The Steve Rubel Stream

Insights on emerging technologies and trends.
Steve Rubel
Steve Rubel (bio) is SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, a division of Edelman - the world's largest independent PR firm.

He is charged with helping clients identify emerging technologies and trends that can be applied in marketing communications programs. Rubel also explores these topics on his site, a monthly Forbes.com column and in a bi-weekly AdAge column. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook as well.

Steve can be reached via email at steverubel@gmail.com.

Note: Everything posted on this site is Steve's personal opinion. It does not represent the views of Edelman or its clients.

               

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Instapaper: Now Even More Useful with Email

I love services I can interact with via email. I can post to my Facebook page via email and I can do the same here. One of my favorite services is Instapaper. I use it to bookmark and save articles to read later, which I often do in bulk on long plane rides.

Earlier this week it quietly added a killer new feature. You can now email in URLs or newsletters and it will save them to your Instapaper account for perusal later. I find this invaluable. 

Kudos to Marco Arment for continuing to build out a killer product. This is by far the most valuable service I have added to my arsenal over the last year or so. And it continues to get better. You can get the details here at the bottom of the page.

Filed under  email   instapaper   mobile   tools  
16 Comments
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Posted 8 days ago

Sooner or Later, Facebook Will Launch Its Own Phone


Change happens slowly.

It took us years before we noticed that Microsoft was upending a tech industry that, until the 1990s, IBM dominated. However, if you squinted you saw this starting in the 1980s once the mainframe era was ending. 

Then Google changed the game for Microsoft (a client) in the 2000s when the desktop lost some of its dominance to the broadband-enabled web - but like with IBM this shift started earlier, back in the 1990s. 

Now, it could happen again.

Just as everyone thinks Google is unstoppable comes Facebook. Over time we may soon witness another shift as the web evolves from an intent-driven medium where you need tell it what you want to one where content and ads finds you through the lens of your friends and their digital footprints. However, if the desktop was the battleground in the 1990s and the web was in the 2000s then mobile is where the battle for dominance will take place next. 

Consider these three data points, all of which are fresh...
And that's just the US. Combine these three trends on a global level and it's obvious that mobile is the future. Mobile is a far far larger market than mainframes, PCs or even the web. It will have lots and lots of winners in hardware, software and services. This is why I believe Facebook can't sit on the sidelines anymore. They will be on every device, but they eventually will try to launch their own hardware too.

Consider this: Facebook is competing with Google for time, attention and ad dollars. With Google clearly serious about phones. And Apple buying up mobile ad companies. Facebook can't solely rely just on others to carry their application if they want to dominate what will increasingly be a mobile market for content and ads. They will want to have a deeper relationship with their users. Deeper relationships means more data and more data means more moolah.

Facebook easily has the brand equity to launch their own phone (most likely with a partner at first) and marry it to your address book, photos, videos and events in ways that Google can never match because they are more social. Facebook gets connections and how to use the data to make your life better.

Scoble talks about the Google Reef. Sure it's big. But in many ways it's the Facebook reef that could be far larger. 

How large? Consider these stats. A lot of people wouldn't know Picasa from Picasso. But Facebook sees more than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month. A lot of people don't know Yelp (a rumored Google acquisition) from Yodels, but Facebook has 700,000 local businesses that are a click away from 350M people - who oh yeah on average have 130 friends on the site and spend hours there, often from phones.

See the pattern? All of these are mobile experiences: your friends, your events, your photos and local businesses. They're made for mobile phones. Mark my words. Facebook will launch a mobile phone. But this isn't zero sum. There will be lots of winners.
Filed under  Facebook   google   mobile   social networking   trends  
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Posted 2 months ago

How Twitter is Rewiring My Brain - and Maybe Yours

These days - perhaps a function of my lifestyle - the mobile device is becoming my primary content reading and browsing tool. This is slowly changing my habits and I wonder if this is part of a larger trend.

With the advent of Twitter lists, I find myself dipping in and out of the stream to catch up not only on news but blog posts from friends and companies whose products and services I use or have more than a passing interest. However the changes in how I interact with media go deeper than news.

I am an avid reader. Each year I read several dozen books - exclusively nonfiction (call me boring, it's ok).

Where I used to finish one book before picking up the next, nowadays, I keep a virtual shelf of books on my iPhone and dip in and out in Twitter-like bursts of time. This could never work for fiction but it suits me fine.

So Twitter is definitely reconditioning this 40-year-old toward a new way of living. How about you?

Filed under  ebooks   media   mobile   trends   Twitter  
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Posted 3 months ago

Google Building Augmented Reality Search for Android Phones

CNBC tonight is running an hour-long special on Google. The show dropped some exclusive news that eWeek picked up on - Google is in the process of developing an augmented reality system called Visual Search for Android phones.

The concept, according to CNBC ...

"Imagine you're a tourist and you arrive at this place and you want to know more about it,” said (Google Product Manager Hartmut) Neven on a visit to the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles the show off the technology. “All you will have to do is take a picture of the sign. We send the information up to the serverand we recognize this as the Santa Monica pier. The idea is you see something that interests you, you whip out your camera phone, take a picture of the object of interest, and this will trigger a Google search."

The CNBC special, which had exclusive access to the Visual Search team, showed that the technology was not quite ready for prime time - at least back in August when footage was filmed. In his report eWeek's Clint Boulton notes that Neven has a patent for mobile advertising around augmented reality.
Filed under  advertising   augmented reality   Google   mobile  
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Posted 3 months ago

The Apple "Tablet" and Chrome OS are Meaningless - the Phone is the Future of Computing

If you're paying any attention to the techosphere today there are two stories dominating the headlines. Both involve non-shipping products.

First, Google showed off the first demo of its Chrome OS. Download Squad does a nice job breaking it down....

"So what exactly is Chrome OS? It's an operating system based on a web browser called... Google Chrome. The idea is that you won't have to (or be able to) install a single application directly on your PC. Rather, all of your apps will be run from the web and all of your data will be stored in the cloud."

Second, a mythical unicorn called the Apple tablet, which I don't believe exists - at least anymore, is rumored to have slipped to late 2010. Like Google Wave the "iTablet" doesn't solve problems so I can't be bullish about it - yet. Ian Paul seems to be the lone voice of reason ...

"These rumors are getting so ridiculous that I think it's time we accepted the truth: the Apple tablet is dead; in fact it probably never existed."

So why do I think these stories are meaningless? Simple. Your phone, my phone - any smartphone - will become our primary portable computers long before these two products catch on in the mainstream. For the more adventurous among us, it's already happening. Chris Rawson writes about 33 products his iPhone made obsolete. It's not just about the iPhone either. Any smartphone - Android, Palm (a client), Blackberry, WinMo - will soon do double duty as PCs, turning all the above two products into vaporware. 

Why? Simple. Moore's Law. Already an 64gb iPod Touch has enough on-board storage to easily hold two operating systems, OS X and OS X mobile. Apple is even billing it as a pocket computer. As processor speeds increase and full graphics systems get embedded onto single chips, the phones will soon be able to embody a PC experience as soon as they get near a flat screen TV and a keyboard. Some data will be locally stored but the rest will be in clouds - either your personal cloud or your employers. Want a clamshell keyboard and screen like a laptop? No problem, soon we'll see "dumb shells" that encase phones so they can do more on the go.

So take today's news with a grain of salt. The phones are going to be where the action is for the vast majority of users. It's good enough. And the pace of change in mobile will be rapid.
Filed under  essays   mobile   trends  
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Posted 4 months ago

The iPhone Gets a Solid Video Editor

Given my mobile lifestyle, slowly but surely my iPhone is becoming my primary computer. I just finished a seven-day, five-city business trip where all I took was my phone. If call goes according to plan I have hopefully taken the last trip where you will see me toting a laptop.

My phone is already chock full of all kinds of useful apps that make this all possible. However, there remain two that are missing: a good PowerPoint document editor (Documents to Go handles Word and Excel files just fine) and a video editing tool. The latter issue just got solved with ReelDirector. Check out the demo below for more. It looks terrific.

Filed under  iPhone   mobile   video  
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Posted 5 months ago

A Week in the Clouds Without a Notebook

On average I travel for business about seven to 15 days a month. Sometimes it can get a bit nuts, but I love it - I never get bored. This is one of those weeks. I will literally be in the clouds all week both virtually and physically.

I am starting my journey today in Toronto. Tomorrow I am speaking at the MIXX conference and will also participate in staff, client, industry and press meetings. Wednesday I head to Atlanta for the day for another private event and then right back up to Montreal that night. Thursday I am speaking at MIXX in Montreal. I head home for one night and then do a round-trip from NY to DC on Friday for, yes, another speaking gig. (Map above. I like maps!)

Despite the travel, however, I still need to be productive. I need to stay in touch with my colleagues and clients and also do some writing. Also, I want to stay in touch with you here on my lifestream and on social networks. Mobile technology is my friend here.

I have a couple of different laptops that I take on trips. All of them are light. But you see, I am on a quest. I want ditch my laptop on every trip and only carry a smartphone and my Iamakey for the rest. Right now I have an iPhone 3GS but I may add a Blackberry to complement it. My key files and even some portable apps are encrypted on the USB key.

The reason is simple: all of these devices are pocketable. A laptop isn't. I don't want to carry a laptop because it's mental baggage. I don't want to be thinking about where it is. Smartphones and USB keys are like appendages. I always know where they are. Plus, I know that one day soon we won't need to carry laptops on business trips because these phones - which are really pocket computers - will be able to do it all, including hook up to hotel TVs. I am trying to experience this future now.

I have gone sans laptop on business trips before but this one at three nights is the longest one yet - although I am home for one night in between trips. I have tweaked my setup so that the apps and services I use on my smartphone are identical to what I use on my Mac at home and - to a large degree - my desktop PC at work. I like the simplicity and consistency of it all.

Here's what I using... (workflow below)

  • Writing and To Do List - WriteRoom (which now has TextExpander support to speed up typing)
  • Contacts and Calendar - Address Book and iCal, which connect with our Exchange Server 
  • Notes - WriteRoom for temporary storage, Evernote for archiving (more on this in a subsequent post on lifelogging)
  • Files - Documents to Go, and if necessary, my IamaKey and Box.net/Sharepoint
  • Mindmapping - Mindjet and Mindnode
  • RSS - NetNewsWire, which syncs to Google Reader
  • Twitter - Tweetie
  • Plus, of course, Posterous and Instapaper for sharing and reading
The only thing I can't do with this setup is create or edit a PowerPoint deck, although I can view them. This is one reason I am considering getting a Blackberry too - you can edit PPT. I don't anticipate I will need to on this trip. However, I will need to write, but I can actually do so on my phone quite comfortably. If some people can write books on cell phones, then I can certainly crank out shorter stuff too.

You probably think I am nuts, but I hate carrying laptops. I have done so for years. I will keep you posted on my progress. Sometimes I am on the road seven or nine days at a time. I don't think I can ditch a laptop on these trips, but this journey might convince me otherwise. Wish me luck.
Filed under  apps   blackberry   cloud computing   gadgets   iphone   mobile   Producitivity   travel  
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Posted 5 months ago

The Pitch: Alan Warms of Appolicious

Alan Warms, CEO of Appolicious, stopped by my office today to give me a rundown of his site - a social network for mobile apps. Right now it's just for iPhone apps, but they will be expanding soon to cover Android and Blackberry. For more see this short video. It's an interesting concept, although I would be eager to see them do more to connect to Facebook and to bring the social network to the iPhone - which is in the works.

Filed under  apps   iPhone   mobile   video  
6 Comments
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Posted 5 months ago

AOL Integrates Lifestreaming into AIM for the iPhone
via appadvice.com

One of the big things that Facebook brings to the age of streams is instant messaging and presence indicators - the ability to see who is online right now and active on the service so you can chat in real time. I hope that sites like Twitter (and its ecosystem of apps) do the same. My bet is that they will soon tie into IM networks more in the near future.

In the meantime, I am very interested in what AOL has been up to lately in bringing lifestreaming and social content the other direction - into IM clients that millions already use. This isn't just a big user base but they're also mainstream users too. Now it's all coming in the iPhone.

With the integration of lifestreaming into the mobile IM client and the potential to create even more value through location-based social networking services, this entire space is about to get a lot more interesting. Keep an eye on the big IM nets and their massive social graphs. They are sleeping giants that are waking up to the potential here.

Filed under  AOL   instant messaging   iphone   Lifestreaming   location based services   mobile   social graph   Social Networking  
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Posted 6 months ago

Airlines that Approve In-flight GPS Use

Did you know you can use a GPS-enabled device on an airplane? Well, according to this list on many airlines you can. That was news to me.

Now a lot of the utility of in-flight GPS goes, pun intended, out the window if you don't have wifi. On the iPhone, for example, Google Maps pulls all the data down on the fly. 

Still. I am sure some developers will come up with creative uses for this with data that remains cached on your device.
Filed under  :mobile   GPS   resources  
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Posted 6 months ago
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