Welcome to the Future — A Programmable World. Photo: Courtesy of Wired.
In this week’s Signal: Tumblr joins Yahoo! (though it’s not officially official yet); The potential of a ‘programmable world’; social command centers that allo...
Welcome to the Future — A Programmable World. Photo: Courtesy of Wired.
In this week’s Signal: Tumblr joins Yahoo! (though it’s not officially official yet); The potential of a ‘programmable world’; social command centers that allow brands to think and act in the moment; apps that turn the personal into the predictive; the Bing Crosby/Nazis/Silicon Valley connection; quality, not velocity, is the future of online news; “Behind the Banner“ helps to understand how the ad tech ecosystem works; battling fraud: a tough fight; a human-values driven approach to privacy; stop dreaming, interactive TV is already here; baby boomer marketers don’t understand millennials; and more!
*A quick note: This week marks the New York debut of OpenCo, and FMP will be hosting a session in its NY offices. If you are going to OpenCo, sign up to attend our session. If you don’t know what OpenCo is, but will be in NY, check out OpenCo here.*
To the links ….
Yahoo Reportedly Moving Forward with Tumblr Acquisition as its Board Mulls $1.1B All-Cash Offer (TNW) According to Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka of AllThingsD, Yahoo’s board was slated to meet yesterday to vote on (and, apparently, to approve) a $1.1 billion cash offer for Tumblr. Yahoo is also said to be vetting video giant Hulu as another potential target for acquisition.
UPDATE: It seems the deal is indeed done, though the official word is not set to come till Monday morning, after this newsletter goes to press. Here’s a good overview from GigaOm, and here’s my take: Yahoo! And Tumblr: It’s About Display, Streams & Native at Scale.
Behind the Banner, A Visualization of the Adtech Ecosystem (Battelle Media) In which we introduce “Behind the Banner,” a visualization produced with Adobe and Jer Thorp and his team from The Office for Creative Research. The project is underwritten by Adobe as part of next week’s CM Summit, and began with a quest to understand the world of programmatic trading of advertising inventory – a world that “at times feels rather like a hot mess, and at other times, like the future of not only all media, but all data-driven experiences we’ll have as a society, period.” Read all about about it in this release.
In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One (Wired) Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Wired, goes in depth on the subject of programmable data. Imagine a future world in which of all the devices, appliances and other ‘things’ in your home, office or anywhere talk to one another: the alarm clock to the coffeepot, thermostats to motion sensors, lights to stereo receivers, etc. “In this future,” writes Wasik, “the intelligence once locked in our devices now flows into the universe of physical objects. Technologists have struggled to name this emerging phenomenon. Some have called it the Internet of Things or the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet—despite the fact that most of these devices aren’t actually on the Internet directly but instead communicate through simple wireless protocols. Other observers, paying homage to the stripped-down tech embedded in so many smart devices, are calling it the Sensor Revolution. But here’s a better way to think about what we’re building: It’s the Programmable World.”
Inside Mastercard’s Social Command Center (Digiday) Several brands have designed social command centers to act as a hub where they can collect, analyze and then act on relevant social media conversations. Mastercard’s “conversation suite,” an open floor plan workspace is one. In the space, “a dedicated team of four sits and listens to what stakeholders are saying about the brand. When this team is sleeping, its counterpart in Singapore, Dubai and Australia takes over,” writes Giselle Ambramovich. “The tool is Web-based, so all 60 of Mastercard’s global PR staff have access to it. And some marketing and product specialists can access it as well. The main team (U.S.) of four collaborates
