Content Matters

Apple Music - the Spotify Accelerator

 

Apple Music was finally announced this week at WWDC.

For months (years) we'd been hearing that Apple was ready to launch it's "Spotify killer". But, will Apple Music be a big threat to Spotify, Pandora and other streaming services?

 

Apple has proven that it can sell music. Before iTunes, digital music was the wild west, fraught with piracy and viruses. Kids and tech-savvy adults figured out how to download music, while the rest of the world barely could figure out how to rip a CD. Along came iTunes, creating a safe and user friendly marketplace for buying music. Yet, 14 years and numerous tries later, Apple hasn't shown the ability to deliver a compelling music service. Remember when Apple launched Genius as the "Pandora Killer"? Yeah right.

It's usually a safe bet that anything billed as a [        ] killer will fail to deliver on that promise.  Remember the Blackberry Playbook, the "iPad killer"? Or for those in fintech, the Reuters 2000 terminal aka "Bloomberg killer".  I love Slack, but it's not really an email killer. And Apple Music won't be a Spotify Killer. In fact, it could be a Spotify Accelerator.

What might the impact of Apple Music be? It might:

• Grow the audience for streaming music beyond the tech-savvy market
• Simplify the concept - Apple didn't use the word "streaming" once. It was all about having all the music in one place.
• Enroll millions of users into Apple Music trials, some of whom will cancel after the 3-month free period ends, instead adopting free versions of Spotify or Pandora.

The one way in which Apple Music could have truly killed Spotify would have been if the rumored deals with the record labels came to fruition, eliminating the free version of Spotify and other competitors. But there's no way that would have passed antitrust muster. 

So now, Apple Music becomes YASMS (yet another streaming music service). Bob Lefsetz said it best:

in order to succeed you’ve got to deliver something better, bring in those who were disinterested or scared to participate previously, and there’s nothing in Apple Music that isn’t widely available elsewhere, including its social network and playlists.

When you're the little guy, driving public awareness is tough. Advertising is expensive and word-of-mouth only gets you so far. Despite those challenges, Spotify has grown to 75 million active users, with 20 million of them paying. Apple Music will help to make subscription-based streaming music mainstream. Think of it as your mother's streaming music service. And as streaming becomes more mainstream, that means more users for Spotify.

 

20 Years In, Personalization Still Fails to Deliver Data's Holy Grail

From the earliest days of the Internet, personalization was viewed as the holy grail.

Sites like My Yahoo quickly allowed users to personalize their web experience and it felt good for a while. 

But as time went on, choosing general categories, or selecting a handful of stock tickers just wasn't enough. We wanted true personalization. New products came on the market - iTunes Genius and Pandora promised to personalize music. Yet they still disappoint.

For data publishers, personalization would seem to be the key way to remain relevant in a world where information is increasingly free. Yet in market after market, personalized data still falls short. Here are three spaces where personalization should have transformed the market, yet it hasn't happened.

College Search

As the father of a HS sophomore, I've started to plan a few summer college visits. Our goal was to pick a few cities and plan visits around them. The process seemed simple - I'd pick a geographic area, select a few fields of study, provide a level of selectivity (e.g. top quartile), and I'd have immediate access to lists of targets. 

Apparently not. I tried several of the leading college sites, including Naviance and Cappex. Neither could deliver the simple lists I was looking for.

Hotels

With all the travel sites out there, picking the right hotel should be a no-brainer, right? Yet hotel screening sites rarely enable screening by the criteria that matter most to me. For business travel, assuming a minimal floor for safety and location, my priorities are:

1. Good wifi
2. Accessible outlets near the bed (I am so tired of moving furniture to plug in devices)
3. Good gym
4. 24-hour room service

OK - so try to search on those using TripAdvisor, Hotels.com or any other travel site. You can't. 

Hiring

Job boards were one of the early winners of web 1.0 and the process has been broken ever since. The job boards removed any friction in applying for positions, resulting in floods of unqualified applicants. I gave up on them a decade ago. 

The solution

In each of these cases, it's really about having good enough metadata to make the data searchable. In some cases, the publisher is fully in control. It's not that hard to provide more granular data on colleges and universities. The data is there. You just need to compile it and build a decent search interface. 

For travel or jobs, it's a little harder, in that you need the reviewer or applicant to fill out a form, rather than just entering text. But it's not that hard. I've posted TripAdvisor reviews and would be happy to score the hotel on 10-15 criteria, as long as you provide a decent UI to do so. 

It's amazing to me that, two decades in, we've seen so little advancement in creating great personalization for big markets. There's still a huge opportunity to take market share for those who can execute. And as the world shifts to mobile, improved personalization becomes even more important, driving alerts and other value-add features.

 

What Role Does Gender Play in Mobile Hardware Use?

Will Apple products start to be designed to meet gender-specific needs? No, I'm not talking about something stupid like pink versions of pens or phones. But the response to both the iPhone 6 and Apple watch seem to be somewhat different, according to gender.

 

When the iPhone 6 and 6+ were first released, I remember many of my friends being awed by the screen of the 6+. It seemed perfect - easy to read and to scroll. Yet, within a few weeks, I noticed many of those same friends had become less enamored with the 6+. Specifically, several male friends were dissatisfied with their decision to buy the 6+. And when I asked them, I got the same answer from each - "it doesn't fit in my pocket". Meanwhile, the women I knew who'd bought a 6+ were still very happy with their decision. I realized that none of them kept their phone in their pocket.

 

Let's face it - most skirts, ladies' suit pants and other women's business attire simply don't have pockets. Hell, for some reason neither she nor I can figure out. many of my daughter's jeans have faux pockets. For many women, their phone sits in their bag or on their desk all day, not in their pants.

 

The other comment I heard from men was that the 6+ was a 2-handed device, while the iPhone 6 could be managed with one hand. And while some men have small hands, and some women larger hands, on the whole, men's hands tend to be larger. For many women, even the iPhone 6 might be a 2-handed device, so moving to the 6+ brings no added drawback.

 

Now, with the launch of the Apple Watch, I'm seeing some comments that make me think men and women are viewing the Watch differently.

In an article on wsj.com, Joanna Stern discusses how she "tamed the watch" by turning off excess notifications, and now it meets her needs, notifying her of important matters. And that's great. Except, that's what my phone already does. I turned off most notifications and now get notified with a gentle vibration for meetings or critical messages. 

 

I think the key difference here is that for many women, their phone sits in a bag where they can't feel the vibrating notifications. For most men, the phone sits in their pocket most of the day. Sure, having it on my wrist might save me from occasionally having to pull the phone out, but for the most part, that slight vibration tells me what I need to know. If I'm in my 2pm meeting, the vibration tells me that my 2:30 will be starting in ten minutes. I don't need to pull the phone out to figure that out. But if the phone lived in my bag, I'd never know that.

 

While for many men, on-body notifications from the phone are nothing new, but for those women who don't keep their phone in their pocket, the Apple Watch brings a totally new experience.

 

Wth the Apple Watch and with the larger iPhones, we're starting to see a gender-based split on use cases. I wonder where this will take us next.

The One Thing Missing From the Apple Watch Launch

The Apple Watch launch event was a spectacle. Thousands of journalists and industry luminaries lined up for entry into the auditorium, giving it almost a red carpet feel (though without the silly "who are you wearing?" questions). Once inside, the crowd hung on every word, with even journalists applauding each new announcement (something I don't believe they teach at J-school). 

The crowd oohed and aahed at each new device - ooh a gold MacBook, a pretty aluminum Apple  Watch and, ultimately, the gold Edition Watch.

 

But for me, one thing was missing. Compelling User Stories. How were these Apple Watches going to solve real problems or drive new behaviors.

 

"That's unfair" was the retort of the fan boys and girls. "When the iPhone launched, no one knew what it would be used for" was a common refrain.

 

But that's not quite true. The iPhone promised a computer in your pocket, with full Internet access wherever you went. And it offered features we had become accustomed to in other devices - an iPod, a phone, a GPS (the camera came later).

 

"What about the iPad?" was another common refrain. Well, the iPad added some core functionality - a larger screen for surfing or reading, but not a lot more. In fact, one of the weaknesses of the iPad model is that it relies heavily on 3rd party app developers to drive innovative functionality. And, to be frank, as an early adopter, I haven't seen a lot of innovation from those developers. 

 

One of the first innovative products for the iPad was the News Corp tablet-based newspaper, The Daily. The Daily, leveraging all the capabilities of the iPad, held the promise for immersive, innovative advertising. But most of the ads were simply boring. It turns out that ad agencies were ill-equipped to create immersive experiences what they were good at were creating static display ads and video ads for television. So, that's mostly what we got in The Daily. 

 

Fast-forward nearly five years and we see that the big challenge for the iPad is that upgrade cycles are long. Since app developers are not pushing the limits of the hardware, the version you bought 3 years ago is still just fine for the primarily tasks of reading and browsing. My iPad 3 does everything I need. And my wife only recently upgraded from her first gen iPad, only because Apple wouldn't allow that version to upgrade to the latest version of iOS. The app ecosystem around the iPad remains largely focused on reading apps, along with more expansive views of phone apps (calendar, mail, social media). App developers have failed the test of driving new use cases that Apple had not imagined.

 

Which brings me back to the Apple Watch. In the demos, the greatest benefit that Apple shared was "YOU DON'T HAVE TO TAKE IT OUT OF YOUR POCKET!!!"

 

OK. There's some value in that. If you get frequent notifications, you might find value in glancing at your wrist, rather than reaching into a pocket or purse. Then again, I shut off most notifications as I don't want constant interruptions for low priorities.  For high priority alerts I am fine reaching into my pocket.

 

It seems to me that Apple has not identified any really compelling use cases for wrist-based access. And the assumption that developers in the Apple ecosystem will identify those must-buy concepts seems a big risk to the model. I'm sure there will interesting uses. I think a voice recorder could be very practical, though I am glad there's no camera. But that alone is unlikely to drive adoption.

 

I've always felt that the wrist was not the most obvious place for a mobile device. The reason why Dick Tracy had a wristwatch phone was that, at the time, a watch was the only "device" most people carried (Maxwell Smart's shoe phone came later). No one at the time envisioned us all carrying a powerful computer in our pocket.

 

Wearables have the potential to impact the way that we work. I'm not sure that a wrist-based disruption device is the answer. Small screens have limited use cases, other than for quick alerts. I think there's more potential for an in-ear device ("smart earbuds") that can provide more useful information. And, perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised by innovative apps that emerge, but I'm a skeptic for now.

How Radio Shack Missed Its Last Opportunity to Reinvent Itself

Abe Vigoda is still alive.

We'll need a new analogy. For years, people were stunned that both Abe Vigoda and Radio Shack were still alive. Thankfully, Tessio is still going strong, but we've seen the end of Radio Shack.

Radio Sh ack lost its relevance in the early 80s when IBM PCs became mainstream and the early adopters moved on from TRS-80s.

And while it never found its footing again, the sad thing is that there's an emerging opportunity that would be a great fit for Radio Shack, had it been able to reinvent itself.

The one thing that made Radio Shack special in the 70s and 80s was that their staff were tinkerers. You could ask them all kinds of questions and get real answers. Long before there was a Maker community, you had makers and tinkerers behind the counter and as customers at Radio Shack. And while most technology today is fairly simple and doesn't require use of a soldering iron nor following detailed instructions, there is a nascent market where those skills would be perfect: Smart Homes.

The Smart Home market is in its early phases. And it's complicated. Sure, it's pretty easy to install a Nest thermostat or a Dropcam camera, but which smart lock should you buy? How about the garage opener? Can you replace your expensive alarm system with a DIY version? And do you need a hub? Can you control it all with one platform or do you need multiple apps?

While it's easy to buy any of this gear online, it's still pretty confusing, even for technically savvy early adopters.

There are several retailers chasing the space, notably Home Depot, Apple, Lowe's, Staples and others. Yet none of them seem particularly well-suited for the space. Have you asked questions at a Home Depot or Lowe's lately? Apple will make elegant products, but you can't bring your house to the Genius Bar. And Staples? Really?

Smart Home gear would have been perfect for Radio Shack. You don't need a massive big box store to show it. You just need well-informed staff and an area to educate and showcase. They could have either provided or partnered with a provider of home installation services, to make it easy for people to adopt the new technologies. The typical Radio Shack employee might not have made the leap, but they could have engaged an entire new generation of tinkerers to want to work there.

But instead, the Shack decided to focus their efforts on selling mobile phones and overpriced phone accessories, driving it to irrelevance.

Product Management Roles at Interactive Data

2015 has arrived and we’ve got an aggressive growth plan. Interactive Data is growing and we have openings on the product team for rapidly growing, emerging products.

I’m currently recruiting for two roles. If you’re interested, reach out to me at barry-dot-graubart at interactivedata-dot-com.

Product Manager, Vantage

Vantage is the industry leading platform for fixed income transparency, price validation, corporate actions and reference data. Vantage today is a critical part of the workflow of hundreds of hedge funds, investment managers and mutual funds.

The ideal candidate will have experience in successfully bringing to market analytics or research applications in the financial markets. Strong knowledge of the fixed income market is desired, with experience serving front- or back-office markets within financial institutions. The ability to balance competing interests in order to manage development priorities is critical. This is a mid-level to senior position.

Here's the full spec for the Vantage Product Manager role.

Business Analyst, Continuous Evaluated Pricing

End-of-day fixed income pricing is no longer sufficient to comply with current regulations, driving the need for a continuous stream of evaluated prices. Interactive Data was first to the market with our Continuous Evaluated Fixed Income Pricing in 2014 and we are in the midst of adding that “CEP” stream to various products. We’re currently seeking a Business Analyst to support the Continuous Evaluated Fixed Income Pricing data across multiple products.

Successful candidates will bring a deep understanding of market data, strong technical skills (including SQL) and excellent verbal and written communication skills. Experience with fixed income data or supporting front- or middle-office functions at a financial institution a plus. This is a junior to mid-level role.

Here's the full spec for the Business Analyst role.

Both roles are based in our NYC (Tribeca) office, though I will consider candidates for the product manager role in Bedford, MA as well. 

If you or someone you know might be a fit for either of these roles, drop me a note or use the job spec links above to apply directly. It's a great opportunity to help drive the growth of some of our most exciting products.

Does LinkedIn Have a Growing Spam Problem?

In the past 24 hours, I've received a half-dozen or more spam requests to connect on LinkedIn.

No, I'm not talking about the typical LinkedIn news stream spam, nor the random requests to connect from people whom I don't know. These are more like Twitter spam - photos of attractive young women with sparse profiles.

In this case, all of them seem to be tied to the media/content/technology industry. So, at the surface level, they seem legit. But, a quick click on any of the profiles shows them to be fake. Beyond their model-like appearances, each seems to have 4 years of professional experience at companies like Elle, People or Playboy, attended a small college in the Los Angeles area and doesn't include a single description of their job, other than a title, employer and dates. As with Twitter spam, they occasionally select interesting names - a shout-out to my new friend Natalie Portman. Here's the typical profile - this one for a Sofia Anderson:

This is just one more reason why you shouldn't randomly connect to strangers on LinkedIn. I keep my LinkedIn network pretty clean, only accepting connections from those whom I've had a business relationship with. That keeps the value of my network high and allows me to confidently refer those in my network to others as appropriate. LinkedIn has never been, and should never be, simply about growing your connections. Spam quickly devalues all of our networks. If you're randomly connecting to strangers or spammers, I don't want to be connected to you, as it simply dirties the data and makes LinkedIn less useful as a biz dev tool.

So, don't accept the request from that beautiful stranger who just reached out to you on LinkedIn. She's not real.

 

 

What makes a great product manager?

Most roles at technology companies are pretty easy to define. Software engineers write code. QA analysts test to ensure releases meet requirements. DBA’s set up and manage data schemas. Marketers market and sales reps sell. But ask the typical person to define the product manager role and they’ll struggle.

Perhaps they’ll say something like “they own the roadmap” or “they define the requirements”, which are certainly true, but that’s only a part of the product management role. Or, they’ll confuse it with project management, which can be a part of the role, but isn’t the primary function.

And, because the product management skills are not so clearly defined, almost everyone in a technology company, from CEO to field sales, believes they can define the product. While they’d never say “let me code that feature”, they all think it’s fair game to weigh in with “that button should be larger” or “we need a search by color feature”.

In reality, Product Managers own the full lifecycle of a product, from initial strategy through market adoption and ongoing enhancement.

image credit: Product Manager via OneDesk

By definition, the day-to-day responsibilities of a product manager will vary, depending upon where a product is in its lifecycle. But, regardless of where you are in that lifecycle, there are certain skills required to be a great product manager.

Evangelist: From the early moments of developing a product strategy, you need to get the rest of the organization behind your effort. Throughout the process, you need to communicate what you are doing and why it should be the priority for scarce dev resources to focus on. And when you approach product launch, you’ll need to rally sales and marketing, customer support and others to embrace it.

Listener: Product management is not done inside an office nor a garage. Product management is done in the field, understanding customer workflows, their challenges and their goals.

Business Process Analyst: The ability to fully understand business needs is perhaps the most critical b2b product management skill. A good product manager can explain, in simple terms, the exact customer need behind a feature request. Typically, this is done in the form of user stories. The key challenge is that customers will often try to explain what they want in the context of how they perform the task today (with your product or something else). So, they’ll say “we need a button here that loads the profile” when what they really need is to integrate data from two systems into a single view. The Product Manager’s role is to probe until they understand exactly what a customer really needs and what specific benefit that provides them.

Relationship builder: To successfully bring products to market, you need to build strong relationships with customers, with engineering, with QA, with UX, with sales, presales and training. Product management is about building mutual trust and respect with each of these groups, so you can constantly manage the balance and conflicts between their desires and the needs of the business.

Prioritizer: product management is about focus and prioritization. There will be constant trade-offs in terms of functionality, resources and timing. The product manager needs to be able to say no, or at least “not now” to feature requests from sales, marketing, customers and even the CEO.

Technical knowledge: while I’ve met a few product managers who come from a coding background, that’s not necessary for the job. But you do need to understand the technology stack and have a sense of what it takes to build something as well as understanding of how to scale to meet the needs of the business. If you don’t understand the technology, you’ll never earn the respect of the Engineering team nor will you be able to effectively translate user stories into technical requirements.

Being a great product manager requires all of these skills. You must be effective at cutting to the core of what customers need, while being incredibly focused, constantly reprioritizing and, most importantly, able to influence without authority.

And I wouldn't trade it for any other job I know.

 

(Part 2 of this post will explore the differences between being a product manager for a startup and for an established company)

 

On Loss (of Data)

There are two kinds of people - those who have lost data and those who will.

That was a truism for most of us who grew up in the PC-era. I learned my lessons early in my career and have been religious about regular backups. In the early days, that was tape and CD; today, it's a mix of cloud backup (Mozy), external hard drive and occasionally burning files to DVDs and storing them in a fireproof safe (as a fire or storm can take out your external drive along with your laptop).

But, as we move more and more of our lives to the Cloud, backing up your data becomes more challenging. 

My Evernote account has been quirky lately; any time I change networks, Evernote for OS X thinks I'm offline and I have to restart it. No big deal, but the fix that the support team proposed was to rebuild my database. Easy enough, but it brought an immediate panic. Where are my notes stored and, if the rebuild fails, how can I get them back? With Evernote, it turned out to be no big deal. I simply moved the existing notes folder to a temporary space and when I next loaded Evernote, it sync'd with my online account and rebuilt the database. But, not all apps make it that clear.

This morning, I saw a panicked post from Felix Salmon.

I'm hoping that Felix will be able to recover his notes. Staci Kramer pointed him to a potential solution.

In Felix' case, it's not the typical, oops - I deleted files from my device - but rather it's that he's deleted an account and a number of critical notes were tied to that account.

But, the bigger issue is how we can backup and manage our information that's stored across numerous services in the Cloud. For me, that includes Dropbox, gmail, Google Docs, Evernote, Flickr, Picasa, Instagram, SkyDrive and probably others. And that number continues to expand.

So, what are the services that allow us to manage and backup our cloud-based services? I could set up some rules in IFTTT to move files around, but what I really want is an easy platform that lets me backup, restore, move and access files no matter where they're stored and in what format.

What tools are you using to manage and backup your cloud data?

 

 

facepalm image courtesy striatic

 

 

With Immediacy Comes Great Responsibility

UPDATE (5/26/14): Rap Genius cofounder Mahbod Moghadam has been fired.

Community site Rap Genius sets as their mission to annotate the world - or to become the Internet Talmud. That's a lofty goal and perhaps a worthy one, particularly if they expand into poetry, literature, political speeches and more. But it's also a thorny path, as you look to a community to interpret the words of others.

Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam learned that today when he decided to annotate and publish the "manifesto" of UCSB mass shooter Elliot Rodger. 

Defenders of Rap Genius will note that the words of mass murderers are often published and analyzed. But, for the most part, that doesn't happen immediately. Ann Rule's biography of Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, was published in 1980, five years after his arrest for multiple murders. Moghadam's annotated version of the Manifesto was published just a day after the shootings, at a time when the names of some of the victims have still not been released.

Making the matter worse, Moghadam's comments seemed to reinforce some of the rawness of the crime itself. In perhaps the most egregious example, in a reference to Rodger's sister, Moghadam's comments try to interpret the shooter's feelings towards her, saying "My Guess: his sister is smokin hot".

(image credit: Gawker.com)

While this text was later edited out of the Rap Genius post, it was at best insensitive and inappropriate, particularly since social media has been dominated all weekend with the #YesAllWomen hashtag. 

But the core issue, in my view, is that, while the immediacy of the web enables, and often encourages all of us to "publish" events as they happen, that doesn't mean that we should.

Traditional news outlets have editors who set policies and help journalists make decisions about what information should be shared when. Those of us (including bloggers like me) who do not have a background in journalism, nor editorial oversight, must make those decisions ourselves. And while I'd argue that having a layperson try to interpret the meaning of a mass murderer's comments, with no context nor professional experience, is a wrongheaded effort, the timing of it becomes a key factor as well.

Just a week or so ago, there was great debate about whether it was appropriate that the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City sell high-priced trinkets at a gift shop. Personally, I've been more offended by the politicians who have spent the past 13 years grandstanding in front of the site, but I can see the view of those who were upset by the gift shop. Yet, the Holocaust Museum has a similar gift shop that generates no such outrage. And a major difference, in my view, is the passage of time.

If Rap Genius wished to annotate the manuscript a year or two from now, it wouldn't generate much attention. Of course, it wouldn't generate many page views either, which was clearly a driver in getting it posted today. 

But the immediacy of the web requires us to gauge public response to our actions and to decide what we want our role to be in doing so.