K.B.SKOBAC BLOG

4.28.2010

Facebook & Google Racing to Establish In-Store Mobile Connections

A few months ago Google sent out QR code stickers for local businesses to put in their windows. If a passer-by snaps a picture of the QR code with their phone they're brought directly to the business's Google Places page where they can read reviews and learn more about the store. It would actually make more sense for stores to put the QR codes in other places, like on their delivery menus or on print ads, since when shoppers are at the store window they can just walk right in and experience the business first hand.

Well rather than be left out of the storefront window Facebook has now answered by shipping their own stickers that advertise a store's Facebook URL and the ability to "like" (formerly "fan") the brand's Facebook page via text message. As it lies now, Facebook's value proposition seems more significant. If a consumer is interested in the brand after browsing the physical destination, it's a great time get them to join the business's social network to kick off a lasting relationship. Google's Places page (at least right now) doesn't offer much to someone who's already been to the store.

It actually makes complete sense for Twitter to get in this game as well. I already see stores advertising on their signs to "follow" their Twitter feed, but that actually isn't so quick in a mobile client. Most people don't know you can just text "follow [twitter handle]" to 40404 to follow a profile immediately, but Twitter could definitely help stores advertise this.

Has anyone seen the Google QR or Facebook stickers in a local store? Which brands do you think make the most sense for in-store promotion? What type of offerings would you like to see as a product of the merging of web presence and physical presence through mobile moving forward?

4.14.2010

East Village Blogging: My East Village Food Spots

Since my move to 11th & Broadway, I've been doing my best to explore the village as often as possible. Recently I've been spending hours just walking the East Village streets hanging out in parks, and eating a lot. I've also started following the East Village blogging scene, after reading Dave Winer's article about the EVB'ers vs NYU. Now Jeremiah's Vanishing New York and EV Grieve are added to my feeds, and I'm feeling the urge to contribute. So with this post I am going to begin what hopefully is an extended series of posts about my experiences in the village.

Since moving down to 11th street I've been trying to identify my go-to East Village spots. It's harder than you think to find the place you want to go to often, that has the right price, the right food, the right atmosphere, the right people. As of late I've been finding myself often drawn to the same 3 spots:

Everyman Espresso - This spot is so basic it's probably overlooked by most people. It's like sitting in a garage: a few metal chairs & tables, white brick walls, set up in the entrance of the Classic Stage Company. It has killer latte's though, wi-fi, the baristas put on good music, and it's barebones atmosphere means it's mostly visited (thankfully) by locals + regulars. I like to come here in the morning before work, or early on the weekends.

Dos Toros Taqueria - Opened by two brothers who came to New York City after living in the Mission District in San Francisco, a place well known for its amazing burritos. Their menu is minimal but you go there for burritos, and they're the best I've had in NYC and I can't help but eat here at least once a week. There also focused on sustainability, sourcing local farms, biodegradable products, their own compost, and more. It's a small spot but I plan on sitting at the street counter often when it's open on nice days.

Nori Sushi - Another small spot, stuck unnoticeably around the corner from St. Marx on the way to the much more popular Paul's and Pom Frit. It's cheap and good sushi, which is always a challenge to find. The owners are always there and really friendly. You can get 8 or more pieces of sushi for $1 a piece any night of the week, or check out their interesting specials. I am drawn to the sushi counter when I have a free night and time to myself for for dinner.

Do you live in the East Village? What are your favorite spots I should try? What are the places you're making home?

3.18.2010

Sorry, More on Foursquare: The Business & Life Tracking Opportunities

As if I wasn't a big enough evangelist already, Foursquare's announcement of a location dashboard for businesses is further proof to me of how disruptive the location check-in game will be.

The early iteration of the location dashboard that Foursquare revealed at SXSWi lets businesses view the data around the check-in activity at their own location. Right now this is limited mostly to who & how many people are checking in at what times of each day, but you can already see the seeds being planted for a much deeper platform. Foursquare mentioned they are looking at including weather data so stores can see how their foot traffic is impacted. What if Foursquare opens up the platform so any data layers of a propper format could be brought in, similar to how Google Calendar operates? Businesses might be interested in traffic patterns or holiday calendars. They might want to import purchase volume or coupon history. They will also benefit from tracking their various location based ad offerings.

And what about companies being able to use check-in's for their loyalty cards or personal visitation records through the Foursquare dashboard or API? It sounds like Tasti-Dlite is working on this, and I'd love to see Starbucks count my check-in towards a free coffee. It also makes sense for my gym not to have to swipe me in once I check in.

The location dashboard is great for businesses, but it's also exciting to consider the different opportunities that this hints at for the Foursquare users. Right now every time I look at my check-in history on Foursquare.com I think of Mint's metrics. We have access to limited data so far, but we could be able to dive into our entire historical trends in order to see how our choices of how we spend our time have evolved over the year. And just the way I use Mint to figure out my years expenditures for insurance, I want to use Foursquare to see my years gym visits for my health insurance.

In fact what I'd really love is somehow be able to mary the data between Mint and Foursquare. Usually one reflects the other, but if I ceck in at a restaurant and don't use a credit card then It would be very cool if foursquare could somehow tell Mint to leave a placeholder for a cash transaction. Though Mint and Foursquare seem far apart in some ways, the fact that they both help me to track and analyze my life patterns makes me think the data should be merged and leveraged together.

I could go on but the point is clear. On the surface Foursquare is a social network and a game, but the data layer below it is a powerful utility for us players and the business owners we are interfacing with. Foursquare's API is already getting used, but as it becomes more robust and people start truly start innovating on top of it's platform, I look forward to seeing the possibilities.

3.03.2010

Roger Ebert Finds His Voice Again

I guess I was living under a rock but I completely didn't know the courageous story of Roger Ebert. For everyone under there with me, here's the quick summary. After years of terrible health issues that left him stripped of much of his face and throat, he completely lost his ability to speak in 2006. His body is terribly weak, he's a sliver of the size he used to be, but nothing has slowed him down. He does the movie reviews he's famous for, but he's also returned to writing in a way that he'd left behind. He writes a prolific blog that has thousands of engaged readers. And until yesterday he was forced to handle speaking needs through post-it notes or computer generated read-outs in a blocky voice.
But yesterday a company called Cereproc gave him his voice back. They were able to take the audio tracks that Roger Ebert had recorded for movie studio DVD extras and stitch together a full framework of his voice. Now when he types into a computer, the output will be his own voice speaking to his wife or children. It may be a small change, but it makes a huge difference in enabling Ebert and his loved ones to feel like they're speaking to the real him. Yesterday he demo'd the difference between his computer voice "alex" and his revived personal voice, and its heartwarming to watch.
Ebert's history was told in this month's issue of Esquire, which I coincidentally read the morning before the story broke. It's magnificent. Read the article, read about the breakthrough that Cereproc enabled, and watch the video.

1.24.2010

My 365 Project

My 2010 goal is to complete a 365 photo project; the idea is to produce 1 picture a day for every day of the year. Ideally this means taking a photo, doing any digital editing that I'd like, and publishing it to my gallery (though sometimes I'll use a picture I took earlier in the year) every single day in 2010. So far I've gone 23 straight days, so I think I'm ready to open up the project to the public:

Follow my daily gallery on Tumblr
or
See the gallery on Flickr

I'd love to buy a DSLR at some point, but in the mean time I'm relying on a point-and-shoot Canon SD700 and my iPhone 3GS. I'd love comments and suggestions on the pictures!

1.10.2010

The Power of Facebook Mobile: Making Your Phonebook Personal

Last week Facebook rolled out a new version of their very popular iPhone app. Aside from finally enabling push notifications, it also provided a new option to sync your address book with Facebook. At first I was skeptical of how well this would actually work, but count me impressed. Facebook's ability to match your phone contacts with personal Facebook information is very impressive.

Consider my experience this weekend. I received a phone call yesterday from a new business contact who I hadn't spoken to before. I missed the call, but I saved the number in my phonebook. This morning when he called back Facebook had automatically located his profile based on his phone number and name, inserted his picture into my contact listing, and linked me to his profile. I could see his company, and put a face to a name. This was especially impressive because I wasn't even connected to this person on Facebook- it was don't only through matching public information. Facebook facilitated my experience in a way that made the power of its personal information so very clear.

Now all of the sudden most of my contacts on my iPhone have faces on them, and each listing has a link to a Facebook profile. And you can imagine this is just the beginning- why shouldn't Facebook fill in the person's work information or home address, if the person has opted in for it? Then when friends move or change which company they work for I don't have to worry about updating my address book- they've likely updated their Facebook profile, and Facebook will update me.

The syncing doesn't work perfectly, but it's a lot more powerful than I expected. And now I feel like the listings in my phonebook are actually my friends, and my new contacts are real people. I can't wait to see where Facebook takes this next.

11.25.2009

The Tenuous Future of Search (or how Rupert Murdoch & Microsoft are Evil & Foolish)

The web world discussion is preoccupied this week with news that Rupert Murdoch & Fox corp. are threatening to pull all of their content from Google's index, and to fuel the fires Microsoft is rumored to be offering a bounty for the exclusive rights if they do. Here's what I think:

Unless most of the world is going to pull their business from Google, this isn't going to work for Fox. No one in the "fastest to the newest story" business is going to be able to charge readers, since there's too much competition. Most of the news from Fox news sources that users are finding on Google is going to be easily found at another source. And even if it's something proprietary to a Fox source, most likely thousands of free bloggers will be writing about it and pointing to it, so searchers would find their way to Fox's content through Google via an alternate (albeit circuitous) path. It's the same reason NYTimes.com turned off their pay wall- in this world of endless news content there's no room for a full subscription, and enabling users to discover your content is key.

So what should Fox do? They should invest heavily in distributing their content through social media, making it easily shareable & social, and monetizing the leads that come in. Twitter & Facebook leads are paying huge dividends for content producers. Clearly, social media and peer recommendation are going to play just as big a roll, if not bigger, in search in the next decade. Plus, readers are clicking through on recommended articles more often because Twitter links don't give as much summary as some search results. Maybe Fox could take a cue from NYTimes.com, who packages incoming leads from various sources and sells them to sponsors; advertisers can be the sponsor, for example, for any reading session on NYTimes that came from a Digg'd article or a Facebook brand page link.

They can also pursue freemium models where they offer deeper, less timely content similar to how GigaOm is selling long form content at a premium and playing the page views / ad game with their smaller more rapid posting. They could provide a better reading experience too, like how the NYTimes is selling it's access via TimesSelect.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is being terrible for even entertaining this, and I believe it would cost them in the long run. Unless they can cause such a stir in the information landscape that it alters the dynamic of information discovery, they'll ultimately lose out incrementally for every bit they invest in purchasing traffic rather than investing in forward-thinking products (for example: launching Bing itself was a forward-thinking product and it did more for their search traffic than any of their deals, be it of the cash-back kind of the yahoo kind). And if for some reason the information search landscape became about making deals across the board, they'd lose at least as many as they won, putting them back where they started. Not to mention, they've finally been gaining some brand credibility back with the Zune HD and Windows 7- making the web confusing and complicated for consumers is just going to make them look more like the big bad wolf they've often been known to be (or as Gizmodo would put it, like Montgomery Burns).

10.30.2009

Early Thoughts on the (Latest) New Facebook Re-Design

The latest new Facebook re-design has been public for a few weeks now, and of course it's been accompanied with the usual chorus of complaints. I for one actually really like the updates that they've made. It's a short sample set, but I feel like this new format is instigating a lot more interaction. Since the "News Feed" is curated with Facebook's secret algorithm (a combination of your interaction habits and the breadth of connections you share), the stories I'm seeing on the front page really seem to be ones I'd want to engage in. Also, because they stick around longer more people seem to jump into the conversation around a piece of content, which is pretty cool. And when I want to take more time to browse my larger social graph, it's a quick click over to the "Live Feed", which even tells me how many stories I've missed since last checking.

Also now there's more useful utility above the fold in the sidebar - suggestions for interaction with lost connections, visible birthday reminders again, both things that lead to re-engagement with the broader friend circle. All together the site seems impressively more optimized for consistent interaction with your closest friends and assisted re-connection with your extended network. And really you can't overlook how important this is; Each day we add more connections and share more content inside Facebook. People already complain how much I share and I'm fairly conservative when it comes to social media hyper-users. Without aid from platforms like Facebook there is no scale to the future of social media. That's why Facebook is constantly trying out new methods of organization and optimization. I hated the previous move that turned the front page into a Twitter rip-off, but I'm liking this more Friendfeed-esque layout so far.

So what does everyone think? What was your first reaction, and if it was negative, is it growing on you? Or do you hate change? And if so what else do you think Facebook could do to prepare us for the future?