A more polished, edited version of this appeared in Ad Age. You’re stuck with the original ‘director’s cut’ here. When Will Facebook Find Its Voice? Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and now Apple made their voice-activated hardware approaches clear. There’s one proverbial elephant that isn’t in the literal living room right now though: Facebook. Does that mean […]
Category: Emerging Media
A 5-Step Framework for Visual Search
originally published on Convince & Convert How would you hashtag the Mona Lisa? You can probably come up with a lot of ideas. Perhaps your list would include: #art, #DaVinci, #smile, #masterpiece, and #Louvre, among others. Conversely, reading a few of those hashtags would make it easy for most literate, English-speaking adults to guess the […]
Divining the F8 of Image Recognition for Marketers
Originally published in Ad Age; image via Wikimedia Commons Facebook’s F8 developer conference this week provided the most fanciful view yet of where augmented reality is headed. The event also gave marketers — Facebook is, after all, one of the world’s largest ad-supported busineses — a glimpse of AR’s commercial potential. While Facebook previewed its […]
The Tech Shift from Passive Voice to Active Voice
originally published in Ad Age At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, it seemed like every device that debuted was voice-activated. Manufacturers added voice activation to televisions, refrigerators, cars and toys, with Amazon’s Alexa emerging as the predominant platform powering them. Even a hairbrush produced by Withings, Kérastase and L’Oreal has a microphone (to […]
Multiple Metrics for Measuring Chatbots
Originally published in Advertising Age About 20 years ago, marketers started adopting metrics for online advertising that remain commonplace today. About 10 years ago, The same thing happened when the advent of smartphones spurred the rise of mobile marketing. As conversational commerce takes off, this is happening again because of automated conversational software known as […]
How Bots Will Change Humanity
Originally published in The Indian Economist Our global society is entering an era of conversational commerce. We need to start paying attention to who we will be having these conversations with, as any different direction can have sweeping ramifications. Conversational commerce, a term coined by Uber’s Chris Messina, refers to how transactions are increasingly started and […]
Look Behind the Curtain: Why I Joined Oz Content’s Board
In some news I’ve been eager to share for a bit and finally can publicly, I am now officially a board member of Oz Content. I had met the founder, Matt Lovett, in early 2014, and we reconnected this March at a friend’s breakfast discussion, leading to this new collaboration. He also introduced me to […]
A Chinese Lens on Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality
Originally published in Advertising Age After attending a conference about making virtual media come alive in a city that is virtually non-existent on Western maps, the future of an emerging field has never felt so real to me. Perhaps I had watched too many X-Men movies on China Southern Airlines, but attending the Virtual Reality […]
99 Other People to Watch in the Chatbot Space
It’s fun to be recognized as one of 100 People to Watch in the Chatbot Space, thanks to my work on the Best Branded Bots compilation, as per a list in VentureBeat. The list is impressive, but like any such list, it’s incomplete. Some others I’d include are: Erez Baum, Eyal Pfeifel, and Seth Greenfield […]
The Secret Technologies Consultants Can’t Live Without
Originally published in CommPro People working for large corporations these days are constantly told to think and act like they work at a startup. Fail fast. Be nimble. Wear hoodies. Here’s a different take on that advice: act like you’re self-employed. After a 15-year streak working for media and marketing firms with barely a day’s break, I […]