Let's Talk Tech
It’s a common debate for savvy shoppers looking to buy their next phone. Should you buy a new, less expensive phone, or should you buy a flagship phone from the year before. Opening up this question on Twitter over the weekend, I got some excellent response from people, bringing up numerous ideas to consider.
Overwhelmingly, people responding seemed to side with buying a year-old flagship: Continue reading “Buy a new mid-range phone, or last year’s flagship? Twitter responds!”
Oof. Even if you’re right, calling out someone publicly might not be the best way to win hearts and minds.
We’ve covered the war of words often fought between fourth place carrier Sprint and third place carrier T-Mobile. Usually reserved for press releases, those digs can be a fun way to shake up otherwise dry industry news. It’s rare though that the public face of a company takes the gloves off on a platform like Twitter.
Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure, after responding to a somewhat snotty question about T-Mobile’s yearly phone upgrades, decided he needed to call out Lil Magenta’s CEO directly over what he considers to be a deceptive pricing scheme.
It is super frustrating when there’s a market perception of a product or service which isn’t quite, though we don’t often see figures like these lose their cool. T-Mobile set the standard for making headlines by calling out Verizon and AT&T. Could this be a new era of tough talk for Sprint?
The video broadcasting wars are heating up. Where we used to only have Google’s Hangouts, now we have services tied to Twitter for real time live streaming video and chat. Let’s take a quick look at Periscope, currently only available for iOS
Aw social media. The great equalizer. Giving people who should know better the tools to publicly embarrass themselves.
Take this little gem of an exchange. Dmitry Rogozin, the Russian Deputy of Military and Space, was apparently unhappy about the recent sanctions imposed, and had this to say on Twitter:
Analyzing sanctions against our kosmoproma, suggest the U.S. to take its astronauts to the ISS using the trampoline http:// russian.rt.com/article/29891
Ouch. Gonna need some ice for that burn, but who should come to our rescue? Why none other than Mr. Tesla McSpaceX himself Elon Musk! His reply:
Sounds like this might be a good time to unveil the new Dragon Mk 2 spaceship that @SpaceX has been working on w @NASA. No trampoline needed.
It’d be great if Russia could once again play the bad guys to motivate us into spending more on our space agency again. I mean, without all that actual pesky cold war nonsense of course. In the meantime, we’ll just keep pointing to Mr. Musk as our own real life Tony Stark.
Companies keep such tight reigns on their marketing and messaging, that when the occasional “human” moment leaks through it can be oddly refreshing. One of the top fights in smartphones right now is the HTC One M8 vs the Samsung Galaxy S5. You can expect a little A LOT of smack talk from these respective camps over the coming months, though it’s rare to see a company wade into a fight directly
Fanboi flame wars are tiresome, but coming direct from corporate, this was kind of fun. Here’s HTC Senior Global Online Communications Manager Jeff Gordon (@urbanstrata), taking the bait.
Click here to enjoy the carnage.
@stevekovach @urbanstrata he started it.
— Philip Berne (@philipberne) March 25, 2014
The speculation can end.
In true social media fashion, Twitter announced their stock price in a tweet. Of course there was a lot more info to announce than could be contained 140 characters or less, so they cheated by posting a picture… full of text…
At $26 a share, Twitter could drop more than $1.8 Billion into its coffers, and you too could own your very own piece of “TWTR” when it goes on sale this Thursday.
All that’s left is to see how the market responds…
***UPDATE***
In morning trading the stock opened at $45.10, and has held to around $46 so far. It’s estimated that Twitter will receive over $2 Billion, and there’s been far less drama today than during Facebook’s shaky public offering.
A question from Timi on Twitter:
How good is the Yeti mic. $149. Looking for something to dub review videos.
I’m a big fan of the Yeti. I recently reviewed the Yeti Pro (black version) here on the site. It’s one of the more versatile USB mics you can pick up.
But do you need that versatility?
If your main use is to record yourself for the voice over behind video, the Yeti might be overkill. Having variable polar patterns which change the “shape” of what the mic will pick up probably wont be necessary if you’re recording videos with similar tone and if you’re in a consistent space while recording those voice overs. I’ve also produced a video explaining polar patterns if you need more info.
The Yeti also makes for a fine interview mic, so maybe it’s worth grabbing it if you think you might want to do that. If that’s not really on your radar however, you’ll be spending cash on features you wont be using.
Some alternatives?
Taking a step down to Blue’s Snowball can save you some cash, and it now comes in fancy new colors.
You could also take a look at Audio-Technica’s lineup. The AT2020 USB is an entry level standard, and many have started their home recording careers with that mic. If you don’t mind the price tag bump, A-T recently updated the AT2020USB Plus to include on-mic volume and headphone controls. Compared to the Yeti these mics aren’t as versatile, but in my opinion they do their one job better than the Yeti does that one job.
Now all of these will be fine options for dubbing a review video, but in terms of maximizing your bang-for-buck, you just need to be honest with yourself regarding what capabilities you actually need.
Happy hunting!
This is where established companies stumble. Adaptation.
We can all agree that Nielsen’s model of ranking television is woefully dated. This antiquated notion of sampling individual families and asking them to log what they watch and when they watch it. All of this fantastic technology, you’d think by now there would be a way for users to opt-in to a piece of software which can be run as an app on a DVR or TIVO. Alas, we still don’t have that, but Nielsen is trying to take some steps to track the popularity of content moving forward.
Their preferred platform to watch? Twitter.
Now I’m not saying this is a bad idea. Twitter has shown a terrific aptitude for being culturally relevant down to the instant news might hit the internet. Those momentary and temporary interactions are great for surveying a general sense of a trend, but the biggest issue
in social media metrics is tracking actual engagement. Often when using Twitter as benchmark we can only confidently talk about “potential impressions”. I have a couple thousand followers on Twitter, so when I tweet, there’s the POTENTIAL for a couple thousand people to encounter my message. There is, however, no concrete way to determine how many of my followers stopped to actually read my tweet.
Which is why Nielsen’s announcement is so perplexing to me. My DVR knows what I watch and when I watch it, even when I’m watching live TV. It knows how long I watched a show, exactly when I turned it off, if I returned to finish a show, and whether I wanted to keep it stored on my drive. It also is able to serve me recommendations based on what I’ve watched in the past. If we’re looking for relevance, for actual metrics on TV viewing, this to me would be a more appropriate first line to partner up with.
Neilsen’s notion that they can derive viewership based on authored tweets, and extrapolate that out to people who aren’t tweeting but still watching TV seems even less accurate than their current method of tracking viewership.
I get it. Twitter is hip right now. But the other issue is one of institution. Neilsen still looks like it’s operating with the notion that once a system is constructed that operating within that structure will provide meaningful results. The way communication is generated online evolves on a daily basis, and each individual network has it’s own etiquette which also adapts to changing trends. Whats vogue today might not be tomorrow, and viewership probably changes by platform. Meaning, you’ll be likely to see some subtle yet unique trends in viewership moving from Twitter to Facebook to Google Plus to Reddit, etc.
Combining that data with location becomes vital, not only the physical presence of where a person was when watching, but whether it came from terrestrial “air”, cable, or some web portal like Hulu or Netflix. Decisions are made every day on renewing or cancelling shows based on data generated by services like Nielsen, but I’m not sure their new strategy here is really going to make them more relevant…
In light of their upcoming IPO though, this is fantastic news for Twitter.
(via Deadline)
Read Nielsen’s full statement after the jump. Continue reading “Nielsen, Twitter, and making sense of changing metrics”