Results tagged “activate”

When I co-founded Activate last year, one of my goals was that, as much as possible, we'd share what we learned about helping established companies with their strategies. I know there are plenty of old-school consulting companies that publish big, fat white papers that nobody reads, but I was raised on stuff like Getting Real. I want to help articulate a message that makes sense to the CEOs of the biggest media companies around, while also compelling someone who's knee-deep in doing a startup to be able to look at a perspective on big media that gets them excited about the opportunity to collaborate. Media companies face perhaps the most acute and visible form of the Innovator's Dilemma of any industry, and it's exacerbated by the fact that startups and media companies don't really even speak the same language, let alone speak to each other.

So, we focused a lot of time and energy from our senior team at Activate on creating a presentation called Redefiners. The premise is, whether you're a big or small company, if you're going to build a big new business going forward, you'll do it by redefining a market that exists at the intersection of media and technology. Based on our work over the past year or two, as well as based on broader experiences dating back to the beginning of the web's impact on media and business, we've collected some key ideas to start that conversation. It should take you about ten minutes to flip through.

Since we first started sharing these ideas on Business Insider and SlideShare and on Activate.com itself a few days ago, about 100,000 people have read through the slides. It's been gratifying to see so many people be interested, but it's just a start. I hope you'll take a few minutes to read over it, and let me know if any ideas in particular resonated with you, or if anything seemed glaringly wrong or confusing.

It should be possible to take two important, powerful communities that are shaping culture and start to shift them from warily eyeing each other as potential threats and instead move towards fruitful collaboration together. Here's one starting point.

The short version: Gourmet Live, the new iPad app that reimagines Gourmet as a sort of massively multiplayer magazine, is live. I've been working on this for the past six months, and I'm enormously proud of it, so if you've got an iPad, you should go get it from the App store and try it out and give some feedback about what you think and how it should evolve. You can also read more about it on the Gourmet Live website.

The longer version: Gourmet Live is something new, and interesting, and I'm excited that Gourmet Live is doing so well — as I write this, it's the #1 iPad Lifestyle app in the store, and just below the Top 10 for free apps overall. But I'm far more proud of the ideas that inform and inspire it, because while the app is just in its very first version, the ideas are deep enough to support Gourmet Live evolving into something truly fantastic. So I thought I'd offer a little peek behind the scenes, because I think it represents something new, and it's gonna take a ton of insight from a bigger community to help it reach its potential.

Now Playing

At Activate, we've been collaborating with the folks at Condé Nast on strategy for some time, and about six months ago, we started what became the Gourmet Live project by asking what a modern, thoughtful, completely native app would look like on devices like the (then not-yet-released) iPad. Because honestly, Condé has already sort of reached the apotheosis of the magazine-forward model of making an iPad app; From simple, clean experiences like the GQ and Vanity Fair apps to the elaborate and beautiful Wired app, they were setting the standard.

But obviously, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on out there from app makers who aren't in the publishing world. Flipboard and Pulse hadn't launched yet back then (though of course our team avidly followed their launches), but Instapaper, iBooks, Kindle — these really simple, clean experiences were kicking ass, by putting great content front and center.

And for me, the apps that take up my time on my iPhone or iPad are Foursquare and Words With Friends and Scrabble. They've got really interesting social aspects and gameplay, but most importantly, they're fun, and engaging, and keep me more connected with my friends.

It's significant that a game like Scrabble happens to be experiencing the greatest popularity of its 70-year history, and that the renaissance is directly attributable to being a really nice social experience that was available on almost every social network and mobile platform out there. That optimistic example suggested that maybe another brand of similar vintage could do the same.

Running With The Idea

With those ideas in mind, we tried an experiment to create a small nimble startup within this giant media company. This startup was going to try to do what the best new app makers do, but using one of the great media names of all time as the foundation. We'd work with Conde Nast to build a team of awesomely talented folks by drafting from within the company and across the world of tech and media.

Astonishingly, the smart people in charge like Conde Nast CEO Chuck Townsend and President Bob Sauerberg heard this idea and after a bit of thought said, "Yes. Let's do it." Frankly, I spend a lot of time around startup folks who are always saying "Sure, let's give it a try!" But I spend a lot less time around folks who have the responsibility of running huge media companies, and my surprise at their agreement was overshadowed by the huge respect I found for seeing that they had that level of curiosity and willingness to try something new.

Ultimately, Gourmet Live began by bringing together people at opposite ends of the continuum of big-and-powerful and small-and-nimble and let them come together as peers to do something awesome. Maybe I'm not as much of a cynic as I used to be, but I found that sort of inspiring. There is something great about discovering that a big, successful institution can still be hungry.

How It Works

The deceptively simple appearance of the Gourmet Live app that's available in the app store masks some pretty ambitious technology. It's probably worth describing how the experience works, if only so you can understand what's new about the whole thing.

You open the app and get a nice cover that fades into a set of stories, and then you tap on the stories to start reading. On some stories, when you finish reading you'll hear a little bell ring and you'll get a reward: access to even more content about that topic. That shows up in the form of a new "issue", and all the issues you collect show up on a Rewards shelf that works a lot like iBooks. Pretty straightforward.

Rewards are the best part of using Gourmet Live — read a story on tailgating, and you'll earn more stories about grilling. The goal was to acknowledge first that content is valuable, and that Gourmet readers are the kind of people who cherish collecting back issues that have meaningful stories in them. But we also wanted to capture some of that delight you get when you read an amazing story and just want to share it with people. Sure, it's "gameplay", but it's not like Gourmet Live is gonna name anybody the Mayor of Cheese.

Though it wasn't a goal, we ended up hitting a lot of buzzwords with the design of the whole Gourmet Live infrastructure: All the content is HTML 5. It's built on Django and speaks JSON. It's hosted in the cloud on EC2. It incorporates both gameplay and a mobile client app, and can make smart use of geolocation though that's not the focus in the first version. It's got a really nimble architecture that lets us push out more ambitious rewards and to build clients for nearly any platform you can imagine.

And best of all, nobody who reads the awesome stories in Gourmet Live has to give a damn about any of that.

The Team

The reason we were able to make an experience that doesn't flaunt its cutting-edge tech and instead favors its awesome content is because we had a team that really, really understood that the priority had to be on the experience. If you read my site, the list of just some of the people on the team will blow your mind:

• The iPad app development was led by Garrett Murray of Karbon, whom you know from apps like Ego
• The gameplay engine development was led by Andre Torrez of Simpleform, whom you knew as CTO and Chief Architect of Federated Media
• The content management system and smart archives were led by Paul Ford, whom you know from his work on Ftrain and as an editor at Harpers

Yeah. And that's just the tech team. On the content side, the lineup had to be just as kickass, because the scariest idea in the world was if we didn't do justice to the Gourmet name. Turns out, we were in fine shape with this team:

• Wrangling content contributors and partnerships was led by Elizabeth Spiers. I take no small amount of pride in having introduced her to Nick Denton not long before she became founding editor of Gawker, but the list of projects she's done in the decade since made her a no-brainer for Gourmet Live
• And the first official producer to join the Gourmet Live team was Kelly Senyei. It was pretty astonishing to meet someone who not only had a great food blog, Just A Taste, but also had both a culinary degree and a serious journalism degree.

Of course, none of that would matter without the fundamental business of our little startup being well-managed. And in addition to the steady guidance of my Activate partner Michael Wolf (see his awesome post about the launch), we were led the whole way by the steady hand of Juliana Stock, who as General Manager set the tone right from the start of the project that Gourmet Live was going to be a hit from the moment it hit the app store.

Half of these folks are people I'd wanted to work with for a decade, and half were ones I wished I'd known about a decade ago. Let me tell you, if you have the chance to ever work with a team half this good, drop whatever you're doing and get in there and ship something awesome.

As we got closer to launch, more and more people from all over Condé Nast got behind the Gourmet Live project, really putting an amazing amount of effort into something that was totally different than any project they'd seen before.

The Guts Of The Thing

Gourmet Live has gotten a pretty good response, and though there are the expected bugs or wonky parts of any version 1.0 app (navigating around can be tricky, some people couldn't sign in when Facebook was down yesterday), overall the idea has been well-received.

But what's actually happening behind the scenes is even more awesome from a tech perspective:

• The app you download is actually a super simple thin client that is less than two megs; All of the content and gameplay comes from the cloud and is cached while you use the app.
• All the actions you do, like favoriting and reading stories, filter through a realtime gameplay engine that gets smarter as more people play. It makes the content and rewards available through a really well-designed API.
• The gameplay engine pulls its content out of a custom-built CMS that incorporates both new content (most of the stories and stuff in Gourmet Live are brand new) as well as being able to reach feed in content dating back a year, a decade, or even half a century, depending on what's been chosen to be shown in the app.

What becomes clear pretty quickly is that this thing is going to evolve, and change shape, almost immediately. I try to pay pretty close attention to this stuff, and I haven't seen a single other app that's trying to combine a really clean design and some really ambitious gameplay elements and a really smart architecture all backing up the best possible content with world-class writing and photography.

I can guarantee that not every idea in Gourmet Live is going to work. But it's more important that it can start to be a framework for building ideas that will work. For almost a decade, I've been writing about ideas like microcontent clients and cloudtop apps and the pushbutton web and the web way and all these other concepts that sound like theoretical bullshit. But the reason why is because sometimes it takes a decade for really good ideas to mature into something great.

I'm pretty convinced Gourmet Live is gonna be something truly great.

Update: Pretty good sign the idea of iteration is really being embraced — there's already an update in progress for the iPad app, based on the feedback that some of the navigation and signin stuff was too complicated. On top of the fact that the gameplay engine's been updated a few times already, it seems like Gourmet Live really has become a living, evolving thing.

I stopped working at Six Apart over a year ago. At the time, I didn't blog about it because the departure was completely amicable and I knew I wasn't sure what I would be doing next, so I figured I'd step back and watch the company for the first time as an outsider and see how it evolved.

It seems like that next step for the company is now clear: Six Apart's become part of SAY Media, by being acquired by VideoEgg. I don't honestly know much about the new entity except that they seem to be primarily focused on doing some clever things with ads, and are well poised to be very successful there, while they've also said they'll be keeping Movable Type and TypePad running along. It's certainly not the end of what Six Apart has become, but it's obviously the end of a chapter, and worth observing.

For me, I'm taking an optimistic wait-and-see attitude about the new company, but I mostly wanted to mark the moment because the company that Six Apart has been has played such a big role in my career and my personal evolution. I learned a ton about business and life and products and communities in my time there, and made many of my closest friends through that work. So, as someone who is again just a fan, and as a person who was part of the larger blogging community that had such deep affection for a humble little startup called "Six Apart" when we first heard the name back in 2002, I just wanted to take a moment to note a milestone that's a bit bittersweet for me.

I was surprised that a lot of folks didn't seem to know I'd moved on last year, so it seemed appropriate to mention what I do now. These days, I advise a few startups and non-profits (see my about page), and split my time between two incredibly challenging and rewarding jobs:

• I'm the founding director of Expert Labs, a non-profit organization that is trying to improve policy making decisions in the Federal government by helping them crowdsource policy ideas on newtorks Facebook and Twitter. Our first project was designed to enable regular citizens to share their expertise directly with the White House to help inform priorities in science and technology policy, and we plan to do that kind of thing for every other Federal agency if we can. The way we're making that all possible is by having our (awesome, beloved) Project Director Gina Trapani lead a community in creating an absolutely ass-kicking new open source app called ThinkUp that anybody who reads this blog should probably be using.
• I'm also a partner in Activate, the new strategy consulting firm that I've co-founded with Michael J. Wolf. Other than having an absolutely awesome URL, we've been mostly under the radar since our initial announcement because we've wanted to let the work we do for our clients speak for itself when it's time. But you can get a sense for what our style of consulting looks like by skimming some of the stories that have been written about projects like Gourmet Live for hints of the kind of really interesting combinations of tech and strategy that we get to collaborate on.

But all of these exciting opportunities that I have wouldn't be possible without all the lessons I learned and relationships I made during my time at with Six Apart. On any given day, I'm trying to create a useful web app that people can install to make their communications more efficient, or I'm trying to help a media company be more thoughtful with the way it's building a business on the web. All of that work is directly informed by having spent years exploring those ideas.

I'm enormously proud of that legacy, and I have to say thank you to my friends Ben and Mena Trott (Ben's birthday is today, by the way; Mena's was six days ago) for allowing me to be part of that story. I've got my fingers crossed that the new SAY does well to honor the incredible talent, spirit, history, passion, and promise of a company I will always care deeply about.

Even more fun news! Today, I'm thrilled to announce the other big project I've been working on: Activate. It's a new consultancy, founded by Michael Wolf (you know him not just as one of the most established names in tech/media consulting, but also as former President of MTV), where I'll be joining as partner.

The compelling thing to me is that we'll be advising firms at the intersection of technology, media and entertainment. You don't have to have been reading this blog very long to know that's an area which is near and dear to my heart, and getting to work with the folks who are merging those disciplines at the highest levels of business and culture is pretty exciting. It took me the better part of a decade to figure out that I'm obsessed with how culture is made, but once I had that realization, it very quickly became clear that those of us in the technology world were the ones driving the transformation of these businesses.

But right now, most of the companies that do this kind of consulting for big media or entertainment firms operate from what I'd consider a fear-based standpoint: Oh no! Technology is happening! It's going to be scary and destroy you! The old-school consultants are good at slashing costs (and jobs), but I think it's a lot more interesting to figure out where new growth and opportunities are going to come from.

Which is important, because some of what we think of as traditional media or entertainment companies will figure out how to take their past strengths and turn them into huge new businesses that work in the modern world, and that respect the way people use technology today. Those businesses are the ones we're working with at Activate.

And yep, I'm still totally committed to my work as director of Expert Labs as well. (As I write this, I'm in Washington, D.C. trying to refine our next project.) I was very fortunate that the Expert Labs project was set up from day one to give me the flexibility to put my skills to use in all of the areas that I find interesting. More importantly, I'm learning in general how to help huge institutions evolve. Whether it's media companies, government agencies, or entertainment businesses, I am truly optimistic that many can transform themselves for the technology world that we live in. In fact, I think those are the only ones that will survive.

Honestly, I feel like the community of innovators and tech minds that I've been part of has earned the right to help determine the future of everything from governance to culture. We've made tools and platforms that have made some fundamentally new things possible. So I'm gonna do everything I can to help make sure our community has a voice at the highest level of the institutions that shape our lives. And Activate is an exciting new part of that work.

For more details:

• Activate.com: Not much here yet, but don't we have a kick-ass URL?
• Some early coverage of our goals, from The Wall Street Journal, The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Post, Paid Content and All Things D.