Group items tagged

Executives expect that new digital tech will transform their businesses, but admit their companies are far from prepared. (via @McKinsey)

The AT&T Tech Channel is featuring a 1950′s Western Electric film on how to dial a telephone without out the assistance of an operator.

Despite a shaky economy, many web companies are in hypergrowth.  This is reminiscent of the five-year period over a decade ago when companies like Amazon, Netscape, eBay, Yahoo, Google and PayPal were built. One challenge, which isn't new, is the battle for consumer attention.  If you're looking to grow your user base, is there a best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users?  I'm increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web. What is social proof?  Put simply, it's the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something.  It's also known as informational social influence.

"Focus groups can only tell you so much. Companies in the mobile business also need to know the right problems to solve, which involves understanding people's implicit needs and unknown desires. Ellen Isaacs, a user experience designer and ethnographer for PARC, explains the benefits of using ethnography to develop better mobile products."

Now television broadcasters are blocking Google TV from getting access to the content broadcasters put online to make sure they don't lose advertising dollars. But the cat is out of the bag. All information is nothing more than bits on one network - the I

Surprisingly, a study of deception in e-mails versus phone calls found that people were more honest in e-mails because they can be documented, saved and aren't real-time communication scenarios, which is when most people drop white lies. Technology isn't the gateway to rampant deception; instead, Toma and Hancock both suspect that our distrust of communication technology is more likely rooted in our fear of it. "We've evolved as a species that talks face to face, and evolution is a slow process, and we're interacting in a new environment where our basic assumptions are undercut," Hancock said. So, in a way, it's natural to expect people to lie more online. "Every time a technology is new, it elicits great fears. Many people are fearful about what it's going to do," Toma said. "So I think fears about deception stem from this general fear of technology and certain features of technologies that make it easy to lie."

When it comes to basic computer applications, even members of the millennial generation may not know as much as they think they do. A study by North Carolina Central University found that most students overestimated their skill levels when they were asked how they perceived their ability to complete certain tasks and then tested on those tasks. Researchers surveyed 171 undergraduates, the majority of whom believed they had either an average or high skill level in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The students were then tested on three different skill levels - basic, moderate, and advanced - in each of those applications. Students correctly perceived their skill level only in PowerPoint, the study said, with 81 percent of students who thought they had at least an average skill level actually performing that way.

Why is it that some technologies cause moral panic and others don't? Why was the introduction of electricity seen as a terrible thing, while nobody cared much about the fountain pen? According to Genevieve Bell, the director of Intel Corporation's Interaction and Experience Research, we have had moral panic over new technology for pretty well as long as we have had technology. It is one of the constants in our culture.

It really amazes me. We are still predicting failure/success, trying to figure out exactly what Enterprise 2.0 is. Why? Not because I know the answer, but because our expectations are off. It's like trying to predict the winner of the ball game at the end of the 1st inning.

This talk explores nine commonly held assumptions about how teens and young adults use technology. By applying nationally representative data, we'll unpack fact from fiction. Do teens really send that many text messages a day? Is Twitter the next big thing among young adults? Are landlines obsolete? Using data from surveys and focus groups from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, we will examine the changes in technology use among young people, and look at why it is important that we understand these trends, even if we're not young adults or parents of them ourselves