Ms. Adverthinker

I am learning to code. I can’t prove it yet, because I am still learning. And part of the reason I am writing this is because by putting it out there I will feel an obligation to continue my education so I can ultimately prove to you all that I am following through with my resolution to learn to code.

I don’t need to learn to code. And it is a skill I’ll likely never use to code a site for a client. I may play around with it on my own sites. But I really want to learn to code so that I can better understand the skills needed to hire for the department I now manage and so that I can better understand the possibilities for digital communications in a world where anything is possible if you now the programming languages, how to manipulate data and are familiar with the platforms and channels that people use regularly. In short, learning to code will make me smarter and help me come up with better, more innovative communications ideas for our clients.

I’ve recently discovered that too many people I know are unfamiliar with TED videos and the knowledge and inspiration they convey to viewers in 18 minutes or less. If you don’t know TED, go there now and start exploring. I promise you will feel at least a little inspired by the people and their presentations that you find there. My feelings won’t be hurt if you leave this blog post now to go there.

TED started out as a conference for sharing ideas around Technology, Entertainment and Design. It has evolved over the years into an online community with videos free to the world to watch as well-renowned leaders in their industries share their knowledge and experiences with the viewers, and still includes conferences around the world. All in short, 18-minute or less videos. We all have time for this at least once a day. And in our high-pressure jobs that require creative thinking on a daily basis, TED videos can provide just the inspiration we need to spark an idea, motivate us to action and generally just make us feel better about the world around us.

As TED has grown, they have embraced local communities that want to hold their own TED conferences. These local TED conferences are not official TED events, but they follow the strict rules of TED that allow them to use the TED name and the videos from these events end up within the TED community. These events are called TEDx.

I had the opportunity this weekend to attend my first TEDx event. It was TEDx Hendrix College. The theme was storytelling and included five speakers with diverse backgrounds and from all over the country. I wasn’t disappointed by my high expectations for TED; I walked away inspired, I learned new things and was moved to become engaged in organizations I might not otherwise have known about. It was a Sunday afternoon well-spent. I hope to see more TEDx events organized in central Arkansas and expand our knowledge and experiences.

Last weekend, I participated in the first Startup Weekend Little Rock, and my first Startup Weekend ever. I joined this event with some trepidation: I am a bit of an introvert and I knew this was going to be a weekend that would require me to meet new people and form instant rapport to be able to work together for 54 hours. I also worried I wouldn’t have much to contribute to a group since I am not a designer or a developer. However, I am intensely curious and am passionate about technology, innovation and learning from people smarter than me. And I do know marketing and communications, can create order from chaos and problem-solve pretty efficiently. So I entered the event on Friday night, still not sure how or if I would participate for the rest of the weekend. I ended up staying all weekend, working on a fantastic project, making new friends, learning a ton and claiming second place with my team for the project we built.

Startup Weekend Little Rock was one of the best experiences I have ever had. I might even go so far as to say it was life-changing. Let me tell you why.

I learned to think differently. So often, we get into our comfort zones and routines. We work with the same people every day. And I work with a lot of talented people every single day and we produce amazingly creative communications for our clients. But because we have our routines and know each others’ strengths and weaknesses, we tend to not push each other as far as we could, or learn new things as often as we could. It happens to the best of us. An event like Startup Weekend removes all of that knowledge and forces its participants to fill gaps by learning on the spot and get even more creative because resources are scarce and time is scarcer. The outcome is not a perfectly polished product or idea. The outcome is a better version of yourself.

I made new friends. Had I not been brave enough to enter the room and participate in this event, I likely would have never crossed paths with 75-percent of the people that were in attendance. And everyone I met this weekend has added value to my life in some way. By learning their personal stories, learning about their skills, learning from their knowledge, being inspired by their passion: everyone had something to contribute and we bonded over the experience. I know for sure that I will stay connected to my new friends.

I stumbled into a really great business idea. And if that business idea becomes a real product, one day I’ll be able to say, “I was there and I got to help!” Our team leader had a great idea. I loved his idea. But he had no team. For a while on Friday night, the team was just the two of us. And we both shrugged and said, “let’s try to do this.” By Saturday afternoon, our team was seven people because the idea really was a great one. It just took longer for others to realize it. I am super proud that Jody had a great idea and we were able to help him take it to the next level. I believe he has the passion and the energy to take it and make it. His energy inspired me and if he needs my help, he has a friend in me that he can call any time. And I’ll be able to say “that’s my friend and I got to help!”

Yes, it is a bold statement, but Startup Weekend LIttle Rock changed my life in a great way.

I am trying to learn how to use my GoPro camera better and how to use Final Cut Pro, so I’ve been doing a little experimenting. A couple of weeks ago, I set up my GoPro on a Gorilla Pod tripod attached to the top corner of the bookshelves in my office and set the time lapse to shoot an image every 60 seconds. I did this for the full five days during the week and no one noticed (or if they did, they didn’t say anything). I only captured three to four hours each days as this is how long the wifi backpack battery lasted. Every time I had to get the camera up or down, I had to crawl on a stool and doing that during the middle of the day usually meant someone would see me and ask what was I was doing. So, I didn’t recharge during the middle of the day to capture the whole day. Therefore, the half-day recordings.

If you are curious as to how I spend my days when I am not traveling, this will be really interesting to you: I sit at my desk working all day. Sometimes people come in and talk to me. Sometimes I leave to talk to other people or go to meetings. You can see me eating my Brown Sugar Cinnamon PopTart and drinking my Red Bull each morning. Like I said, this is a boring video. But I have put too much time into figuring out how to use the technology to not share it.

Office Time Lapse March 2013 from Emily Reeves on Vimeo.

The idea of tracking how much I move and sleep, keeping up with my heart rate and blood pressure, and being able to share that info if I choose, is appealing to my inner geek.  Though I don’t know what I will do with the data, I like collecting it, reviewing it and comparing it day-over-day.

Last year at SXSW, I purchased my first Nike FuelBand. I was excited about this technology because I was already a Nike+ user, so I would be building on that account and activity. Then, several weeks ago I was reading about the Jawbone UP and liked what it had to offer for tracking sleep patterns, too. So I bought one of those to try out.  And then, an iPhone app called Moves started getting some attention for tracking your steps while running in the background of your phone. So I turned that on, too. This means that I have had three devices tracking my movements for the last several weeks. I wondered how they would compare to each other.

Both the wristband products are rubber. The Nike FuelBand comes in three colors (Black, White Ice and Black Ice) and the Jawbone UP comes in eight colors (Onyx, Mint Green, Light Grey, Blue, Navy Blue, Red, Orange, and Hunter Green). Both of the bands that I purchased are black.

My technology laden wrists.

The Nike FuelBand works “through a sports-tested accelerometer” to track daily activity including running, walking, basketball, dancing and dozens of everyday activities. It tracks each step taken and calorie burned.

The Jawbone UP “uses a precision motion sensor and powerful algorithms to passively track and quantify your steps, distance, calories, active time, and idle time. It calculates calories burned based on your age, gender, height and weight, along with activity intensity and duration. UP uses Actigraphy to track your sleep, monitoring your micro movements to determine whether you are awake, in light sleep, or in deep sleep. [The] band uses cutting-edge MotionX technology to track activity, giving it superior accuracy.”

Moves uses the iPhone’s built in sensor and location information to recognize activities, routes and places. The data is uploaded to their servers, which do most of the complex processing to produce daily stats and storyline. The app is always on, running in the background.

All the devices/apps have different features and sharing abilities. I am not doing a full review of all the functionalities here.

The perfect time to compare the three was during my days at SXSW over the last week: I was walking around a lot and always had my phone with me. Because the common denominator across all three technologies is number of steps, that is the number that I tracked for comparison. Here are the results:

Friday

• Jawbone UP: 7,969 steps
• Nike FuelBand: 6,376 steps
• Moves: 5,974 steps

 Saturday

• Jawbone UP: 5,658 steps
• Nike FuelBand: 4,416 steps
• Moves: 3,986 steps

Sunday

• Jawbone UP: 3,813 steps
• Nike FuelBand: 3,409 steps
• Moves: 3,203 steps

Monday

• Jawbone UP: 5,915 steps
• Nike FuelBand: 4,837 steps
• Moves: 4,705 steps

Tuesday

• Jawbone UP: 4,833 steps
• Nike FuelBand: 4,011 steps
• Moves: 4,086 steps

Other than the fact that I am not moving the recommended 10,000 steps per day, or even close to that, it is interesting that there is a pretty significant difference between the step counts  of each device. I wanted to like Moves best because it is on my phone and doesn’t hinder my style. But in reality, I don’t have my phone in my pocket every minute of the day and that likely explains it being on the low end of the step numbers each day.  As for the difference between the Jawbone UP and the Nike FuelBand, I take the FuelBand off each night to sleep and I keep the UP on since it tracks sleep. This could explain some of the difference in the numbers.

Behind Moves, I wanted to like the FuelBand best because it completes/complements my existing Nike+ profile. But in the end, I like the UP the best because it is (1) a little less obvious than the FuelBand on my wrist and (2) I think the sleep data is the most fascinating.

Regardless of performance, I hate wearing both devices. I much prefer to have more fashionable items around my wrists:

How I prefer my wrists be dressed.

And these rubber bands just aren’t pretty enough for the girl in me. I want someone to design a band that can blend in as part of my jewelry or be wrapped with a customizable cuff or is thinner in some way. Until then, my wearing of the bands might be hit or miss going forward.

The problem with wearable technology, such as the Jawbone UP that I am trying out right now (review and comparison to the Nike Fuelband to come in the future), is that it doesn’t always match my style. These gadgets seem to be designed by and for men. Case in point:

Jawbone UP; JCrew bracelets; Kate Spade dress.

The idea of the Pebble watch was launched on Kickstarter in April 2012 with a goal to reach funding of $100,000. Thirty days later, they had raised over $10 million dollars given by almost 70,000 people. I was one of those people. And my reward for backing the Pebble watch almost a year ago arrived in my mail last Saturday: my very own Pebble watch. It had been so long since I thought about this watch, I’ll admit I was a bit ambivalent about its arrival. But I opened the box and saw how easy it was to set up, so I took five minutes, set it up and almost immediately fell in love with my new watch.

The Pebble is lightweight and comfortable on my small wrist. I am the girl that feels naked without a watch and constantly looks at my wrist for the time, even when I have just noted the time on my phone. I have a classic Timex that I love dearly, but this Pebble feels at home on my wrist. It even told me so:

@reeves501 Your wrist is comfy! I’m gonna like it here.

— Pebble (@Pebble) February 14, 2013

Beyond being a timepiece, out of the box the Pebble syncs with my iPhone through a Bluetooth connection. This connections delivers a vibration to wrist and sends text messages and phone calls to the watch screen. This let’s me know if it is vital for me to pick up my phone, or if it is a communication that can be delayed until I am off the road, out of meeting or done with a particular task. It actually allows for additional focus rather than acting as an added distraction. Additionally, I can control music on my iPhone from the watch, which has been pretty fun to demo to everyone who has asked about the watch over the last week.

Which brings me to its appearance: I thought the watch was subtle and unnoticeable, given its lightweight and comfort on my wrist. But it looks cool and everyone I’ve encountered over the last week has noticed it and asked it about. So be prepared to show it off if you decide to buy one.

The company is working on apps that will work with the watch to increase its features and functionalities. I can’t wait to see what the future holds. I am a geeky girl who loves her gadgets.

Yesterday morning I visited with KATV to talk about predictions for digital communications tools in 2013. Check out the video here:

KATV – Breaking News, Weather and Razorback Sports

I tend to work across multiple devices throughout the day–computers, iPad, iPhone–but I use the same applications across all the devices. I try new ones constantly, but here are the ones that are tried and true, that I always return to and typically always have open on my computer or in my browser:

1. Chrome: This is the web browser I use for work. We use Gmail and Google docs and it just seamless to use those within Chrome.
2. Evernote: I’ve talked about this app time and time and time again. I love it. I don’t know how I existed without it. It is on all my computers, my phone, my tablet and it all syncs perfectly so I have my notes with me all the time.
3. Reeder: I read a lot of blogs and news sites, every day, all throughout the day. This app pulls in my Google Reader RSS feeds with the settings/categories. From within the app, I can share the articles/posts I find interesting through a wide array of social choices: email, Twitter, Delicious, Evernote, etc.
4. Delicious: I’ve used Delicious for four years for bookmarking and tagging online finds, mostly articles, that I want to be able to reference in the future as a resource. It is my online library.
5. WordPress: This blog is in WordPress. Our Waiting for the Elevator blog is in WordPress. We use it for many of our client website projects. I am always in WordPress. It is easy to use.
6. Keynote: Presentation tool alternative to PowerPoint. Graceful and beautiful.
7. Google Docs/Drive: We do a lot of collaborating on documents at our agency. Google Docs is a great way to do this, track how everyone is contributing and bring a project together without a lot of meetings while still allowing us to share responsibilities.
8. Garage Band: I use it for our podcasts on Waiting for the Elevator.
9. iMovie: I use it for our video interview series on Waiting for the Elevator.
10. Spotify: Background music throughout the day. I like that I can create custom playlists and share them with my friends and see what my friends are listening to when I need new music.
11. iTunes: Podcast-listening.
12. Twitter: The Twitter app is open on my desktop all day, every day. I re-arrange all my other windows so I can see the constant stream of news throughout the day. It is how I keep up with the world.

What applications to do you like for getting your work done?

Earlier this week, Starbucks and Square announced a partnership. This was big news for the future of mobile payments. While Square has been around for about two years now, it is mostly used by small independent business owners. Partnering with Starbucks means that the Square mobile payment technology will now be exposed to more people and larger retailers may start using Square based on the learnings from Starbucks. And Starbucks has had mobile payments for a while, but it is linked to a Starbucks account that you have to reload with money to spend, making it a bit limited (though super easy and fun to use; I love it). The partnership signifies a big move towards major businesses adopting mobile payments:

“Though smartphone payments have a long way to go before they replace wallets altogether, Starbucks’s adoption of Square will catapult the start-up’s technology onto street corners nationwide, and is the clearest sign yet that mobile payments could become mainstream.” – New York Times

What is Square and how does it work?

Square is a mobile payment technology with two branches: one for business owners and one for consumers. The business owner can download the Square software to their iPhone or iPad, request a Square device from Square to plug into the top of their iPhone or iPad, then accept payments by swiping cards through the device.  Or, if a customer is also using Square for payments, the business owner can see the customer through the Square software and allow the customer to pay just by saying their name.  For the consumer, it is just a matter of downloading the Square app and linking a bank account or credit card to the app. It is much like PayPal, except mobile.

Why is a cashless society a big deal?

According to The Atlantic:

“(1) Innovations that save time, even just a little bit of time, are real innovations, because in any advanced economy time and attention are currency and creating more of them can make us all richer; (2) What’s important about Square isn’t just the transactions it makes more efficient but also the cashless world it pulls closer to the present. As Slate investigated in a fabulous series, a cashless society can make us richer, healthier (dollar bills are dirty!), and smarter.”

I am looking forward to more efficiency in payments and not having to carry around anything but my phone.

I did an interview with KATV this morning talking about the Square and Starbucks partnership. I’ll post the video as soon as it becomes available.

GroupMe is a text messaging app that allows you to create groups of people in your contacts and create ongoing conversations via text with the people in those groups. And I love it. It has cut down on the continuous string of emails I get when my friends and I are planning events, nights out, trips or just generally sharing our lives. It has almost become a mini-Facebook where we post pictures, share where we are, “heart” each others’ posts and ask for advice. The messages come through like texts, but are compiled in the app, so if you are out of commission for a few hours, you can easily catch up on the conversation documented in chronological order with an avatar representing each person next to their response. It is a beautiful tool. You can create as many groups as you would like–a project team, a department, family, different groups of friends, a travel group, etc. and keep all the conversations organized, accessible and immediate.

And GroupMe keeps getting better. I’ve noticed that I can integrate GroupMe into Foursquare so when I check in on Foursquare, I can now automatically share my location with a GroupMe group.  Then there is an “Discover” feature where the app recommends group types and features brand-sponsored group opportunities. For example, featured groups include: Olympics, The Sea Wheeze (a Lululemon sponsored race, and one of my absolute favorite brands!), Oprah Book Club and Vans Warped Tour, among others. And now, they are introducing “Experiences,” a feature that makes it simple to organize and pay for the experience, alleviating the usual hassles that individuals might encounter when trying to organize a group outing.

“Experiences” isn’t available in all markets yet, but promises to hold even more opportunities for brands. Ideas so far have included:

• Branded VIP “experiences.” For example, this could be a brand-sponsored trip in which cyclists get to ride with a celebrity.
• Brand-underwritten “experiences.” Here the brand would foot the costs, and in return gain access to the participants for opinions and other research. The company’s goal would be to unearth consumer insights from highly targeted social groups.

As a research junkie, I am loving the second idea as a new approach for gaining qualitative insights as opposed to traditional focus group research.

I visited this morning with KATV to talk about location-based apps and the predictability of users travel patterns. Check it out here:

KATV – Breaking News, Weather and Razorback Sports

Shazam is so much more than I originally thought that it was, and I like its potential.

I’ve seen the Shazam logo popping up on commercials and television shows the last several month and just couldn’t understand why I would Shazam these things. In commercials, I can never get my phone out and Shazam open quickly enough to capture the sound. In television shows, I just didn’t get it. My use of Shazam has always been for identifying a music selection that I liked and wanted to note and/or buy.  This seemed good enough to me and I liked it for just that purpose.

But then I saw this article about Shazam partnering with the Olympics and I got curious. Though they don’t describe it this way in the article, it seems that Shazam can be used for “scanning” to get more information about what you are hearing, like scanning a QR code gives you more information about what you are seeing. This is actually pretty cool:

“Viewers who tag the broadcast from their Shazam app will be able to see additional information on the athletes, engage in polls, view the competition schedule, check the latest results, keep tabs on the medal count and share on social media.”

The tricky part of this for brands and advertisers is going to be consumer education. If consumers are familiar with Shazam at all, they are going to know it only as a music identification app, like I did. But, like any other new tool and technology, once people figure it out and start using it, it has huge potential for communicated extra and bonus information to its users. I like that.

A must-listen podcast from the Princeton University series, What does it mean to be literate in the age of Google? features Daniel Russell, a “search anthropologist” at Google. During his fascinating talk, Russell covers the ins and outs of efficient search, how most people don’t speak the language of search and only use a fraction of search capabilities. It turns out, I was one of those people. I learned new tips listening to his talk and have now added his blog to my Reader feed where he gives a search quiz and lessons. Educational and geeky fun. Check it out.

Everyone is talking about Facebook buying Instagram this week, and not just the tech geeks. Why are people talking about, even those seemingly not of the geek mindset? Because everyone uses these two services. Well, maybe not everyone, but a lot of people: Instagram has 30 million users and Facebook is creeping up on on 900 million users. The real question is: why do people care that Facebook purchased Instagram (for a whopping $1 billion!)?

First, let’s talk about why Facebook (probably) purchased Instagram:

• For the data.

“Photos for Facebook are already a huge driver of both interactions and data. But while users often upload photos to Facebook, they actually take them with Instagram. The amount of data generated from a mobile device’s camera is significant, from location to time of day to any number of data points that can be associated with a smartphone’s sensors…

“Instagram itself was not in a position to capitalize off of its data. It did not have ads and it provided its API for free (with the right to charge the heaviest users if it deemed it appropriate). Implementing ads would be a recipe for disaster for Instagram and its fickle, emotional user base. But what if Facebook can take that data and provide ads against it without actually putting advertising into the app itself?

“Here is the trick: Facebook has the ability to grow Instagram’s user base by tens if not hundreds of millions of users. The more people use the app, the more of that rich metadata Facebook generates. Facebook can then turn around and serve ads against that data on both the Facebook desktop and mobile clients. It is a matter of linking the back-end infrastructures of the two companies without overtly changing the Instagram user interface.”

• To improve the photo-sharing experience on Facebook, because photo-sharing is only going to continue to increase. In fact, half of all pictures ever taken were taken in the past 12 months.

“In a general sense, this acquisition on the heels of the dramatic growth of Pinterest in the last few months is a massive reflection of just how fast the Social-Stream is becoming visual in nature, meaning evolving social engagement driven purely around visual media, not text – and just how valuable that will inevitably be to every major participant in the social media landscape,” Downing said. “This is a huge endorsement of the shift to the visual web and visual conversation in a social media framework.” {source}

And, Instagram really makes our photos better, especially those of us that aren’t great photographers. “In the end it really is the actual image under the electronic processing that counts. Most of the time the filters are covering the shortcomings of the original photograph and the person behind it.”

Then, there is the fact that Facebook really wants to be your main site for photo-sharing. As Instagram continued to grow, Facebook probably saw the writing on the wall for competition. “Facebook is making sure all those images don’t end up on Flickr or in some other storage cloud.”

• Leverage mobile growth. Instagram is a mobile-only app. Facebook’s mobile app has always been less than stellar. Maybe Facebook is hoping to learn from Instagram.

“Instagram was beating Facebook at its own game, and the social network needed to stop it before it was able to do more.

“The photo-sharing app is essentially everything Facebook wants to be on your mobile phone. Facebook wants people using its mobile app to share photos of what they’re doing with friends and to share their location -– something Instagram users have no problem doing.”

“Smartphones are everywhere now, allowing apps like Foursquare and Path to be self-contained social worlds, existing almost entirely on mobile devices. It is a major change from just a few years ago, underscoring how the momentum in the tech world is shifting to mobile from computers.

“Cellphones are also prompting a shift in how people want to share things online, creating a market for apps that make instant sharing easy, said S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the Media Effects Research Lab at Pennsylvania State University.

“In other words, many people want to post a photograph of themselves right from a sun-drenched beach in Bali, rather than waiting until they are back home to upload all 50 pictures onto Facebook.” {source}

Now, let’s talk about why some users are so upset about the purchase:

• Instagram was relatively private; Facebook is known for constantly-changing privacy rules.

“The app was limited to smartphone users, and there was no built-in way to copy or repost pictures — lent it a sense of privacy and intimacy, separate from the rest of our online lives. Its ability to let its users delicately toe the line between public and private gave us a little breathing room from the all-pervasiveness of Facebook, and to see it whisked away feels like a tangible loss.

“The sale of Instagram brings a harsh reality into focus, the realization that the secret rooms or private spaces online where we can share, chit-chat and hang out with our friends are fading.” {source}

“Part of the concern is that it’s Facebook,” says Chris Conley, an attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. “And their history of privacy and respecting user choices is mixed.”

“That mixed history includes Facebook’s repeated changes to the default settings of user accounts to make more user data public over time — a practice that has vexed advocacy groups, drawn charges of being overly confusing, and culminated in a settlement last fall with the Federal Trade Commission. Meanwhile, Facebook’s user count has continued to grow, and now surpasses 845 million.

“Instagram users thought they were signing up for a simple service, of relatively little utility to advertisers or government. Now that data is likely to be combined with an entire social graph. I picture the consumer happily paddling down a data rivulet only to find themselves suddenly on the open waters of the social sea.” {source}

• The potential for limited sharing. Instagram has always encouraged sharing across a range of networks, with Twitter listed first. Users are worried that Facebook would limit that sharing to only Facebook.

“As regular Instagrammers know, one of the first choices you have to make in sharing your photo — after you’ve applied tilt shift and filters — is which social network you’re going to share it with.

“The two big sharing choices? Twitter and Facebook. No prizes for guessing which of those options may disappear, should Facebook get its way.

“Of course, Facebook has gone out of its way to assure users that sort of thing won’t happen. ‘We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks,’ wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his blog post announcing the acquisition.” {source}

• Instragram will be ruined by advertising. (Well, come on now, it was bound to happen!)