SEOUL (By Joyce Lee, Reuters) – The world’s biggest maker of semiconductors, televisions and smartphones replaced the leaders of its three main businesses, named CFO Lee Sang-hoon as the likely new board chairman, and said veteran co-CEOs J.K. Shin and Yoon Boo-keun would resign.
The shake-up at South Korea’s biggest company is designed to ease investors’ concerns about a leadership vacuum following the arrest and conviction of group scion Jay Y. Lee on bribery charges earlier this year.
“It’s a younger generation of leaders, but the divisional structure has not fundamentally changed,” said Park Ju-gun, head of research firm CEO Score.
The new appointees are all long-serving Samsung insiders whose elevations suggest continuity rather than any new direction at the $348 billion company.
Kim Ki-nam, 59, was appointed to lead the Device Solutions division which makes components including memory chips, the major driver of the firm’s record third-quarter profit of 14.5 trillion won ($12.91 billion).
Park Jung-hoon, a fund manager at HDC Asset Management which holds Samsung Electronics shares, said there had been “some concerns” that Kim would move to expand chip capacity and upset the currently favourable supply-demand balance.
“However, today’s (post-earnings call with analysts) said the chips business will focus on profitability, not market share – suggesting they will continue the current course without deviation, which put our minds to rest,” he told Reuters.
In other appointments, Samsung said Koh Dong-jin, 56, would head IT and Mobile Communications, and Kim Hyun-suk, 56, would lead Consumer Electronics. The changes were effective immediately.
Samsung said it would double dividends next year to 9.6 trillion won and keep them at that level until 2020, as it responds to investor pressure to share its vast cash reserves and catch up with some of its more generous peers.
It also said 2017 capital expenditure would be its biggest ever, climbing 81 percent to 46.2 trillion won ($41 billion) as it builds new chip factories and clean-rooms to stay ahead of demand for servers and devices with ever greater memory.
Third-quarter operating profit nearly tripled from the same period a year earlier, matching Samsung’s earlier estimate. Revenue jumped 29.8 percent to 62 trillion won, also in line with its earlier estimate.
The shareholder return policy for the next three years ramped up guidance to a level higher than its current range of 30-50 percent of free cash flow to 50 percent over three years.
Samsung’s holdings of cash and cash equivalent stood at 76 trillion won at the end of September, eight percent higher than the previous quarter.
While the dividend policy builds on the investor-friendly trend Samsung started in 2015, it was not as generous as some investors had hoped, analysts said.
Apple has paid nearly 22 cents for every dollar it earned over the past five years, while Microsoft Corp has shared 53 cents. Meanwhile Samsung has paid just 11 cents, according to Reuters data.
South Korean family-run business empires like Samsung Group have a reputation for low dividend payouts and other governance practices that favor controlling shareholders at the expense of ordinary investors.
Samsung shares closed up 1.9 percent, while the Kospi benchmark share price index .KS11 rose 0.9 percent. The stock has risen 71 percent over the past 12 months.
Samsung said the earnings outlook was positive with the chips market likely to “remain favourable” in 2018.
Profits from mobile devices jumped to 3.3 trillion won compared with just 100 billion won at the same time last year, when the company booked the costs of the withdrawal of its fire-prone Note 7 gadget.
If you’ve worked in games and technology long enough, you have your Super Fans, the people who you can turn to when you’re designing a product that is targeted at a certain group of enthusiasts. They are the high value, early customers. And sadly, with the state of the Internet, you may also have your Super Haters. So who should you listen to when you’re trying to be inspired to create something wonderful?
I talked about this subject with Amy Jo Kim, CEO of Shufflebrain and the leader of a movement that she calls Game Thinking. We spoke to a group of game designers and app creators at the recent Samsung Developers Conference in San Francisco, where the theme focused on Connected Thinking.
Our session was dubbed an Ask Me Anything session, though we asked each other most of the questions. Kim was pretty clear that Super Fans will help you, while Super Haters are a distraction.
I talked about my own experience with Super Haters who didn’t like the way I played Cuphead, which, at least in my book, is a fairly difficult new game for the Xbox One game console. I was a super noob at that game, and it showed in a video I posted. The whole Internet seemed to hate that video, making me wonder whether they had a point. To Kim, it raised questions about just how accessible products should be. For me, it was a kind of therapeutic session.
Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.
Above: The Sims will continue under new leadership.
Image Credit: EA
Dean Takahashi: Amy Jo Kim, CEO of Shufflebrain, has been a game designer for decades. She worked on big games like The Sims and Ultima Online for Electronic Arts, Rock Band for Harmonix, and Covet Fashion for Crowdstar. She has applied that knowledge gained from game design and turned it into what she calls Game Thinking. When did you first start thinking about applying your game design knowledge more broadly to all sorts of product designs?
Amy Jo Kim: I had been working in game design. I was, at the time, working with the Ultima Online team. Do you any of you remember Ultima Online? The few, the proud. One of the pivotal experiences of my life. I was working with the Ultima Online team, helping them fix their reputation system. Maybe some of your ran afoul of the reputation system or the housing system or one of those systems. I’m a system designer. I was working on fixing the systems, balancing them, and so on.
At the same time, eBay brought me in and had me working on their reputation system. Also, there was no profile system. The “about me” system, the eBay profiles, did not exist. I helped invent those. The power seller program, where they had rewards for sellers, did not exist. I helped come up with that. Here’s the kicker – eBay’s reputation system, the famous reputation system that led them to success, when I started working with them, it wasn’t tied to transactions at all. Let that sink in for a minute. There were these huge arguments internally about whether we should tie it to transactions. Crazy, right?
But going through that, part of why they hired me to help, and part of the heavy lifting I did, was translating for the execs at eBay why something like a tiered power seller system, as opposed to just you’re behind the velvet rope and you’re not—why that would be a good thing. Why you would create a low tier for people to get into and go to the next one and the next. That’s classic game design psychology. And then for the reputation system, why it was so important to tie it to transactions, how to do that, how to balance it, all of that. A lot of the knowledge I brought to eBay for those systems came out of my experience in games.
Dean Takahashi: Games are engaging. One thing that’s engaging about them is climbing this ladder of achievement. The connection you draw for is product design is, why don’t all products have this?
Kim: What was interesting is the history since then with gamification, how that rose and then there was some disillusionment and now it’s transforming into something else. When gamification started, which was probably eight or nine years ago when the first bubblings came, a lot of people looked at my earlier work and said, “Oh, you’re the godmother of gamification. We’ll follow you.” But my work was really about creating a learning architecture over time.
The way you create a path to mastery, which is what this is, is not through visible mechanics. It’s through architecting your experience so that as your customer gets better, the experience gets better too. You’re not going to get that effect with a bunch of points and badges. That’s like inviting someone to dinner and giving them a plate of frosting. It’s the icing. It’s not the cake.
Takahashi: There has to be substance behind the badges.
Kim: The mistake most people make, and that you guys will never make again now that you’ve heard this, is to mistake the visible signs of progress that you can see in the interface for the thing that makes a game compelling and exciting. They’re not the same thing.
Takahashi: I went to one of your sessions and people were very into it, almost reciting some of the points from your book back to you. What is the point you want them to get to? What do you want them to understand or learn as they go through this Game Thinking?
Kim: Where I want people to get to, and where I guide my clients and my students to, is to understand the process that the best game and product designers use to test and iterate and bring their idea to life. Not to copy the way it looks when it’s finished, the visible element, but to actually understand some key elements of the process. There’s a whole system, but let me give you three ideas to go home and remember and learn more about and experiment with: super fans, a mastery path, and a learning loop.
Super fans is shorthand for high need, high value, early customers. Something that most product designers get wrong, app designers get wrong, but that the best product and app designers – including eBay, including Ultima Online, including the Sims, including Rock Band, including Netflix – get right is, focus on building something that a very small handful of very specific people absolutely love. Don’t try and build something, if you’re innovating, that your target market is going to love. If you test your idea on your target market, which is what people are taught in business school, and you’re innovating, you’ll get the wrong feedback from the wrong people.
The best game designers, and you can do this too, they focus on a very narrow slice of people that are defined not by demographics but by their needs. They’re desperate for this thing you want to build. And then getting to an iterative learning loop with those people so that you’re bringing systems to life not with your target market, not with just your team, friends and family, but with this layer of people in between I call super fans.
Huge, high leverage insight, counterintuitive—a lot of people ask, “Why do I design for a niche? Why do I niche myself down?” Key insight: these people aren’t who you design for eventually. They’re how you get there. That’s a different thing.
Two, mastery path. People say, “I’m just designing an app. What does a mastery path have to do with it? Can’t I just stick a leaderboard in there? Isn’t that how you do it?” A mastery path is where you think about, day one, day seven, day 21, day 40, day 60—what’s the experience you’re developing? What is your onboarding? What is your day 21 typical learning loop, the thing where somebody comes back? They’re not learning your product. They’re just coming back for their fix. What does that look like? How, on day 60, is your customer better and smarter than they were on day one, and how is your product opening up to them to make a better experience as they get better and learn more?
That’s how you design a mastery path. To do that you have to understand, not all those game mechanics, but what your customer cares about getting better at. If you have a product where your business model is tied into ongoing revenue—it’s not a fad, not a quick thing. You have stats. You have microtransactions, a subscription, anything like that. Your bread and butter is sustained engagement. The way to build sustained engagement is to create a mastery path.
The third concept is a learning loop. You’ve probably heard of habit loops or compulsion loops. There’s a lot of people that will show you how to do that. Here’s the thing you need to remember if you want to drive lasting engagement. Learning and mastery and skill-building trump behavior manipulation. If you as a product creator say, “I want to use gamification, use this habit design loop that I’ve heard about, and track behavior and then reward people so that I’m manipulating their behavior and getting them to build habits,” you’re doing operant conditioning. It might work for a few weeks. It won’t work in the long term. Take a look at Zynga’s games to know that operant conditioning, compulsion loops, they don’t work in the long term.
There’s a shift from tracking and manipulating behavior to thinking about—how can I pull, not push, my client with desire and learning and mastery? How can I make this experience more interesting and rewarding for my client over time based on what they care about, not based on how I want to nudge them? That leads to long-term engagement. That’s how every product I’ve worked on that was a hit that was designed. I’ve worked on a lot of products that weren’t hits, and I’m not announcing them because you’ve never heard of them. A lot of them weren’t designed that way, and that’s part of why I’m so passionate about these issues. I can see the difference.
Above: The Forest Follies level in Cuphead.
Image Credit: Studio MDHR/Microsoft
Takahashi: That’s Amy’s shtick, and she does it very well. She does this at her seminars. We thought that the combination of the two of us could be interesting here, because I have an interesting case study that I would like Amy to interpret for me in some way. I’ve encountered these super fans, as you call them, in playing this game called Cuphead.
I don’t know if you guys have heard of my whole episode here, but I played Cuphead at an event in Germany, in a preview event, and I recorded all 26 minutes of my gameplay. I put it up on the internet, and people went bananas. I had more than 800,000 views for this video when maybe 10,000 is typical for our videos. What drove them crazy was, I played the game cold and for about two and a half minutes I struggled to get through the very simple tutorial. All you had to do, really, for this tutorial was do a jump and dash sideways. It’s a platform game.
This enraged people, because I’m supposed to be an expert at playing games. I’m a game journalist. I’ve been writing about games for 20 years, and yet I couldn’t get through this very simple part of the game. I was kind of messing around, but then I went on for 24 more minutes trying to get through the first level of the game, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t proceed through this fairly difficult level to the next point.
Now, if you don’t know anything about this game, it’s an Xbox exclusive. It came out on September 29. It’s designed to be very difficult. It looks very cartoonish and inviting and simple, because it’s done in a sort of 1930s animation style, but the whole point is to have a set of boss fights, a dozen or so boss fights, that are almost impossible to beat. One of my colleagues, he showed me up by finishing the game, but then he noted that in the past few weeks, only about four percent of the people who’d bought the game so far had finished it.
It’s been an interesting experience. I got a whole lot of haters. I had to apologize for putting such a bad video up. I also made a plea, though, that we shouldn’t all be required to be experts at games in order to enjoy them. Anyway, those are all the details of this tweetstorm I had, and I wanted to shove that over you to interpret in some way. What does this mean for product designers?
Above: Cuphead tutorial. It’s different in the final version.
Image Credit: StudioMDHR/Microsoft
Kim: I would love to get you guys involved in this too. This is such a relevant issue for you as app developers. How many of you are building games? How many of you are building apps? How many of you would like your apps to feel a bit game-like?
As developers of games and apps, you know that understanding who you’re designing for is critical. You all know that. This is what’s going on with this conversation with Dean. In gaming, there has been, in the last five or six years, but really over the last 10 years, a huge shift going on to more and more casual games. More and more games that are simple and accessible, games like Gone Home that are just clicking through, not a lot of skill required. But there’s also still very skill-based games – puzzle games, RPGs, combat games – that are super hard as well. Some people like really hard games, but it’s a much bigger audience that likes accessible games. Same is going to be true for you with your products.
What’s going on in Dean’s story has a lot of threads. One is what’s happened to games journalists. How many of you are familiar with the Let’s Play phenomenon on YouTube? If you aren’t, you should figure it out. YouTube and Twitch and platforms like that have exploded. Someone sitting in their room at home wanting to talk about a game, wanting to play through a game, wanting to just say, “Hey, I’m playing this game, come watch me,” is that games journalism? Hard to say. It’s bleeding over into what you do.
Above: Forbes’ list of top influencers. Mari Takahashi (gaming) is top left, Lilly Singh (entertainment) is top middle, King Bach (entertainment) is top right, Markiplier (gaming) is bottom left, Baby Ariel (entertainment) is middle bottom and Brian Kelly (travel) is bottom right.
Image Credit: Forbes
Takahashi: It’s part of what they call “influencers” now. Samsung has talked quite a bit about influencers here.
Kim: Right. So you have influencers who are not critical of a game. Influencers don’t necessarily review games. Influencers are more about spreading the word about games. They’re more like the marketing department. They’re not a separate critical voice. In fact, anybody who pays them can get a nice review. It’s clear what it’s about.
Then you have journalism, which is under attack from other sides right now in our political climate. Journalism is supposed to be dispassionate, honest, doing a service for customers and so on. But it’s changing. You have a journalist being very transparent, making a video that’s not necessarily very polished, but that video could have been made by an influencer on YouTube easily. Would they have gotten the hate? What do you think?
Takahashi: I don’t think they would have done it like I did. They would have played through 30 or 40 times until they got through and they were very good at it, and they would have captured that. High quality gameplay is what they would have posted. Maybe if they were a live streamer they would have taken more of a risk there and said, “Okay, I’ll roll the dice here and see if I can play this game competently while a thousand people watch me.” That’s not something I do. Who would want to watch someone who isn’t skillful?
Kim: That’s the interesting issue. Lots of these YouTubers are very skillful, but many of them are an avatar for the customer. They’ll play through and giggle at themselves – “Oh my God, I can’t believe that happened” – it’s all very entertaining and funny. My 10-year-old daughter watches these and learns a lot from them.
But then you have a journalist. People were attacking Dean and saying, “You’re not a real game journalist because you’re not an expert at this super hard game.” Now, Dean engaged with these people. He waded into Reddit and talked to them. [laughs] Here he is alive, surviving that horrific experience.
I would never have done that myself, and the reason is—my interpretation of this is, why the hell do you care about this tiny shrinking minority of hardcore gamers who want to argue with you about what a real gamer, a real journalist is? You have to be somehow magically expert at playing this ridiculously hard game to be taken seriously? That’s the point of view that got thrown at Dean.
I’m here to tell you that that is a shrinking minority, in the same way that, pardon me, white nationalists are a shrinking minority in our country. They are a minority. The demographics are changing. The overall attitudes are changing. Same thing with the game industry. I’m a woman. I’ve worked in the game industry for 20 years. Believe me, I have my stories about harassment. But mostly I’ve worked with awesome people and made awesome games. That’s most of what my stories are because I steered around those ridiculous idiots.
Above: Clinkle’s “Haters gonna hate” T-shirts, as shown in a 2014 video about a hackathon the company organized.
Takahashi: The devil’s advocate in me asks, well, what if I’m the idiot? You talk about super fans. These people I ran into, they kind of sound like your definition of super fans.
Kim: See, that’s where there’s a razor’s edge. It’s different. Super fans are, by definition, people that have a burning need for the thing that you’re building or that you have to offer, and the ability to give you feedback that can help you make it better. That’s my definition of a super fan.
My answer to you is, they’re made because you’re not representing them. But your job isn’t to represent them. Your job is to represent gamers of all kinds. If there are hundreds of thousands of gamers who would have just as much trouble as Dean would playing through that game, by showing that, Dean is representing all those gamers. He’s representing me. He’s not representing this narrow slice of gamers who want to say who’s a “real gamer” and who’s not based on their ability to play something arcane and hard.
I’ve met those people. I know those people. I’m not focusing my business on those people because, one, there’s a much bigger group of people who aren’t them. Two, they’re assholes. I don’t care what they think a real gamer is.
I had lunch with somebody—she used to be the head of product management at Slack. She told me, “I’m looking at new jobs right now and getting a bunch of people from the gaming industry, the hardcore gaming industry, wanting me to come in and interview for head of product. I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons since I was 15. I was in a D&D group with Stewart Butterfield, the head of Slack. These people still tell me I’m not a real gamer. I don’t even want to talk to them.” Here’s the thing. I don’t feel like you need them.
Above: Rock Band
Image Credit: EA
Takahashi: But these super fans–
Kim: Those aren’t super fans. Those are haters. Don’t get confused.
Takahashi: I wonder if you have two sides to something here: super fans and super haters. I remember somebody telling me that Sony’s product lead for the PlayStation in one country got death threats because Sony had to raise the price for the machine there. Those people cared enough about the PlayStation 4 that they would make death threats to someone who did something slightly negative. That’s a weird world we live in.
Kim: That’s so much the gamer world. We talked about Ultima Online earlier, perfect example. In Ultima Online we had super fans and super haters. The super haters were hacking our gold system, exploiting cheats. They were trying to take down our servers. They were posing as newbies, befriending other newbies, and then killing them to take their loot. They did all these things that made it tough for us.
The super fans were the people reporting them, the people saying, “Hey, you want to conscript us into a virtual army and we’ll go get them?” They are two sides of the same coin, but again, I want to give you guys something valuable as developers from this. Don’t be confused between your super haters and your super fans.
The super haters can sometimes be swayed. For example, in Ultima Online, some of our best security experts came from the hacker community. Classic. Not all of our hackers could be dissuaded, but sometimes, when we found somebody exploiting something, instead of going nuclear we would say, “Would you like a job interview?” It worked really well.
But here’s the thing. You and I don’t agree on this, but this is my advice to you. You have a lot of super fans. Your super fans are the people that love what you’re doing, that found it valuable that you were transparent, that jumped to your defense. Many people jumped to your defense, myself included. Your super fans are into what you’re doing and they want you to succeed and they can be, in a sense, your co-creators.
Your super haters want you to be doing something different than what you’re doing. It’s very hard, as a developer, as a creative person, to say, “I’ll listen to this person’s feedback and not that person.” I’m here to tell you, as someone who’s worked on five breakthrough worldwide hits, and then dozens that weren’t—a thing all those hits in common is that they all had haters, first of all. But we didn’t get freaked out by them and focus on them. We managed them, but we really focused on the people that we were serving. It was one of the hardest and one of the most important things in breaking through to a bigger level.
Above: Dean Takahashi and Amy Jo Kim.
Image Credit: Samsung
I’m not saying we ignored them completely. I’ll give you a good example. Ultima Online, for those of you who don’t know, was like a precursor to World of Warcraft. When we launched it we had done beta testing with all these super fans, people that loved it, people that loved Richard Garriott’s previous RPG games and their very interesting moral universe, blah blah blah. We had all these people that had gone to ren faires, people who would role-play. “Oh, milady, thou lookst beautiful this evening.” Stuff like that. We called them the “men in tights.”
Then we launched the game, and this was right around when Doom and Quake were big, with this reputation system we had tested with our super fans. Guess who came into the game? All the Doom and Quake people, 13 years old pretending to be older. The rule in Doom and Quake is shoot anything that moves. They came in wearing those same goggles to our beautiful thee-and-thou men-in-tights world. Boom. Big time problems. Maybe some of you were there.
What did we do? Did we kick out those people? No. But they were asking us for things. “You should do this. You should build this feature. You should add more blood.” That’s what they were asking for. We didn’t give it to them, though, because those weren’t the people we wanted to please.
That’s my message to you. I think it’s the same thing with these, my word, idiots who want to tell Dean that simply posting, “Hey, this was hard for me, this really weird arcane game”—people who think that makes him not a real game journalist, I believe, are living in the past. They wish they were living in a present where people like them were the majority. They’re not, and they’re pissed.
Above: Zoe Quinn’s book Crash Override chronicles her Gamergate experience and how she is fighting back.
Image Credit: Zoe Quinn
Question: What do you think about the trend toward more and more vocal negativity around games on the internet and social networks? We saw, a couple of years ago, women receiving death threats over their comments about women in games.
Takahashi: It’s been encapsulated by this phrase “Gamergate.” That’s been going on for a couple of years and been fairly relentless in the games industry.
Kim: It’s a cyclic thing. I agree that it is a trend, but it’s not new, any more than VR is new. It cycles back and forth. What’s happened with Gamergate is it got a name. It got a meme. Let’s talk about Milo, Dean, Milo and Gamergate. How many of you know about Milo Yiannopoulos? There’s a very weird, interesting confluence between Milo and Gamergate and these trends.
GamesBeat: Milo was an unknown journalist at Breitbart for a while. He wrote a story about a conspiracy among game journalists who would talk to each other and try to influence review scores or talk about problem people in the industry or show their biases against other people. I was part of this network of game journalists. It was a network of game journalists talking about freelance assignments and things like that.
Somebody gave Milo copies of the history of this networking group and he pulled out stuff that had to do with Gamergate and Zoe Quinn and all that. There were some very unguarded comments that journalists made about that, and so he wrote a story as a big expose of this conspiracy. Which, having been on the inside of it, I didn’t think was much of a conspiracy.
He became more famous because of that, and you can tell from the Buzzfeed story that ran just a week or so ago that went into all of Milo’s emails—he parlayed this into helping create the alt-right and doing their best to get Donald Trump elected president. It’s an interesting connection between—it’s Milo and Gamergate, Milo and the alt-right, Milo and Donald Trump. Steve Bannon, Breitbart’s chairman, was Donald Trump’s chief strategist.
Kim: My hope is that this trend is the death cry of nasty old racists, who see that they’re a dying breed, and that women and minorities and people of color are the future. Who cares if you’re a man or a woman or what color you are? Can you make a game? Can you write code? Can you make art? This trend, and it is a trend, is rising concurrently with power shifting in the gaming world and in the political world away from these men, and they’re grabbing it back.
Takahashi: You see it as a death knell, then?
Kim: I see it as a death knell. That’s my hopeful vision.
Question: Aside from the conflict between super haters and super fans, what do you think about this question of, what kind of gamer should a game journalist be? A game like Cuphead is hard because it was made to be hard. Shouldn’t a journalist covering that kind of game be the more hardcore kind of gamer, someone who plays that kind of game?
Takahashi: The phrase “game journalist” just isn’t very precise. I haven’t been, say, reviewing games day in and day out for 20 years. I’ve been writing business stories and technology stories about games. I’ve been going to preview events and playing games at some of them, but my pattern is to play something for a few days and move on. There are games that I get into and I play and I review, but that’s less frequent. I just did Middle-Earth: Shadow of War for about 60 hours and finished it.
We have other people who tend to be the experts in particular areas. We had one of those guys, Mike Minotti, finish Cuphead and then write the review. That’s the way it should be. If you’re doing a formal review and giving it a score, definitely, you want someone who’s skillful enough to see the whole game to review it. There’s no question about that. We abide by that.
I was making a self-deprecating video as a preview of Cuphead, right? We didn’t apply that some rigor to whether I should do that or not. There’s always some value in showing people what a game is like before it comes out. In fact, if you look at game marketing campaigns, they’ve stretched out for years now. Assassin’s Creed: Origins will probably have a dozen trailers go up before the game ships on October 27. It’s part of the landscape. But there is a very big difference in being able to just play a game in a preview and finish the whole thing.
Some games are more difficult. We review a lot fewer MMOs than we do single-player campaigns. In that case we would say, “We played this MMO for 30 hours. Here’s what the experience was like.” We wouldn’t necessarily give it a score. We’d give our opinion of it, whether we think it’s worth your time or not, but the score element is very hard to give to MMOs. I imagine that you ran into this in creating MMOs as well.
Above: Amy Jo Kim says listen to your Super Fans, not Super Haters.
Image Credit: Samsung
Kim: Oh, yes. But it’s an interesting question as far as, what is the job of a game journalist? You look at it in the context of the YouTube and Twitch era—I think it goes back to, well, who is your audience? As a product designer, because that’s what I am in part, I always go back to that. If people want to attack me I can say, “You know what, this isn’t for you.” If people want to spend their time attacking Dean for making a lighthearted video, you want to say, “Really? Why is that worth your time?” You could go online and find 50 YouTubers who could review it who are nerd experts.
What’s happened in journalism now is that there are so many channels. There are so many different reviews. There are reviews for kids, reviews for adults, professional journalists, YouTubers at home. The people who decide they’re going to attack somebody, as opposed to just finding something else that’s more interesting to them—my point is that there’s something going on with that person. It’s not just “ethics in journalism,” the thing they used to talk about. It’s about being an asshole and wanting to attack someone. You could just go look somewhere else. It’s not like there’s three channels and you have to pick one.
Question: Should there be higher expectations of journalists? When I go to someone’s YouTube channel, I just expect to see someone playing a game. I don’t assume that’s their job. A journalist is trained. Maybe you went to school to do that kind of job. Should there be more expected of someone like that?
Takahashi: We probably didn’t put enough context into our video on YouTube. We just had a couple of lines describing it: “This is shameful gameplay.” We embedded the video into a story that explained it more. But the story was also missing some of that context as well. That might have calmed everybody down. But most people came into the video through someone who tweeted about it and cut out two minutes of it, just focusing on those two minutes. That was their context for getting into this issue. Very few people actually came in through the story I’d written.
So yes, there is a responsibility. Yes, we should provide context. Yes, we should explain exactly what we’re doing. We were sort of naïve about posting this, not realizing that someone else with their own agenda could come in to try to draw attention to themselves by taking it out of context.
Kim: There’s a larger moral to the story, though, that’s relevant for all of you. If you find yourself with haters, you’re probably doing something interesting. They’re not going to bother unless they want a little bit of your juice.
Question: How do you respond to these kinds of haters? Do you post another video showing yourself finishing the game?
Takahashi: The very next stories that I wrote, I talked about finishing a couple of games, popular games. I finished Shadow of War. Cuphead is probably not a game I can finish. [laughs] I think everyone has different tastes. There’s nothing—my reason for posting something like I did was that I think there’s nothing invalid about taking a fresh look at something. It exposes you to things that might be problems, things that people with jaded eyes wouldn’t see.
If you’re a jaded product designer who knows exactly who they’re designing for — these people are jaded consumers as well – you miss the opportunity to reach people outside of that realm. You miss the opportunity to get newcomers or people who had never had an idea that this product might be useful to them. Looking at something with a fresh eye is very instructive. That’s one thing we do regularly. Your fresh look with no prior knowledge—whether it’s a game that you have no idea how to play, and you analyze the onboarding—how good was that tutorial for Cuphead? I don’t think it was outstanding. [laughs]
That’s the product design lesson. I’m not going to blame a product designer for problems I had, but they should be aware that it’s possible to make this mistake as you go into the product. The people who make that mistake might not stick with that product for very long.
Above: A man and his troll.
Image Credit: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Question: I had a question about economics in the industry, since you mentioned Shadow of War. I’ve seen a lot of reviews talking about how part of the single-player game involves putting more money in to get past this long slog in part of it. I’ve noticed a trend toward single-player games that get to a point where you have to put in more money over the $60 that you initially paid.
Takahashi: And that goes hand in hand with the news from yesterday that Electronic Arts closed down Visceral Games. They were making a Star Wars game by Amy Hennig, the creator of Uncharted. She was creating a single-player linear campaign game, and they felt like, in deciding to shut it down, that’s not where the market is right now.
They have, in the past, praised a lot of games with live operations, things like loot crates, things you can monetize over a long time. FIFA has its Ultimate Team mode. Battlefield has ongoing downloadable content. Those games are making billions of dollars for Electronic Arts. And then they make this opportunity cost decision: here’s a team working on a game that’s going to sell so many copies in a week and then never be played again. It just declines from there. The choice for them is, do you want this team to continue doing that or not?
Shadow of War gets into this question of, do they force people to buy loot crates by putting a key part of the ending of the story behind 20 missions that were really difficult and grindy? You could get through those missions more easily if you bought some things, but you could also just play all the way through. Shadow of War has a campaign that stretches across 60-something missions or so, but yes, 20 of them have nothing to do with the story.
It was also an artifact of the way Shadow of War was designed. Those 20 missions might be viewed as a grind, but they’re actually very dynamic and fluid missions. The orcs you capture and take control of, their personalities change over time. If you kill them once they might come back as an undead orc and they’ll say something like, “You killed me that first time, but now I’m gonna get you.” As you replay these kinds of missions, you get a different result, a different story out of the orc captains you’re fighting against.
They felt like, for people who really love this gameplay system, what they call their nemesis system, it isn’t a grind. It’s a key part of what makes the game different and entertaining. So it wasn’t, to them, a big deal to put an extra ending behind these nemesis missions. I don’t know. It’s an interesting choice that they made. But it did force players to, say, appreciate what you could get out of those 20 missions and that nemesis system.
Kim: This is touching on a larger question. The much larger-scale trend going on in games and in software is software as a service as opposed to packaged software, one-time sales. Not everyone does that. You can still buy one-shot packaged software. But more and more what you’re seeing is experiments with a service-based model. Often it involves some sort of community or multiplayer environment, or not always. On a larger scale, that’s what people want because of recurring revenue versus one-time revenue. It’s a business decision.
When it’s done well it benefits both the customer, the player, and the company. When it’s poorly done people don’t buy into it and it doesn’t succeed. When I look at the clients that come to me and the business models they’re developing all over the world, they’re all service-based. That’s in part because it’s my specialty, multiplayer game design. But if you’re a developer it’s something you should absolutely be looking at. I don’t see that trend stopping or slowing down in the games industry. I see it accelerating.
Above: Covet Fashion’s model line-up is multiracial. Amy Jo Kim worked on the game.
Image Credit: CrowdStar/Glu
Takahashi: I am worried about something I would call management by analyzing opportunity costs. Hollywood, for a while, they realized that they were spending $90 million to make a movie and getting $100 million back. This isn’t a good business. They looked at games and thought, “Hey, we can make a game for $10 million and get that same $100 million. Let’s go make games.” All the Hollywood companies started making games.
Then mobile games come along and they see that some of these mobile games can make a billion dollar. Supercell is a good example, a company that’s made more than a billion dollars from games like Clash of Clans or Clash Royale. You can make something like that for all of $2 million. So the Hollywood guys think, “Let’s quit making console games and go do mobile games.” You see this unending search for the next opportunity, not realizing that the most entertaining thing was what they were originally doing, making original intellectual properties for the movies. Mobile games aren’t necessarily going to be more fun than the movies they were making in the first place.
Kim: There’s another punch line, which is that it’s not very hard to make a game, but it’s really hard to make a good game.
Foundational blockchain, envisioned as a decentralized online marketplace network, announces advisory board for the new technology
DALLAS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–October 24, 2017–
CyberMiles, a new blockchain network designed and optimized for commercial applications, has concluded the private stage investment opportunity leading up to its initial coin offering, slated to begin Nov. 21. Empowering the decentralization of the online marketplace, CyberMiles is raising millions to fund the development of its groundbreaking technology.
In addition to concluding the private stage round, CyberMiles has announced the formation of an advisory board comprised of well-connected, influential leaders in technology, finance and venture capital. The diverse slate of advisors and contributors includes experienced men and women of different races and backgrounds, along with notables such as Amanda Bush of St. Augustine Capital Partners.
“We’re excited to welcome an exceptional board of advisors to help guide CyberMiles to fruition,” Dr. Lucas Lu, CyberMiles’ initiator and the founder/C.E.O. of the 5miles marketplace, said. “As a public blockchain network that is breaking ground with ‘smart business contract’ modules, CyberMiles can benefit greatly from our advisors’ expertise as well as the funding needed to power this initiative forward.”
CyberMiles’ blockchain technology is emerging from 5xlab, 5miles’ blockchain development laboratory. 5miles is expected to be the first platform to use CyberMiles’ blockchain protocol, itself intended to be a major mainstream blockchain technology for real-world businesses.
The modular solutions that are a hallmark of CyberMiles have protocols for 12 key commercial applications and more than 300 sub-categories of transaction types widely in use. These cover a large portion of potential online marketplace and e-commerce applications via smart business contracts.
“The purpose of CyberMiles is to bring practical blockchain technology to the fore,” Garwin Chan, C.F.O. of 5miles/CyberMiles, said. “Developing commercial apps that are more effective and transparent is what we’re after, something that will benefit both marketplace businesses and consumers.”
5miles, for its part, is committed to migrating its existing 12 million users (along with more than with $3 billion in transactions annually) to CyberMiles. The user identity, credit history, reputation, and transaction history data all can be encrypted and recorded on the CyberMiles blockchain, enabling a wide range of business applications for partners like 5miles.
As one of the most popular shopping apps for both Android and iOS devices, 5miles is the first app of its kind to offer a full-category, hyper-local marketplace experience with access to a variety of goods as well as services, housing and jobs: real items from real people in real time-all within five miles.
To learn more about or to register for CyberMiles’ upcoming ICO, visit cm.5miles.com. To join the CyberMiles community online, go to t.me/cybermilestoken.
About CyberMiles
CyberMiles is a new decentralized blockchain protocol optimized for business transactions. Initiated in the fall of 2017 by 5xlab, a blockchain development laboratory, CyberMiles uses innovative “smart business contract” modules to facilitate and process transactions simply, effectively, and with transparency. This technology focuses on commercial applications with protocols that ensure the appropriate balance between vertical effectiveness and network compatibility. Learn more at cm.5miles.com.
About 5miles
5miles is a free, local marketplace app, one of the fastest-growing online shopping ventures in the United States. The app is the first of its kind to include services, housing and jobs, in addition to second-hand trading. 5miles launched in January 2015, immediately setting itself apart with an easy-to-use mobile interface, identity verification capabilities (for added safety and security), mobile payment and shipping options, and a hyper-local curation of offerings users can search-all within their very own neighborhoods. Since then, buyers and sellers in every major market coast-to-coast have transacted more than $5 billion in merchandise through 5miles, which Google Play has ranked a top 10 shopping app. Visit 5miles.com.
Almost nine years after Bitcoin launched, trading cryptocurrency with fiat currencies remains difficult and expensive, with the space dominated by centralized exchanges charging high transaction fees and not always delivering the user experience and level of service you expect.
Exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken (and many more like them) force you to go through time-consuming anti-money laundering and know-your-customer (KYC) processes before they allow you to trade any significant amounts. After submitting your photo ID and other documents, you’re often left waiting weeks for the exchange to process your request, due to difficulties they have handling the influx of new users. When your identity has been verified and you want to deposit or withdraw funds, you have to deal with the long waiting times of international bank transfers, and the processing fees from the exchange. For anyone doing frequent or large transactions, these fees add up.
The many incidents of exchanges losing or misplacing customer funds — Mt. Gox in 2014 being the biggest and most famous breach, with Bitfinex last year on second place — have given the exchanges a bad reputation among both traders and holders of cryptocurrency, who refrain from storing their coins on the exchanges when possible.
Since 2012, Finnish Bitcoin startup company LocalBitcoins has been facilitating over-the-counter trading of local currencies for Bitcoin. The peer-to-peer exchange is like eBay for Bitcoin, giving users the opportunity to securely buy and sell Bitcoins to and from each other for free. You can sell your Bitcoin via multitude of payment methods without having to give anyone your ID, making it the preferred option for buyers and sellers who value their privacy.
Now Localethereum is promising to do the same for buying and selling Ether as LocalBitcoins did for Bitcoin. The service is opening for trading today and has 15,000 pre-registered users. However, unlike its Bitcoin counterpart, Localethereum will be a completely decentralized service (there won’t be an ICO though) where the user retains full control at all times. Where LocalBitcoins acts as an escrow/arbitrator, the team behind Localethereum wants to achieve the same through use of Ethereum smart contracts so you won’t have to trust anyone at Localethereum. They can’t read your messages or access your funds. Localethereum asserts that it will become the most secure marketplace crypto has seen. It won’t be free to use, though. The company will charge sellers a 0.25 percent fee and will charge buyers 0.75 percent. This is still well below exchanges like Coinbase and others.
(One side note about Localethereum: It has so far refused to disclose where it is based.)
Trading Bitcoin and Ether over services like LocalBitcoins and Localethereum is one of the most private and secure ways available. In some countries it’s also the only way to trade cryptocurrency. Add to this the flexibility in accepted payment methods and the fact that these services impose no buying or selling limits, and they certainly have advantages over centralized exchanges.
However, trading on these services works based on trust between buyers and sellers. Buying is usually very easy and safe, but when selling you need to use caution. There are many scammers and most of them will use new accounts or accounts with little history so make sure you select well rated buyers and maybe also request an ID from them. Also, when making over-the-counter trades, remember that it’s your responsibility to ensure you comply with your local regulations.
Cryptocurrency adoption, which at this point is mostly limited to buying/speculating, is growing, especially among tech-savvy millennials, and the emergence of a service like Localethereum is definitely a sign that Ethereum is becoming more mainstream every day. It’s not, however, a sign that cryptocurrencies in general are. After all, this is a service to trade your crypto into fiat currencies.
Full disclosure: I have no association with or financial interest in LocalBitcoins or Localethereum.
Trond Vidar Bjorøy is head of product development and implementation – Nordics at travel management company ATPI. He became interested in blockchain due to its applications in the travel industry but now tracks ICOs and emerging blockchain projects across a variety of industries.
Media publisher Steel Media is seeking nominees for its first annual Mobile Games Awards. Anyone can nominate games or studios for consideration before the November 6 deadline, and there is no submission fee. It will announce the winners January 23 at Pocket Gamer Connects London 2018, an annual industry event for mobile games.
Steel Media owns a number of media sites that focus on the business of gaming, such as Pocket Gamer, an industry site that covers mobile. The Mobile Games Awards aims to also recognize industry excellence, and folks can nominate candidates for categories such as the Best Recruitment Agency and Best Analytics/Data Tool.
Mobile games are a $108.9 billion market that will grow to $128.5 billion by 2020, according to market researcher Newzoo. They also recently surpassed PC and console sales for the first time ever. Though it’s a segment that has a reputation for attracting only casual gamers, it actually has a lot of variety that ranges from more hardcore games like Super Evil Megacorp‘s multiplayer online battle arena Vainglory to minimalist puzzlers like the Ustwo Games’s hit titles Monument Valley and Monument Valley 2.
Companies like Google are actively courting indies to develop for its Google Play store. The second annual Indie Games Festival was just last month, and its new Infinite Deviation program is aimed toward bringing diverse voices onto its platform.
The categories for Steel Media’s Mobile Game Awards are:
The current chronology Silicon Valley hardware startups typically follow is slow and disordered. But that could change with a new incubation model emerging from an unlikely group: China’s global hardware manufacturers (OEMs).
Usually, when launching a hardware business, startups make prototypes, then raise capital so they can fund production. They then often turn to China, where they begin the arduous process of identifying and trying out multiple suppliers, manufacturers, and logistics companies. After a time-consuming and, frankly, painful process of speed-dating, fraught with miscommunication, startups will choose their partners. These relationships are transactional in nature, which means, right from the onset, there is a fundamental misalignment of interests between volume on the supply side and quality, brand equity, and sustainable growth on the startup side. Without pushing large volume, startups are unable to command quality from the supply chain. Eventually a product is produced and brought to market, though it’s not always the intended, original design.
Take Kickstarter campaigns, for example. Of the campaigns that successfully deliver product, only about 15 percent ship on time. Many more never come to mass production. Lily, the drone startup, is notorious for failing to produce after raising $34 million in a crowdfunding campaign. Even VC-backed, well-funded American hardware companies struggle to align their designs with production processes and cost realities. Nest, Pebble, and Jawbone are all examples of Silicon Valley-backed hot brand names that struggled to play the hardware game as prescribed by U.S. VC rhetoric.
Meanwhile, China is well-known for its hardware manufacturing capabilities. More than 90 percent of the world’s electronics move through China at some point during their production processes. This reputation as the world’s assembly line masks two things: China has best-in-class, large-scale industrial production know-how, and Chinese companies have incredible engineering prowess that is reality-based, not theoretical. Many of these manufacturing goliaths are hungry to move beyond their low-margin wheelhouse.
The dawn of something new
This desire of China’s manufacturing goliaths to be more than hired labor gives startups an alternative to the traditional Silicon Valley VC path. By taking their prototypes directly to manufacturers and taking a small seed round from those companies, startups are able to tear down many of the barriers that continually plague Silicon Valley hardware companies. When the supplier has skin in the game, several interests align, as the potential profit-sharing from a startup’s success can be far beyond a nominal manufacturing margin. The supplier now has an incentive to keep production costs low, a disincentive to work with any competitors or abuse the IP, a sense of responsibility to maintain the highest quality controls, and an urgency to bring the product to market as quickly as possible.
Aligning interests with a supply chain partner, startups can leverage the partner to buy up/lease all the production capacity needed at below-market production rates. Startups are creating products that engineers have put together using the best materials and best possible traits of existing products. It’s a combination that has enabled startups to create a completely new and unique model and open up a brand new product segment that didn’t exist before, more quickly than ever before.
This trend is logically more prominent in manufacturing-capital intensive industries. Sunwoda, China’s largest consumer battery pack manufacturer has invested in two prominent Chinese startups, Anker and JieDian, for example. SCUD, the second largest in the battery pack space, has invested in LaiDian and Xiaole. With manufacturing secured and products already on the market, these companies can later turn to VCs for growth money at more advantageous valuations. This is done instead of diluting valuations simply to raise VC money in order to bargain with manufacturers on R&D costs and bridge cash flow gaps on early production runs. Moreover, when the manufacturers are on the startup’s side, they can help optimize costs, mitigate frequent production errors, and extend payment terms on early production. It’s difficult for VCs to match that platform, and these Chinese startups have begun to realize that fact first.
Global startups starting to follow suit
When my company began designing our first product, we sought out our supply chain partners prior to even incorporating. At the inception level, we gave minority equity stakes to SCUD, who I mentioned above, and ESID, a consumer electronics industrial design firm. These supply chain partners became not just suppliers or investors but rather prideful founding members of the team at the initial incorporation stage. They have incubated and guided our supply chain every step of the way, working with us, not for us. In less than 11 months we designed, developed, produced, and shipped 5,000 units of our first product, a sophisticated energy storage system, to 21 countries. We have also shipped a full range of accessories and are in pre-production for a second product launch; and we have hired more than 10 full-time employees. To date, we have yet to raise a round of angel or VC funding.
Gi FlyBike is another exemplary pioneering global startup – an e-bike company founded by a group of Argentinians. After a successful crowdfunding campaign, Gi Flybike took its designs to Yadea Technology Group, the global leader in e-bike manufacturing with nearly two decades of history. The manufacturer sells more than three million e-bikes to five continents, with almost 15 percent global market share. The Gi FlyBike R&D team is currently based inside the Yadea Technology Group manufacturing plant, entering its first mass production stage.
Startups that hatch ready to hit the market
We are at the beginning of a new era of Chinese and Chinese-Western startups that hatch ready to hit the market. The needs of these companies are, and will be, different. They are able to leverage locals in China’s manufacturing centers with strong knowledge of the supply chain as well as experienced founders who know the end markets. They are creating new value in unused capacity, in back-of-envelope sketches and offbeat ideas from some great engineers.
While this OEM incubation model could, and will, be replicated around the world, rich and hungry Chinese OEMs are probably the most ready to engage today. It will be difficult for Western manufacturers to compete with the cost, speed, niche specialization, and production scale of the new China.
There is a new cadence for global hardware companies, and it doesn’t have to start in Silicon Valley with venture capitalists.
Have your headlines been doing some heavy lifting? If you've been using one headline to serve multiple audiences, you're missing out on some key optimization opportunities. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand gives you a process for writing headlines for SEO, for social media, and for your website visitors — each custom-tailored to its audience and optimized to meet different goals.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about writing headlines. One of the big problems that headlines have is that they need to serve multiple audiences. So it's not just ranking and search engines. Even if it was, the issue is that we need to do well on social media. We need to serve our website visitors well in order to rank in the search engines. So this gets very challenging.
I've tried to illustrate this with a Venn diagram here. So you can see, basically...
SEO
In the SEO world of headline writing, what I'm trying to do is rank well, earn high click-through rate, because I want a lot of those visitors to the search results to choose my result, not somebody else's. I want low pogo-sticking. I don't want anyone clicking the back button and choosing someone else's result because I didn't fulfill their needs. I need to earn links, and I've got to have engagement.
Social media
On the social media side, it's pretty different actually. I'm trying to earn amplification, which can often mean the headline tells as much of the story as possible. Even if you don't read the piece, you amplify it, you retweet it, and you re-share it. I'm looking for clicks, and I'm looking for comments and engagement on the post. I'm not necessarily too worried about that back button and the selection of another item. In fact, time on site might not even be a concern at all.
Website visitors
For website visitors, both of these are channels that drive traffic. But for the site itself, I'm trying to drive right visitors, the ones who are going to be loyal, who are going to come back, hopefully who are going to convert. I want to not confuse anyone. I want to deliver on my promise so that I don't create a bad brand reputation and detract from people wanting to click on me in the future. For those of you have visited a site like Forbes or maybe even a BuzzFeed and you have an association of, "Oh, man, this is going to be that clickbait stuff. I don't want to click on their stuff. I'm going to choose somebody else in the results instead of this brand that I remember having a bad experience with."
Notable conflicts
There are some notable direct conflicts in here.
Keywords for SEO can be really boring on social media sites. When you try and keyword stuff especially or be keyword-heavy, your social performance tends to go terribly.
Creating mystery on social, so essentially not saying what the piece is truly about, but just creating an inkling of what it might be about harms the clarity that you need for search in order to rank well and in order to drive those clicks from a search engine. It also hurts your ability generally to do keyword targeting.
The need for engagement and brand reputation that you've got for your website visitors is really going to hurt youif you're trying to develop those clickbait-style pieces that do so well on social.
In search, ranking for low-relevance keywords is going to drive very unhappy visitors, people who don't care that just because you happen to rank for this doesn't necessarily mean that you should, because you didn't serve the visitor intent with the actual content.
Getting to resolution
So how do we resolve this? Well, it's not actually a terribly hard process. In 2017 and beyond, what's nice is that search engines and social and visitors all have enough shared stuff that, most of the time, we can get to a good, happy resolution.
Step one: Determine who your primary audience is, your primary goals, and some prioritization of those channels.
You might say, "Hey, this piece is really targeted at search. If it does well on social, that's fine, but this is going to be our primary traffic driver." Or you might say, "This is really for internal website visitors who are browsing around our site. If it happens to drive some traffic from search or social, well that's fine, but that's not our intent."
Step two: For non-conflict elements, optimize for the most demanding channel.
For those non-conflicting elements, so this could be the page title that you use for SEO, it doesn't always have to perfectly match the headline. If it's a not-even-close match, that's a real problem, but an imperfect match can still be okay.
So what's nice in social is you have things like Twitter cards and the Facebook markup, graph markup. That Open Graph markup means that you can have slightly different content there than what you might be using for your snippet, your meta description in search engines. So you can separate those out or choose to keep those distinct, and that can help you as well.
Step three: Author the straightforward headline first.
I'm going to ask you author the most straightforward version of the headline first.
Step four: Now write the social-friendly/click-likely version without other considerations.
Is to write the opposite of that, the most social-friendly or click-likely/click-worthy version. It doesn't necessarily have to worry about keywords. It doesn't have to worry about accuracy or telling the whole story without any of these other considerations.
Step five: Merge 3 & 4, and add in critical keywords.
We're going to take three and four and just merge them into something that will work for both, that compromises in the right way, compromises based on your primary audience, your primary goals, and then add in the critical keywords that you're going to need.
Examples:
I've tried to illustrate this a bit with an example. Nest, which Google bought them years ago and then they became part of the Alphabet Corporation that Google evolved into. So Nest is separately owned by Alphabet, Google's parent company. Nest came out with this new alarm system. In fact, the day we're filming this Whiteboard Friday, they came out with a new alarm system. So they're no longer just a provider of thermostats inside of houses. They now have something else.
Step one: So if I'm a tech news site and I'm writing about this, I know that I'm trying to target gadget and news readers. My primary channel is going to be social first, but secondarily search engines. The goal that I'm trying to reach, that's engagement followed by visits and then hopefully some newsletter sign-ups to my tech site.
Step two: My title and headline in this case probably need to match very closely. So the social callouts, the social cards and the Open Graph, that can be unique from the meta description if need be or from the search snippet if need be.
Step three: I'm going to do step three, author the straightforward headline. That for me is going to be "Nest Has a New Alarm System, Video Doorbell, and Outdoor Camera." A little boring, probably not going to tremendously well on social, but it probably would do decently well in search.
Step four: My social click-likely version is going to be something more like "Nest is No Longer Just a Thermostat. Their New Security System Will Blow You Away." That's not the best headline in the universe, but I'm not a great headline writer. However, you get the idea. This is the click-likely social version, the one that you see the headline and you go, "Ooh, they have a new security system. I wonder what's involved in that." You create some mystery. You don't know that it includes a video doorbell, an outdoor camera, and an alarm. You just hear, "They've got a new security system. Well, I better look at it."
Step five: Then I can try and compromise and say, "Hey, I know that I need to have video doorbell, camera, alarm, and Nest." Those are my keywords. Those are the important ones. That's what people are going to be searching for around this announcement, so I've got to have them in there. I want to have them close to the front. So "Nest's New Alarm, Video Doorbell and Camera Are About to Be on Every Home's Must-Have List." All right, resolved in there.
So this process of writing headlines to serve these multiple different, sometimes competing priorities is totally possible with nearly everything you're going to do in SEO and social and for your website visitors. This resolution process is something hopefully you can leverage to get better results.
All right, everyone, we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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Before a meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron today, Apple CEO Tim Cook made a surprise visit to a small company that’s providing crucial optical recognition technology for the iPhone X.
Eldim, based near the Normandy town of Caen, has been making various types of display technology for more than 30 years. More recently, this has evolved into making components that allow for “optical analysis of angular characteristics.” Apparently, a version of this technology is one of the critical components being used in the new Face ID system for the iPhone X.
Local reporters were invited to tag along for the visit, which they documented on Twitter and blog posts. A reporter for Ouest-France noted that executives said the two companies had actually been working together for almost a decade, mostly in an R&D capacity. It was only with the release of the iPhone X that the facial recognition system is being baked into a product, however.
Eldim CEO Thierry Leroux told reporters that working with Apple was “an incredible adventure,” but added that there have also been huge technical challenges over the years. “For us, it was a little like sending someone to the moon,” Leroux told reporters. Cook responded, “It’s great what you have done for us.”
The visit was no doubt a thrill for Eldim’s 42 employees. It was also likely a diplomatic move by Cook, who is scheduled to meet with Macron at 4:15 p.m. CET today. The official agenda for their meeting has not been disclosed, but it’s likely to cover the question of Apple’s tax payments in France, and in Europe in general.
While Macron has cultivated a pro-tech and pro-entrepreneur reputation, he also has been fiercely critical of American tech companies not paying sufficient taxes. Apple is facing a demand to pay $15 billion in taxes to Ireland following a European Union investigation that found the company’s tax structure there violated EU competition rules.
Macron is among the European leaders pressing the EU to develop a new taxation scheme for tech giants that would make it more difficult for them to duck taxes by creating elaborate systems of corporate shell companies.
Cook and other leaders have been eager to highlight the positive economic impact their companies provide in terms of job creation across Europe. The visit to Eldim serves as just one such example.
Cook got a little ribbing by the French on Twitter for this tweet.
It should read: “Bravo pour votre travail!” He deleted that one and posted a corrected version:
Thanks to my friends at Eldim, a team of talented engineers and craftspeople helping make iPhone possible. Bravo pour votre travail! http://pic.twitter.com/hEpxD3iBGf
An Israeli District Court recently ruled that Israeli banks are not obligated to provide financial services to companies whose primary business is trading in cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. The Court reasoned that banks should not have to assume the risks associated with providing a financial platform to these digital currency businesses when the leading Israeli authorities on the subject, namely the Central Bank, the Securities Authority, and the Anti-Money Laundering and Terror Financing Authority, themselves have been struggling to delineate clear measures to minimize them.
One of the primary risks Israeli authorities and other regulators around the globe noted is the pseudo-anonymous nature of cryptocurrency holdings. Regulators view the digital token transfer method as a “black box”, low in accountability and virtually impossible to subject to existing anti-money laundering (AML) and anti-terror financing regulations. However, built-in features of cryptocurrencies, specifically their underlying blockchain technology, have the potential to improve, not harm, AML efforts, even surpassing mechanisms already in place today.
The growing tension between the fast-growing cryptocurrency industry and AML guidelines is fueled by several factors, beyond Bitcoin’s somewhat misguided reputation as a favorite of hackers and criminals, the primary of which is its structure. The current AML system was originally tailored to address existing centralized financial services systems. By default, these guidelines cannot account for a finance system based on intrinsic anonymity. Rather, AML relies on the ability to monitor and exploit the Know Your Client (KYC) process, identifying information that every financial institution is required to account for by law.
The AML monitoring mechanisms currently in place attribute every transaction to a preidentified legal entity. Data tracked in a fiat money paper-trail includes: (a) the financial system entry point, i.e. opening bank account, and (b) any transaction within the system, for example, sending money from one bank account to another or use of swift platforms. The systems then monitor the financial activity, evaluate the AML risks associated with such transactions, and follow up with any relevant notifications and reports. Use of the financial proceeds of a crime, when identified, can be easily attributed to a particular person.
Critics of cryptocurrencies point to the lack of identifying information throughout digital transactions as a substantial obstacle to existing AML surveillance and enforcement capabilities. However, all of the essential regulatory and enforcement elements — identifying parties and information, a record of the transaction, and even enforcement — can exist in the cryptocurrency system. It’s all a matter of adjusting perspective.
First, a cryptocurrency accounts for the identity of its users both at the beginning and end of transactions through digital wallets. Tokens are stored in electronic wallets instead of bank accounts. Only the wallet owner has access to his or her wallet. The owner can send and accept tokens from one wallet to another by providing the identification code of their wallet to the other side of the transaction. The code itself acts as a key, eliminating the need for names or other types of identification. So while the transaction itself is seemingly anonymous, in most countries today, you need to undergo the process of KYC in order to open a new digital wallet. (Just as one example, Coinbase’s legal disclaimer notes that it may check account information associated with your linked bank account among other possible background checks, and the 2017 Global CryptoCurrency Benchmarking Study asserts that all wallets converting national currency to crypotcurrency perform such checks.) So by virtue of owning a digital wallet, even without necessarily using it, your anonymity is compromised.
Nevertheless, in some places, you can still open a wallet without going through a proper identification process, which may allow “dirty money” into the system. “Dirty money” and other issues like coin-join and “smurfing”, make it difficult to attribute a financial transaction to a specific legal entity, presenting a problem still in need of a solution.
One possibility is the expansion of KYC as a worldwide prerequisite to issuing global e-wallets, thereby prohibiting token transfer to a wallet that does not meet that standard. Considering there is only one type of entry and exit point, unlike the multiple exchange platforms available in the fiat system, cryptocurrency could conceivably enhance identity tracking capability.
This kind of solution would require consensus by key players in the industry and complementary regulation. The recent upswing in new KYC requirements for new and existing wallet owners internationally suggests such standardization could be crucial for ensuring the proper functioning of the growing future cryptocurrency industry.
Additionally, thanks to blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies inherently have the potential to reduce AML risks when compared with fiat currencies. The blockchain is an online public ledger, where each transaction is supervised, validated, and recorded as a complete transaction history.
Public ledger viewers and crypto miners are immediately notified of any transfer from one holder to another. Furthermore, unlike counterfeit hard currency, which governments spend significant sums trying to combat, cryptocurrencies are almost impossible to forge, as they each carry their own unique characteristics, which are verified from end to end by miners (“miners” being the computers on which individuals and mining groups are running the blockchain). Without verification of all transaction phases, including the departure wallet, the destination wallet, and the currency type and amount, the transaction is blocked instantaneously without any human supervision. In this sense, the digital trail could better serve AML regulations than the existing fiat paper trail.
The structure of blockchain is not the only characteristic of the cryptocurrency system that benefits AML efforts. Crypto miners, which act as de facto enforcement, are integral to the system as well. Once a validation is announced to the network, miners “check the math,” and a block is added to the ledger only when the required number of miners has verified the transaction. Similarly, the blockchain protocol could be revised to limit transactions to KYC-verified wallets only. All transactions could be traced back to an identified e-wallet. Moreover, AML risk analysis and alert and report-generating mechanisms could be integrated within the crypto system instead of monitoring only the entry and exit points.
As cryptocurrencies gain mainstream public attention and more individuals put their skin in the game, addressing AML challenges has become crucial. At the core of the crypto system, blockchain technology’s inherent characteristics offer a platform to address, if not overcome, these challenges altogether. Evidently, there will be a price associated with such a move in the form of higher transaction costs and less anonymity. But it’s a price worth paying for the purpose of allowing cryptocurrencies to carry onward and change the face of money as we know it.
With the cost of global AML measures currently estimated at over $10 billion annually, the Israeli authorities as well as law and policymakers worldwide would be prudent to look before they leap, ensuring their good intentions to protect financial intuitions and citizens don’t end up blocking a technology that could provide a return on investment that far surpasses the price of transitional uncertainty.
In 2010, J.Ed Marston — then the vice president of marketing for the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce — was tasked with pitching new media outlets about one of the city’s latest high-tech offerings. The city’s utility provider, Electrical Power Board of Chattanooga, had created its own fiber optic network that was capable of delivering internet speeds of 1 gigabit per second to all residents.
The problem that Marston encountered wasn’t that media outlets weren’t interested — it was that not everyone believed that a city the size of Chattanooga (population 177,571) could have created their own fiber network with internet speeds that fast.
“I had to get EPB to write out a technical spec that I could provide to people…to prove that we actually had what we said we had,” Marston recalls.
Today, the city has become synonymous with its homegrown fiber network, earning the nickname “Gig City.” My GamesBeat colleague Stephanie Chan recently covered Chattanooga’s latest event — TenGig, an esports festival taking place October 6-8 — that leverages the city’s fiber optic network, which now can deliver speeds of up to 10 gigabites per second. But the TenGig festival represents just one of a number of ways that Chattanooga has sought to use the gig as a recruiting tool.
While Chattanooga has been praised for its quickly growing tech community, not all of the city’s residents are seeing equal benefits from the tech boom. However, what Chattanooga has succeeded at is taking one component of a tech ecosystem — fast, reliable internet — and used it as a building block for some of the pieces of a strong tech ecosystem that the city was previously lacking.
“Infrastructure is a starting point, but it’s really what you do with it that makes the ultimate difference,” says Marston, now the vice president of marketing for EPB.
In 2013, when Chattanooga’s current Mayor Andy Berke was first elected, he launched a series of task forces aimed at improving certain aspects of entertainment, business, and infrastructure in Chattanooga, including one focused on applications of the gig, tech, and entrepreneurship. Though the city’s gigabit internet had been the subject of profiles in The New York Times and Wired shortly after the fiber network was installed, the city wanted to find new ways to leverage the gig that would ensure the spotlight stayed on Chattanooga.
The task force found that the best way to capture the momentum the gig brought to the city was to unite the efforts of various private and public organizations in Chattanooga. So the Enterprise Center, an organization that’s existed in Chattanooga since 2002, but whose work mostly centered on cleaning up polluted sites and bringing ventures like a high-speed rail to town, retooled its mission to focus on exploring different applications of the city’s gigabit internet.
The Enterprise Center currently focuses on three strategic initiatives — building out the city’s Innovation District where many of its accelerators and tech startups are located, attracting researchers to utilize the city’s smart grid and gigabit internet in their work, and bridging the city’s digital divide, by making digital education courses, as well as reduced-price laptops and internet subscriptions, available to low-income residents.
Andrew Rogers, the director of research applications for the Enterprise Center, says that the center focuses on supporting research that demonstrates unique applications of the gig. For example, the Enterprise Center helped facilitate a partnership between the University of Southern California and a STEM magnet school in Chattanooga in 2015, where students could remotely control a microscope while discussing what they see in the images with a USC professor.
It’s an approach that other Chattanooga organizations like the Gigtank, a five-year old accelerator, have emulated. The Gigtank specifically looks for startups in industries that require a high bandwidth — and has zeroed in on healthcare, 3D printing, and SDN startups in particular. One of the accelerator’s most well-known alumni is Branch Technology, a 3D printing housing startup that moved from Alabama to Chattanooga.
One challenge that Chattanooga faces is that its fiber optic network isn’t as unique as when EPB first installed it in 2010. As of May 2017, more than 110 communities in the U.S. had a publicly owned network offering services of at least 1 gigabit. In order to maintain its reputation as a tech hub, Chattanooga will have to keep pace with other trends in the tech world. That may prove harder for Chattanooga than other cities given that it’s smaller and doesn’t have as close of access to the typical breeding grounds for new technology — large research institutions and Fortune 500 companies.
Ken Hays, the president of the Enterprise Center, believes that what the fiber network has brought to Chattanooga — beyond faster internet — is a sense of pride in being a “first mover.” Some of the most recent initiatives that have garnered attention in Chattanooga — a co-living space for tech entrepreneurs that opened in December 2016, and a pop-up tech-focused kitchen with a 3-D food printer have less to do with showcasing unique applications of Chattanooga’s fiber network, and more about establishing Chattanooga as a place to test out ideas.
“We want to bring in the next generation technologies that are just as disruptive as the gig when we deployed it seven years ago,” says Rogers.
