Streamlining Tweets!

Twitter is a great source of information and news for most of us, however, sometimes there can be an information overload, especially when you regularly see all sorts of personal and non-informational tweets from people who you are following for a particular area of interest.

A recent Techcrunch article featured a project called 'Persona' which has built a machine learning driven categorization tool, that scans the words in your tweets and assigns them to three categories: personal, professional and social. The founders are hoping to monetize this value added categorization service, built on top of free tweets.

Thanks Zach Freeman for sharing!

UberX vs Car Ownership

The debate around Uber continues. A recent blog post on Medium shows a financial comparison of car ownership with UberX. As expected, the answer depends on the number of miles driven, but the author estimates that Americans driving less than 9,481 miles a year would be much better off ditching their cars and using UberX exclusively.

Innovations in college campuses

The New York Times recently published a great article on the technological innovations for college students. It features many interesting EdTech companies, including Chegg, and Boundless that are making the college textbook market more efficient.

Roles in the Workplace of the Future

David Brooks sheds some light on the kinds of skills that the workforce of the future will need to be successful. As machines replace jobs like cashiers, phone operators, bank tellers, and more (see http://excelle.monster.com/benefits/articles/4983-5-jobs-being-replaced-by-robots), skills of the future will involve more than number crunching or data processing. " It’s the kind of skill you use to overrule your GPS system when you’re driving in a familiar neighborhood but defer to it in strange surroundings." You can read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/opinion/brooks-thinking-for-the-future.html

(courtesy Suzie Livingston)

Experimentation Beyond Product Management and Marketing Analytics

HBR has an interesting article on how experimentation can be used at a company beyond the boundary of product management or marketing analytics. For example, Google applies this to its People Operations.

(courtesy Saeyoon Baik)

The Decline of Wikipedia

MIT Technology Review has an article on the decline of Wikipedia. The article summarizes the challenges faced by the 'The Free Encyclopedia' and one of the top ten most visited websites in the world as:

When Wikipedians achieved their most impressive feat of leaderless collective organization, they unwittingly set in motion the decline in participation that troubles their project today

Thanks to Melek Pelen for the link!

Rakuten’s CEO on Humanizing E-Commerce

HBR has an article which is interesting from a social commerce / personalized commerce perspective, particularly as it relates to the big data / recommendations.

Thanks to Justine Van Buren for the link!

The Risks of Big Data for Companies

The WSJ has an excellent article on the risks of big data for companies.

Thanks to Laura Numair for the link!

Example of Price Elasticity at Work

Mike Masnick writes an interesting piece on how dropping the price of an year old ebook to $1 catapulted it to the NYT Best Seller List.

Thanks to Ryan Borker for the link!

What The Times Can Learn from NPR

Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media has interesting proposition in his post, Members, fans and complementary revenue models for the New York Times:

I suspect the business folks at the Times are operating under the assumption that there are only two places to be on their subscriber/revenue curve – you can be a subscriber and pay $300-800 a year, or you can be an outsider and cover a tiny fraction of your free riding with ad views. But there’s another option: the Times could start thinking of its readers in terms of subscribers, fans and passers-by. The Times won’t monetize passers-by, except through ads – these are folks who stumble onto the site occasionally and may not even realize they are reading Times content. That’s frustrating, but that’s how the web works. And the Times should certainly cultivate subscribers and encourage more fans to become subscribers. But they might do a better job of that by courting their fans, instead of locking them out.

Fans could be encouraged to support content on the Times not through a threat of locking them out, but by encouraging them to support the paper, and especially, the parts of the paper they value the most. When I donate to WNYC, I always take the opportunity to tell WNYC that I’m not a customer of the station as a whole, but of On The Media, my favorite outlet for smart media criticism. I have to think that some Times readers would love the opportunity to give to the paper and say, “Please don’t give this to Maureen Dowd. I’m giving in the hope of more Ta-Nehisi Coates op-eds.”