Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Christopher Kahler is a co-founder and CEO of Qriously, a service for measuring real-time public sentiment by replacing ads with questions in smartphone apps. Follow him on Twitter

In late 2010, Apple approved 14-year-old Robert Nay’s app, Bubble Ball, for publishing on the App Store, where it quickly racked up 2 million users and, for a short while, even wrested the ever-popular Angry Birds from its perch at the top of the download charts. It’s a staggering achievement for a young teen with no formal programming experience -– never mind education. No skills. Nada. Zip.

Nay used an application called Corona that essentially allows users to build smartphone apps using a graphical interface, eliminating the need of any coding skills. He’s a pioneering user of the next generation of platform dependencies — innovations upon which further innovations can be built.

The term “platform dependency,” referring to products and services that are symbiotic with an existing platform (FarmVille on Facebook, Tweetdeck on Twitter, Rapportive on Gmail, and so on), has been discussed at length in several recent blog posts that weigh its dangers and opportunities.

While these relationships are not unique to “our” industry, the heady pace of evolution in the information sector, modeled with equal parts idealism and fantasy, is pointing toward some fascinating outcomes. The most fascinating of these is also the most paradoxical: The smartest kids are coding themselves into unemployment.

Before I’m viciously indicted with committing the Luddite fallacy, give me a chance to qualify: Smart kids code platforms that are making it increasingly redundant to know how to code — look at Nay for instance. As such, coding as a skill is becoming a casualty of efficiency, which is a beautiful thing. Coding is a means to an end, and if new methods are developed that enable us normal folks to achieve comparable results, then that’s a win in my book.

To a certain extent this is already happening, albeit to a less romantic degree. Take Google App Engine for instance. Instead of needing to set up whole server infrastructures, you just upload a simple web app and Google handles everything else, from load-balancing to scaling. Many companies don’t even go that far. A Facebook Page, with its built-in tools to distribute content, advertise, promote and engage with an audience, is often all you need.

Beyond the purely technical realm, services and layers are appearing to make aesthetic skills more and more redundant as well. Enterprise software company Cloudera used 99designs, which recently scored $25 million in funding, to crowdsource its logo on the cheap. And apps like Instagram and Retro Camera that allow users with little “skill” to take brilliant photographs.

Eventually, you won’t need to have any technical knowledge in a world increasingly defined by technology.

Rather, the only thing you will need to have is an idea, and having good ones will be the only meaningful thing setting you apart from others. I like to think of it as the triumph of creativity over learned skill — a change that some believe has ramifications for formal education as well.

The only remaining question is: Where are your ideas going to bubble up from?

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Your brand is your favorite. After all, it’s yours. You understand it, you helped build it, you’re obsessed with the nuance behind it. Your organization’s actions make sense to you, you sat in the room as they were being argued about… you might even have helped make some of the decisions.

So, your brand doesn’t do anything wrong. What it does is the best it could do under the circumstances. Someone who knew what you know would make the very same decision, because under the circumstances it was the only/best option.

Of course we should buy from you. You’re better!

When your brand starts falling behind a competitor (Dell vs. Apple, Microsoft vs. Google, Washington Mutual vs. Everyone and then Apple vs. Android, Google vs. Facebook)… you say it’s not fair, nor expected.

The problem with brand exceptionalism is that once you believe it, it’s almost impossible to innovate. Innovation involves failure, which an exceptional brand shouldn’t do, and the only reason to endure failure is to get ahead, which you don’t need to do. Because you’re exceptional.

In the battle for attention or market share, the market makes new decisions every day. And the market tends to be selfish. Often, it will pick the arrogant market leader (because the market also tends to be lazy), but upstarts and new competitors always have an incentive to change the game or the story.

Brand humility is the only response to a fast-changing and competitive marketplace. The humble brand understands that it needs to re-earn attention, re-earn loyalty and reconnect with its audience as if every day is the first day.

Facebook has admitted it authorized an effort to raise privacy concerns about a Google product, but says it was not intended as a smear campaign.

The social networking giant released a statement acknowledging that it hired PR firm Burson-Marsteller to alert the media about the questionable use of Facebook user information in a little-known Google feature called Google Social Search.

The feature pulls in publicly available data about users from social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, and displays it in the search results of your social connections — often without their direct authorization.

Unsavory emails sent to reporters have since surfaced, deeply embarrassing both Facebook and Burson-Marsteller.

“Google, as you know, has a well-known history of infringing on the privacy rights of America’s Internet users,” a representative wrote in an email to one targeted blogger, Chris Soghoian. “This latest tool designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users –- in a direct and flagrant violation of its agreement with the FTC.”

Embarrassment escalated after USA Today and then The Daily Beast published stories about the agency’s antics.

While Facebook refuses to say that it took part in a “smear campaign,” the company admits that it “wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles — just as Facebook did not approve of use or collection for this purpose,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Mashable.

“We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way.”

Burson-Marsteller has been quick to do a little crisis management of its own, telling Cnet in an emailed statement that an anonymous smear campaign “was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined… When talking to the media, we need to adhere to strict standards of transparency about clients, and this incident underscores the absolute importance of that principle.”

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Why Facebook’s Concerns Are Valid

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Although the PR campaign clearly backfired, Facebook does raise some valid concerns about Google’s social search product.

Social search, which was launched in October 2009, provides search results with data aggregated from your social graph. Search for a particular restaurant, for instance, and social search might pull up a tweet from someone you follow noting that she ate there recently and didn’t enjoy the food.

To display this information, Google requires an indexable understanding of your social graph, which Google calls “social connections.” The company builds social connections for users by gathering information about your Google contacts and chat buddies, from information and accounts connected to your Google Profile, and through secondary connections.

Google Profiles generally provide most of this information, as many Google users have set up a Google Profile that links to their accounts on social services such as Flickr, Twitter, Blogger and Quora, just as they might also have done on a service like About.me. Although Google doesn’t allow users to connect their Facebook accounts to their Google Profiles, users can still enter a link to the URL of their public Facebook Pages or private profiles, which Google can scrape to display information such as status updates and photos that a user has authorized to display publicly.

The problem that Facebook is pointing out is that even if a user doesn’t explicitly link their Facebook account on their Google Profile, Google can still display his or her public Facebook information.

The way that Google does this is clever, legal and a little unnerving.

Google is able to crawl accounts to surface secondary social connections. For instance, my colleague Christina Warren has put up a link to her personal website on her Google Profile. Because her website displays a link to her MySpace account, information displayed on her MySpace page might unwittingly appear in the social search results of someone who follows her on Twitter.

Similarly, Google can index her public Facebook status updates even if she doesn’t directly post a link to her Facebook account on her Google Profile. If, for instance, she posted a link to her Quora account, which she signed up with using her Facebook credentials, Google could go ahead and pull in all of her public Facebook statups updates anyways.

This is, to be clear, in no way illegal. Google isn’t surfacing any information that isn’t in some way public. Users could conceivably use their own skills to find these links manually, but Google has just automated the process. The problem is that users aren’t being properly informed about how Google is making their social data public. Publicly available information and information that can be surfaced at a moment’s notice by someone you know are two different things.

We admit we were surprised by how much information Google knew about our social graph through accounts we’d linked together indirectly. I have always been vaguely aware that Google knows essentially everything about me, but knowing that anyone can look through my various social connections and networks associated with my name from my personal email address is still a bit of a shock.

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Is Facebook Really Concerned About Our Privacy?

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So is Facebook really worried about its users’ privacy? Our instincts say no. After all, the only Facebook information that can appear in Google’s search results are those that are public status updates. If Facebook encouraged users to lock down their accounts, they could limit the usefulness of Google’s data-mining efforts.

It’s more likely that Facebook is annoyed that Google has figured out how to use its data without employing its API, so preventing Facebook from controlling how users’ data can be used. Google is selling ads against data that it is pulling from Facebook, putting it directly with Facebook’s own ad network.

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How the Campaign Backfired

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A few weeks ago, Burson-Marsteller reps began contacting various reporters, encouraging them to investigate how a Google feature called Social Circles (used in Google Social Search) has been quietly violating the privacy of millions of Americans. One of the bloggers, Chris Soghoian, was asked to ghost write a post on the topic. Instead he published several of those emails.

When Soghoian asked who was paying for this campaign, the Burson representative refused to name the client. Concerns were further raised when USA Today published a story saying that the firm had begun targeting “top-tier media outlets” with the same kind of pitches.

On Wednesday night, The Daily Beast published a story identifying Facebook as the agent behind the smear campaign, which a Facebook spokesperson admitted to.

Clearly, Facebook never should have hired a PR agency to “raise awareness” about this issue. Facebook itself has a reputation for disregarding users’ privacy concerns. Calling out Google for doing the same is the pot calling the kettle black.

After all, if it is really concerned about the privacy of its users’ data, Facebook should educate its users on how to hide their account information from Google.

Mashable’s Christina Warren contributed to this report.

By Mark Brown, Wired UK

The future of mass transit may be a whole lot cooler than you think.

Japanese researchers rolled into the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Shanghai with a scale model of a robotic plane-train that levitates on a cushion of air. It’s essentially a plane — complete with stubby wings, a handful of propellers and a tail — that flies perilously close to the ground.

The plane-train rides within a concrete channel. And because it has to deal with pitch, roll and yaw as well as the throttle, the research team, led by Tohoku University assistant professor Yusuke Sugahara, built a prototype that autonomously stabilizes its three axes.

So far, the team has a scale model that wobbles down a runway. Once the researchers perfect the idea, they plan to build a larger, manned prototype and a concrete channel to see how it does at 200 km/h 124 mph.

There are already trains that can dart about without the friction that leads to lost energy. Maglev trains, like the 431 km/h 268 mph Shanghai Maglev Train in China, use powerful electromagnets to levitate above a track. Although it minimizes friction, there is still considerable drag between the train and track. That cuts efficiency.

The ambitious plane-train concept doesn’t get around this problem; it embraces it. Using the ground-effect principle, the plane-train uses the fast-moving air beneath it for propulsion.

If all goes well, it could become a full-scale project and become a real-life commuter train called Aero Train. A few decades off, we reckon.

Photo: Scale model in the channel. (Tohuko University)
Video: spectrummag/YouTube

Guest post by Andrew Blakeley. Follow him on Twitter (for exclusive deals and offers!)

I recently undertook a simple Facebook experiment, inspired by a brief Monday morning rant from my boss: “This morning my yoghurt told me to find it on Facebook. It didn’t tell me why, it just told me to find it. Why on Earth would I want to find a yoghurt on Facebook? It’s a yoghurt!”

He was right, of course. As social networks slowly become the default online presence for brands to drive their consumers to, adverts, marketing and packaging has started telling us where to go. However, it hasn’t yet started telling us why to go there.

For my experiment – “Find Us On Facebook” – I vowed to Like every brand that asked me to for one week. I would then blog and analyse the various offerings of each brand, in particular how they were attempting to drive people from the offline world to the online, social, world. Here are the results:

As a marketer, I found the results very disappointing. For an industry the focuses endlessly on providing consumers with “benefits” and “reasons to believe” here was a lot of marketing asking people to take an action, without telling them what they stood to gain from it. In 2011 it’s more or less a given that your brand can be found on Facebook, and consumers know that. What they don’t know is why they should bother.

What consumers want from brands in social media is a topic that has been widely written about already, and is fairly well understood by marketers. Research from advertising agency DDB Paris found that amongst the top reasons for Liking a brand were: “to take advantage of promotional benefits”,” to be informed of new products offered by the brand”,” to access exclusive information” and “to give my opinion about the brand”. Four very clear reasons to bother, which could easily be affixed or suffixed onto any “Find us on Facebook” message for greater impact.

Another key finding was the number of brand Liking requests coming from email marketing. These are brands that I had chosen to receive email marketing from directly into my inbox, and here they were asking to appear in my Facebook newsfeed too. They weren’t, however, telling me why I should open myself up to them in another channel.
Only 1 of the 16 brands provided an incentive to make the leap from email to social media. I literally had no reason to bother with the other brands, as I was already receiving their deals and offers, and they weren’t giving me another reason. Some brands have found interesting ways to incentivise people to make the jump:

• Dingo, a dog food brand from Ohio, included a promotion that would only kick-in when the Facebook page reached 5,000 fans (from a base of 300). They had an unprecedented take-up, with fans forwarding on the email to their friends and encouraging sign-ups to get the offer. They hit the 5,000 mark in just 3 days.

• Bag retailer Timbuk2 included an opportunity to win a bike, helmet and messenger bag in an email to its 100,000 newsletter subscribers. It received 6,500 clickthroughs vs. just 9 from its generic social call to action.

Consumers need these incentives, because they know that otherwise all they’re doing is agreeing to be bombarded with more marketing unrewarded.

The sad thing is that some brands are actually building really fun, engaging content in these spaces, but not making people aware of them. The Fosters beer page, for instance, is full of great exclusive Alan Partridge content, starring Steve Coogan and written by Armando Iannucci. Their TV ad, however, had nothing more than a Facebook URL. Had they said “for exclusive Alan Partridge episodes” they would’ve opened their brand Facebook page up to a whole wealth of people, who felt genuinely motivated to click Like.

My week as a social consumer left me tired and confused. It left my Facebook newsfeed so crammed with nonsense to the point that I could scroll entire pages without seeing my friends. It left me a bit sad for the digital marketers and agencies who were building great content that wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. So, if you’re reading this and you work in advertising or are a brand manager – next time you think about telling your consumers to find you on Facebook, consider telling them why.

Artist: Natalie Dee