Content on 10-inch tablets is mostly shared by email, while content on mini-tablets and the iPhone is more often shared through Facebook. That’s one of the findings of a new report about Content Consumption on the Touch Web.
The report, by tablet publishing and ad provider Onswipe, is based on more than 150 million touches per month that the New York City-based company registers on its platform.
More Sharing on iOS
On minis and the iPhone, the study found that email remains the second choice for sharing, at 29 percent for minis and 32 percent for the iPhone compared to 42 percent for Facebook sharing on minis and 50 percent on the iPhone. On 10-inch tablets, the numbers are nearly reversed, with 48 percent of users sharing via email, compared to 32 percent through Facebook.
Twitter sharing is less consistently related to decreasing device size than Facebook sharing. Thirteen percent of sharing is conducted through Twitter on the larger tablets as well as on smartphones, compared to 24 percent on minis. For all three platforms, sharing through Pinterest is five percent or less.
Mobile Device stats Sharing
The report also found that, despite the huge popularity of Android-based smartphones and the growing popularity of some Android-based 10-inch and mini tablets, iOS-based tablets still account for an overwhelming portion of content sharing — 75 percent of shared content, versus 22 percent for Android.
e-Readers Linger
Interestingly, while iOS device users overwhelmingly employ Apple’s Safari browser (75 percent) for touch-based content, and Android device users nearly universally use the default Android browser (97 percent), Google’s Chrome browser is about equally popular on both platforms (2.33 percent on iOS versus 2.13 percent on Android).
Mobile Browsers used
Onswipe found that, although there are many more iPhone users than iPad ones, more than half (54 percent) of all mobile web traffic comes from iPad users. It also said that users of a tablet such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which is marketed with a slant toward e-reading, spend substantially more time on sites than those who own the Nexus 7 or the iPad tablets. The report said the reason could be that Fire owners tend to favor long-form content, such as e-books.
However, size does not necessarily matter in this regard. Owners of seven-inch, fully-featured web tablets, such as the Nexus 7, spend the same time on web sites as do those who have a 10-inch tablet like the iPad.
Email remains the powerhouse work tool in our connected, social media enhanced lives, and that is why so many dishonest people attempt every day to trick us with seemingly legit sounding email messages.
Spam filters are a huge help, but phishing scams that come to us from what looks like trusted senders are real problems companies like Message Bus are founded on solving.
DMARC Compliance Standard
Message Bus, along with every major email service provider, has been hard at work on a framework for providing enhanced protection capabilities that increase sender validation. It's called DMARC, short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. This is a voluntary standard meant, in part, to improve operational feedback from receivers back to senders.
DMARC works with tools like the Sender Policy Framework and Domainkeys Identified Mail to protect email recipients.
DMARC is the framework that email and text messaging infrastructure provider Message Bus has folded into its new trusted email system. The Global Delivery Network is a service for sending emails and texts at scale without triggering DMARC and spam filters so companies can get their messages through.
Additionally, Message Bus has launched a tool for email recipients to block untrusted senders. It's free and it's called Discover. It's a report generated by looking at who is sending emails from your domain. Anyone using your domain fraudulently can then be blocked before doing any more reputation damage.
Enforce compliance controls and stop message waste with Message Bus Discover
Email Innovation
Google really changed the email scene with Gmail, and its spam filter is among the best. There hasn't been a ton of email innovation since, however. Message Bus thinks it has a great new tool in its Global Delivery Network. Pricing starts at volumes of one million emails per month, and it costs US $439. For 10 million emails per month, the price is US $3,780.
This includes DMARC reporting and policy enforcement, bounce processing, analytics, support, unsubscribe management and campaign management. Tell us in the comments if your company uses an email provider like Message Bus or if you think the Discover tool is particularly useful.
Working on the hush-hush, a team of AOL developers has reconceived the way email is experienced. Photograph by Thomas Hannich
How does it feel to throw a product launch and have nobody come? Just ask AOL. In November 2010, the company unveiled Project Phoenix, a platform intended to rev up its doddering email business. Once synonymous with email--and mailbox-cluttering installation CDs/drink coasters--AOL had been lapped by free-mail rivals Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google, and an @aol.com email address had become the tech equivalent of an AARP membership card. The goal with Phoenix was to turn that around by offering Gmailesque features such as threaded emails and built-in chat, plus new functions like the ability to update your Facebook and Twitter statuses. The company even offered alternatives to the unhip AOL domain name: @ygm.com ("you've got mail"), @games, @wow, and @love. And to maximize its usefulness, Phoenix let users aggregate any external email accounts into their AOL inbox.
Phoenix landed with a thud. Existing AOL Mail users didn't see a compelling reason to switch to the platform, and--perhaps because it looked so much like Gmail--neither did many other people. (At its peak, Phoenix had 30,000 users; currently it's chugging along with 15,000 devotees despite the fact that AOL no longer officially supports the service.)
Now, with less fanfare, AOL is trying again with a platform called Alto, which launched on October 18. But unlike Phoenix, which merely tweaked the email experience, Alto is a complete reimagination of it. And here's a real shocker: AOL produced Alto through the kind of speedy, agile development process you'd associate with a startup, not a $3 billion corporation that defined web 1.0.
Alto is the product of a deliberate strategy change in the wake of the Phoenix fail. David Temkin, AOL's SVP of mobile and mail, split AOL's email operations into two tracks. One group continued to work on upgrading existing AOL users via incremental improvements that were unveiled this July. The other team, working under the radar even within the company, had license to create a truly disruptive product. "Email hasn't had a serious rethink really since Gmail came out," says Temkin. "We wanted to take a swing at that and not be tethered by the existing 20 million or so people using AOL Mail. The idea was to create without scrutiny and questioning."
David Temkin, right, AOL’s SVP of mobile and mail, gave Alto director Joshua Ramirez, left, and his team free rein to create an email product that looks and functions unlike any other platform. | Photo by Kevin Kunishi
Temkin assembled a cross-functional team of about a dozen developers, designers, and product managers, led by Joshua Ramirez, a senior director for product management of AOL Mail and Alto. Both Ramirez, a 37-year-old who had previously logged time at Apple, eBay, and Yahoo, and Temkin, 45, a veteran of Apple and Palm, brought fresh eyes to the project, having joined the company after the Phoenix launch. Drawing on insights gleaned from ethnographic studies of Phoenix users, they aimed to keep what people liked (aggregating multiple email accounts, for instance) and remedy what they didn't (multiple accounts also multiplied inbox clutter and email anxiety).
First proposed in April 2011, Alto was slated for a beta launch the following October. "What allowed us to move so quickly was having design, development, and product constantly talk in real time," says Ramirez. "It wasn't your typical waterfall process, where you define requirements, the developers build it, hand it off to QA, and 12 months later you have a product. This was continuous development." Key details were ironed out during an off-site hackathon, in August, at a rustic retreat near Monterey, California. Says Ramirez, "We packed three weeks into six days."
Visually, Alto won't be mistaken for its competition. "We wanted a product that could attract people from across a coffee shop," says Temkin, who relied on design director Bill Wetherell to create a user interface that passed "the 15-foot test." Alto is a web-based client that looks like a mashup of Twitter and Pinterest, with incoming mail showing up in a vertical feed along the left side of the page. Abutting it is a thin column of icons for basic functions (compose a message, find a contact). The right two-thirds of the window is dominated by rows of tiles called "stacks." These are the source of the platform's unique look, as well as its innovative functionality. "We wanted to provide a post-foldering approach to organization," says Ramirez. (You can create folders in Alto, but AOL's studies show that few consumers actually use them.) The stacks update dynamically and work continuously, automatically sorting incoming messages, which also appear in your main feed, into five default groupings: daily deals, social notifications, retail, photos, and attachments.
These piles reflect the most common categories of email received by AOL accounts--and the fact is that even in the Facebook era, email remains the de facto beast of burden for photos and attachments. Notes Temkin, "No one's going to send bills to your Facebook account, and you're not going to get financial statements sent over text messages."
Alto uses a visual search to display the content being delivered: Click on the photos or attachments stack and you get an instant array of thumbnails displaying its contents--no searching or opening of messages required. Users can also create custom stacks for subjects like travel, work projects, or family by setting simple rules for sorting by sender, domain, or keywords. There's even an option to have certain types of messages bypass the inbox altogether, instead sending them right to a stack for periodic checking. Explains Temkin, "By sifting through bulk mail, you end up with the things that really matter in your inbox."
From studying Phoenix, the Alto team knew that while people like to aggregate multiple accounts, they didn't want to set up a new account in order to do so. With Alto, users can simply log in with an existing Gmail, Yahoo, .mac, or AOL account. (At least initially, Alto won't support POP3 email.) This is a platform meant to streamline your routine, not add to it.
Still in development is Alto's business model. Mail is a key driver for AOL's media properties--the default entry point for AOL Mail users is the AOL Today page, which links to top stories from the Huffington Post, Patch, and other AOL brands. Temkin insists that connecting users to content won't be as central to Alto, though there will eventually be a "top stories" stack containing news clippings that link to, say, HuffPo articles. "We're looking at ways of monetizing this product," he says. "Unlike AOL Mail, we'll likely implement premium features that you pay for on a subscription basis. AOL Mail is a purely advertising-supported product. Alto is optimized for acquiring email users who are open to a new experience."
Even if Alto grabs those users, Macquarie Capital analyst Ben Schachter says it's not likely to elevate AOL's fortunes in the short term. Although its stock price has more than doubled in 2012 and the company posted its smallest revenue decline in seven years in the second quarter--thanks largely to a $1 billion patent sale to Microsoft--AOL's revenue from display advertising on its media properties was basically flat, and its subscription-access business continued free-falling, dropping another 13%. "Efforts like new mail or video are interesting," says Schachter, "but AOL hasn't proved it can make them into meaningful businesses. Changing people's email habits is a tough thing to do."
Six weeks before launch, a calm and confident-seeming Ramirez and Temkin are focused on software bugs, not business plans, making sure that the "minimal viable product" that early adopters see this fall "works well, is beautiful, and addresses the main case uses of email," says Temkin. "We're a big company and we want to rebuild a reputation for innovation. I feel we have an infinitely stronger product than we did with Phoenix--but it's best to speak softly and carry a big demo."
Email took a bruising at Dachis’s recent Social Business Summit. Held up as an allegory for the failure of businesses to embrace change, kicked to the side as a hoarder of information and scoffed at as a time suck. But email wasn’t really the point. What all speakers were talking about was the opportunity and challenge that exist today for businesses to reinvent the way they communicate.
This isn't about buying some new software and placing it on top of your existing system. This isn't about starting a corporate Twitter account that's used as another broadcast channel. This is about total reinvention of how business is done, both internally and externally.
IBM’s Reinvention
Chris Crummey speaks of social business in the tones of an evangelist. As a 22 year employee of IBM, he's born witness to the transformation the company has gone through and was at the Social Business Summit to tell the tale.
First off, Crummey hates email. Hates it. Spends as little time on it as possible and if someone has the gall to send him an email, he responds on a public wall. It's nothing personal, he just doesn't think that the information that's shared in email should be kept between the two people involved. Questions will be asked again, the information will be needed by others and besides, who enjoys slogging through a full inbox to find the one bit of information they are looking for?
He's not alone at IBM in his promotion of other forms of communication. Employees of the company send 50 million instant messages a day, sharing information farther and faster than email. Critically, support for this style of working is coming from above. IBM's CEO, Ginni Rometty started her first day on the job by releasing a company-wide videoblog. She's continued this practice, releasing videoblogs on the first day of each quarter since and inspired a rash of copycat videoblogs from executives throughout the company.
But again, this is not about videoblogs, or email or instant messaging. This is about creating a corporate culture within the company which supports new methods of communication, which breaks down previous hierarchical structures to allow anyone the opportunity to participate, i.e. to create the empowered employee. The integration of these communication initiatives into the existing platform created a high adoption rate and has changed the way IBM does business. IBM saw the writing on the wall, and made the changes necessary to stay relevant.
Org Charts, Co-evolution and the Email Warning
If traditional organizational charts had ears, they must have been ringing as well. The IBM example above shows that social business is not about cosmetic changes. There must be a fundamental change throughout an enterprise, including a reinvention of the organizational structure, to fully realize any benefits.
This is not an appealing prospect to many. Change is scary. As Dachis SVP of Strategy Dave Gray put it, fear is what is holding us back. But as nature has shown, organisms must evolve within their surroundings or risk extinction, and that includes companies.
And that brings us back to email. Daniel Debow, founder of Rypple, brought up a point that resonated. Can you name any of the companies who resisted the switch to email when first introduced? No? That's because they don't exist any more.
The very first email was sent in 1971. In the four decades since, these electronic messages have forever changed the way we communicate. Today, we're an email-dependent society, preferring to pound away a quick response on a smartphone rather than picking up the device to make a call. While we might openly complain about adding quantity to our inbox, there's a trend among my business colleagues of leaving voicemail messages that promptly explain that email is the best way to reach them.
The inbox, for many, is not only an invaluable communications tool but also a burgeoning to-do list. There have been many attempts to better the email experience, but for now the inbox shows no signs of extinction. What we do have access to is a growing number of smart add-ons and plug-ins that can improve your email work flow. Here are some of the most useful.
ToutApp: Find out when recipients open your email and create groups Gmail, Outlook (invite-only): Free
This tool falls into the category of a relationship management email application. Within Gmail, for example, you can create groups so you can automatically email a team you're working with on a specific project. You also have the option to view an email activity feed so you can stay on top of your conversations with a specific recipient. For anyone curious about when a recipient reads your email, Tout can track this in real time so you're aware of what happens after you hit "Send" (and if anyone is clicking on a link that you're sending). This can be very helpful if you're running an email marketing campaign or simply trying to gauge how well your emails are being received.
Smartr Inbox: See who you're emailing and automatically get their shared contact information Gmail, Outlook: Free for basic version
The folks at Xobni (creators of Smartr Inbox) are at the forefront of inbox improvement. While Tout does a few simple things to further your email relationships, Smartr adds context around the people you're emailing on a regular basis. Moreover, it pulls in your contact social networking information from sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, so you can extend your relationships beyond the inbox.
With this integration, it also allows you to view an email recipient's job title, address, and phone number (if they're sharing that on LinkedIn, for example). I've used this tool for a while now and the thing I find the most useful is that a contacts photo is displayed beside an email from that person (again, if this picture is shared online). This is of enormous value when you're trying to put a face to a new business colleague.
WiseStamp: Spice up your email signature with social content Gmail, Windows Live, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail: $24/year for 5 signatures
Most email signatures are pretty bland, but with WiseStamp you can spruce up this important marketing real estate. This tool enables a dynamic social signature, so you can add information such as your Twitter handle and most recent tweet (and functionality to retweet or reply from your email). If you maintain a blog, the latest link can also be inserted automatically (using the WordPress email app). Each signature can be customized based on your preferred look and feel and more than a dozen different social services (be warned--less is more with this tool, so don't muddy up your signature with too much content).
Boomerang: Schedule emails and "boomerang" important messages back to your inbox Gmail, Outlook: Free trial
This simple tool does something many of us desire on a regular basis if we rely on our inbox as a to-do list. If you receive a message that needs a response that you can't give until a later time, it will simply "boomerang" this message back to your inbox at a specific time. There is also the functionality to schedule emails to go out at a later time and date.
WriteThat.Name: Get continuous contact updates in your address book Gmail, Outlook coming soon: $20/year
There are those people who are meticulous about managing their address books and then there are the rest of us. WriteThat.Name can help the latter of these groups. This tool detects an email signature and sucks that content into a new contact (or updates an existing contact) based on profile information from LinkedIn or other sites. Before you want to make an update you have the option to review the information.
Content Management from its earliest days has been about getting the right information to the right person at the right time. This was long before there were laptops, before email, before the web, before smartphones, before e-Readers, before tablet computers, before whatever comes next.
Today the buzz is all about Mobile and the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement: the promise that you will be able to access information at anytime from anywhere via the device of your choice. On the consumer front, multi-device living is, for the most part, already a reality. You can use Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, GoToMyPC, SaaS, PaaS, cloud-based solutions and so on …
The BYOD Dilemma
On an enterprise level, we still have a ways to go, even though nearly every major vendor offers mobile apps. After all, mixing information from an individual’s private life with corporate content and data on a personal device is a slippery slope say most corporate counsels; it’s a risk that many would prefer that their employees not take.
But banning the use of personal devices in the workplace, or for work purposes, isn’t practical, workers wouldn’t put up with checking their smartphones and tablets at the company door. Besides, employers won’t have to shell out the bucks for company-issued smartphones or tablets if you’d rather use your own; needless to say, that saves them a whole lot of bucks.
So this leaves CIO’s tasked with an interesting dilemma — how do you keep your organization safe and out of legal trouble while workers mix personal and company data on devices that the company doesn’t own and has no control over?
Give a technology company a problem and they’ll find an opportunity. That’s precisely what VMWare has done. Yesterday at VMworld 2012 the virtualization company introduced an alpha release of its Platform for Workforce Mobility which promises to offer a secure, flexible corporate workspace in the cloud for mobile workers.
Just Beyond the Horizon
Dubbed the Horizon Suite, the technology bundle has been designed to provide mobile users with secure, consistent, 24/7 access to their desktop, applications and data from any device. This makes it possible for enterprises to get the consistent governance they need, while workers enjoy separate personal and business workspaces independent of the device that they use.
With the Horizon Suite, IT creates a custom service catalog for all company data and applications. The technology was designed so that it automatically understands a user’s environment (device, location and connectivity level) and attributes. It then enforces policies across applications, data and devices.
The Horizon Suite leverages technologies from existing VMWare projects — Project Octopus, Project AppBlast, ThinApp, VMware Horizon Application Manager and VMware Horizon Mobile — to create a mobile platform.
The Project Octopus component, for example, is a file-syncing technology that will allow users to securely access and share their data and files from any device. Much like Google Drive or Dropbox, it has a consumer-like feel, but it also comes with Governance, which allows IT to set policies for data access and sharing etc.
Project AppBlast provides remote access to desktop apps like Office via a web browser.
VMware Horizon Application Manager unifies management of any SaaS, Web and Windows applications to securely deliver them to end-users on the device of their choice.
What does the Horizon Suite bring to the world of information technology that didn’t exist in the past? A set of unified consumer-like tools that will allow knowledge workers to access the right content and the right data, from anywhere, at any time via any device without sacrificing Governance.
Editor's Note: Another article by Virginia Backaitis you might enjoy:
Alfresco announced its next generation Records Management 2.0 platform, and the updated system now fully integrates with Alfresco Enterprise 4 including more granular controls, mobile access and email features.
As more and more enterprise and even government level IT move to the cloud, tracking documents and records is going along for the ride. Records Management 2.0 is just such a vehicle.
Secure, Mobile Content Management
Alfresco 4 debuted early in 2012 and in June, the company released a cloud based version of its open source CMS. With Records Management 2.0, the cloud based transition is complete. Not every document needs to be available for mobile downloading, of course, but things are moving in that direction with this release.
Records management may not be the sexiest aspect of an IT department's mission, but it's become painfully obvious there's a growing need to keep secure documents protected. One way to do that is to make documents easier to identify and sort.
A new multi-level file plan in Records Management 2.0 allows for creating deeper record structures beyond the main levels as defined by the U.S. Department of Defense.
Additionally, because the system has been redesigned to support Alfresco Enterprise 4, mobile, social and cloud capabilities in the Enterprise CMS can be leveraged as well.
New Features
Records are now simpler to search with easier to define queries, and favorite searches can be saved for records more frequently called upon. With a single file repository, less content needs to be migrated so there's less of a chance of losing information.
Furthermore, there's a Web-based interface and native IMAP support so it's easy to file emails without installing a plugin. RM 2.0 shows up as a mail folder so filing records can easily be done with drag and drop.
For those needing to respond to Freedom of Information Act requirements, Alfresco has included workflow and hold tools like better transparency.
