Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

Microsoft hoping to sell lots of political ads on XBox Live, video games

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Ads in video games are not new but Microsoft is looking to use more recent technology and information to sell political ads in its online spaces:

Microsoft is trying to persuade politicians to take out targeted ads on Xbox Live, Skype, MSN and other company platforms as midterm elections begin heating up around the country. To plug the idea, Microsoft officials handed out promotional materials Thursday at CPAC, the annual conference for conservatives.

It’s the latest move by tech companies to seize a piece of the lucrative political ad market. The ads, which would appear on the Xbox Live dashboard and other Microsoft products, combine Microsoft user IDs and other public data to build a profile of Xbox users. Campaigns can then blast ads to selected demographic categories, or to specific congressional districts. And if the campaign brings its own list of voter e-mail addresses, Microsoft can match the additional data with individual customer accounts for even more accurate voter targeting.

The image of white male teens as the stereotypical average gamer is something of a myth; Microsoft says that of its 25 million Xbox Live subscribers in the United States, 38 percent are women. Forty percent are married, and more than half have children. Those numbers are important, because they represent key demographics that are among the most contested in political races. Microsoft is particularly aggressive in selling its ability to reach women, Latinos and millennials; across the company’s other platforms, such as MSN, Microsoft has developed consumer categories like “Ciudad Strivers” and “Nuevo Horizons” that attempt to describe a set of characteristics including age, type of residence and income level. At a time when virtually all politicians are resorting to microtargeting, this technology could help Microsoft become a major player in the advertising space…

Microsoft has made successful pitches to political campaigns before. In 2012, President Obama agreed to advertise on Xbox Live for his reelection campaign. The effort sparked some complaints among Xbox users who disliked the ad appearing on their dashboards. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, meanwhile, opted not to participate. Obama has also advertised within games themselves. With the release last year of the Xbox One, it’s safe to expect Xbox Live to become another important platform in the political ad wars.

It will be interesting to see how users respond and then how effective such ads are. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise to users: we shouldn’t be surprised if we volunteer data online and then it is used for targeted ads. Plus, given the time people spend playing video games (particularly for demographics that might not be accessing more traditional media as much), this seems like a relatively untapped market compared to television. Yet, it is harder to argue this has many benefits for users. While some might argue targeted ads for consumer goods show people what they might want, what average XBox Live user wants to be presented with political content while trying to play a game?

Quicken Loans’ $1 billion bracket challenge set to find more mortgage customers

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Your odds of winning $1 billion from Quicken Loans for having a perfect NCAA bracket are really low – and the company will get great free data on potential mortgage customers.

To register for the contest, you have to sign up for a Yahoo account—a boon in itself for Yahoo, on whose site the contest is run. Then you’re asked to enter your name, address, email, birthday, and the answers to several questions about your home mortgage situation. All of this information goes to Quicken Loans, the fourth-largest mortgage-lender in the U.S.

It’s no coincidence that this information—where do you live? Do you want to buy a home? What’s your current mortgage rate?—is exactly what you need if you want to sell someone a home loan…

It’s not uncommon for companies like Quicken to pay between $50 and $300 for a single high-quality mortgage lead, Lykken says.

Quicken says the info-gathering is not intended for lead generation. Instead, the company says it’s building a base of relationships with people who may want home loans in the future. “The people that are playing the Billion Dollar Bracket kind of fit our demographic,” says Jay Farner, Quicken’s president and marketing chief. “But for the most part, unless they’ve opted in and said ‘please call me,’ it’s not a mortgage lead for us.”

This is the magic of the Internet for companies: users are willing to trade their information for some good. On Facebook, it is a trade of ongoing personal information for social interaction. In this bracket challenge, it is the trade of personal information for the chance to win both (1) $1 billion and (2) the ultimate bragging rights of having a completely correct bracket when millions of others couldn’t do it. Instead of having to make broad appeals to all consumers, companies can instead target specific consumers.

The argument in this article is that the particular trade here is not good for the average player: with the odds at “a 1 in 8,500 chance that anyone wins,” it is not worth giving up personal information. But, this is the sort of calculation that all Internet users must make all the time with all sorts of sites. Do I want to give up information about my music tastes to Spotify if they can use that to sell me targeted ads? What happens when Amazon gets information about hundreds of products I like? What if Google can see all of my searches? These trade-offs are harder to calculate and to avoid making them, the average user won’t be able to do much online.

“Save Darfur” social media campaign doesn’t accomplish much

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While social media is credited for helping the Arab Spring movement, social media movements don’t always succeed. Take the “Save Darfur” campaign as an example:

Focusing on the Save Darfur cause, which took Facebook by storm between May 2007 and January 2010, the team looked at the donation and recruitment activity of over one million members. Roughly 80 percent of the members joined via a referral, whereas only 20 percent joined of their own accord.Furthermore, of the one million-plus members, 99.76 percent failed to ever actually donate any money. 72.19 percent didn’t recruit anyone else, entirely missing one of the main advantages of online activism: the ability to reach out to a very large and connected audience…

“The study is an important counter-balance to unbridled enthusiasm for the powers of social media,” said UC San Diego’s Lewis. “There’s no inherent magic. Social media can activate interpersonal ties but won’t necessarily turn ordinary citizens into hyper-activists.”…

The research was published in Sociological Science and was co-authored by Kevin Lewis, of the University of California, San Diego’s department of sociology, Kurt Gray of the department of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Jens Meierhenrich, department of international relations, London School of Economics.

The advantage of social media for social movements is that it is easier to attract attention. Information can spread quickly and social movements can become popular things to support. The catch, however, is one that always seems to plague modern social movements: once people are informed, how exactly can they be convinced to actually act? Social media makes the bar for joining online quite low but that doesn’t translate into much physical action. Another example is the Kony 2012 campaign: lots of attention and views but limited follow-through.

Perhaps the difference between Save Darfur and the Arab Spring is that physical action was already occurring in places like Tunisia and Egypt and social media helped fan the flames. But, starting everything through social media is a tall order.

Smart highway features coming to two Chicago highways

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A stretch of I-90 will be a “smart highway” within several years:

By 2016, the Tollway plans to install an elaborate system of sensors, cameras and overhead signs on a heavily traveled stretch of the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway (Interstate 90) between the Kennedy Expressway and Barrington Road in Hoffman Estates.

The plan is similar to, but more sophisticated than, a $45 million initiative that the Illinois Department of Transportation will implement during the next two years along the Edens Expressway and the northern stretch of U.S. Highway 41.

The Tollway plan includes installing signs with red and green signals over each lane at every half-mile that would advise motorists about safe speeds and warn of lane closings from accidents or breakdowns…

The goal is to make the Addams, which handles about 317,000 vehicles a day, “a true 21st-century, state-of-the-art corridor,” Tollway officials say.

The fiber optics and other infrastructure being installed on the soon-to-be rebuilt stretch of tollway will be able to accommodate even more sophisticated technology, which might someday automatically drive cars, officials say…

Tollway officials said Washington state’s experience with ATM has been compelling. The system is in use on I-5 in Seattle and on I-90 and State Route 520 between Seattle and Bellevue, and since 2010, the Seattle area has seen an 11 percent decrease in primary accidents and a 40 to 50 percent decrease in secondary accidents, officials said.

While highways in the United States are an engineering marvel, the lack of information about conditions on them has always struck me as a bit odd. It sounds like this new system is intended to provide information for two main purposes: warn people of upcoming obstacles which could then lead to fewer accidents and also to tell people of slower travel times so they can then make decisions about what roads to use.

Up to this point, motorists have been limited to varying levels of information:

1. You see what is front of you. Sometimes, you can spot some of these problems a long way away and get off sooner. But, too often, the line of sight is blocked and before you know it you are in a slow stretch without any alternatives.

2. Traffic reports on the radio. The veracity of these reports can vary.

3. Traffic data now available on GPS and smartphones. These seem to be generally accurate.

4. Cameras along heavily traveled routes. For example, see this set of images from cameras along I-80/94 at the bottom of Lake Michigan. This is more useful these days with smartphones.

Of course, this article also hints that this may just help set up the infrastructure to have completely smart cars where all of the information may be wirelessly passed between cars and limit the human dimension all together.

Differences in selfies across global cities

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A new online project finds that selfies taken in different global cities like Moscow, New York, and Sao Paulo exhibit some differences:

That seems the most salient takeaway from “Selfie City,” an ambitious selfie-mapping project released Wednesday by a group of independent and university-affiliated researchers. The project sought to extract data from 3,200 selfies taken in Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York and Sao Paolo, then map that data along demographic and geographic lines. Do people in New York smile more than people in Berlin? (Yes.) Does the face angle or camera tilt say something about culture? (Possibly.)…

Many of the researchers’ findings are less than conclusive — there’s either not enough data, or advanced enough analysis, to really make sweeping statements without a bit of salt. The photos — 20,000 for each city — were scraped during a one-week period in December and analyzed/culled to 600 by computer software and Mechanical Turk. While 600 photos may seem like a lot, there’s no indication whether that number is a statistically significant one, nor whether the culled photos represent each country’s Instagram demographics…

Selfie City has found more evidence for a phenomenon both sociologists and casual users have noted already: women take far more self-portraits than men. (Up to 4.6 times as many, at least in Moscow.)…

They also suggest that people take more expressive selfies and strike different poses between cities. Bangkok and Sao Paulo, for instance, are by far the smiliest — Moscow and Berlin, not so much.

Sounds like a clever use of available images and analysis options to start exploring differences across cities. While not all residents of these big cities will follow such patterns, cities are often known for particular social features. New Yorkers may be relatively gruff. Other cities are known as being open and friendly – think of the popular images of big Brazilian cities. (I wonder how much this will come up with future World Cup and Olympics coverage.)

At the same time, how many selfies would a researcher have to look at to get a representative sample? Over what time period? And, perhaps the underlying issue that can’t really be solved – this is likely a very select population that regularly takes and posts selfies (even beyond whether this represents the typical Instagram/social media user).

The difficulties in creating viral audio clips

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Why listen to audio on the Internet when you can read an article or watch a video? This is the problem in creating a viral audio clip:

In a provocative piece for Digg on viral sound, reporter  Stan Alcorn asked Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian: “Why does the Internet so rarely mobilize around audio? What would it take to put audio on the Reddit front page?”

Since audio is, of course, our business, we asked Stan Alcorn to make us an audio version (listen above). We want our work to be sharable – and so we’ve decided to be proactive…

As Stan reports, there are certainly exceptions to the rule. For instance, the audio I share usually falls into a few different categories: Isolated David Bowie vocals, super-awkward studio outtakes with Art Garfunkel, and angry phone messages to reporters about drones. (As a journalist, I think the last one is my favorite. “DON’T YOU SUPERVISE THE SUB EDITORS WHO WRITE THESE HEADLINES!?”)

There’s also plenty of stuff that Marketplace has done that I would hope could go viral.

The key here is that audio just seems to take more time to get to the point. With an article or video, you can leave it quickly and plenty of watchers do: they check out the first few seconds, see if it catches their attention, and then either engage further or move on. Audio is more of a mystery. What might happen next? This is something that people who love radio talk about all the time, all of the “theater of the mind” stuff. I’m trying to imagine what might have happened if the Internet had been invented during the golden age of radio, roughly the 1930s and 1940s, and if the Internet could have been an audio medium rather than a primarily visual medium.

It will be interesting to see if any of the Marketplace audio clips submitted at the end of this story could go viral…

Monorails as a vision of the future

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“What I’d say?” “Monorail!” “What’s it called?” “Monorail!” “That’s right – monorail!” I was reminded of this classic parody of The Music Man when I ran into this brief review of a new book looking back at Seattle’s attempt to build a monorail:

“Rise Above It All” by Dick Falkenbury (Falkenbury Enterprises, $14.36). The Seattle resident writes about his effort to establish a 40-mile monorail system. He describes it as a cautionary tale about “a city that once led the way.”

Read an overview of the Seattle Monorail Project here.

While all of this seems quaint – as does the monorail that takes you from the Disney World parking lot to the front gates of the Magic Kingdom – it is always interesting to consider what people in the past thought the future would be like. A quiet and elevated form of mass transit was an exciting possibility in the post-World War II era. Or perhaps we should have flying cars by now (everyone seems to remember this idea) or life should look like that of The Jetsons. But, what do we now think about the future that will look similar absurd in a few decades? The key to these follies doesn’t seem to be whether the technology is possible but whether it is worthwhile to put the new technology into widespread use. Monorails are not that difficult to build but aren’t necessarily much better than other forms of transportation. Flying cars are doable but can they be practical? It might be Google Glass or space elevators or driverless cars.

21st century methodology problem: 4 ways to measure online readership

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While websites can collect lots of information about readers, how exactly this should all be measured is still unclear. Here are four options:

Uniques: Unique visitors is a good metric, because it measures monthly readers, not just meaningless clicks. It’s bad because it measures people rather than meaningful engagement. For example, Facebook viral hits now account for a large share of traffic at many sites. There are one-and-done nibblers on the Web and there are loyal readers. Monthly unique visitors can’t tell you the difference.

Page Views: They’re good because they measure clicks, which is an indication of engagement that unique visitors doesn’t capture (e.g.: a blog with loyal readers will have a higher ratio of page views-to-visitors, since the same people keep coming back). They’re bad for the same reason that they can be corrupted. A 25-page slideshow of the best cities for college graduates will have up to 25X more views than a one-page article with all the same information. The PV metric says the slideshow is 25X more valuable if ads are reloaded on each page of the slideshow. But that’s ludicrous.

Time Spent/Attention Minutes: Page views and uniques tell you an important but incomplete fact: The article page loaded. It doesn’t tell you what happens after the page loads. Did the reader click away? Did he stay for 20 minutes? Did he open the browser tab and never read the story? These would be nice things to know. And measures like attention minutes can begin to tell us. But, as Salmon points out, they still don’t paint a complete picture. Watching a 5 minute video and deciding it was stupid seems less valuable than watching a one minute video that you share with friends and praise. Page views matter, and time spent matters, but reaction matters, too. This suggests two more metrics …

Shares and Mentions: “Shares” (on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+) ostensibly tell you something that neither PVs, nor uniques, nor attention minutes can tell you: They tell you that visitors aren’t just visiting. They’re taking action. But what sort of action? A bad column will get passed around on Twitter for a round of mockery. An embarrassing article can go viral on Facebook. Shares and mentions can communicate the magnitude of an article’s attention, but they can’t always tell you the direction of the share vector: Did people share it because they loved it, or because they loved hating it?

Here are some potential options for sorting this all out:

1. Developing a scale or index that combines all of these factors. It could be as easy as each of these four counts for 25% or the components could be weighted differently.

2. Heavyweights in the industry – whether particular companies or advertisers or analytical leaders – make a decision about which of these is most important. For example, comments after this story note the problems with Nielsen television ratings over the decades but Nielsen had a stranglehold on this area.

3. Researchers outside the industry could “objectively” develop a measure. This may be unlikely as outside actors have less financial incentive but perhaps someone sees an opportunity here.

In the meantime, there is plenty of information on online readership to look at, websites and companies can claim various things with different metrics, and websites and advertisers will continue to have a strong financial interest in all of this.

Using drones to sell expensive homes

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What if the expensive home you are selling is really big or has stunning views? Show all of this better via drone:

On Monday, a house in the East Bay town of Alamo was being prepped to go on the market for nearly $1.5 million. To really showcase the home and its view of Mt Diablo, the realtors brought in a drone.

“You get the scale, you get the feeling of the actual home. You can see, ‘hey, this thing’s on an acre. This is what it looks like,’” said Randy Churchill of Dudum Real Estate…

Churchill says for the $500 he’ll spend on the drone video he may get 10,000 hits online, making it very cost-effective relative to hiring a private helicopter.

“This will be something that we do now on every home that we’re marketing in this price-point,” said Churchill.

This doesn’t sound all that expensive for a pricey home. I could see how this would be particularly useful for a house with numerous exterior features (as opposed to the caricatured McMansion where all of the impressive stuff is on the front and the sides and back are lifeless) or a big property, perhaps 1+ acres, where seeing it all is difficult through two dimensional pictures.

If drones do become normal parts of selling a home, how long until we see some drone images that are blurry or clearly below average, just like some of the photos available online today that appear to be taken with little skill?

Education, income still linked to American digital divide

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The gap between those with Internet access at home in the United States is marked by education and income differences:

The quarter of American households still without Internet, not surprisingly, are disproportionately made up of families with less income and education. Of these 25 percent, half say they simply don’t want Internet, and about a quarter say it’s too expensive. As computers are increasingly replaced by other devices, from phones to tablets, any gap in penetration will seem less significant. Differences in internet access, though, will only become more so…

The Census Bureau’s latest data tracking internet and computer use in American homes suggest that both have become ubiquitous with impressive speed. About three-fourths of American households now boast both technologies, according to the Current Population Survey’s data, collected through late 2012. That’s up from 8.2 percent for computers back in 1984, and 18 percent for the Internet in 1997, when most of us who were online were dialing up to get there.

This is a persistent issue: those with fewer resources are not able to take advantage of what is available online. This becomes more and more problematic as all sorts of information and government services are accessed primarily through the Internet. Additionally, kids in lower income and education households don’t get as much exposure to the Internet.

It will be interesting to see if that number of Americans who say they don’t want the Internet changes in the near future. It may drop as more people see it as necessary. But, it might also rise if people see the Internet as a nuisance or is still better accessed elsewhere (like at a library).