Best Links week 8-9

User-Led Innovation Can't Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and Ikea (link)
"The user is king. It’s a phrase that’s repeated over and over again as a mantra: Companies must become user-centric. But there’s a problem: It doesn’t work. Here’s the truth: Great brands lead users, not the other way around."

The Age Of Relevance (link)
"We are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content. The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social Graph. /.../ Relevance is the only solution to the problem of information overload."

Paywall Strategies 2011: Forrester Analyst Nick Thomas on ‘monetising the user, not the content’ (link)
"The challenge isn’t to monetise whatever content publishers may have online but the relationships with users. /.../ Content builds audiences and the challenge is the monetise the audience."

Are You Mobile Enough? Time to form a mobile strategy (link)
The mobile web is poised to be big. Really big. Morgan Stanley estimated it's going to be at least twice the size of the desktop/laptop Internet within five years. Gartner went further, predicting that mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common web-access devices worldwide by 2013."

Mobile App Revenue to Reach $38 Billion by 2015 (link)
"A report released Monday by Forrester Research said the business opportunities associated with apps were just beginning. Forrester estimates that the revenue created from customers buying and downloading apps to smartphones and tablets will reach $38 billion by 2015."

No apps, no sale: iPad 2 vs. Motorola Xoom vs RIM Playbook vs HP TouchPad (link)
Robert Scoble rant/review of the new tablets.

Why operators will find it hard to sell tablets (link)
”But the most crucial weakness of alternative vendors is the fact that operators don’t know how to sell tablets. Tablets are small computers. They are bought in the same way that buyers buy laptops: in-store testing. Notice that except for the iPhone operators only provide phone mockups in their stores. This is because they want buyers to discuss their purchase with a sales rep. This is not the way laptop hunters shop. Another tell-tale sign of a disconnect between operators and tablets is that operator shops are physically tiny. PCs (and tablets) need large tables for users to look, touch, heft and fondle. Just on square feet alone, operators and tablets are not a good match.”

Why Did It Take So Long for Newspapers to Copy Groupon? (link)
"Word leaked out today about a new service the New York Times is planning to launch soon called TimesLimited, which is expected to provide readers with special offers on travel and other lifestyle items via email. If you’re thinking this sounds more than a little like what companies like Groupon and LivingSocial do, you’d be right."

Why Social? Do You Really Need to Ask? (link)
Very pedagogical pitch from Baekdal.

DEMO 2011: It's All About Social (link)
Three startups in social.

Long read: Twitter Was Act One (link)
Vanity Fair portraits Jack Dorsey – David Kirkpatrick gets the press-shy visionary talking about his taxicab inspiration, his ejection as Twitter’s C.E.O., and his ambition to make Square the payment network of the future.

A Keyboard and Mouse? That's So 1970s (link)
"One project I'm particularly excited about is an interactive tabletop system for visualizing and interpreting large volumes of financial data. We use physical objects on an interactive surface to represent concepts in the system, such as a particular class of assets or window of time. By moving these objects on the surface, our users can ask more sophisticated questions and get faster answers than is possible with more traditional approaches to accessing financial data. We think this approach to interaction has a wide variety of applications, ranging from education to urban planning."

Book review: Simple and Usable (link)
“Designing simple user experiences often turns out not to be about ‘How can I make this simpler’ but rather ‘Where should I move the complexity?’… The secret to creating a simple user experience is to shift complexity into the right place, so that each moment feels simple.”

Six business lessons from TBD’s early demise (link)
"TBD, one of the most ambitious local online launches of 2010, turns out to be a victim of crib death, reduced to an arts and entertainment niche site barely six months after its launch last August. Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but looking back, it is pretty easy to see a number of things that went wrong or were flawed from the get-go."

Memo to Newspapers: Incremental Change is Not Helping (link)
"The dilemma for newspaper companies is that incremental change is not really helping them adapt, or as Filloux puts it: mere adaptive tactics won’t save the traditional news industry in their multi-front war against disruptive technologies.”

What newsrooms can learn from tech startups (link)
Transparency of team, News as software, Product management, Behind the scenes blogging and General startup culture.

Eight trends for journalism in 2011 (link)
From Nieman Lab.

Oscar Monetizes the Two-Screen Experience, But Is It Too Soon? (link)
"It all sounds pretty cool — for one thing, the ability to select camera angles gives the experience an edge on last year’s Emmy Awards, Here’s the catch: All Access costs $4.99. Meanwhile, the Oscar Backstage Pass app for iOS users contains identical content except for the “360 cam” technology, but is priced at $0.99."

LetterMpress: A Virtual Letterpress on Your iPad (link)
"The design process is the same as the letterpress process—you place and arrange type and cuts on a press bed, lock the type, ink the type, and print."

/J