngedanke in our Batch #5 and has picked up an idea from Steven Bartlett, CEO of The Social Chain Group: social media has a PR problem, but not a conceptual one. Social media may have been discredited by fake news and scandals, but the need for social media remains. Users are consuming as much as before, but their expectations of trustworthiness, quality and authenticity are growing.

💥 #MustSeeInAustin

The absolute #MustSee for Monday? Our first Media Startup Night in Austin! What awaits you?

• 1-minute pitches from the most innovative media startups — and of course unicorn dollars to invest.
• the most innovative minds in the media and start-up scene.
• a fun networking game (trust us, it’s fantastic and you’ll make great contacts!)
• Pre-dinner drinks and snacks to get you straight into another great SXSW night.

In addition I’d like to go to the Sony House (Red River/Cesar Chavez, highlight from 2018) and right next to it to the promo of the new series “Good Omens”, with which Amazon Prime even replaced the Food Court at the entrance of Rainey Street. Who’s coming?

Our Favorite Sessions for Monday

9:30–10:30am: How Data Helps to Unleash Creativity in Media. With data you can not only sell things better, but also produce products and content better. Netflix is already strongly geared towards the interests of its users in new productions — CNN, Warner Bros. and HBO don’t have to hide behind this.

9:30–10:30am: Continuous Innovation: Outlearn Your Competition. In an accelerated world, the company that learns faster than its competitors wins. Ash Maurya of Lean Stack explains in this session, how to continuously interact with customers and how companies can master “Continuous Innovation”.

9:30–10:30am: Drowning in Data, Starving for Insights. Data is everywhere and it is becoming more and more. But the trick is to get meaningful insights from this data. This panel will focus on how this works and which data is really important for brands.

11:00–12:00am: The Media’s New Game: Revenue Roulette. Many media houses are increasingly relying on subscription models and less on advertising revenue to finance themselves. It seems, however, that there will never again be the ONE model that finances journalism. Four journalists from Reuters, the Washington Post and the Blockchain-Startup Civil are discussing how media organizations can deal with this.

12:30–1:30pm: Corporations are Failing to Innovate, or Are They? Learning from mistakes is an important prerequisite for any innovation. This panel therefore includes companies that have been successful with startup partnerships as well as those that failed. The speakers want to shed light on both sides, and then show what opportunities the cooperation nevertheless offers.

12:30–1:30pm: AI-Powered Media Manipulation and Its Consequences. In this session, four scientists will present case studies in which AI systems manipulate media content and later analyze the effects that these systems could have on society. Exciting for all journalists who want to inform themselves scientifically about the impending fake news waves.

3:30–4:30pm: Recode Media with Peter Kafka Podcast. You all know Recode anyway, don’t you? The host of the outstanding Recode Media podcast will record the current episode live at SXSW 2019 and talk to his guests about podcasts. What else?

5:00–6:00pm: How to Build a Standout Brand in a Crowded World. Faster and easier networking and communication also means that it’s getting harder and harder to have your own messages heard. Marketing strategist Nick Westergaard explains how this can still work. And because messages can also be journalism, this is certainly also exciting for (journalistic) media companies.