I was in Orlando last week for Mashable Connect. While I was there I did an interview with Adam Ostrow as part of Mashable’s Leaders in Digital series. Here’s the video.
The shift to mobile is creating tectonic shifts in the industry. It’s an incredible time to be an entrepreneur.
Kuddos to Jason and his team from King Toledo Entertainment for doing a nice job with the video.
The public-by-default social networks, such as Twitter and Instagram, nurture a specific type of sharing. It’s slightly more edited and controlled than the sharing that happens in the private-by-default social networks, such as Facebook.
While more open and authentic, the sharing that happens via the private-by-default social networks is still a constrained subset of our experiences. As the number of connections increases, our willingness to share changes. This is true for Path, even with the imposed limit on the number of connections. Path’s constraint of 150 friends may respect the ‘cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships‘ but it doesn’t capture the fact that sharing changes as our networks grow.
Think about what you share with your significant other, family members, or closest friends via email, sms, and the like. This type of sharing is considerably different from what we share across social networks.
I understand the business opportunities and network growth that public sharing provides. But considering the type of sharing that these services don’t capture I am a fan of the emerging services trying to solve the 1:1 and small group sharing problem.
I’ve been using two services that have created positive change in my daily habits. The first is Nike’s FuelBand that tracks your activity level throughout the day. The second is Massive Health’s The Eatery app that tracks the health of the food you’re eating. Both have their shortcomings but it’s what they do right that’s worth discussing.
Most importantly, they both focus on raising awareness instead of providing precise measurement. The FuelBand reports activity in a made up metric called Fuel. The Eatery provides a crowdsourced Health score. Some will argue that the imprecision of these measures negate the value of the service. It’s my opinion that these measures are good enough to help make you aware of the general health of your decisions.
Additionally, the good enough nature of the measures enable an important user experience: easy access to immediate feedback. On the FuelBand you hit a button on your wrist. With The Eatery you snap a photo. That’s it. No inputting info by hand, no sync required. It’s this instant access to data that creates the behavioral change.
Checking the FuelBand after work last week showed that I had been woefully inactive that day. At that moment I didn’t care about the precision of the data. I was happy to be reminded that I hadn’t done much that day and so I made a conscious decision to change behavior: instead of getting into the subway I walked uptown.
The services share other positive traits: historical trends, social features, etc. but in my opinion it’s the interplay of instant access to good enough data that creates the change in behavior. As Michael said, writing about the same observation, it’s similar to the done is better than perfect mantra.
There’s a quote from William Gibson, the science fiction author, that I love: ”the future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” Every now and then we have experiences that remind us how true this is. The week of April 2nd was one such experience.
On Tuesday, April 3 I had an early morning flight to NYC. It wasn’t until I was at the airport that I realized that I had forgotten my wallet at home. I made the decision to board my flight, fully accepting that I would land in New York without cash or credit card.
Here’s what I did have: Cell (Google Nexus S), passport, metro card, computer.
While not having cash or credit was certainly a nuisance, I was able to comfortably get by for four days. Here are a few highlights from the experience (tl;dr: there literally is an app for that)
Transit from the airport to the office: Uber. This was my first experience with Uber and it was delightful. I opened the app, it found my location, I pushed the button, and a driver appeared within 2 min. Magic.
Food: I used Seamless Web and a variety of apps. It was interesting to see the various payment approaches across the apps: scanning a barcode on the phone (Starbucks); prepaying; using NFC and tapping the phone on a terminal (Google Wallet).
The biggest hassle was at the hotel. While my room was prepaid they insisted on a credit card for incidentals. It turns out that I had registered years ago for their guest program and had a credit card associated with that account.
I know that in isolation none of these experiences are significant. In aggregate, however, it did feel odd to comfortably get by for four days without needing cash or credit. Some day, years from now, my kids will read this and laugh at the thought that this felt futuristic, but that’s exactly what it felt like when I boarded the flight home.
If you live in Hamilton you’ve heard the call emanating from James St North: Art is the New Steel. It’s a cute slogan, rallying the art community while staking claim to art’s importance to the city.
But is art the new steel? Of course not. And to answer differently is to minimize the impact that the art community can have on Hamilton at this point in the city’s history.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Technology is rewiring societies and economies. The world is in a transitional period, shifting from top-down hierarchical organizations to network structures. The impact of this shift can be seen all around us, from how dictators are defeated to how we communicate with friends.
Our policies, planning, and the way we operate need to evolve to support the transition that’s underway. The notion that a few monolithic organizations can be the engine for an entire city’s economy ended with the death of the industrial city. It is in this respect that art is not the new steel.
The Blueprint
Made up of dozens of interconnected entities, the art community is organized as a network. This network structure offers many benefits to the art community as well as Hamilton, including:
It is the art community’s network structure that offers Hamilton a blueprint for change. In this respect art can have an impact beyond simply being the new steel.
City leaders should seek to understand the dynamics of the art community. By doing so the city can implement strategies to nurture similar results in other sectors of the city. Imagine if policy and planning supported networks around the city’s areas of strength, such as eduction and health? It would be transformative.
Hamilton should accept that there will never be a new steel. By embracing the socio-economic transition that’s underway throughout the world, and supporting the structural shift from hierarchies to networks, Hamilton can realize its tremendous potential. And art offers the blueprint for how to make this happen.