Author: Mike P. Lewis

“Cable Channel” Presidents

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I recently listened to an interesting podcast interview of Chris Rock.  One phrase he mentioned was that George W. Bush was the first “Cable-Channel President.” What he meant by this is that you used to have candidates and presidents that attempted to appeal to the entire country – similar to Network television – but now you have presidents and candidates that try to appeal only to their audience – like Cable channels – and don’t care about nationwide approval.  

This is an interesting concept, because if you try to appeal to everyone – like a Network show – you tend to appear successful or correct only a fraction of the time to most voters, but if you focus on a niche, you’ll be loved by some and strongly disliked by everyone else.  The highs are higher but the lows are lower.  

You can definitely see this play out in American politics today.  Instead of trying to appeal to everyone and find a middle ground, candidates simply talk to their niche and alienate everyone else.  In most categories such as music, film, education, etc. I love this as it allows me to find exactly what resonates with me, but when you’re trying to run a country, i don’t think it works.   




Steve Jobs Biography was Great

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I just finished the Steve Jobs book and it was probably one of the most enjoyable books i’ve read in a long long time. I might say the past 10 years.  Here’s why:

Steve Jobs really cared about his products, deeply.  He had an intuitive feel for what the consumer wanted, and what he wanted.  He truly wanted his products to be close to art.   Even though very few in the industry believed him, even after the Macintosh had been around for over 10 years, he continued to hold on to this belief.  Each button, CD tray, color, and line was important to him. There’s a great passage in the book when he found out that the CD-ROM drive of a Mac was a tray instead a slot and it brought him to tears.

It was also fascinating to hear about the infant PC industry.  I had no idea how the PC industry started. I knew there was Apple and i knew there were was IBM but i didn’t understand how it emerged.  The narrative of the hobbyists building the board in garages makes sense to me, and i now understand.

I also didn’t understand how Jobs could get kicked out of his own company by a CEO and board that he selected.  But, after reading the story, i’m surprised he didn’t get kicked out sooner.   To hear of his return and his path back towards success was riveting.  Just a great story.  I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s enjoys Apple even a little bit.  Most people didn’t revere Jobs that much when he was alive (except, obviously the fanboys) but looking back at his accomplishments and commitment to excellence and innovation, we have to place him in the pantheon of business and product innovators.
I do think the world is a better place for having him here and i wish more people followed his path and held on to their dreams and reached for the stars.  It’s a great thing when it happens and actually works.




The Machines are Coming! (at least in publishing)

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Last week I spoke at the NYC Hacks/Hackers conference which was a pretty great gettogether of journalists and technology folks. I spoke about all the editorial tools that Kapost provides and got a pretty good response.

One other company that was there was a company called Narrative Science and they sort of blew my mind. This company takes formatted data – think of a baseball box score or census results – and algorithmically turns that data into a news story. So, a boxscore that used to just be 9 innings with numbers in it becomes this:

Michigan held off Iowa for a 7-5 win on Saturday. The Hawkeyes (16-21) were unable to overcome a four-run sixth inning deficit. The Hawkeyes clawed back in the eighth inning, putting up one run.

Whoa.

They are doing 1000 stories a week, and now that they have the template for baseball nailed, they are going into census data, crime information and other avenues that typically just produce data. It’s only a matter of time before SkyNet appears.

SXSW Review

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Granted i was only in Austin for 2 days of the South by Soutwest festival, but here’s my take on it.

SXSW has now become a Spring Break for nerds. Similar to if you went to Daytona Beach for a real spring break and how you’d get sick of tequila and dance music, people at SXSW get overdosed of Apps, Twitter and the words “social” and “media”. With so many people shouting in your face, it had to tell what anyone is saying.

That said, here are some highlights:

  1. The group messaging apps were out in full effect.  GroupMe, Beluga and others were there.  These are fun apps.  My favorite is GroupMe and if you haven’t tried it – i recommend you do.  It’s a good way to keep in touch with people.   Here’s a good roundup of all the group messaging apps.
  2. Uber Cabs were everywhere.  They were the big winners of the show.  It was impossible to attend this year’s event and not hear of Uber.    Fantastic marketing job done by them.
  3. The gaming Keynote by Scavengr CEO was the talk of the weekend.  it’s nice to see a talk that’s well put-together and stimulating.  Gaming is in lots of apps, and with good reason.  If you can find the video of this, you should watch it (and tell me where it is so i can see it too).

So, what do you do again?

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I’ve been asked this question a bit lately.  I remember a funny Friends episode where the gang played a trivia game about how well each person knows the other friends.  The final winner-take-all question asked to the group was, “What does Chandler do for work?”  To which nobody, not even his wife, could answer.  Well, it seems that I’m the Chandler Bing of my friends.

I’m not too surprised by this as the startup that Toby, Nader and I started last year, named Kapost, has shifted (aka “pivoted”) three times in the past 18 months so I frequently end up describing my work in different ways to the same person.  I could see where the confusion comes from.   Luckily, describing my job just got a little bit easier today when we launched a new commercial describing Kapost.   What we do is build software to help Editors of websites manage their users and the content they want to publish.   Watch the commercial below to get a more fun and colorful explanation of this.

The “Better-Nevers” of Technology

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I was thinking about my life and the web the other day and talking to some friends over lunch about how I love that i’m married to a woman who enjoys the web and has intellectual curiosity about it. I was then approached by a woman in a restaurant who was eavesdropping on my conversation. She called me over and then went on for 10 minutes telling me how my love of technology is what’s making the world so horrible. How my blind devotion to electricity is polluting the lakes and ruining the planet. I’ll spare you the “conversation” but let’s just say, i left wishing she hadn’t felt a need to share and that my friends were quicker to pull me away.

So, for her and her hatred of technology, I’d like to share a quote i just read:

“When department stores had Christmas window with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78’s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart”

History repeats itself. The world is changing and that change frightens people and computers are thus responsible for the problems. This isn’t the case. It’s not the web making the world a worse place. Relax people.

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New Startup Ongo Raises $12 MM and Starts Sprinting Off a Cliff

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The new company Ongo announced today that it’s raised $12 million from a handful of big media companies (Washington Post, NY Times, and Gannett who publishes USA Today).  The service they are offering is, according to the NY TImes article about the investment:

Ongo is for readers who peruse a variety of publications every day and want to read them all in one place. It shows articles from about 20 publications, and is in talks with dozens more.

The catch: Readers pay $6.99 a month for the service, while most of the Web sites whose articles it shows are free. In exchange, readers see no ads or cluttered pages, and can search for articles, save them and share them with friends — all from one site.

The article then has this quote from the founder, “I just don’t think my friends are as good as professional editors in finding stories for me to read.”

I don’t see any way for this company to succeed.

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