2017 | Iterations

Home » 2017

Inis: Coopetition and seizing the moment

By lurieben July 18, 2017 July 9, 2017 Games

Inis is a game of following many paths, all at once. You play leaders of Celtic tribes exploring a previously uncharted land. You discover new territories, build castles and religious buildings, hold feasts and have feuds, and compete to be declared the high chief of the new territory. It comes with beautiful art (including ethereally lovely landscapes and mysterious myths illustrating cards), a great draft-based action system and the possibility of glorious deeds. But I find the path to victory the most fascinating. In many games where players compete for land, there’s a straight path to winning. You build up resources, train soldiers and fight your opponents. As you win, others lose their forces and get weaker.

Yet in Inis, your moves towards victory are often simultaneously others’ moves towards victory. In the game, there are three ways to win – and any one can get you there:

Have your pieces present in six spaces.
Have your pieces present in any number of spaces that together contain at least six buildings of a certain type.
Rule over at least six pieces belonging to other players (you “rule over” their pieces if you have more pieces in that space than they do – if you have three pieces in a space, I have two and another player has two, you “rule over” four of our pieces).

It’s fascinating because there’s a simultaneous push and pull.

Push outwards – You want to spread thin in order to win by having your pieces in many spaces. But the more you spread out, the easier it is for someone else to rule over your scattered pieces and move towards that victory.
Pull inwards – You want to concentrate your forces to rule over large numbers of opposing players’ pieces (e.g. ruling four pieces with five or yours gets you close to winning) and to give you a powerful army to attack with. But the more you do that, the more territories your opponents can easily claim without a fight.

You pull your opponents up the ladder behind you as you expand and then have to figure out how to push them down without losing your own balance. For example, if someone is about to be present in six territories and win, you can attack them in one of those territories to push them out of it. But then you don’t get to rule over their pieces there any more, since they’ve been removed. It hurts you and it hurts them.

Since you can win different ways, multiple players can “win” at once. If they do, suddenly the tiebreaker becomes whether you’ve met the victory condition for just one path or for several. So you have to grow in all directions at the same time, trying for all three ways to win, accepting that your fortunes will ebb and flow and seeking opportunities to coexist and grow with your opponents. At least until the moment where you realize that they’re about to win and you can’t coexist anymore.

In other words, Inis is about being open to opportunity, and about knowing when to make your move and when to cooperate. It’s about watching your options grow and shrink and making decisions on both logic and instinct – a real gem of a game.

Chocolate Reviews: Dick Taylor 72% from Belize

By lurieben July 10, 2017 July 9, 2017 Chocolate, Reviews

Appearance
Dick Taylor 72% Belize chocolate comes in a beautiful envelope. It feels classy, like a friend from abroad sent you this by parcel post and steamship. Upscale chocolate is a treat, and it’s lovely to have a chocolate packaged in a way that feels like it was thought through.

The backing also has useful information: origin, expected flavors, and a bit – just a snippet – of their story, dropping all the usual signifiers of small manufacturers’ chocolate, including a map of its origin in Belize, down to the region, a mention of being crafted from the bean, etc. In fact, the wonderful website Chocolate Noise has a fascinating article on the conscious decisions leading up to this packaging.

Opening
A handy pull strip opens the package. Again, someone actually seems to have put thought into this.

Inside, gold foil keeps the chocolate from smearing the envelope. I’m opening this already anticipating trying a piece and then putting it conveniently back in its envelope, where it can continue to look smooth and put together In the cupboard rather than turning into a folded or wadded mess of wrapper and falling out chocolate.

Opening the foil….unfortunately, just like Raaka chocolate, Dick Taylor has a great pattern but no easy way to break it.

I’m struck by a heavy, lush chocolate smell upon opening the foil. Almost too lush for my preferences, but the proof will be in the tasting.

Taste
At a first bite, the fruitiness is almost overwhelming, but it’s just a different goal – and the label did promise dried plum and cherry as major flavors. Bitterness is almost nonexistent except towards the end of each bite – and even then it’s an undercurrent.

The texture is thick, almost chewy. No chalkiness here – it’s fully flavorful, with a notable but not unpleasant aftertaste.

Overall
A chocolate that is distinctly itself. I think “lush” is the best word overall to describe it- thick, fruity and smooth with superior packaging. I was skeptical at first, but found myself really enjoying the experience. Well worth it!

Conversations with Chatbots

By lurieben May 26, 2017 May 25, 2017 Public Relations

Chatbots like Slack’s GrowthBot were a major theme of SXSW 2017. Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot Founder/CTO talked through the transformation of our communications styles and internet interactions to move away from:
Generation 1: The “click” interface (desktop computers)
Generation 2: The “touch” interface (smartphones)
to
Generation 3: The “conversation” interface (chatbots)

He made a really great point that “people don’t go to your website because they love your web design, they just want the answer.” And it’s true, in many cases: people have a specific question, they want to answer it, and they want to ask it in a natural way. We can see this also in the two styles of Google search queries:

Keywords
“Harrison Ford age”
(or, if you need to filter more, “site:imdb.com “Harrison Ford” +date +birth”)
vs.
Conversational
“How old is Harrison Ford?”

Similarly, Shah discussed how GrowthBot integrates with tools like Google Analytics or CRM systems and allows users to ask simple questions like “how many site visitors were there from social media in June” and “how many customers from Texas have more than 1,000 followers” and get quick and accurate answers pulled from your tools.

Simple and handy: a main line straight to the answer rather than digging around in the tool itself.

The issues that are still being wrestled with are discoverability and certainty.

Discoverability – How do you know what a chatbot does? Let’s assume that the backend work is already done of hooking it into your databases. Let’s break that down more:
- How do I know how to make it understand me? Users know that their computers are getting a lot better at natural language processing, but there’s still a level of mistrust and uncertainty about whether the computer has actually correctly interpreted the request.
- What can it do? What questions are legitimate to ask and are possible to answer within the tool?
Certainty – How do you know if you’ve asked the question the right way for the bot to process? You’re offloading the decision-making to the bot and asking it to understand your intent. When a user wants to pull year-over-year trends from Google Analytics, it’s important to frame the question the right way, or you’re going to get a useless answer – or worse, a misleading answer. Ask for the last year’s monthly results – is that 2016’s monthly results or monthly results starting at the end of the previous month? The bot’s making the choice. It’s not a showstopping problem – you can take a look and see the issue – but it does take away some of the simplicity.

Fitting chatbots into your communications plan

Today’s chatbots work best for people who know that they want. That suits customers at particular stages of the consideration process or of the customer service process. They want to know “What are your hours?” “How do I get a refund?” or they want to take a specific action “I want to get a cab.” For that purpose, they let people communicate in the same way they would with a salesperson or customer service representative.

They’re not so great when users are doing research. For a user interested in purchasing, say, vacuum cleaners, they may not know what features they value or what questions to ask. They’re more asking: “Tell me what you think I should find important about your product?” Or, similarly, if you’re looking through your website analytics to see what unexpected events and trends took place, there’s not – at present – a way to ask those abstract questions.

What’s Next?

Users are still in a trust-building stage with chatbots and other conversation-based systems. Once that trust is established, there will be room to push further on their capabilities – to create more predictive systems and “personal assistants” where the bots can begin to anticipate what will be interesting to their users and provide those insights proactively.

Until then, chatbots can help take the load off of existing systems and help users who do just need a particular answer or particular bit of help.

Image by barnimages.com, accessed via Flickr and used under a Creative Commons CC-BY-2.0 license.

Six tips from SXSW for creating awesome native ads

By lurieben March 19, 2017 March 14, 2017 Uncategorized

“How do we transport the audience into the story?” asks Annie Granatstein, head of the Washington Post’s brand studio – the in-house native advertising team that creates thoughtful branded experiences within the Washington Post. It sounds almost exactly the same as what you’d hear from a reporter seeking to compellingly explain a complex issue. At SXSW Interactive,panelists Melissa Rosenthal, Annie Granatstein, Stephanie Losee and Melanie Deziel – experts in branded content partnerships with roles ranging from Head of Content at VISA to Head, WP Brand Studio – weighed in on the latest developments and trends in native ads.

Here’s what I learned: as branded content has grown, publishers have expanded their technological and storytelling sophistication, moving from listicles to deep, rich experiences like the New York Times’ partnership with Netflix around Orange is the New Black, “Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work” that was the #2 piece of content on the NYT site in 2014, or a partnership between VISA and Quartz that resulted in a series of articles promoting tourism in China (using a VISA card), “China’s new “it” city charms travelers year-round.”

At the same time, brands’ expectations have expanded. Melissa Rosenthal of Cheddar explained that many are looking for highly unique native ads: ones where the content couldn’t just be rebranded by anyone else. As a result, publishers’ brand studios have almost become “creative agencies” themselves, working with brands to brainstorm ideas and develop unique creative expressions of a brand’s message that yet reflect the journalistic standards of the publication.

Four top insights for native ad planning

Come in with the takeaway. Annie Granatstein suggests that brands and agencies meeting with publishers should come in to the first meeting knowing what the audience should be feeling and doing as a result of the content. Many show up thinking about the technology – “we want a VR experience” when the emotional impact is what will stick with people.
Define your KPIs up front. A content piece intended for social engagement is going to be different than one driving deep engagement with a web story, and should be a part of planning from the beginning.
One-off activations are penny-wise and pound-foolish. When you do a one-off branded content piece, you’ve effectively launched a startup, says Stephanie Losee. You’ve put together an entire staff for a 6-7 figure project. Made and measured a beautiful thing. Then if you don’t do it again, your startup has folded and those partnerships and expertise have been lost. Think about partnerships that can be extended if successful.
Live events are possible but challenging. Publishers are interested in working with brands on live activations. But live can be risky: there’s no chance to go back and forth on approvals or to correct for on-air (or on-Facebook Live) gaffes. Preparation helps, as does having legal representatives in the room – but the risk is unavoidable and inherent in the activation.

And two value-adds to consider

License and share. Many publishers will either give brands ownership of their native ads or enable them to license it to re-share. So once it has been created, it can then be reshared on other publishers’ sites.
Paid media is essential for visibility. It’s not enough to have rich creative content. Just as publishers now have strategies for sharing and promoting their editorial content organically and in sponsored posts on Facebook, Instagram and other channels, branded content similarly needs a boost.

What do you see as the next steps in native advertising?

Burning your ships to create transformative change

By lurieben March 16, 2017 March 14, 2017 Public Relations

“Alea iacta est,” said Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon marched on Rome to attempt to seize the mantle of emperor. That is to say, “The die is cast” and there is no way back. On the first day of SXSW Interactive, I heard from several folks working to transform the healthcare industry about how they see the path to success in driving transformative change – a panel called “To build in health, follow the $, not the patient.” The healthcare industry faces a broad array of challenges to any change, including:

A massive and interconnected network of organizations, all of whom have a stake in decisions
Heavy regulation
The need to maintain quality treatment for patients as change is happening. You can’t “move fast and break things” when it’s real people whose healthcare is being broken.

In the face of large obstacles, it’s a common instinct when trying to sell in a new plan, program or institutional transformation to begin with a pilot program. If your client or your senior leadership is reluctant to commit, try a pilot first to demonstrate proof of concept. It’s the startup way – create, iterate and scale.

Yet Matt Klitus, the CFO of MassHealth, Massachusetts’ Medicaid and CHIP program, an enormous institutional health provider in a highly regulated industry, rejected that idea.

“Really innovative systems are hard to pilot,” he said. “Sometimes you have to burn your ships.”

For example, healthcare is trying to move from a fee for service model, where payment is based on what treatments doctors provide, to a data based model where payment depends on what the eventual patient outcomes are – to improve efficiency by focusing on what matters. But healthcare payers like Medicaid or insurance companies can’t just move 10 or 20 percent of their patients into a totally different payment scheme as a pilot. The hospitals have to be on board, the doctors have to be on board for it to work, and asking them to shift their system for just a few patients to test results is doomed to failure.

So to really create transformative change in the system, healthcare payers have to burn their ships. They have to commit to a new payment model and insist that it’s the only model that they’ll use. Otherwise the internal considerations of everyone else in the system will drag it down. Of course, healthcare is also full of lots of creative pilots of new technologies for connecting patients with doctors and enabling treatments in new ways. So pilots aren’t wrong – they’re just sometimes the wrong choice when a transformative change is needed.

Similarly, companies looking to change their cultures – whether as part of a merger, as a result of new leadership, or a new set of goals – must decide if they are going to try working around the edges first or whether the change is so transformative that you have to commit if you’re going to succeed.

In these cases and others, you can’t fail early and fail often – you’re going to succeed or fail as a whole. It’s scarier and riskier, but sometimes it’s the necessary approach.

Where have you seen incremental change get lost in the system where transformative change might last?

Public domain image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/randnotizenorg/32000502742/.

Raaka virgin chocolate: Maple & Nibs 75%

By lurieben February 10, 2017 July 7, 2017 Chocolate, Reviews

Raaka chocolate’s unique claim appears to be that it doesn’t roast the cacao before making it into chocolate; instead they balance it out with maple sugar and cacao nibs to create a “deep fudge flavor” and “addictive crunch.”

Appearance
A pretty wrapper and an informative one, providing good detail about what actually makes their product unique (and worth the price premium), including taste profile, origins and sustainability info. I’m a chocolate information junkie. Tell me what you want me to know and taste. Maybe I won’t be able to taste it (I make no claims to have an unusually discerning palate) but at least I know what to expect and what ideal to weigh it against.

The downside is that the bar doesn’t wrap up well – once you’ve torn it open, it’s open and you might as well eat it all.

Opening
I will always complain about chocolate that doesn’t break conveniently. This Raaka bar has a beautiful pattern on it, but the beauty of it quickly vanishes as it starts getting broken into irregular chunks. The texture to the touch is a little melty, even at a mild 72 degrees – my fingers always felt smudged.

Taste
I expected a raw and strong taste reflecting the unprocessed nature of the chocolate. However, it was overall smooth, cool and mild. The cacao nibs blended well: in some past cases I have found them to be overly dry and an unexpected burst of bitterness amid a bite, but this chocolate blended them well to draw out their fruitiness without unbalancing the overall flavors. A clean, cool finish/aftertaste wraps it up.

Overall
Not raw-tasting at all, Raaka’s virgin chocolate is a smooth and delicious chocolate bar with an unusual coolness to it that I quite enjoyed. Crumbly nibs mix up the texture a bit.

Year: 2017