I have mixed feelings about automation. The word even appears in my job title from time to time. The myth about automation is that somehow doing so will allow us to have more time to do other things. I've encountered many scenarios where a consultant or subject matter expert is brought into a workplace situation to help a company build out its marketing automation, only to not retain that talent for the long term.
But, this post isn't about marketing automation or my aforementioned rant about companies that fail to use it to build 1-to-1 relationships with their customers. Instead, I'd like to point out the concerns addressing automation's impact on the US trucking industry.
Hello Alexa
Not sure how long ago this feature was added, but it looks like someone just replaced the default microphone app with Alexa's voice and mannerisms on the Amazon app. You'd think that if you were accessing Alexa from within Amazon's shopping app, that the default search would be for items listed in Amazon's eCommerce ecosystem. Sadly, this is not the case.
My first query: "weather tracking for the home", followed by "weather tracking apps"
I don't like Alexa's color bar acknowledgement followed by its electronic beep. For the few seconds it takes to execute these robotic response commands, it is an unnecessary feature. Alexa responds by verbally giving me the weather forecast for Salem Oregon.
The response is puzzling because I was just adding/removing items from my wish lists in the app which one could assume that I am already logged into my account which has my mailing address in it (and I don't live in Oregon). Even if location services were turned on for this app, surely the developers would have programmed that into Alexa -- to be able to give regional information based on already known criteria.
My next query: "search Amazon for home weather tracking"
That brought up a relevant search list on Amazon's store.
Artificial Intelligence is only as good as the team that builds it.
I can just visualize the disconnect between the business user story and what got implemented by the development team. Maybe I'm just disappointed because I'm so used to Google search providing accurate, relevant results from text or voice queries.
At least Alexa can tell jokes (Siri cannot):
"Tell me a funny cat joke"
Alexa: What does a cat say when it gets hurt? Me-ow.
 |
| Screenshot of Alexa's Intro Screen on Amazon App |
My first query: "weather tracking for the home", followed by "weather tracking apps"
I don't like Alexa's color bar acknowledgement followed by its electronic beep. For the few seconds it takes to execute these robotic response commands, it is an unnecessary feature. Alexa responds by verbally giving me the weather forecast for Salem Oregon.
The response is puzzling because I was just adding/removing items from my wish lists in the app which one could assume that I am already logged into my account which has my mailing address in it (and I don't live in Oregon). Even if location services were turned on for this app, surely the developers would have programmed that into Alexa -- to be able to give regional information based on already known criteria.
My next query: "search Amazon for home weather tracking"
That brought up a relevant search list on Amazon's store.
Artificial Intelligence is only as good as the team that builds it.
I can just visualize the disconnect between the business user story and what got implemented by the development team. Maybe I'm just disappointed because I'm so used to Google search providing accurate, relevant results from text or voice queries.
At least Alexa can tell jokes (Siri cannot):
"Tell me a funny cat joke"
Alexa: What does a cat say when it gets hurt? Me-ow.
Big Bird says "So long" to Big Brother
The Children's Television Workshop lost its government funding in 1981; but was supplemented by grants.
In 1998, the producers of Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop (formerly Children's Television Workshop) opened their brand to corporate sponsorships and product licensing. By 2004, 68% of their annual revenue came from this. Their TV episodes are syndicated worldwide and have been running for 48 seasons so far. If you think that this long running childrens' media brand will be hurt by government cutting of public broadcast funding, sadly you are mistaken about how large this franchise really is.
In 2005, their annual revenue grew 4% to $96m and that was due to international licensing.
Sesame Street on HBO is why you won't find the show running on Netflix or Amazon Prime.
Non-profit status does not mean you don't rake in millions of dollars in revenues; it simply means how you run the organization and its tax liability is different than a for-profit one.
I can see the financial rationale behind cutting government support of "public" broadcasting, as purely a budgetary numbers game.
Sesame Workshop has both non-profit and for-profit subsidiaries. It has built a very successful business model from an initial $8 million investment (this is how Sesame Street got created) to the more than $120m in assets the production company owns today. It is likely that Sesame Workshop will be unaffected by any measure of government cuts to public broadcasting.
Did you know that in the City of Portland, Oregon, there's an arts tax and funding comes out of the pockets of its adult residents earning more than $1,000 per year. The city tax benefits everyone who visits Portland's downtown area with all the public art displays.
Read more:
Sesame Workshop financials
Public Broadcasting Act of 1967
Children's Television Workshop Origins
Trump's Proposed Cuts of Funding For Arts, Humanities And Public Media
In 1998, the producers of Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop (formerly Children's Television Workshop) opened their brand to corporate sponsorships and product licensing. By 2004, 68% of their annual revenue came from this. Their TV episodes are syndicated worldwide and have been running for 48 seasons so far. If you think that this long running childrens' media brand will be hurt by government cutting of public broadcast funding, sadly you are mistaken about how large this franchise really is.
In 2005, their annual revenue grew 4% to $96m and that was due to international licensing.
Sesame Street on HBO is why you won't find the show running on Netflix or Amazon Prime.
 |
| Sesame Workshop: Funding by Source, 2015 |
Non-profit status does not mean you don't rake in millions of dollars in revenues; it simply means how you run the organization and its tax liability is different than a for-profit one.
I can see the financial rationale behind cutting government support of "public" broadcasting, as purely a budgetary numbers game.
Sesame Workshop has both non-profit and for-profit subsidiaries. It has built a very successful business model from an initial $8 million investment (this is how Sesame Street got created) to the more than $120m in assets the production company owns today. It is likely that Sesame Workshop will be unaffected by any measure of government cuts to public broadcasting.
Did you know that in the City of Portland, Oregon, there's an arts tax and funding comes out of the pockets of its adult residents earning more than $1,000 per year. The city tax benefits everyone who visits Portland's downtown area with all the public art displays.
Read more:
Sesame Workshop financials
Public Broadcasting Act of 1967
Children's Television Workshop Origins
Trump's Proposed Cuts of Funding For Arts, Humanities And Public Media
A public transit commuter's podcast recommendations
Five years ago I acquiesced and got a smartphone, upgrading from nearly a decade of using an old flip phone whose only purpose was to send and receive calls. Anyhow, fast forward to today. The smartphone is also a media player, calendar, ebook/RSS reader, fitness logger, camera, video recorder, stopwatch, etc.
On a typical commute into downtown Portland, an activity that typically eats up to two hours per day, I could catch up on some Z's, listen to music, something else relaxing, or learn something new via podcasts. Apple's Podcast app is one of the best default installed apps I have used.
I get burned out on genres and I almost never listen to the same podcast episode twice, unless I happened to have fallen asleep and forgot what happened in the podcast. These are sorted in order of what you should listen to first before the others. Not everyone that I admire from their non-radio works is good at both podcast scripting for audio listeners and are a good podcast host. These are just suggestions of what I think make for pretty good commuter listening.
Non-fiction
Short podcasts (<30 minutes per episode):
Longer podcasts (>30 minutes per episode):
Short podcasts (<30 minutes per episode):
Longer podcasts (>30 minutes per episode):
On a typical commute into downtown Portland, an activity that typically eats up to two hours per day, I could catch up on some Z's, listen to music, something else relaxing, or learn something new via podcasts. Apple's Podcast app is one of the best default installed apps I have used.
I get burned out on genres and I almost never listen to the same podcast episode twice, unless I happened to have fallen asleep and forgot what happened in the podcast. These are sorted in order of what you should listen to first before the others. Not everyone that I admire from their non-radio works is good at both podcast scripting for audio listeners and are a good podcast host. These are just suggestions of what I think make for pretty good commuter listening.
Non-fiction
Short podcasts (<30 minutes per episode):
- Planet Money
Longer podcasts (>30 minutes per episode):
- Freakonomics Radio
- How I Built This
- This American Life
- Agent Marketing Syndicate (for real estate but mostly business)
- The Tim Ferriss Show (mostly business and life-hacking topics)
- The Art of Manliness (really funny if you are a woman listening to this)
- The Moth
- S-Town (crime investigative reporting)
- Crimetown (crime investigative reporting)
Fiction / Fantasy / SciFi
Short podcasts (<30 minutes per episode):
- MarsCorp
- The Bright Sessions
- Lore (by Aaron Mahnke)
- Darkest Night
- The Deep Vault
- Welcome to Night Vale
- Terms
- Star Trek: Lost Enterprise
Longer podcasts (>30 minutes per episode):
- Star Trek: Outpost
- The Penumbra Podcast
- The Leviathan Chronicles
- The Cleansed
- Archive 81
- The Dark Tome
- The Bunker
- Drabblecast Audio Fiction
- Clarksworld Magazine
- Lightspeed Magazine
- The Black Tapes / Tanis / Rabbits
Home Depot In-App Augmented Reality
Home Depot rolled out a nifty feature inside their smartphone app. It allows users to imagine finished products in a space. It's also not easy to find and it certainly doesn't reside in the Tools section of the app, even though it could.
Let's say you are shopping for a replacement sink for the kitchen and you find one in the app, simply select the option for "See this in your home" in the product photo display. The rollout of this feature is limited to certain product groups. You cannot, for example, visualize the fit of the 3-person Infrared Sauna in your home using the app.
The only problem is that it only shows the faucet part, and not it's accompanying base. It would be a hassle for the homeowner to find that the base is what doesn't fit in the current sink configuration. Unless you have a diamond drill bit set, drilling the holes yourself through a porcelain sink might be difficult.
There are other tools in the app that you might not be aware of. Anyone could say "of course, that is obvious" but it really is not so obvious. The ones that I really liked are digital Caliper and the Nut & Bolt Finder, where you simply put the object you are trying to match onto your smartphone screen then using your fingers to drag a ruler and the app shows an estimate of the nut or bolt size. Really nifty. Especially when you go to any hardware store for replacement parts and the store assistant says, "What size are you looking for?" and then shows the aisle filled with shelves and boxes of a lot of nuts and bolts.
Let's say you are shopping for a replacement sink for the kitchen and you find one in the app, simply select the option for "See this in your home" in the product photo display. The rollout of this feature is limited to certain product groups. You cannot, for example, visualize the fit of the 3-person Infrared Sauna in your home using the app.
The only problem is that it only shows the faucet part, and not it's accompanying base. It would be a hassle for the homeowner to find that the base is what doesn't fit in the current sink configuration. Unless you have a diamond drill bit set, drilling the holes yourself through a porcelain sink might be difficult.
There are other tools in the app that you might not be aware of. Anyone could say "of course, that is obvious" but it really is not so obvious. The ones that I really liked are digital Caliper and the Nut & Bolt Finder, where you simply put the object you are trying to match onto your smartphone screen then using your fingers to drag a ruler and the app shows an estimate of the nut or bolt size. Really nifty. Especially when you go to any hardware store for replacement parts and the store assistant says, "What size are you looking for?" and then shows the aisle filled with shelves and boxes of a lot of nuts and bolts.
 |
| Home Depot In-App Tool: Nut & Bolt Finder |
Bitly's Mobile App Refresh
Apps are suppose to make your life easier, not more complicated. You really know when an app's UI has changed before opening the app when you notice that its app icon has changed. And, Bitly's changed from an outlined orange logo to a dark orange background with the outlined logo in white. Certainly a noticeable change.
In the old Bitly app for iPhone, you really didn't have to do much to save, shorten, and share a link. You could be in another browser or in an RSS reader app and the order of operations used to be simple with few steps:
In a browser or RSS reader, copy the link
Bitly's app would automatically recognize that a link was copied, and take both the Title of the link and the link itself, packaged together on a screen that would allow you to edit or insert a new Title (if needed), then share the link to one or all of your connected social media accounts.
It was:
Copy link / Bitly app automatically shortens / Share link
Now, it is:
Copy link
In the Bitly app, you now need to hit the + symbol to create a link (sadly no automatic detect)
Oops, no title at all. Go back to the browser and copy the title from the article
Go back to the Bitly app, edit the link and paste the title
Then, LEFT swipe (left to right) to share
But, sharing no longer brings up a list of your connected accounts, it just shows the default sharing options that the Chrome browser shows
Share / Scroll sideways through the list of options / Post
Alas, no more Bitly convenience for me. Looks like it is back to long URLs and the Feedly share button.
With Feedly, it's Share / Post, and you're done. No analytics. Twitter has some analytics but they're not terribly useful just yet.
Those 4 extra minutes every $5 reward cycle with Bing Rewards, I think I gain them back each time I don't use the Bitly app to share links.
In the old Bitly app for iPhone, you really didn't have to do much to save, shorten, and share a link. You could be in another browser or in an RSS reader app and the order of operations used to be simple with few steps:
In a browser or RSS reader, copy the link
Bitly's app would automatically recognize that a link was copied, and take both the Title of the link and the link itself, packaged together on a screen that would allow you to edit or insert a new Title (if needed), then share the link to one or all of your connected social media accounts.
It was:
Copy link / Bitly app automatically shortens / Share link
Now, it is:
Copy link
In the Bitly app, you now need to hit the + symbol to create a link (sadly no automatic detect)
Oops, no title at all. Go back to the browser and copy the title from the article
Go back to the Bitly app, edit the link and paste the title
Then, LEFT swipe (left to right) to share
But, sharing no longer brings up a list of your connected accounts, it just shows the default sharing options that the Chrome browser shows
Share / Scroll sideways through the list of options / Post
Alas, no more Bitly convenience for me. Looks like it is back to long URLs and the Feedly share button.
With Feedly, it's Share / Post, and you're done. No analytics. Twitter has some analytics but they're not terribly useful just yet.
Those 4 extra minutes every $5 reward cycle with Bing Rewards, I think I gain them back each time I don't use the Bitly app to share links.
Customer Loyalty Programs: Bing and Starbucks
This year two companies revitalized their rewards programs. The rebranding is probably working out great for their advertisers, but it really isn't working out for me. I mean heck, I really didn't expect to do more work to get something for free. Although, for now, the perks of using these apps are still a nice to have. The two in this blog post are Microsoft's Bing search app and Starbucks Rewards app.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)